Breaking Cover -- Michele Rigby Assad

[Music] [Applause] [Music] all of you were really appreciative to see all of you here tonight some familiar faces some new ones that we hope you'll come back again not only to some of our adult programming that we do here at the museum but also to the museum itself you only have another 11 months or so before we're not here anymore we're not going anywhere far we're jumping the other side of the National Mall to a brand new building we conceptualizing the museum and we're excited moving forward but we hope you come back and check us out on another day particularly happy to have with us tonight our guests who I've spent some time with today she sometimes they just show up and you meet him for the first time and then you're introducing him like you've known them for years and it's a little disingenuous but we've got a chance to talk chance to get it know each other a little bit and I can truly say how much of a pleasure it's going to be tonight to have a conversation with you with Michele Rigby Asad who is a former undercover officer in the CIA and the director of operations she's trained as a counterterrorism specialist and she served her country for ten years working in Iraq and other places around the Middle East upon retirement from active service she and her husband Joseph who is here as well what if he wants to call himself out he can if not he can work you know ex-cia you never know right who was also former CIA joined a group of Americans who wish to aid persecuted Christians and their efforts resulted in the evacuation of a group from northern Iraq that was featured on ABC's 20/20 in December of 2015 she holds a master's degree from right up the street in contemporary Arab studies from Georgetown University and today she serves in several roles but as an international security consultant splitting their time between the Middle East Florida where we found out that were quasi neighbors down there she's I'm from South she's from Central Florida and then here in Washington DC so welcome Michelle and thank you for taking the time to talk to us here at this fine example thank you so much it's really exciting to be here I've never been here before either well so I'll have to come back again and not because she has a new book and I think if you don't know I think you do because you're here she's the author of breaking cover and the subtitle of this is interesting and we'll talk a lot about this moving forward but this idea my secret life in the CIA and and this is the key point what it taught me about what's worth fighting for this will be a concurrent theme throughout this talk because unlike a lot of other memoirs and we've had a lot of people who have written memoirs after their lives in the CIA this really kind of gets down to that fundamental question about motivation and motivation something we always talk about here at the Spy Museum usually it's why did someone sell off their country or money or other things but sometimes the motivation to give up your life for a cause whether it's working for an intelligence community or something completely different so let's start with that basic concept that we ask a lot of people who are formers and the answer usually is I wanted to be a CIA agent since Iowa is 15 years old or I was in college or I grew up wanting to be a spy you're the polar opposite of that you had no intention whatsoever of joining the CIA and so very late in your big leader life is there not even late in your life yet very late in your career choices moving for I wanted to be a ballerina kind of like the CIA but actually I didn't even know growing up the this the being a spy or being an intelligence officer was a real job so it would have never entered my mind to consider such a career thrust what and you almost got dissuaded from the very beginnings you applied to the agency and for those who are of the generation of the 60s and 70s in the 80s there's a lot of these conversations about always recruited in a dark alley for the CIA now you go to CIA gov and you apply online will you had applied not for the Director of Operations which he eventually would work for but as an analyst for CIA so actually I didn't know what I was applying to I just threw this was the old days where you put your physical resume into a box and this was at Georgetown and they had done this an informational interview and I was putting my resume into every single box for every job and so I was really surprised when a recruiter called me three weeks later and said we're interested in you for an analyst position and I was like okay great and when it started going through that very intensive vetting process and they eventually said we'd love for you to be an analyst but but then a couple weeks before I supposed to start that job I got a rejection letter in the mail saying that you no longer qualify for this position as an analyst as if I'd done something to jeopardize this job right not why you didn't qualify anymore not while of a sudden you didn't qualify anymore no indication so it wasn't that you you know ran those stop sign or you know it didn't wait long enough you turn right on red in DC that's problematic you can't do that and you really fell into the DC trap that many in this room may understand is at that level or you have an advanced degree you want a job that's doing something that's worthwhile but every job requires what you didn't have experience and how do you get experience exactly that's all this vicious cycle here yes and for me it was so frustrating I mean DC is such an interesting place and it's full of really interesting and accomplished people and so tight lots of type-a personalities everybody's got a job but me or so it felt like anyway you know why can't I get a job and part of the rejection letter they told you you couldn't apply back to CIA for a year correct so you were looking in other directions but at the same time you had not only a family friend but a family member your spouse was looking at CIA with an entirely different Directorate point yes so a friend we were having dinner with he said you know there's actually this other side of the CIA and this is the cool side apologize if there are any analyst in this room right now in his in his description this is a cool side at the clandestine operations and this this is where it's at like we got to do this and so my husband Joseph was like oh yeah and I could not conceptualize myself in such a role I mean I didn't know what does this spy look like right well I mean you know the pop culture doesn't help no no right you don't have 27 costumes and you're not jumping out of airplanes and you're not that kind of perception but what's interesting a lot of people don't have this opportunity is because your friend and your husband started this program York told everything about what was going on was that's a big no-no okay but you at least got to see that they came back from their training without missing limb and without being brainwashed or psychological trauma at least not more than normal and you were able to kind of demystify the Director of Operations a little bit before you went down that path right and so the training process and people are getting cut left and right because not only do you have to pass all of the training exams but they just have to be sure like you've got the Constitution required for this kind of a high-pressure job one thing I found interesting a good thing it wasn't my phone going off no one needs to hear young MCS classic bust a move playing in the middle of our conversation was that they just didn't know who you were because when your husband because of his bio was a natural fit for the Director of Operations but the minute he told them about you they're like well geez of course like let's call it because you have the background the languages to a degree yeah and you're exactly what they were looking for but it had to be brought to their attention right so maybe they don't know everything yeah so they get two-for-one so to Erebus my husband's a native speaker of Arabic originally from the Middle East and so he really was perfect and I looked at him like you're clearly perfect for this and so then when he said I have a wife and she also has that same expertise that CIA was interested well the husband wife thing is a win-win for everyone it's a win for the agency not just because of logistical reasons but also because the husband wife team it's a lot less obvious than a military-age male walking around the Middle East go there's a spot you know you're a couple instead in at the same time it's great because a lot of the problems essentially psychological problems and intimacy problems that case officers run into is the fact that they can't tell those closest to them what they do on a day-to-day but if their wife is cleared to a degree sure you still can't have those in-depth conversations but because you were working and sometimes on the exact same operations you could actually be intimate with the person that you're most emotionally intimate with anyway right exactly and and so that was so useful because you know who knows you better than your spouse right so they're the best I mean having Joseph help me plan for an operation and think through all of the you know potential things that could go wrong providing counter-surveillance support for each other's operations I mean I felt so confident with Joseph behind me because I trusted him more than anybody I mean and that's the key is that you have to trust those you're working with oh yeah these your lives are in there literally your lives can be it especially in the Middle East the lives are in the hands and that built-in trust is already there it's not like you have to go out drinking together you're a it's a lot you're trying to develop that yeah but this see I you talk about what they're looking for and you you lay this out in the book and I think it's done very very well walking contradictions right the idea is you have to be completely honest because the CIA needs to trust you but you're being sent overseas the lie to everyone including you're lying to your family you're lying to your friends about the fact that oh I'm a diplomat on the second deputy agricultural attaché for the US Embassy I'm the minister of shrubberies for the embassy overseas but instead you're actually working for the agency and at the same time you have to be honest you have to make sure you haven't broken the law because rolling through a stop sign can sometimes even stop background checks but you're being sent overseas to break the law of any country that you go into because as far as I know there's no countries in the world that espionage is not against the law right exactly so they have to be sure when they're hiring you that you're not going to pose a threat to the United States as a potential double agent and so they want honesty and they want integrity and at the same time they're asking you to break laws in other countries so it's a wild contradiction to me one of those interesting contradictions and this is because pop culture is set such a crazy standard for what operations are is the fact that there's not an operation whether it's going to be a 30 minute brush or an hour-long meet that doesn't take days if not weeks of preparation beforehand planning routes planning you know surveillance detection runs planning all these things from top and of course you don't see that in bond or homeland I think with up to be really boring movie it's like let's talk about paperwork for a week but all that goes in the planning and that's one part of this juxtaposition but the other side is it never works that way right I mean not you know no plan survives first contact with the enemy so you have to be a meticulous planner yep but be able to be very very agile on your feet at the same time yeah you have to respond to Murphy who always shows up in an operation Murphy's Law anything that can go wrong will and so you plan for all these contingencies and then something always pops up that you you can't anticipate and so that's why it's so hard for the agency to hire because they're looking for people who are meticulous planners but who can then change an operation on the fly based on circumstances so and in operate it under this intense pressure because not only is your life on the line but your sources life you're having a clandestine you're planning for a clandestine meeting but if you bring surveillance to that meeting you could get your source killed so there's definitely a lot on the line you talked about how you were a natural recruit for CIA because of your background and your knowledge of the area and because of the ability to have some Arabic I mean I'm saying something Arabic because you're very self depreciating about your level of Arabic in the book don't ask about my Arabic but even though you're a natural fit you still had to go through the process of yeah the polygraph in a psych eval and all the training at that place you can't say but I can say is the farm down in Virginia but the psych eval in the polygraph examination for anyone like me I grew up Catholic taught at a Catholic school I was married at the Catholic Church I am engrained with this I'm guilty if I think about thinking about doing something I'm not supposed to do usually committed that sin just like I'm considering it by considering considering it yeah and you talk about that a little bit where some some cultures or some some backgrounds are naturally inclined to be really really bad at these kind of examinations because I may have when I was 10 years old looked at a pack of baseball cards and be like I don't have enough money to get that what if I just grabbed in the go no no I'm not gonna grab it off you guilty about thinking about grabbing that so in my subconscious I stole the back of baseball cards yeah and that polygraph would have gone wild have you been questioned about it my polygraphs go like this I have a lot of explaining to do afterwards but within your case you have somewhat similar experience and of course taking the box for the first time when they say relax and they start putting electrodes places and then other sensors other places did you find that that was overwhelmingly onerous just the kind of idea of trying to convince yourself to calm down and it convinced them that you had nothing to hide yeah and I you know they asked you so many different questions like have you ever mishandled classified information I'm like what's classified information and so when they tell you things like well the polygraph went wild on the question of have you ever broken into a computer system and I'm like okay now I know you're lying I have no idea how to basically log into my computer no so they ask you all kinds of questions you're hooked up you've got sensors all over the place and they go just relax right and then sucky bowels are always fine it's like would you rather kick your dog or your cat say about you one thing that's an underlying theme in this book that I thought that came across in all the right ways in your face and I'm not saying that it was overwhelming I think that needs to be pushed in people's faces is the the perception of women within the intelligence world and it's a recurring theme throughout the book and it's something that that we should need to be take it more seriously than we certainly do and this started right in the beginning of your training to work at CIA and your training officer maybe hadn't seen a woman before in his life I don't know what the deal was but can you explain a little bit about your first impressions of CIA yes sir my my instructor had was a legend at the CIA and he was retired and he told me at one point I don't remember which point that was that he had only known women as secretaries and he kept saying are you sure you want to get into operations and I'm like well I don't I think so but when he would sit so it was my myself and another colleague and we would sit in the room this tiny little space together and he would face my colleague the entire time he would never look at me and so that was my introduction to being a female the CIA and you chalk it up to degree in the book about this is an old guy thinking about back in the day but it's is it fair to say things haven't dramatically changed yeah unfortunately the perception is still there yeah about the abilities especially when times in Middle East yes there is a perception of the agency that some jobs are better suited for men dealing with Arabs and Middle Eastern counterterrorism for example right because you're dealing with people that are from very paternalistic cultures so when Joseph and I started working at the CIA they said you know your husband should really do that that's sketchy that the dicey field work and you should remain you know inside the office because as a female you're just not going to be able to connect with these Middle Eastern male sources that a lot of whom are terrorists and I I thought okay well they're the CIA they must know but yet the CIA gave us all this amazing training to do operations and all throughout the training we kept being told you'll get to do everything your husband does you'll just have a little bit more you know office time but I found it very strange that when I got into the field that other individuals who knew nothing about the Middle East had never traveled there before we were in Iraq didn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia didn't understand the sectarian strife that was going on and I thought I'm sorry so my male colleague who knows nothing about the Middle East is gonna do a better job at this than I would huh and it's a double standard that you see in civilian world - that you saw all the time where men who do a specific thing are considered assertive yeah and women are called a different word for that same thing and in your personality you know we've known each other for a couple hours and they've seen you for 10 minutes they can tell you're you're easygoing you're open you're smiling you're you have a great personality but people may perceive that and they have perceived that as you're naive or you're stupid or you're bubbly underestimate your capabilities yeah I mean I don't know what it is I'm sure I'm not the only one in the room if you're friendly if you're empathetic if you're smiley people think you're stupid not everyone but there's this perception that you can't be driven or have in the incredibly determined or have grit and they don't see what's inside of you and so they have to see you in action they actually have to watch you in motion and so though it took me a long time to prove to both myself and my colleagues that not only did I have what it took but that I could be really really good at it once they finally saw me and the debriefing room and the results the intelligence I was able to collect it was like an aha moment for all of us and what's wonderful is that you were able to use these biases against them why take advantage of them under estimating you yes especially in this some cases Middle Eastern men terrorists yes who would look at you as a sex object the minute you walked in the room and of course if you know of anything about debriefing or interrogation the number one thing you want to do is put your subject off guard is kind of give them something to think about that's not you know trying to stop you from getting information that you're getting and you had that built in yeah lucky me and so that you know turning people's biases against them and you mentioned the book and you have a long passage about a OSS eventually CIA female case officer by the name of Virginia Hall yeah who is someone that you've looked up to and has a model for your experience at CIA yes oh she was a spy during World War two but this is after having applied to the State Department three times and getting rejected for being a female and for having shot off the bottom part of her leg and having a peg leg so they told her you're not able-bodied so therefore you could never be a diplomat well eventually Virginia Hall became one of the best spies of World War two because she used that peg leg to pose as a farmhand or an old lady and the Nazis could not figure out where she was and what she was doing they knew she existed they did not figure out she was American they didn't know her to your identity and she operated behind enemy lines I'll give you an example she was a radio operator and because the counterintelligence threat was so high from the Nazis radio operators only lasted six weeks before they were killed she lasted two years and if you want to see her radio her actual radio it's about a floor above us right now so just [Laughter] so we're very happy that you like Virginia Hall let me ask you about your first tour because you joined CIA you think you're gonna travel these wonderful places in the world maybe the Virgin Islands or you might get sent to Australia maybe you're gonna be in the British the British station you got sent somewhere actually CIA won't even let us know where you got said but it certainly wasn't the British Island no no it was not the Caribbean yes no and this is where you had a somewhat interesting experience I'm using that someone's euphemism with your first boss who seemed to have some of the similar ideas that you'd run into during training yes so you know here we were we sold her house in Alexandria and we sold her car we either gave away or packed up all our belongings we said goodbye to our family and close friends and essentially gave up our civilian lives travel to the edge of the world and my boss essentially greeted us by cursing at us that that had to be taken out of the book cursing at us for several minutes and saying don't mess this up and then not speaking to us for about three or four months and then you train to something called a collection management officer which you'd known about it wasn't something you got shoved into and this is not like a secondary job is incredibly important job at CIA a very cool job you're the subject-matter expert of subject matter experts did you kind of get the 30,000 foot view of what everyone is doing we're case officers are somewhat tunnel vision on their particular fiefdom you kind of have the full picture because you're reading all the intelligence reports you're managing your disseminating all the intelligence reports and you're reading SIGINT signals intelligence and so you're putting all the piece of pieces of the puzzle together and you can it creates a subject matter expert and you're supposed to be able to travel out and meet sources and do things that other collection agents do but that's not what happened because I love this this quote women don't know how to deal with Arabs is what you were told yes yes I was told that repeatedly and how many just before CIA how many different countries had you traveled to in the thick yeah and I had studied abroad for semester in Cairo as a student I had been all over the Middle East at that point and so yeah that was a revelation that I would never know how to deal with an Arab so you're able to kind of turn that on its head in Iraq later on so one place that we're allowed to say where you were and this is certainly not a pleasure deployment either this is right before this right before the Sunni awakening yeah a time when there is massive amounts of sectarian violence so you even though you deserved to go to st. Croix yes somewhere like that you got sent from one hardship deployment to the next and you refer to Iraq as Groundhog Day I'm not just unrelenting sameness every single day yes so I always say that probably is the hardest I've ever worked and I am likely to never work that hard again so we were doing 12 13 14 hour days we were handling threat information multiple times a day so it was just hair on fire no time to eat hardly any time to sleep I mean couldn't even go to the bathroom I mean he'd run to the bathroom you'd run back it was constant because you were dealing with the location of a car bomb or the place where they just buried the IE D and troops are about to roll over it and you've got a call that that location of the ie D in before somebody gets blown up so it was just constant and there was no break from this meanwhile you're getting shelled by rockets multiple times a day so you're diving into bunkers it's a hundred and twenty-five degrees out it's miserable and it's hot and you're just exhausted all the time this is where you got the opportunity to show your mettle to show what you had us particularly with debriefing some of the sources that you we're running in Iraq and you mentioned the book that most CIA officers had three strikes against them before they even walked in the war walked in the door they're American of course they were non-believers it was the vast majority them were not Muslim and there were CIA but you had a fourth being a woman right yeah exactly so you had to walk in the door not waste any time and set the tone immediately or you're done yeah so it's interesting because I like to explain to people that these sources that are penetrations of terrorist groups so these guys are a part or very close to a terrorist or insurgent group they most of them were incredibly street smart high levels of emotional intelligence because this is what it took to survive in a place like a rock under saddam hussein when everyone was reporting on everyone else so these guys had worse survivors and so if you walk through that door and you're anything but authentic they're gonna know it immediately and if you're trying to hide the fact that you don't know the Middle East they will figure you out immediately and if they don't trust you they're not going to give you their Intel it's just that simple and these aren't nice people most you know come to Jesus moments they and all of a sudden say I want to help the Americans because I believe in truth justice and Superman they had an ulterior motive maybe even a overt ulterior motive that was to mess with someone else a rival when I get power or money so they weren't doing another goodness of their hearts so you're these are hardened terrorists even what because even though they're helping the United States it's usually to accomplish something for themselves yeah absolutely I mean everybody works within there for their own best interest and they were no different yeah so Iraq you learned a lot you were able to do a lot that really showed that you were capable of doing the job and then you guys decided to leave the CIA and in after CIA and you talked a lot about this in the book it's not all that easy to transition back to civilian world especially if there were a decade where you're privy to the most secret information in the world where on a day-to-day basis like you mentioned you're doing things that our saving lives are changing lives intelligence you collect maybe going all the way up to the top and then of course you need to get a new job and your resume has a ten-year gap in it basically because you can't really talk about all the wonderful things that you've done in the skillsets that you learned so how do you do that transition exactly I mean so I still have colleagues it you know really do want to leave but it's so hard to get out so technically you can leave the CIA whenever you want they don't hold you hostage or you don't have to put in a certain period of time but it's especially when you've served for a substantial period so ten years for us you have no resume you can't say what you've done for two for ten years or so you have no rolodex of contacts because you've been undercover overseas living in crazy places so how are you can even get leads for a job hire you if you're if you're in a particular position where you need to maintain your cover even after you leave the CIA your resume will say Minister of shrubberies and you can't say no I actually did some really interesting things that might work yeah I worked at Langley we'll talk about that later and there's a psychological issue involved with this too that you talk about where you are leading a life that has true satisfaction because you're accomplishing some pretty impressive things yeah and then going to work for some law firm or some K Street law but it went from one to the other does have that how do you find something that satisfies you the same way yeah there was a fear there was a great fear that we had that we we could never find another career that would satisfy us that much and then you know truth be told you become adrenaline junkies and so you get used to getting this high off of doing things that are of national security importance or you're saving lives in the war zones and so it's very it's very scary to leave yeah but you did find a way to use your training yeah to do pretty amazing things in the outside world yet a particular set of skills that applied other places around and you're able to work for NGOs for businesses for people who are doing business in the area of the world that you knew best to provide threat analysis and security and other things like that too as well there's a story in this book that is event that really shows it we did a podcast earlier this the break-in and we didn't talk about this and we're excited now to get a chance because the story is fantastic so you're working for a client who was being propositioned by a guy saying you need to invest in my my fund I have amazing returns and you were there to vet whether or not he was for real yes this man names Sonny yes and Sonny showed up he described the scene about how would you first met Sonny yeah so it was in Dubai anybody in here been to Dubai or the Emirates yeah quite a few so it was in a swanky bar atop a very well-known hotel there and we were all seated and the idea was like we're not gonna tell him who you are what you've done we're just gonna keep it on the down low but we're gonna put you right next to him and Michelle we just want you to you know figure out if this guy is full of it or if he's legit because he was we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of investments and so what he walked into the room and he filled up the relay so it was like he slid in you know I was gray and I thought you know what this is gonna be good when I saw that much ego that fast I knew he was going to talk and when people talk he talks you can get whatever you need out of so the first thing that he said I believe was that not only was he a ranger but he also was a green brain yes that term green beret is a green grey now Ranger School is a pen master and Special Forces training is is dramatically and that's how we wouldn't call themselves a green beret usually very few people have double tabs there are some there are some very few mm-hmm and then he talked about all his work in Afghanistan yeah but he couldn't tell me which agency he worked for he couldn't give me any Afghan names not that I knew them but I was asking anyway trying to act all smart on that but and then he said something he probably wished she didn't know but I work I worked at Langley yeah so I was really pushing hard and to the point that if you if you watch nonverbals he was sweating he was pulling it as color you know it's called the hangman's noose in the CIA you're like I don't like that question he was like squirming in his chair I had him exactly where I wanted him and then so because he was so nervous he's like I got to figure out a way out of this so he's kind of like well I can't answer all your questions because I work for Langley and I was like oh he did not just say that I think he did not just think that because by the way we never say Langley so was it it was like an immediate giveaway that I mean of course that he had never worked for the CIA and he was telling a former CIA agent he had I was like oh do tell tell me about that nice free meal out of it at least we did and and so much fun yes yeah but we ended up you know afterwards for fun I wrote up like a five page assessment on this guy and he handed it to my friend he was like wow and I said so if he did all the things he said he had done in his life he must have started his illustrious career at the age of seven so we were pretty sure he Sonny was not legit yeah so you enjoyed yourselves you had some fun taking away some stolen valor from from everything I think it's a guy claim do you work for everyone oh yeah from special ops to CIA and then you had a pretty extraordinary opportunity come to you where as Isis was on the move throughout the Middle East displacing persons throughout people who are unwilling to bend the knee to their form of fundamentalism in many cases these were Christians who are displaced persons who would have been at the brunt end of Isis brutality and opportunity came together with skill set in this case where someone people may have heard of them in in Mark Burnett if you've watched survivor or anything like that the producer that's behind that along with his wife brought a small team together and said we need to do something about this and then you of course on the at you and your husband on the other hand were the ones with a particular set of skills that can be brought to bear in this to my mind this brings up that the juxtaposition we talked about in the beginning where plans and the ability to be adaptive kind of come together yes because you have on one hand aim a massive bureaucracy as we'll talk about a country that's willing to take in these these displaced persons and then this ad hoc thrown together group of people from all different walks of life that have the abilities the money the skill sets that do something about it yeah it was so fascinating because it was kind of a model for a new way of doing things the fact that you could bring together people with special skill sets and it's not a company it's not an organization but you have a shared common cause so what can we do as a group to try to rescue these people and find a country willing to take them in and and then once you know Joseph ran around God's green earth trying to meet with presidents prime ministers ministers of interior and getting told no no no we we finally found Slovakia and so it was so fascinating about Slovakia was we had to help at once they said yes which was a big deal it was a miracle we had to help them work their bureaucracy and in order to effect this evacuation well it was to me I laughed out loud because Salah key had the infrastructure set up they had money from NGOs there the money from other organizations they're ready to do it like we can't because we we don't have a way to vet these refugees we don't have a way to sit them down and figure out if they're bad guys or not yeah oh I love vetting like nobody's business so I love meeting with people and like and figure out if they're legit or not I love coming through mountains of information to find the gold nuggets I love vetting to be sure that we're getting good stuff and not fabricated intelligence so you know that's kind of our thing because these groups that were trying to escape Isis this could have been a breeding ground for not only Isis people who are trying to slip into Europe but for any type of unscrupulous people you have con men everywhere you have scumbags everywhere and you want to make sure that the people who are really running for their lives yeah get the opportunity to get out so that men who had to go back to Iraq yeah again I think throughout the book never say never because every time I did right around the corner was that thing and I had said yeah I'm once we left bagged I was like I'll never go back to Iraq again there we were back to Iraq but it was so it was so fascinating because we wanted to be sure that we were not bringing in anybody in this group that could put that could pose a security threat to the receiving country and we had to be absolutely certain of that and we had to stand before the Minister of Interior and say we're not gonna bring in anybody here is gonna blow you up or or rob people or you know no criminal elements and all of that we've we've done our work we've done our jobs to vet these people and make sure they really are the neediest people who need a new home in a bit of a sunny redo you have a situation where people don't know who you are that you're you're interviewing and I don't want to use the word do-gooders but I'll use the word do-gooders I mean you might have that perception of this person works for a charity or an NGO they're trying to save the world I can get one over on them right I've been scamming people like this my whole life and you and your husband are sitting in front of them saying we want to help you we want to get you to a better life and I think they can take advantage of you but as again you have a particular set of skills that they weren't necessarily preparing for right right it was so useful but it was also so intense having hundreds of conversations with people who have been displaced by Isis their villages had been surrounded by and they were choked they were cut off so they weren't receiving water or supplies and they had already seen what Isis had done to the Yazidi villages so they had taken the you know it killed the men and then raped the woman and took them as booty you know his prized forced marriage and all of that and they knew it was coming and so when so the Kurds had been holding the village for a long period of time and then the Kurds at some point said we can't hold it anymore heads up we're leaving tonight and that night is when hundreds of thousands of Christians left their ancient villages and just made a run for Kurdistan and so that's of course where we where we went to affect the evacuation and after you've done the vetting after you had collect a lot of the documentation your husband Joseph went to Silla macchia because they now had a separate problem they had the vetting taken care of but they said we're all ready to go we're ready to receive what we don't know we don't have any Christians yeah so they didn't they didn't know we had done in Iraq and they're like we really want to do this but we've been ready for this for about six months but we couldn't find anyone to help really so Joseph takes the suitcase full of all the vetting documents you know brings it up to the table and he's like I got your Christians right there and they're like you got what and so we had we were able to say not only did we do the vetting but we brought all the documentation here to you take a look at what we've got and they were pretty amazed it would have taken them probably at least a year to do that on their own and that's just one element of this because you physically have to get the people out yeah right so it's one thing if Slovakia is ready to receive and the point they were but you have to get them physically from where they are and essentially a displaced persons camp to the airport to fly them to Slovakia yeah that was much more difficult than you thought it was going to be oh my goodness so this was a period of time on Russia was sending cruise missiles over Iraqi airspace into Syria against Isis so the Iraqis had to close all of northern Iraq airspace so basically the whole evacuation was thrown we couldn't get into a rock at first and then after about 24 hours they reopen the airports we made our way you know halfway across the world from Central Florida to Kurdistan and then hours before the evacuation they did it again they shut down air space for more cruise missiles and the whole entire evacuation was completely thrown off because now we didn't have a plane and we had no way to get them out it's not like you have time to kill Isis is down the street yeah it's like about 40 miles away the frontlines with Isis Russians yeah yeah and so amazingly all of this was captured by 2024 a special I mean had it not gotten on camera and just I wouldn't believed it you even watching it myself I was like I cannot believe what we went through to make this happen but miraculously we were able to finally locate an airplane willing to fly into a war zone what was considered an active war zone at that point and fly our people out of Kurdistan to Slovakia let me ask you a question about right now we talked about this earlier we'll talk about a little bit again now how why was this so difficult because there are agencies international agencies and governmental agencies that should be doing this I mean I work with the UNHCR a High Commissioner for Refugees in the Balkans in the 1990s they seem to be doing an okay job but the amount of backlog the amount of time it takes to actually take someone out of a war zone like this and bring them somewhere safe it's dramatically longer than these people have five ten years yeah on average and it takes far too long which is the same thing with the United States our vetting process our clearance process for visitor visas as well as resident visas takes far too long it takes years at a time sometimes so we have to do a much better job at figuring out how to get through that that bureaucratic process and streamline the process hire the people that actually know how to do vetting conduct better training of your officers so we as you know teets could be doing a much better job and UNHCR you know they're representing and they're vetting for countries all over the world so the idea is if it takes longer it must be better that's simply it shouldn't be that way yeah these people are in very desperate situations so they're living in refugee camps for five ten years well and use the word refugee and we can't even use the word refugee because that one layer of bureaucracy is someone with their refugee status is job dramatically different than someone with the IDP status and that determined you had to coach these young Iraqi people that they couldn't call themselves refugees because they wouldn't be able to escape they call themselves refugees even just going to the airport for people who have never flown in their lives was very dicey because we knew at any point that Iraqi authorities could become suspicious and say we don't know what you're up to but we don't like it and that's all you need in the Middle East to shut something down so we had to like coat them the night before and pretend like we were officers asking questions and we kept saying are you refugees and they say yes and we're like no you're not refugees because they weren't there internally displaced people with valid passports and valid visas who had the right to travel had they been refugees that's a whole different story so we're like no you're not a refugee so the whole time we were at the airport I was just like nobody's a refugee so I myself like I stood at the check-in counter and I was trying to deflect the attention of the people checking us in and and all the employees of the airport they who kept saying are you sure these people aren't refugees and I'm like oh yeah I'm absolutely positive why are a bunch of Americans than here helping them like oh we're just really good friends and we're just taking these people in a nice holiday in Europe you're just carrying everything they own it's just this concept of you know refugees status and you're basically giving them one day tradecraft trained on pretend you're something that you're not and how they act under pressure right because that red tape just that simple word kids can mean life or death it can throw off the whole evacuation yeah well I ain't gonna take that to the next step throwing off the evacuation could basically doom some of these people to dying at the hands of Isis yeah I mean what's so very hard is a lot of them were under the impression after Mosul was liberated and after a lot of these villages have been liberated in northern Iraq that they could go home and I mean we were hopeful for these hundreds of thousands millions of people who are displaced in Iraq they can't go home Isis has completely obliterated these areas and these people are willing to live in really rough circumstances I mean it's your home it doesn't matter if the roof is gone we can rebuild the roof but they have destroyed all of the infrastructure so water simple things like water or food you just yeah they can't go back so they're still stuck and that's not I mean it's one thing like if I moved to Canada I'd be okay I'd have to learn some French but I'd get by but going from Iraq to Slovakia where Slovak is not a language that's probably taught a lot of schools in Iraq and that the European culture is completely different the climate is somewhat different and they don't have any discernible skills talk about leaving the CIA and not be able to get a job being displaced to solve akhiya you're basically doing manual labor mm-hmm it's not an easy life and you even argued you told some of them that this life may actually be harder than the one that you're leaving we actually said Joseph and I said this numerous times to them please understand that it might be more difficult for you to integrate into this new country than it is to deal with Isis and they looked at us like we were nuts but then a couple of months into Slovakia they're like we don't know if we can do this we want to go home no matter what that threat is so I really try to express to people who want to support refugees it is they're going through such trauma I mean they've already been through such trauma and now the trauma of trying to start a new life in a place I mean imagine suddenly being dropped into Tokyo and having to learn Japanese going to school and Japanese working in Japanese I mean I don't know that I could do it so I mean I really understood and continue to understand that great struggle you hinted to this a little bit let me let me wrap up with this question you know you talked about the fact that you know you're able to transition to the civilian workforce because you're incredibly well-educated you had 10 years of CIO in your belt you knew all this tradecraft and you were able to help these people because of that right because you can't vet them and you had the power and you understood the Middle East and how things work for those out there that don't have a decade of CIA training and want to do something is there anything that can be done by the average person to help any of these refugees from the Middle East yes that's what's so exciting because there are so many now pockets of refugees all over the United States and there are churches and mosques and community groups that are providing services and helped them and they welcome community support and you know a lot of Americans we're scared to get in people's business but these people are from a lot of cultures where they want you to be their very community-oriented they want you to get in their business they want you to ask about their stories where they come from they want you to take them to the grocery store and teach them how to use a you know credit card machine to pay for your groceries how to pump gas I mean there's there's so many different things they've never been exposed to and simple things like helping their children register in the elementary school is life-changing for them so again it doesn't take much you just need to be a normal person with a little bit of empathy and a little bit of time and a little bit can go a very long way for them well that seems to be a perfect time to move over to any kind of questions that you may have from the audience now since we want to pick it up obviously microphone issues Amanda has a microphone so raise your hand if you wanna ask a question so come to you with the mic and then you can ask your question for Michelle anyone I've got more if you don't have that I always have questions but this is your opportunity if you want to ask who's gonna be bright there is right here yeah hello um after you left I would assume that they gave you somewhat of a debriefing on asking you like why you're leaving and things like that the your shaking of the head is important a lot of people in this room about the second thing is you mentioned how women were perceived in the in the in the CIA and given that they didn't give you an exit interview essentially how are they going to ever change given that they clearly need more women they probably need more minorities they need of people who can speak other languages and if you have the 1950s mentality and anything today yeah I don't see how you're gonna survive how do you see the CIA actually actually changing it it's gonna be painful and it's gonna be painful and it's gonna have to come from really strong individuals who have the confidence to be who they are I mean the CIA right now is simply disadvantaged by a lack of diversity on every level and so if you're going to reach if you're going to collect intelligence in different cultures you need people who speak different languages you need people who understand those cultures you need people of all backgrounds and sizes and shapes who can blend and and get around so how are we going to do it I'm hoping that when I write blog pieces or when I speak publicly that I'm speaking to maybe the next generation of people who will eventually get into the CIA and have it's not going to be easy it's going to be a struggle the CIA has is behind behind the game so maybe I can get in front of leaders at some point and encourage them to try to change the way we do hiring and the way we do vetting to improve that process operational tempo doesn't help that much either because you know you have young people who are being burned out by the pace of deployments that that aren't allowing like we talked about earlier for 30 year CIA career in someone who might be like Michelle work her way up to be the deputy director of operations at one point or the D CIA at one point might leave after ten years or five years because they were deployed to terrible redacted country and in Iraq back to back yeah and just say this is enough I just can't do this anymore yeah and so my concern is that so that the generation above me they were in the CIA their whole career then my generation we came in around 9/11 and so a lot of us had a very difficult careers warzone difficult place difficult place and so for us after 10 years Joseph and I were exhausted I'm fearful that the next generation I don't it's gonna in one sense it's good because they're gonna take less you know crap from the superiors you know they're gonna say like I'm not gonna stick with this unfortunately that's going to mean we're not going to have a depth of expertise within the CIA and we need people who can stick around long enough to enact those changes so that's that's a huge challenge hello my name is Kirk Pyrus I'm from the American Studies Program I wanted to know what was the process like for you to begin speaking about your experiences what inspired you to do that and did you have to go I'm on obviously you had to go through a bunch of clearance to be able to talk about this issue so what was that process like and one of the fruits you've seen from speaking out about it so I for me it was a spiritual calling to share my story to inspire others and so I knew when I felt that calling that I couldn't do it in pseudonym I would have to do it in true name which meant I would have to leave the agency and I would have to drop cover but the agency doesn't have to say yes so I started writing the book initially in faith that they would let me drop cover and they did and so everything that I speak about everything that's in the book everything that I say on radio TV or podcasts or things like this has to be cleared and it's amazing what they'll actually let you actually let you say except for where you actually served but the feedback has been so tremendous and even though there's a risk of coming out and saying I'm former CIA there's a definite risk attached to that it's so worth it when you can give people hope to do the hard things in life because I'm a really big believer that it's in the toughest spaces that we find out what our strengths are and we can have the greatest impact so do the hard things and if I can give people the courage to walk through doors that scare the pants off them then that makes it worth it for me and that's what gets me out of bed every day Michele I can't tell you my name it's a secret but did you ever work with any ministries from the US who help integrate some of the refugees no no we haven't worked on this and with integration issues no okay thank you mm-hmm let me follow up with that I just on an individual basis so like we we have friends who have come to the United States so like as a family we help out but we've never done that like in a large scale per se have you ever heard of voice of the martyrs yes of course so pre CIA my husband did Human Rights work and he worked with a lot of organizations such as voice of the martyr you mentioned risk of I guess talking about being former CIA can you explain what those risk are so I think there's any risk at becoming a public personality so putting yourself out there as a singer or an actor there's a general risk because you kind of got crazy people all over the place but I'm also cognizant that as a former US government official former counterterrorism officer that if I'm in public places or I'm doing book signings there's a very real risk that somebody could walk in who's a lone wolf who's an extremist or a crazy person they bring in a gun that's that's a problem that's the kind of risk if it's always in the back of my mind and so when we're doing public events now we're having to get security and we're having to make sure bags are checked before people walk in the door how much how much risk is there for your former contacts now that you're out is I mean you know I mean people people overseas who you work with is there any any fear obviously the CIA wouldn't have allowed you to go out with your normal name if there was but isn't that a concern that when someone drops their cover that anyone they had worked with overseas anyone they had recruited anyone that they had had any kind of contact with they're tainted automatically now that everyone knows that you're CIA so yeah when you go through the clearance process they make sure that that's not the case concise how much did your family know beyond your husband who obviously knew what you did for a job did your parents know did your friends know and how much decisions there's certain laws that regulate what you can tell other people but common sense plays a role in this also yeah so when you're hired by the CIA they say you are allowed to tell your family and but you need to be sure they can bear the burden of this secret and they can keep your secret for you if that's the rest of your life it's the rest of your life in their life I knew my family could handle the secret so I told my parents there sitting on the front right here my sister who's right behind them and my niece and my best friend Stephanie they always knew where we were what we were really doing and they they kept that secret for us and you know having even a core people of behind you know behind back here in the United States praying for us really I think kept us from really bad things happening so we were very grateful for their love and support and that carry it certainly over until your your post work but as a historian what I found fascinating is and this is where I'm gonna age myself a little bit these kids these days are are leaving us a historical record that doesn't I mean so much better than it was in the past and you have an example of this where when you were making this move from the camp to the airport there's this magical historic record of your your texts and emails and calls back and forth that is like almost a tick-tock or a schedule of every moment going through the flight was canceled the flights back on we're through security we're here were there yeah and to me it's a historical document yeah so I actually had to go back and put the pieces of that puzzle together because we were under such stress I couldn't remember which day was Tuesday Wednesday what happened when and so I took the photographs with the time date stamps on them the text the emails and I put them all together and it was very helpful for me as I was you know remembering all that and writing about it in the book otherwise I couldn't have kept all that straight write everything down which is the opposite unless it's secret which case dog you know any further questions yeah right behind you Amanda yeah hi so what was it like on your marriage was it like per say mr. and mrs. Smith or how is it spiritually based as well so I was so grateful to have Joseph by my side because I don't think I could have gotten through that level of stress without him as my rock and probably he would say the same I mean obviously ten years of that you know working every day constantly looking for hostile surveillance meaning somebody about to ambush you or attack you took its toll on us definitely was hard on our marriage especially towards the end but it it also strengthened our marriage because I mean you are the only ones who know what you've been through together I mean you're we know things about each other that no one will ever understand fully and so to have a spouse by your side helping to keep you safe I was so grateful and the other thing I just have to praise Joseph on was the fact that it's Joseph who taught me that intricacies of Arab culture that I needed to do my job well it's stuff you can't learn in a textbook you can't learn in a classroom but I would pepper Joseph with a thousand questions like so when they say this what do they actually mean or what are they thinking when they say ABC and so bless his heart like we say in the south he had he had the answer a lot of questions when you work together times you didn't want people to know that you're married how difficult was it you tell a great story but you don't think through the whole story by the book and you can read it but there's a great story about this how difficult it was to not let on that you are married so now you're watching your own nonverbal because you don't want to look you know cuz you're with your spouse so you know everything is so you're so comfortable and so familiar and I'm like act like you don't know Joseph very well you know if it we both had the same ring on and just as like take your ring off so and then it was very awkward at times when we were meeting with the source together and trying hide the fact obviously that we're married because that's too much information for terrorists to know but Joseph was placed in weird positions where the guy was like hitting on the terrorist was hitting on me this is very wrong to be like you two should date was there a last question have way go up before the last there it is yeah is there a story that maybe is not in the book that you found yourself at a place where you just realized I will remember this for the rest of my life yeah yeah so in order to get from by app the airport to the CIA compound we had to take helicopters over the CIA took helicopters and flew us skimmed right over the tops of buildings and the idea was that insurgents couldn't see you coming and like shoot you out of the sky but and and so we would only fly between compound and the airport at night and so you would you know you'd make this grand trip from Washington DC to Iraq you get to the airport and then you get on these helos but it was during curfew so it was the one time when it was quiet there were no people on the streets it was just quiet and I would sit next I would try to sit next to the gunner so I could see out the door and it was like my only real glimpse of Baghdad because the rest of time we were stuck on the Green Zone on the compound and I'm like this is what Baghdad looks like it you know look while you can and I probably should have been really scared but I wasn't I was fascinated and Andy in those moments I was like how did I get here you're sitting you're sitting next to a guy with a machine gun and night-vision goggles yeah so that was a surreal moment like yeah I never imagined yeah up here sorry man to make you come all the way up just to pick up on your kids these days them kids can't seem to shut up on social media anymore so how hard is it going to be to recruit them to the CIA when they rejected you for unknown reasons it's gonna be really hard because also it's really high hard to hide if you've done things wrong right cuz there's a record online so that's a really good point I think it's gonna make it much more difficult to hire the next generation and then even something is it what simple as the drug issue you know now you know marijuana is legalized in some states and not others and so no you know cuz we were a polygraph you know have you ever met you miss used drugs or used illegal drugs how are they gonna ask that question now I don't know we jump up on that too this is several years ago that you are vetting these people to come into Europe but nowadays how can you use social media as a vetting process because it seems like people if they're not refugees running from the lights from Isis but if there are people coming from more industrialized places you know Damascus or they have possibly have social media profiles can this be used for vetting as well absolutely yeah great vetting tools yeah I mean and we think of vetting as being so complicated but something as simple as when a refugee walks up and says like I have no documentation to the UN person that's a massive red flag because in the Middle East and Arab culture it is incredibly important even more important the United States to have all your paperwork together so even our internally displaced persons they had before they ran from there ain't you know their homes they brought their paperwork with them so of course there are legitimate cases where someone you know lost their paperwork or their passport or their their ID along the way but generally speaking Arabs treat their their paperwork in their documentation with great care straight behind you what would be an advice you would give to young women just entering the workforce or woman who are working in like a very male-dominated workforce so my advice would be to figure out what you're really passionate about and get really good at it whatever that thing is because I'm in order to break the glass ceilings you have to demonstrate your knowledge your expertise and and sometimes oftentimes we have to work much harder than others to do that but the way that I broke through was by getting really good in terms of my knowledge of Arab culture so for me that's what made the difference so I would just say find that thing and then do everything you can to build up your knowledge on that topic or that skill so so I'm curious I know that your faith plays such an instrumental role in your work can you talk a little bit about the the intersection between the Muslim culture in which you were existing and the faith that you held so personally yeah so my faith is for me very foundational for the decisions I make in my life and what I do with my life and so for me I felt that God had opened the door for me to do this very unorthodox career being in the Middle East as a Christian what was useful about that is you know you're taught to have empathy for others and try to see each other's to try to understand other people better and so that that empathy was really critical both in the workplace as well as just getting around and it also helped me to you know for the first time in my life I was a minority you know so I could understand what it feels like to be the only whatever in the room and so now I have more empathy for minorities in other locations because now I I felt what that feels like to be the weird or the different one yeah you were like a quadruple minority so the American woman is you're signing hands stretched out so I think you're gonna be signing some books in a minute or two please join me in thanking Michelle Ruby Asad for taking the time to talk to us here tonight it's really appreciate it and we wanted to stick around and yellow sign in the back the book you know I'm paid to say the books are good but every so often I get to say it honestly I did truly enjoy this I actually had literally read it in about four hours just kind of sat down and it's very narrative it's now you're not reading you know something that you're gonna be like uh I got to read another chapter and the stories we did we didn't give them anywhere near the kind of justice we needed to one day they're going to make for a hell of a screenplay because the the harrowing Trek to the airport is extraordinary the Sonny's story I had me just laughing out loud so if you have the chance which you all do grab this book was it certainly worth having thank you thanks everybody for coming [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: IntlSpyMuseum

Views: 19,330

Rating: 4.7370243 out of 5

Keywords: Breaking Cover, Michele Rigby Assad, covert, CIA, counterrorism, undercover, spies, spy, International Spy Museum

Id: 9ePN-EVvXQU

Length: 69min 43sec (4183 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 23 2018