Jim Lawler on the Art of Espionage and the Perfect Intelligence Operation

OODAcast informing your decisions with  intelligence analysis and insight brought   to you by the team at oodaloop.com hi  i'm matt devost the ceo of ooda llc   and thanks for joining us on the OODAcast today  we have jim lawler who was introduced to me   by several long time friends and colleagues in  the intelligence community and who happened to   be the author of a book that i had already  purchased and had on my reading list so   jim had a 25-year career at the cia in a variety  of positions including focusing on countering the   proliferation of weapons of mass destruction  recipient of numerous awards and led one of   the you know if not the most successful nuclear  takedown team from an intelligence operations   perspective in the history of the cia so jim  thanks for joining us and you know with all of our   guests we like for them to give us an introduction  to themselves and kind of their career trajectory   where did you start and how did you get to this  point in time well thank you matt for asking me on   the program i i kind of backed into this totally  by accident i was in my last year of law school   at the university of texas back in 1976 and as  anybody who's a graduate student or a college   student or last year of school there's only  one thing on your mind and that's i need a job   so cia was coming to the law school to interview  for attorneys for the office of general counsel   and so kind of on a lark i decided well i'll go  interview with them i was interviewing with law   firms why not with the cia and the interviewer  was a former case officer named bill wood and we   chatted for maybe three or four minutes and mind  you he's there to hire attorneys but he looked   at me and he said jim have you ever thought about  the clandestine service and i said no i don't know   what that is and he said well i can't tell you  much about it but i think you'd be good at this   well i did think about it for 24 hours but  the reality was my wife's mother at the time   was ultimately terminally ill and  there was no way we were going to   be moving away from texas to washington dc and  then overseas so i returned the application to   him with some regret but i was facing reality  that there's no way we were leaving texas   and ultimately and sadly my wife's mother  did pass away about 18 months later   but in the meantime i made a crucial  decision to join a family-owned company   i don't know if you've ever been in a family-owned  company matt but there's a big problem with   family-owned companies and it's that f word family  and i i love my dad and i love my two brothers   and i was making a lot of money more money than  i would ever make again in my life probably and i   was so unsatisfied just i'd come home at night and  it was just so empty there was no meaning to it   i boosted the company's sales i probably  more than tripled it in two or three years   but it was just absolutely valueless in my mind  and so i came home i would complain at night   and my wife who is a real sweetheart she  stood for that for about three and a half   years and then finally she said jim either do  something about this or stop your belly aching   well i had kept mr woods card and i jokingly  like to say this was before al gore invented the   internet so i had to write him a letter and i said  three and a half years ago you and i spoke and   i was interested at the time but couldn't really  pursue this opportunity now i can pursue it and   i'm very interested in chatting with you it was  it wasn't but about three days later that i got   a phone call from a young gal and she said  never used the letter cia all she said was   mr wood got your letter and he was wondering  if you could meet him next thursday at three   o'clock in the afternoon at the holiday inn out  on the gulf freeway i said yes ma'am i think   i can so i went to that interview he said  jim i'd like to fly you to washington and   about two weeks later i flew to washington for  about three days came back and waited another   i don't know two or three months then they had  me come back for another two or three days the   polygraph test the physical the shrink exam lord  knows how i passed that but i did and a few weeks   after that really pretty short order i got a phone  call offering me a job as a gs 11 case officer   now the bizarre thing was i had no idea what  a case officer did none whatsoever but i was   so unhappy with this family business they could  have offered me a job on the moon and i would   have taken it and so i said fine and so a couple  of months later we packed up the car my wife was   pregnant with our first child we moved to  washington and again matt i have to stress   i had no idea what they wanted me to do what  does an operations officer do i have no idea   this was really before cia had a lot of publicity  there weren't a lot of programs out there   i think the only movie i'd ever seen was three  days of the condor i figured it might not be like   that maybe it would i don't know but i was wanting  to start this job and over the next two or three   weeks after i started in february of 1980 then  i discovered exactly what they wanted me to do   they wanted me to manipulate people to exploit  people to subvert people to suborn people   to convince them to betray a trust to  commit treason to become traitors to their   country or to whatever group they remember of and  i found out that not only was i pretty good at it   but i loved it i loved every bit of it  and in fact they they jokingly say that   when they hire case officers they always ask  so how much sociopathy do you want dialed in   and i've had one of my one of my shrink friends  he says lawler you're nothing but a sociopath   but one within lanes those lanes are u.s laws but  anyways that's how i got started in this business   went on five overseas tours consecutively and  finally that was in 1982 came back in 94 after   that 12 years abroad and i had gotten involved  in counter proliferation operations basically   stopping the spread of nuclear and biological  weapons and missile technologies and i really   found that to be psychologically righteous if you  can stop another country from acquiring a nuclear   weapon something that could kill hundreds of  thousands of people that's really worth your time   it was very very righteous in my opinion so that's  how i got started matt excellent and what are you   up to today kind of what was the career trajectory  once you get out of the cia well okay so i   uh okay i came back from my last overseas posting  they asked me to run the counter proliferation   shop in european division then we were melded  into the counter proliferation division and i   spent the next 12 years uh our next  11 years doing that retired in 2005   and my first year i was an advisor to rob richer  on the seventh floor when he was associate deputy   director of operations and to my best friend  rothmois larson who was chief of european division   well after about a year of that a gentleman  who ran the agent of the inter intelligence   community's bio weapons program counter bio  weapons program he asked me to put together   a curriculum to teach young case officers and  young fbi special agents how to go after weapons   of mass destruction scientists and recruit  them and again try and prevent the spread of   nuclear and biological weapons and so i've been  doing things like that just about ever since   in retirement excellent great you know a lot of  the uh viewers of this podcast are interested   in decision making and lessons learned you know  especially from someone with as much experience   as yourself so were there some lessons learned  around decision making or interacting you know   doing your your core mission that you learned  from operations over the years that you can share   well there were some specialized lessons that i  learned a asset that i had recruited once told   me he said jim if you want to disrupt a wmd  facility you have to look for choke points   and by that he meant you need to look for  technologies that are not easy for them to get but   yet something that they absolutely depend upon to  run their plant for instance a uranium enrichment   plant now there's thousands and thousands  of components in a uranium enrichment plant   but there's only maybe a dozen or so that are so  specialized and unique to that type of operation   and my asset said focus on those you don't have  the time or the resources to look at everything   but focus on the choke points and so i've used  that same methodology of focusing on choke points   ever since in various operational endeavors that  i've made another lesson that i learned early   on was really one that my great-grandfather had  used he was a general in the union army um he led   the charge at big black river bridge vicksburg  and he was basically following general grant's   uh triple strategy for success at vicksburg  and those those three lessons were move swiftly   do the unexpected seize every opportunity and  if you do that in operations or even in business   you know moving quickly moving swiftly doing  the unexpected seizing every opportunity   people like to say sometimes they are chat  jokingly say lawler you're you're lucky   well i don't believe in luck you know that old  joke about the harder i work the luckier i get   well there's a lot of truth in that and i think  that during a lifetime almost everybody gets equal   chances equal opportunities it's just part of life  you get these opportunities but there are a lot of   people who either don't recognize an opportunity  when they see it or they'll run screaming from   it i've known case officers like that well they  must be out to get me giving me this chance you   know it's like no they're not this is actually an  opportunity but there are a small number of people   who they not only recognize an opportunity but  they're not afraid of it they seize it and they   run with it i won't say i've run with every  opportunity i haven't but i honestly think   that successful case officers and successful  businessmen it's all that you basically you make   your own luck you make those opportunities you're  networked you're out there you're meeting people   so that's that's my philosophy yeah that was one  of my core tenets you know one thing that has   spanned my career has been my work as  a red teamer you know first red teaming   cyber systems for military and intel in 95 and  then on things like the defense adaptive red   team where we looked at wmd proliferation  and all these other complex issues and   then business red teaming and one of my core  tenants or lessons learned is don't call it luck   really you know it drives me crazy when somebody  says in an operation or in a red team and then we   got lucky it's like no you didn't get lucky you  drove yourself to a point through the decisions   that you made and the actions that you took  that allowed you to take advantage of the   situation that was before you it wasn't luck  it was the the prior work that got you there   so definitely share that conviction with you i  also like the discussion around doing something   unexpected can you give us an example of a time  when you did something unexpected that kind of   changed the outcome of an operation or or made  it more successful than you anticipated well i   okay i'm kind of a contrarian thinker in fact jim  pavitt who was the deputy director of operations   for a number of years uh he had been my boss when  he was chief of the counter proliferation division   and then when he became ddo addo and ndo he  used to call me into meetings and we'd have   a big meeting you know five or six or seven  of us sitting around discussing an operation   and many times he would turn to me and say jim  give me a different point of view i thought   that was good you know he knew that i had kind  of a different perspective on things sometimes   and it wasn't that i wasn't negative but just  give me another viewpoint on something like that   the um you know trying to to turn a what  could be a failure into a success is always   something that i'm i'm looking for i'll give  you an example i was posted in a european city   one of my cover positions was that as a consul  i mean i was i had to take the consular course   and was legitimately i have a  certificate that says i'm a consul   consular officer united states government well  in this particular city that i was posted in   we knew that there was a guy who was a member of  hezbollah in fact he was the chief of hezbollah   for the entire country for that particular country  that i was posted in now what do you think the   chances are that a guy who has a texas accent  a white guy like me can recruit a hezbollah guy   i think not a lot but how do i turn a  failure into a success and so i thought okay   i'm going to write to headquarters and see  if i can find a case officer or not official   cover officer who is basically fluent in arabic  basically from his ethnic group and what we're   going to do is i'm going to have the uh this guy  come here because i knew that this hezbollah guy   believe it or not he was applying for a u.s  visa he wanted to go to the united states now   i also know there's no way in the hell that the  fbi or his state department is going to allow   me to give him a visa to go to the united states  this guy is the head of a hezbollah cell in this   european country so how can i turn this failure  into something that's unexpected so i got the   cia officer the deep cover officer who is an  ethnic arab to come in i had a picture this   guy had already submitted a visa application so we  have his picture so i set up an appointment with   the hezbollah guy to come in at nine o'clock some  morning and i told the non-official cover officer   i said i want you to get in line right there  with him and this is what we're going to do well   okay so the the arabic case officer he goes  and he stands right behind his hizballah guy   he doesn't say anything to him but he pulls  out this passport that's very distinctive from   a certain arab country and he's just holding it  there right behind the guy well the guy's just   kind of looking around he kind of looks down  he sees the case officer there with his arabic   passport and so he knows that it's a kind of a  fellow countryman so he starts chatting with him   so they're chatting for the next 20 minutes in  arabic as they're going up to the to the embassy   coming up to the consular office there by the time  they get to the front door they're best buddies   okay so they come in and then this was where  we scripted it i was the interviewing officer   so the first thing i do is i turn down the  hizballah guy you know reject then i took the uh   the non-official cover officer and i rejected his  as well so now they're both pissed at me and they   go out they're you know you know oh god damn  it you know and it's just cursing up a storm   but that's bonding the two of them guess what our  knock officer ends up recruiting the hezbollah   guy because now they they both detested me and  they're going out and he ran him as a source   and i'd like to say he was one of the ones that  helped prevent a big bombing in south america   uh you know they were hezbollah has had some  real atrocities in parts of south america   well this knock officer was managed we turned  basically a failure into a success excellent cool   i love that story um a lot of fun you uh also uh  got some awards for being the chief of the aq con   nuclear takedown team you know can you explain for  those that aren't familiar uh you know based on   what's publicly available uh kind of what happened  with that team and what you're able to accomplish   yeah i can i can try and compress this it was a  long long story in fact the project took about   eight years eight or nine years of my life but uh  initially we didn't start out looking at dr aku   khan akukan was a metallurgist phd metallurgist  he was employed in the netherlands in a european   consortium called urinco which stands for the  uranium enrichment corporation which is a joint   company of the dutch the british and the germans  for the express purpose of enriching uranium   up to a light enriched stage for nuclear power  reactors peaceful nuclear power but you need fuel   and that's what they do they would enrich the  uranium the u-235 content the fissile part   up to uh what we call light enriched uranium  well if you run that that uranium hexafluoride   through the centrifuge facil piping enough you can  get it up to highly enriched uranium which is what   you use in a nuclear weapon and so you just run it  through again and again and again you continue to   really enrich when they say enrichment they  mean raising the content from say three or   four percent up to 85 to 90 percent highly  enriched uranium that's what makes a bomb   and in fact if you don't have the fissile material  you don't have a bomb well we knew that dr khan in   retrospect he basically was very sympathetic  to his home country of pakistan and pakistan   had sat and watched india detonate a nuclear  weapon in 1970 and the head of pakistan had   said we will eat grass but we are going to have  our own nuclear weapon well dr khan provided them   with the means to do that by stealing the plans  for the uranium centrifuges out of the urinco   company and they took it to pakistan he was also  an incredibly charismatic and networked individual   and he left a lot of european citizens that were  his buddies he paid them basically to supply him   with this high technology equipment that he  needed and consequently they set up a company   in pakistan first was called engineering research  lab and then they changed it to his name khan   research laboratories and they were the ones that  provided pakistan with the the fuel the highly   enriched uranium for nuclear weapons now what  the pakistanis didn't know was dr khan who had   a tremendous ego decided to take nuclear weapons  private and so he had found customers overseas   and my my operation discovered what he was doing  much to the amazement of a lot of people who   thought that this couldn't nobody would ever  take nuclear weapons private but he did and he   found libya as one of his first customers and i  still remember when we got the information that   showed that basically libya was acquiring a  nuclear weapons capability a senior officer   said that's impossible if libya were acquiring a  nuclear weapons capability we'd know about it well   three or four weeks later i had the smoking  gun proof that what i told him was right   and so we were positioned overseas strategically  positioned shall we see shall we say   to penetrate his network i got this idea from  a counterintelligence course i had attended   uh i don't know if you're familiar  with the uh name felix sherzinski   not no no okay well every intelligence officer  should know that name jerzynski was the man   that lenin appointed to run the first soviet  intelligence service the checker and sherzinski   was a bolshevik he was actually a pole he wasn't  a russian but he was faced with an existential   challenge in the soviet union in 1917 1918 and  that's the fact that the revolution had succeeded   but certain countries like great britain  and the united states were financing the   counter-revolutionaries that were infiltrating  and trying to overthrow the revolution   well zizzinski struggled with this challenge  and he said you know in order to defeat the   counter-revolutionaries i'm going to become one so  his czechist agents fanned out across the soviet   union pretending to be counter-revolutionaries and  they systematically identified every one of them   and they annihilated them they even controlled  the bank through which all the money went through   i thought okay if this little bolshevik can  do this i can do that so if i want to defeat   proliferators guess what i have to become a  proliferator so we put little companies overseas   you know trying to sell supposedly ostensibly  going to sell things to bad guys and by   doing that we penetrated their their lines we  penetrated their supply lines their supply chains   we identified their people and over that eight  or nine year period we were finally able to   bring them down excellent cool so the one part  of your career trajectory that you left off was   that you became an author uh and wrote a book uh  called living lies a novel of the iranian nuclear   weapons program so i want to ask you a couple of  thematics from the book but first i'd like to ask   why write a book what uh what impassioned  you to put word to paper and kind of   tell this story in novel format well i've  always had an aspiration to write a novel   in fact in my initial interview with the  agency way back in 1979 uh one of the   officers who was interviewing me he said well  you know what are some of your aspirations i   said god i'd love to write a novel he says  oh lord that's all we need is another author   well i mean he was reacting to some guys who had  like frank snep and some others who had divulged   classified information philip agee was a real  you know he wrote a lot of he exposed a lot   of cia officers that's not what i meant at all i  just wanted to write some fiction some espionage   story and they say write what you know about so  along about 2015 during the first set of nuclear   negotiations with iran i was chatting with a  friend of mine ralph larson i mentioned earlier   and i said you know this is all well and good  but what happens if they cheat and then i   started thinking gee that's like a pretty  good novel you know you know the iranians   they convinced us to come back to the table and  they decide okay we want to really you know we   want relaxation from all these sanctions well  then we're going to pretend that we don't need an   enrichment program and in the book they don't need  an enrichment program because they get the fissile   material elsewhere i mean basically if you've got  the material you don't need to go to the expense   and trouble of enriching uranium so it turns out  to be a win-win for the win for the united states   a win for the iranians except what we don't know  is they really do have a covert weapons program   that they've hidden and it's run by a very  narcissistic brilliant islamic revolutionary   guard corps general who has basically  ridden his uncle who's a grand diatola his   robes his coattails he's ridden him up all  the way into the senior ranks of the irgc   and then he proposes to his uncle who he's also  engineered into becoming the supreme leader he   convinces him we need a whole card we need an  ace you know in our cards here i need to run   a covert nuclear weapons program so it's a story  of at least you know a couple of cia case officers   an fbi special agent and how they recruit  some sources inside of iran but there's the   iranians are not stupid and they run a very very  bright double agent at us and this double agent   convinces a lot of the negotiating team on the  american side that the iranians have come clean   and that you know everything's well and good  let's relax sanctions well in fact they haven't   but they they've manipulated one  particularly gullible case officer   and the white house is wanting to hear this they  want to know that we've got peace in our times   well but we don't so that's that's kind of the  theme of the book you know the confirmation bias   of it there's a couple aspects of the book i'd  love to ask you about the a that you know uh   you and i have met a few times over the years we  determined that i'm probably thinking that uh rob   richards retirement parties maybe the first place  uh now that we know that we start talking about it   there is one character though he starts talking  about the the magic of recruitment and running   an operation and that was kind of one point in  the book where i felt like this is something   that's deeply personal to jim uh that is a  kind of a deeply held belief or something   that he connects with based on his career so  can you step us through you know what is this   what is meant to be implied by kind of the magic  associated with with recruiting these human assets   so i based a scene early in the book there's this  case officer named elaine andrews and he believes   as i do in what i call the metaphysics and the  metaphysics is a certain indefinable quality   that some top recruiters have that you can't  explain it any other way how they actually   make that connection with a recruitment target  but i've experienced and i know a number of a   small number of really top-class case  officers that know what i'm talking about   where you can make a mental link with somebody  and it's it's partially it's like hypnosis   part of it is suggestion but then  there's part of it i can't explain   a knock officer who is a student of mine once  asked me if i was familiar with dr milton erickson   i said no he said well milton erickson  was the guy who developed hypnotherapy   and he says you don't know it jim but you use a  lot of his same techniques i think that explains   part of it i have a soft voice it's a it's  a reassuring voice at least one of my assets   told me that when they talk to me and they listen  to me it's like their brain is in a warm water bed   and i i'm a non-threatening person and i relax  them but there's something more to it than that   and one scene in the book actually happened  to me a couple of neurophysics neuroscientists   these are phd neuroscientists over at at the  agency wanted to talk to me about the subject   of the magic of tradecraft now unfortunately by  magic they meant i found out they meant trickery   and deception and i said but i don't trick people  i don't deceive them and what i meant by magic   was literally magic and they said well that's  not that's not possible and i said okay let me   give you an example if you had been living in the  1880s and you had seen a jet aircraft go overhead   you might have said that was magic because you  didn't know the aerodynamic principles that would   justify you know an airplane flying or a  jet airplane flying and yet 20 years later   in 1903 the wright brothers flew a plane  that wasn't magic anymore so i said to them   these two neuroscientists i said so it's possible  i think that 20 or 30 years from now neuroscience   will actually identify what i'm talking about  that there are some people that can metaphysically   somehow connect with another person and get them  to do what they want them to do and they looked at   me skeptically and i said okay so you're telling  me that the field of neuroscience is complete   well no no and then one of them said well it'd  be kind of fun to watch you work a cocktail party   and i said i'm sorry but i don't do parlor  tricks but i honestly do believe that there are   there's a small otherwise how do you account  for a small fraction of case officers   to do most of the significant recruitments  and and so in my book lane and a few others   are part of what i call the guild and the guild  is are these people who are absolutely top   notch ace recruiters and they're the their  recruitments are the ones that change history   yeah excellent cool yeah and i had the feeling  that that was a a highly kind of personally held   belief uh about your work you know when i read  that section of the book there's also another a   couple other themes that i found interesting and  i don't want to give away you know given it's a   work of fiction i want people to read it uh so  i don't want to give away the plot lines but   from a recruitment perspective you know both the  person that's recruited and one that volunteers   both kind of come out of an affinity  for western culture they've been to   uh universities in the united states uh one is  a as a jazz musician and i'll do the reveal and   show you miles davis over my shoulder there  uh which i know that resonated with you   yeah that resonated with me for sure uh so so what  do you think that this you know the role you know   the united states is kind of a global cultural  leader something that people aspire to to come   here and to study and absorb our culture what  role does that play in the successful recruitment   well i think it gives us a tremendous advantage we  have all of these foreign graduate students coming   here and yeah there's there is maybe a bit some  ci issues with some of that but i'd say 99.999   of these people they really add to our capital  base a lot of them become scientists or doctors or   contribute a lot to the united states and if  nothing else creating a very positive view of the   united states they get culturally you know they  have cultural affinities with us like you said   one of the uh one of the uh iranians in my story  he's a jazz musician he just loves miles davis i   mean he's an expert on miles davis and so that's  something that the case officer uses as well in   fact i actually used that in a recruitment  of a foreign target this foreign target   had been surrounded by some non-official cover  officers who were not in a position to risk their   cover and try and recruit him but instead they  told me all about how this guy he likes chet   baker he likes miles davis you know he likes the  uh the stan gets he likes all these people and   i had not at that time i was not a big jazz fan  but i thought okay i'm going to try and steep   myself in jazz and then i'm going to approach  this guy obliquely which i did and he gave a   talk a publicly publicized talk that i then went  up and congratulated him on the talk and asked him   if he would join me for lunch a couple of weeks  later i knew he was a gourmand and so i took him   to a michelin-starred restaurant and during dinner  we were talking about hobbies and things and so i   just brought up jazz and the guy's eyes lit up  and i mentioned you know the kind of blue album   by miles davis and some of the things by chet  baker chet baker lived in france for a while   things that i was able to find out he was a big  fan of the uh movies of woody allen well i happen   to like a lot of woody allen movies certainly the  early ones and so we chatted about that by the end   of the lunch it was like you know he had found his  long-lost brother and so to be able to you know it   resonates with people a common ground you know  something that you can you both enjoy or maybe a   book by an author you both enjoy and lore peeks at  somebody's cards something like that well then you   know okay i'm going to bring this up i'm going to  something that he can identify that i'm not just   an american embassy officer but somebody who's  got that same soul that same passion that he does   well i can attest that kind of blue makes for  a great soundtrack while reading the book so   definitely once i encountered those  passages i couldn't resist um those   are some interesting thematics around kind of  technology and the vulnerability of technology   what is your take on our increasing dependence on  technology and the susceptibility again i don't   want to give a lot of away a lot of the plot but  kind of the the keys to the kingdom with regards   to intelligence material being contained on  these systems and under control of you know some   of these super users any thoughts with regards  to kind of the risks from a cyber perspective   of our emerging dependence on technology  i i absolutely believe in the fact that   the most vulnerable spot of any organization  is the insider if if i recruit one insider   be it conscious recruitment or somebody  who's an unwitting a useful idiot   then it doesn't matter what kind of encryption  you have what kind of protections you have   you can even not be connected to the internet  not be anything but if i've got a good insider   i guarantee you i will disable your systems i will  he will give me everything i need to know i know   this for a fact i worked i had a course that i  used to teach with some very capable instructors   and myself called the cyber recruitment course and  the whole purpose of the course was to go after   the guy inside the it specialist i used to work  after you know part of the time after i retired   was i was a consultant at department of energy  office of intelligence and counterintelligence   and one day i'm sitting in my office there riding  on the uh classified system and one of the i.t   guys who i had become friends with he comes in he  says jim you may not know this but there's 35 guys   in the back room who read everything you write  so we've got 35 people i'm reading what i write   and and yeah they're all cleared but you know  how that just multiplies your chances of being   able to recruit somebody on the inside and then  he gave me some remarkable insights as to what   makes an i.t specialist tick what pisses them off  you know how they don't you know they i mean he   said how often do you go up to an i.t guy and  say thank you for my system's working so well   no you [ __ ] and moan at them when they're not  working well so he says you know we're usually   the least paid people in the building and yet  we have our fingers on the pulse of this place   he said there's something wrong here  and he said you know a lot of us   rather eccentric a little bit you know  and we've got contrarian personalities   look at ed snowden guess what ed snowden was  he was an i.t specialist let me recruit one   insider and that can enable a hundred or a  thousand technical penetrations and that's   what ed snowden basically did he well he wasn't  a technical failure he was a human failure yeah   as i like to say you know the in the cyber  security domain we talk about endpoint   protection and for the community the endpoint  is your mobile phone it's your workstation   it's your server and i always like to remind  them that the ultimate points the human being   absolutely and that's the game changer  is the human being if i go if i want to   penetrate an organization or a country's defenses  i'm looking for the person that i can recruit the   person who doesn't feel appreciated the person  who is i've recruited more people because they   were pissed off at their boss than for any other  reason they're going through stress i like to say   i never ever recruited a happy person in  my life you don't recruit happy people you   recruit unhappy people people that have got  an axe to grind and the reason they do this   you know your parents my parents most people  grew up where you're taught don't betray your   family you don't betray your country  things like that but i've had at least   several of these people tell me that  they felt like they were betrayed first   their boss stole credit for what they  did and so now they can't stand this guy   so no i'm not betraying they betrayed me first i'm  just evening the score that's how you that's how   they justify unless they're a pure narcissist  or a psychopath a pure sociopath sure that's   how that's how they balance this you know  that you know they started this i didn't so you obviously you know given the book you  know demonstrated some familiarity with the   technology landscape but also just this this job  of espionage is changing as we tend to migrate   towards having our relationships over technology  we're doing this call over zoom uh people are   building and operating in the metaverse you  know what kind of challenges do you think that   the intelligence community is going to have to  overcome to be able to engage in uh recruitment   of assets in this new landscape where most of  the interactions might be in a cyber domain   well i it's funny you ask that matt because i've  been asked i'm a member of an organization called   afsia it used to be something like armed  forces electronics association organization   a lot of dod people intelligence community  people well i'm sharing a panel at our intel   symposium in the spring on uh something called  ubiquitous technical surveillance which means   all the cameras all the biometrics everything  that's out there that makes life for me and my   fellow case officers very difficult well we've  i've invited three three people we're gonna   have four people on this panel and three of the  people are personal friends of mine one of them   is paula doyle who is the former associate  deputy director of operations for technology   another one is fbi supervisory special agent  ed yoo ed is just a brilliant special agent   he's now at the dni and he's the national  intelligence officer for emerging technologies   and in my third choice was doug london who just  wrote the book the recruiter and doug is a really   cracker jack case officer served multiple  tours overseas and he's a excellent street   man and so we're going to discuss in a classified  environment what should we be doing what what what   are our greatest concerns what are our nightmares  about ubiquitous technical surveillance how do   you overcome this how do you spoof it how do you  disrupt it how do we develop our own systems to   disrupt their operations so you have to look at it  from both a defensive and offensive point of view   but don't don't let it shut down operations  because uh you know the the israelis have a   cardinal bedrock counter intelligence principle  and that's swiftness swiftness is your best   your best defense uh a good good example of  this was you may recall i think it was about   10 years ago there was a i can't remember if  he was his no it wasn't his bala he was another   um maybe was hezbollah there was a terrorist in  abu dhabi or dubai and a mossad hit team went   in and they got the guy okay now in doing that  there's five or six or seven of these guys and   their faces and everything were on all these  cameras and things like that and so some of   my colleagues were saying ah this was just you  know big failure you know what a what it was   a blown operation and i said no wait a moment  hold off okay i've run teams not a hit team but   i've run entry teams and right now your biggest  your biggest goal is get your team in and get   out safely that's your top commitment right number  two get the target okay they did that they got the   guy and they got out sure they blew their aliases  maybe they can't go to certain countries anymore   but they moved swiftly they got in they they were  so focused on this guy because he was a terrorist   and they got him they got out sure they  had the cameras and everything there but   by getting in and getting out quickly they  succeeded and i would have been very proud of them   something to be said for for continuing to  operate given that changes in the domain right   of operation where some people might be crippled  to be like we can't kill them at the hotel because   we're going to be on camera whereas it seems like  with that israeli operation they said you know   the operation continued despite the changes  in the domain where they knew that the   assets would be blown people would be photographed  and there was inevitability with regards to   that being discovered and analyzed and posted on  youtube but they went forth with it anyway was   that can i continue to operate uh you know instead  of finding excuses not to operate given that   the landscape has changed i mean there are some  targets and some operational objectives that are   so great you just have to accept the risk you have  to try and minimize the risk in fact a lot of what   we do in the world of espionage is being able to  properly appraise how much how much risk is there   minimize the risk to the extent possible and then  move swiftly get in and get out make sure you   protect your people and uh don't like the russians  put them on tv saying that they were just tourists   walking around well you have to hand this to the  russians they never let anything stop them they   they don't you know back in the 80s uh i think the  french expelled and the farewell case i think they   expelled like 85 russian intelligence officers  i guarantee you they never ceased operations in   france they kept going they had their illegals  there they had their deep network people there   so the one thing you got to hand to the  russian the russians is they don't give up   they just keep coming shift gears here  just a little bit real quickly and ask   you you know what do you think is the greatest  threat uh facing us here over the next decade that's a well i think we've been facing it ever  since 9 11 we let 911 dominate our focus for far   too long you know i'm not saying we shouldn't have  been focused on it we should 3000 americans lost   their lives but while we were consumed with the  terrorist target i guarantee you that the chinese   the russians the iranians everybody else is having  our lunch and so i think we are you know and they   never stopped in fact they've increased their  presence the chinese i like to say it's almost   like in the korean war they're running human wave  attacks at us uh it is just you heard director ray   uh the last day or two saying he just can't  believe the amount of chinese espionage well   that's true that's right they're they're running  at us but as far as the the biggest challenges   yeah being able to justify to an american  public uh budgets for the intelligence community   they you know they were willing to give us  anything we wanted after 9 11. well things start   to fade into the rear view mirror after a while  we haven't had a serious terrorist attack really   on the united states since then so it's been 20  years and you're going to start thinking well okay   we've got this under control and so therefore  the intelligence community budgets might sink   and and i'll be the first to tell you there's  probably been a lot of fat there's a lot of waste   but we don't we don't sometimes focus on the right  thing okay i'm a human guy i strongly believe in   human but i also believe in what we call blended  operations meaning all source intelligence i used   to see my job in my last my last position  running the counter proliferation project   that i did almost like a symphony conductor i'd  have the uh you know the chorus that's the human   i'd have the woodwinds i'd have the strings i'd  have all these other things going on and i had to   be able to bring it all in the sig in the human  the uh the cyber int all of these ants together   and not at the expense of one another but  blended and they each became stronger because   of because of the fact that now they could you  know we recruit somebody on the inside we've   got somebody there not only do we have their  computers penetrated but we say focus on this   focus on this part you can have access to  somebody's computer and be so overwhelmed   that you don't know how to prioritize how to  triage but if you've got somebody who says now   look at these folders look at this here and by the  way it may say this but that's not what they're   going to do that's their goal but in fact they're  going to fall far short of that and they're only   going to go after these fallback things so  having a human that knows okay here's what the   here's what what this really means here's what we  really are going to do very contextualize it right   um it's what becomes important excellent now i  love that love the insights appreciate you taking   the time to chat with us i always like to close  out with one question since i'm an avid reader   uh and you're an author what is one book that  you've read recently that you would recommend   people check out that's a good question  um you just mentioned the recruiter saying   that for non-fiction the recruiter  is excellent um i'm reading a   book by um i'm currently reading a book the book  called first casualty about the losing mike spann   yeah excellent book one of our he was  our first casualty in the war and terror   the author uh toby harkness i believe his name  is um excellent excellent book it's an easy read   for fiction books i um of course  i'm a big fan of jean-luc corey i really like i really like uh his books  uh there's a brit mccarran h-e-r-r-o-n   who has written a book the first book was  called slow horses and it's about members   of mi6 that are not the swiftest horses and  but it's pretty good this whole series that   he's written uh i'd like to read some books by  charles [ __ ] i've got him on my list i want   to read some more of al makatsu she's a former  agency officer and has written a number of books i'm always i'm always interested in more books  not just espionage but all kinds of you know   all kinds of fiction sure yeah absolutely uh those  are great and as always we'll put links to those   recommendations you know when we publish the  podcast so uh jim thank you so much for joining   us i enjoyed the conversation lots of useful  insights and and great stories and obviously the   the best lessons learned to pass on are the  ones that were actually operationalized in   the fields i appreciate you sharing some of those  direct experiences with us that always makes the   the lesson behind a little bit more meaningful  thank you a lot matt it was a pleasure for me   to be on your program thanks for listening  to this ooda loop production for the latest   analysis on cyber security technology  and global risks please visit www

Channel: OODA

Views: 7,680

Keywords: OODA, OODAcast, OODAloop, OODA Loop, Bob Gourley, Matt Devost, Due Diligence, Cybersecurity

Id: YKH5mxCjOdI

Length: 49min 4sec (2944 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 01 2022