Outspoken Former CIA Operative Lindsay Moran - Interview

as usual we have another awesome interview for you guys today it's Leslie Moran she's a former CIA operative her book is blowing my cover my life as a spy she did that after she came out of the agency but mainly I just want to talk about your experience Lindsay thank you for joining us really appreciate it Lizzie used to be on our on our current show all the time and she was our expert on intelligence matters etc but what a reason I want to do this interview Lindsay's because I wanted to find out how in the world you got into the CIA how's life in the CIA I think that's super interesting so where'd you grow up I grew up in the DC area suburbs of Washington and my whole life was kind of immersed in spied on from a very early age my dad did top-secret work for the government my grandfather I'm pretty sure did work for the CIA I never was able to find out for sure and even as a little girl it was my childhood dream to be a spy and to someday work for the CIA so do you know if your father or grandfather ever killed anyone with a pen I'm pretty sure my dad tried to kill me with a pen okay so well if you grew up in that environment that makes a lot more sense then you went to Harvard right yep whoa okay so then you come out of Harvard though like most people coming out of Harvard think oh you know I think like I'm gonna be rich I don't know what they think right but so when you came out what did you think you were gonna be and what happened next well when I got out of Harvard I I didn't really know what I wanted to do like a lot of people coming out of college but it had always been this childhood dream of mine to be a spy so I actually approached the CIA at that time I was really young I was 21 and I got the application you know this was pre-internet days took it home and started to fill it out and I kind of got cold feet I just had this sense that I was too young to embark on this really serious career so I ended up going to having a number of jobs going to grad school at Columbia and then I went to teach in Bulgaria and yes as anyone would naturally and I really fell in love with Bulgaria I had always been interested in the Soviet Union yeah and interested in Eastern Bloc countries and although it was fairly dismal at that time I just loved the country love living overseas really grew fascinated with the Balkans and by that time I was 26 and I kind of reassessed and thought you know if I worked for the CIA I could combine all of these interests my desire to live overseas to assimilate to learn foreign languages and also I'd have this really exciting and glamorous career and be scaling walls in a black cat suit and blowing up safes did you actually do that no the big disappointment when I finally did join the CIA's it's not quite like it's depicted in Hollywood and certainly not as I imagined it would be okay so that's exactly what I want to talk to you about in a minute but first did your dad did you tell him and was he like Pro you joining the CIA again Sid what was his reaction well my dad who I found out was not a spy he did he was a naval architect and designed ships for the Navy and so he did a lot of top-secret work growing up and which is why I thought he was a spy but he was he was actually pretty opposed to me joining the agency he didn't think the agency would take me actually Wow why he said you know if the agency wants you they'll find you and you're far too liberal you know you have to be ahead of the Young Republicans Club so it was partly a desire to fulfill my childhood dream and maybe a little bit wanting to prove my dad wrong that I finally did approach the agency and and they were very interested in facts so I proved him wrong pretty early on yeah I mean they'd be crazy not to be interested I mean you're coming to them Harvard educated you're randomly interested in Bulgaria which no other American is right you're like oh sent me the Balkans like right around when the Soviet Union is melting down who volunteers for that okay so just one last quick thing before we get to the CIA stuff why of all the countries in the world book it's a kind of long story and I won't bore you with the details but suffice it to say I was I was applying for a teaching job overseas and almost all the American high schools overseas are the sons and daughters of diplomats and I was offered a job in Jakarta and another one in Quito Ecuador but this school in Bulgaria really intrigued me it's called the American College of Sofia and it was started by American missionaries in the late 1800s and then when the Communists took over Bulgaria and it was all Bulgarian students it was American teachers and Bulgarian students really bright Bulgarian students when the Communists came to power in Bulgaria they closed down the school kicked all the Americans out accused many of the Bulgarians who had been students there of being spies so in fact there was actually kind of a spy history to this myself so my class was all Bulgarian kids a hundred Bulgarian kids who had sat for an exam basically our SATs translated into Bulgarian they were super smart I left there before they realized they were smarter than I was so really neat interesting kids yeah that's a really interesting life experience and there's also a legend surrounding the school it was after they closed down the school it became the headquarters of the Bulgarian secret police and supposedly that is where they housed the assassin who made an assassination attempt against the Pope oh right who happens to be a Turkish guy yeah so we bring it all the way back around every turn believes that it was in a Bulgarian plant there's like no that guy's not Turkish well he is right Aryans have a place in spy lore because they were the ones who killed a guy with a poison tip umbrella the Bulgarians oh so they were the ones that they invented the poison tip umbrella Daria's big claim to fame it's fascinating what someone's interested in something they wind up being immerse in it like you wherever you went there was spying going on right so it's fascinating so finally you make it into the CIA so my main question is always like is it anything like in the movies where they're so smart and they got all the satellite images and they're tracking everything and they know everything and plus like in in countries like Turkey when I was growing movement right but my dad everybody like everybody was my dad used to fight against this idea I should say right but everybody else was like CIA everything CIA Oh rain today right Oh people didn't show up to my restaurant effing CIA right so what's the reality well the reality that's far from the case and and certainly when I joined the agency I I had this idea of it as this kind of mythical omnipotent organization as many Americans and as many people throughout the world do and then um you get there and it's you know it's a big bureaucracy and it's made up of human beings and some of them are really bright and some of them are really motivated but some of them are asleep under their desks and I'm not saying that figuratively I mean literally I would come across people sleep under their desk slash horrific yeah there's there's a great deal like any big organization there's a there's a great deal of waste there's a great deal of incompetence and this was all stuff that I wrote about in my book and obviously upset a lot of people at the agency and that's not to say that the CIA is useless you know they're they have a pretty big mandate trying to protect us trying to know everything that's going on in the world there's no way that they can do that but it's kind of astounding when you think about all the major geopolitical shifts that the agency somehow missed you know the dissolution of the Soviet Union follow the Berlin Wall Arab Spring one after another things that have happened that the CIA has failed to predict so this organization that everyone thinks makes everything happen and knows everything before it's going to happen is really far from from reality yeah I hear you on it and I don't know to what degree it is today but look I have a theory on what the CIA was actually meant to do back in the day so I don't think that they were here to protect us to be honest okay I think they were largely operating as a paramilitary unit of multinational corporations right they were there to protect the corporation it's not us so if a banana company didn't like a certain ruler in Honduras well then he had to go now how in the world was that protecting the United States citizens come on right oil rights whether it's in Iran whether it's in Latin America Venezuela whatever it might be all of a sudden the CIA shows up okay so let me throw that at you and get your perspective on well in fact one of the reasons I was and remain convinced that my grandfather was a spy and worked for the agency is because he lived his entire or spent his entire career overseas and wherever he was there was suddenly a mysterious coup so the CIA I think it's its mandate is basically to protect American interests it's kind of evolved into and it's presented to Americans now as we're protecting you but really it's about protecting American interests stealing secrets finding out information that the US government doesn't have access to through normal diplomatic channels and that can be you know on yes it can be used to protect Americans to prevent terrorist attacks but it also can be used to protect our economic interests see it bingo there it is because that's I like the way you phrase it it's American interest which is vague enough for them to say well it's in our interest to make sure that American companies do well and how could they do well with a you know ruler who actually care things that the country should keep its bananas right and so so that I think that's the excuse that they use and look I think that you I don't know that you need a CIA but I you need someone to gather intelligence to actually protect American citizens so I get it during the Soviet Union we had interests there now against al-qaeda I hope to god they're collecting information I want to get to that in a second etc and I would hope that they're infiltrating groups but it seemed like that that was not necessarily their objective and as you see them miss these things that you think like what's your point if you're missing these giant events as you're pointing out Arab spraying the the solution of sodium because I think that wasn't their point their point was to protect genomic interests and those so-called American companies aren't American at all they're multinational you know who owns ExxonMobil there's not like one American dude that owns ExxonMobil and when ExxonMobil makes money doesn't necessarily go to Americans it goes to their shareholders goes to their executives who are from all over the world so I think that's part of the issues there but so that goes to the second thing so back in the day I assume they were real spies like inside the Soviet Union inside Russia and they did dangerous work and they infiltrated I'm guessing here so tell me if I'm wrong I but these days I'm not convinced we've infiltrated al Qaeda with an agent or an operative at all I'm sure well I'm quite sure we haven't it's it's close to impossible and and really recently in the past decade specifically we've really shifted away from that emphasis of trying to recruit insiders and trying to recruit spies I mean we spent in the aftermath of September 11th we changed our strategy so much and spent resources on gathering and in gathering so-called intelligence in a way that's completely at odds with American ideals which was you know creating Guantanamo torturing people and I mean I'm the first to admit that the CIA is not a place for any kind of moral or ethical purist you know you you're operating in gray areas right and and that's something that just is kind of the nature of espionage and the nature of the game and something that ultimately I was uncomfortable with because I did go in with a kind of naive idea that all be out stealing secrets and thereby serving my country and it's not quite as simple as that mm-hmm so what did you do to the degree that you can tell us what did you do at the agency well one thing that I think a common misconception about what a spy does you're not really the one who's at the greatest risk so what you're doing basically you're kind of like a glorified salesman in some way and what you're selling is treason and you go to a foreign country usually live there so you're not going off on like a mission here and a mission there typically you're living in a foreign country and you're trying to find people that have access to information that the US government wants so that could be you know someone in the military it could be a scientist you know a nuclear physicist it could be a communications director somebody who has information that we want whether to set up a platform whether to protect our economic interests whether to monitor terrorist activities and then you kind of get to know that person it's like a courtship and you try to find out do they have access to information that you want or the US government wants and are do they exhibit the characteristics that might make them a good spy mm-hmm and some of this is not you know it's not really nice you're manipulating them you're trying to find out what motivates that person and also what their vulnerabilities are you know is he an alcoholic does he have a son or daughter with a crippling disease that we might be able to provide medical care for and so you leverage that and kind of suck them into this relationship where they're giving you secret information usually at first they might not know that you work for the CIA but you get to a point where they should know nine times out of ten that they're there working for the CIA so it seems like in some ways in the art of seduction it is yes it's very much like I liken the whole what we call the recruitment cycle to a courtship and and it it culminates with the pitch where you say to that person you know I want to enter into a formal relationship with you I'm you signed the secrecy agreement you're gonna give me secret information and I'm gonna give you money mm-hmm okay so in the beginning you say hey I'm from X&Y company and you pretend you ran into them so they don't know you're CIA in the beginning obviously right right but and then you what's our plate of options right like is it its money obviously is a huge one is sex number two we're not supposed to and we don't female CIA officers as I was or operatives you're not supposed to use sex as a means of getting information or starting a relationship in fact you're forbidden from having any kind of romantic entanglements with your foreign agents although it does happen it it happens more often with the male's CIA operatives I mean get involved with the safe house keepers or the but there are such things as honey traps but they typically would not be a person who went to an American you know we might hire someone in Russia that's what I was that's what I was getting at first of all I didn't know the term honey trap I already love it second of all the agents having or the operatives having sex with a safe house keeping people sounds fun although I'm sure right I'm frowning upon it as we speak but I like the whenever it's a Chinese spy here in America it's almost like 9 out of 10 at least in the stories that make it into the public it's a woman and she want him having sex with a guy and the guy was like oh my god I'll tell you everything right right so I figured that like that operatives would hook them up with whoever that we thought they wanted so that they we become friendly and yadier so does that happen a decent amount well this the CIA is a little bit nerdier than most other spy services so we typically don't send a honey trap out I'm gonna keep using that word as much as I please I know you like it yes after someone but I will say that in the role I was in as a as a what's called an ops officer an Operations Officer I found that the women we had a distinct advantage over our male colleagues just in that most of our targets are men and it was relatively easy for us to go up and strike up a conversation with a foreign man typically they don't suspect us of being spies and then they start to brag about oh yeah you know their top secret work that's awesome yes so there's all these advantages you have as as a female operative there are also added challenges which is that you know you're kind of engaging in this courtship you're getting this guy to give you information and then telling him like you can't tell anybody about our relationship and in fact we're gonna have to meet in really secret places and late at night maybe even hotel rooms so you're you're giving him all these signals and he gets the wrong idea I've never known a female ops officer who has not had that situation where she's had to make it clear to her agent her foreign agent that you know this is not about sex that this is a business relationship and I personally always found it a relief when I got to that point I was always wanting to get to that point where I could make it clear that I worked for the US government so that he would know what was going on right so if it money sex what sin what else is in the top three for luring in wages well being a good spy or a good operative is is all about figuring out what what motivates people and what their vulnerabilities are so you know sometimes it's like a guy who you get to know and he's underappreciated at work you know he doesn't like his boss or whatever so then you make him feel good you know you're you're giving all this really important information and I'm taking this information and I'm securely communicating it back to Washington and I just want you to know that they think this is great and you make them feel like a hero you know kind of play upon his ego and that's a remarkably effective way to manipulate someone you know they they want to give you more information you tell them that the information that that they're giving you maybe is getting before the eyes of the President of the United States you know this is a huge ego trip for these guys that makes so much sense is that what's the one thing guys want more than anything else appreciation they what they want affirmation and they want to feel like yes I am important I am an important person look at what I did and like if they're smart wives and girlfriends use that to good effect all the time so it makes sense that you would use in a professional context - and I remember yeah I mean when I was the US Attorney's Office I just worked there briefly as a summer intern when I was in law school and I remember my the chief prosecutor there said at the end of a case he said I thank you and the bureau thanks you and I was like oh does it totally worked on me yeah so and I can see how that would work so when you get to the to the the moment where you tell them hey by the way psych I'm CIA right what percentage of the time were they like okay we got a deal and what percentage of time did they walk away I never had anyone walk away and and you're really trained to recognize the clues you you don't want to pitch someone unless you're pretty darn sure that he's gonna say yes I mean I had one guy who when I revealed him that I work for the CIA said I love CA and that was actually my first recruitment so it was this wave of relief but yeah I never had anyone walk away because they they really should know at that point you should have been dropping enough clues you know you're alluding to you're conveying the information through secret and secure channels you know nobody else knows about the relationship so you've dropped enough clues that if they don't know that you're CIA then you know you probably don't want an agent who's that dense anyway okay I'm gonna make it totally inappropriate and analogy as I often do I once interviewed a transgendered woman and she said almost the same exact thing you drop enough clues that by the time they find out they already knew because you don't want any surprises Yeah right so yeah so being a CIA spy is very much like being a transgender different kind of honey you want you want to minimize the possibility of blowback here we go again yeah just you want to minimize the possibility that they're gonna you know scream and run and report you to there in the Minister of the Interior that's exactly the next question I want to ask you actually if you get a sense that oh my god this guy is on to mean he's not into it right in terms of like be like he gets that I'm from the US government even if it didn't happen to you obviously it must happen to some people either at the moment of truth or before that does that mean you're burned and you got to leave the country right away no not not at all in fact you know on the one hand your cover is like your your shield of armor but on the other hand over the course of a career your cover erodes you know if you're really aggressive and you're out and you're running operations all the time and you're spotting assessing and developing and recruiting over time your cover might erode a little bit and people might have suspicions that that you're CIA and then we also have you know we have declared officers where they're in the country and the host government knows who the CIA people are I was not a declared officer but it shouldn't be the case that that if your if your cover's blown your careers over at all okay that's interesting so now I want to get back to the infiltration instead of did we have people that were deep in the Soviet government do you know at all like did we used to do what was in the movies where there a guy would assimilate and he would seem Russian and he would get into the Soviet game or was that all a myth the Russians are a lot better at doing that to my knowledge we've we've never been able to do that and frankly I think the during the Cold War the kind of spy versus spy game between us and the Russians I really think they had us beat at the end of the day I think they had the KGB was more sophisticated serviced their language capabilities were a lot better Americans for the kind of Americans that the CIA attracts there's very few of them that actually have language capabilities to the point that they could pose as a native now we certainly did have many sources Soviet sources you know deep deep within the Soviet government and high-level sources and that was a time you know there's a lot of people at the CIA who are very nostalgic for the Cold War because that was a time when we could infiltrate our enemies the the Soviets in the Eastern Bloc and we could find people who were disaffected with that system and make the argument to them you know where the Americans were the good guys we've got this great standard of living and all of those tactics that we developed during the Cold War they don't really apply to terrorists that they don't work with al-qaeda guys or any of they don't believe we're the good guys no they don't believe they're the good guy they don't care how much money we throw at them they fervently hate the United States and and hate Americans and so these are much more this is a much more difficult enemy that we're dealing with so naturally people at the agency are very nostalgic for those those simple days of the Cold War when there was kind of like a mutual respect almost between us and the KGB not to say that you know that we weren't surveilling each other and spying on each other and we still do but a friend of mine who served in Kali who served in Moscow a former colleague of mine he has this great story you know in Moscow you're followed all the time by at that time the KGB and now the SVR the FSB and there's surveillance on you all the time so there's very little you can do operationally if you're serving in a place like Moscow and he'd been living there for a number of years they adopted a dog while they were there and they had to take the dog and have it put down and as he left the vet's office after having had the dog put down he walked out and one of his surveillance one of these KGB guys surveilling him came up and put his arm around him and said you know I I'm really sorry I feel really bad I was with you when you got that dog yeah that's awesome see that's old-school that's nice like that actually makes me feel a little better like at least people were doing their jobs yeah right so now I feel like if I was a president I would be livid at the CIA for not having infiltrated al-qaeda I mean how many years in now over 12 years in how could we not have a guy I feel like the number four guy at al Qaeda should be CIA yeah you should and and the CIA bizarrely is always kind of like a little bit behind the eight ball you know even even when I went through my training and in 1998 you know we knew that Osama bin Laden was our main enemy we knew about al-quran was that 1998 in 98 you knew bin Laden was the main enemy yeah yeah I mean he wasn't a household name but certainly at the CIA I mean when we used to do when we did weapons qualification we shot at pictures of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein Wow so and that was you know right after the the embassy bombings in Africa but still we were we were being trained with this training paradigm that they've used since the OSS times you know going out on the diplomatic cocktail circuit where you're never going to run into I don't think they drink cocktails yeah you know the CIA is a culture that is very slow to change and that it's it's not a nimble organization and that's really unfortunate because for intelligence collection you you really need an organization that can change quickly I mean look even today with yeah so we got Osama bin Laden and al-qaeda was we thought that al Qaeda are al-qaeda fears were gonna be gone and now we see you know there's all kinds of little terrorist offshoots offshoot groups popping up everywhere and I guarantee this the CIA has no information on that yeah that's really disappointing so in one last thing about that is it that they're too risk-averse so like if I as the president you know I wouldn't want to like they think these days presidents think they're tough guys if they start wars etc but to me the CIA military Special Forces etc their job is to risk their lives right so that's a really really tough ask of some one but you've got to ask him that you can't you can't get cautious in those categories and I would tell the CIA guys I need you to risk your life that's that's what you signed up for I need you to infiltrate is that why they're not doing it that they're worried they're gonna lose people and they're risk-averse in that sense I think the CIA doesn't really attract people who are willing to go the distance like that and I would include myself in it you know I I don't know that I would be willing to try to infiltrate a terrorist group in fact I know that I probably would not it's an incredibly risky thing to do but I think the issue is we asked our military the guys in the military to take those risks everything you know they they risk their lives all the time and the CIA I think is not willing to do that Wow okay so I think that's some common misperception that the misconception that people have I think they think CIA you go in you risk your life you're a spy that's what spies do but apparently not so you left in oh three right so why did you leave I left for for two reasons partly personal because it's an incredibly lonely life it's a really really hard place to be if you want to have any kind of personal relationships you know with your family if you ever want to get married to someone other than the jerks who work at the CIA but so there was that aspect of just you know this is really hard having to lie to people all the time I'd always kind of been an open person and loved living overseas but living overseas as a spy and a kind of predator was a very different experience so that was the personal aspect the main reason I left the agency though was was ideological I was in Russian language training in 2002 and then I was taken out of Russian language training and surged into a group called Iraqi operations and I was working at headquarters at Langley but we were working basically giving support to CIA people in the military out in the field as we were building up to the war in Iraq I was not a specialist on Iraq or the Middle East or certainly not WMD but you become a expert very quickly at the agency when you're immersed in something and so every day I was reading in the Washington Post and hearing the members of the administration say that Saddam Hussein was a direct threat that he had weapons of mass destruction that he was linked with al-qaeda and then I would go in to work at the CIA where I was working with people who this was their area of expertise and to a person they said we have no evidence of WMD there's there's no link between Iraq and al-qaeda and this was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back for me in terms of disillusionment with the agency and I wasn't there for a particular conversation but it was reported to me by a colleague who worked in the counter-proliferation division that a manager gathered his group together of about 20 to 30 CIA people and said look let's face it the president wants to go to war and our job is to give him a reason to do so and this was kind of shocking to me because that's not the job of the CIA or certainly not the job of the CIA as I saw it or that's not what I signed up for I wanted to serve my country and I became aware that I was not serving my country I was serving this organization and the organization was not serving the country it was serving the wishes at that time of the administration so there was a couple of wild moments in that answer now every like if you were paying attention you knew before the Iraq war the Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 and al-qaeda and even the Bush administration they would be misleading rather than outright lying oftentimes they would put them in the same sentence but they wouldn't say Saddam did 9/11 they did on one or two occasions but generally there it was a a campaign to mislead people and it was obvious well the press wouldn't report on it it was maddening at the time but we knew we at least knew that was the case but we had the impression that the CIA thought that yes that he did have weapons of mass destruction like we thought okay the CIA got that wrong are you saying that inside the CIA they also knew no he doesn't I wept as a master every single analyst that I talked to whether they were working on WMD or Iraq said that we had no evidence of WMD not to say that we knew there wasn't any but we had no evidence that there was any that's amazing so I don't know if you knew enough people at the time it set up to give us a general reaction but when colon Powell went to go give that speech at the UN what were you thinking what were your colleagues thinking like whoa what in the world is happening or I was really kind of baffled and confused the CIA though it's not a place where people sit around and philosophize and debate you know you're kind of a foot soldier when you're there and you're just doing what you're supposed to do and I think there was certainly not it's not a place where if you voice concerns dissent disagreement with any policies that's going to be viewed upon favorably yeah I'm suspecting that yeah and and when I left right around that time also was when I started to hear in the hallways about our enhanced interrogation technique program I didn't know anyone directly involved with it but I knew people who had been approached and asked if they wanted to be trained to conduct these kind of interrogations and that was very troubling to me too and another reason that I just wanted to get out all right so let me tie them back to the present now and ask you one more quick question in regards to what we're doing so you know it it's now I understand CIA better having had this conversation it's a bureaucracy and and if a train is going in a certain direction people are gonna go with it etc but I wonder why the direction why the train goes in a certain direction so in particular in regards to drone strikes that we're doing now so it appears from what I've read from the press the president is often told you've got to do this okay and this is better than the big war and that's a you know the rationale they use for the drone strikes and if you were directing it at Al Qaeda's number two or number seven would make some sense right but we do something called signature strikes where we literally do drone strikes on people we have no idea who they're at what their identity is we don't know who they are we're like we there's a signature of activity down there guns whatever it might be large trucks whatever they day use let's just kill them just to be safe right that seems so morally unconscionable how does a train head in that direction so what's your sense of why do you think they need to do that especially because it seems from every report on the ground that it's counterproductive everyone in Yemen because of the drone strikes now it despises America because they don't innocent people who died and they think America is the big guy in the sky who murders us every once in a while and they claim they get terrorists but I know they hit a wet right so it's counterproductive so why did the train go in that direction I think because to go back to what we were talking about before we don't seem to have any well-placed sources so we're just sticking with this well let's go out and kill them all and I think this is a real mistake and we're reaping what we sow at this point I mean all of these terrorist groups that are sprouting up everywhere I think that's in direct response to the drone program and the fact that we've killed countless civilians you never hear about it Americans never hear about it we don't know the identities of any of those people who are killed and it's very it's very disappointing because I felt like after the war in Iraq we were so unpopular and then I thought maybe we would yet again experience this this era of popularity and I really think Obama has pretty much furthered all the programs of the Bush administration in terms of national security and and squandered the goodwill that he had when he was first elected if somebody just sent me an old video I did back in o8 when Cheney said Oh Obama will do everything we did and I remember at the time saying like oh that's ridiculous I mean the guy campaigned on changing and I wasn't all about rainbows and unicorns I didn't think it was gonna be the end-all be-all but I thought well I mean he's at least gonna change these heinous programs and we didn't get much change as you point out and and I guess I'm curious about the mechanics behind that so that no matter what guy we put in that office and no matter how much he says he's gonna change things we get the same exact result we do yeah I mean the the I think that Americans have been so conditioned during the past decade to kind of act on fear you know we were we were manipulated into to fearing after 9/11 to being fearful people and acting out with that as our motivation and I think that's where the the drone strikes it's easier it's certainly easier to send in a drone than it is to infiltrate or try to understand the psychology of these groups and this is another criticism of the intelligence community at large is that were are we tend to to think that just by killing these people that's gonna take our problems away and it's not and there's never really the attempt to really understand the psychology of these groups why are that why do they hate us so much why are they but what kind of people are attracted to these groups and why can't we get someone in there you know under deep cover we should be doing that I wish you'd go back to the CIA and run it doesn't sound like Lindsay Moran the book is called blowing my cover my life as a spy as you can tell absolutely fascinating stories Lindsay this was incredibly educational thank you so much for doing it

Channel: TYT's The Conversation

Views: 524,544

Rating: 4.5184107 out of 5

Keywords: TYT Network, Interview, TYT Interviews, The Young Turks, cia operative, cia, Young Turks, lindsay moran cia, ex-spy ex-cia, cia book, blowing my cover my life as a spy, lindsay moran, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (Organization), TYT, former cia operative, my life as a spy, lindsay moran spy, former spy, ex-cia operative

Id: Mk7UUDE6UWk

Length: 38min 42sec (2322 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2013