The Spy Whisperer - CIA Clandestine Officer Darrell M. Blocker

[Music] I'm so glad to welcome you to this second talk and a view from inside the CIA an FBI with our wonderful partner Smithsonian associates last week we heard a lot about the FBI from Mike German and today we're going to take a deep dive into the CIA with Darrell blocker Darrell recently completed a 32 year career in the US intelligence community and he earned the CIA's distinguished career intelligence medal upon his retirement he served for years as an analyst in the US Air Force from 1987 to 1990 and 28 years as a CIA operative from 1990 to 2018 his career highlights include serving as chief of the CIA's iconic training facility which I cannot mention by name today the deputy director of the counterterrorism center chief of Africa division and multiple tours as a chief of station at the time of his retirement in October of 2018 Darrell was the most senior black officer in the CIA's Directorate of operations he's lived and worked in ten foreign countries including Italy Okinawa South Korea Niger Senegal Morocco Nigeria Nigeria Uganda Pakistan and Switzerland he has also spent time in Somalia after Black Hawk Down and in Burundi after the Hutu Tutsi massacres he managed the intelligence community response to the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa in 2014 so might have a coronavirus question for him after that in November of 2019 Darryl was appointed chief operating officer of mosaic a boutique crisis management intelligence and advisory firm he's also an ABC News contributor and consultant for CT watch a global solutions provider of training and consulting in counterterrorism security and intelligence so I'm hoping he'll also share some stories with us of his musical cover career in Uganda Thank You Darryl this is surreal good morning since his Black History Month I want to start with a little bit of history of Black History Month because it's important for people to understand that black history is American history I've always felt that my parents felt that my grandparents felt that so Black History Month started as an idea in 1926 and it was many many years later in 1970 when Kent State University Black Student Union actually recognized Black History Week at that time Gerald Ford as president 19 1976 during the Bicentennial officially recognized it but it wasn't until 1985 in the state of Georgia my state when Martin Luther King was celebrated as a state holiday in 1985 and then became nationwide in 1986 and I and I bring up this story because one of my for a couple of reasons I was a junior at the University of Georgia when in January of 1985 I was sitting in the cafeteria and I was with my roommate and we were all excited it was the first time that MLK was being recognized as the first black leader in our history with a federal holiday and we were just everybody was just a buzz and there was this one table of four guys sitting next to him and and they were having a similar conversation similar only in the sense that we were both talking about Martin Luther King and then I heard one of the guys say maybe we should shoot for more of them to make a week out of it and same reaction you just had and I wasn't sure that I heard what I thought I heard and I saw one guy kind of glanced over because there's a black guy at the next table and I said well what do you mean by that and the guy was like well why don't we recognize Kennedy as a holiday so first of all he's from Massachusetts he's not from Georgia and it's not really relevant to to the discussion this isn't about you know Kennedy versus versus King so I recall I recount that story because we still have a long way to go and the fact that I'm standing here today before such a fantastic I know the amount of history and people have involved in intelligence in this room is mind-boggling I can just feel it I am a second generation intelligence officer my father was an NCO in the Air Force my brother was an NCO in the Air Force and they both did SIGINT so I kind of grew up in this I grew up Cub Scout Boy Scout ROTC in high school ROTC in college then I became an air force officer myself military analysts served in Korea served at Bergstrom Air Force Base which doesn't exist anymore if we got any people here from Austin Texas it is now Austin Bergstrom International Airport so I along the way my path was simply you know be proud of who you are be proud of your nation be proud of this flag give back and CIA was came calling after four years in the Air Force I answered an ad in a newspaper article and it said write a 1,500 word or less essay on anything that you feel strongly about I'm a I'm a convert to Judaism so I was writing about the Intifada at the time in 89 90 timeframe someone saw that I could put a couple of sentences together and have some reason thought and of course that started the process whereby 28 years later I retired as an S is for far exceeding my my original plan to walk out the door as a and I wanted to be a full-bird colonel I was a military kid grew up you know in Italy in Japan so that was my that was my baseline and that's what I understood in and and knew but I kind of wanted to start with the the black history in the Black History Month because I think it is important to know that from my perspective my history is your history don't care if you're black or or not Jewish your history is my history now I have been called a lot of things over the years spy whisperer without question is the coolest so so whoever on staff came up with the name for today's theme thank you very much okay I'm looking at it right there spy whisperer come on that is so cool and so the CIA is an espionage service as everyone knows and people are either intrigued or in repelled by the thought of of spying the notion of spying so as the head of the operational training facility which I am unable to name but I don't think there's anyone in the room who doesn't know what that means those are some of the archaic rules that the agency has that don't make a whole lot of sense to anyone but it is what it is so I ran it and train the next generation of clandestine collectors from multiple agencies from the FBI from from DIA and of course from CIA all of the new hires that walked into the director of operations at that time fellip under what was my command and so I had all the the new fresh excited bodies for the first 24 months of their time in the agency I spearheaded with Doug wise the largest paradigm shift in operational training since the days of the OSS what is now today called the operational tradecraft course which was to fill tradecraft course for many many years up actually up until about 2 or 3 years ago so who in this audience agrees that relationships are built on trust exactly so Trust is the core of every relationship that we have whether it's personal private intimate professional you have to have some semblance of trust for that relationship to exist so in order for me to talk about what it's like to be a you know the head of training for what we'd use to train you know our CIA operatives and I forgive me for the use of the term operative I retired out of the senior job I knew that I wanted to come out from undercover because I knew that there were going to be some possibilities in the entertainment sector that I wanted to be able to take advantage of and stay in undercover just was not going to be in the cards if I wanted to be able to do that they don't understand case officer or ops officer and operative is just kind of one of those words it's kind of cool like spy whisperer so for the sake of the audience that I'm dealing with on the entertainment front I'll use the term operative even though I didn't never really consider myself that so if you will picture a bull's eye target logo whatever it is it's going to help you that Center target is who you're looking for that's the source that you want and each concentric ring as it goes out from that center bull's eye is your most intimate contacts than your personal contacts then your personal contacts and the last ring of your professional contacts and some of them might blend in and have multiple but just to give you a visual for that so what you're looking for of course is the bull's eye and within the context of human that is it that's who you're looking for in the middle now every one likely came here today one any here some secrets and that secrets and the revelation of how secrets are actually achieved are diametrically opposed views so I'm gonna start with the fact that espionage is about established trust that is important for everyone to understand and that the goal of and that the establishing trust with the end goal of entering a secret pact between the spy handler and the recruited spy as an institution the CIA has only been involved in this game for a very short period of time when you compare it to the biblical the most famous biblical story and the first documented story of of spying and the story of Joshua and Caleb and who led the Exodus at Moses direction to go spy out the land of Canaan so how do you and today I'll share some of the stories that hopefully will answer the three questions that were a part of the advertisement for hopefully what brought you here and those caught three questions were how do you train someone to spy how do you collaborate with other countries on spy education and not lose your own secrets and then finally how are these things consistently accomplished in a dangerously changing world I'm a big-picture guy with you know with just a thirst of knowledge and and hopefully to understand and a keen attention to detail so I'll be answering these questions in reverse order because I think you need to understand that the overall picture before I can get into the training piece of it so I know there's a lot of knowledge in here of the intelligence community but for the sake of those who might not have the same background I'm going to quickly cover some you know basically on the history of the CIA so the CIA is the successor to the Office of Strategic Services which only existed between 1942 and 1945 during war war during world war ii and we were born out of a state-sponsored terrorist attack that we know as Pearl Harbor 7 December 1941 so the OSS was demanded disbanded after after the end of the war in 1945 two years later President Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 which for the intelligence community and specifically for CIA is kind of our Bible our Torah our you know our that's our Hammurabi code whatever however you want to view it that's what it is for us National Security Act of 1947 so that created the Central Intelligence Group which two years later became the CIA and we've maintained that name for more than seventy years now and the CIA the CIA only does three things no matter what you see here or read about three things we collect we analyze and we execute the president's the president's covert action that's it and we do that through five directorates the Director of Operations from when Sahel the Directorate of Science and Technology the Directorate of digital innovation the Directorate of support and the Directorate of analysis and they all have one mission so five directorates three missions one objective to keep us safe and our allies that's it so the do the do is the operate or do or the Director of Operations is the operational arm of the CIA they're the ones that are always in the newspaper they're the ones that books and movies and TV shows are created about and they're the ones who typically are the ones always getting us in trouble as a nation it is what it is we were created by the National Security Act of 47 to be that whipping boy of the of any administration so the do measures success by one's ability to recruit new business business development that's what we're eating sources is and that business has to result in the production of foreign intelligence reports they go to the president policymakers all of that well by all measures within the do I was a failed case officer I did not recruit in my first tour I did not recruit in my second tour I learned a lot and it was very good for me not at the time but I learned and eventually I was able it all started to crystallize and make sense but at the end of the day the do is a result driven entity and I didn't live up to anyone's expectations including my own so as we move into the first question is there anyone in the room who doesn't know the adage that that espionage is the second-oldest profession but yet but less reputable than the first is there anyone in here who has not heard that before well I tend to think that people are are more inclined or less repulsed maybe by the thought of selling your body than they are selling your soul which is what people think you're doing when you spy I'd never saw it that way but always it always gets a chuckle and whatever your views are of it in my 32 years I know that people thought less of me than they thought of people who had to do what they needed to do to survive so how are spying and collaborating with other intelligence services accomplished in a dangerously changing world I had I'm just gonna say director Brennan and I had philosophical differences on a lot of issues and one of him was the the point that he thought that we are now living in the most dangerous time in the history of the world and this was twenty fourteen or fifteen and I'm thinking where they're not two world wars a Korean War of Vietnam war and those are just our wars I'm not talking about all the other wars or fighting that was going around the world I do not believe that we are living in the most dangerous time i i think statistically we might be living in one of the safest times in our and our history it's just that the information that comes to us via these spy devices that you all just turned off hopefully just the constant bombarding of information so it's not more dangerous is just more accessable and it just is always always in our in our presence in our psyche so the short answer to how we do it in a constantly changing world is that intelligence services have always collaborated with one another they've always shared the 12 Israelite tribes that were sent out the spider land of Canaan all went to different places they all collected pieces of little pieces and they all brought it back together that was collaboration yes they were all on the same team and they weren't from different you know services but it was collaboration from the very beginning we're able to continue to adjust and shift and change because human nature has not changed changed since Cain slew Abel it hasn't people are born on the wrong side of the track people are born into a a body that they don't believe should be there their body that didn't start with transgender in today's world it is always existed and a person like myself is always looking for that anomaly that person who doesn't feel like they're being listened to that person who doesn't feel like they fit that person who feels like they're not being listened to that's who I'm looking for as a you know as a potential spy in whatever area I'm trying to get into and for the CIA the heart and soul is human intelligence or human sitting down and looking a person in the eye and convincing that person that your goal is also their goal not always easy but at the end of the day danger is danger whether it's faced by the Israelites during the exodus or by the CIA today in Syria Iraq Afghanistan yada yada yada so Moses chose Joshua from the newer tribe Caleb from the Judah tribe and the Judah tribe was known for its intelligence gathering and its you know being able to decipher secrets you know dreams and much like Moses chose these two to lead that our administration's since 1942 beginning with FDR chose the OSS the CI G the CIA to be those people who go out and spy out the land of fill-in-the-blank not any different now the other thing that's not any different is the tenth row of the 12 tribes when they came back ten of them told Moses hmm you know I don't think we can defeat these guys Joshua and Caleb however stood up and reported correctly and the ten called for the stoning death of Joshua and Caleb now those same voices that rose up against Joshua and Caleb are still present in today's world in the form of the White House the press the hill Hollywood and perhaps even someone in this audience you just don't know my point is it's nothing new people have always questioned our methodology people have always questioned our reason people have always mistrusted who we are as an institution but the information that led to us finding UBL that led to us finding al-baghdadi that led to us finding whatever secret is that we're trying to do is something that's done in very dangerous times over many days months or years by an entire group of people who have a similar goal so how do you collaborate with another service and not lose your competitive edge very carefully that's the first thing so the British in the OSS days provided provided general Donovan's trainers with trainers with curriculum so essentially everything that we know as the CIA today is based on the British model and most of the intelligence and security services of the world today are either based on the British model the American model or the Russian model every single one at least can be tied back to one of those three institutions so whether you're in Zimbabwe or whether you're in US the intelligence cycle is the intelligence cycle spot assess develop recruit handle terminate I always like to begin with terminate because terminate does not mean what Hollywood thinks terminate means terminate does not mean taking somebody out in the alley and putting a bullet in the back of their head never seen a CIA person do that okay except for in movies so weather doesn't matter where you're from the methodology the intelligence cycle is the same and it's within the DNA of all intelligence services so I have a kind of a complex and convoluted story so please bear with me because as I was explaining to my girlfriend she like that's not really clear on how you do this but I was in the war zone and I'll just say in Pakistan and working and living with our Pakistani partners and colleagues there was a target that was identified as the most senior Taliban commander and we needed to capture him so working with the Pakistanis we developed a plan but it just wasn't enough to get us to where we wanted to go and then one of our Western partners learned who we were chasing and said well we we have a we have a source they can help you get to this guy and so we tried to figure out how to use that information because they absolutely refused to allow CIA to share with the Pakistanis the fact that they had a source so non CIA source Pakistani partners with us in the middle on how to get to this did is one thing the only way it was going to be possible was through trust established between us and our Western partners to not share that with the Pakistanis at their request and to be on the ground with the Pakistanis without revealing the fact that the Westerners or we following all right we got intelligence professionals in this room so uh sorry baby at the end of the day it took us a while but the source got captured along with the along with the with the target and I'm sure he got compensated well for it but my point is collaboration between different services and not sharing so we taught them everything they know but we didn't teach them everything that we know and we were able to protect the fact what the Pakistanis didn't want to share with our Western partners didn't want to share and at the end of the day everybody got what they wanted but it all boils back down to trust and familiarity and then being on the streets at the same time so the segue to the third and final question and then I'm gonna open it up to questions because I know there are going to be many so human human intelligence is what CIA does that's our mandate and so how do you train someone to spy by establishing trust the primary role is to recruit whether you're a CIA case officer a dia case officer and a CIA trained FBI officer recruiting spies and producing intelligence but this requires manipulation and manipulation is always seen in a negative light i I'm a spy handler I don't see it the same I don't see it as necessarily a negative thing but you can we build and establish trust at the very beginning through our training through the schoolhouse what we're looking to identify for case officers like myself are people out there who are interested in joining the CIA who have similar intellectual social and personality traits of those people who have successfully made it through the program in the past whether you're a CMO a collection management officer whether you're a staff operations officer whether you're a case officer or a targeter it doesn't matter what they're comparing and against is those people who have achieved some measure of says to say that yes this gentleman right here has everything it takes to be able to do this now I used to caution the students as they were coming through it's not a checklist you can check all 99 of the things on that list and not make it through the filled tradecraft course or you can check a third of them and fly through it really is it's just a it's a marker it's just a tool that we use but the intellectual social and personality traits are what we're looking for and then we impress upon that you got to have integrity you got to have people with as close to unimpeachable you know character as you can possibly find no one is unimpeachable of course but that is what we're looking for so we build thrust trust through our training curriculum through the execution of tradecraft and at trust must exist between the spy and the spy handler between the intelligence service that the spy handler belongs to between the partnerships between intelligence services but for me the most important one is between the CIA and the American people that trust has been broken many times over many years but I'm telling you that the CIA isn't there's no such thing as a rogue elephant that's a term from the 70s I never really understood it we have more oversight than any other government institution we have more people looking at us we and in even in today's today's world we can get away with a lot less than we did back in the in the dullest era in the in the 40s and 50s and 60s and of course church submits commissions and all that in the 70s we're trustworthy people hmm so if you're having difficulty viewing CIA as the harbinger of of trustworthy folks you not the first and you won't be the last but if found a if the foundation of espionage is trust how do you reconcile that with moral moral compass and I'll close with the story from when I was Dean of the spy school and did a recruitment center visit to Norfolk State which is a historically black college and university down in the Tidewater area of Virginia and it was this young man who I was I was manning a booth job fair booth and I saw this young man for the entire time that I was out and he kept kind of walking by and looking but he didn't want to approach and so that I got to a point where there was nobody that was that was at the podium and kind of waved them over and I said clearly you have questions and that's what we're here to answer anything that you might have how can you work with people who did experiments on black people in the 60s BAM just no no preamble no hey nice to meet you no tell me about the CIA just BAM right in the face and I said well yeah we've been accused of that and far worse if you want to talk about history we can call by history if you want to talk about job opportunities for young black men and women today or people of color I'm your guy so he kind of looked at me again I wasn't he wasn't completely convinced looks at me again he says what are you looking for in new employees integrity literally look on his face was priceless like but don't you guys like cheat and steal and I said absolutely but never to the American public and he's like I don't believe that and I said you know I don't it's not really a question of whether you believe it or not that's my experience does everybody tell the truth every time no no one in the history of mankind has told the truth every time to everybody just it's unnatural it doesn't work I don't think I convinced a young man I'm sure he's not a CIA officer now that was that was more than probably I was that was a decade but I think I was able to show him that what he thought CIA was might not necessarily be the real CIA that there's always more to the story that there's always something else out there that maybe they didn't know or consider and that at the end of the day would you rather have people of good character moral and integrity out doing questionable business or people of questionable morals out doing questionable business so this young men didn't embrace CIA or my higher in pitch but he left thinking the possibility believed he knew about CIA was wrong or at least incomplete and that's how we trained our operatives to think question authority question the premise of assumptions of others questioning information you receive internally and or externally and that's the crux of what we okay blow it up don't like literally blow it up just so I I didn't talk a lot about my own personal part of it because it was in the it was in the in the in the advert but I served in Nazir Senegal Morocco Nigeria Uganda Pakistan Switzerland just as it was a that it was announced and the I I raised two fantastic children one graduated from high school in Uganda one graduated high school in Switzerland one's an artist and married in Seattle the others a social worker in Chicago and both of them are absolutely never ever gonna be CIA officers yes ma'am the other question did you do anything in your career that you felt compromised you ever no that's an easy one absolutely not now there were there were there were operations that that I either cut off because they were you know one in specific one specifically comes to mind that would have resulted that almost assuredly would have resulted in the the target being killed by his own country there are too many variables there are too many things that we couldn't control and I on three separate occasions tried to shut this CEO from bringing it up again and I finally did but that would have been something that that would have weighed heavily on my conscience for a long time so my answer is absolutely absolutely not yes sir would you say a few words about the information in the post today regarding the crypto are you aware of that and I did a literally have seen no news this morning is it not cryptocurrency no the idea was there was a Swiss company called crypto that was owned secretly by the CIA and German intelligence and providing cryptography devices to other one of those artifacts is from our collection that was photographed it is extremely weird to be 28 years undercover and not ever being able to talk about CIA and then transitioning to a world where I only talk about CIA whether I'm doing that for on ABC News on Good Morning America and I think the last time I was on was in the aftermath of the sulemani strike and talking to audiences that clearly don't have the background that you have living here California's not as they're different but different in a different in a good way I'm just a nice Georgia boy okay I'm just a country kid from Augusta Ga and my world is has always been shifting and I tell Californians that it was a culture shock moving to LA and not any different than when I moved to near me or quite frankly not any different in Mogadishu and some in some sense Hollywood is brutal place did I but you know I I'm gonna have to pass on on that one I do have knowledge and I just would rather not I I can't go there I'm gonna take the microphone to this person who I think is stuck in a row and then I'm gonna ask a question thank you thank you for talking to us would you I have so many questions but one is I'm curious about the ethnic breakdown of the CIA and I'm also curious if you would give us an example of how the training works are you doing defensive driving your guns surveillance I mean just what is the curriculum amount to and when does someone wash out so when I went when I visited the spy music I was I was here last spring for ABC News and one of the investigative journalists asked me have you been to despot museum yep been to the spy museum then no no have you been at a news 5 minute a tional spy museum so he arranged a VIP tour for me I came over with a good friend of mine who's in the back of the auditorium right now and we just had a fan it was an amazing visit but during that visit the the lady that was that was working with us saw that I knew a lot of the people that were flashing up on the screen if she's like will you come when you come speak for us and I said let's talk and figure out figure out the timing and I was extremely honored to be a part of the Black History Month part of it but I only have two red lines when I'm dealing with Hollywood anyone dealing with tight [ __ ] in the audience I don't talk about the curriculum at the school it's what keeps us safe it's what separates us from from from the others and that's our that's that's our competitive edge that I'm just I can't but we do do defensive driving we do do weapons and those are mostly for people who are going out to really really dangerous places or go into war zone war zone areas and people wash out of the program for any number of reasons they can't they can't adapt to this they know it's a fake model but it's a fake model that is built and based on real-world events over many many years and and constantly updated and and adjusted to adapt to you know whatever timeframe you know pre 911 post 9/11 is probably the biggest paradigm right now but a lot of it has to do with people who are just caught up in this concept that Hollywood has got it right and they haven't so they come in thinking about CI a one way and I tell them just be the person that we hire don't go down there trying to be what you think they want so just adjusting and adapting and recognizing that what you think you know about it and what we're gonna teach you are not the same or not the same thing excited kind of dance around that but that's about as close to talking about school house that that I feel comfortable feel comfortable doing oh and then and so I can't talk about the agency writ large but within within the do quick story so when I was the deputy director of the counterterrorism center the DD o at the time came to me and he said I got a favor to ask of you Mike boss you you know the boss it's not called a favor just tell me what it is that you want and he says I want you to meet the cast and crew of homeland but come on no no anything but that I just didn't I love the show I just didn't I just saw no utility and doing that I did it he's the boss and unfortunately well I walked into the meeting probably it was already going on for twenty or thirty minutes I was in an actual meeting so I I but when I came in and all literally every I turned and looked at me and I'm like who I apologize for being late they said no this is perfect timing they wanted a senior do officer to answer this question and and I said well what's the question they said well what's different well how long have you been in the agency I think it was twenty two years at that point no 24 how what's changed between when you walked in the door and now and I looked around the room I said Israeli British and I pointed out all the nationalities that were on the cast and crew of homeland and said I'm sitting in a room with foreign nationals on the seventh floor CIA headquarters talking to people who pretend to be us but aren't us and of course people started laughing I said that would have never happened 24 years ago I said but realist honestly the real thing that has changed is what I in the door there was no zero examples of any people of color or women that were division Chiefs and within the do rising up to the level of division chief was what everybody every good case officer wanted to do well that's not true some people just want to do the work and you can't do to work as a division chief are there any former division chiefs in here but at the end of the day it was I think I lost the threat of the O so and then I explained but now we have who at that point my counterparts were a Puerto Rican guy running la division a korean-american running EA division me running Africa vision 3 women running other divisions and so I said we're much more diverse were much more effective we're much more efficient than we were you know 25 years ago and it has to do with hiring and trying to recruit people that represent and I don't think you need to have you know only black officers an AF in fact when I walked in the door because I had grown up in Japan and because I had served in Korea I knew I was going to ei there was no way in the world that I was going to be the black dude going to Africa I just simply refused to be that guy and then I met a gentleman that has a mustache like this mr. Stewart right here and his name was Bill Mosby and bwana was a force of nature a guy from rural Pennsylvania close your eyes and vision a great white hunter of the you know of the the 19th century you know I'm literally just Burt I mean that was that was Bwana that man knew more about Africa than anybody on the planet more importantly I was at a some division party going on and he knew everyone's name he didn't know who everyone ah'd only their names he knew their spouses names he knew the kids names he knew their pets he knew their I'm not and there was nobody standing behind B'Elanna saying you know this is Darrell coming up and this is where he served he knew everybody that to me meant that that was family and I was so drawn to this one guy and to grow up and actually do the job that he did when I first met I've literally got goosebumps right now love bill Mosby that man changed my life and so he was a perfect example of that you don't have to have a black guy out there doing something Africa or Asia guy in Asia you can train I can train anyone in this room to go anywhere in the world and do the work that we need to do but you do have to have some you got to have diversity and not just diversity and color diversity and thought diversity and experiences all of those all of those count so we are more diverse when I made it to the sis ranks there were I think I was number 11 but when I walked out the door there were five so there I don't know if it's backsliding I think it's just timing and a whole bunch of other things but I think they're doing better and to John Brennan's credit John John Brennan director Brennan was serious about doing those things and making sure that we were hiring the right people and yes ma'am okay good afternoon thank you very much for coming in today I have a very basic basic question a couple years ago I took a river cruise from Moscow to st. Petersburg on my iPhone I do have the name address phone number and email of a very special person who works for our no such agency I decided to leave all of my electronics at home for fear of what might be picked up and took only a straight regular digital camera did I make the right decision absolutely 100% yes ma'am you did listen people the CIA is not the only person in the game everybody is out there doing the same thing that we're doing it but they don't have the same they do it differently they right they the Chinese if you if you traveled into China whatever you have on any electronics is theirs they already own OPM and Equifax and me and all these others too so I'm not really sure it matters that much but I always recommend the people who are traveling whether your business whether it's you know River Cruises if you don't need to take that device and phones aren't just phones anymore there's more information on your phone than in your home you would rather someone break into your home than steal your phone trust me you would much rather me break into your home then get a hold of your phone cuz I got your phone I got you period henceforth now and forevermore until you change your to you change your phone and then I'll have to get it another way but yes she made the right decision and I'm glad that you were astute enough to recognize that you can go have fun and travel and be safe and have a phone and not be taken advantage of by by intelligence let me decide yes sir okay by way of introduction I'm not in the intelligence community nor have I been but I did spend 23 years in the infantry and I was a user of intelligence my daughter however is in the intelligence community my question is about your cover stories any time you were undercover particularly the one that was mentioned earlier in your introduction about your musical cover right so that the musical cover was actually Lucien Bruggeman was the ABC journalist who wrote the article he had he had listened to a podcast that I did in Washington and the tagline that came out of that was singing as hard spying is easy and so he saw that and he wanted to interview me on on my love of music so music was my first love I sang from fourth grade all the way through the University of Georgia men's glee club and and with two bands one in Senegal and one in Uganda now I was under covered the entire time as a State Department official I didn't have you know banned cover I just sang in a band because that's what I love to do and it introduced me into entirely different group of people of interest that I had never considered before and without getting to a lot of details it was very good for us it was very good for our nation for me to be exposed to some people by might not otherwise have been exposed to so cover within the CIA is not like cover in the FBI if you're in the FBI and you're an undercover and you have to become Donnie Brasco you actually have to be a mafioso you have to do some things to get that's not the same for someone who is undercover under State Department working as a political officer or issuing visas somewhere in the world so the band thing was just more of a journalistic spin to it and it was we were the biggest thing in Uganda at the time well whatever that means but that's that's that's kind of the gist of the article and if you if you haven't seen it it's a singer sink singer tailor soldier spy okay so I didn't name it but it is kind of it's not as cool a spy whisperer but it's pretty close it's pretty close did I answer your question yes ma'am given the White House's fairly amazing lack of respect for the intelligence community and the CIA does it does it affect morale I assume it does and has it affected ability to recruit I don't know if I can answer the second one but I don't think we're running into people who want to come in to the I don't think there's a problem with people who want who are interested in joining the the CIA I work for every president from Reagan to Trump Trump is different and and I and I don't say that in a you know in an anti in an anti Trump way because honestly every president who takes that office has zero idea the challenges and the threats that are out there so I give him a pass that first year maybe even that first two years because again you're talking about a guy who came from zero zero like zero knew nothing about the intelligence community and has to get and has to deal with the amount of things that any anyone that sits in the Oval is going to have to deal with one of the best responses to the saw where he went for the for the question asses as a as an article that sue Gordon did in the last two weeks where she talked about as her number two job at the DNI briefing the president how much she enjoyed it because she actually had to dig back deep into the roots of all of her training to explain to this guy who really knew nothing but wants to understand and I do believe he wants to understand I don't think he always wants to understand for the same reasons that we do as an intelligence community but he's not a he's not he's not the person that's being depicted just like Bush wasn't the person there's a pic tat or Obama there's don't make these folks one-dimensional the problem that I have with our current administration is when he stood up before that wall on day one of his administration for me that was the problem and yes the intelligence community has always been kind of like the the punching boy but we're getting a lot of bruises a lot more there are a couple of believed things that I never witnessed I never saw poor morale in the agency and that might be because I lived in Africa I served in Africa division which typically has high morale because you're serving in tough places and you just kind of kind of coalesce and work together more closely that we were risk-averse I never saw that I'm not once in 20 I'll say 27 years because it took me well 20 26 years because it took me to in the pipeline to get out not once did I ever have any operation that was turned down because we were afraid that you know it was gonna come known to whomever not once now I'm sure other people had that had an experience where that happened but that was not my experience so I never saw being risk averse so being risk-averse being and and the last one was that oh that CIA had lost its way the CIA was more involved in paramilitary operations in any other time we are a paramilitary organization since 1942 period the same folks that created you know when we broke up in 1945 we split off into two groups current days Special Forces current days CIA that spear designed by general Donovan represents some people who served in Special Forces and CIA same you know same roots that's it paramilitary never went away there's never been a conflict in the history of CIA where we didn't have paramilitary boots on the ground now you see 9/11 and you see Afghanistan and you see the focus on counterterrorism but inside counterterrorism is it's just one one thing counter-proliferation is important iran's important north korea's important russians are important Chinese are important it's more than just CT that's what the world sees because you know it's the oh my god there's the threat it is what it is did I ask you a question okay yes sir one of the things I appreciate and respect most about your service in particular was your focus on your area of operation as you know we came up immersed in the experience and the mystique right of the Cold War yes that and then were immersed in the global war on terror specifically focusing on the Middle East and Central Asia hmm I was wondering if we could take a few minutes to explain to us what your assessment is of what is strategically imperative to the national interest as it relates to Africa okay um so when I when I talk about Africa people think that we're out chasing African sources we're we're not we need to know what's going on in that country the Ambassador relies on the station chief and and the CMO to be the person to know more about that country than anybody else outside of the Ambassador and we always know more than the ambassador strategically China China I don't think China is the problem that everybody believes it's going to be because the China are never going to assimilate into whatever society in which they in which they work the CIA with all its warts and all its you know with all its flaws we we we go native that's what we have to be able to do so when the Cold War when the Cold War ended you know it was easy to go after one bear that's what I did I was a Soviet military weapons analyst because everyone that was on the other side had Soviet weapons even the Chinese based their weapons off of what the Soviets did so knowing that was was a good baseline and then when that model went away and then all of a sudden this you know multi-headed Hydra who you know chop off one head and ten more spring out of it in the form of al Qaeda in the form of Al Shabaab in the form of Boko Haram in the form of you know fill in the blank those are those are problem sets that can be looked at in the same model in which you went after the the Russians or the Chinese I don't see it as as any different the difference is it was a whole lot easier to recognized a Soviet weapon system or a Soviet uniform whereas al-qaeda is not walking around with you know here's my al-qaeda card and it doesn't exist so in that sense it got a little more a little more difficult but the strategic this for me the strategic thing and in Africa is the and a very wise man just told me this last night some of the 10 largest economies growing in the world are in the African continent resources everybody only thinks in terms of oil but there are some things in Zaire and yes I still call it as a year it was a year when I walked in the door and he made me the Democratic Republic of Congo but they ain't democratic and I ain't never gonna call them DRC so as I year Zaire has some minerals out there they don't literally if you're a Black Panther fan whether I can't remember what that what is that thing no I know what Conda what's that what's the we got a young guy in the audience he what's the thing that you don't know whatever that that mineral that they have in black panther that makes them there's stuff like that in zyre that weapons systems can only use that how can that not be important to us we talked about wanting to counter Russia and China if we're going to counter Russia and China we're gonna have to go back to the to the model of the Cold War because that's where it was fought on the African continent and if we pull out there we are just ceding we're literally just giving it to them I don't give ground not to the Chinese or the Russians not ever sorry okay did I answer your question and yes ma'am yes I have a question about you mentioned CIA going native and you've traveled you were assigned a lot of these different countries but how is their assimilation unless you really know the languages because otherwise you're getting you know it interpreted for you not only language but right how the word so in the training you know you don't want to get in too much training but it seems like knowing the language to assimilate to be able to have a good communication which doesn't strike me as possible as you know you had all these assignments at different places and you know your trainees coming in do you spend much time on at least a foreign language for them so I'm just curious of how do you assimilate when you can't possibly know all these languages right so on the recruitment side and it was a question earlier we're doing a lot better of finding people who are walking in the door with near native if not native language capabilities across the spectrum now when we went into Afghanistan and we had people who needed to speak dari guess what we already had Persian speakers Persian speakers and dari speakers know just enough enough similarities that we were able to put an entire cadre of farsi Persian speaking officers into the theater so there was no language no language problem well there everyone out there doesn't speak the language but enough of them enough of them do and the interpreters that we have are Americans these aren't Afghans these are American citizens of Afghan nationality who speak both languages native so it's not like they're not staff officers but as far as the CIA is concerned if they're out there side by side with us they are they are CIA so we have people who already speak the language and if we don't have them in the doors we go out and find them so when something crops up in Yemen guess what there many dialect of Arabic I don't know how many of many communities there are in the United States but I know there are there are quite a few and so we start tapping in into those and and I'll just very quickly so we do we do I I grew up speaking Japanese but the Japanese population between okinawa and san antonio texas kind of dipped so i didn't use it and and i lost i lost that that capability they taught me french and i was able to use that in easier synagogue morocco and in switzerland so they did the the Romance languages Latin America got any LA officers and here from the from the from the from the agency they don't LA officers go to Latin America and never never resurfaced they literally never come back anywhere they only want to stay in Latin America from Paraguay Uruguay - Panama and they just boom so they can serve their entire careers speak in that language and if they don't know it we we can we can teach it to you so we have people who come in with a lot more language capabilities than maybe in previous decades thank you they found out by finding documents locked in so you talked about trust I'm interested in how what you as an organization communicates the people that work for you because you're dealing with a whole person who has a business place right but they also have a family in some cases have a family life so I'm gonna ask you a question I mentioned earlier that I had two red lines when I came out one of them was a schoolhouse the other one is the Ngoc program Karen's father from everything that you just said sounds like he was part of our non-official cover cadre and it's a special cadre that's been around for a long time it is up to the individual officer to decide when they're gonna share with their children the fact that they are you know that there's more to then their mom or dad and then they might have known now every person has to choose I mean my son and my daughter were in two very different places when I when I told them and quite frankly two very different ages the one thing that I did see when when I ran the almost said the words when I when I ran the ICONic training facility I would meet with the spouses of the officers who we're gonna be going down or going to the train going go into training this is not as easy as it looks going going go into the training and six runnings of the course four times a spouse three three women and one guy got up and walked out of the room literally like I didn't know you were in CIA how you can join an institution and not share the fact that you're CIA with the person that you have committed your entire life that's not the type of person that we that's just idiotic it's stupid it's unhelpful it's it's wrong now the father-daughter not getting along and there's probably other things and a lot of what we do as operations officers looks like illegal activity in fact espionage is illegal activity but it looks like a drug deal going on a brush pass a secret meeting a lot of people use use this in order to have affairs because guess what you go away for a little while and there's if you which is why you have to have people with good integrity I'm not saying everybody who's had an affair is not person of good moral character because things happen and people are people but if that's what your goal is if you're gonna use these skills for for evil that's not the type person we have and quite frankly if you don't trust your spouse enough to share with them that you are CIA maybe you shouldn't be CIA did I answered the spouse part of it and the child part of it so I have two really long stories that I'm not going to tell but it's about when I told my kids about me being CIA the most important thing is that both of them asked me the first question it was five years apart in these stories the first question was is it dangerous because in a child that's what you're constantly I know dad's a little bit different and not be able to put my finger on it but is it dangerous which I always thought was really interesting and I had to not tell them the whole truth so anyway yes sir so at the beginning you spoke a lot about trusts and collaboration around the time of 9/11 there was a lot of criticism about the lack of communication between the various protective agencies that are in the country are you can convince them can you assure us that things in that arena between FBI CIA etc have improved to a satisfactory degree short answer is yes and here's why we've always so the the fight between the CIA and FBI goes back to to Hoover timeframe when the CIA was expanding into areas overseas and the only the only place that we didn't win the battle with was in Latin America because the FBI refused to give up this hemisphere as their you know their sphere of influence I first work with the FBI during a domestic tour in in the Midwest in 1994 you know seven years before 9/11 there's the level of mistrust or level of not really sure that you're telling me everything is almost non-existent now a lot of it is because we talked about it in the training now not just at CIA but in the FBI Academy they are integrating their analyst and their and their field agents during my time of running our school house I worked with my counterpart at the FBI to make sure that our curriculums if they are curriculums don't need to be the same because we're not law enforcement and they're not in intelligence service but at least acclimating to people the fact that you're going to be involved with people who are being we're not looking to put somebody in jail looking to follow this thread of information you know to get the next then the next guy up so on a on a day to day level as a station chief in a in the second-largest location in the US I can tell you that my officers were meeting with or meeting with an FBI agent and a source or meeting with an FBI agent about meeting a source every single day of my three years and that's just one place now abroad they do it as well the league ATS and the station Chiefs are part of the part of the country team the it's it's constant headquarter level filled level can people slip through a crook is always going to find a loophole to a good law or a good you know a good lock you know as soon as the lock is made you know there are people out there trying to figure out how to beat that lock every lock every whatever every system has ever been designed someone like me is looking at it trying to figure out how to deconstruct it it's a part of it and we have to collaborate because we can't do it alone there's no doing it alone 9/11 happened for a lot of reasons and it wasn't just the fact that FBI wasn't talking to CIA or CIA wasn't talking to FBI we were it's just that the FBI so here's the deer's a huge difference between FBI and CIA and the CIA everything we report goes back to the mothership in the FBI the mothership is New York field office because they think so or LA field office because they think so I might send this information back to FBI headquarters they don't have to we have to we absolutely have to and there are lot of that happened as well where people like who I don't want to share this is a good case I don't want to share it with with someone else because somebody else might come in now people don't care about the credit we just care about you know completing whatever objective is that we're trying to trying to do I would venture to say that what has happened in in my you know over my 28 years when I whoa 30 now good lord since I walked in in 1990 there's there's almost no separation there's no FBI and see I are talking every single day all over the globe about keeping us safe Darryl yes ma'am I was reading you've got time yep yep I'm watching I'm being respectful no I love that I was reading an interesting article today about misinformation disinformation being put out around the coronavirus mm-hmm by places that would like to keep the globe unstable I wondered if you had any experience with that during the Ebola crisis I not to the level that exists right now so when the Ebola virus broke out I was first in the counterterrorism center front office and then and then Chief of Africa division and we were afraid that people were going to try and weaponize it that people are gonna try and you know get there and have their you know and take it and spread it around the world but we talked to the scientists we talked to the analysts we talked to CDC we talked to the people that mattered we had a presence on the ground which was literally right in the middle of the the you know a bola hot zone and what was impressive to me is I had a a first-time COS who was a gs-13 which if you're a gs-13 in your station chief god bless you because it is way beyond what my capabilities were as a gs-13 but this was a very very solid officer and he had he was back on actually on paternity leave his son was like a week old he's like I'm ready to take my family back in I'm like you realize there's ana bola virus who break out and you're like in the middle of a hot zone I'm not comfortable sending you back much less you in a you know a newborn infant and but we worked it out he went back he did what needed to be done and nobody was ever exposed anything it's never as as as onerous or as ominous as people make it out to be so take take China it has now surpassed a number of people who are killed by SARS I think they're up in the eight number but that's 800 out of one point five or six billion people billion eight hundred one point five billion three percent mortality rate meaning you have a ninety seven percent chance of living so if the entire world were to die that three percent that would be huge I get that but it's not gonna happen it's not I I don't want to say it's not a threat because it can be a threat but it's never as bad as the misinformation and disinformation so oh and one of somebody bring something I'm like what is CDC say what did the World Health Organization say because those are collaboration of scientists from the United States and Asia and Europe and Africa and a whole bunch of people who are looking at this from a perspective that's not ours we don't have the answer to everything which means we have to rely on people who literally spend their entire lives doing nothing but tracking viruses and ebolas and things like this I defer to them very very smart trained people who who can figure we can figure it out and the misinformation I don't think has hit the web sites like CDC and WH oh they can be hacked so you always have to you know keep going back but don't travel into China right now I would just not I would not travel in and carry Purell I don't I'm not one of these guys who walk around washing my hands all the time but I am now cuz I've been on a couple of flights over the last couple of days and you know when you're in a tuna can breathe in other people's air then you take a lot of precautions I'm not I wouldn't be too overly concerned about it I was more interested in the manipulation of the news right one of the reasons I retired is because quite frankly the this the information age and the disinformation age is at a level that I I can't I'm not that bright I can't wrap my brain around the level of dissention as being so just for the sake of keeping people off balance I who thinks like that Putin she maybe not she in this one but Putin for sure not a good guy yes I wanted to ask about the infographic too especially the center part the central part okay so my progression through the agency I broke down into kind of three areas my first ten years in where I was learning the truth of the craft schoolhouse applying it in the in the field so the next you know nine or 10 years is moving into middle management and then my last you know nine or ten years were all at the SAS strategic strategic level so instead of being involved in day-to-day operations my job was to take care of the people and so some of the stories that I that I was able to share were were based on failures my failures my personal and professional failures that I didn't know we're going to resonate with the folks who were running the our leadership development staff who asked me to come in and prepare a presentation that I could start giving to our gs-15 cadre who were all interested in going into making it into the SIS ranks so everyone at CIA now matter Directorate if you want to be considered for promotion to the general ranks has to take this course and I was one of one of the do speakers that would go and talk and the thing that I would would which was stress to them is you need to remember those things that are important to you what are those things that are important to you you know what's important to the agency you know why you walked in the door so unless you literally sit down and start thinking about okay this is important to me this isn't important to me now the things that are important to me I keep I keep to carry two things with me this is my moral compass my personal values and what's important to me this is with me all the time the other thing that I keep is a copy of the US Constitution you know why because it matters it matters in everything that I did as a case officer it matters everything I do in life and that's just how I think and that's the message that I was trying to get across to the people to understand that this isn't about you the day you walk in the door it's not about you anymore the hiring process is about you and your retirement is about you everything else is about protecting our nation and as soon as I starts to come into what I want me me me that's what I can't use you anymore don't let the door hit you in ass on the way out so no I was very serious about this and I would tell I would tell the folks when they're walking in the door I would tell them at the retirement now it's about you but not everything in between so those are the 10 things that were important to me human human is what separates CIA listen CIA is not the only one out there doing a collection of human intelligence military's doing it NSA is in the SIGINT sided house but human personal contact that's what we do that's what separates us from from the others and some of this was born out of one of my failures and I think I'll probably end with this story so I went out as a base chief and my fifth tour and I was I was ready I thought I was ready the job that I bet on was me and a communications officer so basically two officers I can handle that by time I got there a year later I had three second tour case officers one described to me as a Waterwalker one described to me as CEO who wasn't sure that she still wanted to be a CEO and the third one was I just don't let him get anybody killed so just think about managing that spectrum of capabilities well at the end of that two years to your tour they sent me to a leadership course where at the end of the week there was a little surprise that was thrown in there basically there was an observer in there matching up what they witnessed personally during that week of a whole you know literally sunup to sundown exercises and all these things that you do and leadership training courses but there's one person their job was to do nothing but watch you and look at what was reported from your 360 feedback that you had to be a part of for this training and see whether you know is Darrell the person that his peers colleagues and direct reports say he is well in my case unfortunately it was and so the clinical psychologist came to me and he looks at me and he says are you ready to listen are you ready to listen now I don't know how many of you think that a conversation that starts with are you ready to listen is going to end up well to the to the listen II it did not and I may have heard the first three to four minutes of probably twenty minutes you know walk with this guy him explaining the feedback what it meant and what it meant was it was crushing I wasn't the officer that I thought I was Genghis Khan Pol Pot Hitler micromanager know-it-all those are the good ones but I recognized in that moment that if I didn't change who I was I wouldn't be able to rise up and do the things that I wanted to to do and be so I told that story and oh my god that's a great story you got to tell it but that's not the end of it so I'm walking around and feeling I'm not happy not happy at all and so at the end of the day and I was married for 27 years and I called my wife at the time and I'm like just had the worst day of my life okay tell me about it and I did and I realize there was complete silence on the other end of the phone so um like did you not hear what did you not hear what I just told you I just had like yeah I got a couple questions for you so okay said well how long have you known that clinical psychologist well you know I just showed up I mean I was here on Sunday so four days so okay and the people that work for you like you were there with me two years you know okay I've been telling you the same thing for 14 years and you expect me to feel bad for you so just imagine this I'm gonna this feedback and I'm on the ground and I'm being kicked it was painful it was painful but I learned from it I grew from it I you know we later divorce but I think I became a better husband I know I became a better father I'm I'm proof positive because I'm standing here that I became a better leader and all of that boil down to the fact that I learned how to listen for the first time in my life and if all of you out there if you think you're in fact will do this how many of you think you're a good listener raise your hands no seriously raise your hands now those people with those hands up I want you to go home and find your loved one your children whatever it is and ask them the same question do you think I'm a good listener [Music] the thing is we think we're good listeners but you teach your children what how to walk how to talk how to use a fork and spoon how to ride a bicycle but you don't teach someone how to listen I learned it the hard way and the agency ultimately paid for me to go out to be an internal coach for you know for officers and in coaching you learn how to listen listening takes so much more energy than it does to speak and every one of us has been in that conversation where the other person is just doing this and you know they're not listening all they're doing is waiting for their turn to speak and that's not listening and when you and I would teach that to folks when you recognize that that's going on just stop the conversation tell that person we need your you're not tuned in you know you're not I know you're not just go get a glass of water come back in 15 whatever it is just break that night now I'm here too I need you to listen and listening is listening stuff listening is tough and I'm not I'm still not the best listener but I've improved and I'm constantly working on it Darrell yes ma'am we have really enjoyed listening to you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: IntlSpyMuseum

Views: 21,660

Rating: 4.757576 out of 5

Keywords: Darrell M. Blocker, spy museum, CIA, spy, spies, espionage, clandestine service, counterterrorism, intelligence medal, intelligence, International Spy Museum

Id: hoRtcdDHgkc

Length: 84min 46sec (5086 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 18 2020