S8 Ep50: Conspiracies, Disinformation, and Mission Implausible with John Sipher and Jerry O’Shea

[00:00:01] Due to the themes of this podcast, listener discretion is advised. Lock your doors. Close the blinds. Change your passwords. This is Secrets and Spies. Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics, and intrigue.

[00:00:34] This episode is presented by Matt Fulton and produced by Chris Carr. Hello everyone and welcome back to Secrets and Spies. On today's episode, I'm joined by two former CIA officers and now co-founders of Spycraft Entertainment, John Sipher and Jerry O'Shea to discuss their podcast, Mission Implausible.

[00:00:53] In their careers with the clandestine service, John and Jerry in a sense created conspiracies, convinced terrorists and hostile foreign governments to believe things that were not true. Now they're looking into past and present conspiracy theories to assess what's real

[00:01:06] and what isn't and explore why so many are so eager to believe some of the most outlandish stuff. This was a fun one to record and I'm excited to share it with you. As always, a couple housekeeping notes first.

[00:01:17] If you enjoy the show, please leave a five-star rating and review on your podcast streaming app of choice. That really helps new listeners discover the show. And if you're not already, please consider supporting us on Patreon. It's super easy.

[00:01:29] Just go to patreon.com forward slash secrets and spies. Your generosity helps keep this podcast going. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy our conversation. The opinions expressed by guests on Secrets and Spies do not necessarily represent those of the producers and sponsors of this podcast.

[00:02:05] John Cipher and Jerry O'Shea, welcome to Secrets and Spies. It's so great to have you both with us. Thank you. Nice to be here. Glad to be here. Yeah. So today we're discussing conspiracy theories, disinformation and your podcast, Mission Implausible.

[00:02:18] Before we get into that, can you share a bit about your careers at CIA and how your experiences might have shaped your perspectives on conspiracies and misinformation? Sure. Hit it, Jerry. I'd tell you, but I'd have to kill you. Sure, sure, sure.

[00:02:36] Why don't you lead it off, John? Well, sure. Yeah. I spent 28 years in the clandestine service, obviously living overseas undercover, recruiting spies and running spy networks, as you know, because you obviously have a podcast talking about these things.

[00:02:50] I spent time in Russia and in Northern Europe and then in the Balkans during the Balkan Wars and then eventually doing terrorism work out in Southeast Asia and South Asia. And it was a wonderful career.

[00:03:03] In terms of the disinformation thing, it's really interesting because I spent time in Russia and then working on Russia and Russian counter espionage and sort of arresting spies and stuff. And so Russia and the Soviet Union have been using what we call now disinformation and

[00:03:19] lies and misinformation and chaos for years and years as part of their foreign policy, as a part of to keep their enemies weak or to force their enemies to focus on things that benefit themselves. And so it was especially interesting.

[00:03:32] I didn't have any sort of public face after I retired. And then when the 2016 election came up and there was all these allegations of Russia interference, people just didn't understand the history of Russian intelligence and the

[00:03:43] US government has been so focused on terrorism for such a long time that it just came sort of out of the blue to people. Whereas if you've been working on Russia for a long time, it really wasn't anything new.

[00:03:51] They've been doing the same game for quite a long time. Obviously the tools of social media and other things made it easier and speedier to weaponize disinformation and false information, but it wasn't anything new.

[00:04:02] And so, yeah, I retired from the agency in 2014 and eventually Jerry and I hooked up and created a company to make espionage movies, TVs, and podcasts and other things. That's spycraft entertainment, right? Right.

[00:04:16] Not just to make them, but to have sort of a throughput of authenticity in all of them as well. Sort of Hollywood has too many sort of chase scenes and pyrotechnic events for real espionage. It's actually way more interesting and way more character-driven and personal and even

[00:04:35] intimate than most novelists or Hollywood directors really understand. And for myself, I did 33 years in the agency, served in Europe, Africa, Asia, Middle East, number of war zones. Like John was a chief of station multiple times. And I have to say, I really enjoyed my time at CIA.

[00:05:06] Found it challenging, fun and almost addictive. Sure. Yeah. Well, thank you for that. I don't know if you were, how much you can say about it, but given the topic that we're talking about today, were either of you ever involved with the political action group at

[00:05:27] Langley or that sort of more covert action, Title 50 side of things? Not really. In fact, it's funny because when people talk about the CIA and obviously you do and talk about the history there, in the early years of CIA, it's all you were overthrowing governments

[00:05:40] and CIA assassinations and all these kinds of things. We came in the post reform after the 1970s reforms of CIA. So that real focus on the things that the Soviet Union did that we thought we had to

[00:05:53] do after World War II when we were fighting the Soviets were much less taken seriously. There was very little effort in terms of trying to come up with these sort of games and overthrowing governments and spreading disinformation.

[00:06:05] And obviously in the modern era, we have regulations and laws against putting false information into the ecosystem that comes back into our own system. And that's almost impossible to stop nowadays. So of course, the US government does engage to some extent in these things.

[00:06:21] Covert action is a wide range of things. We were mostly involved in the espionage, the spying side of what the agency does as opposed to the action, covert action. But of course there's been some major covert actions, everything from going after terrorists

[00:06:36] after 9-11 and getting involved in a variety of other things. But I never worked directly in it and didn't find that in terms of the psychological warfare and things people get interested in, I don't really saw much of any of that during my career.

[00:06:51] Well, Matt, I think I would say that it might be a mistake to focus just on PEG. So PEG is a long story past. And in fact, some of the things that the agency had done, say the overthrow of the Guatemalan government back in the 50s, right?

[00:07:12] So we're talking a long time ago through disinformation and a malign influence campaign. A lot of that people still think that we can do today or that it's where we're able to do it today.

[00:07:24] And I don't think the agency to the extent it engages in influence campaigns at all, those days are over, right? And not only over, but it's really almost an impossibility legally for the agency to engage in such things.

[00:07:40] So it's interesting to hear, I'll come back to that just a second. It's interesting to hear accusations and assertions like coming out of Russia that Vladimir Putin would say things like Hillary Clinton and the State Department were responsible for

[00:07:57] the Maidan and the overthrow of the popular uprising against the government in Ukraine. A, we couldn't do it. B, we don't have the resources. It wouldn't really work. I mean, there's no way that we have the expertise or the wherewithal to do it.

[00:08:15] Now where I think we could talk more about influence campaigns is things that people would understand and I think agree with. And so I spent a lot of time as did John in the counterterrorism efforts, especially after 9-11.

[00:08:29] So things like convincing Taliban to surrender, like right after 9-11. We had leaflets, we had an information campaign to try to get into their dialogue internally within them. And then also with ISIS and Al Qaeda, it's not so much that we could get them to believe

[00:08:52] things that weren't true, but I think we could sort of understand their internal dialogue. And it's an old thing, but I think if there are ways of like getting exacerbating fissures within Al Qaeda itself.

[00:09:08] And it's no secret that like the Egyptians in Al Qaeda of old, they sort of ran things. Zawahiri and then some of the Saudis, they were the top positions and they and their kids didn't commit. They weren't engaged in suicide operations.

[00:09:26] But if you were a lowly Uzbek or Iraqi, you're expendable. And those were the young peasants they sent out. And we did know that within the organization, people like recognize that. It's like, well, if you're an Egyptian and you've got a college education, nobody's asking

[00:09:45] you to blow yourself up, right? But they think it's great for me to go do it. And so it is possible to in certain ways and generally working with liaison partners who understand the mindset, which we don't, you know, who speak native Arabic to get into

[00:09:59] that dialogue and sort of create fissures and problems within the organization. But we didn't create them. It wasn't disinformation. It was really sort of understanding some of the issues and problems within a culture and manipulating it to our advantage, mostly to save American lives. So more tactical.

[00:10:19] And it doesn't always work that way. Tactical than big. Yeah. We weren't very good at the big part of it in the 50s and 60s. A lot of that stuff's come back to haunt us, right? In Iran and other places. Yeah.

[00:10:29] Well, that's some important context, I guess, as you said. You know, the seventh floor isn't nearly as open to risk as it was back in those early days of the Cold War. And I guess if you guys down in the trenches somewhere suggested an effort to that extent

[00:10:44] now, a lawyer furiously popping tums would appear quickly. And it's almost impossible. Well, it's not impossible. We can talk about that too. But it's much more difficult in a CIA that's ruled by laws and that they're worried about

[00:11:01] – not worried about leaks, but if leaks happen, if we're doing something that was less than moral, it's probably going to get out, right? Because we've got – we talked to oversight committees in both parties and so forth.

[00:11:13] It's really hard to dominate a media space like it used to be. So let's go back to our bends back in Guatemala in the 50s. There was, if I recall correctly – I mean, this is way before I was born, and I'm 66.

[00:11:27] But there was like the radio station, right? And they took over the radio station. And then there was two newspapers. And then one of them was used to put out information that wasn't true. But there was no internet. People couldn't like – they didn't have alternates to check it.

[00:11:45] Is this true? Isn't it? Has the army collapsed? Has the president run off? So those sort of things, very simple, almost primitive, just simply aren't available to us today, those tactics. Well, nowadays it's not so much the CIA secretly trying to do regime change from the behind.

[00:12:05] When the U.S. government talks about regime change, it's overt. Like it's the U.S. military going into Iraq or Afghanistan or – it's big USG. And in terms of propaganda and information, it's essentially overt, real information

[00:12:21] that we're trying to pump into the system as opposed to – now, Jerry talked about tactical stuff for – to go to create problems inside Al-Qaeda and things. That makes sense to me. There's also – I mean, for your listeners and Matt, you're probably aware of this.

[00:12:33] One of – CIA did have, I think, an enormous success during the Cold War on exactly this front, on the influence front. It created – it started, it initiated Radio Free Europe and to beam truth and actually good journalism because for people hungry for actual – people can – if you talk

[00:12:55] to people who've lived in societies where they're being fed nothing but propaganda, people are smart enough generally by and large to figure it out, right? There's the old – in Russia, what is it, John? There's – Pravda is truth and TASS is news and there's no – there is no – there

[00:13:14] is – yeah, there's no news in truth and no truth in – and no truth in news or – no TASS and Pravda, no – Of course enough. But Radio Free Europe started out as a clandestine operation back in the 50s and it was so successful

[00:13:30] that people started sending money to contribute genuinely because not knowing it was – and eventually CIA let go of it and let it run on its own and it continued to be throughout the Cold War to be one of the most popular and effective ways of conducting, I'll say

[00:13:48] information warfare but it really wasn't. It was good, solid, truthful journalism being beamed into places full of lies and that was – that proved to be very effective at least in those days. Our colleague on our podcast at Mission Implausible, we talk about conspiracy theories is Adam Davidson.

[00:14:08] Adam Davidson was a New Yorker, writer, a journalist, did Planet Money and podcasts and spent time in Iraq and other places as a journalist and he made a good comment in one of our podcasts.

[00:14:17] He says essentially in some of those countries the one thing you know for certain is when the government says something that's not true, right? And so – When Saddam wants you to believe it.

[00:14:26] You deal with those kind of countries which is North Korea, Russia, Iraq in the day, these type of things and so they are starving for just real information. You don't need to punch – push false information into the system. You can push real information into the system.

[00:14:41] Tell us about Mission Implausible. It's been on the air for a couple months now. It's really good stuff. What do you cover there? Go for it, Chuck. Hit it, Jerry. No. This is a problem because we do meetings all day on our – we end up talking over each

[00:14:58] other. We either like – we either defer too much or we talk over each other. So I mean Mission Implausible, the idea was we in CIA and the clandestine services were conspirators in the sense small C conspirators.

[00:15:12] When I go out to do a surveillance detection run, I'm trying to convince the other side that might be following me that I'm not doing anything when I might actually be doing something or I'm undercover to my neighbors. I don't actually – I'm not a CIA officer.

[00:15:25] I'm undercover as a diplomat or something else. So that in a sense is creating fictions. So the notion was we would try to look at conspiracy theories, everything from the funny ones to political ones. So everything from chem trails and – Mossad sharks. Oh yeah. Yeah.

[00:15:42] Mossad sharks in Egypt. That's a real one. And there's an Illuminati underneath the Denver airport, all these type of things. So we do things that weaponization of conspiracy theories in our politics now.

[00:15:54] And so we do interviews, we talk with Adam and so we try to like dissect and look at conspiracy theories to see was there a kernel of truth that led to interest in this? Who is taking advantage of it? Who is it benefiting?

[00:16:08] Does it make any sense at all? Is it something we could replicate? So that's the notion behind the podcast. In looking at these conspiracies that you have this far, has your sense of how they're created, how they kind of seep into the bloodstream changed at all?

[00:16:27] I mean, there's sort of like – some of these conspiracies are like herpes. Once they're out there, you can't get rid of them. They're just there forever. Yeah. You know, we started out, Matt, talking about like really simple sort of campaigns like

[00:16:40] back in – again, back in Guatemala or what we tried to do in the Bay of Pigs in Cuba that didn't work. The societies are the same but the technology has changed radically. And I think we found that our adversaries have becoming extremely good at understanding how

[00:16:58] our societies work. And just like we talked about with Al-Qaeda, they have found fissures and ways to exacerbate cracks in our society. And so it's not so much that the Russians or to a certain extent the Chinese or others

[00:17:16] are using disinformation, information that just isn't true, but they're using malign influence to tell us things that are partly true but we want to hear or that fits a certain narrative. You know, to underline differences inside of American society or Western cultures, to make

[00:17:37] us angry with each other, to up the temperature. And those are proving to be extraordinarily powerful and effective. And to quote Steve Bannon, this is somebody I find myself not wanting to quote, but you know, they're flooding the zone with shit, right? I think that was his quote.

[00:17:57] And you know, quantity is its own quality. And I think Prygosian, you know, who's now dead, the head of Wagner, he didn't just run the Wagner Russian mercenaries. He also ran troll farms in St. Petersburg with, you know, employing thousands of people

[00:18:13] to pump enormous amounts of misinformation into the altered, doctored or manipulated information into our bloodstream, poison, to confuse people and to create a sense that there is no truth or that, you know, that there's several truths or if you feel it, it's true.

[00:18:32] And I just think there's a very human interest in conspiracy theories. It is a way of telling a story. I mean, the world is just so unbelievably complex. I mean, there's no way in this day and age that even a government can control all the

[00:18:45] things that affect our lives that we would like them to do it. And so in that complexity and in that mess of things, you need to try to tell yourself a story to understand the world. And conspiracy theories sort of fill that void.

[00:18:58] It tells you a simple story that answers a question for you. That's why I think they're so powerful and they stick with us. And so it's not a surprise that people grab onto them.

[00:19:08] And it's also, we've talked to some experts about how difficult it is to get people out of rabbit holes if they dig down them. And so even for us, you know, we're trying to look at some conspiracy theories, talk about them, see whether they make sense.

[00:19:19] There's some that are so deep that we like the issue like UFOs or JFK assassination or something. There's people that are so into it that have read hundreds of books and stuff that you

[00:19:27] just can't even, you know, in an hour long podcast or whatever, you're not about to get into the depth of arguing with someone over all the minutia of a conspiracy that they've totally bought into. I just want to just riff on what John said.

[00:19:39] So I think throughout human history, people, you know, the fact that we're sentient beings, we're looking for answers and we don't have answers. And that's that bothers us as a species. So we create simple answers, right? Like where does thunder come from? You know, you create Thor, right?

[00:20:00] Or Zeus. And you know, now you've got your answer. It may not be true, but it makes you feel good. It gives you a sense of control and power that you understand your environment. So I think conspiracy theories have always been there.

[00:20:11] What's changed is that up until 50 years ago, if you believed in, and I'm old enough to remember before the internet, but you know, 50 years ago, if you believe that the moon landing was faked, yeah, you might be able to find somebody in a bar, right?

[00:20:25] You know, who to sort of talk to about that. In fact, my father was a salesman and he bumped into a John Birch Society guy who like talked his ear off about how the communists were running the Eisenhower administration.

[00:20:40] You know, it was like as if that was possible. And my father, since he's a salesman, he's like, oh yeah, that's interesting. You know, he's not going to say you're nuts, right?

[00:20:48] And so for years, the John Birch Society would send him pamphlets in the mail until they realized he was never going to send him money. But those days are over. So anybody who believes any crazy conspiracy can go online and can find a community and

[00:21:03] be empowered by that. I think as a species, we're looking to try to deal with that. And I think that's creating the polarization that we're seeing in our politics. The fact that people are able to band together with those. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about that.

[00:21:20] I mean, it's been a huge and growing concern of mine. Just the lack of media literacy in our society. And I mean, you guys know full well the sort of cliche of the Middle East for many decades.

[00:21:34] It's been like this place that runs on rumor and conspiracy, like Egypt and Pakistan are two countries that jumped to mind in that way. Russia has been that way for a long time.

[00:21:43] And in past years, it's sort of making an end run into like full North Korea in the terms of its nationalistic propaganda. We've always had conspiracy theories in our Western society. But it seems like in recent years, I don't know if it's just the algorithm just pumping

[00:22:00] this out there, but it feels different. To your point, it's not just the crazy person at the bar saying who's largely harmless, but says, oh yeah, the moon landing was fake. But like, okay, so here's an example. In the spring, the Key Bridge collapsing in Baltimore.

[00:22:16] Shortly after that, you open TikTok or Twitter and it's just, oh, the bridge collapsed because Baltimore has a black mayor or the crew is Indian or it's like, wake up sheeple. What are they trying to distract you from?

[00:22:31] And I see this and I'm just like, what are you talking about? And it just, I don't know if it's just more culturally acceptable or the contagion is more out there, but I don't know.

[00:22:45] This is a very long wind up here, but after 9-11, we spent so much time and money investing in the resiliency of our critical infrastructure, whether that's electrical grids, fiber optic cables. But in the meantime, we've left millions of our own citizens completely susceptible to

[00:23:05] this, these deliberate influence operations by our adversaries. And they're just, many don't even realize that their targets or that they would be targeted or in some cases the extreme, they are knowing willful vectors of this contagion.

[00:23:21] And I don't know in a free open society how we deal with that. Yeah. I mean, there's communities of interest that Jerry was talking about. There's people who want to believe these things that come together and then they can find each other easier to share.

[00:23:34] But also just like you said, Matt, there's a confluence of actors that have an interest in this. So there's malign actors who just want to spin up clicks and cause trouble. There's foreign actors who want to do damage to us by creating chaos and other things.

[00:23:49] There are partisan actors who benefit by pushing certain conspiracy theories about the other side or what have you. And so these people all sort of come together and now they have these tools with social media and other things to pump this stuff out.

[00:24:01] And then other malign actors can then see that stuff that's coming out there and they can put it on power and push it forward. And malign actors, especially for ones who have seen that the First Amendment is something

[00:24:15] that to them is a weakness in our society they can take advantage of. It's a strength for us certainly as a people, but it's also something that can be, it's hard for us to fix it or stop it easily.

[00:24:25] So all these things seem to be coming together at a time when we've been susceptible to this and we're sort of at each other's throats over this type of thing. And at the same time, it's pumping into the system and making things worse. It's also monetized.

[00:24:38] So I mean, some of the prime people doing this, I'll just take the infamous Alex Jones for example, right? So he's made a fortune off of this and other people are trying too well. So it's not just foreign actors.

[00:24:52] The other thing too is with algorithms, it used to be that... So I have a master's degree in international marketing, which I never used because I joined the agency after grad school. And then I remember them saying like half of marketing is like doesn't work, but you

[00:25:10] don't know which half it is, right? So you've got to do your marketing campaign. You just don't know which part is effective or isn't it. But today with even small time operators can look at an algorithm and can read it and they

[00:25:22] can determine instead of throwing spaghetti in the wall and seeing what sticks, they know what sticks, right? You can see, you can actually watch what people are reacting to and then you can feed that.

[00:25:34] So there's not only a monetization and this is really interesting at least as far as the population goes. There's mice with food pellets, right? They did this experiment with rats and mice where they hit a lever and they receive either a food pellet or a shot of dopamine.

[00:25:50] And eventually, at least when it's the shot of dopamine, the rats will starve to death, because they just sit there with a little lever. They don't walk anymore and they're just... And I think there is a psychological, and we've all got them, members of our extended families.

[00:26:07] I've got one member of extended family who says, and maybe he is, he believes in the flat earth now and yet he wants to really argue this, but he gets in with his flat earth friends and I think he gets a psychological kick out of being special.

[00:26:21] I think he gets a psychological kick out of being the center of attention. Everybody wants to talk to him. He has all the answers, even though they're silly, but he has a sense of control.

[00:26:33] And I think he gets a real dopamine kick out of this and I think there's something really powerful. We should get him on the podcast, Jerry. You should. My brother-in-law. I don't think people really understand how that works just yet, but because this is,

[00:26:53] again, this is really new in the human experience, this sort of total control of not total, but this mass information that we have available to us now. And Matt, you know one of the problems is that there's no real function in the US government

[00:27:07] is meant to deal with this or is prepared to deal with this. I mean, it took us a long time to even see that it was happening. I see like on Twitter now people write like, why doesn't the CIA or something do something about this?

[00:27:18] Well, the CIA is a foreign intelligence collection thing. We're not meant to be doing anything domestically. If we have sources that tell us that a bad actor overseas is doing something, we report that to the administration.

[00:27:30] The FBI is a law enforcement organization set almost to deal with crimes after they happen and if they're pushed from people who are not breaking the law but are causing trouble, there's not a lot they can do. People have First Amendment rights and then foreigners are doing it.

[00:27:43] There's not much they can do because it's coming from overseas. And then of course, when administrations try to put together some fashion of dealing with this information, the other party thinks it's an effort against them.

[00:27:55] And so we don't really have the institutions and infrastructure to deal with this yet. And the legal structure. So John mentioned earlier, I want to come back to something that the legality of the CIA

[00:28:07] if and when it engages in Title 50, I don't know if you want to explain what Title 50 is, but it's deniable information operations. To the extent we do that, we have to be very careful that it doesn't seep into impact on the US public.

[00:28:23] The problem of course is that English is now the global language. So if you want to conduct a campaign, it's much easier to get permission to do it say in Burmese, right? Or pick your exotic language.

[00:28:39] But if you're going to do it in English to reach a larger audience, it does tend to seep back and we can't give those guarantees. So that further and should restrain the agency from being involved in campaigns if and when

[00:28:53] they're turned back into English because it washes back into the English speaking world, which is everywhere now, right? I think it's also, I just want to quick touch on, and I think it's a really important point. We talk about it in the campaigns and we talk about disinformation.

[00:29:09] For those of us who were involved in these kind of things, even just sorta kinda, it's like Eskimos with snow, right? They have all the different words for snow and people involved in it. So disinformation by and large means things that aren't true that you're pushing out, right?

[00:29:27] Malign influence is really sort of what insiders would use, like what the Russians are doing to us. And that's a mixture, a heady mixture of things that are completely true, partly true, untrue, true but curated or doctored, right? And those things are all put in together.

[00:29:47] And so when you look at like a Russian disinformation campaign, it's the wrong word because they're basically a disinformation campaign would be something like, you know, the- The AIDS stuff. Yeah, exactly right. There was an operation in Fexion where they said the US government is responsible for AIDS.

[00:30:06] That was just disinformation. But then they would put malign influence into it, like Fort Detrick, Maryland actually exists, right? They would put in, they would name some names of people who may or may not have been involved in sort of research.

[00:30:19] And so what we're dealing with, and I'll stick my finger in the wound real quick, but Hunter Biden's laptop, right? The laptop from hell. The question isn't whether it's authentic. The question is whether it was part of a malign influence campaign that was being pushed, right?

[00:30:37] So whether a, you know, one sentence or two, whether it was authentic or not, or what it was meant, that's less the thing than what's assertions made about it, how it's presented and so forth. Like in 2016, the Russians stole emails from the Democratic National Committee and published them.

[00:30:57] And there's no evidence that I know of that suggests that emails are fake, but it was an effort to try to cause problems in an election season by a foreign actor. So the stuff was true, but it was also meant to be a malign activity.

[00:31:09] And there was another thing, timing. So the Russians, Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, the two Russian entities, stole them, gave them to WikiLeaks, and Roger Stone was apparently involved. But what was important there was the timing to drop it in October just before the elections

[00:31:27] with all sorts of assertions about how awful these emails are. No one can tell me what's in any of those emails today, right? They weren't Hillary Clinton's emails. Those were the emails of the Democratic National Committee where they were like, as any organization

[00:31:41] they were arguing with each other and backbiting. And it was a bit salacious, but there was nothing illegal in any of those emails. And I'm sure hardly anybody here can remember what they were about.

[00:31:51] But the fact that they were dropped just before the election with all these assertions about what this was that all proved to be false, that's what counted, right? It was two weeks before the election. Well, here's a specific question about a...

[00:32:06] I don't know if legally this would qualify as a foreign effort, but okay. You guys tell me if you think this is foreign or not. So on the last show that Chris and I, my co-host did, we talked about this guy.

[00:32:21] He is a former Palm Beach deputy sheriff from Florida who has political asylum in Russia and now runs this network of a bunch of... It's fake news in the literal sense, not I don't like what you're saying so therefore it's fake news.

[00:32:38] But fake news in the literal sense of fake websites that purport to be US newspapers like the Chicago Chronicle or something, right? That puts out disinformation in a way to specifically deceive Americans.

[00:32:52] So stuff like that, Dylanski is using US aid funds to buy Highgrove House from King Charles, right? And yachts too. I'm not a lawyer for NSD. Yachts, yeah. Yes, yachts also. Can't forget the yachts.

[00:33:06] I'm not a DOJ lawyer so I don't know if he technically qualifies as a US person. But okay, let's say you guys get pulled up to the seventh floor one day while you guys were still at Langley and the director says, yo, this guy, get rid of him.

[00:33:24] Stop what he's doing. Is that something that CIA's own Center for Cyber Intelligence or even the big guys Fort Meade with Cyber Command, is that something that they could address or do we have to just lay down and just take it? That's a good question.

[00:33:39] I think the first thing, like if Jerry and I got pulled up, the first thing we do is we go right to our lawyers. What actually can this foreign intelligence organization do if that's an American person?

[00:33:50] We had this issue and Jerry dealt a lot more in Counterterrorism Center with American citizens or American persons who were overseas that were part of Al Qaeda or ISIS. Al-Haqqi. Al-Haqqi, right? How do you respond to that?

[00:34:06] So you have to go through the lawyers to say, okay, what can you do? What can you not do? And then you have to look at what is the way that you stop this? And those are all different issues.

[00:34:17] And of course, I mean, if he is living in Russia and putting this stuff out, even if he's doing it completely of his own, the Russians are providing him the sanctuary to do that. So it does have, I mean, I think there is a foreign intelligence and counterintelligence

[00:34:31] interest in that. So I think that would be an issue that would be between CIA, FBI, the Justice Department. It's funny, like one jerk from Florida would take a sort of all of government approach to deal with. So let's talk about limits of CIA, right? We work abroad.

[00:34:48] I think the answer would, the way to do that would basically say, I mean, the director wouldn't like it, but he'd say, yeah, that's not my job. But how to do that? But it's not my job, but I think we know how to do it.

[00:35:02] And it would be politically touchy and we can talk about that a bit, but it would be reaching out to Twitter. It'd be reaching out to some of the big, the online firms and the terms of service, right?

[00:35:15] Is that this guy is probably breaking those terms of service, right? So back to the, I hate to go back to it, but the Hunter Biden laptop, one of the accusations about that whole schlamazel was that after the New York Post story that came out just

[00:35:33] back to timing, just before the election with all these wild accusations of what was apparently or on this laptop, Twitter at the time said, I'm just going through what I understand from the press had been given to understand that Rudy Giuliani was working with Russian intelligence

[00:35:53] officers and he was, it was like, we know who they are. You know, Dmitry Firtash, Andrei Derkash, we know who these guys were. And Twitter was told not you have to do anything, but be aware that you're being manipulated

[00:36:09] or that Rudy Giuliani knowingly or unknowingly is a vehicle for Russian, possibly a vehicle for Russian malign influence to influence our elections. And Twitter is like, well, we don't want, we want, we don't want to purvey Russian disinformation. That's not our job.

[00:36:26] So is this New York Post story on the laptop? Is it Russian disinformation or isn't it? And what they decided despite the fact of what people are saying about it now was I believe it was 24 hours.

[00:36:39] They didn't let people, you could post the story, but you couldn't forward it. And it was basically while Twitter before Elon Musk was trying to figure out the morality and the legality of this. We don't want to expand Russian malign influence. There's also, what if, was this stolen?

[00:36:58] Which is goes against, if it was stolen from Hunter Biden, legally, it was illegally taken from him, whether it was or wasn't, they had to determine this. Stolen information is not allowed to be, you know, wider, widely disseminated than on Twitter.

[00:37:12] And then I guess there were like, there was porn on there as well. And like, we can't put, you know, Hunter Biden's dick pics on here either. And so they struggled. Tell that to Marjorie Taylor Greene.

[00:37:24] So it wasn't, but what this has turned into now is an accusation that large media companies form, you know, what Twitter was then, that they were engaged in suppressing information, First Amendment things. And I think if you, you know, Matt Taibbi, somebody that John knows, you know, Twitter

[00:37:47] files, they tried to make it seem big, but if you actually read it, it was basically a bunch of lawyers and, you know, the owners trying to figure out what's the right thing. And so for- Doing their job. Doing their job. Yeah. It was like, is this legal?

[00:38:01] Is this moral? Should we, shouldn't we? Is this bad? I mean, do we push lies? And I think they're trying not, they were trying not to. And so I think for this guy who's out there now pushing these things, you know, he's faking,

[00:38:14] you know, he's spoofing other, you know, legitimate organizations, news organizations. That's probably illegal. It's probably against terms of service. But I think a lot of these big organizations are now afraid to stop any propaganda now

[00:38:28] being, because especially if it's, you know, I'll just say if it's pro-right or pro-left, they're afraid of being attacked by proponents of people who think they're going to benefit from pushing that propaganda. Right. Yeah. So it's a difficult proposition.

[00:38:41] John, did you have anything you wanted to add there? No, just other than that, you know, my understanding of none of that had anything to do with CIA or porn or tele- Exactly right. Yeah. At that point, it's a domestic issue. They talked to the FBI. Right.

[00:38:53] The FBI was honchoing that. Yeah. Before we wrap up here, because I know you guys got to go soon, if you could get any figure connected to any conspiracy, historical, more contemporary as a guest on Mission Implausible to discuss, who would it be?

[00:39:07] I know who it'd be, but I want to see what John says. No, no, go, go, Jerry. I would say Leon Trotsky. I mean, if anybody knows anything about the Russia back then was militarily weak and they basically destroyed the whites and the white Russians in the West.

[00:39:23] What was it called, John? The Trust? Maybe if you could sort of outline what the Trust was. The Trust was incredible. Oh my God. Yeah. You may have talked about it in one of your earlier podcasts, but yeah, the Trust.

[00:39:33] What's really interesting to me is when the Bolsheviks took over in 1917, 1918 and in the Soviet Union, one of the first things they did is they created a security service. They called it Cheka, which became later the OGPU and the KGB and sort of in today's security services.

[00:39:49] And what's interesting is all the leaders of the Soviet Union then Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin, those weren't their real names. Those were their undercover names because essentially they were terrorists. They were undercover terrorists running from the Tsarist secret police.

[00:40:04] So when they took over, they knew the most important thing to do was own the secret police. And so they created a secret police, which they openly said is a terrorist organization to destroy any potential opposition to our leadership.

[00:40:14] And so all of a sudden, yeah, there's a civil war going on. This is small group of Bolsheviks, which is the word for majority in Russian, but actually they were the minority party. They were a very small group.

[00:40:24] They had this continental size country and right out of the bat, they were foreign entities. And so Winston Churchill said, we need to strangle the Bolshevik baby in its cradle before it grows. And Western countries were obviously against this new communist regime.

[00:40:42] And so literally within months, this new secret organization created an operation, which the Russians to this day still study and we in the West still study when we talk about Russia called the trust operation.

[00:40:55] And what the trust operation was is this brand new security service created this really quite sophisticated thing that spoofed and screwed with every other intelligence service that had been around much longer than they had in the West and in Europe.

[00:41:08] And the notion was at the time, the enemies of the Bolshevik government was this group called the Monarchist Union of Central Russia. It was a group that was trying to overthrow the Bolshevik regime and it operated all throughout Europe and it operated in Russia.

[00:41:23] And it was involved in trying to like assassinate mid-level bureaucrats and trying to raise money and trying to propagate against the Bolshevik regime. Well, this thing went on for a number of years was sort of the main place where anybody who was opposed to the Bolsheviks would come.

[00:41:37] By the early 20s, all of a sudden it turned out that all of those people who were involved with it were arrested or killed. And it turned out that the whole thing was a fake. It was a honey pit.

[00:41:46] The Cheka, the Bolshevik security service, they created their own enemy organization. So they made it up. They said, we're going to create the anti-Bolshevik organization. We're going to let it run through Eastern Europe. We're going to let it run.

[00:41:58] We're going to let it even kill some people and stuff so that brings people in and we're going to monitor that. And so they created their own enemy organization, let it run. And then once everybody sort of was pulled into the trap, they killed them all.

[00:42:08] So it's an incredible sophisticated organization that fooled the British and the French and the Germans all that had these long running intelligence and security services. And what's interesting is the way Russia looks at security and intelligence and these issues to this day is sort of the same.

[00:42:27] The idea is to get inside the other side and be a cancer inside the other side so that you can control them. And what we're seeing now in our elections is in a way very similar to what they did in the trust organization more than 100 years ago. Absolutely.

[00:42:42] Yeah. Sorry, that was a bit long. No, no, that's fine. I would maybe an idea, maybe an episode idea for you guys. I would love to explore the whole Martin Borman situation, that red clay that was found on

[00:42:55] his skull that is not native to Berlin, but it is native to South America. That's something that is just... If I had to pick one conspiracy that I'm like, that's interesting. Jerry's our German expert here. I think it's important too on conspiracy theories.

[00:43:14] English is not well served yet with coming up with the right nomenclature for this, but there really are conspiracies to create conspiracy theories. In Moscow, 50 people will sit in a room with a whiteboard and try to figure out what conspiracy

[00:43:33] theories they can come up with to dish us. So there are conspiracies. I wouldn't laugh at all of them. And oftentimes they're to create conspiracy theories. Anything else you'd like to cover today that we haven't yet? No, we're good. This is fun.

[00:43:46] It's a real pleasure to talk to you. It's a pleasure to talk about anything. If you guys are down for it, I would love to have you back on in the future to talk

[00:43:54] about spy craft entertainment and the importance of telling the truth in spy fiction and how that when done wrong sort of bleeds into this issue that we're talking about today. That's another big issue of mine that we just don't really have time for today, but we'd

[00:44:08] love to talk about that. We're learning a lot about how Hollywood works. Doesn't work. Or doesn't work. Yeah. That's something that'll drive you to drink, I'm sure. I thought working in the intelligence community was crazy and weird place. Hollywood is pretty rational. Stranger. Hollywood, yeah.

[00:44:26] Where can listeners find Mission Implausible and more about you and your work? Mission Implausible is an iHeart production and it's on Apple Podcasts or iHeart Podcasts or any other podcast place. And so, yeah, we'd love for people to get on and give some feedback on the podcast.

[00:44:42] And some conspiracy theories. Well, we're in no danger of running out of conspiracy theories, unfortunately. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're going to be in business for a long time to come. Give that keeps on giving year round.

[00:44:56] John Cipher, Jerry O'Shea, thank you so much for coming on the show. Links to all that will be in the show notes. Yeah, it was great having you on. Thanks, Matt. Well, thanks Matt. Next time, hopefully Chris will be on. Yeah, wishing you all the best.

[00:45:08] Talk to us more. Yeah, I can drag him on. Yeah, for sure. All right. Thanks so much.

[00:45:46] Thanks for listening. This is Secrets and Spies.