Transcript of How Bad Intelligence Helped Sell the Iraq War | Luis Rueda (throwback episode)

Hey everyone, welcome to episode 254 of The TeamHouse. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park, and our guest on tonight's show is former CIA officer Louis Rudolph. You guys missed the pre-conversation that we just had about the Roman Empire and ancient Greece. Maybe we'll get back into that one. But Louis served as the head of operations in Iraq, chief of station in New Delhi, lots of assignments in Central and South America. Was there for the invasion of Grenada. I mean, very extensive career at Central Intelligence. And Luis, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

My pleasure.

Thank you for having me.

So I'm going to hit you up right off the bat. Tell us about, you know, where you grew up, how you grew up, and how that took you towards the CIA.

Ah, that's, that's, that's a story. I was, I was born in Cuba. We had to flee immediately after the Bay of Pigs, and we ended up in Miami for a while. And there's a whole lot of detail in there.

Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt, but when you say I had to, or your family had to flee right after the Bay of Pigs, it sounds as if maybe you had family members who were involved.

Oh yeah, my father and an uncle were involved in what passed for the anti-Castro underground on island in Cuba. And the whole Bay of Pigs invasion had been compromised from the get-go. My father and uncle were going home after work one day and some woman from the town they lived in right outside Havana came running up and said, don't go back into town, they're arresting all the men, they know what's coming. So they spent the night at the cemetery and then got refuge in the Brazilian embassy. After a few months, they let them go, and they landed in Mexico. And interestingly enough, at the foot of the stairs as they came off the plane was a State Department counselor officer from the U.S. embassy and said, would you guys like to go to the United States? And they said yes, and there we were. So they got up there, moved to New York, I grew up in an extremely anti-communist household, as you can imagine, with a sense that not only were we engaged in a life or death struggle against communism, but we owed the US a lot for having taken us in. I think every male member of the family volunteered for the military when they got asylum in the US.

The US. And so I grew up with that sense of I owe the country and we really are in a struggle that if we lose, we're screwed. So I thought of, you know, what do I want to do? And the agency offered that and it also offered the ability to pick up and move every 2 or 3 years. You know, I get bored easily. And it's hard to stay at the same job or the same place for long. And the agency offered to, you know, a young guy, they offered adventure and excitement. So I joined.

Where did, when did the idea, I mean, I understand the motivation now when you describe it, like when did this sort of come up on your radar? I take it when you were in college, did you interface with like an agency recruiter?

That's very prescient of you. Yes, I had a Russian history professor who looked— it was a spitting image of Teddy Roosevelt. And he sort of suggested and directed me toward, you know, I might be interested in this kind of work in this field. And I suspect he might have been spotting for the agency. I don't know. I can't say. But he steered me. Uh, and in my senior year, I applied knowing that the process took a while. Uh, usually it takes about a year just to get in. And I remember having received a letter from the agency and, uh, it scheduled an appointment for me at the federal office building at that time at the World Trade Center, uh, for an interview. And I went down there dutifully. You know, the interview was at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. I got there early. and I couldn't find the office. It was, you know, I had a number and I kept looking. There was no number. I couldn't find it for the life of me. And I was now at this point, I was late. And so in desperation, I walk into a nearby office, which is the wildlife licensing office where they give you the fishing license and all this kind of stuff.

And I asked the lady behind the counter, I said, look, I'm looking for room, whatever it was, 221. She goes, oh sweetheart, you want the CIA. Yeah, there in the office between the broom closet and the bathroom. And I walked down there and there's this little door with a tiny little number and a peephole. And that was my introduction to the agency. I went in there for the interview and the process took about a year before I got the okay.

Was that part of the test to see whether or not you could find the door?

I don't think it was. Because the guy was kind of annoyed that I was late. He had other people to talk to. But it's, you know, it's one of the things we found about the agency. The quirkiness is sort of a nice way to put it. There's some oddities that seem to work at cross purposes to what they want to accomplish.

We talked to Rick Prado, also another Cuban American, about this. About sort of the staunch anti-communist, you know, the Cuban Americans. Was there— was that represented pretty well in the agency?

Yeah, there's, you know, it's probably an exaggeration, but there is a sort of quasi-Cuban mafia in the agency, specifically working Latin America. I knew a lot of people and who were Cubans and had joined the agency Again, you know, it's the egg. The Cuban exiles were staunchly anti-communist, true believers. You know, my father used to tell me, look, you know, they got a name on our names on a list. And if the US loses this struggle, we're all going to get lined up against the wall and shot. And so there was that deep belief that this was a life or death struggle. And a lot of them joined because they wanted to fight back.

Tell us about, you know, when you show up at the farm and you're training, like, what year was this? And, you know, how— what was your thoughts about, you know, the farm and that experience, if you have any memories that stand out for you?

Yeah, well, memories, geez, you know, George Washington was president when I went down to the farm.

It was still a farm.

Yeah, it is. It's, it's an interesting place. Yeah. It's a really— it's a very well-run program, I have to say. And at one point in my career, I ran the program, uh, the Field Tradecraft Course, uh, and as a student, I found the training logical and at times very challenging. It is meant to build up the start slow, get you acclimatized, get you used to it. And as it builds and builds, the pressure starts to mount until you near the end of the training and you're thinking, you know, shit, I hope my job is not going to be like this for the rest of my life. Because you're, you know, it's like a lot of those kinds of training, you're functioning on 4 hours. It is not designed to weed people out. It is designed to train you. It does have— it does weed people out. But again, they're not there to harass you and break you and do this, but they are there to test you. And all the instructors function under the understanding that sometime in the future, you will work for me or with me. And I have to understand that I want you there, right?

And, and, uh, an interesting story, which is it really has nothing to do with all this, this stuff, but it is a farm, uh, at the end of the farm, like, like most places, you, you put in your wish list and you put in the top 3 areas you want to go work for— Africa, Latin America, Europe, wherever. And they have a thing they call division night on a Sunday night. Every, uh, each weekend is a different area division. Latin America division will come down one night, Europe division will come down, and they, they bring a team of people and they give you a dog and pony show and, and explain to you why you want to come and work for my division. Uh, and, and that's one of the things that left me an impression. I remember two presentations I remember the presentation from Africa Division because they brought a team that had just returned from the field. Most of them look like they had died in the field. They had suffered from dysentery, malaria, typhoid, whatever, and spent an inordinate amount of time talking about how wonderful the medevac facilities were and how they blew you out.

And they let you bring all this food because you couldn't get this food, and you couldn't walk barefoot because these weevils would go up your feet and all this kind of stuff. And I thought, never, nope, thank you very much. And then what was SE, Soviet and East European Division night came. And this gets into, you know, the anti-communist thinking. And the chief of that division went down into the arena, the auditorium and, and gave his presentation. And it was one sentence. He said, 'The CIA exists because the Soviet Union can wipe the United States off the face of the Earth in 20 minutes. Any questions?' And that encapsulated in a nutshell why we were here. It was, at least for us, we believed it was in defense of the United States because we had a foe that can destroy us. And that left an incredible impression on me.

And it's the CIA's job to prevent strategic surprise.

Yes. And so, you know, that was it. That's where I wanted to go. I wound up in Latin America because we were fighting the wars in Central America. And like most places, they had a draft on. They got, they were allowed to take half the class. Yeah. I mean, Tegucigalpa, Honduras was the largest station in the world at the time. Wow.

This is like 1985, '86?

Ah, yeah. Let me see. I got an '83. So yeah. Yeah, we were right smack dab in the middle. Counterinsurgency in Guatemala and Salvador, insurgency in Nicaragua. And, you know, plus we had all the other programs in Afghanistan and Angola and everything. So the agency was hopping. And what they had done at the time, in addition to the operations course, which runs a little over 4 months, uh, because the agency was managing so many covert action programs, they felt, uh, that the case officers, the operations officers should understand paramilitary operations. So they ran us through a 4-month paramilitary course. It was good and was bad. It was bad because it came after 4 months of being down there and then they turn you around and bring you down to another 4 months, and you just really don't want to go there. Uh, but it was great, let me tell you. Uh, it was, it was splendiferous.

Uh, you got a couple jumps in, huh? You got a couple jumps in. Yeah.

Oh yeah. And, and not just that, they had an armory in the back. They had weapons from WWII on. I got to fire MP40s, Kar98ks, and every other kind of weapon you can imagine. Light machine guns, heavy machine guns, mortars, rocket launchers. We did air operations, maritime operations. It was, you know, if it wasn't for the fact that you were gone for another 4 months, it was a blast. But everybody got a lot of paramilitary experience at the time.

Well, I want to ask you about Central America, but before we get to that, I want to ask you about the 1983 invasion of Grenada and your role there.

Yeah.

Uh, I had been overseas at that point for 3 months, and I was home, and I got a phone call one night about 10 o'clock from the secretary at the office. Asking if I could come in. So I went in, fine, okay. Showed up and the chief was there and he handed me a ticket and said, you're flying out to Barbados tomorrow. We're invading Grenada. Okay. My first invasion. Uh, do I need to bring anything? Well, you know, I don't know, but bring a suit just in case. Okay. I'll be a very well-dressed invader. Uh, I got there, somebody met me at the airport. They took me in and said, okay, we're going to fly you in that night. And it was, uh, I, I think it was emblematic of, of a lot of experiences I had with the agency, uh, that it is small, inelegant, but gets the job done. And so these guys said, we're going to take you to the airport, we're going to fly you to Grenada. And we were driving down toward the airport And I noticed we missed the two exits to the airport. And I said, hey, we just missed the exits.

He goes, no, no, no, no, we're not going there. And we pull up to the back of the airport by the chain link fence and there's a hole cut into the fence. And he says, go through the hole. See that plane there with no lights on? That's ours. Get on that plane. And we get on the plane. I get on the plane and you take off. There's no lights. There's nothing. Totally blacked out. And we're flying over Grenada and the guy, the crew chief hands me NVGs and says, take a look. And, you know, remember, this is my first time. I'd never been in the military or anything. And I put my, the NVGs on. I look down and tracers are going back and forth and bombs are going and the US is just blowing the shit out of the place. And I'm thinking, yeah, that's going to be wasted on this thing. and I spent the next 2 weeks debriefing, you know, exploitation, finding documents and things in whatever, where they were located, and living kind of, kind of rough in a house with 60 guys. But it was, it was interesting.

Did they, did they tell you what your mission was? What what they wanted, what information they wanted you to find, or was it just go see what you can get?

Yeah, it was— a lot of the stuff is, it's on the fly. You know, this is, this is clearly a military operation. The military has its, its mission and whatever. And, and we're sort of there to, to support that and support U.S. policy. And U.S. policy was find whatever you can get your hands on. From the agency's point of view, there was a Cuban presence. So our goal was to find out anything we could about the Cubans. Who were they? What did they have? What their intentions were, what their capabilities had been. We were trying to find out the details of what had happened because, you know, remember, they had, they had a socialist slash communist revolution and then they had had a counterrevolution where they killed Maurice Bishop, who was the prime minister. And were taking over, and we did not know whether that was a genuine internal movement, whether that had been directed by the Cubans or the Soviets. We need to find out what the intents. They were building this airport in Grenada that would have handled the largest Soviet transport aircraft. We wanted to know, was that indeed the intent? Were they gonna use that as a launch point?

So we were looking, we were looking for stuff. And whatever we get our hands on.

Did you find any evidence of, you know, Soviet or malign, you know, communist influence in Grenada as you were doing your job out there?

Yeah, you know, it's one of the things I have learned through my almost 30-year career. Just like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, malign is in the eye of the beholder. Yeah, there was communist influence. Yes, the Cubans were there. The Grenadians wanted them to be there. Here to help them because nobody else was going to help them. So they, they thought, you know, they could help with this, that, uh, we didn't find any hard evidence that the, the, the Russians or the Cubans were going to use Grenada as a jump-off point to some larger nefarious plot. They were sort of like, you know, reacting like the U.S. Hey, here's an opportunity, let's take advantage of it, see what comes out of this. But there was no overarching plan. Uh, the Cuban presence, you know, everybody was, oh, there's a, you know, Cuban combat troops. Yeah, no, there really wasn't. There's about 35 Cuban military advisors because they were trying to build a Grenadian military. Uh, and the rest were Cuban construction units. Now, you know, like all Cubans, they were trained as a paramilitary force, a reserve force. They all knew how to use an AK-47.

That was about it. I talked to these guys and, you know, man, they were pure construction workers and wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of there because they went in there, you know, I'm a bulldozer operator, I pour concrete, I do this. Have you been trained in the military? Well, you know, I get 2 weeks a year how to fire an AK. Yeah, okay. So it wasn't the threat that it was brought out to be, but it was a potential long-term threat. And that's one of the things that we looked at. It's, you know, today it's not a problem, but next week you never know.

So how long had you been on the job at this point?

I think 6 months.

6 months?

Yeah. Overseas.

How was it for you? Because I don't know if you had interacted much with the military prior to this, but how was it for you to be kind of thrown in this environment and now interfacing with the military? Wanting to, you know, to debrief their, you know, their POWs, stuff like that.

Yeah, I did my first time really dealing with the military. I've done that extensively throughout my career. And I got to tell you, it's, it's, it's, it's great. I've never had any problems dealing with the military. It is— the military speaks a very different language. Than we do, uh, and they look at things slightly different. Uh, I mean, you know, their, their goal is to, is to destroy things. Uh, our goal is to sort of just not be seen and go and move around. Uh, but our objectives are pretty much the same, uh, and, and they sort of go hand in hand. Uh, I, I enjoyed it. I, I, I found the US military to be professional, direct. Yeah, we all have our assholes, no doubt about it. You know, we're human beings. But overall, it was great. They were very supportive of us. We did what they needed us to do for them.

It was good. And while we're at it, please also consider supporting the show. There's a link to our Patreon down in the description. If you subscribe to us, you get all these episodes ad-free and We really appreciate all of our supporters out there. So Louis, I apologize for the interruption. I think I'd like to jump off if it's okay on sort of a larger conversation about your time in Central and South America. If we were to move a little further forward, or let's say from '83 into the mid to late '80s, you know, it's controversial. The Contras were not a perfect partner force for the United States. But at the same time, Daniel Ortega was going to Moscow and receiving Soviet military aid, which got the United States involved in the conflict in Nicaragua. Could you tell us a little bit about your perspective and what you experienced while you were down there?

Well, I'm still processing the breakfast for life free.

We'll hook you up.

Yeah, sure. You know, it's— I, I do think about Central America, uh, somewhat often nowadays, uh, and it's, it's, it's one of those very difficult subjects. Uh, yes, uh, the Sandinistas, uh, and the Salvadoran FMLN were communist, uh, they were hell-bent on installing communist regimes, uh, yet at the same time we were supporting regimes that were brutal and killed their own people and slaughtered and tortured. And in, in trying to put myself in the shoes of, of everyday Central Americans, and it's, and it's one of the things I think that case officers try to do is, uh, to understand all the different sides. I necessarily agree with them, but you have to understand, uh, what their thought process is. You're facing a choice of, I have a government now that is pretty much oppressing and trying to kill me, versus the government is going to come in and oppress me and trying to kill me.

Right.

And a lot of these people, you know, were, were taking the, the, the choice of, well, I'd rather get the ones that are coming in to kill me because I know these guys have killed me and my family and this kind of stuff, and I want revenge. Uh, we were not, we were not helping ourselves to drum up support against the FMLN or the Sandinistas by supporting regimes that would be no better than what was going to come in. And we were not offering the people a real choice. It was, you can, you can have hell, or you can have hell, take your choice. Uh, instead of, you know, eventually we got around to giving Salvador some degree of, of democracy where they eventually had a free and fair election. But I think it would have gone better for us if if we did that from the get-go. Uh, there was— you know, I'll give you an example of one of the things that I did admire about the other side. Uh, and they worked their insurgency much more different than we did. We took the Contras and, you know, we created this and we equipped them We, we managed them.

We did all this stuff. The Cubans were faced with 5 different insurgent groups, and the Cuban attitude and what they told them was, okay, here's 2 things. We will give you aid if you as an insurgent group can survive on your own for 2 years. And that way what they were doing is this becomes a viable group. It's not something we're imposing. They can survive. They're viable. So we'll support them. And two, we will support you if you join the umbrella organization. If you don't, we'll make sure you don't get— you're starved of everything and we'll crush you. But if you come into the umbrella, you have survived, then we'll help you. And they created— they helped create viable, sustainable organizations. We created groups that could not survive without us. And who had a hard time developing the support among the population because they were viewed as alien. These guys, these American tools.

They had bourgeois leadership that was hanging out in Miami, right?

Exactly. And it's not like the FMLN leadership was any better. They're all sitting in Mexico or Havana. They're not living hard. But the fact that they have sustained themselves over time and they had to live among the people gave them a degree of cachet among the population, which made it easier for them and harder for us.

What can you tell us about your own experiences down there? I mean, you mentioned you did a couple trips down to Guatemala.

I was assigned, I did Guatemala for about 5 years. Yeah. You know, it's— I like the country. Uh, I enjoyed my time there. I, I have to say, you know, there's a point where you start to realize you are supporting a horrendously brutal regime. Uh, you know, I, it was— I gotta tell you, it was There was part of Guatemala, and this was before I got there, and this is a story I had been told by Guatemalans. There was an insurgency operating in the Petén, which is one of the regions in Guatemala. And the zone commander in the Petén had offered a bounty, $50 was a lot of money then in Guatemala. For each pair of ears belonging to gorillas that you brought back. They brought back 3,000 pairs of ears. The insurgent group was estimated at 150. And you have to ask yourself, what are we doing, right? Yeah, right. We are not going to win these people over. And we're, you know, you can stand in and, and in the halls of Congress and spout Jefferson and democracy and shit, but you get down there and that's not what's going on. And the people know that.

They may be uneducated peasants, but you can't fool them. They see exactly what's going on. And you start looking and say, this is a no-win situation for us. We have chosen the wrong side.

I sense, and correct me if I'm wrong, Louis, that your, excuse me, your heritage is, you know, being a devout anti-communist, a little bit conflicting with your values as an American. And I think that, and I mean, I want you to hear your opinion, but I mean, I think that conflict there really is, you know, defines the nature of our presence in Central America at the time, this conflict between these two values.

Yeah, it's, you know, it's— I can be as ruthless, as amoral as the next guy. And if I look at it coldly, leaving those issues aside, it strikes me as a no-win situation.

Yeah.

And we are digging a hole for ourselves that we don't need to dig and we shouldn't be in. If you bring the moral aspects in it, it's like, okay, you know, it's something that the US has struggled with, right, for decades, right? Now, at the end of the day, I believe for all the faults we have, and we have many, the fact that the US exists is one of the reasons this world hasn't turned into a bigger pile of shit than it is now. And I'll tell you a story. There was two Egyptian journalists talking when the US invaded Iraq, and one turned to the other and said, "Oh my God, what are we gonna do? The Americans are just, they're outta control. They're bombing everywhere, they're invading everywhere. What do we do?" And the other one turned and said, "We do what we always do. We wait till the Americans fix themselves." And for me, that's always been the thing. Eventually we will look and say, Okay, this is not the way to go. And we try to do better. Unlike a lot of other countries where they sit there and look at the Russians in the Ukraine, they're just gonna dig themselves in and they're never just gonna walk away.

We'll look and say, okay, this is not the right way to go. But that having been said, we have chosen sides in battles where you clearly look and say, this is a mistake. This is not what we are supposed to stand for. And this is not what's gonna give us the victory that we need to stop the other side. So yeah, there's a conflict. And I think anybody who has a shred of, well, has a moral compass will say, yeah, okay, I'll do what I gotta do, but This is not the right way to go.

How did you feel when the elections were held in Nicaragua? I think it was 1989, um, when the Sandinistas lost. Did you see that as a victory, or did you— I mean, what was your view of that?

Yeah, it was, it was a short-term tactical victory. Uh, I, I tend, I tend to look at things because I, I, you know, I did study history, and, and I tend to look at things long term., and I, I don't think the history and the victory of Central America has been written yet. But I saw the elections where the Sandinistas were thrown out as, as a victory. But now we're faced with the same thing. The Sandinistas are in power. The Sandinistas are not going to let go of power, uh, and unless something gets done, uh, you know, they're going to stay in power for as long as they can. And you could, you could see the whole thing repeating itself, and eventually there'll be another revolution and someone We'll try to oust them and, you know, depending on who's in the White House at the time, you know, do we get involved? Do we not get involved? Do we let it go? It's just, it's a cycle.

It's a history of personal fiefdoms and, you know, I've had people tell me to this day, if you go down there and you buy off the right generals, you can do whatever you want.

Oh yeah, in Guatemala, there were 300 families that controlled the country. They, they owned all the businesses. You had to deal with them. They owned the land, they owned the farms. And with these people, they funded everything. And between them and the 20 or 30 generals who ran the military, that was it. That was the power structure. Nobody else had a say in what happened.

You know, the CIA gets hate sometimes, along with like Special Forces working with indigenous in the sense of like the Contras, you know, is promoted as these CIA-run death squads. But, you know, I— would you say that America goes into these situations sort of with the same repeating sort of naïveté? You know, that they see a strategic purpose and they imagine that the people that are against the communists, the bad guys, the terrorists, whomever it is, are by the very nature going to be the good guys. And that's not always the case.

Yeah, that's a very good question. And I could do an entire show on that issue. One of the problems— yeah, we are naive and we are simplistic in our views. Like, as you pointed out, communists bad. Anybody against them, good. No, not, no, there's, it's, it's, we like black and white. We like the movie High Noon and Gary Cooper walking down the street and they're the bad guys. Life isn't like that.

Right.

And it is, it is messy. It is dark. There are, there are usually other choices, but we tend to pick the easiest choice. These guys here, they're anti-communist. They're in charge. Let's go with them. and it's easier because this, despite the fact that we're a democracy, it's a mess dealing with democracy. Holy shit. I mean, you know, you got one policy going, the next, next year there's an election, the policy changes, and who's up, who's down, this kind of— here we got a dictator and that ain't going to change, and it makes it easier for U.S. policy. But again, that's not necessarily the right the right way to do it. Uh, to your, to your comment about, you know, CIA-funded death squads and stuff, it, it's, it's one of my pet peeves. Uh, you know, it's, it's because that idea, you know, oh, the CIA overthrew this government, the CIA did that, is, is only partially correct. The more accurate statement is the US of A overthrew that government. The CIA doesn't run around sitting there, you know, we're sitting there on a Friday afternoon having a few drinks and said, hey, Hey, let's overthrow the government.

At the very end. Right.

Yeah, exactly. It comes down from the White House and they said, we don't like this. I mean, Chile's a great example. The White House came and said, we don't like these guys. And the agency said, yeah, but you want to come after them. We think it's a bad idea. What comes after them is going to be worse. And they said, we don't care. We want these guys. We want Allende and his crew. Okay. You know, at the end of the day, we salute and we go do the job. But it's not a, you know, the CIA executes it, but it's not the CIA's policy. It is the White House policy. It is US government policy. And at the end of the day, which is something I always say, which probably does not make me popular, it's the American people's fault. We live in a democracy. You chose these guys. This is what they did.

Right.

You don't like it, get off your ass and get them out. You know, it's, it's, we as a people bear a degree of responsibility in a representative democracy.

Right.

And this was a topic that would rear its head many years later for you in Iraq.

Yeah.

But we'll get to that. But after, after Guatemala, I mean, you had some other interesting assignments in like South America. I was wondering if you, if you could talk a little bit about that.

Oh yeah, after, you know, after the Central American wars, narcotics reared its ugly head. I mean, it's always been there, but it becomes the flavor of the month. And it's one of the things I've noticed that a lot of this stuff is driven by domestic politics. Sure. And so if there's, you know, some domestic political gain to be had or there's a problem in the States, it'll eventually start making its way overseas. And that's what, what happened with narcotics. And then the U.S. government, including the agency, the State Department, the Defense Department, DEA, engaged in decades-long war against narcotics cartels. And I spent a lot of time doing that in, in South America and Central America because everything, once the, the Central American wars were over, Everything shifted toward, uh, counter-narcotics. Like most government agencies, organizations, private sector stuff, uh, everything moves where the money is. And there was money in counter-narcotics. They were dumping billions and everybody got money. Everybody got directed to do this. Uh, and so huge programs were created and everybody chased narcotics. Uh, for me, counter-narcotics was the most frustrating job I've ever had. Um, you know, it is— it's a proverbial whack-a-mole.

For every narcotics organization you dismantle and guys put in jail, there's 100 people waiting to take their place. Uh, there's nothing you can do in that regard. They're willing to die for that kind of money.

Right.

Cartels, when I was there, and this was a long time, this was shit, 30 years ago, cartels were making profits of $1 billion a year each. They couldn't process the money. They had rooms, and I'm talking rooms stacked ceiling to floor, wall to wall with cash. They just couldn't launder the money fast enough. Uh, I went, I went to a DA conference and they had a narcotics financier who had turned state's evidence and witness protection, the whole thing. And he gave a talk in, and it was the most scary thing I've ever heard. He said, for you to make a dent in our finances, you have to interdict 95% of the drugs coming into the U.S. Wow. That's when we start making— when we stop making a profit. 95%. We were interdicting 5%. Uh, and, and, you know, he said What you guys see, you see 2 tons here, 5 tons, 20 tons, that's spoilage. That's just the cost of doing business. And, you know, I was in Bolivia and you can buy a kilo of pure cocaine hydrochloride, pure cocaine, for $900 a kilo. It was selling in New York for $18,000 a kilo at the time.

Just, I'm not good at math, just do the markup. That's a profit and that's pure. If you cut that thing 2 or 3 times, oh my God. So it's another one of these things that frustrates me is when the politicians talk about, well, we're gonna go in and we're gonna bomb Mexico, we're gonna do this, we're gonna send troops. It's like, guys, we have been doing this for decades. The war on drugs that was fought very quietly in Latin America with no— there was no gloves on. I mean, we— it was, you go and do it. And, you know, you watch the movie Sicario, it's like, yeah, I lived that. That's what we were doing. And it had zero impact on the drug trade because you're not attacking the root causes, the consumption in the United States, the movement of weapons from the US into Mexico. And the laundering of money in US banks who are making a fortune off this money.

And the poverty in the countries where this starts.

Yeah. You know, a cop in Mexico makes, I don't know, $250 a month. Traffickers show up and say, yeah, I'll give you $5,000 a month. How can you compete with that?

Right, right.

I mean, I was at a country team meeting. Where AID, the Agency for National Development, was talking about the alternative crop program and how they were gonna help the farmers who grew coca.

Gonna grow corn or whatever.

Yeah, and change it into, they're gonna make them strawberries. And the reality of life was, you know, picking strawberries, growing strawberries, a backbreaking, labor-intensive work. And at the end of it, they're getting about, uh, $5 a kilo or something. I mean, the— I'm not sure what the numbers are, but it's $5 a kilo. Cocaine, the coca leaf, basically grows wild. You don't have to do much. You plant it and you sit back and let it grow. Doesn't require a lot of tending. It has 2 to 3 growing seasons a year. And you're going to get $500 for the kilo of the leaf. Again, we're picking the wrong fight here. You're not going to get them. I want you to work harder and make less money.

Right.

Right.

Right.

And it was funny to see that repeated in Afghanistan with the poppy fields. Yeah. You know, oh, we'll have them plant something other than poppy. It's like they're not going to plant something other than poppy. Yeah.

No. Why? They're not stupid. You can't— I mean, which American can you go to and say, hey, I want you to work harder and make less money?

Right.

Nobody's going to buy that deal. Right. We expect them to do it. No, it's, you know, you got to deal with the problem a different way because all we're going to do is get stuck in another war.

So you must have been down there during like the bad old days of Pablo Escobar and all that. I mean, any war stories from that time that you can share?

Uh, yeah, I do have some and I can't share them. I would get in serious trouble.

If you leave out names and specific locations, it's okay.

No, because it's bad stuff.

So that'll be some post-show spice just for us, Jack.

Yeah, I'll tell you offline. And I'm trying— there's a lot of stuff. I'll tell you one story, which is not— but it shows you the scope of the problem. Uh, no names, no countries, uh, but a representative of a trafficking cartel went to the office, sought an appointment, and got an appointment with the Attorney General of the country and came into the office and he had a suitcase and he put the suitcase on the guy's desk, opened it up, and said, here are $5 million. It is yours if you listen to our offer. You don't have to do anything, just listen what I want to tell you. And the guy just looked and, you know, closed the suitcase and put it under his desk and said, go ahead. And they said, we will give you $18 million a month, uh, if you get the police to the other way at certain times on certain dates. That attorney general stayed in office for 1 year and then bought a mansion in an unnamed European country and moved there after that year.

Good work if you can get it.

Yeah. I'd sell my principles probably for $18 million a month. Like, uh, just kidding, China.

Just kidding, China.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I know this is like a sensitive question, you know, with agency people getting pitched, but I mean, with the drug cartels and the kind of money that you explained, I mean, was there any time where they tried to buy you off?

No.

Damn it.

I'll tell you this. It's one of the things that has amazed me throughout the years. I mean, we have problems. And we'll have problem children in the agency. Sure, sure. Uh, but I've, I've never seen or heard of anybody in the agency being bought by, by narcotics cartels. We've, we've been bought by, by the Russians, we've been bought by the Chinese, uh, but nobody has succumbed to the cartels, uh, and, and that's a hell of a lot more money than Russian.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and, and for the life of me, I, I don't know. Uh, I, I used to, when I was in headquarters, I used to sit on, uh, camera, the name, I think it's, we used to call the, the Personnel Evaluation Board, and that's the, uh, the board that meets as the final say on whether you get fired or not and referred to the Justice Department, uh, and never did I see anybody come in for that kind of, of, of thing. Mhm. And never have I heard of an operation being compromised because somebody got bought by the narcotics traffickers.

Before we move on from Central South America, there was one more question I wanted to ask about, you know, your, your Cuban heritage But it sounds like they didn't actually have you work in Cuba. And I was just interested in, did you ever touch Cuban operations or, you know, go to the island or?

Oh, no, I never went to the island. Interestingly enough, I was pitched by the Cubans.

Oh, really?

Yeah. When I was in Guatemala, there are no Cubans in Guatemala. They take a dim view of communists. but my father, who has the same name or had the same name, uh, as I did, received a letter. He was living in New York, uh, Staten Island, and he received a letter from the Cubans. They were thinking he was me. Ah, and, and it basically gave a pitch where, you know, they said, look, you know, after, after Aldrich Ames, uh, the agency is looking at, at foreign-born officers, looking at Cubans. Your career is going to take a hit, uh, you're going to have a problem, yada yada yada. Next time you're out, you know, we'd like you to reach out and talk to us, and this kind of stuff. Uh, I found out about this and my father called me on the phone and, and was, uh, virtually incoherent. The, the only words I could understand was a stream of obscenities because he's so pissed.

Yeah.

Oh, God, was he pissed. I said, just, just calm, calm down. This happens all the time. Send me the letter. And then I went back to headquarters and said, look, this has happened, yada yada. And they said, yeah, we've had about 8 or 10 of these things happen since Ames was arrested. And the Cubans are making an effort to use that to try to recruit our people. But other than that, I have, you know, in some places there are Cubans and you do get involved. In my first tour, I was involved in some Cuban operations. But I didn't do a lot of that. Just, it didn't interest me and was probably a good thing because those Cuban operations were a disaster that the agency ran.

I've been told the DGI is like particularly sinister.

I don't know about sinister, but boy, they're good. They are really good. And they are good because of, I think, two main reasons. They are great risk takers, very creative, very imaginative, will take risks that we would not do. And they have, for all intents and purposes, one target, United States. And it makes life easier when all you do is focus on the one, one country, one target instead of 30, 40, 100, 150 different countries. And you got to They become experts. They understand. They know. They are formidable organization. They're very good. And they have— they handed our lunch to us.

Do you, do you think that Cuba eventually learned the lesson, their lesson about like pitching Cuban, you know, officers with a Cuban heritage? I mean, they got Ana Montes, who was not Cuban. She was Spanish, right? I think Spanish.

She's Puerto Rican.

Puerto Rican.

Okay.

Yeah.

Uh, yeah, I mean, the problem the Cubans have faced is that the, the, the first and second tranche of Cuban exiles are, are pretty fanatically anti-communist. Yeah, right. Uh, the— again, I'm not trying to cast aspersions on anybody, uh, but you'll have, you know, those memories, those feelings start to die out over time.

Right.

I mean, you saw it with people like Ames and Hansen.

Right.

You know, that whole thing when the wall came down and the Soviet collapsed, they started to lose that inherent anti-Russian communist Soviet attitude. And it was like, well, yeah, shit, you know, money is money and you make money. I think, you know, you could see, you know, next generation of Cubans lose it. That mean they're all gonna run off and work for the Cubans. But that intensity of feeling is not gonna be there because they were born here, they grew up here. They don't have that sense of we lost everything. You know, I had family members in jail, all this kind of stuff. You know, that goes. Just the way it's gone. Hell, I mean, you know, we've got politicians who are siding with the Russians. When you start losing that sense, it's going to make it easier.

Right.

Right. And after this period of your career, you moved on to Eastern Europe.

Yeah, I went— I did. You know, I got tired of Latin America, so I It's, you sort of, you're sort of dealing with similar issues all the time. I got, I got tired of counter-narcotics because that just, it wasn't, you know, you have successes, but in the big scheme of things, the big strategic picture, you had no success. They were all tactical, you know, you were, you were, you were winning battles and losing the war. So I, I went to the farm and eventually was running the, the Tradecraft course, uh, that was sort of— I requested that, that for, you know, it was for me, it was a reward, uh, you know, you lived on a really nice base, uh, for, for 3 years. I had— I didn't even know where my house keys were because you never bothered locking the door. Your commute to work is 5 minutes. I used to bitch when I had 2 cars in front of me. I thought, my God, Russia. It's, you know, it was really nice. And then I got offered a job up in Washington to do East European operations. That was interesting in that it came at a time the Soviet Union had died out.

And the East European countries were all pushing to join NATO. Mm-hmm. Uh, one of the tactics they were using to, to gain entry into NATO was a very close intelligence cooperation with the US. Uh, and again, you know, can't discuss it, but they would do things for us that we desperately needed to do that we couldn't do ourselves. In the hopes, successful, that they could use that to get into NATO. And yeah, we spoke up for them.

A certain country that's very helpful today with Ukraine.

Yeah. And there's a lot of countries that were helpful in a lot of different places. And I really, I enjoyed working with the East Europeans. They were good. They were very professional. Some of those services, you know, clearly trained by the KGB. They were top-notch, top-tier. And I still remember the Russians were bitching, I guess, to the Poles, how they could side with the West and this kind of stuff. And the foreign minister just turned to them and said, we are the West. And, you know, for me, that was the final nail in the coffin. They said it. We are not with you. Were over there. And that was interesting. And then I got— I was offered a job, uh, which was probably one of the best jobs I had in the agency. And it was, it was scut work. Uh, I was, I was made executive assistant to the deputy director. And, uh, what that is, is it's a glorified gopher job. You're there at the deputy director's beck and call. You get him ready for meetings at the White House, uh, make sure he gets briefings. You handle liaison visits, trips, and everything.

And the beauty of it is you saw everything.

Uh-huh.

You saw the entire U.S. intelligence community. Uh, you saw how U.S. policy is made. You saw how the White House functions, how the different departments function. I mean, I was sitting at my desk one day and somebody drops a piece of paper on it, on the desk, and it's the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal. All the weapons, all the warheads, where they are, what they're doing. You're looking like, oh my God, this is amazing. And you saw all this stuff because you had to, you know, you had to prepare the Deputy Director and all this kind of stuff, and you you learn so much. Uh, you learn bureaucratic stuff, but at that stage in my career, you know, there's a, there's an acceptable assumption that I know my trade as an operations officer. I know how to recruit, I know how to handle, I know how to produce intelligence, I know how to run covert action, I know this stuff. Now you're being taught a different skill set, and yes, they're bureaucratic skill set, but when you start moving your way up the chain they're looking for a different skill set. You know, if you as a senior officer have to go out and recruit sources, well, you know, the agency is destroyed.

That's what other people do. Your job is to motivate those people, guide them to recruit, to represent the agency, to manage resources, people, money, all this kind of stuff. And that job was, it was a year-long job. It was, you know, again, long hours, 6 in the morning till about 8 or 9 at night. but it was an incredible learning experience. Uh, I, I learned tons of stuff. Uh, the agency, the DO, I should say, not the rest of you, the DO, uh, doesn't really have a lot. That's for those out there don't know, Director of Operations, doesn't have a lot of leadership training. It's one of the things I've always admired about the military. You know, the military has got one-third of the force doing the job, one-third refitting, and the other third preparing. And that includes going off to war colleges, going off to this assignment, that assignment, to prepare you for bigger pictures. We don't do that. Uh, we're just always going overseas, go overseas, go overseas. Now that's, that's great, but it doesn't create a core of senior leaders who have experience doing that. This job gives you that kind of experience.

It's sort of a training course. And from that, then I slid into chief of Iraq operations.

Talk to us about, you know, kind of the run-up to that. I mean, 2003, the invasion happens and sort of like, where are you and what's that lead-up to you going to Iraq?

Well, I was, I was, I got to IOG, Iraq Operations Group, in 2001. And it was obvious from the get-go that the incoming Bush administration was serious about Iraq. Under Clinton, they'd probably have an Iraq meeting once a month. Under Bush, they were having 2 to 3 meetings a week. So, you know, clearly that was a, you know, something was going to happen there. And I got to Iraq Operations and the task became, you need to develop a covert action program to support regime change in Iraq. That was an experience in and of itself. I mean, I had plenty of experience in covert action at all different levels., but to be handed a program to develop a program when there wasn't anything there to build a program on.

Right.

With a serious test. I mean, you know, people have, have a sort of a semi-false image of what the agency does from Hollywood and books and stuff. And you flip a switch and you got all these guys all over the place and doing this and doing that and blowing this up. They're shooting. It doesn't work that way. And if you want to have a successful program, there has to be something there that you build on. There has to be people. There has to be opposition groups. If you have to build them from whole cloth, you're going to have problems. There have to be people there willing to do the job with you. I had a senior officer tell me, he said, you know, the one piece of advice I have with you is if you have to work with these people, Work with patriots. Don't work with people who are there for money or personal power. Work with people who want to do right for their country. And finding people like that was difficult, right?

Yeah. It's interesting because you mentioned how, you know, working with the Contras and the leadership was elsewhere. Here, you know, I don't know when it was decided, but it was Chalabi, right? A guy who lived in Virginia and said he had all these contacts.

He lived in London.

London. London. Okay. But how does that— so somebody who had previously had on the show said that there were people in the administration, like long-term administration, you know, the bureaucrats. There were people who had been gunning for Iraq for a very long time. And Bush was the right person to receive that message.

Yeah.

Like, how were they— when they're asking you to, you know, come up with plans for this regime change, I'm sure that there was pushback from your own analysts, from State Department, from people who knew, like, what was supposed to be the counterbalance to Iran if Saddam went? Yeah.

Let me tell you, I was, for a very long time, I was a redheaded stepchild. People hated me, didn't want to see me. And when they saw me coming, it was painful. You had, you got to remember, at the time we started the Iraq program, we had just had 9/11. And the agency, the DO, was in full counterterrorism swing. Uh, the, the agency is not a big organization, and the Directorate of Operations is not a big organization, uh, in terms— at that time, I don't know what it's like now— case officers worldwide and in headquarters numbered less than the Ranger Regiment would. And that's what we had to do everything we had to do from, you know, the latest coup in Bangui to, you know, Chinese and North Korean missile tests and all this kind of stuff. And CTC, the Counterterrorism Center, put a strain on the system when they basically said, we're going to increase by 3 to 4 fold what we have here. And the agency was like, we don't have them. They physically don't exist.

Right.

And they were pulling officers, closing stations, and this huge stress hit the system. And then Iraq shows up and says, oh, by the way, we need to do more. And it was just like, oh, it's just physically impossible. Uh, so there was a lot of pushback, uh, from, from my own people in the building, uh, there were elements within the analytical community that said this is probably not a good idea. You know, the sense the analysts had was, and correctly so, you know, Saddam is a pain, right? But he's not a direct threat to the US. He's not going to attack the US. He's a problem in the region, but he's a problem. Is that a threat?

Right.

Uh, the military, the regular military is pretty much rotted from the inside. Uh, he doesn't have the capability anymore to launch a major invasion of any other country. He could harass, he can attack and do this kind of stuff. At most, he's a regional annoyance, right? And probably not worth a war. Uh, But at the same time, you had elements, uh, as you pointed out, they were long-term elements, uh, that a lot of them, I would say, were, were political guys who came in and out of government, uh, the, the, that top tier who are political appointees, um, but who have done multiple tours of duty in the Pentagon, in the White House. But, you know, you know, Cheney's a great example. He had done this. Rumsfeld was the same way. They had been in the White House. They had been in the Pentagon and back and forth. And you had these guys who were hell-bent on, you know, we got to finish the job we started in the first Gulf War. Right. And you had a group of neocons, especially people on the outside of the Pentagon who were advisors to the Secretary of Defense and to the Vice President, who kept saying, touting the— we are now in a unipolar world, we're the top dog, and we have to— we have to show— we want to demonstrate that we can act unilaterally in a light, efficient, rapid manner and, and bring about change that we want.

And we pick a rock.

It's, it's beaver dreams.

Yeah.

HW Bush did it in the Gulf War to show that he could build this global coalition. But I mean, after 9/11, I mean, for the reasons that you just laid out, I mean, it's completely unnecessary.

Yeah. And, you know, and then we're even— they weren't even concerned about building coalition. Their attitude was, we can do this by ourselves. I was, I was at a meeting with it at CENTCOM with General Franks, and, and Rumsfeld had called on the phone and I could only hear one part of the conversation, but they were going back and forth on, on the plan. And Franks had been able to strip the thing down to 250,000 troops. And I, you know, you could, you could hear from his tone that he was getting a lot of pushback. And he eventually hung up and said, we are at 140,000. That's what the Secretary wants. That's what the Secretary is going to get. And you could see them, you know, we have a theory, we have an idea, and we're going to prove it and we're going to test it out here. Right. And it gets to some of the subsequent problems. I'll give you an example. We had— the agency had gotten in touch with many, many, many of the major unit commanders in the Iraqi Army. And we said, You know, this shit's gonna happen, uh, you don't want to be in the way.

And they all say, okay, fine, we're going to surrender, but, eh, we're not going to surrender until we see U.S. troops because, you know, you did that to us last time, uh, and we got hosed. So when the U.S. troops show up, we're going to surrender. Well, the, the, the unintended consequence was, as, as CENTCOM explained, we have 140,000 troops That leaves us one MP unit, and their sole job is to keep the traffic flowing from Kuwait to Baghdad. We can't take prisoners. And so the, the, the military launched a leaflet campaign before the invasion telling people, go home, put your civvies on and go home, because we— they— there's no facilities. We can't take prisoners. We don't have enough guys to do prisons. We got enough to punch our way up to Baghdad. That meant that 450,000 Iraqi guys put on civilian uniforms and took their AKs with them and went home.

It's ideological beliefs just completely overwhelming any sort of strategic rationality.

And, and, and like just wishful thinking and not, not good planning. Like, you know, I'm like I said, they're very smart analysts. Both in the State Department and the agency and the military. And you know, you have all these soldiers who, why don't you drop pamphlets and say, remain in place, we're gonna take over your pay. You know, like, don't, like, stay in your barracks, don't come out, but we'll take over your pay. But this whole thing we went through with de-Ba'athification, like, it's almost like nobody thought this through, or they did, Or they did think it through, like smart people thought it through. And then I don't know, Bremer or whoever looked at it goes—

Oh, God, it was— look, you're right. And that's one of the things that is, at least in my profession, the most dangerous is wishful thinking.

Yeah.

If I do A, then B is going to happen. The other guy's thinking, no, no, no, C is going to happen. No, no. B is going to have— and there's a lot of wishful thinking. There was a lot of good advice that the powers in charge decided not to accept. Uh, the debaathification, you know, they were told time and time again, uh, the, the Army— I mean, the agency went and said the Army is not a problem, right? The Army right now exists, a regular Army, not the Republican Guard. The Army exists as a social welfare program. You got 450,000 guys plus families plus people who depend on them who get a salary and they go do their stuff. You know, 2, 3 million people depend on that. Don't disband them. Take them and put them on the borders as a border police force. Pay them a salary, have them guard the borders, keep all the Iranians out and all this stuff. And I was at a meeting at the White House and Bush asked, how many, how many Baathis are there? I said, oh, about 70,000. And he said, well, how many we gotta take care of?

I said, it's only about 5,000 or so who really are hardcore believers. The rest of 'em, it's like the Communist Party. You wanna be a teacher, you gotta be a party member. You wanna be a cop, you gotta be a party member. You wanna run the oil fields, party member. They don't give a shit. All they want is a job, right? So all you got to do is deal with 5,000. Well, what do they do? Get rid of all 70,000, right? Now you got 450,000 unemployed soldiers, 70,000 unemployed bathies, which meant that the teachers were all fired, which meant that you had thousands of teenagers with nothing to do. And you know what happens then, right? And it all turned to shit very quickly.

And all the public works, like every functioning part of government was like suddenly out. Yeah.

Do you—

I mean, you may not want to throw shade or spill the tea, but were there specific people who were responsible for these decisions that went against all logic? Yes.

Oh, yes. I mean, yeah, I For, for, for your listeners, I, you know, I, I would refer you to— there's a whole bunch of books out on Iraq that does name names, uh, and, and identify the people. Uh, but there was a coterie of senior people, uh, who were most definitely responsible for the mess that came after. They were handed a document that said you shouldn't do this, this, this, and this because it will lead to that. And they took that document literally and said, we're gonna do this, this, this, and this. And then they're stunned. I mean, I went again, I was in the sit room, no names mentioned, but some senior officials in the Pentagon were briefing the president. On the day after. What are we going to do with Iraq?

Right.

And the first slide that goes up is the US occupation of Nazi Germany in '45. And based on that, they start their presentation. And it was so bad that the Secretary of Defense had to stop it and say, okay, we're not ready, Mr. President. We'll get back to you. And clearly they had no idea what they're doing. And he said, the analysts were saying, you can't use Nazi Germany as a template for Iraq.

Right, right.

And there was no plan. Literally, there was no plan. It was, it'll fix itself. And that gets to your mention of Chalabi. Chalabi was, a very articulate, very poised, westernized Iraq. He wore $4,000 suits, tailor-made in Savile Row in London, spoke excellent English, uh, and, and had snowed all these senior officials. And his argument was, it's gonna be okay because I'm gonna be welcomed, my guys will be there, we'll fix everything for you. And it gets that wishful thinking. It's going to, it's going to be fine. This is what's going to happen. And they bought it. It's going to happen.

Was there any intelligence supporting that, or did he just woo like the right politicians and make them believe it?

There was no intelligence supporting that. You know, we told them and they— senior officials in the Pentagon hated us because We went in there and they hated the State Department because we said, Chalabi's a con man. Chalabi doesn't have anything. All the exiles have been exiles for 30 years. They have no following inside Iraq. They have no infrastructure, no capability, no organizations. They can't deliver on anything. And we're gonna, it's gonna go into these hands. And we're going to have to deal with it. Not them. It's not going to get fixed. Nobody listened. Chalabi, excuse me, Chalabi worked his magic on them.

Yeah.

And they bought it. They believed he's going to fix it.

And he got there and he's a total outsider with like nobody. Yeah.

So tell us about your, your experience landing in Baghdad and running ops.

Let's do this real quick because you have the Iraq Operations Group starting, you know, you start there in 2001. How did we get to WMDs and yellow cake?

Uh, it's a good question. I don't know. Uh, it's not a cop-out. Uh, and back to our, our earlier discussion, I'm gonna paraphrase Julius Caesar. Uh, Iraq was divided into 3 parts. Uh, the Counterterrorism Center handled Iraq counterterrorism issues. Uh, Counterproliferation Division, CP Iraq, handled WMD. and then everything else in the COVID action fell to Iraq Operations Group. Uh, I was on— I mean, I was on the periphery because I would sit in some of the briefings. Uh, but the best I can, I can assess is there were no reliable human sources on Iraq WMD. Uh, most of what we had came from liaison services, you know, Germans, Brits, Italians, whoever. I mean, I don't know, I'm just rattling off names. I don't know if they provided anything, uh, technical means. And as the analyst explained it, uh, pretty much a formula. At, at, in the first Gulf War, Iraq had so many chemical weapons So many were decommissioned after, and this much is left. So this is what they have, chemical weapons. Uh, then there was a whole host— and one of the, one of the problems you face in any kind of intelligence, uh, operation is, especially when it starts to be big like this and people, uh, smell money in the air is you get a lot of fabricators, people who will make up shit and tell you stuff in return for money.

They say, oh, we can get some money. The yellow cake thing came out of, if I understand it correctly, and I could be wrong, came out of Nigeria, I think it was, or Niger. I'm not sure which, that they were, the Iraqis were buying the stuff. Uh, but it was, it was not very well sourced and it was weak, but we had elements of the administration who would latch on to anything, right, right, that would make their case. Uh, so I'll give you an example. Uh, I was sitting in my office in, in CIA headquarters and a message came in from one of our stations saying that this guy, this Iraqi, had, had volunteered, walked into the embassy and said he had information from the head of Iraqi intelligence who wanted to cooperate with us. So I had him do a check, uh, and by the time the information on this guy came back to me Uh, I had a senior agency officer— we won't name names— standing in front of me saying, the vice president wants you to send somebody to meet this guy because he has valuable information. And somehow he had gotten this information.

I don't know how he got it, probably from the briefer. And I said, well, we ran checks on this guy. The CIA terminated him for being a fabricator. The British terminated him for being a fabricator. The Austrians terminated him for being a fabricator. I think he's a fabricator. And I think the guy is here with a load of bullshit just to get some money. And they kept insisting, you gotta meet the guy. I said, I'm not gonna waste somebody's time flying out there talking to a guy who's lying to us and then putting the information out knowing it's a lie. Right. And I said, you know, you guys pay me for my expertise and my experience. And when 3 different intelligence services terminate somebody for being a fabricator, I don't want to have to do it a 4th time. I look like an idiot. And, and boy, did I get a load of shit.

You were not their buddy after that.

No.

And, and, you know, it— they tried to send somebody else out there. And, and we had a lot of this stuff where, uh, there was badly sourced information or suspect fabricators, uh, and they kept trying to force us. We, we had— we met a guy, uh, who claimed to be an Iraqi nuclear physicist, and we thought, now this guy's a fabricator. I said, no. Yeah, why do you think he's a fabricator? Ah, because Chalabi's people have directed us toward him. So we had to, we had to send people out. So we had to send people out. This came out from the White House. So we sent people out to debrief the guy, and they were doing the debriefing, and the guy was clearly nervous because he kept going to the bathroom all the time. Every 15 minutes he had to pee. Uh, fortunately we had an analyst there who was a nuclear physicist. And the guy went to the bathroom. It's one of those old-fashioned doors where you had the glass pane on top. And the analyst stood in the chair and looked inside the bathroom. And the guy was pulling his sleeve up and reading all the notes that he had written on his arm.

And that's where he was getting his information from. And he came back and he said, guy's not, he's not a physicist. He doesn't know what he's talking about. I ask him 2 or 3 questions, he doesn't understand. Uh, and, and the White House had, had the Defense Intelligence Agency parole the guy into the U.S., uh, to provide additional debriefing and information. We said this, this guy's in it.

This stuff is like— I, I'll be honest, Lewis, it's like mildly traumatic to hear because I served in Iraq in the Army. Dave served, thousands of American soldiers served.

A lot.

My son served in Iraq in the Army.

A lot did not come home. Yeah. And to hear that our troops were sent under such dubious circumstances is difficult. It's difficult to process.

It is incredibly difficult to process. It is, you know, I— again, I— it's one of the things I, I struggle with. Uh, you could, you can make, you can make a logical argument that the neocons made, that, you know, we're trying to, to create a better Iraq. And, and, you know, Saddam was, was a savage, and his sons were savages, and the world is better off without them. But the end result is we left a much more unstable Middle East.

Yeah.

Yeah. We created a lot more terrorism, more insurgency. We lost a lot of goodwill that we obtained after 9/11. And I have a friend who, you know, he worked with me on Iraq and he's gonna be pissed about this stuff, but because he's a believer in, in getting rid of, of Saddam, uh, but we sent a lot of American men and women into a situation they didn't have to be in. Uh, yeah, I, you know, I, my son was in Iraq and I, I spent a year, I couldn't even watch the news, right? Because I, I, and, you know, and he's, he lost friends. And I, I, I, I, I understand that in, at the end of the day, the soldiers fight for each other.

Yeah.

And that's what they're there for, to make sure the guy next to him doesn't get killed, that they have their back, uh, and it's, it's, it's that bond and that whole flag shit and whatever. It's nice, and the big picture is nice, but at the end of the day, you fight for your buddy. Uh, and that's the only, the only saving grace I have toward this whole Iraq thing. Uh, you know, people, people who, who didn't, who never served their country in that capacity had no qualms about sending men and women into this shitstorm for, you know, it's probably bogus is too strong a word, but it's, you know, it's a cause you look at, it's not necessary.

Yeah. Yeah. And Congress wasn't that— Yeah, I'm sorry. Congress wasn't that divided on this either. Yeah. Yeah.

Uh, you know, it's, it's— and, and it pisses me off because it didn't have to be as hard and painful as it was, right?

Exactly right.

Yeah, they made it worse. They— and they kept making it worse. And it gives— I remember sitting in, uh, in the sit room. They were having a meeting. I always went with the director as a plus one, and the president was there, and they were all going back and forth. And, and the only two guys in the room who kept raising objections, uh, were Colin Powell and Richard Armitage. And they were the only two guys in that room had fought in combat. And they kept saying, you know, you're— this is, this is not— this doesn't make any sense, right? And, and, and everybody else who did not never did, and their kids never went. None of them did shit. They just, they didn't, they didn't heed the advice.

Louis, what was, could you tell us about your personal experiences in Iraq when you were running ops over there in Baghdad?

No, I ran, I did headquarters. I did the lead up to the war and the end of conventional operations. I prepared for my next overseas assignment, which was India. I watched operations there from afar.

Oh, I see. Okay. So let's jump into your time then as COS in New Delhi, because I think India is just an absolutely fascinating country. Pivotal country perhaps in some of the conflicts that we're looking at in this century. Let's talk about that.

Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. When I joined the agency, uh, India was one of those places I wanted to go to. Uh, I, I wanted to go to places that were as different from the U.S. as I can get. I wanted a different experience. And in India, let me tell you, it is— I don't know if you've ever been there, but it is a feast for the senses. Fascinating place. Uh, I enjoyed my time in India. Uh, work there is challenging. Uh, the Indians are all over you. It— there are still significant elements of the Indian government and security services that grew up in a very pro-Russian world. Uh, they, they, they were part of the Non-Aligned Movement, but let me tell you, they, they're buddy-buddy with the Russians. And, you know, the Russians are their main suppliers, their main trainers. Uh, and we are viewed as, as the, the Indians have three main enemies. The first one is obviously Pakistan. The second one is the US, and the third was China when I was there.

What was your opinion of RAW and IB?

Uh, not bad. There are, uh, I mean, the IB is a good domestic security service. Uh, RAW has I think a good regional coverage. Their officers are fairly well trained. They have a good training program. The Indian services are getting, are getting better because they are being pushed to expand capabilities. When I was there, the Indians were still struggling with what they wanted to be. They were trying to develop strategies, what the future was going to be, what their role was going to be. Was it regional? Did it expand more? And one of the things obviously was their intelligence capability. And so they were trying to come to grips with that. I, you know, one of the challenges, and I used to laugh with them because I was declared to them and I dealt with the Indian services. One of the challenges they were facing was keeping, retaining, and hiring employees. Because everybody says, oh, you know, India, it's a land of a billion people and they must have hundreds of thousands of surveillance and stuff. No, they were losing people to the IT industry.

Makes sense. Like the dot-com boom in America. I mean, we dealt with it, right?

Yeah.

I mean, you know, the guys were telling me, it used to be the Indian Civil Service was a highly prestigious organization. They went to schools, to colleges, they graduated, they call them batches, almost like military academies where they all graduate and stuff. it was good paying jobs. You got a pension. They gave you housing, all this kind of stuff. And then the IT boom came in and, you know, IT companies and call centers are paying 3, 4, 5, 6 times, what an IB or a raw officer would get. And they're saying, we're having a hard time. We're, we're competing. And, you know, the agency was faced with the same thing with, you know, we're competing with, with for university graduates who can make 3, 4, 5 times what they make at the agency. Uh, but they, you know, they were, they were, yeah, and we've seen it with all these, these accusations of, of the Indians assassinating Sikh separatists in different countries. Uh, they're, they're starting to feel their oats.

Yeah.

And they're getting out there.

It's a multi-polar world, huh? It's a multi-polar world.

Yes. Uh, in India is now, I think they have settled on the, the, the near abroad, as they call it, uh, the Indian Ocean area, East Africa, Myanmar, their, their environment. Uh, but I, I think, you know, yeah, we look at them as instrumental in some of our strategies against China and in the Indian Ocean. India is never going to be the ally we need, uh, and, and I don't say this maliciously or not, but for us to think— I mean, we look at an ally as somebody with shared common interest and agreed-upon goals. We're never going to get that from India. They have different goals, they have different interests, they, they have still a sense of a non-aligned movement, the they don't want to get tied to the US.

What do you think of like, I believe it was Ambassador Blackwell penned a piece in Foreign Affairs about how we should basically just arm up the Indians and they're naturally going to do what we want them to do.

Yeah, never do what we want them to do. If anything, they'll get pissed off if we assume they're going to do what we want them to do. It's the Indians are not like that. They have, and this is where we get into that wishful thinking. Uh, yes. Well, we view China as a threat. India must view China as the same threat. Uh, you know, you, you look at the region. Pakistan views India as a threat.

Yeah.

India doesn't view Pakistan as a threat. They view them as an annoyance. They view China as a threat. China doesn't view India as a threat. Uh, they're, they're a competitor, but there's no way that the Indians are going to be a threat to China. They're not going to invade China. They're not going to take over. They're not going to push China out of their spheres of influence, whereas China could do that to India. Uh, India doesn't want to have a problem with Pakistan. They understand that, you know, if you're going to be a power, a regional power at least, you can't spend time with bullshit border problems, right? The Pakistanis, they can't afford India not to be a threat. Right. The Pakistani military has so much power and authority and money because they have blown up the Indian threat to such a large extent, right? And if they turn around and say, hey, let's make peace with India, which India would probably buy, then someone's going to say, well, why do we need all this crap that we give you?

So, so India is basically the counter-narcotics program of the '80s for Pakistan's military and intelligence.

Yeah, uh, yeah, you can say it that way. I, I, you know, I just— India is not going to give us what we want. They'll, they'll give us piecemeal stuff, uh, they'll give us things where they think they will win more, uh, it's sort of a, you know, a trade-off, but they're not gonna— they're not gonna be for us like Japan is or Australia. Sure, sure, South Korea.

You bring up an interesting point because I always wondered why we didn't more, you know, court India more because it seems as though they're a regional counterpoint to China, that we have a lot of alliances. But what is it that India, you know, wants for themselves that wouldn't be in alignment with the US's strategic goals?

Well, I think, I think India, India wants to, I, I think, be the premier power in the Indian Ocean. Uh, the U.S. is uncomfortable letting anybody be a premier power anywhere. Uh, they want to have the greatest extent of influence in, in East Africa. We're probably not comfortable with that. They want to be able to secure the lines of communication into the Middle East because of oil and the oil coming back and forth. We don't want that. I'll give you a fine example. During the Iran-Iraq War, Iran was mining the Gulf and attacking shipping and stuff. And the US sent in the Navy to secure and escort the ships out and secure the Gulf, uh, and we guaranteed the free passage. And this is where you get to— you, you can't do wishful thinking or mirror imaging because we saw ourselves as we are now guaranteeing freedom of the seas. China and India saw the opposite. Their attitude was, if the U.S. can keep the Straits of Hormuz open, They can close them. And in a time of conflict, that's exactly what they're going to do. So we need to build naval capability to get in there and keep the straits open ourselves, which is one of the reasons why the, the Chinese are starting to build a big navy that will eventually start to go into the Indian Ocean, which is why the Indians are going to get started.

You know, we got to stop the Chinese. We need to build a big ocean because both these countries get a significant portion of oil from the Middle East. So in that regard, you know, we're all going to be competing for space and primacy in that area.

So, I mean, look, the United States Army has been conducting training exercises with the Indians. They did one this last year, or in 2023, they did one, you know, not on the Chinese border, but within like 100 kilometers. Like, this relationship exists. And I just want to kind of probe you a little bit as far as like What do you think is a realistic US-India security relationship?

Uh, well, I, I think one of the first things is— and I don't know if this is going to happen, uh, but what the Indians would like to see in order to improve that relationship is for us to begin divesting our obsession with Pakistan. That has always been a sticking point And when I was there, the Indians were always pushing, you need to help us with Pakistan. Pakistan is sponsoring terrorist attacks against India. And the US was so heavily invested in Pakistan, giving us a corridor into Afghanistan that we weren't about to upset the apple cart.

Could that change now with the— with our extraction from Afghanistan?

It can if the U.S. policy starts to shift. And if the U.S. has got to make it a clear decision, we're choosing India over Pakistan because Pakistan has pretty much chosen China over the U.S. Yeah, fuck them. Which is— yeah, it's freaking the Indians out. Uh, and, and now China is working on port facilities in Pakistan and the Indians are really getting, getting tense about that. Uh, but we've got to make a very clear situation. The Indians are, are interested in getting from us military know-how, right? Everybody has seen how the U.S. military functions, uh, and they understand, you know, if you're going to fight a war, that's the model to, to follow right now. Uh, so yeah, they're going to host U.S. forces in India— the Navy, the Air Force, the Army. They're going to want to do joint things because they want to learn from us. But, you know, the trust issue remains. Are these guys going to ditch us as soon as Pakistan comes calling? Yeah, we, you know, not to, not to, not to beat the US about the head and shoulders, but, but our reputation over the last 15, 20 years has suffered significantly.

Right.

We are not the reliable partners that people used to think we were, right? Uh, you know, you got, you got the Europeans right now planning for the eventuality that if Trump gets elected and decides to yank us out of NATO, they're on their own. So how do they cushion themselves? And other countries are watching and saying, huh, if the Europeans can't rely on them, we surely can't.

Yeah, right.

So, so, you know, a good deal is going to be we've got to rebuild those, those alliances, those trusts, uh, those capabilities. It's, you know, I, I'm just, I know I'm preaching to the choir and I'm just babbling here, uh, but people don't understand. Yes, the U.S. has untold bases overseas, you know. How the hell do you think we project power? Uh, you're not, you're not gonna land, you're not gonna go from Missouri to, to Pakistan overnight. You need bases, you need facilities. How do you think we get our wounded? Where do we get them to? Frankfurt, right? You pull all that crap out and we're at— we're out. We're out of the Middle East, we're out of South Asia, we're out of all these places.

Isolated island.

Yeah. So, and, and everybody in all these countries are looking, uh, and they're looking with, with, with two ideas in mind. Is the U.S. Dependable and trustworthy? And if the answer is no, how do we slip in and take over? And I don't mean, you know, conquer, but how do we fill in that vacuum? Because that's— there's going to be a vacuum there and we need to fill it sooner rather than later.

I, I know we've had some, uh, some challenges dealing with Pakistan in the past, and partly because we've had an ambassador or two that had been in love with Pakistan and just would not let anything happen in their yard. Do, do countries like India, do, do they have that benefit also where ambassadors will just go to bat for them?

Uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's interesting to watch. And not just ambassadors, uh, you know, there's a reason why we have 2 and 3 year assignments, and that's to avoid clientitis.

Yeah.

And the longer you stay in a country, the more you get clientitis. I have, I have seen ambassadors in India who are a big cheerleader for that country.

Yeah, they're appointees. They don't know anything about diplomacy.

Yeah. And, you know, and they forget. I mean, I worked for one ambassador who was— he is independently wealthy. So you can't say, you know, you don't forget who pays your salary. He didn't even take a salary. And, you know, they see it to some extent from the locals' eyes, from the Indian eyes. And they, instead of becoming a representative of the US toward that country, they become representative of that country toward the US.

Right.

And a lot of these countries work really hard to establish that relationship. They do it to our chiefs of station. You know, there's nothing like if you're the chief of station and the director of the CIA comes to visit, that the local service can get the director a meeting with the president or prime minister. They take him on this trip and they go here and he sees all those kind of, and the glory goes back to you. Oh, he's got everything plugged in. You don't want to upset the apple cart. They're making you look good.

Yeah, right.

So, you know, you tend to be hands-off-ish. We don't want to, we don't want to press them on some issues. And I've seen it where, you know, the US policy is we got to press them on this and, oh, you don't want to upset them. So yeah, it goes, it happens and it happens not infrequently.

So what was, what was the next stop for you after chief of station of New Delhi.

Oh, that was, uh, I, out of all bizarre things, I went to be the scholar in residence in Miami, University of Miami. Uh, my, my then wife, her parents had moved to Florida. Uh, her father had had his second heart bypass and her mother was recovering from breast cancer, so we needed to be close. So there was an opening where, you know, I taught national security issues and I did a couple of years there and then went back up to Washington to do counterintelligence for CTC and retired out of there.

And how is, how have you enjoyed retirement? What's that like?

Oh God, I love it. Um, I got— I gotta tell you, it's, uh, being the director of operations, especially overseas, but in some headquarters assignment, uh, from the military, uh, it, it is a demanding job. Uh, 12-hour days are the norm. Uh, working 6, 5 and a half, 6, 7 days a week, not unknown. Uh, when I was doing Iraq, I, I would be in the office at 5:30 in the morning, go home at 10 at night, uh, when I didn't sleep in the office. Uh, you know, it, it— even overseas, you're, you know, you, you— especially when you start out, you have a regular job and then you got to do your agent agency job, which tends to be at night and weekends and stuff. So it, it takes its toll after a while. Uh, it is also— it's an isolating job, uh, psychologically. And then you retire and it's like, it's, it's— when I, when I went to the retirement program, they had, uh, a speaker who was, uh, uh, a psychologist, and he specialized in retirement stuff and all this stuff. And he said the number one thing that people extol about retirement is sleep and the fact that they can sleep.

So it's nice. It's different. You know, like you're in the agency and you're very isolated. You're in the building, you can't, you can't take phones in, you don't have access to streams of information. Uh, people outside, you can't really tell what you do, you can't discuss your day. Even when you go home, especially overseas, and you go home, you can't talk to your spouse and say, how, how was your day? You don't know if somebody's listening. Uh, so it tends to isolate you, and you retire and I mean, a guy I worked for retired, he's teaching at one of the universities. He says, I don't, I can't see ever going back. I am, I am now so plugged in, so much information, talking to people and all this kind of stuff, which you don't do. Even inside the agency, you know, we function on the need-to-know basis. So I'm not telling the guy next to me who sits next to me necessarily what I'm doing or how my, my cases are going because he doesn't have a need to know. She doesn't have a need to know. So, it does tend to get you isolated and that changes when you retire.

Where are you at today? What are you doing now?

Talking to you.

And we appreciate it.

No, I'm not doing anything. It's, you know, I live in DC. For a while after I retired, I did some contracting work. Uh, did that for about 5 years or so after I retired. Uh, and you know, that's okay. Uh, I, a lot of people turn around and go back working for the agency as a contractor. I, it's, I, I got to do, I'm fortunate, I got to do pretty much I wanted when I joined the agency.

Yeah.

And so there's nothing left to do, and other than it would be there collecting a paycheck, uh, which is not intellectually stimulating for me. I write a blog just to keep my, you know, my mind going. Uh, I read. I got a 12-year-old daughter who's in school that, you know, sucks up a lot of my time, uh, wonderfully so. And, uh, not much.

Where can people find your website?

Uh, it's called The Debrief, uh, a rundown of today's national security interests. I should have given you something, but I'm too goddamn lazy to do anything about it. Uh, again, it's, you know, it's the website, the, the blog is, is—

we'll put it in the description.

Yes, it's, uh, for those of you listening, it's Debrief, uh, Debrief, a rundown debrifaroundown.com.

Thank you. It's, it's geared toward non-professionals. Uh, it's, you know, I believe that it is important for laymen, the people out there, to understand how intelligence functions because we go to war or not based on intelligence. It affects our lives whether we know it or not. And while people do not have access to sources and methods, they should understand how it works and the complexities involved. Because again, it's not, it's not what you see in Hollywood. It's not some guy sits in computer, flips a switch, and he's got all the cameras in the world pouring in there. It doesn't work. It is, it is a different skill set. It is labor-intensive. Anyway, I'm babbling, but it is. And every now and then I babble on about what's going on in the world.

That's great. No, Louis, this has been like a super informative episode. And actually, I would love to have you back at some point to talk like, like maybe zero in on some specific like geopolitical issues. But this has been a great conversation.

I'd be happy to come back. There's no case off officer on earth who doesn't want to babble to an audience and say, listen to me.

Well, we, we deeply appreciate it. I, I don't want to keep you too long, but I do want to ask you one question about your time as, you know, doing counterintelligence. We had James Olson on, um, you know, who was the director of counterintelligence for a while, and he talked about how it's very different than being a case officer, and that it, if you let it get to you, it can make you very paranoid. And how was that for you ending your career in a CI post?

Well, I've— I'll give you the— the spiel should be that every case officer does counterintelligence. It's the only way you survive in the field. And I've had several counterintelligence positions. Mr. Olson, is, you know, the term is used too loosely nowadays, but it does apply to him, that he is a living legend. Uh, he is, uh, really good at what he does. And he's, he's right. The more you do it, the more paranoid you become, because you understand what can happen. And a good counterintelligence officer understands all the possibilities, all the permutations and starts looking to see which is actually the case in this situation. But it does— look, I tell you, I have been retired since 2010. I still look for surveillance. I step out of my house and the first thing I do is I look up and down the street to see what cars are there. Do I know the cars? Are there people sitting in the cars? What are they doing? And it's stupid because I'm, you know, nobody's going to be following me. I'm nobody other than, you know, if it's criminal activity. But just like, like an Army officer can never look at a piece of terrain without thinking, how do I hold it?

How do I take it? A case officer looks at everything. Oh, that's a good dead drop. Oh, that's a good meeting site. Oh, I can turn. I mean, I turn corners and I do it in a fashion that gives me a logical way to look behind me. So, yeah, you do get a degree of paranoia. You do get jaded. I am not judgmental about— yeah, maybe I am, but I'm not stunned by the things people do. I gotta say, I've probably seen it all, and I have dealt with people who have done it all, and, and they're, you know, people that I would never have over my house for dinner. Uh, so it does skew your view of, of people and life in general. Uh, it, it, it, it— again, I, I apologize for the language, but it does fuck you up beyond belief. Yeah, yeah, I get it.

Yeah, it's got to be hard too, because you could potentially ruin somebody's career if if like you're wrong and, you know, uh, oh yeah, but, but you, but you ruin your job if you're, if you don't pursue it.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's a high wire act. I mean, you know, it's always this, just, just like what you just did right now is what a CIA officer is going to be doing. I could do this, this could happen, here it is, and you start looking at all the different permutations and it'll start spinning you up.

Yeah. Yeah, it seems like a tough job. Let me get some questions real quick. Um, ohms, thank you very much. Uh, headphone— is that chilly?

Cool.

Uh, thank you. There's probably some meaning that I just don't get. I'm too old. Uh, Chaba TV, thank you very much. Number one. Uh, Ryan Joffrey, thank you very much. Uh, for my dead father Chris, incredible man, patriot. Uh, our condolences. M Corbin, thank you very much. After the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the relationships between the US and India begin to solidify in any form of cooperative training?

Training? No, not, not from the intelligence perspective. The Indians are extremely proud and do not take agency training lightly unless it's of a technical nature that they don't have a capability of, which They're pretty well, well healed. No, it didn't. It did not change. It actually, to some extent, exacerbated the relationship because we would not help them as much as they wanted us to help them because the Pakistan issue.

What is their— where is their background in terms of their intelligence training? Who do they like? Did they base their intelligence methodology off any particular country?

Yeah, well, they, they started from the British.

Yeah. Okay.

It is, it is, it is modeled on MI5 and MI6, uh, but somewhere in the '60s that split off and the, the organization stayed the same, but a lot of the training came from the Russians.

Okay. And then on Patreon, um, oh, this is— we'll answer this, this question about a Ranger tab. We'll, uh We'll, we'll answer this question on Patreon. Um, so that's it. Let's— thank you so much.

We deeply appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it.

Yeah, this has been an awesome interview, and like I said, I'd love to talk to you again. Um, should I announce who's coming up next week? Sure. Uh, I, uh, I'm sorry if I'm a little delinquent on this.

Uh, while Jack's looking that up, uh, make sure you check out Check out debriefarundown.com.

And please take a look at our friends at Casa Carabeo Cigars, casacarabeo.com. It's what we've been smoking here on the show.

Next week, we're going to have Frank D'Alessio and another ATF agent in studio.

So yeah, Frank was on the episode once, or was on the show once before, and he's gonna come in studio. And I think actually he's bringing one of his buddies with him too. So we'll have him here next Friday. We're definitely excited about that. Thanks for reminding me. So Louis, thank you for an awesome episode, man.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, have a great rest of your weekend, and I hope to talk to you again soon.

All right, thanks. Mao.

All right, see you guys soon. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks, everybody.