Transcript of Inside the FBI's Hunt for a Russian Mole | Wayne Barnes New

Hey everyone, welcome to The TeamHouse. My name is Jack Murphy, and our guest on tonight's show is Wayne Barnes. He is a retired career FBI agent, and he is the author of a new book called A Traitor in the FBI: The Hunt for a Russian Mole. Um, now I'll, I guess a little bit of a spoiler alert. This interview is going to dovetail very well with a past interview we did with, uh, Eric O'Neill. So, but that story, as interesting as it is, Wayne brings a totally new aspect of this mole hunt in the FBI that I was completely unaware of. I read the book on Kindle. The Kindle edition of it is really good, but it's also available as paperback, and it's one of my favorite espionage books out there, nonfiction espionage books out there. Because of the amount of detail really that Wayne was able to get into. And also, you're just a good writer. I mean, you have a talent for it.

Thank you very much. I'm really glad to be here and I'm glad if this is a recent read for you to have it reach your top 10 or your top 5 books, because I know you've only read hundreds of espionage and counterintelligence books. So that's a, that's a high, high standard to reach. But yeah, I work very hard at the craft of writing. We can talk more as we go, but I had a niche in debriefing defectors, Cold War defectors, that is Romanian generals, KGB colonels, probably a total of about 24. Most agents will meet one or two defectors in their career, maybe during a counterintelligence school at Quantico, the academy. But I had a niche in debriefing defectors. If you think holding a straight face in a casino in Las Vegas playing poker requires a poker face, that is nothing compared to what you have to do debriefing a KGB colonel, for instance, because they're looking for information. They're looking for information to learn that if they decide to defect, they don't go back and be executed. They want to go back and have information, which is positive intelligence about the West, to make it so they can have a soft landing instead of an execution.

So you can't give them anything, which is very difficult, but it's important. Anyway, debriefing defectors was a special deal.

So, oh, Wayne, uh, let's, let's start at the beginning. Tell us a little bit about your upbringing and the path that, that took you towards the FBI.

All right, uh, you read this in Chapter 4. Yeah, and, uh, invariably if you write a book, uh, you get people to read it as beta readers, that is not pros, but to see how it flows. And invariably everyone would come back and say, well, What, what led you to get in the FBI? What was your childhood like? You have to incorporate that into the book. So chapter 4 is called A Childhood That Led to the FBI. It seems obvious at this point. Uh, I was raised, I'd like to say, a poor boy in Philadelphia. Um, I have a girlfriend of many years who's a city planner, and she says, no, you were raised in a working-class neighborhood. But she was, she was raised in Princeton, so she doesn't have the right to say where I was raised. Anyway, uh, it was, uh, primarily a Catholic neighborhood. My elementary school, uh, was down the street, but my neighborhood, West Oak Lane in Philadelphia, and Mount Airy, where the junior high school was, was almost all Jewish other than the Catholic folks who went to parochial schools. Big division in Philadelphia between Catholic and public schools.

And then the high school was in a place called Germantown. Uh, it was probably, uh, 95% Black area, but the high school, because of our feeder school neighborhoods, it made it maybe about 65% Black. When I started high school, I was 5 foot tall and weighed £100, bright platinum blonde hair. I was the littlest kid in the school. And so in my school, if you weren't Black, you were Jewish. And if you weren't Jewish, you were me. And so I understood minority status, you know, early on. But I managed to succeed pretty well. I grew 13 inches in 3 years. So while I started too small to be on the football team, I started too small to be the waterboy for the football team. But eventually I was on swim, gym, soccer, and track. I had a gymnastics scholarship to the University of Iowa by the time I graduated. But I had never been across the Mississippi. I had never even been across the Susquehanna. So going to college in Iowa was like Mars. So not, not, wasn't on my game plan, but I ended up getting— I love Philadelphia, the Eagles, the Phillies, and all the Philly things.

But being in where I was raised was not a good place. It was a difficult place.

But it sounds like it taught you how to talk to people and how to manage conflict and, you know, how to make friends with people.

Yeah, that was a— that's also part of the book. But it was very, very significant to to survive. It was a survival tactic. Had I been much taller, it may not have made a difference, uh, but my hair was so satiny. If you, if you picture the baby's blanket that has like satin on the edge, like a light blue blanket, and it's so soft, that's what my hair was like. That was my bangs were like. And anybody passed me on the street, in a hallway, whether I knew them or not, they would pet my head like this, down on my forehead. Drove me nuts. It's a little, a little kid thing. But there's a story, I think it's in the book, but when I, I got to High school, my father feared for my life. My mother cried when she knew I was going to Germantown. But I went in the men's room, the boys' room the first day between classes, and there were 3 big Black guys in the school, a fellow named Freeman Washington, about 6'4", which put him about, I don't know, 16 inches taller than me. And he was known as the great-grandson of a slave, and he was a mean character.

And I did my thing at the urinal. As I was getting ready to leave, I washed my hands and I hear a fellow say, 'Hey!' Like, it's Freeman. And he says, 'Come here.' So I turn around, he says, 'Give me a cigarette,' or 'Give me smoke.' Like, I don't have any smokes, right? And so he said, 'Give me smoke, like I really mean it.' So I walked over to him, I said, 'If I had a smoke, you could have it.' So he sticks his finger in my pocket, and I have a box of Sun-Maid raisins. He thinks it's a box of like Lucky Strike. So I pull it out and I open it, and I say, It's just raisins. So he puts his hand up, so I pour some in his hand and he tastes them and he said, looks at his boy, he says, hey, raisins, raisins. So I said, listen, you keep these raisins, I'll bring you some more raisins tomorrow. He says, okay, raisins, you do that. So he became my protector and I was raisins and he helped me get through school, you know, unscathed. And a few months later, there was a fight that broke out in one of these wide hallways, school's built in 1914, so high roofs and old columns.

And as I was trying to get past it, one of the guys reached out for me and somebody else right on the edge of the fight said, no, no, no, he, he Friedman's boy. So he saved my bacon without knowing it. So that's a concept now I call recruit everybody every day. And, and you don't know that it's going to work. But in counterintelligence, it worked an awful lot. But that was the principle anyway.

And so you went to college in Iowa and you had—

no, no, no, no, no. I went to Penn State.

Penn State.

I did not go to gymnastics at Iowa. I went to Penn State. And I did, I did, I did some gymnastics, but I, I went through college in 3 years. I studied very hard. I took extra credits. I had no money. So the money I saved for my 4th year from being a Boy Scout counselor with the council camps, Philadelphia had a lot of Boy Scouts. I saved that money up and I had enough for 4 years of college. But I want to graduate in 3. I took the last year's money. And put it toward tuition at law school. And I went to Villanova Law just outside of Philly. So that was a big deal.

And you had some conception that you wanted to go into law enforcement pretty early on, right?

What I did— not exactly, but what I did have was an early life which gave me the straight and narrow. My parents were honest. They were decent. I mean, my father joked that if you ever went through a stop sign there would be a police officer right there. That's not a reason not to go through a stop sign, but it tells you the mentality. But it was straight. Now, in my neighborhood, if you could escape without having a criminal record, you were fortunate. There would be fights all the time. All the boys would have one of their front teeth would be chipped like a little V. And I swore I was going to survive childhood without a chipped tooth, which means no fights and whatever. But so that was a big deal for me. I had no idea that was going to be important for an FBI application, not just having no criminal record but leading the straight and narrow. It was actually when I was in law school. I got my last year at Penn State. I had been accepted at Villanova and George Washington and a couple other places. So I talked to the dean of men at the law school and I said, I want to come, I have money for tuition, but I got to— I don't know where I'm going to stay.

My parents lived in Cherry Hill, which was a long ride there. I couldn't afford an apartment. So he sent me to the Dean of Men undergraduate, and he said, go see this man. So the next Friday, I hitchhiked from Penn State down to Philadelphia and out to Villanova, and I met with him. And Joe Bevilacqua, a little guy, and he interviewed me for a while. He said, look, you're big enough, you're strong enough. Would you like a counselorship? So I became a dorm counselor. So for the next 3 years, that was room and board, which saved my bacon. But having that intuition, but the inspiration to succeed. So I was in my last year of law school and people were coming to the school from law firms, from the various alphabet government organizations, the SEC, FCC. They all want lawyers who just graduated law school. Of course, the top flight law firms, the white shoes law firms, they really only wanted people what they call in law review, the top 5 or 10 in the class out of 150. But so I didn't know what I was going to do at that point. Just be a lawyer someplace.

I had never— the first day I started law school, I had never even met a lawyer. Did not know a lawyer. And most people there, their fathers were lawyers or there were fathers who owned businesses where they wanted their sons to go to law school to learn how to think or learn how to organize themselves. Mine was a survival deal. So I had been in at Penn State. I was a second base in the men's glee club. Which was a wonderful experience. Hopefully the 3 years at Penn State was great. And but I sat beside a guy who became a good friend, his name was Bill Guttow. And in my dorm, my 3rd year of law school, a fellow knocked on the door wearing a business suit and he said he was with military intelligence, asked me if I knew Bill Guttow. And I said, I sat beside him as a second base for a couple years. And they said, well, he's in the military, he's in a military base in Turkey, and he got into the military and went in language school and learned Turkish. And he was going to move up to be the translator for the commandant, which means he needed a higher clearance.

So he needed to get more names and more people. So from 3 years before, he somehow dug into his brain and got my name, the guy stood beside him from the glee club. So he was a good guy, didn't smoke pot, didn't get drunk, he was a decent fellow. And I spoke with this fellow about an hour and a half, and I was wondering why he didn't wear uniform if he was in the army, but it was army intelligence. So an hour and a half later, he said, you know, this is the first time I ever interviewed someone where I felt like I was the one being interviewed. And he said, would you consider a career in military intelligence? Like, he offered me a job, like, right there. I thought, gee, that's interesting. And he said, oh, that's right, you're in law school. The place for you is the FBI. And that was the first time I even thought of it. I had watched Efrem Zimbalist and the FBI when I was younger, and the police shows in general, but it never occurred to me to carry a badge or have a gun. I only had like firearms training with, you know, rifles at Boy Scout camps, nothing, you know, .22. So a few, a couple weeks later, someone from the FBI Philadelphia office came to the law school and he had 150 people in his class.

I guess at the time were probably 6 or 7 women. This was 1971. Anyway, so he started to speak about the Bureau and what they did, why they needed lawyers, accountants, and whatever. And, uh, finally someone raised their hand and they said, do you have a visual requirement? And, uh, he said, yes, we do, it's 20/40 correctable to 20/20. Which, at which point, 146 guys got up and walked out of the class, and there were 4 of us left with, 4 of us left with good vision. So, and I was one, a 20/15 vision at the time. So I filled out the application and I got hired in October. I went into the Bureau.

There is also like a height requirement at FBI, right?

There was, was, there was, was like 5'8", 5'8.5". It was Mr. Hoover's height. So he wanted to have everybody his height or taller, which whatever else you may say about the man, he got a lot of big agents who could arrest bad guys. But later on when women came in, in the '73 and '74, that timeframe, I trained many of them. I was, I I did really a— it was really good. I have one older brother, so I didn't have any girls growing up with other than people I knew in the neighborhood. But so the, uh, the idea of having women in the Bureau, I knew, was a good thing. And not to sound despicable, but we had a case where there was a tube, uh, wasn't a sewer pipe, but that size. We had to get through that tube down to here, and it was a female agent who was about 5'5" when they had til turned the requirement for height off, that knocked a lot of women out at 5'8". I mean, a man to be parallel for what, how tall a man would have to be, would be like 6'3" or 4', for women 5'8", with percentage of how many women that tall.

But when they got rid of the height requirement entirely, and this, she squeezed through this thing and got whatever we needed. And so it was good to have a smaller person, plus they're smart, they're trained, they know defensive tactics, they can shoot. So those things were, uh, were important. Anyway, so I, I, uh, yeah, I was in the FBI and it was, um, extraordinary career for 29 years.

Uh, and so you go to Quantico, go to the academy, um, what was your first assignment with the FBI?

Before you get there, I'm not— my point is not to correct you, but I want to make the record straight. Yeah, I, I entered on duty in October 1971. So I was in until the end of 2000. So I've been retired 26 years.

I'm—

my last birthday a couple weeks ago, I was 79 years old. Every morning I do 45 minutes of yoga, stretching. I do 50 push-ups, 100 sit-ups. I do 5 miles on a bicycle. And every year I do a handstand. I do handstand every month, but I have a friend who takes a picture of my handstand every birthday and I post it. People say, is that you? Is that you? Yeah, it's me. So anyway, so handstands are— let me show you handstand. But handstands are a good thing. When I do the exercise, people say, oh, your shoulder's gonna collapse, you're gonna hurt yourself. But you know, not yet. Anyway, this, if you can see this from there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you sent me that photo.

Yep, sent that photo. It's a handstand there someplace. Anyway. Uh, at 79, happy to do that. So when I entered on duty in the Bureau, there was no FBI Academy. Uh, the FBI Academy was beginning to be under construction, so our classes were in the old post office, which used to become, uh, was an old post office, I think, and now Trump Tower or Trump something, but it's been many things in the meantime. Was built in, I think, 1896, and they decided it would cost more money to knock it down than to, uh, you know, remodel it, so that's what was done. But we were in the old post office for training. We go to Quantico for a couple weeks every month for firearms training and some defensive tactics. But so there was no academy. The FBI Hoover Building across the street from the old post office was a 100-foot hole in the ground, and it was under construction. So I preceded the FBI Academy. I preceded the Hoover Building, which now it's so old they're getting rid of it. You know, thank goodness they're not getting rid of me because I'm old. But something like that for retirement.

And also Mr. Hoover was alive. So he died in, I guess, May of '72. So I was in for about a year when he was still alive. That's a demarcation today. But when I started, my first assignment was in Los Angeles. And the first agents, older agents I met, they were the case agents on Ma Barker and Baby Face Nelson. So that was their era. Now I'm a Cold Warrior. So people coming in new now— in fact, what makes you really feel old is you have retired agents lunches. There's organ— chapters, organizations all around the country. And the agents retiring now in 2026, they came into the Bureau like 2003, 2005. I've had 20 years in. So the agents retiring now entered on duty in the Bureau after I had already retired. That would make you feel old. But I'm not. I don't feel it. I feel like I'm 47. I do a lot of things that are still active. I have 5 children. I do all things all the time. I travel around the world. I recover stolen art, impressionist paintings. I do signature, you know, analysis all around the place. But anyway, so I started in Los Angeles, uh, and that time they had what they call the first office agent.

You were in your first office for one year to the day, and you learned the, uh, the trade of the FBI, uh, how to investigate, arrest people, do cases. And you, you know, someone teaches you the ropes. And then when you get to a second field office, you pretty much know what you're doing., and you're more competent. And they've changed the system now, but that was how it was then. So I was first office in Los Angeles.

So tell us the story about how you joined the Black Panther Party.

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Well, fortunately, you've already heard about Germantown and Freeman, Washington. In Los Angeles, they would put you on a rotation every 4 months, every 3 months you would switch squads. So you learned about bank robberies versus kidnapping versus other, other kinds of investigations, fraud, etc. Uh, and then you move to the next squad. So the second squad I was on was, uh, an extremist squad. We call them 157s, but extremists. Uh, they had La Raza, which was doing some bad things. They had Nation of Islam under Louis Farrakhan were doing some bad things. Uh, there were white hate groups of various sorts. There's one called Youth Action where they were They had a plan to kill President Nixon at his Western White House in San Clemente. I was the inside guy on that, that assassination effort. And but there was also the Black Panthers. And a couple years before, there had been a shootout between the Black Panthers and the Los Angeles Police Department. And they had maybe a couple hundred shots exchanged, no one was hit, a lot of holes in the brick walls around them. But they had very difficult connections with anybody involved in law enforcement.

And there was a group within the Panthers which came alive as an organizational structure within them, and they called themselves the Nation of Nigritia. And Nigritia was a made-up word, made-up name of various Black African nations. And they said, we are a nation which is all the slaves who were brought against their will to the United States Many who don't know where their families had come from in Africa, but who are in the U.S. for generations. And we ourselves are a nation without land. We are the nation of Nigritia. And the interesting thing was there were two major leaders of the Panthers at the time, Huey Newton, who was in jail in Northern California, and Eldridge Cleaver, who had escaped the U.S. and was in Algeria as a wanted fugitive, but he was living in Algeria. And all of the people in the nation of Nigritia were Cleaver faction people, which was also curious. So if you remember the movie The French Connection, Gene Hackman, he's Popeye Doyle, he's in a pretty ritzy restaurant and a table there, the guys who are actually doing the drugs deal, Frog One, Frog Two, Sal and his wife at that table, and, you know, living it up.

And Gene Hackman and his partner who later was in Jaws. I forget his name, but his partner. They looked at the table and they looked and they said, that table's dirty, like there's something wrong with that table. Those people, they're just— that sixth cop sense. So all the agents in the squad who've been doing extremist matters for, for years and years, they looked at Naysham Naigresha and they said, there's something wrong here. It's the same sixth cop sense. We had a number of Black agents in the office, but they were all known in the community, outreach and that sort of thing. So I went into my supervisor's— I took the case agent, main guy had the ticket on the case for the Black Panther Party. I went into the supervisor's office and I said, you know, I can do this. And I said, my past— and I told him my history of Germantown, even about Freeman Washington. But growing up, I was on the track team. Track team had— Germantown High had like 155 kids on the team. There were 6 white boys on the team. As a little kid, I realized I wasn't going to run faster than anybody, but what I did have was gymnastic muscles.

The pectoral muscles are the ones that enable you to do pole vaulting. That's where you pull yourself up on the pole and go over. So I was a pole vaulter on the team. So I ended up being elected president of the student government. And as I said before, somebody Black had to vote for me. But the track team was on my side and the swimming team and the soccer team. So anyway, But that's how I got along really with everybody. So, uh, um, something that I'm almost reluctant to say because of the nature of what goes with it, but your audience would appreciate this. Uh, there was a fella sat two seats away from me in my class on alphabetical basis. His name was Bob Cosby, and he was Bill Cosby's younger brother by 10 years. So Bill would start his routines by coming to our morning assembly session where the whole auditorium full of kids giving out notifications and, you know, news of the day and whatever. And he would come on and the first routines he ever had, like where the Lord is telling Noah to build the ark and, uh, it— you cubits— and it's the Lord Noah and right, all that, that all came the first time we ever gave those, uh, presentations.

Those routines were in front of the Germantown High School morning assembly sessions. So I knew him pretty well because I was the president of the student union. I had to introduce him. We talked to him, but because his younger brother and the fact that a lot of his early routines, it was him picking on his younger brother, but in a very humorous way. What about the projects? And the Cosby family had a lot more money than my family had. I can tell you that. Bob would come to school every day with a white dress shirt, and I had one for Christmas and for Easter, right? So I didn't have what they had. Anyway, so I knew him in that regard. So I told my supervisor of my past and they looked at me carefully. They couldn't possibly believe it. Even then I had pretty platinum hair and a 6'1" blonde-haired, blue-eyed guy. So I went and I said, here, I can do this. So I went out to San Fernando Valley State University, which is now Cal State Northridge. And I learned the campus. I went to several sociology classes, you know, 100 easy classes, 400 graduate classes.

I met some of the professors at Pierlow. I was an auditor auditing the classes, just sitting in them. No one there was, you know, taking names or having any ID that needed. I went to the cafeteria, met the people there. I learned the streets and whole campus. I got alias identification. I'm Wayne Barnes, my mother's last name. My maiden name was Johnson. And they always say your first undercover role, you have your own first name and you use your mother's maiden name as your last name. So I became Wayne Johnson. I had a Datsun 240Z, the bullet-shaped car of the year. We had a new license plate for Wayne Johnson. I got a driver's license for Wayne Johnson. And, uh, so I drove down to Panther headquarters in South LA, parked right in front of the building with my nice sparkling new car, not dressed like an FBI agent but in jeans and the gray college t-shirt. I had bought it and washed it a few times so it faded out, looked like I'd been around for a while. So I'd already been out of high school, college, and law school and passed the New Jersey bar.

And now I was assuming the role of a graduate student at San Fernando Valley State. So I went in, there's a big guy behind the desk, and I said, you know, my name is Wayne Johnson, I'm doing a master's thesis at San Fernando Valley State. I have to do one on an American ethnic group. I picked you guys, what do you think? He stood up, gave me a big toothy smile, put his hand out, he said, welcome to the Black Panthers. So I became a card-carrying, blonder, blue-eyed, white guy as a Black Panther Party member, which was exciting. But agent, before I left to go to South LA, the last thing the case agent said is, you know, if they knew what you were, they'd shoot you just as soon as look at you. That was his parting advice. Crushed. So anyway, so in the nation like Grecia, which I picked as my specific topic, They didn't know why, but that was part of it. And they would have meetings at the High Priestess of Nigritia. She also lived in Compton area. And she would clear her dining room, put about 20-some chairs, 5 by 6 in rows of folding chairs.

People would sit there at meetings talking about lunch for kids and trying to get— what they did was they tried to get Nigritia recommended— not recommended— recognized by various other Black African nations. By the time I was there, and that time span in '72, 4 Black African nations had recognized them, and one of them, Senegal, even gave them a couple acres of land in case they wanted to build an embassy or have some official building to be, quote, a nation. So what they wanted was recognition from the UN, but they wanted to be a nation, which would have been a unique situation, nation of that land. But there's some really, as we've seen from the World Cup, there's some really small countries that are out there. And so they would have a lot of thousands of people all around the country. And there was a chapter of the Nation of Igrisha in all the places in the majority Black cities in the country that had Black Panther parties. They all had sections there. So I took notes every other Tuesday night, I think it was, for a couple hours. And I would take notes like crazy, like I was the secretary for the Nation of Igrisha, taking notes and giving the records of what took place, the minutes.

Meanwhile, I'm writing this stuff down so the next morning I can write a memo in the FBI of what happened at the Nigresha thing the night before it goes into file. So it was a dual purpose, which the other didn't— they didn't know about. So about the third meeting, the high priestess came down the hallway with two big guys behind her and a fellow beside her about 20 years old, looked a lot like the nation of Nigresha high priestess. And she said, Wayne, this is my son Rodney. He's a student at San Fernando Valley State. I'm like, Oh shit, this could have been the end of me, right? I mean, I was expecting a test, but this was pretty bad. So he asked me about my classes, you know, who I had, professors and things, which he was vetting me. If I had been real with what I said I was, it would have been no problem. I had to have those same answers as part of my backstopping, which I did. But at that point, it was the spur of the moment. So I turned the tables on him as quickly as I could.

And I said, who do you have? Like, what do you have? You have sociology. So he mentioned one fellow who I'd seen around, but then another fellow who I saw in the 400 class, the graduate class. And it wasn't that I disagreed with him when he was giving the class, but I listened to him carefully than others. And Rodney— oh yeah, her son was Rodney— he mentioned this guy. And I said, oh yeah, I said, he's an old, fat, bald, white Jewish guy. Has no idea what he's talking about. And the 3 faces there, 4 faces, they just stared at me and their mouths were open and I had no idea. So I looked around and I said, what? And he said, we've never heard a white person defame another white person before. I thought, they don't get out very much. That's pretty far off. But that was really the test. So I palled around with Rodney. 2 or 3 meetings later, I would see him afterwards. We might go out to a bar or someplace, and it was just all, you know, I got the right credit cards for being Johnson. So at one point, uh, a meeting a few, couple months later, he said, you know what this is all about, don't you?

And, uh, I said, yeah, we're trying to do good for the community, we're trying to get recognized. And he said, he said, all that, yes, but we want to get recognized by the UN. If the UN recognizes us as a nation Then we will have Eldridge Cleaver come back to the U.S. as our ambassador to the United Nations for Nigritia, and he'll have diplomatic immunity and he won't be arrested by the FBI. That was the plan. So I, uh, I jumped for joy with him, like, that'd be great. We're doing high fives, we're running in circles, like, that'd be wonderful for the organization. You know, I'm thinking, like, I gotta get out of here, like, now I know what it's all about. So I wrote it up the next morning, it became what we call a letterhead memorandum. Bureau letterhead on top, a disseminable piece of paper, just paragraphs explaining what had taken place. And it went off, went through the Bureau, went to headquarters, went to State Department, went to the White House. And the Bureau was very happy with it. Not happy with that it was happening, but happy that we had someone inside.

I don't know if they ever knew I was a white guy. Back at headquarters, I don't think— I assume they presumed I was black. But, you know, Barnes, if you see a name with Barnes, on an NBA shirt or an NFL shirt, the guy's Black who's wearing a Barnes thing. So it fits all the needs that I had. Even the name would have worked. So anyway, part of my backstopping was the Bill Cosby story. And the story with him was that when he had been on I Spy, I guess was the first TV show he was on with Robert Culp as a camera— as a CIA guy. And then he had— he set up the Cosby Kids, which was a, you know, cartoon TV show. Uh, Fat Albert was in my gym class. He was about 3 times as wide as most people. He could be on the offensive line but not the defensive line. He couldn't go forward, but he was wide enough to stop people. There was a fellow in the Cosby Kids named Junior Barnes. I knew him personally. He sat beside me in gym class. And there were others. So Cosby created the Cosby Kids.

He was literally picking friends of his, uh, of his brother, and they were real people modeled after them. And at one point he said, you know, if there was— so what we debate was whether we would have one white kid in the Cosby Kids. And he said, if there was a white kid in the Cosby Kids, would be modeled after you. But he decided against it. Well, how's that for backstopping if you're telling people in the Panthers that Cosby said this? And there's no Google. There's no Google. There's no web searching, you know, you just have to believe it. But if it weren't true, the temerity to say it would be right off the scope. So that, that worked well for me, and, uh, that was how I was able to survive it. So I sent my memo out and it went to every place that needed to know. And, uh, I was told that the ambassador to the United Nations for the U.S. at the time was George H.W. Bush, and, uh, he got the, the the memo, and he personally walked it down the hallways in the building to all 4 of the ambassadors for the Black African nations that had recognized Nigritia.

And he stood there as they read it, instead of having this reach their inbox and have them read it sometime. This was important to the U.S. security. So he stood there as they read it, and the— especially Senegal, which had given some land— and the nation of Nigritia slowly slipped away. They withdrew recognition, and that would be the end of the story, which is a decent story in itself. And that was '72. So 10 years later or so, I was in the Washington field office. I was working counterintelligence at that point against the KGB, the political line of the KGB, KGB-PR, and I was debriefing defectors. And that's a special niche I mentioned earlier. We have to have skill in writing and have to have the stories, you know, pan out. So one of the individuals had been a Soviet official in Morocco, and when he defected to the U.S., the agency debriefed them and the FBI debriefed them as well. So while I had him there across the table, I guess we'd gone to lunch. You try to talk about other non-intel things at lunchtime. But I asked, I said, when you were assigned to Algeria, you know, a decade before, I said, did you happen to come across this guy Eldridge Cleaver?

And he said, oh yeah, yeah. And he said, oh, I've got a good story about Eldridge Cleaver. I thought, this is a good story for you, this could be a great story for me. So he told the story and he said Eldridge Cleaver came into one of the receptions, they have gala occasions all the time, He said, we know most people hate the Soviet Union, so anybody wanted to come into our evening bashes, we'd have them. So he came in, and one night, and he said, the odd thing is with medical technology in Russia, he said, it's not very good compared to what you have in the U.S. He said, we had heard two things about him, both that he had syphilis and that he had leprosy. I don't forget either, but they said, so no one wanted to shake his hand because all the Russian diplomats and the people catering to it. They thought if they shook his hand, it might break off as they were talking to him, and they didn't want to have that happen. That's Russian medical knowledge. It's 1972. So, uh, he said at one point through the evening, he came to a Soviet official, said, I want to talk to somebody in the KGB.

And that would have been this fella who was our— later to be our defector. And, uh, They met in a room in the back and he said, I have a way of getting back to the US without being arrested by the FBI. And what I want is to have the KGB, the Soviet Union, supply me with weapons. And his term was so I can foment revolution in America. So the Russian, he sent a telex to Moscow. A couple of days later, it came back and the answer was, we will give him the weapons, but first he must get back to the US without being arrested. And then we'll give them weapons to foment revolution. Now picture this is in every major city in the country, especially the Black cities— Philadelphia, Baltimore, LA, all the places that were obvious.

Milwaukee, that kind of thing. I'm sure the CIA loved that.

I don't know what they did, but we got the information. They didn't get that. I don't know how they would have gotten it. So anyway, but at that same moment in time, George H.W. Bush was walking down the hallway in the UN and the nation, like Greece's, recognition was withdrawn. So they didn't get their weapons. But picture this: if that operation hadn't taken place, that undercover case, if you think the riots in Minnesota recently and after George Floyd, even after Rodney King, picture people with Kalashnikov rifles in every major city in the country wanting to foment revolution. What would that have looked like? And it's a, it's his own book, it's his own horror story, uh, but fortunately it didn't happen. Now, a number of years later, Frank Church, the senator from I think Tennessee, had the Church Committee, and he wanted to close the door on the FBI, having to do fewer operations. He wanted a tighter leash. And everybody I talked to said if the Church Committee had been in season when my, my undercover operation taking place, they never would have allowed it, you know. There's no probable cause. It's not your sixth cop instinct.

That's not enough. So it would have never existed. And I have, you know, it makes me, you know, not want to go to sleep at night thinking what might have happened, but it didn't happen. But that was a— that was a big deal.

What was the other case that, you know, I think it's largely an undocumented assassination attempt on President Nixon. You said there's a white extremist group that was looking to kill the president?

Yes. So I was a young agent. I think I was 24. I think that's the youngest you can be because I cheated years in, in college. I was younger than I would have been having just gotten out of law school. The Bureau, when they hire people, they wanted you to be, I think, no less than 23 or 24, but they want you to have 3 years, 3 years after college So you have some experience in life. So I managed to meet that, but fortunately I was still younger than most even out of law school, which helped me on that particular case. So there was a fellow who was another fellow hitchhiking across the country, and he was a white guy in his late 20s, and he was a rabble-rouser, and he had a lot of personal confidence And when he got to LA, there were chapters of his organization, which was called Youth Action, which I never heard of before afterward, but it became a case from the squad because as he was hitchhiking across the country, he would tell people who picked him up what he was going to do, that he had this organization, we were going to go get— I'm sure he asked them some upfront questions to make sure that they were not Nixon people, but like, we're going to go kill Nixon at San Clemente.

So he had, you know, 80 people or so who were his followers, and the plan was to go to San Clemente with weapons when Nixon was there. And this was the same time frame. And interestingly enough, one evening on a Tuesday, I would be with the Nation of Iglesia undercover as a Black Panther, and the very next night I was undercover with Youth Action planning to help kill Nixon. So, It was an active first office, I'll say that. So as it turns out, they had an auditorium and they were going to get themselves together. They had a big flag on the curtains. And I was then posing as a person who was not fully alert, maybe. I had a pushcart with a bucket and it was a false bottom to the bucket where the FBI handy talkie was talking to the people out on the street. There were police officers and FBI there. And we knew from what I'd done undercover what they were planning to do. And had records of it from others in general. But I was there on the inside, so they could hear outside what was taking place. And literally they were cheering up, and it was, I don't know, like soccer people, but it was like, you know, okay, everybody up, we're gonna go.

And it's like, you know, the coach when it's halftime and you go back out to the field, the football field, you know, it's everybody go and you charge and you run outside. It was just about like that. And, but everybody, the people outside in charge, they heard it, and they came in and shut the whole thing down, and that took people away because I was the undercover guy. I was never involved with arrests or learning what happened, and eventually I was transferred to my second office, which was New York. So I lost all track of what had happened with that and where it went, but, uh, they didn't need me to be a witness for anything. But that was, yeah, the attempt was— I don't— and the public never heard about it unless I told this story now, however many years later, uh, it wouldn't be known. Uh, but that was, you know, I was the right person at the right time for the right case.

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Yeah, that's a, that's a good, uh, a good scenario. Uh, the CIA and the FBI had never really gotten along well. Um, they have offices in the United States. They're not all just abroad. They're called FR, which is, I think, foreign resources. So national resources, right? Yeah. So if a professor from Georgetown goes to a meeting in Moscow or in China, when they come back, while the FBI could do it, it's really the CIA's territory because the essence of the concept of what was interesting took place abroad. They'll interview someone who may have sources, but that's really the CIA's bailiwick. Essentially, the CIA at the time, I don't know how much it's changed now, but they saw themselves as being like the Ivy League, and they saw the FBI as arresting thugs, bank robbers. And they didn't think we were the right people to do intelligence, but it was counterintelligence. Once we actually started recruiting intelligence officers, that gives the positive intelligence that the CIA was responsible for doing, usually abroad, but in the US. But when the FBI got good at recruiting people, we had recruited, I worked the Eastern Bloc country. Let me go back on that.

I had Spanish in high school and French in college. I'm one of those strange people that actually remembers things that I'm taught. And they give you the Army Language Aptitude Test, the ALAT, during training. So, uh, they have to base it on Romance languages. They can't have Cyrillic or Chinese characters. It has to be American, you know, English language, uh, and for the grammar. So, uh, I scored well in the test. So when I was in New York for a few months, I got a call from people at headquarters saying, you're the next highest score in the language test, you can go to Monterey, California and learn Romanian for us. The first thing I did was get out a map and find out where Romania was. That was important. Anyway, so I went to Monterey for 9 months and Spanish, French are 6 months, Portuguese, Hungarian, Romanian. Romania has a lot of Slavic sounds in it, so it makes it more difficult than straight Romance language, but it's Romance grammar. So after 9 months, I spoke Romanian. "Țe cumo vo besca teșlimba?" And now I speak Romanian. So I was sent to a counterintelligence squad which had the major Warsaw Pact, the bloc countries, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria.

And you learn some of the languages of all those countries. You're on a bus at some point and there's a guy who looks like a little guy from Eastern Europe. And you go and say, "Vorobist romaneshte?" And he goes, "No, no, no, no." "Parlez-vous français? Hablas español? Jó napot kívánol?" Hungarian. And you go through various languages and he says, "Oh yeah." And he speaks Serbo, right? 'Jindobri pandu.' So anyway, you can get his name and number and give it to one of the guys in the squad to go find him, which is very helpful to speak at least smatterings of a lot of languages. So on that squad, I— we were just successful recruiting intelligence officers. It was that simple, and compromising those intelligence services. So after enough years of doing that, I went to work, Soviet work. I'm sorry, I know you had a question. I should have been—

No, no, okay.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it was pretty unique at that time, right? As you mentioned, CIA and FBI didn't play well together.

Right, exactly right. So when I left Iranian work, I moved over to Russians. Actually, the general who was a 2-star intelligence general in charge of the Romanian intelligence service, like the head of the KGB or the CIA, he was their Romanian intelligence chief. His name was Ion Mihai Păcepa. And General Păcepa was the most senior-ranking defector from the Cold War. He knew everybody, not just all the Romanian stuff, but he knew Khrushchev and Yasser Arafat and the Castro brothers and Mao Zedong. And he knew all the bad guys in the world. Nicolae Ceaușescu was their evil president for life, and he was with him on his coattails every place he went. And we did not know that he would eventually defect to the U.S. And no one knew that he was defecting. But when we did debrief him years later, what was most entertaining— and with, I know, your mindset, you would find this interesting— he came with Nicolae Ceaușescu. They went to Dallas, they went to see Boeing in Seattle. They would buy Boeing airplanes. And at the airport, he'd get off the plane. This is when you're coming out of the runway, the steps down from the plane, not in a tunnel from the doors.

And he would go down, bend down and tie his shoe. Like it was untied, but tie his shoe. And what he would do is pick up a pebble from the ground of the tarmac, he put in his pocket, and every place he went, when they got off a plane, he would bend down and, as he described it, pick up a small piece of America. So when he got back to Romania, he had a little container that had like 16 little pebbles from America. If we had known that then, that that was his mindset, we could have tried to do something else with him. But that's like halfway recruited, right? But he wasn't, no. So that was, that was tremendous. So anyway, uh, in debriefing General Pacheco, he knew, like I said, he knew all the bad guys. Um, so he helped compromise the entire intelligence service with his defection. And that was when they said, you know, the CIA had a section, uh, which resettled, uh, defecting intelligence officers.— it used to be called— well, they had different names for it, but it was Alien Branch, I think, at the time. They changed names. And they had a map on the wall of Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, and all the Eastern Bloc countries.

And at one point, when we got some defectors, they put some cross-hatch marks— hash marks through Romania. And then we had more defectors, they put more hash marks through it. And then when Păcepa defected, they blacked out the entire country of Romania. So it wasn't on the map anymore. One day I went in Someone actually cut out Romania so you can see the green wall through the map. They were completely compromised. So we didn't have anything to work on counterintelligence. So I went to work Russians. So while I was working Russians, having had a past of doing a lot of undercover things and now years of experience, there was a squad that was begun in about 1979 or '80, early '80. And there was a meeting between the CIA director who was Sannesfield Turner, Admiral Turner, and the CIA, uh, well, excuse me, the FBI director was William Webster at the time, previously a judge. And they met at a meeting somewhere, and they knew of this, you know, harsh relationship between the Bureau and the Agency. And, uh, they said, we need to put this behind us. We have too many people that could work well together and with our combined knowledge.

So they create— they, they, and with the administration of the Bureau and the Agency started a single squad in the FBI they called Courtship, and it was 3 CIA case officers, 3 FBI special agents, and we had an off-site location in Springfield, Virginia, far, far away from D.C., and we had rented space, we leased cars, so there was no connection with the intelligence community at all. And, uh, we— they had the name Courtship, which actually came from the the court was from the judge and the ship was from the admiral. They called it courtship, and we like to think that it showed that we were— how we were recruiting intelligence officers, you know, we were like courting them. And that was the kind of thing which we had as an objective, to be able to recruit people. So there were, uh, they like to pick what they considered the best and the brightest from all the agencies. Like, how do you, how do you pick someone? But it's not like— it's like the Academy Awards where you can't like volunteer to get an Academy Award or vie for position. So I wasn't in the first round, but I was in the second round, and I was happy to be there.

It was a 2-year assignment. I was there for 3 and a half years, and we were very successful with the efforts we did. It was all undercover work. And for you and your audience, you want to have an example of working undercover activities besides what I mentioned with Panthers and the white extremists, Uh, of the 3 officers or agents from the different agencies, 2 agents were required for each case. One would be what we call the control or the case agent, and the other would be the undercover operative, the UC. So you had the CIA and the FBI involved in every case in one position or the other. That was good. So we learned things from them, and they learned things from us, for sure. So at one point there was a, uh, a case. I'm not sure why the man was picked. His name was Vladimir, but someone said he's the next case to be assigned to courtship. Maybe he was a nice guy or there was something that led someone to believe he should be assigned to courtship. So the question is, what do we know about him, you know, personality-wise? And, uh, as we were there sitting around our table in Springfield, Virginia, business, you know, a conference table, we're on the, on the horn with, uh, uh, surveillance squad person in the FBI who's on the street, and he said, Vladimir, he just pulled into a spot across from the embassy and he's sitting in his car, and the window was down, and Russians aren't allowed to do that.

They get there, they're timed, they can only see people they're authorized to see, they have to sign in, sign out, all every minute it's covered. He was sitting in his car listening to the radio. So I said, well, go find out what he's listening to. So, well, I'm thinking this could be, you know, Dvořák, it could be symphony stuff, it could be Jazz, who knew what. Now, I was raised in Philadelphia. I was a bandstand boy. I was a, you know, dance on the TV shows. I was a rock and roll kind of guy. So as he walks down the street, he comes back, says he's listening to country music, like KIX 106, you know, country in your car. I thought, I don't know anything about country music. Like, I'm a rock and roller. So I had all of a sudden become an expert in country music. I mean, I met the guy, that's one of my fellow agents knew a fellow who managed the country station that was involved, and I listened to music. I went to concerts, uh, you know, Don't You Make My Brown Eyes Blue with Crystal Gayle and all the other songs that I would have never known or heard of, but I had to have no more than Vladimir did about country music to be able to meet him, right, so he can lean on me for knowledge.

That's, that's backstopping, but it has to happen with the case. So, uh, he was in the political section of the embassy There was another individual who was in the commercial section of the embassy, which was far separated. Uh, just like in the Bureau, you can work counterintelligence or you can work bank robberies down the hallway, and you have never connected. You know, you may carpool to work, but your work is unconnected. And then there was a third one who was a military attaché in what they called the Soviet Military Office, the SMO, at another building in Washington farther away. So I turned out to be the undercover agent working against 3 Soviets at the same time. And to do a thing like this, there's a, you know, the Tidal Basin is beautiful with the cherry blossoms in the springtime, and everybody has pictures taken of what's going on there. So at this point, I have, I think I have 3, 2 or 3, I have 3 sons born every other year. And so with my then wife, we would take pictures of us at the Tidal Basin, us and our oldest son, maybe was 3, and then just my wife and my son, me and my son, and just my son.

And then we bring Sebastian and my other child to take pictures of all 4 of us, and the pictures of just Sebastian and me, just Sebastian, me and my wife, and the same way so that every possible combination. So if you meet a Russian and say, I have 2 children, and then somebody else says, well, I met an American, he had 2 sons also, like, how old were they? And you can't have that confusion. So you prepare years in advance to take the right pictures at the springtime cherry blossoms. So when you meet a Russian 4 years later, you have a picture to show them. And I would never have a picture of my wife and one son if I had two sons, ever. So I have the right picture with the one son for one Russian, and then for the next Russian, it's the my wife and me and the other son. And for the third Russian, it's my wife and me and two sons. And no one gets to write up in the report my exact family definition because they don't know it.

That's—

how far is that in advanced planning? And it worked more than that because I ended up having 3 sons and then 2 daughters, and we did the whole thing every time. So I had 2 wallets in my back pockets, one on each side. Usually a man will have a thick wallet on one side, and his wife always complains about, "Your wallet's so fat." In half of it was a fold-over wallet, and half of each wallet was a different identity. It was me, Wayne Barnes. There was another one who I think was like William Arthur Brewster. There was another one who was Wayne T, you know, Burnside. And then there was another one with another name. So I had 3 different identities. So in each wallet there were 2 identities. So one day I'm walking down the Springfield Mall with my son, who was 3 years old at the time, and, uh, I happened to see Vladimir there with his son, was about the same age. Coincidence. I didn't want to bump into him, and I saw him, and at first I put myself in front of him so he would see us. And, oh, Wayne, Wayne, or John, John, you know.

So we say, let's go get some milkshakes. We sat down with milkshakes and we, we talked, and, uh, it was a surprise meeting, but I was going to pay for it. So I had to pick out the right wallet and the right identification and sign my right name on the credit card, not Wayne something but John something. And then put them back in my pocket. So I had 4 identities on me at all times in case I met someone by chance, and I did. Now that's an undercover operation.

Yeah, you have to live your cover in so many ways.

And it isn't like you're like in a drug case where you might be deep cover for, you know, weeks and months away from home. But when you are doing it, it is intense. So, you see.

Um, now let's get into when you were first approached about there being a mole in the FBI. It sounds like this was more on the tail end of your career, but they came to you for a very specific reason. Who were those people that came to you? What did they say? How did that transpire?

Why did they come for me again? Why did they come to me? Yeah, tough one. So in, so I'd worked, Like I said, 8 or 9 years in Romania and block countries, and then another 9 or 10 for Russians. And I was the undercover coordinator. When I first took the position, we had like, I think, 17 agents who had alias ID. So if you meet a source who's a lobbyist or something on a Thursday and he says, hey, Ivan's coming to my party on Saturday night, why don't you come and meet him? You have no ID. You can't do that as an FBI agent. So I wanted to get IDs for everybody I possibly could. So I arranged with the Virginia DMV at 7 o'clock. They opened up early one day, and I brought down 50 agents, got the pictures taken, the real identification, all to get false ID. And the same thing with credit cards. So I made it a mass thing so we'd have more people have the ability to do undercover, you know, activities. Um, So besides being the undercover coordinator, I had worked undercover against Romanians, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, and several Russians.

When I had come off of the courtship, my assistant special agent in charge said, we're looking for someone to work the night shift. It's a midnight to 8 AM shift. Guys hate it. You know, it's like you live the life of a bat. You know, you sleep in the daytime and you're out at night. And he said it's tough to have anybody do it consistently. So I said, you know, I have more experience in working undercover than most people could dream of having. I said, but there are things that are difficult to do. So what I want to write is a handbook, a manual about how to work counterintelligence undercover activities. Like, for instance, how do you pick a name, and how do you pick a house, and how to use a credit card? And if you pick a house, do you rent a house, do you lease a house? To borrow a friend's house for a night just to show you have a house. But there are a lot of questions that if you've done it, you can answer. But if you haven't done it, you know, don't try it by yourself. So over the next, you know, 6 months, I wrote a manual about undercover activities.

So at about the same point in '86, I became the security officer for the field office, which is another whole story. But you can't do that in Washington field office without yards and yards of experience with all the matters that you may have to deal with as a security officer. So in 1990, my daughter Natalia was born. She had spina bifida, and it was unexpected. And all the doctors— this is in Fairfax Hospital, now Inova— all the doctors who had skills, they said the best orthopedic surgeons in the world are in San Diego at Children's Hospital, which was interesting to know. And they said, you ought to get a transfer to San Diego. So it took a couple months, but I did get a transfer. We moved to San Diego. I thought that was my— the end of my counterintelligence career. You know, there's no embassies, there are no diplomats in San Diego. There's a lot of big military base, but you know, how many Russians were there? So I thought that was the end of that career. So I got there in 1990. I worked counterterrorism. I did backgrounds on federal judges. I was working healthcare fraud at the time in '98.

And Gene McClellan, a dear friend who I worked Russians with for years, He called me up on a Sunday and he said, uh, hey, Mike and Dave and I are coming out to see you on Tuesday. And Mike was Mike Rochford and Dave was Dave Greb, and they were senior people in the intelligence line at headquarters in Washington. And I thought, gee, like, to see me? I mean, everybody thought I was like a maverick. I needed a long leash. A supervisor once said, we have short leash agents and long leash agents. He said, you're a lot— you're pulling, tugging real hard at the end of a long leash every case you work. I call that walking up the stream, turning over all the rocks in the stream, trying to find new leads, new things to do, different. So like working undercover as a Panther, that's far and away a long leash thing. So I couldn't believe it, why they would come out to see me, why 3 of them would come, or why they couldn't talk on a secure phone, which we had. So I met him at the Bahia Hotel and we sat down and Mike was in charge and he got there right to business.

There's an infiltration of the U.S. intelligence community. We hope it's the CIA as opposed to the FBI, but likely the FBI. And, uh, he said there's a Russian who we know has seen in, uh, he has seen what we consider to be the traitor in the FBI, the traitor, the mole, and, uh That was through other sources. We had recruited some Russians and they knew this incident, this story. So unequivocally, they knew the guy was coming, had seen what we call the unsub, the unknown subject. So, uh, he was going to be coming in 2 months to a film festival in Santa Monica. It's the American Film Market, AFM. And so that gave us a lot of lead time, but we were able to find out the locations and travel of people who we suspected, the Bureau suspected, might know the identity of the mole in the FBI. And, uh, this was one— the first one is actually coming to the U.S. Others who they thought might know had been to places like Tokyo and London, and they tried to do various things there that weren't successful. But this was the first one coming to the U.S. So they sat around a table in Washington.

The guy was coming. Now it had the FBI's chance to have someone, you know, try to meet this guy. And, uh, It's really a mission impossible. I mean, it's just that simple. Uh, there were two superpowers. The Russians thought they were members of the best superpower, so why would a guy want to talk to American about this stuff? Tom Cruise's movies with Mission Impossible, he's jumping out of airplanes and motorcycles off the cliff, but they're all physical obstacles. This is a psychological issue. So, uh, and I saw that as a big barrier depending what the man's personality was, but I had never known or heard about him. So, uh, we had to get—

they—

the last thing they said was, we want you to go to the festival, you know, find him, meet him, befriend him, recruit him, and show him photos of a dozen senior agents we suspect might be moles in the FBI. They narrowed it down to a certain extent who they thought.

Because, I mean, I don't know if you knew this at the time, but if I remember from your book, there is a defector that showed them internal FBI memos that the Russians had that only could have come from a certain number of people in the organization.

Right, right. I mentioned that before, uh, the defector debriefings, they were written up in a form called a letterhead memorandum, LHM. The internal memos would have a memo at the top and would say from and to the special agent in charge of this office to this office, and would have other file numbers, other things on it. They were internal memos. They're not disseminated. The Bureau disseminates prosecutorial reports in the criminal field to the U.S. Attorney's Office and letterhead memorandums to all the agencies you've heard of, uh, in the counterintelligence field. But nobody gets a memo. So if someone had a memo, it came from the FBI. There were no memos in the State Department and CIA. Anyway, so let's say you have 6 or 7 documents. Let me preface that by saying almost every defector who came out, no matter what country they came from— and I debriefed Many, they would always say, oh, we have you guys penetrated. Like, they tell us during training that, you know, like, we have you guys. I mean, I've defected openly and they can't hurt me, but we know we have you guys penetrated. So when General Păcepa, the man in charge of Romanian intelligence, because I had to brief Romanians who had said the same thing, he came out and he said, nah, that's bullshit.

We just tell them that during training so they won't work for the FBI. Nice. So they really didn't have it. So here you had a Russian who, like all the others, said, ah, we have you penetrated, just like he learned in training. But in this situation, he had documents. So whoever the source was in U.S. intelligence, he didn't just want to say, we've got you penetrated. He got photocopies of documents that someone in U.S. intelligence had given to the Russians. He photocopied them, and there were— some of them were FBI memos. Which meant someone in the FBI was involved. So here's the theory. You have like, let's say, 6 documents, and you put a circle around this document, and you say, who saw that memo? And who saw this memo? And who saw this memo? And the theory is, if you manage to figure from the cases that were worked where the information was in it, at one point you would have an ellipsis in the middle where there's one person who saw all of them. But the problem was, you're sitting at your desk at headquarters, for instance, and you have an important memo on your desk or detail of some operation, and you go to the bathroom.

When you went back, you get some coffee, and the guy sitting at the desk beside you looks over and he sees it. He picks it up, goes to the photocopy machine, photocopies it, puts it back on your desk, and he goes back to his desk. His name isn't on any piece of paper, so it meant it expanded the number of people who could have been the bad guy by a lot. So it made it made it very difficult. So one of the reasons they came out to see me was I had left Washington in 1990, and they knew that the intelligence operation of the traitor was alive and well in 1992 and '93, but I wasn't there at the time. So I wasn't the bad guy. And this harkens back to the Kim Philby case with British intelligence, right?

Right.

It was the, uh, the 5 guys from, uh, Cambridge who were recruited by the Russians was, uh, very liberal socialist gay guys from Cambridge, Kim Philby and Anthony Blount, and there were a total, I think, of 5. They all had authoritative positions. He— well, Philby was in the military, I was in their intelligence service. Uh, one of them was the director of a museum, but they all knew influential people. They could all do informational things, and it was an extraordinary compromise of their intelligence service. So when they learned that Philby was the one who was in the military, was in the, in the, uh, intelligence service who was working for the Russians. They sent a cable to the US, to the British Embassy in Washington, DC. So I think 1950, '51, and they said, arrest Philby, he's the bad guy. As it turned out, Philby wasn't the one who decrypted that communication. And the next time that they saw him, he was walking down the streets in Moscow, living a life.

So they came to you because they knew emphatically that you could not be the mole in the FBI. You could not compromise the investigation.

Now, without letting my ego get in the way, I did have a lot of experience working undercover, but ultimately that was, that was to me the last, the last block to check with. And he's not the bad guy, you know. You don't, you don't want to send an FBI agent who is the bad guy to recruit a Russian to have him point out what should be your own picture. That would be a bad thing. Well, I mean, investigatively, that would be brutal.

That, that was a huge issue, as I will get to, I'm sure, in a bit, but The issue that this, uh, the position this mole had was he was supposed to catch spies himself, but he was the chief spy.

Yeah, he was, uh, well, so the, so the movie Breach came out in 2007, I think. Uh, Hanson was arrested on President's Day in 2001. My operation was 1998. And, uh, so, and I, we came out with an answer. What I was asked to do was to have Ivan point out a photo from the photo spread, and he did that. As you know from the book, what I just said was the most simple way of saying the most complicated operation that one could imagine.

Yeah.

And I don't want to have too much of a reveal for your viewers, but it didn't take the 8 days of the conference. It took much longer than that and was much more complicated. But all the tools in the toolbox were used on this one.

All of them.

Anything all the stuff I— we had learned, all the stuff I had made up, everything. So, uh, anyway, it was important that it wasn't me. So when the movie came out, 2007, Breach, uh, in the movie, Laura Linney playing the senior person over, uh, Eric O'Neill, his real name, which is, uh, he was flying Ryan Philippe in the movie, uh, he said, gee, you know, he had been placed in the office with Hansen just so we could monitor him, just so he would know, try to get his, his PDA and just see what he was doing, because they believed at that point that he was the one for sure. So when the movie came out and that thing came up where, uh, the clerk said to Laura Linney, I don't think he's a bad guy, he's, uh, he goes to mass every morning, you know, he does all these other things in the Bureau, like, what does he work for, the mafia? And she said, no, we paid a KGB guy $7 million for that information. And I sat there in the movie theater, I thought, I didn't give anybody any money. Like, how does that work?

There's a lot of reasons we could discuss now or later about what Russians will or will not take by way of financial aggrandizement if they're going to give away secrets which could change their lives. That's psychological and it's a little different part of the story. But so I went, I talked to my colleagues who were involved in the case. The problem was I retired in 2000, so I was out of the loop. I no longer had clearances, and no one was telling me what went on after I left. We know that Ivan pointed out a photo, and I don't know what they did with that because I don't have privy to that. I was, I was still in San Diego, and I had no, no connection. And because of the sensitivity of the case, only very few people in the Bureau and in the vertical administrative line above it, very, very few people So I did not know what happened at that point.

I'd like to take a bit to look at this, you know, kind of your part in the case, because I thought what made it such a great espionage story was that it required a lot of thinking on your feet, a lot of finesse. This was a very delicate thing, both in terms of the operational security around it and also handling these different personalities that you came in contact with? You were— and your role was also subtle. You weren't going right up to this guy and trying to pitch him, say, "Hey, I'm from the FBI, work with us." You had this whole game plan where you were kind of like setting the stage to warm things up, to ingratiate him to you. And ultimately, it wasn't going to be you making the pitch. I mean, if you could tell us a little bit about how that came about.

Well, earlier today, uh, picking a little out of school here, earlier today I was watching one of your earlier shows with Michelle, I think, Brigby, and she had been in the CIA in the, in the Middle East. And you said the phrase, uh, a cold bump. So that is if you find one of your targets at an embassy reception or someplace, you kind of just bump into them cold and you meet them. Okay, not knocking what you said or what may have happened to her, it is a term. But you can't do it and make an operation work, exactly what you had said. You can't do a cold bomb. There is such a thing, and it depends on your circumstances. But, you know, we have this expression, IDTSFAL, I do this shit for a living. People in the Bureau know what that is. So, and there's no one you can go to, like, for consoling or for assistance. Especially when I was by myself in San Diego. But there were a few factors which were very important, which begin the first few chapters of the book. Uh, we needed some help, uh, which people inadvertently would not have known that they could be the ones really helping us.

Uh, there was a fellow who was well known to the FBI who was Jack Platt, and he was in this FR— he was in the local office in Roslyn, Virginia, of the CIA. And, uh, he was— his, his His nickname, code name, was Cowboy, and he had a big Budweiser tumor out to about here, and he was a real jolly guy, and everybody loved him. He helped the Bureau with surveillance training. He did it for the CIA and for the FBI in various areas, and he was just well known. He was liked. And Gene McClellan, one of my colleagues who called me from Washington back in '98, they were very close because Gene was running what they called the Special Surveillance Group, SSG, Oh yeah, which is all the, all the people doing surveillance, which are really just like the Watch Service in London. And they've been doing this forever. I mean, they started it up, I think, in 1973 or so, and from there on they just became very good. And then the older they got, the more they blended in with every age and every style and every— everything. So several number of them were out at this, at the film festival in Santa Monica, uh, which I thought was a great part of the book because they never did know that we're trying to recruit a Russian who would point out a mole in the FBI.

Just another Russian surveillance. They had no idea what the goal was, and they never did until either the movie or until this came out, because it was so sensitive. So we needed help if possible. So Gene said, well, Jack's sister is a, uh, an Academy Award— Academy member and lives in Los Angeles. And the few things that would stand out in her background that you would appreciate Uh, she wrote the screenplay for Pretty Baby, and she personally discovered Brooke Shields to play the role of Pretty Baby. So she's a screenwriter. That's mostly what she, she loves and does. But she also did the Barbra Streisand movies. She did the set design. She was nominated for Academy Award for set design in one of those movies, the rom-com that Barbra Streisand had been in, those kind of things. Uh, so she was known in Hollywood. At one point, she married to Peter Bogdanovich, who was a well-known director producer of movies. And so she was a known quantity, but she had broken all the glass ceilings because she became a producer, director. She, she be— she was the, the epitome, and she was a tiny person.

So anyway, I— so Gene talked to Jack Blatt and said, you know, Wayne's working this case with this, you know, do you think your sister could help us? So he called her and, you know, would you help the FBI with something? And she had also no idea why. She knew there was a Russian involved, but ultimately no one could have even guessed what the reason was to beat the Russian. It was just another counterintelligence Cold War type case. So she said, I have to, have to meet him, who I'm going to work with, which is smart because she could be losing her whole career if someone knew what she was doing. So I drove from San Diego to, um, uh, Hollywood Burbank Airport and the Carsey Warner studio. And I met her there. Her, I guess, step— step-niece, stepdaughter, Kelly Wade, was there as her assistant. And, uh, she was about as tiny a person in height and in width as you could possibly imagine. She was the opposite. In fact, it looked like Jack could have eaten her and you would not have known it. He was just, just so tiny. Uh, but she was wonderful.

And I'm a fairly big guy at 6'1", 220. But, uh, we got along well, and she understood the seriousness of that I was approaching this and some of my past, so she was willing to pitch in. So that was something I needed. I was a tool, was a piece of the puzzle that I saw lining up. I also needed backstopping, and there was nowhere to go in the Bureau to find backstopping. So my old pal George Ramonas, he had been the legislative assistant for Senator Pete Domenici from New Mexico, who was on the Budget Committee when Reagan was president, and he was with the White House a lot. He knew a lot of Capitol Hill things, later became a lobbyist covering both sides of the aisle, but a dear friend. And he'd helped us when I was on courtship with various backstopping for cases that the Bureau just couldn't imagine how we would backstop certain things we were doing, and they didn't care. But we were successful with it, even though had they known, just like, uh, undercover Panthers, had Senator Church known we were going undercover in the Panthers, you would have gone crazy.

So that's— it's— you're working. I like to describe it as walking up a stream, splashing up a stream, and turning over all the rocks in the stream to try to make a case work. It's, it's that simple. Just up the stream is an investigative concept. So, um, I went back to George and I said, I have an operation coming up and it's meeting a Russian like we had before, but this has got to do with the movie industry. So he helped set up a backstopping, which would be I would be a previously a lobbyist in Washington, now a lawyer in San Diego. But in fact, I would represent Texas millionaires who would like to invest money in a movie which could possibly show in the theater down at the corner from where they live. And as they said, it's just as, just as much gambling as where you drill your next oil well or what the situation is with cattle next year. And that's where they made their millions. Uh, so we set up this ostensible thing, and George had been doing this with me for so long. He was just so, so good, uh, and helpful to the FBI.

So, uh, we set that up. But then I have to have business cards. And back then, unlike today where you can go online and get business cards the next day or print out your own business cards, back then you could not meet a Russian and pull out a napkin and write your phone number on the back of it. You got to be professional. So as soon as we could get the COVID I had a phone installed in my bedroom in San Diego. I had a fireplace and a marble hearth, and the phone was there that the Bureau installed, and the answering machine, message machine, the Bureau installed, and the sign on the phone that said to my children, "Don't ever touch this phone. This phone rings and they say, you know, Barnes residence, we're dead," you know. So I did everything except put a lock on it, but those are the kind of things that you have to take in consideration. The most wouldn't think about. If you have a phone in your house, who can answer it? Nobody. Let the message come in. So we set up that kind of backstopping. And I was going to go to the film festival on a given day to get there on the first day, but the business cards weren't ready.

They weren't finished. So I had to sit around and wait till the next afternoon until they finally arrived, because you had to have the perfect business card to make it look like you were what you said you were. And they, of course, give you 500 So I ended up handing, I think, 3 during the operation. So I still had 497 cards. And you just don't hand them out to people at a film festival, you know, 'cause when that phone rings, it's Ivan. Right.

I loved all the chicanery that you built around it, that you had, like, other FBI agents, like, in the crowd pitching you their ideas as if you're this big-shot financier, as Ivan comes walking by to sort of build up your legend. And then, and then you kind of concocted this situation where he saved you from falling into the pool, and, and that's your introduction.

Yeah, well, these are the kind of things that I'm sure someone could make up, but I couldn't make this up. And this happened just as, as told. The first one was I needed to have backstopping, and that came through Polly. I needed, uh, backstopping on a financial basis, and that came from George. But actually Uh, I needed to have something else. That's where the idea of the cold, the cold bump— I could not introduce myself to Ivan. I could not find him. I mean, we had been following the wrong person for a day and a half or so, and when we finally located him, uh, he was in the crowd and I was the other side of the crowd looking at all the other faces, and finally I saw him. And then we had surveillance where he was staying, who he was staying with, and what their circumstances. We needed all those things as soon as we could because someone's going to pitch this guy. Has to have the right moment, the right time. So the, the, the process was— I know psychologically, and this I'm sure this is in my undercover handbook, but if not, I can write more, another at any point— you don't want to meet someone where a person like that, the Russian, has not already seen you first.

I don't want to bump into him and have it look like a possible cold pitch, like a setup. And there's, I don't know, 2 or 3,000 people at this conference in the— it was then the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel, now I think it's condos, but a big beautiful atrium. And all the rooms have been converted to shooting movies and tables converted and all the beautiful women and all the wannabe directors and all those sort of things, just the circus you'd expect to have at a conference like this. So Uh, we set up some of the SSG, the surveillance people. Again, didn't know why, but I took him aside and one of the agents in the G, his handle was Crab, uh, another one's Hooker, and they're good friends from, from Washington, but they were out there. And, uh, I took him aside and I said, I need to have Ivan see me and I need to know surveillance on him as he's going through the crowd. And then I needed to set up 6 or 7 in a line and watch people pitching their movies. I mean, they're doing it all the tables. That's a, it's a thing.

That's what they do. Not just Los Angeles, but at the film festival itself. So I said, and then when I say so, when you give me the word, I want you guys to start pitching me. And I remember the first one, someone had the idea of having a, uh, after the TV show Friends, which was very popular then, but making it into a movie, a little different actors and whatever. And then it's, what is your pitch and how much money do you need? Those are the two ingredients. And that means you know what you're doing, right? So, uh, you remember from the book, people would come up to me and they'd lie to me right away about how much money they have or didn't have. Someone would say, I have $2 million, I need $4 million, so I only need $2 million more from you. And the next day I would come up behind him and turn him in and say, he doesn't have any money, he wants only $2 million, so he's trying to get it all from you. You know, lying and cheating and stealing. In fact, about the same time, the movie Argo came out.

Yeah, Argo with Ben Affleck, where he's rescuing I think, uh, Americans from the Canadian Embassy in Tehran. Yeah, yeah, I think that's what it was. It was just at the same time, essentially. And I'm watching Ben Affleck where he and the two guys in Hollywood— I forget the actors, uh, old, older time actors at that point— but they were Hollywood and they knew that people were lying to them and they were lying to other people. And it showed you like a greasy undercoating of Right. Boy, Hollywood's a really disgusting place. And I'm like, I'm right there now. I couldn't say to my wife, that's it, that's what I'm going all these days and nights, that's what it is. I couldn't say that. Boy, boy, was a close parallel. Anyway, so I had to have him see me first. So we set it up with the SSG and they got in line and they said okay. And I couldn't have a handy talkie, somebody else had it. I couldn't have any ears. Earplugs or Piggly Wiggly tails coming out of my ear. I could not be on their connection, their communication system. So they said, oh, he's coming, he's 20 feet away, and they started pitching.

And then as they started pitching, other people, part of the festival, they pitched as well. They got in line. So I had like 15 people in front of me instead of the 6 I started with. So we went on, did it, and then when I haven't gotten nearby and someone, one of my people, started saying something a little louder, a little more you know, to draw attention. And so Ivan Sapti turned around, he watched it. Of course, my deal is I cannot have eye contact with him. I cannot have him believe I ever saw him or know him at all. But he has to see me.

Right, right.

For what I am. And this is not— I mean, I have pride in what I do, but this is not an ego thing. This is acting. I have to have the play so he sees me and knows that I'm there already. I'm a person.

You're building his comfort level, right?

So the first time we meet, he has to know me at least that I'm there already. And it was successful. And then I told— I thanked the G's, I think everybody else. And, uh, the Hooker, he was, uh, one of the— he, he got his handle from, uh, General Hooker in the Civil War. He's a Civil War buff. He does the, uh, reenactment things. And he was in the Washington field office. But, uh, I said, I hope it's okay with the G's that, you know, we did this. And he said— I told him, he said he's my handle. But I was watching, it was— yeah, your training agent, and when you're in a senior office, will give you your handle. He'll figure who you— what you should be as your handle on the radio. And he decided I was Captain Cosmic. So I was either Captain Cosmic or just the Captain, and they all knew what that was. So he said— I told him, when you're dealing with Captain Cosmic, like, expect the unexpected, right? But that no one had done that before, that kind of an operation. So that worked. And then it came for Polly.

And I figured the Russian had no idea who Polly was, and he was traveling with an Armenian woman who was a producer in Armenia, in Yerevan, their capital. And that was a big step for them to come here. So I don't know— no, they wouldn't know who she was. But if you've been nominated for Academy Award, if you've done all things Polly did, you are Hollywood royalty, essentially. So, uh, I went out and got Polly. I said, like, it's time. And, uh, so we set up the same sort of a deal. Now, a couple of days before that, when I was trying to find— we're trying to identify Ivan in the, in the group of people, uh, Leah Thompson came in and she was interviewed at one of these tables where they had the bright lights and the cameras. And this is— someone's gonna be interviewed here, and this guy with a sharp blazer and too much makeup to be not on camera, and he interviewed Leah Thompson, right? And I saw Ivan there in the crowd looking at her, and she was known for being the, the mother and the girlfriend in Back to the Future.

And everybody there knew who she was, uh, but did he know who she was? And if he didn't know that, you know, he certainly wouldn't know Polly, but he might know the movies that she had done. But I had to make it so that she became a known quantity. So I said the same thing. I went out, got Polly, we came back. The, uh, the surveillance people, I said, we're following her. When she comes in, we get— we know where Ivan is exactly, by the front atrium. We had to either pay money or get a pass to get in. And as soon as I came in with Polly, somebody right beside Ivan, she said, "Look, it's Polly Platt!" And then 4 or 5 others said, "Oh yeah, Polly Platt!" And they started to follow her wherever she went. Because as she explained to me, the American film market is not a place where the more senior people in the movie industry would go. Right. It's a place where people come with their scripts, where they come with their movies, where they're from abroad and they want to have someone buy distribution rights for the movies they already have, what they call in the can, already made.

So it's not as much what Polly would come to. And as she explained, without being an egomaniacal person, she said, like, I'm elevating the whole thing here by coming to this because my kind of people don't come to this. So that's like, you know, that's the benefit from the FBI to the film festival, you know, have at it, that's good. So when we came through the door and the retinue started behind her, she was like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. All these people behind, and then others who knew who she was. But I said in the book, unless you knew her personally, you wouldn't have approached her. You wouldn't take your script and like throw it in her face and say, please read this. She was way above all that. In fact, she had business cards, but she never needed one. If you didn't know who Polly Platt was, you didn't need her business card. You wouldn't be seeing her at all. She was of consequence. So as we went through with the retinue, we knew where Ivan was. And we made sure that he saw not this, but as we went through. And then when he was going farther down the path, we made sure we stopped at certain spots, and he would catch up and see all the more people.

And then people she did know who were more senior, older people at the festival that she'd known from years and years in Hollywood, you know, 4 or 5 decades in Hollywood, you know, they would come over and hug her and talk for a minute. Very formal, but very, very, uh, my komode. What's that? My, uh, just friendly, just, just a good relationship with people that already knew her. But all these things stood out for Ivan, who watched whoever this lady was. And of course, I was the one there with her, you know, she was on my arm as we walked through the crowd. So we made sure he saw all of that. So not only did he have to see me in advance, I wanted him not to see who Polly was. I wanted him to know that Polly would— Polly is a thing, she's a person, she's a person of consequence. And he would have no idea that all this took place or why we were doing it. But eventually, when I wanted to have get close to him. She was my ticket to do that because he knew already she was a somebody.

And I think of him sitting back in his room thinking, boy, this is great. Like, this, this, uh, this guy, whatever my name was at the time, this guy, this guy doesn't know, but I know. I saw him before, and I saw this lady Polly, and I know she's a big thing. He doesn't know, but I know all about her. He could have been home and looked her up. You could Google her, you know, and that would have been important. But that all was that setup just to get to the moment so I could have Ivan be right where I needed him and able to do some manipulation. So yeah, that's complicated.

And I don't think we've said it explicitly, maybe, but I should point out Ivan's background. He is not some KGB colonel. He is actually a music journalist. He's a civilian, really.

Yeah, he was— that wasn't music, but film. He was not— yeah, film. Yeah, he did It was, he was a good writer and he did journalism things.

And so the reason why you guys were approaching him was because he had been in one room at one point in time, many years prior in a Soviet embassy and had seen an American come in and demand to talk to the KGB.

Exactly.

That's outstanding. Yeah.

Now we had, we had two Russians, specifically two Russian intelligence officers recruited, Valery Martinov and Sergei Motorin. And again, in the intelligence community, they did not know they were both recruited by the FBI, but they were. And they called them M&M, Motorin and Martinov. And one of them, when he was being debriefed, he told this story and he explained that it was because it was a buzz through the embassy because the a US intelligence guy walked into one of their establishment offices and he said what he said, which it could only be because he's doing spy things. I mean, he's not looking for a project for your kid who's in high school about maps of Russia. You know, it's not the same thing. But he was there when this took place, so he wouldn't have known his name, even though the bad guy never gave the Russians his name. But the fact that he saw that made him a target for us. And it was such a unique moment. The question is, if you met someone 15 years ago, would remember their face? Well, if you're in that situation and that office and someone comes in and has that conversation, you don't forget them.

Yeah.

I mean, that's just— that's— that's— and plus the fact that the buzz went around in the embassy, what happened? Uh, it was something to remember. So it would take having a conversation with him, taking his brain back, if you could convince him to do that. And that's, that's what the story is. But what I've said before, not to sound too long-winded, I realize we're— I'm long-winded at this point, I apologize.

No, it's great.

All of that, all of that was a necessary setup. And while this time it didn't require the pictures every year at springtime of how many children are by the red cherry blossoms, but that's the mentality to piece it together, how to make the case work so you will have all the ammunition you can possibly have. To make the cases work.

So you were really working to develop this sort of intelligence picture around Ivan and the entire setup. And I guess we should point out that a couple other FBI agents did cold pitch him and he basically told them to fuck off, it sounds like. And so you had to reassess the entire situation and like kind of start over again from the beginning, get him back to the United States and try this again. And the big epiphany, I think, that you had was you realized it's gotta be a woman that makes the pitch.

Yeah. I don't want you, I don't know how much you would like to reveal in case someone wants to buy the book and have any suspense.

Go over as much as you prefer.

Okay. Well, let me go back to something which you mentioned earlier.

Yeah.

Because you let, certainly sent the cat out of the bag. The moment of, With all that preparation, uh, it's redundant to say in advance, but all that advanced preparation, I still had a meeting. And the question is how to do that. I didn't— we didn't know anybody in common. He was with a lady from Armenia that spoke Armenian and Russian, so I— that was not the ticket in. And while there are other Russians at the film festival on their own accord, as from film studios in Moscow, they were not connected with him at all. In fact, they didn't even know him at that point. So how do you meet the man? How do you— how can you possibly do that? And boy, like they said in elementary school, put your thinking cap on. Like, it's got to happen somehow. So they— her name was Anahit, which is an Armenian name. But so— and the surveillance people kept calling her the girlfriend, but this was not a girlfriend. He's a traveling translator and he's writing articles about her, about the film festival. You know, he's very business-oriented in that regard. So they would go outside to the pool almost any moment where there wasn't some kind of a speech or something that they would be attending on a normal basis.

And they seem like they're out in the pool too much to me. But if you come, I guess, in February from Moscow, you'd like to sit outside at Santa Monica. By the pool with the sun beating down instead of where you came from, which is like -20 degrees in Moscow. So, uh, they would go to the same table, the same place every time, right at the edge of the pool. And this is where there's like 30, 40 tables. It's a beautiful blue pool. It's in the, in the, the right beside this enormously beautiful atrium, uh, building. And the ocean is right out there, and you can see it in the beach. And it's just an exceptional spot. And they're out there sitting by the pool, and to a certain extent they were talking, but as the surveillance people reported, they're just sitting there like, why are they here? And it was really for the woman so she could have— make contacts, maybe have someone get her connected to stuff in America. I didn't think that was going to happen, but at least that's what it seemed to be. So, um, I noticed that the, the edge of the pool, the cowling for the pool, was identical to what I had at my house in Solana Beach.

And just where it's a little up at the edge and it's like bricks, but it's rounded. And I had two daughters at the time who were like, I don't know, 6 and 7. And I would play act with them. I would come home from work and I would be still in my suit. I'd have a suit, a 9mm, 40 rounds of ammo, handcuffs, and a gun. And I would play by the pool as though I was falling in. I would do this, "Ahh!" sort of a thing. And they would always laugh. If I was doing that with either my regular clothes and no phones or but a bathing suit, I would fall in with a big splash and everybody would have a good time. Other than I would just pretend to fall in. And I had done this before. Had I not had those games with my daughters, this case would not have worked. This could not have happened. So they were at a table which is right by the edge of the pool, coincidentally. So I felt— I— so we're— they had been outside and I stood in a corner outside in the shade looking at the the sequence, at which point I recognized what was going on with the pool.

So they got up to get in line. The barbecue started and the smell of hamburgers and cheeseburgers, and it was just a great smell wafting through the air. And they got in line behind 20 or 30 people to get their stuff. You get a Styrofoam plate and you have a can of soda and a hot dog or a burger and a thing of potato chips, and you walk back to your table and you sit down. And so I got in line about 10 people behind them. And to get my, my burger and whatever. So when I got it, I, I locked my hand on it and with a Coke can over it and the, and the potato chips so nothing fell out. And I walked around to where I'd been before, and then I went toward where they were by the pool. And I'm weaving myself between these tables. They're, you know, round tables, 6 feet across, and, uh, place is fairly crowded. So I'm walking between Ivan's table and the pool And I'm balancing on the edge, I'm kind of teeter-tottering, and this is exactly what I'd done like the day before, 2 days before with my own daughters.

So I have my hand with the Styrofoam plate over the pool and my other hand is the left kind of balancing it, and I hit the cowling so I knew exactly where it was and had to play with it. And I went back and forth tottering and I did made the, oh, like I was about to fall in the pool. And all of a sudden, now he had a nice family, he had twin daughters. We knew he was a good father. I thought, this is the guy who'd save somebody if he could. He wouldn't push him in the pool like some of the KGB guys who were dogs would have done. This guy reached out, he grabbed my arm, and he pulled me away from it. Of course, I was pretty much on balance, but whatever. And he yanked me over, and I sat down at the table. And, uh, yeah, I was waiting for this. So I, I, you know, I was just so relieved I didn't fall in the pool. And it was like a heroic thing. People, all the tables around us, they're giving him applause. They're clapping for him. He saved this guy from falling in the pool.

They don't know this is part of an FBI operation, which is okay. So, uh, so like he pointed a chair and I sat down. And, uh, so I, I, I, I said, I, I want to thank you. He said, your name is, you know, and he said John. And, and I said Wayne. And I was Wayne for this occasion, right? And, uh, it came so quickly when I, I, what he said, and I said John Wayne, heard it say it out loud right away. And everybody nearby was still listening and watching because it was such an entertaining scene. But it ringing the name of the old Hollywood cowboy John Wayne. It was an amazing coincidence. Also, if his name was Ivan, that translated in English as John. Most languages have something like Ivan. In Romanian they have Ioan, or Ioan. And in English there's Ian, you know, Ian Fleming. But that is all Ivan. It's based on Ivan the Terrible, it's based upon John the Baptist, but all those have Ivan. So anyway, so he went by John. And I call him Ivan in the book for clarity's sake, but to have a Russian be, I would say, kind enough or good enough to make it easy for Americans to deal with him, instead of being called Ivan, if they could call him John, they would feel much closer to him right away.

Psychologically, that was good for him. So that worked. And I hadn't planned on that, but it work the way it did. So almost falling into the pool, you know, it made the next piece of the case fall together. And we sat down and talked for, you know, a long time. I learned about them, all the stuff we wanted to know, I learned about.

So eventually the meeting, the, the actual meeting that the FBI wanted to have with Ivan did, did occur, and he did point out to somebody. Um, do you want to kind of like tell us kind of like the, the follow-up, like what happened after your part of the operation?

Uh, you had mentioned something earlier about another couple of agents that made a cold pitch. I just, I wanted, I wanted to get back and address that just for a second.

Yeah.

Psychologically, if you want somebody to do an action that they might never do on their own or never want to do, especially someone has any level of moral principles. You can't pay them to do it. You can't pay them to subvert their principles. And everything showed me that he had high standards, raised nice daughters, and had a good marriage, and seemed like an honest and decent guy. And, uh, if, if you should have a suitcase which you say is like a million bucks, first it's very heavy. It's a heavy thing. I've been involved in a number of cases, both in the Bureau and after with other investigations. If you have a regular leather briefcase, it will only hold $250,000. If you have all money and $100 bills, that's all that fits in a suitcase, briefcase, $250,000. Someone says I have $1 million here, they're lying to you. Okay, it doesn't fit. If you say I got a million, you better have 4 briefcases. Bad guys don't know that. Bad guys are selling back stolen paintings, for instance, you know, they don't know that. So if you have a suitcase that has a million dollars in it, 4 suitcases, 4 briefcases worth, and you say to someone, you know, have knowledge I'd like to have and I'd like to give you a million dollars for it, that's called a cold pitch.

Cold pitch is an insult. You don't want to insult people. But picture it this way. If a Russian is offered, or anybody, but if Russian is offered a million dollars for certain information, First, it's insulting. You know, you don't know me. You don't know anything about me. You haven't, I would say, profiled him, but you don't know anything about me. And but worst of all is what's the downstream from that? Let's say the man says yes. He's in Santa Monica. He's on a visa to get here. You cannot take a suitcase with $1 million in it through customs and get back to Moscow. You can't put it in a bank here. You can't put it in a bank there. Right. You can't hide it under a rock. You have no friends here. You can't turn it into a cashier's check.

You—

there's nothing you can do with a million dollars in a suit case. It sounds good, but it's, it's simply impossible. Not possible. There was another example of why the cold pitch wouldn't necessarily work, and that's based upon an extraordinary case which I've mentioned in the book, but it's worth doing the vignette. There was a great supervisor whose name was Nick Walsh, and he was over the KGB, the GRU squad, the Soviet military intelligence. They were really hardliners. The KGB guys, some were soft, some were harder, but all the military guys were really hardliners. It was their job to be hardliners. I mean, they would meet people in the Pentagon, they would learn, want to learn stuff, but they were just hardline people. So we wanted to have an operation which Nick called Pitch a bum a month. We consider the military guys to be bums, like the bum on the street, but pitch a bum a month. So what happened was in January, we had sources of various individuals who knew the military people would have lunch with them. So on like, I think the third Thursday of the month, we made sure at least a couple of our sources were having lunch with some of the military people at just a restaurant out in DC.

And at one point, if the American drinks enough beer and has enough water and convinces the Russian to have as much, somebody has to go to the bathroom, someone has to pee. So you would wait until the Russian would get up to go to the men's room to relieve himself, and you take an FBI agent, looks like an FBI agent wearing a suit, he would go into the bathroom right after him, go to the urinal right beside him, there's only a little partition there, And he would start to pee. Russians there peeing. And he would say, hey, I'm an FBI agent. I have a lot of money to buy secrets. You know, can you sell me some secrets? And we'd have a briefcase or something. But he would do what we call hard pitch, which is not made to succeed, but it's made to be a hard pitch. Well, Russians could normally just look nonchalant about it, but the pitches were so hard. So like, you know, I can meet you tonight. I can give you this money. Like, your wife would really like it. And, you know, you can, you know, but I only want good secrets.

I mean, to the point that they have to report when they're pitched by the Americans. Have to run right— and what eventually a person like this would do is he'd go back out to the restaurant and not even talk to the guys having lunch with, right out the door in his car and right back to the embassy. And the guy had security and say, you know, the Americans just pitched me. So we did that once a month on a Thursday. And the next month we did the same thing with a different KGB, with different GRU officer. Next month, a different GRO officer, same deal, third Thursday of the month. And then in September, the ninth month, we didn't pitch anybody. But in October we did it again, and November we did it again, and December. So we made 11 pitches but nothing in September. So the man in charge of counterintelligence and security for the embassy, he gets these reports and he has 11 and no one came into him on the third Thursday of September to say, hey, the FBI pitched me today. So what's going through his mind— he's going to be a colonel in the KGB— what's going through his mind is, which of my officers is now working for the FBI that didn't report the pitch?

It will drive him nuts. Now, if one of them had said yes, we would have real quickly pitched somebody else. But the whole idea was to screw up the Russian system and the security people, to put a bee in their bonnet. And it was— it's a Cold War fun and games. But that's an operation. But it's based on the fact that if you pitch somebody cold for money, it will be rejected. The whole base of the operation was this doesn't work.

Yeah, it was harassment.

Yeah, right. So what happened in Santa Monica with two agents decent guys, they knew them well, but they were given this assignment to do a cold pitch with a suitcase full of money. And like, that was made to fail, but that was the effort. But then when that didn't work, and they tried twice, when that didn't work, then they did the fallback of, you know, the Wayne guy. So now instead of just being the undercover guy, now I was going to be the pitchman. So I didn't, I didn't make a lot of noise about it, but how could they think that would have worked with any Russian? So that's, that's more of intel knowledge and how a case works and what the psychology is for it.

I mean, those, those types of, those types of details were what made this book so amazing. And but let's kind of like finish up.

Thank you for that, by the way. Yeah, really appreciate it. Yeah, I'm glad.

Well, if you can kind of round out the Robert Hansen aspect of it, so Your, your part of the investigation resulted in Ivan pointing to this picture saying, this is the guy I saw come in. And then what have you learned since, you know, subsequent years, how the rest of the Hanson investigation panned out?

First, from the day I retired, which was the last day of 2000, December 31st, 2000, I wasn't class cleared for anything. I had no more clearances, and I wasn't given any information. But during the operation, I did learn that he pointed out a photo. That's unequivocal. That was the goal. All this enormously complicated, right, things took place, including getting him back to the U.S., which was an incredible story in itself. The whole point was, as, as Gene McClellan, whose handle is Red Pop— everybody knows him as that— is the head of the SSG, who was like the father of all the surveilling people. So Gene said that we were given an assignment and we did everything they asked us for: find Ivan, meet him, befriend him, recruit him, and show him photos and have him point out a photo. That was our endgame. Now, if the bad guy's pace wasn't there That wasn't on me. I believe that it was, but I don't have any idea because the photos— when they first met me in the hotel room in January in San Diego, they showed me the photos they had, like, did I know any of these people?

And they were the ones suspected of being the bad guy. There were some CIA, some FBI, but of a certain age because this stuff happened in the '80s and '90s, so they wouldn't be brand new people. Uh, I only knew one or two, and I told them the ones I knew, like, 'Is this guy a suspect?' But after that, at various times, the people who were suspected, some were removed because they were no longer suspected, and some were added to it as, 'Now this person's suspected.' So I don't know who the pictures were. I don't— other than one or two I knew before that, I didn't know who was added, who was subtracted, and I certainly did not know who the photo photos were of that Ivan had sitting in his lap at one point. So I was out of that. But I know that I was waiting for some headlines in the news from 2000, from the January 1st, 2001 on, waiting for somebody to say, "Hey, spy in the FBI." And it wasn't until President's Day 2001, which was January 18th, I guess, that it came out that Hanssen was arrested. Now, I had every reason to believe that I was involved with that.

And if I weren't involved with that, at the very least, I was a piece of the puzzle of what was an enormous case which had its tentacles all around the world. I know they were pitching people in places like Tokyo, places like London. I mean, I was involved in one, involved one in London, but there are other places in the world. But you have to understand, you can only make a cold pitch so many times before you realize this isn't working, right? A cold pitch is not, is not the answer. So having that kind of experience helped me to work the case also, like, this has to be soft. Really soft. Then psychologically, I have to, to, uh, uh, profile him. So that's where John Douglas came into it. He wasn't with us at the time, but he invented profiling. He started interviewing serial murderers in prison with something which is not a lead for the FBI in general, but he was in what they called Behavioral Sciences at the time. Now it's Behavioral Analysis Unit, BAU. Uh, and the, the TV show Criminal Minds was based upon what John Douglas and those people did.

I knew several of They'd help with other counterintelligence cases. But John did criminal things, but we weren't doing the same thing. But taking a hint from that, we were doing it in counterintelligence, assessing what is in a person's personality who's an embassy official who we could possibly recruit, way before the Ivan case. Also, what is it in the personality of a defense contractor who's an employee, maybe he's working for Boeing on the new B-2 bomber wing, and what would cause him to want to sell secrets to the Russians for money? That's a profile. So worked in counterintelligence on those two diametric oppositions, and essentially the answer was a crisis in their life. We had a diplomat whose child was born at 7 and a half months. By 8 months, a pregnant woman, wife of an embassy official, all the bloc countries and the Russians would have to be back in Moscow or back in their home country. So they weren't born in the U.S., even though with a diplomat father they wouldn't be called U.S. citizens But they didn't want him born here during the— anytime pregnancy had to end in Moscow or in Bucharest or whatever.

So one fellow's, his daughter, his son was born at 7 and a half months and the child needed heart surgery right away. And that particular Russian knew that if his child were taken back to Moscow, he would die for sure. They couldn't possibly do this. So we realized this, we learned what it was and we found exactly the situation. Doctors were very helpful. And we said, who is the best doctor in America to pull this off? And they said, this is very difficult, but there's a guy in the city. So we reached out to him, he flew in for us, and he did the surgery and the kid lived.

Wow.

Okay, so what— it's not leverage, but what does the Russian then think of America? Like, picture all the people from the World Cup soccer now, where the Scotsmen coming in and Norwegians, and they're rowing and they're cheering and they're taking over Boston. Everybody loves them. You know, that's, that's a, that's a fun fest. That's a celebration. What was in the Russian's head when he realized that only in America, you know, he doesn't have to have an allegiance to us, but that's the kind of thing that enables you to pitch somebody, right? Even soft pitch. You know, the surgeon can say, you know, when you're here next time, let me talk to you. And then you can have a person like me in the room say, this is a gentleman who was partly responsible for your son surviving today. I will tell you, he's in the FBI. He means no harm, but he's a friend of mine. That's—

yeah, that's counterintelligence.

Yeah, counterintelligence at its best. So anyway, so now get back to your, your question. I had no connection with it after I retired, but I did know that the photo had been pointed out. They're trying to find a way to, uh, zero in on the person whose face was pointed out. I did not know until much later that there was a fella whose name was Brian Kelly who was a senior CIA officer at Langley, that he had come under suspicion. I didn't know why. I wasn't part of that. And the books of various sorts hadn't come out at that point. So they said it was decided investigatively that he was the bad guy. He was the mole. He was in the CIA, but it didn't matter. He was, he was the mole. And I, to my friends, I said, "Can't be." I mean, it's just not the right pattern. Uh, when the KGB would do dead drop activities, that is, they have a person like in the 1980s, Johnny Walker worked for the Russians. He was a naval intelligence guy, and then he was, uh, had a PI business in Richmond or someplace in Virginia, and he was still getting secrets.

He had his son who was in the Navy and his daughter who was given, were giving secrets to him, or that was his plan, and he was selling them to the Russians. You know, that, that kind of a person, by hook or by crook, you know, they're stealing secrets and they're trying to get in there. How you find out who these people are, how you assess their personalities, who would be a thief, who would be a person giving away secrets, it's all part of that profiling deal. So the idea of having Brian Kelly be the bad guy took some investigation. And then it became much more open, and I learned that they had found a map in his sock drawer which they thought was a KGB map or GRU map, uh, about where the next drop site might be. And the problem was Brian lived in Great Falls, which is a good neighborhood north of— east of Langley by the, uh, the Potomac River. Nice neighborhood, but it's also where Soviets had done various dead drop activities, this non-personal communications, over years. But he lived in that area and he had the map which he said was his jogging trail, you know, which he would jog.

And the GRU maps, they looked very specifically in a certain way. Plus the Russians wrote— made the maps, not the Americans. And there was always an X mark where the spot was going to be, you know, from, uh, Harrison Ford and his Indiana Jones, X never marks the spot, you know. Well, it does mark the spot. That's— KGB maps have the X on them and that's where the drop's going to be. You go across a one-lane bridge make a hairpin turn, pull it to the side, 10 feet in there's a stump, put the rock right behind the stump that has the secrets in it. That's your X. Well, they didn't have any X's on these maps, and they weren't made by the Russians. But that was one thing that seemed like evidence against him. And I wish I had done the interview, but I wasn't— I wasn't around to do the interview. So they were zeroing in on somebody else. And at one point I learned that if Ivan had pointed out Brian Kelly, all would have been right with the world for the people doing the investigation, but they were on the wrong track, and he didn't point out Brian Kelly.

So at that point, they— I don't know whether they threw away the pictures or whatever happened to it, but I wasn't part of that situation. Even within the Bureau, it was still the most tightly held case in the Bureau. I mean, understanding the tightliness of the pace at this point, the Bureau had a computer system the Federal Information Management, FOIM, as they call it, and all documents went in on a digital basis. So if we had information about this case or mafia cases or any kind of case, you could search for the FBI computer, and he could search to see if there was a case mounted against him in the FBI computer. So I would meet him, like, for a meal, or with Polly, and I type it up at my hotel in Santa Monica that night. I print it out on the hotel printer and make sure that I ran some clean sheets through so my document was not left on the barrel, if you will, and then go to FedEx office and send it double-wrapped to Gene McClellan in Alexandria, Virginia, and he'd walk it in the next morning to, uh, to the office, and they all read it, but they never scanned them, never put them in the machine, because the bad guy could have found out whatever was taking place.

So I did a Freedom of Information Act request around 2013 when I started to write this book, and I gave them the code name I had, and I gave them the file numbers, which I still knew, and they came back a few months later like, no record, we don't have that. They never scanned these things in. So if I didn't write this book, this would be gone. Yeah, so I had it.

Maybe they're in a vault somewhere.

Yeah, I, I met, I met a fellow named Cliff Stahl in the early '90s at Quantico at a— I was teaching some classes at the FBI Academy in counterintelligence. That is, they flew me back from San Diego to talk. I'm happy that they did such a thing. But he was an astrophysicist at Berkeley, and he had discovered a case which— he wrote a book called The Cuckoo's Egg, and it was a bestseller at the time. And a few years before, doing extra money at the library at Berkeley, California, they gave him some accounts and they said, you know, figure these accounts and just figure where the numbers are. And he was an astrophysicist, he could do numbers and accounts. And he found one account that was 75 cents off. This is when you had telephones, you're putting in a receptacle and it's beeping and you're using computer time, that sort of a thing. That was from that time in the late '80s. Uh, and, uh, but it was 75 cents off. And he said, it can't be. They said, don't worry about it, it's only 75 cents. He said, no, it can't be 75 cents off.

I have to find out how that happened. So we traced back through it, and he found that it came from the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. And he found that someone had hacked into there, and it turned out to be two East German guys working for the KGB, hacked from East Germany into the U.S. military system, which is what the original internet was. And somehow when they put their stuff in with the time, it screwed up the numbers with how much money was being spent for time on the computer. That was the 75 cents.

Holy shit.

So he wrote his book, he wrote his book called The Cuckoo's Egg. That's Cliff Stoll, S-T-O-L-L. And he was, he became famous, but it was extraordinary. It was the first computer hacking book. First people really understood about computer hacking. So he was at Quantico, uh, also talking about his book and what happened with the class. To the class. So because he had clearances at that point, he was allowed to stay and hear some of my stories. So I told him, you know, stuff— I was undercover against the Hungarian, against the Czech intelligence guy. And he stopped me after class and he said, 'You have to write a book.' And like, I was two-thirds of the way through my career at this point. I said, like, 'The FBI just don't write books. It doesn't happen.' And he said, you don't understand. He said, if every 75 years the people from the past, whether they were cavemen or astronomers or Dark Ages people, didn't write down that they saw this flame in the sky, today we would not know that was Halley's Comet. And he said, it wouldn't be like they didn't write it down, it would be like it never happened.

He said, if you don't write this down, it won't be like you didn't work this case, it would be like this case never took place. Right. He said, the— and that, that wasn't this case, that was other earlier cases. He said, this is too good not to write down, he said, you have to. So that was the inspiration for it, so he's still an astrophysicist. When I was in the process of getting approval by the pre-publication review people, again, you might recall that I sent it to the manuscript in 2016, and they have 30 to 45 days to review a book, and usually they get back at that time, but 3 years later, 3 years later, they wrote back and said no. You're laughing with me, right? So, uh, I submitted it again with some revisions. I flew to Washington 3 times from Fort Lauderdale where I live and argued my case for all various reasons it should not have been classified. And finally, in the end of 2023, they approved it. So it took 7 years, 7 years to get through pre-publication review. I've had literary agents say, what took you so long? I said, well, hey, talk to those people.

I didn't do that. So that's how long it took to get the book reviewed. So that gives an example of why in the 1990s I had no reason to believe I could write a book or that it would ever be approved.

Right, right.

But I had the temerity, I had the temerity to write a book. But if you want to write a book about your big drug case in Detroit or a big kidnapping case in Tampa, have at it. It was never classified. It was briefly classified confidential while it was ongoing so the bad guys didn't know what was happening.

Right, right.

But this one was the most highly classified case in the Bureau. To get, to get to the squad, which was called Gray Suit— that was the undercover operation for the whole case, which turned out to be the Hanssen case— you had to go into the field office, and you went down a hallway, and there was a cipher lock, and you went through the cipher lock. 10 feet later, there's the next hallway with another door, and through that cipher lock, and in there is where Gray Suit worked. And there were a dozen, maximum 15 people, but I think a dozen or so people there. Every Friday afternoon, they were all polygraphed to make sure they hadn't given up conversation to anybody else. If they had, they would be banned from the squad, and also they would, you know, not be able to tell any secrets after that either. So it was the most tightly held case in all the FBI because it was penetration of the FBI. So that was tense. So when they came out to talk to me, I didn't realize all of that, how intense it was. But so all those things go around the case.

It isn't just catching the bad guys. It's like, Jesus. Yeah, yeah. The logistics were absolutely extraordinary. Again, so I'm a long leash agent and I'm happy they gave me the assignment.

I, uh, one more question. I was talking to a friend and he asked me, or he advised me, that I should try to get you to tell a story you had about Robert Redford.

Are you sure it was Robert Redford? Let's think.

I don't know, maybe, maybe it wasn't.

I don't know, some Hollywood person. Oh gosh, why, I can't think of it. Robert Redford. Oh yes, yes, I know who it was and what it was. Oh, okay, you led me astray there. I'm sorry to say. Sorry, you're my, you're my friend now, right? We can talk. All right. Gosh, why, you just pinged the right bell. So I have a dear friend for years and years, his name is Harry Gossett. And he was a criminal supervisor in the Washington field office, now of course long retired. And he did a lot of, uh, organization of undercover things in the criminal field, and I was doing the coordination of undercover counterintelligence. Like I said, two completely different spectrums. You're working on a bank robbery squad here, you're working Romanians over here, you guys never see each other unless you're having lunch together. I mean, never, no contact at all. It's like a different agency almost. But I had— Harry and I had befriended each other and we were good friends. And, uh, Harry was having a party at his house in Alexandria one night. He said, you ought to come to my party. So I came to his party, and among other 20 or 30 people there, his wife was an assistant U.S. attorney and she worked at Maine Justice.

Uh, she was really a phenomenal individual, passed away during the pandemic, but she was a great lady. So between the two of them, they knew people from far and wide, all sorts of individuals. So you wouldn't know who you would meet at Harry's party. It wasn't like the guys down the street having beer together. It was a much more, uh, cosmopolitan occasion. So at the party was this fellow named Grady, I think James Grady, and, uh, and I learned, uh, that he had been the one who wrote the book which became the movie 3 Days of the Condor, which is your Robert Redford connection. I've met him.

I've met that author. Yeah, yeah, good guy.

That's it. That's a small tale on the end of this. Well, I saw him somewhere connected with all of your, your page, which has voluminous information on it, but I saw him there, much older guy than what I had seen. So Grady was at the party, and, uh, in fact, he'd just written another book writing detective type stories, and the COVID was like a, a curb where there's an evening and it's a woman's red high-heeled shoe, and it's by itself on the curb, like a woman was running away and shoe fell off, you know, à la Cinderella or whatever. But that wasn't the COVID of the book. Harry had it on his fireplace, on a mantle, and I saw it and I thought, I gotta meet this guy. So Harry introduced us. So, uh, I had a conversation with him, and when he wrote 3 Days of the Condor, as he explained it, he didn't write that first. He was from Montana. I think he'd never been outside the border of Montana. You got to know how much cosmopolitan things there are in Montana. So he had never been outside of Montana. If maybe for a short trip, but he was born, raised, and lived there.

And he wanted to write a book, and he thought of something exciting he could write about. Obviously turned to the CIA. I don't know if there's anybody in CIA in Montana, but nevertheless, we wrote the book, which was 7 Days of the Condor. And it was the story of what happened each successive day. Robert Redford— I can't believe this, we pieced this together— Robert Redford at the same time was in Hollywood and he was looking for a script or a story that he could make in the movie where it would be very inexpensive to buy the rights to the book, to the book or wherever it came from. Usually it's book to screenplay and screenplay to movie. So he had stacks and stacks. When I was in Polly Platt's office, she had stacks and stacks and stacks of screenplays, scripts, each one 117 pages long, which I didn't know. But they're in piles, and I can picture what Redford had, the piles, but he had the book. So he read The 7 Days of the Condor, and he thought, gee, this would be really inexpensive to buy, and it looks like an exciting story. So he ended up, you know, buying the rights to it before Grade even knew it.

So they had the screenplay written, and they decided 7 days was too many days for a movie, so they did 3 Days of the Condor. So Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway were the lead characters in the book. And it was a very successful movie. The book then came out as 7 Days of Condor and it sold, but it was the movie which was successful. But here was the actual story. So I met Grady at Harry's party. And this is— it's after the movie by many years. And I said, do you have any idea what the effect was on the intelligence community? And like, his brain is not knocking him. I'm sure he's more cosmopolitan now, but his brain was still the Montana brain. And I said, you should know that you set the US intelligence community back at least 20 years, maybe 25 years, in the relationship with American citizens. Because every American now saw that movie, they think there's a special organization within the CIA that has the goal of both getting money for themselves and subverting US security. And you told them that this is what the CIA does. You've told them that it's a building that reads all the books that are published.

Try to find some conspiracy theory in there, and then they find one, and then people start dying, and CIA hit crew team comes in and kills everybody who's there. That's what people believe. The CIA is who set the U.S. intelligence behind 20, 25 years because of your book and your thing. He stood there like white-faced. So I said, I'll tell you one other thing. I said, a couple years after your book came out, There was a, uh, and the movie, and the movie of course came out. I said there was an Iranian, um, not a dissenter, dissenter, what do you call them, against the Iranian regime, right? So who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. And, uh, when we had them with Russian people, the Romanians and Czechs and Poles want to get their relatives out, they'll parade there in the embassy, make a lot of noise, they carry signs and that sort of thing. But this guy was one of those individuals, and he was from Iran, and he lived in Silver Spring. And one day he— and the Iranian government, just like the Russian government, they hate people like that in the U.S. because when you carry signs in their countries, it means a big thing.

It's like a demonstration. But out here, who cares? Guy's got a sign on Capitol Hill, you know, give him some money for lunch, you know. It's not the same thing in America, but there makes a big difference. So one day a guy as a mailman comes to his door, knocks on his door, and has a, you know, a letter you have to sign for. The guy opened the door and he took out his, his AK-47. He blew the guy— I think it was an Uzi— and he blew the guy away. And he killed this, this fella from Iran. And, uh, the story is that was exactly what happened in 3 Days of the Condor. But the mailman comes to the door where Faye Dunaway's living, and Robert Redford sees him. He looks down, he sees his shoes And they're not the shoes a mailman should be wearing. It's a different kind of boot, and he knows that. So he quick slams the door, then they have a fight, tussle, and Redford ends up killing the guy. The Iranian intelligence, the SAVAK, they took that directly from this man's movie in order to kill this guy, Silver Spring.

Again, his face went white like he had no idea. But so that's the results of seeing intelligence things which are either real or not real and having a bad action with it.

It's very odd to me, and this is like a whole podcast in of itself about how fictional works are made that claim to portray real events, but they're not. It's not really how espionage works. It's a work of fiction, but those works of fiction sometimes actually do inspire people in the real world.

And in a negative way.

And so they're mimicking the fiction. Thinking that it's the reality. I've heard stories even in the military, how foreign militaries will watch American action films to get tips for tactics, to learn how to clear rooms and things. It's like, no, Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie Commando is not a great mentor for doing that. So it's just very interesting and odd to me how the fiction is more real than reality at a certain point.

Well, we've learned certain things from TV and certain things that are clearly wrong.

Right.

I mean, there was a program in the FBI called the Development of Espionage and Counterintelligence Awareness, DECA. We would give DECA lectures about security matters to all defense contractors in whatever area you were in the country. I gave a few dozen myself at Langley, at military units, but defense contractors.. And invariably someone would say, what book should we read to understand more about intelligence and security? And someone would always ask about the Bourne Supremacy, the Bourne Conspiracy, you know, Jason Bourne. And I said, the difficulty is if you read a Robert Ludlum book, by the time you finish it, you'll have less knowledge of actual intelligence matters than before you started the book. So he was in the Pentagon, Ludlum, in his youth in military uniform, and he went into a room where there was a meeting he believed was part of And the colonel, whatever, is coming, he starts doing a briefing or talking, he looks around, he sees Ludlum, he says like, "Who are you?" And the guy says, he says, "You're not supposed to be here." So that was less than 15 minutes in an intelligence briefing. That was Ludlum's complete and utter only contact with U.S. intelligence.

Everything else was made up. Everything made up entirely. I mean, it drives my girlfriend, whose name is Cynthia, drives her nuts. We're watching TV, somebody happened to say, "They wouldn't do that." Just say stop that, because they wouldn't, especially intelligence things. Like, for instance, if you want to pitch a Russian who's got the most valuable piece of information the US wants to have— yeah, we want to know about the Soviet submarines and they're running this and that, but the penetration of the FBI— if you want to know that one piece of information and you say, hey, I know, let's take a suitcase full of money and make a cold pitch, that don't work. Like, ask me that question, you know. Pitch a bomb a month. How can you do that? You know, so even within the Bureau, they're asking things that they see on TV, which was, which was a horrible, horrible thing. So yeah, there's a lot of stuff on TV that's so not real, and it could be bothersome to people who don't know the actual story. I've been in a lot of writing courses and classes, and eventually someone will call me and they're writing a book, which is like a procedural cop thing, where they have never carried a badge, they've never carried a gun, but they want to have this thing with cops.

And they'll say, so how do you handcuff somebody? I'm supposed to tell them on the phone how to handcuff somebody so they can write it in the book. That's who's writing the books.

And well, your book is A Traitor in the FBI: The Hunt for a Russian Mole.

Look, I have this.

It's up. You can find it on Amazon right now, uh, the hard copy or the, uh, ebook. Wayne, thank you for doing this interview. Like I said, I love the book. I'll be recommending it to more people. Is there anything, any final words that you want to put out there before we go tonight?

I'm very glad to be— I'm very proud that we've met each other somehow, and it's very special. I was at the CrimeCon convention in the end of May, early April that Nancy Grace started 7 years ago. Like the Comic-Con, but it had 6,000 people there. And, uh, I ended up meeting her and she endorsed my book on, uh, Instagram. So if people read it, I'd like them to read it without saying, and this is the, this is the truth, this is it from my part of it. Whatever happened after my piece of the puzzle was over, and someone said, he pointed out a photo, and that's my, that's my, uh, pop the cork day for the champagne. As, as Gene McClellan has said, We did everything they asked us to do. If they didn't have the right picture there, not my fault, right? But what I would like to— and one of the objections that pre-publication review had was, as they said, this is hard to say, they interviewed Gene McClellan because he still had clearances. He was still doing background, and they didn't want to talk to someone who didn't still have clearances. This is now long after most people had retired, and they said, we don't want Wayne giving the KGB a manual about how the FBI catches spies.

And he said, this is how the— this isn't how the FBI catches spies, this is how Wayne catches spies. And that's one of the nicest things anybody ever said. So I— it is not to tell them, but it's to tell young agents and advanced agents, you know, these are the things you can do, and you just have to have a clear mind and see what the goal is. But, you know, long leash, have a long leash, splash up the stream, cover all the leads, It was a great career, as you can tell. I loved every minute of it. I'm sorry, I'm not— now I recover stolen impressionist paintings. I'm a signature expert for personality and forgeries nationwide. I— John Solomon from Justin News, he asked me to do Hunter Biden's signature on the receipt for the laptop in Delaware, and I did it, and it was in fact his signature. A few days later, 51 intelligence professionals came out and said it wasn't, but it was, and we all knew it. I did a paper on whether Trump had signed the page in Jeffrey Epstein's 50th anniversary birthday book. And in fact, it was his signature, but it was an appliqué applied to it.

He did not write that thing. So I do those kind of things as well. Now I testify a lot. So I had to reinvent myself. But the time it took to write the book was enormously long, as well as the 7-year wait to get it out in public. So I'm very active. As long as my ex-wife still has half of my FBI annuity, I will work every day. You're not laughing with me. I can tell you're not laughing with me.

Uh, no, it's, it's okay. Uh, I, I am also divorced. Um, what, where can people go to find you online?

Um, additionally, well, I, well, like they can do the, the book is available on Amazon, like you say, for ebook and, uh, uh, audiobook. Uh, Barnes Noble has it online as well. Target, Simon Schuster. Uh, my, my publisher is Republic Book Publishers. I think they went through Simon Schuster for the actual publication, but I have a website which is waynebarneswriting.com, waynebarneswriting.com. It has maybe 5 dozen essays about various things besides signatures, just other cases that I've involved. There's also a Barnes-Investigations, Barnes-Investigations, which has more cases, things I've written. Let me just— one last thing on writing. When you tell someone that you work for the federal government and you wrote a book, they pretty much think you've written the book like a police report, like a car the color blue. And I spent a lot of time in not just debriefing a record number of intelligence people, but writing it up. And if I write a 4-page memo, a letterhead memorandum, just like the Black Panther memo, if I write it for the KGB colonel and Romanian generals and Hungarian whatever, if I don't write it so by page 3, if I write it so by page 3 they're yawning, and they really aren't interested in page 4.

That's no good. So I started using adjectives and adverbs. And Truman Capote wrote the first book which we call narrative nonfiction. That was In Cold Blood. He went out to Kansas, he saw the family killed in the farmhouse, all the blood, and he wrote it like fiction but nonfiction. So that began that genre. This is narrative nonfiction. It happened, but it's written like it worked. So one day when I had sent one of these 4-page memos to headquarters, which was a good story from some defector, but completely a story completely within itself. Uh, I was crossing Pennsylvania Avenue, he was coming from the other side, and he stopped me in the median strip. He said, Wayne, Wayne, I have to talk to you, stop. Like, the cars are zipping by, what do you want? And he said, I read that memo. He mentioned the, the topic, and he said, I got to page 4 and I turned it over. He said, I wanted more pages. And that was the first moment I realized there may be something to this. Maybe I can write this to make it work. And that was the craft of writing.

So that's how it happened.

Well, we will have links down in the description for the viewers and listeners to find you, to find the book. And we really appreciate you joining us on the show tonight, Wayne, and telling us your story.

I thank you very much. I hope you smiled most of the time. I certainly did, but I'm glad to tell it. You know, there's more. I'll be glad to come back. But the point is, If this book has any level of success, I have other books that I've written. Oh, I have a saga, a saga about the FBI from the beginning of, uh, the, the— well, my part of it from '71 on to the '90s, the FBI's role during the Cold War and how we helped the Berlin Wall come down. Oh, I'd love to read it longer, but it has too many words to be a first, a first book. Like Ken Follett would write, uh, Pillars— he wrote, uh, Eye of the Needle and various spy books, and he said, I want to write a different book, and they said, no, no, no, you've got a great A great way you're writing, we've got one, make a lot of money. He said, I won't write another book until you publish this book I want to write now. And his publisher and his literary agent said, what's it about? And he said, well, it's about building a cathedral in southern England in the year 1265.

And they said, no way. So he wrote it and they published it. It was Pillars of the Earth. It sold more books than all of his other books combined. Then there was movies, 3-part series on Netflix. It was phenomenal, but he couldn't get that published because it was too long. So my other book, which is called The Dance Before the Wall, Interplay of Intelligence Actions on Our Side of the Berlin Wall. It is, it's the best. I like it more than this, but it is the story of the FBI and the Cold War. But it was far too long for a first book, so this is the book.

But when you, when you're ready to get it out there, um, shoot me an email, please.

All right, thank you very much for this. I really, really appreciate it. Yeah, it's been very, very wonderful.

Yeah, thank you, Wynn, and thank you everyone who joined us tonight. We will see you guys again next week. Hey guys, I want to take a moment to tell you about the TeamHouse Podcast newsletter. If you go and subscribe, it's totally free. And what it will do is aggregate all of our data, all of our content that we put out, uh, the things that are on the TeamHouse, on our geopolitics podcast Eyes On, uh, things that I write journalistically with Sean Naylor on The High Side, anything else that we have going on, books we recommend, upcoming guests that we have coming on the show, and also, you know, filtering in some fun stuff in there as well. If you go and check it out, we send it out just once a week. We don't want to spam you guys. It's just a kind of roll-up of all of our content on a weekly basis. You can find our newsletter at teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join. Again, the website for that is teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join. Uh, so we hope to see you there. The link will be down in the description.