Security Unfiltered
Security Unfiltered
Inside the Mind of a CIA Agent: Nuclear Threats and Intelligence Operations
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How's it going, jim? It's been probably a year at this point. I mean, I think at this point you come on once a year, you know, and it's been too long since we last talked.
Speaker 2:I was trying to remember Joe. I think this is my third time, although it may have been fourth. Time flies so quickly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe, honestly, it might be your fourth. I mean I think I had you on where we talked about your background and everything, and then the next time we were talking about your books, right, and you know you just had your third book published. Congrats on that. I mean, again, you know I'm not a big physical book reader and I'm not a big you know fiction reader, right, and I mean it reads so easy. I'm very impressed with how you write it, with how you construct it, especially with it being such complex topics of espionage, right.
Speaker 2:Well, you're very kind, joe. Thank you, I enjoy writing it. I can't run CIA operations anymore, but I can fictionalize and live through my characters, and that's what I enjoy a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no, I could definitely tell that and I feel like, just from talking with you and hearing other interviews and whatnot, I feel like, you know, just from talking with you and hearing other interviews and whatnot, I feel like there's several different characters in the world that you've created, right, that kind of resemble different aspects of what a successful, you know, case officer might be, that you've experienced firsthand in your own career. Right, and you know it's an interesting way to talk about those topics, right, Because you can't talk about all the stuff that you did, right, you can only really talk about like one you know event, one monumental event in the world that took place. But it's interesting to like hear it. Like hear the book, you know, read the book, right, and envision it like oh, you know, we talked about how he would go on runs, right, we talked about your runs.
Speaker 1:And then in your book, you know, one of the main characters is going on daily runs, right, which you know it provides a whole lot of different facets. Maybe I'm reverse engineering it too much, you know, just from my technical mindset, right, but just thinking of the counterintelligence division of the FBI views this run completely differently from how this. You know this completely, you know American, you know fully, fully loyal to their country, is taking their runs Right. They're taking their runs as like almost a mental check in Right. Less about actually, you know, doing anything harmful to the country, or even developing an asset, so to speak.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, well, I mean they say, write what you know. And I've been a runner for about over 49 years and so a lot of my characters, not surprisingly, are runners, and I think each one of the characters. In my three books there's at least one character who's a runner. And I'm not running at the moment, I'm just power walking and I miss the running terribly, except in the ungodly heat we're having here in Northern Virginia. I don't miss that. But it's true, being a runner, a long-distance runner, which I started way back in 1975, it has certainly been a big part of my life. I used to consider my various CIA operations when I was running. I occasionally would attract what I would call a't really put much time into running lately, you know and my excuse is having two little kids and getting my PhD right.
Speaker 1:So I don't really make excuses, but that's my light attempt at an excuse, right, so I can't really find the time right now. But you know, I ran cross country, I ran track and then I ran all the way through college and beyond, not for a college team, but just in college, right. And whenever I go on really long runs I find it so mentally beneficial, you know, far beyond the physical benefits, right, of your health and whatnot, but I feel like I always refer to it as working out the demons, right, because for me, for my brain, for me, to go on a really long run we're talking 15, 18 miles, something like that right, I have to keep my brain completely occupied the entire time. 100% of the time has to be occupied, otherwise I start talking myself out of running.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, because I hate it. You're right. No, it's a great time for reflection, for meditation. In my case, the last few years I've used it to construct dialogue for my characters in my novels, and whenever I come back home, I always quickly scribble down my thoughts lest I forget them. They slip through that all too porous sieve of my brain, and so I use it for all kinds of things. Nowadays, as I said, I'm more into power walking. By that I mean trying to do like a 16 or 17 or an 18 minute mile, which requires a lot of focus to walk that quickly. And so and especially if you're in a hilly area like I am in McLean Virginia it can be challenging, but I get out, I do it. It's really healthy for you, both physically and psychologically, and I still get not quite the runner's high that I did, those mental endorphins. I do still feel good about myself and I come back and I want to write down what I've been thinking about. So I know exactly what you're talking about, joe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's the endorphins part, that running that runner's high is addictive. I remember when I was training for the marathon. There are specific days of the week that you take off and on those off days I would be sore but I would be so frustrated that I couldn't go out running or shouldn't go out running, and I was thinking to myself like I I actually hate this thing, but I'm sad that I can't do it. So how much do I actually hate it?
Speaker 2:I have that feeling and on the days when I couldn't run I'd be in a depressed mood, snappish, and you know that kind of. Usually I would do my running early in the morning when I don't obstruct anybody, don't take up anybody else's time, besides the fact that it would be cool and dark and felt good just to go out and do that. But yeah, a lot of my characters are that same philosophy, not surprisingly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you know, I got to ask you, okay. So in your book, right, this counterintelligence team, you know, identifies your main character as being a potential mole right in the agency, and I don't want to give away too much, but it's also very like hinted, you know, in your first paragraph of your first chapter and whatnot in your experience, can you talk to how that is really, you know, managed or mitigated? Because I'm thinking about it from an operational perspective. Right, where you're somewhere, you're in another country, right, you have an operation that you're running, you're trying to, you know, gain targets or assets for a certain goal that you're trying to fit, all while being investigated by this counterintelligence team. You know, great professionals, very well skilled and everything. And I'm trying to think through, because the actions that you would take to gain that asset, to gain that resource, would probably look very suspicious to a counterintelligence team.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And so how do you? It's just what James Jesus Angleton, the CIA chief of counterintelligence, called the wilderness of mirrors. It was, you know, I mean, what they're looking for. What the counterintelligence team is looking for, especially the counter espionage CI team is looking for is a spy, just like the type of people I recruited, and looking for what would be the motivations for somebody to be a mole? And, as I've told you on previous programs, there's all kinds of reasons for espionage. The most salient one typically is revenge or ego. And so they're looking for why would this person commit espionage? And it's the same thing that I would look for in my targets, because I'm trying to convince them to become moles in their government. So it really is like that endless wilderness of mirrors where you're looking to try and cause something and other people are looking at you trying to decide are you the person who's leaking? Are you the person who is revealing who our assets on the other side are?
Speaker 2:And I was in my book, in my new book, the Traitor's Tale At the acknowledgments, I talk about the fact that I was betrayed by a friend of mine named Ed Howard, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1985. Ed and I had been friends, we had dined in each other's homes several times I was jealous of the fact that he was selected by our then called Soviet European division so that he could have a tour in Moscow. One of the most difficult places to operate in the world is right in Moscow, under the nose of the then KGB. And I was jealous of the fact that they selected Ed out of our training facility at the farm to go to this elite first tour of Moscow and they gave him Russian language training at Georgetown University. At the same time. I was getting consular training from the Foreign Service Institute and I was I was more than a little jealous of Ed getting this plum assignment. And then I was shocked.
Speaker 2:About two years later I came home from a trip. I was in Bern, switzerland. I came home from a trip and my wife Ellen said you know, ed Howard called today and he asked for you and you weren't here. So we chatted for a while and she said that he quit the agency and is now working for the New Mexico State Legislature. And I thought, why would he do that? Well, what I didn't know was that Ed had all kinds of suitability issues. He had drinking problems, substance abuse problems and he also had anger management problems, including one egregious incident on an aircraft on a commercial aircraft where a woman who was seated next to him, who had a small baby, and that baby was being very, you know, baby-like, crying and stuff, I know you know that with two small children Well, she gets up from her seat and goes to the bathroom with the infant, leaves her purse there and Ed is so angered he rifles her purse and steals $20. I mean, we're talking about a guy who's got some real issues.
Speaker 2:So the agency fired him. Basically they fired him. They found him a job with the New Mexico State Legislature, but that wasn't obviously suitable for Ed. He was so upset he ended up volunteering to the Russians and in doing so he betrayed one of our most valuable assets, the one that David Hoffman in the Billion Dollar Spy wrote about, alfred Tolkachev. Tolkachev had revealed all of the Soviet avionics designs, things like that. It was calculated that it would have cost the Department of Defense, our Pentagon, over a billion dollars to develop these same things that Tolkachev gave us. Well, ed betrayed him. Tolkachev was shot and also he betrayed everybody he knew, including myself.
Speaker 2:I was going to go to another post in Scandinavia and we always do a counterintelligence write-up where headquarters does a description of what your cover exposures have been. You know who knows that you in fact are CIA. Well, so I got a copy of the cable, the write-up that they were sending to my new post, and they send a courtesy copy to you at the old post. And my copy read simply betrayed by the traitor Ed Howard. I went whoa, and sure enough, ed had told the KGB who I was, because I could never get any of the KGB officers out one-on-one with me because their counterintelligence chief said stay away from Jim Lawler, he's nothing but trouble. And he was right. I wouldn't be nothing, I would be nothing but trouble. But it's a terrible feeling to have, you know, a guy who I thought was my pal, my buddy, and he basically stabbed me in the back and said yeah, jim Lawler, he's a CIA officer you better stay away from him.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I couldn't even imagine the betrayal that goes into that. I mean, you know you're putting your life on the line every time you go out of the country. You know, I mean probably even technically, if you're in the country, right, like you could be a target of something right, a foreign, foreign adversary, and you're risking everything going over there Maybe it's even a benign trip, right, and a colleague is going to betray you like that, knowing full well that your life is on the line. I mean that's really hard to compute for me.
Speaker 2:I know, but the feeling was it really was like a cold knife in the back. And then years later in fact it was only about, I guess, about eight or nine years ago well, after my retirement, I decided with my wife that we would take a Baltic cruise. We would visit Sweden, we'd visit Finland and we'd call in the former Baltic republics and in St Petersburg, russia. Well, I still have a clearance. And my headquarters said no, you're not going to Russia. So we docked in St Petersburg and I stayed on the ship for three days while my wife went ashore. You know, it was a Viking cruise or something like that.
Speaker 2:But I stayed on the ship and then, more recently, about, oh, and I guess it was in January or February, I had a visit from three not three, but two female FBI agents who came to my house and they said Mr Mr Lawler, we want to give you an advisory that you should not travel to Russia, china, cuba or North Korea because of the operations you were involved in. And I thought, well, okay, none of those are on my bucket list, fortunately, so I don't have any plan to go there, but you've got to watch where you travel, because I'm well known to some very hostile services.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is. You know it's interesting, right. So I've never done anything, you know, as awesome as you have, obviously, I mean I just have a podcast, right. But you know I was talking to a vice admiral of the Navy one time and my traffic in China and Russia and you know all of those allies, right, our enemies over there all just black holed my traffic after Russia invaded Ukraine, you know, in 2021 or two at this point, and the traffic completely dropped off.
Speaker 1:I love to travel, I love to see the history, I love to, you know, get my feet on the ground and see the culture and experience it. You know I liked it puts me out of my comfort zone. I really love that, you know, because it kind of adds like a it's like a nervous energy perspective of it. Where you're in a foreign land, you don't know the language that they speak there, necessarily you have to work your way through it, right, and you know you're learning all the way along the way. So it really like intrigues me to do things like that.
Speaker 1:And you know I was talking to this vice admiral and I mentioned, you know I'd really love to go to China someday and see the Great Wall of China and just see everything. And he told me you know, maybe you should hold off on going. And if you do go, you know, just expect you're going to be monitored the entire time, from the time you get off that plane until the time you leave. There's going to be someone watching you very physically, like they will be there the entire time. And I thought to myself like man, I just have a podcast. You know, all I talked about was, you know, I was calling Russia out in the in the beginning, when they amassed a whole bunch of tanks and, you know soldiers on the border of Ukraine. And then, when they finally invaded, the only thing that I said was one I called it three months ago and two, you know they're not going to stop until they get all of Ukraine right. And that it was wrong. And you know, immediately, blackholed by traffic, immediately saw a decrease in a useful idiot.
Speaker 2:That would you know basically parrot the Beijing line or the Moscow line or whatever. These people do it again, either wittingly or unwittingly, and maybe they get paid sometimes to praise Xi Jinping or praise Vladimir Putin, and so you know a podcaster absolutely just the same as being a journalist. They have journalists on their payroll. I'm sure they have certain podcasters on their payroll. So you would be maybe not for harassment although possibly but more as a target for possible target for recruitment. I mean, it would be a nice recruitment target for them. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess I never really thought about it like that from a disinformation perspective, right. And I'm sure it becomes more tempting for them the bigger the platform gets you know and something. So I've actually watched, you know, the UFC, right, since since it came out, I mean late 90s, right. And so Joe Rogan I don't know the guy, obviously, but I know of him and whatnot, and he was talking at one point in time on his podcast about how he doesn't go overseas for the UFC. He's the most famous UFC commentator, his voice is synonymous with the UFC. He's commentating his knowledge. Really everything about the UFC goes hand in hand with Joe Rogan and vice versa.
Speaker 1:And he was talking about how he absolutely refuses to go overseas because not only does it mess up his schedule but he has to bring enhanced protection with him. That isn't cheap. He's not flying commercial, he's flying private, you know, and he has to do all these other things and you know the security doesn't want him to go anywhere outside of the hotel or the stadium. That he's announcing it, right. And to him he said that takes, you know, the fun out of it going to a new place, seeing new cultures and everything but the security risk around him, I guess, of becoming that disinformation. You know, podcast right is too great for his security team to allow it right. And it's a frustrating situation because, again, I watch all of the pay-per-views and so I want to see, I want to hear. You know Joe Rogan out there every time and you know he can't do it because he doesn't go overseas like that.
Speaker 2:Well, I also wondered if you know my three novels are very well. I mean, I'll be quite honest, they're very pro CIA, very pro FBI and very pro America and I take no. You know, I criticize Russia, china, cuba, north Korea in these novels and so I've not made some friends, I'm sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean. It's interesting, I guess, how the team that came over that you just mentioned, they said don't go to North Korea. My immediate thought is well, who vacations in North Korea? Very few. Like, how do you even book a flight to North Korea, you know?
Speaker 2:Well, that's a good question. I think you go through China. Is there one way to get there? Maybe through Moscow, I don't know, but you can't do it through South Korea. I know I have no desire. I mean, really the only one I would kind of like to go to and I've been only once is to China to see the Great Wall, like you said, or see the various things. China's a big country. I actually did go on a liaison visit there back in the year 2007, so 18 years ago, and that was an official liaison visit, and so we were received, of course, quite graciously, but going as a single person, they were saying you better not do that. So I thought, okay, fine, I've got a lot of other places I'd like to see in the world.
Speaker 1:So there's really two more main questions that I have from reading your third book here, and I don't want to rush the conversation or anything like that. Right, we got some really great topics that we're going to dive into right after this, that we're going to dive into right after this. But when you're labeled a traitor and maybe you've witnessed it from colleagues or something like that, but it hasn't been proven out, right You're kind of labeled as that because this counterintelligence team goes and meets with you and they interview you and whatever else they might do, it leaves a stink on you, right with your colleagues. What is that like, from your third-party knowledge, of course, and is there even a possibility of erasing that at some point in time? I mean, what is that even like?
Speaker 2:Well, one of our CIA officers in fact I loosely patterned my character after him. His name was Brian Kelly, and Brian Kelly, for at least a year and a half, maybe two years, was in fact suspected of being a mole, a Russian mole, and it turned out he wasn't. He was ultimately exonerated and the real mole was the FBI agent, robert Hanson, and they happened to live fairly close together. They happened to have virtually the same access. There were other things that caused the FBI to suspect that it was the CIA officer, brian Kelly, and not one of their own, robert Hansen. In fact, it was a bit of arrogance on the FBI's part to think that it couldn't be an FBI guy, it had to be a CIA guy. I mean, this was after Aldrich Ames, and so it was proven that CIA had some problem children. Jim Nicholson was another one, and so they did not think that it was. They thought it was really Brian Kelly.
Speaker 2:Well, it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was Robert Hanson, and but poor Brian Kelly he had been, as you said, got the stink on him like the scarlet T. Instead of the scarlet letter of A for adultery, he had the scarlet T for traitor on him and so people were avoiding him. He went into kind of a purgatory. The agency tried to, you know, exonerate him, to rehabilitate him. They gave him a medal and everything else, but the poor guy was so crushed that ultimately he died prematurely.
Speaker 2:He was just how would you like your friends thinking that you're a spy? And so I patterned my character after him a little bit. After poor Brian Kelly, and the feelings that would go through your head is good, friends of yours would start looking the other way. They wouldn't want to talk to you, they wouldn't want to have lunch with you in case that taint of espionage was to rub off on them. And you start thinking, well, who are my real friends and who aren't? And in my novel, my character, the people that are close to him. They stick with him, they know that he's not the spy. And so you find out who your real friends are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and for and for the counterintel team. You know they have to understand that there's a great risk that if they're wrong and they go down that path, you could push someone that had no intention of ever becoming a mole to become a mole.
Speaker 2:And that's exactly what happens in my book. We won't go into it. Yeah. He ultimately decides OK, to hell with them. Well actually he's talked into it. I don't want to ruin the premise, but he actually becomes right, probably from like a reverse engineering perspective right.
Speaker 1:How do they? I mean, I guess if I word the question like that, you won't be able to tell me. But how in the world do you manage multiple covers like that? The reason why I ask is because I'm thinking from a cover officer perspective overall. Just you doing your job duties, right, whatever that entails. I envision it as that's taking up 100% of my brain power, right? And now I have to add on another layer of another cover for an intelligence service, right? How does that balance out? How does that work out?
Speaker 2:Well, it's a bit like method acting you put yourself in the mind of if I'm supposed to be an international attorney I mean, I actually do have a legal background then that's what I today I'm an international attorney. Or if I'm an oil and gas trader another cover I used at one point vis-a-vis a certain target then I happen to know a lot about oil and gas trading and come from the state of Texas and I'd taken courses in oil and gas law, so I put my mind in okay, today this is what my cover is. But the interesting thing is is I rarely, if ever, had anybody probe my cover, because typically people aren't interested in you. They're interested in talking about themselves, and so in that respect, I shared that interest. I wanted them to talk about themselves and we didn't have to talk about me and I, you know I would be able to steer the conversation back around to their favorite subject, which was themselves. So you know the cover it had to be good, but it didn't have to be so airtight.
Speaker 2:Now, what makes it difficult today is all of the internet profiles and LinkedIn and Facebook and things like that, and if you're not on LinkedIn or Facebook, people look at you and think well, why not? Why would an international attorney not be on one of these social media outlets? And so, if you are, you've got to have maybe you have to have a phony account. If they've got facial recognition software, which is quite common with AI these days, they're going to find out. You know, this guy's name isn't Jack Mitchell, it's Jim Lawler. Look at this. So in today's social media area, it's really difficult in our digital world to carry this off. So the solution such as it is, in my opinion, the best counterintelligence solution, is one that the Israeli Mossad uses and that's called swiftness. You get in, you do it and you get out, and you don't linger and let people think, hmm, let me look up Joe South and see who he really is and who his friends are, and things like that. You use it, maybe briefly, and then you get out of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, for something like that there's no other way of doing it. You know you don't want to tempt fate at that point, right, like you're already doing enough, right?
Speaker 2:right. You know every time you do something operational, there's another thing you're having to think about, and so you want to keep it as simple and as quick as possible and get them to focus on the subject you're talking about and not on you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good transition into the conflict that we're experiencing right now, with Iran and Israel and America bombing Iran over the weekend here. Give me your take on it, right, because I was so I was watching some videos earlier, right, where the defense secretary was talking to reporters and I mean he got very visibly frustrated. That, you know, all the media outlets are talking about is how they missed, how there wasn't nuclear material there in those compounds. You know they're talking about it from a perspective of like if they knew, you know if they were like on the ground, or something you know just based on like a very preliminary intelligence report that came out. That's what it sounds like to me.
Speaker 2:Well, I told somebody who wanted to interview me. I said they wanted to show me satellite photography of Fordow and Natanz and Isfahan, and I made it very plain that I am not a photo interpreter. We have imagery analysts that are skilled at doing that. I mean, my reaction would be oh gosh, that is a big hole in the ground. That doesn't mean anything. What I you know where my expertise is is. I know what goes into a centrifuge enrichment program and it's very complex. And centrifuges, these ultra-centrifuges themselves are very delicate instruments. And so those bombs at Fordow and Natanz and Isfahan, I mean, if they damaged those centrifuges, which I think they did, I think that's probably a good thing. I really I'm not trying to say that I am a supporter one way or another of what folks did, but I'll state it quite frankly Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. It's just stop, full stop. That's the end of the game right there. And so if we can prevent that, if we can delay it you know that was my specialty was detecting a program, penetrating the program, denigrating the program, disrupting it and trying to stop it. You know, my team had that luck in Libya and we've had some marginal previous experience vis-a-vis Iran, and so we need to do. We as Americans, we as Westerners, we as people with the same minds, need to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon. And I think that the bombing was necessary. And you know most in Tehran. I don't like these people, but they're not stupid and they know that Israel has an estimated maybe 150 weapons, maybe nuclear weapons. Why would the Iranians launch a nuclear attack on Tehran knowing that their country was going to be basically obliterated, the entire country? No, what really concerns me about an Iranian nuclear weapon is what I call a nuclear infection or a nuclear pandemic in the Middle East. Suddenly, the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Turks, the Egyptians, everybody in that region would decide well, if the Iranians have a nuclear weapon, we've got to have one too. And that means the chances of a nuclear exchange, either intentional or accidental, goes up logarithmically. It becomes almost a certainty that someone or ones is going to have a nuclear exchange and that is going to be absolutely catastrophic for the entire world. Catastrophic, you know, in death, astrophic, in radiation exposure, catastrophic economically, no telling what that would set off as a chain reaction. Is somebody else thinking my gosh, who is that? You know? And they set off more nuclear weapons.
Speaker 2:I am not in favor of total nuclear disarmament because I don't think we could ever trust the Russians or the Chinese or other adversaries to completely disarm. But I abhor nuclear weapons and I have devoted most of my career, two-thirds of my CIA career, to stopping their proliferation. It's an uphill battle, I'll be honest, but it's also a righteous battle. It's very righteous that we stop countries such as Iran from having a nuclear weapon. And you say, well then, what's the end of it? I say I don't know what the end of it is, but I do know some other countries that had a nuclear weapons program and they disarmed, and that includes Libya, that includes South Africa. They had six nuclear weapons and they declared them to the International Atomic Energy Agency and had them dismantled. And Argentina had a nascent program. Those three countries regime changes and so suddenly you know, we don't worry about them anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I, you know, I completely agree with you that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. Right? I mean, like it's for me the discussion stops when they say death to America. Right, Like, right there. It's. Like okay, man, like you're taking it so far, right there, because now I'm a hundred percent confident that if you ever were to get your hands on one, that you would find a way to use it against us and trigger a situation that we don't need. Like, who benefits from a nuclear war? Really Nobody.
Speaker 2:Nobody. It's that concept that Herman Kahn had in the 50s and 60s MAD, m-a-d. Mutually Assured Destruction. Only an insane person, a lunatic, would launch a nuclear war. There could be misread signals.
Speaker 2:The Russians, at one time the Soviets, had something called the Dead Hand System a great book by David Hoffman called the Dead Hand where it was a semi-automated system where if it detected incoming US ICBMs, it would, without a human intervention, would automatically launch a counter-strike of Soviet missiles at the US. Now just think about the hair-trigger danger that would present. It could be a flock of something and they would think it might be incoming US ICBMs and without a human intervention, they would automatically launch weapons. Well, we found out about it and there was a strongly worded exchange between the White House and the Kremlin, and the Kremlin dismantled that system. And I have the same fear that if we start using AI to automatically launch nuclear weapons without human intervention, we're running a very, very dangerous tightrope there. It would be terrible. You need somebody to finally say no, wait a moment. I don't think that's. We're not reading this right. Why would they launch a single missile or even a dozen missiles at us? No, you need humans in the equation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I had someone on yesterday actually and it wasn't live. I'm kind of frustrated with myself that it wasn't live because I forgot to click the button, but I started talking about the genie being out of the bottle with AI, right, and how we're accelerating at such a speed, just in the public eye, right in the public eye, when you start thinking about what the government may have, what DARPA may have, that you know no one's talking about yet, right, it's astronomical the difference that it could be. It's astronomical the difference that it could be. And the reason why I'm saying that is because when you start mixing AI with quantum computing, right, it really unlocks the world, it unlocks everything. There's actually no limit to what it could do.
Speaker 1:And we're in this weird space where, you know, we're not just in like a quantum AI race, but I would venture to say that there's probably something like the Manhattan Project. You know we're not just in like a quantum AI race, but I would venture to say that there's probably something like the Manhattan Project, you know, like it was for the nuclear bomb, there's probably Manhattan Projects and the world's superpowers, you know, developing this technology to develop the strongest AI, to develop the best quantum computer right and to make it all usable and tie it all together. Because if you have that, there's no encryption that you can't break, there's no intercept that you can't, you know, have right Like they're doing it all.
Speaker 2:And I've got that theme in my novel as well, the. You know, if somebody were able to achieve cryptographically relevant quantum computing, that's what they call it Cryptographically relevant, meaning you could break within a matter of hours or minutes. You could break whatever encryption that the adversary has, which means that basically everything you own, you know, you're totally naked, everything no more sensitive, all your sensitive communications are revealed and things. And even Vladimir Putin must've been about seven, eight years ago. He said he who controls AI will control the world. Well, he's right. Yeah, I wouldn't agree with Putin on much, but that one I would agree. And it's scary coming from the Kremlin.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if anyone could actually control AI. You know, if we're talking about AI at its, you know most mature, you know state, I don't know if anyone could really control it. You know this is a part of you know, what I was discussing with the other person was we always hear, oh, it's five years, 10 years away, right, I mean, I've been hearing about it since I was a kid, right In the 90s. You know, oh, over 10 years away from you know AI and this augmented reality world and whatnot. Well, you know, when you really figure out quantum computing and you combine that with an AI, what are we minutes away if we're not already there? I mean, who's to say that we're not already there? Because if you look at different sources, right, you start seeing, oh well, ai could generate that video, ai could fly a plane like that. You know, like these are not things that are completely out of the realm of possibility anymore.
Speaker 2:Actually, they're totally feasible. In fact, I probably am not talking to the real Joe South, but to a computer image, and the real Joe South is sitting back sipping a margarita somewhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah Right, it's a weird world that we're going into.
Speaker 2:I think what was it? Kurzweil who called it a singularity that we were going to go through and that the world will be totally different on the other side of that singularity, and I think there's a lot of truth to that. Yeah, I am not a specialist in AI, but this generative AI, meaning something that's almost sentient, that could think like a human being, that's okay. There's going to be pluses to this too AI in the field of developing new life-saving pharmaceuticals, ai in a lot of things making life easier Absolutely. But the downside is there's a lot of dangers in this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and it's hard to even try to say the pros outweigh the cons of it or vice versa. It's really hard because we're going into a place that we've never been before, you know. I mean, like that's like trying to weigh the pros and cons of developing a nuclear weapon. And during World War Two, you know, I mean they were in a situation where it's like, hey, the Nazis probably have this program too, they're probably working towards something like this. If we don't develop it and use it before they do, they will absolutely use it, and that's going to cause a whole other cascading effect of things. And so you're kind of in a situation where you have to regardless of if you want to, you have to develop it.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, in the matter of the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan, it was horrible. It killed 140,000 people in Hiroshima and I think 70,000 or 80,000 in Nagasaki and I sympathize with that loss of life. But it was also calculated that probably close to a million Japanese would have died if we had invaded the mainland main islands and maybe several hundred thousand American GIs and Marines would have been killed. My father had just finished up his tour as a B-24 co-pilot in Europe and after the victory in Europe in May he was being trained in B-29s to be a bomber pilot over Japan. There's a good chance had we not dropped those bombs, that my dad would have been killed and I wouldn't exist. So I've got a very personal viewpoint on the fact that we use those A-bombs. As terrible as they were, I think it was the right decision to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, for sure, it's just a, you know, I bring it up right Because it highlights the complexity of the situation. I feel like people that aren't necessarily in the world that you came from or in my world that's dealing with this stuff and actually researching these advanced technologies. We're playing with fire. A lot of people don't realize that, don't realize that they're just thinking, oh, I can accomplish this and I don't have to, you know work at nine to five anymore, right, or whatever it might be.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, there will be some really big benefits to using AI properly. Again, if AI develops cures for certain types of cancers and things, there are going to be a lot of happy people with that, and some of my physician friends have said that. On treatment things, that AI could look through all the medical literature and come out with maybe some really excellent treatments for people or, like I said, formulation of pharmaceuticals and things, and there's other ways that AI could be developing more efficient cars, more efficient airplanes it's absolutely. But it is a double-edged sword. It could also be pretty bad, especially in the hands of either a hostile country or AI itself. It could decide, you know, we don't need humans.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's very true. So to circle back to you know what happened over the weekend, right? How does an operation like that even begin in such a hostile country? And I'm not asking you, obviously, you know this right, I don't want any tradecraft or anything like that, but just you, using your knowledge, saying you know how would you even begin to approach that? Because I'm thinking about it from an outsider, where that's a completely hostile country. I don't fit in. They would like rule me out right away. Right? How do you even get the knowledge to say these three sites are where this nuclear material might be, maybe at different phases? It seems like an impossible task.
Speaker 2:Israel's intelligence service, mossad, and I've worked with Mossad before on certain joint operations and shared things with them and they've shared with us. They have an incredible focus as well they should have on Iran. It's an existential focus, meaning this could absolutely threaten the state of Israel's existence. So they have an extensive network of covert assets inside Iran. It's obvious the way they were able to pinpoint what all of these nuclear sites have, the way they were able to pinpoint what all of these nuclear sites have, the way they were able to pinpoint the military leadership, the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps where these people live. They were able to pinpoint the homes of some of the top Iranian nuclear scientists and for killing, for assassination, and actually of all the things that have happened in the last week or two the bombing and everything.
Speaker 2:Sure, that's something, but frankly, my own opinion is, taking out some of those top nuclear scientists has got to be one of the most effective choke points on the Iranian program. Easy, people like you or me, joe, we couldn't go. I mean, we could have all the equipment there, and do you think we could do it? No, I don't think so. Uh, you need skilled technicians and skilled scientists. Somebody had said well, you know, if you don't have eggs, you know the, the material, you don't have the omelet. And I said the most important thing is not having the chef that knows how to do it, and so they you know. But with the, with the uh israelis taking, taking out these nuclear scientists, that puts a big choke point on the program, chokehold on the program. I mean, how many PhD nuclear scientists would want to go into that program knowing that you're a target and can be reached inside your home in Iran? So this is going to discourage people from either joining the program or it might encourage people who give us knowledge Because, as I've said in some of your earlier programs, joe, you don't recruit happy people. You recruit people under stress and their stress has to be sky high at the moment.
Speaker 2:I think I'd rather talk to Mossad or CIA than risk my life doing this, but they have an extensive ground network there. Now there probably were some Mossad operatives on the ground as well, but it's more likely that they had networks of assets, their agents on the ground, iranians working in place, probably working at Fordow, working at Natanz and working, working at Isfahan. That could say here's the precise location you need to hit and this is what's going on in there, and it's the same way that they could then measure the damage afterwards. Now I know there's a lot of controversy at the moment. The DIA report came out a day or two ago about they think it was minimal damage, I think, and I just read a statement by a very, very renowned expert, david Albright. He's one of the foremost American experts on nonproliferation and he said in his opinion they have destroyed the centrifuge enrichment program because these instruments are so delicate. They're so you know the way you balance them, the way you do everything else to them.
Speaker 2:And then one of the key factors was they totally obliterated the uranium conversion facility. Now what that is is that's where you take the yellow cake uranium. You convert it into uranium tetrafluoride UF4, and then uranium hexafluoride UF6, which is a gas, and it's that gas feedstock that you feed into the centrifuges. Well, if you don't have the feedstock, you don't have any enrichment, you don't have any material to enrich.
Speaker 2:So you know, the one concern I do have is there is about 900 pounds of 60% highly enriched uranium that they had produced. I don't know where that is. That's probably enough for about 10 to 12 weapons. It's not really at weapons grade but at 60, it doesn't take much to get up to the mid 80s or whatever, to what we would consider weapons grade. In fact, most of the work I think 98 to 99% of the separative work separating the uranium 235 isotope from the heavier non-fissile isotopes of U-238, most of that work has already been done. So going from 60 to, say, mid-80s, to high 80s to 90%, it wouldn't take much in the way of plumbing and re-sending that gas through the centrifuge cascades.
Speaker 1:So if we know where that is, then I'm sure that you know Mossad is, I'm sure, trying to find out where it is so they can destroy that. But I share David Albright's assessment that the Iranian centrifuge use their brain. I guess, right, just thinking about it, even just from the blast, let's say, somehow the bunker buster doesn't get all the way down into there for some unforeseen reason, right, I mean, there was two of them, so you'd have to get lucky twice to miss that kind of precision.
Speaker 2:I think they dropped 14 bombs, so seven B-2s each dropped two bunker busters. So essentially, I mean I assume what they did and again, I'm not a munitions expert, but you probably would drop one, let it go down below, and then the second one would go even deeper. You know, because you've created a hole, a big hole, and if you do that enough, you're going to work a lot of damage on those things. I mean collapsing those tunnels, collapsing the adits, shaking up everything. I mean, yeah, they could dig it out, but how would you? Let me ask you this how would you like to be the Iranian running the bulldozer and looking over your shoulder wondering when something Israeli jet is going to kill you? You know, trying to dig out that stuff, because I guarantee you the Israelis are looking at that just like frogs look at June bugs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no, that's a great point where I was really trying to say like, even if it didn't reach, you know, that underground facility, the sensitivity of the enrichment process would still, no matter what, be damaged, you know, to an unrepairable state. Like you have to start over at certain key critical points in the enrichment process, and so, at a minimum, it delayed their nuclear enrichment program overall, you know, I mean like there's a reason why, you know, 24 hours later, Iran immediately agreed to a ceasefire.
Speaker 2:Well, my preliminary assessment and this is again rough, rough estimate I'm not a nuclear scientist but looking at the reports of everything that was damaged, I would say this has set them back two to three years, and that's assuming that nothing else is done. But if they try and reconstitute the program, I guarantee you that the CIA and Mossad will be on top of them and we will continue to take kinetic action, as we call it. Kinetic action, in addition to subtle sabotage things that I was a specialist in and sabotaging A lot of the equipment that they use. They have to import from abroad. It's not domestically made, so if it was destroyed you've really damaged that.
Speaker 2:The centrifuges themselves are very delicate instruments. They have to spin at 60,000 RPM or more. They have to be perfectly balanced or they crash. They have to be in a vibration-free environment, again, because it's spinning at such a high speed. That's why they call it an ultra centrifuge. It's literally 60, sometimes 60,000 RPM, separating the heavier isotopes, which are not in the bomb, from the lighter isotope and then pumping that gas, enriching it gradually through the cascade. But it's you know, the other things that are hard to get certain flow meters and certain pumps and certain converters, frequency converters. Frequency converters, all of this stuff. They don't produce a lot of that stuff in Iran itself, and so they're going to be having to go back out on the black market and look for this stuff and they're going to try, you know, if they have another hidden location which is like my book Living Lies. Suppose that they had another hidden location. It wouldn't surprise me if they do, but it's going to be a very difficult road to reconstruct all that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so one final question. We're unfortunately at the top of our time here, but you know there was a report out that, oh, there's a whole bunch of trucks out there and I know you're not an image specialist or anything like that, right but what is the process like to stop an enrichment process at some phase? I mean, I don't know what phase they would have been in. Obviously there's probably a handful of people that would have known the rough phase that they were in. What would be the process to even move that material? Because now the argument you know that other news outlets are putting out are oh, there was a whole bunch of trucks lined up outside of this facility for two days beforehand. You know they probably moved it. There was probably nothing in those facilities at that time. What I'm saying to myself, I don't know, because that sounds like a very complex, risky maneuver to move it in the middle of enrichment, right, like you probably risk losing a good amount of that material if you were to move it.
Speaker 2:Well, they probably were moving it inside of what we call a US six cylinder I mean, it was a, you know and so these are very heavy cylinders that they, if they, in fact moved and put them on those trucks.
Speaker 2:But again, my solution to a lot of these challenges is always the human equation. Think of all those truck drivers who aren't paid very much. And now you know, maybe you've got 20 truck drivers and each one of them knows where that UF6 went, and they decide you know, I bet you, the Israelis or the Americans, would love to know that, and maybe we already do know it, maybe we're just waiting to hit that. So, and even if, even if that's all true, even if they got all of the highly enriched, so, and even if that's all true, even if they got all of the highly enriched the 60% highly enriched uranium out, still by working a total collapse on the centrifuge facilities itself, it means you know they're frozen at that amount and then we just need to look for that amount and destroy that. So I don't think this was a failure at all. I think it was pretty much of a success.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I definitely agree as well. Well, you know, jim, I really appreciate you coming on. You know, it's always. It's always a joy. You know, having you on it's a fascinating conversation. I mean, I feel like I could talk to you for another three, four hours. You know it's, it's been a great time.
Speaker 2:Well, joe, I always enjoy coming on your program. You're always a most gracious host with excellent questions and understanding of my sometimes less than brilliant response. So you know it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:You're performing a very valuable service for the American people goal, right, I just want to put out valuable content to people that can use it and hopefully benefit themselves. Well, you know, jim, you know. Before we end, right, how about you tell my audience where they could find you if they wanted to connect with you and reach out, and where they could find your books? I'll leave all the links in the description of this episode.
Speaker 2:It's easy. My books all three books are on Amazon or from my publisher. Book Baby that's Living Lies is the first one, in the Twinkling of an Eye is the second one and my third one, the Traitor's Tale and my author's website. I believe I've got that on Amazon. If not, I'll have Joe post my author's website, which tells a little bit more about me and each of my books has links to my books and to a lot of my podcasts, including several with Joe. I'll have Joe make sure that he posts those links to the author's website.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, thanks, Jim, I really appreciate you coming on and I hope everyone watching or listening to this episode. I hope you guys really enjoyed it. Thanks everyone, Thank you.
