- Hey, humans.
How's it going? Susan Ruth here.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of Hey Human Podcast.
This is episode 400, and my guest is Brian Fairchild.
Brian is a retired CIA agent
who held top secret clearance from the
Department of Defense.
He's a counter-terrorism expert.
And during the decade, immediately following the nine 11
attacks, Brian trained over 10,000 F-B-I-C-I-A
and military personnel, as well as state
and local police intelligence officers.
He served in Kabul, Afghanistan,
where he mentored Afghan National Police
Intelligence officers.
He's also the author of the Spy Thriller, the Hidden.
We talked about dysfunction in the intelligence agencies,
how to recruit spies, thoughts on China and more.
It was really interesting.
I'm so thrilled to have had a chance to talk with him.
I'm always incredibly curious about the lives
of people in this line of work,
so I'm really excited for this episode.
Check out hey human podcast.com for links.
And to learn more about my guests in the show,
check out Susan ruth.com.
To learn more about me
and my other artistic endeavors, follow Susan Ruth
and hey, human podcast on social media.
Find my albums on Spotify, apple Music, Amazon music,
or wherever you get your music.
Write, review, and subscribe to.
Hey, human podcast on iTunes
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Thank you for listening. Be well, be kind, be love.
And here we go.
Ryan Fairchild, welcome to Hey, human.
- Thank you very much. It's, it's a pleasure to be here
and an honor to meet you.
- It's great to meet you as well.
I'm so glad you could be on the show.
Your life story is intriguing and fascinating
and an adventure and everything in between.
So I'm really excited to, to jump in,
but I like to start these conversations by finding out
what shaped the person I'm speaking with, and especially
because of your choice of career paths.
- Yeah. Well, I, you know, uh, the origin story,
the CIA origin story is that when I was 13 years old,
I was living in, uh, in Mesa, Arizona,
and it's hot in Mesa, Arizona, desert,
saguaro cacti everywhere, you know, that kind of thing.
So I'm a kid. I'm growing up in the desert, and, you know,
and I read a book and I, I, I wanna make this point
because to all your listeners, especially any kids
who are listening, you know, read as much as you can
because when you read, you get, you know, it,
it incites your, your imagination.
It gives you the ability to write and so forth and so on.
But it takes you anywhere. You can go anywhere if you read.
So, when I was 13, sitting in Maca, Arizona,
I read Jack London's Call of The Wild, you know,
and Jack London's Call
of the Wild is a story about a kid up in the Klondike
and his, his, uh, mush dog buck and their adventures.
You can imagine me sitting there in the desert reading about
the Clon Dyke and Pine Forest and snow and mush dogs,
and, you know, all the exciting things that were going on,
you know, with, with these, this guy and his dog.
And so, at that particular point in time, I was, I was sold.
I was like, I'm not gonna stay here in Arizona.
I'm gonna go for a life of adventure.
I'm gonna find buck somewhere, you know, in my own buck.
And, and go that way.
Shortly thereafter, we moved to, uh, Boulder, Colorado,
and in Boulder, Colorado, I was, I turned 14.
I went to the movies. I went
to see the very first James Bond movie was Sean Connery.
It was from Russia With Love.
I gotta tell you, Susan, right there, ,
I was, I was hooked.
I mean, that just completely captured my imagination.
It was filmed in Instanbul, Turkey.
Foreign languages were being spoken, you know,
accents were being used, different costumes, you know,
characters had different costumes.
And then of course, the James Bond figure, you know, I mean,
Sean Connery was doing all kinds of cool things like,
you know, checking for bugs in his, in, you know,
listening devices in his room.
And, and he and his liaison guy from the Turkish service
went down into the, the, the bowels of Istanbul
and these underground passages.
And they had like a, a, a submarine periscope
that would come up into, you know, the Soviet Embassy
so they could spy on the Soviets
through this periscope and stuff.
And of course, he got the girl, you know, I mean, that,
that was a big deal too.
So at 14 years old, I decided that's what I want to do,
you know, I want to be one of those spy guys.
And so, as soon as the movie was over,
and this was a long time ago, this was long before computers
and iPhones or anything like that.
So as soon as the movie was over, I've made a beeline
to the Boulder Public Library, put on my most innocent face,
and went up to the librarian
and said, you know, miss Librarian,
could you please help me find stuff about the CIA?
And she was all for it.
She's got periodicals and lined them up
and showed me the, the, the articles and the periodicals
and, and whatever books they had.
Of course, there were no books for 14-year-old wannabes,
you know, wannabe s spies, as it was.
It was all pretty much serious, uh, you know, adult stuff.
But I read all that stuff, and I went into those books,
and I searched page to, to, you know, page by page
to find someone that represent, you know, resembled
Sean Connery's oh oh seven.
I, I couldn't do it, you know, I mean, I couldn't find it,
so I figured I gotta know, you know, I mean,
I gotta figure this out.
So, so what I did is I went
to the Yellow Pages back then we had Yellow Pages, ,
and you'd find federal listings and things.
And I found the, and I was living in Boulder, Colorado.
So I found the, the federal listing in Denver
for the Central Intelligence Agency, a post office box.
And, you know, I sat down with a, a, a pencil
and some lined notebook paper,
and I wrote, I printed, actually, I printed a letter
to the CIA, and I can't remember exactly what I said,
but I said something like, dear CIA,
I'm a 14-year-old student at Centennial Junior High School
in Boulder, Colorado, and I've decided I wanna be a spy.
You know, how do I do that sincerely, Brian Fairchild
and I got a stamp from my mom, put it on the, you know,
put it on the envelope, and I mailed it.
And I, and that was a good thing.
That's another, uh, you know, sort of life lesson.
It's like, if you don't take the shot,
you're never gonna get anywhere, you know, I mean,
maybe nothing's gonna happen,
but I might as well take the shot.
So I mailed it off, and I sort of forgot about it
for a while, and then two weeks later, I came home
and my mom had gotten this letter
and put it on my pillow in my bedroom.
And it was from the Central Intelligence Agency,
and it was on colored envelopes and, and stationary,
and, you know, it, it, it said Central intelligence,
a t post office box, whatever, Washington, dc and I glanced,
and I saw it was addressed to Mr.
Fairchild. And right away, Susan, I mean,
I, I, I was terrified.
I'm like, oh my God, you know, the CIA is writing to my dad,
you know, to basically say, Hey, get your kid
to knock this stuff off.
We don't need pencil requirement.
You know, that sort of thing. And, and because the only Mr.
Fairchild I had ever known was my dad, right?
I mean, nobody called me 14 years old, Mr. Fairchild.
So I opened the letter to see how much trouble I was in,
and I found a two, two-page typed plan
written specific to my pencil request for how
to get into the CIA written by a guy.
And this is a, this is absolutely true, Michael Vic.
Now, you can't get a better CIA name than Michael Tvi,
especially for a 14-year-old kid
who had just watched from Russia with love, right?
All these Russians going around going
and, you know, Vic, Vic, you know, that sort of thing.
And here's Michael Tvi from CIA, writing me a letter.
And it was a plan.
And I subsequently called it the Vic Plan.
And it started out, you know, as you might imagine, he said,
uh, dear Brian, you know, it's, it's great
that young Americans like yourself would
like to serve the government.
And in this case, especially CIA,
and, uh, here's my advice to you.
Stay in junior high school.
You know, okay, that's check .
Go on to high school and,
and when you're in high school, apply yourself
and learn as much as you can.
I figured, okay, that's good.
If you go to the university, I would recommend
that you take international politics or area studies and,
and you're gonna need a language.
So, you know, choose a language and,
and study that language.
In fact, you can start that anytime.
You don't have to wait until you go to college
and military is good.
So, you know, if you get into the military
that that's a good thing for us.
And six months prior to you wanting to accept, you know,
employment with the Central Intelligence Agency,
get back in touch and we'll do your polygraph
and we'll bring you on board.
You know? And I'm like, whoa,
I'm gonna be in the CIAI got a letter later when I got into
the ccia, a I told my colleagues about
this, and they all knew him.
They, oh, Mike, yeah, Mike ado.
He was in Denver for a while, wasn't he?
Oh, he's a great case officer. What a good man.
You know, that sort of thing. So the guy was
absolutely true, right?
And, and, and a real guy. And it wasn't even an alias.
And he, he took the time to respond
to a 14-year-old kid's pencil request, you know?
So I thought, that's great.
And I'll tell that story for as long as I live,
and to as many kids as I can, can tell it to,
because, you know, take the shot for one thing,
and there are people out there who want to help you
and will do things for you like this guy did for me.
- And kudos to him,
because any other person, perhaps
that letter gets across their desk and they just giggle and,
and send you a, a hat or a pin or something,
- Or it wouldn't even do that.
They'd just rip it up and send it and put it.
But this guy sat down and,
and typed a, a two page letter, you know, specifically,
you know, to me how to, how to get into the CIA.
And it worked. That's the key.
It worked, the TVI plan worked.
So that when, as I was growing up
and I was going to all those things, go going
through high school, and I did exactly what he said,
I became a Green Beret,
and I went into the 19th Special Forces Group.
At that time, it was, uh,
it was situated at Buckley
International Guard Base in Denver.
So I got into that.
So I had the military check mark getting into college
and taking what I was gonna take.
I had a dual major in International Relations
and Asian Studies, and I had been a
exchange student in my junior year at
university and to Taiwan.
And so I had to obtained, you know, operational fluency in,
in, uh, Mandarin Chinese.
I had international relations, Asian studies, a language,
and, and been overseas
because I had been, you know, in Taiwan
as an Exchange Exchange student.
And, you know, CIA is very, uh,
it is like a tier one agency, right?
It's like trying to get into SEAL Team six, or Delta Force,
or IBM, or, you know, whatever you're shooting for.
I mean, it's a, it's a, you know,
they only take a few people from all the, the people that,
you know, uh, send in applications.
But I had something that none, none, none
of those guys had all those guys
that were applying from Yale and Harvard
and all these cool places,
and, you know, had all these cool things
that they could say about themselves.
But I had it Todorovich plan,
and it carried the day, you know,
and they said, welcome on board.
And I, you know, I, I raised my hand
and took my, you know, took the oath
to defend the Constitution and,
and became a member of the clandestine service. So please
- Tell me that you got
to meet Todorovich at some point. No,
- I didn't.
By the time I got in, he was already retired.
- But even after the fact,
you didn't find him somewhere out there? No.
- Yeah. No, I didn't.
I mean, but, but remember, I mean,
I was 14 years old when I got that, you know,
I was 25 years old when I got into the ccia, a
so a lot of time had passed.
Sure. And so I was sitting, in fact, I was sitting in the,
on the Taiwan desk at CIA headquarters, uh, having just,
you know, joined CIA shortly before that.
And I was talking to the guy who was the chief of the desk,
and I told him this story,
and he said, I know Mike Michael tdo.
Yeah, yeah. He and I were in the same class going
through the farm, and, you know, I mean, it was,
it was that kind of thing.
But he had, he retired long before I got in, and,
and, uh, you know, nobody had any contact information
for him, but I did, to your point,
there was another guy at the, at the same time,
there was a guy by the name of Clayton, Tony Lamb,
and Tony Lamb had been a,
a bobby in the London Police Force.
And now, when I was 14,
he was a private investigator in Boulder, Colorado.
And this was, you know, I mean, just like I went from
the movie theater to the library.
Now I'm into it. Now.
I got a letter from CIA , I'm gonna be,
I'm gonna be a spy one of these days.
And I'm talking to people, as many people as I can
to find out as much as I can about anything like that.
So I called up Tony Lamb,
and I said, Hey, my name's Brian Fairchild,
and this is, I'm a 14-year-old guy, and da da da da.
He said, ah, come on by.
So I went downtown and I went to his office,
and, you know, the guy took me in
and he gave me his best advice.
And he said, you know, he told me about surveillance.
And above Boulder, Colorado is the Rocky Mountains.
I mean, to the west is the Rocky Mountains.
And, and, uh, there's a, a, an overlook, a sort of a, a,
you know, lovers, you know,
lovers' parking place and overlook.
And he said, you know, he was saying, you know, as far
as following people
and stuff, he says, I go up to the, you know, to
that overlook, and I get my cameras and I set up, and,
and all of Boulder is just lined out in front of me,
and I can follow people all over the city just
with my cameras.
I don't have to be following them.
You know, I can follow 'em all over the
city, you know, wherever they go.
And so I like, well, that's pretty cool.
And then he said, well, have you done any, like, you know,
self-defense things or anything?
And I said, no.
He said, well, you know, across the street over
here is this dojo.
And I'm, you know, Tony says,
I'm taking Juujitsu lessons over there.
You might wanna look into that. You know?
So at that, that's when I got involved in martial arts
and, you know, subsequently did that
and got together
with some Chinese students at Colorado State, uh,
Colorado University, cu and, you know, on the campus.
And they taught me kung fu
and I started that whole lifelong thing, you know.
But when I got into the CIA to, to show you how,
how cool this is as a story evolves, you know,
after my first two assignments overseas, I got assigned
to Denver, the same office that Michael
Vic had been in when he wrote to me all those years
before, part of my responsibility was going to Boulder
and talking to contacts and things in Boulder,
and I sought Tony Lamb out.
And, you know, the interesting thing is,
he made such an impression on me,
and he was important to me,
but he didn't remember the incident at all.
You know, when I told him, I said, yeah, you know,
I don't know if you remember me, but you know,
when I was 14, I came to your office
and he, he didn't , you know, to me,
to him, I was just a blip.
I was something that, you know, oh, yeah, yeah, nice kid.
Okay, see you later. You know,
he never gave it a second thought,
but for me, I'm still telling the story, you know, so,
but I did, I did look him up specifically, and, uh, and,
and I thanked him for, you know, taking an interest and,
and, you know, giving me his guidance.
And, you know, we, we shook hands
and I never saw him again. But it's wild
- That at 14 you had such a, a perseverance
and a determination.
I'm sure , I just picture this kid in his family
doing little spy spy games.
- Well, I followed people around town and at the mall.
I mean, I got in trouble for it too, you know?
I mean, if you follow the wrong people, like, you know,
girls, and they figure out that you're following along
and they tell somebody, it's like, you know,
are you stalking this poor young lady?
I wasn't, no, I was just practicing
my surveillance technique.
But yeah, I mean, it, it was, it was that kind of a deal.
But I, you know, I just, I read everything I could from
that point on, and, and then I got in and,
and once I got in, you know, one of the things I regret,
so I used to sleep with that letter under my pillow.
But then once you do these things, you know,
once you get in, those letters seem less important, right?
Because now it's not an aspirational thing.
You are already there. You're one of 'em, you're in the,
you know, in it deep.
So I misplaced that letter somewhere,
and now it's very valuable to me.
I mean, I would love to find that letter again,
my parents passed away.
I was overseas, you know, my brother put stuff in storage,
and we've never been able to find that letter again.
But if I can, I mean, I, I will, I'll, I'll frame it,
I'll gild it and frame it, you know,
because now it's a, it is important, which is another thing
to remember, you know, it's like, hold on
to those things when, when you're a kid, don't think just
because you're gonna get into something
or become a Green Beret that this stuff isn't important.
I mean, you know, take those things and save 'em,
because they're very important. Did
- You have a, a generally patriotic family
that you came from, or was it run of the mill?
- No, it was a run of the mill.
I mean, my dad, you know,
my dad had done different things at the time
that we were in Denver.
My dad was an iron worker,
and, uh, you know, we didn't, I was the first one who went
to college in, in the family, and, you know, and,
and got my, you know, diploma,
although I had a hard time getting outta high school
, but that's another whole story, .
But I did get outta high school,
and I did get my degree, you know, my high school diploma.
And then, uh, then I got into Cal State of Chico
and graduated with, uh,
highest honors in international relations.
So, you know, I mean, it all sort of came together,
but yeah, I wasn't, uh,
but it wasn't a military family or anything like that.
But, uh, you know, I was patriotic.
My brothers were patriotic.
My younger brother subsequently went into the Air Force
and Office of Special Investigations
and then became the chief
of all criminal investigations in Montana,
you know, for the state of Montana.
So, you know, he followed his dream
and I followed mine, my older brother, uh, something else,
, he did something else, you know.
But, uh, but the two of us, we, you know, we stayed to,
you know, stayed true to that kind of a concept.
And, uh, I would be still working today if it wasn't
for the fact that CIA, you know, downsized and
after the fall of the Soviet Union, you know, I,
I tried everything I could to stay,
and they said, no, we want you guys to leave.
- I imagine that these days they're maybe regretting
that decision and maybe bulking it back up again.
- Yeah, well, they are, they're, they're rebuilding,
but now they're not so happy with me
because I've written to them on numerous occasions,
written papers, cri critical of CIA,
because CIA's really not doing what it's supposed
to be doing now, you know?
So even, even if they needed somebody
that had my requirements,
they probably wouldn't choose me. ,
- Uh, what is the difference between CIA and FBI?
Because I think a lot of people confuse those two agencies.
- Yeah, absolutely. Different.
The FBI, well, here's, here's a, uh, excellent question,
and there's several reasons why a lot of people refer
to the CIA guys who work in CIA as CIA agents,
and that's not what we are.
No, we never call ourselves CIA agents.
We're CIA officers, or we're operations officers
or clandestine service officers,
but we never call ourselves agents.
Agents are law enforcement type guys.
Like the guys in the FBI are special agents
of the FBI guys in, you know, immigration service
or special agents of the, you know, immigration service
or DEA is, are special agents in the, in the DEA, but,
but CIA are clandestine service officers, case officers,
ops officers, you know, CIA officers.
And that's important
because the, when we refer to agents, we refer
to the foreigners that we've recruited overseas
to penetrate foreign governments so
that our government gets their secrets.
So we refer to them as agents.
So that's, you know, so to call a guy like me,
a CIA agent is just, you know, completely skewed backwards,
you know, I mean, I'm the, uh, I'm the officer.
I go on recruit des spies who are our agents, and,
and the FBI is a law enforcement organization.
Their charter is the, you know, federal laws.
And anybody who breaks federal laws, they're going
to investigate the federal laws, develop evidence,
bring a case against somebody, you know, go to the
Attorney General or, you know, the prosecuting attorneys
and, and give their cases
to the federal prosecuting attorneys.
And the, if they have enough evidence
and can prove their case, then they bring it to trial
and so forth and so on.
But the CIA isn't anything like that.
But the CI is is guys like me who go overseas,
speak foreign languages, understand foreign cultures,
understand foreign politics and regional politics,
and the politics of our enemies especially.
And then we try to find people that have access
to secret information about those people, about our targets,
and we try to recruit them.
So to give you an example, if, if you, Susan, were a target
of mine, if, if I had met you
and you were in, you were in, uh, Bahrain,
and you're in the Ministry of Economy in Bahrain,
and I am, you know, in the US Embassy, you know, covered
as a diplomat, covered as a political officer,
and in the course of my duties, I get to know you.
And it seems like we kind of hit it off
and we, you know, we're on the same wavelengths and stuff.
I will build, build a relationship with you.
And then as I build a relationship with you, I find out,
you know, your husband needs a, needs a, uh, an operation
that you can't afford.
You know, the baby needs a new pair of shoes, uh,
you know, that kind of thing.
And then if you have access,
and then we're talking about government,
and we're talking about politics and stuff, and,
and a couple of times you look at me
and say, well, look, Brian, I I'm gonna tell you this stuff,
but don't tell anybody I told you this, you know,
and then you give me a couple of secrets, right?
And so I'd go, okay, no problem, Susan.
I'll put, I'm not gonna say anything,
but at some point I say, Hey, Susan has re you know, things
that I can help her with.
She's willing to share information with us.
Maybe I should pitch her and try to recruit her, right?
So one day we're at a, you know, we're at a restaurant
or something and I say, you know, Susan,
you might have figured out by now
that I have duties other than my political reporting duties,
and we could sure use help from,
you know, a person like yourself.
And, and I pitch you, right?
And I recruit you as a spy,
and now my responsibility is to protect you.
So I've gotta meet you.
So that's where you, all these things like safe houses come
into to play.
I mean, everybody's heard about a safe house.
Well, what's a safe house? Well, you gotta, you know,
you gotta have places to meet your secret agents.
You know, you can't just go and,
and, you know, hang out in public now anymore and,
and start, you know, you give me classified information
that I can take photographs of stuff.
You can't do that in a, in a restaurant.
So you gotta have a safe house.
And then, then you've gotta be able to make sure
that when I come to meet you
and you come to meet me, that we're not followed, right?
So we practice surveillance, detection, routes
and things like that, so that if I'm being followed,
I don't want to lead your security services
or the Soviet Security Services and the Chinese
or anybody else who might be following me to you, right?
So that's where you have to get all clandestine.
That's where you use phones and code words,
and you know, somebody, you know, calls you and asks for Mr.
Mr. Kvi,
and you say, I'm sorry, it's a wrong number, you know, and,
but that means something to you, right?
And then there are the occasions when, like,
if you're in really hostile environments like China
or the Soviet Union where you can't meet face to face,
you have what you've probably heard of, uh,
as dead drops, right?
A dead drop and signals and things like that.
Well, a dead drop is, uh, like anything, like maybe,
maybe this can, right here could be a dead drop.
I'm gonna have secret information in this can,
and I'm gonna put it at a preselected location
that you know about where I can be underserved,
actually be under surveillance, make a few turns,
make that final turn.
Boom. I put the, uh, I put the package down in a place
that nobody's gonna see it.
I continue on surveillance, comes around the corner,
they see me, I'm still walking.
Okay, great. We've got 'em, you know,
but they don't know about that package.
And then maybe, and then I go somewhere,
and you know, the, the easiest way to be, uh,
to describe a signal is like a chalk mark on a wall.
You know, I walk, I turn another corner
and I take a piece of chalk
and I mark the wall very quickly.
And a day later,
you come from another direction entirely in your normal way
of coming to work or whatever,
and you know, to look at that wall.
And if you look at that wall
and you see that there's a chalk mark, then you know
that there's a package waiting for you.
You know? So you'll go
and retrieve that package when you can,
and if it's secure, that gets into the real
clandestine stuff like that.
But see, see the difference between CIA
and the FBI, I mean, I don't have a badge.
I can't go to anybody overseas and to a CIA badge
and say, you gotta talk to me there.
No, you know, I'll get arrested and thrown in jail.
- It's interesting that you bring up that in your example.
Let's just say it's somebody who needs money
or is financially in trouble.
And that's certainly, I, I imagine one
of the biggest indicators of someone who'd be willing
to help because they're desperate for their situation.
Sure. This is such an important thing, I think,
in our own United States government
of why if you're a politician with debts
or, you know, heavily involved in the stock market
or anything like that, I think that's, that's a big,
huge red flag of a easily compromised individual.
- Yeah. And the Chinese,
especially the Chinese, are all over us.
I mean, the Chinese are the best in the
world at this sort of thing.
They've been stealing our data for decades,
not just the last couple years.
They've been stealing it for decades.
In 2015, last year, it was reported in 2015,
started in like 2013 and went on.
But there's a, a place called the, uh, office
of Personnel Management, OPM.
And guys like me, when you, when you become a CIA officer
or any, you know, in intelligence officer
or an FBI, you know, agent for that matter, you have
to fill out forms that are like this thick.
Everybody's gotta fill 'em out.
And they're a security questionnaire.
And it's all about who you are, what you are,
where you live, who your neighbors were, you know,
where your banks are, all that kind of stuff.
And then they can do the background investigation on you,
and then they can see if what you told 'em, you know,
turns out to be true or, you know, that kind of deal.
So everybody had to do that.
All those, those forms were held by OPM
and the Chinese back in between 2013
and 2015, stole 22 million of those farms.
22 million, not just one or two,
or, oh, they snuck Brian Fairchild's file out.
They just grabbed him.
We found out about it in a, you know, a belated way.
I mean, it wasn't like we were so sharp.
We were like, Hey, the Chinese are stealing our stuff.
You know, we found out afterwards,
the OPM wrote me an actual letter saying, Hey, Mr.
Fairchild, you know, you're one of those guys, ,
they stole your stuff.
And so for the next 10 years, if you have any problems,
like all of a sudden your bank account's cleaned out
or anything, contact us and we'll reimburse you.
You know, that that's what they told me.
But the point is that they've got information on me, my, my,
my family, my son, my daughter, you know,
let's say they get into a security situation, you know,
they know so much about us that they,
they can already build pitches or,
or maybe try to do a, a cold pitch
or maybe try to do a coercive pitch
based on some kind of a vulnerability.
I mean, you see it in the movies all the time.
People coercing other people to do this stuff.
And it kind of, it is like
that in counter-terrorism operations,
but not in espionage operations like this.
Because if you force somebody
to do something against their will sooner
or later, they're gonna screw you.
They're gonna say, I'm gonna get you back, man.
You're bullying me. You're forcing me.
I don't wanna be doing this.
You're putting my life in danger,
and I've gotta do it right now
because you're holding this thing over my head,
but I'm gonna get, you know, sooner
or later, you know, they'll get you.
So it's not a good policy to, to coerce people
to be, become spies.
But, but yeah. So that's the difference between, uh,
like a law enforcement, federal law enforcement, like FBI
and spy agencies.
- I know that China is certainly a big threat.
Uh, did the Cold War ever end, in your opinion, with Russia?
It feels to me like it's still pretty rocking and rolling.
- Yeah, the Cold War never ended for them.
, the Cold War ended for us,
and it was a big deal when it ended for us,
because we we're just not, you know, to tell you the truth,
Susan, and, and I was a, a excellent CIA officer.
I came with a great pedigree and,
and, uh, you know, I I I did a lot of cool things,
but, you know, we're not really very good at this stuff.
You know, America as an institution,
the United States of America isn't very good at this stuff.
I mean, when you think of all the times where we had the
ultimate advantage after World War ii, Europe is decimated.
We have the atomic bomb, you know, nobody else has it.
We couldn't figure out how to keep that position. Right?
And so the Soviets built the bomb,
and then the, the, the Chinese built the bomb,
and Israelis built the bomb.
And we just couldn't do anything.
And North Korea is a, is a perfect example
for my entire life.
The US policy for North Korea was
to prevent it from becoming an atomic power.
And it is and our
- Right - And artificial line is still not to allow it
to become a nuclearized, you know, sure.
Company, but it is already country, but it's already there.
'cause we couldn't do, we, we didn't exert our influence
or do anything to, to prevent that.
You know, we just watched
- Right?
If uranium suddenly disappears,
these places aren't even guarded that well, unfortunately,
especially in places like Russia.
So it's not a surprise when Yeah, when chunks
of things go missing.
- Right. The, the countries themselves
have their own programs.
How long have you heard the United States say, you know,
we're not going to allow Iran to become a nuclear power.
Iran is a nuclear power today. Yeah.
- But don't you feel like it's only a matter of time
for these things to happen
- As, yeah.
And so my my point is that we're,
we're just not very good at this stuff, .
And so, you know, I mean, we did great operations
and special operations guys do fantastic operations,
and they're the best special operators in the world.
But as a nation, we don't know how,
once we have attained power to maintain power and keep power
and, uh, exert influence
and stuff, you know, so here's a,
here's what actually happened.
We, uh, we beat the Soviets in the Cold War, right?
But a lot of it happened to do with hap happened to, to be,
because the Soviet economy was terrible.
We kept putting pressure on them.
You know, we did the, the Star Wars program.
They couldn't keep up with us.
Their people were disenfranchised and,
and they rebelled themselves.
And, you know, then they went to Afghanistan like we did,
you know, screwed that whole thing up, kind
of like we did their own people rebelled against them.
And finally they fell.
And when they fell and they fell in 1991,
there was a guy in Congress by the name
of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an old Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
was in the front pages of paper every day, a flamboyant guy,
a brilliant congressman, and all this sort of thing.
And after the Soviet Union fell, he came up
to James Woolsey, who was then the director of CIA.
And he said, James, you guys did a great job.
You beat the Soviets way to go.
You won the Cold War, but do we even need a CIA anymore?
You know, I mean, why do we even need you guys? Right?
This is how we handle things. Right?
And, and, but it wasn't just Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
It was all the politicians, all the presidents.
They actually coined a phrase, there was an end to history.
We had beaten the Soviet Union. What more can you expect?
You know, we are the leading country of the world.
Europe was in, in tatters,
and we rebuilt Europe in the Marshall Plan.
We are the guys that, there's never gonna be any guys
that are gonna ever contest us again.
There's an end of history. Why do we even need a CIA?
So from 1991 to 2001 CIA was a,
like a rudderless ocean going vessel, right?
It had no primary mission
because we were created basically
to go after the Soviet Union.
That was the reason for the creation of CIA in 1947.
And so for 10 years, the poor CIA,
you know, is running around.
I mean, James Woolsey joked, there, there was a time,
you might have seen it in, uh, in a newsreel
or something in, in the past,
but Cessna aircraft accidentally crashed in into the,
the front lawn of the White House.
And that was a big, oh my God,
you know, that was a big deal.
Well, Jim Bull, Jim Woolsey would joke about that
and say, that was me trying to get in to see Clinton.
'cause Clinton didn't even wanna see him.
You know, he only saw his,
Clinton only saw his CIA director like three times
during Jim Woolsey's tenure.
- Meanwhile, the internet is getting stronger,
and the global powers are getting more connected.
Yeah. And it's a,
and it's a lawless land without any safeguards.
- Absolutely. And like you said before, I mean, China
and Russia never stopped being in the Cold War,
and they looked at us taking this hiatus, you know, like,
great, you guys do your thing,
and we're gonna build up capabilities
that specifically target your vulnerabilities.
And that's what they did for 10 years, right?
Rudderless, the guy, George Tenet, who was director
in 2001 at the door at the nine 11 attacks by Al-Qaeda.
Well, that 10 years later, from 1991 to 2001,
September 11th, CIA was a rudderless, you know,
rudderless boat ship.
And all of a sudden they got their new primary mission,
and it was terrorism, counter-terrorism,
because Al-Qaeda attacked us.
Now, J uh, George Tenet said that at that time, they were
beyond beside themselves.
Because CIA was basically in chapter 11 bankruptcy.
I mean, the, the farm was in disrepair.
The farm is a place that is our training facility.
The farm was in disrepair. We had closed stations and bases.
They forced me and my brothers out.
I was in Tokyo in 1995, came time for me
to choose my next assignment.
And I said, well, send me anywhere. I don't care.
You'll just send me anywhere. I like this.
And they said, no, come back to headquarters.
And Susan, nobody ever, if, if you're a CIA officer
and your, your job as a recruit foreign spies, you,
you can't do that from the hallways
and corridors of headquarters, right?
So you never wanted to come back to headquarters,
you'd do anything to stay overseas.
That's what you did. That's who you are, you know?
So I wrote and said, nah, I don't wanna come back
to headquarters, you know, send me,
where does no one else want to go find a place
that nobody else wants to go and send me?
I'll go. And, uh,
and they said, nah, come back to headquarters.
And I said, well, look, okay, if I can't, if you don't want
to send me to any place, nobody else wants to go
and nobody's going, well, they'll send me to the farm
and I'll teach other guys how to be a case officer.
They said, no, I'll come back to headquarters.
And then they finally came
back and said, look, here's the deal.
We don't really want you guys anymore.
Why don't you take early retirement?
We'll give you, in fact, we'll give you an early out bonus.
We'll give you lots of money,
and you can take your retirement
and the early out bonus that we're gonna give you,
and you have a lot of money
and you can start a whole new career.
Why don't you guys do that?
Because they basically didn't want us anymore. Right?
They said there was an end to history.
Do we even need you guys how they'd rather spend the peace
dividend is what they called it,
the peace dividend in their own constituencies
and for their own personal purposes.
And so that's what they did.
So for 10 years, the CIA was rudderless.
Then in 2001, they get the new mission
and it's counter-terrorism.
And for 20 years thereafter, they do nothing
but counter-terrorism.
But it's not, it's not even strategic counter-terrorism.
See, that's the thing we're the CIA was the premier
strategic intelligence agency, which meant the big picture.
Who are their enemies? Who are enemies, allies?
Why are they the allies of our enemies?
What kind of military capability do they have?
What are their foreign policies?
Why are they going to Latin America?
Why are they going to, to Africa?
What, you know, what, what,
what are the answers to these questions?
So our policy makers can make good policy
regarding those, those things.
That's what spies do when they focused on.
So, so that's strategic intelligence.
But when we got into involved in counter-terrorism,
people like to say it was strategic
counter-terrorism, but it wasn't.
The reason they say that is
because we were doing counter-terrorism all over the world.
So if you're doing it all over the world, well, it must be
strategic, but that's not true.
We didn't strategically, you would've gone
after the leadership and the ideology
and the places that supported the ideology
and the Madras that taught the ideology.
And, and you would do that
and try to stem the ideology, nip it in the bud,
and then at the same time, go after the soldiers
and the mid-level guys try to get them out of the picture.
And maybe you have a chance of stopping
Islamist terrorism against, you know,
the rest of the world. But
- How do you fight?
I get how you fight people, but how do you fight their ideas
or the ideology?
- Yeah. See that, that, that's the thing.
I mean, it's hard to kill an idea, right?
And you can't, but
what you can do is you can put a kibosh on it.
If you start dealing with Middle Eastern countries
and you start saying, you know,
the guys in your country are the guys that attacked us,
and we wanna do business with you country to country,
and we wanna have military contracts
and all that kind of stuff, but we can't do it if you're
supporting the ideology
that creates the people that attack us.
So you deal with them on a national level, like the Saudis,
for instance, right?
And you say, put the kibosh on these radicals,
because not everybody in Saudi Arabia is radical.
So you put the kibosh on the guys that are radical,
and you make it harder for them
to spread the ideology harder for, for, for them
to operate according to the ideology and so forth and so on.
But we didn't do that. We went very narrow.
We said, we're gonna go after these leaders of Al-Qaeda,
and we're gonna capture or kill 'em.
And that's what we did for 20 years.
The only thing we did for 20 years,
it hasn't stopped Al-Qaeda, it hasn't stopped.
The Islamic state hasn't stopped any of that stuff.
Well, we got rid of a lot of people,
and a lot of those people, you can't even say
were legitimate targets
because they were only military aged males from areas
that had the ideology.
And maybe they were hanging out with guys
that had reputation of being radicals.
So therefore they're all radicals.
So we had to get rid of all of 'em, you know?
And so we were doing, that's
what we were doing in Afghanistan and Iraq
and, and all that kind of stuff.
So it wasn't even a strategic approach.
But while we were not doing the strategic approach,
and we were just doing tactical,
basically tactical counter-terrorism operations against
individuals themselves, we let the rest of the world grow up
around us, and Russia grew up around us
and became another, uh, a power again.
You know? And China became the, the ascended power,
you know, much more dangerous
and powerful than anything we ever faced
during the Soviet Union Cold War times.
And now China is basically running the world.
But here's what we allowed them to do in the 20 years
that we weren't watching China became, it has the,
the largest armed services in the world,
the largest navy in the world,
the largest ship building in the world,
the largest fisheries in the world, the largest,
the largest, uh, coast guard in the world,
and the largest maritime militia in the world.
And that's very important
because when you're talking about a situation like Taiwan,
any conflict we get involved with in China is going
to be a naval conflict.
And they've got the largest Navy,
and of course they've got missiles coming out of the,
the woodwork, including a missile called a
hypersonic missile.
We have no hypersonic missiles
and hypersonic missiles we have no defense against.
And that's not Brian Fairchild telling you this, Susan,
that's Millie, who was just formerly the chairman
of the joint Chiefs of staff, said,
China has this capability, hypersonic missiles
that we have no defense against, uh,
a regular ballistic missile like during the Cold War,
you know, where we're gonna blow each other, you know,
countries off the map, they take off
and they go basically into space,
but there's a trajectory, right?
They take off and they go like this,
and then they start arcing
and they're gonna come down on their targets.
And because of that arc, and
because you can see, you know, we have sensors
that can see them firing their ballistic missiles,
we can track where the target is.
And if you have an anti ballistic missile capability as
that missile is going into, its a, you can shoot it down,
but a hypersonic missile can be launched from a submarine,
can be launched from an aircraft, can be, can be,
you know, sent into space.
But once it comes back down, it doesn't go, eh,
and boom, it goes Mm mm
- Oh, it's wiggler, it says serpentine,
- And it goes around your air defenses.
And not only that, but it's doing that at like,
maybe 10 times the speed of sound.
So at 10 times the speed of sound,
our air defenses can't even track.
It doesn't even see I'm, it goes by, right?
And, and your air defense capability didn't go, Hey,
you know, we, we got a threat.
No, , you know, they didn't even see the threat
because the thing is, you know,
going in at hypersonic speeds.
And so we can't stop 'em.
And that also means that from the time it fires
to the time it hits us,
is really a shortened length of time.
So when you're talking about Taiwan
and China, the Chinese have missiles up and down the coast.
I mean, there's no way we can get within a thousand miles
of China without them seeing us
and without them being able to fire their missiles.
Not just hypersonic missiles,
but other missiles in included.
But the Chinese recently did studies saying, if we did three
salvos of I think six hypersonic missiles, each salvo,
we could wipe out all of your aircraft carriers.
See? Now that's one of the reasons
that when you saw China encircling Taiwan like five times
now, you know, and basically putting a, uh,
a blockade in place that
the United States forces stood way back, we watched,
but we never got involved.
We didn't do what we're doing in the Red Sea now, right?
We do that in the Red Sea now
because Iran, yeah, they've got some missiles
and they've, they're giving their missiles to the proxies
and the proxies are shooting at 'em, but they don't,
and they, and they, Iran has a hypersonic missile,
but they don't have so many of 'em
that we can't respond to 'em and wipe 'em out.
But China does. China
- Wants Taiwan, obviously.
But do you think that China would be so bold as to attack
the country of the United States of America?
But that mutually assured destruction sounding bell seems
to pop in my head thinking, well,
they gotta be crazy to do that.
- Yeah. But see, all those missiles aren't nuclear missiles.
They're just normal missiles.
They're, you know, there's normal kinetic missiles.
Now, the hypersonic missile can be both.
It can have a nuclear warhead or a conventional warhead.
Let's just take the situation in Taiwan.
We're scared to death of getting too close to, to China
because of their missile capability.
And they've got submarine capability
and they've got, you know, they've got everything
that we've got, you know, and they've got pretty much as,
as well as we do, a lot of people will say, oh, yeah,
but the US technology is better.
Well, you know, most experts I know, say we,
we may have a couple of destroyers that have a little better
radar than the, the 0 55 does, you know, for China.
But it's so narrow that it really doesn't matter.
And they have so many of them, and we have so few.
There's a quality in quantity all of its own.
So the same thing with submarine
hunters and all that kind of stuff.
So here's the deal.
If China attacks Taiwan,
and it doesn't even attack Taiwan
and blow it up with missiles
and try to, you know, storm the beaches like D-Day,
it puts a blockade around it.
What can the United States do?
Well, unless we're willing to go to war and have our,
and imagine the United States of America
having its premier
aircraft carrier strike group sunk.
What would that do to the, to the United States of America
and to our reputation, what allies of ours would say,
let us rush to your cap, to your aid, given the fact
that we don't have anything close to
what you have in the United States, and
you just got yourself wiped out.
See? So you start seeing that it's not like all of a sudden,
you know, article five and NATO takes effect, and,
and everybody goes to World War, you know,
'cause they can go, well, they didn't really attack it
with nuclear missiles and,
and they basically have the upper hand on all of us, and,
and we need their trade.
So I, I think I'm gonna s this one out.
- And it's tricky too, right?
Because we can't really sanction not really sanctions in
China because we owe them a a lot of money.
B, they run our,
pretty much our entire electronics industry,
- .
Well, and it's, and it works both ways.
See, the, the, that's another thing
that the United States let happen during the hiatus
of not having a strategic spy agency, is that
we became China and the, the Chinese
and American economy became so entangled
that we can't unentangle ourselves.
But what what we can do is we can,
we can look at specific technologies that we can try
to deprive them of, but it, and,
and so we've initiated sanctions against China
and against everybody, right?
The sanctions didn't stop Russia. I
- Mean, I don't think they really work that well.
- Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they punish people
and they, they hurt,
but they get, they figure out ways around them.
So sanctions isn't gonna work.
So, you know, unless you have hard military power
and an enemy knows that they're going
to pay a dear price if they take you on,
there's no deterrence.
And one of the things you'll find bandied about, you know,
Washington, DC these days, is
that the United States no longer has a deterrent.
And that's why China's running rough shot over everybody.
That's why it's, you know, it's forcing the Philippines out
of the Philippine waters.
And we have A-A-A-A-A treaty with the Philippines,
a 1951 treaty, and we haven't done anything about it.
And the treaty. But the treaty, that's another thing is
that there's legalese, right?
The treaty calls for the United States
to defend Philippines if they're fired upon.
But when the Chinese are using water cannons
and ramming ships, instead of firing upon them,
the treaty really doesn't have to be enacted.
And what politician is gonna run into a World war
if the treaty hadn't even really been officially broken.
Yeah. And so we got Biden, who, who basically has, has
seeded the South China Sea
and the area around Taiwan to China right now.
We look at all the stuff we've done in the Red Sea,
all the naval assets, we have marine expeditionary groups,
all that sort of thing, gets all over the place in a Red Sea
and shooting down Houthis
missiles and all that sort of thing.
But there's nothing like that around Taiwan.
And there's the reason, the reason is
what I've just been explaining to you.
Yeah. I mean, and we've run war games, right?
Not just CIA, I mean the Department of Defense
and civilian think tanks like CSIS, you know, considered
to be the best think tank in the world, has run these,
these, uh, war games.
And what they've come out with is, you know,
after running like 64 war games
and all different kinds of possibilities, shapes and sizes
and, and capabilities and things,
and they said, well, the best we can say is we might
actually stop China from physically, you know,
overwhelming the, the geography of Taiwan,
but at such a price that we will be screwed
for the rest of our lives.
I mean, so what does that mean?
Well, means they'll,
they'll sink at least two aircraft carriers, 20 to 30
of our destroyers, all the men on board submarines.
They'll destroy some of our submarines.
Now we'll get our licks in
and we'll give them, you know, hell too.
But they've got the biggest, you know, strategic
ship building capability that can repair
and create new ships at a rate
that we can't even start to come close to.
So even if they take it in the shorts,
they can rebuild their, their navy faster than we can.
Mm-Hmm. And there's another thing
that people don't understand either.
China is now the leader of what
I call, I wrote a paper.
I I, you know, I've written a book,
but that book is, is, uh, is uh, fiction.
But I write analysis too.
And a year ago, over a year ago in October, uh, I wrote a,
a paper called The New Axis of Evil, the Military Block,
the anti-American Military Block led by China.
And that's the facts on the ground.
So China, Russia, Iran,
and North Korea comprised this thing called
the New Axis of evil.
Now, you can call it whatever you want.
You can say it's a, it's a, uh, a military alliance
or military block or whatever.
They, it doesn't matter if they have formal designations
and stamps on papers, they are cooperating
in a concerted way to make the United States and the,
and our allies distribute our power all over the place
where we can't focus on any one of 'em.
North Korea sounds off.
We send a carrier strike group up there, oh,
we gotta do something, you know, the things go on.
They, all of a sudden, the new A of evil says to Iran, Hey,
why don't you do something and attack Israel?
Because if you attack Israel,
the United States is gonna rush to your aid.
And if they rush to your aid, we can tie them down
and tie their missiles down, tie their subs down,
tie their carriers down, and we'll tie them down there.
And in the, you know, in North Korea, around North Korea,
and of course we got Taiwan taken care of.
And every day they're trying to figure out how
to get weapons to Ukraine,
except now their own Congress doesn't wanna support Ukraine
anymore, which is exactly what we want
as the new axis of evil.
- I feel like there's this, this huge campaign
that has been incredibly successful in the United States to
manipulate Oh, yeah.
The, the people online. Oh, yeah.
So Putin, and that to me is bonkers.
All these people don't seem to really understand
what is happening here.
They've been completely manipulated,
and I don't know how to get out of that.
- Well, I mean, there's no easy answer.
And you're absolutely right.
And one of the, the, the,
sorry things about our state right now, our, our state
of being, our inner, our national, you know, cap,
our national, uh, state of being is that we have
so much polarization in the United States
that we've in effect
negated the word united in the United States of America.
Now, you can call us the,
the dysfunctional states of America.
You can call us the polarized states of America.
You can call us the, you know, whatever you want.
But we're not the United States of America anymore.
And I, I would, I believe that
Americans would be hard pressed to define
what an American is anymore.
And I'm not a politician. I'm not a Biden guy.
I am not a Trump guy. I'm an intelligence officer.
I just gotta tell you the way it is from an
intelligence officer's point of view.
And you've got the Putin wing of the Republican party,
you know, uh, uh, you know, a rarely a, a fairly few number
of congressmen that are preventing, is preventing any kind
of aid to get to Ukraine.
And when that happens, you know,
because we were on record, uh,
the president is on record saying, we will be there for you
through thick and thin forever until you're done.
And now we're not. And so do you look at
what do our Asian allies, what Singapore, Malaysia,
you know, Indonesia, the Philippines,
when they're looking at us
and saying, can we count on the
United States of America to protect us?
You think China worries about us and Taiwan?
They say, even if we get into the thick of it with the,
the United States of America in Taiwan
and another two years, they'll be tired of it.
And they'll say, well, we don't wanna do this anymore.
It's too expensive. We want, don't want to do it.
- Not only that, it's not hard to manipulate the
American people into whatever these axis,
as you call it, the new axis of evil powers want.
I mean, I don't think folks really understand how yeah,
this computer that they're staring at are this phone
that they're staring at is working overtime to help
our quote unquote enemies.
Now, I'm a humanist
and I want a world where everyone gets along, you know?
And I have friends from all walks of life, all colors
of the rainbow and entire political spectrum.
For me, like you, this is not political. This is
- Common sense - Common.
I mean, it feels like common sense.
But then I feel like, am I the one taking crazy pills,
- Survivability, sustainability?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But see, it's so ingrained now.
This is, and this is a generational issue.
The United States is in really bad shape now.
The, you know, the, the Heritage Foundation, you have, you,
you know who the Heritage Foundation is.
I do. Well, the Heritage Foundation,
for lack the last 10 years has been pri appraising our
military capabilities last year
and this year, they basically come out
and said, the United States military is
overall rated as weak.
The Navy is rated as very weak, and the Air Force very weak.
And those are the two services that we would need
to go against China in any situation,
whether it's in the Philippines, Taiwan, or whatever.
'cause it's a naval air battle.
And we don't have the pilots, we don't have the planes,
and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Right? Let's say everybody in in politics
and in the administration agrees with me, Brian Fairchild,
former CIA author right now.
And they say, absolutely, I believe that everything
that guy says is true, and we're gonna change it right now.
You can't just snap your fingers
and have a, a ship ship building capability.
You can't snap your fingers
and stop the, the fact that no young Americans want
to join the, the service anymore,
and the services can't meet their quotas,
their recruiting quotas.
They haven't met 'em for two years, 25,000 short,
25,000 less weapons that are on,
you know, on the battlefield.
'cause you don't have the people to
have those weapons. Right.
- And the military tends to prey on, uh,
the, the poor, right.
The economically disenfranchised
- And former and former military
legacy families and so forth.
- But, but the greater part of the people
that die in wars are the people whose families have
to send these kids off, you know? Sure,
- Sure.
Yeah. And so, I I, can you imagine the United States
that now given the, the,
the polarization in the United States,
let's say they initiate the draft tomorrow,
how even if you're drafted,
how many kids do you think are gonna go to the military?
And how many are just gonna say, no, I'm not going.
Well, so anyway, the my point being,
you can't just snap your fingers and turn this around.
You can't all of a sudden have a world-class naval
capability anymore.
And put that around Taiwan, because we're only,
and this might be a shock to you,
but as the military says, the chief of naval operations say,
we can only build one and a half destroyers and one
and a half submarines a year, a year in China.
They one ship building, they have like 13 ship building,
uh, uh, shipyards.
One of those shipyards has more capability than
the entire United States at one time.
They, they build six destroyers simultaneously,
and we can only build one and a half a year.
And we don't have the ship shipyards, we don't have the,
the expertise and capability anymore.
We let our defense industrial base slide away.
So it's a generational problem.
And you've gotta have leaders
that wanna work together with the other side.
You know, I mean, when I was growing up,
there's always Democrats and Republicans,
but the one thing that we all basically agreed on, you know,
across the aisle, was defense
and the defense of the United States of America
against the bad guys.
And now we don't even have that.
So, so we're kind of in a world of hurt.
And, uh, for what it's worth, I mean, that's,
that's my 2 cents worth
- As somebody that has been trained to see operatives.
When you look at something like the American political
system as it is right now, do your hackles go up?
And do you think in some cases
that we have been infiltrated?
- There's no doubt we've been infiltrated.
In fact, in fact, I mean, to your point, just today, just
before I got on with you, I was reading about, you know,
a chief petty officer in the US Navy assigned to, to, uh,
Japan, who's been selling secrets to a foreign power.
I mean, that happens all the time.
Espionage happens all the time.
Every agency in the United States has been penetrated.
I mean, it's a matter of historical record.
The CIA in particular, in 2010, the, uh, the,
the Chinese wrapped up the entire CIA network in China,
you know, killed several dozen people, one publicly in a,
in a courtyard to show the rest of the,
the people don't mess with the United States,
or this is what's gonna happen to you.
They, they wiped out the entire CIA network.
And then just a year and a half ago, CIA came out
and sent a worldwide message to all stations
and bases worldwide saying
that our operations have been compromised, people have been
arrested, people have been killed,
people have been turned against us.
What the heck are you guys doing?
I mean, a CIA talking
to its own officers saying, what are you doing?
We, we think you're, you know,
you're just not paying attention
or you don't understand the capabilities
of foreign intelligence services,
or you're not spending enough time on counterintelligence.
You don't even know if these people have secrets.
You know, you're just recruiting people willy-nilly, and,
and they're all getting wrapped up,
and what the hell are you doing?
And so that's the capability of the espionage
situation right there.
So, to your question, uh, are we being penetrated?
Well, yeah, you, the CIA says we're being penetrated.
FBI says, we're being penetrated,
and then you can't, that's not even talking about the,
probably the major threat, which is a cyber threat.
And the fact that the Chinese have showed us on time, time
and time again, and the fbi, I has reported time
and time again that they are specifically targeting against
our infrastructure, and especially infrastructure like oil
and water and electricity.
And they're doing it in Guam too.
Now, Guam's, one of the key things, we can't fight any kind
of a war around Taiwan
or the South China Sea without basing people
in Guam and Okinawa.
So my, my estimation would be that China's not going
to attack the, the continental United States with missiles
and so and so, such and so forth.
But they will attack us spaces.
Us, uh, uh, owned Guam is a US property.
You know, it's not a foreign property.
Now, Okinawa, we borrow bases and stuff,
but Guam is our territory.
They will attack Guam and they will attack Okinawa,
and they will attack, you know, places in the Philippines,
and they will attack Taiwan and,
and they will threaten to attack any Asian power
that comes to our aid.
And all those Asian powers need their trade.
So Biden has been doing his best to build up.
He, since he's not gonna do military hard power,
he's been doing his best to put together things
that take years and years, maybe decades,
to actually make efficient.
And that's allies and alliances.
So one of the things that he's been doing is really focused
on, you know, South Korea and Japan as coming to our aid.
That's great, except that, you know, the South Korean
and Japanese capabilities are, you know,
not the best capabilities,
but even more so, the Japanese population recently in a,
in a, in a poll, said that they're not willing to go
to war against China about Taiwan.
So see, if you're building alliances, that's great.
If your alliances are like the alliances
during World War ii,
and we're all going on the beach in D-Day,
and the Australians and the Americans and the Brits
and everybody, we're going against the enemy
and we're all fighting equally, that's great.
But we're putting together alliances
that are not even gonna be secure for the next 20
or 30 years with people who don't wanna go and fight for us
because of our national, national interests.
They want to protect their own national
interests in the Red Sea.
You know, we put together a task force now, right?
We've invited all these nations to come to, well,
the Australian sent like 15 guys, no, no naval assets
or anything, 15 guys to like go to headquarters
and coordinate and other powers like Italy
and Germany said, well, we don't want to be officially part
of your task force, so your alliances aren't any good
unless they're willing to be shoulder to shoulder
to you fighting against the enemy that you've agreed on.
And we don't have that. So, you know,
you can talk about it all you want.
And Biden can go and say, well, look at what I've done.
And, you know, the, we've never had a stronger position
and we've got alliances in Japan and South Korea.
But when you really look at it, those alliances aren't,
were spit unless those people are willing to go to war
with China over Taiwan and US national interests.
And they're not. There's the intelligence
officers assessment.
I think that war is coming
or some kind of military action is coming in the South China
Sea and, and, uh, you know, against China.
- I might be a pessimist, but I think war is here.
I think we've been fighting Oh, a war for a, a while now.
Uh, yeah, whether or not people seem to wanna agree with
that, I don't know, but that's, and I, what do I know?
But that's what it seems like to
- Me.
Oh, I would agree with, I would agree with your point.
It's even worse. I mean,
because what has to happen if we were to go to war
China, let's say China moves against Taiwan.
Oh, a huge question in my intelligence officer's brain is,
would Biden commit to that?
You know, now Biden has gone overboard, you know,
Ben over backwards telling the Chinese,
we don't want confrontation.
We don't want a new Cold War.
We don't want have any problems with you.
And the few times he said, we would,
we would put troops on Taiwan.
His own people have walked that back now.
So the question is, if they move on Taiwan,
would the United States even react?
Would Biden commit forces
and naval forces knowing that, you know, he's going
to get into a war, ships are gonna be sunk,
American soldiers are gonna be dead.
Where's that gonna take him? Would he even commit?
So if he, if the Chinese estimate that he's not even going
to commit or not in any meaningful way,
then they're not deterred.
And the big thing, like I said
around Washington DC these days, is
that the United States deterrence isn't working right.
It's not working against the proxy forces that Iran has.
No matter how many sorties we take out
of our big cool US aircraft carriers, with our great planes
and, and pilots and stuff, it's not stopping them.
They keep sinking ships. They keep firing missiles at us.
So if we can't even deter the Iranian proxies,
do you think China's worried about us deterring them?
And there's a, you know, there's a deal.
I mean, it's all pretty straightforward, you know?
I mean, you either have hard power
and willing to use it, which deters your enemy,
or you don't, you know?
And right now we're kind
of in a world of hurt, we don't have it. Yeah.
- Do, when you see things like in the news today, the at t
towers shut down cell service to all those people,
does your instinct immediately go to, uh,
uh, shit's hitting the fan? Yeah.
- No, I, I think what I think what is happening with,
with all these cyber taxes, one of the targeting against,
uh, our infrastructure, you know, we eventually found,
I think we found it through, uh, some, some, uh, you know,
civilian organizations that were doing,
uh, analysis of the systems.
So we know that they're targeting our infrastructure.
But I think some of their attacks, many
of their attacks are just to send us a message.
Like when they did the attacks against Guam,
there's only one way to take that.
I mean, it wasn't an attack.
It was a, it was a, they were attacks that were known
that the Chinese knew we were going to discover,
and they wanted us to discover them
because they want us to know,
if you guys go against us, this is what we're gonna do.
We've got the capability, you see, we've got the capability.
Do you really want to go against us? Right. That deters us.
Right? And that deters Biden
or any president, you know, it's like president says
to his national security team, well,
if the shit hits the fan, how are we gonna, you know,
how is it gonna be for us?
You know, those guys have to look at 'em
and say, well, sir, I mean, the Chinese have already proven
to us that they can shut down our infrastructure in Guam.
They've got the hypersonic missiles.
They'll take out our, our,
our runways if nothing else in our ports, you know,
and we won't be able to use those places
to the marshal forces or resources.
It's gonna be kind of bad for us.
And, you know, uh, we can move stuff from Australia,
but, you know, they can see us coming from a thousand miles
away and they got these hypersonic missiles,
and, you know, that's gonna be tough for us.
Although, you know, we can dodge and, and move around
and move our, our forces.
But see, China doesn't got all their array of satellites
watching our aircraft carriers as they move.
And they know, see, they know when we pull into port
and, you know, in Japan, and we say, here we are in Japan,
or here we are in South Korea with our submarines and,
and our aircraft carriers.
They go, great, good starting point.
Start from there and track these
guys wherever they go. Yeah.
- Well, that's what, when the balloons that came in the,
the Chinese air balloons, I I, oh yeah.
To me, everyone freaking out about that.
The, the regular American public freaking out about that.
And I thought, you know, you're literally holding a foam
that they have been tracking since day one.
If you think that that little balloon is getting
more intel Yeah.
Than the phone in your hand that is being held by bazillions
of Americans, you're insane .
- Well, the, the scary, the scary thing is that, I mean,
this phone, this is the,
the biggest vulnerability we have, you know, sure.
As individuals, but worse than that, I mean,
like I've mentioned before
and everything I say, you know, I, I hope
that your audience, you know, checks me in fact checks me
and stuff, because they'll see
that I'm not making this stuff up.
It's all true. If you look at the,
the National Counter Intelligence Center,
the National Counterintelligence Center,
which puts out public, you know, public warnings
and things of the United States government has stated
repeatedly that the Chinese have probably obtained
DN DNA information on practically every American citizen.
Now, what does that do?
Well, on one on one hand, it's, it's a big deal for them
because, you know, in using artificial intelligence,
which I know that you're really interested in the Chinese
excel at that artificial intelligence, it depends on your,
how the size of your language models, how much you can do,
how much research you can do,
how much progress you can make, and so forth and so on.
Now, China has already, you know, weaponized every bit
of information within China, right?
I mean, they've got you everybody's DNA,
they got everybody on facial
recognition and all that sort of thing.
Well, if they get everybody's DNA from the United States,
well, they can put that into their language model so
that they get better and their military weapons get better
and so forth and so on.
DNA and CRISPR technology, do you know, crispr, you know,
CRISPR technology, is this, uh,
is this genetic cutting and, and pasting?
Oh, sure, sure, sure. Yeah.
So, so CRISPR and I mean, and it's a,
and it's a solid, you know, great, wonderful technology
and, uh, , you know, the lady who developed this,
I mean, you know, she's solving, you know, she's solving
and curing diseases, genetic diseases.
Also, if you can go
and you can cure somebody's sickle cell anemia, well,
if I want to, you know, go after Brian Fairchild
and I've got his DNA and I look at his DNA
and they can do your whole genome, right,
just from the DNA, right?
So your whole genome, and they find out that I've got,
you know, some kind of a syndrome that's depressed
and not active at this particular point in time,
and they decide to kill me with a genetic weapon.
They can create the, the genetic weapon, use a flu
as the, as the vector, as a way to get that to me.
And it's only gonna kill me.
And, and, and the Chinese are known and,
and have stated in their own documentation
that they're working on ethnic, ethnic weapons.
- Yeah. It's the assassin warfare.
- Oh, yeah. And you think about
what they're doing against the, their own Uyghur population
where they've got millions of people, you know,
basically in concentration camps.
They, they have, you know, forced sterilization, you know,
forced abortions, uh, DNA taken from everybody,
cameras everywhere, you know,
everything on your phone is, is taken.
And it's an ethnic group
that the Chinese would just like to go away.
And then you hear the, the Chinese military defense
and the defense, uh, university saying,
we're looking at the, the capability of
creating ethnic weapons, you know, genetic ethnic weapons.
You know, that's something to worry about. So, I mean, yeah.
So the phone is terrible, you know, and that's why
whenever somebody like me goes into a skiff, a secure area
where you're not allowed to go in
unless you put your phone somewhere outside and go in,
because everybody knows this phone can be tracked, you know,
even if the phone's turned off,
it could be made into a microphone.
And, and we've been doing that.
I mean, the agency has been doing that
for decades, you know?
So, I mean, it's like nothing new.
- That's why I get so frustrated when people
don't really understand what has been happening,
as you say, for decades.
And that they themselves are holding the device,
which is compromised so much information.
Yeah. Information
- Probably three times a day.
They, they agree
and permit that device to, you know,
take more of their information.
'cause they want shop from a certain place.
And, and it asks them, you know, can I use your data?
And, and they, I wanna buy this thing.
So they say, I agree. Right?
- Consumerism will be our downfall for sure.
- And the Chinese have gone to all those, the,
all those information sellers
and bought up all those, all that information about us.
It's terrible. And if you just talk about cover, cover as a,
as intelligence officer, why do you have
to have cover, you know, what is cover?
Well cover is if I go abroad and, and,
and I, they, you put me
as an official in the American Embassy, well,
everybody knows that I'm an official American,
whether I'm CIA or not.
I'm an intelligence officer of some kind, right?
I'm an enemy. If you're China,
I'm an official American, uh, official.
I'm a, I'm an enemy. But we're, yeah.
If I was to go to a, a, you know, the Tokyo Embassy
and say, I'm CIA, I'm a spy.
Well, then I try to meet you, right?
And I meet you at a, at a restaurant,
and we start having talks.
Well, everybody knows that I'm CIA
and I'm meeting you, right?
So one day they come to you and they knock on your door.
The, your own security service
and your own security service says, Hey, Susan,
you know this guy Brian Fairchild, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah. I, he is a, he's a nice man.
He is a, a diplomat in the United States government.
And, and they say to you, well, you know,
he is a spy right now.
Right away you are on the spot.
You've got your National Security service coming into your
house and saying, why are you dealing with an American spy?
Right? And then so you, so you get all nervous
and you go, oh, I've gotta cut off relationships.
I'm not gonna ever see him again.
And they say, no, no, Susan, we want you to see him.
And at some point he's gonna pitch you to become a spy.
We want you to accept,
and we're going to give you the information
that he's asking you to provide to the CIA and their po.
His policymakers are gonna be making policy wrong policy
on fallacious intelligence that you're gonna provide him.
And if you can do that for a lifetime,
that's what we want you to do.
So that's why you have to have cover, you know,
and you can't have cover anymore.
CIA can't have the cover anymore
by putting people in official
cover positions out of embassies.
And if you talk about just the satellite capabilities
that we were just talking about,
and you talk about CIA headquarters
and all the, the information that they've soaked up
and all those license plate numbers,
how can you say if anybody goes into CIA
headquarters that they have cover?
Because all the Chinese have
to do is put that in the system.
And then when you come overseas, they say, well,
let's do a trace on this Fairchild guy.
Oh yeah, he's a CIA officer.
Here's his, here's his license plate number.
He is been going into the CIA for years.
Those are things that people don't think about,
but that's what the real situation is. And it's bad.
- If it weren't so terrifying, it would be
hysterically funny because it's like some insane movie
that if you wrote this script Yeah.
And turned it in, they would say, this is ridiculous.
- Yeah. It can't be for, - It's so over the top.
- It's a really comedy, but it's not even comedy.
We can believe. Yeah, that's, but it's true.
Yeah, , it's true.
I got another technology that I've gotta tell you about
because it's just amazing.
Have you ever, ever heard
of whammy wide area motion imagery?
Okay, well, whammy, you know, we developed,
not we obviously,
but the US government developed whammy technology
and used it in Afghanistan.
I was in Afghanistan for a year
and a half forces used it in Afghanistan and back in 2011.
And it's an amazing technology
because it's only, it's only about a size like this.
You can put it in a Cessna aircraft,
you can put it in a balloon, you can put it in a dirigible,
you can put it in a drone.
But what it does is it circles the city, it's all digital,
and it videos the city in a big cone, right?
So as it goes around the city,
that cone is constantly looking at the city so
that it records all movement in the city,
all movement, right?
So if you come out on your stoop
to get the paper, it's got you.
And then they can go back
and they can do a, a search back into time
for you if they decide you're a target
or that you're a threat, and they can go back
for as long as they've got it.
'cause it's digital. And as much as they've got saved,
they can find out where you went, how you got there,
you know, what vehicle you used, what people you met,
where they went, where they live,
you know, all this sort of thing.
So imagine now you're a, you know, Brian Fairchild,
and you go to the American Embassy in Tokyo,
and Whammy is circling above.
And I come outta the American Embassy and I'm undercover.
I tell people I'm a political officer,
but nobody's fooled by that.
So they got me, as soon as I come out
of the door, they got me.
And I say, okay, I'm gonna be kind of spooky here,
and I'm gonna do surveillance, detection, routes,
and I'm gonna take a bus from here to there,
and then I'm gonna take a taxi from there to there,
and then I'm gonna take the, the, the tube from there
to there, and I'm gonna walk around these neighborhoods
and I'm finally gonna go to the safe house.
They, they got you right. , right?
So, so wham e technology, completely obole, you know, makes
CIA technology, CIA, Tradecraft Obsolescent.
So you, what you've gotta do now,
and what I've been pushing CIA to do
and why they probably don't like me very much,
like I was saying before,
and the, the whole book that I wrote, the, the, you know,
the fictional book is about this
and about coming up with cover that's actually viable.
And it's the kind of cover where it's like,
you're recruited not at CIA headquarters
or sending in applications online,
but you're recruited by what, uh, a sports talent scout.
You know, say I'm living overseas and I'm a businessman.
I'm in Zambia and I'm doing business.
I'm selling Montana beef to, to Zambians,
and I've got, I've been there for 10 years.
I've, I'm, I'm married to a Zambian woman.
You know, I have some of the, you know, the language
and I've got networks of my own in government as well
as in commercial spaces.
I know tribal leaders and all this sort of thing.
I mean, I'm a great spy, right? If I was a spy, but I'm not.
I'm just a commercial guy.
But if CIA sends out a talent scout
and looks at different, you know, populations,
American business populations,
and goes, Hey, this guy's Fairchild, hey,
he was in a 19 special forces group,
and you know, he's a heck of a businessman
and he's, he's working in a business in, in a, in a area
that makes grown men cry and be being successful about it.
How about we wait till he comes home
and we'll approach him
to see if he wants to be a spy for us.
And if that happens, whether I recorded by whammy
or not, doesn't matter because I'm never going in
and out of the, the US Embassy, I've never known as anything
to do with any US government institution.
They already know me
and have done searches on me for years saying, oh yeah,
fairchild's that guy who sells Montana beef,
you know, he's not a threat.
Let's look at the Fortune 500 companies in the US Embassy,
and those guys are the threats.
If you're gonna have cover anymore.
It's gotta be that kind of a non-official deep cover,
and it's gotta be really respected and taken care of.
And you've gotta pick just the, the diamonds in the rough,
you know, not this five Fortune 500, you know, come
and be an intern for us
and we'll turn you into a spy. That's not gonna work.
- I can't help but think that the really, the only thing
that will pull us out of this, just as a global force,
a global human entity, is if aliens come.
And I,
- Yeah, but aliens, you know, I mean,
Western civilization treated all the new people
that they've discovered, you know, so that's Yeah.
You know, plus course. Yeah. Yeah.
They'd have to be benevolent
and hopefully they have some cool technology
that they'd wanna give us just so we could play with it.
- But if they were malevolent, then, um,
perhaps this world would band together finally,
but it would be short lived
because the detentions,
the attention span is so short. .
- Yeah. And then my brother, you know, he's one of the guys
who says, well, you know, the only thing
that's gonna change this country is if we get into another
war, you know, like World War II brought us all together,
and that, that was true back then,
but it was a completely different era.
And now with the threats that we've talked about just
during this time, if we went to war,
it's not gonna be a world war as such.
And Guam's gonna get hit. Okin Island is gonna get hit.
Couple, some ships are gonna be sunk,
and then a politics will take play,
and no American is gonna go, oh, you know,
let's go against the Chinese, you know,
because it'll be iffy.
You know, it'd be like, well,
we shouldn't have probably done that.
And, you know, it's not like really a war war.
It's not like a D-Day war.
And I don't want to be a military guy anyway,
so I'm not gonna go into the draft.
And I mean, I don't think I,
that's why I say it's a generational problem.
So generational problem means you have to start, first
of all, you gotta educate Americans in the civics.
You know, most Americans don't even know
what the US government is,
or that's divided into three branches,
and, you know, they couldn't answer you on the street.
So if you don't even know what your own club is
and what that club stands for,
and what you know, what it's driving to do,
how are you gonna support it?
You know? And how are you gonna go, yeah, I'm an American
and I want to be there for you.
They don't even know what America is.
- Yeah. That ship has definitely sailed, I think.
Well, tell me the name of your book.
- Uh, it is, uh, the Hidden,
and the reason it's called The Hidden is
because you have to remain hidden under the radar
of China's surveillance state.
And the hero, Griff Harkin is that guy in Zambia
that I was just describing.
And he's a guy, and he is been there,
and his girlfriend is a deaf Zambian.
So she uses sign language, he uses sign language,
he's got a group of kids that are just deaf on the street
that he recruits as a surveillance team.
They don't even have a recognized view of sign language
because nobody's educated them, because in Zambia
and many parts of the world, deafness is considered
insanity or disease.
So nobody's educated them. They've gotten by, by
- Gesticulations. Yeah.
- That's what the hidden means is staying
hidden below the radar.
And, and that's what Griff Harken does.
CIA had the, you know, had the, okay, everything,
you know, they read the manuscript.
- I got to ask, is it true that the CIA, uh, trained what,
uh, layman would consider psychic soldiers?
- Yeah, I mean, it's true that they had a,
a program back in the day.
And the reason why is the Soviets had a program,
and you know, like I said, we were at, we were, you know,
we were designed to go after the Soviets,
so we found out the Soviets had a program, they're like,
Hey, we ought to look into this.
And, and actually, I mean,
I've never had anything particularly, you know, particularly
to do with that operation,
but I've talked to people in the agency who, you know,
who were like counter-terrorism guys who said, you know,
some of this stuff is, is kind of like, yeah,
it worked like, you know, they were looking for a guy, uh,
you know, he was a, a, a senior general, was kidnapped
by a terrorist force and abducted and taken somewhere,
and they're, uh, remote, remote viewers.
Yeah. So the remote viewer, you know, who was working on
that, drew, like a, a, an industrial place
and a, like a green pup tent.
Of course, what the CIA needs is, you know,
where is he, where's an address?
What city? You know, I mean,
that doesn't do anything for you.
But when they found the guy, he was an industrial area
and he wasn't a green pup.
You know, you wonder .
- Yeah, well, I read the book, the Men That Stare at Goats,
and that was such a great, oh,
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I saw that movie too. Yeah. Yeah. Well,
- The movie was more playful.
The book is really fascinating.
I would love to be a Pollyanna person
who wears rose colored glasses
and just says, can we all get along?
But I know the reality is not that you have an open door
to be on the show anytime, so, absolutely.
I've been delighted by this conversation as intense
as it got in some places. Yeah,
- Yeah.
And then we're in bad shape, like I said, it's gonna,
it's gonna take a lot to get back, you know, any kind
of a semblance of
what the United States of America used to be.
And I, you know, I'm a pess, I'm not a pessimistic guy.
I'm an optimistic guy, and I like to have fun
and tell, you know, funny stories.
But, you know, I mean, the, the truth is
that we're in a bad way.
I, I understand as an intelligence officer that you know to,
to right the problems that are wrong.
You can't do it like we're talking.
You can't do it with a snap of the finger.
You can't just say, okay, we understand and have it done.
And in fact, I, I think there is a, there's a trend
among politicians to where
politicians think if they acknowledge a problem,
it's the same as solving it, you know?
So if people say, oh, China's our biggest threat, it's like,
oh, okay, automatically it's, it's taken care of.
But no, China is a, is our biggest threat.
That means you gotta bill of a Navy, the Department
of Defense just slashed it's budget, you know,
because it's trying to fit into continuing
resolution budget deals.
And they've been doing this for five, seven years,
and they don't have any money.
They can't do planning, they can't get new stuff going.
They can't start new programs
because they don't have the money.
So you can talk about we need more submarines, we need more,
you know, destroyers, we need defenses in
Guam, we need all this.
But unless you fund it and the funding gets to the military
and they use it for that purpose, it doesn't get done.
And so all I've heard among politicians
so far is acknowledging problems,
but not doing anything to solve the problems.
- Our politicians are spending far too much time arguing
with each other to do an actual good.
It's really frustrating.
- Yeah, absolutely. I
- Really appreciate you taking the time.
Thank you so much.
- Thank you. Talk to you later. Bye.
- Rate review and subscribe to, Hey,
human Podcast on iTunes, Spotify, iHeart,
wherever you get your podcast.
Thanks. Bye.