The Rosenbergs | Inside the CIA | 5

0:00Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

0:16From Audible Originals, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American Scandal.

0:39In June of 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for spying on the United States. They were accused of helping funnel America's nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Neither was a trained intelligence officer. They were an ordinary couple who became the only U.S. civilians ever executed for spying during the Cold War. Their story reveals the personal cost of espionage, not just for the people who steal the secrets, but for everyone drawn into this world built on deception, uncertainty, and decisions that carry enormous consequences. These stakes make it incredibly rich territory for stories, both real, like the Rosenbergs, and fiction, stories of superhuman spies and world-saving missions.

1:23My guest today has lived in both worlds. David McCloskey spent nearly a decade as a CIA analyst before turning to fiction, where he's become a best-selling author of spy novels. He's also the co-host of The Rest is Classified, a podcast that explores the real history of espionage. We'll talk about what it's really like inside the intelligence world, how the Cold War changed espionage, and whether spies like the Rosenbergs truly shaped the course of history. Our conversation is next.

1:56Show button here. Football is finally back and prize picks is going crazy with the deals to start the season, giving out promos every day in September on prize picks. You can make all the picks you want all in the same app. And now prize picks is available nationwide. So what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff because everyone and everything is on prize picks. What you want? Download the app today and use code Wondery to get$150 instantly in lineups. If you win your first$5 lineup prize, pigs. Run your game. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Business Wars from Audible Originals. In our new season, Sweet and Low, Equal, and Splenda are locked in a bitter fight, battling for billions while scientists and regulators threaten to shut them all down.

2:42Make sure to listen to Business Wars on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts.

2:55David McCloskey, welcome to American Scandal. Lindsey, great to be here. Thanks for having me. So let's start with your experience at the CIA. You were hired as an intern when you were just 19. I'm wondering what that onboarding experience was like, specifically the lifestyle polygraph you were forced to take. Yeah, so the agency obviously has an interest in doing a significant amount of vetting of people that it brings on board. so you initially apply and it sort of feels like a normal job to start where you know you send in I was a sophomore in college at the time so you send in writing samples they see your resume such as it is at that point you know your grades etc right so pretty normal stuff they do an interview and then from that they give you or you know if you get through it they give you a conditional offer of employment.

3:50And then from there, the fun begins. And that's the point where they give you kind of a full background investigation. So quite literally, they send investigators out to talk to your friends and your neighbors and your family, very intrusive. They do a psychological examination. They do more interviews. And the worst part, most interesting part, is the polygraph. And there's different flavors of polygraph. And you mentioned the lifestyle polygraph, which is the most intrusive. And that's really all about establishing some facts around your background and whether or not you've lied on your application, of course.

4:28But it's also about asking you, for example, you know, do you work for a foreign intelligence service? Have you done anything nasty on government computers or computer networks, that kind of thing? And it's all yes or no questions, but it can take hours because because you're having a conversation with the polygrapher about the question in advance. So, for example, they might say, okay, I'm going to ask you a question about whether you've committed property crime. Is there anything you want to talk about in advance of answering that question? And if you happen to be like me and you've done a little bit of light pranking that may have ended in windows being smashed or some sort of light property damage, you might raise that with them and then they say, okay, that's not the kind of thing I'm talking about.

5:10I'm talking about arson and blah, blah, blah. So you can confidently answer no to the question. But then what they do is even if you don't have anything to hide, they really push the fact that you are lying to put pressure on you and to see what comes up. So in some ways, and I think actually the core of the experience, is to put you in a very uncomfortable position and see what comes out. And so you can sit for multiple of these. They could take three or four hours. It's a, you know, I would say it was one of the more stressful experiences of my young life. But somehow I made it through and then got in and, you know, was an analyst there.

5:50But it's an unpleasant experience to sit for one of those things. It sounds like practice for an interrogation. interrogation. What do you think they saw in you? You know, they're different, a lot of different jobs at the CIA. And I was applying for an analyst job. And so I think what they're looking for are really a lot of critical thinking and writing skills and interest in the broader world and how it works. And importantly, I think they're looking for, especially when you're hiring young analysts, they're really looking for someone who's kind of a blank slate who they can teach. And so there is a behavioral aspect of, I think, looking for coachability.

6:29Is this someone who we could bring in and actually school and how you become an analyst? But the job of a CIA analyst would be very similar to going to work as a journalist at a newspaper or a researcher at a think tank. So it's a very similar kind of critical thinking, writing set of skills that they're primarily hiring for when you're talking about analysts. Well, you've anticipated my next question because I wanted to know with a little more detail what an analyst at the CIA is and how closely they might relate to what we think of as a spy. Definitely not a spy. I think that's really important.

7:03And in fact, the word spy gets overused and used as shorthand when you're talking about anyone who's connected at all to the intelligence business. The way it's used inside CIA, to be quite honest, it's not used inside CIA. But the correct way to label someone a spy would be the foreign asset who is providing us with the information. They're the one who's doing the espionage. The analyst is an analyst. The case officer who runs that asset, you know, be it in Syria or Russia or Germany, wherever it might be, that person is a case officer. They're an intelligence officer. They're not actually a spy, and they're not an agent.

7:46That's also a misnomer. The analyst, though, I think the best way to think about that job is that it is a version of clandestine journalism. You're doing a lot of the same things that an investigative reporter does when they're putting together a big story. You're using a bunch of different sources. In this case, it could be human sources, but it could also be intercepts, signals intelligence, satellite imagery, press reporting, diplomatic cables from our embassy in that country or the region. You're using all of that information. Some of it is fragmentary. Some of it's going to be contradictory.

8:20Some of it's better than others. And you're answering a question that's really important to policymakers. So you're basically taking a big national security topic. For example, I worked on Syria while I was at the agency. And in the early days of the Arab Spring, one of the big questions was, well, how long can Bashar al-Assad hold on to power? And so you're answering a question like that in written form, using all of those different sources, and putting it in very simple, economical, precise language for the president or other senior policymakers or intelligence officials, so that they can make better decisions about the world.

8:58Much in the same way that an investigative journalist would put together a story for a newspaper so that readers could have a better understanding of what's going on in the world or the economy or whatever. So that's essentially what an analyst does. Just a quick follow-up on an analyst's job. Of course, some of the best investigative journalism happens with shoe-leather reporting. How many of your sources are discovered or found by the analyst? Well, you hope none, but that doesn't always happen. It's not a particularly safe job to commit treason, right? I mean, you think about if you zoom all the way out and say, what is the CIA doing with these assets?

9:36I mean, we are recruiting them to steal secrets for us. So they're doing something that in their country is almost always illegal. In some cases, it can lead to long prison terms or even the death penalty. you know, protecting that source, protecting that asset is fundamentally one of the key, if not the key rule that the CIA and case officers follow when they're handling an asset. So you're communicating with them and meeting with them using forms of tradecraft to keep that association clandestine. And that usually works, but obviously with really committed, really effective counterintelligence services like you have in China or Russia or Iran or Cuba or North Korea, the way you go about doing that can be very difficult, very dangerous.

10:30And as a result, sometimes assets are caught. So Julius Rosenberg and his brother-in-law David, given the definition of spy that we've just established, would probably fit the definition. They're less secret agents, but informants working for a foreign government. Yeah, exactly. We would call them, in our parlance, they would be assets of, I believe they were assets of the Soviet NKVD. I mean, the recruitments, I think, predated the KGB itself. But yes, they were assets or agents of Soviet intelligence, precisely. So one thing that is obviously striking about the Rosenberg story is the torn family tragedy at the center of it.

11:11David ultimately betrays his own sister to save his wife. And it seems that almost anyone in the intelligence business has to make or probably has to make enormous personal sacrifices or faces dilemmas like this. Was that true of yourself as an analyst or others you worked with? It definitely was not true of me as an analyst, although, you know, obviously you're working in a very secretive environment. And so the things that you're doing day to day, you can't really share with people around you. It's not a normal job where you can kind of come home and really talk openly about what you may have done at the office that day.

11:48So everybody involved in the business has to deal with that in some way, shape, or form. I think the Rosenberg case is a striking and really tragic demonstration of betrayal of the business, but it's also quite exceptional. When I think about the case officers, the agency officers that I know, I can't think of an analog. I can think of cases, though, where case officers have lost assets, assets who've been arrested or killed. And there can be a sense of, you know, deep loss. And certainly, on the part of those assets, families, a sense that what they did, often in secret, was a betrayal, betrayal of family and marriage and country.

12:28And so that's certainly true. But I think one of the misconceptions about the spy business is that the case officers, the intelligence officers are walking around sort of betraying and deceiving everybody all the time. And I think that's not true. I actually think that the reality of the business, the paradox of the business, is that it is cloaked in secrecy and deception. And yet at the core of it, the bond that holds the asset to the handler and the asset to the intelligence service that he or she is working for is really grounded on a tremendous amount of trust and openness. and, you know, in the best cases, a large degree of honesty about the shared mission.

13:14So this concept that there's sort of constant betrayal in the business, it does come from somewhere. The Rosenberg case highlights it very well and very starkly when you're talking about that foreign agent or asset, because what they are doing day in and day out as part of this relationship is betraying the organization they work for, the country they live in, and oftentimes friends and family. So that is true, but it's not as true for the actual intelligence officer who works for the CIA or British SIS or the Soviet NKVD or whatever it may be.

14:07shiver up your spine. Your heart aches. Your ears burn. You yearn for Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy to profess their undying love for one another. You can't bear it any longer. Well, maybe a chapter longer. Performance is so good, you'll give love a second chance. Audible. Stories that speak to you. What if AI could recreate the voice of somebody you loved who died? What if it destroyed your reputation with words you never said? And what if you fell in love with something that was never human? I'm Mark Fennell, and in my brand new Audible original podcast, I'm travelling the globe to investigate the very personal ways AI is already changing our relationships, our memories, and our sense of what is real.

14:51Unreal. Listen now on Audible.

15:03You used the phrase shared mission, and many spies, especially of the Cold War period in which the Rosenbergs were operating, seem to have real ideological conviction. From your experience, what do you think drives most spies to take on such enormous risk? Well, it is certainly true that ideology can play a significant factor in the decision. I think it's less true today than it was during the Cold War. I think that today it is perhaps a bit more mercenary than in those decades. But, you know, there's an overused but I think directionally correct acronym about what drives people, what compels people to spy.

15:43And it's MICE, M-I-C-E. M is money, I is ideology, C is control or coercion, and E is ego. And, you know, money, obviously, people can do this because they have massive debts or they want to fund a particular lifestyle. ideology, as the Rosenbergs case shows. You have communists working inside sort of the U.S. technical military establishment. The converse is also true that in Russia and the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, you have Russian intelligence officers and scientists who felt that the Soviet system was rotten and wanted to work to help the United States undermine it. There are very ideologically driven cases among them.

16:26Coercion or control frankly, less commonly used by Western intelligence services, but the Russians use blackmail, kompromat, kind of having leverage over people to get them to then spy for you. And then intelligence officers are people with access to secrets who feel slighted by the organization they work for, passed up for promotions, not given favors. That kind of stuff can actually be very potent and very visceral for people, and thus, you know, a real kind of impetus to spy. So it's always more complicated than any of M-I-C-E acronym, any of those single letters. It's usually a stew of a lot of different things, but that kind of gives you some sense of the different reasons why.

17:08And as we saw in the Rosenberg case, ideology absolutely can be a factor. So in this Cold War period, this is probably the most frightened and paranoid that America and probably the Soviet Union has ever been. What role did spying have in that paranoia? Did it cause it or was it caused by it? Well, it's a great question. I mean, my sense of the Rosenberg case is it drops at a particularly sensitive time in the Cold War. Soviets have just tested an atomic bomb. The Korean War has kicked off at this point. We're a few years away from Sputnik and the space race. And when you zoom all the way out, you don't really have a set of rules yet for this conflict.

17:52And so it's this very heady period. And I think one of the things that the Rosenberg case in particular does is it demonstrates that there can be enemies within, which had been a fear prior. But this is a sort of visceral demonstration of just how penetrated the U.S. military industrial establishment could be. And so I think it, you know, from my sense, is that it takes on a life of its own and sort of feeds the idea that there are enemies everywhere. And that you can't know, we don't know the full extent of how many other spies like this are there. And certainly that the Soviets had very effectively penetrated the atomic bomb program.

18:32And so if you take that as a case study, you think maybe it's the same at the CIA. Maybe it's the same at the State Department. Maybe it's the same at the FBI. And I think it fuels an incredible panic that is definitely out of proportion to the actual scale of the threat, but it demonstrated practically that there was one. And so it is a bit of a chicken and an egg thing, but I think my read on kind of the, frankly, the witch hunts to come afterward are that it dramatically amplifies a fear that existed and was probably to some degree understandable and reasonable, but it blew it up into something that had its own energy and that blew the threat out of all proportion.

19:12In this Cold War moment in the mid-20th century, the CIA is both an ambitious and overreaching organization. We can point to the 1953 coup in Iran, the 1954 coup in Guatemala, the Bay of Pigs. This is a moment maybe in which the organization is trying to professionalize to gain a playbook. What is your assessment of how well the CIA fulfilled its mission in this period? I'll give you a bit of a controversial take, which is I think the CIA did pretty well in this period. And I think you have to evaluate it against the sort of directives and orders, frankly, that it's given by the White House. I think the 53 coup in Iran is successful.

19:56Guatemala is successful. Bay of Pigs isn't. But I think on the covert action front, the CIA in those years was sort of finding its way at what it meant to be a global intelligence service and what it meant to resist Russian expansionism and active measures all over the world. And so I think, when we look back at that period, I think askance in many respects of just how activist it is and how secretive the CIA was and, frankly, how unaccountable it was. This is a period where there's really no scrutiny on its budget and there's really no congressional oversight whatsoever. This is a period where there aren't memoirs written by former CIA officers.

20:36We don't have former CIA analysts going on podcasts in this period to explain the inner workings of the place. So it's a deeply secretive place, but I think, you know, it's sort of finding its way at what it means to both, from a covert action standpoint, underbite and resist Soviet expansionism, and then at the same time, how do you develop an information advantage over our adversaries? series. And we can't give it perfect marks for that period. And obviously, there's a tremendous amount of excess that happens. I mean, goodness gracious, like, you know, I don't know how much you've covered in your program, but your MKUltra, which is this journey into trying to find ways to actually control, you know, essentially to bind control.

21:16It involves the CIA at one point becoming the largest purchaser and supplier of LSD in the entire world. It ends up with a whole bunch of lawbreaking. So, you know, it's very much a mixed record over this period with a lot of stains on the agency's record, and rightly so. But I think my view is that you have to evaluate it at the context of the time. And in the context of the time, you know, as you're talking about the Rosenberg story, it's a time of deep uncertainty about what the Cold War actually is and who the Russians are and what they want. And a time when we were actually quite similar to the Russians in terms of military and technical capabilities, and it was not at all clear who was going to win the Cold War.

21:58You've detailed that in this period that the CIA was largely unaccountable and gave a great example in MKUltra. So it's no surprise that the CIA did come under scrutiny in the 1970s with the church and then the Pipe Committee hearings, both investigating abuses by the U.S. intelligence community. What were some of the major lessons of those hearings and what changed afterward, if anything. I think the big lesson was in an open society, you can't have a completely secretive, largely unaccountable intelligence organization. That when that happens, there will be abuses. And the most egregious ones to buybind are actually not the foreign adventures.

22:40The really awful stuff is when the agency, I mean, repeatedly over the course of the 50s and 60s, broke its charter and did things like essentially ran mind control experimentation on American citizens without their knowledge, wrote reports and spied on the domestic anti-war movement under the fig leaf or in some quarters suspicion that it connected to foreign communists, opened mail domestically of American citizens. And in the case of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, had agency psychiatrists write up a psychological profile of an American citizen that was intended to be used to tar him publicly by the White House.

23:26So to my mind, those hearings uncorked all of this and revealed that when you have an intelligence service that is totally secretive and really only accountable to the president and a very small number of congressional leaders, very small, that it's going to do bad things. And so I think the reforms coming out of that, they do go a long way toward making sure that there is a much more sort of sophisticated and institutionalized congressional oversight. I think tilt the balance back toward a bit more openness so that the intelligence service of the democracy can be held accountable to the laws and norms of an open society.

24:03So I think the reforms of the 70s are sort of very necessary in that respect to protect the constitutional rights of American citizens and showing what can happen when an intelligence service gets out of control.

24:24What if AI could recreate the voice of somebody you loved who died? What if it destroyed your reputation with words you never said? And what if you fell in love with something that was never human? I'm Mark Fennell, and in my brand new Audible original podcast, I'm travelling the globe to investigate the very personal ways AI is already changing our relationships, our memories, and our sense of what is real. Unreal. Listen now on Audible.

24:54James Arthur Ray was a charismatic self-help guru who promised his followers a path to wealth and enlightenment by becoming the best versions of themselves. But not all who followed him finished their journey. After Ray appeared on Oprah, thousands flocked to his events. But what many people didn't know about were his more extreme methods. Methods that push his followers to their limits, giving some the transformative experience they envisioned and killing others. For the best bingeable series like the one I just told you about, listen to the Audible True Crime Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.