1386: Sean Wiswesser | Inside Putin's Russian Intelligence Machine

21:50Sure, and I'll give the Russian names. We're doing acronyms. SVR stands for Sluzba Vnešno Rozjetki, the Service for Foreign Intelligence. So they are the former first chief directorate of the KGB, which was in charge of foreign intelligence. They're about probably 30 ,000 to 40 ,000 strong. They're the smallest of the three services for foreign intelligence. FSB is the internal service It is the largest in Russia It is a monolith giant bureaucracy I believe about 400 ,000 strong We ultimately don't know until the vector comes out They have over 200 ,000 border guards They are in charge of cyber operations Against the West and the United States Under their Cyber Center 16 and Cyber Center 18 They employ hackers for hire They employ criminal proxies The FSB is embedded with companies, corporations across Russia People make the analogy, oh, FSB internal, kind of like FBI, nothing further from the truth.

22:43Forget it. Whatever faults of our system, we're still a law-abiding democracy. We still answer to the Constitution. In Russia, the FSB answers to no one. Putin was their former director, remember. And then the GRU is military intelligence plus a whole lot of other stuff. Again, no equivalents to the U.S. intelligence community. The GRU has their equivalent of DIA, but also NSA, signals intelligence, NRO. They're in charge of the satellite constellations. They have 14 special operations brigades, like our Navy SEALs or CAG, the Delta Force. These are 10 ground brigades and four marine brigades of some of the most elite of special forces in their intelligence community.

23:23Giant bureaucracies, giant monolith-like corporations, Jordan. And when I say corporations, they're embedded with companies. Russian intelligence is making a lot of money off the Ukraine war. It's not in their interest to end this war. There's a lot of Russian intelligence leadership generals and all those services getting very wealthy on the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their own soldiers and sadly hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, too. So, yeah, that's a snapshot of the services. Russian officers sometimes copied newspaper stories, added the political spin Moscow wanted and presented them as secret intelligence.

23:55So basically chat GPT, but with epaulets and a drinking problem. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by PACA. True story, I was packing for New York and I couldn't find either of my pack of hoodies. I own a gray and a green one and I was frantically looking for them at 5 a.m. Worried I left it in China where I was a couple weeks ago. So I get in the Uber and I go to the airport anyway. Something doesn't feel right. So I have the driver turn around. Now, did I also want to stay home and play Pokemon with my son? Yes, but I also didn't feel right about leaving without my favorite travel hoodie.

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25:59We don't get a cut of sales or anything, but it lets the company know that people are hearing the ad, they're taking action, they'll maybe renew their campaign with us. So if you're signing up for something, you're buying something, please use our code. It is often just my name, Jordan. Of course, all the codes are searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. It's a win-win. You get the discount and you help keep the show going strong. Thank you for your support. Now, back to Sean Wisswesser. Which are more likely to target, say, an American diplomat? It sounds like that would be SVR, Right.

26:29Foreign intelligence service would go after the diplomats. I suppose an American diplomat in Russia would be FSB territory, right? Exactly. What about a university researcher or technology company who's going after Elon Musk? Is that SVR? I think it's all of them, to be honest. So what we learned, for instance, with the hack of the Democratic servers in the 2016 election, the GRU and the FSB were literally falling all over each other. Part of how FBI discovered the GRU hack from that unit called Fancy Bear that had done successful phishing attempt against Podesta, I guess it was. They infiltrated the Democratic servers.

27:04They had them hacked. Well, as detailed in the reports later on, they were partially found because the FSB was trying to hack into the same server. FBI noticed that, was paying attention, and they discovered, lo and behold, wait, somebody's already exfiltrating data. What's going on here? So they weren't sharing with each other. The FSB is just to hell with the GRU. We're going to do our own hacking. And by the way, they were all of them at the same time. SVR, GRU, FSB. Bet money. They were also targeting the Republican servers, too. There's no sentimentality here, folks. They don't care ultimately who wins our elections.

27:37They're out for bigger prey than that. They're against democracy writ large. They're trying to undermine our entire system. And I always make that point talking about the election meddling, Jordan. Is it an ideology thing where they want to just take down their longstanding enemy? Or is it like, actually, we all get rich if there's no police and the U.S. is the only one sort of freezing our accounts and pressuring countries to expel diplomats? It seems like they're just after money, but maybe some of the old guys just want to settle a score. We're the only other power in the world capable of thwarting their vision of dominating Europe and rewriting the map quite literally.

28:13Putin is a dictator with grievances, just like one hundred years ago in Europe, Jordan. the similarities are striking. And he said what he was going to do, said Ukraine didn't have a right to exist, laid it out in an essay and a speech he gave 2021 and then 2022. And what did he do? He invaded. He said, okay, I'm just going to take this whole country. You don't like it? Stop me. Who's going to stop me? And so we're not accustomed in the 21st century, Americans and our European allies. I think we fundamentally didn't think this would really happen. We shared intelligence at an unprecedented level.

28:44We warned our European allies, still many of them, including the Ukrainian government said, no, they're not really going to carry out the largest land invasion since World War II. They did. That's what they're up for. This is big game, honey. I wrote a piece for the cipher brief a couple months back, Jordan, about the danger of Sino-Russian opportunism. Not that they have to coordinate and say, okay, well, we're going to move against NATO and you move against Taiwan. No, they don't have to coordinate. We're engaged now in a war with Iran. Maybe China just decides, you know what, we don't need to talk to Russia and Iran about it.

29:16The U.S. is engaged enough. Its interceptor stocks are so low. Not going to get a better opportunity than this. So let's move on Taiwan. That's what I wrote about. I fundamentally believe this is the greatest danger of a large world war that we've ever had since possibly the Cuban Missile Crisis. I feel really strongly about it. It's a dangerous time. And we're also not projecting deterrence, Jordan. We're projecting weakness. The United States and our European allies from NATO, we're projecting weakness, unfortunately, right now. The only people who are projecting strength is Ukraine to a certain extent.

29:45They do what they can. They are. Of course they are. I got a shout out to Poland. Poland has like really stepped their game up. So there's nuclear deterrence. But I don't think the Russian military could take Poland at this point. I don't know. Poles are tough. The Balts are tough. These are tough peoples. I've served in those regions. I know them. I've worked with them. Thank God for the Poles and the Baltic peoples. A lot of fans Lithuanians, Estonian. My wife's Lithuanian. I'm biased. You're biased. They know the Russian threat, Jordan, they'll fight like hell. They'll fight alone if they have to, like Ukraine's done.

30:13They shouldn't have to, though. This is the only time that we've had in many decades. It's not the only time ever. NATO's had problems, okay? When the king visited the United States from the UK, he pointed out, this is an alliance that's endured for 80 years. We shouldn't forget that. He was right about that. He gave good perspective. There's too much emotion right now on both sides of the Atlantic. He did not play into that, thankfully. The alliance is our strength. NATO is our strength. It's the very envy of China and Russia. They don't have anything like that, Jordan, nor does Iran. I don't want to get too far in the weeds on this, but people always say, oh, there's going to be bricks and it's going to take down the dollar and then they're going to create a military alliance.

30:48You just can't do that with countries that have dictators that want everything for themselves and can't trust each other. Oh, yeah, bricks is going to take over. Oh, yeah, sure. You're going to see a common currency between countries that manipulate their own currency and cheat with the international markets and the trade deals and our sanctions evading. I mean, guys, it's ridiculous. It's just a ridiculous thought that they're going to even do anything like that. Fundamentally, these are not allies. And I point out strategically, they have nothing that could rival the intelligence sharing relationships we have from my sphere, from my career.

31:20But back to Russia, though, unfortunately, though, we're allowing them to constantly probe, test us, cable cuts in the Baltic Sea, targeting the CEO of Ryan Mattel in Germany, trying to kill a leader of a company. There's some sort of, I can't remember the name of the ship. You probably do. It's in the Baltic Sea and it, what, drags anchor over fiber optic cables and destroys them and maps the whole internet and oil pipelines. Yeah, it's called Jantar and it's been in the Baltic. It's been off the coast of England. Its job is, it works for GUGI. It's a long, long acronym. It stands for the Directorate for Underwater Sea Research, okay?

31:55It's an intelligence unit and it's staffed by GRU and other divers from special military units. And what they do, Jordan, is they map underwater cable lines so that in the time of war, they're going to cut them. And they've been practicing cutting them with shadow tankers. So they've used these shadow tankers where they've dragged their anchors sometimes 100 kilometers. I was in Finland giving a talk on hybrid war, appropriately enough, when the Finns, good for the Finns, they arrested one of the crews. It was a Georgian captain from the country of Georgia and a bunch of other sailors. They dragged their anchor for over 65 kilometers and they cut two major cables and they arrested him.

32:30Unfortunately, again, not enough education, not enough understanding of a hybrid war threat. The captain pleaded ignorance. Oh, we're so stupid. We didn't see the speed of the ship was reduced because we were dragging this dang anchor for 65 kilometers. I'm sorry, Judge. We're just that stupid. Nobody's that stupid. It's my first day captaining a ship. Sorry. Yeah, I mean. Yes, exactly. So the Finnish judge let him go. We can't have this. We have to have a better educated system in all of these countries. You would think the Finns would understand the Russian threat having been invaded by Russia and losing territory to them.

33:02I mean, the Winter War is a long time ago, I guess, but holy smokes, the Finns have no love for the Russians. There's a reason they shoot people that try to cross the border. I will say this, Jordan. I think a lot of Finns get it. I do think that a lot of Finns, though, some Finns bury their heads. I was covered very widely in the press up there. one of the clips I had had like 1.5 million views because I spoke out strongly about the Russia threat. And can you believe an analyst from SUPO, their intelligence service, felt they had to refute what this CIA officer was saying? It's irresponsible for him to claim that we are at war with Russia.

33:34We have good relations with our neighbor. Good relations? My God, what the hell are you talking about? You're a member of NATO now. You're a member of NATO. Your country's a threat as much as any of them. So yes, I think the Finns, like all of our populations, we have it in the United States. Some get the threat, some don't. But they should get it. They fought a brave, valiant war against Soviet aggression in 1940, the Winter War. Yeah, crazy to me that somebody would refute that, good relations with Russia. I mean, unless his boss told him to post that, that's absolutely insane take. I couldn't believe it.

34:05He came on a podcast. They didn't invite me on to refute him. I said, I responded to the newspaper that did it. And I posted this on my LinkedIn not too long ago. I said, I'm happy to debate him. How does he think since last October? Is it going any better for you right now, Finland and NATO? How are we doing with that whole friendship thing? We get along with our neighbor. Yeah, exactly. Totally, totally insane. You mentioned that the SVR is also targeting the CEO of Reinmetall. So that's a defense contractor in Germany. How are they targeting people like him? Yeah, so we think it was the GRU, most likely.

34:36Unit 29155 of the GRU is, I should explain, I never hear anybody explain this. There's experts out there like myself that know it, but the five numbers or number digits when they talk about GRU units. GRU unit 29155. It's just a random number, but it's a legacy of the Soviet times when Soviet military intelligence units were known by what's called their Pachtovie Index, their zip code. So these units were placed all over in different spots in the Soviet Union, but in the West, we started to identify them based on their zip codes. And when the Soviets realized, we knew that it was kind of too late.

35:11So that's a remnant of that system. That's why 29155 has this catchy number. but a lot of people don't understand the history. Well, they're a unit known for sabotage, assassinations, what the Russians call Mokre Adyela, wet work, or direct measures, as the Russians also call it. So in early 2025, the CEO of Ryan Mattel was targeted by this unit. I believe, again, a result of Russian intelligence just unhinged and reckless escalation, where the boss has said to them, impress me, much like a mafia boss. Go out, come up with creative ways to punch back against the West. and one of those morons came up with an idea, let's kill the head of one of Germany's largest companies, and nobody stopped them.

35:51So whether Putin sanctioned it or not, the Germans have them dead to rights. They have the evidence for it. It's why, by the way, Jordan, earlier this year, the head of Germany's Foreign Intelligence Service said, I believe correctly, he said, we're de facto already at a state of war with the Russian Federation. Call it hybrid war, call it gray war, whatever you want. NATO's already at a state of war with the Russian Federation. and he was some criticizing for that some agreed with them but the problem right now is we don't have consensus in nato that's the problem jordan and from the united states for that matter i wonder if we're going to find consensus when russia decides to stalemate and ukraine starts doing something i mean we can almost count on them doing something else what do you think i feel like they're not going to stop with ukraine even if they lose essentially or don't complete their goals in ukraine i feel like they could start moving against other places as well i do believe that they'll have the capability.

36:42Russia will within a year or two of any ceasefire in Ukraine. And I think the next step in the process is attacking the Baltics. And it doesn't need to be a grab. It doesn't need to grab a capital like Vilnius or Riga. I believe it'll be a land grab at some type of operation to show how hollow they think the alliance is. But here's one scenario. Carlo Masala wrote a book in Germany last year. It's a bestseller. Tiny little book.

37:09It's only the political scenario of a ceasefire in Ukraine, and then the Russians decide to move against Narva in Estonia. Mine is a little different scenario. Mine focuses more on all the military and intelligence enablers. Listen, Jordan, here's as succinctly as I can put it. Thank God the Ukrainians are ahead of the Russians with electronic warfare, drone warfare, but the Russians are ahead of us. Don't expect peace to break out in Europe. Russia's ready for war. 40 % of their entire economy now is oriented and mobilized towards war. War is good for them right now for Putin. He doesn't need to change that.

37:41So ceasefire in Ukraine, they look for their next target. Unfortunately, that's what I believe. Back to the espionage elements here. Walk us through an ordinary day in the life of an SVR officer posted in New York or Washington. What happens when he leaves home until he reports back to Moscow in the evening or at the end of the week? What is he looking for on the way to work? He's obviously trying to shake surveillance. who might he meet under diplomatic or academic journalistic cover how much of this is glamorous espionage and how much of this is bureaucratic ass covering and paperwork overall the main theme of their day jordan that they're obsessed with russian intelligence officers of all three services is corruption taking care of oneself taking care of one's boss is equally important have to make sure you're paying up in the feudal system again much like a mafia structure you're making money on the side, you pay the boss, you pay and your captain pays the boss, man.

38:38That's how they work. Constant schemes, rackets, and scamming. Sergei Tretikov related this to me personally. I had a chance to debrief him. His time in New York, he was fed up to hear about it. He was deputy resident. He's supposed to be deputy chief of station of the SVR residency in New York, a prestigious job for them. He said he spent an inordinate amount of his time buying televisions, buying jewelry, buying things he had to ship back to his bosses in Moscow constant corruption, constant schemes not just small ones, big schemes Russian embassy in Iraq in the run up to the war they weren't the only ones doing it but they were buying entire tankers of gasoline from the Iraqis and they would say this is for the embassy community so they write it off to the Russian state budget, the foreign ministry and then they were driving those tankers across the Syrian border and selling it below market price and banking the profit.

39:31I had one of my proofreaders, a good friend of mine, he read that. He said, no, you mean above market price so they can make profit. I said, no, you're thinking like an American. No, they stole it. For the Russians, it's all profit. It's all profit. Yeah, they stole the whole damn thing. It's all profit. They can afford to sell it as cheap as they want because they're getting a tanker of gasoline they've sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. So that's examples of the scam scheming constantly. They did that. They do that. anytime they can take advantage of a situation with a war or sanctions, they're going to do it.

39:58Scams like buying cell phones in the United States, we use them in espionage, buying laptops. They'll buy 40 laptops. They'll tell the center, SVR center, here's what it costs us for 20 laptops. The other 20, they ship back in the diplomatic pouch. They got a buddy waiting. He sells them on the black market there. We'll split the profit. This is the obsession. Now let's talk about when they do try to do espionage, what they do. They'll start their day, though, between all the other corruption, because that comes first. They'll do a surveillance detection run if they're a good, competent officer, and not all of them are.

40:29But the good ones will do a surveillance detection run. They'll leave their home, and they'll be looking for FBI surveillance. They'll do this, what they call an MP, and they may stop a couple stops on the way into the embassy, and they'll try to see are they being followed or not. Now, their goal is to see when they're in the embassy and they report to their bosses, they'll report and say, I was free today, I wasn't covered, or no, you know, I think the FBI is on to me today. Unfortunately for us, we have limited resources in the West. So do the Brits, so do the Germans, the French. The Russians know this.

41:03It's always been a numbers game to them. So if they have one officer covered, they knew, especially in the old days when there was hundreds of intelligence officers in the embassy, there's less now, but there's still dozens of them there. The point is, Jordan, somebody else won't have coverage that day. They'll just say, hey, Yuri, it's not your day. Vladimir, here's what you're going to do. And what are the examples of the types of things they'll do? They'll attend academic conferences in whatever country they're based at. They love to target academics. They refer to academics as useful idiots.

41:32They say, hey, you know, would you be willing to discuss with me the possibility of Russia being the third Byzantine, these philosophies about, you know, we have a role to play in the world. We're the third Rome. We can play a critical role. And they take advantage of academics that they can get to empathize with the Russian Federation and its policies. If that doesn't work, what are they doing on the clandestine side? Of course, they're handling agents. And usually in our countries, like United States or UK or France, if it's a government agent that they're handling, remember, we refer to ourselves as officers.

42:06The agents are the ones we handle betraying their countries. The Russians are the same way. They call themselves Russia Chiqui, their officers. The agents are those that they're running. They won't meet those agents in that country. They will use what they call impersonal communications, and that's dead drops and signal sites. So those are the types of intelligence activities they're doing. They're servicing their existing agents with dead drops, signal sites. I've had journalists in Europe, they're all the rage right now is to talk about, oh, they're not doing that anymore. They're using Telegram to recruit these sabotaged teenagers and all.

42:39No, excuse me. They're not 10 feet tall, but they're not completely incompetent. When they have a good penetration of a government, the Russians know how to protect them. Witness Robert Hansen. They ran him for 20 years, Jordan, and they never met him in the United States person face-to-face. They did it in dead drops and signal sites. So that's a little bit of a flavor, how the residency works. Let me give one other example, though. This is telling. Sergei Tretikov told me about this. His personal experience with Russian officers, he would ask them when they were reporting a new intelligence source, he'd have to ask them, wait, Is that just for the reporting, though, or is that a for-real case?

43:15Meaning, are you making that shit up? Did you just pull that from the newspapers, or is that actually for real? It's so common in their service that they have a name for it. Is that for the popkey? Is that just for the files, or is that a real source? So they're taking reporting from the New York Times or something. They're giving it political spin that Moscow wants, and then they're saying, oh, my secret source in the Department of Commerce or whatever said da-da-da-da-da. And it's like, no, you just had ChatGPT rewrite an article from The Times today, and you submit that to your boss. So it's not even intelligence.

43:46It's open source intelligence rewritten to make somebody smile or happy or whatever, to toe the line. That's pathetic somehow, actually. It is pathetic, but it has a long history. Back to the KGB, it was talked about in the 80s and 90s, too, from other defectors that said, yeah, this is common practice, unfortunately. Yikes, man. Man, so managers have to decide which sources are real or even ask, hey, is this fake nonsense so that you don't get a slap on the wrist or is this real? And man, how does the leadership even make rational decisions if everybody knows that the reporting is all embellished?

44:17I also wonder what happens to an officer who reports an unpleasant truth rather than a useful lie. Do they get in trouble? Is there a problem with that? That's how you end up with Russia invading Ukraine. That's how you end up with the Russians convinced they would have a one week war. and now they're into their fifth year of war. That's what happened. You had the FSB in particular. Its fifth service is in charge of operational analytical reporting to the president. They're the ones that briefed President Putin. And they convinced him, hey, we'll boss chest pound and we got this. This will be a quick one.

44:46They had scripted roles for themselves as I lay out from my research and my work. That's what you get. You get a culture where they're telling him exactly what he wants to hear. I think Putin's never been more isolated. He's in literally a bunker complex right now, like Hitler at the end of the war. No generals are going to tell him his version's not right. All the intelligence services are nodding in agreement. Yes, Vladimir Vladiminovich, we're winning. It'll be next week. It's just one more week is all we need, and it'll be over. Russian officers asked soldiers' parents for money to keep their sons away from suicide missions.

45:17And you thought airline baggage fees were predatory. We'll be right back. This episode is also sponsored by FlyKit. We're getting ready for a trip to Taiwan with both kids. I'm excited but also bracing myself because we're tired on a normal day, adding a 13-hour flight, a 13-hour time change, and two kids who don't care what time zone we're in. And jet lag is not just annoying. It's an emergency. That's why we're packing FlyKit. It's a kit plus an app that creates a personalized jet lag schedule for your trip, when to take the supplements, when to wear blue light blockers, when to get light, when to caffeinate, when to nap, all to give you the best shot at beating jet lag.

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47:19If a code's not working, you can't find something, you're not sure if it still exists, email us, jordan at jordanharbinger.com. We're happy to surface codes for you. It's that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Sean Wiswesser. By the way, you mentioned Telegram being used to recruit teenagers. Somebody that I know who was from Belarus, she lived in Poland, she was a server at a cafe, and she was always posting on social media, oh, I'm in Paris now. And I was thinking like, wow, you must make really good tips over there. And I honestly, I feel a little bit bad, but I thought maybe she's got like an OnlyFans or something because how are you making enough money as a server?

47:58And she's attractive. So I just didn't ask, right? I thought like, all right, that's between her and her boyfriend. I don't really care. But if I was making Polish cafe waitress wages, I don't think I'd be jet setting every weekend. She got arrested by whatever the Polish FBI is because what she was doing was she was getting paid in cryptocurrency from a Russian handler to take photos of things in Poland. And apparently she took a bunch of photos of something in Poland and that got burned. It was like a railway depot or something. There was a mysterious fire that got lit there. I don't think she lit the fire.

48:27I think she was providing some kind of intelligence because she had a Polish visa. And now she's in prison, actually. She's still in prison. No one's heard from her for a long time. So these are Russian direct measures. They call it, they call it, but I'm way to do it. Okay. This is being carried out by units like GRUnit 29155 by FSB units. But, Jordan, we have to make the distinction it's not traditional espionage. It's not traditional what the Russians call agatorna robota. So this is sabotage operations. This is them taking advantage of misfits, miscreants of society, drug addicts, kids that hate their parents, that want to practice anarchy, doom, and play too many damn video games.

49:05I don't know. So me at age 18. Got it. but unfortunately russian intelligence says you know what these kids are vulnerable so they're getting onto them on telegram they're taking advantage of whatever media they can to reach them and they entrapped a lot of them though what they do usually at first is say i work with a organized crime group they're not saying i'm russian intelligence will you do this they say i'm willing to pay you a thousand bucks we have a competitor company we're working against go take a picture of their rail yard i'll give you 500 bucks kid doesn't think hey man i'm making good money.

49:36And then after they do it a couple of times, the typical method, Russians work off coercion. They'll say, hey, we're actually Russian intelligence. We're with the FSB. You've been betraying your country. You're going to go to jail for your whole life. Now what's that miscreant of society going to do? They're feeling trapped. They're doing this a lot. There are some experts don't like the term throwaway assets or one-time assets, whatever we call them. They're not traditional, what the Russians call it, or penetration of a government. They know how to handle those. They know how to do that very well, as I described, signal sites, dead drops.

50:09And they pay very well for agents that deserve it. These are just throwaway cases. They'll use the teenager once or twice. Look at what happened with the Bulgarians in the UK, this hooker ring that they set up. Also, I think it was the GRU, possibly, I guess that one was the FSB, where you had, I think, six different Bulgarians, a couple of pimps and four of their hookers. And they had all these cell phones provided to them by Russian intelligence. They were trying to target journalists. They were going to go after Belencat and Grozev, some of the journalists reporting on Russian intelligence.

50:39Folks like me or you now, Jordan, because now you're on with the CIA officer talking about Russia. Oh, I get targeted by the dumbest stuff, though. It's really clunky. So far, it's clunky level up to 11. They'll send me an email that says I got to do something. And at the bottom is the instructions from their handler or whatever. Like, you guys are idiots. But that's the level of tradecraft. Some of this stuff was clunky, stupid, not very sophisticated. But then look at the Russian side of it, Jordan, though. They say, what are we able to lose? These are not staff officers of our intelligence services.

51:12We don't have to swap for these guys. Let the Bulgarians rot in the prison, the hookers and pimps that we used. They don't care. It's sort of a no loss for them. So they are doing more and more of this, a lot of this going on in Europe right now. Democracies, I think, are particularly vulnerable to it. It's their own citizens being used to sabotage their societies. Well, in this case, it was strange, right, because she wasn't a Polish citizen. She was from Belarus, which is an ally of Russia. So they're even using their own allied citizens as disposable nobodies and letting them rot in prison.

51:41They just don't care. What's even more tragic, Jordan, a lot of these cases have been Ukrainian emigres. They're very poor. They don't have a lot going for them. Some of them are being mistreated. some in some of these countries, but they're also Lithuanians, Estonians, Poles, Germans. They're all nationalities, but they are taking advantage of some Ukrainians as well. They don't have a lot of resources. Maybe they're having a tough life and having to flee their country in a time of war. And there've been many implicated, unfortunately, in some of these sabotage operations. But what are we in NATO doing about it?

52:11We could be saying, you know what, the next sabotage act that we see, we're going to give the Ukrainians those Tomalch missiles that the Russians are so up in arms about. They don't want long-range assets being given to the Ukrainians because the Ukrainians are using them really well, their own assets, to target the energy sector, hit those refineries in Moscow and all over the country. Whether it's tomahawks or a different type of missile, air-launched cruise missile, there's a lot of varieties. That's what the Russians are really afraid of. So if we want to end this war, what we need to say is the next escalation, say, you know what?

52:40Actually, we are going to give them about 50 tomahawks now. The next acts of sabotage that you do, it'll be 100. That's how you end escalation from the other side. Right now, we have empty deterrence. Jordan, we have a deterrence with no consequences. We say, don't you dare do that. We won't tolerate that again. There's no repercussions for Russia. I've had Russian intelligence officers tell me for the decades that I was active and it worked, I had it over and over tell me, what's wrong with your leadership in the United States? They don't get the threat from our intelligence services? You're not listening to what we're telling you?

53:14what's happening. And we didn't listen. So we got Georgia in 2008, the Russians invaded, and then Ukraine in 2014. And so as in any mystery, Jordan, why in 2022, Putin with his Sylviki, his men of power, by the way, the term's very telling. Where else do you get, except an autocrat who can say, calls his cabinet level officials, these are my Sylviki, these are my men of power, my strongmen, is how it's translated. They said to him, just take the whole thing boss they ain't gonna stop you nato's not gonna stop you us isn't gonna stop you look at what they did before boss 2008 2014 they were weak sanctions yeah we can handle your sanctions so if we had projected strength and said you know what we're gonna provide arms we're giving abrams tanks now to ukraine to show you that you better not invade but we didn't we used half measures warnings if only there was an earlier world war where we appeased a tyrant and it turned out to be a bad idea.

54:09I don't know. Oh, well. Jordan, what did Churchill say about Munich? I've said this in an article I wrote a few months back. Churchill's famous warning at Munich was you had a choice. Spoke to his own people, France and the UK both. You had a choice at Munich between dishonor and war. You chose dishonor and you'll have war. His words proved true. A year after Munich, they had general war in Europe because of it. If we don't watch it, what are we worried about, Jordan? We hear it all the time. We got to watch it. This could turn into World War III. No, it will be World War III if we don't deter aggression, if we don't deter the escalation of our adversaries.

54:44I use the example of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy famously said, when the missiles were in Cuba, we shall regard any attack by Cuba against the United States as an attack by the Soviet Union or the United States requiring a full retaliatory response. That was mutual assured destruction. Kennedy was saying, even one missile flies from Cuba will launch a full strike on the Soviet Union. That's deterrence, Jordan. That's deterrence. What do we have right now in Europe? In Europe, what's happening is send over 20, 25 drones in one day to Poland, crash them near military bases, and the alliance does nothing.

55:18It's not deterrence. No, that must have been an accident because I think the excuse was electronic warfare jammed their guidance systems and they landed in the wrong spot. It's like, okay, so when that happens again and they have an explosive payload, can we use the same excuse? Is that going to work again, guys? I don't know. I guess we'll see. I guess we'll test it later if we need to. That's what I'm worried about. And it ties to the mentality of Putin, who he is. He's a Czechist. We have to understand, Russians have a saying, what does a person breathe? What does Putin breathe? He believes deeply in the Orwellian system where the KGB were the elite of society.

55:54Putin's vision of the world, what did he say? Way back in his early years in power, around 2005, he gave a speech. He said, the greatest disaster of the 20th century wasn't World War II, by the way, where the Soviets lost 25 million of their people, and Putin's own older brother died in the war. He starved. Poor child starved during the war. No, it wasn't that. The greatest disaster of the 20th century for Putin was the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's the biggest disaster, because for him, that was his system. That was what made the KGB the elite. It fed their corruption. So that's what he can't get over.

56:27He can't get over the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's why you see him with Ukraine. can't have democracies functioning on Russia's borders. It's deeply tied to the intelligence service's place in Russian society and their elitism, their belief that they need to rule Russia, and he is entitled to rule Russia. So it's all tied together. The corruption, again, is always just so staggering. It makes them less competent, but I feel like it also makes them more dangerous because a criminalized intelligence service is probably going to take risks that a professional service would just refuse to do.

56:55What do you think? I agree. The problem is Putin was underestimated by his own people. So Yeltsin made a barter. Deep corruption in the Yeltsin government. Jordan, back in the 90s, the oligarchs were ruling Russia. And Putin knew it. He was director of the FSB. He knew where the bodies were buried, literally. He knew how to compromise these oligarchs. But he was a nobody. Nobody knew who Putin was. He was short, not imposing. So Yeltsin's family, his daughter, and those oligarchs believe, let's make a barter. Let's pick this guy, relative unknown. We can control him. But what did Putin say? No, I'll control you.

57:30I know dirt on all of you. I know where your money's hidden. I know who's cheating with whose wives and who's killed whose rivals. I've got all the dirt on all of you. And one by one, he turned the oligarchs, or he kicked them out, or like Khodorkovsky, he put them in prison, took over Luke Oil. Nobody saw that one coming. And so now you have a system where Rosneft, the oil company, largest oil company in Russia, it's run by Igor Sechin. It's one of his closest KGB hardliner buddies. So he outwitted them all, Jordan. We got to give it to Putin. He's clever. He's been at this a long time. I often say he gets a straight A in the autocrats of the world course for 26 years now.

58:08He's been getting straight A's. He's watched other dictators come and go. He has his system wired very well. They're the HQ for this, right? Where did Assad go? Moscow. And where do these dictators go when they fall out of power or when they're surrounded? They just fly to Moscow and that's the end of it. If they don't fly to China, they fly straight to Putin, big daddy. Jordan, it gets to another thing I've written on. I wrote a piece for Foreign Policy magazine a couple months back called Don't Believe the Rumors of Putin's Weakness. You hear all this constant talk a month after my, oh, he's getting ready to fall.

58:37Putin's going down, baby. He'll fall any day now. No, unfortunately not. I'd love it as much as anyone. I'm as hopeful as anyone. But it's not happening, Jordan. He's built a system of layered security around him. He knows to make sure not to let what Gaddafi happened, happened to him. It's not going to happen. What happened to Assad is not going to happen. Assad from Syria, Gaddafi from Libya, exactly. The corruption, it does blow up in the agency's face a lot of the time, though. There's this officer you call Kitchen Boy. Tell us that story, because this was an epic fail. So here's how we use that corruption against them.

59:12Here's what matters, is ultimately intelligence officers in Russia, I believe they're more vulnerable now than they've ever been. And they've always been vulnerable because of the corruption. I relate the story of called Kitchen Boy, who was very talented, smart officer, graduated near the top of his class from a very reputable, important feeder program as they have at their universities, entered the SVR and he was hazed. He was relentlessly picked on, brutalized and singled out because he was super smart and he didn't want to go along with the corruption. And he related to me. I really naively believed I wanted to serve Mother Russia and I wanted to help my country.

59:48and I had watched all the movies on TV and now they have more than ever in Russia under Putin. It's all about glorifying the intelligence services. What happened to him? He related to me, you know, one of his residency get-togethers, they get together on days like 20 December, they salute Dzerzhinsky, the ruthless Iron Felix who founded the Chekhov, the first committee for the defense of the revolution. He's seen as the founder of the... So secret police for the Soviet Union? Yeah, secret police. So on 20 December, they get together, they have vodka shots and they were celebrating an occasion like that.

1:00:19He said they had some fish out, dried fish and vodka shots, and one of the more senior officers humiliated him. He said, hey, go clean up the kitchen. He said, I'm not going to clean the kitchen. What, I look like a maid? I'm an intelligence officer. I'm a raziachik. He's proud of himself. He's trying to serve his country on one of his first foreign postings. The officer says, hey, didn't you hear me, kitchen boy? I told you to go clean the kitchen. And so he pauses. He looks at the resident, the chief of station, looks over to him. hoping that the chief of station is going to stand up for him, the resident.

1:00:51What did the resident do? He's like, clean up the kitchen like he told you. He was humiliated. And he was seething with rage over it, though, Jordan. He said, guess I showed him who Kitchen Boy was, didn't I? Giving away all their secrets to the CIA. Said, yes, you did. And he was a hero. He took tremendous risks to help us. And he ended up working and helping with a service that recognized his talents. And so that's the kind of system they have. It's not a meritocracy. It never was, Jordan. And you can't get ahead by wanting to serve your country or do the right thing in Russia. It's all about the corruption.

1:01:19If you're not one of the Rebyata, one of the guys, then you're going to be singled out and picked on. By the way, the most extreme example of that corruption today, there's been great reporting on this in Ukraine and very reputable sources. Reuters has reported on this, I think, too. In Ukraine, Russian soldiers have to pay to stay alive. They have to pay their officers. Their officers contact the parents and say, hey, do you want your son to stay alive another month? I'm going to need another$500. To not send him on a suicide mission, essentially? Yeah. Wow. It's the ultimate form of what the Russians call Diodavshina.

1:01:53It's that hazing. It's that culture in the military and the intelligence services of picking on those that are vulnerable. And this is happening all across the front in Ukraine. Want your son to stay alive? Better keep paying me. I'll take care of him. I'll make sure he's not in the most brutal assaults. Frontline in Ukraine, they say, Jordan, Russian soldier has minutes to live when he's exposed to the drone warfare. Only in Russia do you have that level of corruption where literally human lives are bought and sold now at the front. Those are true stories. Can't make that up. That's disgusting.

1:02:22How do you distinguish between a principled dissident from the intelligence services from somebody who's just a bitter person trying to settle a personal score? Or does it not really matter because you're just getting information from them at the end of the day? I will say that I was privileged in my career. I was honored to truly work with Russians that inspired me, that they were doing it for not just money. Money is usually a part of the espionage business, let's be honest. Finances, it's money towards an end, too. Money to provide for a family, to relocate one's family in the United States where we do have a meritocracy, right or wrong.

1:02:52In our country, you can get ahead. I was not a rich kid. I grew up with nothing, okay? Not a shame to say our family, we had government support. We needed that as a family. I was able to have a great career in CIA and now provide for my own family, rise through a government system that's not perfect, but you can get ahead with hard work. Not so in the Russian intelligence services today. I was privileged and honored to work with Russian spies who were betraying their country for the right reasons. Many of them relocated here to the United States. Not all of them, but many of them did. And so that was the greatest privilege of my professional career was to work with such heroes.

1:03:27They're the heroes, not us. I'm going to challenge you a little bit. You offer these people safety, recognition, money, and a future in the West, which is pretty good. In your opinion, is that morally cleaner than Russian coercion or extortion? Or is it just a much more attractive form of persuasion and manipulation? Oh, it's a huge difference. Listen, people have challenged me. Oh, you're telling me CIA never used coercion? No, of course we did. Look at the history of the Cold War. but in my CIA that I came into, I was a part of, we don't believe it fundamentally works, Jordan. We don't. We just don't believe that coercion works as long as you keep beating a person.

1:04:00And when you stop beating them with whatever it is, intimidation, Russians call it compromising material operations, whether it's sex spionage or gambling or taking advantage of human weakness. We don't believe that works. We believe fundamentally you have a problem, let me help you solve your problem, whether it's money or health issues or whatever it is. and that person will be loyal to you for life. They'll say, this person saved my life. They saved my family. They kept their word. They helped us get out of Russia. And we've done that over and over again. The Russians, what do they have? They have the stick.

1:04:31They say, work with us or we'll kill you. Or work with us or we'll destroy your marriage because we caught you in sexpionage with one of these swallows. Or work with us or the Russian mob will beat the crap out of you because you've been gambling stupidly at a casino know, that we control. And now we've got pictures of it. So that's how they operate. It's perfectly normal to them. But we believe fundamentally it's not a good motivator. It's not that we've never used it, but we've come around to believing it doesn't work fundamentally long term. Our method works. For people whose understanding of Russian intelligence comes from TV shows like The Americans, which I love, right?

1:05:05People who are Russian and they come to America and they pretend to be American. They have kids and everything here. What exactly is a Russian illegal? How is that different from an intelligence officer working out of an embassy. I think a lot of people didn't realize this kind of thing is real. Yeah, it is real. Americans is a good show. I enjoyed it. They had some CIA advisor, one or two, I think that helped them. There's a lot of truth to the show. There's also a lot of Hollywood. I just talked about Sex Pienaub, but in that show, my goodness, Jordan, you remember, especially in season one, there's just sex all the time.

1:05:35Kerry Russell was all over the town. Yeah. Yeah. So that was Sex for Effect Hollywood, of course. A lot of killing in the Americans too. But let's talk about the illegals that the show actually was based on. The case it was based on was the ghost stories case. Illegals have always been a foundation of Soviet and Russian intelligence, Jordan, gone back 100 years. Putin loves illegals. He believes in them. I call the chapter Illegals, the pride of the Russian intelligence services, because that's what Putin believes and feels fundamentally. The ghost stories illegals that were in the US, there were 12 illegals, 10 of them were the main illegals, and there was a traveling illegal, there was one more, but eight of them were couples, like related in the Americans, and then there were two that the Russians called special agent illegals like Anna Chapman.

1:06:17She was different. But fundamentally, this is an old tactic that goes back over 100 years and used to be used to great effect by Soviet intelligence. We have to acknowledge that. Great intelligence cases they pulled off in the 30s and 40s, illegals of Soviet intelligence stole the atom bomb project from under our noses. They stole the plans using spies like Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs to a lesser degree. They were handled by illegals. So Cambridge Five were five spies that were recruited at Trinity College and Cambridge University. They were privileged elite of British society who decided on idealistic reasons they were going to betray their country and help the Soviet Union because they believed in the communist cause.

1:06:58They were what Vladimir Lenin called useful idiots. They believed really, oh, it was a worker's paradise there. One of the most damaging was someone named Kim Philby, who ended up in British Intelligence, their Secret Intelligence Service, their SIS, also known as MI6, and he did tremendous damage to their service in their country. All of them did. They had other spies, but the Cambridge Five, McLean and Burgess and Philby, they infiltrated into the foreign ministry, other offices of government. They were recruited by an illegal Deutsch who went to Trinity and talked to them and convinced them that they should help the Soviet cause.

1:07:33By the way, typical also of Soviet intelligence, Deutsch himself was later killed in Stalin's Burgess. He didn't survive to get any medals for his work. But my point is, in that time period, the Soviet spies that helped infiltrate the Manhattan Project, our atomic bomb, and helped the Soviets dramatically, probably get the bomb 10 years sooner than they would have, they pulled out amazing feats of espionage. They're known in history, historically, Soviet historians have called them the great illegals. They were the generation of the great illegals. But today's illegals, I call them not-so-great illegals.

1:08:04They're not quite up to muster. They're not quite up to those standards. So the 10, eventually 12 illegals that we wrapped up with the FBI in 2010 were a bunch of bungling fools. They were nothing comparable to those great illegals of old. They were mostly living here comfortable lives. Their story would not have made good watching on TV. One of the best examples of it, I love this one. This is from the archives of the FBI. One of the couples, the wife was trying to work as a travel agent. Her husband was supposed to be the main illegal. He was lazy. The FBI has tapes where she would call home on the phone and say, hey, can you help me out with grabbing some groceries today for the kids?

1:08:41Because I'm doing that thing. Remember, she's trying to do her job and work. He would tell her, I'm too busy, too. I got a lot going on. He was watching Sopranos on TV, literally watching Sopranos. Wow. That's an SVR illegal of the modern times, the not so great illegals. That's funny. FBI is like, oh, we got a lot of activity. And the surveillance guy is like, no, sir, he's still on the couch. Sir, he's on season three right now of Sopranos. He's binge watching the episode. Can I leave? He hasn't left the house in three days. Can I go take a proper piss and get a burger? Telling his poor wife, hey, I'm busy.

1:09:10I got stuff to do too. You know, I've got my tasking, you know, hinting to her and she's like, all right, whatever. I'll pick up the groceries too. He's watching Sopranos. One Russian sleeper agent spent his operational time watching the Sopranos while his wife did the grocery shopping. Our sponsors also fund this operation, but with fewer feds parked in a van outside. We'll be right back.

1:09:33Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light, and slowly the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season, you create it layer by layer until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross. Don't forget about our newsletter, We Bit Wiser. It's a specific and practical under two minute read, and it comes out many Wednesdays. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it.

1:10:13Now for the rest of my conversation with Sean Wiswesser. So illegals are supposed to recruit people with access and support operations, remain available as infrastructure, and probably not just sit on the couch and watch Sopranos. So why does Putin celebrate illegals, even the failed ones? He greets them, he decorates them, he turns them into heroes. You mentioned that before. Why does he believe in this so much if the truth of the matter is they haven't been doing much for the past several decades? It plays into the, why do Brits love the James Bond image? Why do all folks around the world love the image of James Bond?

1:10:46Sometimes the mythology of the spy is far above the reality of the work. And in Russia, they've immortalized the image of the illegal. Putin's hero as a kid growing up was an illegal that he read about in books by an author called Yulian Semyonov. There was a famous Soviet film. Everyone of that generation from the 70s remembers it, knows this film very well. It's called 17 Moments of Spring. And it's about this GRU, Russian military intelligence illegal, that penetrates the Gestapo, the SS in Germany. And he's so good at his job. He's just really excellent at it. But there's more than that. There's the image of him as a really stoic servant of the state.

1:11:27There's this famous scene in the movie where he's at a reception in a SS uniform. This is a Russian in an SS uniform. And he sees his wife come into the room, and he hasn't seen her or talked to her in years. And for fully a minute or two, there's no dialogue at all. He just watches her with a stoic face, with the discipline to not approach her and not do anything. And Putin's commented on that. He believed Shterlitz was a real hero. The problem is it's mythology. It's fake. There was no such real hero. But Putin loves to mythologize his security services. It plays into his image of them as the elite of society.

1:12:03They're the stoic defenders of Mother Russia, Jordan. So it plays into his narrative why they need to be ruling Russia. And he always says it. KGB was the elite of the Soviet society. Today, the FSB and our security services. Thankfully, we have the illegals. When those illegals were wrapped up in 2010. He famously sung a song with them, greeted them at the airport. He said, you're all heroes. In point of fact, what do we know? What the FBI publicized of the communiques from the SVR center? It was telling them, hey, you're not in the United States to live comfortably and raise your kids. Produce intelligence, recruit sources.

1:12:37You're not doing that. So their own words condemn them the worst. The SVR's own communiques, their cable telegrams, they would write them. Say, hey, you're not doing anything. You're not getting any results. Come on. Anna Chapman was a bungling fool. She was a disaster as an illegal. She went home and wrote books. One of the illegals is now a member of parliament in Russia, so they don't get any accountability for their failure. Do you know who Jack Barsky is? Does that name ring a bell? Sure. Yeah. So he was an illegal, I guess, that history episode 285. And he literally was like, I didn't do anything.

1:13:08I just showed up to the number station drop where he would get instructions. He did that every Thursday or whatever it was. And he did absolutely nothing. And he told me, yeah, I told Moscow, I said, what am I supposed to be doing? And they're like, just make connections. And he's like, I sell insurance. What do you want me to do? I don't have access to anybody. I literally sell life insurance, dude. I'm not going to fancy parties with billionaires. I work as an insurance salesman. And they were just kind of like, stand by. It was just useless. It's just a waste of time. Most of them were failures.

1:13:38Rudy Herman, that my wife and I got to know from studying language with him. He was a defector. The FBI caught him in the 70s and he decided, okay, I'm just going to stay in the United States. He ran a deli when he was living in Canada. He was infiltrating Canada first before coming to the United States. And the SBR would say to him, we want you to target the Canadian politicians. He says, I'll run a deli. What do you want me to do? People come in, they say, you want your sandwich with mustard or no mustard? That's about it. That's what he literally told me. He's like, how the hell am I going to penetrate the Canadian government?

1:14:06Now, at the same time, let's talk about when they do have successes. While those ghost stories, the illegals were not successful in the United States, Jordan, we need to point out there was a couple in Germany, the Anschlags, and they recruited a diplomat from NATO and they did have success. So even if they succeed only one out of a hundred times and they have a success like that, they recruit an actual penetration of NATO. Yeah, then it's a big deal. But the ones here in the U.S. were a bunch of bungling fools. No two ways about it. Walk us through the wrong number incident from the book, because this is such a shocking little anecdote.

1:14:38This is true. This happened. There was an incident where, as I said, a member of our intelligence services, not CIA, but another agency we partnered with in the fight, with the best of intentions, this government worker was planning to have a conference call with another office because those illegals were stationed all over the U.S., Jordan. You had basically four sets of couples in New York, Boston. One was out west. I think another was in Virginia area. And then you had Anna Chapman, and yet another illegal that was also stationed out west named Kretkin. So that's a lot of monitoring is my point.

1:15:11That's a lot of government efforts. On this particular occasion, one of these special agent from a government service, United States government service, doesn't matter which, not trying to embarrass him, was going to call another office, was going to have a secure conference call. In those days, you picked up a special phone and you would call the office of the other field office you want to talk to or any office and you say, hey, can we go secure now, have our conversation, press a button, you get encryption. We'll leave it at that. Nowadays, it's a lot simpler. Things have come along a long ways in 20 years.

1:15:40What happened was he looked at the file and some poor fool had put all the numbers on one sheet together. That's government work for you. We make mistakes too. And there was no separation of the numbers. So right next to the field office number, yep, you guessed it, there was the number of the actual house of the illegals. so he didn't look very carefully he dialed the actual number of the illegals female picks up the wife illegal the russian illegal picks up the phone he says hey it's such and such calling from this field office of this government agency he lists it we're gonna have the conference call still right so can we go secure and she's like stunned because she doesn't know what to do this is a trick and they found us right because she exactly yes she doesn't know that the fbi knows who they are or whichever agency that might have been.

1:16:27That was my read, the transcript and all that we had. And this was relayed to me by my buddy that I worked very closely with on the case. Remember, as I relayed, he told me they don't want to go back because he relayed the incident to me. And then I looked at the logs and all myself. She paused. I think she thought this was a pitch. I think she thought, oh, this is them. They've caught us. They now want us to work with them. So he repeats himself. He's like, no, we're going to do the meeting. And then he gives the code names we had called them for her and her husband and it's itsy and bitsy it's just funny government code names but it's clear he's talking about he's like so can we go secure because we got to talk about the case and again tells i'm from this field office and she's like pauses and she says basically i think you have the wrong number and she hangs up now we know that she knew and her husband knew because, again, they were monitored closely.

1:17:19And they knew what was up, and they talked about it, and they discussed it, and they decided not to report it. That's treason. They betrayed their country. They didn't report that they had strong reason to suspect, having gotten a phone call from this particular government agency that's the counterintelligence agency monitoring them. And so how do you not report that, Jordan? You can't excuse that. I hope the FSB reads my book and they go investigate them and say, hey, which one of you assholes got the phone call and didn't report it? They didn't have to have the disaster that they had in 2010.

1:17:48They could have been exfiltrated from the United States. So I point out their treason and bungling and failures. At the same time, it's true that we have our slip-ups too. And that government official, to his credit, he reported it immediately. All of them were surveilled more intensely. But hey, that's government work. We do our best and sometimes mistakes are made. And point of fact, they didn't report it. My friend said, I agree with him. He said, Sean, they don't want to go back. They just want to live here. That's why they didn't report it. I agree. He's right. They didn't want to go back.

1:18:17Yeah, that's interesting. They didn't want to go back. Same with Jack Barsky. His thing was, they said, you got to come back. And he said, no. And they said, if you don't come back, we're going to kill you. And he said, I have HIV, which was not true at all. And he knew that they didn't want him there because they thought it was an uncontrollable degenerate disease. So they just said, oh, good luck. And they severed contact with him. And they never talked to him again. And the truth is, he didn't have AIDS. He just wanted to stay in the U.S. because he got married and had a kid and stuff. And the FBI didn't find out until he was in an argument with his wife.

1:18:50It's an amazing story, episode 285. But it's fair to mention, if we're going to rag on the Russians for being incompetent, we got to highlight how much the U.S. government guy blew it by telegraphing that U.S. intelligence knew who these people were and where to find them. This is like accidentally calling your mom instead of your high school girlfriend and telling her, I'm so wasted. I need a ride home. Not that I've ever done that twice. Nice. Talking sweet nothings to your mom on the phone accidentally by mistake. Yeah. I will say again that that officer showed integrity by reporting it right away.

1:19:19Now, of course, the phone lines were monitored and all things would have been found out. But Jordan, I come back to again, the fact that just no integrity of those officers corrupt deep down in the soul, because again, had they reported it, they could have saved themselves in the operation that had gotten away. But no, they actually wanted to live in the US. So some of your viewers may be thinking and wondering so then why didn't they stay when they were given a chance when they were arrested i believe fundamentally it happened too fast when they eventually were all wrapped up it was in the matter of a day or so and then we were interested in swapping them we had real spies in russia alleged spies anyway four spies we wanted to get out of russian prison they were suffering they were in bad shape they had done heroic things for united states and the uk in the case of one of them the uk so we were trading russian intelligence officers for real spies and that's a good swap because we're just getting their officers sending them home like a bunch of incompetent fools they are and we're getting hero spies out of prison so that was well worth it so there are still illegals now right or are they just mostly using diplomats for this stuff no i think that they're being more creative than ever now they don't have as many diplomats in embassies across europe and the United States because the Ukraine war, they lost hundreds of positions of officers who were declared persona non grata and kicked out of those countries.

1:20:36So I think they're being more creative than ever with the illegals. When I was in Finland last fall, I talked about that. I said, there's certainly illegals in Finland. Again, I got skepticism of societies. I had that analyst from their intelligence services said, I don't think the CIA man understands Finland. Russians could not possibly blend in here. Excuse me? They know how to speak the languages. They get trained on this. The illegals that were living here in the U.S., many of them had no accents at all. Some of them did have strange accents they said were European, but nobody was pegged as a Russian by their neighbors.

1:21:07You talk to any of those neighbors, nobody said, yeah, we have those Russians living. No, they'll say, oh, he said he was from Ireland. He had a little bit of an accent. No, I'm not. So they're well-trained. It takes, on average, if they deploy a staff illegal, it takes seven or eight years of training, Jordan. So it's not that they're not trained well, it's that they don't carry out their training. Those illegals, by the way, one of the things they failed to do, They never did their surveillance detection routes. They never carried out good tradecraft. They were sloppy, lazy. So as we train our own officers in my service, CIA, we tell our young officers, the tradecraft is no good if you don't use it.

1:21:40You don't use it. You're too lazy to use what you were trained on. You're going to get caught every time. The illegals are here. They redeployed them, of course. You studied in Russia and you said you encountered suspiciously old graduate students who still lived in the dorms and showed up at every foreign student event, never seemed to graduate. So who are these people? They're just there to keep an eye on you or what? These were FSB miners. I think in the case of some of them, they were actual staff officers and they lived in the foreign dorms in and among us. Very friendly. They were some of the first Russians we met.

1:22:09Some of them are what we call co-optees. Co-optee is somebody basically that is paid or forced to collaborate with the FSB. And so, yeah, they were our miners. And this was one of the things that education for me as a young American, not understanding the role of Russian intelligence in their society. You know, Russians expect to be surveilled, Jordan. They expect to have their phones tapped, to be listened to. It's a surveillance state. Sadly, it always has been. For Americans, the very idea of surveillance being followed or having someone listen to your calls, that's an anathema to us. That's offensive.

1:22:42And it should be in a democracy. Not so in Russia. We would have students tell us, they'd whisper to us literally, you know, hey, Sean, so even the walls have ears. Be careful. Hey, what did you say to me back there about the walls having ears? I mean, we didn't understand where I explained. They're like, you don't know. You're being watched. So I got to be careful. I don't know if I want to hang out with you. So this was the first, this was the early 90s when, again, there was a chance of flavor of freedom and democracy. The Russians were still living in fear, Jordan. And that's one of the great tragedies, of course.

1:23:11I believe fundamentally that Putin, his intelligence and military, they are culpable for the Ukraine war and all the suffering that they cause. I don't indict all the Russian people. I don't believe that we're fundamentally at war with all Russian people. I don't buy into that because this is a propagandized state where people don't honestly get any source of news other than what the state tells them. And historically, Russians have suffered more from their security services than any others. Remember, heroic Russians have died. Anna Polikovsky was a Russian journalist, died for opposition to Putin.

1:23:43Navalny, of course, famously died just a couple years ago. So there are Russians that speak out valiantly and are trying to fight back. But tragically, it's in a system where there's just overwhelming oppression from the state. Yeah, like you said, the walls have ears and the authoritarian service really turns an entire society into this loose surveillance network and people can't trust each other. I guess you acclimate, you get used to it, you adapt, but I wouldn't want to do that. I wouldn't want to have to do that. I don't think that there's any rival right now, Jordan, except for China. Even North Korea doesn't have the technical advantage of what the Russians do as a surveillance state now.

1:24:20All internet service providers, all phones in Russia, because remember, North Korea, nobody really, who has cell phones, right? Yeah, people have them, but it would be like people in the capital city that have a job where you need it. It's not something that everybody just has. So in Russia, every person is carrying a personal surveillance beacon. Over 20 years, by law in Russia, the FSB has access to all internet service providers, all phone companies, all complete control of the media in Russia, no independent press whatsoever. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister of World War II under Hitler, he can only dream of the resources right now of Russian intelligence and their Sylviki that are running the state.

1:25:00Unfortunately, I believe that it's only rivaled by China. China is the only society today that could say, oh, maybe they're more of a surveillance state than Russia. But otherwise, as Russia's contending for the gold. Greatest surveillance state of all time, unfortunately. I would imagine now, though, it's almost impossible for anybody to be a lone spy or not. You've got so much digital surveillance everywhere. I do want to talk about the compromise and the swallows. It seems like loneliness is often more important than the sex, right? You just find somebody who's unhappy in their life or doesn't feel like they have anybody, and you can target them pretty clearly.

1:25:35Again, this also seems clumsy. I've told this story on the show before. my friend was supposed to go write a profile about Lukashenko in Belarus, and they have their KGB. It's literally still called the KGB there. And he got an email before he went that said something like, tell us what kind of women you like, because maybe you'll find love on your trip to Belarus. And he was like, this is the dumbest clunky he showed me. It's like the stupidest pitch. I just showed it to my friend who was in FBI counterintelligence. And I was like, look at this. And he's like, this is first year agent nonsense.

1:26:02It was really like a crappy, pathetic dating ad that had been translated from Russian into English using chat GPT. Yeah, literally, mail order, let us know your prostitute swallows in advance. We'll have them ready for you when you arrive. Yeah, and it was like they didn't even bury the lead at all. It was just like, here you go. Yeah, it's not just about sex. Russians are very good at sex spionage. They know that the best operations are not just based on sex, but where they build an emotional bond. And that's what they did with Clayton Longstreet. So they had this Violetta Siena who worked in the embassy.

1:26:34A &E did a neat series. They called it Sex B. Now, they interviewed her. She said, you know, at first he was just a face to me, but then we got to know each other. And of course we created a bond. That's all bullshit. She was tasked by the KGB. This was her job. That's why she worked in the embassy, seduced some young Marine. And she did it. But Lontree, to his credit, yes, he was a traitor, but I give him credit for this. He knew what he did was wrong. He turned himself in. But But that CIA officer that met Lone Tree said he met a devastated young man who profoundly regretted his actions. He did his time in prison.

1:27:07He was released. That's very different than a spy like Hansen, who willingly betrayed his country for 20 years, had blood on his hands. But the Russians take advantage. They use swallows because fundamentally it works, Jordan. It still works. Whatever the target's into, men, women, whatever, homosexual, heterosexual, but they want to build an emotional tie to it. It's not just about the sex because that emotional tie. Let me give you another example of how they use the emotional tie. Common scheme scam they use in the former Soviet Union is they'll use maids in the hotels. Western businessmen, okay, they might be smart enough to be told, hey, stay away from the prostitutes, trip clubs.

1:27:46So they'll use maids that are cleaning the rooms. And it'll start as, would you like me to do your laundry for you? I am glad to. It helps me and my family. I make a little bit of extra money on the side. okay fine i won't do dry cleaning so i'll give you my laundry and then that evolves into once a week she chats a little bit more my son has horrible medical conditions so i need a little bit of money on the side you see they're building an emotional connection that would work on me that would work i was thinking to myself the sex thing wouldn't work because it's like oh you got to do this for me i'd be like whatever i can go meet another one like tonight i'm married now but when i was young it's like what do you think i'm not some kind of simp good luck you got no leverage over me i go to the club will meet another one.

1:28:27I'm not putting up with this crap, but the maid with the sob story. Oh my God, that would work on me in two seconds, man. Jordan, you see it. Yeah, no, it's much more sophisticated, right? And then what happens is the businessman does try to help. And then she might invite him out. Please come to my apartment for a dinner. And then somebody comes barging into the room, even if there was no sex. And she says, oh no, they are threatening me and my son because they say that you are a spy. And if you don't help them, please. So that's the emotion again. And the businessman says, oh, my God, now I've gotten her in trouble over the dry cleaning.

1:28:58Damn it. I guess I better give them information on my company. Because remember, the Russian intelligence services aren't bounded by law. They target businessmen because they do corporate espionage, not just for the state, but they do it for money. They'll steal a corporate secret and they'll sell it to a company. This is how they work by U.S. law. We can't do that. That's against U.S. law. We'll go to prison. Of course. So if this kind of thing happens, you're at your Russian maid's house having dinner with her and her husband or son or something like that, and they come barging in and they accuse you.

1:29:26You just go straight to the FBI and say, this is this weird thing that happened to me, and now I'm being pressed, right? That's what you're supposed to do, correct? I think it works on maybe some Americans. Who knows? I hope not. But it definitely works. I know many cases it's worked on. It's been reported to us by Russian defectors in intelligence. It works on people of the Central Asian region of that part of the world where they travel a lot and they do business in Russia and from the Middle East, for that matter. Well, they're intimidated. If the FSB now comes barging into the room, Jordan, you probably can't get back to your home country.

1:29:58Couldn't get back to the FBI necessarily. You're under arrest. You're in big trouble. But they wanted company information. So I have to go get that information, right? I'll be right back on my way and been zoomed to the embassy, you know, sit in there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and then report it. But of course, you need to report it because compromising material operation only works if you allow them to continue to compromise. You're fundamentally right. Of course, report it. If anybody's listening to this now and you've had that maid approach to you or you're sleeping with a Russian prostitute, get out from under it by reporting it to the FBI.

1:30:26Literally. Get out from under it, literally. Finish your business, wash your hands, and call the FBI. No, I didn't say that last part. You did. No, definitely wash your hands. Definitely wash your hands. So, take a shower. So there's a whole school, state school four, supposedly, that trains their sex spies. That's got to be, probably should do a whole separate show on that. That's fascinating. The honey trap stories are just irresistible and easy to sensationalize. It seems like it's probably more boring than it would be. It seems like the real story is they spend weeks or months just chatting somebody up little by little and creating an organic relationship.

1:31:03That's the tradecraft, Jordan, is they will develop a relationship to make emotional bond in order to facilitate an intelligence approach. I've studied Soviet intelligence history. Keith Melton is a friend and colleague I've gotten to know. He just wrote a book I reviewed for our retiree organization. Melton and Nigel West wrote The Definitive Study of Trotsky's Assassination. Yes, they used romantic approaches to Trotsky to get information. I'm not aware, though, in any Soviet or Russian intelligence history that I'm aware of where they used a lastichka, a swallow, to try to kill someone. No.

1:31:36They'll use a swallow to get information. In the case of Trotsky, like I said, I just got done reading that book. Yeah, they used romantic approaches to Trotsky. He was a famous womanizer because Stalin was one of them dead. But then they used an assassin. They used Ramon Mercator who put the ice pick in his head. The GRU and FSB don't need to use hookers or lost-a-chicky swallows that they train at their state schools. They don't need to use them to kill. That's the part of the book by Jason Matthews. I loved his series of books, Red Sparrow, but that's the part that's sensationalized and not quite history.

1:32:09A lot of people ask me, how do we know that Russia did this and that? And it's like, look, they use polonium-212, they use ricin, they use Novichok, which are these very rare poisons. And people are confused about this. They say, well, why would they use that when they could just use something like cyanide, whatever, some quieter death that would offer far better plausible deniability? and it seems like they don't want plausible deniability as much as they want to be able to say we did this and you know we did this because we use something that only comes out of a reactor in suburban Moscow or some space program facility something like that right Ben McIntyre is a very well-known writer and historian on these issues and he points out it's hearkening back to the tradition of smersh under Stalin smersh was a special unit set up smersh spionum so death to well, spies.

1:32:59Russians have a concept, the highest measure of punishment, they call it. The highest measure of punishment is a bullet to the back of the head. You want to betray the state, we're going to find you, we're going to kill you. Bullet to the back of the head. Or the famous story of, who knows if it's ultimately true or not, but it's taught at the academies that the first GRU spy to help the United States, Popov, in the 1950s, the story is he was thrown into a furnace alive. I had Russian defectors tell me. They still talk about that at the academies. That happened. That's the ultimate price you pay for treason.

1:33:34So it's that intimidation, Jordan, to your point. You use polonium, you use Novichok, so that afterwards everybody knows it was Russian intelligence. Putin wants that. He wants that highest form of intimidation and coercion. Don't you ever consider betraying the state because we'll track you down fine and kill you horribly. That's what they want. We don't do the same thing, right? Like Sergei Skripal, who they tried to kill in the UK, he was already swapped, right? Putin was like, no, I still want him dead. It's like, wait a minute. So they swap him. It's like, we don't go after their people after that, which is, I don't know, probably we're not supposed to do that.

1:34:09But you mentioned deterrence. It's hardly deterrence at that point. We went to extraordinary lengths with that swap to show professionalism to the Russians. We actually tried specifically not to embarrass them. We were very professional in how we conducted the swap. We treated their children. Remember those illegals in the U.S. had children. Some of them were very small children. The FBI went to extraordinary lengths to show a human side to us as intelligence services. Took care of those kids, made sure they were watched out for. And so we were professionals. And part of the unwritten agreement was to leave the families alone.

1:34:39Okay, we did the swap now. Can we just agree? Because the Russians were concerned, hey, these kids, they have very complicated lives. Two of those kids, by the way, successfully petitioned. They had all infiltrated through, most of them, illegals had infiltrated through Canada. Story for another show another day using what are called dead double legends. That's stuff that folks like Barsky were trained on. That's where they take a dead baby's identity and become that person and just say that they're not dead. Yeah. Yep. Two of those kids petitioned the Canadian government, successfully brought legal cases, and they got their Canadian citizenship back that was removed from them.

1:35:12So we honored our commitments in the West. We said, we're not going to go after your kids. And what do the Russians do? They go to try to kill Skripal and his daughter with a chemical agent. There's no agreements with Russian intelligence. These are killers. These are thugs, Jordan, and they've done it over and over. Yeah, I remember the guys who did it. They were interviewed. We caught you on camera. We've got your travel records, passport data everywhere. and then they said something like, oh, we wanted to see largest steeple from church in Western Hemisphere. Famous cathedral in Salisbury. They were thumbing their nose at the world, Jordan.

1:35:44That was their way to get on TV, to troll the world and say, hey, you know what? Our middle finger to the whole world. Yeah, it was us. What are you going to do about it? And what did we do about it? We didn't do much of anything. Exactly. We didn't do anything about it. You offer two possible explanations for why Russian assassins keep leaving such obvious trails. One is incompetence. Two is that maybe the hidden hand is supposed to remain partially visible. How do you distinguish between a botched covert action where they're just slobs and morons versus a theatrical warning that was never intended to stay fully covert and hidden?

1:36:18Yeah. So here's how I break it down, Jordan. I'm a tradecraft expert. I've always been fascinated. But so I broke down those cases. Look at how they conducted themselves in the UK. Jordan, they were blissfully unaware of what we call ubiquitous technical surveillance. They weren't looking for cameras. They weren't doing anything to mask their travel. That's just poor intelligence tradecraft. Even though, ironically, they live in a surveillance society, Russian intelligence officers increasingly nowadays are not trained up to the standards to deal with that level of surveillance. So you see those two officers, when they were traveling through the UK in 2018, went right from the airport to Salisbury on the trains, didn't make any effort to sort of obfuscate their travel, which they could have done in a number of different ways.

1:36:59And then when they were casing out the actual hit on Skripal and his daughter, again, very poorly done, not paying attention to where the public cameras were all over the town. They were picked up on them. And so I just call that portrait craft. That's just incompetence. Now, the larger point of using, of course, Novichok, that I do believe is a state warning and indication, hey, the highest measure of punishment, remember what we call it, folks, The highest measure of punishment is in play, and that's how we killed them. They thought they would be successful. Of course, tragically, a British citizen, Dawn Burgess, died as well because they had a perfume bottle they used, the toxin.

1:37:38They discarded it callously, and a British citizen picked it up, and tragically, she died as well. Yeah, I think her boyfriend found it. They were homeless. Her boyfriend found it, said, oh, my God, a full bottle of perfume. I'm going to give this to my girlfriend. She sprayed it on her, and then she died. Yeah, gave it to her as a present. Tragically, she died. It's sad. Really horrible. Why doesn't the U.S. track these guys until they're 60 years old and kill them in Uzbekistan when they go on a vacation to send a counter message? Why don't we do stuff like this? Well, here's the thing, Jordan.

1:38:07You know, I would never condone murder of any kind. That's not why I joined CIA. That's not the CIA would be a part. Eh, I'm not that sensitive, but you're a better person than me. We get it. Here's what I do want to say. There's got to be repercussions for our officers being targeted with AHI. I believe they were targeted. I believe the Russians are doing this. There has to be repercussions. They have to understand. During the Cold War, we had an understanding with the KGB and GRU. We don't target each other's officers. We don't want this to get out of hand. They always targeted their dissidents.

1:38:34That's why what's happening with, unfortunately, with Navalny and Skripal, Liefenenko, dissidents and defectors have always been, unfortunately, on the Kremlin's kill list. I wrote a column about that about a half a year ago, calling it that. But targeting each other's intelligence officers, targeting the CEO of Ryan Mattel in Germany, hey, Jordan, this is unprecedented. They're unhinged now. There's just no norms and boundaries. And part of it is they don't believe there's any reaction from the West. I was on Jack Murphy's podcast. He's a former ranger. He said, heads need to roll, literally.

1:39:05You're going to attack our people? We're going to hit back. We have the best special operations capabilities in the world. I don't condone murder. Let's kidnap some of these bastards when they're traveling abroad, because they do travel. Render them to justice like we did terrorists. Render them to justice in the West. Yeah. Black bag, detour through Spain, show up in Washington, D.C. with wide-eyed surprise and realize that all that evidence that you didn't look for because you didn't care because you never thought you were going to be in front of a judge is now sitting right in front of you, all laid out nice and neat.

1:39:36You're going to die in a supermax. Like, oops, now that's deterrence. My views are mine alone, not those U.S. government. But absolutely, there needs to be repercussions. They need to be sleeping very uncomfortably worried. Look at what the Ukrainians are doing. God bless the Ukrainians. They're facing atrocities carried out by Russian intelligence and their military, and they're hitting back and they're killing Russian generals. You know, they're targeting them. They're in a war. I read recently on Instagram where I guess this guy, he'd been some kind of officer doing something in Ukraine. He came back to Russia.

1:40:06He basically retired. But now he was in recruiting and he was jogging. And there's footage of a guy jogging right behind him, comes up, puts a few bullets in his head, jogs away, gets in a car and ends up back in Ukraine. and they were outraged. He's retired. Oh, well, he did plenty of things while he wasn't retired, and he's still recruiting for the war for the invaders. So he's not an innocent party. He just happened to be out for a jog. Everybody who's jogging, who's responsible for this kind of stuff should be looking over their shoulder on their morning jog. That's what they should be doing.

1:40:37They're at war and the Ukrainians are fighting for their very existence and their lives. And the Russians have, what have the Russians not done in Ukraine? Targeted civilians, targeted maternity wars, targeted children. Thousands of children have died. 20 ,000 Ukrainian children were abducted into Russia. So they're in a fighting, no kidding, kinetic war. We are not, as societies. So again, I don't condone murder of any kind, but there needs to be repercussions against the intelligence services in Russia. And so far, we haven't done that, Jordan, unfortunately. Putin benefits when we think, oh, his agents are everywhere.

1:41:09Seems like over-attributing every suspicious accident to Moscow doing something. that's almost like a Russian influence operation of its own because we end up advertising their omnipotence that they don't actually possess. Israel, for example, benefits from something similar to this. I'm not comparing Israel to any of these countries, right? But if you look online, people will see, I don't know, a bad weather event in some Middle Eastern country. And they'll be like, how could the Jews do this? And the Mossad's sitting there going, oh, geez, we might as well capitalize on this, right? It's, oh, there's bad weather in your boat saying, how could Israel do this.

1:41:41And it's like, we might as well start taking credit for some of this stuff. They're going to blame us for everything anyways. We might as well pretend like we're everywhere. Yeah, no, Russian intelligence is fallible. They make mistakes. They're fallible. They make mistakes. They're incompetent at times. But again, I'll return to what I said earlier. They unfortunately are reconstituted with more resources, money, authority from the Russian state and from Vladimir Putin himself. I'll give an example from Ukraine. GRU Spetsnaz Brigade, some of the most elite in their military community, the equivalent of Navy SEAL teams, and again, Delta Force in their system.

1:42:11They were wiped out in the first year of the war. They were used on the front lines to plug gaps where the conscript troops and the other Russian units weren't holding their weight. And so those GR units took 60, 70 % casualties, Jordan. They were wiped out, decimated, not combat effective. Within a year or so, reconstituted completely, given new equipment, given the newest, best recruits that were eligible out of the Russian youth, and they go right back into the fight. So the analogy I make is to the end of the war, World War II, the SS had become the elite of the German army because they were getting all the resources and all the equipment and all the best men that were left in Germany.

1:42:52That's what's happened in Russia. The intelligence services get what they want. They get paid first. They get their needs met first. And what do you have when that happens? You have preglozhin's mutiny. His guys weren't getting ammunition. The Wagner guys weren't getting ammunition. So he drove to Moscow. People remember that. Yeah. 2023, his men were dying at the front, and that's what he marched on Moscow for. Not because he ever thought he could overturn Putin, but he wanted Shai Gouh Gerasimov, as he famously shouted in Russian TV, the head of the Ministry of Defense and the head of the general staff.

1:43:24He wanted accountability. But the GRU, Russian intelligence, the elite units, they get theirs first. They get taken care of. That's why, by the way, Putin is not vulnerable, unfortunately, Jordan, because the FSB, Raskovardia, the Russian National Guard of about 300 ,000 strong, Prigozhin was not going to take them on. He knew it. That's why he stopped before he got to Moscow. He had no chance. He drove all the way up there and then decided to maybe turn around and then he, yeah, he's dead now. His plane fell out of the sky months later. Exactly. So the paradox of authoritarian intelligence here, almost unlimited collection power combined with a decreasing ability to even tell the leader what everything means because you might end up falling out of a window in ukraine russia's opening plan failed but it seems like i wonder how the svr fsb gru how they've adapted are they more dangerous now than they were in february 2022 before they invaded ukraine absolutely jordan you stole my thunder a bit great question they are absolutely they've adapted the first two years of the war i wrote quite a bit on the failure of russian air power coming out of air war college where i got my master's that was the story early in the war russian air power failure russian military failure the failure of their intelligence services prognosticating a quick victory they had it all wrong the last two years have been about adaptation of all of them russian military standing up unmanned systems troops an entire new wing to their military putin just appointed a new commander to those troops this week the russians are ahead of us in nato when it comes to electronic warfare and drone warfare, and we know it.

1:44:53Our military experts know it. Fortunately, the Ukrainians are ahead of the Russians too. But let me give just one example of that. The Russians have been able to adapt their economy. They're building between one to two million drones this year of various types and sizes. Do you know that with all the might and capabilities of the United States, Jordan, estimates are we'd be lucky to be able to put together 150 ,000 to 100 ,000 drones. Yeah. So the Russians are building drones like crazy. They're adapting their economy, and their system to today's modern warfare. We've got a lot to learn, and we could be learning it from the Ukrainians if we were smarter about it.

1:45:29They've been telling us for a long time, they're not just fighting with hands open. They have things to offer. Much like during Lend-Lease in World War II, the Brits gave us radar. We got radar from the UK during World War II. We didn't invent radar. They did. The Brits did. They called it chain home. The Ukrainians have their own technologies. They've been innovating and adapting. We should be learning from them and in turn giving them more of the weapons they need to finish the job and finish this war. Wow. Yeah. What do you think Western governments are still underestimating because the initial invasion of Ukraine was so badly mismanaged?

1:46:01Yeah, I think it's that adaptation and seemingly inexhaustible ability of the Russian people to accept suffering, Jordan. We fundamentally don't get this in the West. Okay. I give the example again. I'm a historian and a Russian Soviet historian at that. If we don't remember history. World War II, the Russians lost Soviets, all the Soviet people, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarus. They lost 25 million of their people. Okay, United States lost about 400 ,000 dead in the entire war. Soviets lost 25 million of their people. Most Russians lost one of their grandparents in the war. I mentioned Putin's own family.

1:46:37Tragically, his mother almost died. His older brother died in the war. Putin was born after the war, of course. Russians know this, they remember is that's why Putin and the state play so heavily on the analogies to World War II. They call the Ukrainians fascists. But the other lesson we forget about the war is how the Russians were able to take seemingly inexhaustible suffering, and not just in World War II, in World War I. Pasternak, the author of Dr. Zhivago, famously made into the movie in the United States, the character Yevgrov, Zhivago's brother, says, everybody thought the war would last only as long as the Russian peasant had boots on his feet.

1:47:16Three years later, the boots were entirely gone. The Russian peasants were still fighting. That's an analogy that holds true today. Who would think that they could lose 1.5 million casualties? And there's no uprisings in Russia. You don't see any protests. Nobody's out on the streets. The Russians just kind of take it on the chin. They just say, ah, our great leader, he knows better. It's the propaganda machine, too. Jordan, this is hard for us to understand in the West, and this is why they remain a very formidable threat for further aggression against NATO, is because their people, sadly, are not up in the arms against Putin.

1:47:51They're not rising up against him. They're taking the suffering, and they're pressing on. Eventually, if he has to mobilize people in cities, it's going to be hard to ignore that your neighbor's kids are both dead. Yeah, St. Petersburg and Moscow, you're right. The villages is where he's getting the recruits from so far, yeah. It's easier when it's people in a rural village in a former Soviet republic that are getting paid to do it, and you've never even been there. It's going to be much harder when it's the kids down the street and they're coming home in boxes, or not at all, and Russia says, oh, yeah, they defected.

1:48:18Oh, yeah, all 70 kids from my kid's school defected to Europe and are now living there, and none of their parents have heard from them? I don't think so, buddy. The jig's eventually going to be up. You're 100 % right, Jordan. The youth of Russia are not dying from St. Petersburg and Moscow. They're dying from the villages. And also, what else has the Russian security state done? the intelligence services and others controlling. They turned off the internet in the big cities. The reins of power. Yeah, nobody knows about the deaths. They don't know about the numbers, but also they've incentivized death in what way.

1:48:45They pay huge compensation to the families. On the order of 50 or$100 ,000, they're paying now to Russian families that lose dead and paid for by oil and gas profits. That's a very smart tactic, actually. For the Russian families, there's been good reporting that a lot of European sources are doing it on it, and the Ukrainians have done, talking to Russian soldiers, what's going on, what do they hear? the families realize they say young Ivan in our village here what would he amount it to probably not very much but at least in death we're living a lot better life now we got that fifty thousand dollars and other families hear about it they say well you know Ivan you know he always was a little bit slow in school so even though he tragically died in Ukraine at least the family gets the fifty thousand dollars it's really dark it's twisted but that's the Russian state under Putin that's what they're doing here's your payout take the money and be glad for it remember young Ivan.

1:49:35You wrote this partly hoping that Russian intelligence officers themselves might read it. So what would you say directly to a disillusioned Russian officer listening right now who knows the system is corrupt, knows what it's doing is wrong, and is just terrified of what choosing the other side would cost? Russian intelligence officers need to know that we will value your help and cooperation with the United States or other allies if you choose to volunteer to them. The examples like Sergei Tretikov, defecting from the SVR, had a great life in the United States. His daughter and his wife still do.

1:50:06We value your professionalism. We can protect you. We can take care of you. It was my great honor and privilege to work with many such cases over the years. And I always respected the Russians that were willing to take those ultimate risks for freedom and for hopefully a better Russia ahead of two. All the Russians I worked with, as I mentioned in the epilogue, Jordan, they never give up on Russia. It's very sad. It's quite touching, actually. Many of them that I would meet and debriefed over the years and got to see later after they no longer active spies are living happily safely in the United States.

1:50:36They miss Russia. They miss its people. They miss its culture. They miss their families. They don't regret their decision, but they always hope that maybe one day they can go back. They never give up on that hope of change one day. And I think that's telling about there's greatness in the Russian people as well. And there's greatness in their culture, their literature, their science. It's tragic that they don't have a government worthy of its people, that they have an autocrat ruling them that doesn't give a damn about the Russian people. That's what's tragic. But yes, please consider helping us.

1:51:05We can take care of you. We can protect you. Of these Russians that you've handled and debriefed, the defectors, what do those people understand about freedom that most of us are fortunate that we never have to learn? Yeah, great question. We have the benefit, we have the privilege of division, don't we? Yeah, exactly. These defectors that I had the honor and privilege to work with and some active agents. I traveled all over the world to meet Russians that were helping us and risking their lives. It was the pinnacle of intelligence work is when one intelligence officer's meeting another in order to carry out espionage.

1:51:36One of the oldest professions in the world, of course, as the saying goes. These intelligence officers, they get it. They understand they're risking their own lives for the hint of freedom, for the ability. Many of them, the dream was to relocate with their families, to earn enough money doing these risks, taking the risks they would so they could relocate. And many of them did. We Americans take that for granted every day, Jordan. We take those freedoms for granted. We don't have to risk our lives. Many serve in war zones. I honor and respect those that did. I served myself in Afghanistan with CIA.

1:52:08But I think those spies sometimes appreciate our freedoms even more than we do, because they're just dying to have a chance to live that life in the United States, and they're willing to risk it all to get here. And some of them tragically don't make it, of course. They were executed for what they did. Where is Putin's secret war most likely to become visible next? Not to intelligence professionals, but to ordinary Americans going about their lives. Where are we going to see the information warfare, the active measures, all this stuff start to add up to something that makes the news, so to speak?

1:52:38There's two possibilities that I worry about. Jordan, I mentioned already the Russians evolving hybrid war to attack the Baltics. Another kinetic war. I think that's a real possibility. I think that it's one that the Europeans know and they're preparing for, but I think in the United States, we need to stand by them, be ready for. Here's the more worrisome threat, Jordan. I worry about a cyber or an infrastructure related 9-11 that, like you see the Iranians just this past week attacking our water companies. The Iranians are not as capable as the Russian intelligence services, nor the Chinese for that matter.

1:53:12There's those books by fortune. It's about what happens if the United States was hit by an EMP weapon, and the first book he wrote was one minute after. Everything changes. Parts of our society are literally thrown back hundreds of years. Microchips are fried. In a similar vein, I worry about Russian intelligence or Chinese intelligence and their military saying, okay, we want to solve the Taiwan issue in order to make sure that the U.S. doesn't get in the way we're going to attack X, whatever it is, our power systems, our water systems, and the Russians think the same way. There are battles being waged in Putin's secret war right now, Jordan, under the waves in the seas by units like I told you, Guji, their underwater directorate for underwater sea research, mapping all of our cables, getting ready to take them out in times of war.

1:53:59The Washington Post has done great reporting on the war in space right now, the Chinese and Russians both, positioning kill satellites near our key systems in space so that we have no GPS, we have no ability to use our weapons when war breaks out. These are the things that keep me awake at night, Jordan, is the next war is evolving. Are we keeping up with our enemies? Are we as prepared as they are for the next war? If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show to check out, here's a trailer of our interview with Jack Barsky, former KGB spy who posed as an American in a truer-than-life version of a Hollywood movie.

1:54:34This is one of our most popular episodes of the show. Jack not only dodged the FBI for decades, but also defected from the Soviet Union, secretly becoming a real American. We'll learn how spies were recruited and trained during the Cold War, and what skills Jack used to assimilate seamlessly into American culture. I was untouchable. I was above the law. I was always bypassing customs and passport control. So a young person, it really feels good because I never liked rules. How did you flip to eventually becoming full American? I know they tried to call you home. Can you take us through that? They called me back as an emergency departure.

1:55:12They've done this in the past, they call back an agent, and as soon as they step on Soviet soil, they are jailed or even executed. I was stalling the Soviets, and then one day they send one of their resident agents, and he said to me, you've got to come home or else you're dead. It was a threat. I decided I would defy them and tell them that I'm not returning. I will not betray any secrets and please give the money on my account to my German family. Wow. Tell us how you got caught because the story is just not complete until you, like you said, had to face your past. I was stopped on the other side of a toll gate.

1:55:50It was a state trooper. Just like to check your license and registration. And could you step out of the car? I stepped out of the car still not having a clue what was going on. out of the corner of my eye, somebody approaching me from the back. The fellow introduced himself. He says, Joe Riley, FBI, and he showed me this badge. We would like to talk with you. The first question I asked, am I under arrest? And the answer was no. Then I said, what took you so long? For more from Jack Barsky, including how Jack was finally caught by the FBI and what happened after that, check out episode 285 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

1:56:28Thanks to Sean Wiswester. The book is Tradecraft Tactics and Dirty Tricks, Russian Intelligence and Putin's Secret War. And if your hotel mate offers laundry service, emotional intimacy, and a tour of the server room, maybe skip the minibar and call the FBI. Links are in the show notes, as are transcripts, advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Six Minute Networking over at sixminutenetworking.com, of course. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

1:56:58And the show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sadlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in spies, tradecraft, or Russia, maybe just Putin's kookiness, share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn.

1:57:26And we'll see you next time.