The Spy Who Sold Nuclear Secrets to Iran | How a CIA Spy Recruiter Helped Stop Dr Strangelove | 4

13:34Jim Lawler:Yeah. Well, we got to our table and the first words out of his mouth to my amazement were, Jim, that offer you made me last Friday, is that still good? And he said, what you don't know is my wife has announced that she wants a divorce. And I can't afford to pay her the alimony to which she's entitled, plus put my two high school age boys in private schools when we go home next summer. I can't do that unless I accept your offer, even though I know it's morally wrong. And so the very next day, I met him and he gave me a stack of maybe five or six inches of classified material from his embassy. And then I learned that there's never just a single motivation for espionage.

14:18Jim Lawler:he said as he was handing it to me he said let me tell you why i'm doing this it's because i hate my ambassador he steals credit for everything i do and everything everybody else in my embassy does and he goes around this country as if he's god's gift to my country and he's not and as i'm handing you this classified material it's as if i'm kicking that son of a bitch in the face and i took the material from him and i said bring me some more and let's kick him again and this is where your

14:46Raza Jaffrey:MICE technique comes in, I guess.

14:48Jim Lawler:Yeah, MICE is an acronym that they teach you at our training facility at the farm. M-I-C-E. M is for money. I is for ideology. And I've had a certain number of people I recruited who told me the reason they were doing this was maybe they hated communism or they hated their country's nuclear weapons program. and I feel like they probably are truthfully telling me that partially is true, but it's like a thin veneer on the real emotional motivations. The C in mice is for coercion, and I will not deny that the agency has tried using that in the past. I don't want to use it, and it's not for a moral reason.

15:29Jim Lawler:It's because I don't want somebody who's a rattlesnake in my back seat. I want to be able to trust the person I've recruited and have them trust me. You mean there's more chance of them becoming a double agent? Absolutely it does. They'll desert you at the first chance if they're coerced. And so finally you come to E in mice, and that's ego, and that's the most powerful motivator at all. People do things for ego. You know, revenge is partially ego. You've been dissed. You've been disrespected. And your ego has been hurt. And people, the people I recruit, again, I'm like their therapist. They trust me.

16:03Jim Lawler:They will tell me things that they won't tell their spouse, their loved ones, anybody else, but they trust me and they want to have a listener.

16:10Raza Jaffrey:So which of those MICE acronym letters applied to you?

16:15Jim Lawler:Probably ego. We all have, I'm not ashamed to say.

16:20Raza Jaffrey:It wasn't the money, right?

16:20Jim Lawler:Oh no, I had to take a 50 % pay cut to join the CIA. And part of it might have been ideology, because I'm patriotic. There was no coercion, not at all. But ego, I think most case officers have a healthy ego, and I'm certainly one of them. But did any of them go wrong to the point

16:40Raza Jaffrey:where their cover was blown essentially very early on when you realized that you recruited someone that was difficult for them to exist in that country anymore? I mean, the CIA are notoriously, not notoriously, quite the opposite actually, are very good from what I understand at looking after their own. They're unlike other security services who leave you to the wolves if something goes wrong. They're known as being very good at looking after people once they're recruited, right?

17:04Jim Lawler:Exactly. It's one of our most sacred obligations is to protect our sources. And I mean that with my whole heart. Were you able not to protect anyone ever? Some members of the AQCon network whom I recruited, and they were arrested because they were proliferators. They really were. Why do you think I was recruiting these people? I mean, we don't recruit nuns and Boy Scouts. We recruit people that have got information we need or doing stuff that they shouldn't be doing. And so we got the first couple of these three people out. But the third one, it was taking months and months, and it was really agonizing for me because I had given these people security guarantees, or not guarantees, but promises that we would do everything on their behalf.

17:46Jim Lawler:And sure enough, finally, former President Bush's father, the senior President Bush, former President Bush, called the president of this particular country and said, you need to let this guy go. He ultimately did the right thing. And guess what? The government said, you know, you're right. And so they got him out of prison and we were able to honor our security commitments. But it was agony for me for those months where, you know, I gave my word, I gave our director's word that we would do everything possible. And ultimately we did do it and we got them out.

18:32Raza Jaffrey:So you mentioned AQ Khan. I'd love to talk to you a bit about this. when did you first get the call inviting you to be part of the team?

18:41Jim Lawler:Well, it was in 1996, I believe. I had been trying for a particular position in the counterproliferation division. And then when we formed counterproliferation division, I became the acting chief of operations. And three times I tried to become the total chief of operations. and I was turned down because... Who got the job? It was another officer. And the reason he got the job was because he was political and I'm not political. If you look up politically correct in the dictionary, my face isn't going to be there. So I literally was going to resign. I wrote out a letter of resignation. I was holding that letter in my briefcase when I got a call from the division chief.

19:30Jim Lawler:He calls me up to his office and he said, look, Jim, I want you to do something else. I want you to penetrate and disrupt the Iranian nuclear weapons program.

19:41Raza Jaffrey:At the time, I mean, you say you're not a political animal in that way, but presumably in the position that you were in, you were forced into those situations. I know with the A.Q. Khan case, there must have been pressures internationally on you at the CIA. You know, the differences between MI6's idea of how we should be proceeding with this and the CIA's ideas. You must have had meetings where you were defending your position.

20:04Jim Lawler:Well, I had to brief MI6 on what was going on because we had created entities that looked for all intents and purposes to be proliferators. Well, okay, MI6, there's two organizations out there that are going to have those entities under a tight scope, and that would be both MI6 and Mossad. And so I went to both organizations, told them that if they came across this entity, it was ours. My people were in it. And we were doing everything to disrupt the nuclear programs, not to assist them.

20:42Raza Jaffrey:Do you only have, what, I think you said somewhere about 10 people working on this. How did it feel having to share that information now with a whole other foreign intelligence service when you know how tight your group is?

20:53Jim Lawler:Okay, well, so what happened was we had, you know, the NSA and GCHQ work very tightly together. And we got an intercept that laid out a conversation between my people and one of these entities and people inside of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization. And I look at it and I thought, my God, if I'm reading this, who else is reading this? And, of course, you look up and you see, well, GCHQ collected it, so no, MI6 is reading it. And then I thought, well, and guess who looks upon things like this out in the Middle East and will kill my people? And that would be Mossad. So I wrote to the head of the program.

21:34He was working for me that was running these entities.

21:37Jim Lawler:And I said, I feel obliged to declare this to both MI6 and Mossad. And he wrote me back a very short cable, and it said, better declared than dead. So I worked together. I briefed both organizations, and then ultimately it became apparent to me that I needed some MI6 help. And so we became partners. They were junior partners, but we became partners on this operation. And I have to say we never once in the years that we were working together did we disagree. I think we probably had more transparency between our two organizations than any time since World War II. Right, right. When OSS and MI6 were running joint operations together, I had total confidence in them.

22:22Jim Lawler:They had total confidence in me. But there must have been enormous pressure on you at the time. Not until 9-11, because when 9-11 happened, then the pressure escalated considerably because we had already had definitive proof that AQ Khan was going to be selling nuclear weapons technology to Libya. And Libya was classified as a rogue nation supporter of terrorism.

22:45Raza Jaffrey:But were they not asking you at the time to, you know, there must have been the conversation about whether you had to act. I mean, to shut down the networks or let it play out and actually as you did.

22:55Jim Lawler:But I had the confidence of Director George Tenet who appealed to his counterpart at MI6, Mr. Dearlove, Richard Dearlove, and to the President of the United States and then to the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Tony Blair, that just let this play out. Because if we try and stop it now, my illustration, it's like if you turn a light on in the kitchen and you see roaches, they run for cover. And if we had done this prematurely, that's what would have happened.

23:26Raza Jaffrey:What was the breakthrough for you in the case? What was that moment when you went, we've got it, we're on our way now with this?

23:33Jim Lawler:You know, I had to basically, I came to the conclusion that the best way to stop it would be to recruit sources inside the network and have them stop it. But yeah, we had to have the key people that AQ Khan had in the network.

23:49Raza Jaffrey:And so I had to cold pitch these people. And wasn't it pretty rare at that time for you to be out in the field actively involved?

23:57Jim Lawler:Well, I had been back at headquarters at that point, nine years, and running this operation and other operations. And we couldn't have somebody else do it. because our entities that we had in the field had contact not only with the con network, but with other proliferators. So we couldn't have one of them jeopardize that platform. Blow their cover. Blow their cover. So I had to come out of the wings, basically, and do cold pitches. But we had enough information on these people that we'd collected for a long time. And I'd actually run it past our operational psychologists to have them comment on what the key points I should touch.

24:43Jim Lawler:So it gave me a lot more confidence, and confidence is everything when you go into a pitch. It must have been one of the most important meetings of your career. Were you anxious about it? No. I actually had with me a very good friend who was a member of our general council, but he had been acting as an operational officer. His name's Peter Comfort. And Peter and I are both runners, and so I would practice the pitch on him in the mornings when we were running, and he would hit me basically like sparring. You know, he would hit me with every objection that he could think of, and it really helped me, you know, knowing that he was there.

25:23Jim Lawler:And so when we did the pitches, he was by my side. Now, you never want to pitch two people at once, but you can have a colleague there. You do the pitch. The colleague is there for support. Right, right. And it worked perfectly. In fact, at one point, when I pitched the first guy, and he said, could I think about it? And I said, no, if you leave this room, then, you know, certain phone calls are going to be made, and I can't guarantee your security. And at that point, Peter said, look, you need to listen to him. He has appealed to the seventh floor to give you this very attractive offer. And so that's when they caved.

26:00Raza Jaffrey:So I heard you did a little jig by the side of the container when the Libyans finally threw their arms up in the air. Right.

26:07Jim Lawler:I did indeed. What was that moment? That was wonderful. I mean, we found, you know, the containers, the five containers had more nuclear equipment in them than any time in history. I mean, hundreds of thousands of pieces of parts for centrifuges. And so there's a picture of me holding one of these things. And yes, I was dancing a little jig. What did you think would have happened if the Libyans had have got what they wanted? So an analyst years later in the year 2012, which I believe is when Gaddafi was overthrown, he came to me. I was already retired by that point. But this analyst came and said, Jim, if you and your team had not stopped Gaddafi from getting nuclear weapons, he would probably have taken those nuclear weapons and used them either on his own people or against some European countries.

26:58Jim Lawler:And I thought, you know, I bet you're right, because he was so desperate.

27:01Raza Jaffrey:Is that what drove you through all those years, through all of A.Q. Khan and even the proliferation beforehand? I mean, were that what your sleepless nights were?

27:08Jim Lawler:Yes. I mean, when I was a teenager, I read John Hersey's book, Hiroshima. And the thing that still resonates with me is there's a passage in the book about three unfortunate citizens of Hiroshima who essentially were disintegrated and all that was left of them was shadows cast on a wall. and I thought, how would you like to be just a shadow etched into concrete because your body was between you and the blast for microseconds and the rest of the wall was bleached and all you have there is a shadow. And so I hate nuclear weapons, but I would never ever propose that we unilaterally disarm because countries like China and Russia and others would take advantage of that.

27:58Raza Jaffrey:Do you think my generation has become too kind of comfortable with the threat?

28:05Jim Lawler:Well, you're probably seeing this in Iran right now. How comfortable are you that, you know, Iran could have been developing nuclear weapons? And people sometimes ask me about that. And I always tell them, you know, the thing about Iran developing a nuclear weapon is not so much the threat that that presents vis-a-vis Israel, because Israel, as we know, probably has 150 nuclear weapons and could wipe Iran off the map. But what I'm concerned about, what I'm concerned about is if Iran develops a nuclear weapon, we're going to have a nuclear pandemic in the Middle East. And suddenly the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Turks, the Egyptians, every other country with means in that area is going to want a nuclear weapon.

28:46Jim Lawler:And then the chances of a nuclear exchange goes up logarithmically. And a nuclear accident as well. Out of an accident. Yeah, they don't have the same care and knowledge and experience that we have. In fact, I think it's well known that even though we don't like the fact that Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons, we have offered them advice on safekeeping and safeguards. We don't want one of these weapons going off because let's say a weapon goes off by accident in Pakistan. Who are they going to assume that was from? From India immediately. And that would ignite a war in the subcontinent. a nuclear war with hundreds of thousands, millions of people at risk.

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30:23Raza Jaffrey:What did you feel when you saw A.Q. Khan retract his confessions all those years later?

30:28Jim Lawler:Well, it didn't surprise me. I mean, he was caught red-handed. In fact, George Tenet told me that when he basically briefed Pakistani President Musharraf in New York at the Waldorf Astoria, Musharraf's first comment was, I'm going to kill that son of a bitch because there was no love lost between the sheriff and Khan. And George Tenet said, no, sir, we don't really want that. And so we put him under house arrest for the next five years. And he couldn't get rid of the guy. He was a national hero in Pakistan. In fact, sometimes I like to say, you know, A.Q. Khan was like a combination of Robert Oppenheimer, George Washington, and Elvis.

31:14Jim Lawler:He was so popular. And still is to many people. I mean, he was a hero. He was the savior of Islam, you know? And so President Musharraf couldn't execute the guy. He probably could have arranged an accident, which is what he was hinting at strongly. But instead, he put him under house arrest, and that was about as good as he could do.

31:36Raza Jaffrey:Were you taking flack at the time of the CIA for not paying enough attention to AQ Khan being able to give Pakistan the bomb early on.

31:44Jim Lawler:Yeah, they'd already, he had, you know, Khan had worked for the Urenco, he was a subcontractor to the uranium enrichment company there that was based in the Netherlands. You know, that's a joint venture between the UK, the Netherlands, and Khan stole all those designs for the centrifuges and took them to Pakistan. But I wasn't involved. I was overseas. It was already a done deal by the time I got back. Now, one could rightfully say, though, that the agency was not paying attention to what was going on. At the same time, however, you might remember that Pakistan was assisting us in Afghanistan and getting the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

32:23Jim Lawler:So there was only so much that the agency could do pressure-wise to prevent Pakistan. In fact, we could do nothing to prevent Pakistan from acquiring nuclear weapons capabilities.

32:35Raza Jaffrey:So you must have had a huge file on this guy by the time you were working with him, because they knew everything about him.

32:40Jim Lawler:It had cobwebs. I mean, it was, yes. But what we found out was not that this was inward proliferation. He was not just acquiring it from Pakistan. He took proliferation private. And this was the first time in history that anybody had done that. And, of course, he had the advantage of being the head of Khan Research Laboratory. And I often analogize, you know, if his name had been Henry Ford II, do you think anybody that works for Ford Motor Company would question the president on what he's doing? And so Khan, he had all these means at his disposal to do this. Now, he wasn't doing this for Pakistan.

33:18Jim Lawler:He was doing this for his own enrichment. Absolutely. His ego and his pocketbook.

33:23Raza Jaffrey:Did you ever get to interview him? No, no, no. Would you have liked him?

33:28Jim Lawler:I would have kind of liked to. I mean, the man was supposedly very charismatic, a networker. You know, he was not a brilliant nuclear scientist. He was a metallurgist. He was good. But he himself was not a brilliant nuclear weapons designer. What he was was a brilliant networker. And he was gutsy. Yeah. I mean, I jokingly talk about him, but I have to say I respect him. I respected him. Is he a one-off? Are there others out there, do you think? Well, you know, the senior levels of the agency asked me that and said, is there another Dr. Khan out there? And I said, probably, you know, you might look at some Russian generals or some Chinese generals that are wanting to do this for either ego or money or both.

34:15Jim Lawler:you could very well have a very powerful Chinese or Russian general who sees a way to make a profit out of selling either fissile material or actual weapons or the technology, you know, depending on what they have access to.

34:32Raza Jaffrey:And do you think we're in a better or a worse place now to try and stop that? I don't know. I hope so.

34:37Jim Lawler:I mean, you know, it's – well, actually what troubles me more than just nuclear proliferation is proliferation of, say, biological warfare. You know, in nuclear warfare, nuclear weapons, you always have a choke point. That choke point is fissile material. If you don't have either U-235 or PU-239, plutonium-239, you don't have a weapon. So, but in biological warfare, there's no real choke points and the knowledge is almost ubiquitous. And there are thousands of people all over the world that have the requisite skills to develop a very devastating biological weapon. And now with AI, the possibilities of developing a synthetic pathogen, ah, scares the heck out of me.

35:22I know you're not an active part of the security services,

35:27Raza Jaffrey:but how do you feel it's changed since you were there? Do you think there's been seismic change since you left? I mean, think about it now, like social media wasn't really getting going by the time you left, but how do you even come up with a cover story now? You have a digital footprint all over the world. How do you cross borders without people knowing about you? How do you start a business that's selling weapons and go under the radar anywhere where people will be looking for your footprint for years?

35:52Jim Lawler:I'd say carefully. Well, I agree with you. And I hearken back to a counterintelligence principle that Mossad has, and that's called swiftness. You get in, you get out. Try it as quickly as you can. and not attract attention. And, you know, about 10 years ago, there was a Mossad attack on a Hamas financier in the United Arab Emirates. There was a lot of criticism after they got in. They actually killed the guy and they got out. I said, look, you know, the fact is that they were caught on camera, that their alias documents were blown and things like that. And I said, well, that's a lot of that Monday morning quarterbacking.

36:37Jim Lawler:But we've got to remember, the head of that team accomplished three things. Number one, and the most important thing, he got his team in and out safely. All of them got in and out. Number two, they got their target and they basically gave a signal to Hamas that it doesn't matter where you are, we'll get you. And thirdly, you know, it was a brilliant operation. And so what if they burn some alias documentation? That's what it's for. So yeah, it's a challenge. You're right. But it's also a challenge for the Russians and the Chinese and everybody else. And we have to be on the forefront of being, you know, more creative.

37:14Raza Jaffrey:In recent years, you've started writing novels.

37:17Jim Lawler:Can you tell us a little bit about the latest one? So my latest one is The Traitor's Tale. And it was based on an unfortunate incident, a tragic incident that happened back in the 90s where a CIA officer named Brian Kelly was accused of being a mole for the Russians. So I based the traitor's tale on a thing where a senior case officer, a very successful case officer is accused of being a mole. And so then the novel takes off from there as he ostensibly is working for the Russians.

37:54Raza Jaffrey:Well, thank you, Jim. I say this carefully because you might have been using your mind control on me, of course, all the way through this. But I do think you have the most extraordinary mind. I really do. To have witnessed what you've witnessed through the years and to have served as you've served through the years, it's beyond extraordinary to me. It takes real courage to do what you've done. And I'm very grateful that, personally, that you were there for us all as you were. When you look back on your career and all those extraordinary moments you've been part of and you think about the times you've lived through with, well, the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of modern terrorism.

38:31Raza Jaffrey:Is there any perspective that you'd like to leave our listeners with, like how we should think about the role of the intelligence services today?

38:40Jim Lawler:Well, we definitely need the intelligence services. We were created after the disaster of Pearl Harbor where we had very little advance warning or what advance warning we did have. It simply wasn't passed up the chain of command. And so that led to the creation of the OSS during World War II, which worked very closely with your intelligence service with MI6. And then in 1947, it was thought that the CIA, you know, we need to create a CIA because we were faced with the Soviets who were threatening to basically absorb all of Europe. and I get a lot of pleasure and satisfaction out of, you know, defending democracy, defending our freedoms and I got special satisfaction out of defeating the spread of nuclear weapons.

39:28Jim Lawler:It's what I call psychologically righteous.

39:31Raza Jaffrey:I got incredible kind of comfort from something you said a moment ago actually when you were talking about, you know, things change, like these moments will pass. Do you feel like we've been here before, where we are at the moment?

39:42Jim Lawler:Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the agency went through terrible times at the end of the 70s. We had a director who fired seven or eight hundred people. So it was called the Midnight Massacre. Things go in cycles. And, you know, eventually, you know, hopefully it won't be a tragedy, which will cause whatever the administration is that's in power to see we really need to have a strong intelligence community, but we do. And I have a lot of sympathy for my colleagues who are in the FBI. They're facing a lot of Chinese and Russian espionage, especially Chinese espionage in this country, that are stealing our intellectual property and our research and development.

40:24Jim Lawler:The FBI opens a new case every day on some Chinese intelligence officer or someone working for them.

40:33Raza Jaffrey:Well, thank you, Jim. That's fascinating and a incredibly powerful note to end on as well. Jim Lawler, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me on. Next time, we open the file on Václav Jelinek, the spy who stole a son. Johanna van Haalem was left heartbroken when made to give up her son for adoption. Then, decades later, she found him living in London. But what she's really found is a Czech spy who is using her son's identity to further Moscow's aims, and he'll do anything to stop her from blowing his cover. Follow The Spy Who now, wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen to the full season of The Spy Who Stole a Son early and ad-free on Audible.

41:25Raza Jaffrey:You've been listening to The Spy Who, an Audible original. Have you got a spy story you'd like us to tell? Email your ideas to thespywho at audible.com. The Spy Who is hosted by me, Raza Jafri. It's a Yellow Ant production. This episode was written and produced by Liam Garrow and researched by Louise Byrne. The senior producer was Jay Priest. The sound designer was Joshua Morales. Music supervision by Scott Velasquez for Frist and Sink. For Yellow Ant, the executive producer was Tristan Donovan. And for Audible, the executive producers were Estelle Doyle and Theodora Lululez.

42:06Raza Jaffrey:Follow The Spy Who on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of The Spy Who ad-free by joining Audible.