Former British Intelligence Officer: The Truth About Real World Spies! - Gavin Stone | E58

0:09Have you worked with the CIA? What is it that you can see in someone's body language that the average civilian can't see? Gavin Stone is a former British intelligence officer who worked with MI5, MI6 and international agencies, including the CIA. He is a best-selling author and a globally recognized expert in body language, human behavior and deception detection. With over two decades of covert operations experience, he applies intelligence tradecraft to help people understand influence, persuasion and nonverbal cues. His book, How to Tell if Someone is Lying, is an international bestseller, sharing insights into body language, deception, and human dynamics.

0:46The truth tellers will give you facts because they've got facts on their side, whereas liars, they will try and convince you that they're telling the truth because they don't have truth or facts on their side. We see again and again the mental repercussions of soldiers going to war. It changes your brain. Did that happen to you? There are some awful sights and things that I've seen that I would rather not remember. A criminal organisation. They thought it was a cop. It got very, very, very nasty. And I thought, this is it. Kevin, have you ever killed anyone? I didn't shoot to miss. So the American government is spying on the American people?

1:28Indirectly. What about the British government? Many people believe that the British government is behind many conspiracies, that conspiracies exist. Do they exist?

1:40Yes.

1:44Gavin, can you explain to me who you are and what is your line of work? Certainly. So I've spent about 20 years working in the security and intelligence industry in different capacities. A lot of that has been covert surveillance, human intelligence gathering, right up to training and now pushing myself as an author. I've worked primarily as a contractor, although at one point I was a civil servant for the British Ministry of Defence, working in the intelligence industry. What does a contractor do? Contractors, so unlike somebody who's worked directly for say MI5 or MI6 and they are a permanent member of staff, a contractor is brought in as and when they are required for particular assignments whether it be surveillance or human intelligence gathering or whatever the case may be and the beauty of being a contractor is the fact that you can go to multiple agencies and that's to me has been more advantageous because i've had the luxury of working for several different government departments in allied governments all around the world rather than being stuck behind the desk of just one can you name me the different departments that you've worked with?

2:52MI5, MI6? I'll let you in on a little secret that if somebody has actually worked for MI5 and MI6 and that kind of thing, they're not really allowed to tell you. So if somebody claims that they have, it stands a chance that they haven't. Whereas if somebody who hasn't worked for MI5 or MI6, there's no law stopping them saying that they have. It's crazy. It's a bit weird. How did you become an intelligence officer? This is an interesting story because this isn't like the usual way it happens. Usually there are talent spotters or scouts in each and every university and college of the major ones in the UK.

3:29And talent gets spotted at an early kind of stage of their education in those kind of environments, like the college campuses and that kind of thing. And they are looked upon by these recruiters, all these talent spotters. and if they tick all the boxes, they have a direct line to MI6 to say, we've found somebody who's a potential recruit. And that's when that person usually gets a tap on the shoulder and they get asked, do you want to serve your country? So for me, it was very, very different. I actually did it all the wrong way around and I started in the private sector and worked my way into the public sector in private investigations.

4:05And that started with a friend who knocked on my door one day and he said, Gavin, you're one of the most resourceful people I know. Can you help me find somebody? So I said, sure, why not? we went and found them he was struggling and we did it in less than a day i didn't think too much more of it until uh the end of or the beginning of the following month and he brought me a big envelope of cash around i was like what's this he said we were doing something called process serving and uh you know that person you helped me find that's your fee and i looked at this big envelope of cash i was like you got any more of those people you weren't finding and uh and of course it was just something that i thought okay you know what can i what more of this can i do it was in my opinion easy money and the bread and butter stuff of the private investigation industry and i started off doing process serving for those who don't don't know what process serving is or sometimes called a per serve it's usually when a court has to send the court summons out and they've either they don't know where the person is or they've put return to sender on the on the envelope and put it back in the post and you have to go and find that person and personally serve them the documents the court summons and that's one of many reasons why you could be getting a a purse herf and that's the bread and butter stuff of the private investigation industry when i started doing that it then led to all sorts of things like marital affairs and then fraud investigations eventually it went on to benefits fraud and it just built up until i started working for government departments within the covert surveillance side of things and that was when the real fun started happening uh and eventually i managed to build up and up until i got to the right people in the right department i used what i'd learned and i He contacted people in the human intelligence gathering side of things, rubbed shoulders with the right people, and started taking on that kind of work.

5:49I was working a fair amount of years helping out and very, very envious the entire time of the full-time staff because, like I said, I was a contractor. Eventually, after working my way into becoming a full-time civil servant, I couldn't stand it. I hated it. It was awful. and did it for around about a year or so and I thought, I don't like this, I want to go back to being a contractor. It was higher pay and it was easier work and that was when I went into that, did that for a while and then worked on the training side of things where I was teaching either new recruits, you know, the old ways or the systems we use or teaching the seasoned operatives with, you know, the latest techniques that have been taught out there.

6:38you've said many things that blew my mind but one in particular which is that there are talent recruiters from the mi5 and mi6 yeah that are constantly at top british universities and they're scouting talents they're you know trying to understand if they can tick all the boxes what are all those boxes so what are they looking for so um usually if they're looking for somebody who has a reasonable political knowledge um they want somebody obviously who's uh it's not just about having the right intelligence level it's about being trainable it's about being able to be educated and it's more of a state of mind um you can have the smartest person in the world but if you can't coach them in the way that you need them to operate then they're no good to you at the same time you can have somebody that's coachable but just isn't switched on enough so you need you need a little bit of both and then you also need somebody who's comfortable with breaking the rules so they don't necessarily have to be a criminal or a criminal mind but they have to be be able to understand that sometimes you need to do things that are outside of the the black and white laws as it were in order for the greater good to succeed and that's kind of it's used used a lot now and then people say oh the greater good the greater good but you know it's it's been able to calculate is it worth taking this risk in order to save a nation from war and that's when you know they're looking at that kind of mindset of person and they want that kind of person on board but then it sounds to me that the agency is asking the agent to do something illegal is that the case yeah so by very definition of what we do we are breaking the law from the minute we land in a foreign country so we are generally going to a foreign country under alias and we will have a legend that it's called a legend like your your documentation and the person you become when you're operating under that name you'll have all the identity paperwork and everything you need and when you get into that country you need to be able to recruit somebody generally somebody that has access to two secrets you have to convince them to commit treason.

8:52You have to convince them to steal secrets, to break the law and bring those secrets to you. And you have to risk not only your life, but their life and possibly even their family's lives. And if it's not life, then it could be life imprisonment and some very harsh conditions and ramifications if you or they get caught. And you have to risk all of that just because you want them to, just because you've asked them, I need you to do something for me. so you have to be pretty good at sales. And why would you say yes to such an offer? Again, this has been able to weigh up the good and the bad when it comes to the greater good, as it were.

9:32It goes back to that conversation about the greater good. Is what you're doing there, you're risking your life. So I'm one person, a singular person, that by the definition of what the government put me down as is disposable. I can go to a country, I risk my life, just like anybody else, like a soldier going to the front line, risk their lives, or like a fireman going into a burning house. I risk my life in order to try and obtain secrets that are going to save the lives of the nation. And that's something that, you know, it's what we have to do and how we have to operate. What are the different types of agents?

10:07The two main ones are, so you've got diplomatic cover, and this is somebody who works directly for MI6. They are under diplomatic protection, so they go over to the country with a diplomatic passport. They will operate out of the embassy, and if they are recruiting, if anything happens to them, then they can't be kind of imprisoned or anything like that. They will just be what they call PNG'd or persona non grata. They're deported from the country. They're not welcome to come back again, and really their career is over. So it's best not to get caught because you're then kind of outed publicly, as it were, amongst all the governments.

10:47You're known for spying. And then the other one is what's sometimes called non-diplomatic cover or sometimes commercial cover. And this is when you're going over and you're generally using either government replicated documents or fake documents or something along those lines. you're going in undercover basically and you'll enter that country you'll have no diplomatic protection at all so you might go over as a businessman or a tourist or whatever the case may be and you operate as if you are working within that environment and the idea is while you're over there and it could be a few days could be months it could you know you might get a 12 month contract with a company that has been set up for you to work and while you're working for that company uh you then have to operate uh obtaining secrets within that country and you've been doing that yeah and a mixture of other things as well so yeah i mean um one of my first not the first but one of my first assignments uh it was really interesting because i i was actually very hollywood educated when i first got into the industry and i expected everything to be very very different to how it really was and i was called in i sat they sat me down and they said write you know this is your assignment one sentence find out how the russians are getting railgun information out of korea okay and i waited and i waited for more and instead i got what are you still doing here get on with it okay uh and i walked out of the front door thinking okay not much to go on and it took me about two or three days to do it and did most of it from my living room so and this is the bit where a lot of people say well how the hell where do you even start with an assignment like that so i just reverse engineered it i thought if i wanted to get railgun information out of korea how would i do it so i looked and i thought well the first thing i'd do is find myself a railgun expert and surprisingly unlike mcdonald's workers there's a very short list of railgun experts so then you can narrow that down by saying okay how many of these railgun experts operate in Korea and that list gets a hell of a lot shorter then you keep narrowing it down and keep narrowing it down as much as you possibly can and look into the lives of each of these people and what I did I got it down to a list of around about three and there was one in particular that I started investigating mainly online further and I found that he'd done an article and it was co-published by another gentleman who was had a Russian name I was like ah, okay, that might be the link.

13:22So I looked into that deeper, and when I investigated, that particular Russian had got ties to the Russian embassy, and the background of him revealed that he was the person who was leaking the information. So it didn't take very, very long to kind of get it all confirmed, put it all back together. Three days later, I went back, and I put the report on the desk. I said, that's where the leak is. And they were impressed. So yeah, that's why they kept hiring me, I think. so the main role of a spy is to gather information that would in some way helped the nation what are other things that a spy does that is perhaps different to what we see in the movies okay so i mean like like that one i just said it's also about finding leaks which is kind of your counterintelligence sometimes as well there's a different ways of uh like operating which not only helps your government but might hinder other governments or stop leaks from other countries or information getting to other countries so sometimes it's about plugging leaks sometimes it's about finding information out other times you might have to extract your asset so um what does that mean so a lot of the time the way we get the secrets is by uh people who already work in government who have access to to those secrets already and we will recruit those people and we will find out what motivates them so we will look at all the different possibilities of all the different potential assets and once we've established one that can be motivated and it might be cash it might be help it might be the fact that they don't want to live in that particular country and want to you know a british passport any number of different reasons for motivation we can then go down the route of uh you know kind of asking them to to get the secrets for us so once we've done that uh if at any point that asset is in danger or they reach the end of their kind of agreement, they've got as many secrets as we want, then we then have to extract them.

15:18And if it's a dangerous situation, sometimes we'll have to do an emergency extraction. So we have to get that person out of that country under the radar, which is very different to standard kind of, yeah, okay, now we can just put you on a plane and bring you back to the UK or the US. So an asset is a person that can give you extra intelligence for going back to the initial premise, which is saving your country. And you are hoping that that asset would cooperate with you by giving them some sorts of rewards, either cash or bringing them back to a safer country. What about the other way around?

15:51Is there any... Did you have any experience in which the asset needed to be threatened or treated? No, so yeah. So Western intelligence agencies don't usually operate like that. Usually. And I'll say that because there are always exceptions to every rule but in all honesty it's a case of preferring more carrot than stick um if you because if if i ask you one little thing just one small thing like hypothetically these are beautiful glasses you know if i tell you where you know if you if i ask you where you get these glasses from and you tell me and i give you 500 quid are you happy with that yeah and you go okay so i'll give you 500 pound and you tell me they're from a glass company in staffordshire so i go okay wonderful thank you and what that's done it started a very small transactional uh relationship between you and i but then next week i come back and go do you know what i like the cups too if i give you 500 pound will you tell these are beautiful cups tm thriving minds custom made i really want you can i do the same as we did before with the glasses you go okay so again i build this up but each and every week i'm finding out a little bit more and eventually i find out who your food suppliers are i find out who your uh insurance is done through i find out everything about your business where you advertise bit by bit and the more information i've got the more i've collected the more uh credible or more of a threat i'd become to you um so with that in mind if you can imagine uh an asset that you're recruiting in the field you you never usually start off with the heavy stuff it's generally something that you want to know usually something that you actually already know and you want them to give you information and you ask them something you already know because you want to be able to confirm that what they're giving you is true and that you're not being set up with false information you do that two or three times and then eventually you build up to then knowing you know okay this is good intelligence that we're getting from this person and then you can ramp it up and go for something a bit more important a bit more important bit by bit incrementally increasing the stakes and how much money is the maximum money you can for an asset uh it it varies you know totally completely uh dynamic on on what country you're in uh the person you're getting intelligence from um i mean if this is if if it's a low-level military person who's just giving you gate codes and that kind of thing then not really much you know it's a few beers and a curry um whereas if you're um if you're looking at somebody who's you know in the same office as pewton five days a week then all of a sudden the dynamic changes And it's not always about cash.

18:27There could be any number of reasons. It might be somebody who needs medical attention that they can't get in their country, or they have a parent who is stuck somewhere, or a child or a relative somewhere that they need extracting. There's so many different ways that you can look for, and I hate to use the word leverage, but it kind of is, but there are ways you can find leverage. But as long as you're not using it as a threat, if you say, look, if you help me, I might be able to get your brother back from this country and bring him home safely. And that gives them the motivation to want to help you.

19:02And what are some examples or types of cases in which the reward won't work and you need to use other resources? Yeah, I mean, so again, it's more like kind of your Russian agencies and that kind of thing where they use the threats. The Americans have something called MICE or RICE. It depends on which acronym they keep updating it. MICE is money, ideology, compromise, and ego. And the money, they change it to reward, which is where the rice comes from. And the compromise, they change to coercion. So basically, money or reward is what motivates the person. Is that going to be what gets them to steal your secrets?

19:45Is it going to be cash? Is there something else? They will do a psychological evaluation of that person and their predicament or their lifestyle and all of their relatives as well. And if they believe that this person can be manipulated into helping, then they'll move forward. Then you've got ideology. Now, this could be anything from communist Russia to people in Islam who want to come over to the Western world and say, I don't want to live under these conditions anymore. And that could be women, could be youngsters, could be all manner of things. compromise is usually something that when you have what they call compromat which is compromising material and this is kind of the the photograph of a man with a woman in bed or man with a man in bed whatever the case may be that you say look do you really want this to become public or do you really want your wife to see this very seldom used and then finally the last one ego uh is is down to basically using elicitation skills on somebody where if you know they are a captain of a submarine you can just start sitting and drinking with them and if you inflate their ego enough you'd be surprised when when the whiskey starts flowing how much information they give away do these agencies ever ask to eliminate somebody else um there there isn't an official term to eliminate um what there is is there's something called a hard stop, and this probably isn't very well known by a lot of people, but what you've got, you've got special branches, special forces that generally operate with MI5, and if there is a threat, say, in London, and they know that there's a terrorist heading towards a particular target, and they know for certain that that target is going to do some damage and it's imminent and there are lives in danger, then they can initiate what's called a hard stop.

21:40And a hard stop is, or the terminology used is, stop that person by whatever means necessary. And that is not an order to kill per se, but if you happen to kill them doing it, then you're fine, you've done what you've been requested to do. So that hard stop, it could be crashing a car into them, it could be shooting them, it could be stopping them any way you can. You've basically got permission to stop them in any way you wish. Kevin, have you ever killed anyone? I didn't shoot to miss. So you're risking your life. Mm-hmm. Or did you only do that because you truly and deeply believed that you were helping your country?

22:28The money was good too. Money is good? Yeah, so it was an excitement. and this is this is where going back to what you were saying about recruitment my entire life um there are certain people who kind of color outside of the lines a little bit and i was on the verge i was born in in central england and grew up in a in a city where crime was rife and no matter what you do you're generally on the fringes of it one way or another it's very very easy to get yourself involved with the wrong people. And that's where I was going. I was mixing with the wrong element. I was on the fringes of a lot of things that could have easily dragged me down into the criminal world.

23:15And one day I made the conscious decision to say I don't want to be on that side of it. I don't want to go down that route. And I thought I want to do something more than what I'm doing. And that was why I thought, you know, let's see if I can help the good guys out.

23:34As an intelligence officer, you are an expert in so many different things that are pertinent for your line of work. One of them is body language. What is it that you can see in someone's body language that the average civilian can't see? Okay, so most of the time, there's a lot of myths out there with body language. Most of the time, it's just comfort you're looking for. I remember one of the assignments I had when I had to meet an asset. so there's a way you do things when you go to meet an asset and you will you if you're in a foreign country you'll do what's called an SDR or a surveillance detection route and that is just a check to make sure you're not being followed so you'll go completely out of town and all around the houses before you're almost back where you started to where the meeting or the arranged meeting is and once you know you're surveillance free or you're as confident as you can be you then go to the meeting and this is this is what what's commonly known as a safe house it's actually a cop which is a clandestine operation premises and that can be something that's owned by the intelligence agencies or it could just be a hotel and a lot of the times it is simply just a hotel and you meet your asset at that hotel and when you get there there's a lot of things that you have to go through one of the first things you do is you set up the next meeting in advance and that way if you have to cut the meeting short, you've already got the next one arranged.

24:57You don't have to worry if anything goes wrong. And then there's a list of questions that you have to ask and those questions are all about, they're like a standard set of questions that you ask that are, do you feel threatened? Has anybody followed you? Does anybody know what you're up to? Blah, blah, blah, this kind of thing. And one particular question is, has any other foreign intelligence agency approached you to ask for information and i remember meeting my asset at the hotel and he sat down on the chair and we were talking and we'd set up the next meeting and i started going through this list of the usual questions and i'm going to tick them off like clickboard but you don't actually do that you just ask them and usually as you're going down the list you get no no no no and that's it and you can then get on with the meeting and this one particular occasion I said, right, has anybody followed you?

25:49He said, no. I said, does anybody believe, you know, that you are doing anything you shouldn't be? No. And the one question when I said, has a foreign intelligence agency approached you to get information for them? He said, no, I wouldn't do such a thing. And he folded his arms and he tucked his feet in and he shuffled about and it caught my attention. I thought, okay. And then I didn't say anything at the time. I went through the rest of the list and we went back and no no no and that was it and i didn't say anything at the time but i i noticed that real massive shift in his body language and when we uh discussed it afterwards um myself and the officer in charge of the situation i'm not i'm not going to say the actual person um we we agreed that he'd been approached by somebody else uh and when we sat him down we found out he had and we managed to turn him into a double agent and that was then feeding false information back to the other intelligence officer so that was what kind of kicked me off with body language i really started to get deeper into it so there's no specific training per se within the intelligence community solely on body language they do they're fond of a lot of role play um and what they'll do is they will they will have you at the assessment at the end when when it's indexed and you're going through all the uh everything you've done in that particular exercise they will ask you did you notice this person's body language or you can write in your report i noticed a shift in your body language so and that was when i started to get deeper and deeper and deeper into it so um but yeah comfort and discomfort is generally the the two ends of the scale and the more kind of closed off somebody is if they're covering their throat if they're covering their vital organs generally the more uncomfortable they are and the more open and relaxed they are the more comfortable they are and that's when you can tell between the two if somebody is lying or not lying generally the cortisol rush that's going through their body and the the things that are going on with their brain causes them to start feeling defensive and closed off and threatened we'll get to lying in a minute but in terms of body language is there anything else that you think i would find interesting my audience would find interesting to know yeah um there there is no kind of pinocchio effect um it's a fallacy that if somebody folds their arms that they're being defensive um there are millions of different reasons that people fold their arms um it could be they're cold it could be the fact that they work on nightclub doors and that's where they're comfortable because they stand like that all the time um it could be any number of things and it might be a thought they're having that's completely separate to the question they've asked what you're looking for instead of an individual tell like this particular action equals this thing you're looking for clusters if you see clusters of things and for example they pull their feet back they shuffle on their chair they fold their arms their blink rate increases their breath location changes you see all these things going on at once that's when you're more than likely picking up on something that is very, very different.

28:57You're looking at everything from micro-expressions to lip compression. I'll break down a couple of those. One of the most effective things when it comes to detecting lying is actually blink rate. Watch how fast and how frequently somebody is blinking. Well, it indicates high stress levels. So if you can imagine when you're really concentrating on something, whether you're reading a book or watching a film or whatever the case may be, your blink rate is probably one to two every minute. It's very, very low and slow. High stress situations cause a blink rate to increase and can be up to 90 blinks per minute in somebody in a really high stress situation.

29:44But does that mean that they're lying or they're maybe just stressed? So there's no, even the lie detector machines, they're commonly known as the polygraph machines, they effectively don't work. They don't pick up lies. They pick up stress. So if you can de-stress yourself, this is how you beat a polygraph, is by altering your bodily kind of tells, as it were, in the polygraph assessment. If you can keep yourself calm, then you've covered most of it. But, yeah, there's no machine that can detect a lie. How can we stay calm, even to the extreme, to be able to be the polygraph machine? So if you want to be the polygraph machine, it's understanding that the two test questions at the beginning is where they're going to decide what does and doesn't constitute as potentially a lie.

30:42So they will ask you a question like, what is your name? You answer it telling the truth. Then they ask you, did you go to the moon last night or something crazy like that? You answer it telling a lie by saying, yes, I did. And then what you've got, you've got two lots of, you know, kind of baselines set for, one's for lie, one's for truth. They can then differentiate between what's a lie and what's a truth by seeing if you deviate from your standard baseline. So if you tell a lie later on, they can compare it. Were your signs spiking higher than the truth or were they higher the same as when you told a lie?

31:20so what you can do when you're when you know that you're going to be telling the truth is increase that spike and there's different ways of doing it you can think of something dramatic you can put yourself into a position where you're thinking of something really emotional answer it make yourself deliberately nervous by thinking you know cause yourself to hold your breath do lots of things that are going to throw the machine out there are cases where people have done things like bite their tongue and that kind of thing to to kind of increase the vital signs and then when you are doing it the other way around when you're telling the lie you have to almost put yourself in a hypnotic state it almost into a trance and just like if you if you imagine you're sitting there watching your favorite movie start replaying it in your mind and as you talk just answer yes no yes no or whatever the answer to the question is and they're always yes and no questions did you become very good at lying yes had to be there's training for that um so this is what doesn't usually make the movies but what they do is they sit you in an environment very similar to this and have a conversation with you which is about an hour and a half to two hours long and the whole thing is recorded from different angles and it's non-stop all the way through just questions about yourself your life you know all manner of things the interrogator knows exactly what they're doing and they give you the recording afterwards and they say right go back watch it learn your tells because you are the only person who really only knows when you're lying nobody else knows when you're lying for sure other than you so they say go back learn your tells and then learn to pepper your tells in when you're telling the truth and learn to dilute them when you're telling a lie and that way you you become more effective they can't differentiate between when you're being truthful or dishonest and to tell that is a common denominator across everyone is the amount of blinkings yeah yeah any other ones yeah so if um one of the most common ones uh is is what what's known as a withheld opinion and that's have you ever seen somebody you'll ask them a question and they'll do that lip compression kind of movement there's a there's a really funny thing on the internet with a dog doing it you know how to tell when your dog's involved in a sexual scandal and it shows the puppy doing something very similar um but yeah that lip compression is generally a withheld opinion um so that's something that is pretty much universal for everybody so if you if you ask somebody you know did you like the food at my restaurant they go yeah you know that they're holding something back and you know so therefore you can say was there something that wasn't quite right or an area i can improve or whatever the case may be and that's when they might turn around and say, well, I would have preferred a nicer red wine or whatever the case may be and you can tell that there's something that they're not telling you.

34:18And what about when someone gives you too many details? Is that also a tell? Yes, I had to study something called statement analysis once and that's really, really brilliant. This is something that I find so interesting. There is a ratio, especially on insurance and police statements, that you can tell when somebody has been truthful or when they're lying. If somebody's been truthful, it's about 25 % pre-story and 50 % of the actual incident and then about 25 % post-story. And that is the ratio of somebody being truthful. If somebody's been dishonest, then what they will do is they will build up and build up and build up and they'll take so long to build up to the point where they have to lie.

35:03and then they will quickly put the lie in like in one or two sentences and then they'll wrap it up as fast as possible and that's because inherently as humans we don't like to lie um so what we what we will do is we'll put off being deceptive as far as we possibly can so if your ratio of your story is 80 percent building up to telling a lie and then kind of 10 the lie and 10 after the lie that way you can tell them on the statement police statement, insurance statement, whatever the case may be that somebody is being so for example if I'm dating someone and I ask the other person did he cheat on me and then the answer would be I was the other night with some friends and I came back home late but before that I met my friend Kelly and Kelly told me about this and then we met these guys and then we had a drink we were only talking and after talking but I didn't cheat and then I came back home that's it that would be something that I would definitely so straight away the most important thing you're looking for when somebody asks you a yes or no question it must start with a yes or a no it's as simple as that so for example I mean this is one that I've used when it's statement analysis I've seen so many people pacified by lies and you might say to somebody did you take my wallet and they might answer with, I don't even know where you keep your wallet.

36:35But that doesn't mean they didn't take it. They didn't say they didn't take it. They didn't say no. Is that telling you that they lied? Exactly. They could have come across your wallet. They could have found it anywhere. But they didn't say to you, no, I didn't take your wallet. What they said to you was, I don't even know where you keep your wallet. So that is deflecting the question. And you have this kind of thing. Listen for the answer. If the answer is yes or no, listen for a yes or no if you don't get a yes or no ask yourself why ask yourself did you actually get the answer or did you get an answer because that person might give you a sentence that would pacify you and you go okay he doesn't know where i keep my wallet so therefore you yourself have decided that you don't think he's stolen it or they've stolen it or whatever the case may be so if you if you take that in into account where the where the uh question is asked if you get a no it doesn't matter what comes afterwards it doesn't matter um no i didn't take your wallet i don't know where you keep it i haven't seen it didn't even know you had a wallet that's all irrelevant but listen for that all important yes or no in the very beginning the very beginning and do people lie in different ways for different reasons so perhaps i would lie in a romantic relationship in a different way that I would lie at work?

37:56Most people, because humans are creatures of habit, they tend to stick to what works for them. So if you lie at work and that works for you in that particular style, then it stands a chance you're going to do the same thing at home or with your family or in court or wherever. And I would do it in the same way? Yeah, usually, yeah. and what are other ways in which we can unmask a liar there is something that uh it's recently been called a resume statement and i think it's it's really wonderful it's very similar to what i just told you um but it's when somebody is convincing you that you're going the wrong way with your with your thoughts or accusations um and this is where a friend of mine she said it once and I think it's absolutely brilliant.

38:47She said, liars convince, truth tellers convey. So the truth tellers will give you facts because they've got facts on their side, they've got the truth on their side. They will tell you this is what happened, this is how it happened, this is when it happened. That's all you need to know. Whereas liars, they will try and convince you that they're telling the truth because they don't have truth or facts on their side. So one particular gentleman I used to know, and I'll make a scenario, I'll say, you know, kind of he may have stolen some boxes and when i asked him he put his arm around me he said listen to me listen you know if if if you think about what i do i do this for the church and i volunteer for this on a saturday evening and i give this to charity and i do x y and z for the community um you know do you really think if i did all that that i would take a few of your boxes well of course first off he hasn't answered the question he hasn't said no but secondly what he's done is really really powerful he's got you questioning your own question so if you think about the fact that he doesn't have to now convince you that he's not stolen the boxes you've just convinced yourself because you're going to be yeah i suppose he does do that he does do this yeah and it's generally used by narcissists who kind of turn the tables uh and and kind of they're good at manipulating people in a way that you you question your own thoughts and go, okay, and you write it off and you dismiss it and go in a different direction.

40:14So right now, if I play you a number of videos from different politicians, you can tell which ones are lying and which ones are not? If they're a politician, it stands a chance that they're all lying. That's a good answer. Let's reverse the situation. How can we build trust with someone? Building trust. This is something that if you... so as an intelligence officer one of the very first important things that we have to do is build a relationship with a complete stranger and once you've built that relationship you then have to ask them to literally risk their lives to commit treason and steal secrets and people don't do that if they don't trust you this is something that we have refined the fastest way to infiltrate somebody's life, build rapport and relationships with them, and win them over enough to get them to do that.

41:11And it's empathy-led. If you go into any relationship with a state of mind of, what can I get out of this? Or can this person steal secrets for me? Then you've started the wrong way. You have to look at that person's life and say, how can I really do something to make this person's life better in a way that they're going to be happy with. And that's the most important part. When I said in a way they're going to be happy with, because some people, their psychological profile, you can do something really nice for them. You can kind of get them a brand new car and they'll go crazy. I don't want a brand new car.

41:52So you can't assume or make any assumptions. You have to really get to know the person really deep down what they want, what drives them, what their personality type is, and find out what's actually going to make them happy. And once you've established something that you can say, right, I can now genuinely definitely make this person's life better, then you go ahead and do that for them to the best of your ability. And it has to be from a genuine place of empathy. You can't fake this. If you go into it trying to fake it, then it's not going to work. And once you've built that relationship and you've got that person in a position where, you know, they are really, really solid with you, you know, they trust you, nine times out of ten, you don't have to ask them to steal secrets.

42:38You can just say, do you know what I really could do with that report on the new fighter jet your government's just making? And they go, leave it with me. And that's it. And the next day, you've got the file. So a lot of the time, you know, if you can really build a relationship where you are going all in, then that's the way to do it. I think Winston Churchill once said, I don't like that man. I must get to know him better. And that's where if you look at everybody and anybody, whether you do or don't like them, find the things about them that you can relate to. Build on the areas where you do have commonalities.

43:18And that's how you forge a relationship. And can you do that with someone you don't like? yeah because a lot of the time people don't like people because that because of either a preconceived notion or something they've heard about them or a judgment for whatever the case may be but once you've got to the point like what winston churchill said when he said i don't like that man i must get to know him better once you've sat with somebody for long enough as long as you're not building upon that distaste and you actually get to know them and you look behind the mask that everybody has because everybody has a persona they portray and it's not the real person within them you know we're all scared little children and we've just learned to grow up and act like an adult in a world in a way that we believe makes us fit in so the bottom line is we're all going about our lives putting on a persona for people to see and once you see past that persona because everybody is insecure everybody's concerned everybody's just trying to survive and do the best they can in life and once you get past that that shield and through the armor and see the real them you'll find out that most of the time the people you don't like are actually very very different to how you perceive them to be does that mean that then perhaps we need to study their youth how they were as kids so then we can understand them better rather than the version of themselves that they are presenting themselves to be now yeah um and of course most of this um so there's this thing where they say you know oh children are tough children are resilient children are not tough or resilient if children were tough or resilient then why would be why is there so many people in counseling for childhood trauma um it shapes who we become as adults so we have to be really really careful what we allow our children to see and experience and how they're treated um the right amount of discipline is fine as long as it's not too far to the point where it's traumatic to a child not enough is actually doing more harm than if you were to to be more disciplined with them so if you think about the fact that most personas or people's the persona they project that image generally come from something that happened to them earlier on in life so if they were hurt whether it be physically or mentally they might then put on like a tough guy image they might go around shouting and making themselves look like they're a particular tough guy if they if there was a kind of kid that kind of fell over and every time they fell over mommy gave them an ice cream or chocolate or whatever the case may be or you know they're there and they've got sympathy and they got treated there might be the kind of person that becomes a a victim personality uh you know somebody who constantly wants sympathy and they almost create their own disasters in their life so i'm sure everybody's got these friends who they've always got something that's gone wrong in their life because they want sympathy they want attention they want love so there's many different categories of this but yeah it generally creates who they are as a person and what is the armour that you're wearing that protects that inner child?

46:22everybody has their own unique armour yours in particular mine I tend to just kind of crack on no matter what's happened around me I'm not going to say on screen what's happened over the last couple of days but I've had incidents even in the last two days where I haven't compartmentalised it and carried on coming here and being here today to get work done that needs to be done. So that's my kind of carry on and face it and continue no matter what. We see again and again the mental repercussions of soldiers going to war. Then they come back home and they suffer from so many different mental disorders naturally because what they leave out there, I can only imagine that it's so brutal that it changes your brain.

47:15Did that happen to you? Not directly, no. So I don't get PTSD like what soldiers do, but there are a lot of things that I've seen that I wouldn't like to see again that I have to live with and that are usually only there when I go to bed at night. So there are a lot of people in the intelligence community who turn to drink and a lot of people that do have breakdowns. It happens a lot because of some of the things that we have to deal with and the things that we see. The lucky ones don't have those kind of bad incidents. But for me, I didn't get any kind of post-traumatic stress disorder or anything like that.

47:57I just got memories of things that I'd rather won't be there. Do you regret anything you've done? No. I don't because of the fact that when I look back at the things I've done, yes, there are some awful sites and things that I've seen that I would rather not remember. But at the same time, when I look at what I've learned through everything I've done, and I look at the training I've had and the life I've lived and the privileges I've had because of it and the things that have been afforded because of it, I'm grateful for all of it.

48:39You have seen the world in a completely different lens than most of us, most other humans. Do you see mankind as kind as we all want it to be? or do you think the world is a more evil place than what we all imagine? Nobody's a bad guy in their own story. And if you look around, there are lots and lots of people that are going to be kind to their own tribe, shall we say. And there are people, whether it's in the Middle East, China, Russia, they have love and kindness for their own tribe. They have compassion for the people around them, whether it's their friends, family, colleagues, whatever the case may be.

49:26Overall, there's a lot of divide in the world and this division between whether it's races, religions, countries and whatever else, it's causing a lot of problems. Inherently, we don't want as humans to be cruel and evil, but everybody is being kind of force-fed beliefs and everybody has been told that their beliefs are right. And this big division that's happening is being almost created and causing evil where there wouldn't necessarily need to be any. Many people believe that the government, governments in general, but it could be also the British government, is behind many conspiracies, that conspiracies exist.

50:14Do they exist? Yes. but not all of them and there are things that the government has done there are lots of cases where the government do false flag attacks there are lots of cases where governments do um experiments there are lots of these things that that do genuinely go on the problem is is when it gets out there's a fantastic system that the government uses and have you ever heard the phrase how do you hide a tree you plant it in a forest so what they will do if say the government are doing an experiment on mind control and it gets out and one particular person is talking about mind control and you know the government are doing experiments instead of confirming it or denying it what they'll do is actually send that person a load of information saying yeah we're also doing this and we're also doing that we're also and it will just keep getting more and more crazy until the next thing you know there's aliens living among us and there's ufos flying and there's all sorts of things you know that that are going on and yeah and what they'll do they'll make them more and more and more insane until eventually the people who once believed that single conspiracy theorist then go actually he's crazy and then they write off everything he's ever said so instead of kind of putting out the fire they had fuel to it let it burn out naturally does the british intelligence have any evidence or information that point to the fact that perhaps there are actual aliens not in any of the work or departments that i ever worked in so um there may be but i wasn't privy to any of that information and if i was i probably wouldn't say have you worked with the cia yes and what are the main differences in between mi6 and the cia Money.

52:08They've got lots more money. So the Americans are accommodating. They've got better tech. They've got better gear. They've got more money. They've got a lot more available to them in the way of resources. That does also vary, however, department to department. So CIA has pretty much a limitless budget for whatever they need, Whereas the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency over in the States, they haven't got as much to choose from. They don't have as much in the way of budget. They don't have as much in the way of resources or manpower. So they have to make do with whatever they can get. So agency to agency over in the States will dictate what's available and what the differences will be.

52:57But working with a – well, I was chatting to a friend of mine from the FBI. he's a former spy recruiter and he worked over in New York catching Russian spies so he was kind of counterintelligence so he'd catch them in the act we've both worked interagency with different countries and I remember saying to him once about the fact that I couldn't forget working over in the States with your guys you were so much more helpful you had better kit and he said that's funny we got exactly the same thing when we were working with the Brits so it seems that when you go it's a bit like when you go to somebody's house and they bring out all the best cutlery and all the best china you know um and i think that's very much a case of as a brit going over to work for the americans um they were a bit more accommodating um and i think the roles are reversed in in the states and the uk do they have a different approach to perhaps extracting information from the assets are they more aggressive um it can depend on on time constraints um and it can depend on entirely on on the situation so the american government themselves they won't necessarily um i'm trying to think of the right words to make sure i say this properly they won't necessarily take part in something that wouldn't be um oh i'm trying to think of the right words i'm struggling here sorry um yeah they they wouldn't necessarily do anything untowards directly and this is where people like myself who's a contractor and there are other contractors out there we're kind of an outside entity so a good example of this is when the NSA were asked if they were spying on Americans the NSA could honestly answer no and that's because they directly weren't there was an outside contractor and that contractor was spying on all of the americans and gathering all the intelligence and all the information uh that it could literally hoover up everything from social social media to uh telephone calls text messages a whole lot it was just bringing it all in and saving it all now the nsa even though they weren't part of that could go to them at any particular point and say we want this information or on something on this person or what have you got on that person and they then had direct access to it so having that removed party having that contractor um you know the CIA views people like Blackwater or one or two others and they've said well we've not done it but they may have hired somebody else to do it when you hire somebody else to do a job and you say I don't want to know the details I just want you to get the job done then you've given them a free hand so and this is where people like myself are useful what they call a clean skin or a contractor i can go to a foreign country and they can say can you achieve this for us we don't want to know how you want how you're going to do it we don't want to know any of the details all we want to know is that you do this job and that was that's it so i'll have to go do a particular job and it's usually done through a broker as well so it's twice removed so the agency will call the broker so they can say i don't want to know who you're hiring and and then the broker will call me and say, do this.

56:22And that allows them then plausible deniability. So the American government is spying on the American people? Indirectly. Indirectly. What about the British government? Exactly the same. Yeah, there are...

56:42companies out there that are watching a lot of the communications between the people in the UK and kind of monitoring all of it. And then whatever is deemed necessary by the intelligence agencies is when they will ask for it and get the information from them. And like I say, it allows them the plausible deniability to be able to say, we're not watching everybody. Now, that being said, they're not interested in your cat pictures or your barbecue with your Uncle Bob or anything like that, a lot of it is completely ignored. They have no reason to be looking at anything and everything all the time.

57:30It's only if somebody that they have an interest in, they can go and access their electronic footprint, as it were. Based on this information, in your experience, do they try to change political ideologies in a country? It has been done in a lot of Western countries, and I would say it's a safe assumption to assume that the UK has done the same kind of thing, or an entity behind closed doors has tried to influence UK political outcomes. As an average civilian, what can we do? Because we have T-double encryption on WhatsApp and perhaps on other forms of digital devices. They're all rubbish. It's not that they're rubbish, but if a man can create something, then another man can destroy it.

58:24And, you know, whether it's to gain access to it, whether it's to copy it, whether it's to clone it, whether it's to whatever, I don't care how encrypted something is. Somebody, you might have the smartest person in the world who can create an encryption device, but there's always going to be somebody else who's going to be able to access it one way or another. And a lot of the times it isn't done directly through an electronic attack. There are other ways of accessing that information. So if you want to send messages, and this is something that a lot of parents out there might find useful, for example.

59:02The CIA actually have a code when they're directly communicating with assets via text messages or WhatsApp messages or Telegram or whatever the case may be. and they say, can we meet you or I'll meet you at the coffee shop at 1pm? And the person replies and they put yes, sure, and they put a happy emoji. And that happy emoji means everything's good to go. But they might put two happy emojis in a heart and that means I've been compromised. Or they might put two happy emojis and a rainbow emoji and that means I think I might be getting watched. So there's lots of different ways that they can use emojis now to communicate to say something's wrong or whatever.

59:45And they actually use these as an indescribable code that foreign intelligence agencies might not be able to pick up on. And it'll change each and every time. So you might have one happy emoji, means we're all good. But one in a unicorn means, you know, I can't make it, but I'll do it at the same time tomorrow. So you can make your own code using the emojis. now if parents uh are say they've got a daughter or or a kid at a party and they know that there might be other kids that might um you know give them a hard time if if you know they're trying to convince them to stay but the kid doesn't want to stay the parent sends a message i'm coming to pick you up if the kid responds with yes please i don't like it here all the other children or their peers you know and they might give them a lot of grief over and say oh you know you can't take it you should stay here um whereas if that child turns around and responds with no i'm having the time of my life here i really want to stay don't come and pick me up but then they put a happy emoji and a rainbow that two emojis at the end signals to the parent something's wrong just come over and drag me out and parents can use that then without their children getting any repercussions uh to be able to pick them up and get them out of a bad situation do the governments have the population's interest at heart?

1:01:08Is that their priority number one? The smooth running of the country as best as possible under circumstances is their top priority.

1:01:21So population-wise, they just need the country to operate. They need the tax money. They need the growth of the country. They need the growth of the economy. they need as much as they possibly can to continue to run as efficiently and as smoothly as possible so it's not down to having the population's best interest at heart it's about not annoying the population that much that it causes chaos and anarchy and brings everything to a grinding halt so it's it's a very very difficult one they they look after their people as best they can in order to keep everything running smoothly for their best interests.

1:02:05In the Western world, we're told that certain countries are bad. Russia is bad. North Korea is bad. Venezuela is bad. Libya was bad. What's all that about? Is it true? A few years ago, everybody loved Putin. Everybody thought he was the greatest thing to ever happen to Russia. and he attacked Ukraine going back to one of the first times in 2016, was it, something like that? Nobody cared. Nobody noticed because the TV didn't tell them to because it didn't fit an agenda. Now, when you go fast forward a few years to the latest Ukrainian war, all of a sudden it fits the agenda that the UK government want you to believe.

1:02:53so therefore everybody's flying yellow and blue flags and i'm not saying what's happening there is not atrocious and you know don't don't don't get me wrong but what i'm saying is people care about ukraine a country they've never been to because the television told them to do they care that 60 000 christians got killed last week in uganda nobody noticed nobody knows it didn't even make the news do they care about all the different wars that are going on around the world because there's lots of wars going on around the world, but nobody cares about the other wars that are going on or the other people who are getting killed or what's going on because the television hasn't told them to.

1:03:33So why do people care about Palestine right now? Why do people care about Ukraine right now? I bet you if you asked any of these supporters and sat them down and said, okay, here you are flying a Palestinian flag or flying a Ukrainian flag, why do you care about these ones and not those ones? Why do you not care about these civilians being killed in this country? Because, like I say, there are lots of wars. There's not just those two. And again, it's all down to the narrative that whatever government wants you to believe at the time fits the agenda of where they want to go. Does that mean that the British government controls the British media?

1:04:11The majority of it, yeah. There is a department in MI6 called IOPS, which is Information Operations. information operations and that whole department is to ensure what they want in the spotlight is put there and nothing else so but there are other government departments as well not just within MI6 within the government itself that works alongside with the likes of the BBC who have a lot of a lot of power in order to be able to shape the opinion of the public this is one of the main reasons why they fear the likes of Twitter and Facebook and so many other things that that is allowing people to be their own reporters and bring things to the attention of people that wouldn't normally necessarily make it to the news.

1:05:01We are at a point now where we are almost self-reporting to the population of what's going on everywhere and this is one of the reasons why they are going to push digital ID and digital currency because they don't have control of it at the moment because people are able to put what they want on and send stories of what's really happening. There's a lot of misinformation out there as well, but they don't have control over any of it. Where as soon as things go completely digital, and it will, they will push it very, very hard until they have control over everything. And then once they've got control over that, and we're back to square one.

1:05:42What do you make of all this? Do you think this is fair? This is just? This is right? I personally have lost a lot of faith, more so recently, in what's going on with the UK government. I don't think it's fair or just all right. I don't believe in a lot of what's being done and there are things that are getting out of control and that can be done and handled a lot better. And I think they're going about it the wrong way. And I think it's causing a lot of problems within the UK. I'm still trying to find what makes it so attractive to be an intelligence officer. So aside from serving your country, but once you understand that there are perhaps other business for which they ask you to do things that are not in relation to saving your country, then it's down to the money.

1:06:36So how much money does an average intelligence officer or perhaps maybe in your case as a contractor, in a high-stake involvement? So, I mean, when I first started in the industry, I mean, a good wage back then was around about 1 ,500 quid a day plus expenses. Wait, wait, wait. 1 ,500? 1 ,500 plus expenses. 1 ,500 a day. Yeah. And that was a good wage in a reasonable job. The most I ever got paid was 3 ,600 plus expenses per day. but also bear in mind that you're not working every day you might have a four-day job and then not have anything for three months then you might have a three-month job and not have anything for two days and so you really hit and miss you never know when you're going to be working you literally have to wait for the phone to ring and usually it either won't ring for months and then when it does you'll end up with three offers all at the same time and you then have to say which one am I going to take?

1:07:37And usually whichever one you pick is the wrong one. And from experience I've learned the ones that sound like the easiest ones in the world, they're the bad ones, leave them alone. Have you ever worked for a non-British intelligence agency? Non-British, yes, but all allied intelligence agencies. So I haven't worked for any hostile foreign governments. What are the hostile... What are the countries that are presumed to be hostile? Russia, China, any country that is considered like an enemy state or affiliates with enemy states, that kind of thing, I haven't and wouldn't work for those.

1:08:23Let's talk about other skills that you learned as an intelligence officer. Manipulation. what are the early signs when someone is trying to manipulate us how can we tell if someone is aiming at that one of the the methods that has become common recently is this thing called persuasion um and there's been that many um kind of experiments with with steering somebody down a path um you know to get what they call the nodding dog effect you'll ask somebody a load of yes, yes, yes questions. And then there are other different ways that you can kind of guide somebody to making a particular choice. And these experiments have been done even by security companies where they'll say, look, do you consider yourself an honest person?

1:09:14You go, yes. Do you consider yourself an open person? Yes. And you ask these questions and then when you find, when you sit them down for an interview, they are generally more open and honest with you. They've done other experiments where they've asked people to list 10 really, really bad things that have happened to them in their lives. And they list the 10 things, and at the end there's a question. And that question is, do you consider yourself to be an unlucky person? And people put yes at the end of answering the 10 bad things that have happened to them in their lives. Then they did another experiment, exactly the same thing, where they've asked, list 10 good things, different people, that have happened to you in your life.

1:09:52and then at the end the question is changed do you consider yourself to be a lucky person and then they answer yes to that one so the mindset you put somebody in first can completely decide or differ the outcome to the answer to the question North Korea used this with prisoners of war when they caught American troops and these were like patriotic American troops and within a few weeks were on camera saying I hate America and you know they were recorded as saying that and kind of the American government couldn't understand why and this is what's known now as cognitive behavioral therapy that's this was the precursor to it was what the Korean government were doing so they sit the American soldiers down and then just have a conversation with them they say look you know do you like your country what's great about your country and they talk about it I say okay, are there any faults though?

1:10:53And no country's perfect. So of course they'll say, oh yeah, taxes are a bit high. Okay, no problem. What else is there that could be improved to make America better? And they'll ask these questions and then they'll go down a path of, okay, so what about this? Tell us more about the corruption. Tell us more about the crime. Tell us more about... And they'll keep getting deeper and deeper and deeper into the bad parts and the bad things of America and they will feed them back to this person again and again and again and over a short period of time you can take a patriotic american god loving god fearing soldier that loves his country and have him saying i hate america and i want it to you know be destroyed well how long does that take depends on the individual but sometimes it can be as little as three or four weeks oh you know you give them um it's the same way cults operate you can give them rewards and when i say rewards it doesn't necessarily have to be like physical rewards it could just be um you know verbal a verbal pat on the back of well done thank you you know you're doing well and there are cults will operate in a way where uh if one particular person does something that's that's uh in keeping them what they like they'll get you pats on the back and well done and you're great and they'll get all this praise but if they say something slightly uh against that particular cult or whatever people will sneer at them or they'll turn their back on them or they'll shun them you know even if it's only temporarily um and it creates that awful feeling of being outcast from the tribe which nobody wants and therefore it gets them to assimilate into the into the cult and this is a tactic that's used by intelligence agencies by governments by different kind of militaries all over the world in governments do you think this is a tactic that perhaps was used in any way during brexit campaign?

1:12:49There were a lot of fallacies with the Brexit campaign. There were a lot of things that I believe were pushed to steer people to believe that Brexit was a good thing. There are a lot of people now that still believe it was a good thing. There are some good things that come of it, but not as many that are disadvantageous advantageous to the British people. So when it comes to shaping the opinion or the public opinion, I think, yes, there was a lot of propaganda involved. Does that mean that the British population was manipulated? Yeah. And you've got to remember that this is an exercise that governments have been doing for a long, long time.

1:13:40They know this inside out. what they do sometimes there's different ways they will create a problem and then they will pose something that they want to implement as a solution to the problem so hypothetically they they might have a message of illegal immigrants coming over by dinghy you know which is at the minute something that is being pushed as a problem on social media and then they say oh but digital ID will stop all this and so they're trying to use what they want to impose the digital ID as as being a solution to a problem that they've probably created deliberately in order to um push an agenda that they want this kind of thing is done all the time and then the other psychological trick used by a lot of governments let's take a problem um like like the COVID shot right let's take something like that they don't have to convince the masses that um that everybody wants the covid shot or everybody's having the covid shot they just have to convince them that the masses believe they are so you might have a town of 10 000 people 8 000 people might not want that shot but the news will make it appear that 8 000 people do want that shot and follow the crowd and they'll put psychological pressure on you using uh there's something called the fear model which is focus emotion attention repetition um and what that basically means is they'll get your focus by saying oh this big bad thing is happening then they'll have emotion thrown in your granny's in danger your kids are in danger you're in danger uh that emotion will then uh spark something with inside them to to keep the focus keep the attention so that that then takes you to attention so it'll be everywhere you look it'll be on the tv it'll be on the radio signs on the side of the road magazines everywhere you look they will have your attention and then repetition is just to keep going back over it again and again and again once they've convinced the masses that the masses believe that the shot is the answer then they don't have to actually have the masses convinced they just have to be convinced that the masses are convinced so the 8 000 people they might not believe that the shot is the answer but they believe that the rest of the 8 000 people do and therefore they take it what is the difference in between manipulation and influence there's a very fine line isn't there really i mean it's it's something that you can influence a lot of people by um you know you look at celebrities that go on and use a particular perfume or drink a particular drink and then all of a sudden they've influenced many many people uh you know in in the way of you know i want that watch that you know kind of this particular person's wearing i want to drink that drink that they drink um whereas manipulation um is is done something in my opinion more directly and it's not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing we all do it we all you know say manipulate our children say come on eat your veg and you get pudding you know is it a bad thing that you've got them to eat their veg you know you've manipulated them into eating something that they don't want but it is good for them so everybody uses manipulation one way or another um so it's got a negative connotation to it but it's like anything isn't it um you know an axe is a tool it can be used to do some good cut down wood and help you to survive or it can be used to kill somebody.

1:17:14It's all about the person who's holding it and how they use it. All of this is so fascinating. For example, when you came right now in the morning, when you look at movies like James Bond and all those sorts of spy movies, we're told that spies are able to read a room and understand how many scapegoats are there and all those sorts of things. When you go into a room, do you also scan those? Yeah. Yeah, most people who work in the intelligence industry are looking for where the cameras are, where the exits are. People in the room, they'll generally tend to sit at the back of a room so they've got the best view around them, so they can see everybody coming in, everybody going out, and have the best visual advantage.

1:18:01They will choose where to sit deliberately. And I do this, even my daughter now, she's just turned 13, but from the age of like seven, whether we went to a bar or a restaurant or whatever, else she would know where i would want to sit you know she'd pick say you're gonna sit there aren't you daddy um i spent a lot of time teaching her um situational awareness and this is something that is key in many many roles you know there was an incident the other day a guy in the united states he was uh he'd done i think it was 11 years of brazilian jiu-jitsu he was carrying a pistol legally um and still got attacked and it wasn't anything to do with the fact that he couldn't fight it wasn't anything to do with the fact that he didn't have defense on him um he'd got protection he'd got all those things he just wasn't paying attention situational awareness is paramount to survival so um i started teaching my daughter this from a very very young age we'd play little games one of them we played the silly plate game and it'd be where we were sitting in the car and she'd have to make up a silly word from the letters on the number plate or the license plate of the vehicle and uh you know that was behind us and what we'd do is it started off just when she was young you know she could look out the back window and and we'd do this and if you spotted the same car twice uh in two different places on two different occasions then she'd win that round uh and if she spotted the same car three times in three different locations uh then she won the entire game and daddy had probably started driving a bit faster as well so but um but this was something that i started doing that um just to teach her to keep her eye out for you know vehicles and just for it to become a natural instinct and then later on i changed it where she's not allowed to look backwards and look behind her you know she can has to use a phone or a mirror or something to be able to see behind and that helped her when it came so um this is a something that i'm teaching her to be aware of her surroundings but why can't you look backwards but you need a mirror um because it will alert the person in the car behind so whereas if you can do it subtly by you know pretending you're taking a selfie checking your mirror checking the wing mirror whatever the case without the car behind you seeing it's got to be done subtly um then you've not alerted any potential surveillance do you still do this yourself why is it muscle memory or are you afraid of anything i think it's a little bit of both it's just it's become a habit um over years you know and it's i mean i have been followed by surveillance vehicles on many occasions and and of course it's something that has allowed me then to become surveillance free just by doing it so i think out of habit i just naturally do it just to to make sure that I'm not kind of under any kind of surveillance constantly.

1:20:49How do you part ways from such big agencies like the MI6? It's difficult in many ways if you still have assets that are active, as it were. That's something that I had to wait a long time before either any assets that I'd ever recruited were either um you know brought to another country no longer active or or um unfortunately were deceased or whatever the case may be and that was when um i said okay i can now go out and tell the world what i used to do so there's no danger anymore so to speak for me or or my former assets um or at least they shouldn't be um so providing certain information doesn't ever get out i'm pretty much fine um but yeah it's difficult especially for people who've been working you know their entire life for the likes of mi6 from college right up to retirement they will have a lot more in the way of assets and things that they've done that could cause problems for them have you ever been threatened yes your life by this government not by my government Can I ask you by which government?

1:22:04It was actually by a criminal organisation. They thought it was a cop. And, yeah, it got very, very, very nasty. And I thought I was about to be stabbed. And, yeah, I was... What did you do? Lucky to get away with it. It was all down to working with the police to find a particular individual who was in charge of a lot of financial crime and other criminal elements. Not my usual thing. I just ended up getting dragged into it. And, yeah, there was a couple of nasty fellows that came around and the way the situation was, it was very, very early on. And I thought I was about to get killed. He'd got a knife.

1:22:52The other guy was on the phone. He'd got me by the throat and I was up against the wall and the guy on the phone was saying, shall we kill him or do you want to talk to him? And I actually generally at the time thought, this is it. And this was here in the UK. I thought this is how it's all going to end. And I thought he's going to just stab me and leave me on the floor. And luckily the guy on the phone said, no, tell him to come speak to me. I want him in front of me now. Are you trained to defend yourself? I am, yeah, to a degree. like I said this was very early on that was a very scary moment because I knew the two particular gentlemen were not well they weren't wimps they were nasty nasty fellas but taking on the one would have been tough taking on the two the odds of surviving would have been pretty low that's how you scan potential situations it's a matter of probability So what are my chances of taking on one person versus two people?

1:23:53Is that how your brain functions now? Yeah. So pretty much everything in the intelligence world is done on probability and percentages. It's very rare you will hear anybody in the intelligence world saying this will never happen or this is going to happen. The reports and the kind of things that goes into the PDB or the President's Daily Brief or any of the reports, We give the customer either a percentage or what's usually done in a tier of highly likely, unlikely, less likely. It's all about likelihood, and that's how we look at everything. What are the chances of this happening? Is it highly likely?

1:24:33Is it extremely likely? And that's how everything's kind of – and that way it allows a little bit as well of we never said it was definitely going to happen or we never said it's not going to happen. We said it was unlikely or less likely. Is hypnosis real? Yeah. Is it used? In a way, yeah. It's not the same way as everybody thinks it is. It's not like somebody clicks their fingers and then all of a sudden you turn into a zombie and you're like, yes, I'll do whatever you tell me to. It doesn't work like that. It's about getting somebody into a state of hypersuggestibility. and there are ways to create that um i don't want to go into explaining that here now because it's very lengthy it's very complicated but there are ways you can walk somebody down a path of hyper suggestibility and when you get them there you can then literally convince them to do almost anything and if you can get them into the hypnotic state that you want them in depending on on the brainwave level and again this all changes um there are different brainwave levels um there's this fallacy that you can't hypnotize somebody to get them to say um to do something that they they morally don't want to do so if i were to say to you well look i tell you what if i hypnotize you and tell you to shoot that dog you're not going to want to shoot that dog because it's it would go against your moral code but if i were to turn around and say okay so let's hypnotize him then instead and tell him when he wakes up that dog he's going to see as a crocodile and it's threatening him and in his mind it's going to kill him if he doesn't kill it and therefore i give you a gun and say shoot the crocodile you shoot the crocodile you've just shot your dog so this is how it works in those scenarios when it comes to hypnosis you yes you can't get somebody to do something that they don't want to do but you can change the perspective so therefore you can get somebody to shoot somebody they love because they believe it's something or someone else is it that transformational can you actually make me believe that i'm seeing a crocodile and not a dog with the right person uh and again this is why um if you look at certain cases in history where there have been conspiracy theories of shooters shooting at, say, presidents or presidential candidates and that kind of thing.

1:27:10And I'm not saying, for the record, that that was the case. But if that was the case, they wouldn't have just got anybody. They would have picked somebody that has already a level of hyper-suggestibility. So there are about kind of one in ten people that are what they call floppers. And these are the kind of people where if you even walk down the road and do the most simple, say, confusion statement on them or whatever, you can put them into a state of hypnosis. You don't need to ask this right now. In your knowledge, without maybe perhaps just telling me exactly the president or what happened, but to your knowledge, is that something that happens?

1:27:59So has a shooter being hypnotized and then aimed at the president? It's definitely been experimented with, and this kind of stuff has been tried, trialed, tested, and I imagine possibly executed, but I've got nothing in the way of experience or evidence to support that. I'm just, experience would tell me that it's highly likely. Kevin we've been talking at length about so many different topics that are in relation to your line of work but also several different intelligent agents intelligence agencies and governments are you not afraid of everything you've shared with me like that perhaps in the sense that perhaps these institutions may not be happy with what you're sharing yeah so some of it is kind of got closer to the bone today than I probably have with anybody in the past but you know I don't worry too much because in all honesty if this was something that was going to be a major problem for them if I got assassinated then it would make the headlines which would be a bigger problem for them because then it pretty much confirms what I've said is true.

1:29:22Wouldn't they be able to cover it? They probably could, but these things do tend to leak. Now, the easiest thing would be to discredit me. They would just run an advertising campaign saying, he's a loony, he's crazy, or whatever the case may be. Or they'd do something that made me look completely insane, and it's so easily done. and if you look at some of the leading controversial figures, even the likes of Tommy Robinson, when it got to the point where they didn't like what he was saying, they just threw him in a jail cell and turned half the people who did support him against him by putting rumours out there and that kind of thing and that was something they weren't really too bothered about.

1:30:11So if it's something they were really bothered about, It wouldn't take them long to put a campaign together to make me look insane or anything like that. And again, I haven't really given anything away that most people don't already kind of consider already to be the case. So I don't worry too much. Is that the kind of thing that they do to politicians when they all of a sudden like 50 different news articles come out of, you know, about them and they're predominantly negative things about that particular person? yeah yeah these kind of things happen all the time and again this isn't all um always necessarily the government it could just be opposing candidates that have hired private investigators or whatever the case may be um but yeah it happens so frequently these kind of smear campaigns and that kind of thing um it's not always as effective as it should be but it does work in the majority of the case usually it only results in in confirmation bias people who didn't like that person and now just got more reason not to like that person the people who do like that person tend to ignore anything that contradicts what they believe about him and only believe or her and only believe the good stuff anyway so it's not always as effective Kevin I have a final question for you if you had to compress all your knowledge that you've gathered in the intelligence field over the last 20-30 years and you had to compress it into one essential piece of advice that we must implement in our daily lives what would it be question everything question absolutely everything everything can be manipulated all the the statistics that you hear all the narratives you hear everything on every form of media and that includes online um any person who's a you know kind of spokesperson look at all of it as objectively as possible because there are so many things out there surveys statistics scientists all these different things and they can convince you of so much and they can make it sound and seem so real and so convincing that you know the most people just buy into it and believe statements as evidence and believe numbers as factual and all manner of different things but when you start to really really dig deep and you go how okay why are they only showing me the statistics from the last two years and not the last 10 why are they only showing me this why are they only showing me that once you start digging into things and really really investigating it and going to to experts or looking at things objectively you'll find a lot of what's out there is just push you into thinking a particular way do you watch the news i don't how i don't watch television at all but i keep up with current affairs.

1:33:05Gavin, thank you so much for coming. No problem. I loved every single second of this conversation. I think you've opened my eyes and hopefully the eyes of my audience into a world that none of us have the opportunity to see. So thank you. And we'll leave a link to both of your books. Thank you. So my audience, which I pretty much think that they would be very interested in following even more into the work that you've done and to the world of intelligence. So thank you so much. And yeah, you've left me with so many things to think about. So thank you. Thank you for having me.