Tim Weiner
Appearances
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
On the other hand, the CIA officer is trying to convince the recruit to commit treason against his own country, his own tribe, his own political group, or his own terrorist organization. It's a tricky business, a dirty and dangerous business, and sometimes you're going to get burned. Covert operations without underlying intelligence to guide them are a fool's errand.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
They depend on the quality of intelligence underlying. And in the war on terror, counterterrorism swamped espionage analysis. It's only been in the last decade or so that that balance has been restored.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
The most important for the CIA after 9-11 was financing, and in some cases creating out of nothing, foreign intelligence services. The Jordanian intelligence service was created by the CIA back in the 1970s when King Hussein was a young man.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
Happy to be with you.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
He came to power, his son and successor, and the Jordanian intelligence service exists and holds power and authority with the steadfast support and financial assistance of the CIA. You could say the same for 20 different foreign intelligence services all over the world in places you wouldn't normally think of as being American allies. Uzbekistan, for example.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
The CIA simply doesn't have the number of people and foreign language skills and the reach to be a global intelligence service by itself. And so the financing of friendly and often not so friendly foreign intelligence services is a really big part of what the CIA does. Its liaisons with them are one of the most important, if not the most important, ways of gathering intelligence around the world.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
There have been operations that stayed secret for many years. For example, the head of Hezbollah military wing, the man named Imad Mugniyev, His operations against the United States go back to the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1982, in which some 240 American soldiers and sailors were murdered. He kidnapped the CIA station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, who died in captivity.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
Meunier went on to lead, for example, the bombings as far afield as Buenos Aires against Israeli and Jewish targets. By the early 20th century, Hezbollah with Iranian support was really the most powerful army in the Middle East. In 2008, the head of the Mossad came to the CIA director, General Mike Hayden, with a plan to assassinate him. The CIA built a bomb.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
The bomb was installed on the rear mounted spare tire of the target's Mitsubishi SUV. And in the streets of Damascus, in one of the most heavily guarded neighborhoods in the country, not far from the Syrian intelligence service headquarters, in 2008, Mugabe was blown into smithereens. The CIA was directly involved in that.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
And that operation stayed secret for seven years until the press pieced it together.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
The CIA has been around since 1947. It operates as part of the American government and operates under law. Now, overseas, it gleefully and sometimes very skillfully breaks the laws of foreign countries, espionage and illegal everywhere. Over the decades, presidents have ordered the CIA to do some very, very illegal things.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
A reckless president can make the CIA not an intelligence service under law, but a secret weapon wielded by men above it. A second thing I think people should know is that CIA support for Ukraine has been essential to that country's survival.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
if american military and intelligence support to ukraine is diminished or eliminated in the near future putin will take ukraine and he will not stop there the third thing that i think is important for people to think about when it comes to american national security is that from the end of world war ii until the beginning of the 21st century
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
The number of countries in the world who were democracies slowly grew and grew and grew and grew. And that growth escalated after the end of the Cold War. And by the turn of the century, the number of democracies and autocracies in the world were roughly equal. And that had never happened before in the history of civilization.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
Ever since then, the number of democracies in the world has flatlined and declined. Autocracies on the rise. We cannot encourage democracy in the world if we ourselves do not live up to democracy.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
Well, the greatest success was the CIA, through espionage, obtained Vladimir Putin's war plans for Ukraine in 2021. And rather than squirrel away that remarkable achievement, it decided to convince President Biden that it would be the best thing to tell the world about And both Biden and Secretary of State Tony Blinken did tell a disbelieving world that Russia would invade Ukraine imminently.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
Thanks very much.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
And they were right. Trying to understand the intentions and capabilities of America's enemies, trying to anticipate surprise, has always been among the highest missions of the CIA.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
In the beginning, what President Truman wanted when the CIA was created in 1947 was a newspaper that was better than the New York Times and the Washington Post at informing him what was going on in the world, to know the secrets of the Kremlin, to understand what Stalin was, what he really wanted as he pressed westward throughout Europe and took more than 58% of European territory hostage.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
Within a year, the mission changed. The Pentagon and the State Department wanted the CIA to conduct paramilitary activities, to fight fire with fire, and to try and roll the Russians back to their original borders and to liberate the captive nations of Eastern Europe, like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and perhaps Russia itself.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
These led to a five-year flurry of paramilitary activities, which were suicide missions. Hundreds of people died. These missions stayed secret for many, many years. In the 21st century, CIA was called upon once again to become a paramilitary arm and then to become jailers and torturers. The CIA was not equipped to do that. But the CIA does what the president tells it to do.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
This is a very important point that is lost on a lot of Americans. It was not the case, for example, that some CIA officers sat around drinking martinis one day and one of them said, hey, I've got a good idea. Let's overthrow Iran. Let's kill Fidel Castro. Presidents wanted those things to happen. The CIA was duty bound to salute smartly and do what the president said.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
George W. Bush did so, and he acknowledged that he did so in his memoir, Decision Points.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
I have interviewed quite a number of people who were involved in the secret prison system, the black sites, including the man who created them. They all knew that this would never stay secret, that it would come out one day, as it did rather rapidly, and that there would be hell to pay for it. But they didn't have a choice.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
The answer to that is yes and yes. The crucial part of that was human intelligence, was the recruitment of Russians who had some access and, in several cases, worked in the Kremlin.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
Well, signals intelligence belongs almost entirely to the National Security Agency. That's their job. Since 2014, the CIA has been supporting Ukraine's military and intelligence services. And their intelligence support, primarily, has been a major factor in the survival of Ukraine since the Russian invasion. The United States is under attack by Russia and China and has been for at least a decade.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
The Chinese intelligence services are massive players. The main Chinese intelligence directorate, the Ministry of State Security, has probably 400,000 officers and analysts, the CIA a little more than 20,000. The Chinese, through digital warfare, have penetrated the government of the United States and indeed the civilian computer telecommunications and data systems of the United States.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
to an extent few Americans realize. In 2014, for example, Chinese intelligence penetrated the Federal Office of Personnel Management and stole the personnel files of every one of the 22 million Americans who worked for the government of the United States, including the security files of everyone who worked in the CIA.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
Those files included their true names, passport information, in some cases, biometric data, The Chinese took this purloined information, cross-indexed it with passport and biometric data stolen from the nation's international airports, and developed profiles of most, if not all, CIA covert operations officers working abroad. It is extremely hard to spy on China when you're on the ground.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
You are under constant surveillance. There are an estimated half a billion closed-circuit television cameras in China, digital license plate readers, and other forms of surveillance that make traditional espionage today virtually impossible to see eye-opening.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
And just recently, in an operation the United States has called a salt typhoon, the Chinese were found to have penetrated every single major telecommunications company in this country. Why are they doing this? Well, the Chinese and the Russians have two different modalities of espionage against the United States. The Chinese want information dominance. They want to know us.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
The Russians just want to screw us. And the Russians are also conducting political warfare in this country. And the CIA, along with the FBI and the National Security Agency Cyber Command, has got to start playing better defense against this. ongoing and escalating threat.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
A great deal. And that's one of the most highly classified secrets in the government. I think it is safe to assume that they are trying to do what the Russians and the Chinese are doing to us. And a lot of this, frankly, is preparing the battlefield for any conflict between the great powers. that might arise in years to come.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
For example, both the American CIA and NSA and their Russian equivalents, the FSB and the GRU and the SVR, are able to take down the electrical grids of major cities by having implanted Trojan horses. If war or crisis arose or the threat of war, the Russians could take down the electrical grid in New York or Washington. The United States could do the same in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
The chaos that this kind of thing would create is almost beyond imagining.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
It was an Israeli intelligence failure and a massive one. The United States and the CIA in particular rely on liaison with foreign intelligence services. You know, the clandestine service of the Central Intelligence Agency, the spies. This is not a massive army. It's somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 people.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
The CIA cannot function without liaison with friendly foreign intelligence services and some that are not so friendly. Warning of this attack on October 7th by Hamas was there, but it was ignored. It must be remembered that Benjamin Netanyahu was covertly financing Hamas as a way of undermining the Palestinian Authority. Very often what we call intelligence failures are also political failures.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
It's not enough to ring the alarm. You have to make sure your leaders hear it. And leaders rarely want to hear bad news.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
Well, the CIA stations in Damascus and in Beirut and in Israel and in Jordan in particular, the Jordanian intelligence services and the CIA have a long and extremely close relationship. They are primarily listening, learning, trying to map the battlefield. There are few, if any, covert actions that the CIA could undertake that could change the current history of the Middle East.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
And the primary mission right now is to figure out what in the world is going on, which, of course, was the original mission of the CIA at its creation.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
The CIA suffered a catastrophic loss in roughly 2013. It had remarkably recruited a network of about 30 recruited foreign agents in China, Chinese people, who had access to the political leadership, the intelligence services, and the military. And then that network, which had been developed over the course of a decade or more,
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
One by one by one, these recruited foreign agents were arrested, tortured, and killed by the Chinese intelligence services. It took several years for the CIA to figure out how that had happened. As it developed, the CIA had a covert communication system that it used to stay in touch with its network of recruited foreign agents.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
And this covert communication system, or COVCOM, was not terribly sophisticated. It could be hacked. And it was hacked, probably first by the Iranians, who then shared their knowledge with the Chinese. And that's a tragedy.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
Well, the fact that Putin's war plans was a remarkable feat and probably one of the greatest successes of the CIA in the 21st century. The CIA has gotten bolder, more aggressive about trying to recruit Russians. It has done so openly by publishing on the internet ways in which Russians can covertly communicate with the CIA.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
They've obviously fixed the flaws in their covert communications networks over the past decade. And traditional recruitment, that is a CIA officer pitching a Russian spy, a Russian military officer, a Russian diplomat, a Russian oligarch. Apparently, it's been quite good hunting for the CIA because there is clearly dissatisfaction among the Russian elites with Putin, with the way the war is going.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
And these recruitment efforts, according to the CIA itself, have borne fruit.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
With the limited resources that the CIA has, I think the best the CIA can do is to maintain and strengthen its liaison with the Jordanians, with the Israelis, with the Lebanese, and perhaps now create liaisons with the new rebel force that has seized control of Syria. You know, the CIA station in Damascus is still there.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
And the best they can do is to try and figure out on a daily basis what was happening. The CIA cannot affect events in the Middle East the way it once tried to do during the Cold War. It can keep its eyes and ears open and report to the president what it sees and hears.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
Well, the problem with covert action in the war on terror is that it wasn't covert. It was paramilitary warfare. The CIA's best weapon over the years and the decades was not a a rifle, it was stacks of cool green $100 bills. And the recruitment of foreign sources, you know, it's an art. It's not like firing a missile at a mud hut in Afghanistan.
3 Takeaways
The CIA’s Secrets: Spy Missions, Cyber Wars & Covert Operations (#235)
The relationship between the CIA officer and the recruited foreign agent depends not simply on money, although it almost always does depend on money. The going rate for an important source is a million bucks. The relationship has to be, on the one hand, built on trust.