Tom Drake
Appearances
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The more there's Q level, we call it Q level clearance, which was for like nuclear stuff. My mom is a secretary at Barksdale where she met my dad because he was in strategic air command back in the mid-50s. Had a queue clearance because she was the secretary for one of the senior officers. Holy shit. Because she's looking at stuff that's quite sensitive, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Even though she was an administrative assistant, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I understand why they did what they did. I understand. I get that. And I remember under a short term, you're allowed to go after threats without a warrant, but you still have to go seek it shortly thereafter. It's all prescribed in FISA. But they just buy it. We don't have time for that. Forget it. Don't have time for it. Just bypass it. They just wanted the data. Now, why?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I'm now, it's like, I'm incredibly alarmed at the developments within just a couple of weeks. First week in October. Turns out it's also, I didn't know it at the time, was officially when the President's Surveillance Program went into effect. It's called the PSP under Bush. PSP. PSP. President's Surveillance Program. Okay. Umbrella Program.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Authorized by the president, the primary umbrella program at NSA, which became the executive agent, right, for the program was Stellar Wind. That was the umbrella program itself, encompassing a number of other sub-programs. Got it. There was one counsel that I'm aware of, based on my understanding even to this day, there was one particular lawyer in the Office of General Counsel
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
He was actually interviewed once as part of a larger NPR frontline report. Actually, I was interviewed for that. Myself, Diane Rourke, Bill Binney, Keurig Wiebe, Ed Loomis. I'm on the phone. I said, what are we doing? We're violating the Fourth Amendment. FISA is the, and there was a whole, there was a whole set of internal reports
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
NSA, nothing is done without, you know, you have to have authorities, right? And it goes all the way down to just like individual procedures, standing procedures. NSA had and been refined over the years based on the FISA. FISA had been updated five times to keep up with the times since 1978. Wow. Most of you don't realize that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Oh, yeah. And on the RC-135, we did have a post, I'll say, Holocaust, nuclear Holocaust mission, which was What's Left.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So they had special procedures for handling FISA because now you're, quote, unquote, spying on a U.S. person. sometimes without a warrant initially, but the normal procedure was you had to get the warrant, right, up front. So I said, what are we doing? He says, exigent conditions apply, direct quote, exigent conditions apply. We just need the data. Don't ask any more questions, Mr. Drake.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I say, wait a minute. This is the attorney. The attorney inside the Office of General Counsel who happened to be read into the program.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yes. Right there. Yeah. Now, hot pursuit, that is allowed. Hot pursuit was allowed under FISA for a short period of time. Oh, okay. It was. It wasn't, yeah, exigent, but there was a legal standard built into FISA, Fourth Amendment compliant, but you could temporarily, because sort of the immediacy of it, you could actually go after, surveil a U.S. person. What if they were intending harm?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
What if it was that immediate?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That's one reason it was there. That was actually in the FISA. All that was bypassed. I mean, bypassed meaning it was going to be a permanent, warrantless, basically a general warrant, which is actually unconstitutional. Now, some would say, people even then said, Tom, you don't understand. You didn't make the decision. Shut up. Be quiet. things will take care of themselves. This is the crisis.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Sometimes we, you know, we have to do things differently. I kept talking. So back to the conversation with this attorney, I said, well, then why don't we go to Congress? Congress legislates. One of the things that's happening now, you see this in Trump 2.0, where even Congress, you get into this whole thing about can executive override or can they re, well, that's another conversation.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, super, super classified because it was operational. Meaning depending on the scenario, military doesn't do anything without plans and plans always change. Right. But you always had plans and you were always updated and you were always playing games. You're always doing war, war game, war planning scenarios.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Legislates, if the law of the land and FISA, which applies in this case, is no longer sufficient, Remember, they passed the Patriot Act a couple months later, actually late October, which is another component in all this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
To begin legalizing what was, okay, to begin legalizing, they did through acts, which is ex post facto, which in itself, ex post facto law, which in itself, that's unconstitutional. You can't pass a law to, in essence, legalize what you were doing or conducting even executive action, that was unlawful or unconstitutional, particularly if it's unconstitutional.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But remember, FISA ultimately falls under the Fourth Amendment. It is a statute in law with criminal sanctions if you violate it. Didn't matter anymore. All this didn't matter. I was told it's quaint document. So another conversation, you know, dustbins of history. We live in different times now, Mr. Drake. Different times. We're just going to be different.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We're just going to take the thing that makes us American, the very thing that defines the foundational law of the land. Go to Congress. I'm talking to the attorney. Go to Congress. Change the law. He says, with what we want to do, they would say no.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
In that moment, right as he said it, hair standing up on the back of my neck because I realize in that moment, moment of truth, it didn't matter what law was. It didn't matter. We're not going to even bother They were so worried that if they went to Congress, Congress would say no because they wanted to get away with this. They wanted to do this anyways. Didn't matter.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Like, law doesn't matter in this regard, which is, to me, central to even why we have the United States of America. I could argue that the First and Fourth Amendment, because of all the abuses of the colonists,
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
colonial America because of the severe abuses that rose to such a crescendo and got to such a fever pitch that we ended up having a violent American revolution to cast off King George III and all of his officers that would literally show up at people's homes with a piece of paper and say, I can take your effects, your papers, and even you with just the piece of paper, a general warrant.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That's why we have a Fourth Amendment, which Louis Brandeis later, one of my all-time favorite Supreme Court justices said, it's a right to privacy. Wrote his phenomenal paper on it. What defines us as American, right? This is free speech. You get in, remember, okay, First Amendment. Those are two things. I mean, that's really the basis for what it means to be American. He's saying, wow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We're going to spend all that too, permanently. It's like permanent now. This is not even temporary. We're not even going to go back. We're not even going to, what's the phrase, even face value. We're not even going to pretend. We're not even going to pretend. But we're doing all this in secret because you can protect.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We, I would participate.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Thin thread people in particular.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Here's why. Again, without getting all the details. Thin thread had already solved the big data problem, also protect the privacy of U.S. persons. It could go through vast amounts of data, leave all the ocean where it was, leave the sand on the beach, don't touch it, just see what changes. It protected US persons. It encrypted. It also provided basically two levels of suspicion.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Didn't go any further, right? But they decided not, they would not allow ThinThread to be employed even after 9-11. I begged them. We have the program. Nope. We're not going to. Didn't matter. There were solutions, not just thin thread. They were never put into the fight after 9-11. Wouldn't you think because of the failure, you'd want to put the best you had, even if you hadn't used it before?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah. Wouldn't you think you would want to put the best you had in the fight? You gotta protect more people from getting placed into harm's way.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Is it just incompetence of this whole bureaucracy? That's part of it, but we need to make, he would say, Hayden, the general, we just need to make Americans feel safe again. That's not in the Constitution to make Americans feel safe. And it's not like we're pansies and we have to be afraid. But it was actually, you have to do the reverse psychology thing. It was, they knew they had failed.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They had to project it. Their way was, oh my God, even he's argued, oh, if we had all this technology prior to 9-11, 9-11 probably wouldn't have happened. They actually had the technology prior to 9-11. He's in denial about what NSA. Not only did they have the technology, they had the intel. Yes, had that too.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Oh, I hadn't gotten to that story, which is a punchline for me when it comes to ThinThread. Right. What do you do? This is a moment of truth for me. I was already incredibly alarmed. I'm already gone to the most senior people at that time. I've already gone to the office of general counsel. I've already confronted the director of the signals intelligence. In that moment,
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
is I got off the phone with that attorney. I said, I cannot remain silent. If I remain silent, I am complicit in the subversion of the Constitution. I took an oath to support and defend basically my entire military career, government career. I'm not going to let the government violate the Constitution. You can have both.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
This thing about it's black or white, liberty or security, you actually can have both at the same time and compromise neither. There's that famous Benjamin Franklin quote. Right. Security for free. For those who, yes. You can sell both. They erred and even Hayden himself admitted, we drew that line. He always sports it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And one of the tests you take is a very special test to see if you qualify for a very special program, which is in the crypto linguistics arena. And they actually make up a language.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
A little bit. Those who seek a little will lose both.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah. A little liberty for security will lose both. There's a larger quote around that. Right, right, right. I moment, in that moment, I knew I could remain silent, but I knew by not remaining silent, I put myself at extraordinary risk. I'm a senior executive. I had taken the oath. I have a fundamental responsibility.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So- I'm going to accelerate this because it's really because then how was I punished, right? And this is where life literally was turned upside down for me because even then I was being tagged as a troublemaker, okay? So I decided to blow the whistle. I went to the inspector general.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I then went secretly, which was allowed under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, an actual act of Congress. I could go at the time. They modified it later. I could go directly to the Intelligence Committee's oversight, both HPSI and CISI, I'm just, well, expanding it, but it's the secret. I could go to them to share my concerns in private.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Now, there's a risk that I could be exposed. It turns out every channel that I went to, all the official channels were exposure channels. So I'm disclosing, but I'm being exposed at the same time. You could argue in part, the intelligence communities were already co-opted, owned by the intelligence community in large part. Right, they're beholden, remember, it's secret, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
You go to a secret chamber even in the Capitol, right? So you went to these proper secret channels. Then I was subpoenaed, equivalent of being subpoenaed, prima facie testimony, evidence, material evidence and testimony to two 9-11 congressional investigations. One was Saxby Shambles. They had been a recently formed Homeland Security agency.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Provide all kinds of information to them, which was basically the precursor to the 9-11 joint inquiry. Both of the committees.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Wow. All of that was suppressed. No one to this day can find my testimony or the highly classified information I gave them. Really? And I didn't keep it at home. And I didn't secret it away. Right. I didn't hide it somewhere in a basket or in a pumpkin.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So I can laugh about it now. Okay. But. So that's spring, fall, or summer. People think I was interviewed by the 9-11 Commission. I know why I wasn't, because they didn't want me on the record. But no one can find. In fact, I was told later that what I provided, the joint 9-11 inquiry, was so classified it couldn't be in the classified report. What does that tell you? They covered up.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They helped cover up for NSA. NSA had a lot of egg on its face.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But they were at the heart of the failure. there gets into great detail because this is what happened.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So I was able, I couldn't put any of these programs, none of the ones I was telling you about, including Thin Thread and a bunch of others, weren't allowed to go operational because they were continuing to spend, they were in fact, oh no, I was sitting in a meeting and my supervisor, the director of the signals intelligence directorate says, 9-11 is a gift to NSA.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Plans were not just defensive. They were also offensive. I mean, that's part of what makes them so classified. It wasn't just what would happen if... someone, they launch the, what do you do? Because you didn't have much time, but then there was first strike, right? So if you, you had to plan for the possibility of a first strike that you would launch, there's times where it came really close.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We're going to get all the money we want and then some. And that's certainly what happened. Congress has opened it up. They opened up the coffers and just started pumping even more billions. Who said 9-11 was a gift to NSA? My supervisor.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Signals Intelligence Director. It became now this haunting quote. sitting right next to her, where she says, 9-11, it's a gift to NSA.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I was in a meeting, people were so, we were going around together, because I led the communications part of my leadership and communications team, we're going around to the workforce, because people, they needed to be held, they needed to be, I mean, people are just really taking this hard. I encouraged her to go around not just to console, but to be seen and explain, what are we going to do?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And she's sitting in this meeting, this one particular meeting, saying, I'm just sitting there with my, like, where she says 9-11 is a gift, and then some. Jesus Christ, man. Because they're always, oh, we never got enough money. If we just had enough money, we could, you know, no, it's not about the money. And you'd already solved the core challenge problems already. So...
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I then was part of a, the thing about this is the Department of Defense Inspector General My other colleagues, I was anonymous because I was still working. They were all retired, including Diane Rourke, who was the staffer on the highest permit select committee. She had the primary NSA account, Republican primary NSA account.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I had made secret connections with her to, to give her a heads up on what the heck was going on in NSA early on, early on. Okay. After 9 11. Okay. But remember then I was in formal right with, with investigators. In fact, under 9-11, they were so hyper about... See, NSA wanted to put childminders along with me. They did not want... They wanted to know exactly what I was going to share.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The investigators, to their credit, said no. But I was spirited down to basically a secret... It was a nondescript government building where I was then interviewed in this building. I was interviewed at NSA for the joint inquiry. Because that's what was happening, all this pushback.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Because it was exposing a lot of embarrassing details about how the entire intelligence community had failed to prevent. And all Congress said, how do we stop this again? How do we prevent another 9-11? That was a big thing. How do we prevent another 9-11? So-
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
was part of this dod inspector general investigation went on for a while i was the primary source thousands of pages corruption the fraud the billions in waste the thin thread versus trailblazer thin thread versus stellar wind which was obviously super classified um the at that time, and it had been for several years as it turns out, right? That went on for a while.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I was flagged and tagged left and right. All kinds of retaliation, reprisals started occurring. I started getting shifted. That's how I ended up at the National Defense University, out of sight, out of mind. We accelerate to November of 2005. I make a fateful decision. And by the way, as a side note right now, this is about the furthest and longest I've ever publicly said how all this transpired.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
There's a lot more behind what I said in terms of details and fascinating human dynamics, right? But I've never really gone this far, right? Because most interviews don't last very long. Right, right. So here it is, November 2005. I decided I had one last chance to make my case to the new director of NSA, Keith Alexander, who actually was much more technologically savvy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
He did not take kindly to my blowing the whistle. I sent him a letter. Caused quite a stir. But the last thing, Trailblazer, they had decided Trailblazer, it basically got canceled in 2006. But he was convinced that he could do it better. And there was a following program called Turbulence, all these T programs. Yeah, T programs. See, this is the kicker for me.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Able Archer is one of the exercises where they actually thought that we were engaged in a first strike. This, it goes back to 83.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I'm just on a kind of a weird masculine, this masculine level. We had the T at NSA. The T in NSA had already been fully demonstrated, okay? But low T is what they focused on. Right. As much as they projected high T, I'm just, I've never said this before, it was low T for sure. Look, if you take on and you solve the problem, that has its own reward. It's not about spending money.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
You want to make sure you create and deploy systems that actually provide for the common defense. So he didn't like it. Shortly thereafter, middle of December, this above the fold, old school print newspaper, New York Times, Eric Lichtblau, James Risen publishes for the first time exposure of this warrantless wiretapping program that had been in existence just after 9-11.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Now, there was a huge scramble in the entire intelligence community, but particularly the NSA. They went apoplectic. Bush, there's public statements. You go on the internet, you'll see public statements from Cheney and Bush and a bunch of others about, oh my gosh, They just blew, it was one of the most secret programs. Yeah. It was one of the most secret programs in history in modern America.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
What year did this come out? This was December 2005. Still out there. Okay. The article itself.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Okay. Remember, I've been following all the developments internally. The program was rapidly metastasizing, even before it got out in public. Remember, I'm going through channels. I'm spending lots of time in front of investigators, sharing with them what I know. Right. At great risk.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Remember, all exercises of any kind, no matter what it is, will have either operation or it just, they'll have the NATO phonetic, you know, like Able, and then there'll be a series depending on what it is. I was fully immersed in that environment.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Extraordinarily risk. Again, I was already... So... article comes out two weeks later a massive national security leak investigation is launched by the doj i knew even when the article came out a couple weeks earlier in december 2005 that i would be immediately targeted right because so few people do in fact this program was so secret that the only authorizing document was a letter
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
memo that was stored in david addington's safe chief of staff slash attorney for cheney in his office safe wow even nsa sent their own attorneys down to get a to get the authorization because they were so worried they wouldn't have cover You always look at what's the cover. You want a lawful order. You get into lawful orders. I know that from the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
You only have to follow lawful orders. Nuremberg trials principle, which was their excuse. We're just following orders. No, lawful orders. It wasn't lawful to break the Constitution. And there's lawful means to update the Constitution. But national security just like had this huge carve out, right? This huge exemption, remember? Exigent conditions, but now it's like permanent. We're now in 2005.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So Accelerate Forward, I knew that I became a target, a person of interest and a target as of spring 2006. Back up just a couple of months. I wrestled with this for quite a while after my last conversation, last email with the director of NSA. There was one last route I could go, but it wasn't authorized.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I grew up in an era when I became intimately familiar, until I met him later, but intimately familiar in terms of the history, Daniel Ellsberg.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yes. He went through channels. No one would listen to him in terms of the bright and shining lie of Vietnam. A whole other story. He was part of the study that showed it was. But it was buried. It was classified. He, not all of them, there was stuff in there that was quite secret that even he didn't release to the press. He ultimately went to the press.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Unauthorized, ended up facing 115 years because of government malpractice. They ended up, the judge threw the case out. I was there wrapped by a young teenager, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So I had one last route. I could touch the third rail, go to the press. And NSA, if you go to the press without authorization – and I had gone – I knew what it was like if you have to have something published. I had something published based on my work I did on Jackpot in IEEE Computer Magazine in 1996 when I was doing all my really highly technical stuff.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I had to go through the whole – with the classification review officer just to make sure it was good. It took months. Right, right. Here, I'm going to go to the press without any authorization. But at that time, it only violated administrative policy. It didn't violate the Constitution. It was not a crime. It wasn't criminal to go to the press.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
However, I knew if I did, I could end up just like Ellsberg. I already knew that. Some people thought I was stupid and naive and didn't know that. That's not true at all. I knew exactly what the risks were. I knew not only could I lose my job, probably would, but worse, I could be charged on the espionage. I knew that. So how do you go to the press?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
where they're, and this is, I wouldn't get into all this, part of it is still technically classified. Yeah, wasn't the NSA spying on the press? Yes. They had a special program as part of this larger, it's called First Fruits. First Fruits.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Where they were monitoring certain media outlets and even individual reporters and journalists because they were so scared that something would come out, not just about the secret surveillance program, but the torture program. Right. Torture program came out way before this one did. Okay. Abu Ghraib. Yep. Yep. Shai Hirsch, right? Eli, that's where he became famous as a journalist.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So I had that choice and I won't go into all the details, but I had one chance to make contact with a reporter which worked and ended up anonymously communicating with the reporter for about a year before I knew that I would ultimately have to go face-to-face. And so I actually, through 2007, I was having infrequent a periodic face-to-face meetings with this reporter at even greater risk.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Because as things progressed, I was under extraordinary electronic surveillance. I knew they'd eventually catch up with me. I knew that I might find myself being pulled out of my house or having my house raided or my office down at the National Defense University. And that's exactly what happened.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The early, this is my technical background. I knew that they would start monitoring me electronically with, because they could. Via your. Their own means. I could see, I set up, I set up logs. I could see where they were attempting to break into my system. I had a network at home. Remember, I'd been in long into this. Okay. I was, you know, back in the early days, pre-internet. Yes. BBSs.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Waze, Gopher. I was, you know, I, before internet was internet in terms of public eye. Back in the 80s.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Wow. And what's interesting, it was actually on the Soviet side realized it was a notional exercise, but it was ultra realistic. It was so realistic that they were actually preparing to defend themselves with their launch of their nuclear weapons. Really? And he was in the command and control. He was an alert officer. And he said, this is an exercise. Stand down.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yes. You were prepared. Weird things like the Verizon DSL box would get reset. I'd call them up and they'd say, oh, you have to pass. It's like, wait a minute. Yeah, they were remotely resetting it. But I had multiple firewalls, both hardware and software. Wow. I don't ever believe, although it's possible, I never saw that they actually got into my computers. Oh, really? No, that's right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
In some ways, I take some pride in that. I knew what their capabilities were. But the problem was there's what's called zero-day exploits. It was always possible, right? So I had to assume I was compromised anyways. But see, people say, well, gee, if you know that, why didn't you get rid of everything?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I had nothing to hide, to use that, which I don't like that phrase, because that comes from Joseph Goebbels, right? If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about, so who cares what we know about you? Wait a minute. That's not the point. I used to do exercises on privacy and people get to, oh yeah, no, that's me. Why is it you? No, because I don't want them to know it. Why?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Because that's me. Oh, so there is some ownership here in terms of your own privacy. Ah, right? Privacy is essential to even living. Yes, 100%. As much as people want to dump stuff out there, right? It's amazing what people put out there, right? But there is something about who we are, the essence, but that's a different conversation. Yes. So I'm,
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I'm getting, then they start physically surveilling me. One, it was covert, covert. This is where John Kiriakou knows that really, really well, better than I do. But it was clear that they, and then it started to be overt. They wanted to make clear that we're onto you. Like they were now sort of- They want you to know that they're following you. Wanted me to know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I was getting stopped quite frequently. They would have random searches. My searches weren't random. at all coming to the gate, right? They had already alert based on the tags, the car description. It's intimidation. Oh, of course, huge. So that went on until my colleagues, NSA, all retired, and then Diane Rourke were raided all in the same day in July of 2007.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I knew that I was now the primary target and probably had been for a while. I was still at NSA. They probably had suspicion that I was in contact with a reporter. although later they actually thought I was really in contact. They actually thought that was a cover, a cutout. There was like a cover, and that I was like a convenient hangout, as they call it, right? A limited hangout?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
A limited hangout with her, but I had really been in contact for a longer period of time with the New York Times. Oh, really? They later made up a whole chronology, but it turned out I wasn't. I never had any contact with the New York Times. That's crazy. So I knew in July that I was now the target. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And it was clear based on the last couple of meetings with the reporter, Siobhan Gorman, who at the time has worked for the Baltimore Sun, later went to the Wall Street Journal. Now she's more in private consulting practice, has been for quite a while. I knew that there were agents in the room.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Including, by the way, I found out later that they were actually using a significant number of agents from the mole hunter unit, FBI. Those are the ones that are trained to go after spies. Like legitimate spies, foreign spies. But that's how I was being treated worse than a spy. That's clear. I was, I was now the threat. I was the leaker.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I found out later that Chaney had issued a fine and fry the leaker. He just said fine and fry them. I don't care. Just make sure it's someone, you know, apparently, you know, it has to be senior enough, but fry, burn them, burn them, make an object lesson of them. That's how I interpreted it. Right. So late November, I'm getting ready to go to work. I had two vehicles at the time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I had my hybrid, which is a Prius, and then I had a Toyota RAV4 EV. It was all electric. It was a limited run. I'm getting ready in the other bedroom, right? to get in my car, go down to the Metro and go down.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And then it's like, what if of history? What if it's a history? Yeah. That's so crazy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And then there was a bus that would shuttle me over from the Coast Guard headquarters over or take me to one of the Metro stations, drop me off by bus, a government bus in front of, and then I walked to my office where I was teaching, had been for a couple of years. It was actually during that time is when I met, we'll probably want to take a break here shortly, but that's when I met Elon Musk.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
During the time I was at the National Defense University where I was teaching in the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. And I was a co-lead on their space industries team. That's how I ended up going to SpaceX with some students.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
yeah a bunch of different we went to cape kennedy we went out wow we went out to a cheyenne mountain i mean went inside the cheyenne mountain right uh we went to a number of different sites right so i'm getting ready for work i look out the window and i see a bunch of agents streaming across the front yard and a bunch of cars pulling up as they're piling out oh no and that's where i mean the moment is another one of those moments because
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Cryptolinguistics.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
You know, this is years later, right? But that article had come out, right, almost two years ago, right? And so, remember, they've had this multi-million dollar National League investigation going on as to who were the sources for the New York Times in particular. I got caught up in that for all the reasons I gave earlier because so few people knew about the program.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Even though they argued later, oh, just some disagreement between two programs, Synthread, Trailblazer, while that was like... the limited cutout as to why they came after me when in fact it wasn't that at all. It was the fact that Stellar Wind had been revealed even though I had not provided any classified information about the program to anybody outside of channels. Not even the reporter.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So you can imagine knocking on the door. They said, you know, they told me later, if you hadn't opened it, they'd knock twice. They had a battering ram with them. No kidding that they would have used the battering ram to punch through the door. And then you can file a claim later for damages. Did you say your son answered the door? Son answered the door because it was upstairs.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I just said, Zachary, go answer the door. He's got the presence of mind. And you knew, you didn't say. Oh, I knew, I knew. But you didn't tell him. I hadn't told anybody. Man, I kept this a secret from my own family.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yep. And they actually test your propensity or proficiency in being able to pick up a language and the structure. It's made up. It's a made up language. OK. Bears no resemblance other than just basic linguistic structure. OK. And then they ask you a whole bunch of questions. And I scored high enough to qualify. So that was the first thing. Now, you can still choose to not enter into that program.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
No, of course not. How old was he? He was, okay, 95. He would have been 12. Middle school. So normally my spouse would take him to the middle school, right, in the local town, and then I would pick him up, right, after school. So, yeah, a bunch of agents come in. They start sweeping the house. I had a choice. They read me my Miranda rights. I didn't have to cooperate, obviously.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I could have said, you know, you're going to have to deal with my attorney. I didn't have an attorney at that time, right? At that moment, I didn't have an attorney. So I said, this is one final time to blow the whistle. I named president, the vice president, senior people, including Hayden about what had gone down over the last six plus years. No, we're not here for that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We understand you violated, you know, certain laws. And so we're here to collect evidence. And we can interview you or you don't have to, I didn't have to be interviewed. Obviously I had Miranda rights. I couldn't have remained silent. I said, no, I'm gonna, I'll, it was an interviews interrogation. That was one of three, by the way, they took notes. They, I knew anything I said would be right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Of course used against me. It was, um, That was an interesting experience all by itself. I remember at one point there was an anecdote where one of the techs is coming up from a basement. I was really into computers, a lot of retro stuff going way back into the 70s. This was a highly modified, my first computer that I owned was an Atari 800 home computer. That's where I learned everything.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That's where I learned computing, programming, networking, dial-up, all that. Right. And it was a highly modified, basically it was a closed circuit version, modified in box. I looked down at him and said, you know, the last time they modified that operating system, it was back in the late 70s. You really think you need that?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And he stopped at the top of the stairs going into the basement in my office. And he looked down and looked up at me and said, nah, we don't need it. He went back and put it back on the shelf. But they took a bunch of Amiga stuff. I was also new Amiga, right? That was kind of a follow on to the Atari 8-bit in terms of the technology. Went through all of my library.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I mean, they just ransacked the house. Meanwhile, they're ransacking my office and my car looking for evidence. I knew in that moment that I was behind several eight balls and I knew that I would probably get charged. I knew that. I interviewed twice more. The last interview was in April of 2008. I was placed on administrative leave in November 2007. The last interview was in April.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It was a setup. They brought in the chief prosecutor. It was the first time I met the chief prosecutor at the time. It was a different one later. But the chief prosecutor said, we have more than enough evidence, just short. He confronted me. He said, we have in a windowless room in an FBI facility outside of D.C., Right, it was the windowless room right behind where the mole hunters were.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I'm no kidding. He said, we have more than enough evidence to put you away for a long, long time. You better start talking now. Because he said, how would you like to spend the rest of your life in prison? And you can imagine, I'm sitting there. We might be able to, you know, 25 years, 20 years, no guarantees. That's better than life in prison.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
In 2008, I had just turned, oh, I hadn't quite turned yet. I was 52, right? I knew I could no longer continue having any, said, nope, you're going to have to deal with an attorney from now on. They were moving to revoke my clearance because I was a senior executive. It was either you could have a set of your peers or the director himself. I said, I'm just going to resign. I resigned.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Got an attorney, criminal defense attorney. They tried to get me to plead out multiple times between April of 2008, the first time, confronted by the chief prosecutor, and April of 2010. Now we're in a new administration. I wasn't indicted. Obama. Obama. Bush, it's important to note, even though it began under Bush, I was not indicted under Bush. They had a draft indictment. I have a copy of that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
but I was not indicted under Bush. I was indicted under Obama. Wow. The irony. Huge irony. And the reason Bush even made sort of passing reference to it in his memoir, right, biography, his autobiography, where he says, you know, just why go after it? Because it's like, for him, it wasn't like, I think even he had problems with Cheney later.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They kind of went their ways a little bit in the second administration. There's a passage in his book that makes sort of indirect reference to Cheney Because I think you realize he had actually, without even admitting it fully, that he had gone over the line, right? Because he had listened to Cheney. So I'm sitting, I'm working at Apple now. Man, I had no job. I couldn't get any work.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That's a whole story in itself. I couldn't get work. I was persona non grata. I was, you know, I was hot potato. There's literally persona non grata. No one hired me. I formed my own company, a small LLC, right? No one would touch me. In part, when they would find, even though my security clearance didn't show anything was negative, they said, you're under national security investigation.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I understand. So here it is, April 2010. I'm sitting at lunch. I'm working at Apple in Bethesda, Maryland, one of the stores where I worked for 13 years. Quite a jump, quite a distance going from senior executive to wage grade specialist in a retail store. I'm sitting there. I get a call from my attorney. My attorney says, where are you? And remember, I had this attorney now for two years.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
He said, oh, I'm at lunch. He said, did you know you were just indicted? Now, there had been a – it was Kafkaesque – again, we'll go into the detail, where he, myself, and the prosecution team with NSA personnel were there in that same windowless room again. It was clear that they were moving to indict me. And it was basically, you're on notice, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We're basically, we're on notice as to why we're doing this. And they actually, in essence, had the outline of the indictment. So I got indicted. I was not pulled off the street. I ended up having to, it was an arraignment.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I pled not guilty to all 10 charges, five under the Espionage Act, one for obstruction of justice, four for making false statements to FBI agents during the interviews, which themselves were actually true.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And what exactly did he say? Oh, they had one of their security officers inform her that her husband had been indicted and was facing 35 years in prison.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah. And I don't want to cost the family. I mean, this is where you, so, and then what? Well, what do what you, you know, my criminal defense, I had spent umpteen money. Remember there, there's a whole lot of history.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Uh, they tried, they later did a, uh, interrogated her. So what they, that was, but then they interrogated her and they tried to get her. There's this thing called basically sort of the pillow privilege where you have spouse. Yes. Right. I never told her anything. She had nothing to share because I had never told her anything anyways, but they were threatening to take away her clearance.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Wait, clearance. Remember? It's like.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
She's worked at NSA her entire life. Wow. Or related contracts. She's been a contractor, although she was a, for a short time, she actually worked summer hires, intern then hire.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I never told her. Of course I wasn't going to say anything. I didn't want to expose them. I had to protect them, too. That's so crazy. I'm protecting the nation, but then I have to protect the Constitution against my own government, and I've got to protect my family at the same time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
No word. Well, I had learned how to be silent. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I'm unwinding it now. I'll say, share something off the record with you. Um, maybe during the break, but I, uh, because I don't really want, there's certain things I don't advertise still does.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
very dark future right because the indictment included five charges counts under the espionage act same it's the same espionage actor was used against john well yes okay It was the same, at this time, I was only the second American, and this guy's a whistleblower, who had been charged. Ellsberg was the first. Ellsberg was the first for non-spy activities.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
He was a senior. He was a senior. It's very similar in terms of his position in government. And he exposed, was part of the study, but then exposed the Pentagon Papers to the press. Caused a huge stir. It was no doubt partially responsible for the demise of the Nixon administration. And he ended up facing 115 years in prison and went to trial.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And the trial went on for a couple of years until they broke into his psychiatrist's office looking for dirt. And the judge threw the case out because of malpractice. Misconduct on the part of the prosecution.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah, the way, well, you know, the Supreme Court left room open to go after a source with the same charge. Got it. There was more protections. This gets into a whole, you know, press reporting, right? Right. Is the press liable or is it the source? Now, that's changed, especially under Obama, where it was clear they were also saying, hey, press, you know, you could be next. And then under, well...
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
In terms of Sterling, he's another one charged on the Espionage Act. Jeffrey Sterling, another CIA employee. Not familiar with that one. Ended up in prison. He... They tried to get James Risen, right? This is the same one who was the co-author of the December 2005 article, wrote this article about Operation Merlin. Interesting.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And they thought that Jeffrey Sterling was the source, and they ended up trying to get him to testify against his own source, alleged source. several times until they dropped it. Remember, all under Obama. Oh, wow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They're sharing actual nuclear technology, even though it was quote-unquote flawed, as a way to get inside their program.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah, kind of like that, but it was, this is sort of the arrogance, I'd say the arrogance is that we'll be able to get away with it. It backfires. So like if we give you the technology, we'll now understand the technology. Slip it in. That's right. And they'll think it's real and they'll take advantage of it because they have cutouts, right? There's cutouts. Yeah, right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It's kind of the operational limited hangout. I mean, limited hangout can be used, but in this case, it was actually an operational cutout. Wow. Not a limited hangout. It was a cutout. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, there's all kinds of programs like that. That's so crazy. Think about Switzerland, which is supposed to be a super secure system. Look that one up. That's a good one.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So this one has to do with certain types of encryption. These are devices that protect like the secrets of Switzerland. US had already managed to compromise that too. It's fascinating. I mean, the spy, I mean, this, you get into, you know, the combo of the technology of James Bond you see in movies and John LaCarre, which is a pen name, and just all the games people play, right? All the games.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That's why they called it MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. No one really wanted to do it. Especially at the great power level, particularly Soviet Union, U.S., because what could happen? It wasn't just one nuclear mushroom popping up. You're talking just dozens, hundreds. But that was why we had a triad. Because, true, the fixed sites, like Minuteman, right? Right, right, right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Spy versus spy. Actually, a game I used to play on my Atari 8-bit. Oh, wow. Spy versus spy. There's a whole comic book series on spy versus spy, and it's hilarious. Sort of like Tom and Jerry or Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner, right? It's just funny. It's funny, but it's real. It's real stuff, and it has consequences. Mm-hmm. Right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
People don't realize the extent, I mean, the games, the cutouts, the distractions, the misinformation, the propaganda. In my world, when I was in, you know, there's ways you can, what's called meekening, right? Meekening is a way to fake out somebody, you know, this electronically. They think it's a real signal, like a nav signal, but it's actually fake. Oh, wow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah, and it can obviously cause disruptions and... I wouldn't even get it. There's classified means by which I used to engage certain types of signals. Get inside the decision loop, literally, or the command stream. Fascinating stuff. But you've got to keep it all under wraps for obvious reasons. It was similar to what happened. We actually had Osama bin Laden's cell phone.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
There's a different system that's used the... So you have a couple of different protocols in terms of cell phone technology, the communications protocols. There's an international, oh, I say international. I mean, there's, you know, I have Verizon, AT&T. Verizon kind of uses, it's a CDMS. Well, again, all the different types of waves with inside the cell phone frequency band.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, he was using a cell phone that would access a satellite, you know, satellite comms out over the Indian Ocean. Well-
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
some intrepid reporter exposed the fact that we had a cell phone number of course which i would consider to be a secret that at least was worth keeping for a while yep i would think that's one of those and of course he stopped using it and he went to a courier system which was way more secure way more how do you get so that's and then the ci is playing games trying to get inside the courier network you know so it's there's a lot there's a lot of weird shit about bin laden
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And it was under Obama that we ultimately took him out. We had him though at Tora Bora. That's the kicker. But see, the decision was made, Iraq, we got to go into Iraq. Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Can you find that, Steve? Jeez, that one I hadn't heard. I had heard about the pancreas and being kind of spirited out for treatment, but I hadn't heard about that one. It wouldn't surprise me. Find the article. Wow. Yeah, that's another dynamic of 9-11 that was kept. There was the pages that were kept out of the report, the missing pages. Oh, yeah. What was the story with that?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Are very vulnerable. Right. Even – although my father, who was a World War II veteran and then was strategic air command, he actually helped develop almost single-handedly the whole –
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Because of the links to the Saudi government protecting. Now, this gets into the details that we won't have time to go into. Right. But this is where, you know, what was missed. with the hijackers, but there were a couple of them were living in California.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Being supported. And where was that support coming from? Well, follow the money. We always, there was this whole thing. We had a whole thing in a safe, follow the money.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah. And what I didn't, I skipped over the part where I was able to take ThinThread, point it to the main databases. This is right after 9-11. I was given a couple of million dollars based on all I had, my background, everything I learned in terms of agile development. So you develop, you iterate. And then you go back.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So you code a little, test a little, code a little, test a little, deploy, code a little, test a little, deploy. And you just keep doing that in very, very tight cycles. We ended up, I still, I begged, right? I begged to deploy ThinThread to the 18 most. So there's a whole nother storyline here, which again, we don't have to go into. The Defense Authorization Act has an intelligence component.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
there was $14 million set aside to deploy ThinThread. I am not kidding you. Remember, language is authorizing language that once it's approved, you appropriate the money, you are then, the executive branch then actually has to Execute. If it says 14 million, 9 million of it was supposed to deploy ThinThread to the 18 most critical, which are classified, terrorist collection sites in the world.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
plan the whole failsafe chrome dome plan where the b-52s in particular because they were the intercontinental bombers that carried multiple nuclear weapons yeah um at least they were mobile but they're basically once you launched and then they would they would have their particular uh locations where and it would change depending on world events and all that yeah but if they got the signal then they would go in but they knew there was probably a one-way mission
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Some very interesting locations. We'll say what they are. Operational. Congressional language. Signed into law by the president. This goes back to 2002, late 2002, because they delayed because of 9-11.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Another 5 million, different program, another one I'm intimately familiar with called Sweep Forward, which is an extraordinary out-of-the-box skunk works, an analytic program using non-traditional means of various types, culture, history. Just a much, and even esoteric sources, I'll just say it that way, which gets into another part of someone I ended up meeting who actually predicted 9-11.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
He's a precognitive psychic, completely nonlinear. got to know him really, really well. That's a whole story in itself.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
he had this special gift and he can't even fully explain it. It's one of those things because it's kind of, remember what Arthur C. Clarke said? And for some people it's weird stuff. How do I explain if I can't explain it? It sounds too kooky, why? But he actually had worked with police.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
This is not unusual even in the US where you have psychics working in police departments to track or to go to the site of a crime or alleged crime and they would pick up additional information. He got very good at it. He was even on special undercover operations, right, even at great risk himself. He had a dream about 9-11, went to the authorities, and they just, they couldn't believe.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
You know, he's a very unassuming man, right? They just, it's like, what are you talking about? He had a dream, right? We all have dreams, don't we? We all have dreams. He dreamed about 9-11 before 9-11. There was also an entire communication system set up by the terrorists, which I won't go into detail here, that was used. How do you communicate worldwide with the cell?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It's a cell, and the cell itself was broken up. How do you communicate in the open without anybody knowing about it? Well, without going into the details, they did, right? That was fascinating. Well, anyway, so I'm leaving you hanging. Five million was set aside for this special analytic program. called Sweet Ford. NSA completely ignored it, defied the Authorization Act.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Why? Circle the wagons. Even though Congress is signed into law, nah, we got a better solution. They didn't have any solution. That was the problem. But the thing was, neither program was ever part of what they call the official production chain on the analytics side, and it seemed that it sort of was both. So it was convenient to just ignore it. So I got $2 million.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I ended up becoming the executive, basically the program manager, the executive program manager. I had an actual program manager that reported to me unofficially, right? This is why I was still in the signals intelligence. So this is like November, December, January. We just rapidly evolved ThinThread to make it even better. They wouldn't let us go operational. Remember we didn't.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So I remember this came out, that thing came out later. This is before the Intelligent Authorization Act. So I was able to get permission to point ThinThread against the databases NSA, the primary databases. So vast, we're talking terabytes on end of terabytes of data. And We set it up, we turned it on for about 24 to 30, roughly 24 to 36 hours, and guess what?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So you had the other part of the triad, which were the submarines. Submarines, yeah. So the submarines were the ones that were super mobile, but essentially hidden.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
One, we found out that about 40% of the database was corrupted, the databases. Then we found all kinds of information pre and post 9-11 regarding the plot in terms of movement and a lot of other evidence that they had not been able to uncover or discover. Thin Thread did because of the way it worked. Good Lord. So what do you think, if you have a responsibility...
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
to look at yourself to be better going forward so another 9-11 doesn't happen, what would you think that you'd want to improve the way in which you discover information, even from the existing databases, the traditional RDMS, the relational database systems? Why would, nope, guess what they did? Immediately shut the program down. Famous scene, first Indiana Jones movie.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
warehouse arc on a crate with wheel on a little cart with wheels you see it going down what appears to be this incredibly long aisle turns left never to be seen whoops yeah it's never to be seen again well they figure it out later right because a certain power is magnetic right right right That's what happened to Thin Thread. This sweep forward was summarily shut down.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It was a research project shut down. This is how I live with all this. I'm an American. I was brought up in Texas and Vermont, two republics before they became states. Vermont, in fact, a lot of the constitution of what then became United States of America was based on the Vermont constitution. came the 14th state. I just, you know, I just... So there I was, okay? I'm facing 35 years in prison.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, the MIRVs can be placed on any nuclear.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
What do you do? I had spent umpteen amounts of money to my private criminal defense attorney. He no longer wanted to represent me in part because I had no money left. How much did they say it would cost? A million dollars. A million dollars between the point I was indicted and just the start of the trial. Jesus Christ.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
He was being practical in part. Right. He agreed to stay on. We tried to get other high power lawyers to take it pro bono without cost because certain law firms are required as part of their community service, quote unquote, to take pro bono cases for cases that are significant enough, but the person, in this case, the client doesn't have the money. Guess what?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The firm said, yeah, you can represent Mr. Drake, but you got to leave the firm. And they weren't going to leave the firm. And the reason why is because of conflict, because they had senior government clients. So I'm in front. So he, the public defenders, I was indigent.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I was literally formally declared indigent by the court, which meant I was now eligible to be represented by the federal public defenders. Deer in the Headlights. The last time it was the Nicholson, you might remember he was a spy, Navy spy. It was the last time that that court, and we're going back 30 years. It was the year of the spy. It was 1985, the so-called year of the spy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Multiple. You could have multiple targets. I mean, that's really...
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Pollard, there was a number during that period. The court had no institutional memory, right? I mean, there was all kinds of special procedures put into place. They had a special skiff built inside the courtroom just so I could meet with my attorneys. So I'm behind several eight balls. I'm staring into Pandora's box, and guess what's staring back at me? The abyss. Mm-hmm.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I also knew I had to influence the court of public opinion. But the problem is you say anything outside in the federal court, guess what? They can actually use that against you. But I knew I was going to have to influence the court of public opinion. I also knew that I was going to need someone.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And so this extraordinary individual, Jocelyn Radack, had written an op-ed in the LA Times just after I was indicted. And I ended up, she became my primary, she's not a criminal defense attorney, but she became my primary whistleblower. So she provided legal counsel, advocacy, and she was the liaison with the press, right? So I met her in May. You sign, basically, you sign an agreement, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It's a representation letter. Excuse me, at the time, she was with the Government Accountability Project. And then there was other attorneys as well. And my original criminal defense attorney agreed to, at the government rate, which was nowhere near, he was charging me Well, originally $550 an hour gave me a $50 an hour break.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
You know how fast your money goes, even though I had a middle class America, but I'm a senior executive. I've done really well in industry, right? I've, you know, pulling down $200,000 a year plus, right? But you know how fast your money goes when you're being charged over two years, $500 an hour, right? So I couldn't afford a million. There was no way.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Other attorneys later, they wouldn't want either. I said, no, it'll be 750,000. Nope. So public defenders was basically the only people I could rely on for criminal defense.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
There was an initial hearing in the October, November timeframe. That was after they got their clearance. They had to have a clearance before everything is... Remember, the government's saying that I had not just damage, now security, I had not just grave damage, it was exceptionally grave damage. It was the highest level of damage.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And you're dealing with top secret sensitive compartmented information, allegedly. So they had to have a clearance. They didn't have a clearance of this kind, not even close. They had basically what's called collateral. It's like basically just a national background investigation check. And that was it. I mean, it was basically straight secret.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So they had to go through that whole process, which in itself was, you know, that was a journey for them. We used to talk about it. So the hearings began in the fall. And all kinds of shenanigans are played, right? Because it's just, it unwinds week after week, month after month, because they kept alleging that I had really damaged.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I was worse than a spy because not only did I give up secrets like a spy does, but I'd given it to a press outlet, a reporter, which means everybody got to see the secrets.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Once I was indicted, there was no further attempt at a plea agreement. They already tried and failed prior. I didn't even tell you the other attempts, right, prior. So we get to the spring. Things are starting to develop rather quickly. So it's important to note, remember I said my, Jesslyn Radak, my attorney on the outside, although she was partnered with the public defenders, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But then you started like the Tomahawk missile, right? Then you started getting into cruise missiles, which could be launched from B-2s, could be launched in a number of different ways or from ground sites.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
She even filed briefs, right? There was an advocacy brief that she provided on my behalf, right? And the judge actually accepted it. It was one of his first orders of business, right? It was he actually accepted the brief.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
remember, one of the few public hearings, because practically every hearing had to be behind closed doors, they had a whole, there was a special security officer, they had to basically empty the room, only certain people were given access, there was a special court recording or quarter, right? Because it was national security. So in essence, became a star chamber. So
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Most of the hearings were, again, in secret. We get to the spring. I was awarded the Ridenour Truth-Telling Prize for what I did. It's out there. I gave a speech. Jessalyn introduced me. Jane Mayer had met with her off the record with Jessalyn, ends up dropping, she's an investigative journalist of some renown, She dropped everything she was doing. This was in early 2011.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And remember, we're now, if you think about when I was raided, now we're, this has gone on for a while. She dropped everything she was doing, did a compressed investigation of my entire case in history. sources that were willing to talk with her off the record. Most were off the record, but were real, you could quote, right? But you couldn't attribute. Sure.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yep.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So that came out in the New Yorker in May, the secret share, long form article, many, many thousands of words. Then I was interviewed by Scott Pelley, 60 minutes. that's the one where all kinds of people ended up like seeing because it's 60 minutes. Right. That was pretty dramatic. It was, that was a very interesting experience in itself. Washington Post and other publications started weighing in.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It's like, maybe he is a whistleblower. And oh, and Post kind of remember like Watergate era, like Woodward and Bernstein. Right. So it came to a fever pitch. So the week before, a week and a half before I was scheduled a trial, we were going through the final days was actually selecting the jury, right? And there's strikes and everything else.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
You have to have the 12 and the alternates, and there was four selected. So they came in the well of the courtroom. They approached, I didn't know it at the time, but I knew something was up. And remember, in the press, it's like, what's going to happen? Ellsberg was willing to fly all the way out from Kensington, California to be out on the federal courthouse steps to say how critical. Wow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Oh, yeah. So in the well of the Senate, the chief prosecutor, William Welsh, interesting history, reported at the time, Lanny Brewer, head of the criminal division, who reported to Eric Holder, who I actually confronted earlier in the Apple story because he loved his Apple products, whole story in itself. So he approaches right after that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So he approaches my public defenders in the well right below the dais where the judge sits and says, we would like to enter into, if the defendant agrees, we'd like to enter into plea negotiations. That was an extraordinary decision. seven days from that Friday all the way to Thursday the next week.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Remember this trial schedule start that following Monday, basically the 40th anniversary of when the Pentagon Papers were released. Kind of interesting juxtaposition in terms of history. I remember I got to know Ellsberg really, really well at this point. They then tried to get me multiple, I lost count. It was like five, six attempts. First, well, five years in prison.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But that could be months, potentially months. In a wartime scenario, they could stay underwater for quite a while. But all the parameters of all that's classified.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Then it was like two years in prison. And then it was like one year in prison. And then it was still pleading out as a felon.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
pleading out to a felony i had told them back in april of 2008 when i the original chief prosecutor confronted me that i would never plea bargain with the truth and i wasn't going to do it then but you can imagine the pressure i was under oh yeah and it gets very it gets sensitive for me in terms of my criminal defense but they they they actually tried to strong army into pleading out
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
under the criminal code to two years. I said, you can handle two years. There was no way I was gonna plead out to something I hadn't done. And I already admitted during the interviews that I had gone to the press, even though it was only administrative policy violation, I started going to the press way back in 2006 and 2007.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
long story short this was just i mean it's just right they come into my house the public defenders they're putting pressure on my on my spouse it's like oh you know what they do to you in prison they tried to pull all that angle and we're this is our bread and butter we we know how to do plea agreements right right last break of the day that thursday prior to the monday when the trial began
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I would never plead out, but if there was an off-ramp that emerged, however faint or slim it was, you better take it. Here's why. Because if you don't, they could basically just go, basically do an interlocutory review, have the higher court, this is the Fourth Circuit, review the decisions, because they were already starting to complain about the judge.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
have it in review, and they could just suspend it. They did it with Jeffery Stern, they basically hung him out to dry for almost two years before they came back, waiting for the decision. It's a way to suspend it, takes all the heat off the press, right? I was still being pressured to plead out, okay? I'm talking to Justin Radack, I'm on the phone, out in the hall of the courtroom, right outside
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They kept changing the language, right? Because the last thing he wanted to do was hook me on classified. I said, it cannot, there was no classified. They'd already demonstrated that, in fact, it was acknowledged by both parties that no classified information was released. So plea agreement, no jail time, no fine, there was administrative fee, and 240 hours of community service.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I also chose to go airborne. I wanted to go airborne, and I wanted to be assigned overseas. So I went through basic training at Lackland Air Force Base, and then I went on to Monterey. It's the foreign language center, Bresidio Monterey Defense Language Institute. And that's where I learned basic German to a level where you could have at least basic understanding. Focus was all comprehension.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Misdemeanor for doing what? Under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Because it's a federal, remember I was charged in federal, you have to stick within the federal crime under the code 18, US code 18. So it was for doing what? Exceeding authorized use of a government computer. Jesus Christ. I know. Huge relief. Pro forma sentence. The judge still had, but we're now agreeing to a plea.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They drop, the proviso was they drop all the felony counts and no time in jail and nothing involving classified. So that's what happened. And huge victory. I mean, it was just like, wow. I mean, all these years- No felonies, no jail time. No felonies, no jail time, two and four hours of community service. That was in July 15th of 2011.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The judge did note at the time, I was sent to Fort Detrick to the community service director. At Fort Detrick, this is outside of Frederick, Maryland. Mm-hmm. It just so happened that he was a civil engineer, but he also was part of the Veterans History Project, the Library of Congress. He said, how would you like to interview veterans? He saw my military background.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Because the community service is like, we're not going to have you paint rocks. That's not who you are. That was like, they were paint rocks, what, on base? Or bust up rocks, not just paint them. Or dig holes and fill them in again, or the equivalent. Not gonna do that. I ended up over the next number of months, it took paperwork, I had a probation officer.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The first two that came out realized they thought I was some hardcore, I had really done something bad. And they realized, nah. So one of the probation officers about to retire shows up in his motorcycle, visits the house. They had that right to visit your house. He visited me one time and the rest was just over the phone or through the mail. Oh, that's great.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So guess what I did as my community service? Interviewed veterans from World War II to the present day, including veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, and I got to interview Daniel Ellsberg, who had never been interviewed for the Veterans History Project. Oh, wow. Fascinating. Joint chiefs of staff, chiefs, veterans from the Battle of the Bulge of...
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Sheet metal machinists from World War II, Korean War, in-between campaigns. That's amazing. Yeah. And Afghanistan and Iraq. Stunning. I mean, just... And all kinds of interviews, press, you can imagine.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
This is 2011. Now, I didn't know at the time, although I had obviously secretly hoped that someone like Snowden would reveal how far all these secret surveillance programs had metastasized. But this is 2011. So I was on the circuit for quite a while. Overseas, Europe, Canada, Australia. And I had to find a way to, after a shattered life, how do you end up rebuilding it?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And just the psychological, I mean, there's a whole lot that the ordeal created a lot of suffering. PTSD, at one point, I was actually It's a weird condition. I was actually, you know, people sweat. I actually started sweating blood. What? Yes, sweating blood. It was weird. I thought, like, what the heck's going on here? Like blood coming out of your skin? Blood started coming out of pores.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
If you look it up, it's a special medical condition. It's really interesting. I actually, it's... The stress, let's put it this way. I'll give you the- Hematodrosis.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yes. Holy shit. Holy shit is right. I am not kidding you. It was like dramatic. So imagine an anvil, that's how I'll share, what was it like up until the plea agreement and then the pro forma sentencing? Felt like an anvil had been sitting on me, just crunching, pressing for all those years, nevermind the whistleblowing before 2007. You know what it was like when the anvil released itself?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Some of the routes are known. Some of them are loiter. Some of them, you can remember. I mean, think about it. You don't have to launch from your homeland. You can launch adjacent to the coastlines of a country. And then you're talking maybe a couple of minutes at best.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But the anvil, so I was just being compressed, like in a press, a hydraulic press. Life turned inside out. The only thing I had left was my integrity. What else was left? They took everything else away and were about to take away my life in terms of confining it to a prison. I had PTSD. I didn't know it at the time. This was one of the symptoms, though.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Awkward is a very simplistic way. Awkward. I was actually separated for a while because it caused some real issues, as you might imagine.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Where I located myself – You know a battle fatigue? My father used to call it battle fatigue. That's what they referred to it. That was a term for PTSD, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Vietnam. I know now exactly what it's like to stare into the abyss at a distance and be completely empty. Not pleasant. Everything you ever stood for, everything you ever took an oath, the Constitution, all of your service to the country, faithfully serving the country, completely blown apart. They systematically dismantled your life. I took an oath. Remember, the fidelity to the oath.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That meant something to me.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Now, they did profile me. It's really interesting. You know what they said later? So part of what happened with me is they actually said, and this came out after Snowden. If you go out there, you'll see a chart. Basically, it's a rogue's gallery of spies. Guess who's also on there? We're talking the real spies in U.S. history. Snowden's on there and I'm on there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They all have flags under the countries to which they quote unquote gave up secrets or were operating on behalf of. No flag- Where's this? You'll see it. If you go out there and do a search, it's the Insider Threat Program. Insider Threat Program. They gave briefings. They actually formed a joint committee. I'm not sure. It's joint, D-O-J-D-N-I. Sorry, a joint, right? Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They formed a joint task force, insider threat task force, and they put together briefings and they kept updating them. And for the longest time, and I understand even recently from another source, I'm still being flagged as representative historically of an insider threat to the government. You know what they said about me? I self radicalized. So underneath our portraits,
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And by the way, the picture they had there was from the Ridenour. It was a picture, ironically enough, for my truth-telling prize. It was a picture, a press picture. All the spies had flags under their portraits, quote-unquote. Remember, rogue gallery. No flags under Snowden or mine. None. We were men without a country.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah, but I had been one like him. Remember, he worked at Booz Allen one time, so did I. But you're right. I was a senior executive when all this happened. He was a contractor working in Hawaii. Right. And he was faced with a similar thing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
At best. Because once it reaches the surface of the water, then, yeah, it doesn't take very long after that. I mean, that's part of the problem. That's the thing with the submarines.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But he saw what had happened to myself and the others and said he knew, given what he was going to bring out, that he would end up in prison for the rest of his life. Yeah, right there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But we don't have flags.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Oh, yeah, that's our part. We're in the same league. Same league. You're sitting across from a real, you know, bad guy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
No.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It'll be interesting, well, what I told you off the record, it'll be interesting to see any time, technically, if you write, speak, you're supposed to run it through. Oh, yeah, because you were an employer.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
There is what's called a lifetime obligation. But the nondisclosure agreements I signed, which they technically think are loyalty oaths to secrecy, they're not, actually reflects directly the paragraphs in the executive orders governing classification.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
You cannot use classification, and it's still on the books, to use as cover for embarrassment, cover for wrongdoing, cover for violations of the law. How ironic. Because they kept throwing that in my face. You signed multiple times military, NSA, non-disclosure agreements. Okay, so what takes priority? The oath to the Constitution or the non-disclosure agreement?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I realized joining this secret system, deep state, national security system, that you are giving up certain rights. But you certainly don't just give them all up. Right. They just have some restrictions. I had restrictions in the military.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah. So it took a while to... I kept working at Apple. And... You go back to a quieter life. But then when Snowden, of course, that just reignited everything. I was on every, you can imagine, every major, Lou Dobbs, for example, had me, I mean, I lost track after a while. I was getting special permission to leave work at Apple just for these interviews.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Because there were so few people that could talk about what had happened to Snowden. I ended up going to Moscow in 2013. We were the first Americans with myself, Colin Rowley, Justin Radak, and Ray McGovern. And we went there to present him the San Adam's Award. It was a candlestick holder. We spent many, many hours with him one day. Wow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah, that was a very interesting experience being in Moscow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Okay, so now the things where I didn't elaborate, you want to hear? Yes. Live. Okay. So I mentioned I was teaching. I was actually the NSA rep to the National Defense University in ICAF. There was actually one over at the War College, and then there was one at ICAF. They had just created – it was a new position. Okay. So NSA chair at ICAF, Industrial College of Armed Forces. Okay.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Because of the industrial college-run forces, they have civilians, military, and even overseas. It's a compressed master's program over about a year. Full-time, the companies that send them, they still get paid full-time. And then military or civilians still get paid full-time, but their full-time job is being in this master's program.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
fort mcnair in dc okay beautiful you look across to the cherry blossoms in the spring in the lincoln memorial and it's so anacostia so i um i was teaching a leader uh strategic leadership information technology um cohort groups by 15 to 20 students and
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
each of the professors would lead up an industry team i ended up on the well you had choices right and i end up on this because of my background in part national technical means i end up on the space industries team in the spring of 2007 is when that portion of the master's program kicks in so you visit local sites That includes government, Goddard, contractors. We went to JPL.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That was a California trip. Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. We went to Cape Kennedy. We went out to Colorado. On the trip to California, which at the time was SpaceX headquarters, We, of course, I'm leading in this. I'm the one that's leading the team at this point. We ended up going to SpaceX and meeting Musk. And he, it was amazing. We sat there in the lunchroom, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Short of all-out war on civilians, there's always, this has been the case, Cold War even now, there are designated targets that now they'll change, they'll update them. But that's why, you know, the little, that case, the briefcase.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Lunchroom, which was basically off sort of the main, it was amazing. Sort of the early Dragon mock-up was there. They were still working on improving the original Falcon version The, the, the Merlins, the Merlin engine, but the early Falcon, there's like a Falcon one member. They, they got this before any successful launch occurred. Okay. So you imagine they were under enormous pressure.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Remember he was also at Tesla. You have to remember that's the other thing is Tesla, but the roadster hadn't come out yet. It was, it was in advanced development, but the roadster hadn't come out yet. Right. Oh yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Musk, I mean, he's in his mid-30s. I remember we walked into sort of the office, right? And it's like a startup office. He says, yeah, that's where he sits, right? But we don't see much of him there because you imagine he's very out and about, right? And very hands-on. Very much the entrepreneur, very much the marketing, very much, right? That's who he is. And he regaled us.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I have to say it this way, right? No matter what else you think of Musk, right? And what's going on right now with him, right? And his association with Trump and all this apparently unfolding within the government where he's taking teams and visiting certain agencies already.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
He regaled us for over two hours plus his entire vision of becoming a spacefaring species, why he wanted to go to Mars, the technology, right, behind all this. and why he also wanted to commercialize space as well. I mean, it was just an amazing, just incredibly passionate. And of course, this is like an open cafeteria, clanging noises, machines, forklifts going by.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I mean, it was all like just the hubbub and activity. Sometimes he very much like that's where he kind of gets his energy from. And he just was fired up. And you just, you could, I mean, it was just fascinating. It's like you walked away and says, wow, right. He could sell ice to Eskimos. Yeah. So it's, it was, that was, yeah. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The football that's been carried for decades now. It always follows the president and the backup vice president, always. There's a special, there's a whole team, incredibly specialized.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I'm reminded more of that because no one, I mean, this is before Musk went political. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, this is kind of irony and hypocrisy at the same time. I'll be very blunt. The bulk of his money, even on the Tesla side, his credits, credits. I mean, this reminds me, because remember, the era I grew in was Steve Jobs, Bill Gates. But these are the tech bro, the emerging, they came out of the 90s. They're now in their 50s, most of them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And now they're ascendant and they want to create a technocratic utopia. I'll just say it. That's sort of their vision and there's different flavors of it. And there's different, people are trying to sort of speak to this philosophically or with political philosophy. Like, what does this mean to create this technocratic utopia? Some of them are a very personal level, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I'm going to live longer than normal, right? Right. cryo stasis type stuff i mean it's just some of it's kind of out there right you know almost like uh interstellar type technology right what do you make of palantir wow palantir see for me pal it was before i mean i'm well aware of theol um another tech bro billionaire Palantir is very much in the surveillance business. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They started picking up very aggressively a lot of some of the early contracts where when things became privatized in terms of when things started coming, all this exposure as I was a part of. Right. You have to remember, there was a bunch of things that hit the press. during the time I went in the 2006, 2007 timeframe, Mark Klein, that special room, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
There's specialized codes. you don't want an accident, right? So if you decide to make that, I mean, we're talking about an incredible decision that you would be making under dire circumstances. It would only be under the direst of circumstances you would even launch, whether it's to defend yourself or to go on the offense. But the offense typically is because, yeah, we only get wiped out first.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The AT&T room where we actually had special like Naros devices just sucking up everything in the optical networks. I used to consult to Nortel networks before they collapsed.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
i this is this again my background right i just i just was on a contract in in triangle park north carolina deeply involved and what do you do they just like what we have all this on this dark all this dark net right dark optical what are we we're talking like 40 gig like capacity in terms of bandwidth what do we do with it like what do we do with it people this goes back right we didn't know what to do with it we have to develop programs so they're buying up at super high inflated prices all these small companies they were building
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
apps right and services for the new net the the high-end net yeah palantir is head over heels and then some and fully fully embedded in the national security establishment money from incutel and all this stuff well incutel actually goes back so i'm familiar from my cia and then my I'll just say it this way. I'll go into detail. Even at NSA, I would liaison.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
There was a time period where I was a liaison because 9-11 happened. How do we, we had to, oh my gosh, we better like, what else, are there any other pockets out there? What are other people doing? How do we help?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
This is like predicting the future at one level, but I also had to develop technology and processes, even organizationally, to deal with, quote unquote, the new threat or emerging threats. I spent some time at CIA going over and exploring this. We're talking like really getting into it. We're like talking workshopping it, as they call it, workshopping it. Yeah, fascinating.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But In-Q-Tel was an early, this was one of those early seeds. I mean, basically they were seeding. And they were giving significant amounts of money to promising companies. And some existing companies that were- I think Google was one of them, right? In-Q-Tel is just one, there's a number, but that was a more public company.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
um, for, I mean, it was their own, in essence, a government, there's all these like special government entities, John Hopkins university. Wow. Tom, then, um, that's the sweep.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
There's a whole lot of other, all kinds of other background to this. Um, But then the last few years, I've had near-death experiences in my life, and that's a whole story in itself. What is it like to be not just on the edge, but in the tunnel and coming back?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But a few years ago when I was at Apple, something was happening to me in terms of my health, and it turned out I actually had a very rare form of lymphoma. And it was equivalent to stage four. Invaded my kidneys and invaded my bone marrow, and I had to retire early. I realized I had to devote whatever energy I had left. I was 65 years old.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I was planning on working a few more years before I wanted to move on, maybe go back to teaching. But then I'm confronted by an expiration date that appeared to be rapidly approaching. the closure distance, like two fighter planes far faster, because the closure, right? Yeah. I could see the event horizon of my own death appearing in front of me, and it wasn't far into the future. So...
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But then what are you initiating? That's why people don't want, you know, the horror of nuclear war, I haven't talked about it much, but, you know, it's... those weapons are just, and especially now, you'll see, I mean, all you have to look at is the original atomic, which became then hydrogen.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
2022. Oh, wow. October.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Had a relapse. was put on a first-generation targeted therapy after immunotherapy and chemo booster didn't work. I then had another, they had to take me off all of that. That goes back to September 23. Long story, end up at NIH with a new diagnosis. They realized something wasn't right. Advanced blood tests determined the rare form of lymphoma. It's the Waldenstrom variant.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I had to really get into this. I took this on just like I did anything else in life. I said, you know what, lymphoma, you showed up, you're about to kill me, but you're an uninvited guest, it's time for you to leave. So I partnered as my own advocate with an extraordinary set of doctors, right? Just extraordinary.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And I'm now, I say, the second path of recovery, but it looks like I'm pretty stable. I'm on a second generation version of the therapy. It's a pill I take every day. Super expensive, but it's a pill I take every day.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Akela Brutinib. Calquence is the brand name. And what is the mechanism of action? Targets a special protein where the lymph cells basically go malignant. There is a particular marker, and basically that's how it hones in, you know, the sensor. You're basically, it's help, because obviously my immune system was totally overwhelmed.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I couldn't do the CAR-T, which they take blood out, they super energize your T cells, put it back into you because my kidneys are compromised. Yeah, what is the CAR-T?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, CAR-T, it's very expensive, but it's basically a one and done. But some people have psychotic reactions. They have to be in a special facility. Psychotic? Psychotic because, oh yeah, because it's really intense. Okay. But I didn't qualify. Okay. They wanted me to go that route if things got, but I didn't qualify.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
At one point, I even thought I was going to do bone marrow, but 10% of people who do bone marrow die. And I wasn't gonna, that's worst case scenario. So then I was like, okay, what do I do? I can control everything I eat. Now, what's the cause of it? None of the doctors could say for sure. They said it could be environmental. It could be triggered by a whole host of things.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I talked a little bit about, I was put under enormous pressure the anvil, the hydraulic press for many, many years. Who knows? I don't know, right? I don't know for sure. I can suspicion, but I don't really want to conjecture. Some people say a lot of people have a lot. A small number of people will have kind of a lymphoma, but it's called smoldering. It never manifests.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It just, it just, the immune system keeps it like- Keeps it at bay. That's correct. If you looked at the CAT scan and the PET scan, which is they put a small vein, that's a radioactive isotope, and basically in a sugar solution, and it's IV'd into you, pretty much every lymph node in my body was lit up.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And then you look at some of the tests when they still were blowing them, you know, either on land or sea or in the air. My father actually was one of the last, he was part of a team. It was actually, it was a team Christmas Island west of, it was a site where they would do airbursts. Then of course there was a treaty that banned all that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And it was getting to the point where I was gonna have problems on the urinary side of the house to be a little bit more TMI, where it was gonna close off, right? So they were really worried because the last thing you want to do is to go in. I mean, remember, this is a blood cancer. It's a liquid cancer. It's not in the form of a tumor. It is, yeah, it's a tumor, but it's- It's everywhere.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That's right. It's like, wow. So I'm now on a second generation, which is this Calquence, and I'm on a renal friendly diet. There's certain things I have to avoid or minimize. Like what? I can't eat a whole lot of tomatoes or basically I can't eat bananas. Alcohol is out. Broccoli is out. Spinach is out. Did you ever try the ketogenic diet? Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, there's aspects of that that I'm incorporating, but as long as it's renal friendly. There's certain fruits like I can't eat grapefruit, but that's not unusual for a lot of people with these types of medicines because it would interfere with the absorption of this pill. And then I have certain dietary supplements. to help boost my immune system and just stabilize me.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And there's still some things that are balancing out because they thought, this is interesting, they thought, just to indulge a bit, because it's obviously extremely personal to me because I'm there, right? They thought when they first began to run the blood test, they actually came into my bedroom in the hospital and they said, Are you vegan? All the indicators was I was hardcore vegan.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But I'm not. There was a time in my life that I was lacto-ovo, right? For other health reasons, because I was very sickly as a kid. I was not vegan by any, not even close. But the profile of the blood tests was that I was vegan. Hemoglobin was in the five range. Anybody knows about your, oh, incredibly anemic, super anemic. Oh yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I had to have, I had 20, I lost count 20 units of blood over a period of four months just to keep me going. So life and I get a little emotional still. Okay. Life is incredibly precious. And so I just live each and every day. I got up in the morning, right, in the hotel and pinched myself virtually. I'm still here. I get to live another day, seize it, live it to the fullest, each and every moment.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
What else do I have against the backdrop of my entire life? Good God. Because I realize we have an expiration date at a certain point.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
but I'd rather it be further into the future.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
No. Interesting enough, no indication that I got COVID. None. Apparently, some people don't believe that. It's like, well, everybody- I never got it. No.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
but they would actually do nuclear, they would actually blow up a nuclear weapon in the air at high altitude.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, it also turns out that certain blood types, interestingly enough, are more immune. I'm O positive. Okay. And apparently, even when the O positive, I happen to have apparently, this is what I've been told, that my blood type makes it harder for the COVID to... Yes, with the spike protein.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Now, having said that, because I worked at Apple, initially it wasn't required, but then they forced, if you wanted to continue working, and remember, I'm in massive debt, right? I still am, I'm still crawling out of it. have nowhere near the income I had, discretion or otherwise, basically have no retirement, right? I have a 401k from Apple. I have a small annuity from, I was able to convert.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
There is an annuity, but nowhere near. Right. Okay. And obviously my salary, my hourly rate at Apple is nowhere near what I used to make or what I made in industry.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Just not, even though Apple pays pretty well and has a lot of benefits. So I ended up, having the original COVID shots, we're talking Pfizer Moderna. Multiple? Multiple, with several boosters. Oh, wow. Over the intervening two years. But the last one that I took- And this was what year?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yep, and he got radiation poisoning and was actually in the hospital for a while.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
This is, you're talking, so remember, they took the, you know, they did the, again, Trump, I say Trump to his credit, you know, they put everything they could, you know, into the-
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
accelerating warp speed warp speed literally right into coming up with the rna right the mrna right um and uh it would have been i'm just thinking it was it's interesting i was in action australia in late 2019 just ahead of the wave is it fine as it turns out so that would have been it would have been into 21 so starting in early as i'm just trying to remember now
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
early 2021 when they started to release holy shit yeah it was 2021 there was that first and then like you have to get another one for six months later and then i was still there all the way through until the fall of 2022 yeah although for part of that time i worked from home okay so i didn't it I'm aware of people that have had, you know, reactions.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I'm aware of people that have gotten long, like have had other, especially with the multiple.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I'm aware of that. And I, yep. And I, and I've, you know, I've, I don't, I won't go down the path because I've wondered, but I don't. Part of it is the lymphoma itself has its own sort of unique, what happens to it is sort of the later stages. One of them, and then it turns out when you have the targeted therapy that I did, it has side effects. They're known.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
There's a small percentage of people, usually over 60, that develop rapid heart palpitations as a result of the therapy. Okay?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah. So imagine your resting heart rate, whatever that is, average person somewhere between 55 and 75. Imagine that triple to four times. How did you feel? Not good. Imagine that, not just for seconds or minutes. Imagine that for an entire day plus. That's what I experienced. I had to have a whole bunch of heart tests to make sure that I was – because you can't sustain that. You just can't.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It's like I used to run. I used to run. I used to run competitively. So it turns out I had an extremely – robust heart, but they did say there's a point at which it's just going to start breaking down.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
that subsided oh yeah i do have so i do take special medicine very small dose um but uh the this second generation there is actually a third generation that's emerged in the last couple years but they don't want there's no need to change it as long as this one is now it's because i'm in a recovery mode it's more of a suppressant it's not like getting it doesn't have because after even after the first one within months it got rid of all the malignant cells literally cleared them wow
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
with only four left. But those four started coming back after I had the severe reaction from the first generation. So, you know, it's just like our bodies are just these incredible biological, you know, machines. I mean, it's stunning. It's stunning. But, yeah, life's precious. I'm just going to say that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well. and I'm still just gonna keep showing up. There's people who say, why do you do this, Tom? Why do you even bother with interviews? Why do you do any of this? I say, well, part of this is for history, but part of it is for the next generation. My youngest son is 29. I worked with a lot of young people at Apple. I mean, what world are we leaving behind? What world do we wanna keep?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah, stupid monkeys kind of reflects, I'll say the dark side of the human condition.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Remember what happened when Franklin came out of the Constitutional Convention? There was a woman reporter reportedly asked him, what did you guys do in there? Create a republic if you can keep it. Yeah, well, that's the great experiment, right? That is the great experiment of America. I don't want to see that disappear. And we don't need to compromise ourselves. We just don't.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
This propensity just to, because all the tech, one of the things, technology ultimately is used at some point and has been historically used in war, combat, conflict.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That's a very street language way to express what we're facing. Yeah. And part of it is like, well, then how do we – see, part of it, I think we're in retrograde. That's the fear I have is we're in retrograde. I thought we're supposed to – I mean, this is the great promise of America. What do you leave behind, right, for the next generation? Think of your young, right, your young one.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I mean, I think even though my son's 29, my youngest son's 29, his future, his history, what are we inheriting? I don't want them to inherit the wind. Right. So I've, I've, I've said this, but I'll say it again. Um, where do I center myself? I go back.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So origin story constitution before that declaration of independence, that extraordinary document, the one that has, there's certain enabled rights. Well, I've dedicated the rest of my life to defending what life Liberty pursuit of happiness.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I'm on social media, both Blue Sky and on X. Okay. That's probably in terms of public.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So people, if they can follow up there or just follow me there. Okay. And I've had people that DM me and then follow up from there. Awesome. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I appreciate the space that you provided in which I could show up and share a far greater insight into what happened to me and some fascinating history that apparently people find rather interesting just given everything. I just happened to be there. This is sort of the Waldo. Where's Waldo? But this was Waldo, you know, Remember, it always comes back to, well, who was I representing?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I was spying for America. I was actually serving the nation and providing for the common defense for who? The American people, period. Now, have I gotten a whole lot of people around the world as a result of... Being an asterisked American and being semi-public, yes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But I would do it all over again. There'd be some tweaks here and there, but I'd do it all. Ellsberg has said that. Right. He just wished more people would have said something. But a lot of people knew what he knew. They just remained silent. But then guess what? In silence, right, if you remain silent,
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I mean, at one point they were telling, when all this sort of broke, and remember, this goes back, it's like, even Clapper, right, used to be very senior in DOD. He actually said, I just wish... People in the national security, basically, I'm paraphrasing him. This is how he said, be like my grandchildren, seen and not heard. Direct quote, seen and not heard.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It probably says more about who he is as a grandfather and who he is as a person. I met him. I met Clapper when he headed up the advisory board at NSA. We used to have meetings with the advisory board.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
You're spending your time listening. You're not spending your time talking. So it was primarily, but with a military flavor. I went to advanced classified training, highly classified training at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo. So now we're in the spring of 1980. Then a very interesting series of trainings. This is even before I go overseas, which involves survival school.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
seen and not heard just what shut up do your job follow orders right follow orders wow that's how you climb the ladder my father ended up on the ground for six months doing what fighting the germans have we forgotten history well you know history doesn't necessarily repeat but it certainly rhymes That's a fact. Yeah. But life is life.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And, you know, I have a garden and I've got my hobbies and I, I hold family and friends right close because that's what matters. Remember in the end, what matter, what does matter, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
John Wayne, they're pretty sure, and a number of other actors, a lot of the Westerns, they would go right through areas that were completely irradiated. And they didn't know it. They didn't realize the effects at the time. Even the original in Alamogordo. Really? That test, the very first test.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
People that were actually – it turns out there was living close enough downwind. Guess what happened? And then there's all these cases later of people getting sick and cancers.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It used to be visitors. It was like a Disney thing, right? You'd go see the cloud go up.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
From a distance. Oh, yeah. There was places. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I know. You can imagine that. Oh, yeah. Let's go and see the little mushroom cloud. A little mushroom.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So I was at Fairchild Air Force Base. And I went through, in the field, surviving. I mean, this is the SEER program. It's the whole survive, escape, resist. It's a whole program in which you learn how to evade, how to survive, how to resist, and how to escape. That's, well, the initials for SEER. So they had a prisoner of war camp.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
See, part of it – there's a lot of controversy over should those – I would argue they didn't need to be, but it was also to send a message post-World War II. to the Soviet Union that we have this weapon.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Even though they're allies, people sometimes forget this, allies during World War II,
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Father's passed away now. But he was actually on a troop transport. He was a combat engineer. They had plans, 10 million – I mean, we're talking a million men and then some invading Japan, homeland. Yeah. And they were anticipating, I mean, tens of actually millions, there was gonna be millions. They anticipated upwards of a million casualties.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
If you go back and actually look at what they were planning for, up to a million casualties. Because you can imagine based on the island came in, that's why they started bypassing all the islands because they just put up, they were extraordinary fighters, right? I mean, there's unbelievable fighters. As good as we were, they just were next level.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, you talk about the samurai spirit and the willingness to just die for the homeland. I mean, they just – and dug in, like really dug in. You can imagine how they would have resisted if we had invaded mainland Japan. I mean, the main island.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But war itself is hell. My father always said, you know, war is hell, but if you find yourself, you know, there's no such thing as a fair fight. If you have to fight, then you take the gloves off if you need to.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Super secret. Yeah. At the time. He didn't talk about it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Europe. Oh, yeah. He's flying out of North Africa and then later Italy as we went up the spine of Italy. Whoa. The plane got hit. It was on a night mission, right? They had special –
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
goggles and everything else uh he he operated the he at that time he was a bombardier navigator norden bomb site fascinating instrument wasn't quite as accurate as some people said it was but it at least would give you with you know within so they're they're they're dropping things you know to the partisans right the partisans they were fighting a guerrilla war against it's against the germans plane got hit caught fire um
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It was going down. He was the only man. He just happened to be close enough to the hatch door and bailed out. Took a swing and a half in the harness, hit the side of a hill. Lone survivor. All the rest of the... He's got survivor's guilt. He was behind the lines for six months until the British underground picked him up. Which means he was always indebted to the British for saving his life.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Because the Germans really wanted him. I mean, they wanted their hands on someone doing OSS missions for obvious reasons. Oh, yeah. He didn't talk about it. Behind the line for six months. He lost 50 pounds. He would never eat yogurt again because the Greek yogurt is super sour. He just always stayed away from yogurt. And we didn't know this. This was a family secret. We didn't know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We knew he had served in World War II, but it was a family secret. And we always wonder, anytime we had food in front of us, right? You say, eat everything on your plate. We couldn't leave the table until everything was finished because you never know. And he would say that, never know where your next meal's coming from. Why was he saying that?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It had a highly classified component, which is how do you resist when they're psychologically torturing and interrogating.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Much, much later. Yeah. Well, what was happening? He retired. This is much later in life. He's in San Antonio and, um, it was, it was USA towers. It's now just the towers. It was actually part of their real estate venture. It was only one. It was built beautiful place. Right. And he would play penny ante poker with his fellow residents.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And, of course, they're going to relive because that's all you got left to talk about. Now you got your memories, right? So they would share their memories. And they say, Bill, Bill, Bill, you got to write about this. You got to talk about this. So he did write it. It was a monograph. It was published by a military publishing house press called Down in Grease.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah, northern Greece was what – well, it's no longer but Yugoslavia. It was then – it was what became that part of Yugoslavia, but that's where he went down. But he got picked up. He actually got picked up north in – north of Greece.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah. Wow. But the partisans they were supporting were in northern Greece.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Of course, the Germans occupied Greece at that time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Oh, yeah. This is still super classified stuff, right? Still super classified. It's probably of all the trainings I received in the military, it's the one that has stuck with me the most after all these years.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Oh, so the war game stuff in particular. I mean, the war games we did were extremely detailed. I mean... So a lot of those as well. But most of our mission overseas, when I was on the RC-135 platforms of various types with different types of equipment and capabilities, that was all real world reconnaissance.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And a lot of, if depending on, we were sending reports out, we would actually have to process our mission as we called it. But if the information, even real time in the air was significant enough,
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We had different types of systems that we would use, different types of thresholds by which you would send out reports, up to and including what was called a critic, which if it was, depending on the level, right, if it rose to that level, it had to be on the president's desk within 10 minutes. Wow. Because we were a field site.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We were part of the other half of NSA that no one talks about, which is the military side, the NSA slash CSS side. Oh, interesting. Cryptologic service support. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I was part of the 6980th Electronic Security Squadron, Electronic Security Command. We worked, and we even said to ourselves, we worked for Big Brother. I mean, our reports went back through NSA. Okay. But we were the military, the military wing. But remember, NSA is a military organization.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It's headed up by, well, then a three-star, now a four-star general with a civilian head underneath him as a deputy. Oh, wow, man. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Overseas. So when I got there, I was 20. I had just turned 24 after all the training. Right. Okay. I was there for four years, came back, did the electronic warfare for another four years, got out, went to the CIA. Oh, you went to the CIA? I did. What made you want to go to the CIA?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And we can get back to that later because there were certain things about that training that actually helped me resist the government, deal with the government. Oh, wow. So I was actually using training that the government paid for during my survival school at SEER. Wow. in Fairchild, Air Force Base in Eastern Washington.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Because it's my background and interests, and it's like, hey – I finished up my first master's when I was in Tucson in international relations and national security policy. And I applied and went through a very extremely rigorous review process, including – even more enhanced background investigations.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And you had to have a poly, it was the first time I was exposed to the, you know, where you're hooked up to the polygraph machine. And all kinds of tests, test after test after test, I was finally offered a position. I left, I had an opportunity to go to operations and go overseas, basically undercover. There's different covers at NSA. There's like, you know, official, non-official.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
There's what they call knocks. You probably heard knocks.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I heard about that recently. They want, at one point, they want me to be official.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah, well, deniable, but you're on your own. If something happens, they're not going to, it's like, it's the most risky, it's the riskiest of all. Right. Like you're expendable. They're not going to come save you. That's correct. Exactly. Oh, yeah. So I chose not to go that route. I had a young family. I'd come back and stay out now. It's like, no, I just, I'm not that young anymore.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So, but I did go into their director of intelligence. And so I was working what you call national technical means, satellite, intercept, collection technology. So, and I was at a downlink site, the primary downlink site in which you processed all that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Oh yeah, of course.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Military background. That was partly why they were interested, right? Oh, so, so they reached out first? No, no, no.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But just to give you just a sense of the initial phase of it. Yeah. They give you an address. which was a nondescript motel. You knock on a door a certain number of times. There was basically a, there was a code. They opened the door and that's how it started. That was the first interview. Wow. Yep. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Oh yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I mean, it is about as a true – think of – and, of course, I ended up experiencing this in a different way later when I was under electronic and physical surveillance when they decided that I was such a threat to the national security that we're going to have to charge him. But during the investigation, I was under all kinds of surveillance. Right. But just imagine an electron microscope.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
being pointed at your life and anything you have ever done, any evidence at all of your entire, all of it, no matter who you met, where you worked, what you did, And then they get into your head.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The actual in the field part of survival and evading, and we're talking extremely rigorous. It's still a training environment, so they had Safety monitors, there was boundaries, but we were out in the woods for quite a few days. During this training. During this training, learning how to survive. And then you come back, you go through prisoner of war camp. That was quite something.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I mean, what year is this? This is 88. The background of escape, they don't even, what's interesting, they don't even start the clearance because they can leverage, obviously they leveraged my, I had all kinds of background because I was at one of the highest levels because it was sensitive compartment information. That was the baseline.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Nevermind SAP, SAR, and a lot of compartments later, or even more when I got to NSA as a senior executive. I'm talking just that. So they could leverage that. For them, the psychological was probably, by far, I mean, that was where they really get intrigued, and they had special permission. This is similar to what I went through in the classified training.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So the classified training, the resistance training, but the highly classified part of it, is they had special permission to violate your privacy, Fourth Amendment. They could...
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
it was basically you're just saying you're consenting to just we can get anything on you we don't have to have you sign a paper or we're going to go here and go there it's just anything and they literally had things that somebody i had forgotten about it would come up and what is the means of finding stuff in just they use they use in the 80s they use like there's no cell phones there's no computers right yeah but they've got all kinds of access to databases even then
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
and interviews they have with neighbors and friends and where you lived and what your potential, remember, the whole thing is about trust, trust and risk. Yeah, well, yes. You have to forget, there were still computers back then, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And most of them were mainframes, mainframes, right? But there were still tons of paper-based records, still tons. Much more laborious to go through. Yeah. incredibly intrusive. So yeah, they're just...
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
drilling down into your life they want to know how trustworthy you were how you know so they they test you yeah and the tests the tests were very sophisticated in terms of preferences and how you thought and and if you were in these circumstances but extremely extremely rigorous to you what was the most never mind the interesting one the ones were actually the face-to-face interviews yeah those were the most dramatic really
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, because in part, there was interviews without the poly. There was interviews with polys.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It was the ones where they're really lifestyle questions. Those are the hardcore lifestyle girlfriends, friendships, associations. Mm-hmm. Who you may have been a part of. I mean, like I said, they just- Try to make you uncomfortable. The onion. They just keep peeling your life away, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, I was an intelligence analyst and all imagery analyst. I could have gone that route, but that's in essence its own CIA. CIA at the time, Central Intelligence Agency. But the one you always hear about is the operations. There's a whole nother, there's several different parts of CIA. The one I was in was the director of intelligence. So this is the part that's linked to NRO. Oh. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Plus a SIGINT division.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That was even more secret than NSA. I know. That's crazy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They don't. Because it was one of the other agencies. The irony, of course, for me, I mean, I jump in ahead a little bit. NSA itself was never part of the National Security Act of 47. It was never legislated by Congress. It was literally created out of thin air by the stroke of Harry S. Truman's pen in 1952 as a secret military agency to collect and analyze and report on foreign intelligence.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I actually went through everything you heard about later, which became the torture program, which they called enhanced interrogation techniques.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
61. You're talking the Cuban, that period, it's like, oh my God, it became formalized, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But it operated in secret under sort of the aegis of CIA. It was its own, it was, but it operated under CIA. It was like under the umbrella. It was still was even when I was there. It's like CIA of the sky.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
You could you could say that and in essence, it was a subsidiary you want to use a corporate term as a subsidiary of CIA, high specializing in national technical means that's what was always the phrase that was used national technical means typically meant primarily space borne assets, like satellites, satellites, but there are other types of assets.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It was torture. Because they reverse engineered it. I went through all of that. I know exactly what it means. I was waterboard a couple of times in a training environment. It feels like you're drowning alive. I was put into pretty interesting stress positions. The one that was the worst was the Chinese water drip.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yes. Remember, the original SR-71 was actually a CIA asset. Right, right, right, right. U-2 flights, right? Yes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I mean, this is where it gets, I mean, you get into the weeds with all the different assets. But NRO primarily was focused on, that was national technology in terms of Spaceborne. Right, okay. And that's Spaceborne across the board.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Vandenberg's part of all that in terms of launches, both military and secret launches.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But people forget about Vandenberg.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, Vandenberg has significant launch capability, but it was always the secret launch capability primarily. It's not like Cape Kennedy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I don't keep up with that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, remember, even when I was at survival school, I mean, just as another sort of a vignette here, an anecdote, where I stayed, so in between some of the courses I was taking at Fairchild Air Force Base, I was in... I was in the barracks. Guess where the barracks that I was in were located?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Right outside where they kept all the nuclear weapons in bunkers besides, you know, three roads of barbed wire and dogs and lights and everything else. And then I actually watched what they call the elephant walk. Oh, really? My father used to fly B-52s as well. In fact, you know, buff. We always called them buffs. Big, ugly flying effers. Yeah. Yeah. And they had the elephant walk.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They practiced what would happen if. The alert is given, launch. And one after the other, two-minute intervals going down the runway at Fairchild. just one after the other. It was quite amazing. I had read about it, heard about it, but I'd never seen the elephant walk, what they call the elephant walk, just like that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
This is it, the elephant walk?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Those aren't B-52s. Oh, okay.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It's cargo, that's C-130.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We're talking the eight engine B-52s, elephant walk. That is a version of an elephant walk, but they're just lined up. We're talking about they're taking off. They come in, take off. Wait two minutes, take off.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They strap you down and they just slowly drip water onto your forehead.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
oh yeah get all the planes in the air get all the nukes it could be that bad right we're not just talking like a mission but they have to practice you always have to practice worst case scenario yeah right right right yeah but it was amazing just watch them and they can can't their wheel because you have to take off what if the wind's blowing sideways the other direction they could actually turn the wheels could bite they could bicycle the wheels
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Wow. So they're going down the runway, but they'd be defending on the wind. You would see them turn. Right, right. But the wheel stayed straight. Oh, my God, dude. Yeah, pretty cool. That's why you still have it. It's a massive platform.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
For a while until the point where you just want to itch, itch, and you can't because you're strapped down. And it just goes, you just really get crazy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
and um it's a highly specialized it's not the normal air force one right it's got yeah yeah it's got like i think all the windows are blacked out it's like it's like super protective for a nuclear blast it can survive a nuclear blast it can even defend itself but again there's all kinds of classified stuff on it i mean that's where you assigned things there are secrets worth keeping i'm the first to acknowledge that there's a lot of secrets that aren't worth keeping because they're using the secrecy system to protect
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
A lot of stuff that this will get into my whistleblowing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And why would the government charge me, right, as they did. But in the military, including our own, there is equipment still to this day or versions of it, upgrades, that are incredibly sensitive. You would not want that to fall into the wrong hands by any means. We're talking the very leading edge of how do you collect, store, analyze, pick up, transmit equipment.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I'll give you one example though, without going into all the details, just to give you a sense of, we had to be able to operate on our own. We had, we had satellite, well it was early satellite, you got to remember the whole global positioning GPS, right? It was just beginning to emerge.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Right. So our primary radio, which is still by the way, you know, like ham operators, it's all HF. Oh, okay. HF, super long distance. So HF was always our, if primary means of communication, that's how you would communicate because no matter what was going on, even with atmospherics, even in terms of like stratosphere, you could still get a message out and it could be picked up.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Oh, yeah. But remember, the constraints were, and they had safety monitors, right? It's an attorney environment, but it's extraordinarily realistic.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So there were specialized ground stations all over the world that even though we had ones that were designated, that could then communicate with you. But we had to know where we were because of shoot-down attempts, force-down attempts in years past because of the sensitive of the missions I flew on. How do you know where you are? And you also had to keep track of where they thought you were. They.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I'll put they in quotes. So we had a special nav system. Interesting. Called the LN-20. Okay. Amazing system. The accuracy, I am not kidding you, is so accurate. Assuming you put in the correct longs, and we're talking way down to within 25 feet accuracy. 25 feet.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Late 70s, early 80s. Wow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Once we knew, and assuming there was no failures, there was always, we had no-go criteria, both on the ground, it sometimes would happen, even in the air, going to our, what they call the sac-sensitive area, or even in, and then if there were certain types of reactions, there were threshold at which we would have to abort. I was on a couple of those missions. Not pleasant.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The other one, which a lot of people freaked out in, was the box. something they did later, but that is part of their torture. They stick you in a box and then they close it, meaning they actually, it's a specially designed box. And what they do is they bind it down so that there's no room to move. You cannot move and you're all crouched.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But the NAV system was such that once you had it properly calibrated, it always knew where it was in reference... To your base. Wow. Your hard stand. Literally, the hard stand on your parking spot at your base.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I'll just give you another one. I have any number of these, but I guess even though I know I'm going to be here a while with you, here's just one. So some of the systems I worked with when I was at CIA involving national technology, satellite technology. Did you know, and this gets back to, and you'll read it, there's a lot of stuff out there now, the keyhole program. I'll just mention that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That was the name. It was super secret. It's still secret. But the fact that there was a keyhole program is not secret.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So this is when they went digital. There was all kinds of analog. I was part of that because I was part of the transition. You're talking late 80s. So there was still... people, analysts I work with who had grown up during the early 60s, Cuban Missile Crisis. In fact, one of the older hands, he pulled me, took me under his wing to learn the trade because I was an imagery analyst.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And I'm just saying imagery.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And I can't even to this day reveal. It's like, how fast could the SR-71 go? We used to fly coordinates with the SR-71. We call it, that particular program name when it was on that mission was Giant Reach, right? I was on Rivet Joint or it was Burning Wind was the mission where I was on the RC-135 other variant, which was, a specialized variant, I flew on that one as well, called Combat Scent.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But we would fly coordinators with, and you see this coming in, man, it's, you know, multiple times the speed of sound, right? Way over 2,000 miles an hour. The top speed, yeah, you'll see books out there, there's things that have come out, but it was never revealed what its true top speed was. But it could cruise it easily three times. And then some the speed of sound root mean easily.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That is bananas.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It was difficult for ground stations to, to maintain contact even as a blip because it was moving so fast. Yeah. That was, but that was advantage. Yeah. Fly super high 80,000 plus feet. And if you need to, fly really fast. I mean, it was faster than a bullet. Wow. Oh, yeah. Fascinating airplane. I used to watch it. The Blackbird. I used to.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I had a little moped because I lived right off the west end of the runway at Mildenhall. And I had a little moped. It was a 49cc moped. my air crew members would joke around, say, oh yeah, here comes Tom in his RC-49, you know, with my big bag, right? And you go around the back of the runway and the SRs at that time were stationed there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They would rotate, but they were stationed there, had their own special hanger, maintenance and everything else in a more secluded part of the base. But it was so fascinating watching them get ready to take off from the end of the runway.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I did the box. I went to sleep. I did the box.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, no one knew who I was until I became what I call an asterisked American at the point that the government made me a very public figure, especially in the United States, when I blew the whistle on a number of different things going on at NSA. So if you want to start there in terms of just – I'm in NSA as a senior executive.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and the box is an interesting design because it's not just a fixed volume. They actually, they can actually... Shrink it? Shrink it. Oh, no. And you cannot move. They can shrink it down to a point where you cannot move. That's so crazy, man. Threw me in the hole. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
you know, as they accelerated at speed down the runway. Steve, can you pull up an image of the SR-71 so we can see it? But you're seeing like all the fuel be dripping out of it right at the end of the runway, just dumping. Because it wasn't until it got to speed when the titanium, when it started to heat up, that it would actually seal the tanks. Amazing airplane, even to this day.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Remember, this was drawing, we're not analog era. They were using computers to create this, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
This is Kelly Johnson's skunk works, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So you can understand I was exposed because this is extremely relevant to no doubt another part of our conversation. The very best of American innovation ingenuity was creating things like the SR-71.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Even today, even today, I mean, it looked kind of out of this world almost. Yeah, it's a stunning airplane.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, this is even like radar. I'll get into that. He passed away a few years, some number of years ago. Joseph Lockhart, we'll get to him. December 7th, 1941, I interviewed him. Yeah, as part of my 240 hours of community service.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Joseph Lockhart, he was there on the North Shore of Oahu. with the newfangled radar, which was super secret because it was an edge. Arthur C. Clarke was part of inventing radar.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Oh yeah. But remember what he said about technology. Yeah, what did he say again? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Right, right. So you can imagine even back in the early 60s, when this started flying, right, even in prototype form, If you happen to see that flying over in the, particularly in the Western part of the US, what would you think it was?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It didn't look like anything that flew. Exactly.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah. So. It's a layering technique. Yeah. So you always protect, as I learned, right? You always protect the core. You always protect what's really secret that you don't want anybody to know about. And some for legit reasons.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I have people right now in my circle, right, family, friends, who basically are shutting down from like involving themselves with any news of any kind because the level of the cacophony, the chaos, the disinformation, the what's true, what isn't, oh, I'm gonna go crazy, trying to crazy and just, right? Just trying to figure it all out. I just don't wanna figure it out.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
right no yeah people how can i this is where discernment we may talk about this later discernment becomes really critical in these kind of environments yeah well it's like yeah
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We had a version of that in this prisoner of war camp at very high decibel with the lights blaring. Plus, you'd have a bag over your head most of the time where you couldn't even see anything.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I get all kinds of invites to subscribe to some new patron or subscribe to... Right. Right? And... Substack. I mean, it's like 50 bucks a year, 60 bucks a year. I don't even have... I don't even remember as much as... I don't. Right. Part of this is flood... The zone gets flooded.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It's amazing. As a kid, I mean, just how easy it is when you pass on something, how it's so completely distorted by the time it gets to the other end of the classroom.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
In fact, it often has no bearing on what was whispered into the first ear. Yep. Remember in 1938, Orson Welles' War of the Worlds? Of course. How many people were convinced that the Martians were invading? And they were calling up neighbors, the newspapers, keeping them up to date because this is radio. Even though at the beginning of the radio broadcast, he said, it was just a story.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It was not real. That's 38. Right. There was a social media. That was a social media of the day. It was radio.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Most aren't because I can tell you there's a bureaucracy. Yeah. See, the real deep state, I'll put that in huge quotes because it's been completely, it's an overloaded phrase now, is the bureaucracy. Some like to call it the administrative state, but it's really the bureaucracy, the everyday running, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They're just people sitting at desks doing their job, going home with real families and bills and mortgages.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The vast majority of those aren't involved in anything close to what is alleged. Right. But having said that, and remember, part of the problem here is I worked in a very, very secret world for umpteen years. It does do something to you in terms of sort of there's that world, then there's the real world. And there was years I couldn't say what I did outside of work.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And not have them break you. And you're not allowed to talk about how to resist it. I can talk a bit more about the prisoner of war part, but not the classified training, the classified training. So you have like, what do you deal with when they're pounding on you physically and putting you in all kinds of weird positions, sleep deprivation, bright lights, loud music.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The only place I could even talk about it was at work.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
it does it does it does do something to you but on the other hand you're also doing things that no one else knows about i say no one else that the public at large doesn't know about right can we speculate about when you have secret agencies and secret organizations it's very easy to ascribe to them certain activities certain events and it may and it can make sense
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And you can even create logic, logic trees from it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But you're also generating a whole bunch of rabbit holes. Right. And people get lost in the rabbit holes. Yeah. You can imagine, I'll just share this because I have inside knowledge on this, the kind of phone calls that the main desk, just the operator, the main operator, public operator NSA receives is a team of people. You can only imagine the bizarre at times calls that come in on that line.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It's stunning. I can't imagine. Oh no, I've had conversations with people that have had the conversations, right? And it's just, they shake their head. They have a whole protocol for how they handle it. But there's people that actually, you know, allege all kinds of things. Or they'll start saying, you know, I've got a chip planted in my head. And I'm communicating.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Or somebody's communicating with me. And it's secret. But I need to share this. In some cases, they definitely want to share it. But they're going to call off NSA. People ascribe. On the other hand, it has enormous power. This is where the spider web comment. Remember the uncle? With great power comes great responsibility? Well, also, you can commit all kinds of irresponsibility.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
With the power, and too often, as it was my experience, for all the things that are legit, right, what happens when it's turned for other purposes? What happens when they use national security to bend law, get around law, violate your privacy, conduct operations in the shadows? See, the shadow land, is that what I call the shadow land? Yes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
and a whole other things I haven't even mentioned yet, a whole range of other, because it goes on for a while. I mean, they are, they're really, and in fact, they had a special instructor. I mean, the instructors themselves had to be carefully trained. And because what happens if you start enjoying the pathological, Oh, enjoying the abuse of people? Oh, yeah. I mean, I can say it right now.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
This goes back decades, though, way before all of the digital age. It goes back, Operation Shamrock, special program, NSA, 1950s. Actually, it was in the government even before NSA, the precursors to NSA. So one of the means, how did you send out electronic messages back then? in the 50s or even earlier. Remember with the invention of the telegraph. One of the things that came about was telex.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, there was a small set of companies, RCA was one of them, that were response, Western Union, okay? They were responsible for telex. Guess what they were, who they were sharing it with? This all came out in the 70s. People forget all this came out during those investigations in the 70s. Pike Committee, Church, Bell Abzug, Rockefeller Commission, and others. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Secretly sharing, it was supposed to be protected information, but it, quote, unquote, had intelligence value. So basically, they had a special conduit, which all of those telegrams are being provided en masse to NSA, right? Minaret, spying on Americans. Remember, foreign intelligence, wait a minute, this is domestic. You're not the agency that does domestic, or they did under Minaret for years.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
All came out in the 70s. So it's not like NSA has always operated lawfully. It's part of the problem when you're secret. It's too tempting. It's too convenient. And then you partner with certain companies. A lot of the partnerships that I'm aware of, The precursors of partnerships, this is pre 9-11, were already in existence. Super secret. There was a special, there's a special office.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They changed the name to quote unquote protect, to protect the guilty over the years. There's a special office. It deals with corporate partnerships. But it's, imagine it's incredibly sensitive.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
if it's the US, if it's to support national security in the United States, who's going to argue with that? Right. Remember, a lot goes under the imprimatur of national security.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, the CIA had a standing program where they would actually have their journalists and they would seed certain things into the media years way before 9-11. This is like Project Mockingbird. Mockingbird is the primary one. The Mockingbird was a very- During Kennedy, right? Yeah. Well, yeah. But there was a lot of other programs similar where you're using fronts.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
USAID, for example, which was great. I mean, this is huge.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I mean, if you're overseas, Peace Corps, unfortunately, Peace Corps got used. This is where For all the right reasons, the Peace Corps, right, did exist. But what if they're being used to, quote unquote, collect intelligence?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, what if you're in that country and they find out that you're really a spy, quote unquote, civilian, but you're really a, you're operating like a spy, even when you're, quote unquote, helping the locals? That's a compromise. That's a corruption of the mission. But it's too tempting. It's just, you get into the whole dynamics of this and the psychology of,
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I've always said this is where he gets into sort of my own, because, yeah, I was part of that environment. I was part of what I'll call the normal part of the environment, not the sort of the compromised part until later, where it's just, it becomes, I mean, remember, spying is the world's second oldest profession. That's kind of the joke.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They had instructors who started enjoying it, and they would have to pull them out of the program. Oh, my God. Yeah. Stanford, we're talking way worse. So dark. Extremely dark. Oh, no. Even that part of the training sticks to me this day. And speaking of sticking.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I'll just say it that way. It doesn't surprise me. And it's, I think, remember the government at large, but particularly the agencies that don't get a whole lot of direct public attention, even though you may hear about them in the news, national security, like USAID, Pentagon at large, How do you audit them? How do you audit them?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Remember, follow the money, but what if you don't want to follow the money? Meaning you don't want people to follow the money, because if you follow the money, you're gonna find out where the money went. And when you find out where the money went, you're gonna find out that the money went for things that you don't really want the public to know about.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Agency for International Development.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
No, I knew people. Remember, because of my long government career, I knew people. I had a neighbor that was a senior in the USA agency.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But we did that, as I well know, as I discovered, but I well knew that we were doing that with certain, you know, our own corporations. Hey, if you go overseas and have a contract with even an allied government, let's backdoor. Let's just use it and you funnel everything back to us.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I've heard that argument. I understand the argument. I understand that. Then just be open about it. But see, that's the problem. If that's true- It doesn't work if you're open about it. But that's the paradox, isn't it? Yeah. But then it justifies continuing it because, oh, we don't want them to take it over. Now you're in just this vicious cycle.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
One song I remember was a name poem song. It was basically a war protest song from the Vietnam era. And they would just play that at super high decibels. Plus they had all kinds of like psychological, I mean, they would try to break you in terms of you being American and they would bring up all the literal facts
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I was at the CIA working in the National Photographic Interpretation Center, NPIC. It changed its name. There is now an agency.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, it was the analytics side that took what would come down from national technical means, including NRO primarily. and analyze it and report on it. And it could even end up in the president's daily brief. But later on, I was even part of a joint team at the military in the Alert Center at the Pentagon, working for the J2, where you'd put together you know, a morning report. Oh, wow. Oh yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Which would include, it was all source. It would include imagery of all types. It would include signals intelligence, which was a huge component because there's, you know, obviously I worked on the Elint disc for a while, right? So this, this overlaps.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
electronic intelligence. So there's a number of different ints. SIGINT incorporates basically communication intelligence, electronic intelligence, signals intelligence. But I worked in multiple ints. So there was a time when I was in the Navy. So this goes now we're talking 91. So I left the CIA. And the reason is I had an opportunity to become a contractor doing similar work.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It ended up being something completely different. It was a government contractor getting paid a whole lot more money. I'm in the D.C. area. Okay. And without even going into all the details, it was better at that point with a 40% increase plus in salary and a young family. Right. Who wouldn't? You get to keep your clearance, right? Correct. Do all of that. Yep. But working as a contractor. Mm-hmm.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah. So I ended up applying- I wanted to continue to serve my country. I'm a contractor, but is there a way to do that without going back into the military full time? Because it's clear that I had moved on from that. So one way to do that is in the reserves. So I became a, it was a direct commission program. I had the master's degree
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
about all the issues that, yeah, there's some dark history in America and it's going across the continent and pushing all the indigenous peoples out of the way and slavery. They would actually tell you the truth. In training. In training about your own country. And that was one way, because that was indoctrination.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And I had the background, I had the qualifications, and they were looking doctors, lawyers, intelligence specialists. So I applied, was accepted. I went through their training program, and then I was assigned to the DIA headquarters unit in the Alert Center in the National Military Joint Intelligence Center at the Pentagon, reporting directly to the J-2. DIA was a day-to-day agency that
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
people that don't know what is j2 the j2 is the most senior intelligence officer in um in the military in the in the pentagon and they are the they provide the the consolidated intelligence to the joint chiefs of staff right okay so they work within the joint chiefs of staff office you have different j's i was in the j2 part okay But we got, I'm feeding, we're big feeds from all over the world.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Fascinating. I was there for a number of years. I got to the rank of a lieutenant. So I was, you know, the railroad tracks on my naval uniform, my Navy uniform.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Feeds, multiple desks. Civilian and military. So for example, the first desk, I'll just give you an example. We don't have time to go into every, because it's a huge, it's in, but it's kind of like the SIGINT Operations Center, the SOC as they call it at NSA. This is the Pentagon's version of that. But we had multiple agencies there. CIA had its own desk. State Department had its own desk.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The CIA had its own desk. Later, NSA had a desk. I was first assigned, because of my technical background, to the ELINT desk. Fascinating, right? It was another aspect of this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Then I was assigned, and this is critical to the rest of the story, which is really at the heart of what we're gonna be talking about, because of what led up to it, what happened on 9-11, and then what happened in the aftermath of 9-11. And then how did I find myself on the front pages of all major newspapers in the country? Some years later. Right. Okay. How did that all happen? Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And so I was sitting on the terrorism desk, terrorism desk doing incredibly advanced link analysis. Link analysis meaning we're doing advanced social – I'll just – to simplify this, right, without getting into the weeds, social network analysis. Wow. You're going beyond just raw intelligence. What you're doing is because it's terrorism, which is an idea, right, right? But where is it embedded?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It's embedded in people who decide, you know what? I'm going to commit acts of violence or the equivalent against others, right? Because I have an ideology. I have a beef. I've got a bone. It could be historical. It could be personal. But it's not basically non-state actors, although states obviously involve themselves in terrorism. They even help sponsor with proxies and everything else.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I'm gonna sit on the terrorism desk. Guess what happened in 1993 in lower Manhattan? People forget about this. They attempted to drop the World Trade Center towers of truck bombs. And if they went off, people were killed, people were injured. There was a lot of damage. And if they'd been positioned differently, it may have caused way more damage. I'm sitting, I'm in the alert center.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They would basically attempt to re-indoctrinate you, but they had to basically separate you from your own culture and your own history. And pointing out, of course, all the worst of its evils. I'll put evils in quote. Wow. Some of which were pretty dark. There's no question that there are aspects of American history that are dark. We're not a perfect nation.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We're following all of this. I literally issued a report It's a written report. I am sure it's buried. I'm in the alert center. I'm wearing my uniform, my naval uniform. I'm sitting at the desk. I later, shortly thereafter, I went to the Middle East, North Africa desk. That was interesting as well.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But on the terrorism desk, which was a unique desk, a unique desk because it was, in essence, focused on a particular challenge of how do you deal with non-state actors, right? primarily, or the proxies of state actors. They don't wear uniforms all the time. They blend and disappear into the population.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They have their own unique ways of communicating, both in terms of language and even technology. So I'm sitting on the desk. I used to report. I said, Because we've been following any number of terrorist groups and individuals, including Al Qaeda. And when you're following them, are you working with other agencies to follow them? Yeah, it's all source. I have different phones on my desk.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I could call up and, oh yeah, or my colleagues right there in the alert center. Like the FBI and- Right there. Right, okay. Right there. That was the beauty of it. It was a fusion center. It was really the first fusion center. The 9-11 triggered all the fusion centers. But we already had that, at least the military, right, reporting to the J-2. But it wasn't just military.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
You had all the other representing agencies that had anything to do with intelligence, world affairs, challenges, period. Mm-hmm. We even had people dealing with weather. I mean, we're talking, it's a holistic, as we would call full spectrum. Yes. Why were you guys worried about weather? Yeah, because depending on where you were, right? I mean, things happened. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We had the specialized desk that dealt with alerts for nuclear, like certain, or not just nuclear, but certain launches. You're always tracking launches. You're always tracking. There's signatures, specialized technology to analyze in real time or near real time what those signatures were, where the angle was, what, I mean...
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Then there's all kinds of, how do you determine strength of signals, emanations, emissions of all kinds, right? Mazint is a whole other int as well. What is Mazint? Mazint, that's basically the technical, more technical ints in terms of things that, basically anything that provides a signature. Got it. Yeah, besides normal signals, besides normal electronics. Okay.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
yeah like smoke or vapor yeah they're all there's all this is we're talking fire full spectrum full spectrum full spectrum oh yeah yeah and there's even specialized even within that right it gets really specific yeah i mean even in the imagery space we had specialized instruments to measure things did you ever did you ever um work with the sibbers system i'm aware of it
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But we are America.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
There was partial versions of that when I was there. Remember, there's been an evolution in technology that has advanced that. Find out, Steve, find out when Sibbers became. See, a lot of the early stuff was prototype or it was in the highly classified military space. That was always like one of the covers or operating under military as a cover for other agencies.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Pretty challenging.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, it's a shorthand to say that's what you launch when a warning is, oh, they're heading. They're incoming.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I went to water survival, Homestead Air Force Base, which doesn't exist anymore because of Hurricane Andrew. But I was there before that. So this is still 1980. 81 now. We're now in 81. So I went through water survival. That was the funnest one. That one is still strange, but it wasn't psychological. It was just learning how to survive if you found yourself having to bail out of an airplane.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Use it or lose it is a launch on warning. Yeah, right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Remember, I'm only aware of prototypes that had nowhere near the coverage of You have to remember, I mean, this extraordinary evolution of technology has enabled all this. And even the ability to launch on a regular basis. One of the things that Musk can do with SpaceX. I met him, by the way. You met Elon? That's a whole other story. Really? When did you meet him? Oh, 2007.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
before the first successful launch of Falcon.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I was still in NSA. I was teaching at the National Defense University at the time. What was the context of this? We'll get to it. That's a whole nother, I mean, if you want to jump around, I can, but. Okay, we'll get to it. I want to make a note.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
You might want to make a note. Yes. People always say, you met Musk? What was he like? I'd say, yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
You got to remember he was in his, when I met him, he was in his mid thirties. Right. Yeah. Right. 2007, yeah. Yeah. Full of mojo and just... Yeah, he was... It's a new story. But it's, you know, this fascinating startup, right? It was...
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Oh, yes. This is critical to what literally became the split in the time-space continuum for me, the US, and the world. Okay. Because without this particular event-
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
but so let me go back and see this joseph lockhart you'll want me to talk about joseph lockhart from from pearl harbor 1940 december 7 1941 a day of infamy that never should have happened either i can tell you in terms of the damage let alone our warning you know there was a warning the warning went out it got rejected why did it get rejected it wasn't considered important enough
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The duty officer said, ah, he decided that, nah, it's not worth reporting, not worth sending out the alert to move, to move airplanes on the fails pointed nose, you know, basically wingtip the wingtip to move ships out or to alert the crews that actually man the anti-aircraft guns. But that gets, I'm entering interview, Joseph Lockhart.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I'll just, I think there's a both and here. It's not either or. This is all people want, this simplistic, it's black or white.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It's not. It's not. But Roosevelt was looking for a way. He was already supporting Britain. Many things can be true at once. Yes. Many things can be true and they can even appear to be contradictory. And yet still, yes. So 1993. I sent out a message. This is one that's going to haunt me for the rest. This is the first haunt of my life, right? Being within the deep state.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Day one, when I reported to my duty station, reporting to number three person, was 9-11. That day was my first day on the job.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Sent a message saying, they may have failed to drop the World Trade Center. I said it this way. I'm paraphrasing myself. They may have failed to drop the World Trade Center, but they're coming back. They're coming back. We must warn all the command authorities about what their intent is. They're coming back. This is not a one-time event. This is not a one-off event.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And how... We've been doing long-term, short-term, mid-term analysis on this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Remember, I'm drawing on my entire... This is the thing. People don't realize what it takes to become... fully like is knowledgeable in your space you're basically you're you're not just an area specialist in this case I was sitting in the terrorism desk I had to know as much as I could know that was possible we had we had all kinds of updated updated topic areas on terrorism, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So parachutes, they would take us out into Biscayne Bay. And it's funny, because that was a fun part. It was the very last of the training. Some people go the other way. They don't end up with the nice training. They end up with it first, and then they go to the real survival school. But this was water survival, and it was several days. But we're out in the bay.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
What's the latest? And we keep iterate, iterate, iterate, publish it, iterate, iterate, iterate, publish it because the desk rotates. I mean, I was only there on weekends. I was a weekend warrior because I was in the reserves. Usually at least once
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
once a month so i was there for you know for two full cycles sometimes friday night till sunday sometimes from saturday through monday morning and then i would go to work and at that time i was working at booze allen and hamilton a whole another part of my career oh wow oh yeah oh yeah So I sent out this report.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Now, it's an internal, but it gets all the way to the J2, which is usually a one or two star general. He comes down to the Alert Center, and the Alert Center itself, it's 24 hours. normally run usually by a 06, usually a Captain Navy or a Colonel Air Force Army. And it rotates, right, depending on who's on shift and working. It can be temporary filled by a senior like Lieutenant Colonel in 05.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But flag level, because it's a flag level position, it's usually in 06. Generals begin at 07 and then go up to 010. And so he comes down, he literally, which is rare, he rarely ever came down, right? But he comes down, the alert center says, yeah, I saw your report. And this is almost literally what he said out loud. Yeah, who cares? Who cares about some raghead
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
issuing fatwas in the desert, sitting under a fig tree. And I paused because it's like, he just dismissed it. I was classically trained in terms of intelligence. It's an art and a science. It's not perfect. It has confidence levels. You know, in some cases you have low confidence. Sometimes you have high confidence. We had pretty high confidence that they meant business.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
There already been a series of terrorist incidents. You can go back to the Reagan, right? Remember Beirut? And we didn't do anything. He just pulled us out. People have argued about why did he do that? Some would say it actually emboldened the terrorists. Never mind sort of the larger geopolitical dynamics in terms of history, which in itself gets complicated enough. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But remember a bunch of French military lost their lives too in the US. Right. So it was clear the system, I say the system, and this is where you get in as people, it wasn't considered. Remember, you got to remember what year it is. This is critical in context. Context is everything here. Remember, it's classically trained. Indications, warning. Duty to warn, but indications.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
You don't want to wait until you warn. You also want to be in the decision loop, no matter what it is, ahead of time. And what's the whole focus? To keep people out of harm's way. Not just U.S. It could be allies, friendly allies.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
period if you know there's an international airliner by kl007 i'm jumping ahead again okay but the same year i mean i mean go back 10 years in 1983 which i have inside knowledge on that one if you know there's an international airline flying flying uh outside of its of its route okay
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
You know, with all the sharks floating around. And they would actually lift you up into a helicopter. Now, for safety, they wouldn't bring you all the way up. But you'd have to learn, depending on your ground or air, what it was like to get onto the hoist or what was at the bottom. So there's different ways they could extract you.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
83. KL007. Korean Airlines.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I was stationed at Mildenhall, but we got all the reports. I knew people that worked at the Massawa unit. There was then a secret collection unit way up Wakanai, I can say it now, way up on the coast. It was the most northern collection, but at the time it was highly, super sensitive. I knew people that worked there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And they sent out the, remember I mentioned the critic reporting system, which is supposed to get on the president's desk within 10 minutes? Issued it, got rejected by NSA. Issued it again, got rejected by NSA. Then it was too late. They thought it was an exercise back at headquarters. They didn't trust the field. That's why you have the alert system.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The field site is supposed to provide for that type of coverage. You didn't just have a responsibility to quote-unquote spy, collect intelligence on an adversary. You also had a responsibility to the civilian side of the world. This is a civilian airliner. It's not a military airliner at all. But they thought it was an RC-135. Why?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Because a Cobra Ball mission, another variant of the RC-135, didn't fly on it, but I certainly knew people that did. Happened to be in the area. What were they waiting for? A launch from Kamchatka, because that's typically how the Soviets at the time, they would launch into the Pacific. Got thousands and thousands of miles. It's out in the boonies on this huge peninsula.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But we monitor it with super specialized equipment. Without going into all the details, they end up going home. They switched the track, so they call it on the radar because radar back over there wasn't that as advanced. And they kept thinking as they saw this, what they thought was an RC-135 violating their airspace as it flew over the peninsula and into the sea of Otkos.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And they said, well, we better go up and shoot it down. The order was given to shoot it down. And it got shot down. All this was captured. Now Reagan made a big deal out of it because it was incredibly embarrassing because it turns out they shot down a civilian airliner.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But you also were exposed to the prop wash, the rotor wash, which is pretty huge.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
In the profile, if you're on radar, the profile, even looking at it, even though a 747 is actually quite a bit larger than an RC-135, but it kind of looks the same. Can you pull up a picture of an RC-135, Steve? They both have four engines. Mm-hmm.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
it's similar in terms of the angle of the wing that's one of the yep plane that's the i believe the combat scent variant wow there's different variants of course okay but if you look at that and compare it to a um a 747 very similar in profile from a distance it's similar on the radar a few feet here and there can't really tell they thought it was an rc-135.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
TW 800, yes. That is wrapped in a mystery inside of a puzzle that's then smothered with an enigma. To paraphrase Churchill.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
out in the and we're talking a couple of miles plus out in the bay right so yeah you can on the horizon you can see the city but so at what point did you finally uh deploy somewhere to gather surveillance or intelligence or what specifically were you doing so i show up at mildenhall in june of 1981 and then my training begins and i wasn't fully qualified
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Many people said, yes. I can't definitively say, but by virtue of how they sealed it, The whole investigation and a lot of the mystery around what really happened in terms of reporting, it raises some really hard questions that still remain unanswered to this day. I think there was an accident. But I can see, and some have argued, that that variant of the 800, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It was a flight, but a variant of that plane could have been susceptible to, and this gets into static electricity, and it could have ignited. But... You know, there are safety mechanisms.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah, machines are imperfect, but there's other things around that in terms of what appears to be some kind of launch coming from the vicinity of the ground that would lead to a possibility that was, this reminds me, it reminds me of what happened with the Airbus, nevermind KLW-7, the Airbus, the Iranian Airbus, They took off from the airfield and they share it with the military.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And the Vincennes, you go back in the history, this is interesting. They thought, the Vincennes, they thought that it was an F-14 that was coming in at an angle to attack them. Well, there was a ferry flight that they always flew back and forth. There was an airbus that flew back and forth across the Gulf routinely. And it was on descent. It peaks out.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It's a very short flight across the Gulf when you're flying 350, 400, 450 miles plus miles an hour. So they fired off a standard when I was in the Navy, a standard missile, which is basically fire and forget. You can't really recall it per se. And boom. And to our horror, we shot down a civilian airliner. Oh, God.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, it turns out, even though there was an instrument panel that showed it, it was an F-14 squawking on the airbase, but it got mixed up. They trans, and in the heat of the battle, and that was, you got to remember the dynamics then. That was one of those periods where they were sending out their little boats and needling like a, you know, like a, like a, like a flea, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Just, you know, and the Vincennes is, you know, Ticonder class, you know, cruiser. So, but a whole bunch of civilians lost their lives. Yeah. I mean, I, so. But it was an international incident of major proportions.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
so the head of the airplane just freaking came off got decapitated yep wow actually that's the first time i've seen this i've not i haven't seen i've never seen the animation that was i imagine these guys are blacked out already right they're unconscious oh yeah it's just the the forces involved right and then the people that are in the plane well you're you're at altitude that's the other problem you immediately you i had to i had to we went through special chambers uh
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
to learn what would happen if you lost air or had a blowout or whatever, or even got hit at altitude. You had to go on oxygen almost immediately.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
To listen in, this is intelligence collection, peacetime aerial reconnaissance program. That's actually the name of it. There was a number of different missions I flew on, but it was on the RC-135 airframe. But it has different missions depending on how it's modified. They call it rivet joint. That was like the primary mission. name of the platform, but then each mission had its own name as well.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
There wasn't enough pressure to keep the oxygen, you know, the air in your lungs. Yeah. Wow. You saw what happened to the plane that was coming in on about 300 feet off. This is the helicopter that ran into.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
What was the story with that? The commuter jet.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
No, it's commuter. It's Eagle. It's a subsidiary.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That was apparently some kind of a meta flight. They were actually on their way to... The central part, the heartland America, and then going into Mexico, someone got flown in for special treatment in the Baltimore area. I mean, Philadelphia area.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah. I don't, that one is, that one's like, wow. It was like a missile.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They were talking. It was incredible. I mean, just, just dropped out of the sky. Straight down. Yeah. Super steep angle. It put an eight foot hole apparently for people on the scene and it was scattered everywhere. debris everywhere. But that was, yeah. But you saw what I'm saying is how quickly that commuter jet broke up, got hit. You can see that helicopter
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
is plowing right in the UH-60, which is their kind of the workhorse helicopter, goes back 30, 40, 50 years now. Can you find a video of it, Steve? The UH-60? Yeah. I mean, I'm very familiar with that, because we used to, some of the missions, you would see them flying around, besides the Patchys and everything else, but the UH-60 is a workhorse. And it just didn't even know it was there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It's pretty clear. There was no evasive maneuvers. It just flew right into it. Oh, the video's really kind of hard to see. Well, at 300 feet, because it was basically just before 9 o'clock on Wednesday, it just flew right into it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
like that's all it is and it just everybody's dead yeah including helicopter how does that happen man well see that's that's there's been a lot of close calls as it turns out a lot because they have all these helicopter routes you're now and reagan has been expanded thank you because if you're in congress you want to get home as quick as possible you want me it's right there but it's you know basically it's in downtown it's that close yeah and it's just a very congested area
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
No, this is D.C. This is D.C.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
You don't hear about it anymore. You're not hearing about it now. It became this thing, it reminds me of War of the Worlds. People started seeing all kinds of things. People were showing, hey, there's a whole nother one. And it's got regular blinking lights, it turns out, because there's all kinds of airfields, both public and private, and military in that area.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
People just, well, you're talking New York, the New York area, right? The greater New York, New Jersey, right? That's very congested as well. People are just on regular flight paths, people in and out of airports, and they're saying they're UFOs.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I heard that. Plus there's all kinds of people. There are training exercises. And sometimes with the training exercises in the military or sort of the secret side of government, They do it under the cover of civilian, right? It just makes it more real. We used to do that. Right. Look, I'll give you another example. Yeah, of course.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Everything has, you know, a program name. Right. So we did intelligence collection and we're, we used to say, you know, we were the vacuum cleaner of the sky and this is primarily analog. The digital world was just beginning and, But it had already started with computers. And then we had a computer-assisted technology that rapidly came into the fleet.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We used to fly all kinds of training flights with a compass call as a wartime mission. Remember, it was combat support, not wartime, but conflict. You just didn't routinely go out and jam stuff.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
didn't we had a special uh it was basically an oil bath where if you would you could send the signal the jamming right the electronic into this but it would never it never radiated outside we had a special it was basically called a cheese cutter it never radiated outside of the airplane But there was a switch, and it was actually because it was a weapons system.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It was technically an electronic weapons system. It was controlled by an officer. So I reported in the back of the plane. There was the front end crew. I reported as a mission crew supervisor to a mission crew commander, an officer. I was a non-commissioned. He was commissioned. But he had a switch. And the switch, there was one that's live or it's the oil pot, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So you had to flip the switch to an on position for any radiation that was electronic, a suppressant. It's a suppressant version of an electronic signal, multiple frequencies, depending. You could target it. You could broadband it. You could be very... And you had to flip a switch. Well...
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We were flying a certain part of the Western U.S., and we had special permission because we'll get to the whole thing with you can't listen in, spy on, collect on Americans. Right. Without a warrant. Yeah. Not that it matters anymore, but that's part of the Constitution. Right. Part of the reason why we're Americans, because we had a revolution, for cripes sake. Yeah. We're flying around, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And of course, that plane flew a lot lower. We're talking about 20,000 feet, 15,000, 20,000 feet. It could go higher, but that was sort of its normal operating thing. And it's a prop plane, turboprop, four-engine. Accidentally flipped on the switch. Oh. and shut down. Good news, rather remote part of the Western, this Western part of the United States shut down radio stations in the area.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
People were calling in saying, what happened to the radio station, right? Whoops, whoops, whoops. Oh man. What plane is this?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So I was also a contractor at NSA. This is where I was at Booz Allen Hamilton and later with a couple of boutique.coms doing management information technology consulting. Okay. So I had become very, very familiar with NSA. And I was actually working on a special program called Jackpot, which was an out-of-the-box program, separately funded, had five-year funding.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It was actually part of, interestingly enough, Al Gore's Reinventing Government Initiative. Now, Al Gore did not invent the internet. That's a popular meme at the time. It was basically an expand internet, enhance internet. But under reinventing, a number of agencies were given special money to take the best of American ingenuity and innovativeness in the IT digital space and bring it in NSA.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But it was, you're learning some radio spectrum. We had to learn all kinds of different signals, not just voice, but all kinds of different signal types. You have to understand and recognize multiple languages. I specialized in the languages spoken in what was then East Germany, the DDR. So you're listening in, right? You're listening in, picking up signals, you're reporting out.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
NSA had become very institutionalized. It had become very reliant on its legacy. This gets into, you've got to remember, it was designed to deal with a very rigid command and control system called the Soviet Union primarily, even though it had a worldwide mission. But that was its primary focus. Even when I flew in RCs, the bulk of the linguists, the crypto linguists were Russian. Not all of them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And I had to know enough Russian to understand it, which is another part of my job. But the primary function, the primary, in terms of the set of people that were on that plane were Russian. Just by virtue of the priority. So Cold War ends. I'm sitting on desks that are dealing with emerging threats. but it was being basically ignored or dismissed by those in power.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Wasn't. That's right. Yeah. So, but I was working on this special program called Jackpot. So we're now bringing in the best because they realized, here's the kicker, the key, but it's a kicker. They did study after study after study. Some were pretty significant, including a Rand Corporation study. There was others. including stakeholders with the oversight committees.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Remember, there was a forum late 70s under Carter because of all the scandals that emerged and all the spying and everything, all operation chaos in the field intelligence program with the military spying on Americans, the Operation Minaret, the COIN Intel Pro with FBI. It's like just going crazy, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And it all culminated under the Nixon administration in terms of – of course, that's when I grew up. I grew up as a young teenager during that period. So I'm working on this program because NSA realized they had a problem. How do you deal with all this data? How do you deal with these new – Non-state actors, they're murky, it's hard to figure them out, let alone follow them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
A lot of times they don't use any normal means, normal, regular means of communication where we're used to. So part of my job at the time, and this is where it got very technical, but it was also on the management side, okay? How do you form organizations? How do you create organizations to deal with this new digital age? Analog to digital.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The analog didn't disappear, believe me, but now increasingly it's digital. So they just sat there staring at their navel because it would require change. And in a large organization, and this is the challenge we're seeing now emerge with Trump 2.0, you're seeing institutionalized, very rigid organizations, who have gotten used to the way they do business.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And that way that they do business is business as usual. The last thing they want to do, and some of it's justified in part, especially when they're supporting directly like social security payments, right? Medicare, for example, those built on systems, basically COBOL, which I'm very familiar with, COBOL, Common Oriented Business Language, right? To...
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
but very difficult as an organization to change. Never mind corruption, never mind- Sure. Right? So- In this space, right, I'm coming in from the outside, and I'm basically saying, even as a contractor, we weren't looked on very kindly. We would go into organizations and actually do a full scope, basically a full scope.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We had ways we did this technical examination of the organization in terms of what they were creating, their projects and programs. We also examined the leadership and management structure, and then we would create a report. And we invite all the key principals, including basically the entire organization into like a conference room. A lot of the managers in particular did not, leaders, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Some quite senior did not appreciate this, right? Because they're being exposed even from within, even though it's a safe environment, they're still being exposed. Took great exception to it. Just to give you an indication of how difficult it is, even when it's for all the right reasons and when it's actually necessary for the continuance and the sustainment of the mission.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Sometimes there were world events where you'd actually have to send out certain messages that reach a certain threshold. So very long missions, by the way. I mean, these, you know, these were long minimum was in the nine to 11. Some went sometimes 20 plus hours.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Remember the whole thing, my upbringing was mission, mission, mission. So bringing in outside expertise, and it's ironic because this is where NSA is like, well, and it started in the mid-80s, by the way, we're just going to go buy solutions, spend tons of money. We can't do it. We don't want to do it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So we'll go to the corporate America, military industrial complex, or some of the new emerging industries. Silicon Valley companies that we mentioned earlier, like Google, for example. I'm actually responsible. I'll take credit, but with some embarrassment, responsible for bringing the first Google appliance in NSA, which then got summarily rejected. We'll get to that one. Okay.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Because of what it found. Right. These are the boxes it would send out to all the little spiders to pick up... all the, you know, any, right? Well, it turns out even, I'll just mention it, I might as well say it now. Even at NSA, even though I had a very high clearance, beyond the high clearance, there were special red zones, special compartmented programs off limits to very few people.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Most people wouldn't even known about them. Some of them for legitimate reasons why you're protecting very, very, very sensitive sources and methods. Certain operations overseas, certain types of technology you're employing that you don't want anybody to know about outside those that are using it. I knew what those were like when I was involved in SAP and SAR in the military.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Only the people that are inside that compartment, that mission compartment, would know and would have access to the information. Even the commander of our unit, would know you just know that it this is how you protect for legitimate reasons you don't want to compromise member military operations especially when they're hypersensitive right okay
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So it found, the Google appliance found, it went right through what they thought was the firewalls, bypassed the firewall, went cruising right through. And this is, it's in essence cataloging all these hypersensitive, like I'd say hypersensitive programs. Of course, you can imagine the embarrassment if your NSA leadership shut it down. Just shut it down.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Oh, pensioning NSA firewalls. Remember, NSA, their way – they just kept – it's Rube Goldberg. Remember, it had its own net, old school, right? But there was a point where they were even arguing whether an individual should even have access to email. That's how bad it was in the early days. So what they did is they built this very complex Rube Goldberg just –
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
just kept adding and adding on and it was called the NSA net. It's like internet, but it's, it's inside NSA.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Okay. Okay. It's all network. Everything's networked. Yep. So there is, there was a net, this goes way back. This goes back. Right. But it was very difficult post nine 11 to figure out what you had. what's important, what's critical, how do we keep, I mean, there's just staggering amounts of data, right? We're not just talking regular internet.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We're talking about the vast just volumes of information, data, raw data coming, streaming in from all the collection sites, from everywhere.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
everywhere right and that's that's so that's the vast enterprise and where was it all being stored various places right there's a huge data center now in utah now that had to be developed because they're what they're running out of room quote unquote physical room to even put the servers up which had you know we're talking it's a petabyte level okay, all the data.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So now there's an entire facility which can actually grow even more if they needed to. So there is locations, physical locations, without mentioning where they are, on the campus, they call it the NSA larger campus at Fort Meade, where they would have special buildings that are all air chilled, right? Chillers and everything else, vast. Some are underground, some are in special buildings, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That never, that was never the case. It was always either over allied or friendly countries. Oh, okay. Yep. Known air routes, right? It's not like you're invisible. We weren't stealth in that regard. No. Okay. As we say, we were alone, unarmed, but unafraid. Right. Because you have to rely on our ears, literally. Although we had ground support. So how does that work?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah. where they would store all the data and where you end up, this data is being stored in databases. So this Google appliance was in essence to figure out what we had, right? It was, it's part of the network, but of course it does its job really, really well. It just goes out, finds it and brings it all back.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It was an attempt for the right reasons to help facilitate communication, to help provide sharing of information within NSA. but it found things that they didn't want the rest of NSA to know about, which were these special red zones, compartmented programs, highly sensitive. Because they thought, the techs thought, oh no, our firewalls are strong enough that it'll never penetrate.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We're not talking a physical barrier. We're actually talking firewalls at the software firmware level which would prevent even other parts of NSA because as soon as... To get through it. Right, it would just reject it, any attempt. And it was a Google appliance. It was a Google appliance, but they didn't realize the power of the Google appliance.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I did because I was spending all kinds of time in Silicon Valley consulting. I had this dual thing. It was an interesting place. I just happened to be there. You say, where's Waldo? Well, I was Waldo. I work in a super secret world. Then I'm going out into the burgeoning explosion of internet in terms of commercial. And where am I going most of the time? Silicon Valley.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Learning, I mean, just fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Doing consulting. I was even allowed to engage with separate, basically consulting efforts, projects when I was there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Management and technology. But I was also part of my entree. I was doing what we were doing inside NSA, but I was even doing it now both ways. So they were getting the benefit of what I was doing inside NSA. They're willing to share its national security. Right, remember I'm- They can share everything with you. Well, not everything, but this wasn't surveillance.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We're just talking about, I mean, I'm going to different labs. I actually went to PARC, Palo Alto Research Center, fascinating trip. I went to AT&T Bell Labs, it doesn't exist anymore, up in New Jersey, fascinating, phenomenal stuff, right? Leading edge, but all in labs, people don't even realize what's, this again, this extraordinary thing about America in terms of inventing, hey,
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Because we have this mentality, problem, solve it, problem, solve it, problem, solve it. Why wouldn't you? Necessity, the famous phrase, necessity is the mother of invention. Why not? Why would you stop that from happening? Why would you prevent that from happening? So,
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I'm at NSA, I begin, because I'm bringing back, right, new thoughts, new, and then there's people at NSA that I'm, because I had an enterprise, I had enterprise responsibility, I'm going through the ends, I even went overseas in a couple of cases. So I'm going to the ends of NSA, to find the very best projects, the very best program is to help those improve themselves at the same time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And we primarily flew in international airspace. So international airspace, when you're out over water, it was international airspace. So flying over like ships and stuff? Well, just over the ocean, but at a very high altitude. You're talking, you know, 40,000 feet plus. Oh, wow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And that's why we were doing these special reviews. In the course of doing all that, just to compress all this to get to 2001, I was finding people phenomenal, call it SIGINT Skunk Works, like Lockheed Martin Skunk Works that built the U2 in the SR-71.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
phenomenal because NSA was realized in the 90s in particular they faced a huge challenge with the digital age they couldn't just because that's the only thing they knew oh we'll just bring everything back store it and figure it out later bring everything back store it yeah how do you suck the ocean dry Can you just, wait a minute, leave the ocean where it is. Just keep track.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And this is how I was taught, even on the RC-135. Essential elements of information, metadata, the critical information, the things that you need to know about. The stuff that's routine, you just keep track of that. It's only when it turns to something other than routine that you care.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That's kind of the signal to noise ratio. When it rises above a certain level, you then say you notice it, but you can't notice everything. I can't always look at every straw in the haystack, can I? I need to know, though, if one of the straws turns. How do I know that? Well, I have to know when it turns. Or it catches on fire, okay? I got to know about that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That's part of indications of warning as well, ultimately, in terms of how you provide that to support what is stated in the preamble of the Constitution, providing for the common defense of the United States. I not only just took that to heart, I lived it as well as others did, silent warriors, for years and years and years. That's how I was taught. It's what I experienced.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It's what I provided the American people in secret knowledge. in the national security space. So NSA kept pushing back, resisting because it meant change. They were so wedded to their legacy systems that they weren't willing to look at something differently. You know, the famous quote from Einstein, keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Oh, yeah. Easily. Oh, yeah. No, I had the experience. Extraordinary. I mean, I kind of look back on it. There were some missions we went even higher than that. And when you looked out the porthole window, you know, the portholes of the plane and looked up, it was starting to get a lot darker.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It's a form of insanity. This is institutional insanity. As I was told at one point after I got to NSA, well, joined NSA as a senior executive, Tom, you just don't understand. That's not how we do things around here. But this is actually going to improve how we do things around here. That's not how we do things. They just were wedded to how they did things. So, Huge resistance.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
In fact, they tried to shut the program down because it was embarrassing. But I'm bringing back, and then I'm meeting people inside NSA super frustrated because the new director, now it's 1999, Michael V. Hayden, who's central to my story, central to my history, central to what then happened with... as though he's done a very good job, okay, of faking and deluding.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
He's very articulate, and he has a lot of respect still, you know, as a former, and he became CIA director after he was the principal deputy director of the new director of national intelligence. So it's 1999. He said, you know, this is the same thing as we encountered in World War II, Manhattan Project. We've got to treat this as a Manhattan Project. We have to partner. with industry.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We need to buy this solution. And it's going to cost a lot of money. You know why? Because it's a really big problem. Why is it a big problem? Because all kinds of data. It's a big data problem. They actually called it that, the big data problem. Here's the funny thing. In the 90s, particularly the latter part of the 90s,
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
NSA historically, for a number of years, had published their five top challenge problems. They had more than that. But the five top was for the priorities. One of them was the big data problem. So you can imagine NSA, the necessity being the mother of invention, let's go solve it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I met the engineers, met the program and project and a whole collection analysis, right, and reporting to do exactly that on behalf of the American people. They solved the big data problem, the core of it, prior to 9-11. Had already solved it. But NSA, nope, the corporate decision is their people actually got punished for this internally, punished. We've already made the decision.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We're just going to go to, and they spent, we're talking the initial version of this transformation, this whole transformation effort, which I was actually a part of. I was in the inside of it. But it became clear all they wanted to do was create a contract vehicle to spend billions and billions and billions of dollars.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And you started, when you looked out to the horizon, you could start to say, yeah, it looks like it's beginning to curve. You were that high. When you approach 50,000 feet, that's when you start to see the curvature. See the curve, yeah. Yeah. Looking down inside of a thunderhead, like it was cut out. That was pretty cool. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Now, I already got an insight on that back in the late- By partnering with private industry? Yes. Okay. Commercial, private, but military. We're talking those who had access and had the proper security clearances or could. We're talking like the SAICs of the world. We're talking about the Booz Allens of the world. We're talking about the IT portions of those companies.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Long story. So in my early 20s, I made a choice. It's a volunteer military, so I volunteered. It's no draft. Technically, you have to register. So I joined the Air Force in late 1979. It was right before Christmas. after going through a bunch of screenings and tests.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
NSA had already solved it internally. Not by buying it, they were going to make it, but that was the historical legacy of NSA. They had contractors going all the way back, but they weren't just going out to industry and just wholesale, here, we'll just give you a bunch of money, figure it out. Remember what Eisenhower warned the nation about in his farewell address in 1961?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
the rise of military in the halls of, the rise of military industrial complex. Now it's a military industrial intelligence complex. If you're a contractor and you have shareholders, But guess what you're going to perversely incentivize to do? Why solve the problem? I started seeing it. I was seeing it in the 90s. I was already seeing it on this program.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
People were like, we're going to buy lines of code. Well, if I'm a contractor, okay. People, there's a joke about it. I'm just going to code me up a Winnebago today because I could just crank. bunch of lines of code just to get paid more. There was one project that we analyzed. They literally, the government was paying the contractor $8,000 for every line of code. So we'll get it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We'll get you to do more lines of code. It's not about lines of code. It's about the functions that provide support to the mission. Fulfill the mission. Yes. Right. Provide for the common defense on behalf of the American people. That's your responsibility. And you have a fiduciary responsibility to make sure that the money is spent wisely and that you account for it. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
So he decided Trailblazer is the program. Trailblazer. Pre-911, 1909. He was on Newsweek magazine front page. He was inviting reporters and whining and dining them at his residence on Fort Meade. I mean, he went political and he was dazzling.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
dazzling the overseers the the oversight committee because he he he carried that he had those three stars right he's sitting there in front of him and he wasn't he was not a technologist that's the last thing he was right he actually used to be a bulgarian linguist in the military at one point he actually headed up the very one of the units that i was a part of in the military not when i was in but he goes all the way back okay but he also worked interesting enough
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Under George Bush first, he also had been part of basically the military, the intelligence side of the National Security Council. So he had inroads. He was operating with the players, as it were. That's one reason he was called when he was in Korea, hey, how would you like to become the director of NSA? Right. So he's going to buy the solution. The original program was just shy of $4 billion.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The amount of money that was spent originally on one of the programs, this is one of them, I don't have time to go into all of them, but there was a number of these really skunkworks that were solving these challenge problems at NSA that they actually had defined as a challenge problem. This wasn't like, we're just going to go off and just play. No, there were labs that they did that too.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That was four years. And then I was sent to Davis Month in Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona. And I was a mission crew supervisor flying on EC-130H Compass Call electronic warfare aircraft. So a different application of my training. Combat support, direct combat support.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
This was to solve the problem. So a little over $3 million solved it well prior to 9-11. Thin thread? Thin thread. But if you're spending millions, but then you've got this other program that's billions, and you're going to buy it, not make it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
why would you know what was happening is that people's careers promotions are being based on how large you grew your organization how much money did you bring in how much money did you allow to a contractor you didn't in fact you became further and further away from the day-to-day of the con and even the big contractors got all kinds of pass-through fees because they're just giving it to the subs to actually do they didn't a lot of cases didn't even do the real work themselves right who's doing real work oh it's not about real work
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Look, I had already blown the whistle on an earlier program, at the time, the most expensive automated data processing system at NSA called Minstrel. Anytime you bring up Minstrel at NSA, probably not as much now because most of the principals have gone or are dead, it was super embarrassing. At the time, it was incredibly expensive. You're talking 1985, it was awarded, right, for almost 200.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We're talking almost $200 million. That's a ton of money for an IT system. They bought a bunch of hardware, right, at inflated prices, and then it never delivered. They ultimately spent about $250 million on it by the time they were finished. The same core people that were on menstrual got another bite at the apple. under Trailblazer, but way bigger. Way bigger.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But this is going to catapult NSA because they were under a huge pressure. You're falling behind, becoming less relevant. You're going deaf. Right. Literally. Bringing all this data back can't make sense of it. Or you're getting to know more and more, and this is sort of a twist here about what I'm going to say, knowing no more about less and less. So it becomes your myopia, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Get incredibly narrow. Because there's all this stuff that's just like on, as they would say, it's on the cutting room floor in some database, obscure database somewhere. How do I know its value? How do... This problem was solved. Now, I was part of that because what I was doing was advanced analysis.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
On the technical side, I was analyzing software and how it was being developed, how it was being designed and developed and deployed. So we're talking soup to nuts, full, you call it life cycle, okay, including maintenance, O&M, operations and maintenance. where a lot of the contractors knew they would get even more money just because they could just milk it, milk it, milk it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We used to joke about that at Booz, which is we'll milk it. And if we can't, if we can't get them to milk it, we'll just repackage it and sell it to some other government agency and milk it some more. So I developed, I developed using very advanced script technology at the time, okay?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Because guess where I had been when I was on another contract, when I was before Minstrel, I was in the AI, this is early, early, this is just part of my background. I was part of an AI department in this government contract office in the late, late 1989, summer, fall of 89. Really? Yes. Expert Systems Machine Learning. And who was developing this? This was GTE. It doesn't exist anymore. GTE?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It used to be one of the largest rural telephone payphone carriers, right? Rural. But they had a government operation. So, I blew the whistle on that program, long story short. But remember, I went and jumped back, but this gives you sort of the grounding of what I was confronted with already as a contractor before I even joined NSA as a senior executive. I went to...
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Could if we had to train for it. So if the balloon goes up or some operation or you're going to support what they call C-suppressed enemy air defense, that was our fundamental. You're protecting fighters, bombers, et cetera, and other military assets going into whatever.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We'll go into the details of how I blew the whistle. That's a story all by itself. But we're talking the 91 timeframe, I got kicked off the program. Okay. I was a test engineer, customer, special, basically, a specialist that I had, because I had the background, but at the time I was operating. And then later, I was actually part of the software engineering team. It was a voice processing system.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It was supposed to basically catapult NSA into the digital age when it came to voice processing, which was a space I worked on for years when I was overseas. So, they, in their infinite wisdom, they had issued this contract to GTE. I blow the whistle. NSA itself was getting antsy about it because years had gone by. Now it's six years in and where are we going to? Where's the delivery?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Where's the delivery? Where's the delivery?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
No, but this is before that. I just happened to be there. I'm just saying this gives you – I mean, AI is huge now. That's a whole other conversation, AI, which I'm also playing with that myself even at home. It's stunning. Oh, yeah. But there are risks. There are issues. There is lots of – how do you hold AI accountable? What are its ethical obligations? Oh, wait a minute. AI?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, it's not actually – It could be artificial at best, but it's definitely not intelligent. I did a whole talk on this at my opening remarks in Berlin at a conference recently, back in late November, when I was invited to come to this conference. Here we are, so they actually had an investigation.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The general counsel comes out from Mountain View, that was their home office, it was Mountain View, California. He comes out, he does his own internal investigation, brings in all of us, a lot of us to interview. And I looked at him and I said, weren't we under, remember, you know my background, right? My background already, just the summary of it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
He's sitting there in his chair, and I looked at him at one point in his interview, and I said, were we under an obligation to deliver something that actually worked? No, we weren't. Contract plus. All we had to do was show best effort. I just stopped. I mean, my jaw just like dropped. He didn't care whether or not the program delivered. All he cared about was the funds kept flowing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
When the decision had been made at the highest, what we call the National Command Authority level, then you were there to support it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Didn't matter what was developed. It didn't matter it didn't work. It didn't matter that it was a piece of crap. And I'm being polite when I say that. Didn't matter. This was my now dawning realization after having worked with extraordinary people that you'll never hear about in the field when I flew, right? Especially overseas. dedicated to the mission, not to just lining their pockets.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Yeah, I get in the American capital is, yeah, make a profit. But now you're talking obscene levels of profit. And then wait a minute, it didn't matter that we've, it's one thing you've spent a lot of money and you actually deliver something. It's a whole nother thing to spend a whole lot of money and not deliver. Increasingly, they weren't delivering.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And then they would just, because it's what they call sunk cost in the economics, you just keep spending, dumping more money and money into the hole, right? Right. So long story short, In February of, so to give you a background, that I was very sensitive now to corruption, to fraud, waste, and abuse, had already been a whistleblower.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I was even a whistleblower in the military, but that's another story. When I was on the Compass Call Mission, Big Safari, right? Big Safari is another interesting program. It's sort of the umbrella program. It funds a lot of this, including what I was doing overseas. February 2001, I just moved into a new house where I live, right, in Maryland. I was doing really, really well.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
What year are we talking about? I never actually deployed to a combat. We did training. We would go to Europe for training. We would go up into Nevada. We would support red flag, green flag exercises. We would fly out near Fort Irwin, the National Training Center, and play games. I say play games. War games? War games. All kinds of war games. Oh, yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I had special projects, contracts. I was working with the University of California, Riverside. I was still doing all my consulting. I had been expanded. I was now a principal in a boutique.com. This is the late, the 98, 99, 2000 early aughts. Flying all over. I used to fly in the nerd bird flight. They call it the nerd bird flight. Dulles de San Jose. A lot of spying went on in that plane.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
What was that about? The nerd bird, because people are flying back and forth, tech lobbyists. This is when the sort of the growth of the tech bros, venture capital, Silicon Valley, venture capital got involved in all of that, right? Okay. Wow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Including up to Sand Hill Road to make the case for small boutique.coms who are given a bunch of venture capital money, nondescript office, technology level playing field. They had a, you know,
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
good-looking secretary sitting up front just so anybody came to the front door but the building itself was nondescript some office complex meanwhile in the back room you know the couple of three or four or five back rooms depending how much money they got they had a bunch of code code cutters say that loosely developing the next killer app that became the phrase we got to develop the next killer app
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Because people, internet had exploded. Yes. Especially with the web and browsers.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And it's like, how do we exploit this? How do we, we're going to make, and people were just, it was staggering amounts of money being dumped. and the conferences that I went to, this was the heyday of you would go into where they have all the companies, and they all started outdoing each other. Who had the fanciest stand and all the little things they would give away, and some got really fancy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I mean, it was quite something. It was a world, right? It was quite a world. Dot-com bubble. Dot-com bubble. And I even almost moved to San Jose. I almost moved there. But I realized it had become a gambling environment. People were just rolling the dice. The fact is, on average, only about one out of 14 companies ever actually made it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And then they would usually get swallowed up by some bigger company. I saw all this happen all in front of me. So I'm sitting there February of 2001. NSA was under huge pressure because they weren't solving the problem, to say it simply. Huge pressure from stakeholders and other studies like you got to do something. Maybe you need to stir up the gene pool.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Maybe you need to bring in senior people with outside experience, both government and industry, and bring them into NSA, put them in senior positions, and let them make the necessary changes. I was part of about six-month period, roughly. There was a couple of people that had been hired in a little sooner, where about a dozen of us were hired in from the outside. I applied.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They actually went to careerbuilders.com. Remember monster.com? They tried to do this like high-tech ITs would do or startups. How do you hire people? They realized on the government, they couldn't go through the normal government cycle because it would just take too long. Right. Way too long. And they had to have security clearances on top of that. Right. So they accelerated, compressed it all.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And then we actually provided specialized support.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I went through. Even though it wasn't the position I originally applied for, I went through a multi-month process, but for NSA, it was basically two months. And then I started going up. I kept getting, I kept making the cut to the point where I made the cut. Two of us made the cut with the person I ultimately reported to when I was hired and I got hired.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
They accelerated because I already had a clearance. Okay. So that only took a couple of months. I started in late August. I had a different color badge. I took the oath, and this is critical. I'm now taking the oath as a senior civilian, Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service. I'm taking the oath for the fifth time in my career to do what?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
No.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies foreign to domestic. I'm taking an oath. not loyalty not to a person not to an agency not to secrets or secrecy not to corruption not to cover up i'm taking oath to a piece of paper to defend the constitution the thing that defines who you are as a country and makes us americans with all the amendments
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, there was always in the background the SIOP, the Single Integrated Operating Plan. I mean, that was always there. There's all these scenarios, what would happen if, and up to and including a nuclear exchange.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
particularly the first 10 okay fifth time i had done you know twice in the air force because i had re-upped yep once in the navy once at cia as an officer there and then now as a senior executive
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
In fact, all the jobs I had when I was at NSA over a six and a half year period, my supervisor was always reporting to the top deck, the civilian head, which was the deputy director, who then reported to the director as a military head. So, first day I reported to my new duty station as a senior executive was 9-11. And this is where life...
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
rapidly shifted in short order a little bit later that morning. And I pause because even to this day, and I feel it right now emotionally, okay, it's, you're probably gonna see it in my face, because almost 3000 people were murdered that day, and they never should have disappeared. They never should have lost their lives. It never should have happened.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I literally am haunted the rest of my life with that reality, the what-ifs of history. I still wake up sometimes sweating over the what-ifs of history. I pause again because did I know, even though the system was blinking red since 1998 per George Tenet at the CIA... They knew that Al Qaeda was up to something. Remember 93 when I was sitting there on the terrorism desk?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
It's not like we didn't know. Remember, we already had Cole incident, Kaibar Towers, a bunch of others. But it wasn't a priority. Bush was the new president. Wasn't a priority. Counterterrorism was not priority. Even on the list, it was on a list, but it wasn't where it mattered. Just wasn't. And I went home. And I remember calling in.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
very early the next morning of course i was i was i sat in front of the tv i just sat there just absolutely it was hard to break away just everybody went home i went home because i see i was so new right they had crisis teams remember there have been crises yeah this clearly was going to be something way different
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And remember, there were other planes that they had attempted, or one of them we know, Shanksville, right? Pentagon, right? It would have been way worse if they hadn't hit the part of the Pentagon that had just recently been modernized. And then, of course, the two towers. People don't realize those towers are actually quite susceptible to that type of terrorist attack. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And it wasn't like there hadn't been attempts. Bojica had been exposed where they're going to hijack airliners. Okay? Mm-hmm. Remember. But 93 sort of had been forgotten, I guess. Remember what they said. Remember the general, what he said to me personally, right? Yep. I was right there when he said it. Yep. So... I went home because I wasn't part of the crisis team.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I called in later, said, yeah, you better come in. And then the next four months are a blur, a total blur. It would take hours and hours, if not days, to unwind those next four years. But it's critical that I then tell you what I was confronted by. Because what I was confronted by was the very thing, the very thing that I had taken an oath to support and defend.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
And yet I was confronted in the secret world with what happens if your own government decides to violate the constitution willfully as an act of commission, not omission commission. I mean, I'll even ask this rhetorically to any and all of you or your listeners. Okay.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Subscribers. What if you're confronted? Do you just, as I was, you know, look the other way. So I'm in four months later, I didn't even become feeling normal again. And I was sitting there in a Marriott hotel in New Orleans celebrating Mardi Gras in mid January with family. So what happened after 9 11, all bunch of meetings were taking place.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Cheney who had basically been given the national security portfolio by Bush, just kind of seeded that to him. Yep. Plus energy. They went into like deep, deep emergency mode, right? And there were certain, may have heard of COG, continuity of government. Yep. I used to be a part of that in terms of what happens if, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Special procedure put into place and there's actually emergency executive orders on the books, right? So they went into a version of that. Yeah, can you explain that to people who may not know what it is? So what happens if, you know, it could be an extreme natural disaster, it could be war, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Where the president, as the executive, does have certain, where certain emergency powers are allowed. to invoke, you can invoke certain numbers, and there's basically a standing set of executive orders, basically, that, and some are acts, right, that prescribe what you do. And there's basically, there's facilities where government can reassemble. They can go through training for that, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
He's down in the Situation Room, which is underneath the White House. Cheney. Cheney in particular. I mean, Bush would be there too, but Cheney, he basically was leading. And of course, they're having these meetings right after 9-11. What else can we do? What else can we do? Are there any other authorities?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
There are certain executive orders, without getting into the weeds, that allow the government to... increase their ability right to provide protection for the for the country still has to be within the bounds of the constitution you're not allowed even under emergency circumstances to basically suspend the constitution you're not right but there are things where you have some flexibility
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Even under FISA, I'm going to introduce FISA, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, we had annual training to ensure that, because of the scandals in the 70s, to ensure that we did not, without a warrant, we couldn't just routinely collect, except under special training regulations.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
circumstances and even then it was highly controlled right um you couldn't collect analyze etc because that's sacrosanct it's the fourth amendment okay super high bar but you can and even under fisa there was provisions to hot pursuit meaning you could go after somebody foreign intelligence u.s person u.s citizen resident resident uh basically a foreign but resident right legal resident right
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
slash visitor, but legal. Could be visa, could be green card, or some equivalent, or there's different visas. Okay. Or, interestingly enough, U.S. corporation. Not just stateside, not just boundaries, but also overseas. Okay. Which means even when I was in RC-135, we couldn't just start collecting. Now, we did have an emergency support mission.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
If someone was in distress, ship in distress or in distress, we then could help assist. But that was specifically to help save lives or search and rescue. Right, sure. So FISA had criminal sanctions. You violate it. $10,000 fine, five years in prison for every incident in which you violate the Fourth Amendment rights of a US person. Okay. Criminal use of the 18, US 18, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That's the criminal code. I pause because this is, here I was. Shortly after 9-11, I discovered that they were taking the vast power of NSA and
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
extraordinary power power in which they essentially had carte blanche to do just about anything when it came to collection but now use that vast power in addition to overseas use that vast power remember they had failed remember that's why pearl harbor what happened was so critical because the whole thing this whole national security establishment was set up after night after the end of world war ii was to preclude another surprise attack here not only were we quote i'll say surprised we weren't
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We failed to keep 3,000 people. We did not keep them out of harm's way. That's our fundamental, right? We failed the nation. The workforce knew it. Management leadership went into denial mode. They just could not accept, right? Workforce, there's a whole, I could tell you just horror stories about what it was doing to the workforce. Because that's not, this is not supposed to, it's on our watch.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
We are the watchers. We're the protectors of the nation electronically. We failed. And they're asking, you can imagine, Congress is now asking questions, what the heck happened? Now, I will be the first to acknowledge, it was a systemic failure. And there's a lot of reasons for that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
But NSA had a critical part of all this in terms of what they should have known, could have known, and didn't provide and report. Even with the mess of their IT and the databases and everything else that I mentioned earlier. Mm-hmm. I'm finding out that they're now turning the vast years of NSA in partnership with certain key corporations for access and retrieval on the US.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The US was always blacked out and allies, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
didn't just routinely spy on your friends quote unquote you didn't sort of it was when did this happen it was bad form this is not this is september this is the remember september 11th so in the two weeks after 9 11 i'm finding out the decisions had been made in the deepest of secrecy super hush hush right we're going to essentially suspend the fourth amendment We will bypass FISA.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
There's special procedures. At one point, I was part of the affidavit process. We go up to the secret court, which is housed in the Department of Justice, to provide affidavit to say we need a warrant from the secret judges, which are actually on rotation, appointed by the chief justice. And you bypass the secret judges. Bypass FISA. They didn't even know about it in the early days, early years.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Didn't even know about it. Bypassed it. So... I mean, you talk about what do I do? I'm now, I'm saying, wait a minute. I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Now my government is suspending that part of the Constitution because they've, under the imprimatur of national security, it's necessary. I began to blow the whistle within September, within channels at NSA.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
That's where I started. Boss Office of General Counsel stopped there because then I went to Inspector General later. Okay. Office of General Counsel. I'm on a phone call with him. This is early October. How much thought did you put into this before you started to blow the whistle, before you started to- A lot, but it was all super compressed because remember, I had a full-time job.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
I was leading a team, communications. How do you keep people informed as they're coming in around the clock? People are burning out. You can't get people burned out. You can only sustain crisis mode for so long, usually about a week or two, and then you just start getting fried. People are having heart attacks. People are collapsing. People are sleeping in the cars out in the parking lot.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Because they really, oh my God, you can imagine people's guilt, the guilt they felt. Yeah, yeah. And so they're doubling down, but they're burning themselves out. Right. And I was in all the leadership team meetings, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
The ones I weren't in, the only ones I weren't in were the ones that were my supervisor, who was the number three person, the signals intelligence director, she would have special meetings with the very top deck, right? I was a much smaller, even smaller, I was part of sort of the 40. But then there were sort of like the seven or 10.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Well, this is where I had my moment of truth. Okay. True moment of truth. I already was aware that they were shifting equipment, buying equipment from like the HPs of the world to put them on US networks to, quote unquote, consume and just suck up all kinds of data. Okay. Raw, just raw data. No constraints. No, didn't matter. Okay.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Collection is what they called it, but it's really mass surveillance. Right. without getting into deep, but starting with phone calls, starting emails, later expanded very quickly.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Right, I already started. Remember, I already had the capacity to do all that. And you were seeing this firsthand. I already had all that, yes. I became directly aware of it. Then I started poking around.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
i was making trouble already good trouble okay okay good trouble early early on i was already being tagged america's a new hire and already being tagged so what do you do so i confront the office of general counsel now it turns out because this program is so secret it was in its own compartment the name of the program
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
was its own compartment, which was inside what they call exceptionally controlled information, ECI, which is way beyond even SCI. But it had its own compartment. Its own compartment was the name of the program. This program name in itself was classified. You never said it. Oh no, I can say it now. Oh, you can? But back then... People who said it was way under their breath. What was it called?
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Stellar Wind. Oh, okay. We called it, colloquially between us, Cosmic Fart. That's amazing. Okay, so Stellar Wind. Interesting name, but there's a whole office that handles program project names. Very famous name now. But the name itself... right, the program name itself, which is extraordinarily rare, because the program itself uses a cover. This program was so secret, it turns out.
Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Sensitive compartmented information. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, there's handling caveats, which are basically compartments, or can be. Right. how do you distribute? Right. There's, but just there's, there's classified secret, top secret standard week. But then there's, then there's the, the SCI world and above. Okay. Got it. And it just gets hyper, you know, you get super secret.