Danny Jones Podcast
#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake
Mon, 03 Mar 2025
Watch the exclusive fan Q&A with Tom on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Thomas Drake is a former NSA senior executive who famously exposed the governments illegal domestic surveillance program. While at NSA, he blew the whistle on a multi-billion fraud and secret dragnet electronic surveillance and data mining program conducted by the NSA after 9/11. In April 2010 Tom was charged by the US Department of Justice with a 10 felony count Espionage Act indictment facing 35 years in prison, until the government's case against him collapsed in June 2011. SPONSORS https://shopmando.com - Use code DANNY for $5 off your starter pack. https://stopboxusa.com/danny - Use code DANNY to get BOGO StopBox Pro + 10% off. https://nordvpn.com/dannyjones - EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal: Risk-free w/ a money back guarantee. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off GUEST LINKS https://x.com/Thomas_Drake1 FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Torture survival training 10:41 - Tom's first intelligence mission 18:36 - Nuclear War 38:31 - Being recruited by CIA 48:46 - Top secret Nuclear War protocols 55:56 - The keyhole program & SR-71 01:02:56 - Strategic deception 01:10:28 - The REAL deep state 01:19:15 - USAID 01:27:26 - Working the Pentagon's terrorism desk 01:35:14 - 1993 WTC bombing 01:44:58 - TWA Flight 800 01:53:06 - Military plane training exercises 01:56:18 - NSA's "jackpot" program 02:02:07 - NSA / Google Partnership 02:09:03 - Secret data hidden at NSA 02:21:26 - Government AI program in 1989 02:31:42 - What happened at NSA after 9/11 02:53:57 - How NSA & FISA betrayed the 4th amendment 02:57:28 - Legal punishments for whistleblowers 03:11:28 - Tom whistleblows to the press 03:20:08 - FBI raids Tom's home 03:37:35 - Tracking Osama Bin Laden 03:49:06 - Indicted for 35 years in prison 04:01:58 - Tom's plea agreement 04:14:03 - Meeting Elon Musk in 2007 04:23:23 - Tom's rare cancer battle 04:37:12 - Is America getting better or worse? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What survival training did Tom Drake undergo?
I've been waiting to have you on for a long time, man. John Cariocco has been on the show a few times and he's the one who connected us. So shout out to John. Love John. You guys are both in good company being fellow whistleblowers. You worked for the NSA, John worked for the CIA.
And for people out there who are listening to you, why don't you just, we're listening to the show for the first time and maybe may not be aware of who you are. Why don't you just give us like a brief introduction to your background?
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.
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.
We'll talk about the whole story on how you blew the whistle on the NSA and how all that came to be. But going back before that, what made you decide you wanted to be in the NSA in the first place?
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.
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.
Cryptolinguistics?
Cryptolinguistics.
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Chapter 2: What led Tom Drake to join the NSA?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It had a highly classified component, which is how do you resist when they're psychologically torturing and interrogating.
Oh, really?
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.
Really?
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.
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Chapter 3: What are the secrets behind nuclear war protocols?
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.
And what... The purpose of putting you guys through this stuff is to kind of numb you to it? Is that what the goal is? Not numb you, to learn how to resist it. To learn how to resist it.
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.
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.
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.
Mm-hmm.
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
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.
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.
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Chapter 4: How was Tom recruited by the CIA?
But we are America.
Yeah. So what was it like getting through that, getting out to the other end of that?
Pretty challenging.
And what after the SEER training?
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 5: What was the keyhole program and its significance?
But you also were exposed to the prop wash, the rotor wash, which is pretty huge.
Mm-hmm.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
And I imagine you're flying over countries that don't know that you're flying over them, right? Or that we, that you were flying into airspace that you didn't have permission to fly into. Is that how it works?
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?
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Chapter 6: What does Tom reveal about the deep state?
Combat support. So like flying into combat zones and stuff?
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.
When the decision had been made at the highest, what we call the National Command Authority level, then you were there to support it.
What kind of combat zones would you have been in?
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.
And then we actually provided specialized support.
Any kind of stuff involving nukes?
No.
Or like nuclear war games, things like that?
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Chapter 7: How did Tom's experience shape his views on the 4th Amendment?
Chapter 8: What are the implications of the NSA's partnership with Google?
The football, right?
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.
Right.
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.
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.
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.
but they would actually do nuclear, they would actually blow up a nuclear weapon in the air at high altitude.
Yeah, like EMPs.
Yep, and he got radiation poisoning and was actually in the hospital for a while.
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