The FBI dug a tunnel under the Russian embassy
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What is the story behind the FBI's secret operation under the Russian embassy?
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G'day, Matt Bevan here. This is If You're Listening. We've spent the last few weeks digging into Palantir, the data company that is powering everything from the US military to the CIA to Coles. Our first episode covered how the 9-11 terrorist attacks led to its conception, and we talked about how it works. And in the next episode, we're taking a look at the CEO, Alex Karp, and where he wants the company to go. My supervising producer Cara has been helping with writing these episodes, which means that she has even more tabs open than usual, and she's got a story that she's somehow managed to keep from me entirely. It's about why the FBI and the CIA weren't getting along, and as a result, were not sharing their data, which was one of the key contributing factors to 9-11 being able to be pulled off without the terrorists being detected beforehand.
I'm told it's a story that contains all my favourite elements, but that is all she's told me. Cara Jensen-McKinnon, hello.
Hello. How do you think you'd define your favourite elements of a story before we dive into this? What are you expecting to hear?
Honestly, Cara, I don't know that I've ever enjoyed hearing a story more than when you told me the story about the humanoid robot. And then we're sort of chugging along in the story and I'm going, oh, yeah, it's an interesting story. And then the robot pulls out a gun. I like a story that involves a robot pulling out a gun, really. I keep looking for that in every story. That's the main thing that I'm hoping for this week. There may or may not be a gun in this. I also have seen your current situation with tabs on your screen and it's not good, Cara, it's bad.
It's taken hundreds of thousands of tabs for me to pull together this brief and so I'm excited to finally be able to close some of these tabs because they're driving me insane.
Adair is listening and Adair, I want you to, while you're listening to this, get that picture of Cara's tabs and count how many there are and tell us at the end because people will be mortified. Let's go.
Okay. So basically the first episode that we did on Palantir kind of starts with this absolute breakdown in communications that's happened between the CIA and the FBI. They're not exchanging information. And as you've said, it was that kind of breakdown in comms that was one of the reasons that led to 9-11 happening. So I got interested in why that actually happened, why that eventuated, because there's a lot of weird anecdotes. One of which is that any time the FBI would call the CIA for information, they would just leave the phone off the hook playing Another Brick in the Wall by Pink Floyd. They disliked each other so much that they were like just trolling all through the early 2000s. And I was like, why do they have so much beef?
Like they're on the same side. What's going on? And so to understand where the beef originated, we're going back to 1977 to a hill in Washington. Oh, we're going that far back. All right. Basically in Washington. the Russians are sniffing around for a new location for their embassy. We're in Cold War politics. Everyone's distrustful of the Russians, obviously, but they kind of deserve to have their own embassy. And so the State Department's like, okay, guys, you can put your embassy up on top of that hill. They didn't tell anyone else.
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