1386: Sean Wiswesser | Inside Putin’s Russian Intelligence Machine

1386: Sean Wiswesser | Inside Putin's Russian Intelligence Machine

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Today, retired CIA officer Sean Wisswesser takes us inside Putin's intelligence machine. Havana syndrome, sleeper agents, disposable teenagers recruited on Telegram, honey traps that start with a hotel maid doing your laundry, and assassinations designed to leave a radioactive signature. We'll also find out why the West's refusal to impose consequences could invite the next attack against the Baltic states, undersea cables, or even critical infrastructure right here at home.

Here we go with Sean Wisswesser. Before we get into what your book is actually about, I would love to talk about this Havana syndrome thing. For people who don't know, this is diplomats, CIA officers, and other diplomatic personnel in countries like Cuba, for example, and I think Vienna.

They basically think they got zapped with some kind of microwave and now they get headaches and they've got disorientation and maybe some hearing loss or something like that. And I know former CIA who say, my friend has it, she's not crazy, her boss has it, he's a high-level diplomat, a career State Department guy, whatever. And these are not fragile folks who just aren't cut out for life overseas.

They're not people who watch too much YouTube. But then I have other friends who are also former CIA who go, this is a conspiracy theory and anybody who has it is just a weirdo who needs to stop watching the news.

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah, Jordan. So first, thanks for having me on. And it's an interesting topic to delve into.

I should state my disclaimer from CIA up front, my views are mine alone, don't represent the US government. I'm retired from CIA now, been a few years. I do think it's likely the Russians were behind those incidents.

I have colleagues, I cannot explain away their stories. These are colleagues that I have high respect for that suffered inexplicable medical incidents, very debilitating. Now along with that, there's a few facts that we should talk about that I know are facts and from personal experience talking to and knowing some of these people.

First it was poorly handled and that's been acknowledged publicly by CIA and the entire intelligence community. It was poorly handled. The incidents and the allegations and the reports of officers that were suffering weren't treated with the respect that they deserved at the time.

And so what it led to was critical evidence and critical information that could have helped with later findings. It was lost. And then I do think unfortunately there were some people, I would never say who, I'd never make allegations.

There were some that jumped on the bandwagon to try to say, yeah, I'd like to try to get benefits from this. I'd like to be included in this group. And it wasn't legit.

Jordan Harbinger: I want to be medically retired, basically.

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah, exactly. And so that discredits those that did suffer and those that are victims. Let's talk about these other facts, Jordan.

The Russians have a history of microwave attacks. They did it against the US embassy for decades, literally. There's been good reporting on this.

I believe it was the Wall Street Journal did a report a while ago, a year or two ago, about the attacks of microwaves on the US embassy. They've always attacked us with all sorts of radio waves, trying to find ways to use them, to bug the embassy. They attacked our officers with spy dust back in the 80s, which we know is a carcinogen.

I don't put anything past the Russian intelligence services. I think that they have no morals anymore. They're completely unhinged.

Look at the assassinations, the wet work they're carrying out. And then look at the 60 Minutes reporting, which was very credible and pointed out they're certainly up to something.

Jordan Harbinger: I was reading something, I think, in the New York Times, and this is, I think, rumor still, but they had paid something like $20 million to somebody who was in the FSB or the SVU or SVR or GRU, whatever military unit. We'll go over these acronyms in a minute here, but they basically bought the device and now they're studying it. Now, again, I think this is rumor.

I don't think the CIA was like, hey, we bought the device, everybody. I don't think that's how you guys roll.

Sean Wiswesser: I agree with you. I don't think that we have anything to point to yet as a fact. There was a device bought, apparently.

There was reporting from the spy scape, I think it was, from the International Spy Museum. They helped break the one report. But so a device was bought.

I'm glad that we're trying to get to the bottom of it, but a device, a microwave device was bought by some type of a broker, alleging, again, ties to Russian intelligence, nothing conclusive yet. But I'm glad if they test it, I'm glad if they get to the bottom, if that might be related. I think the way it's going to be solved, Jordan, is how we solve all these spy mysteries, spy cases.

Defectors. Yeah, we're going to get a defector. I always advertise, I'll do it again tonight.

If you have information that will help solve these crimes committed against U.S. government personnel, the U.S. government pays very well for this. I'm not offering for the U.S. government. There's plenty of cases of defectors living very happy lives, very successful in the United States.

Their families are provided for. We can protect you and your information securely. That's how we solve intelligence mysteries, Jordan, is we get defectors that come out and help us.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, and say things. Yeah. There's so many interesting defector stories that I would love to get into.

There's also fake defectors. There's one going around right now. I really don't want to mention her name, but I think she's fake.

She's going around talking about how she was a red swallow. The word in Russian, lostisk, yes, swallow, yes. So this is somebody who is trained to seduce people and then maybe assassinate them or get information from them.

And she's going around. There was a podcast about her and her story just does not add up at all. And I've got to tread lightly because in part of her story, she was sexually assaulted by her Russian commander.

I believe that part of the story. In fact, those parts of the story make complete sense. The part that doesn't make sense is that she claims to have assassinated one hundred and sixty people over a career of a few short years.

And I did the math on some claims she made on other podcasts. And she would have had to go from one part of town where she killed somebody in the morning, drive across town, kill somebody in the afternoon and then go back to wherever she was stationed. And that just doesn't make sense.

I know the U.S. supposedly doesn't do a lot of these sort of assassinations and sextortion type stuff. But I would imagine if you do that, you have a target a few times a year at most. You don't have multiple operations per day where you're killing someone.

That would just be logistically crazy.

Sean Wiswesser: I know who you're referencing. I also watched that a very good reputable podcast. She had an interesting story.

I do believe she may have worked with Russian intelligence. It's not how it's done, though. The way that she relates it is not how it's done, Jordan.

No, it's not.

Jordan Harbinger: And I hate that I'm about to say this because she can just fix it if she hears this and decides, oh, that's destroying my credibility. But all these people, right, from your book, Putin goes and poisons people with Novichok and polonium 212 and they die these agonizingly horrible, painful deaths, right, from poison that the Soviets have made for this. And so people are afraid to cross Vladimir Putin.

And she's out there being like, I had to escape Russia because I have a child. But I'm going to go on the Internet and talk about all this classified stuff that's going to embarrass Russia and embarrass Putin. She doesn't seem to be that afraid of him.

Why would you not be afraid? Oh, because you're making it all up and therefore there's nothing to really be afraid of because you're not actually disclosing anything. You're spinning a yarn.

Sean Wiswesser: Well, the other piece for me, Jordan, is the Russians, they've shown it. They have assassination hit squads. They don't need to use a former sex worker.

I believe she was probably at one point another prostitute for Russian intelligence. I don't know. We're not going to name her.

I don't need to be sued. I'm sure you don't either. But the story doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me on the merits.

Jordan Harbinger: Sean, Russian intelligence has poisoned defectors, embedded deep cover families in American suburbs, or that's just my favorite TV show. We'll talk about that in a minute. Attack democratic institutions.

There's officers also siphoning the gas from their own surveillance training cars and rigging people's grades for bottles of vodka. And there's one incidence in your book where this bungle of a U.S. counterintelligence agency calls them by accident, uses their secret code names, and they basically ignore that because they don't want to do anything about it. So how is it that the Russian intelligence service is both this terrifying strategic machine, the stuff of nightmares, but also at the same time, a corrupt clown show where they can't even chase you because they sold the gas from their car?

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah, they are bungling fools at times. They're incompetent. And yet they are formidable adversaries.

I believe our most professional intelligence adversaries in the world, Chinese military, conventional adversarial threat to United States, conventional military and a nuclear threat. Russians are a nuclear threat. They're not much of a conventional threat to the United States, but they are a huge intelligence threat.

And the reason is they have no accountability, Jordan. So no matter what mistakes they make, just like those illegals that we can get into and talk about more from the ghost stories case, had the honor to work on with FBI. They made a lot of mistakes, bungling idiots, fools.

They're all heroes in Russia today. They returned as heroes. They get to write books.

Anna Chabon wrote books, was on magazine covers. One of them's a member of parliament right now. That jerk, a month ago, he was talking about destroying the United States and how they don't need diplomacy.

His name is Bezrukov. Donald Heathfield made a statement. We don't need diplomacy.

We're out to destroy the United States and the world order that it built. We don't want to engage in diplomacy with them. These are thugs.

These are morons, idiots, bungling fools. And yet they're competent when they need to be. They pull off amazing feats of intelligence prowess at times.

So we would be fools on our side to underestimate their capabilities. I try to be as truthful as possible in exposing them. All of their foibles, all of their shortcomings, but also the fact that in a system where they only get reinforced and they're not accountable for any of their mistakes, they remain formidable.

Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: I want to talk about the central tension of the book really is that the Russian services are dangerous precisely because they combine real capability and resources with basically no moral limits. They don't care if they look bad on the world stage. Look at the Ukraine disaster.

They don't care about any of this. They're not trying to pretend they're good guys in any way. They also have systematic corruption and astonishing human incompetence, but they'll still kill you.

I don't know, some nuclear byproduct or whatever. Polonium 212 is. Polonium, you know, Litvinenko, yeah.

Give me the strongest example of an operation that should genuinely scare us, but also an example, a strong example of something that should stop us from turning Russian intelligence officers into 10 foot tall supermen. Because you see these amazing operations they pull off and then it's like, oh, and then you just forgot to delete the website that shows your fake name off the Internet. Nice.

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah, I think the most existential threat to our democracies really is the one that's most insidious. Nobody's paying enough attention to is information warfare. It's active measures.

What they did in 2016 with social meddling, human enabled operations to meddle in our election. Now they can do with cog AI and they are doing in a sort of the Chinese and the amplification is 10,000 or 50,000 fold or more. So that I believe is the most dangerous threat.

It's the one Americans don't see. They're not paying attention to in a world where somewhere between 40 to 60 percent of everything out there on the Internet now is bought and AI generated. The Russians and Chinese are way ahead on this.

And we as democracies, American people, what do we do? I see it with my son. They're targeting American youth, especially.

They don't want youth to believe in democracy. The Russians and Chinese, both in their cynical worldview, don't have free and fair elections. They don't exist.

In that environment, when Americans are clickbaiting, constantly reacting with emotion to the things they see, and I have a good example to talk about the dangers of that. That's the greatest existential threat to the your second question. It's corruption.

Of course, you can't make this stuff up at their very academies. Unfortunately, they teach and they indoctrinate their officers with corruption surveillance training where the SVR was training its officers. It happens to be an area of expertise of mine that I've always turned back to with defectors, Russian intelligence officers.

So I'm working with the Russian intelligence officer talking about his time at the Russian academy. So what'd you do in vehicular SDRs? Because it's important.

Marshrut Praverki in Russian MP is a surveillance detection run to detect your adversary, trying to keep an eye on you. Oh, yeah, we did those, but we didn't use the vehicles. Why didn't you use vehicles?

Because our instructors stole the cars and kept them on the weekends with their girlfriends. So there was no gas left in the cars on Mondays. So most of the time we were never able to use our own vehicles.

I was like, wow, that is Russia. That is so Russia. Everybody I've ever worked the target with FBI, CIA.

They say, hey, well, Sean, great anecdotes that you can't make that shit up. That's Russia right there. So that's the level of their corruption, even at their academies.

And there's plenty more examples.

Jordan Harbinger: That's crazy. This is a tangent, but I will say the training our youth to not respect democracy. We're in a bind, right?

Because the problem is my vote counts as much as a broccoli head haircut. Eighteen year old. I shouldn't be making fun of people's haircuts.

If you've seen mine, it's terrible. But some 18 year old kid who thinks that, I don't know, the Jews secretly control all the media and the government and Iran is the good guy is Russia's the good guys. And we're just not being told that Ukraine is all Nazis or whatever.

Like they believe this stuff. That kid's vote counts as much as mine. So because of information warfare.

And then also they're training the youth to not respect free and fair elections. They might have a point if that moron is voting and it cancels out my vote for something where I've read it for a hundred hours on the subject matter that I'm voting on. And I realize I'm voting for somebody who I think is going to do the right thing.

And that guy goes, oh, that guy's name is cool. And he looks badass on TV. That's my vote.

I'm like, oh gosh, I don't know. I hate saying this because I used to, I grew up pro-democracy and I'm old enough to remember when we were the good guys. But I'm also like, geez, some of these people are so dumb and inbred that I don't know if their voice should count.

I don't know. I'm on the fence, man. Again, it's a tangent that I don't need to go into, but that's what I'm thinking.

Sean Wiswesser: Jordan, you know that the one requirement of a democracy, of course, is an informed public. That's the only thing that democracy asks of us is be an informed public. I'm trying to do my part in a small way, informing on the threat from Russian intelligence, at least.

Thomas Jefferson also said, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. We as a democracy are getting away from our roots. We're not as well informed.

Americans aren't willing to listen, not willing to engage in informed debate. And that's to our great detriment. And our adversaries are having a field day with the American people, with disinformation and information warfare.

And we have to be wise to the threat. What I always challenge audiences I talk to, and I've talked to businessmen, students. I'll tell you, one of the toughest crowds I talked to, but they were receptive, was a group of businessmen in Alabama.

I was worried that you can't talk about Russian intelligence in some quarters without people starting to shout, Russian hoax, Russian hoax. This was a group willing to listen. And when I was done talking about the threat from Russian intelligence and I pointed out, what would Ronald Reagan have done with the level of escalation Russian hybrid war being waged against the United States and our allies?

GRU putting bombs on planes, literally doing mock runs. This was reported on by the New York Times. Americans aren't paying attention.

Let me tell you, missiles would be flying against Russian or Soviet proxies. Ronald Reagan would not have stood for that. I had applause from this audience.

People get it. They say, yes, absolutely. How dare we let our adversaries escalate against us in this gray zone?

So, Jordan, I just think that we need more education. We need a better informed public and folks willing to listen. And I've often found audiences willing to listen when I lay out in a nonpartisan fashion.

Jordan Harbinger: I do think eventually we're going to end up with some form of semi-authoritarian or authoritarian government because we're going to realize, oh, my gosh, only 5% of the population is smart enough to even understand how to do media literacy at all or understand what's going on in the world. We can't have everybody vote. It might not happen in my lifetime, but I feel like it's inevitable at this current trajectory.

Let's hope to God not. Which hopefully we can reverse. Anyway, when you began your CIA career, what did you believe about Russian intelligence and their officers that you were eventually forced to abandon?

Did you overestimate them, underestimate them, misunderstand what made them dangerous?

Sean Wiswesser: I fundamentally misunderstood Russian intelligence as a student. I thought I understood their history. I studied Russian, Jordan, for seven years until I finally got to Russia.

Imagine that. Almost seven years. I studied four years at boarding school, had a great Russian language program at the Hill School outside of Philadelphia, where I went.

I was a poor kid, won a scholarship to go to a rich kid's school and had great language programs there. So four years in high school, I did two and a half years in college of Russian and finally got to Russia. Like people speak this language, right?

And the Russia that I experienced in the early 1990s as a student, the first time I was over there and then successive trips, I was there I think four times as a student. A lot of hope, the famous song from the Scorpions, Winds of Change, that was the anthem of that. Our generation, really my generation in Russia, there was so much hope.

And I fundamentally believe that the KGB was done. I thought that's it. The chairman of the KGB under Yeltsin, the first chairman, his name was Vadim Bakhatin.

He famously said he hated the KGB. He was placed in charge. Yeltsin wanted him to destroy it.

Bakhatin said, I'm going to put a stake in the heart of the KGB. Well, guess what? The KGB was a vampire.

It rose from the dead, literally in the form of the FSB, all the old directorates that Bakhatin and his reformers had broken up and scattered. They reformed largely into the FSB, with the exception of the first chief directorate, foreign intelligence, which is today's SVR. So I underestimated, as still a Russophile, I was studying the language, I was studying the history and culture.

I had the privilege to meet Dr. Christopher Andrew over in the UK at Cambridge last month when I was lecturing there. He's the great historian of Soviet intelligence. I read his books.

I was telling him, sir, I was reading your books as a freshman in high school, and I thought I knew, I thought I understood Russian intelligence. It's only really when I started to work with and debrief Russian intelligence officers when one nicely tried to educate me. I said to him after 9-11, what about Putin and Bush are friends now?

Can we expect that we'll end up working together against terrorism? And he just laughed at me. You don't get it, do you?

You were the main enemy during the Cold War. You are the main enemy now. You always will be the main enemy of Putin and our intelligence services.

He said, for us, you come first, OK? Forget about terrorism, anything else. We're coming at the United States first.

He's not the only one. Sergei Tretyakov wrote his own book. I mentioned Sergei.

I had a chance to work with him and debrief him. He wrote in his book, too, with Pete Early over 20 years ago, Comrade J. He said, too, you Americans think the Cold War is over.

It never ended for us, for Putin and the intelligence services. That's what it sounds like.

Jordan Harbinger: It sounds like these guys just live in 1985 and they can't get over it.

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah, I think honestly, Andrei Soldatov, very learned writer, scholar on Russia. I respect a lot. He said it very well recently.

He said not 1985, Jordan, 1952, back when Stalin was still alive. That's what these guys are living in a time when their security services only answered to one man. During the years of the KGB, remember most of the KGB's history, they answered to the Politburo.

They still answered to the Communist Party. They were the sword and shield of the Communist Party. Today's intelligence services in Russia answer to only Vladimir Putin.

That's it. Just like in Stalin's time, they only answer to him. And the terminology they use is telling.

They called Stalin Kazyayin, like the host, the boss of the collective farm. They call Putin chef. They call him the boss, like a mafia boss.

He's running the whole show. And they try to impress him like the boss. They carry out operations to impress him.

So assassinations, wet work. I believe that's fundamentally going on now. They're all trying to one-up one another to impress the boss.

Jordan Harbinger: So before we turn this episode into acronym soup, I want to get one clean sentence on each service. What does the FSB do and what does the GRU do?

Sean Wiswesser: Sure. And I'll give the Russian names. Just we're doing acronyms.

SVR stands for Sluzhba Vneshno-Razetki, the service for foreign intelligence. Okay. So they are the former first chief director of the KGB, which was in charge of foreign intelligence.

They're about probably 30 to 40,000 strong. They're the smallest of the three services for foreign intelligence. FSB is the internal service.

It is the largest in Russia. It is a monolith giant bureaucracy. I believe about 400,000 strong.

We ultimately don't know until an effector comes out. They have over 200,000 border guards. They are in charge of cyber operations against the West and the United States under their cyber center 16 and cyber center 18, they employ hackers for hire.

They employ criminal proxies. The FSB is embedded with companies, corporations across Russia. People make the analogy.

Oh, FSB internal, kind of like FBI. Nothing further from the truth. Forget it.

Whatever faults of our system, we're still a law abiding democracy. We still answer to the constitution. In Russia, the FSB answers to no one.

Putin was their former director, I remember. And then the GRU is military intelligence plus a whole lot of other stuff. Again, no equivalency to the U.S. intelligence community. The GRU has their equivalent of DIA, but also NSA signals, intelligence, NRO. They're in charge of the satellite constellations. They have 14 special operations brigades like our Navy SEALs or CAG, the Delta force, these are 10 ground brigades and four Marine brigades of some of the most elite of special forces in their intelligence community, giant bureaucracies, giant monolith like corporations, Jordan.

And when I say corporations, they're embedded with companies. Russian intelligence is making a lot of money off the Ukraine war. It's not in their interest to end this war.

There's a lot of Russian intelligence, leadership generals and all those services getting very wealthy on the desks of hundreds of thousands of their own soldiers and sadly hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians too. So yeah, that's a snapshot of the services.

Jordan Harbinger: Russian officers sometimes copied newspaper stories, added the political spin Moscow wanted and presented them as secret intelligence. So basically chat GPT, but with epaulets and a drinking problem. We'll be right back.

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Thank you for your support. Now, back to Sean Wisswesser. Which are more likely to target, say, an American diplomat?

It sounds like that would be SVR, right? Foreign Intelligence Service would go after the diplomats. I suppose an American diplomat in Russia would be FSB territory, right?

Sean Wiswesser: Exactly. Yep. What about a university researcher or technology company?

Who's going after Elon Musk? Is that SVR?

I think it's all of them, to be honest. So what we learned, for instance, with the hack of the Democratic servers in the 2016 election, the GRU and the FSB were able to literally falling all over each other. Part of how FBI discovered the GRU hack from that unit called Fancy Bear that had done successful phishing attempt against Podesta, I guess it was.

They infiltrated the Democratic servers. They had them hacked. Well, as detailed in the reports later on, they were partially found because the FSB was trying to hack into the same server, FBI noticed that, was paying attention, and they discovered lo and behold, wait, somebody's already exfiltrating data, what's going on there?

So they weren't sharing with each other. The FSB is just, to hell with the GRU, we're going to do our own hacking. And by the way, they were all of them at the same time, SVR, GRU, FSB.

Bet money they were also targeting the Republican servers too. There's no sentimentality here, folks. They don't care ultimately who wins our elections.

They're out for bigger prey than that. They're against democracy writ large. They're trying to undermine our entire system.

And I always make that point, talking about the election meddling, Jordan.

Jordan Harbinger: Is it an ideology thing where they want to just take down their longstanding enemy? Or is it like, actually we all get rich if there's no police and the US is the only one sort of freezing our accounts and pressuring countries to expel diplomats. It seems like they're just after money, but maybe some of the old guys just want to settle a score.

Sean Wiswesser: We're the only other power in the world capable of thwarting their vision of dominating Europe and rewriting the map quite literally, Putin is a dictator with grievances, just like one hundred years ago in Europe, Jordan. The similarities are striking. And he said what he was going to do.

Said Ukraine didn't have a right to exist. Laid it out in an essay and a speech he gave 2021 and then 2022. And what did he do?

He invaded. He said, okay, I'm just going to take this whole country. You don't like it.

Stop me. Who's going to stop me? So we're not accustomed in the 21st century, Americans and our European allies.

I think we fundamentally didn't think this would really happen. We shared intelligence at an unprecedented level. We warned our European allies, still many of them, including the Ukrainian government said, no, they're not really going to carry out the largest land invasion since World War II.

They did. That's what they're up for. This is big game, honey.

I wrote a piece for the Cypher Brief a couple months back, Jordan, about the danger of Sino-Russian opportunism. Not that they have to coordinate and say, okay, well, we're going to move against NATO and you move against Taiwan. No, they don't have to coordinate.

We're engaged now in a war with Iran. Maybe China just decides, you know what? We don't need to talk to Russia and Iran about it.

The US is engaged enough. Its interceptor stocks are so low. Not going to get a better opportunity than this.

So let's move on Taiwan. That's what I wrote about. I fundamentally believe this is the greatest danger of a large world war that we've ever had since possibly the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I feel really strongly about it. It's a dangerous time. And we're also not projecting deterrence, Jordan.

We're projecting weakness. The United States and our European allies from NATO, we're projecting weakness, unfortunately, right now.

Jordan Harbinger: The only people who are projecting strength is Ukraine to a certain extent. They do what they can. They are, of course they are.

I got a shout out to Poland. Poland has like really stepped their game up. So there's nuclear deterrence, but I don't think the Russian military could take Poland at this point.

I don't know.

Sean Wiswesser: Poles are tough. The Balts are tough. These are tough peoples.

I've served in those regions. I know them. I've worked with them.

Thank God for the Poles and the Baltic peoples. Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonian. My wife's Lithuanian.

I'm biased.

Jordan Harbinger: You're biased.

Sean Wiswesser: They know the Russian threat, Jordan. They'll fight like hell. They'll fight alone if they have to, like Ukraine's done.

They shouldn't have to though. This is the only time that we've had in many decades. It's not the only time ever.

NATO's had problems, okay? When the King visited the United States from the UK, he pointed out, this is an alliance that's endured for 80 years. We shouldn't forget that.

He was right about that. He gave good perspective. There's too much emotion right now on both sides of the Atlantic.

He did not play into that, thankfully. The alliance is our strength. NATO is our strength.

It's a very envy of China and Russia. They don't have anything like that, Jordan.

Jordan Harbinger: Nor does Iran. I don't want to get too far in the weeds on this, but people always say, oh, there's going to be BRICS and it's going to take down the dollar and then they're going to create a military alliance. You just can't do that with countries that have dictators that want everything for themselves and can't trust each other.

Oh yeah, BRICS is going to take over. Oh yeah, sure. You're going to see a common currency between countries that manipulate their own currency and cheat with the international markets and the trade deals and our sanctions evading.

I mean, guys, it's ridiculous. It's just a ridiculous thought that they're going to even do anything like that.

Sean Wiswesser: Fundamentally, these are not allies. And I point out strategically, they have nothing that could rival the intelligence sharing relationships we have from my sphere, from my career. But back to Russia though, unfortunately though, we're allowing them to constantly probe, test us, cable cuts in the Baltic Sea, targeting the CEO of Rheinmetall in Germany, trying to kill a leader of a company.

Jordan Harbinger: There's some sort of, I can'remember the name of the ship. You probably do. It's in the Baltic Sea and what drags anchor over fiber optic cables and destroys them and maps the whole internet and oil pipelines.

Sean Wiswesser: It's called the Yontar and it's been in the Baltic. It's been off the coast of England. Its job is it works for GUGI.

It's a long, long acronym. It stands for the Directorate for Underwater Sea Research. Okay.

It's an intelligence unit and it's staffed by GRU and other divers from special military units. And what they do, Jordan, is they map underwater cable lines so that in the time of war, they're going to cut them and they've been practicing cutting them with shadow tankers. So they've used these shadow tankers where they've dragged their anchors sometimes a hundred kilometers.

I was in Finland giving a talk on hybrid war appropriately enough when the Finns, good for the Finns, they arrested one of the crews. It was a Georgian captain from the country of Georgia and a bunch of other sailors. They dragged their anchor for over 65 kilometers and they cut two major cables and they arrested him.

Unfortunately, again, not enough education, not enough understanding of a hybrid war threat. The captain pleaded ignorance. Oh, we're so stupid.

We didn't see the speed of the ship was reduced because we were dragging this dang anchor for 65 kilometers. I'm sorry, judge. We're just that stupid.

Nobody's that stupid.

Jordan Harbinger: It's my first day captaining a ship. Sorry. Yeah.

Sean Wiswesser: I mean, yes, exactly. So the Finnish judge let them go. We can't have this.

We have to have a better educated system in all of these countries.

Jordan Harbinger: You would think the Finns would understand the Russian threat having been invaded by Russia and losing territory to them. I mean, the winter war is a long time ago, I guess, but holy smokes, the Finns have no love for the Russians. There's a reason they shoot people.

They try to cross the border.

Sean Wiswesser: I will say this, Jordan. I think a lot of Finns get it. I do think that a lot of Finns though, some Finns bury their heads.

I was covered very widely in the press up there. One of the clips I had had like 1.5 million views because I spoke out strongly about the Russia threat. And can you believe an analyst from Supo, their intelligence service felt they had to refute what this CIA officer was saying?

It's irresponsible for him to claim that we are at war with Russia. We have good relations with our neighbor. Good relations.

My God, what the hell are you talking about? You're a member of NATO now. You're a member of NATO.

Your country's a threat as much as any of them. So yes, I think the Finns, like all of our populations, we have it in the United States, some get the threat, some don't, but they should get it. They fought a brave, valiant war against Soviet aggression in 1940, the winter war.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Crazy to me that somebody would refute that good relations with Russia. I mean, unless his boss told him to post that, that's absolutely insane take.

Sean Wiswesser: I couldn't believe that he came on a podcast. They didn't invite me on to refute him. I said, I responded to the newspaper that did it.

And I posted this on my LinkedIn not too long ago. I said, I'm happy to debate him. How does he think since last October?

Is it gone any better for you right now, Finland and NATO? How are we doing with that whole friendship thing? We get along with our neighbor.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, exactly. Totally, totally insane. You mentioned that the SVR is also targeting the CEO of Rheinmetall.

So that's a defense contractor in Germany. How are they targeting people like him?

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah. So we think it was the GRU, most likely. Unit 29155 of the GRU is, I should explain, I never hear anybody explain this.

There's experts out there like myself that know it, but the five numbers or number digits when they talk about GRU units, GRU unit 29155, it's just a random number, but it's a legacy of the Soviet times when Soviet military intelligence units were known by what's called their Pochtovy Index, their zip code. So these units were placed all over in different spots in the Soviet Union. But in the West, we started to identify them based on their zip codes.

And when the Soviets realized we knew that it was kind of too late. So that's a remnant of that system. That's why 29155 has this catchy number.

A lot of people don't understand the history. Well, they're a unit known for sabotage, assassinations, what the Russians call mokre edela, wet work or direct measures, as the Russians also call it. So in early 2025, the CEO of Rheinmetall was targeted by this unit, I believe, again, a result of Russian intelligence just unhinged and reckless escalation where the boss has said to them, impress me much like a mafia boss, go out, come up with creative ways to punch back against the West.

And one of those morons came up with an idea. Let's kill the head of one of Germany's largest companies and nobody stopped them. So whether Putin sanctioned it or not, the Germans have them dead to rights.

They have the evidence for it. It's why, by the way, Jordan, earlier this year, the head of Germany's foreign intelligence service said, I believe correctly, he said, we're de facto already at a state of war with the Russian Federation. Call it hybrid war, call it great war, whatever you want.

NATO is already at a state of war with the Russian Federation. And he was some criticizing for that. Some agreed with them.

But the problem right now is we don't have consensus in NATO. That's the problem, Jordan, and from the United States, for that matter.

Jordan Harbinger: I wonder if we're going to find consensus when Russia decides to stalemate in Ukraine, starts doing something. I mean, we can almost count on them doing something else. What do you think?

I feel like they're not going to stop with Ukraine, even if they lose essentially or don't complete their goals in Ukraine. I feel like they could start moving against other places as well.

Sean Wiswesser: I do believe that they'll have the capability. Russia will within a year or two of any ceasefire in Ukraine. And I think the next step in the process is attacking the Baltics.

And it doesn't need to be a grab. It doesn't need to grab a capital like Vilnius or Riga. I believe it'll be a land grab at some type of operation to show how hollow they think the alliance is.

But here's one scenario. Carlo Masala wrote a book in Germany last year. It's a bestseller.

Tiny little book. It's only like 100 pages long. Encourage others to read it.

It's a good book. It focuses just on the political scenario of a ceasefire in Ukraine. And then the Russians decide to move against Narva in Estonia.

Mine is a little different scenario. Mine focuses more on all the military and intelligence enablers. Listen, Jordan, here's as succinctly as I can put it.

Thank God the Ukrainians are ahead of the Russians with electronic warfare, drone warfare. But the Russians are ahead of us. Don't expect peace to break out in Europe.

Russia is ready for war. 40 percent of their entire economy now is oriented and mobilized towards war. War is good for them right now for Putin.

He doesn't need to change that. So ceasefire in Ukraine. They look for their next target.

Unfortunately, that's what I believe.

Jordan Harbinger: Back to the espionage elements here. Walk us through an ordinary day in the life of an SVR officer posted in New York or Washington. What happens when he leaves home until he reports back to Moscow in the evening or at the end of the week?

What is he looking for on the way to work? He's obviously trying to shake surveillance. Who might he meet under diplomatic or academic journalistic cover?

How much of this is glamorous espionage and how much of this is bureaucratic ass covering and paperwork?

Sean Wiswesser: Overall, the main theme of their day, Jordan, that they're obsessed with, Russian intelligence officers of all three services is corruption. Taking care of oneself, taking care of one's boss is equally important. Have to make sure you're paying up in the feudal system.

Again, much like a mafia structure, you're making money on the side, you pay the boss, you pay your captain, pays the boss man. That's how they work. Constant schemes, rackets and scamming.

Sergei Tretyakov related this to me personally. I had a chance to debrief him. His time in New York, he was fed up to hear about it.

He was deputy resident. He's supposed to be deputy chief of station of the SVR residency in New York, a prestigious job for them. He said he spent an inordinate amount of his time buying televisions, buying jewelry, buying things he had to ship back to his bosses in Moscow.

Constant corruption, constant schemes, not just small ones, big schemes. Russian embassy in Iraq in the run up to the war, they weren't the only ones doing it, but they were buying entire tankers of gasoline from the Iraqis and they would say, this is for the embassy community. So they write it off to the Russian state budget, the foreign ministry, and then they were driving those tankers across the Syrian border and selling it below market price and banking the profit.

I had one of my proofreaders, good friend of mine. He read that. He said, no, you mean above market price so they can make profit.

I said, no, you're thinking like an American for the Russians. It's all profit. Yeah, they stole the whole damn thing.

It's all profit. They can afford to sell it as cheap as they want because they're getting a tanker of gasoline they've sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. So that's examples of the scam scheming constantly.

They did that. They do that. Anytime they can take advantage of a situation with a war or sanctions, they're going to do it.

Scams like buying cell phones in the United States, where you use them in espionage, buying laptops. They'll buy 40 laptops. They'll tell the center, SVR center, here's what it costs us for 20 laptops.

The other 20, they ship back in a diplomatic pouch. They got a buddy waiting. He sells them on the black market there.

We'll split the profit. This is the obsession. Now let's talk about when they do try to do espionage, what they do.

They'll start their day though, with between all the other corruption, because that comes first, they'll do a surveillance detection run. If they're a good, competent officer and not all of them are, but the good ones will do a surveillance detection run. They'll leave their home and they'll be looking for FBI surveillance.

They'll do this, what they call an MP, and they may stop a couple of stops on the way into the embassy and they'll try to see, are they being followed or not? Now their goal is to see when they're in the embassy and they report to their bosses, they'll report and say, yeah, I was free today. I wasn't covered.

Or no, you know, I think the FBI is onto me today. Unfortunately for us, we have limited resources in the West. So do the Brits, so do the Germans, the French, the Russians know this.

It's always been a numbers game to them. So if they have one officer covered, they knew in the, especially in the old days when there was hundreds of intelligence officers in the embassy, there's less now, but there's still dozens of them there. The point is Jordan, somebody else won't have coverage that day.

They'll just say, Hey Yuri, it's not your day. Vladimir, here's what you're going to do. And what are the examples of the types of things they'll do?

They'll attend academic conferences in whatever country they're based at. They love to target academics. They refer to academics as useful idiots.

They say, Hey, you know, would you be willing to discuss with me the possibility of Russia being the third Byzantine, these philosophies about, you know, we have a role to play in the world. We're the third Rome. We can play a critical role in.

They take advantage of academics that they can get to empathize with the Russian Federation and its policies. If that doesn't work, what are they doing on the clandestine side? Of course, they're handling agents.

And usually in our countries, like United States or UK or France, if it's a government agent that they're handling, remember we refer to ourselves as officers, the agents are the ones we handle betraying their countries. The Russians are the same way. They call themselves Russia, their officers.

The agents are those that they're running. They won't meet those agents in that country. They will use what they call impersonal communications and that's dead drops and signal sites.

So those are the types of intelligence activities they're doing. They're servicing their existing agents with dead drops, signal sites. I've had journalists in Europe.

They're all, all the rage right now is to talk about, Oh, they're not doing that anymore. They're using Telegram to recruit these sabotage teenagers and all. No, excuse me.

They're not 10 feet tall, but they're not completely incompetent. When they have a good penetration of a government, the Russians know how to protect them. Witness Robert Hanssen.

They ran him for 20 years, Jordan, and they never met him in the United States person face to face. They did it in dead drops and signal sites. So that's a little bit of a flavor, how the residency works.

Let me give one other example, though. This is telling Sergei Tretyakov told me about this, his personal experience with Russian officers. He would ask them when they're reporting a new intelligence source, he'd have to ask them, wait, is that just for the reporting though?

Or is that a, for real case, meaning, are you making that shit up? Did you just pull that from the newspapers or is that actually for real? It's so common in their service that they have a name for it.

Is that for the pop key? Is that just for the files or is that a real source?

Jordan Harbinger: So they're taking reporting from the New York Times or something. They're giving it political spin that Moscow wants. And then they're saying, oh, my secret source in the department of commerce or whatever said, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

And it's like, no, you just had chat GPT rewrite an article from the Times today. And you submit that to your boss. So it's not even intelligence.

It's open source intelligence rewritten to make somebody smile or happy or whatever, to toe the line. That's pathetic somehow.

Sean Wiswesser: Actually, it is pathetic, but it has a long history back to the KGB. It was talked about in the eighties and nineties too, from other defectors that said, yeah, this is common practice. Unfortunately.

Jordan Harbinger: Yikes, man. So, so managers have to decide which sources are real and, or even ask, Hey, is this fake nonsense so that you don't get a slap on the wrist? Or is this real?

And man, how does the leadership even make rational decisions? If everybody knows that the reporting is all embellished. I also wonder what happens to an officer who reports an unpleasant truth rather than a useful lie.

Do they get in trouble? Is there a problem with that?

Sean Wiswesser: That's how you end up with Russia invading Ukraine. That's how you end up with the Russians convinced they would have a one week war. And now they're into their fifth year of war.

That's what happened. You had the FSB is in particular. Its fifth services in charge of operational analytical reporting to the president.

They're the ones that brief the president Putin and they convinced him, Hey, we'll boss chest pound and we got this. This'll be a quick one. They had scripted roles for themselves.

As I lay out from my research and my work, that's what you get. You get a culture where they're telling him exactly what he wants to hear. I think Putin has never been more isolated.

He's in literally a bunker complex right now, like Hitler at the end of the war. No generals are going to tell him his version's not right. All the intelligence services are nodding in agreement.

Yes, Vladimir Vladimirovich, we're winning. It'll be next week. It's just one more week is all we need.

And it'll be over.

Jordan Harbinger: Russian officers asked soldiers parents for money to keep their sons away from suicide missions. And you thought airline baggage fees were predatory. We'll be right back.

Jordan Harbinger: If you liked this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment, support our amazing sponsors. They do make the show possible.

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We're happy to surface codes for you. It's that important that you support those who support the show. Now back to Sean Wisswesser.

Jordan Harbinger: By the way, you mentioned Telegram being used to recruit teenagers. Somebody that I know who was from Belarus, she lived in Poland. She was a server at a cafe and she was always posting on social media.

Oh, I'm in Paris now. And I was thinking like, wow, you must make really good tips over there. And I honestly, I feel a little bit bad, but I thought maybe she's got like an OnlyFans or something because how are you making enough money as a server?

And she's attractive. So I just didn't ask, right? I thought like, all right, that's between her and her boyfriend.

I don't really care, but if I was making Polish cafe waitress wages, I don't think I'd be jet setting every weekend. She got arrested by whatever the Polish FBI is because what she was doing was she was getting paid in cryptocurrency from a Russian handler to take photos of things in Poland, and apparently she took a bunch of photos of something in Poland and that got burned. It was like a railway depot or something.

It was a mysterious fire that got lit there. I don't think she lit the fire. I think she was providing some kind of intelligence because she had a Polish visa and now she's in prison, actually.

She's still in prison. No one's heard from her for a long time.

Sean Wiswesser: So these are Russian direct measures. They call it, they call it, but I'm aware of this too. Okay.

This is being carried out by units like GR unit 29155 by FSB units. But Jordan, we have to make the distinction. It's not traditional espionage.

It's not traditional what the Russians call agitator. So this is sabotage operations. This is them taking advantage of misfits, miscreants of society, drug addicts, kids that hate their parents that want to practice anarchy doom and play too many damn video games.

I don't know.

Jordan Harbinger: So me at age 18, got it.

Sean Wiswesser: But unfortunately Russian intelligence says, you know what? These kids are vulnerable. So they're getting onto them on Telegram.

They're taking advantage of whatever media they can to reach them. And they entrapped a lot of them though. What they do usually at first is say, I work with a organized crime group.

They're not saying I'm Russian intelligence. Will you do this? They say, I'm willing to pay you a thousand bucks.

We have a competitor company we're working against. Go take a picture of their rail yard. We'll give you 500 bucks.

Kid doesn't think, Hey man, I'm making good money. And then after they do it a couple of times, the typical method, Russians work off coercion. They'll say, Hey, we're actually Russian intelligence.

We're with the FSB. You've been betraying your country. You're going to go to jail for your whole life.

Now what's that misfit miscreant of society going to do? They feel entrapped. They're doing this a lot.

There are some experts don't like the term throwaway assets or one-time assets, whatever we call them. They're not traditional. What the Russians call it, but anything in Vienna or a penetration of a government.

They know how to handle those. They know how to do that very well. As I described signal sites, dead drops, and they pay very well for agents that deserve it.

These are just throwaway cases. They'll use the teenager once or twice. Look at what happened with the Bulgarians in the UK.

This hooker rang that they set up. Also, I think it was the GRU possibly. I guess that one was the FSB where you had, I think six different Bulgarians, couple of pimps and four of their hookers.

And they had all these cell phones provided to them by Russian intelligence. They were trying to target journalists. They were going to go after Belenkad and Grozev, some of the journalists reporting on Russian intelligence.

Folks like me or you now, Jordan, because now you're on with a CIA officer talking about Russia.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I get targeted by the dumbest stuff though. It's really clunky. So far it's clunky level up to 11.

They'll send me an email that says I've got to do something. And at the bottom is the instructions from their handler or whatever. Like you guys are idiots.

Sean Wiswesser: But that's the level of tradecraft. Some of this stuff was clunky, stupid, not very sophisticated, but then look at the Russian side of it, Jordan, though, they say, what do we have to lose? These are not staff officers of our intelligence services.

We don't have to swap for these guys. Let the Bulgarians rot in the prison. The hookers and pimps that we use, they don't care.

It's sort of a no loss for them. So they are doing more and more of this. A lot of this going on in Europe right now.

And democracies, I think are particularly vulnerable to it. It's their own citizens being used to sabotage their societies.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, in this case, it was strange, right? Cause she wasn't a Polish citizen. She was from Belarus, which is an ally of Russia.

So they're even using their own allied citizens as disposable nobodies and letting them rot in prison. They just don't care.

Sean Wiswesser: What's even more tragic, Jordan, a lot of these cases have been Ukrainian emigres. They're very poor. They don't have a lot going for them.

Some of them are being mistreated. Some in some of these countries, but they're also Lithuanians, Estonians, Poles, Germans. They're all nationalities, but they are taking advantage of some Ukrainians as well.

They don't have a lot of resources. Maybe they're having a tough life and having to flee their country in a time of war. And there've been many implicated, unfortunately, in some of these sabotage operations.

But what are we in NATO doing about it? We could be saying, you know what? The next sabotage act that we see, we're going to give the Ukrainians those Tomahawk missiles that the Russians are so up in arms about.

They don't want long range assets being given to the Ukrainians because the Ukrainians are using them really well, their own assets to target the energy sector, hit those refineries in Moscow and all over the country. Whether it's Tomahawks or a different type of missile, air launch cruise missile. There's a lot of varieties.

That's what the Russians are really afraid of. So if we want to end this war, what we need to say is the next escalation. So, you know what?

Actually, we are going to give them about 50 Tomahawks now. The next acts of sabotage that you do, it'll be a hundred. That's how you end escalation from the other side.

Right now we have empty deterrence. Jordan, we have a deterrence with no consequences. We say, don't you dare do that.

We won't tolerate that again. There's no repercussions for Russia. I've had Russian intelligence officers tell me for the decades that I was active in work, I'd had it over and over.

Tell me what'wrong with your leadership, the United States. They don't get the threat from our intelligence services. What you're not listening to what we're telling you what's happening.

And we didn't listen. So we got Georgia in 2008, the Russians invaded and then Ukraine in 2014. And so is it any mystery, Jordan, why in 2022 Putin with his Siloviki, his men of power, by the way, the term's very telling.

Where else do you get, except an autocrat who can say, calls his cabinet level officials, these are my Siloviki. These are my men of power. My strongmen is how it's translated.

They said to him, just take the whole thing, boss. They ain't going to stop you. NATO's not going to stop.

The U.S. isn't going to stop you. Look at what they did before, boss, 2008, 2014, they were weak. Sanctions.

Yeah, we can handle your sanctions. So if we had projected strength and said, you know what? We're going to provide arms.

We're giving Abrams tanks now to Ukraine to show you that you better not invade. But we didn't, we used half measures. Warnings.

Jordan Harbinger: If only there was an earlier world war where we appeased a tyrant and it turned out to be a bad idea. I don't know. Oh, well.

Sean Wiswesser: Jordan, what did Churchill say about Munich? I've said this in an article I wrote a few months back. Churchill's famous warning at Munich was you had a choice.

Spoke to his own people, France and the UK. Both. You had a choice at Munich between dishonor and war.

You chose dishonor and you'll have war. His words proved true. A year after Munich, they had general war in Europe because of it.

If we don't watch it, what are we worried about, Jordan? We hear it all the time. We've got to watch it.

This could turn into world war three. No, it will be world war three. If we don't deter aggression, if we don't deter the escalation of our adversaries.

I use the example of the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy famously said when the missiles were in Cuba, we shall regard any attack by Cuba against the United States as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response. That was mutual assured destruction.

Kennedy was saying even one missile flies from Cuba, we'll launch a full strike on the Soviet Union. That's deterrence, Jordan. That's deterrence.

What do we have right now in Europe? In Europe, what's happening is send over 20, 25 drones in one day to Poland, crash them near military bases. And the alliance does nothing.

It's not deterrence.

Jordan Harbinger: No, that must've been an accident because I think the excuse was electronic warfare jammed their guidance systems and they landed in the wrong spot. It's like, okay, so when that happens again and they have a explosive payload, can we use the same excuse? Is that going to work again, guys?

I don't get, I guess we'll see. I guess we'll test it later if we need to. That's what I'm worried about.

Sean Wiswesser: And it ties to the mentality of Putin, who he is. He's a Chekist. We have to understand Russians.

I was saying, what does a person breathe? What does Putin breathe? He believes deeply in the Orwellian system where the KGB were the elite of society.

Putin's vision of the world. What did he say way back in his early years in power around 2005, he gave a speech. He said the greatest disaster of the 20th century wasn't World War II, by the way, where the Soviets lost 25 million of their people and Putin's own older brother died in the war.

He starved, poor child starved during the war. No, that wasn't that. The greatest disaster of the 20th century for Putin was the collapse of the Soviet Union.

That's the biggest disaster because for him, that was his system. That was what made the KGB the elite. It fed their corruption.

So that's what he can't get over. He can't get over the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's why you see him with Ukraine.

Can't have democracies functioning on Russia's borders. It's deeply tied to the intelligence services place in Russian society and their elitism, their belief that they need to rule Russia and he is entitled to rule Russia. So it's all tied together.

Jordan Harbinger: The corruption, again, is always just so staggering. It makes them less competent, but I feel like it also makes them more dangerous because a criminalized intelligence service is probably going to take risks that a professional service would just refuse to do. What do you think?

Sean Wiswesser: I agree. The problem is Putin was underestimated by his own people. So Yeltsin made a barter.

Deep corruption in the Yeltsin government. Jordan, back in the 90s, the oligarchs were ruling Russia and Putin knew it. He was director of the FSB.

He knew where the bodies were buried. Literally, he knew how to compromise these oligarchs. But he was a nobody.

Nobody knew who Putin was. He was short, not imposing. So Yeltsin's family, his daughter and those oligarchs believe, let's make a barter.

Let's pick this guy, a relative unknown. We can control him. But what did Putin say?

No, I'll control you. I know dirt on all of you. I know where your money's hidden.

I know who's cheating with whose wives and who's killed whose rivals. I've got all the dirt on all of you. And one by one, he turned the oligarchs or he kicked them out.

Or like Khodorkovsky, he put them in prison, took over Lukoil. Nobody saw that one coming. And so now you have a system where Rosneft, the oil company, largest oil company in Russia, it's run by Igor Sechin.

It's one of his closest KGB hardliner buddies. So he outwitted them all, Jordan. We've got to give it to Putin.

He's clever. He's been at this a long time. I often say he gets a straight A in the autocrats of the world course for 26 years now.

He's been getting straight A's. He's watched other dictators come and go. He has his system wired very well.

Jordan Harbinger: They're the HQ for this, right? Where did Assad go? Moscow.

And where do these dictators go when they fall out of power or when they're surrounded? They just fly to Moscow and that's the end of it. They don't fly to China.

They fly straight to Putin. Big daddy.

Sean Wiswesser: Jordan, it gets to another thing I've written on. I wrote a piece for Foreign Policy magazine a couple months back called Don't Believe the Rumors of Putin's Weakness. You hear all this constant talk a month after my, oh, he's getting ready to fall.

Putin's going down, baby. Do you hope to fall any day now? No, unfortunately not.

I'd love it as much as anyone. I'm as hopeful as anyone, but it's not happening, Jordan. He's built a system of layered security around him.

He knows to make sure not to let what Gaddafi happened happen to him. It's not going to happen. What happened to Assad is not going to happen.

Jordan Harbinger: Assad from Syria. Yeah, Gaddafi from Libya. Exactly.

The corruption, it does blow up in the agency's face a lot of the time, though. There's this officer you call Kitchen Boy. Tell us that story, because this was an epic fail.

Sean Wiswesser: So here's how we use that corruption against them. Here's what matters, is ultimately intelligence officers in Russia. I believe they're more vulnerable now than they've ever been.

And they've always been vulnerable because of the corruption. I relate the story of, called Kitchen Boy, who was a very talented, smart officer, graduated near the top of his class from a very reputable, important feeder program, as they have at their universities, entered the SVR and he was hazed. He was relentlessly picked on, brutalized, and singled out because he was super smart and he didn't want to go along with the corruption.

And he related to me, I really naively believed I wanted to serve mother Russia and I wanted to help my country. And I'd watched all the movies on TV and now they have more than ever in Russia under Putin, it's all about glorifying the intelligence services. What happened to him?

He related to me, you know, one of his residency get togethers, they get together on days like 20 December, they salute Dzerzhinsky, the ruthless Iron Felix, who founded the Cheka, who founded the first committee for the defense of the revolution, he's seen as the...

Jordan Harbinger: So secret police for the Soviet Union?

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah, secret police. So on 20 December, they get together, they have vodka shots and they were celebrating occasion like that. He said they had some fish out, dried fish and vodka shots.

And one of the more senior officers humiliated him, said, Hey, go clean up the kitchen. He said, I'm not going to clean the kitchen. I look like a maid.

I'm an intelligence officer. I'm a Russian Chekist.

He's proud of himself. He's trying to serve his country on one of his first foreign postings. The officer says, Hey, didn't you hear me? Kitchen boy told you to go clean the kitchen.

And so he pauses, he looks at the resident, the chief of station, looks over to him, hoping that the chief of station is going to stand up for him. The resident, what'd the resident do? He's like, clean up the kitchen.

Like he told you. He was humiliated and he was seething with rage over it though, Jordan. He said, guess I showed him who kitchen boy was, didn't I?

Giving away all their secrets to the CIA. So yes, you did. And he was a hero.

He took tremendous risk to help us. And he ended up working and helping with a service that recognized his talents. And so that's the kind of system they have.

It's not a meritocracy. It never was, Jordan. You can't get ahead by wanting to serve your country or do the right thing in Russia.

It's all about the corruption. If you're not one of the Rebiata, one of the guys, then you're going to be singled out and picked on. By the way, the most extreme example of that corruption today, there's been great reporting on this in Ukraine and very reputable sources.

Reuters has reported on this. I think too. In Ukraine, Russian soldiers have to pay to stay alive.

They have to pay their officers, their officers, contact the parents and say, Hey, do you want your son to stay alive another month? I'm going to need another $500 to not send them in on a suicide mission, essentially. It's the ultimate form of what the Russians call Dedovshchina.

It's that hazing. It's that culture in the military and the intelligence services of picking on those that are vulnerable. And this is happening all across the front in Ukraine.

Want your son to stay alive, better keep paying me. I'll take care of him. I'll make sure he's not in the most brutal assaults.

Frontline in Ukraine, they say, Jordan, Russian soldier has minutes to live when he's exposed to the drone warfare. Only in Russia do you have that level of corruption where literally human lives are bought and sold now at the front. Those are true stories.

Jordan Harbinger: Can't, can't make that up. That's disgusting. How do you distinguish between a principled dissident from the intelligence services, from somebody who's just a bitter person trying to settle a personal score, or does it not really matter?

Cause you're just getting information from them at the end of the day.

Sean Wiswesser: I will say that I was privileged in my career. I was honored to truly work with Russians that inspired me that they were doing it for not just money. Money is usually a part of the espionage business.

Let's be honest finances. It's money towards an end to money to provide for a family to relocate one's family United States where we do have a meritocracy right or wrong in our country, you can get ahead. I was not a rich kid.

I grew up with nothing. Okay. Not ashamed to say our family, we had government support.

We needed that as a family. I was able to have a great career in CIA and now provide for my own family, rise through a government system that's not perfect, but you can get ahead with hard work, not so in the Russian intelligence services today, I was privileged and honored to work with Russian spies who were betraying their country for the right reasons. Many of them relocated here to the United States.

Not all of them, but many of them did. And so that was the greatest privilege of my professional career was to work with such heroes. They're the heroes, not us.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm going to challenge you a little bit. You offer these people safety recognition money and a future in the West, which is pretty good. In your opinion, is that morally cleaner than Russian coercion or extortion, or is it just a much more attractive form of persuasion and manipulation?

Sean Wiswesser: Oh, it's a huge difference. Listen, people have challenged me. No, you're telling me CIA never used coercion.

No, of course we did look at the history of the Cold War. But in my CIA that I came into, I was a part of, we don't believe it fundamentally works, Jordan. We don't, we just don't believe that coercion works as long as you keep beating a person.

And when you stop beating them with whatever it is, intimidation, Russians call compromising material operations, whether it's sex, espionage or gambling or taking advantage of human weakness. We don't believe that works. We believe fundamentally you have a problem.

Let me help you solve your problem. Whether it's money or health issues or whatever it is. And that person will be loyal to you for life.

They'll say, this person saved my life. They saved my family. They kept their word.

They helped us get out of Russia. And we've done that over and over again. The Russians, what do they have?

They have the stick. They say work with us or we'll kill you or work with us or we'll destroy your marriage because we caught you in sex, espionage with one of these swallows or work with us or the Russian mob will beat the crap out of you because you've been gambling stupidly at a casino that we control. And now we've got pictures of it.

So that's how they operate. It's perfectly normal to them. But we believe fundamentally it's not a good motivator.

It's not that we've never used it, but we've come around to believing it doesn't work fundamentally long-term. Our method works.

Jordan Harbinger: For people whose understanding of Russian intelligence comes from TV shows like The Americans, which I love, right? People who are Russian and they come to America and they pretend to be American and they have kids and everything here. What exactly is a Russian illegal?

How is that different from an intelligence officer working out of an embassy? I think a lot of people didn't realize this kind of thing is real.

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah, it is real. The Americans is a good show. I enjoyed it.

They had some CIA advisor one or two, I think that helped them. There's a lot of truth to the show. There's also a lot of Hollywood.

I just talked about sex being honest, but in that show, my goodness, Jordan, you remember, especially in season one, there's just sex all the time.

Jordan Harbinger: Keri Russell was all over the town. Yeah.

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah. So that was sex for a fact. Hollywood, of course, a lot of killing in The Americans too.

But let's talk about the illegals that the show actually was based on. The case it was based on was the ghost stories case. Illegals have always been a foundation of Soviet and Russian intelligence.

Jordan gone back a hundred years. Putin loves illegals. He believes in them.

I call the chapter illegals, the pride of the Russian intelligence services, because that's what Putin believes and feels fundamentally. The ghost stories, illegals that were in the U S that were 12 illegals. 10 of them were the main illegals and there was a traveling illegal.

There was one more. But eight of them were couples like related in The Americans. And then there were two that the Russians called special agent illegals, like Anna Chapman.

She was different, but fundamentally this is an old tactic that goes back over a hundred years and used to be used to great effect by Soviet intelligence. We have to acknowledge that great intelligence cases they pulled off in the thirties and forties illegals of Soviet intelligence stole the atom bomb project from under our noses. They stole the plans using spies like Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs to a lesser degree, they were handled by illegals.

So Cambridge Five were five spies that were recruited at Trinity College and Cambridge University. They were privileged elite of British society who decided on idealistic reasons they were going to betray their country and help the Soviet Union because they believed in the communist cause. They were what Vladimir Lenin called useful idiots.

They believed really, Oh, it was a worker's paradise there. One of the most damaging was someone named Kim Philby who ended up in British intelligence. Their Secret Intelligence Service, their SIS also known as MI6.

And he did tremendous damage to their service and their country. All of them did. They had other spies, but the Cambridge Five McLean and Burgess and Philby, they infiltrated into the Foreign Ministry, other offices of government.

They were recruited by an illegal Deutsch who went to Trinity and talked to them and convinced them that they should help the Soviet cause. By the way, typical also of Soviet intelligence, Deutsch himself was later killed in Stalin's purges. He didn't survive to get any medals for his work.

But my point is in that time period, the Soviet spies that help infiltrate the Manhattan Project, our atomic bomb and help the Soviets dramatically probably get the bomb 10 years sooner than they would have. They pulled out amazing feats of espionage. They're known in history, historically, Soviet historians have called them the great illegals.

They were the generation of the great illegals. Today's illegals, I call them not so great illegals. They're not quite up to the muster.

They're not quite up to those standards. So the 10, eventually 12 illegals that we wrapped up with the FBI in 2010 were a bunch of bungling fools. They were nothing comparable to those great illegals of old.

They were mostly living here comfortable lives. Their story would not have made good watching on TV. One of the best examples of it.

I love this one. This is from the archives of the FBI. One of the couples, the wife was trying to work as a travel agent.

Her husband was supposed to be the main illegal. He was lazy. The FBI has tapes where she would call home on the phone and say, Hey, can you help me out with grabbing some groceries today for the kids?

'Cause I'm doing that thing. Remember she's trying to do her job and work. He would tell her I'm too busy too.

I got a lot going on. He was watching Sopranos on TV. Literally watching Sopranos.

Wow. That's an SVR illegal of the modern times. The not so great illegals.

Jordan Harbinger: That's funny. FBI is like, Oh, we got a lot of activity. And the surveillance guy's like, no, sir.

He's still on the couch.

Sean Wiswesser: Sir. He's on season three right now. Sopranos.

He's binge watching. Can I leave? He hasn't left the house in three days.

Can I go take a proper piss and get a burger? Telling his poor wife, Hey, I'm busy. I got stuff to do too.

You know, I've got my tasking, you know, what a hitting turn. She's like, all right, whatever. I'll pick up the groceries too.

He's watching Sopranos.

Jordan Harbinger: So illegals are supposed to recruit people with access and support operations remain available as infrastructure and probably not just sit on the couch and watch Sopranos. Yeah. So why does Putin celebrate illegals?

Even the failed ones, he greets them. They decorate them. He turns them into heroes.

You mentioned that before. Why does he believe in this so much? If the truth of the matter is they haven't been doing much for the past several decades.

Sean Wiswesser: It plays into them. Why do Brits love the James Bond image? Why do all folks around the world love the image of James Bond?

Sometimes the mythology of the spy is far above the reality of the work. And in Russia, they've immortalized the image of the illegal. Putin's hero as a kid growing up was an illegal that he read about in books by an author called Yulian Semyonov.

There was a famous Soviet film. Every one of that generation from the seventies remembers it knows this film very well. It's called Seventeen Moments of Spring.

And it's about this GRU, Russian military intelligence illegal that penetrates the Gestapo, the SS in Germany. And he's so good at his job. He's just really excellent at it.

But there's more than that. There's the image of him as a really stoic servant of the state. There's this famous scene in the movie where he's at a reception in a SS uniform.

This is a Russian in SS uniform. And he sees his wife come into the room and he hasn't seen her or talked to her in years. And for fully a minute or two, there's no dialogue at all.

He just watches her with a stoic face with the discipline to not approach her and not do anything. And Putin's commented on that. He believed Stirlitz was a real hero.

The problem is it's mythology. It's fake. There was no such real hero, but Putin loves to mythologize his security services.

It plays into his image of them as the elite of society. They're the stoic defenders of mother Russia, Jordan. So it plays into his narrative why they need to be ruling Russia.

And he always says it. KGB was the elite of the Soviet society today, the FSB and our security services. Thankfully we have the illegals.

When those illegals were wrapped up in 2010, he famously sung a song with them, greeted them at the airport. He said, you're all heroes. In point of fact, what do we know what the FBI publicized of the communiques from the SVR center?

It was telling them, Hey, you're not in the United States to live comfortably and raise your kids. Produce intelligence, recruit sources. You're not doing that.

So their own words, condemn them the worst. The SVRs own communiques, their cable telegrams, they would write them. Say, Hey, you're not doing anything.

You're not getting any results. Come on. Anna Chapman was a bungling fool.

She was a disaster as an illegal. She went home and wrote books. One of the illegals is now a member of parliament in Russia.

So they don't get any accountability for their failure.

Jordan Harbinger: Do you know who Jack Barsky is? Is that name ring a bell? Sure.

Yeah. So he was an illegal, I guess that his story episode 285. And he literally was like, I didn't do anything.

I just showed up to the number station drop where he would get instructions. He did that every Thursday or whatever it was. And he did absolutely nothing.

And he told me, yeah, I told Moscow. I said, what am I supposed to be doing? And they're like, just make connections.

And he's like, I sell insurance. What do you want me to do? I don't have access to anybody.

I literally sell life insurance, dude. I'm not going to fancy parties with billionaires. I work as an insurance salesman and they were just kind of like standby.

It was just useless. It's just a waste of time.

Sean Wiswesser: Most of them were failures. Rudy Herman that my wife and I got to know from studying language with him. He was a defector.

The FBI caught him in the seventies and he decided, okay, I'm just going to stay in the United States. He ran a deli when he was living in Canada. He was infiltrating Canada first before coming to the United States.

And the SVR would say to him, we want you to target the Canadian politicians. He says, I run a deli. What do you want me to do?

People come in. They say, you want your sandwich with mustard or no mustard? That's about it.

That's what he literally told me. He's like, how the hell am I going to penetrate the Canadian government? Now, at the same time, let's talk about when they do have successes.

While those ghost stories, illegals were not successful in United States. Jordan, we need to point out there was this couple in Germany, the Anschlugs, and they recruited a diplomat from NATO and they did have success. So even if they succeed only one out of a hundred times and they have a success like that, they recruit an actual penetration of NATO.

Yeah. Then it's a big deal. But the ones here in the U S or a bunch of bungling fools, no two ways about it.

Jordan Harbinger: Walk us through the wrong number incident from the book, because this is such a shocking little anecdote. This is true.

Sean Wiswesser: This happened. There was an incident where, as I said, a member of our intelligence services, not CIA, but another agency we partnered with in the fight. With the best of intentions, this government worker was planning to have a conference call with another office because those illegals were stationed all over the U S Jordan.

You had basically four sets of couples in New York, Boston. One was out West. I think another was in Virginia area.

And then you had Anna Chapman and he had another illegal that was also stationed out West named Karetkin. So that's a lot of monitoring is my point. That's a lot of government efforts.

On this particular occasion, one of these special agent from a government service, United States government service, doesn't matter which, not trying to embarrass him, was going to call another office was going to have a secure conference call. And those days you picked up a special phone and you would call the office of the other field office you want to talk to or any office. And you say, Hey, can we go secure now?

Have a conversation, press a button, you get encryption. We'll leave it at that. Nowadays, it's a lot simpler.

Things have come along a long ways in 20 years. What happened was he looked at the file and some poor fool had put all the numbers on one sheet together.

That's government work for you. We make mistakes too. And there was no separation of the numbers.

So right next to the field office number. Yep. You guessed it.

There was the number of the actual house of the illegals. So he didn't look very carefully. He dialed the actual number of the illegals.

Female picks up the wife illegal, the Russian illegal picks up the phone. He says, Hey, it's such and such calling from this field office of this government agency, he lists it. We're going to have the conference call still.

Right. So can we go secure? And she's like stunned because she doesn't know what to do.

This is a trick and they found us. Right.

Jordan Harbinger: 'Cause she doesn't know that the FBI knows who they are or whichever agency that might've been.

Sean Wiswesser: That was my read the transcript and all that we had. And this was relayed to me by my buddy that I worked very closely with on the case, remember as I really, he told me they don't want to go back because he relayed the incidents to me. Then I looked at the logs and all myself, she paused.

I think she thought this was a pitch. I think she thought, Oh, this is them. They've caught us.

They now want us to work with them. So he repeats himself. He's like, no, we're going to do the meeting.

And then he gives the code names. We had called them for her and her husband. And it's itsy and bitsy.

It's just funny government code names, but it's clear. He's talking about, he's like, so can we go secure? Because we've got to talk about the case.

And again, tells I'm from this field office and she's like pauses. And she says, basically, I think you have the wrong number and she hangs up. Now we know that she knew and her husband knew because again, they were monitored closely and they knew what was up and they talked about it and they discussed it and they decided not to report it.

That's treason. They betrayed their country. They didn't report that they had a strong reason to suspect having gotten a phone call from this particular government agency.

That's the counterintelligence agency monitoring them. And so how do you not report that Jordan? You can't excuse that.

I hope the FSB reads my book and they go investigate them and say, Hey, which one of you assholes got the phone call and didn't report it? They didn't have to have the disaster that they had in 2010. They could have been exfiltrated from the United States.

So I point out their treason and bungling and failures at the same time. It's true that we have our slip ups too. And that government official to his credit, he reported it immediately.

All of them were surveilled more intensely. But Hey, that's government work. We do our best and sometimes mistakes are made.

In point of fact, they didn't report it. My friend said, I agree with him. He said, Sean, they don't want to go back.

They just want to live here. That's why they didn't report it. I agree.

He's right. They didn't want to go back.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's interesting. They didn't want to go back. Same with Jack Barsky.

His thing was, they said, you got to come back. And he said, no. And they said, if you don't come back, we're going to kill you.

And he said, I have HIV, which was not true at all. And he knew that they didn't want him there because they thought it was an uncontrollable degenerate disease. So they just said, oh, good luck.

And they severed contact with him and they never talked to him again. And the truth is he didn't have AIDS. He just wanted to stay in the U.S. because he got married and had a kid and stuff. And the FBI didn't find out until he was in an argument with his wife. It's an amazing story, episode 285. But it's fair to mention if we're going to rag on the Russians for being incompetent, we got to highlight how much the U.S. government guy blew it by telegraphing that U.S. intelligence knew who these people were and where to find them. This is like accidentally calling your mom instead of your high school girlfriend and telling her, I'm so wasted. I need a ride home. Not that I've ever done that twice.

Sean Wiswesser: Talking sweet nothings to your mom on the phone accidentally by mistake. Yeah, I will say again that that officer showed integrity by reporting it right away. Now, of course, the phone lines were monitored and all things would have been found out.

But Jordan, I come back to again the fact that just no integrity of those officers corrupt deep down in the soul. Because again, had they reported it, they could have saved themselves in the operation that had gotten away. But no, they actually wanted to live in the U.S. So some of your viewers may be thinking and wondering, so then why didn't they stay when they were given the chance when they were arrested? I believe fundamentally it happened too fast. When they eventually were all wrapped up, it was in the matter of a day or so. And then we were interested in swapping them.

We had real spies in Russia, alleged spies anyway, four spies. We wanted to get out of Russian prison. They were suffering.

They were in bad shape. They had done heroic things for the United States and the UK, in the case of one of them, the UK. So we were trading Russian intelligence officers for real spies.

And that's a good swap because we're just getting their officers, sending them home like a bunch of incompetent fools they are. And we're getting hero spies out of prison. So that was well worth it.

Jordan Harbinger: So there are still illegals now, right? Or are they just mostly using diplomats for this stuff?

Sean Wiswesser: No, I think that they're being more creative than ever now. They don't have as many diplomats in embassies across Europe and the United States because of the Ukraine war.

They lost hundreds of positions of officers who were declared persona non grata and kicked out of those countries. So I think they're being more creative than ever with the illegals. When I was in Finland last fall, I talked about that.

I said, there's certainly illegals in Finland. Again, I got skepticism of societies. I had that analyst from their intelligence services said, I don't think the CIA man understands Finland.

Russians could not possibly blend in here. Excuse me. They know how to speak the languages.

They get trained on this. The illegals that were living here in the US, many of them had no accents at all. Some of them did have strange accents.

They said we're European, but nobody was pegged as a Russian by their neighbors. You talk to any of those neighbors. Nobody said, yeah, we have those Russians living. No, no.

They'll say, oh, he said he was from Ireland. He had a little bit of an accent. No.

So they're well-trained. It takes on average, if they deploy a staff illegal, it takes seven or eight years of training, Jordan. So it's not that they're not trained well.

It's that they don't carry out their training. Those illegals, by the way, one of the things they failed to do, they never did their surveillance detection routes. They never carried out good tradecraft.

They were sloppy, lazy. So as we train our own officers in my service, CIA, we tell our young officers, the tradecraft is no good if you don't use it. You don't use it.

You're too lazy to use what you were trained on. You're going to get caught every time the illegals are here. They redeployed them, of course.

Jordan Harbinger: You studied in Russia and you said you encountered suspiciously old graduate students who still lived in the dorms and showed up at every foreign student event, never seemed to graduate. So who are these people? They're just there to keep an eye on you or what?

Sean Wiswesser: These were FSB minors. I think in the case of some of them, they were actual staff officers and they lived in the foreign dorms in and among us. Very friendly.

They were some of the first Russians we met. Some of them are what we call co-optees. Co-optee is somebody basically that is paid or forced to collaborate with the FSB.

And so, yeah, they were our minors. And this was one of the things that education for me as a young American, not understanding the role of Russian intelligence in their society. You know, Russians expect to be surveilled, Jordan.

They expect to be, have their phones tapped, to be listened to. It's a surveillance state. Sadly, it always has been.

For Americans, the very idea of surveillance being followed or having someone listen to your calls, that's an anathema to us. That's offensive. And it should be in a democracy.

Not so in Russia. We would have students tell us, they'd whisper to us, literally, you know, hey, Sean, so even the walls have ears. Be careful.

Hey, what did you say to me back there about the walls having ears? I mean, we didn't understand. We're like, explain.

They're like, you don't know, you're being watched. So I've got to be careful. I don't know if I want to hang out with you.

So this was the first, this was the early nineties when again, there was a chance of flavor of freedom and democracy. The Russians were still living in fear, Jordan. And that's one of the great tragedies, of course.

I believe fundamentally that Putin, his intelligence and military, they are culpable for the Ukraine war and all the suffering that they cause. I don't indict all the Russian people. I don't believe that we're fundamentally at war with all Russian people.

I don't buy into that because this is a propagandized state where people don't honestly get any source of news other than what the state tells them. And historically, Russians have suffered more from their security services than any others. Remember, heroic Russians have died.

Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist, died for opposition to Putin. Navalny, of course, famously died just a couple of years ago. So there are Russians that speak out valiantly and are trying to fight back.

But tragically, it's in a system where there's just overwhelming oppression from the state.

Jordan Harbinger: Like you said, the walls have ears and the authoritarian service really turns an entire society into this loose surveillance network and people can't trust each other. I guess you acclimate, you get used to it, you adapt, but I wouldn't want to do that. I wouldn't want to have to do that.

Sean Wiswesser: I don't think that there's any rival right now, Jordan, except say for China. Even North Korea doesn't have the technical advantage of what the Russians do as a surveillance state now. All internet service providers, all phones in Russia, because remember North Korea, nobody really, who has cell phones, right?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. People have them, but it would be like people in the capital city that have a job where you need it. It's not something that everybody just has.

Sean Wiswesser: So in Russia, every person is carrying a personal surveillance beacon. Over 20 years by law in Russia, the FSB has access to all internet service providers, all phone companies, all complete control of the media in Russia. No independent press whatsoever.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister of World War II under Hitler, he can only dream of the resources right now of Russian intelligence and their Siloviki that are running the state. Unfortunately, I believe that it's only rivaled by China. China is the only society today that could say, oh, maybe they're more of a surveillance state than Russia, but otherwise Russia's contending for the gold.

Greatest surveillance state of all time, unfortunately.

Jordan Harbinger: I would imagine now though, it's almost impossible for anybody to be a lone spy or not. You've got so much digital surveillance everywhere. I do want to talk about the Kompromat and the Swallows.

It seems like loneliness is often more important than the sex, right? You just find somebody who's unhappy in their life or doesn't feel like they have anybody and you can target them pretty clearly. Again, this also seems clumsy.

I've told this story on the show before. My friend was supposed to go write a profile about Lukashenko in Belarus. And they have their KGB.

It's literally still called the KGB there. And he got an email before he went that said something like, tell us what kind of women you like, because maybe you'll find love on your trip to Belarus. And he was like, this is the dumbest clunky he showed me.

It's like the stupidest pitch. I just showed it to my friend who was in FBI counterintelligence. And I was like, look at this.

And he's like, this is first year agent nonsense. It was really like a crappy, pathetic dating ad that had been translated from Russian into English using chat GPT.

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah, literally mail order. Let us know your prostitute swallows in advance while I'm ready for you when you arrive.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And it was like, they didn't even bury the lead at all. It was just like, here you go.

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah. It's not just about sex. Russians are very good at sex being nice.

They know that the best operations are not just based on sex, but where they build an emotional bond. And that's what they did with Clayton Longstreet. So they had this Violetta Sienna who worked in the embassy.

A&E did a neat series. They called it sex being, I was interviewed her. She said, you know, at first he was just a face to me, but then we got to know each other.

And of course we created a bond. That's all bullshit. She was tasked by the KGB.

This was her job. That's why she worked in the embassy, seduce some young Marine. And she did it.

But Lountree to his credit. Yes, he was a traitor, but I give him credit for this. He knew what he did was wrong.

He turned himself in. But that's the officer that had met Lountree said he met a devastated young man who profoundly regretted his actions. He did his time in prison.

He was released. That's very different than a spy like Hanssen who willingfully betrayed his country for 20 years, had blood on his hands, but the Russians take advantage. They use swallows because fundamentally it works during it still works.

Whatever the targets into men, women, whatever, homosexual, heterosexual, but they want to build an emotional tie to it. It's not just about the sex because that emotional tie, let me give you another example of how they use the emotional tie. Common scheme scam they use in the former Soviet Union is they'll use maids in the hotels, Western businessmen.

Okay. They might be smart enough to be told, Hey, stay away from the prostitutes, strip clubs, so they'll use maids that are cleaning the rooms and it'll start as, would you like me to do your laundry for you? I am glad to, it helps me and my family.

I make a little bit of extra money on the side. Okay, fine. I won't do dry cleaning, so I'll give you my laundry.

And then that evolves into once a week, she chats a little bit more. My son has horrible medical conditions, so I need a little bit of money on the side. You see, they're building an emotional connection.

Jordan Harbinger: That would work on me. That would work. I mean, so this, I was thinking to myself, the sex thing wouldn't work.

'Cause it's like, Oh, you got to do this for me. And I'd be like, whatever. I can go meet another one tonight.

I'm married now. But when I was young, it's like, what do you think? I'm not some kind of simp.

Good luck. You got no leverage over me. I go to the club, I'll meet another one.

I'm not putting up with this crap, but the maid with the sob story. Oh my God. That would work on me in two seconds, man.

Sean Wiswesser: Jordan, you see it. Yeah, no, it's much more sophisticated, right? And then what happens is as a businessman does try to help and then she might invite him out.

Please come to my apartment for a dinner. And then somebody comes barging into the room, even if there was no sex. And she says, Oh no, they're threatening me and my son because they say that you are a spy.

And if you don't help them, please. So that's the emotion again. And the businessman says, Oh my God.

Now I've gotten her in trouble over the dry cleaning. Damn it. I guess I better give them information on my company.

'Cause remember the Russian intelligence services aren't bounded by law. They target businessmen because they do corporate espionage, not just for the state, but they do it for money. They'll steal a corporate secret and they'll sell it to a company.

This is how they work by US law. We can't do that. That's against US law.

We'll go to prison. Of course.

Jordan Harbinger: So if this kind of thing happens, you're at your, uh, Russian maid's house with having dinner with her and her husband or son or something like that. And they come barging in and they accuse you of being a, you just go straight to the FBI and say, this is this weird thing that happened to me and now I'm being pressed, right? That's what you're supposed to do.

Correct.

Sean Wiswesser: I think it works on maybe some Americans who knows, I hope not, but it definitely works. I know many cases it's worked on. It's been reported to us by Russian defectors intelligence.

It works on people of the Central Asian region of that part of the world where they travel a lot and they do business in Russia and from the Middle East for that matter. Well, they're intimidated. If the FSB now comes barging into the room, Jordan, you probably can't get back to your home country.

Couldn't get back to the FBI necessarily. You're under arrest. You're in big trouble.

Jordan Harbinger: But they wanted company information. So I have to go get that information, right? I'll be right back on my way.

I've been zoomed to the embassy. You know, sit in there.

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah. Yeah. And then report it.

But of course you need to report it because compromising material operation only works if you allow them to continue to compromise. You're fundamentally right. Of course, report it.

If anybody's listening to this now and you've had that maid approach you or you're sleeping with a Russian prostitute. Get out from under it by reporting it to the FBI.

Jordan Harbinger: Literally get out from under it. Literally finish your business, wash your hands and call the FBI. So I didn't say that last part.

You did definitely wash your hands. Definitely wash your hands. So take a shower.

So there's a whole school, state school for supposedly that trains their sex spies. That's got to be probably should do a whole separate show on that. That's fascinating.

The honey trap stories are just irresistible and easy to sensationalize. It seems like it's probably more boring than it would be. It seems like the real story is they spend weeks or months just chatting somebody up little by little and creating an organic relationship.

Sean Wiswesser: That's the tradecraft, Jordan, is they will develop a relationship to make emotional bond in order to facilitate an intelligence approach. I've studied Soviet intelligence history. Keith Melton is a friend and colleague I've gotten to know.

He just wrote a book I reviewed for our retiree organization. Melton and Nigel West wrote the definitive study of Trotsky's assassination. Yes.

They used romantic approaches to Trotsky to get information. I'm not aware though, in any Soviet or Russian intelligence history that I'm aware of where they used a last touch, a swallow to try to kill someone. No, they'll use a swallow to get information in the case of Trotsky.

Like I said, I just got done reading that book. Yeah. They used romantic approaches to Trotsky.

He was a famous womanizer cause Stalin was one of them dead, but then they used an assassin. They use Ramon Mercader to put the ice pick in his head. The GRU and FSB don't need to use hookers or last touch key swallows that they train at their state schools.

They don't need to use them to kill. That's the part of the book by Jason Matthews. I loved his series of books, Red Sparrow, but that's the part that's sensationalized and not quite history.

Jordan Harbinger: A lot of people ask me, how do we know that Russia did this and that? And it's like, look, they use polonium-212, they use ricin, they use which are these very rare poisons. And people are confused about this.

They say, well, why would they use that when they could just use something like cyanide, whatever, some quieter death that would offer far better plausible deniability. And it seems like they don't want plausible deniability as much as they want to be able to say, we did this. And we, you know, we did this because we use something that only comes out of a reactor in suburban Moscow or some space program facility, something like that, right?

Sean Wiswesser: Ben Macintyre is a very well known writer and historian on these issues. And he points out, it's hearkening back to the tradition of SMERSH under Stalin, SMERSH was a special unit set up, Smert Shpionam, so death to all spies. Russians have a concept, the highest measure of punishment, Vysshaya Mera Nakazaniya, they call it.

The highest measure of punishment is a bullet to the back of the head. You want to betray the state? We're going to find you.

We're going to kill you. Bullet to the back of the head. Or the famous story of who knows if it's ultimately true or not, but it's taught at the academies that the first GRU spy to help the United States, Popov, in the 1950s, the story is he was thrown into a furnace alive.

I had Russian defectors tell me. They still talk about that at the academies, that happened. That's the ultimate price you pay for treason.

So it's that intimidation, Jordan, to your point, you use polonium, you use Novichok, so that afterwards everybody knows it was Russian intelligence. Putin wants that. He wants that highest form of intimidation and coercion.

Don't you ever consider betraying the state because we'll track you down, find you and kill you horribly. That's what they want.

Jordan Harbinger: We don't do the same thing, right? Like Sergei Skripal, who they tried to kill in the UK, he was already swapped, right? Putin's was like, no, I still want him dead.

It's like, wait a minute. So they swap them. It's like, we don't go after their people after that, which is, I don't know, probably we're not supposed to do that, but you mentioned deterrence.

It's hardly deterrence at that point.

Sean Wiswesser: We went to extraordinary lengths with that swap to show professionalism to the Russians. We actually tried specifically not to embarrass them. We were very professional in how we conducted the swap.

We treated their children. Remember those illegals in the US had children. Some of them were very small children.

The FBI went to extraordinary lengths to show a human side to us as intelligence services. Took care of those kids, made sure they were watched out for. And so we were professionals.

And part of the unwritten agreement was to leave the families alone. Okay, we did the swap now. Can we just agree?

Because the Russians were concerned, hey, these kids, they have very complicated lives. Two of those kids, by the way, successfully petitioned. They had all infiltrated through, most of them illegals had infiltrated through Canada.

Story for another show another day using what are called dead double legends.

Jordan Harbinger: That's where they take a dead baby's identity and become that person and just say that they're not dead. Yeah.

Sean Wiswesser: Yep. Two of those kids petitioned the Canadian government successfully brought legal cases and they got their Canadian citizenship back that was removed from them. So we honored our commitments in the West.

We said, we're not going to go after your kids. And what do the Russians do? They go to try to kill Skripal and his daughter with a chemical agent.

There's no agreements with Russian intelligence. These are killers. These are thugs, Jordan.

And they've done it over and over.

Jordan Harbinger: I remember the guys who did it, they were interviewed. We caught you on camera. We've got your travel records, passport data everywhere.

And then they said something like, Oh, we've wanted to see largest steeple from church in Western hemisphere.

Sean Wiswesser: Famous cathedral in Salisbury. They were thumbing their nose at the world, Jordan. That was their way to get on TV to troll the world and say, Hey, you know what?

Our middle finger to the whole world. Yeah, it was us. What are you going to do about it?

And what did we do about it? We didn't do much of anything.

Jordan Harbinger: Exactly. We didn't do anything about it. You offer two possible explanations for why Russian assassins keep leaving such obvious trails.

One is incompetence. Two is that maybe the hidden hand is supposed to remain partially visible. How do you distinguish between a botched covert action where they're just slobs and morons versus a theatrical warning that was never intended to stay fully covert and hidden?

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah. So here's how I break it down, Jordan. I'm a trade craft expert.

I've always been fascinated, but so I broke down those cases. Look at how they conducted themselves in the UK. Jordan, they were blissfully unaware of what we call ubiquitous technical surveillance.

They weren't looking for cameras. They weren't doing anything to mask their travel. That's just poor intelligence tradecraft.

Even though ironically they live in a surveillance society, Russian intelligence officers increasingly nowadays are not trained up to the standards to deal with that level of surveillance, so you see those two officers when they were traveling through the UK in 2018 went right from the airport to Salisbury on the trains, didn't make any effort to sort of obfuscate their travel, which they could have done in a number of different ways.

And then when they were casing out the actual hit on Skripal and his daughter, again, very poorly done, not paying attention to where the, the public cameras were all over the town. They were picked up on them. And so I just call that poor tradecraft.

That's just incompetence. Now, the larger point of using, of course, Novichok that I do believe is a state warning and indication. Hey, the highest measure of punishment.

Remember what we call it folks highest measure of punishment is in play. And that's how we killed him. They thought they would be successful.

Of course, tragically, a British citizen, Dawn Sturgess died as well because they had a perfume bottle they used the toxin. They discarded it callously and a British citizen picked it up and tragically she died as well.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I think her boyfriend found it. They were homeless.

Her boyfriend found it said, Oh my God, a full bottle of perfume. I'm going to give this to my girlfriend. She sprayed it on her and then she died.

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah. Give it to her as a present. Tragically she died.

It's sad.

Jordan Harbinger: Really horrible. Why doesn't the U S track these guys until they're 60 years old and kill them in Uzbekistan when they go on a vacation to send a counter message? Why don't we do stuff like this?

Sean Wiswesser: Well, here's the thing, Jordan, you know, I would never condone murder of any kind. That's not why I joined CIA. That's not the CIA would be a part.

Jordan Harbinger: Eh, I'm not that sensitive, but you're a better person than me. We get it.

Sean Wiswesser: Here's what I do want to say. There's got to be repercussions for our officers being targeted with AHI. I believe they were targeted.

I believe the Russians are doing this. There has to be repercussions. They have to understand during the Cold War, we had an understanding with the KGB and GRU.

We don't target each other's officers. We don't want this to get out of hand. They always targeted their dissidents.

That's why what's happening with, unfortunately with Navalny and Skripal, Litvinenko dissidents and defectors have always been, unfortunately on the Kremlin's kill list. I wrote a column about that about a half a year ago, calling it that. But targeting each other's intelligence officers, targeting the CEO of Rheinmetall in Germany.

Jordan, this is unprecedented. They're unhinged now. There's just no norms and boundaries.

And part of it is they don't believe there's any reaction from the West. I was on Jack Murphy's podcast. He's a former Ranger.

He said, heads need to roll. Literally, you're going to attack our people. We're going to hit back.

We have the best special operations capabilities in the world. I don't condone murder. Let's kidnap some of these bastards when they're traveling abroad, because they do travel.

Render them to justice like we did terrorists. Render them to justice in the West.

Jordan Harbinger: Black bag, detour through Spain, show up in Washington DC with wide-eyed surprise and realize that all that evidence that you didn't look for because you didn't care because you never thought you were going to be in front of a judge is now sitting right in front of you all laid out nice and neat. You're going to die in a super max.

Sean Wiswesser: Like, oops, now that's deterrence. My views are mine alone, not those of the US government, but absolutely there needs to be repercussions. They need to be sleeping very uncomfortably worried.

Look at what the Ukrainians are doing. God bless the Ukrainians. They're facing atrocities carried out by Russian intelligence and their military and they're hitting back and they're killing Russian generals.

You know, they're targeting them.

Jordan Harbinger: They're in a war. I read recently on Instagram where I guess this guy, he'd been some kind of officer doing something in Ukraine. He came back to Russia.

He basically retired, but now he was in recruiting and he was jogging. And there's footage of a guy jogging right behind him, comes up. She puts a few bullets in his head, jogs away, gets in a car and ends up back in Ukraine.

And they were outraged. He's retired. Oh, well, he did plenty of things while he wasn't retired.

And he's still recruiting for the war, for the invaders. So he's not an innocent party. He just happened to be out for a jog.

Everybody who's jogging, who's responsible for this kind of stuff should be looking over their shoulder on their morning jog. That's what they should be doing.

Sean Wiswesser: They're at war and the Ukrainians are fighting for their very existence and their lives. And the Russians have, what have the Russians not done in Ukraine? Targeted civilians, targeted maternity wards, targeted children.

Thousands of children have died. 20,000 Ukrainian children were abducted into Russia. So they're in a fighting, no kidding, kinetic war.

We are not as societies. So again, I don't condone murder of any kind, but there needs to be repercussions against the intelligence services in Russia. And so far we haven't done that, Jordan, unfortunately.

Jordan Harbinger: Putin benefits when we think, oh, his agents are everywhere. It seems like over-attributing every suspicious accident to Moscow doing something, that's almost like a Russian influence operation of its own because we end up advertising their omnipotence that they don't actually possess. Israel, for example, benefits from something similar to this.

I'm not comparing Israel to any of these countries, right? But if you look online, people will see, I don't know, a bad weather event in some Middle Eastern country, and they'll be like, how could the Jews do this? And the Mossad's sitting there going, oh geez, we might as well capitalize on this, right?

It's, oh, there's bad weather and your boat sank? How could Israel do this? And it's like, we might as well start taking credit for some of this stuff.

They're going to blame us for everything anyways. We might as well pretend like we're everywhere.

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah, no, Russian intelligence is fallible. They make mistakes. They're fallible.

They make mistakes. They're incompetent at times. But again, I'll return to what I said earlier.

They unfortunately are reconstituted with more resources, money, authority from the Russian state and from Vladimir Putin himself. I'll give an example from Ukraine. GRU Spetsnaz Brigade, some of the most elite in their military community, the equivalent of Navy SEAL teams, and again, Delta Force in their system.

They were wiped out in the first year of the war. They were used on the front lines to plug gaps where the conscript troops and the other Russian units weren't holding their weight. And so those GR units took 60, 70% casualties, Jordan.

They were wiped out, decimated, not combat effective. Within a year or so, reconstituted completely, given new equipment, given the newest, best recruits that were eligible out of the Russian youth, and they go right back into the fight. So the analogy I make is to the end of the war, World War II, the SS had become the elite of the German army because they were getting all the resources and all the equipment and all the best men that were left in Germany.

That's what's happened in Russia. The intelligence services get what they want. They get paid first.

They get their needs met first. And what do you have when that happens? You have Prigozhin's mutiny.

Jordan Harbinger: His guys weren't getting ammunition. The Wagner guys weren't getting ammunition. So he drove to Moscow.

People remember that.

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah, 2023, his men were dying at the front and he, and that's what he marched on Moscow for. Not because he ever thought he could overturn Putin, but he wanted Shoigu Gerasimov, as he famously shouted in a Russian TV, the head of the, the minister of defense and the head of the general staff, he wanted accountability. But the GRU, Russian intelligence, the elite units, they get theirs first.

They get taken care of. That's why, by the way, Putin is not formal, but unfortunately, Jordan, because the FSB, Rosgvardiya, the Russian national guard of about 300,000 strong. Prigozhin was not going to take them on.

He knew it. That's why he stopped before he got to Moscow. He had no chance.

Jordan Harbinger: He drove all the way up there and then decided to maybe turn around. And then he, yeah, he's dead now. His plane fell out of the sky months later.

Exactly. So the paradox of authoritarian intelligence here, almost unlimited collection power combined with a decreasing ability to even tell the leader what everything means. 'Cause you might end up falling out of a window in Ukraine, Russia's opening plan failed, but it seems like, I wonder how the SVR FSB GRU, how they've adapted.

Are they more dangerous now than they were in February, 2022, before they invaded Ukraine?

Sean Wiswesser: Absolutely. Jordan, you stole my thunder a bit. Great question.

They are absolutely, they've adapted the first two years of the war. I wrote quite a bit on the failure of Russian air power coming out of Air War College, where I got my master's. That was a story early in the war, Russian air power failure, Russian military failure, the failure of their intelligence services, prognosticating a quick victory.

They had it all wrong. The last two years have been about adaptation of all of them, Russian military, standing up unmanned systems, troops, an entire new wing to their military, Putin just appointed a new commander to those troops this week. The Russians are ahead of us in NATO when it comes to electronic warfare and drone warfare.

And we know it, our military experts know it. Fortunately, the Ukrainians are ahead of the Russians too, but let me give just one example of that. The Russians have been able to adapt their economy.

They're building between one to 2 million drones this year, various types and sizes. Do you know that with all the might and capabilities of the United States, Jordan, estimates are we'd be lucky to be able to put together 150,000, 200,000 drones would be, yeah. So the Russians are building drones like crazy.

They're adapting their economy and their system to today's modern warfare. We've got a lot to learn and we could be learning it from the Ukrainians. If we were smarter about it.

They've been telling us for a long time. They're not just fighting with hands open. They have things to offer much like during Lend-Lease and World War II.

The Brits gave us radar. We got radar from the UK and during World War II, we didn't invent radar. They did.

The Brits did. They called it Chain Home. The Ukrainians have their own technologies.

They've been innovating and adapting. We should be learning from them and in turn, giving them more of the weapons they need to finish the job and finish this war.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. What do you think Western governments are still underestimating because the initial invasion of Ukraine was so badly mismanaged?

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah, I think it's that adaptation and seemingly inexhaustible ability of the Russian people to accept suffering, Jordan. We fundamentally don't get this in the West. Okay.

I give the example again, I'm a historian and a Russian Soviet historian at that. If we don't remember history, World War II, the Russians lost Soviets, all the Soviet people, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarus, they lost 25 million of their people. Okay.

United States lost about 400,000 dead in the entire war. So it's lost 25 million of their people. Most Russians lost one of their grandparents in the war.

I mentioned Putin's own family. Tragically, his mother almost died. His older brother died in the war.

Putin was born after the war. Of course, Russians know this. They remember us.

That's why Putin and the state play so heavily on the analogies to World War II. They call the Ukrainians fascists. But the other lesson we forget about the war is how the Russians were able to take seemingly inexhaustible suffering.

And not just in World War II, in World War I, Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago, famously made into the movie in the United States. The character Yevgraf, Zhivago's brother says, everybody thought the war would last only as long as the Russian peasant had boots on his feet. Three years later, the boots were entirely gone.

The Russian peasants were still fighting. That's an analogy that holds true today. Who would think that they could lose 1.5 million casualties?

And there's no uprisings in Russia. You don't see any protests. Nobody's out on the streets.

The Russians just kind of take it on the chin. They just say, ah, our great leader, he knows better. It's the propaganda machine too.

Jordan, this is hard for us to understand in the West. And this is why they remain a very formidable threat for further aggression against NATO is because their people sadly are not up in the arms against Putin. They're not rising up against him.

They're taking the suffering and they're pressing on.

Jordan Harbinger: Eventually, if he has to mobilize people in cities, it's going to be hard to ignore that your neighbor's kids are both dead.

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah. St. Petersburg and Moscow. You're right.

The villages is where he's getting the recruits from so far.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's easier when it's people in a rural village in a former Soviet republic that are getting paid to do it. And you've never even been there. It's going to be much harder when it's the kids down the street and they're coming home in boxes or not at all.

And Russia says, oh, yeah, they defected. Oh, yeah. All 70 kids from my kid's school defected to Europe and are now living there and none of their parents have heard from them.

I don't think so, buddy. The jig's eventually going to be up.

Sean Wiswesser: You're 100 percent right, Jordan. The youth of Russia are not dying from St. Petersburg and Moscow. They're dying from the villages.

And also, what else has the Russian security state done? The intelligence services and others controlling. They turned off the Internet in the big cities.

The reins of power. Yeah. Nobody knows about the deaths.

They don't know about the numbers, but also they've incentivized death. And what they pay huge compensation to the families. On the order of 50 or $100,000, they're paying now to Russian families that lose dead and paid for by oil and gas profits.

That's a very smart tactic, actually, for the Russian families. There's been good reporting that a lot of European sources are doing on it. And the Ukrainians have done talking to Russian soldiers.

What's going on? What do they hear? The families realize they say, young Ivan in our village here.

What would he amounted to? Probably not very much, but at least in death, we're living a lot better life now. We got that $50,000.

And other families hear about it. They say, well, you know, Ivan, you know, he always was a little bit slow in school. So even though he tragically died in Ukraine, at least the family gets the $50,000.

It's really dark. It's twisted. But that's the Russian state under Putin.

That's what they're doing. Here's your payout. Take the money and be glad for it.

Remember, young Ivan.

Jordan Harbinger: You wrote this partly hoping that Russian intelligence officers themselves might read it. So what would you say directly to a disillusioned Russian officer listening right now who knows the system is corrupt, knows what it's doing is wrong and is just terrified of what choosing the other side would cost?

Sean Wiswesser: Russian intelligence officers need to know is that we will value your help and cooperation with the United States or other allies if you choose to volunteer to them. The examples like Sergei Tretyakov defecting from the SVR had a great life in the United States. His daughter and his wife still do.

We value your professionalism. We can protect you. We can take care of you.

It was my great honor and privilege to work with many such cases over the years. And I always respected the Russians that were willing to take those ultimate risks for freedom and for hopefully a better Russia ahead, too. All the Russians I worked with, as I mentioned in the epilogue, Jordan, they never give up on Russia.

It's very sad. It's quite touching, actually. Many of them that I would meet and debriefed over the years and got to see later after they no longer active spies are living happily, safely in the United States.

They miss Russia. They miss its people. They miss its culture.

They miss their families. They don't regret their decision, but they always hope that maybe one day they can go back. They never give up on that hope of change one day.

And I think that's telling about there's greatness in the Russian people as well. And there's greatness in their culture, their literature, their science. It's tragic that they don't have a government worthy of its people, that they have an autocrat ruling them.

It doesn't give a damn about the Russian people. That's what's tragic. But yes, please consider helping us.

We can take care of you. We can protect you.

Jordan Harbinger: Of these Russians that you've handled and debriefed, the defectors, what do those people understand about freedom that most of us are fortunate that we never have to learn?

Sean Wiswesser: Yeah, great question. We have the benefit. We have the privilege of division, don't we?

Yeah, exactly. These defectors that I had the honor and privilege to work with and some active agents, I traveled all over the world to meet Russians that were helping us and risking their lives. It was the pinnacle of intelligence work is when one intelligence officers meeting another in order to carry out espionage.

One of the oldest professions in the world, of course, as the saying goes, these intelligence officers, they get it. They understand they're risking their own lives for the hint of freedom, for the ability, many of them, the dream was to relocate with their families to earn enough money doing these risks, taking the risks they would so they could relocate. And many of them did.

We Americans take that for granted every day, Jordan. We take those freedoms for granted. We don't have to risk our lives.

Many serve in war zones. I honor and respect those that did. I served myself in Afghanistan with CIA.

But I think those spies sometimes appreciate our freedoms even more than we do, because they're just dying to have a chance to live that life in the United States and they're willing to risk it all to get here. And some of them tragically don't make it. Of course, they were executed for what they did.

Jordan Harbinger: Where is Putin's secret war most likely to become visible next? Not to intelligence professionals, but to ordinary Americans going about their lives. Where are we going to see the information warfare, the active measures, all this stuff start to add up to something that makes the news, so to speak?

Sean Wiswesser: There's two possibilities that I worry about. Jordan, I mentioned already the Russians evolving hybrid war to attack the Baltics, another kinetic war. I think that's a real possibility.

I think that it's one that the Europeans know and they're preparing for. But I think in the United States, we need to stand by them, be ready for. Here's the more worrisome threat.

Jordan, I worry about in a cyber or an infrastructure related 9-11 that like you see the Iranians just this past week attacking our water companies. The Iranians are not as capable as the Russian intelligence services, nor the Chinese, for that matter. There's those books by Forstchen. It's about what happens if the United States was hit by an EMP weapon.

And the first book he wrote was One Second After. Everything changes. Parts of our society are literally thrown back hundreds of years.

Microchips are fried. In a similar vein, I worry about Russian intelligence or Chinese intelligence and their military saying, OK, we want to solve the Taiwan issue in order to make sure that the U.S. doesn't get in the way. We're going to attack X, whatever it is, our power systems, our water systems. And the Russians think the same way.

There are battles being waged in Putin's secret war right now, Jordan, under the waves in the seas by units like I told you, GUGI, their underwater directorate for underwater sea research, mapping all of our cables, getting ready to take them out in times of war. The Washington Post has done great reporting on the war in space right now. The Chinese and Russians both positioning kill satellites near our key systems in space so that we have no GPS. We have no ability to use our weapons when war breaks out.

These are the things that keep me awake at night, Jordan, as the next war is evolving. Are we keeping up with our enemies? Are we as prepared as they are for the next war?

Jordan Harbinger: If you're looking for another episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show to check out, here's a trailer of our interview with Jack Barsky, former KGB spy who posed as an American in a truer than life version of a Hollywood movie. This is one of our most popular episodes of the show. Jack not only dodged the FBI for decades, but also defected from the Soviet Union, secretly becoming a real American.

We'll learn how spies were recruited and trained during the Cold War and what skills Jack used to assimilate seamlessly into American culture.

Jack Barsky: I was untouchable. I was above the law. I was always bypassing customs and passport control.

So a young person that really feels good because I never liked rules.

Jordan Harbinger: How did you flip to eventually becoming full American? I know they tried to call you home. Can you take us through that?

Jack Barsky: They called me back as an emergency departure. They have done this in the past to call back an agent. And as soon as they step on Soviet soil, they are jailed or even executed.

I was stalling the Soviets. And then one day they send one of their resident agents. And he said to me, you've got to come home or else you're dead.

It was a threat. I decided I would defy them and tell them that I'm not returning. I will not betray any secrets.

And please give the money on my account to my German family. Wow.

Jordan Harbinger: And tell us how you got caught, because the story is just not complete until you, like you said, had to face your past.

Jack Barsky: I was stopped on the other side of a toll gate. It was a state trooper. Just like to check your license and registration.

And could you step out of the car? I step out of the car. Still not having a clue what was going on out of the corner of my eye.

Somebody approaching me from the back. The fellow introduced himself. He says, Joe Reilly, FBI.

And he showed me this badge. We would like to talk with you. The first question I asked, am I under arrest?

And the answer was no. Then I said, what took you so long?

Jordan Harbinger: For more from Jack Barsky, including how Jack was finally caught by the FBI and what happened after that, check out Episode 285 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Thanks to Sean Wisswesser. The book is Tradecraft Tactics and Dirty Tricks, Russian Intelligence and Putin's Secret War.

And if your hotel maid offers laundry service, emotional intimacy and a tour of the server room, maybe skip the minibar and call the FBI. Links are in the show notes, as are transcripts, advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show.

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And the show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others.

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