Inside the FBI's Hunt for a Russian Mole | Wayne Barnes
We speak with retired FBI agent Wayne Barnes about his career in counterintelligence, from undercover work with the Black Panthers and a hidden Nixon assassination plot to debriefing Cold War defectors and recruiting Soviet intelligence officers. We also dig into his book A Traitor in the FBI, the hunt for a Russian mole inside the Bureau, and the tradecraft, deception, and lucky breaks that shaped the case.
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"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"
00:00 — Start
01:16 — Debriefing Cold War Defectors
02:28 — Wayne Barnes’ Origin Story
07:13 — Penn State, Villanova, and the Road to the FBI
14:08 — Early FBI Career Before Quantico
17:39 — The Undercover Black Panther Operation
26:38 — The Compton Vetting Test
29:52 — Bill Cosby, Backstopping, and the Cover Story
31:23 — George H.W. Bush and the UN Recognition Play
35:59 — The Hidden Nixon Assassination Plot
39:22 — Debriefing Defectors and the CIA-FBI Divide
42:49 — Ion Pacepa and the Romanian Intelligence Collapse
45:33 — Courtship: CIA and FBI Working Together
48:08 — Country Music, Cover Legends, and Recruiting Soviets
53:06 — The FBI Mole Hunt Begins
59:21 — The Mission: Get a Russian to Identify the Mole
01:04:25 — Robert Hanssen, Breach, and What the Movie Missed
01:07:03 — Setting the Stage at the Santa Monica Film Festival
01:11:17 — Hollywood Help, Polly Platt, and Backstopping Ivan
01:20:03 — Staging the First Visual Contact
01:25:43 — Who “Ivan” Was and Why He Mattered
01:28:58 — The Poolside Setup That Made Contact Possible
01:35:35 — Why Cold Pitches Don’t Work
01:42:24 — What Happened After Ivan Pointed Out the Photo
01:48:38 — Brian Kelley, False Leads, and Dead Drop Maps
01:52:52 — Why the Case Almost Disappeared
01:58:23 — Robert Redford, Three Days of the Condor, and Real-World Fallout
02:06:37 — What Spy Movies Get Wrong
02:09:01 — A Traitor in the FBI and Final Thoughts
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Team House. My name is
Jack Murphy, and our guest on tonight's show is Wayne Barnes.
He is a retired career FBI agent and he is
the author of a new book called A Trader in
the FBI The Hunt for a Russian Mole. Now, I
guess a little bit of a spoiler alert. This interview
is going to dovetail very well with a past interview
we did with Eric O'Neil.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 1: But that story, as interesting as it is, Wayne brings
a totally new aspect of this mole hunt in the
FBI that I was completely unaware of. I read the
book on Kindle. The Kindle edition of it is really good,
but it's also available as paperback, and it's one of
my favorite espionage books out there, nonfiction espionage books out there,
because of the amount of detail really that Wayne was
able to get into. And also you're just a good writer.
I mean, you have a talent for it.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much.
Speaker 3: I'm really glad to be here, and I'm glad if
this is a recent read for you to have it
reach your top ten or your top five books, because
I know you've only read hundreds of it that's been
counter intelligence books, so that's a high, high standard to reach.
But yeah, I work very hard at the craft of writing.
We can talk more as we go. But I had
a niche in debriefing defectors Cold War defectors, that is
Romanian generals KGB colonel's probably total of about twenty four.
Most agents will meet one or two defectors in their career,
maybe during a counterintelligence school at Quanticod Academy. But I
had a niche in debriefing defectors. If you think holding
a straight face and a casino in Las Vegas playing
poker requires a poker face, that is nothing compared to
what you have to do with debriefing a Cage B colonel,
for instance, because they're looking for information. They're looking for
information to learn that if they decide to read defect
they don't go back and be executed. They want to
go back and have information which is positive eligence about
the West to make it so they can have a
soft landing instead of an execution. So you can't give
them anything, which is very difficult, but it's important anyway.
Speaker 2: The briefing defectors was a special deal.
Speaker 1: So Wayne, let's start at the beginning, tell us a
little bit about your upbringing in the path that that
took you towards the FBI.
Speaker 2: All right, you read this in chapter four.
Speaker 3: At Invariably, if you write a book, you get people
to read it as a beta readers that is not pros,
but to see how it flows. And invariably everyone would
come back and say, well, what led you to get
in the FBI? What was your childhood? Like, you have
to incorporate that into the book. So chapter four is
called a childhood that led to the FBI. That seems
obvious at this point. I was raised, I'd like to say,
a poor boy in Philadelphia. I have a girlfriend of
many years who's a city planner, and she says, no,
you were raised in a working class neighborhood. But she
was raised in Princeton, so she doesn't have the right
to say where I was raised. Anyway, It was primarily
a Catholic neighborhood. My elementary school was down the street,
but my neighborhood, West Oak Lane in Philadelphia and Mount Airy,
where their junior high school was, was almost all Jewish
other than the Catholic folks who went to parochial schools.
Speaker 2: Big division.
Speaker 3: In philadelphitween Catholic and public schools, and then high school
was in a place called Germantown. It was probably a
ninety black area with the high school. Because of our
feeder school neighborhoods, it made it maybe about sixty five
percent black. When I started high school, I was five
foot tall, weigh one hundred pounds, a bright, platinum blonde hair.
I was the littlest kid in the school, and so
in my school, if you weren't black, you were Jewish.
Speaker 2: If you wrent Jewish, you were me.
Speaker 3: So I understood minority status, you know, early on, but
I managed to succeed pretty well. I grew thirteen inches
in three years. So I started too small to be
on the football team. I started too small to be
the water boy for the football team, but eventually I
was on swim, gym, soccer, and track. I had a
gymnastic scholarship to the University of Iowa by the time I graduated,
but I had never been across the Mississippi. I had
never even been across the Susquehanna. So going to college
in Iowa was like Mars. So it wasn't on my
game plan, but I ended up. I love Philadelphia, the Eagles,
the Phillies and all the Philly things, but being in
where I was raised was not a good place. It
was a difficult place.
Speaker 1: But it sounds like I taught you how to talk
to people and how to manage conflict, and you know
how to how to make friends with people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was as that's also part of the book.
Speaker 3: But it was very, very significant to survive who was
a survival attack.
Speaker 2: Had I been much taller, may not have made a difference.
But my hair was so satiny.
Speaker 3: If you if you picture the baby's blanket that has
like satin on the edge, like a light blue blanket,
and it's so soft.
Speaker 2: That's what my hair was like. Was my bangs were like.
Speaker 3: And anybody passed me on the street in a hallway
where I knew them not they would pat my head
like this down on my forehead, trove me nuts.
Speaker 2: It's a little kid thing. But there's a story I
think it's in the book.
Speaker 3: But when I got to the high school, my father feared
for my life. My mother cried when she knew I
was going to Germantown. But I went in the men's room,
the boys room the first day between classes, and there
were three big black guys in the school. A fellow
named Friedman Washington about six foot four, which put him about,
I don't know, sixteen inches taller than me. And he
was known as a great grandson of a slave. And
he was a mean character. And I did my thing
at the urinal. As I was getting ready to leave,
I washed my hands on a hero fella. Say hey, like,
that's freemanly and he says, come here. So I turn
around and he says, give me a cigarette. Well, give
me smoke, like I don't have any smokes, right, and
so he said give me smoke like I really mean it.
Speaker 2: So I walked over to him. I said, if I
had to smoke, you could have it.
Speaker 3: So he sticks his finger in my pocket and I
have a box of sun made raisins.
Speaker 2: He thinks it's a box of like Lucky Strike.
Speaker 3: So I pull it out and I opened it and
I say, it's just raisins. So he puts his hand
and so I pours him in his hand and he
tasted him and he said, looks at his boy. He says, hey, raisins. Raisins.
So I said, listen, you keep these raisins I'll bring
you some more Raisins tomorrow.
Speaker 2: He says, okay, Raisins, you do that.
Speaker 3: So he became my protector and I was Raisins, and
he helped me get through school, you know, unscathed. And
a few months later there was a fight that broke
out in one of these wide hallways schools built nineteen fourteen,
so high rooms and old columns, and as I was
trying to get past it, one of the guys reached
out for me, and somebody else ran on the edge
of pace said no, no, no, he Freeman's boy. So he
saved my bake without knowing it. So that's the concept. Now,
I called recruit everybody every day and you don't know
that it's going to work. But in counterintelligence, too worked
an awful lot. But that was the principle anyway.
Speaker 1: And so you went to college in Iowa and you
had no no, no, no.
Speaker 3: I went to Penn State. I did not go to
gymnastics at Iowa. I went to Penn State, and I did.
I did some gymnastics, but I went through college in
three years. I studied very hard, I took extra credits.
I had no money, so the money I saved for
my fourth year from being a boy Scout counselor at
the Council camps.
Speaker 2: Philadelphia had a lot of boy Scouts.
Speaker 3: I saved that money up and I had enough for
four years college, but I want to graduate in three.
I took the last year's money and put it toward
tuition at law school and I went to Villanova Lodge
just outside of Philly.
Speaker 2: So that was it was a big deal.
Speaker 1: And you had some conception that you wanted to go
into law enforcement pretty early on, right.
Speaker 3: What I did not exactly, but what I did have
was an early life which gave me the straight and narrow.
Speaker 2: My parents were honest, they were decent.
Speaker 3: I mean, my father joke that if you ever went
through a stop sign, there would be a police officer
right there. That's not a reason not to go through
a stuff signed, but it tells you the mentality.
Speaker 2: But it was straight.
Speaker 3: Now, in my neighborhood, if you could escape without having
a criminal record, you were you were fortunate.
Speaker 2: There will be fights all the time.
Speaker 3: All the boys would have one of their front teeth
would be chipped like a little v and I swore
I was going to survive childhood out of chipped tooth,
which means no fights and whatever. But so that was
that was a big deal for me. I had no
idea that was going to be important for an FBI application,
not just having no criminal record, but leading this straight
and narrow.
Speaker 2: It was actually when I was in law school.
Speaker 3: I died my last year at Penn State. I had
I've been accepted at Villanova and George Washington and a
couple other places. So I talked to the dean of
men at the law school and I said, I want
to come money for tuition, but I got a I
don't know where I'm going to stay. My parents lived
in Cherry Hill, which was a long ride there. I
couldn't afford an apartment. So he sent me to the
dean of men undergraduate and he said, go see this man.
So the next Friday, I hitchhiked from Penn State down
to Philadelphia and out to Villanova and I met with
him and Joe Bevloqua, a little guy and you know
me for a while, he said, look, you're big enough,
you're strong enough. Would you like a counselorship? So I
became a dorm counselor. So for the next three years
that was room and board, which.
Speaker 2: Saved my bacon.
Speaker 3: But having that, you know, not intuition, but the inspiration
to succeed. So I was in my last year of
law school and people were coming to the school from
law firms, from the various alphabet government organizations, the sec FCC.
They all want lawyers who just graduated law school. Of course,
the top flight law firms, the white shoes law firms.
They really only wanted people what they called a law review,
the top five or ten in the class out of
one hundred and fifty. But so I didn't know what
I was going to do at that point, this be
a lawyer someplace I had never the first day I
started law school, I had never even met.
Speaker 2: A lawyer, did not know a lawyer.
Speaker 3: And most people there their fathers were lawyers, or there
were father's own businesses where they one of their sons
to go to law school to learn how to think
or learn how to organize themselves.
Speaker 2: Mine was a survival deal. So I had been at
Penn State.
Speaker 3: I was a second base in the men's glee club,
which was a wonderful experience. Hopefully the three years at
Penn State was great. But I sat Sudbi side a
guy who was became a good friend. His name was
Bill Gutteau. And in my dorm my third year of
law school, a fellow knocked on the door wearing a
business suit and he said he was with military intelligence.
Asked me if I knew Bill Gutteau, and I said,
bood beside him as the second base for a couple
of years. And they said, well, he's in the military.
He's in a military base in Turkey. And he got
into the military and I went in a language school
and learned Turkish. And he was going to move up
to be the translator for the commandant, which means he
needed a higher clearance. So he needed to get more
names and more people. So from three years before he
somehow dug into his brain and got my name. The
guy stood beside from the glee club, so he was
a good guy. Didn't spoke pot, didn't get drunk. He
be a decent fellow. And I spoke with this pill
about an hour and a half and I was wondered
why he didn't wear uniform if he was in the army,
but it was army intelligence. So an hour and a
half later he said, you know, this is the first
time I ever interviewed someone where I felt like I
was one being interviewed. He said, would you consider a
career in military intelligence? They offered me a job like
right there. I thought, gee, that's interesting, and he said, oh,
that's right. You're in law school. The place for he
was the FBI. And that was the first time you
even thought of it. I had watched that from zimbalists
in the FBI when I was younger, and the police
shows in general, but it never occurred to me to
carry a badge or have a gun. I only had
like firearms training with rifles at boy scout camps.
Speaker 2: Nothing, you know. Twenty two.
Speaker 3: So a few a couple of weeks later, someone from
the FBI Philadelphia office came to the school law school
and he had one hundred and fifty people in his class.
I guess at the time were probably six or seven women.
This was nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 2: Anyway.
Speaker 3: So he started to speak about the bureau and what
they did, why they needed lawyers, account and whatever, and
finally someone that raised the hand and they said, do
you have a visual requirement and he said, yes, we do.
It's twenty forty correctable at twenty twenty, which at which
point one hundred and forty six guies got up and
walked out of the class and the four of us
left with four of us left with good vision. So
and I was one at twenty fifteen vision at the time.
So I filled out the application and I got hired
in October. I went into the bureau.
Speaker 1: There was also like a heart requirement at FBI.
Speaker 3: Right there was was there was was like five eight
five eight and a half. It was mister Hoover's height,
so he wanted to have everybody his height or taller,
which whatever else you may say about them. Man he
got a lot of big agents who could arrest bad guys.
But later on when women came in in the seventy
three and four that timeframe, I trained many of them.
Speaker 2: I was. I did, really it was really good.
Speaker 3: I have one older brother, so I didn't have any
girls growing up with other than people I knew in
the neighborhood. But so the the idea had women in
the bureau, I knew was a good thing. And not
to sound despicable, but we had a case where there
was a tube wasn't a sewer pipe, but that size
we had to get through that tube down to here,
and it was a female agent who was about five
five when they had still turned the requirement for height off,
and that knocked a lot of women at five eight.
I mean a man to be parallel with what how
told a man would have to be like six three
or four for women five eight with percentage of how
many women that fall. But when they when they got
rid of the height requirement entirely, and this she squeezed
through this thing and got whatever we needed. And so
it was good to have a smaller person. Plus they're smart,
they trained, they know defensive tactics, they can shoot, so
those things were important anyway. So I yeah, I was
in the FBI and it was extraordinary career for twenty
nine years.
Speaker 1: I And so you go to Quantico, go to the academy.
What was your first assignment with the.
Speaker 3: FBI before you get there, I'm not My point is
not to correct you, but I want to like the
record straight. Yeah, I enter on duty in October nineteen
seventy one, so I was in until the end of
two thousand. If I've been retired twenty six years, I'm
my last birthday a couple of weeks Agar was seventy
nine years old. Every morning I do forty five minutes
of yoga stretching, I do fifty push ups, one hundred
sit ups, I do five miles and a bicycle and
every year I do a handstand.
Speaker 2: I do handstand every month.
Speaker 3: But I have a friend who takes a picture of
my handstand every birthday and I post it.
Speaker 2: People say, is that you? Is that you? Yeah, it's me.
It's anyway.
Speaker 3: So handstands are show your handstand, but handstands are a
good thing. When I do the exercise, people say, oh,
your shoulder is going to collapse. You're gonna hurt yourself,
but you know not yet. Anyway, this, uh you can
see this from there?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you set me that photo.
Speaker 3: Yeah, send that photo. Yeah, it's a handstand. There's some
place anyway. At seventy nine'm happy to do that. So
when I entered on doing the Bureau, there was no
FBI Academy. The FBI Academy was beginning to be under construction,
so our classes were in the old post office, which
became was an old post I think is now Trump
Tower or Trump something, but it's been many things in
the meantime. Was built in I think eighteen ninety six,
and it decided which costs moremony to knock it down
than to you know, remodel it, So that's what was done.
Speaker 2: But we were in the old post office. For training.
Speaker 3: We go to Quantico for a couple of weeks every
month for firearms training and some defensive tactics.
Speaker 2: But so there was no academy.
Speaker 3: The FBI Hoover building across the street from the old
Twass office was one hundred foot hole in the ground
and it was under construction. So I preceded the FBI academy.
I preceded the Hoover building, which is now it's so
old to getting rid of it, you know, Thank good,
it's not getting me because I'm old.
Speaker 2: But something like that for retirement.
Speaker 3: And also mister Hoover's alive, so he died in I
guess may have seventy two, so I was in for
about a year when he was still alive. That's a
demarcation today. But when I started, my first assignment was
in Los Angeles and the first agent's older agents I met.
They were the case agents so on Mab Barker and
Babyface Nelson, so that was their era.
Speaker 2: Now I'm a cold warrior. So people coming in new now.
Speaker 3: In fact, what makes you really feel old is we
have a retired agent's luncheons. There's organ the chapters organization
all around the country. And the agent's retiring now in
twenty twenty six. They came into the bureau like two
thousand and three, two thousand and five. I've have twenty
years in so the agent's retiring now ended on duty in.
Speaker 2: The bureau after I had already retired. That would make
you feel but I'm not.
Speaker 3: I don't feel it. I feel like I'm forty seven.
I do a lot of things that are still active.
I have five children. I do all things all the time.
I traveled around the world. I recovered stole an art
Impressionist paintings. I had signature at analysis all around the place.
But anyway, so I started in Los Angeles and that
time had to go to the first office agent. You
were in your first office for one year to the day,
and you learned the trade of the FBI, how to investigate,
arrest people, to cases, and you you know, someone teaches
are the ropes, and then when you get to a
second field office, you pretty much know what you're doing.
And you're more competent and they've changed the system now,
but that was how it was then. So I was
first office in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: So tell us this story about how you joined the
Black Panther Party.
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Speaker 5: I love gold Well, fortunately you've already heard about Germantown
and Freeman Washington.
Speaker 2: In Los Angeles.
Speaker 3: They would put you on a rotation every four months.
Speaker 2: Every three months you would.
Speaker 3: Switch squads, so you learned about bank robberies versus kidnapping
versus other other kinds of investigations for aud et cetera.
And then you moved to the next squad. So the
second squad I was on was an extremist squad. We
called them one to fifty sevens, but extremists. They had
La Rasa, which was doing some bad things. They had
the Nation of Islam under Lewis Farakhon, we're doing some
bad things. There were white hate groups of various sorts.
There's one called Youth Action where they were they had
a plan to kill President Nixon at his Western White
House in San Clementy. I was the inside guy on
that that assassination effort. But there was also the Black
Panthers and a couple of years before there had been
a shootout between the Black Panthers and the Los Angeles
Police Department and they had maybe a couple hundred shots exchanged.
No one was hit, a lot of holes in the
brick walls around them, but they had very difficult connections
with anybody involved in law enforcement. And there was a
group within the Panthers which came alive as an organizational
structure within them, and they called themselves the Nation of Nigritia,
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against their will to the United States, many who don't
know where their families had come from in Africa, but
who are in the US for generations. And we ourselves
are a nation without land. We are the nation of
Ni Grecia. And the interesting thing was there were two
major leaders of the Panthers at the time, Huey Newton,
who was in jail in northern California and Eldridge Cleaver
who had escaped to the US and was in Algeria
as wanted fugitive, but he was living in Algeria, and
all of the people in the nation in I Grecia
were Cleaver Faction people, which was also curious. So if
you remember the movie The French Connection, Gene Ackman, he's
Popeye Doyle. He's in a pretty gritty restaurant and a
table there the guys who were actually doing the drugs deal,
Frog won Frog two, Sal and his wife at that
table and you know, living it up and Gene Hackman
and his partner the later was in Jaws, I forget
his name, but his partner.
Speaker 2: They looked at the.
Speaker 3: Table and they looked and they said, that table's dirty,
Like there's something wrong with that table. Those people that
just that sixth cop sense. So all the agents in
the squad who were doing in screamers matters for years
and years, they looked at Nation of Na Grecia and
they said, it's it's something wrong here. It's the same
six cop sense. We had a number of black agents
in the office, but they were all known in the
community outreach and that sort of thing. So I went
into my supervisor, I took the case. Agent main guy
had the ticket on the case for the black Panther party.
I went into the supervisor's office and I said, you
know I can do this, And I said, I my past,
and I told my history of Germantown, even about Freeman Washington.
But growing up, I was in the track team. Track
team had a Germantown High had like one hundred and
fifty five kids on the team. There were six white
boys on the team. As a little kid, I realized
I wasn't going to run faster than anybody. But what
I did have was gymnastic muscles. The pectoral muscles are
the ones enabled to do pole vaulting. That's where you
pull yourself up on the poll and go over. So
I was a pole vaulter. On the team. So I
ended up being elected president of the student government. And
as I said before, somebody black had a vote for me,
but the track team was on my side, and the swimming
team and the soccer team. So anyway, but that's how
I got along really with everybody. So something that I'm
almost reluctant to say because of the nature of what
goes with it, but your audience would appreciate this. There
was a fellow sat two seats away from me in
my class on alphabetical basis. His name was Bob Cosby,
and he was Bill Cosby's younger brother by ten years.
So Bill would start his routines by coming to our
morning assembly session with a whole auditorium full of kids
giving out notifications and you know, news of the day
and whatever, and he would come on and the first
routines he ever had, like where the Lord is telling
Noah to build the arc and you cubits and it's
the Lord Noah and right, that all came the first
time we ever gave those presentations. Those routines were in
front of the Germantown High School morning assembly sessions. So
I knew him pretty well because that was the President's
I had to introduce him. We talked to him, but
because his younger and the fact that a lot of
his early routines it was him picking on his younger brother,
but in a very humorous way. Were about the projects.
And the Cosby family had a lot more money than
my family had. I can tell you that Bob would
come to school every day with a white dress shirt.
Speaker 2: And I had won for.
Speaker 3: Christmas and for Easter, right, so I didn't have what
they had anyway, So I knew him in that regard.
So I told my supervisor of my past, and they
looked at me carefully.
Speaker 2: They couldn't possibly believe it, even though.
Speaker 3: I had pretty platinum hair and a six to one
blond hair, blue eyed guy.
Speaker 2: So I went and I said, I can do this.
Speaker 3: So I went out to Sanfraderna Valley State University which
is now cal State Northridge, and I learned the campus.
I went to several sociology classes, you know, one hundred
easy classes for undred graduate classes.
Speaker 2: I met some of the.
Speaker 3: Professors that appeared though I was an auditor auditing the classes,
just sitting on them, knowing there was you know, taking
names or having any id that needed I went to
the cafeteria and met the people there. I learned the
streets and the whole campus. I got alias identification. I'm
Wayne Barnes. My mother's last name. My maiden name was Johnson.
And they always say your first undercover role, you have
your own first name, and you use your mother's maid
names your last name. So I became Wayne Johnson. I
had a Dots in two forty Z, the bullet shaped
car of the year. We had a new license plate
or Wayne Johnson. I got a driver's license for Wayne Johnson,
and so I drove down the Panther headquarters in South LA,
parked right in front of the building with my nice
sparkling new car, not dressed like an fbigen but in
jeans and the great College T shirt I had bought
it and washed it a few times, would faded out,
looked like I've been around for a while. So I'd
already been out of high school, college, in law school,
and had passed a new Jersey bar. And now I
was assuming the role of a graduate student at San
Feranda Valley State.
Speaker 2: So I went in.
Speaker 3: There's a big guy behind the desk, and I said,
you know, my name is Wayne Johnson.
Speaker 2: I'm doing a.
Speaker 3: Master's thesis at San Fverda Valley State. I have to
do one on an American ethnic group. I picked you guys,
what do you think? He stood up, gave me a
big toothy smile for to stay out. He said, welcome
to the Black Panthers. So I became a card carrying
blond or blue eyed white guy as a Black Panther
party member, which was exciting, but agents before I left
to go to the South LA. The last thing that
case Aaytan said is you know, if they knew what
you were, they'd choot you just as soon as look
at you. That was this party advice.
Speaker 2: Crushed.
Speaker 3: So anyway, so in the Nation Night Gresia, which I
picked as my specific topic. They didn't know why, but
that was part of it. And they would have meetings
that the High Priestess of Ni Gresia, she also lived
in the Compton area, and she would clear a dining room,
put about twenty some chairs five by six in rows
of folding chairs. People would sit there, have meetings talking
about you know, lunch for kids and trying to get
What they did was they tried to get n Gresia
recommended recommended, recognized recognized by various other Black ay the
African nations. By the time I was there and that
time span in seventy two, four Black African nations had
recognized them, and one of them, Senegal, even gave them
a couple of acres of land in case I wanted
to build an ambassy or have some official building to
be quote a nation. So what they wanted was recognition
from the UN, but they wanted to be a nation,
which would have been a unique situation nation of that land.
But there's some really as we've seen from the World Cup,
there's some really small countries that are out there, and
so they would have a lot of thousands of people
all around the country. And there was a chapter of
the Nation a Grecia, and all of the places in
the majority of black cities in the country that had
Black panther parties, they all had sections there. So I
took notes every other Tuesday night, I think it was
for a couple hours, and I would take notes like crazy,
like I was the secretary for the Nation of a Grecia,
to takeing notes and giving the records of what took
place the minutes.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, I'm writing this stuff down. So the next morning,
I can.
Speaker 3: Write a memo in the FBI what happened to the
Na Grecia thing the night before? It goes into a
file old purpose which the other they didn't know about.
So about the third meeting, the High priests came down
a hallway with two big guys behind her and a
fella beside her about twenty years old. I looked a
lot like the Nation of Ni Grecia High Priestess, and
she said, Wayne, this is my son, Rodney. He's a
student at Safronana Valley State. Like, oh shit, this could
have been the end of me, right, I mean, I
was expecting a test, but this was pretty bad. So
he asked me about my classes, you know, who I had,
professors and things, which who was vetting me? If I
had been real with what I said I was, it
would have been no problem. And I had to have
those same interests as part of my backstopping, which I did,
but at that point it was the spur of the moment.
So I turned the tables on him as quickly as
I could, and I said, who do you have?
Speaker 2: What are you have? You have sociology?
Speaker 3: So he mentioned one fellow who I'd seen around, but
then another fellow who I saw in the four hundred class,
the graduate class. And it wasn't that I disagreed with
him when he was giving the class, but I listened
to him carefully than others. And the Rodney, Oh yeah,
his son was Rodney. He mentioned this guy and I said,
oh yeah. I said, he's an old, fat, bald, white
Jewish guy, has no idea what he's talking about. And
the three faces there, four faces. They just stared at
me and their mouths were open, and I had no idea.
So I looked around and said what and he said,
we've never heard a white person to fame another white
person before, and so they don't get out very much.
That's pretty far off, but that was really the test.
So I powered around with Rodney. Two or three meetings later,
I would see him afterwards, we wake out to a
bar or someplace, and it was just all, you know,
I got the right credit cards for Bean Johnson. So
at one point a meeting a few couple months later,
he said, you know what this is all about, don't you?
And I said, they were trying to do good for
the community. We're trying to get recognized. And he said,
he said all that yes, but we want to get
recognized by the UN. If the UN recognizes US as
a nation, then we will have Eldridge Cleaver come back
to the US as our ambassador to the United Nations
for night Gretia, and he'll have dipomat a community.
Speaker 2: And he won't be arrested by the FBI. That was
the plan. So I jumped for joy with him, like
that'd be great.
Speaker 3: We're doing high fives, we're running circles like that'd be
wonderful for the organization.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I'm thinking, like I got to get out of here,
like now I know what it's all about.
Speaker 2: So I wrote it up the next morning.
Speaker 3: It became what we call a letterhead memorandum if you're
a letterhead on top a disseminable piece of paper, just
paragraphs explaining what it taken place. And it went off,
went through the Bureau, went to headquarters, went the State Department,
went to the White House, and the Bureau was very
happy with it. Not happy with that it was happening,
but happy that we had someone inside. I don't know
if they ever knew it was a white guy back
at headquarters. I don't think they assume they presume I
was black, but you know Barnes. If you see a
name with Barnes on a NBA shirt or a NFL shirt,
the guy's black, who's wearing a Barnes thing? So a
fifth all the needs that I had, even the name
would have worked. So anyway, part of my backstopping was
the Bill Cosby story, and the story with him was
that when he he had been on I Spy I
Guess was the first TV show he was on with
Robert Kolpe as a camera as a CIA guy, and
then he had he set up The Cosby Kids, which
was the cartoon TV show.
Speaker 2: Fat Albert was in my gym class.
Speaker 3: He was about three times as wide as most people,
and he could be on the offensive line, but not
the defensive line. He couldn't go forward, but it was
wide enough to stop people. Who was a fellow in
the cos because named Junior Barnes, I knew him personally.
He sat beside me gym class, and there were others.
So Cosby created the Cosby because he was literally picking
friends of his brother and there were real people modeled
after them. And at one point he said, you know,
if there was what the debate was whether we would.
Speaker 2: Have one white kid and the cosmic kids.
Speaker 3: And he said, if there was a white kid in
the cosmic kids would be modeled after you. But he
decided against it. Well, how's that for backstopping If you're
telling people in the panthers the Cosby said this, and
there's no Google, there's no Google, there's no web searching.
You know, you just have to believe it. But if
it weren't true, that Samerity to say it would be
right off the scope. So that worked well for me,
and that was how I was able to survive it.
So I sent my memo out and it went to
every place that needed to know, and I was told
that the Ambassador to the United Nations for the US
at the time was George H. W. Bush, and he
got the memo and he personally walked it down the
hallways in the building to all four of the ambassadors
for the Black African nations that had recognized Nigritia, and
he stood there as they read it. Instead of having
this reached their in box and have them read it sometime,
this as important to the US security. So he stood
there as they read it. And the especially Senegal, which
had given some land and the nation of Ni Greecia
slowly slipped away. They went through recognition and that would
be the end of the story, which is a decent
story in itself.
Speaker 2: And that was seventy two. So ten years later or.
Speaker 3: So, I was in the Washington Field Office. I was
a working counter intelligence at that point against the KGB,
the political line of the KGPR, and I was debriefing defectors.
Speaker 2: And that's a special niche I mentioned earlier.
Speaker 3: We have to have skill in writing and have to
have the stories, you know, pan out. So one of
the individuals had been a Soviet official in Morocco and
when he defected, the the agency debrief them and the
FBI debriefed them as well. So while I had him
there across the table, I guess we'd gone to lunch.
He tried to talk about other non intel things at lunchtime.
But I asked, I said, when you were in assigned
to Algeria, you know, a decade before. He said, did
he happen to come across the sky in Eldridge Cleaver?
And he said, oh, yeah, yeah, And he said, oh,
I've I've got a good story about Aldridge Cleaver. I said, well,
this is a good story for you. This will be
a great story for me. So he told the story,
and he said, Eldrich Cleaver came into one of the receptions.
They have gall of cages all the time. He said,
we know most people hate the Soviet Union, so anybody
wanted to come into our evening bashes, we'd have them.
So he came in and one night and he said.
The odd thing is with medical technology in Russia. He said,
it's not very good compared to what you have in
the US. He said, we had heard two things about him,
both that he had syphilis and then he had a leprosy.
I don't forget either, but they said, so no one
wanted to shake his hand because all the Russian diplomats
and the people catering to it, they thought if they
shook his hand it might break off as they were
talking to him, and they didn't want to have that happened.
That's Russian medical knowledge. It's in nineteen seventy two. So
he said. At one point through the evening he came
to a Soviet deficienci I want to talk to someone
in the KGB, And that would have been this fellow
who was our later to be our defector and they
met in a room in the back and he said,
I have a way of getting back to the US
without being arrested by the FBI, and what I want
is to have the KGB the Soviet Union supply me
with weapons.
Speaker 2: And his term was so I can foment revolution in America.
Speaker 3: So the Russian, he said a telex to Moscow a
couple of days later, came back and the answer was,
we will give them the weapons, but first he must
get back to the West without being arrested, and then
we'll give them weapons to foement revolution. Now a picture
this is in every major city in the country, especially
the black cities, Philip Baltimore, La, all those places that
were obvious.
Speaker 1: CIA loved that.
Speaker 3: I don't know what they did, but we got the information.
They didn't get that. I don't know how they would
have gotten it. So anyway, but at that same moment
in time, George H. W. Bush was walking down the
hallway in the UN and.
Speaker 2: The Nation n I.
Speaker 3: Greisha's recognition was withdrawn. So they didn't get their weapons.
But picture this if that operation hadn't taken place, that
undercover case. If you think the riots in Minnesota recently
and after George Floyd, even after Rodney King, picture people
with Koleshnerkov rifles in every major city in the country
wanting to p foment revolution. What would that have looked like?
And it's his own book, it's his own horror story.
But fortunately it didn't happen. Now, a number of years later,
Frank Church, the senator from I think Tennessee, had the
Church Committee, and he wanted to close the door on
the FBI having to do fewer operations. He wanted a
tighter leash. And everybody I talked to you said, if
the Church Committee had been in season when my undercover
operation taking place, they never would have allowed it. You know,
there's no probable cause. It's not your six cop instinct.
That's not enough.
Speaker 2: So it would have never existed.
Speaker 3: And I have you know, it makes me, you know,
not want to go to sleep, and I thinking what
might have happened?
Speaker 2: But it didn't happen. But that was a that was
a big deal.
Speaker 1: What was the other case that you know? I think
it's largely an un a documented assassination attempt on President Nixon.
You said there's a white extremist group that was looking
to kill the president yes.
Speaker 3: So I was a young agent. I think it was
twenty four. I think it's the youngest you can be
because I treated years in college. I was younger than
I would have been having just gotten out of law school.
The Bureau when they hire people, they want you to
be I think it's no less than twenty three or four,
but they want you to have three years three years
after college so you have some experience of life.
Speaker 2: So I managed to meet that.
Speaker 3: But fortunately I was still younger than most even out
of law school, which helped me on that particular case.
So there was a fellow who was another Fellows hitchhiking
across the country, and he was a white guy in
his late twenties, and he was a rebel.
Speaker 2: Rouser and he had a lot of personal confidence.
Speaker 3: And when he got to LA there were chapters of
his organization which were called Youth Action, which I never
heard of it before. Afterward, but it became a case
from the squad because as he was hitchhiking across the country,
he would tell people who picked him up what he
was going to do, that he had this organization where
you're going to go get I'm sure he asked him
some upfront questions to make sure that they were not
Nixon people, but like, we're going to go kill Nixon
at Saint Clementy. So he had, you know, eighty people
or so who were his followers, and their plan was
to go to Sant Clementy with weapons and when Nixon
was there. And this was the same timeframe, and interestingly enough,
one evening on a Tuesday, I would be with the
Nation night Grisia undercover as a black panther, and the
very next night I was undercover with Youth Action planning
to help kill Nixon.
Speaker 2: So it was an active first Office, I'll say that.
Speaker 3: So, as it turns out, they had an auditorium and
they were going to get themselves together, a big flag
on a on the curtains, and I was then posing
as a person who was.
Speaker 2: Not fully alert.
Speaker 3: Maybe I had a push cart with a bucket and
it was a fall spottom of the bucket where the
FBI handy talkie was talking to the people out of
the street. There were police officers and FBI there, and
we knew from what I had done undercover, what they
were planning to do, and had records of it from
others in general. But I was there on the inside
so they could hear outside was taking place. And literally
they were cheering up and it was like a soccer people.
But it was like, you know, ok, hey, everybody up,
we're going to go. And it's like you know the
coach when it's halftime and you go back out to
the field, the football field. You know, it's everybody go
and you charge and you run outside. It was just
about like that, and but everybody, the people outside in charge,
they heard it and they came in and shut the
whole thing down. And that took people away because that
was the undercover guy. I was never involved with the
rest or learning what happened, and eventually I was transferred
to my second office, which was New York, so I
lost all track of what had happened with that and
where it went.
Speaker 2: But they didn't even the witness for anything.
Speaker 3: But that was attempt toous I don't and the public
never heard about it unless I told this story. Now
how many years later, it wouldn't be known. But that
was you know, I was the right person at the
right time for the right case.
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I mean you've had some other interesting detours. I mean,
as you mentioned, you debriefed a lot of defectors and
you got brought into this joint CIA FBI counterintelligence outfit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good, good scenario. The CIA and the
FBI had never really gotten along. Well, they have offices
in the United States. They're not all just abroad nickelled
fr which is I think foreign resources, so.
Speaker 1: Off national resources.
Speaker 3: But yeah, so if a professor from Georgetown goes to
a meeting in Moscow or in China, when they come back,
well the FBI could do it. It's really the CIA's territory.
Because the essence of the concept of what was interesting
took place abroad. They'll interview someone and may have sources,
but that's really the Cis Baily way. Essentially. The CIA
at the time don't how much it's changed now. But
they saw themselves as being like the Ivy League, and
they saw the FBI is arresting thugs, bank robbers, and
they didn't think we would were the right people to
do intelligence. But it was counter intelligence once we actually
started recruiting intelligence officers. That gives the positive intelligence that
the CIA was responsible for doing, usually abroad, but in
the US.
Speaker 2: But when the FBI got.
Speaker 3: Good at recruiting people we had recruited. I worked the
Eastern Bloc country and go back on that. I Spanish
in high school, in French and college. One of those
strange people that actually remembers things that I've taught. And
they give you the Army Language Aptitude Test the ALAT
during training. So they have to base it on Romance languages.
They can't have Cyrillic or Chinese characters. It has to
be American. You know, English language and for the grammar.
So I scored well in the test. So when I
was in New York for a few months. I got
a call from people the headquarters saying, to the next
high score in the language test, you can go to Monterey,
California and learn Romanian for us. The first thing I
did was get at a map and find out where
Romania was. That was important anyway, So I went to
Monterey for nine months and Spanish, French or six month Portuguese, Hungarian, Romanian.
Romania has a lot of Slavic sounds in it, so
it makes it more difficult than the straight Romance language,
but it's Romance grammar. So after nine months I spoke Romanian.
Should come up for biscuits as Limba and now I
speak Romanian. So I was sent to a counterintelligence squad
which had the major warsaw packed the block countries Romania, Czechisava, Capol,
and Hungary, Bulgaria, and you learned some of the languages
of all those countries. You're a bus at some point
and there's a guy looks like a little guy Meastern Europe,
and you go and.
Speaker 2: Say Este and no, no, no, no, no, no, Pal
I'm less Spanol.
Speaker 3: You nappot Kievano, Hungarian, and you go through various languages
and he said, oh yeah, and he speaks Serbo, right,
gindobre pandu. So anyway, you can get his name and
number and give it to one of the guys in
the squad to go find him, which is very helpful
to speak at least.
Speaker 2: Matherings of a lot of languages. So on that squad.
Speaker 3: Uh, I, we were just successful recruiting intelligence officers. It
was that simple and compromising those intelligence services. So after
enough years of doing that, I went to work Soviet work.
I'm sorry you had a question I should have, but no,
no's been there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean it was pretty unique at that time, right,
as you mentioned, CIA and FBI didn't play well together, right.
Speaker 2: Exactly right. So when I left, Romanian work was moved
over to Russians.
Speaker 3: Actually, the general who was a two star intelligent general
in charge of the remaining intelligence service like the head
of the Kajubir the CIA, he was there Romanian intelligence chief.
His name was i Bhai Pacheppa, and General Pacheppa was
the most senior ranking defector from the Cold War. He
knew everybody, not just all the Romanian stuff, but he
knew Khrushchev and Yasser Arafat and the Castro brothers and
Mau Sedong, and he knew all the bad guys in
the world. Nikolai Shoshska was the evil president for life,
and he was with him on his cotails every place
he went. And we did not know that he would
eventually defect to the US, and no one knew that
he was defecting. But when we did debrief from years later,
what was most entertaining and with I know your mindset,
you would find this interesting. He came with Nikolai Shoshsku.
They went to Dallas, they went to see Boeing in Seattle.
They would buy Boeing airplanes. And at the airport he'd
get off the plane. This is when you're coming out
of the runway, the steps down from the plane, not
in a tunnel, from the doors, and he would go down,
bend down and tie his shoe like it was untied,
but tie his shoe. And what he would do is
pick up a pebble from the ground of the tarmac
he put in his pocket. And every place he went,
when they got off a plane, he would bend down
and as he described it, pick up a small piece
of America.
Speaker 2: So when he got back to Romania. He had a
little container that had like sixteen little pebbles from America.
If we had known that then that that was his mindset,
we could have tried to do something else with him.
But that's like halfway recruited. But he was, so that
was that was tremendous.
Speaker 3: So anyway, in debriefing General Pacheppa, he knew, like I said,
he knew all the bad guys. So he helped compromise
the entire intelligence service with his defection. And that was
when they said, you know, the CIA had a section
which resettled defecting intelligence officers. It used to be called well,
they had different names for it, but it was Alien Branch.
I think at the time they changed names. And they
had a map on the wall of Europe, Eastern Europe,
Russia and all the Eastern Bloc countries. And at one point,
when we got some defectors, they put some cross hatschmark
hash marks through Romania, and then we had more defectors,
they put more hash marks through it, and then when
Patcheppa defected, they blacked out the entire country of Romania,
so it wasn't on the map anymore. One day I
went in and someone actually cut out Romania so you
could see the green wall through the map that were
completely compromised. So we didn't have anything work on counter intelligence,
so I went to work Russians. So while I was
working Russians, having had a past of between a lot
of undercover things and now years of experience, there was
a squad that was begun in about nineteen seventy nine
or eighty early eighty and there was the meeting between
the CIA director who was Santisfield Turner, Admiral Turner, and
the CIA excuse me, the FBI director was William Webster
at the time previously a judge, and they met at
a meeting somewhere and they knew of this harsh relationship
between the Bureau and the agency, and they said, we
need to put this behind us. We have too many
people that could work well together with our combined knowledge.
So they created they they and with the administration of
the Bureau and the agency, started a single squad in
the FBI they called Courtship and it was three CIA
case officers, three FBI special agents, and we had an
off site location in Springfield, Virginia, far far away from DC,
and we had a rented space we at least cars,
so there was no connection with the intelligence community at all.
And they had the name Courtship, which actually came from
the court was from the judge and the ship was
from the admiral. They called it Courtship, and we like
to think that it showed that we were how we
were recruiting intelligence officers, you know, we were like courting them,
and that was the kind of thing with which we
had as an objective to be able to recruit people.
So they were they like to pick what they considered
the best and the brightest from all the agencies, Like
how do you pick some of it?
Speaker 2: But it's not like it's like the Academy.
Speaker 3: Awards where you can't like volunteer to get Academy award
or buy for the position. So I wasn't in the
first round, but I was in the second round and
I was I was happy to be. There was a
two year assignment. I was there for three and a
half years, and we were very successful with the efforts
we did what was all undercover work. And for you
and your audience, do you want to have an example
of working undercover activities? Besides what I mentioned with panthers
and the White extremists. Of the three officers or agents
from the different agencies, two agents were required for each case.
One would be what we called the control of the
case sag neether to be the undercover operative for the UC.
So you had the CIA and the FBI involved in
every case in one position or the other.
Speaker 2: That was good. So we learned things from them and
they learned things from us, for sure. So at one
point there was a.
Speaker 3: Case I'm not sure why Meyers picked his name was Ladimir,
but someone said he's the next case to be assigned
to courtship. Maybe he was a nice guy. There's something
that led someone to believe he should assigned to courtship.
So the question is what do we know about him,
you know, personality wise. And as we're there sitting around
our table in Springfield, Virginia business conference table, we're on
the on the horn with a surveillance squad person in
the FBI who was on the street and he said, Valdimir,
he just pulled into a spot across from the embassy
and he's sitting in his car and the window was down,
And Russians are allowed to do that. They get there,
they're time, they can only see people. They're authorized to
see that the sign in sign out all every minutes
covered You're sitting in his car listen to the radio.
So I said, well, go right now, what he's listening to?
So well, I'm thinking this could be you know, Divorgac,
you could be symphony stuff.
Speaker 2: It could be jazz. Who knew what now.
Speaker 3: I was raised in Philadelphia. I was a bandstand boy.
I was a you know, dance one of the TV shows.
I was a rock and roll kind of guy. So
as he walks down the street, he comes back and says,
he's listening to country music like Kicks one oh six,
you know country in your car. I thought, I don't
know anything about country music, like I'm a rock and roller.
So I had all of a sudden become an expert
in country music. I mean, I met the guy that's
one of my fellow agess knew a fellow managed the
country station that was involved.
Speaker 2: And I listened to music. I went to concerts, you know,
Don't You Make My Brown.
Speaker 3: Eyes Blue with Crystal Gale and all the other songs
that I would have never known or heard of. But
I had to have no more than Vladimir about country music.
Table to meet him, so we can lean on me
for knowledge that's backstopping, but it has to happen with
the case. So he was in the political section of
the embassy. There was another individual who was in the
commercial section of the embassy, which was far separated.
Speaker 2: Just like in the bureau.
Speaker 3: You can work out intelligence or you can work bank
robberies down the hallway, and you'd never connected. You know,
you make carpool to work, but your work is unconnected.
And then there was a third one who was a
military out of Shay in what they called the Soviet
Military Office of Smoke at another building in Washington farther away.
So I turned out to be the undercover agent working
against three Soviets at the same time. And to do
a thing like this, you know, the title Basin is
beautiful with the cherry blossoms in the springtime, and everybody
has pictures taken of what's going on there. So at
this point I think I have two or three. I
have three sons born every other year, and so with
my then wife, we would take pictures of us at
the Title Basin. Us and our oldest son maybe was three,
and then just my wife and my son, me and
my son and just my son, and then we'd bring
Sebastian and my other child to take catures of all
four and the pictures of juste Bastian and me just
to best me and my wife, and the same way,
so that every possible combination. So if you meet a
Russian and say I have two children, and then somebody
else says, why met an American?
Speaker 2: He had two sons? Also like how old were they?
Speaker 3: And you can't have that confusion, So you prepare years
in advance to take the right pictures at the springtime
terry blossoms, so when you meet a Russian four years later,
you have a picture to show him. And I would
never have a picture of my wife and one son
if I had two sons. Ever, so I have the
right picture of the one son for one Russian, and
then for the next Russian, it's my wife and me
and the other son, and for the third Russian it's
my wife and me and two sons. And no one
gets to write up in the report my exact family
definition because they don't know it. That's how far is
that in advanced planning. And it worked more than that,
because I end up having three sons and then two daughters,
and we did the whole thing every time. So I
had two wallets in my back pockets, one on each side.
Usually a man will have a thick wallet on one
side and his wife always complains about you wallet so fat.
Speaker 2: In half of it.
Speaker 3: It was a fold over wallet, and half of each
wallet was a different identity. Who was me Wayne Barnes.
There was another one who I think was like William
Arthur Brewster. There was another one who was Wayne t
you know, Burnside, and then there was another one with
another name. So I had three different identities, so in
each wallet there were two identities. So one day walking
down the Springfield Wall with my son, who was three
years old at the time, and I happened to see Vladimir.
They were with his son who was about the same age.
The coincidence, i'd want to bump into him, and I
saw him, and at first so I put myself in
front of him so he would see us, and oh, Wayne,
Wayne or John John, you know. So we say let's
go to the milkshakes. We sat there with milkshakes and
we talked and it was a surprise meeting. But I
was going to pay for it, so I had to
pick out the right wallet and the right identification and
signed my right name on the credit card, not Wayne something,
with John something, and then.
Speaker 2: Put them back in my pocket.
Speaker 3: So I had four identities on me at all times
in case I met someone by a chance, and I did.
Speaker 2: That's an undercover operation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you have to live your cover in so many ways,
and it is.
Speaker 2: Like you're like in a drug case.
Speaker 3: We might be deep cover for you know, weeks and
months away from home, but when you are doing it,
it is intense.
Speaker 2: So you see.
Speaker 1: Now, let's get into when you were first approached about
there being a mole in the FBI. It sounds like
this was more on the tail end of your career.
But they came to you for a very specific reason.
Who were those people that came to you? What did
they say? How did how did that transpire?
Speaker 2: Why did they come from me? Again? Why did they
come to me?
Speaker 3: Yeah, tough one. So in uh So, I worked, like
I said, eight or nine years and remain in block country.
He said, then another nine or ten in for Russians,
and I was the undercover coordinator. When I first took
the position, we had like I think seventeen agents who
had alis ID So if we made a source who
was a lobbyist or something on a Thursday and he said, Hey,
i'veens coming to my party on Saturday night, why don't
you come and meet him.
Speaker 2: You have no ID.
Speaker 3: You can't do that as an FBI agent. So I
wanted to get IDs for everybody I possibly could. So
I arranged with a Virginia DMV at seven o'clock. They
opened up early one day and I brought down fifty agents,
got the pictures taken the ELIAUS identification all to get
false ID and the same thing with credit cards. So
I made it a mass things. We'd have more people
have the ability to do undercover you know, activities. So
besides being the undercover coordinator, I had worked undercover against Remanians,
checks polls, Hungarians and several Russians. When I had come
off of the courtship, by assistant Special Agent in charge
said we're looking for someone to work for the night shift.
It's midnight to eight am shift. Guys hate it. You know,
it's like you live the life of a bat. You know,
you sleep in the daytime and you're out at night.
And he said it's tough to have anybody do it. Consistently.
So I said, you know, I have more experience in
working undercover than most people would dream of having. I said,
but there are things that are difficult to do. Said,
what I want to write is a handbook, a manual
about how to work counter intelligence undercover activities, like, for instance,
how do you pick a name, and how do you
pick a house? And how do you use a credit card?
And if you pick a house, do you rent a house?
Do you lease house to borrow a friend's house for
a night just to show you have a house. But
there are a lot of questions that if you've done it,
you can answer. But if you haven't done it, you know,
don't try it by yourself. So over the next you know,
six months, I wrote a manual about undercover activities. So
at about the same point in eighty six, I became
the security officer for the Field Office, which is another
whole story. But you can't do that in Washington Field
Office without yards and yards of experience with all the
matters that you may have to deal with as a
security officer. So in nineteen ninety, my daughter Natalia was
born because you had spina bifida, and who was unexpected
and all the doctors.
Speaker 2: Is in the Fairfax Hospital now in Nova. All the
doctors who had skills.
Speaker 3: They said, the best orthopedic surgeons in the world are
in San Diego at Children's Hospital, which was interesting to know.
And they said, you ought to get a transfer to
San Diego. So it took a couple months, but I
did get a transfer. We moved to San Diego. I
thought that was the end of my counterintelligence career. You know,
there's no embassies there, no diplomats in San Diego. There's
a lot of big military base, but you know how
many Russians were there, So I thought that was the
end of that career. So I got there in nineteen
ninety I worked counter terrorism. I did backgrounds on federal judges.
I was working healthcare for at the time. In ninety
eight and Jean McClellan, a dear friend who I worked
Russian with for years, he called me up on a
Sunday and he said, uh, hey, Mike and Dave and
I are coming out to see you on Tuesday. And
Mike was Mike Rochford and Dave was Dave Greb and
they were senior people in the intelligence line at headquarters
in Washington, and I thought, see like to see me.
I mean, everybody thought I was like a maverick. I
needed a long leash. A supervisor once said, we have
short lease agents and long lease agents. He said, you're
a lawyer. You're pulling, tugging real hard at the end
of a long leash. Every case you work. That's I
call that walking up the stream, turning over all the
rocks in the stream, trying to find new leads through
things to do different.
Speaker 2: So like working under cover as a panther, that's that's
far and away a long leash thing. So I couldn't
believe it.
Speaker 3: Why they would come out to see me, why three
of them would come, or why they couldn't talk on
a secure phone, which we had. So I met him
at the Bahia Hotel and we sat down and Mike
was in charge, and he got their right to the
business here. With his penetration of the US intelligence community,
we hope it's a CIA as opposed to the FBI,
but likely the FBI. And he said that there's a.
Speaker 2: Russian who we know has seen.
Speaker 3: In He has seen what we considered be the trader
in the FBI, the trader, the mole and that was
from other sources. We had recruited some Russians and they
knew this into this story so unequivalently. They knew the
guy was coming, had seen what we call the unsubbed
the unknown subject. So he was going to be coming
in two months to a film festival in Santa Monica.
It's the American Film Market AFM, and so that gave
us a lot of lead time. But we were able
to find out the locations and travel of people who
we suspected the Bureau suspected might know the identity of
the mole in the FBI, and this was one the
first one was actually coming to the US. Others who
they thought might know had been to place like Tokyo
in London, and they tried to do various things. They
were at warn six, but this was the first one
coming to the US. So they sat around a table
in Washington. The guy was coming. Now I had the
FBI chance to have someone, you know, try to meet
this guy. And it's really a mission impossible. I mean,
it's just that simple. There were two superpowers. The Russians
thought they were members of the best superpower, So why
would a guy want to talk to American about this stuff.
Tom Cruise's movies with Mission Impossible. He's jumping out of
airplanes and motorcycles off the cliff, but they're all physical obstacles.
This was a psychological issue, so and I saw that
as a big barrier, depending what the man's personality was.
But I had never known heard about him, so.
Speaker 2: We had to get.
Speaker 3: They The last thing they said was, we want you
to go to the festival, you know, find him, meet him,
befriend him, recruit him, and show him photos of a
dozen senior agents we suspect might be mold the FBI.
They narrowed it down to a certain extent who they thought.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know if you knew this at
the time, but if I remember from your book, there
was a defactor that showed them internal FBI memos that
the Russians had that only could have come from a
certain number of people in the.
Speaker 2: Organization, right right.
Speaker 3: I mentioned that before the defector debriefings. They were written
up in a form called a letterhead memorandum Lahm. The
internal memos would have a's a memo at the top
and would say from into the special Agent in charge
of this office to this office, and it would have
other file numbers of other things on it. They were
internal memos. They're not disseminated. The Bureau disseminates prosecutor reports
in the criminal field to the US Attorney's Office and
letterhead memorandums to all the agencies heard of in the
counterintelligence field, but nobody gets a memo. So someone had
a memo, it came from the FBI. There were no
memos in the State Department in CIA anyway. So let's
say you have six or seven documents. Let me prefaced
that by saying, almost every defector who came out, no
matter what country they came from, and I debrieve many,
they would always say, oh, we have you guys penetrated,
like to tell us during training that you know, like
they we have you guys, I mean not affected openly
and they can't hurt me, but we know we have
you guys penetrated. So when General Pacheppa, mean in charge
of Romanian intelligence, because I had to break Romanians who
had said the same thing, he came out and he said, nah,
that's bullshit. We just tell him not during training, so
they won't work for the FBI. Nice, So they really
didn't have it. So here you had a Russian who,
like all the others, said oh, we have you penetrated,
just like you learned in training. But in this situation
he had documents. So whoever the source was in US intelligence,
he didn't just want to say we've got you penetrated.
He got photocopies of documents that someone in US intelligence
had given to the Russians. He photocopied them and they
were Some of them were FBI memos, which meant someone
in the FBI was involved.
Speaker 2: So here's the theory.
Speaker 3: You have like say, six documents, and you put a
circle around this document, and they say who saw that
memo and who saw this memo and who saw this memo.
And the theory is, if you manage to figure from
the cases that were worked with the information was in
it at one point, you would have an ellipsis in
the middle where there's one person who saw all of them.
But the problem was, you're sitting at your desk at headquarters,
for instance, and you have an important memo on your
desk or detailed of some operation, and you go to
the bathroom when you went back and get some coffee,
and the guy sitting the desk beside you looks over
and he sees it. He picks it up, goes to
the photocopy machine, photocops it, puts it back on your desk,
and he goes back to his desk. His name isn't
on any piece of paper, So it meant it expanded
the number of people who could have been the bad
guy by a lot.
Speaker 2: So it made it meant it very difficult.
Speaker 3: So one of the reasons they came out to see
me was I had left Washington in nineteen ninety and
they knew that the intelligence operation of the Trader was
alive and well in nineteen ninety two and ninety three,
but I wasn't there at the time, so I wasn't
the bad guy. This harkens back to the Kim Philby
case with British intelligence. It was the five guys from
Cambridge who were recruited by the Russians. Was very liberal socialists,
gay guys from Cambridge, Kim Philby and Anthony Blounton who
were total I think of five. They ordered thardit data positions.
He well, Philby was in the military, I was in
their intelligence service. One of them was the director of
a museum. But they all knew influential people. They could
all do informational things, and it was an extraordinary compromiser
of their intelligence service.
Speaker 2: So when they learned that Philby was the one who
was in.
Speaker 3: The military, was in the intelligence service, who was working
for the Russians, they sent a cable to the US,
to the British embassy in Washington, d C. So I
think nineteen fifty to fifty one, and they said, arrest Philby.
Speaker 2: He's the bad guy.
Speaker 3: As it turns out, Philby wasn't the one who decrypted
that communication, and the next time I saw him he
was walking down the streets in gout, live in a life.
Speaker 1: So they came to you because they knew emphatically that
you could not be the mole in the FBI.
Speaker 2: You could not get now without letting my ego get
in the way.
Speaker 3: I did have a lot of experience working undercover, but
ultimately that was that was to me the last last
block to check with.
Speaker 2: And he's not the bad guy. You know, you don't.
Speaker 3: You don't want to send an FBI agent who is
the bad guy to recruit a Russian and have a
point out what this should be your own picture.
Speaker 2: That would be a bad thing. Well, I mean investigatively,
that would be brutal.
Speaker 1: That was a huge issue, as I will get to
i'm sure in a bit. But the issue that this,
the position this mole had was he was supposed to
catch spies himself, but he was the chill spy.
Speaker 2: Yeah he was. Well.
Speaker 3: So the movie Breach came out in two thousand and seven.
I think Hansen was arrested in on President Day in
two thousand and one. My operation was nineteen ninety eight,
and so we came out with an answer. What I
was asked to do was to have Ivan pointing out
a photo from the photo spread, and he did that.
As you know from the book, what I just said
was the most simple way of saying the most complicated.
Speaker 2: Operation they want you to imagine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I don't want to have too much of
a reveal for your your viewers. But it didn't take
the eight days of the conference. It took much longer
than that and was much more complicated. But all the
tools in the toolbox were used on this one, all
of them. Anything, all the stuff we had learned, all
the stuff I had made up, everything. So anyway, it
was important that it it wasn't me So when the
movie came out two thousand and seven Breach. In the movie,
Laura Lenny playing the senior person over Eric O'Neil his
real name, which is he was Flotten Ryan Leap in
the movie, he said, gee, you know who had been
placed in the office with Hanson just we could monitor him,
just so he would know, try to get his PDA
and just see what he was doing, because they believed
at that point that he was the one for sure.
So when the movie came out and that thing came
up where the clerk said to Laura Lenny, I don't
think he's a bad guy. He goes the mass every morning,
you know, he does all these other things in the bureau,
Like what does he work for the mafia? And she
said no, we paid a KGBI guy seven million dollars
for that information. And I sat there in a movie theater.
I thought, I didn't give anybody any money, Like does
that work. There's a lot of reasons we could discuss
now or later about what Russians will or will not
take by way of financial aggrandizement. If they're going to
give away secrets which could change their lives, that's psychological
and it's a little different part of the story. But
so I went I talked to my colleagues who were
involved in the case. The problem was I retired in
two thousand, so I was out of the loop. I
no longer had clearances, a no one was telling me
what went on after I left. We know that I
even pointed out a photo, and I don't know what
they did with that because I don't have privy to
that I was. I was still in San Diego, and
I had no no connection And because of the sensitivity
the case, only very few people in the bureau and
in the vertical administrative line above it, very very few people,
so I did not know what happened at that point.
Speaker 1: I'd like to take a bit to look at this,
you know, kind of your part in the case, because
I thought what made it such a great espionage story
was that it required a lot of thinking on your feet,
a lot of finesse. This was a very delicate thing,
and both in terms of the operational security around it
and also handling these different personalities that you came in
contact with. You were and your your role was also subtle.
You weren't going right up to this guy and trying
to pitch him say hey, I'm from the FBI, work
with us. You had this whole game plan where you
were kind of like setting the stage to warm things up,
to ingratiate him to you, and ultimately it wasn't going
to be you making the pitch. I mean, if you
could tell us a little bit about how that came about.
Speaker 3: Well earlier today, speaking a little out of school here,
earlier to that, I was watching one of your earlier
shows with Michelle I think Brigby and she had been
in the CIA, in the in the Middle East, and
you said the phrase a cold bump. So that is,
if you find one of your targets an embassy reception
or someplace, you kind of just bump into them cold
and you meet them.
Speaker 2: Okay, not knocking what you said or what may have
happened to her. It is a term. But but you
can't do it and make an operation work exactly what
you had said. You can't.
Speaker 3: You can't do a coum. There is such a thing,
and it depends one of your circumstances. But you know,
we have a s expression I dts f al I
do this shit for a living. You're people in the
bureau know what that is. So, and there's no one
we can go to for consoling or for assistance, especially
when I was by myself in San Diego. But there
were a few factors which were very important which began
the first few chapters of the book. We needed some
help which people inadvertently would not have known that they
could be the ones really helping us. There was a
fellow who was well known to the FBI, who was
Jack Platt, and he was in this fr He was
in the local office in Roslin, Virginia of the CIA,
and he was his nickname Codny was Cowboy, and he
had a big Budweiser tumor auto about here. And he
was a real jolly lea guy and everybody loved him.
Helped the beer with surveillance training. He did it for
the CIA and for the FBI in various areas, and
he was just well known.
Speaker 1: He was liked.
Speaker 3: And Gene McClelland one of the colleague who called me
from Washington back in the ninety eight. They were very
close because Jane was running what they called the Special
Surveillance Group SSG, which is all the people doing surveillance
which are really just like the Watch Service in London.
And they've been doing this forever. I mean they started
it up I think in nineteen seventy three or so,
and from there on they were just became very good.
And then the older they got, the more they blended
in with every age and every style and everything. So
several number of them were out at this at the
film Festival in Santa Monica, which I thought was a
great part of the book because they never did know
that we're trying to recruit a Russian who would point
out a mole in the FBI just another Russian surveillance.
They had no idea what the goal was, and they
never did until either the movie or until this came
out because it was so sensitive. So we needed help
if possible, so Jean said, Well, Jack's sister is an
Academy Award Academy member and lives in Los Angeles. And
the few things that would stand out in her background
that you would appreciate, she wrote the screenplay for Pretty Baby,
and she personally discovered Brookshields to play the role of
Pretty Baby. So she's a screenwriter. That's mostly what she
loves and does. But did the Barbara streisand movies, She
did the set design, She was nominated for Academy Were
for set design in one of those movies, the Romcom
that Barbara Streisan hadn't been in those kinds of things.
Speaker 2: So she was known in Hollywood.
Speaker 3: At one point, she'd married to Peter Bodanovitch, was a
well known director, producer of movies, and so she was.
Speaker 2: A known quantity.
Speaker 3: But she had broken all the glass ceilings because she
became a producer director. She was the epitome and she
was a tiny person. So anyway, so Jean talked to
Jack Blatt and said, you know, Wayne's working this case
with this you know, do you think your sister could
help us?
Speaker 2: So he called her and you know, would you help
the FBI with something?
Speaker 3: And she had also no idea why she knew there
was a Russian involved, but ultimately no one could have
even guessed what the reason was to meet the Russian.
Speaker 2: It was just another kind of intelligence cold war type case.
Speaker 3: So she said, I have to have to meet him
who I'm going to work with, which is smart because
she could be losing her whole career.
Speaker 2: Someone knew what she was doing. So I drove from
San Diego to.
Speaker 3: Hollywood Burbank Airport and the Carcy Warner Studio, and I
met her there her I kept step step niece, stepdaughter,
Kelly Wade was there as her assistant, and she was
about as tiny a person in height and in width
as you could possibly imagine.
Speaker 2: She was the opposite. In fact, they looked like Jack
could have eaten her and you would not have known it.
He was just just so tiny. But she was wonderful.
And I'm a fairly big guy at six one two twenty.
Speaker 3: But we got along well, and she understood the seriousness
that I was approaching this and some of my passed,
so she was willing to pitch in.
Speaker 2: So that was something I needed. I was a tool.
It was a piece of the puzzle that I saw
lining up.
Speaker 3: I also needed backstopping, and there was nowhere to go
in the Bureau to find backstopping. So my old pal,
George Ramnis, he had been the legislative assistant for a
Senator Pete de Menicci from New Mexico who was on
the Budget Committee when Reagan was president, and he was
with the White House a lot. He knew a lot
of Capitol Hill. Things later became a loveliest covering both
sides of the Aisle, but a dear friend, and he'd
helped us when I was on courtship with various backstopping
for cases that the Biera just couldn't imagine how we
would backstop certain things we were doing, and they didn't care.
But we were successful with it even though had they known,
just like Undercover Panthers, had senator at church known we
were going undercovered the Panthers, you were done crazy.
Speaker 2: So you're working.
Speaker 3: I like to describe it as walking up a stream,
splashing up a stream and turning over all the rocks
in the stream to try to make a casework.
Speaker 2: It's that simple, just up the stream as an investigative concept.
Speaker 3: So I went back to George and I said, I
have an operation coming up, and it's meeting of Russians
like we had before, but this has got to do
with the movie industry. So he helped set up a
backstopping which would be I would be a previously a
lobbyist in Washington, now a lawyer in San Diego, but
in fact I would represent Texas millionaires who would like
to invest money in a movie which could possibly show
in the theater down to the corner from where they live,
and as they said, it's just just as much gambling
as where you're drilling your next oil well, or what
the situation is with cattle next year, and that's where
they made their millions. So we set up this ostensible thing.
And George had been doing this with me for so long.
He was just so so good and helpful to the FBI.
So we set that up. But then I have to
have business cards. And back then, unlike today where you
can go online and get business card the next day
or print at your own business cards, back then you
cannot meet a Russian and pull out a napkin and
write your phone number on the back of it.
Speaker 2: You got to be professional.
Speaker 3: So as soon as we could get the cover, I
had a phone installed in my bedroom in San Diego,
had a fireplace in a marble hearth, and the phone
was there that the bureau installed. Then the answering machine,
message machine the bureau installed, and a sign on the
phone that said to my children, don't ever touch this phone.
This phone rings and they say, you know, Barnes residents
were dead, you know, so I did everything you said,
put a lock on it. But those are the kind
of things that you have to take in consideration. The
most wouldn't think about if you have a phone in
your house, who can answer it? Nobody did the message
come in, So we set up that kind of backstopping.
And I was going to go to the film festival
on a given day to get there on the first day,
but the business cards weren't ready, they weren't finished, so
I had to sit around and wait till the next
afternoon until they finally arrived. Because you had to have
the perfect business card to make it look like you
were what you said you were, and they of course
give you five hundred. So I ended up panning I
think three during the operation. So I still I had
four ninety seven cards, and you just don't hand them
out to people at the film festival, you know, because
when that phone rings residing.
Speaker 1: I loved all the chicanery that you built around it,
that you had, like other FB eye agents like in
the crowd, pitching you their ideas as if you're this
big shot financier as Ivan comes walking by to sort
of build up your legend, and then and then you
kind of concocted this situation where he saved you from
falling into the pool, and that's your introduction.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, these are the kind of things that I'm
sure someone could make up, But I couldn't make this up.
And this happened just as told. The first one was
I needed to have backstopping, and that came through Polly.
I needed backstopping on a financial basis, and that came
from George.
Speaker 2: But actually.
Speaker 3: I needed to have something else. That's where the idea
of the cold the cold bump. I could not introduce
myself to Ivan. I could not find him. I mean,
we have been following the wrong person for a day
and a half or so, and when we finally located him,
he was in the crowd and I was the other
side of the crowd looking at all the other faces,
and finally I saw him. And then we had surveillance
where he was staying, who is with, and what the circumscaners.
We needed all those things as soon as we could
because someone's going to pitch. This guy has to have
the right moment at the right time. So the process
was I know, psychologically, and I'm sure this is in
my undercover handbook, but if not, I can write more
or another. At any point, you don't want to meet
someone where a person like that the Russian has not
already seen you first.
Speaker 2: I don't want to bump into him and have it
look like a possible cold pitch, like a setup.
Speaker 3: And there's don't know, two or three thousand people at
this conference in who was then the Low's Santa Monica
Beach Hotel. Now I think it's condos, but a big,
beautiful atrium and all the rooms have been converted to
shooting movies and tables converted, and all the beautiful women,
all the want to be directors, and all those sort
of things, just the circus you'd expect to have it
of conference like this. So we set up some of
the SSG the surveillance people. Again didn't know why, but
I took him aside. And one of the agents in
the g Handah was Crab. Another one's hooker, and they're
good friends from Washington. But they were out there and
I took them aside, and I said, I need to
have I even see me, and I need to know
surreillson him as he's going through the crowd. And then
they need to step six or seven in a line
and watch people pitching their movies. I mean they're doing
it all the tables. It's a thing. That's what they do,
not just Los Angeles, but at the film festival itself.
So I said, and then when I say so, when
you give me the word, I want you guys to
start pitching me. And I remember the first one. Someone
had the idea of having a after the TV show Friends,
which was very popular then, but making it into a
movie a little different actors and whatever. And then it's
what is your pitch and how much money do you need?
Those are the two ingredients, and that means you know
what you're doing, right. So you remember from the book.
People would come up to me, they'd lie to me
right away, but how much money they have or didn't have.
Someone was saying I have two million, i'd need four
so I only need two more from you, and they
say I would come up behind him and turn him
in and say he doesn't have any money, he wants
only two million, until he's trying to get it off
from you, you know, lying and cheating and stealing. In fact,
about the same time the movie Argo came out argu
with Ben att Fleck where he's rescuing I think Americans
from the Canadian embassy in Tehran.
Speaker 2: I think that's what it was.
Speaker 3: It was just at the same time, essentially, and I'm
watching Ben Fleck where he and the two guys in Holly.
I forget the actors, old older time actors at that point,
but they were Hollywood and they knew that people were
lying to them, and they were lying to other people,
and it showed you, like the greasy undercoating of boy.
Hollywood is a really disgusting place. And I'm like, I'm
right there now. I couldn't say to my wife, that's it.
That's that's what I'm going all these days and nights,
that's what it is. I couldn't say that boy boy
was the close parallel anyway. So I had to have
him see me first. So we set it up with
the with the SSG and they got in line and
they said, okay, and I couldn't have a handy talking
somebody else had it. I couldn't have any ears, you know,
ear plugs or biggly wiggly tails coming out of my ear.
I could not be on their connection, their communications system.
So they said, oh, he's coming, He's twenty feet away,
and they started pitching. And then as they started pitching
other people part of the festival, they pitched as well.
They got in line, so I had like fifteen people
in front of me instead of the sixth I started with.
Speaker 2: So we went on did it.
Speaker 3: And then when I haven't gotten nearby and someone one
of my people start saying something a little louder, a
little more, you know, to draw attention, and so I
haven't stopped. He turned out he watched it. Of course,
my deal is I cannot have eye contact with him.
I cannot have him believe I ever saw him or
know him at all. But he has to see me
right for what I have. And this is not I mean,
I have pride in what I do, but this is
not ego thing.
Speaker 2: This is acting. I have to have the play. So
he sees me and knows that I'm there already.
Speaker 1: I'm a person's you're building his comfort level.
Speaker 3: Right, so the first time we meet, he has to
know me at least that I'm there already. And it
was successful. And then I told I thank the g's,
I think everybody else and the Hooker he was one
of the He got his handle from General Hooker in
the Civil War.
Speaker 2: He's a Civil War buff. He does the.
Speaker 3: Reenactment things and he was in the Washington Field office.
But h I said, I hope it's okay with the
g's that you know we did this, and he said,
I told him, he said, he's on my handle, but
I was in Washington was your training agent. And when
you're in a senior office will give you your handle.
He'll figure who you what you should be as your
handle on the radio. And he decided I was Captain Cosmic,
So I was either Captain coswor just the captain, and
they all knew what that was. So he said, I
told him, when you're dealing with Captain Cosmic, like expect
the unexpected, right that no one had done that before,
that kind of an operation.
Speaker 2: So that worked.
Speaker 3: Then it came for Polly, and I figured the Russian
had no idea who Polly was, and he was traveling
with an Armenian woman who was a producer in Armenia
in the Erava on their capital, and that was a
big step for them to come here.
Speaker 2: So I don't know they wouldn't know who she was.
Speaker 3: But if you've been nominated for Academy Award, if you've
done all things Polly did, you were Hollywood Royalty essentially.
So I went out and got Polly, I said, like
it's time, and so he said it the same sort
of a deal.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: A couple of days before that, when I was trying
to find we're trying to identify Ivan in the group
of people, Leah Thompson came in and she was interviewed
at one of these tables where at the bright lights
and the.
Speaker 2: Cameras and this is almost gonna be interviewed here.
Speaker 3: And this guy with a sharp blasier and too much
makeup to be not on camera, and he interviewed Leah Thompson, right,
And I saw Ivan there in the crowd looking at her.
Speaker 2: And she was known for being the mother and the
girlfriend and back to the future, and everybody there know
who she was. But did he know who she was?
Speaker 3: And if he didn't know that, he certainly wouldn't know Polly,
but he might know the movies that she had done.
But I had to make it so that she became
a known quantity. So I said the same thing. When
I went out got Poby, we came back the surveillance people,
I said, we're following her when she comes in. We
get nowhere, Ivan is exactly by the front Hrium. We
had to either pay money or get a pass to
get in. And as soon as I came in with Polly,
somebody right beside ivan. She said, look, it's poll Platt,
and then four or five brothers said, oh yeah, poll Platt,
and they started to follow her wherever she went, because
she explained to me, the American film market is not
a place where the more senior.
Speaker 2: People in the movie industry would go, right.
Speaker 3: It's a place where people come with their scripts, where
they come with their movies, where they're from abroad, and
they want to have someone buy distribution rights for the
movies they already have with they go on the can
I already made. So it's not as much what Polly
would come to. And as she explained, without being an
ego miniafual person, she said, like, I'm elevating the whole
thing here by coming to this because my kind of
people don't come to this. So that's like, you know,
that's the benefit from the FBI to the film festival.
Speaker 2: You know, have at it. That's good.
Speaker 3: So when we came through the door and the retinue
started behind her, she was like the pied piper of Hamlin,
all those people behind her, and then others who knew
who she was. But I've said in the book, unless
you knew her personally, you wouldn't have approached her. You
wouldn't take your script and like throw it in her
face and say, please read this.
Speaker 2: She was way above all that. In fact, she had
business cards, but she never needed one.
Speaker 3: If you didn't who Polly Platt was, you didn't need
her business card. You wouldn't be seeing it at all.
She was of consequence. So as he went through with
the retinue, we knew where Ivan was, and we made
sure that he saw not this, but as we went through,
and then when he was going farther down the path,
we made sure we stopped at certain spots and he
would catch up and see all the more people.
Speaker 2: And then people she did know who were more.
Speaker 3: Senior, older people at the festival that she'd known from
years and years in Hollywood, you know, four or five
decades in Hollywood. They would come over and hugger and
talk for a minute, very formal, but very very my commode,
what's that? My just friendly, just a good relationship with
people that already knew her. But all these things stood
out for Ivan, who watched whoever this lady was, and
of course I was the one there with her. You know,
she was on my arm as who worked with the crowd,
So we made sure he saw all of that. So
not only did he have to see me in advance,
I wanted him not to see who Polly was. I
want him to know that Polly would Polly is a thing,
She's a person. She's a person of consequence, and he
would have no idea that all this took place or
why we were doing it. But eventually, when I wanted
to have get close to him, she was my ticket
to do that because he knew already she was a somebody.
And I think of him sitting back in his room, thinking, boy,
this is great. This this guy whatever my name was
at the time, This guy, this guy doesn't know but
I know I saw him before, and I saw this
lady Polly, and I know she's a big thing.
Speaker 2: He doesn't know, but I know all about her.
Speaker 3: He could even home and looked her up, he could
google her, you know, and that would have been important.
But that all was that setup, just to get to
the moment so I could have Ivan be right where
I needed him and able to do some manipulation.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that's complicated, and I.
Speaker 1: Don't think we've said it explicitly maybe, but it should
point out Ivan's background. He is not some KGB kernel.
He is actually a music journalist. He's a he's a
civilian really.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and he was that wasn't music, but the film
he was not your film film he did. It was
he was a good writer and he did journalism things.
Speaker 1: And so the reason why you guys were approaching him
was because he had been in one room at one
point in time, many years prior, in a Soviet embassy
and had seen an American come in and demand to talk.
Speaker 2: To the KGB exactly.
Speaker 1: That's outsidunding. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now we had we had two Russians, specifically two Russian
intelligence officers recruited Valerie Martinev and Sergary Motorin and again
in the intelligence community. They did not know they were
both recruited by the FBI, but they were, and they
called him Eminem Motored and Martinov, and one of them,
when he was being debriefed, he told this story and
he explained that it was because it was a buzz
through the embassy because a US intelligence guy walked into
one of their establishment offices and he said what he said,
which it could only be because he's doing spy things.
I mean, you're not looking for a project for your
kid who was in high school about maps of Russia.
Speaker 2: You know, it's not the same thing.
Speaker 3: But he was there when this took place, so he
wouldn't have known his name, even though the bad guy
never gave the Russians his name. But the fact that
he saw that made him a target for us. And
it was such a unique moment. The question is if
you met someone fifteen years ago, would remember their face? Well,
if you're in that situation, in that office and someone
comes in and has that conversation, you don't forget them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, that's that's right.
Speaker 3: And plus the fact that the buzz went around in
the embassy of what happened, it was something to remember.
So it would take having a conversation with him and
taking his brain back if you could convince him to
do that. And that's what the story is. But what
I've said before not to sound too long winded, I
realized I'm long winded at this point.
Speaker 2: I apologize.
Speaker 1: No, it's great.
Speaker 3: All of that, all of that was a necessary set up,
and while this time it didn't require the pictures every
year at springtime of how many children are by the
red cherry blossoms. But that's the mentality to piece it together,
how to make the case work, so you will have
all the ammunition you can possibly have to make the
cases work.
Speaker 1: So you were really working to develop this sort of
intelligence picture around Ivan and the entire setup. And I
guess we should point out that a couple other FBI
agents did cold pitch him and he basically told them
to fuck off. It sounds like, and so you had
to reassess the entire situation and like kind of start
over again from the beginning, get him back to the
United States and try this again. And the big epiphany
I think that you had was you realized it's got
to be a woman that makes the pitch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't want to.
Speaker 3: I don't know how much you would like to reveal
in case someone wants to buy the book and have
any suspense go.
Speaker 1: Over as much as you prefer.
Speaker 3: Okay, let me go back to something which you mentioned earlier,
because you let certainly send a cat out of the
bag the moment of with all that preparation. Uh, it's
redundan to say in advance but all that advanced preparation,
I still had a meeting, and the question is.
Speaker 2: How to do that? I did. We didn't know anybody
in common.
Speaker 3: He was with a lady for Marmenia's book ar meaning
in Russian, so that was not the ticket in and
while there are other Russians at the film festival on
their own accord as from film studios in Moscow, they
were not connect with him at all.
Speaker 2: In fact, they didn't even know him at that point.
So how do you howd he meet the man? How
do you? How can you possibly do that?
Speaker 3: And uh, boy, like they said, elementary school, put your
thinking cap on, like it's got to happen somehow.
Speaker 2: So they.
Speaker 3: Her name was Anna Hit, which is an Armenian name,
but so and the surveillance people kept calling him the girlfriend,
but this was not a girlfriend. He's traveling, he's a
traveling translator and he's writing articles about her. But the
film festival, you know, he's a very business orient in
that regard. So they would go outside to the pool
almost any any moment where there wasn't some kind of
speech or something that they would be attending on a
normal basis, And they seem like they're at the pool
too much to me. But if you come, I guess
in February from Moscow, you'd like to sit outside at
Santa Monica by the pool where the sun beating down
instead of where you came from, which is like minus
twenty degrees in Moscow. So they would go to the
same table, the same place every time, right at the
edge of the pool. And this is where there's like
thirty forty tables. It's a beautiful blue pool. It's in
the in the right beside this enormously beautiful atrium building,
and the ocean is right out there and you can
see it in the beach, and it's just an exceptional spot.
And they're out there sitting behind the pool, and to
a certain extent they were talking, but as the surveillance
people reported, they're just sitting there, like why are they here?
And it was really for the woman, so she could
have made contacts, maybe have someone get her connected to
stuff in America.
Speaker 2: I didn't think that was going to happen, but at
least that's what it seemed to be.
Speaker 3: So I noticed that the edge of the pool of
the cowling for the pool was identical to what I
had at my house in Swlana Beach and just where
it's a little up at the edge and it's like bricks,
but it's round it. And I had two daughters at
the time who were like, I don't know, six and seven,
and I would play act with them. I would come
home from work and I would be still in my suit.
I'd have a suit nine millimeter forty rounds of amoal handcuffs,
and I would play by the pool as though I
was falling in. I would do this, oh that sort
of a thing, and they would always laugh. If I
was doing that with either my regular clothes and no
phones or but a bathing suit, I would fall in
with a big splash, and everybody would have a good
time other than I would just pretend.
Speaker 2: To fall in. And I had done this before. Had
I not had those games with my daughters, this case
would not have worked.
Speaker 3: This could not have happened. So they were at a
table which is right by the edge of the pool. Coincidentally,
so they had been outside, and I stood in a
corner outside in the shade looking at the sequence, at
which point I recognized what was going on with the pool.
So they got up to get in line with the
barbecue started and the spell of hamburgers and cheeseburgers, and
it was just a great smell wafting through the air.
And they got in line behind twenty or thirty people
to get their stuff. You get a starpham plate and
you have a can of soda and a hot over
or a burger and thing of potato chips, and you
walk back to your table and you sit down. And
so I got in line about ten people behind them
to get my burger and whatever. So when I got it,
I I locked my hand on it and with a
coke can over it and the potato chips so nothing
fell out. And I walked around to where I'd been before,
and then I went toward where they were by the pool,
and I'm weaving myself between these tables. They're round tables
six feet across, and place is fairly crowded. So I'm
walking between Ivan's table and the pool, and I'm balancing
on the edge. I'm kind of teeter tottering. And this
is exactly what I'd done like the day before, two
days before, with my own daughters. So I have my
hand with a styrofoam plate over the pool, and my
other hand is the left. You kind of balancing it
and hit the cowling. So I knew exactly where it
was and how to play with it. And I went
back and forth tottering and I did made the oh
like I was about.
Speaker 2: To pool in the pool.
Speaker 3: And all of a sudden, now he had a nice family,
he had twin daughters. We knew he was a good father.
I thought, this is the guy would save somebody if
he could. He wouldn't push him in the pool like
some of the KGB guys who were dogs would have done.
This guy reached out, he grabbed my arm and he
pulled me away from it because I was pretty much
unbalanced whatever, and he yanked me over and I sat
down on the table and yeah, I was wayne for this,
so I you know, I was just so relieved that
and fall in the pool and it was like a
heroic thing. And people all the tables around us, they're
giving him applause, they're clapping for him. He saved this
guy from falling in the pool. They don't know this
is part of an FBI operation, which is okay. So
so like he pointed a chair and I sat down,
and so I said, I want to thank you. He said,
your name is you know? And he said John, and
I said Wayne, And I was Wayne for this occasion, right,
And it came so quickly when I I what he
said nically, John Wayne heard it say it out loud
right away, and everybody nearby was still listening and watching
because it was such an entertaining scene. But it ringing
the name of the old Hollywood cowboy, John Wayne. It
was an amazing coincidence. Also, if his name was Ivan,
that translated in English as John. Most languages have something
like Ivan, and remaining they have Yuon or Yon and
in English ers Ian, you know Ian Fleming, but that
is all Ivan. It's based on Ivan the Terrible. It's
based upon John the Baptist, but all those of Ivan.
So anyway, so he went by John, and I call
him Ivan the book for clarity's sake. But to have
a Russian be I would say, kind enough or good
enough to make it easy for Americans to deal with him.
Instead of being called Ivan. If they could call him John,
they were feel much closer to him right away psychologically.
Speaker 2: That was good for him.
Speaker 3: So that worked, and I hadn't planned on that, but
it worked the way it did. So almost falling into
the pool. You know, it made the next piece of
the case fall together. And we sat down and talked
for you know, a long time. I learned about them,
all the stuff we wanted to do, I learned about them.
Speaker 1: So eventually the meeting, the actual meeting that the FBI
wanted to have with Ivan, did occur, and he did
point out to somebody, do you want to kind of
like tell us, kind of like the follow up, like
what happened after your part of the operation.
Speaker 3: You would mentioned something earlier about another couple of agents
that made a cold pitch. I just I wanted to
get back and address that just for a second. Psychologically,
if you want something to do, an action that they
might never do on their own or never want to do,
especially someone has any level of moral principles, you can't
pay them to do it.
Speaker 2: You can't pay them to subvert their principles.
Speaker 3: And everything showed me that he had high standards, raised
nice daughters, and had a good marriage, and seemed like
an honest and decent guy. And if you should have
a suitcase, which you say is like a million bucks, first,
it's very heavy.
Speaker 2: It's heavything.
Speaker 3: I've been involved in a number of cases, both in
the bureau and after with other investigations. If you have
a regular leather briefcase, it will only hold two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: If you have all money in one hundred dollar.
Speaker 3: Bills, that's all that fits in a suitcase briefcase two
point fifty. Someone says, I have a million dollars here
or the lion to you, Okay, it doesn't fit. If
I got a million, you better have four briefcases. Bad
guys don't know that. Bad guys are selling back stolen
paintings for instances.
Speaker 2: You know they don't know that.
Speaker 3: So if you have a suitcase has a million dollars
in it, four suitcases or four briefcases worth, and you
say to someone you know, have knowledge I'd like to have,
and I'd like to give a million dollars for it,
that's called a cold pitch. Cold pitches and insult. You
don't want to insult people, But picture it this way.
If a Russian is offered or anybody, but if Russian
is offered a million dollars for certain information, first, it's insulting.
Speaker 2: You know, you don't know me, you don't thing about me,
You haven't. I would say profiled him, but you don't
knowing about me. But worst of all is what's the
downstream from that? Say?
Speaker 3: The man says, yes, he's in Santa Monica. He's on
a visa to get here. You cannot take a suitcase
with a million dollars in it through customs and get
back to Moscow. You can't put it in a bank here.
You can't put it in a bank there. You can't
hide it under rock. You have no friends here. You
can't turn it into cashier's check. There's nothing you can
do with a million dollars in his suitcase. It sounds good,
but it's simply impossible, not possible. There was another example
of why the coal pitch wouldn't necessarily work, and that's
based upon an extraordinary case which I've mentioned in the book,
but it's worth doing the vignette. There was a great
supervisor whose name was Nick Walsh, and he was over
the KGB, the gru Squad, the Soviet military intelligence.
Speaker 2: They were really hard liners.
Speaker 3: The KGB guys somewhere soft, some are harder, but all
the military guys were really hardliners. It was their job
to be hardliners. I mean they would meet people in
the Pentagon. They want to learn stuff, but they were
just hardline people. So we wanted to have an operation,
which Nick called pitch abum a month. We consider the
military guys to be bumbs like the bum on the street,
but pitch above a month. So what happened was in
January we had sources of various individuals who knew the
military people would have lunch with them. So on like
I think the third Thursday of the month, we made
sure at least a couple of our sources we're having
lunch with some of the military people at just a
restaurant out in DC. And at one point, if the
American drinks enough beer and has enough water and convinces
the Russian have as much, somebody has to go to
the bathroom.
Speaker 2: Somebody has to pee.
Speaker 3: So you would wait until the Russian would get up
to go to the bed's room to relieve himself, and
you take an FBI agent looks like an FBI agent,
we're in a suit. He would go into the bathroom
right after him, go to the urinal right beside him.
There's only a little partition there, and he would start
to peek. Russians they're paying and he would say, Hey,
I'm an fbigin. I have a lot of money to
buy secrets. You know, can you sell me some secrets?
And we would have a briefcase for something, but he
would do we call hard pitch, which is not made
to succeed, but it's made to be a hard pitch. Well,
Russians could normally just look nonchalant about it, but the pitches.
Speaker 2: Were so hard.
Speaker 3: So like, you know, I meet you tonight, I give
you this money, like your wife would really like it,
and you know you can you know, but I only
want good secrets. I mean to the point that they
have to report when they're pitched by the Americans if
you run right. And what eventually a person like this
would do is he'd go back out to the restaurant
and not even talk to the guys having lunch with,
right out the door in his car and right back
to the embassy.
Speaker 2: And the guy had have security and say that, you know,
the Americans just pitched me.
Speaker 3: So we did that once a month on a Thursday,
And the next month we did the same thing with
a different KGB, a different GRU officer. Next month, a
different gro officer, same deal. Third Thursday of the month,
and then in September, the ninth month, we didn't pitch anybody,
but in October we did it again, and November we
did it again. In December, so we made eleven pitches
but nothing in September. So the man in charge of
counterintelligence and security for the embassy, he gets these reports
and he has eleventh and no one came into him
on the third Thursday of September to say, hey, the
FBI pitched me today.
Speaker 2: So what's going through his mind. He's going to be
a colonel in the KGB.
Speaker 3: What's going through his mind is which of my officers
is now working for the FBI that didn't report the pitch.
Speaker 2: It will drive him nuts.
Speaker 3: Now, if one of them had said yes, we would
have real quickly pitched somebody else. But the whole idea
was to screw up the Russian system and the security people,
to put a bee in their bonnet. And it's a
cold war fun and games, but that's an operation, but
it's based on the fact that if you pitch somebody
cold for.
Speaker 2: Money, it will be rejected. The whole base of the
operation was this doesn't work there, I was harassing, yeah, right,
So what happened.
Speaker 3: In Santa Monica with two agents, decent guys, they knew
them well, but they were given this assignment.
Speaker 2: To do a cold pitch with a suitcase full of money,
and like that was made to fail. But that was
the effort.
Speaker 3: But then when that didn't work, and they tried twice.
When that didn't work, then they did the fallback of
you know, the Wayne guy. So now instead of just
being the undercover guy, now I was going to be
the pitch man. So I didn't I didn't make a
lot of noise about it. But how could they think
that would have worked with any Russian? So that's that's
more of intel knowledge and how a case works and
what the psychology.
Speaker 2: Is for it.
Speaker 1: Anyway, interesting, those those types of those types of details
were what made this book so amazing. And but let's
kind of like finish up.
Speaker 2: Thank you for that, by the way, I really appreciate it. Yeah,
I'm glad.
Speaker 1: Well if you can kind of round out the robber
Hanson aspect of it, so you're part of the investigation.
Resulted in Ivan pointing to this picture saying, this is
the guy I saw come in And then what have
you learned? Since you know the subsequent years. How the
rest of the Hanson investigation panned out.
Speaker 3: First that from the day I retired, which was the
last day of two thousand December thirty first, two thousand,
I wasn't class cleared for anything. I had no one
more clearances, and I wasn't given any information. But during
the operation I did learn that he pointed out a
photo that's unequivocal.
Speaker 2: That was the goal.
Speaker 3: All this enormously complicated things took place, including getting back
him back to the US, which was an incredible story
in itself. The whole point was, as Gene McClelland, who
handles Red Pop everybody knows him as that as the
head of the SSGGIUS was like the father of all
the surveilling people. So Jean said that we were given
an assignment and we did everything they asked us for fine.
I meet him, befriend and recruit him, and show them
photos and have a point out a photo that was
our end game. Now, if the bad guy's pace wasn't there,
that wasn't on me.
Speaker 2: I believe that it was.
Speaker 3: But I don't have any idea because the photos when
they first met me in a hotel room in January
and San Diego. They showed me the photos they had,
like did I know any of these people? And they
were the ones suspected of being.
Speaker 2: The bad guy. There were some CIA, some FBI, but
of a.
Speaker 3: Certain age because this stuff happened in the eighties and nineties,
so they wouldn't be brand new people.
Speaker 2: I only knew one or two, and I told them
the ones I knew, like this guy is suspect.
Speaker 3: But after that, at various times the people who were suspected,
some were removed because they were no longer suspected, and
somewhere added to it as now this person suspected. So
I don't know who the pictures were I'd done other
than one or two I knew before that. I didn't
know who was added, who was subtracted, And I certainly
did not know who the photos were of that Ivan
had sitting.
Speaker 2: In his lap at one point, so I was out
of that. But I know that I was.
Speaker 3: Waiting for some headlines in the news from two thousand,
from the January first, two thousand and one on waiting
for some aspying the FBI, and it wasn't until President's
Day two thousand and one, which was January eighteenth. I
guess that it came out in Hanson was arrested. Now
I had every reason to believe that I was involved
with that, And if I weren't involved with that, at
the very least, I was a piece of the puzzle
of what was an enormous case which had his tentacles
all around the world. I know there were pitching people
in places like Tokyo, places like London. I mean I
was involved in one involved one in London, but there
are other places in the world. But you have to understand,
you can only make a cold pitch so many times
before you realize this isn't working right. Cold is not
the answer. So having that kind of experience helped.
Speaker 2: Me to work the case. Also, like this has to
be soft, really soft, and then psychologically I have to.
Speaker 3: Profile him. So that's where John Douglas came into it.
He wasn't with us at the time, but he invented profiling.
He started interviewing serial murderers in prison with something which
was not a lead.
Speaker 2: For the FBI in general.
Speaker 3: But he was in what they call behavioral sciences at
the time now it's Behavioral Analysis Unit BAU, and the
TV show Criminal Minds was based upon what John Douglas
and those people did.
Speaker 2: I knew several of them. It helped with other counter
intelligence cases.
Speaker 3: But John did criminal things, but we weren't doing the
same thing, but taking a hint from that, we were
doing it in counter intelligence assessing what is in a
person's personality, who's an embassy official who we could possibly
recruit a way before the Ivan case. Also, what is
it in the personality of a defense contractor, who's an employee,
maybe he's working for Boeing in the new B two
bomber wing, and what would cause him to want to
sell secrets to the Russians for money. That's a profile.
So worked in counter intelligence in those two diametric oppositions,
and essentially the answer was a crisis in their life.
We had a diplomat whose child was born at seven
and a half months by eight months, a pregnant woman,
wife of an embassy official all the block countries in
the Russians, but after back in Moscow or back in
their home country, so they weren't born in the US,
even though with the diplat father they wouldn't be quote
US citizens, but they didn't want him born here during
the any time pregnancy had to end in Moscow and
ra Pooch arrested. Whatever, so one fellows his daughter. His
son was born at seven and a half months and
the child needed heart surgery right away, and that particular
Russia knew that if his child were taken back to
Moscow he would die for sure if they couldn't possibly
do this. So we realized this, we learned what it was,
and we found exactly the situation. Doctors were very helpful
and we said, who is the best doctor in America
to pull this off? And this is very difficult, but
there's a guy and he'said a city, so he reached
out to him. He flew in for us and he
did the surgery and the kid lived. Wow, okay, so
what it's not leverage? But what does the Russian then
think of America? Like to picture all the people from
the World Cup soccer now where the scotsman coming in
in Norwegians and they're rowing and they're cheering, and they're
taking over Boston. Everybody loves them. You know, that's that's
a that's a fun fest, that's a celebration. What was
in the Russian's head when he realized that only in
America you know, he doesn't have to have an allegiance
to us. But that's the kind of thing that enables
you to pitch somebody, even soft pitch. You know, the
surgeon can say, you know, when you're here next time,
let me talk to you, and then they can have
a person like me in the room, say this is
a gentleman who was partly responsible for your son surviving today.
Speaker 2: I will tell you he's in the FBI. He means
no harm, but he's a freendom mine.
Speaker 3: That's that's kind of intelligence. Yeah, counter intelligence at his best.
So anyway, so now get back to your question. I
had no connection with it after I retired, but I
did know that the photogen pointed out they're trying to
find a way to zero in on the person whose
face was pointed out. I did not know until much
later that there was a fellow whose name was Brian Kelly,
who was a senior CIA officer at Langley, that he
had come under suspicion.
Speaker 2: I didn't know why. I wasn't part of that, and
the books of various sorts hadn't come out at that point, so.
Speaker 3: They was decided investigatively that he was the bad guy.
Speaker 2: He was the mole. It was in the CIA, but
it didn't matter. He was the mole.
Speaker 3: And I to my friends, I said, can't be. I mean,
it's just not the right pattern when the KGB would
do dead drop activities. That is, to have a person
like in the nineteen eighties, Johnny Walker worked for the Russians.
He was a naval intelligence guy, and then he had
a PI business in Richmond or someplace in Virginia, and
he was still getting secrets. He had his son who
was in the Navy and his daughter who was given
were giving his secrets to him, or that was his plan,
and he was selling them to the Russians. You know
that that kind of a person by hooker, by crook.
You know, they're stealing secrets and they're trying to get
in there. How you find out who these people are,
how you assess their personalities. Who would be a thief,
who would be a person giving away secrets. It's all
part of that profiling deal. So the idea of having
Brian Kelly be the bad guy took some investigation.
Speaker 2: And then it became much more open.
Speaker 3: And I learned that they had found the map in
his sock drawer, which they thought was a KGB map
or GRU map about where the next drop site might be.
And the problem was Brian lived in Great Falls, which
is good neighborhood north of east of Langley by the
Potomac River. Nice neighborhood, but it's also where Soviets had
done veryous dead drop activity. But he's this non person
communications over years, but he lived in that area and
he had the map which he said was his jogging trail,
you know, which he would jog, and the GRU maps
they looked very specifically in a certain way. Plus the
Russians wrote made the maps, not the Americans. And there
was always an X mark where the spot was going
to be, you know from Harrison Ford and his Indiana Jones.
X never marks the spot, you know, well, it does
mark the spot at the KG maps have the X
on him, and that's where the drop's going to be.
Speaker 2: You go to across a one lane bridge, make a
hairpin turn, pulled to the side ten.
Speaker 3: Feet in there's a stump. Put the rock right behind
the stuff that has the secrets in it. That's your
ex Well, they didn't have any extras on these maps,
and they weren't made by the Russians. But that was
one thing that seemed like evidence against him, and I
wish I had done the interview, but I wasn't around
to do the interview, so there was zero on to
somebody else. And at one point I learned that if
Evan had pointed out Brian Kelly, all would have been
right with the world for the people doing the investigation,
but they were in the wrong, and he didn't point
out Brian Kelly.
Speaker 2: So at that point I don't know.
Speaker 3: Whether they threw away the pictures or whatever happened to it,
but I wasn't part of that situation. Even within the bureau.
Was still the most tightly held case in the bureau.
I mean understanding the tightliness of the pace.
Speaker 2: At this point.
Speaker 3: The Bureau had a computer system, the Federal Information Management
Forms they call it, and all documents went in on
a digital basis. So if we had information about this
case or mafia cases or any kind of case, you
could search for the FBI computer, and he could search
to see if it was a case mounted against him
in the FBI computer. So I would meet him for
a meal or with Polly, and I type it up
at my hotel in Santa Monica that night I printed
out on the hotel printer and make sure that I
ran clean sheets through so my document was not left
on the barrel, if you will, And then go to
FedEx office and send it double wrapped to Jean McClellan
and alexandri Vige and he'd walk in in the next
morning to the office and they all read it. But
they never scanned them, never put them in the machine,
because the bad guy could have found out whatever was
taking place. So I did a Freedom of Information Act
request around twenty thirteen when I started to write this book,
and I gave them the code name I had, and
I gave them the file numbers, which I still knew,
and they came back a few months later like no record,
I don't have that.
Speaker 2: They never scanned these things in So if I didn't
write this book, this wulld be gone.
Speaker 1: So I had somewhere.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I I met a hill named Cliff Stall in the
early nineties at Quantico at a I was teaching some
classes at the FBI Academy and counter intelligence like that is.
They flew me back from San Diego to talk. I'm
happy that they did such a thing. But he he
was an astrophysicist at Berkeley, and he had he had
discovered a case which he wrote a book called The
Cuckoo's Egg and it was the bestseller at the time.
And a few years before, doing extra money at the
library at Berkeley, California, they gave him some accounts and
they said, you know, figure these accounts and just figure
where the numbers are. And he was an astrophysicist, he
could do numbers and accounts. And he found one account
it was seventy five cents off. This is when you
had telephones. You're putting in a receptacle and it's beeping,
and you're taught using computer time that sort everything, and
that was from that time in the late eighties.
Speaker 2: But it was seventy five cents off. And he said
it can't be.
Speaker 3: They said, dont worry about it's only seventy five cents.
He said, no, it can't be seventy five cents off.
I have to find out how that happened. So he
traced back through it and he found that it came
from the Red Stone Arsenal in Alabama, and he found
that someone had hacked into there and it turned out
with two East German guys working for the KGB hacked
from East Germany into the US military system, which is
what the original Internet was. And somehow when they put
their stuff in with the time, it screwed up the
numbers with how much money was being spent for time
on the computer that was seventy five cents. So he
wrote his book. He wrote his book called The Cuckoo's Egg.
That's Cliff Stall, that's coll and was he became famous,
but it was extraorday. It was the first computer hacking book.
There's people really understood about computer hacking. So he was
at Quantico also talking about his book and what happened
with the class to the class. So because he had
clearances at that point, he was allowed to stay in.
Here are some of my stories. So I told him,
you know stuff, I was undercover against the Hungarian against
the Czech intelligence guy.
Speaker 2: And he stopped me after class and he said, you have.
Speaker 3: To write a book, like I was two thirds of
the way through my career at this point, like FBI,
just don't write books that doesn't happen.
Speaker 2: And he said, you don't understand.
Speaker 3: He said, if every seventy five years the people from
the past, whether you were cavemen, or astronomers or dark ages.
People didn't write down that they saw this flame in
the sky, today, we would not know. That was Haley's comment,
And he said, it wouldn't be like they didn't write
it down, would be like.
Speaker 2: It never happened. He said.
Speaker 3: If you don't write this down, it won't be like
you didn't work this case. It would be like this
case never took place, he said. And that wasn't this case,
that was other earlier cases. He said, this is too
good not to write down.
Speaker 2: He said, you have to. So that was the inspiration
for it. So he's still a an astrophysicist.
Speaker 3: When I was in the process of getting approval by
the pre publication review people again, you might recall that
I sent it to the manuscript of in twenty sixteen,
and they have thirty to forty five days to review
a book, and usually they get back at that time.
But three years later, three years later, they wrote back
and said, no, you're laughing with me, right, So I
submitted it again with some revisions. I flew to Washington
three times from Fort Lauderdale, where I live, and argued
my case for all various reasons it should not have
been classified and Finally in the end of twenty twenty
three they approved it. So it took seven years, seven
years to get a complete publication review. And I've had
literally agency what took you so long, and said, well, hey,
talk to those people.
Speaker 2: I didn't do that.
Speaker 3: So that's how long it took to get the book reviewed.
So that gives an example of why in the nineteen
nineties I had no reason to believe I could write
a book with it whatever approve. But I had the temerity.
I had the timerity to write a book. But if
you want to write a book about your big drug
case in Detroit or a big kidnapping case in Tampa,
have at it. It was never classified. It was briefly
classified confidential what it was one going, so the bad
guys didn't know what's happening. But this one was the
most highly classified case in the bureau. To get to
the squad, which was called Gray Suit, that was the
undercover operation for the whole case, which turned out to
be the Answer case, you had to go into the
Fueld office and he went down a hallway and it
was a cipher lock, and you went through the cipher lock.
Speaker 2: Ten feet later, there's the next hallway with another door
and through that cipher lock and in there is where
Graciouet worked. And there were a dozen maximum fifteen people,
but I think a dozen or so people there every
Friday afternoon. They were all polygraphed to make sure they
hadn't given up conversation anybody else. If they had, they
would be bent from the squad. And also they would
you not be able to tell any secrets after that either.
So it was the most tightly held case in all
the FBI because it was a penetration of the FBI.
So that was tense.
Speaker 3: So when they came out to talk to me, I
didn't realize all of that how intense it was. But
so all those things go round the case. It isn't
just catching the bad guys. It's like Jesus. Yeah, the
logistics were absolutely extraordinary. Again, so I'm a long leash
agent and I'm happy they gave me the assignment.
Speaker 1: I one more question. I was talking to a friend
and he asked me, or he advised me, that I
should try to get you to tell a story you
had about Robert Redford.
Speaker 2: I'm sure was Robert Redford. Let's see, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Maybe it wasn't.
Speaker 2: I don't know some Hollywood person. Oh gosh, well I
can't think. Oh, yes, yes I know who. It wasn't
what it was? Oh you led me astray there. I'm
sorry to say.
Speaker 1: Sorry.
Speaker 2: You're my friend, now right, we can talk all right?
Speaker 3: Gosh, boy, you just ping the right bell. So I
have a dear friend for years and years. His name
is Harry Gossip, and he was a criminal supervisor in
the Washington Field Office. Now of course long retired, and
he did a lot of organization of undercover things in
the criminal field, and I was doing the coordination of
uncovered counter intelligence. Like I said, two completely different spectrums.
You're working on a bank robery squad here, you're working
Romanians over here. You guys never see each other unless
you have lunch together. You never know contact at all.
It's like a different agency almost. But I had Harry
and I had befriended each other and we were good friends.
And Harry was having a party at his house and
an in Alexandria. One night he said, you ought to
come to my party. So I came to his party
and among other twenty or thirty people there, his wife
was an assistant US attorney and she worked at Maine Justice.
She was really a phenomenal individual, passed away during the pandemic,
but she was a great lady. So between the two
of them, they knew people from far and wide, all
sorts of individuals. So you wouldn't who would meet at
Harry's party. Wasn't like the guys down the street haven't
beer together. It was a much more cosmopolitan occasion. So
at the party was this spell named Grady, I think
James Grady, and I learned that he had been the
one who wrote the book which became the movie Three
Days of the Condor, which is your Robert Redford connection.
Speaker 1: I've met him, small, I've met that author. Yeah, yeah,
good guy.
Speaker 2: That's a small tale in the end of this well.
Speaker 3: I saw him somewhere connected with all of your page,
which has voluminous information on it.
Speaker 2: But I saw him there, much older guy than what
I had seen.
Speaker 3: So Grady was at the party, and in fact he
had just written another book, writing detective type of stories.
And the cover was like a curb where there's a
evening and it's a woman's red high heeled shoe and
it's by itself in the curb, like a woman was
running away and shoe fell off, you know, a la
Cinderella or whatever.
Speaker 2: But that wasn't cover of the book.
Speaker 3: Harry had on his fireplace in a mantle and I
saw it and I thought, I got to meet this guy.
Speaker 2: So Harry introduced us.
Speaker 3: So I had a conversation with him, and when he
wrote Three Days of the Condor, as he explained it,
he didn't write that first. He was from Montana. I
think he'd never been outside the border of Montana. You
got to know how much cosmopolitan things are in Montana.
So he had never been outside in Montana, if maybe
for a short trip. But he was born and raised
and lived there, and he wanted to write a book,
and he thought of something exciting co'd write about. Obviously
turned to the CIA. I don't know if there's anybody
in CIA in Montana. But nevertheless we wrote the book,
which was Seven Days of the Seven seven Days of
the Condor, and it was the story of what happened
each success day.
Speaker 2: Robert Redford, I can't believe this. We pieced this together.
Speaker 3: Robert Redford at the same time was in Hollywood and
he was looking for a script or a story that
he could make in the movie where it would be
very inexpensive to buy the rights to the book, to
the book or wherever it came from us this book
to screenplay and screenplay the movie. So he had stacks
in when I was in polly Plats office, she had
stacks and stacks and stacks of screenplays scripts, each one
hundred and seventeen pages long, which I didn't know, but
they're in piles, and I can picture what Redford had
the piles, but he had the book. So he read
the Seven Days of the Condor and he thought, gee,
this would be really inexpensive to buy, and it looks
like an exciting story. So he ended up, you know,
buying the right show before grade even knew it. So
they had the screenplay written and they decided seven days
was too many days for a movie, so they did
Three Days of the Condor. So Robert Redford and Fade
Unaway where the lead characters in the book, and it
was very successful movie. The book then came out at
seven Days Conduit and it's sold, but it was the
movie which was successful. But here was the actual story.
So I met Grady at Hire's party and this is
it's after the movie by many years. And I said,
do you have any idea what the effect was when
the intelligence community? And I like, his brain is not
knocking him. I'm sure he's more cosmopolitan now, but his
brain was still the Montana brain. And I said, you
should know you set the US intelligence community back at
least twenty years, maybe twenty five years, in the relationship
with American citizens, because every American now saw that movie.
They think there's a special organization within the CIA that
has the goal of both getting money for themselves and
subverting US security.
Speaker 2: And you told them that this is what the CIA does.
Speaker 3: You told them that it's a building that reads all
the books that are published, try to find some conspiracy
theory in there, and then they find one, and then
people will start dying, and CIA hit group team comes
in and kills everybody who's there. That's what people believe
to say. Who set the US intelligence behind twenty twenty
five years because of your book and your thing. He
stood there like white faced. So I said, I'll tell
you one other thing. I said, a couple of years
after your book came out, there was a in the movie,
and the movie, of course came out. I said, there
was an Iranian not dissenter. What do you call them
against the Iran sim right, so who lives in the
Silver Spring, Maryland, And we had them with Russian people,
the Romanians and checks and polls when he got the
relatives out for prairaade air and the embassy make a
lot of noise to carry signs and that sort of thing.
But this guy was one of those individuals and he
was from Iran, and he lived in Silver Spring. And
one day he and the Iranian government, just like the
Russian government, they hate people like that in the US
because when you carry signs in their countries, it means
a big is like a demonstration. But out here cares
guy's got a sign on Capitol Hill. You know, give
him some money for lunch.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: It's not the same thing in America, but there makes
a big difference. So one day a guy as a
mailman comes to his door, knocks on his door and
has a you know, a letter you have to sign for.
Speaker 2: The guy opened the door and he took out his
ak forty seven.
Speaker 3: He blew the guy I think it was an Uzi
and he blew the guy away and he killed this
This spellow from Haran and the story is that was
exactly what happened in Three Days of the Condor. But
the mailman comes to the door of Faye Dunnaway's living
and Robert read for a season. He looks on and
he sees his shoes and then not the shoes a
mailman should be wearing. It's a different kind of boot
and he knows that, so he quick slams the door.
Then they have a fight, tussle and repent. I's killed
in the guy the Iranian intelligence that Savakh. They took
that directly from this man's movie in order to kill
this guy. It'silver Spring again. His face went whitely. He
had no idea. But so that's the results of seeing
intelligence things which are either real or not real, and
having a bad action with it.
Speaker 1: It's very odd to me. And this is like a
whole podcast and of itself about how fictional works are
made that claim to portray real events but they're not.
It's not really how espionage works. It's a work of fiction.
But those works of fiction sometimes actually do inspire people
in the real world and in a negative way, And
so they're mimicking the fiction thinking that it's the reality.
You know, I've heard stories even in the military, how
foreign militaries will watch American action films to get, you know,
tips for tactics, to learn how to clear rooms and things.
When it's like no Erld Schwartz and Agger in the
movie Commando is not you know, you know, a great
mentor for doing that. So it's just very interesting and
odd to me how the fiction is more real than
reality at a certain point.
Speaker 3: Well, we've learned certain things from TV and certain things
that are that are clearly wrong, right. I mean, there
was a program in the FBI called the Development of
Espionage and Counterintelligence Awareness DECCA. We would give decal lectures
about security matters to all defense contractors in whatever area
you were in the country. I gave a few dozen
myself at Langley, at military units, but defense contractors, and
invariably someone would say what books should we read to
understand more about intelligence and security? And someone would always
ask about the Born supremacy of the Born conspiracy, you know,
Jason Bourne and I said, the difficulty is if you
read a Robert Ludlum book, by the time you finish it,
you'll have less knowledge of actual intelligence matters than before
he started.
Speaker 1: The book.
Speaker 3: So he was in the Pentagon, Ludlam in his youth,
in military uniform, and he went into a room where
there was a meeting he believed was part of and
colonel of whatever coming. He starts doing a briefing or talking.
He looks around, he's loved him. He says like, who
are you and the guy says, he says, you're not
supposed to be here. So that was less than fifteen
minutes in an intelligence briefing, and that was love them,
complete and utter only contact with the US intelligence. Everything
else was made up. Everything made up entirely. I mean,
it drives my girlfriend's name of Cynthia drives her nuts.
We're watching TV. Simple happened to say? They wouldn't do that.
Say it's not that because they wouldn't, especially intelligence things like,
for instance, if you want to pitch are Russian, who's
got the most piece of valuable piece of information the
US wants to have.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we wonder about the Soviet submarines and they're running
this net. But the penetration of the FBI.
Speaker 3: If you want to that one piece of information and
you say, hey, I know, let's take a suit case
full of money and make a cold pitch that'll work,
Like ask me that question.
Speaker 2: You know, pitch Obama month. How can you do that?
You know?
Speaker 3: So even within the bureau, they're asking things that they
say on TV which was which was a hor horrible thing.
So yeah, there's a lot of stuff on TV that's
still not real and it could be bothersome to people
who don't know the actual story. I've been in a
lot of writing courses in classes and eventually someone will
call me and they're writing a book which is like
a procedural cop thing where they have never carried a badge,
they've never carried a gun, but they want to have
this thing with cops.
Speaker 2: And they say, so, how do you handcuff somebody?
Speaker 3: I'm supposed to tell them the phone how to handcuff
somebody so they can write it in the book.
Speaker 2: That's who's writing the books.
Speaker 1: And well, your book is a trader in the FBI,
The Hunt for a Russian Mole. Look, I have this,
it's up. You find it on Amazon right now, the
hard copy or the books.
Speaker 2: Wayne.
Speaker 1: Thank you for doing this interview. Like I said, I
love the book. I'll be recommending it to more people.
And is there anything any final words? That you want
to put out there before we go tonight.
Speaker 3: I'm very glad to be I'm very proud that we've
met each other somehow, and it's it's very special. I
was at the Crime Con convention in the end of
May early April that Nancy Grace started seven years ago,
like the Comic Con, but had six thousand people there,
and I ended up meeting her and she endorsed my
book on Instagram. So if people read it, I'd like
them to read it and without saying and this is
the this is the truth, this is it from my
part of it. Whatever happened after my piece of the
puzzle was over and someone said, he pointed out a
photo and that's that's my pop the cork day for
the Champagne. As Jane McClellan had said, we did everything
they asked us to do if they'd have the right
picture there. Not my fault, but what I would like
to And one of the objections that pre publication Review
had was, as they said, this is hard to say.
They interviewed Gene McLellan because he still had clearances, he
was still doing background and they didn't want to talk
to someone who didn't still have clearances. This is now
long after most people had retired, and they said, we
don't want Wayne giving the KGB a manual about how
the FBI catches spies. And he said, this is how
this is how the FBI catches spies. This is how
Wayne catches spies. And that's one of the nicest things
anybody said. So it is not to tell them, but
it's to tell young agents and advanced agents. Now, these
are the things you can do, and you just have
to have a clear mind and see what the goal is.
But you know, long leash, have a long leash, splash
up the stream, cover all the leads. It was a
great career, as you could tell. I loved every minute
of it. Sorry I'm not to now. I recover stolen
impressionist paintings. I'm a signature expert for personality and forgeries nationwide.
I John Solomon from Justin News. He asked me to
do a Hunter Biden's signature on the receipt for the
laptop in Delaware, and I did it and it was
in fact his signature. A few days later, fifty one
intelligence professionals came out and said it wasn't but it was,
and we all knew it. I did a paper on
whether Trump had signed the page in Jeffrey Epstein's fiftieth
anniversary birthday book, and in fact it was his signature,
but it was an apple qu applied to it. He
did not write that thing. So I do those kinds
of things as well. Now I testedify a lot, so
I had to reinvent myself. Time took to write the
book was enormously long, as well as the seven year
wait to get it out in public. So I'm very active.
As long as my ex wife still has half of
my FB annuity, I will work every day.
Speaker 2: You're not laughing with me. I can tell you're not
laughing with me.
Speaker 1: No, it's okay. I am also divorced. Where can people
go to find you online?
Speaker 2: Additionally, well they can do.
Speaker 3: The book is available on Amazon, like you say, for
ebook and audiobook, but Barnes and Noble has it online
as well target Simon and Schuster. My publisher is Republic
Book Publishers. I think they went through Simon and Schuster
for the actual publication. But I have a website which
is Waynebarnes Writing dot com. Wayne Barnes Writing dot com.
It has maybe five dozen essays about various things besides signatures,
just other cases that I've involved. There's also a Barnes
Hyphen Investigations Barnes hyphen Investigation, which has more cases things
I've written. Me just one last thing, and on writing.
When you tell someone that you work for the federal
government and you wrote a book, they pretty much think
you've written a book like a police report, like a
car of the color blue. And I spent a lot
of time in not just debriefing a record number of
intelligence people, but writing it up. And if I write
a poor page memo, a letter head Memoran would just
like the black panther memo. If I write it for
the a KGB colonel and Rominian generals and Hungarian whatever.
If I don't write it so by the page three,
If I write it so by page three, they're yawning
and they really aren't interested in page four, that's no good.
Speaker 2: So I started using the adjectives and adverbs.
Speaker 3: And Truman Capoti wrote the first book which we call
narrative nonfiction, that was in cold blood. He went out
the canvas Kansas, he saw the family killed in the farmhouse,
all the blood, and he wrote it like fiction.
Speaker 2: But nonfiction, so that began that genre. This is narrative nonfiction.
It happened, but it's written like it worked.
Speaker 3: So one day when I had sent one of these
four page memos to headquarters, which was a good story
from some defector, but comply a story completely within itself,
I was crossing Pennsylvania and he was coming from the
other side and he stopped me in the meetings to
He said, Wayne, Wayne, I have to talk to you.
Stop like the cars are zipping by. What do you
want And he said, I read that memo and he
mentioned the topic and he said, I got the page
four and I turned it over. He said, I wanted
more pages. And that was the first moment I realized
there may be something to this, that maybe I can.
Speaker 2: Write this to make it a book. And that was
the craft of writing. So that's how it happened.
Speaker 1: Well, we will have links down the description for the
viewers and listeners to find you to find the book.
And we really appreciate you joining us on the show tonight,
Wayne and telling us your story.
Speaker 3: Thank you very much. I hope you smiled most of
the time. I certainly did, but I'm glad to tell it.
You know, there's more. I'll be glad to come back.
But the point is, if this book had any level
of success, I have other books that I've written. I
have saga about the FBI from the beginning of my
part of it from seventy one onto the nineties, the
FBI's role during the Cold War, and how we helped.
Speaker 2: The Berlin Wall come down.
Speaker 3: That's longer, but it has too many words to be
a first book.
Speaker 2: Like Ken Follett would write.
Speaker 3: He wrote I the Needle and various spy books, and
he said, I want to write a different book, and
they said, no, no, no, you've got a great way
you're writing. We've got we'll make a lot of money.
He said, I won't writ into the book until you
publish this book. I want to write now.
Speaker 2: And his publisher, in his literation, said what's it about?
Speaker 3: And he said, well, it's about building a cathedral in
southern England in the year twelve sixty five. And they said,
no way. So he wrote it and they published was
Pillars of the Earth. It sold more books than all
of his other books combined. Then it was movies, three
part series on Netflix. It was phenomenal, but he couldn't
get that publish because it was too long. So my
other book, which is called The Dance Before the Wall,
Interplay of intelligence actions on.
Speaker 2: Our side of the Berlin Wall, it is it's the best.
I like it more than this, but it is the
story of the FBI and the Cold War. But it
was far too long for first book. So this is
the book.
Speaker 1: But when you're ready to get it out there, shoot
me an email please.
Speaker 3: All right, thank you very much for this. I really
really appreciate it. Yeah, it's been very, very wonderful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you Win and thank you everyone who joined
us tonight. We will see you guys again next week. Hey, guys,
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