In this special live recording, Brad and Michael sit down with former CIA Analyst and author David McCloskey. David offers a glimpse into his career in the CIA and shares the communication techniques he learned along the way. Tune in for a conversation on how the art of communication and storytelling can enhance your daily life—at work and at home.
Listen to the full episode using the player below, or by visiting one of the links below. If you have any questions or would like to learn more, email us at info@byrdadatto.com.
Transcript
*The below transcript has been edited for readability.
Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. Legal issues simplified through real client stories and real world experiences, creating simplicity in 3, 2, 1.
Brad: Welcome back to Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. I’m your host, Brad Adatto, my co-host, Michael Byrd. Now Michael, we have a special today.
Michael: Yes, we have another live show in Dallas, Texas at Royal Oaks Country Club. Woo-Hoo!
Brad: All right. We’re really super excited for everyone here. We got a rowdy crowd. We’ve been throwing cocktails at y’all. Hopefully that enough of you audience members have indulged in some of that, so maybe that can make us more interesting. Michael, do you think it’s working?
Michael: Not yet, but we do have a guest. There’s hope.
Brad: So we got a chance. So Michael we have this special, should we just jump right into it?
Michael: I think we need to discuss the theme, right? Oh, for the season?
Brad: Yeah. You think, well, we have a guest here who’s a highly trained professional CIA analysts, and we’re going to ask him to discuss just one season of business.
Michael: [00:01:00] No, good point, but we’ll talk about the seasons of a business just to remind everybody what we’re doing this year then we’ll move on.
Brad: Context.
Michael: Got it. Yes, context. Yes. So this year we’ve been camping out on the seasons of a business, and each season has been a podcast season. So we started out the year with the building season- starting a business, and then we moved to the operating season- running a business. We are currently in the middle of scaling season – growing a business, and then we will end in the buying and selling season.
Brad: That’s awesome. Now, before we bring on our guests, can I ask you like a classified information about my background? But you can’t share with anyone else.
Michael: Yeah, even though we’re live and we’ll be, we’re recording. I don’t think anyone’s listening.
Brad: Okay. Good to you. Probably not. Okay, good. Michael, do you think I’m a spy?
Michael: I do not think you’re a spy, Brad.
Brad: What gave it away?
Michael: Well, I’ve known you for 20 years. [00:02:00] And most importantly, I’ve played poker with you, and if you were a dog, you would wag your tail whenever you had a good hand. So no, you’re not a spy.
Brad: Okay. It’s that obvious.
Michael: Yes. Yes it is.
Brad: Alright. If I had six pack abs, I drove an Aston Martin, I chuck protocol out to the wind just to solve problems, I could get out of handcuffs or maybe duct tape without anyone noticing, could I then maybe be considered a spy?
Michael: There is so much to unpack with what you just said. I don’t even know what’s the most far-fetched. So we can start with six pack abs and an Aston Martin. I don’t see that happening.
Brad: It’s pretty fair assessment actually.
Michael: Okay, then what was the next thing that you said? What was the assumption?
Brad: Protocol to the wind?
Michael: Yeah. Well, you’re a compliance attorney. We know that’s not going to happen. You’re going to follow protocols. I mean, you get paid to tell people to do that.
Brad: That’s true. Handcuffs?
Michael: The last time [00:03:00] when we went on a trip together, I had to help you put your luggage in the overhead thing because of your bad shoulder, so I don’t think that’s going to happen either.
Brad: Alright, man. I mean, audience, he just shot my dreams. No spice for me, but before our guest figures out he can leave, maybe we should bring him on.
Michael: Great timing, so first thing you did right. Joining us today, audience is David McCloskey. David is the author of multiple books, Damascus Station, Moscow Acts, and his newest book, the Seventh Floor. David holds an MA from Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies where he specialized in energy policy in the Middle East. He’s a former CIA analyst. He’s a former consultant at McKinsey and Company, and he lives in Texas. He lives here with his wife and three children. Welcome!
David: Alright, thanks for having me guys. Excited to be here. [00:04:00:]
Brad: We’re real excited for you. And then we’re going to just hit the hard hitting questions right away, so not to let you run away again. First off, do you currently drive an Aston Martin or can you get out of handcuffs?
David: So they make you turn in Aston Martin when you leave the agency. And yeah, the fuzzy pink handcuffs go back too by the time you leave, unfortunately.
Michael: Yeah. Okay. Alright, well, let’s get started. I want to have the audience meet you. I’ve gotten to meet you before and hear your story. I’d love you to share your story, talk a little bit about that and why you chose to join the CIA.
David: Yeah, sure. Again, great to be here, so thanks for having me, guys. So I got recruited by the CIA pretty young. I was 19 and I don’t have like a crazy recruitment story other than they literally showed up at my International Relations 101 class when I was an undergrad at a school called [00;05:00] Wheaton College outside of Chicago. And at the time, I was like, my resume, literally when I was that age, had two entries on it prior to applying for the CIA, it was, I had dug holes for a sprinkler system company in the Minneapolis St. Paul suburbs, and I had been a cashier at Wendy’s, and I was like, I don’t think they’re going to be interested in me. But you know, I’m like, I’ll just apply and see what happens. So it turns out though, if you go to like a small liberal arts Protestant school outside of Chicago, you’re pretty good at passing polygraphs as a general rule. So like, I hadn’t committed any of like, the major sins. And they also, I would say like I had a, it was a Protestant, you know, institution, but I had like a very Catholic level of guilt. And so they know you’re not a narcissist also or a sociopath, and so I kind of walked that narrow path, got in, and really, I think I was intrigued by it because I wanted to understand how the world worked. I wanted to travel, you know? [00:06:00] And it felt like the CIA was a place where I would get kind of, you know, I thought at the time, and I think it was true, this kind of insider’s view of like, well, how did things actually function in the real world? And so I joined as an intern actually after my sophomore year and then full-time when I graduated.
Brad: Man, our interns and your internship is totally different.
Michael: Yeah. What do you do on an internship at the CIA?
David: Well mean they put you through with the whole clearance process, like upfront.
Brad: Getting out of handcuffs.
David: So getting out of handcuffs, how do you crash the Aston Martin appropriately, you know, it’s like, I mean, full medical, full psych exam, poly multiple, like what we call lifestyle polygraph. Like, it’s a very uncomfortable conversation with an absolute stranger about your darkest secrets for like eight hours, full background check, all that. And then as an intern, you’re just doing the work. [00:07:00] So I showed up and within a few weeks you’re writing intelligence reports and briefing and doing that kind of stuff. Now I was at Langley for the internship, and then later in my time there, I was in the Middle East, but you know, you’re not traveling as an intern, but it’s like a full thing.
Michael: Yeah. Well talk real fast. I just kind of context guy here. For the audience that doesn’t know much about the CIA, talk a little bit about what its purpose is and what it does and kind of how you fit in there.
David: Yeah, sure. Well, the CIA I think the best way that you can think about what the Central Intelligence Agency actually does is, it’s like clandestine journalism. Like that’s really the best way to think about it. The CIA exists to provide our government with an information advantage over everybody else. Like, that is why it exists. And the role of the CIA is basically to explain what’s going on in the world, why is it going on, and what does it mean for us? And so, I [00:08:00] think the best analogy I can give is, it’s a lot like investigative journalism. I mean, you think about. As a CIA analyst, you have a question you’re trying to answer, right? I worked on Syria for most of my time there, and when the protests and unrest started there, it’s like, okay, well, what’s going to happen? It’s a big question. It’s a question that really matters to like the president and other policy makers.
And so, you have sources that in a journalism context might work in a business or might be an academic or something. In the CIA context, they’re people that we have recruited and paid and trained to give us secrets, so they’re people who are committing treason in their own country. They’re Syrians who are giving us stuff that they shouldn’t be giving us. And then you try to write it all up and communicate it in a way where it’s like the President’s daily brief is this essentially classified newspaper the president gets every day. And the articles for that paper are like a page long with [00:09:00] maybe a graphic or a map or something like that, so very concisely explaining the answer to that question. It is a lot like journalism in that way.
Michael: That’s amazing. Brad, you would have whiteboards stuff all over that.
David: There are a lot of whiteboards too.
Brad: So let’s take a step back. You’re interning at Langley. You were working at Langley, so I don’t know how much you can give away. It’s classified, so if you had to say no comment, that’s fine. But is it true that at Langley, at CIA headquarters, they actually have a hotdog machine
David: Yes, that is true.
Brad: Okay, good. I was worried about that.
David: It’s one of the more bizarre – I mentioned it in my first book because as I reflected on it, at the time, it didn’t seem that weird to work in an organization that has a hotdog vending machine in the basement. But in retrospect, it’s kind of strange and it is a – or was, I actually think it’s been retired since. It was a Hormel branded hotdog vending machine that [00:10:00] was down in the basement. And I mean, essentially it was like a buck 25 or something, and this carton pops down and a bun and then a hot dog, and then there’s like a condiment stand next to it. And basically the cafeteria shuts down every day at like four. So if you end up stuck there late, you’re eating hot dogs.
Brad: Government workers go all the way to four o’clock.
David: Yeah. It’s surprising, isn’t it? And so you, you know, we’d eat those at night when you’re working on pieces or things like that and having to stay late. And I think the number I consumed is still highly classified facts that I won’t share, but I’ve never seen one anywhere else. I don’t know if it was made specifically for the Central Intelligence Agency by Hormel, but it’s the only place I’ve ever seen it. That’s true.
Brad: Okay. Good. I got that done. I’m feeling better about myself now.
Michael: Oh my goodness. Okay. So, can you talk about where you, you mentioned a minute ago you were stationed overseas. Talk a little bit about that. [00:11:00]
David: Yeah, so I did a couple years at Langley, and then in 2010 I went to – I had been working on Syria the whole time I was there. And so I went to Damascus and lived there really up until the unrest started, and then we had to leave. But I did a lot of kind of, so living in Damascus, but then did a lot of travel, you know, sometimes for months, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for days around the region. Saudi, Emirates, Jordan, Turkey, Israel, everywhere. It was a really incredible way to kind of peak. I mean, it’s very interesting to work on these topics. And then you’re reading the intelligence and you’re meeting with a lot of the people who are involved in sort of making the policy or whatever, and then you’re reading the press about what’s going on. And I think for me, that really – that kind of scratched that itch that I had had when I was in college. Like, what’s actually happening? [00:12:00] You kind of see it and you can see where the press or get things right, where they miss things, where things are totally wrong. It’s a very intoxicating kind of feeling.
Michael: Yeah.
Brad: So we’ve established…
Michael: Not the way you think of intoxicating.
Brad: I heard intoxicating, so we established the fact that, you know, in your training you learn how to jump out to planes and drive fast cars and wear fancy clothes, obviously. So as an analyst, you were saying that you’re just gathering this information and then just being a journalist, like a special hat that you kind of type on a typewriter kind of thing.
David: It’s not that far off. I mean, one of the first days I was actually in the station in Damascus, like my boss is a station chief is sitting there, I come into his office and he’s like typing on his computer and he is like, I’m spying real hard right now. Leave me alone. And the reality of it is, I mean, there’s a whole Hollywood superhero spy thing that all of us are really inundated with, right. [00:13:00] All of the, you know, name your show, name your movie, your book series, like tons of action, it’s really not like that at all.
Brad: Like they tell you, you have to say that now, right?
David: They do. Those are clear talking points for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Michael: Don’t crush his dreams.
David: Yeah, I know. It’s a lot of writing. It’s a lot of writing. Like, it’s spying is a lot of writing at the end of the day. A lot of waiting and a lot of writing.
Brad: So lawyers could be spies.
David: Basically spies.
Michael: It’s amazing. And it is intoxicating.
Brad: It is.
David: It is. Three check marks there,
Brad: Well, I think the next, you know, I guess getting more serious then is you were talking about these things that you put together from your meeting with, I guess president aids or the president himself. Talk about the process you would go through when you’re trying to brief your colleagues or try to go through the process of actually briefing or taking all that information from the different people that you’re speaking with and trying to break that down. [00:14:00] How difficult is that and what’s your process?
David: Yeah. Well, it’s very difficult because you’re dealing with, you know, you think about the sources you’re looking at to answer those questions. Some of them are terrible and you don’t know it. Some of them are terrible and you know it – you often have massive gaps in the picture, right? You don’t have all the information that you would really want because inherently, you’re trying to steal this information from another government organization. They do not want you or anyone to have it, so they’re hiding things. A lot of it’s fragmentary, you know, and then you’re in a world where if you’re getting it from humans, think for a second about what type of human is actually committing treason, right? They tend to not be the most, well-balanced, trustworthy individuals. And so there’s a lot of stuff you have to sort of sort through and vet.
So you put all that together and the picture can [00:15:00] oftentimes be really chaotic. And so when you’re trying to analyze it and put down a very straightforward answer that is objective and non-valuated and apolitical to a question like that, it becomes a really a very tough process. And so as a result, writing this stuff, it’s very different from fiction, ideally, hopefully. Like you’re fighting over individual words. You’re coming up with probabilistic language that makes sense to, you know, the president, right? You’re trying to just strip all voice and value and emotion out of it, and you’re trying to make something clear that inherently isn’t. And so it’s actually – it’s a very challenging process. And then everyone involved in it will oftentimes disagree, you know, so you’ll have everyone looking at the same fact base, but then you’ll have a group of people that’ll come up with a very different assessment of what’s actually going on sometimes, so that can be tricky to navigate as well. [00:16:00]
Michael: How often were you turning briefings and going through this chaotic process to write? I mean, is this like a daily thing or a weekly thing?
David: So it depends on what country or topic you’re working on. When Syria blew up, it was a daily thing for a long time. Prior to that, it wouldn’t have been, it would’ve been slower. I mean, analysts don’t miss an opportunity to fight with one another. So even if there’s not president’s daily brief expectations, there’s still papers and things you’re writing that we’ll fight over. When Syria started, I mean, it was a daily thing. We were writing an article every day for Obama’s book. And that’s a pretty – I mean, we also had, I think at the time there were like nine layers of edit and review on that stuff. It’s much easier writing novels. [00:17:00] I get to make it up and there’s only like one editor, so it’s a lot easier.
Brad: So when you’re going through the CIA and you’re being trained, did they say this is the process you should go through and how you vet that information? Are there certain tricks they teach you how to do that?
David: Yeah. There’s a, I think it was like six months of training on how you do that. And honestly, after the Iraq WMD fiasco, the CIA completely reworked how it – not how it did analysis, but the process for training everybody in how you think critically and how you write analytically. And there were a whole bunch of analytic techniques that started to really be adopted and used in order to check assumptions, look at different competing hypotheses about what could be going on and to communicate that effectively, so Iraq WMD really [00:18:00] changed the game pretty significantly.
Michael: So, talk for a minute, I want to apply what you learned to kind of the professional world. Talk about what kind of communication expertise or tips did you learn from doing what you did that you think would translate into this professional world, bunch of lawyers who are communicating gray, complicated things to clients and trying to send it to them in a way that is in their language?
David: Well, I think one of them was, despite the desire to strip emotion from everything, it was this realization that at the end of the day, the people who are consuming the reports are humans who have emotions and who are going to be drawn to story, and to things that hit some kind of emotional cord. And so, like a very [00:19:00] tangible example I can think of is, a lot of the people in the Obama White House had experience working on the Bosnian conflicts in the early nineties. And so, they took these lessons and applied them to Syria in particular and said, well, it’s kind of like this because of this. And it really actually, and we weren’t writing anything that was making any of these comparisons, just this was the experience that a lot of these men and women had had 20 years earlier.
And so we started thinking about how can we address some of this stuff? Because there were some assumptions that they had about the way the war was unfolding in Syria were correct based on that kind of historical reference, and some weren’t. And we ended up writing a paper that did that comparison and actually specifically used some of these pretty awful, but historical events that had happened in those [00:20:00] conflicts as the comparison point, because we knew that some of these policy makers had been directly involved in them. And so I think even with the desire to kind of make these products really cold and analytical, there’s always emotion involved in the decision making process and in how you absorb the information. And I think some of the stuff that we wrote that dealt with that directly or indirectly were some of the products that had the most impact on the administration’s thinking on the war.
Brad: Well, and so you said that you would write a brief and then it’d be eight different people that edit it. Was it like your spell check was not working? Like, what were the things that you started learning very quickly about how they started stripping down or changing things?
David: Well, sometimes the changes were just ridiculous, and so you kind of have to deal with the fact that you don’t always agree with your editors, but they outrank you, and so at some point you have to salute and be done. A lot of it would be disagreements [00:21:00] about what particular words mean, or really searching for utter clarity in language. Sometimes it would be like, I mean, because the president isn’t oftentimes spending a lot of time with this book and their schedule is extremely condensed. And so sometimes it’s like, well, how can we take the essence of this thing that you have written on a page and a half and try to get it in half that volume so we can put other stuff in or kind of get through it more quickly? So it’s like economy of language too. It was a lot of that.
And then it’s honestly, it can be this give and take of, like, we have a team of people who are looking at a topic and writing on it. And then if you have someone who’s sort of outside that day to day, they can push on judgments in a different way. They’ll come at it from a different perspective. And so, there’s real value in that too. As annoying as it is, [00:22:00] if you’re sitting there like on your third hotdog at night and someone is reading this piece and kind of ripping it up and you want to crack your head into the wall. But like, oftentimes the points they’re raising are really effective ones.
I would say the other thing is, the higher you go in that kind of chain, the more you have people who are actually plugged into what the nature of the policy making is down at the National Security Council or the White House. And so they’ll bring a view of what else is on the customer’s plate and how this might fit in or not, and sort of where the story gets slotted, which is a slightly different skillset, but really important. Because again, it’s like, you could write a really great article, but if it’s buried behind a whole bunch of other stuff, it might never get read.
Michael: So what in the world made you think, I’m going to take the leap? It doesn’t sound like a leap at all to becoming an author. It sounds like you were an author before and then in the private world, decided to write a book.
David: [00:23:00] Well, when I left the CIA like, I mean, Syria was gut awful. I mean, the whole country was completely shattered and destroyed over the course of that war. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Half the population ended up being displaced internally or fleeing. It basically broke down into a kind of system of warlords that had completely wrecked this place. That was a pretty affecting experience for me emotionally, having lived there and befriended tons of Syrians and just kind of lived through it. Like it was awful. And when I left I had, I think a desire to kind of process that in a way, and so I started writing and I had no intention that it would become like a novel or anything. It was just, I’m trying to work through some stuff in my head. And so I just started to kind of write it down.
I took this consulting job here in Dallas, [00:24:00] which did not allow for a side hustle as a writer. And so for a long time I didn’t – I kind of put that aside and didn’t write anything, you know, turned my fiction skills to making PowerPoints for consulting firm. But then like five years ago I had the opportunity to take some time off and kind of reset. And I went back to that writing and thought, you know, I’m going to try to make something out of this and just kind of see what happens. And the first book, Damascus Station came out of that.
Brad: So, yeah. Let’s go to that first book. Well, for those who don’t know, it’s about the Syria and the civil war that was going on there. The inspiration sounds like it came from the fact that you were living there, but what additional research or other things did you do to really tie yourself back into the environment that was happening in Syria?
David: Well, yeah, I mean, I did have a lot of it in my head. I had to go back and, you know, old colleagues and friends, honestly, [00:25:00] a lot of getting on calls with people and asking them to kind of tell me stories about what they remembered. A lot of research of like going back into things that I had maybe had read five or six years earlier and kind of re-read it with the purpose of coming up with the world of the novel. But I mean, the biggest thing was transitioning from, I think a writing mindset that I’m an analytical writer that’s trying to get all of these details, like very, very right, and I’m trying to render Syria accurately and all that stuff is true. But at the end of the day, I’m trying to tell a story that you don’t want to pull yourself away from. The research is part of that, but it’s not the core – I don’t think. So it was like, how do I assemble enough authenticity around the setting or the CIA trade craft or whatever that the research kind of feeds that, but allow ][0026:00] the story to run its course in a way that keeps people from engaging with their families at home because they’re trying to read it or they stay up too late? Like, that’s what you’re going for is a writer. It’s like that page turning – a story fails if it’s not consumed, so that’s what I’m after.
Michael: Were you surprised at how easily, or how you became were able to become a fiction writer? Like, did you know you had that skillset?
David: No, because I don’t have any creative writing background. I’d never done it before. I mean, I don’t know. I guess maybe I just like making shit up.
Michael: Have you met Brad?
Brad: That’s 90% of what I do, not a hundred.
David: I think for me, it was no, there was never this thing of like looking back and saying, oh, when I was eight or nine, I knew I wanted to do this. Yeah. But that period, like [00:27:00] right after I left the CIA when I was writing that stuff down, I would go and I would sit and sometimes I’d be at like a coffee shop for the most part. And I was like, I would sit down, I would start writing. And then it’d be one of those things where you kind of look up and it’s like, well, four hours had passed, where did that time go? And it’s this flow state. So for me, it was less like, oh, I’m trying to get this book out or done, or whatever. It was more like, how can I do something or can I do something where I can continually get into that flow and enjoy just the input of it? Like, obviously now I’ve got books out there. This is my business. Like, I’m trying this thing to succeed financially. That is in my mind, but the core of it every day is like getting back to that. That’s when I discovered that this is what I love doing.
Brad: I won’t give away that much. For those who hadn’t read your first book like I said, it’s about this the war, but you have lots of different characters from different regions entering the [00:28:00] same area. Do you feel that that reflects really what was happening at that time?
David: Yeah, totally. I mean, and that was part of my desire to write it that way was, I feel like, you know, Syria, if you now look at newspapers here in the States or in the West, like it’s really fallen. It’s not in the headlines. I mean, it’s in the headlines when the Israelis blow something up in Damascus. It’s not in the headlines for anything related to Syria itself. And I think I wanted the book at some level, I mean, great story, of course, that’s what you’re going for ultimately. But I wanted it to kind of show a human aspect to this war. Like let’s just take actual people who had lived through this and who had dealt with all the real human stuff that happens in a conflict, some of which is very mundane, and then other things are awful and tragic. And all of that stuff was happening layered on top of each other in Syria every day.
And there’s [00:29:00] a tendency also, I think, in the way we cover these kinds of conflicts to really search for pretty either – I think, to look at it and say, that’s complicated and messy and I just don’t even want to engage. Or to say, there are good guys and bad guys here, and I kind of want to create a good guy, bad guy narrative. And just both of those things. To me, when you actually looked at the way the conflict un unfolded and the fact that there were people in Syria who just behaved and reacted very differently to the war, I kind of wanted to punch windows, I think, into different perspectives on the conflict and just kind of tell those stories without – there’s geopolitics that hang over it, but this isn’t a geopolitical story. This is a story about people.
Michael: Talk about your second book.
David: So the second book is called Moscow X, it came out last October.
Brad: Is it in Moscow?
David: Parts of it are in Moscow, yes. And it’s different. [00:30:00] So it’s kind of in the same universe as Damascus Station, but it’s Russia-focused. It’s set in present day Moscow and St. Petersburg, and it was a story that kind of turned into the answer to the question of what might it look like if the CIA got really serious about sticking it to Vladimir Putin – to use a technical agency term. It was frustrating to write at the time because I was writing it as the Russians were invading, and so I had to write multiple versions of it up and start over. But it was also an effort, I think, to step outside of my comfort zone because I did serious stuff through the lens of, sorry, Russia stuff through the lens of Syria, but I wasn’t a Russia guy at the CIA.
Michael: Yeah. That’s fascinating. Well, final question. Any kind of final thoughts on things you’ve learned about yourself kind of in this journey?
David: [00:31:00] I find it to be, I think every day, and this was kind of the case as a consultant and working at the CIA too, like, there were different aspects of this, but in with writing, there really are like, every day is a three-legged stool of like, fear, joy, and self-loathing. And it’s really this question of like, just what’s the proportion? You know, because they’re all going to be there. The like blank page or the idea of having to sit down and really manufacture sometimes a story out of nothing can be really, really daunting. And I think the other thing I would say is I have come more and more to the conclusion that like, and this will sound kind of weird, but when I was writing at the CIA or at McKinsey, it always felt like I was analyzing something in kind of a very dispassionate way. [00:32:00].
With the fiction, when you start to write it, it honestly doesn’t feel, when you’re really in that flow state, it doesn’t feel like it’s coming from you. It feels like you’re channeling something else. It feels like the story has always existed, you are just finding it. And so there’s this very interesting feeling of like an archeological dig almost of like, this thing exists, I’m just digging here and maybe there’s nothing interesting. And then I dig here and I find something. And then you sort of dig this whole thing up over the course of the writing process, but it starts to feel like the character actually are real and the story is real, which is a very – it’s a very cool feeling when you find that because it has a sense of, like, this thing has always existed, I’m just the one who’s kind of communicating it to the world, which is kind of, I realize it sounds kind of mystical, but it’s a very kind of profound and powerful feeling when you find it. [00:33:00]
Michael: That’s cool. Well, this has been amazing. We are going to take a break for a commercial, and then on the other side, we will take some questions from the audience.
David: Sounds great.
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Brad: Welcome back to Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. I’m your host Brad Adatto out my co-host Michael Byrd. Michael, we’re still here with our live audience at Royal Oak Country Club, and our special guest, David has not run out yet, so we still got him here. I think we handcuffed him to the chair.. [00:34:00] Now, at this time, because we have this audience about two to 300,000 people here, I think it’s time to really start getting some questions for the audience, and so raise your hand if you got one.
Audience Member: So you were talking about how you had to – most of your information was coming from these sources that were there. I’m sure a lot of this is confidential, but how were you interfacing with them most often? I’m assuming it’s not face to face every time. So like, what’s the way in which you’re both giving and receiving information from these people generally?
David: Yeah. Let me think about how I can answer that. So yes, as you can imagine, and as the question implies, like that person shouldn’t be talking to us, and so meeting with them face to face is kind of a complicated thing. A lot of the spycraft in the novels kind of centers on this point because there is a whole system of tradecraft that has been developed over the last century for how do you meet with somebody in a way, [00:35:00] in an environment that’s extremely hostile? Whether it’s Syria, Russia, China, whatever. How do you go somewhere and meet with somebody that shouldn’t be meeting with you? So there’s some different pieces of tradecraft. One is called a surveillance detection route. So it’s like, okay, if I’m going to try that – if I need to have a face-to-face meeting with somebody, and by the way, I should clarify, I was an analyst, not an operations officer. Those are two very different things at CIA. So the case officers or operations officers are the ones who spot, assess, develop, handle, recruit human assets. That’s not me, but I’ve lived with them in the wild for a long time so I can recite some of them.
Brad: So you say.
David: So I say, exactly. So the surveillance detection rate is like, it’s in Syria; these could be 12 hours. It’s like a series of movements. If I’m going to go meet someone at this apartment at 9:00 PM – the day might start, and as you [00:36:00] are moving around the city, you’re doing things, it looks to anybody watching, like you’re out shopping, you’re having lunch with your family, you’re taking a run, all these kinds of things. But the whole day is actually structured around you observing if somebody is watching you and you’re moving around very intentionally to spot that, not so that you can like lose the surveillance, because that’s… The Hollywood version of this is like, surveillance is spotted and you’re kind of like trying to lose them. No. Like you’re trying to determine if it’s there so that you can then bail on the meeting and not get the source killed by bringing surveillance to the meeting.
So there’s, there’s a whole bunch of art around that, that got honed during the Cold War. And that increasingly these days is changing tremendously because of the technological environment that we’re in, which is like a whole separate thing. And then on the kind of digital side, [00:37:00] there’s a lot of very creative ways that we’ve come up with to engage with people and it’s kind of this trade off of like, the ways that are easiest to get information back and forth are also the least secure. It’s a complicated question and it’s very different for every source and every situation.
Brad: Do we have other questions just come up front please.
Audience Member: So being over there, it’s probably a difficult and complicated environment. How did you find normalcy and kind of your experiences over there or spots of happiness over there?
David: Well, mostly wasn’t very normal, and it was hard to find it. There was a relatively large American community at the embassy there, and you spend a lot of your time, kind of your social time with them to keep it feeling kind of normal. But it is strange. I mean, it’s like a weird – you get used to it over time, but like, someone’s watching you at all times. [00:38:00] They break into your apartment and hotel room and let you know that they’ve come in and you don’t know where they’ve got camera. All this kind of weird stuff that over time kind of wears on you or starts to, you know, if you reflect on it for a second, you’re like, it is kind of weird that someone’s watching me all the time and I kind of have to go about my business like they’re not, so it’s kind of a grading thing. It felt good to come back after that.
Brad: I think we have time for one more question. Oh, up here in the front.
Audience Member: Hi. So these hot dogs, were they like cold or were they boiled?
David: Well, they’re not cold when they come out. I would imagine that at some point they were boiled. That’s probably right. Like in some kind of commercial, big commercial kitchen. I mean, the way – so I have seen them like load this machine a couple times, like in the early morning hours. And it does kind of – the hot dogs are like [00:39:00] individually in plastic and it kind of is like a circular thing. It kind of looks like a machine gun, like a belt fed machine like an ammo clip.
Michael: Just firing hot dogs.
David: Yeah. And I don’t know how the machine like gets the plastic open or whatever, but when it comes out, it is relatively warm. So there’s some kind of heating toaster system in there too. But I don’t know, I mean, honestly, I include that random fact in the book and it has been of all the like random CIA stuff I get asked about, like, it’s high on the list because apparently, I don’t know, has anyone ever seen one anywhere? Like no, yeah. And they were okay hot dogs, but it’s not…
Brad: Was the extra plastic when it melts on it, does it make it tastier?
David: There probably were some, I probably have eaten a decent amount of hot dog plastic in retrospect.
Brad: Well Michael, you want to close this out?
Michael: Yeah, I don’t think we have anything else. That’s all we have for today. I don’t know if you…
Brad: You know, obviously David, thank you for joining us. [00:40:00] We really appreciate you being here.
David: Thanks for having me here.
Brad: And audience members, do not panic. Michael and I will be back next week, not from this live audience. Y’all give yourself a round applause. You’re awesome. Next Wednesday we’ll be back in the studio, unfortunately, just be the two of us, so we’ll have Michael not talk as much, and we will be talking about adding a new partner.
Michael: You can also sign up for the ByrdAdatto newsletter by going to our website at byrdadatto.com.
Outro: ByrdAdatto is providing this podcast as a public service. This podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast does not constitute legal advice, nor does it establish an attorney-client relationship. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or [00:41:00] recommendation by ByrdAdatto. The views expressed by guests are their own, and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Please consult with an attorney on your legal issues.
