Spies, Lies, and Centrifuges: A CIA Case Officer’s Hunt for the World’s Most Dangerous Man

Welcome to Spycraft, a podcast that tells gripping life and death spy stories and the amazing devices and operations that made them possible. Now let's get started.

Welcome back, everybody. We have another great guest the name of James Lawler. He's an author of a great book. I just finished reading actionally about a week ago, Living Lies and novel of the Iranian Nuclear weapons Program by James Lawler. You're probably asking, well, who is James Lawler. Besides being the author, he serves as a national security consultant and as a senior partner at MDO Group. MDO Group, which provides human training to the intelligence community and the commercial sector focused on WMDCI, technical and cyber issues. He's also a noted speaker on the insider threat and government and industry. All right to this, Mister Lawlers served for twenty five years as an operations officer in that three

letter agency we love, the CIA and various international posts, and as chief of the Counter Proliferation Divisions Special Activities Unit. That's a mouthful. So we're going to get started to find out more about him. But he also was on a different group too. He was a chief of the AQ KHN Nuclear Takedown Team, which resulted in the disruption of the most dangerous nuclear weapons network in history. We're going to start off our conversation with that. Head over to the book and maybe his thoughts about what's going on in today's world. Before we get started. You know what to do, share, subscribe, hit that I like button.

You know we like it. That's not wasting no more time. Over to the show, mister James Lolly. Welcome, sir.

Thank you very much.

Carlos, thank you for being here. And I mentioned before the interview, thank you very much for your service as well. Well. You've been around for a long time in the CIA twenty five years and obviously you moved up quite a bit and got involved in that AQ con tell us a little bit about who AQ was and what was it all about.

Well, AQ Cohn. Doctor Abdul Kadir Khan was a Pakistani scientist, a metallurgist who had gotten his graduate degrees in the Netherlands and he went to work for a company called the Uranium Enrichment Corporation or URINKO, which was a consortium of the Dutch, the Germans and the British and their goal is to produce enriched uranium for nuclear power, peaceful purposes.

For use of uranium, well, they used a technique called centrifuge enrichment. And with centrifuge enrichment, you can either make it light and enriched for nuclear power purposes, or you can make it highly enriched. You just keep the process going a little bit more piping, just keep enriching and enriching until you get up north of eighty percent enrichment of the uranium two thirty five isotope, and suddenly you've got fuel for a nuclear weapon. So India had exploded a nuclear bomb back in nineteen seventy and the head of Pakistan at the time said, we have to have a nuclear weapon as well. In fact, we'd eat grass if that's what it takes to get our own nuclear weapon. Well, doctor Khan was a Pakistani. He was very pro his

home country, Pakistan. So he contacted the Pakistani government. He had in his possession the designs for these ultracentrifuges that are used for enriching uranium, and he basically stole those designs and he headed east to Pakistan and there he helped establish what initially was the Engineering Research Laboratory, but it was so successful they renamed the Khan Research Laboratory, and that's what provided Pakistan with its fuel for its nuclear weapons. And we've known about that. He did that in the seventies. He is a consummate or was he.

The man passed away about six weeks ago, but he was a consummate networker. He left a lot of allies in Europe, not Pakistanis, but Europeans who then supplied Pakistan his Kan Research Lab with a lot of sensitive technology so that they could then amass the amount of fissile material that they needed for the contents of nuclear weapons. Well, nobody ever imagined that it would go beyond Pakistan until we started getting indications that doctor Khan decided to take proliferation private and it was no longer going to be country to country proliferation of nuclear technology. But in his case, he was going to sell this to other countries, countries that were enemies of the United States, countries such as Libya,

and so my operation detected that this was going on, and then we set out to ultimately disrupt it and stop it, which we did. It took us a long time, but we ultimately stopped it. And Libya, as you may recall, in about the year two thousand and four two thousand and five, they gave up their nuclear weapons when Muimar Kadaffi, the lunatic leader of Libya, in one of his rare cases of sanity, saw what was happening to his Arab cousin, Saddam Hussein, and he had this epiphany thinking, you know, maybe it'd be better to be a friend of the United States than an enemy of the United States. And so his intelligence chief Musakusa, reached out to both British and American intelligence and asked what does it take, what

would it take for us to normalize relations? And we had one major demand, and that was you need to give up your weapons of mass destruction programs. We knew he'd had chemical weapons, biological programs, and due to the intelligence that my grow gathered, we had indisputable proof that he had a nuclear weapons program, and so our negotiators used that proof to basically force the Libyan's hand to surrender all of this nuclear weapons technology. This occurred in two thousand and four when the BBC China, a ship that was filled with nuclear components, was stopped and seized and five forty foot containers with thousands and thousands of nuclear components were taken off of it, and then the Libyan negotiators rapidly threw in the towel and conceded that

the yes, they did have nuclear weapons technology, and so they were willing to surrender. That that was all well and good in two thousand and four. I didn't think any more of it until about seven years later, when Kadaffi was overthrown, and a friend of mine said, Jim, do you realize that if Kaddaffi had maintained his nuclear weapons, what he might have done with done with those as in a panic, he might have used him in his own people. And of course I thought, good lord, I hadn't even thought about that, that here we'd have a madman with usable, proven nuclear weapons. These weren't untested designs.

These were the same designs that Pakistan had tested back in a few years before, back in nineteen ninety eight, So we knew these were We knew that these weapons would work, and he would have had those weapons had we not stopped him.

How many countries have with the weapons now came about six or seven, that's about it. One hundred and eighty countries out there.

Yeah, well you've got the US of course, Russia, China, North Korea, France, Great Britain, Israel certainly has them. And then you know when you start adding in the wannabes, the wannabes, we would have been Libya, could have been some others. Iran clearly as a wannabe.

Did you see North Korea too? Oh?

Yeah, north Korea's tested.

Yeah, I guess you know, I have a random question, maybe maybe not. This is your area ver expertise? How tightly monitored? Trying to think how ward phrases you said? Aq Con went to the Netherlands for his education. Do a lot of these schools that start teaching things in this area are they monitoring the student's backgrounds as well?

Is there a certain level of knowledge that you hit that you stop and then you're going to have to get into a more classified section or can they jump if you see what I'm following my thoughts. Can they go from a certain education level then have to go to that final step in classified department or can they actually figure out how to do it in a school environment.

Well, in this case, again, the whole purpose of the company that he was working for run by the British, the Dutch and the Germans, was to produce fuel for nuclear power plants. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. In fact, a lot of people, myself included, would argue that nuclear energy is about the cleanest energy providing there's not a nuclear meltdown, and cleanest energy you can have, and it's you know, even the you know organizations like Sierra Club and others have said, you know, nuclear energy maybe the answer.

We can't depend totally on wind and solar, but nuclear energy we have ample amounts of that. So what he was really doing, he was working as a metallurgist on designing helping to design these ultracenterfuges which purify the uranium two thirty five, which is the isotope that you want in a bomb, and getting it up to eighty to ninety percent enrichment levels. But in the case of the nuclear power plant, you don't need to have that. You're talking about three four percent enriched uranium. But it's the same principle. It's like, how all along twenty times do you run that gas through the pipe, you know, and you keep making the U two thirty five content higher as opposed to the non fissile isotopes of uranium.

I guess that that was what I'm thinking about, because it doesn't seem like it's a huge lead to make. So I'm looking at a lot of espionage type tactics being used in schools and professors and things of that nature that have that skill set. They can say I can take you from one step to another. It is a big problem. That is a big problem. Yeah, to me, it's honestly, it's amazing when you said six or seven countries the only ones that have it. Considering the Internet leakage, people can be bought out, but I guess we can also track almost anybody either too as well. But it's really amazing.

Well, there are other countries that have had it. For instance, South Africa had actually six working nuclear weapons when the apartheid regime fell and they declared it to the International Atomic Energy Agency. They had six weapons that were ever bit as devastating as the one that destroyed Hiroshima. We've had other countries that had thought about having them, like Argentina.

Even Sweden had thought Sweden, Peaceful Sweden, we had thought about having a nuclear weapons program. So lord knows, what the South Koreans are doing. If I was a South Korean and I knew North Korea had nuclear weapons, you know, about the only place where it would be unpopular to have a nuclear weapon would probably be Japan, since they were the only place on Earth that has had two of them tested right there in their cities.

Yeah, that's true.

But even them, faced with China and some other threats, there's probably factions in Japan that would say we need them too.

Yeah, that's interesting, because you always have I guess the biggest deterrence is the finishing of the world at that point. If you get into one of those battles, you get into very serious. It's a big commitment to use those type of weapons, I guess, is my point.

Well, the more countries that have it, the more likely there's going to be an accident or some madman, you know, he decides to use one. I always found I devoted about two thirds of my career to countering the proliferation of these weapons. And I told my team members, I said, it is really psychologically righteous when you can say hundreds of thousands of lives. I mean, that's what we did.

We basically by preventing the Libyans from having nuclear weapons. We were also trying to prevent the Iranians from having nuclear weapons. I find that to be very satisfying.

Absolutely, And I know that's why I wanted to start with this conversation so because it kind of leads into your great book. But my last question, you know, I think I might have asked this before the show. A while back. I remember hearing rumors about aq Khon and Ben Laden. I don't know if Ben Laden was chasing him or vice versa. Is that more the headlines hyperbole was actually something going on there.

We were very concerned about that. Certainly after nine to eleven, one of my very good friends, one of my best friends, Roth Mowatt Larsen, was head of the Counter Terrorist Centers Weapons of mass destruction department, looking to make sure that al Qaeda did not have either nuclear or chemical or biological weapons, And he and I used to have lunch every week and we had total openness between us. There was no compartmentation between anything that he and I were doing, because we feared that Bin Laden or elements of al Qaeda could have had certainly had aspirations for nuclear weapons, and we had evidence that Ben Laden had spoken to some Pakistani nuclear scientists. It was not aq Con. And you know, as much as I might detest aq Con

and what he was doing, he wasn't a total lunatic that he wanted to give nuclear technology to a terrorist group. He didn't do that. He was selling it to a fellow Islamis nation sure, led by a lunatic Kadafi, but that at least was I guess, more palatable to him than peddling his technology to a terrorist group. Also, it was a big commitment. We're talking about several hundred million dollars.

You need a location to do this. At the time Al Qaeda was in Afghanistan, they didn't have the capacity and the wherewithal to do that. So but it was a nightmare scenario. Much more likely would be if a terrorist group could get a nuclear weapon that's already on the market. Now that's more difficult, but not impossible.

A scary thought. It's a bad movie. We'll just put it that way. It's a bad movie. And what was the motivation for writing this book? Was it all the information and experience that you had through twenty five years.

It came out of a conversation I had again with my friend Rothmade Larsen. He at that time was a head of Department of Energy's Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, and I was his senior advisor. And this was during the twenty fifteen negotiations with the Iranians which resulted in the initial agreement what we call the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which meant the Iranians were going to freeze their nuclear enrichment technologies in return, we were going to relax all of these economic sanctions that are strangling Iran. Well, I'm not necessarily against that plan of action.

At the time, I thought, well, it's better to jaw jaw than war war, like Churchill said, but I speculated to Rolf. I said, but what if they cheat? And then that gave me the idea for a novel where the Iranians approach the United States. The United States is eager to have a peaceful solution to the Iranian nuclear program, and so what the Iranians do is they surrender all of their enrichment technologies. In the United States is going to relax all the sanctions. But what we don't know is that the Iranians have an ace in the hole and that is the fact that they've acquired enough fissile material, enough bomb material already from the Soviets, their former Soviets, I should say, and they are constructing secretly several nuclear

weapons just to have that ace in the hole. They live in a rough neighborhood. They want to do that. This Islamic Revolutionary Guard general. He masterminds the whole thing and convinces his uncle, who is the supreme leader, let's do that. We'll get sanctions released, but we'll still have in essence, we'll have our cake and eat it too.

Now I know you told me before the interview too. There's some how would you say, truth intertwined in the book as well. There's some stuff that does actually did happen, or at least it's true in some capacity. Correct.

Some of the scenes are based on scenes that actually happened in my career. I don't really want to get into too much of one, but a lot of time it's lightly disguised of things that I actually did and experiences I actually had. One example is a and this probably something that would appeal to you professionally, because I know you're a student of the powers of persuasion and how people can be manipulated. Being a psychiatrist and forensic psychiatrist and interested in that, and so I have a scene early in the book where the one of the case officers, Lane Andrews, is invited to a meeting with a couple of top notch neuroscientists who invite him to discuss the magic of tradecraft. Well, by magic, they meant

trickery or illusions, and he, by the definition of magic, he meant real magic. That this is something we can't explain, my ability to recruit people, to persuade people to do what I want them to do. And these neuroscientists say, no, no, what's the trick, what's the slight of hand? He said? There is no sleight of hand. I don't trick people, he said, but I think I have some kind of ability that and maybe a few other top case officers have to link into somebody's brain and to somehow persuade them to do things they wouldn't otherwise do otherwise, How do you explain my success rate? Okay, I mean you can say, okay, I'm persistent. I've got techniques that I use that are similar to doctor Milton Erickson, who developed hypnotherapy.

My voice is low, it's soothing. I've had assets that say, Jim, when I listen to you, it's like my brain is in a warm water bed. All that's good, but it still doesn't explain why my success rate was so high unless there's something and I use the term metaphysical metaphysics, but by that or magic, by that, I mean it's something that science can't currently explain. Well, these two neuroscientists, they're skeptical of this. And so then I asked, and the character in the book asks, so you're telling me that the field of neuroscience is complete and we understand everything. Well, no, of course not. And I said, well, that's my whole point, because if you had been a person in the eighteen eighties and you saw a jet aircraft go overhead, you

might say, well, that's magic because you don't understand aerodynamic principles that we have, you know, even back twenty years later in nineteen oh three, when the Right Brothers flew an aircraft. But it's not real magic. It's just an unexplained scientific phenomenon that we don't understand at the moment.

So what's to say that in twenty or thirty years, neuroscience might have finally caught up with the fact that some people are gifted to be able to almost somehow mentally link into someone and cause them to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do. So that's that's one example in my book. It's again I call it the metaphysics.

I know that's not the correct term. I've been taken to task for using that, but it's to me, it's metaphysical.

Well, I'm not going to get into an argument of semantics. But again, folks, the book is a great read, Living Lies and Novel excuse me, Iranian nuclear weapons Program Again, let me repeat that, Living Lies and Novel of the Iranian Nuclear weapons Program. But James Lawler l A W.

L e. R.

You can get it on Amazon. It's really it's a great read. It's also scary times too, And I have to admit speaking with other case officers from the CIA, some people you probably know as well, people like Glenn Carl and other individuals. You guys, are you guys? And the only reason I say you guys, I haven't spoken to too many females because I haven't spent I haven't spoken to many female CI A case officers yet probably haven't been able to find them. But anyway, in the meantime, the ones I have spoken with really no human behavior quite well. It's really amazing how insightful is a CIA case officers are. So when I was reading the book, it really didn't even feel like fiction a lot of the times. And you mentioned one of my favorites in psychology,

which was Milton Ericson, because he does kind of have this aura of magic around him. And it's interesting because I know I read a book. Oh, actually have it over here. Which was the authority it was? Bob, I can to tell you right now, Ben Robinson, I get any respects on Ben Robinson that The Magician, the Book of the CIA and Magic and I was used in the nineteen forties, and there isn't a unique relationship between magic and the CIA. Oddly enough, if you look in the history right right.

Well, I was turned on to doctor Ericson when a student of mine, probably one of the best students of all the case officers that I've tried to teach recruitment techniques too, he told me about seven or eight years ago. He says, Jim, you don't know it, but you're using the same techniques as doctor Milton Ericson. So I did some research to see what was it that I was doing the narrative that I take people through the stories and things like that, and somehow I guess I, you know, I've never really studied his techniques, but my students said that I was using or employing the same techniques that doctor Ericson did as he developed hypnotherapy.

Yeah, I mean when he's really known for presuppositions, which starts influencing people's thought patterns and how they're thinking and how they're feeling, and it definitely works.

I sometimes analogize that to the crack and the windshield, you know, when you're driving down the street and a car truck in front of you tosses a little stone up and it makes a little spider web, and then over the next two or three weeks or months it starts to spider web out. Well, that's my planting suggestions that somehow spider web out sometimes make people more susceptible to recruitment.

It corancks me the world of psychology. I don't want to get too far away from the book either, but the world of psychology. A lot of his techniques are used, even though people criticize him sometimes for being able too hyperbolic. But it's funny because I look at the techniques and I'm thinking, that's Ericson. You're actually using the Zame guy or critiquing. Yeah, I wouldn't do that anyway. As we go with your book, you talked about Iran. It was interesting how you included a billionaire CIA by any thought them Why you did that? I was curious about that.

Do you want to have somebody who couldn't be bought out?

Well, it's it's not unusual for political appointees to be huge contributors to whoever's in the White House. We've been fortunate with most of our CIA directors that that's not the case. That we actually get very serious, brilliant people. The finest director I ever served under was George Tennant. I didn't serve under Panetta, but I have tremendous respect for him. For General Michael Hayden, we get a lot of very talented people, But in this case, I found it convenient with the narrative, with the story, to have someone who is such an egotist, such a narcissist himself, that he's going to run the CIA like a business, and we mistakenly refer to our sources sometimes as assets.

Well you say that to a hedge fund guy, and he's thinking assets. You know, that's either a black or a red mark on my ledger, and he treats them like that, as if they could just be struck off. And that goes against the grain of a really serious case officer, because our first and most sacred commitment is to the security of our sources, and you can't just write these people off. That well, too bad, you know, we zeroed out that ledger. No, we don't do that.

We will go to hell and back, as the people in the book do to basically rescue and save our sources. I've had to do that myself. I had three sol horses that were in trouble through no fault of their own, through no fault of mine, and we basically had to go to a former president of the United States to make a protest to the head of a country to get these people released, and by God, we got them released.

I saw that a lot with the special ops community and some CIA friends of mine. After the Afghanistan debacle of last year, there was a lot of as you mentioned assets for people who helped them that they really took it seriously. It was amazing how personal it was for them. Well, it's personal because you make the commitment.

It's not just on behalf of the United States and the director, it's on you personally. You have guaranteed these people not guaranteed, but you've offered we will do everything possible to protect you.

And we mean that. We absolutely mean that.

And I saw some of that in the book as well. I know in the book you talk about Iranian source, a double agent controlled by Islamic Revolutionary Guard. It's interesting because it reminded me a little bit of his name escape me. Now he was part of.

The Solemni Well you know what I think about it.

Yeah, it reminds me of him too, but also made me think about the one in the Iran Contra affair Gorberineiffer.

Oh yeah, yeah, more on Soleimani. You know, Soleimani was head of the Goods Force, brilliant, charismatic guy. Actually, when I when I was designing this character, General al Borsey, the mental picture I had as a guy who looks as good as good looking as say Sean Connery, you know, just and he's he's just like you, right, he's got the physique, he's got, he's got everything. He's self assured.

He rides his uncle's coattails, you know, into power. In fact, he assassinates the supreme leaders so that his uncle can fleet upwards in him with him. The guy is absolutely immoral. He has he's not religious at all. If he has a religion, it's himself, it's his own god. And he's got a secret bank account in Switzerland. He's playing the commodities market because he knows exactly what the what the Iranians are going to do in the Gulf. So if he wants to cause oil prices to spike, they send out gunboats, you know, to waylay oil tankers. Then if he wants oil prices to fall, they call them gunboats back.

And the whole time his colleagues thinks he's doing this for Iran, He's not doing it for Iran. He's doing it for himself, allowing his commodities trading account in Zurich to skyrocket.

Sometimes it doesn't even seem like it's that far from fiction.

No, it would be totally possible. If you were in his place, you could absolutely manipulate the markets and enrich yourself.

Now I know in the book you actually have a part two. That's correct, the part two, I think in Amazon and has that as one of two.

Oh okay, yes. The next book is called In the Twinkling of an Eye, and this has a few of the characters that the first book has, But I wouldn't call it strictly a sequel. You could read them out of order. It probably makes more sense if you read Living Lies first that the second book is about a Russian North Korean conspiracy to develop a very devastating genetic bioweapon that they're going to use for assassination and ultimately for genocide. And in it there's a Russian scientist who's a victim of Chernobyl. He was as a young man.

His father dies in the Chernobyl meltdown, and his father was deemed a hero of the Soviet Union, which allowed this young man to then get the best education and he becomes a very eminent geneticist and he gets lured into a very secret Russian program to develop this bioweapon. Parallel with this, a young woman escapes from North Korea thanks to her father and she immigrates to the well, she's adopted by a US Army officer and becomes an FBI special agent, and she's very concerned about North Korea and the fact that it's acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

And so these two characters finally meet. She recruits him as a source in this very secret Russian program.

Yeah, there's a lot going on. Now, did you work also in bioweapons? Yes? Now, how I guess I'm trying to see back to reality for a second, away from the fiction. But how plausible is that? I guess I'm trying to see with what the phrase would be. We know what the nuclear weapons we said six or seven countries have. It's obviously it's really challenging to get that.

Is it easier or harder to actually get bioweapons comparatively? Well, hold onto your hat. But when I tell you that any country in the world could have a bioweapons program, I mean there's a choke point when it comes to new cclear weapons, and it's called fissile material. If you don't have U two thirty five or plutonium, you don't have a weapon. There are very few, if any, choke points on bioweapons, and the knowledge about how to construct a bioweapon that's ubiquitous. There are thousands and thousands of people just in the United States who could construct a very devastating, at least terrorist bioweapon. So in essence, it's much much more plausible that a country or a group would have a working offensive bioweapon. In fact, that the

agency we used to say, you know, the terrorists are only one good scientist away from having a bioweapons program, and those scientists are fairly plentiful. The worst bio attack ever in the United States, though, was perpetrated by a researcher at one of our biodefense labs, that anthrax attack in two thousand and one. The Bruce Ivans was a very very imminent scientists and he was the one that did the anthrax attacks.

Why do you think theyve asked this question? But why do you think we haven't received any other attaxes? So some of these countries have to have the ability to do it.

Oh, they all have the ability to do it. Yeah, okay, part of it. Part of it, and this is not a big part of it. Part of it is most countries in the world entered into the Biological Weapons Convention. Now in truth. That's great, but only honest countries observe the protocols of the Biological Weapons Convention. Anybody could and we have suspect I'm not going to say which ones, but we certainly suspect certain countries of having biological weapons programs because, as I said earlier, there's no choke point.

You could you could develop a very devastating biological weapons program. Now that the challenge if you were going to do that is how to do it to where you affect the enemy and not your own indigenous population.

And it's interesting. I know it scared me a few years back watching the Syria crisis. Yeah, there was accusations flying back and forth. Of them was bioweapons. But with the era of misinformation, there's a lot of propaganda. It was really hard to determine whether or not they did. Was it real, was it a setup? Was a propaganda from one site to make them look really evil so they could justify going in. It was just a whole lot of stuff going on. It was really hard to determine.

Well, let me give you let me give you a bit more food for thought. Current day, you know that the coronavirus emerged out of China in late twenty nineteen. In fact, that he merged out of a city called Wuhan. In Wuhan there is a bio safety lab for what we call a BSL four lab, where they work on the most dangerous of all pathogens, and we do know that they had been working on coronaviruses. Now, do I think that the Chinese deliberately released this, No, but I think that old saying about shit happens. I think somebody had a lab accident. This is Jim speculating now, but I think somebody had a lab accident and this stuff got out.

I know.

I was coming through China in late twenty nineteen with my wife. We'd been on a tour in Southeast Asia, and as we got off in the airport in Beijing, there were two young Chinese women there flashing these thermal detectors at all the passengers getting off, and I know what it looks like. And I told my wife, I said, that's odd. Why did they think that we are carrying some kind of disease. Now, it may have been fear of just the flu, but this was like I'm talking late twenty nineteen and late November of twenty nineteen at about the same time this pandemic was emerging from Wuhan.

I honestly believe that the Chinese were working on something, maybe not a biological weapon, but some kind of research into these coronaviruses carry by these bats. We know they'd been working on them, and then somehow there was an accident and it got out. I just I have a feeling that that's the explanation. So now we've had how many people in the United States die from this, hundreds of thousands and people around the world.

I don't think you're going back to China anymore, Jim, after that. I think that wouldn't be welcome back. Let me ask I know, well, the last time I heard from China, I think it was some I forget where the propaganda came out of. I don't know if it was one of their ministers that tweeted something over I can't remember what country it was, but they tweeted that it actually originated for Dietrich Gens.

You know, they say, oh wait a moment, now, uh, you know you've got your own bio you know, bio weapons labs. Actually they're biodefense labs, but you know they're the difference between bio offense and biodefense is about that then, So if I were them, yeah, that's the kind of accusations I would throw. You had the same signatures, the biosafety lab three and four level, you know labs protection.

They're working on these very you know, horrible things, and so it's easy for them to cast dispersions at us. But I would swear on a stack of bibles that we do not have an offensive bioweapons program. But I certainly couldn't say that about some of our adversaries, and.

Folks, I'm not making it up. We're going to look it up. That's the accusation was made that for Dietrich, we had it here the military, our soldiers went over to China and spread it over. There was the story. Then it moved over to Italy and they blamed them after a while. So I don't know, we'll see who.

Well, the Chinese have a sad history because the Japanese in World War Two actually used bioweapons on them and they I was in China on a liaison trip a number of years ago and they reminded me that I think there's twenty or thirty thousand maybe more Chinese who were killed by these Japanese bioweapons. So they have a bad taste in their mouth about this, and they love to accuse the West of having a bioweapons program, and we did up until I think it was nineteen sixty nine.

We actually we in France and Great Britain, a lot of countries had bioweapons programs. But President Nixon decided, we're not going to do that anymore, so they stopped it.

Crazy stuff again, folks, we're talking to James Lawler. The book is Living Lies in all of the Iranian nuclear weapons program. He's got the other one as well, Twinkling, Twinkling of an Eye and Twinkling of an Eye A little biblical reference there. Both books great reads. If you like the conversation we're having right now, well it's interspersed into these books. What's fiction and what's true we can't tell.

But all I can tell you that it's interestpersed in the book. It's a great read. Really did a great job writing this book. I mean it's like a real author, an author who specializes in writing books wrote it, not as a case officer who switches over to an author. It's really did a great job. It was really a fascinating read. Now you look something you're looking at doing a series.

I've had, well, I've had some people talk to me about doing a streaming series. Uh. In fact, a lot of people who've read Living Lies have said, you know, that'd make a great series on Netflix or Amazon. And as I wrote it, it was actually like movie scenes in my head. Now, I'm not going to pretend to be a great writer, but I think I can tell a pretty good story, and that's you know, that's fine as long as I can tell a good story. And as I as I did the scenes and Living Lies, I thought, you know, this would here's a scene, Here's how I would stage it. And a lot of my friends, my wife and everybody said, you know, this would really be a pretty cool series. And I've been talking to some at least a couple of producers about potential for

something like this. Now talk is cheap. Who knows, there's a lot of great books out there that are being turned into streaming series, so I'm not holding my breath on this, but yeah, I'd be wonderful if that happened because it kind of reminds me of that one series I watched it for a while.

The Looming Tower right Now. They did a pretty I mean, the series was okay. They added a little too much that was not in the books, but that's Hollywood for you. But it was, it was really, it was really fascinating because it really kind of gives us an idea of what's what kind of what's happening in the background. I always tell people that they really only know about it at most fifty percent I was really happening. You probably maybe even think less or more. I don't know, but we don't have privy to a lot of information out there and what's going on, and for a lot of good reasons too. Yeah.

One of the challenges of writing a novel like this is the difference between reality and entertainment. And in reality, intelligence operations take typically take a long time and then suddenly you're going at one thousand miles an hour. But in a story, you've got to get the reader's attention or the viewer's attention if it's a movie, and you've got to get going pretty quickly. You just don't have the time to you know, measured pace and things like that, so you have to move very very swiftly. And that's not really reality. That's not the way these intelligence operations work.

Some of my operations were seven eight, nine years long.

Might they don't work like The Born Identity or Sean Connery. Yeah, the time to think of that movie with Sean Connery you did with the Suven Rings. Was it Red Crimson or something?

Well. I had an asset, one of my covert assets who once told me, says, Jim Good, cooking takes time.

That's true. I guess we'll wrap up with this in the next few minutes. Is talking more about contemporary times in the sense of even your book is contemporary, but I guess right now, and the issue of Iran and the nuclear weapons and all this stuff, what's your take on it? You know, because we know with the IAEA, as you mentioned earlier, your book is based on the Living Lives, is based on whether or not Iran decides to that playfair. Some of theccues that are ready with the IAA saying, hey, look, they're now letting us go in there. We can't tell what's going on. Some said they have underground bunkers, some say this, and some say that, what's your take?

Well, my take now again, I sometimes feel like a hammer that sees nothing but nails out there. But as a former spy recruiter, I can assure you that the best way to get an early warning about Iran having a nuclear or real nuclear weapons program is to have penetrations of their nuclear weapons establishment, their nuclear establishment. The scientist Mosen Fakrizi Dae, who was assassinated a little over a year ago. He was the brains behind a lot of the nuclear weapons planning for Iran. The Israelis took him out. They've assassinated other Iranian scientists. I'm not advocating doing that, but then I don't live as close to Iran as Israel does, so you know, for them, it's an existential question. I would hope that we could somehow

reach a peaceful negotiation with the Iranians, but at the same time, I would be wanting to run intelligence sources. As President Reagan used to say, trust but verify, and I would want verification that they're not secretly constructing a nuclear weapons program, sort of like in my book. But no, I don't want war with Iran. I'm not one of these warmongers that says we need to be bombing Iran.

Absolutely not we've gotten into too many, too many, We've lost too many American men and women. My son was a marine and he fought in Iraq and six and seven, and then later one of his best marine coup or buddies was killed by an ied in Afghanistan, and you know it haunts him still.

So he was an irector in the Wild West Days too.

Yes, seven, that was a rough time. My wife and I were constantly concerned. He was a Marine infantryman on a fast boat going up and down out of Ramadi on the Euphrates and they were interdicting terrorists coming across. So he was in firefights three and four times a week.

Man. Yeah, folks, we have a couple other podcasts you might be interested as we did talk to some Special op guys that were down there during the Wild West Days in two thousand and six to two thousand and eight. You can find that stories of Special Forces operators. And then we just started a new podcast a few months ago called Covert Operations, so we talked about all the different operations that are that have happened over the years.

Did you have a name for the operation you did with AQ Connor? No, Okay, we can call it Operation AQ connyeyes, Let's I guess I have a I think what are two more questions? Now two more? What is the dynamic is there? It seems complicated when you have Israel involved, and of course, like you said, they have to be involved because it's right next to them. But there's a lot of moving pieces there and they do things sometimes of course, as you mentioned, the assassinations of the Masad and things of that nature. But is that complicate your work in the CIA, for instance, working with other countries too and seeing how they move. Do they work independently? Is everybody telling everybody exactly what's happening or

you just hope they tell you.

We work more closely with some than others, but we have a I think a pretty robust liaison with Israel and with other like minded nations. None of us want Iran to have a nuclear weapon or some of these other countries either, so of course we work very closely with our British allies, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Canadians, and yes with the Israelis. They have remarkable sources and we do not want Israel to be destroyed, so we have a congruence of interest, and we work with some of the other Western allies as well. So now if some are more reluctant than others, in fact, some have been frankly complicit in supplying technologies to some of these some of these countries like Iran and turn turning a

blind eye to it, and they get upset when we interdict it and stop it.

Well, I don't know, I can't remember really well, would your book have been different because I don't remember, I Vakmundinajad was around in twenty fifteen with the peace deal.

If it was.

Rohani already at that time, Uh, would it be different if Akmadinajad was still president around that time?

Would you have changed the book a little bit? Well, I probably would have because he was different. He was more of a he was more of a hard liner. But there's it's it's amazing, you know, I don't know. I mean the guy right now supposedly as a hard liner. They've had some that are soft liners. Amazingly though, Iran's desire to have nuclear energy, not nuclear weapons, but nuclear energy actually is pretty widely accepted in Iran that we are a sovereign nation as long as we comply with IEA restrictions. We ought to be allowed to have nuclear energy.

Now they're sitting on a fortune in oil and gas. But I guess if I was Irani and I'd say yes, but we need to be for you know that when we reach peak oil or whatever. And as I said earlier in the program, nuclear energy is very clean. So you could make an argument that if they were sincere that Iran. I mean, in fact, I'll tell you who put the first nuclear reactor in Iran. We did, right, right?

I forgot about that, Yeah, I forgot about that, But that was true. During the time of the Shah, we were selling nuclear technology to Iran. You hear them a lot, and so they you know, now they have some They do have some peaceful nuclear the power planet Bouchier. That's a peaceful nuclear reactor. Nobody in their right mind wants the Bouchier plant to melt down like sure Noble did so.

I guess my last question is an opinion question for you, in the sense of how the media operates in today's world and social media. It's a very different world than it was fifteen years ago. You have a lot of stories that got flying around, You have a lot of people throwing accusations on both sides, not politically, but both sides of both countries. And you have multiple actors that create narratives all over the place. How has this changed the world for you in the sense of espionage and I know you've been out of it for a little while, but you still work in the industry in the sense with human Has it changed it a lot? Has making it much more complicated? Has it made it pos and cons at all?

Or well from multiple angles, Yes, it's much more complex. Back when I was active as a case officer, the Internet was just in its infant stages and there was no such thing as Facebook or LinkedIn, you know, back then, back before things social media was popular. If I wanted to recruit somebody, frequently I would develop a relationship with a close friend of theirs and they would say, well, here's if you want to know how to recruit Carlos.

This is what makes him tick, this is what he's irritated with some people. Because I use that as a lever a lot of times. Basically, somebody would be massively irritated with their boss, but I might not know that unless a friend told me that. Nowadays, people post things on social media that are very illuminating about them and I don't need to do that, Or if I just wanted to say what we call a bump, I want to get close to somebody, and I noticed, for instance, Carlos, I don't know if you're a golfer or a tennis player, but if you were, you know, and I wanted to recruit you, I would show up at your tennis club or your golf club and you know, strike up a conversation with you on a friendly basis, totally oblique angle.

Now also you've hit a note where the news that we have today it's twenty four to seven, and it's a lot of it is bs. Anybody can put anything on the internet. You know, it's just incredible what some of the garbage that people put on the Internet. And yet there's a lot of people that are susceptible of this.

They say, oh I saw this, well that doesn't make it true. So it's changed a lot. And then then technical surveillance. These days, you have cameras everywhere, you've got biometrics. It's making the life of a spy a lot more difficult in many respects. We call this ubiquitous technical surveillance. A lot of countries, a lot of friendly countries have cameras everywhere. Now, does that mean that we're stopping intelligence operations?

By no, means absolutely not. You just have to be know the risks. You have to have your people be acquainted with the risks, and then you have to you have to move swiftly.

There's a lot of CCTVs out there now, really are a lot of coverage for the news people too. That's interesting because I did see an article a couple of weeks ago and I was was giving a lecture and it was astonishing because the article said two Canadian tourists got killed in Mexico at a hotel. So I thought, boy, obviously it sounds cartelish. But then when I read the article, the two individuals were actually fugitives that were living in Canada.

But there were fugitives for a drug deal, drug dealing organization that made a bad deal with the cartels. It's like, Okay, it's the truth, but it's kind of a half truth. These aren't just normal every day so tourists hanging out in the hotels in Mexico fascinating stuff. Folks Again, James lawl or L a. W. L. E. R. The book Living Lies and novel of the Iranian Nuclear Weapons Programmers.

Your other book are already available to James.

Yes, I'm sorry. No, it will be an ebook form on the twenty fifth of April and then in hard copy in late July. But you can go on Amazon now and reserve with it.

Oh excellent, So go ahead and check that out too. It twinkling in the eye, twinkling in the twinkling of an eye, in a twinkle of an eye. Check it out. Look at James Lawler. You can find his books there. Pre order it again, as he mentions you can. It is in the twinkling of an eye. You can buy. You can read the book at any order you want.

But it's a good start. Now go ahead and get that in the Living Lives. Thanks again everybody for listening. Thank you so much, James for being here.

My pleasure. I enjoyed it.

Thank you everyone. Make sure to share, subscribe, hit that like button you know we like it. Stay safe out there.

Spies, Lies, and Centrifuges: A CIA Case Officer’s Hunt for the World’s Most Dangerous Man

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