CIA Station Chiefs and not-so-secret Secrets
I’m joined by two high-level former CIA intelligence officers in this week’s podcast. John Sipher and Jerry O’Shea were station chiefs in Moscow, Baghdad and other key posts. They now host a podcast called Mission Implausible in which they banter - as you’ll hear on my show these former spooks can certainly banter - about conspiracy theories.
I started off by asking them how foreign intelligence services heads based in Washington DC would be dealing with the US election. What kind of reports are the men and women in MI6, French intelligence or Australian intelligence sending back to their capitals? Or the Ukrainians?
There is so much at stake in this election for the world, so how are America’s allies making sense of the razor-slim chance that Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will take the White House?
Jerry summed it up perfectly.
“They’d be befuddled, right?”
Frankly, all of us living in America right now are well and truly befuddled. Not just foreign spies. I just had a phone conversation with a New Yorker who said she felt like she was living in an alternative reality to me. New York and Atlanta are so far away from each other that it’s like we’re living in different universes.
As for America’s enemies, John and Jerry rightly point out, it’s not like they can steal the results of the election. Or rig it. But Russia, China, Iran can try to put a finger on the scale and influence and manipulate via social media and other ways. “They all want to create weakness in the United States.”
The key to that? Getting Americans to turn on each other.
That must be the easiest job right now. Americans are doing a fabulous job of hating each other, the Presidential candidates, the media, the government, the immigrants, the economy and even the weather. Death threats against meteorologists have soared since the last two hurricanes battered us. Whoever thought you’d see a country hating the weather guys for the bad weather?
When I asked John and Jerry where they’d go if they could time travel in American history, John said he’d like to go to the 1950’s when American and global institutions were being made after World War II. Jerry cheated, as John says. Jerry wants to go to the future, not the past. Fifty years from now. He wants to know how all this anxiety and division ends? What kind of America emerges from the fragmentation of now?
We all hope somehow the center holds and the extremes do not endure.
Join me,
Robyn
