76: Adrenaline Rush with Jim Lawler

This episode has been automatically transcribed by AI, please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.

0:03:57 Chris: Jim Lawler, aka Mad Dog, serves as a national security consultant and is the senior partner at MDO Group, which provides human intel training to the intel community and the commercial sector. Focused on weapons of mass destruction, counterintelligence, technical and cyber issues. Jim, how’s it going, man?

0:04:16 Jim: I’m doing well, Chris. Thank you very much. I appreciate you inviting me on your program.

0:04:20 Chris: Absolutely, man. It’s an honor to have you on. And I’m also here with matt CanAm, who you already know. Hey, Matt.

0:04:27 Matt: Hello.

0:04:28 Chris: So, Jim, first time on barcode? I’d love to hear your origin story. Talk me through your background and what led you into the CIA.

0:04:38 Jim: Born and raised in Houston, Texas. Went to undergraduate school at Rice University there in Houston, and then went off to the University of Texas Law School in Austin, Texas. And in fact, that was where I first had an encounter with the CIA, because I was in my last year of law school thinking about only one thing, and that’s to find a job. And I was interviewing with a lot of law firms, and lo and behold, the CIA was coming to campus to interview for attorneys for the Office of General Counsel at the CIA, because like any large bureaucracy, the CIA needs attorneys to either keep it out of trouble or more frequently, get it out of trouble.

0:05:24 Jim: So I went to this interview, and the interviewer was a gentleman named Mr. Bill Wood. In retrospect, now, I think he was a former operations officer, because we got about three minutes into this interview, and he looked at me and he said, jim, have you ever thought about the clandestine service? Now, this was 1976, long before the CIA even had a sign outside its headquarters saying what it was. And I said, no, I don’t know what the clandestine service is.

0:05:56 Jim: And he said, Well, I can’t tell you much about it at the moment, but I think you’d be good at this. So I was intrigued. I took the interview, or the application rather took it home that night. But reality sank in pretty quickly because my wife’s mother was ill at the time, and the chances that we would go all the way to Washington, DC. And then thousands of miles away overseas, that was not going to happen.

0:06:24 Jim: So I, with some reluctance, returned the application the next day. And instead of going to work for the CIA or a law firm, I went to work for a family owned business. Now, I don’t know how many of your listeners have ever been in family businesses, but if they’re no longer in a family business, it’s probably due to that F word family. And I love my dad and my two brothers, but I was very frustrated working in our family steel components business, making a lot of money.

0:06:57 Jim: In fact, I learned at an early age that one can make a lot of money and still be very unhappy. And so I would come home at night and I would complain to my wife about how frustrating and unfulfilling this work was. And finally, after about three and a half years, she had it up to here. And she said, jim, either do something about it or stop your belly aching, which is great advice. You don’t have a right to complain if you’re not willing to do something about it.

0:07:27 Jim: So I went into my office and I wrote this gentleman, Mr. Bill Wood, a letter and said that three and a half years ago I wasn’t ready for this opportunity that you mentioned to me, but now I really am. And it wasn’t but about three days later that I’ve got a phone call at my office, and a young woman said, without ever saying the words or the letters, CIA, she said, Mr. Wood got your letter and he was wondering if you could meet him next Thursday at 03:00 p.m

0:07:57 Jim: at the Holiday Inn out on the Gulf Freeway. If you could be in the lobby. And I said, yes ma’am. So I went to that interview, spent about 2 hours with him. He said, I’d like to fly you to Washington in a couple of weeks for some tests. Which I did. Now this was in the basically the summer of 79 and came back and about three months later they invited me to come back for some more tests for the polygraph test, which some people mistakenly call a lie detector test.

0:08:27 Jim: But it’s not. It’s a stress test. And about two or three weeks after that I got a phone call and they said, mr. Lawler, we’d like to offer you a position as a GS Eleven operations officer or also known as a case officer. Now the bizarre thing, Chris, was I had no idea what a case officer did. Absolutely no idea. But I was so damn miserable in that family business I didn’t care. I just wanted to get out of Texas, get away from the frustrations of the family business.

0:09:01 Jim: And so in February of 1980 we packed up our car. My wife was pregnant with our first child and we moved all the way to Washington DC. Me not knowing anything about what they wanted me to do. But I soon found out they wanted me to exploit people. Manipulate people, subvert people, suborn people, corrupt people. Basically convince them to commit espionage, to commit treason. All for the United States to provide me with classified information.

0:09:34 Jim: And I found out that I was not only pretty good at it, but I also enjoyed the hell out of it.

0:09:41 Chris: I never looked back since.

0:09:42 Jim: No. Never. How many jobs do you think a person can say 19 mornings out of 20? I can hardly wait to get to work.

0:09:52 Chris: Not many.

0:09:53 Jim: Not many.

0:09:56 Chris: Okay, so once you’re in the Agency, talk to me about your mindset then and then how it evolved over your time there.

0:10:08 Jim: Well, they have a lot of introductory courses that we take, basically getting used to. One thing I’m sure Matt could confirm this government writing styles. The Bureau has its own style. The Agency has its own style, but also clandestine tradecraft, the need for discretion and confidentiality. I mean, unlike Matt, who could go around and tell his friends and family that he was working for the FBI, I couldn’t say anything.

0:10:36 Jim: I had a cover job, which was basically I was a State Department officer now. Yes, my family knew, but my friends all thought I had gone off to Washington to join the Foreign Service. And we kept up that cover for most of my 25 years in the Agency. And of course that’s for our own protection. And so that was getting used to living undercover and then being able to think clandestinely. How do I go after a target? How do I recruit a foreign source?

0:11:07 Jim: And we go off to our training facility at our operations center, which is known colloquially as The Farm, and I can’t tell you where it is, even though 99.99% of the entire world knows where it is. But anyways, you go off for about five, four or five months of training there and they teach you or try to teach you how to recruit foreign sources. So did that emerge from the farm? Did well, and my first choice was going to be the, what we called Soviet East Europe Division.

0:11:49 Jim: I didn’t get my first choice. Instead I got my second choice, which was European Division. And then after some language training, in my case, they decided to give me French, which was good. And after several months of French, then I went off to our first European assignment in the summer of 1982. Then we had five consecutive assignments overseas, which was unusual, very unusual because normally you come back home, get maybe some different language training or different operational training and then go back overseas.

0:12:24 Jim: But we spent a consecutive twelve years overseas, went overseas with our first child and came back with two more who were born, one in Switzerland and one in France. So it was a great experience and my family loved it. We loved it. Kids were educated in French schools. We did that deliberately so as to give them a different language, a foreign language, and so they became native in speaking French.

0:12:53 Matt: Jim, you and I have talked quite a bit about the psychology of insiders. And essentially what you are doing is you are recruiting insider threats in other organizations is what your assets were. And you brought up something interesting earlier about not having the excitement in your previous, in your F job. And that was one of the things that drew you to the CIA. And for those who aren’t familiar with the acronym Meister, M-I-C-E Hyphen R stands for money, Ideology, compromise, Ego, revenge, as being motives for why people will commit espionage.

0:13:37 Matt: But when you were describing your background, it actually made me think of something else. And I’m curious your perspective on this excitement.

0:13:45 Jim: That’s a good point. Now actually, whether you want to call it excitement, you can call it that. Maybe you could call it ego. Because again, it’s stroking the ego to think that you’re a spy. And I actually one of the first people I recruited. He had a whole panoply of reasons why he was willing to commit espionage. In fact, I had pitched him. When I use the word pitch, it means, I am asking you to become a spy for me, for the United States.

0:14:14 Jim: And when I asked him that, I really had no indication that he was under any kind of stress at all. I had no basis for my pitch. But headquarters, my CIA headquarters, was so desperate for us to acquire sources in a certain country’s program that they approved my naive, rather cockamamie proposal to try and recruit this man based sheerly on my friendship, our friendship. Now, how naive is that? Do you really think that you’re going to say, yes, Jim? Sure, I’ll commit treason for you. We’re buddies.

0:14:53 Jim: No, it’s not going to work. And for some inane reason, I thought I could do that. So I pitched a guy. He says, Jim, that would be morally wrong. Well, I backed off and didn’t try and cram it down his throat, but we have a saying at CIA that it’s okay to be turned down, but not turned in. Meaning, what if he goes to his ambassador? And by the way, he was number two in his embassy. He was the Deputy Chief of Mission.

0:15:23 Jim: What if he goes to his ambassador the next day and tells the ambassador, you know, young Mr. James Lawler, third Secretary of the American Embassy, just propositioned me to become a traitor. Now, how do you think that’s going to go over when his ambassador storms into our ambassador’s office? Lodging a very strongly worded. DeMarsh. DeMarsh is a polite word for a bitching session to complain about me, you know, the impertinence of me propositioning his deputy to become a traitor.

0:15:58 Jim: And I thought, even though I’ve got CIA approval for this, I’m several thousand miles from Washington. They’re going to be thinking, how did Lawler screw this up? There’s going to be a lot of COVID your ass back in Washington, and I’m going to be the one left holding the bag here. So I thought, oh, I better call this guy and make sure that he and I are still on speaking terms. So I did. I called him about three days later, and I was relieved when he didn’t hang up the phone in my ear.

0:16:29 Jim: So that was a good sign. And then I said, we had such a good time the other night at dinner, I was wondering if we could do it again this weekend. My only goal was to take his temperature and see if he and I are still friends. And that he didn’t go around complaining to people about my improper suggestion. It wasn’t just a suggestion. It was a proposition that he become a spy for money. Okay? Because I had told him, if you do this, if you share these privileged insights into what your country is doing in this crucial set of negotiations, I will give you X amount of dollars a month for these as a consultant. You can be on my team.

0:17:10 Jim: We can work this together. Rah, rah, rah. Meaning I’m going to pay you to betray your country. Well, I was relieved when he told me. When I said, let’s go to another dinner, he said, you know, Jim, I was thinking of that same thing. I think that’s a great idea. So I thought oh, good. Excellent. So I go to the second dinner. My only goal is again, smooth the waters. Make sure that if he’s still upset, that I can somehow back away from that.

0:17:39 Jim: Maybe somehow I was misunderstood, something like that. Just to make sure that we are still friends and that he is not going to be a burr in my saddle. So we got to the restaurant the second time. This is one week later. The waiter came and put down the menus, walked away. And the first words out of my friend’s mouth, jim, that offer you made me last Friday, is that still good? And I said, yeah, of course it is.

0:18:13 Jim: I made it because we’re friends. And he said, well, what you don’t know is three days after our dinner, my wife announced that she wants a divorce, and I can’t afford to pay her the alimony to which she’s entitled and put my boys in private schools when I go home next summer. Because in my country, if you don’t go to a private school, you don’t get a good education. I can’t afford to do that unless I accept your offer.

0:18:42 Jim: Now, I know it’s morally wrong, but I don’t have a choice. And I remembered something from law school. One of the first lessons you learned, if the judge rules in your favor, shut up and get out of court. And so I shut up and allowed him to become a spy for the United States. He brought out reams of classified material from his embassy. And the first time he handed me probably six inches worth of classified material.

0:19:19 Jim: He said, Jim, I didn’t tell you this before, but I hate my ambassador. I hate that little cocky son of a bitch. He goes around all over this country claiming credit for everything that I do and everything that everybody else in this embassy does. It’s as if he’s the only one working here. He says, I can’t stand the son of a bitch. And when I hand this to you, it’s like I’m kicking that son of a bitch in the face.

0:19:45 Jim: I smiled and I said, you know, you and I are a team now. Why don’t you bring me some more of this, and let’s kick that son of a bitch again. He did. He was bringing it out. So I thought, okay, revenge. I mean, he had been belittled. Somebody had stolen credit for what he was doing. He felt pissed off, and I’m sure in his heart he didn’t feel like he was betraying anything. How can you betray something if you’re betrayed first, and his boss had betrayed him.

0:20:19 Jim: And that, I think, is what a lot of insider threat people. They rationalize this by saying, I’m not the trader. They betrayed me first. This is what the Jesuits call covert compensation. It’s just that revenge, that dish best eaten cold. You’re getting even. And that’s how you mentally justify this. Well, it turns out he had even more rationale, more reasons than even that. And I like to say that there’s a whole mosaic of reasons as to why people commit espionage and betray a trust.

0:20:54 Jim: And it’s never, ever I know when Matt used that term mice, the first term was money. They never do it just for money. They never do it just for that. They may need money for something, but there’s other reasons why they do it. Okay? This guy loved his children. He needed the money because of the alimony. He needed the money to put them in private schools. He needed the money as a mark of revenge against his boss.

0:21:22 Jim: And to him, it wasn’t just about the money, but we needed to polygraph this guy. I made a comment earlier about a polygraph not being a lie detector test. It’s not. It’s a stress detector. And you have things attached to your breathing, attached to your skin to see about how much you’re sweating and things like that. And ostensibly, an operator can tell whether you are telling the truth. Deception indicated or no deception indicated.

0:21:51 Jim: I’m highly skeptical of that. But I’m not going to go into this. We still needed to polygraph this man for a very good reason, at least for a counterintelligence reason. And that’s because when he was going to go back to his country in another year, he was going to be handled by one of my colleagues who does not have diplomatic protection. We call that officer an NOC or NOC non official cover. And a non official cover officer does not have the black diplomatic passport that allows him to get out of jail, maybe gets expelled from the country.

0:22:28 Jim: But he doesn’t go to prison. He has diplomatic protection. And my friend that I just recruited was going to be handled by a knock. So we had to make sure that when he offered to basically volunteered at that second meeting that this was legitimate and not a double agent provocation. So we administered a three question counterintelligence polygraph. Those three questions are very easy. First question, have you told anyone about your secret relationship with CIA?

0:23:02 Jim: That’s very easy. Black or white. Question two, are you working for any intelligence service other than CIA? Very good. And third question, did anyone instruct you to volunteer to Mr. Lawler? Again, yes or no? Well, the polygraph operator is supposed to strictly abide by those questions unless the subject being tested takes the polygraph operator off on a tangent somewhere, then the polygraph operator has the right to pursue a line of questioning about that and they’re not supposed to come up with any other questions.

0:23:42 Jim: It’s supposed to be just those basically three simple CI questions. But I had a very naive very inexperienced polygraph operator who had never been overseas before and the first question out of his mouth to my friend golly I’m just wondering why you’re doing this. I thought oh my god we’re going to have a moral epiphany here. The guy is going to stalk out of this room and there goes my first major recruitment.

0:24:14 Jim: But my friend surprised me by laughing out loud and he said because I think this is going to be a lot of fun. And that gets to what Matt mentioned earlier about excitement. Some people do it for excitement. I think Robert Hanson which was an FBI spy I think part of his motivation was excitement. He did this just to be the best spy ever and so that motivates some people. But anyways I found out that people don’t commit espionage unless they’re under stress and I always say to my students and courses I teach I never once recruited a happy person.

0:25:01 Jim: You don’t recruit happy people. You recruit people under stress. And one of my talents is I’m a fairly accurate stress detector. I’m fairly empathic. In order to recruit you I need to get inside your head and understand what it’s like to be you and find out what are those crack patterns. I was a rock climber when I was a young man and the way you climb rock is you look for crack patterns. You can’t climb smooth rock unless you’re a fly or spiderman.

0:25:33 Jim: You can’t do it. And so over time I can find out what those crack patterns are. Sometimes it takes a long time. In one case it took me eleven years because the guy that I was going after he had no cracks that I could tell. But eventually stress enters into people’s lives and eventually that makes them recruitable.

0:25:57 Matt: That’s fantastic. And I want to ask a follow up question to that, to turn this around. And looking from the perspective of the organization that’s trying to protect itself from insider threats, with the example that you gave with this gentleman who is getting back at his boss, what could an organization have done, perhaps to have defeated your effort to get this person to turn around and not betray their country?

0:26:29 Jim: Well I think all of us have been in organizations where we have either a boss or a senior officer who’s a jackass and that is just creating tension right there. So I guess number one get rid of the jackasses. That sounds easy but I think trying to make people feel like they’re part of the team and you don’t have to give employees everything they want. You can’t, you can’t afford it. You can’t give them everything they want.

0:26:58 Jim: But if you can make them feel and sincerely feel like they are being listened to and treated equally. If they are treated the same as every other employee, then they’re going to feel loyalty to the team. That makes a job for somebody like me very difficult. We used to observe foreign embassies. Like, for instance, we might have an observation post looking out on a Russian embassy because we want to recruit Russians.

0:27:23 Jim: So at 05:00 p.m., we’d see three or four Russians coming out, slapping each other on the back, and they’re heading off to a bar. We’re not going after those people. Those guys are buddies, they’re friends. And besides, you’d never go after more than one person anyways. But what we’re looking for is the loner, the guy that comes out a few minutes later, he’s not part of the team. He’s that straggler.

0:27:47 Jim: It sounds crude, but there’s a reason why predators go after stragglers, you know. You know, people who stray from the pack. And that’s what we’re looking for, people who stray from the pack. People are who are hurt, you know, they go after a wounded animal. A wolf or a lion will go after a wounded or injured animal. In a sense, that’s what we do. That sounds harsh, but that’s exactly what we do. This person is hurting and so we are going to go in and offer that person some help, some relief.

0:28:19 Jim: And so that’s what I would do. So again, I would say listen to your employees, reduce the revenge motivation. Make your employees feel like they are all treated at least equitably fairly. Of course, everybody makes different amount of money in different organizations. Some people contribute more than others. I understand that. And so if you have bonuses based on merit, that’s fine. But as long as people think, well, Matt didn’t get that bonus because of his merit, he got it because he kisses up to the boss.

0:28:54 Jim: Well, that’s the kind of thing that creates contempt. And once you’ve created contempt, then the insider feels like, well, it’s just fair, screw them. I’m going to take my toys and go to a competitor and let them fairly compensate me instead of these jerks Matt or Chris or whomever they cheated. Now, whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. But perception is everything to people. So trying to treat people fairly, be an understanding, being attuned to stress when people are going through obviously you can’t prevent people from, say, going through a divorce or something like that.

0:29:35 Jim: But if you can be sympathetic and patient and be willing to listen to them and talk to them, have it. Maybe an employee assistance program, something where you could help people through a time of financial stress. And maybe the financial stress is due to their own incompetence. Maybe it’s due to exigent circumstances. It could be a family member who needs medical attention, or there could be a child who is having problems, or it could be elder care issues, all kinds of issues that create stress in people’s lives.

0:30:08 Jim: And if you can minimize the stress level and tell people, look, I’m here for you, I can’t do everything, but I will try and help you. If you do that, it’s amazing you would insulate your company from somebody like me or from somebody inside the company who just volunteers to steal your intellectual property.

0:30:29 Matt: That’s great. I think that you hit on some really good points. Currently I consult with companies to defend against insider threats. And it’s so prevalent that the mentality is we’ve got to stop something from happening. And it almost creates this error of suspicion towards the employees. And I like what you’re saying in that you can really promote the positive behaviors and maybe get a more effective outcome in the long run.

0:30:58 Jim: Absolutely. You don’t want this to be the Ten Commandments against insider threat. You don’t want that. I’ve seen some of these online programs. They’re bullshit. I mean, that’s not what you want. You want a corporate management team that genuinely cares about people, that goes around and what we used to call helicopter management, just stopping inside an office, talking to somebody, how’s it going?

0:31:24 Jim: Being attuned being aware of their personal situations, not being invasive. Everybody’s got a right to privacy. That’s fine. But if you notice people are acting erratic or there’s some aberrant behavior going on, be curious, find out what’s going on here. Why is your work not up to its normal, excellent standards? I mean, is there some way I can help? And if you say that and you mean it, people will respond positively that you’re reaching out a hand to them to help them up. Maybe they tripped and fell somehow, psychologically tripped and fell, and you are helping them up out of their problem.

0:32:03 Jim: I think that’s the way to handle it, yeah.

0:32:07 Chris: And I guess that there’s indicators that you have to look for to identify their need. Do you feel like over time that it’s possible to identify those indicators quickly? Because within an organization, it’s often a struggle to identify someone as a potential insider threat. In a corporate environment, they may not know an employee at the same level that you did. So that could be difficult.

0:32:43 Jim: Right now at times there are indicators. Someone who is working odd hours, maybe they have a lot of work to catch up on. But if they’re doing this just for no good reason, it could be that that’s the time when they’re stealing things, stealing the intellectual property or whatever. People that go around asking questions about a lot of things that they’re not working on, trying to. And maybe there’s some natural curiosity, but it could be that they are trying to steal, again, some intellectual property or some proprietary information.

0:33:19 Jim: People that are having drug issues, alcohol issues, people that are acting aberrant, not normal. You might have somebody that’s a little odd. That’s nothing against oddness. So we’re all a little odd, a. Little eccentric in a way, but if you’ve got a, you know, a person that’s been kind of like this, and then suddenly there’s something going on in their life, being attuned to that, and without being too invasive, americans pride themselves on their privacy and their individualism, and I’m all for that. I’m a libertarian, and I think everybody’s got a right to live their lives.

0:33:59 Jim: You know, as long as they don’t harm other people, then fine, that’s that’s that’s fine. But if there if there’s some serious problems in this person’s life, I think you need to maybe talk to that person and just find out in a compassionate way, not in an inquisitorial, but not the inquisition, not pull out the toenails and fingernails. No ask, see how are things going? Can I help you? Your job performance, giving people positive, giving people feedback on their performance and being accurate, maybe your performance is off a little bit, and I just wondered if there’s something going on at home, or is there something that I can help you with?

0:34:40 Jim: Would you like some more training, something like that? And everybody’s busy. I know at CIA and FBI, we were always busy, busy, busy with all of our cases and things. But you’re just creating a problem if you don’t pay more attention to your employees and taking the pulse of the organization and those employees. I know it sounds kind of bad, but sometimes if you have a way for another employee to anonymously, say, tommy is having an issue here.

0:35:17 Jim: I don’t know what it is, but he’s acting bad. It bothers me. And have a way for an employee to confidentially tell you that again, not to create an inquisition, but to let you know that there may be something off here. I had to do that once in my career of an employee, a fellow employee, that I thought was this person’s going under a lot of stress, and he was privy to a lot of very sensitive information, and I agonized over whether I should say anything or not.

0:35:49 Jim: I ultimately did, and I don’t know whatever came of that. It’s handled very discreetly. But anyway, that’s the way I feel about it.

0:36:01 Matt: You brought up something, Jim, that got me thinking, because I’m less familiar with the organizational culture at the CIA or the sort of informal culture at the CIA, but at the FBI, we talk about Type A personalities. And at least amongst the agents, the type A personality prevalence rate is probably somewhere around 95%. And I think that that can be counterproductive in the sense that when someone does have a problem, you don’t want to bring it forward because it’s looked at as a sign of weakness sometimes.

0:36:37 Matt: I don’t know. Is that something that you ever encountered at the Agency?

0:36:42 Jim: Yes, I think the agency hires people because we’re strong individualists. We are the kind that I mean, I don’t want to say just lone wolves. But we want people that are very self starting, very type A personalities. The type of person that can think on their feet and go out and do stuff. Well, that’s a double edged sword. So you get somebody who is a type A personality and it’s my way or the highway.

0:37:13 Jim: You get obsessive sometimes on things like that and so they need to ratchet that back and remember the team. And I mean, I was guilty of that too. Sometimes. It was like, well no, get out of my way, let me do this. But it just kind of comes with the territory, I guess. But we need to watch out for the person who is so obsessed or so type A that they won’t take any criticism, they don’t brook any criticism.

0:37:48 Jim: That’s unhealthy. In fact, it’s more than unhealthy, it’s self destructive.

0:37:52 Matt: Okay, so that leads me to another question. What do you think are the biggest discrepancies between the outside perceptions of people who are case officers, people in the CIA, and the reality of that?

0:38:10 Jim: Well, I think a lot of people outside think that we’re all Jason Bourne or James Bond and that we are all, unlike you, special agents who did pack a weapon all the time. Most of the time we don’t. Unlike you, who had arrest powers, we don’t. I think a lot of people in the country think that we are spying on Americans. We don’t. We’ve been prohibited from doing that. We have very strict rules and laws.

0:38:41 Jim: Not just rules, but laws. We can get in a lot of trouble if we do anything. Like, I mean, you’ll get not only fired, you can be prosecuted. And so I think that we have a lot of legal strictures and things that the American public is really not aware of. They think, well, you’re just telling us that. No, I’m not just telling you that, it’s true. Was my job exciting? Yeah, it was exciting, but it was not like Mission Impossible.

0:39:10 Jim: Now there were times where it would really get your pulse going. I mean, we did what we call physical access operations overseas. Okay? That means you break into a place, you basically steal the intelligence and then you leave without anybody ever knowing it. That’s exciting. That’s called basically a breaking and entering. You can either get arrested or killed doing that, and that’s exciting. And doing the casing for it, going in, being part of that type of operation, it can be very exciting.

0:39:44 Jim: But most of the times, the CIA operation, it goes along slowly for a while, slowly for a while, and then it might take off like a rocket. And so the fact is it’s not like a rocket all the time. Yes, I confess I’m an adrenaline junkie. I love things that are exciting, but you can’t have that all the time. You just can’t.

0:40:10 Chris: Looking back at your career in the CIA, what would you say was the hardest challenge for you personally that you’ve had to overcome, and how did you.

0:40:20 Jim: Do so I think one thing is learning to listen more and talk less. You don’t recruit people when you’re talking, you recruit people when you’re listening. And I’m a slight extrovert, and I think that I have case officer colleagues and friends who are a little more introverted. So sometimes when they would approach a similarly introverted person, they were more of a natural match for that person than maybe I would be.

0:40:56 Jim: But I had to learn how to just shut up and listen and not comment, but be a very soothing voice to be somebody’s therapist. My voice has a certain soothing quality to it, I’ve been told. And I’ve had more than one of my sources who said, jim, when I’m listening to you, it’s like my brain is in a warm waterbed. And they will tell me things that they won’t tell their spouse or their best friends, because I’m listening and I’m not condemning.

0:41:29 Jim: I don’t condemn, and I’ll talk them through it. Maybe I should have been a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but I wouldn’t have had as much fun. So I think learning to be patient patience is in persevere. Perseverance is a big one. I pitched an Eastern European intelligence officer towards the end of the Cold War, and he had even given me hints that he might be approachable, because he told me, he says, you know, Jim, my dad told me the other day that he went to bed as a communist and he woke up as a capitalist.

0:42:08 Jim: So I pitched him, and the guy struggled with it, and he didn’t say yes, but he didn’t really say no. And unfortunately, I was leaving that country to go on to another assignment, and my big mistake was not coming back two or three days later and saying, okay, time is growing short. You need to be on the right side of history. Won’t you join my team? And I know now in my heart I could have recruited that guy.

0:42:37 Jim: So being a little more being a little bit more persevering, a little bit more patience, I’ve always had a lot of, I think, a fair amount of patience. Like I said, I it took me eleven years to recruit one guy because he didn’t have any obvious stresses earlier in his life. But then his life fell apart and he needed me first. His marriage fell apart. By the way, I had been best man at his wedding. That’s how close I get to some of my targets.

0:43:06 Jim: And he married a young lady from a certain European country, and they went off to a third world country, and she decided she had not signed on to be to be seven or 8000 miles from home in this God forsaken third world country. They’d had a child. She had doubts that she was going to have a divorce from him and take that child and go home. So his his married life was shattered, by the way, if you detect a trend here, I recruited, in a certain time period, at least three people going through divorce, because it’s probably the most psychologically tumultuous time in anybody’s life.

0:43:42 Jim: It’s like a little death. And not only are you physically and psychologically, you’re financially vulnerable, suddenly all kinds of stress. And if I detect that and I’m in your orbit, and if you have something I need, I become your best buddy. And so his marriage fell apart, and then he was reassigned to his home country, and he found out that in the several years that he had been gone, that his ethnic group was no longer in charge.

0:44:10 Jim: There was a new sheriff in town, and it wasn’t from his ethnic group. And he found out that there was this glass ceiling in his Foreign Ministry, and he could no longer aspire to a senior level because he was not of that ethnicity. He said, Jim, this is so unfair. I can work and work and work, and I’ll never get any further ahead. How can I give allegiance to a country which treats its citizens like this?

0:44:35 Jim: So I said, I know you’re going back to your home country, or not the home country, but the home country of your ex wife to celebrate your little daughter’s third birthday. How about if we meet there and we discuss other job possibilities? That took me about 30 seconds to break cover, to briefly apologize for not telling him I was a CIA officer a long time ago. In fact, I thanked him for protecting me and being compassionate like a brother.

0:45:07 Jim: And I said, I’d like you to join my team. And he told me, Jim, now you’ve given me something to believe in. And he went on, and he worked for us for a number of years. During 911, he was over in his home office in this foreign country, and he watched those twin towers come down, and he said, I got very emotional. He started crying. And his fellow Foreign Ministry employees looked at him quizzically, wondering, what’s wrong with him?

0:45:38 Jim: He’s not an American. And he said, it was almost a counterintelligence issue, why I’d be so upset. But what they didn’t know was, now I’m on your team. It was a transfer of allegiance over. So patience, perseverance, empathy these are things I think I had them instinctually, but to be able to sharpen those and to just be a little more feeling compassionate towards people.

0:46:07 Chris: And you mentioned getting closer to your targets, right? So during your recruitment responsibilities, how did you draw the line between your personal emotions and your mission? Was there ever a time where your personal feelings impacted or came close to compromising your logic?

0:46:32 Jim: Well, okay, so this is a number of years ago. Occasionally I had to go after, say, an attractive female target, and if she suddenly started mistaking my attention for something romantic, I had to back off because I’m happily married and there are certain things I’ll do for my country, but that wasn’t one of them. And so typically, I would turn her over to a female colleague, something like that, and to remember that what you’re trying to do is to recruit a spy.

0:47:07 Jim: You’re not just doing this to become a friend. In fact, if all it is is a friendship, let’s call it what it is. It’s a friendship. It’s no longer what we call a developmental activity. And I think that a mediocre or poor case officer number one is someone who fears rejection. And I tell my students, if you’ve never had a recruitment pitch rejected, you haven’t pitched enough people. You need to keep pushing and pushing and seeing where this takes you.

0:47:38 Jim: And secondly, another mark of a mediocre officer would be, well, what if that person, the target, is upset or I get to hurt their feelings? Well, again, maybe you’re talking about somebody you should just be friends with and not going after them as an intelligence target. So I think those are the things that the salespeople say ABC always be closing. You got to close the deal. Matt did an excellent job.

0:48:07 Jim: One of the best recruitment pitches I ever heard in my career was in a training thing. I was his mentor, and I was observing him pitching someone, and boy, did he drive the train. At one point, he just looks at the guy and he says, now here’s what we’re going to do. No question. Now here’s what we’re going to do. And the guy just, okay. It was magnificent.

0:48:30 Chris: Where’s that mad at? I want to see that.

0:48:34 Matt: Mad is speechless at the moment.

0:48:37 Chris: So I do want to talk to you about the ethical aspect real quick, because I’m sure that there were situations where you needed to act or to react quickly. Tell me about the hardest ethical decision that you had to make during an assignment.

0:48:55 Jim: I thought as long as I was doing this for our national security, in fact, I had a young man about six or seven years ago at NSA, I was giving a talk on their Counterintelligence and Security Awareness Day, and there must have been 500, 600 NSA employees in this auditorium. And after I gave a talk very similar to what I’m giving to you and Matt, a young man raised his hand and he said, mr. Lawler, do you consider yourself to be a moral person?

0:49:26 Jim: And I said, I think that’s an excellent question and one I’ve pondered quite a bit. But I think that a young Marine Corps sniper who takes an Al Qaeda bomb maker into his sights at 1000 yards, I think he’s a moral person. And I think as long as I do it for our national security and not for my own self aggrandizement, that I’m a moral person, where it becomes immoral. However, is how much I enjoy it.

0:49:54 Jim: I do enjoy it.

0:49:56 Chris: Yeah. That’s not immoral, though, if that’s how you feel.

0:49:58 Jim: No, no, it’s not. But it was also captured by a good friend of mine, a very deep thinker, very profound scientist I knew at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. And I was remarking at dinner one night about how much I admire human excellence in the arts or the sports or in writing anything where a human being is truly excellent. And he looked at me and he said, Jim, that’s ironic, since you also look for human imperfection.

0:50:32 Jim: And it’s the flip side that I’m looking for the flaw as well as the excellence. And I had never thought about that before.

0:50:41 Matt: So I’ve taken a few courses from Jim when I was with the FBI. And Jim, I don’t know if you remember talking about this, but it’s something that actually you covered in one of your courses. And it was very helpful for me personally is that you said that we should think about somebody that we consider to be a hero and then think about whether or not that person would approve of what we were doing at that time.

0:51:11 Matt: And I have to say that that was actually something that I used as sort of a North Star to help guide me, because there are points that you run into particularly for me. What I can think of is times where I had to send somebody into a situation that I knew would be dangerous, and I was concerned for their well being. And that was something where I always struggled with a little bit. But that’s your job.

0:51:39 Jim: Well, we make a commitment. You do, and we do. CIA and FBI makes a commitment to our covert assets that if we say that we are going to protect you, by God, we’ll go to hell and back to protect you. I had a situation late in my career where three of my assets were arrested through no fault of their own, no fault of mine. And it bothered me greatly because I had given the word of our director of CIA, we guarantee basically that we will do everything we can in our power.

0:52:11 Jim: And we did. We got them out of trouble. But it bothered me every night as I was going to bed thinking, I’ve got to get these people out of trouble. I gave my word. I gave the director’s word. And we have got to always think about the security of our assets. I was given an illustration of this about a young case officer, or young female case officer who was in Iraq, and she was handling a very sensitive asset inside of Al Qaeda.

0:52:41 Jim: And at one point, he signaled that he was in a meeting with a lot of Al Qaeda leadership in a certain location, and he gave her the geo coordinates. Now, one of her bosses wanted to put a predator strike on that place and she said, no, we’re not going to do that. My asset is there. And she refused to give those GPS coordinates because she said, I gave my word. We have given our word to this person.

0:53:08 Jim: We are not going to kill one of our assets simply so we can wipe out several of these leaders. And I think that is absolutely the right moral way to handle it.

0:53:20 Chris: So I’m curious about Mad Dog. Was that alias born within your time with the CIA?

0:53:26 Jim: Absolutely. Let’s say I was in Paris, whether I was assigned to Paris or just briefly in Paris, but I was in Paris, and I used to go running in their big part, the void, bologna, which is a huge part. And one morning I was running, it was about a five or six mile run, and I passed a German shepherd that didn’t bark or anything past a dog. And I got about ten yards up the trail, and suddenly I felt the most incredible pain in my right leg.

0:54:00 Jim: And he had his jaws around my right leg. And if you look up the amount of pounds per square inch that a German shepherd can exert, it’s probably the worst of all, strongest of all dogs. So I dragged my bleeding leg out of his mouth, and then, of course, I tried to run, but you’re not going to outrun a dog. And he was about to attack again. I picked up a large branch and I hit him across the snout, and he went howling off.

0:54:29 Jim: And then I struggled back to my house and doctored the wounds. I was bleeding, but patched them up, went into the embassy, and they proceeded to give me tetanus shots. But then they said, you know, we’re right here where the Pasteur Institute is. The Pasteur Institute was the place where Louis Pasteur developed the rabies vaccine back in the 19th century, and you need to really go over there. So I went there, and the French doctor, he said that dog was almost certainly rabid, the way he acted so bizarre.

0:55:04 Jim: And he said, if you get these shots now, you’ll get a shot in each arm today, and then next week we’ll put a shot in your right arm. A week after that, a shot in your left arm. He said, if we do that within 30 days of your being bitten, then you will be okay. If you don’t get them, though, there has never been, but I think one person in all of history who has survived rabies, he says, you will go progressively mad, and you will absolutely have a horrible, terrible death.

0:55:35 Jim: At the time, I was going through some friction with certain people at headquarters, so I went back to my desk at the embassy, and I made a list of all the people who I was going to bite if I got rabies. So my nickname was born about then.

0:55:58 Chris: Did you ever have to bite anyone?

0:56:00 Jim: No, I think my my bark is worse than my bite, but.

0:56:07 Chris: So I do want to transition from Mad Dog to your novels. You’ve authored two novels thus far, living Lies an Espionage Story of the Iranian Nuclear Weapons program, which just last month, Spy Skate named number 38 on its list of 50 best spy novels ever written. So congrats on that.

0:56:27 Jim: Thank you.

0:56:27 Chris: And then In The Twinkling of an Eye, which is about recruiting a spy at the heart of a devastating covert Russian North Korean genetic bioweapons program, which was just recently published in mid 2022. Is that correct?

0:56:43 Jim: That’s correct.

0:56:46 Chris: Rather than writing an autobiography, what steered you in the direction of writing novels?

0:56:52 Jim: Well, I’ve never been a person that really wanted to write an autobiography or a memoir. It kind of puts me off. I don’t feel like patting myself on the back and writing some egotistical memoir. And some of the memoirs that I’ve read by my colleagues are good, but I never felt like doing that. And so since I can’t run operations anymore, the only way I can exercise that operational creativity is to write a novel, write some spy stories.

0:57:22 Jim: The first one, Living Lies, I’ll be candid, it was quite, I mean, very thinly disguised, some of my operations. And I actually have several characters in these stories that are based on people that are my friends, people I actually knew at CIA. And I interviewed these people, got their agreement that they could serve as a model for some of the characters, and they did. I’ll be honest. Some of the bad guys were also based on people I knew.

0:57:52 Jim: But I’m not telling anybody who they are. And so it served as a creative it serves as a creative outlet for me. And I’ve enjoyed what I call the psychological dividends from this. If I have some reader who reads it and then they write me a note or they put a review on Amazon that says how much they enjoyed it, that, to me, is that’s priceless. That’s a psychological dividend that somebody somewhere thought that this was worth reading.

0:58:22 Jim: I spoke about six months ago to our former director, George Tenet, and he told me he loved Living Lies. He bought 40 copies of it, and he said this should be almost like an instruction manual at the Farm, because in the book, not surprisingly, I’m a very strong critic of bureaucracy and people who are ass kissers and things like that, and I never could put up with that. So a lot of my personal philosophy comes through in these books.

0:58:53 Jim: I want people that are doing this for the right reason, that are doing this because they are passionate about it. And both of my first two books are about weapons of mass destruction, either preventing a nuclear weapon or a biological weapon in the hands of our adversaries.

0:59:10 Chris: And you’re currently writing your third novel, correct, titled The Trader’s tale about treachery and treason deep within the CIA. Tell us about that a little bit. And when should we expect that?

0:59:21 Jim: Well, I’m hoping to get that out by late spring or early summer, and then I have to put it through the CIA’s publication review board because everything I write that has to deal with intelligence or the CIA, I have a lifetime commitment to submit to them. In the case of Living Lies, it took them a year to clear it because I had some FBI parts and Doe parts and things like that. At the end of the year, for Living Lies, they had a request or actually a demand for a redaction of five elements.

0:59:54 Jim: Basically a few words here and there, sometimes just a single word or a phrase. They thought they were classified. I disagreed, but since they didn’t affect the storyline, I said, okay, fine. So I just struck them out in the twinkling of an eye. It only took them a month to clear, and then they asked for a copy for the CIA library. So I guess I made some friends by not being a hard case on the first one.

1:00:18 Jim: This third one, I’m not sure how long it’ll take them, but in fact, I tease Matt a little bit. The FBI comes off really looking good in my first two books. In my third book, though, what goes around comes around. And the FBI is going to take it on the chin in a certain respect on this one.

1:00:41 Chris: So besides writing your third novel, what does 2023 look like for you? What are you currently in the pursuit of? What’s next for you?

1:00:51 Jim: I have speaking engagements that I do quite frequently. I’m almost every year I’m in Valerie. Plain Spies, Lies and Nukes conference. We’re going to have that again in, I think around November the 9th in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And so look for spies, lies and nukes. We’re going to have a lot of good guests there that former CIA officers and might even have one or two FBI agents, former FBI agents there.

1:01:19 Jim: I’m hoping to get I don’t know if Matt, if you know Special Agent Pete Lap, who was the lead agent on Anna Montez case, but Anna Montez was just released. She was a spy for Cuba. And Pete has written a book that’s going to come out next October. I’m hoping to get him at the Spy’s, Lies, and Nukes Conference and maybe some others as well. I do that, travel around, see grandchildren. My wife and I are about to leave on a big trip to New Zealand. I’m doing some research for my third novel.

1:01:51 Jim: It’s based part of it’s based there, and I still do a little training. I did a course for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in November, and I’ve actually got one tentatively scheduled for the FBI sometime in the spring.

1:02:07 Chris: Where can our listeners find you and connect with you online?

1:02:11 Jim: Amazon look Up Living Lies, or In The Twinkling of an Eye, or My Name James Lawler on Amazon, we sell the books on Barnes and Noble, and in my publisher book, Baby, you can look in all of those, put My Name, those titles there. I’m also on LinkedIn. If anybody wants to link in and share some experiences, I’m there on LinkedIn and be happy to. I like questions from readers and listeners, so feel free.

1:02:47 Chris: Nice man. So you’ve traveled extensively throughout your career. I’m curious to know what is your most favorite country that you’ve visited?

1:02:59 Jim: Good question. I’d say probably Switzerland. I served there twice. I love Switzerland. I love the Swiss. In fact, I’ve got a couple of Swiss movie producers who are talking to me about turning Living Lies into a streaming series. And whether that comes about or not, I don’t know. It’s a long hurdle, a long road to something like that. But I love their country. I love the Swiss. The people are very independent, very hardy.

1:03:25 Jim: It’s a gorgeous country. So I guess that’s probably my favorite foreign country.

1:03:31 Chris: Okay, so then, with that being said, what would you tell me is the coolest bar that you’ve ever been to where I know you’re into wine, so it could be a nice winery.

1:03:43 Jim: Yeah, I have my own wine cellar. I’d say some of the Champagne vineyards that we visited in France were absolutely wonderful. That’s where I became a real fan of wine, wine collector. And so some of the vineyards either in Burgundy or up in Champagne, were absolutely exquisite. I still remember a picnic that we did, and we were all three families were on a hill, and we’ve got sandwiches, and it was just one of those days that’s maybe about 70 degrees, just perfect weather and just falling asleep under a tree while the children are playing and having a glass of wine there.

1:04:26 Jim: It was wonderful.

1:04:27 Chris: Nice. You can’t beat that, man. So I just heard last call here. You got time for one more?

1:04:32 Jim: Sure.

1:04:33 Chris: If you opened a cybersecurity theme bar, what would the name be? And what would your signature drink be called?

1:04:40 Jim: Maybe the quantum zone. And that’s perfect. My signature drink would be the Quantum margarita, I guess.

1:04:49 Chris: Jim, thanks for catching up with us, man. I really appreciate all the knowledge, and I encourage everyone to follow you online. I’ll get the links posted.

1:04:57 Jim: Sounds great.

1:04:58 Chris: And Matt, thanks for joining us.

1:05:00 C: Thank you.

1:05:00 Jim: Okay, guys, take care.