1386: Sean Wiswesser | Inside Putin's Russian Intelligence Machine

The Jordan Harbinger Show

Retired CIA officer Sean Wiswesser joins Jordan Harbinger to dissect the paradoxical nature of Russian intelligence services. He describes a

Key takeaways

• Sean Wiswesser notes that Russian intelligence is dangerous not due to competence, but because they operate with no moral limits or accountability.
• The GRU unit 29155 is identified as a specialized group responsible for 'wet work' and sabotage operations.
• Information warfare using AI-generated content poses an existential threat by targeting the political views of democratic youth to undermine trust in elections.
• Systemic corruption exists even within Russian intelligence academies, where instructors have been known to steal fuel from surveillance vehicles.
• The 'Yantar' ship is used for underwater research to map and potentially sever critical fiber optic cables in the Baltic Sea.

Main topics

• Russian Intelligence Services (FSB, SVR, GRU)
• Havana Syndrome and Microwave Attacks
• Information Warfare and AI Disinformation

Notable quotes

They are bungling fools at times... and yet they are formidable adversaries.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a sobering warning about the evolving nature of

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) This episode is brought to you by Xero. That's Xero with an X. Running a small business and managing your finances shouldn't make your day more complicated. Learn more at Xero.com. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional real-life pirate special operator or music mogul. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash starts or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, Russian intelligence is either a terrifying army of 10-foot-tall supermen Or a bunch of guys stealing gasoline from their own surveillance cars and binge-watching The Sopranos while the FBI watches their every move. Today, retired CIA officer Sean Wiswesser takes us inside Putin's intelligence machine. Havana syndrome, sleeper agents, disposable teenagers recruited on Telegram, honey traps that start with a hotel maid doing your laundry, and assassinations designed to leave a radioactive signature. We'll also find out why the West's refusal to impose consequences could invite the next attack against the Baltic states, undersea cables, or even critical infrastructure right here at home. Here we go with Sean Wisswisser. Speaker 3 (1:38) Before we get into what your book is actually about, I would love to talk about this Havana syndrome thing. For people who don't know, this is diplomats, CIA officers, and other diplomatic personnel in countries like Cuba, for example, and I think Vienna. They basically think they got zapped with some kind of microwave and now they get headaches and they've got disorientation and maybe some hearing loss or something like that. And I know former CIA who say, my friend has it. She's not crazy. Her boss has it. He's a high-level diplomat, a career State Department guy, whatever. And these are not fragile folks who just aren't cut out for life overseas. They're not people who watch too much YouTube. But then I have other friends who are also former CIA who go, this is a conspiracy theory. And anybody who has it is just a weirdo who needs to stop watching the news. Speaker 4 (2:22) Yeah, Jordan. So first, thanks for having me on. And it's an interesting topic to delve into. I should state my disclaimer from CIA up front. My views are mine alone. Don't represent the U.S. government. I'm retired from CIA now, been a few years. I do think it's likely the Russians were behind those incidents. I have colleagues. I cannot explain away their stories. These are colleagues that I have high respect for that suffered inexplicable medical incidents, very debilitating. Now, along with that, there's a few facts that we should talk about that I know are facts and from personal experience talking to and knowing some of these people. First, it was poorly handled, and that's been acknowledged publicly by CIA and the entire intelligence community. It was poorly handled. The incidents and the allegations and the reports of officers that were suffering weren't treated with the respect that they deserved at the time. And so what it led to was critical evidence and critical information that could have helped with later findings. It was lost. And then I do think, unfortunately, there were some people, I would never say who, I'd never make allegations. There were some that jumped on the bandwagon to try to say, yeah, I'd like to try to get benefits from this. I'd like to be included in this group. And it wasn't legit. I Speaker 3 (3:29) want to be medically retired, basically. Speaker 4 (3:31) Yeah, exactly. And so that discredits those that did suffer and those that are victims. Let's talk about these other facts, Jordan. The Russians have a history of microwave attacks. They did it against the U.S. embassy for decades, literally. There's been good reporting on this. I believe it was Wall Street Journal did a report a while ago, a year or two ago, about... The attacks of microwaves on the U.S. embassy, they've always attacked us with all sorts of radio waves, trying to find ways to use them to bug the embassy. They attacked our officers with spy dust back in the 80s, which we know is a carcinogen. I don't put anything past the Russian intelligence services. I think that they have no morals anymore. They're completely unhinged. Look at the assassinations, the wet work they're carrying out. And then look at the 60 Minutes reporting, which was very credible and pointed out they're certainly up to something. Speaker 3 (4:18) I was reading something, I think, in the New York Times, and this is, I think, rumor still, but they had paid something like $20 million to somebody who was in the FSB or the SVU or SVR or GRU, whatever military unit. We'll go over these acronyms in a minute here, but they basically bought the device and now they're studying it. Now, again, I think this is rumor. I don't think the CIA was like, hey, we bought the device, everybody. I don't think that's how you guys roll. Speaker 4 (4:42) I agree with you. I don't think that we have anything to point to yet as a fact. There was a device bought, apparently. There was reporting from the Spyscape, I think it was, from the International Spy Museum. They helped break the one report. But so a device was bought. I'm glad that we're trying to get to the bottom of it, but a device, a microwave device, was bought by some type of a broker, alleging, again, ties Speaker 2 (5:02) to Russian intelligence. Nothing conclusive yet. Speaker 4 (5:04) But I'm glad if they tested it. I'm glad if they get to the bottom, if that might be related. I think the way it's going to be solved, Jordan, is how we solve all these. Spy mysteries, spy cases. Defectors. Yeah, we're going to get a defector. I always advertise. I'll do it again tonight. If you have information that will help solve these crimes committed against U.S. government personnel, the U.S. government pays very well for this. I'm not offering for the U.S. government. There's plenty of cases of defectors living very happy lives, very successful in the United States. Their families are provided for. We can protect you and your information securely. That's how we solve intelligence mysteries, Jordan, is we get defectors that come out. Help us. Speaker 3 (5:41) Yeah, and say things. Yeah. There's so many interesting defector stories that I would love to get into. There's also fake defectors. There's one going around right now. I really don't want to mention her name, but I think she's fake. She's going around talking about how she was a red swallow. The word in Russian, lastichkus. Yes, swallow. So this is somebody who is trained to seduce people and then maybe assassinate them or get information from them. And she's going around. There was a podcast about her and her story just does not add up at all. And I got to tread lightly because in part of her story, she was sexually assaulted by her Russian commander. I believe that part of the story. In fact, those parts of the story make complete sense. The part that doesn't make sense is that she claims to have assassinated 160 people over a career of a few short years. I did the math on some claims she made on other podcasts, and she would have had to go from one part of town where she killed somebody in the morning, drive across town, kill somebody in the afternoon, and then go back to wherever she was stationed. And that just doesn't make sense. I know the U.S. supposedly doesn't do a lot of these sort of assassinations and sextortion type stuff, but I would imagine if you do that, you have a target a few times a year at most. You don't have multiple operations per day where you're killing someone. That would just be logistically crazy. Speaker 4 (6:54) I know who you're referencing. I also watched that very good, reputable podcast. She had an interesting story. I do believe she may have worked with Russian intelligence. It's not how it's done, though. The way that she relates it is not how it's done, Jordan. No, it's not. And Speaker 3 (7:07) I hate that I'm about to say this because she can just fix it if she hears this and decides, oh, that's destroying my credibility. But all these people, right, from your book. Putin goes and poisons people with Novichok and polonium 212 and they die these agonizingly horrible, painful deaths right from poison that the Soviets have made for this. And so people are afraid to cross Vladimir Putin. And she's out there being like. I had to escape Russia because I have a child. But I'm going to go on the Internet and talk about all this classified stuff that's going to embarrass Russia and embarrass Putin. She doesn't seem to be that afraid of him. Why would you not be afraid? Oh, because you're making it all up and therefore there's nothing to really be afraid of because you're not actually disclosing anything. You're spinning a yarn. Speaker 4 (7:47) Well, the other piece for me, Jordan, is the Russians, they've shown it. They have assassination hit squads. They don't need to use a former. sex worker. I believe she was probably at one point or another prostitute for Russian intelligence. I don't know. We're not going to name her. I don't need to be sued. I'm sure you don't either. But the story doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me on the merits. Speaker 3 (8:07) Sean, Russian intelligence has poisoned defectors, embedded deep cover families in American suburbs, or that's just my favorite TV show. We'll talk about that in a minute. Attacked democratic institutions. There's officers also siphoning. the gas from their own surveillance training cars and rigging people's grades for bottles of vodka. And there's one incidence in your book where this bungle of a U.S. counterintelligence agency calls them by accident, uses their secret code names, and they basically ignore that because they don't want to do anything about it. So how is it that the Russian intelligence service is both this terrifying strategic machine, the stuff of nightmares, but also at the same time, A corrupt clown show where they can't even chase you because they sold the gas from their car. Speaker 4 (8:56) Yeah, they are bungling fools at times. They're incompetent. And yet they are formidable adversaries. I believe our most professional intelligence adversaries in the world. Chinese military, conventional. adversarial threat to the United States, conventional military and a nuclear threat. Russians are a nuclear threat. They're not much of a conventional threat to the United States, but they are a huge intelligence threat. And the reason is they have no accountability, Jordan. So no matter what mistakes they make, just like those illegals that we can get into and talk about more from the ghost stories case. had the honor to work on with FBI. They made a lot of mistakes, bungling idiots, fools. They're all heroes in Russia today. They returned as heroes. They get to write books. Anna Chabin wrote books, was on magazine covers. One of them's a member of parliament right now. That jerk, a month ago, he was talking about destroying the United States and how they don't need diplomacy. His name's Bezrukov, Donald Heathfield, made a statement, we don't need diplomacy. We're out to destroy the United States and the world order that it built. We don't want to engage in diplomacy with them. These are thugs. These are morons, idiots, bungling fools, and yet they're competent when they need to be. They pull off amazing feats of intelligence prowess at times. So we would be fools on our side to underestimate their capabilities. I try to be as truthful as possible in exposing them. All of their foibles, all of their shortcomings, but also the fact that in a system where they only get reinforced and they're not accountable for any of their mistakes, they remain formidable. Speaker 3 (10:16) Yeah, I want to talk about the central tension of the book really is that the Russian services are dangerous precisely because they combine real capability and resources with basically no moral limits. They don't care if they look bad on the world stage. Look at the Ukraine disaster. They don't care about any of this. They're not trying to pretend they're good guys in any way. They also have systematic corruption and astonishing human incompetence, but they'll still kill you. I don't know, some nuclear byproduct or whatever Polonium-212 is. Polonium, yep. Lithuania, Speaker 4 (10:46) yeah. Speaker 3 (10:47) Give me the strongest example of an operation that should genuinely scare us, but also an example, a strong example of something that should stop us from turning Russian intelligence officers into 10-foot-tall supermen. Because you see these amazing operations they pull off, and then it's like, oh, and then you just forgot to delete the website that shows your fake name off the internet? Nice. Speaker 4 (11:07) Yeah. I think the most existential threat to our democracy is really... is the one that's most insidious, nobody's paying enough attention to, is information warfare. It's active measures. What they did in 2016 with social meddling, human-enabled operations to meddle in our election, now they can do with Cog AI, and they are doing it, and it's sort of the Chinese. And the amplification is 10,000 or 50,000-fold or more. So that, I believe, is the most dangerous threat. It's the one Americans don't see. They're not paying attention to in a world where somewhere between 40 to 60 percent of everything out there on the Internet now is bot and AI generated. The Russians and Chinese are way ahead on this. And we as democracies, American people, what do we do? I see it with my son. They're targeting American youth, especially. They don't want youth to believe in democracy. The Russians and Chinese both, in their cynical worldview, don't have free and fair elections. They don't exist. In that environment, when Americans are clickbaiting, constantly reacting with emotion to the things they see, and I have a good example to talk about the dangers of that, that's the greatest existential threat. To your second question, it's corruption, of course. You can't make this stuff up. At their very academies, unfortunately, they teach and they indoctrinate their officers with corruption. Surveillance training, where the SVR was training its officers, it happens to be an area of expertise of mine that I've always... Turned back to with defectors, Russian intelligence officers. So I'm working with a Russian intelligence officer talking about his time at the academy. So what'd you do in vehicular SDRs? Because it's important. Marshalshut Praverki in Russian, an MP, is a surveillance detection run to detect your adversary trying to keep an eye on you. Oh yeah, we did those, but we didn't use the vehicles. Why didn't you use the vehicles? Because our instructors stole the cars and kept them on the weekends with their girlfriends, so there was no gas left in the cars on Mondays. So most of the time we were never able to use our own vehicles. I was like, wow, that is Russia. That is so Russia. Everybody I've ever worked the target with, FBI, CIA, they say, hey, wow, Sean, great anecdotes. You can't make that shit up. That's Russia right there. So that's the level of their corruption, even at their academies. And there's plenty more examples. Speaker 3 (13:12) That's crazy. This is a tangent, but I will say the training our youth to not respect democracy. We're in a bind, right? Because the problem is my vote counts as much as a broccoli head haircut 18 year old. I shouldn't be making fun of people's haircuts. If you've seen mine, it's terrible. But some 18 year old kid who thinks that, I don't know, the Jews secretly control all of the media and the government and Iran is the good guys, Russia is the good guys, and we're just not being told that Ukraine is all Nazis or whatever. Like they believe this stuff. That kid's vote counts as much as mine. So because of information warfare. And then also they're training the youth to not respect free and fair elections. They might have a point if that moron is voting and it cancels out my vote for something where I've read for a hundred hours on the subject matter that I'm voting on. And I realize I'm voting for somebody who I think is going to do the right thing. And that guy goes, oh, that guy's name is cool. And he looks badass on TV. That's my vote. I'm like, oh, gosh, I don't know. I hate saying this because I used to I grew up pro-democracy and I'm old enough to remember when. We were the good guys, but I'm also like, geez, some of these people are so dumb and inbred that I don't know if their voice should count. I don't know. I'm on the fence, man. Again, it's a tangent that I don't need to go into, but that's what I'm thinking. Speaker 4 (14:23) Jordan, you know that the one requirement of a democracy, of course, is an informed public. That's the only thing that democracy asks of us, is be an informed public. I'm trying to do my part in a small way, informing on the threat from Russian intelligence, at least. Thomas Jefferson also said, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. We as a democracy are getting away from our roots. We're not as well informed. Americans aren't willing to listen, not willing to engage in informed debate. And that's to our great detriment. And our adversaries are having a field day with the American people with disinformation and information warfare. And we have to be wise to the threat. What I always challenge audiences I talk to, and I've talked to businessmen, students, I'll tell you one of the toughest crowds I talked to, but they were receptive, was a group of businessmen in Alabama. I was worried that You can't talk about Russian intelligence in some quarters without people starting to shout, Russian hoax, Russian hoax. This was a group willing to listen. And when I was done talking about the threat from Russian intelligence, and I pointed out, what would Ronald Reagan have done with the level of escalation Russian hybrid war being waged against the United States and our allies? GRU putting bombs on planes, literally, doing mock runs. This was reported on by the New York Times. Americans aren't paying attention. Let me tell you. Missiles would be flying against Russian or Soviet proxies. Ronald Reagan would not have stood for that. I had applause from this audience. People get it. They say, yes, absolutely. How dare we let our adversaries escalate against us in this gray zone? So, Jordan, I just think that we need more education. We need a better informed public and folks willing to listen. And I've often found audiences willing to listen when I lay out in a nonpartisan fashion. I Speaker 3 (16:00) do think eventually we're going to end up with some form of. semi-authoritarian or authoritarian government because we're going to realize, oh my gosh, only 5 % of the population is smart enough to even understand how to do media literacy at all or understand what's going on in the world. We can't have everybody vote. It might not Speaker 4 (16:19) happen Speaker 3 (16:20) in my lifetime, but I feel like it's inevitable at this current trajectory. Let's hope to God not. Which hopefully we can reverse. Anyway, when you began your CIA career, what did you believe about Russian intelligence and their officers that... you were eventually forced to abandon? Did you overestimate them, underestimate them, misunderstand what made them dangerous? Speaker 4 (16:40) I fundamentally misunderstood Russian intelligence as a student. I thought I understood their history. I studied Russian, Jordan, for seven years until I finally got to Russia. Imagine that. Almost seven years. I studied four years at boarding school, had a great Russian language program at the Hill School outside of Philadelphia where I went. I was a poor kid, wanted a scholarship to go to a rich kid's school, and then had great language programs there. So four years in high school, I did... Two and a half years in college of Russian and finally got to Russia. Like, people speak this language, right? And the Russia that I experienced in the early 1990s as a student, the first time I was over there, and then successive trips, I was there, I think, four times as a student. A lot of hope. The famous song from the Scorpions, Winds of Change, that was the anthem of that. Our generation, really my generation in Russia, there was so much hope. And I fundamentally believe that the KGB was done. I thought, that's it. The chairman of the KGB under Yeltsin, the first chairman, his name was Vadim Bakhatin. He famously said he hated the KGB. He was placed in charge. Yeltsin wanted him to destroy it. Bakhatin said, I'm going to put a stake in the heart of the KGB. Well, guess what? The KGB was a vampire. It rose from the dead, literally, in the form of the FSB. All the old directorates that Bakhatin and his reformers had broken up and scattered. They reformed largely under the FSB with the exception of the first chief directorate, Foreign Intelligence, which is today's SVR. So I underestimated, as still a Russophile, I was studying the language, I was studying the history and culture. I had the privilege to meet Dr. Christopher Andrew over in the UK at Cambridge last month when I was lecturing there. He's the great historian of Soviet intelligence. I read his books. I was telling him, sir, I was reading your books as a freshman in high school. I thought I knew, I thought I understood Russian intelligence. It's only really when I started to work with and debrief Russian intelligence officers, when one nicely tried to educate me. I said to him after 9-11, what about Putin and Bush are friends now? Can we expect that we'll end up working together against terrorism? And he just laughed at me. You don't get it, do you? You were the main enemy during the Cold War. You are the main enemy now. You always will be the main enemy of Putin and our intelligence services. He said, for us, you come first, OK? Forget about terrorism, anything else. We're coming at the United States first. He's not the only one. Sergei Tretyakov wrote his own book. I mentioned Sergei. I had a chance to work with him and debrief him. He wrote in his book, too, with Pete Early over 20 years ago, Comrade Jay. He said, too, you Americans think the Cold War is over. It never ended for us, for Putin and the intelligence services. Speaker 3 (19:09) That's what it sounds like. It sounds like these guys just live in 1985 and they can't get over it. Speaker 4 (19:14) Yeah, I think, honestly, Andrei Soldatov, very learned writer and scholar on Russia, I respect a lot. He said it very well recently. He said, not 1985, Jordan, 1952, back when Stalin was still alive. That's what these guys are living in a time when their security services only answered to one man. During the years of the KGB, remember, most of the KGB's history, they answered to the Politburo. They still answered to the Communist Party. They were the sword and shield of the Communist Party. Today's intelligence services in Russia, Answered to only Vladimir Putin. That's it. Just like in Stalin's time, they only answered to him. And the terminology they use is telling. They called Stalin Kazyayan, like the host, the boss of the collective farm. They call Putin chef. They call him the boss, like a mafia boss. He's running the whole show. And they try to impress him like the boss. They carry out operations to impress him. So assassinations, what work? I believe that's fundamentally going on now. They're all trying to one-up one another to impress the boss. Speaker 3 (20:12) So before we turn this episode into acronym soup, I want to get one clean sentence on each service. What does the FSB do and what does the GRU do? Speaker 4 (20:21) Sure, and I'll give the Russian names, just we're doing acronyms. SVR stands for Sluzba Vnichna Rozetka, the Service for Foreign Intelligence, okay? So they are the former first chief director of the KGB, which was in charge of foreign intelligence. They're about probably 30,000 to 40,000 strong. They're the smallest of the three services for foreign intelligence. FSB is the internal service. It is the largest in Russia. It is a monolith, giant bureaucracy. I believe about 400,000 strong. We ultimately don't know until Defector comes out. They have over 200,000 border guards. They are in charge of cyber operations against the West and the United States under their Cyber Center 16 and Cyber Center 18. They employ hackers for hire. They employ criminal proxies. The FSB is embedded with companies, corporations across Russia. People make the analogy, oh, FSB internal, kind of like FBI. Nothing further from the truth. Forget it. Whatever faults of our system, we're still a law-abiding democracy. We still answer to the Constitution. In Russia, the FSB answers to no one. Putin was their former director, remember. And then the GRU is military intelligence plus a whole lot of other stuff. Again, no equivalence to the U.S. intelligence community. The GRU has... They're equivalent of DIA, but also NSA, Signals Intelligence, NRO. They're in charge of the satellite constellations. They have 14 special operations brigades, like our Navy SEALs or CAG, the Delta Force. These are 10 ground brigades and four marine brigades of some of the most elite of special forces in their intelligence community. Giant bureaucracies, giant monolith-like corporations, Jordan. And when I say corporations, they're embedded with companies. Russian intelligence is making a lot of money off the Ukraine war. It's not in their interest to end this war. There's a lot of Russian intelligence leadership, generals, and all those services getting very wealthy on the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their own soldiers, and sadly, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, too. So yeah, that's a snapshot of the services. Speaker 3 (22:20) Russian officers sometimes copied newspaper stories, added the political spin Moscow wanted, and presented them as secret intelligence. So basically chat GPT, but with epaulettes and a drinking problem. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by P.A.C.A. True story, I was packing for New York and I couldn't find either of my P.A.C.A. hoodies. I own a gray and a green one and I was frantically looking for them at 5 a.m., worried I left it in China where I was a couple weeks ago. So I get in the Uber and I go to the airport anyway. Something doesn't feel right, so I have the driver turn around. Now, did I also want to stay home and play Pokemon with my son? Yes, but I also didn't feel right about leaving without my favorite travel hoodie, and that's P.A.C.A. They make outdoor and lifestyle apparel from alpaca fiber, one of the world's most sustainable natural fibers. Their best-selling hoodie is softer than cashmere, warmer than wool, and breathable. It's thermoregulating, odor-resistant, built to last. Each hoodie is made start to finish in Peru with an Inca ID hand-woven by artisans honoring generations of tradition. But it doesn't look super hipster because, you know, I'm not about that. Over 250,000 people have picked one up, and I get it. I use mine all the time. It's the softest, coziest thing that I own, so try it out for yourself. Speaker 1 (23:22) To grab your P.A.C.A. hoodie, go to www.pacaapparel.com. That's www.pakaapparel.com. This Speaker 3 (23:31) episode is brought to you by Xero. That's Xero with an X. Running a small business means there's always something competing for your attention. Managing your finances shouldn't make your day more complicated. Xero brings accounting, payments, payroll, and analytics together in one connected platform. So you spend less time piecing together the numbers and more time actually building your business. We've been using Xero for nearly a decade now, and honestly, we don't know what we'd do without it at this point. That's meant clear reports, dashboards we can actually read, forecasts and AI-powered insights that help us understand our own cash flow and see how the business is really doing. It was simple and easy to use from day one, and it still is. In fact, 91 % of customers surveyed agree that Xero is easy to use. And when you choose Xero, you're joining 5 million customers worldwide, including us. That's Xero with an X at Xero.com. The 91 % claim is based on a 2024-0 survey conducted in the US, UK, and Australia. Hey, a little inside baseball most people might not know. When you use our promo code, it helps support the show. We don't get a cut of sales or anything, but that lets the company know that people are here in the ad, they're taking action. They'll maybe renew their campaign with us. So if you're signing up for something, you're buying something, please use our code. It is often just my name, Jordan. Of course, all the codes are searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. It's a win-win. You get the discount and you help keep the show going strong. Thank you for your support. Now, back to Sean Wisswesser. Speaker 3 (24:54) Which are more likely to target, say, an American diplomat? It sounds like that would be SVR, right? Foreign Intelligence Service would go after the diplomats. I suppose an American diplomat in Russia would be FSB territory, right? Exactly, yep. What about a university researcher, technology company? Who's going after Elon Musk? Is that SVR? Speaker 4 (25:14) I think it's all of them, to be honest. So what we learned, for instance, with the hack of the Democratic servers in the 2016 election. The GRU and the FSB were literally falling all over each other. Part of how FBI discovered the GRU hack from that unit called Fancy Bear that had done a successful phishing attempt against Podesta, I guess it was. They infiltrated the Democratic servers. They had them hacked. Well, as detailed in the reports later on, they were partially found because the FSB was trying to hack into the same server. FBI noticed that, was paying attention, and... They discovered, lo and behold, wait, somebody's already exfiltrating data. What's going on here? So they weren't sharing with each other. The FSB is just, to hell with the GRU. We're going to do our own hacking. And by the way, they were all of them at the same time, SVR, GRU, FSB. Bet money they were also targeting the Republican servers too. There's no sentimentality here, folks. They don't care ultimately who wins our elections. They're out for bigger prey than that. They're against democracy writ large. They're trying to undermine our entire system. makes that point talking about the election meddling, Jordan. Speaker 3 (26:18) Is it an ideology thing where they want to just take down their longstanding enemy? Or is it like, actually, we all get rich if there's no police and the U.S. is the only one sort of freezing our accounts and pressuring countries to expel diplomats? It seems like they're just after money, but maybe some of the old guys just want to settle a score. Speaker 4 (26:35) We're the only other power in the world capable of thwarting their vision of dominating Europe and rewriting the map quite literally. Putin is a dictator with grievances, just like 100 years ago in Europe, Jordan. The similarities are striking. And he said what he was going to do, said Ukraine didn't have a right to exist, laid it out in an essay and a speech he gave 2021 and then 2022. And what did he do? He invaded. He said, OK, I'm just going to take this whole country. You don't like it? Stop me. Who's going to stop me? So we're not accustomed in the 21st century, Americans and our European allies. I think we fundamentally didn't think this would really happen. We shared intelligence at an unprecedented level. We warned our European allies. Still, many of them, including the Ukrainian government, said, no, they're not really going to carry out the largest land invasion since World War II. They did. That's what they're up for. This is big game, honey. I wrote a piece for the Cypher Brief. a couple months back, Jordan, about the danger of Sino-Russian opportunism. Not that they have to coordinate and say, okay, well, we're going to move against NATO and you move against Taiwan. No, they don't have to coordinate. We're engaged now in a war with Iran. Maybe China just decides, you know what? We don't need to talk to Russia and Iran about it. The U.S. is engaged enough. Its interceptor stocks are so low. Not going to get a better opportunity than this, so let's move on Taiwan. That's what I wrote about. I fundamentally believe this is the greatest danger. of a large world war that we've ever had since possibly the Cuban Missile Crisis. I feel really strongly about it. It's a dangerous time, and we're also not projecting deterrence, Jordan. We're projecting weakness. The United States and our European allies from NATO, we're projecting weakness, unfortunately, right now. The Speaker 3 (28:12) only people who are projecting strength is Ukraine to a certain extent. They do what they can. They are. Of course they are. I got a shout out to Poland. Poland has, like, really stepped their game up. So there's nuclear deterrence. But I don't think the Russian military could take Poland at this point. I don't know. Speaker 4 (28:27) Poles are tough. The Balts are tough. These are tough peoples. I've served in those regions. I know them. I've worked with them. Thank God for the Poles and the Baltic peoples. Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonian. My wife's Lithuanian. I'm biased. You're Speaker 3 (28:38) biased, yeah. They know the Russian Speaker 4 (28:39) threat, Jordan. They'll fight like hell. They'll fight alone if they have to, like Ukraine's done. They shouldn't have to, though. This is the only time that we've had in many decades. It's not the only time ever. NATO's had problems, okay? When the King visited the United States from the UK, he pointed out, this is an alliance that's endured for 80 years. We shouldn't forget that. He was right about that. He gave good perspective. There's too much emotion right now on both sides of the Atlantic. He did not play into that, thankfully. The alliance is our strength. NATO is our strength. It's the very envy of China and Russia. They don't have anything like that, Jordan. Nor does Iran. Speaker 3 (29:12) I Speaker 4 (29:12) don't Speaker 3 (29:12) want to get too far in the weeds on this, but people always say, oh, there's going to be BRICS and it's going to take down the dollar and then they're going to create a military alliance. You just can't do that with countries that have dictators that want everything for themselves and can't trust each other. Oh, Speaker 4 (29:26) yeah, BRICS is going to take over. Oh, yeah, sure. You're going to see a common currency between countries Speaker 3