Lawfare Daily: National Security, Counterintelligence, and Counterespionage: A Guide for the Perplexed

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The National Health Organization is a very important role in the public. The National Health Organization is a very important role in the public. The National Health Organization is a very important role in the public. They're too busy for them. You'd deal with the ones that actually rise to a level that they could be predicated.

Nobody's got time to say, "Hey, I'm going to target this person." Today we'll be discussing the difference between counterintelligence and counter-espionage. The skill sets needed for each and what happens when these cases become overly politicized. The reason we're doing this now is that it's most people know. Roughly two weeks ago on a Friday evening, the news media began reporting that

at the FBI's Washington Field Office is squad which focused among other things on Iranian counter-espionage matters was summarily fired for their role in a politically sensitive matter. The very next day, the United States functionally went to war with Iran. And in the human cry that followed in most media from the center-right moving left,

following that chain of events, there was a lot of discussion that conflated counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and counter-espionage as if they were one thing, which they emphatically are not. So today, I thought it would be helpful to have Derrick, who also left the FBI similar to the way I did as in ASAC within a counterintelligence division. For us to have a conversation about what exactly counterintelligence looks like,

how it differs from counter-espionage, and why the nation should care, particularly in a time of conflict. Derrick, with that said, would you be willing to sort of tout your own credentials

“and explain to us why we should care what you in particular have to say about counterintelligence?”

Sure, Mike, and thanks for having me.

You know, this is my first opportunity to talk about myself in a while, so I appreciate it.

So yeah, like you said, I mean, my entire career at the Bureau, almost 21 years, was sent working counterintelligence. I was assigned to a CI squad in New York. So the first half of my career was as a New York field agent, working counterintelligence, worked on Russia counterintelligence stuff. And one of the cases that people have heard of out is that the ghost story is rational in those case.

So that was part of what my squad did when I first joined the Bureau. The other part of what my squad did at that time was work Esquianage cases. So we had a lot of actually internal FBI cases where, you know, an agent would be suspected, or there would be an allegation that there was an Esquianage allegation, or at least some sort of misconduct that there was close enough espionage to look at it.

So from the very beginning of my career, I was doing this hybrid thing, where I was looking at Russian illegals, and I was looking at that espionage cases. After the illegal case ended in 2010, I moved over to the New York offices.

right around 2009.

“And I was transferred over because I had some experience working those cases.”

So I did that for a couple of years, work of variety of almost all, well, it was all espionage, or media leak, or mishandling pipe cases on the Esquianage squad.

I became a supervisor after that, and that's one of the first time I went over to the global side.

The Bureau counterintelligence tends to be broken up into Russian matters, China matters, China matters, and global matters, and global being the catch all for everything else. And so I moved over to become a field supervisor in New York on a global squad, so we get a variety of cases against a variety of countries. After doing my supervisor time there, I went to headquarters, and that's where I met you.

I was a unit chief over the internal espionage unit at FBI headquarters.

“So the Bureau has its field offices where the regional problems then, the headquarters,”

which is supposed to be looking at the program as a whole. So any internal espionage case against the Bureau employee across the country would have fallen into that unit. So I was working there managing helping field offices with resources, or some guidance,

and basically overseeing those cases, pushing them along to make sure that they were addressed properly.

After that, what they do. I went back in New York for a hot minute, and then I came back to headquarters. I worked over at CIA as a detail for the Bureau in the Russia Operations section. So being the senior FBI person over at CIA headquarters, working on Russia matters. This was very scrupal, and all those kind of dust up between the U.S. and the overall world and Russia at that time.

So it was a busy moment. After that, came back with a chief of staff and the general intelligence division for a little while, working for the assistant director, helping them with whatever they needed. And then I became a WFO ASAC. So Washington Field Office has three assistant special agents to entourage within the division within the field office.

I was broken up into criminal, CT, CI, and then there's mission services. And so I was one of three. I had the global group. So if it wasn't Russia, it wasn't China, I had it. So that's kind of where my career ended. I ended up staying there five years until last January when I decided I could retire.

So I would. And this somehow, I'm enjoying the retirement. So over the course of my career, I've touched on both the CI side of counter-celligence side of counter-intelligence,

but also counter-SPNR side, which I always thought the two sides of the same coin really.

And one of the things that I used to do with with new agents would be assigned to my division. Quantico, remember this. Thus, I do a real good job of preparing agents for counter-intelligence work.

“I think I got a grand total of three hours training encounter intelligence when I was at the Academy.”

Yeah, I don't even remember what mine was, but I remember it not being very impressive. And I mean, in 2004, when I went through, I mean, it wasn't that long after Hanson. You know, there was some significant, you know, counter-intelligence work going on or head just finished. I think I read the wise book on Hanson at the Academy and thought, well, that sounds interesting. But I don't remember very much about learning about counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism training was even worse.

So, yeah, you get a new agent that gets assigned in a lot of new agents end up advancing to field office. And they get assigned to a CI squad and they have no idea, like, all right, I don't know what this is. So what I used to try and explain to them is, you've got the CI side, which is, you're looking at the counter-intelligence activities of your adversary. What is, what is an intelligence officer from another country doing in the U.S. to try and either hurt, steal, recruit, you know, Americans here or our interests.

So there's that angle on CI. I should caveat this as, I only have big office experience in New York and Washington field or the two biggest counter-intelligence programs. I work in both of them. So, this is going to differ if you're working in a small office in the middle of the country somewhere.

But that's the CI focus, so you're looking at the actual foreign actors who are within the U.S. who are trying to hurt the U.S.

Counter-esping our side is looking at the people that have either been recruited or volunteer to work for a foreign adversary,

“whether they're providing the access or materials or secret information or, you know, a whole wide variety of different things that they could be doing.”

So on the one side, you're looking at the foreign actor and on the FBI side, you're really looking at the American. Okay, so this might be a good place to pause because you and I have sort of lived in this universe for close to two decades each, for a little more than two decades for yourself a little under for me. And I just want to make sure, because I worry that some of our listeners may be in the same position of somebody who just graduated from quannico and is assigned to a counter-intelligence squad.

So I just want to sort of like do a one minute encapsulation of what you're saying and make sure that you and I are tracking on the same definitions.

And I always told you, give it, you're going to hear acronyms.

And if you don't know, ask, so now it's the time to recap what I said. Yes, so essentially counter-intelligence is as a general matter identifying foreign spies in the United States and at the risk of broadly oversimplifying things, figuring out what they're up to. And then counter-espionage is looking at the individuals who are usually United States citizens that have access to classified material or national defense information, who have been recruited by those foreign spies to help them in the reference to steel secrets.

That's a good recap.

“So I do want to talk about something because we're going to dive more into the nuances, but I think when you and I first joined that definition of counter-intelligence was actually pretty narrow.”

You were looking at spies in their attempts to recruit US persons to get classified information. By the time both of us left, the universe of what counter-intelligence entails had probably expanded quite a bit.

I think when you and I joined the Bureau for example, was not really looking a lot at foreign influence efforts or economic espionage or theft of technology.

Could you maybe talk a little bit about how and why that expansion might have occurred? And since neither of us worked for the organization anymore, feel free to give your opinion on whether that expansion was generally a good thing or if it's distracting from what used to be the primary mission.

“If you have the core mission of what are the spies doing? I think it's logical and made sense for us to begin to go down the path of what are the spies doing and what are the spies or why are the spies doing it?”

And who are they targeted? And so the whole foreign influence task force, let's say that was 2015-2016, it was 2017 they started it because it was in response to the formalization of that. So we had started looking at how our foreign countries influencing our opinions, our policies, our politics. And I think the big difference between what I started and that point was the ability for foreign actors to do this stuff without being. So they could do it from overseas and the whole cyber angle and the fact that you could have people sitting in a basement in Russia, let's call it, influencing American elections or influencing American opinion on something.

And today you would have to rely upon those spies who were already here that the intelligence officers or the diplomats and how are they meeting and how are they doing it, we're now they're doing it over the internet really. The world changes, and even when I left, the other comment I used to make a lot was, you know, the counter intelligence has been around forever. I mean, espionages what the second oldest profession. So I mean, in the way that they conducted espionages, essentially, you know, the technology is different, but I mean the goals and the aims are really the same to get up and get an advantage over your global adversary.

It's all really distilled, you know, you able to effectively implant destiny trade information, you know, in another country wants.

“Yeah, so I mean, I saw a change, and I think, you know, it is technological advances were made and coverage got better. It's just sort of you're peeling back the onion into.”

It's a stuff that you can see or you find out, and then it's like, how do we not look at this, you know, and, and yeah, you start walking down that path, it's dangerous because you're going to anger somebody. But how do you all get. Yeah, you know, and how do you realistically say, but we didn't look at it, you know, I mean if it's for comment, there's nobody's above the law. Well, if nobody's, you know, if somebody's breaking the law, how's the bureau not supposed to look at this.

And the bureau has a ton of tools and a ton of ways to do this and, you know, and to wheel those tools, you know, in an illegal way using all the avenues that you are provided.

I don't know how you don't walk, you know, and I don't think it's sideline the bureau from its CI mission.

“I think it was just in the natural extension of the CI mission to see, like, why are these people working in for us? And what's the point of it and, and how affected is it and how do we how to act that and how do we get the word out that.”

What you meet, maybe looking at online is not what you think it is or is paid for by somebody else. I mean, I think, you know, it's such a, it's such a sticky.

It's a problem, but I don't know how you don't look at it. And if you, if the bureau's not looking at it, then who is? And if nobody is, I was not a problem.

Well, we may find out. I mean, as you know, the foreign influence task force at the FBI has been disbanded, as has the foreign blind influence center in ODI and I. So I'm not in the government anymore. I don't know what efforts are being made on the foreign influence fronts. If they are being made, there are a lot less demonstrative in public. And if they're not being made, we're going to have a natural experiment in what happens. Yeah, no, I think I think we may be at that point where we're going to fool around and find out, you know, like, for all the criticism that the bureau got over the years about, well, they shouldn't be looking at this or this was a witch hunter, whatever.

“Now we're going to get to the point where, okay, well, the bureau's not looking at it, so what happens next? You know, and I think that's a serious, I think it's a serious problem.”

Yeah, and it's funny. I was actually, I didn't interview a couple weeks ago, I think, where I was trying to explain to somebody the difference between dropping the ball in counter terrorism and dropping the ball in counter intelligence. And the way I explained it was, if you drop the ball in counter terrorism, people are going to dive then and there. If you don't stop a plot, there's going to be a bomb somewhere, there's going to be a shooting, there's going to be a truck veering off the road, and it is a discrete moment in time.

People tragically are going to lose their lives. If you have an intelligence on the other hand, if you drop the ball, it might not be clear right away that there was a failure. It might not be clear for a decade, and I think back to my time in Los Angeles, because like you, I served mostly in large offices, and the LA office overlooked a veteran cemetery. And one of my early supervisors pointed out to me, all the graves from World War II. And he said, every single one of those deaths is a counter intelligence failure, because we didn't get ahead of figuring out what the Japanese or the Germans were trying to do to us.

And as a result, that had real ramifications in battle and in war. So if we fail in Chinese counter intelligence today, for example, we might not know until we're unable to defend Taiwan, if China chooses to invade a year or a decade. Yeah, no, you know, from the Bureau, you'll have an arrest, and it's in the criminal side, and it's very kind of cut and dry versus in jail. CT side, maybe you disrupt a plot, you can kind of articulate, but even then, if you disrupt a plot, you don't get the kind of credit that you probably deserve for keeping things from blowing up.

Did you had in your coverage, or you should have had in your coverage, or you should have been paying a test to, or those dots that should have been connected and you didn't.

“I mean, I think, you know, the other countries on the U.S. is too, I'm, you all don't expend the amount of money in human capital to go try and get up on our adversaries for no reason.”

Okay, so, you know, and when you look at the amount of effort it goes into a China or a Russia or, you know, any other country to go put people here to find out information about what the U.S. is going to do. We're doing the same thing. And if, if the FBI, as the counter intelligence people aren't figuring that out or aren't tracking that, I mean, we're going to get hit with a surprise if we should have probably seen coming. And that's dangerous.

And I mean, I can, you know, you asked about the economic espionage. I mean, that was not so much of a thing when I first started, but it became a thing.

You know, in the 2010s, period, we're all the sudden people were noticing that, you know, a Chinese operative skills, you know, a seed, you know, now they can, they can take this overseas and regenerate where the, the skipping all of the research and the developments that the U.S. did and the amount of time in the effort and the money that the U.S. been and just now they've got, I mean, it saves them so much time and effort. And that, you know, and now there's, there's an advantage that is shifted that they didn't once have, you know, the biggest problem I always had with economic espionage thing was they would, and maybe you saw this presentation at 1.2 is they came in and they talked about the importance of the economic espionage and they were beaming up the faces of all the people that they had done.

And then it was like, sentence was like, time served five years if that. You know, you're kind of like, you know, you spent seven years making the case, but the guy got five, you know, and that's not the bureau spot that's that's Congress, you know, not taking economic espionage serious enough to putting some sentencing it didn't actually mean something. But what we really started seeing what other countries in particular, China, you know, is stealing and walking off with, you know, without having to expend much effort other than, you know, recruiting somebody.

It's devastating, you know, and it's, it's a loss of money, it's a loss of opportunities in the losses just rack up. So I want to pivot off something you just said about recruiting people.

“I think you and I would both agree, I think most people who've worked national securities would agree that one of the most important things even we do is counter intelligence agents is recruit confidential human sources.”

And one thing I always noticed was that some people are very good at recruitment and other people are very good at handling the sources once that recruitment has occurred.

But it's very rare that somebody is good at both. They're just, they're different skill sets and they take different personality types and I'm curious, it's sort of get back to the counter intelligence versus counter espionage divide. Do you think it's similar that some people are better at general CI and some people are better at counter espionage or are the bodies fungible?

“I think like in an office like WFO where you have enough people where things CI and just you get WFO is the washing facility.”

In a place like that or a place like New York where you have enough agents assigned to counter intelligence where you can kind of mix and match skill sets. I think it's a little different, but I do think I think you're absolutely correct that there are people in the bureau who I knew who were fantastic recruiters. They could get in front of somebody and they could convince them that it was in their life's best interest to help the United States government in some way and they could take a recruit just about anybody because they were just that good at it.

I mean handling is different, I mean handling is not the first date, it's the living with them and there's a whole different set of skills there and I know you know me, I would not be a good recruiter, I would give better handling. Important things I think about it CI still is to know which of those you are because you put the wrong person in the wrong role, it's it's not helpful and so I mean a lot of times we would have people who we knew were good at recruiting go out and talk to whoever it was because they were they were good at that and then they could hand them off to a handle but I mean all about the recruiting is is building that initial trust and then the handling is the keeping that trust.

I think that I used to have as people were doing me like a recruitment plan and they would think that they would be newer and they would think that this was the greatest idea and they came up with this and it's like yeah but we've done this before and it didn't work and they just didn't know because they hadn't been in long enough to generate the history they weren't certainly more trained on it so a lot of it is. Follow on training or getting approved briefings or just working the card in with other people who know what they're talking about and you know you'd have to shoot down an idea that you know just wasn't going to work or they'd be want to be the recruiter and they want to be the handler and then if they're one overseas they wanted to do that too.

Like this isn't how these work you can't you know if you've already argued yourself because you've done surveillance on them and now they know you're trying to recruit them how would they go on the trust you you just pretended you were something else. For the first six months that they knew you were now you're going to transition you know it just didn't know when you're back and that's where that on the job training you know in the CI stuff is so important which means time and you're see I'm on the target knowing that you know I was valued to work on Russian because a Russian would expect to see the gray hair.

You know you're fresh out of a quannico and you can do a thousand push ups saying you know and you look like you've been in five minutes.

That's not what a Russian is going to expect because that's not what the mindset is and so if you if you're that person you try to recruit them. A Russian's going to come back to me with somebody more senior I may not know anything but I look more senior. So you know and so it's knowing the kind of knowing how how it works and gathering that information over time it just it's it's not a skill that you can just replace on the fly.

“Like oh, we'll just find somebody else to do the massive loss of yeah, I think we're right with all the people that have left the last year each don't replace that overnight.”

Where's the new book? I'm going to tell you that we're going to reveal the future. I have to tell you more or more already. Now you're going to do it with the future. Now you're going to reveal the kangaroo rebellion of Mark Oveklink. Now you're going to book it and over everything that's going to happen and I'm going to hear you.

So I still want to get more a little more at the dichotomy between the two disciplines. I mean, I think you and I are in agreement based on what we just talked about that becoming a skilled sea agent.

Well, you're so much of your work is on recruiting sources and then doubling them back against the agency they're purportedly working for takes time. You just like you could do all of the simulations in the world and all the role playing in the world. But there's nothing that is a substitute for real life experience and at least in the way I learned there is nothing that was as good as substitute for screwing it up. Like I learned more from the recruits that failed than I ever did from the ones that worked.

“Well the other the other danger just is if you are going to sit in a room with an intelligence officer and try to recruit them, they're also trying to recruit you.”

Right exactly. Yeah, so all right. So that's sort of like the bread and butter of counter intelligence.

But once you get into the counter espionage realm, I argue it's a very different skill set for the soul reason that. And I'm going to generalize here and I know and we could both think of people who would disagree with this characterization, but a really successful counter intelligence case, pure counter intelligence probably ends in a recruitment.

“On real successful counter espionage case, probably ends in an arrest. So if I've been working counter intelligence for three to five years, what have you?”

And I get pulled to a counter espionage squad. What are the new skills that I need to learn and what are the potentially bad habits I might need to break? Yeah, so if you're coming from the CI world over to the espionage counter espionage side. It's a hybrid of the criminal world because you are now dealing with prosecutors you're dealing with trying to take a case to court.

We would traditionally call that just for the audience building alternate predication. In other words, you got a tip about Mr. Smith that the government is never going to admit an open court how it got.

“So you've got to come up with an equally legally valid reason to look at Mr. Smith that does not involve classified information.”

Yeah, and that's where I think having a bit of a CI background helps because you understand the nuances of why information might be more sensitive than not, you know, or like, all right, this is why I can't have been up because there's a human source on the line who might get killed.

If this comes out and we're not going to trade, you know, this or that guy's death, you know, so having that CI background, I think helps.

I mean, I mean, my background before the bureau was public corruption, so that was another good avenue to looking at the internal pipe cases because there was a corruption the hangle and not, you know, I know criminal as well. So having that a little bit of a criminal background, I know people who have had a CT background, which was particularly relevant on the global side because a lot of the countries, you know, take a run.

“You know, you've got, you've got state sponsored espionage being committed by China or Russia, you know, and Iran, it's kind of like state sponsored espionage, but they also might throw a bomb. So, and that's why there is this big angle.”

That next is between CT and CI on on the Iran threat in particular, it's, it's a complicated threat because so much of it is not symmetric, like you would normally think, you know, it's an asymmetric type type threat where you'll have a. Yeah, somebody will be doing a correct life, somebody will be doing a cyber. I mean, they use all these things are all sponsored by by the state. But again, Iran doesn't have an embassy, so I mean, it takes a different type of, you have to take a look at a different look at that particular argument versus like a China or Russia.

But like an espionage counter espionage agent, I mean, they can come from all different backgrounds, whenever I would select them. Just put on that squad, it would be somebody who had done something else before there was meaningful, there was sensitive. And if they understood the nuances and I also didn't want to have anybody who would come in and tell me they wanted to capture the next cancer.

Because your goal is never on the espionage cases is not to arrest the subject or it may not be. It is to identify whether that person did it.

And if they did, then you run them down and figure out what damage they did and how do you stop that damage and then how do you prosecute them. But oftentimes, there's a lot of cases that get opened that the guy didn't do it, did something else that got a spot like put on them. But it wasn't espionage, you know, maybe it's been some other kind of infraction or maybe it's something else or it could have been totally innocuous. And I always felt like the role of counter espionage agent should be to understand that there's huge risks to letting that case go on any longer than immediately to go.

Identify, it is the first and the threat, deal with the threat, what happened to the information that they have went out or clear them as crashes you could.

So they could go back and not have a career that's, you know, goes down the coil it because they were an espionage subject.

“So you need very, I think, for sure agents, you need very good dose of common sense, but you also don't need the glory down to, you know, once once the director's a work because they caught the next spy.”

And I mean, I, I moved agents away from that squad when I got the sense that they were really thinking that every case they opened was the next handsome. You know, I don't think most people realize most espionage leads turn out to be nothing. There's a lot of grunt work separating the wheat from the chef and one thing I found most frequently in the ones that I came across was not a case of somebody giving classified information away.

Yeah, I mean, just, I had an instance where we were watching this particular person and the allegations seemed sound.

“There was stuff backing it up, but among the things that he was doing was there's also buying real estate.”

And so he would meet some random guy in an alley and he'd be looking at a building and, you know, what a spies do. And they might be meeting with somebody you don't know in an alley, but they also might be meeting with a real estate agent. You know, you have these moments where you're like, oh my god, is this it? And then you find out it's his broker. You know, so what I found with almost all of those cases, especially the internals is there was always.

There was always a good reason why probably that person shouldn't have been trusted to be an FBI agent, but it often wasn't espionage.

They didn't join the bureau to steal secrets and they didn't come just grump old and work with that foreign intelligence agency. They got frustrated with the rules and they grow their bureau car somewhere. You know, and, you know, so there was always separating, you know, the is this guy a spy. So you know, or, and if he's not, and if he's not, should he still be trusted with for secret information, should he be putting a position across oftentimes those answers turned out to be no.

“But they weren't spies and, you know, and, and that's why a lot of the cases.”

I worked, you never heard of because they ended up getting the stress from the bureau for some other reason.

But it wasn't, you know, they weren't arrested for spying. Yeah, an agent you and I both know, who is still in, so we'll remain nameless, told me that the most important quality for car espionage investigation in his view was always emotional maturity. Because you have to realize when you're investigating somebody who has access to classified information, you're investigating a public servant, which means that you are, if you are totally wrong and totally off base. Investigating a bona fide patriot who is doing their country good.

“And one of the things that worries me when you jettison an entire squad as we saw happen two weeks ago have experienced.”

Ponder espionage agents is that they might get replaced by people right out of the academy who. They haven't been tempered yet by experience and they might not make that connection. Because you you get an espionage case in the bureau, it may not be the biggest case in the bureau, but it's on everybody's radar as a and to be clear when we talk about an espionage case in the bureau or in internal case. What we're referring to is an allegation that somebody actually employed by the FBI is the spy you're looking for.

And if you get one of those, you've got the attention of everybody who knows about it because it's also prop compartmented and it's you know, so it's a small pool of people who would know about the case. But they're all looking at you if you're the case, you know, how a lot, you know, what's going on today, you don't take days off on a case like that. When I always told my people that worked for me, who got cases like that was, yeah, you worked that case hard, but you also realized that you should work that case like as if you were the subject, how would you want to be treated professionally, you know, you're not going to, you're going to do it right, you're going to, you know,

the suit hard, but you're also going to do it professionally and because that person, you may clear that person and they got to come back to work and that's your colleague. You know, if your colleague until you prove that they're not right, there's there's actually is a presumption of innocence. Yeah, and once you kind of turn that corner and yeah, this is legitimate, then you know what they've earned or right to have the bureau, you know, come at them full force. But while it's just an allegation or while it's, you know, work at hard, work at fast, figure out if it's real.

But the assumption can't be, this is the next handsome thing, then you're thinking about the outcome as opposed to following the evidence of a fast. All right, and that, so that sort of gets to something that is going to be an elephant in the room for a lot of people, which is the bureau, in certain quarters, has gotten a reputation for using the counterintelligence or counter-espionage program to go after people for political reasons.

I've made the arguments that it's not, but can you talk briefly, hypothetically, why does the counterintelligence division so often have to bump up against high profile people from both sides of the political spectrum? You and I can probably name half a dozen career politicians on both sides of the aisle, whom the bureau has publicly investigated, and we could probably name a lot more, who are still not known to this day.

“Let's not. Can you talk about why is it that so many of these cases become so high profile?”

Well, I mean, they become high profile because of who they are, and then once, once becomes known that the bureau is looking at them, it seems like over the last, you know, it's called dozen years.

The New York reaction is just to label it as this is political, you know, and it never was in my experience, you know, there was something at a coverage or something that came in from a lead or some piece of information that the bureau would collect, usually in its routine coverage, or would be brought to them. And the decision had to be made to look at this or not. The kinds of information that would come in, you know, if you're in Washington, D.C., you know, the politicians in Washington or staffers or people working on the Hill, working in the White House, they all have contacts with foreign nationals, they all have contacts with different foreign countries, they all have overseas, you know, connections in one way or another.

“But let's clear, most of those are legitimate.”

Yeah, and most of them are legitimate, but the bureau will know about them, one through some means or another, and it's not because anybody's looking at anybody in particular, but it just comes up in coverage in the sweeps or comes in directly from some lead. The feeling with, like, look, if you're looking at this allegation and it can be predicated properly and it's supported by, you know, some other independent facts and it makes enough sense. How do you not look at it? Because if you look at it, you're being just as political as you'd be accused if you did.

And that's the worrisome thing that I saw happen over the second half of my career is, you know, you were damned if you did and you were damned if you didn't, you were political no matter what.

Because, you know, half of the people would say, well, it's political and the other is how good they, you know, it is extremely frustrating, especially when you boil it down to, all right, well, do they have this contact and did they do this thing and, you know, did they report it? Or, and look properly, you know, you end up on on the bureau's radar if you do something that puts you on the bureau's radar. And if you don't want to be on the bureau's radar, then don't. I mean, generally, you know, the bureau will look at a legitimate contact and say nothing to see here, you know, the idea that any agent is sitting there.

If they're sitting through data trying to find the next case, they're too busy for that, you know, and you deal with the ones that actually rise to a level that they could be predicated nobody's got time to, you know, say, hey, I'm going to target this person. When, when the last five years, I mean, we, we work on cases on, unfortunately, I'm both sides of the aisle. I mean, you know, and you're just behavior that, you know, nobody's above the law, they deserve to be investigated. And it should have been run out. And if they were, if there's enough to go to a brand jury, it should go to a brand jury. If there's enough to go forward with a trial, it should go forward with a trial.

You know, the idea that the bureau was making decisions for political reasons that wasn't my experience whatsoever.

And then I went through my 21 years and I don't think anybody could tell you how I voted if I voted, you know, and I would say, well, I would vote a for adults.

“All right, I'm going to ask you a question that to you and I is probably rhetorical, but I think it's important for it to be reiterated for the public is much as humanly possible.”

What happens when the investigators get punished for working those sort of cases? I mean, you lose the ability to get people to willing to work that stuff.

Got so slammed that you couldn't get them to volunteer or even assist with other legitimate cases because they're like, no way, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not going to do it. And if the current climate is if you worked those cases, you're going to be fired for something as simple as, you know, wasn't necessarily the case agents that got fired. It was the support staff who worked on the spreadsheet who put together a list of phone numbers who got fired. That just sours from a rail of the entire office because nobody know, you know, if that's the reason you can get fired, everybody can get fired.

And therefore, you steer away from those kind of cases, it's better to make the decision to not, you know, all right, we just want to deal with that. You get to me, you know, my, my impression is if you found something like that these days, if you pushed it up the chain, nobody would want to support it. Nobody wants to get fired for bringing, for bringing a case and you shouldn't, you shouldn't fear retribution working a legitimately predicated case that had evidence to support it. And it's collected lawfully and by the proper means and was not targeted in any way, you shouldn't, you shouldn't be fearful for your job, and those are the professionals that are here.

You know, I work for, or different presidents, you know, and I work under, or different directors.

There was never a change in what my mission was, or what I was asked to do or expected to do, or how I was told to do my job in any of those change or worse.

Until until last year, supple. Yeah, and there's public data to support this, we don't have to sort of dance around it. If you look at, for example, when the DOJ inspector general, does a report of viscerating a number of agents who worked on certain FISA's as Michael Horowitz did in the aftermath of Crossfire Hurricane, and then you look at the publicly released numbers for how many FISA's were sought the year after.

“It's a cliff, I mean, it is a, like, I think we're talking like over a thousand less if not more.”

Yeah, no, I mean, I was in a meeting, it over a CD during that time period where CD is counterintelligence. Yeah, it had headquarters. You know, we're somewhere to ask, well, why are the FISA numbers so far down? And I kind of sat there and I didn't, you and your enough, I wasn't going to say the obvious. But I'm like, you just vilified everybody who's working on the FISA,

and you, you know, in the press is running about how the bureau is done this on that. Like, why would anybody sign up to do that?

“And then, you know, and they're costly, and do we want to be looking at this stuff?”

We always did the calculus, so do we need to be looking at, at this country or that, you know,

the work into who, who constitute in more of a threat because you can't, you can't, to vote resources to everything. But you were always having that conversation, which I think is legitimate. But the, oh, well, we're just not going to renew stuff. Well, we're not going to pursue FISA on a legitimate pace because we don't, you just don't want to be with it.

I mean, that's a huge, that's a tool that, that solves cases. It identifies plots. It, it helps keep things from going boom. I mean, it, it's a, it's a, it's a powerful tool that, if used correctly,

and in my experience, always was, it keeps America safe.

And if you're too worried about the fallouts to put one up, you're not going to find out the information you needed to stop a plot or to find the terrorists or find a spy. I mean, these are all terrible decisions made by Bill of trying, you know, the bureau and the agents themselves who work with stock.

“Well, on that wildly optimistic note, I think we will wrap things off.”

Derek Piper recently retired assistant special agent in charge. Thank you for joining us and for sharing your knowledge on this topic. I look forward to talking again soon.

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