Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Why is Trump Building a Secret Ballroom Bunker?

Transcript

Why is Trump Building a Secret Ballroom Bunker? · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:03
G'day humans!
0:04
Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
0:07
Well, dangerous ideas are
0:08
aplenty today.
0:10
If you're a lover of espionage, of Cold War subterfuge, and all the things
0:15
that spies in places like Israel and the CIA are able to do to hoodwink their adversaries,
0:23
capture criminals, and sometimes not criminals.
0:26
Matt Bevan is an amazing raconteur.
0:29
He hosts
0:30
It's one of my favorite podcasts.
0:31
It's called If You're Listening.
0:32
It's basically about
0:33
international affairs and subterfuge and espionage and all the things that go on under the surface.
0:38
He now has a book.
0:40
It's called If You're Listening Declassified, and he was kind enough to swing by
0:44
the Uncomfortable Conversations studios to regale us with some of the most amazing tales in that
0:50
book, from the Hezbollah exploding pages to the Enigma Code during World War II to sexy Israeli
0:57
spies hoodwinking, well, perhaps not so innocent Israeli Australians and kidnapping them,
1:04
including an aside on J. Edgar Hoover's boyfriend's incredible inventing capabilities
1:11
and his curious window opening device.
1:14
You'll find out about all that and more as you enjoy,
1:16
as I did, the one, the only, Matt Bevan.
1:27
One of the big things with the show is the things that we're talking about tend to be quite complicated.
1:33
And one of the biggest complaints that we get from people is you didn't mention this or you didn't mention that or you didn't mention that.
1:40
Yeah.
1:44
And generally what we say is, well, can I refer you to the episode where we did do that?
1:49
Yeah.
1:49
Or I can refer you to that or we intend to do an episode on that and that kind of thing.
1:54
we can't fit the entire history of the middle east into every episode no it's also they're
1:58
short episodes sometimes frustratingly short for a person like me yeah yeah talks to people for an
2:03
hour and a half yeah yeah two hours yeah you know uh 22 minutes comes up and i'm like wait is that
2:07
then you're like next week we'll talk about yeah yeah the next thing that we really should be
2:11
talking about now because we're doing three episodes on a thing that takes an hour to
2:14
explain so why don't you make it an hour because it takes because it takes it takes a week to make
2:19
each one of those fair enough well it's a wonderful show i love it uh it's both funny and also um
2:27
informative and also sort of wise and also even handed as well about very very touchy things i
2:33
mean you know you do a whole series about gaza and lebanon and you know hezbollah and you know
2:40
israel and stuff like that without and i can imagine that you get responses from people where
2:45
if again if they only listen to one episode they go you weren't fair to the other side and you're
2:49
like we just did an entire episode on the other side yes yes yeah and in fact we often do exactly
2:55
that yeah we recently explicitly did that when um uh indian india and pakistan briefly uh sort of
3:03
had a bit of a tiff over um you know obviously the latest iteration of their long-running tiff
3:11
over Kashmir in the middle of 2025, and we explicitly did,
3:17
okay, here's India's version of this and here's Pakistan's version of this.
3:22
This is the Rashomon of podcasts.
3:24
Kind of, yeah.
3:25
Yeah, each person's perspective.
3:26
It was very much, you know, these are the same.
3:28
It's actually interesting.
3:29
We kind of do do that quite often.
3:31
Yes.
3:31
Well, you did do it on Southern Lebanon as well.
3:34
Absolutely.
3:34
Because I listened to one episode and I was like,
3:36
it's a bit anti-Israel.
3:39
And just in the sense that, I mean, I have more criticisms of Israel than probably any non-Jew does, but there does seem to be this kind of human rights-y, left-y point of view that all the people in southern Lebanon want to do is live peacefully, lobbing rockets at Israeli towns, and nasty Israelis keep coming in and disrupting those plans.
4:01
And then I heard the next episode, which was the opposite point of view, which was great.
4:06
well look i mean i i write a bit about this in in the book that came out this year the fabulous
4:12
book that we're here to promote yes which i had forgotten about whose existence i had forgotten
4:16
until approximately three hours ago when i said can you send me a pdf of the yeah and i'm out you
4:22
know on my way in and i'm like something but anyway lives in a different city so you have to
4:27
drive for several hours to get here for an event tonight and uh now i can say that i have read the
4:33
book, which means in like most podcast interviewer speak, they ran it through Claude.
4:39
That's right.
4:40
And they read a summary.
4:41
That's not what I normally do, but this time I did.
4:44
I used to, when I worked in local radio, as I know that you did as well, I used to refer
4:50
to it as a radio producer's read.
4:52
And a radio producer's read is the first 30 pages, the last five pages, and then sort
4:57
of six randomly chosen pages in the middle.
4:59
Yep.
4:59
Yep.
5:00
Or you go through the chapter index and you go, well, that looks like an interesting chapter.
5:03
Well, in fact, for this, for this, like indexes aren't a huge thing that happen in every book these days.
5:10
You know, often books are put out without indexes.
5:12
I asked them to please do an index for this book, which, you know, to basically allow people to do that.
5:21
Yes.
5:23
Either I'm interested in this, so I'll find it immediately, or more likely, you know, I've read the book and I want to tell you, you know, you meet someone at a dinner party or something.
5:33
you go and pull the book out you go ah the bit that was about this yeah right and and shuttle
5:38
through to find that bit the funniest thing about this though is i hadn't kind of considered how
5:43
strange and eclectic the book was until i got the version back with the index which put all the
5:50
topics in the book in alphabetical order right and you know you end up with sort of strange little
5:56
runs of topics
5:59
like we came across
6:00
like there was
6:01
okay so
6:02
diabetes
6:05
dialysis
6:06
Dillinger
6:07
John
6:08
Dion
6:08
Celine
6:10
Disneyland
6:10
Tokyo
6:11
distances
6:12
judging of
6:13
dog
6:14
Snoop
6:14
Snoop
6:15
a lot of really
6:20
very odd
6:21
sort of
6:21
groupings of topics
6:22
yes dog
6:23
of the Snoop
6:24
kind
6:25
And I'll say, when I do a reporter's read of something,
6:28
this is pre-AI, instead of doing the first pages
6:31
and then the five last pages, you look like you've read it better
6:34
if you don't read the, I mean, you might read the introduction
6:37
because you want to know what the book's about,
6:38
but then you read more of the back, flip to one third of the way
6:43
from the end and read 20 pages there.
6:47
Pick one interesting thing out, you put that to them,
6:50
they go, he has read the book.
6:51
Has he got it all that way?
6:52
Yeah, yeah.
6:53
Little do they know.
6:54
the crafty old Zeps in his wily ways.
6:57
Don't ask me what's on page 45.
6:59
Exactly.
7:00
145.
7:01
I've got that down pat.
7:03
So there's so much, there are so many things that I could talk to you about because you're
7:07
as much like your book, your show also bounces around or everything.
7:11
How do you describe it?
7:12
If someone doesn't know your show and they say, what's the show about?
7:18
What do you say?
7:19
It's difficult.
7:21
Usually I send them a link and just go, you check it out.
7:24
I mean, the show is basically about taking something that's in the news at the moment and giving you an interesting story that will tell you a bit more about it.
7:34
I, you know, as I sort of, my guiding principle is always towards just finding interesting stories that people will go, man, that is a really strange thing that I didn't know before.
7:49
The classic example of this was in one of our early seasons.
7:53
we did an episode about Roger Stone.
7:59
Roger Stone was one of the sort of the side quest characters
8:05
in the first Trump administration,
8:07
and he was involved in Donald Trump's campaign in 2016.
8:12
Odd sort of a twirly mustachioed villain to a certain extent.
8:18
Yes.
8:18
But we came across this fact about him,
8:20
which is that he doesn't wear socks.
8:22
ever.
8:24
And so he goes around just, you know, raw dogging his shoes.
8:28
Yeah, right.
8:31
And we put it in, and I couldn't get that fact out of my head,
8:34
and I put it in the podcast about him.
8:38
And for years afterwards, people would just be like,
8:41
I can't, like the first, you know, I would be listening to your show,
8:44
and then you'd say something like that Roger Stone doesn't wear socks.
8:47
And I just find myself telling people every time I saw Roger Stone.
8:50
Do you know?
8:51
You know that guy doesn't wear socks?
8:52
Yeah.
8:53
And it was just, to a certain extent, it's like a marketing strategy for us because it means that people, I heard on this podcast that this guy doesn't wear any socks.
9:01
They're like, really?
9:02
What kind of a wonderful podcast would provide you with an amusing anecdote like that?
9:06
That's right.
9:06
You're like, I can't describe the podcast.
9:08
I'll just send you a link.
9:09
Well, yeah, it's about finding interesting stories that illustrate something about what is happening in the world.
9:16
Yes, and it leans heavily into international affairs and espionage.
9:21
and, you know, the hoodwinky things that states get up to with each other
9:25
and that sort of thing.
9:26
Because those are interesting stories.
9:28
Those are interesting stories, which brings us to Clyde.
9:31
Yes.
9:31
Which, now, any interesting story is wrapped around an interesting person.
9:37
And I only knew Clyde Thornton?
9:39
Tolson.
9:40
Tolson, sorry.
9:41
I had only ever heard this name in passing as essentially the de facto husband
9:47
of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director.
9:50
Yes.
9:50
And as you mention in the book, and I know that because of Claude, there has been endless speculation about the nature of their relationship, how romantic it was and blah, blah, blah, and this and that.
10:01
But you think that's a little bit boring, really, because, okay, they were basically married.
10:06
I mean, they were basically.
10:08
I mean, if they weren't in a relationship, then they were uncommonly close best friends.
10:13
They had dinner every night.
10:15
They traveled together all the time.
10:17
They had adjoining rooms in their hotel all the time.
10:20
Yes, and on the train.
10:22
They would take trains places and they would ask for adjoining cabins
10:25
and they had dinner at each other's places literally every night
10:29
when they weren't eating together at the restaurant where they went every day.
10:33
J. Edgar Hoover left him everything in his will.
10:35
Absolutely.
10:35
He inherited J. Edgar's house.
10:37
Yes.
10:38
It's like you couldn't be more married in that era.
10:43
Absolutely.
10:43
And I feel like, and they were basically like, to their friends, their friends thought of them as a couple.
10:51
Right.
10:51
We're going over for drinks at Clyde and-
10:55
And Jay's house.
10:56
And Edgar's house.
10:57
Eddie's, Eddie as Clyde would call him.
11:00
At their house, they would go on couples vacations with, they went on a couples vacation with the Nixons.
11:06
I mean, they were basically, and I think, you know, in the context of the mid 20th century,
11:12
that's what people really wanted to focus on.
11:14
They wanted to focus on, is the FBI director
11:17
in a gay relationship with his deputy director?
11:20
And I don't, it's the 21st century,
11:22
I don't really care about that that much anymore.
11:25
What I am more interested in and what we explore in the book
11:27
is just the fabulous ways that Clyde Tolson found to be corrupt.
11:36
Just the, just, I mean, people, people, you know,
11:39
you hear stories about corruption, it's like,
11:42
you know, whether they're blackmailing people or they're doing something, you know, to try and get
11:46
some sort of money or power or whatever it was.
11:48
Clyde, uh, Tolson decided that he wanted
11:51
something and he was like, what is the most delightfully corrupt way that I can do this?
11:56
I mean, being reminded of this period of American history gave me hope about our current position.
12:00
I was like, oh, you know, Trump and crypto and he's making all this money and he's putting,
12:04
installing all these stooges and the director of the FBI doing his own bit, doing his bidding for
12:09
And then I'm like, oh, I mean, this is really nothing new.
12:12
Like the director of the FBI and his deputy presided over, I mean, we'll get to the corrupt, we'll get to the incredible corruption, but also the most damaging, soul-destroying, anti-gay crusade while they were sleeping with each other and were openly, an open couple prosecuting this incredibly harsh crackdown.
12:36
Yes.
12:37
And bribing and like anyone who suggested that J. Edgar Hoover was gay would get a knock on the door from the FBI and like would have their lives shredded to tatters at the same time as he's parading around with Colson.
12:52
What he was saying was, you know, what they would argue was, oh, no, we don't have anything.
12:55
There's no problem.
12:56
We don't have any specific problem with homosexuality.
13:00
Our concern is that if you are working in the government and you have access to classified information and you are gay and keeping that secret, then that makes you a national security risk.
13:14
Well, it's a good thing that the highest law enforcement authority in the land was not a closeted gay man.
13:20
Absolutely.
13:21
I mean, it was an extraordinary level of hypocrisy and just incredible.
13:26
But the wonderful things that I found that Clyde was doing is Clyde has, you can look it up in the US patent directory, Clyde has a number of patents to his name for inventions.
13:39
He fancied himself an inventor.
13:42
And if you look up the patent for modern garage door opening remotes, you will see a reference to a Clyde Tolson patent from the 1950s that is in some way connected or we've seen that invention.
14:04
and this is different enough to be its own invention.
14:06
You know, we're not stealing Clyde Tolson's invention
14:09
because that's, you know, that's his property.
14:12
So what he claimed to have invented was a remote-controlled window.
14:18
So if you're in bed and it's hot and you want the window to open
14:23
so you can let the breeze in, you can have a button next to your thing
14:26
and you press a button and the shutter will go up.
14:28
No air conditioners in the 1950s.
14:30
They were all Euro pansies in America in the 1950s.
14:34
That's right.
14:34
And so he invented, in inverted commas, this and had it installed in J. Edgar's house.
14:41
And then President Johnson, when he was the vice president, lived nearby and was friendly with J. Edgar Hoover and saw this thing in his house.
14:52
And so when Johnson became the president and moved into the White House, he said, Clyde, could you install one of your window remotes in the bedroom, in the bedroom of the residence, in order to get that in there?
15:06
And the great thing about it was that Clyde had no electrical engineering experience at all or ability to invent this thing.
15:17
What he had in fact done is, gee, it'd be good if we could open the window without getting out of bed.
15:22
And then he went to like the lab at the FBI where the, you know, science people who do the forensic investigations work and went, can you guys whip me up like an electrical device that can do this?
15:35
They did it for him.
15:36
And they're like, sorry, what case does this have to do with?
15:39
He's like, whatever, I'm the deputy director.
15:41
Forget about it.
15:41
You don't need to.
15:42
This is top secret information.
15:44
And then he takes the invention to the patent office and says, I've just invented this.
15:49
Amazing.
15:49
And then he'd call up the New York Times and get the New York Times to report on Clyde
15:53
Tolson.
15:53
What an amazing inventor.
15:55
What a brilliant man.
15:56
He's a modern day Benjamin Franklin.
15:58
Yes.
15:58
And he doesn't know anything.
16:00
Absolutely had no idea how to do it.
16:01
And this is not the only patent.
16:02
He has multiple patents of the things that he just got his department wonks to invent
16:07
for him.
16:08
And then he claimed as his own.
16:09
Absolutely.
16:10
Which endure to this day.
16:11
That's true.
16:12
He claimed to have invented a door opening system for the space shuttle.
16:19
He's very big on opening things.
16:21
In fact, all of his inventions were about opening things.
16:24
It was either about-
16:24
For a man who's in the closet, there's a certain irony.
16:28
He's all about opening things up.
16:30
And it was also like an openable bottle for beers as well.
16:36
But it was all about opening things.
16:38
Incredible.
16:39
And so he did that.
16:40
And so he got the boffins in the lab to invent those for him.
16:44
But the FBI also had a department which was called the exhibits section.
16:50
And their job was when the FBI was going to court, they captured someone or whatever,
16:58
and they needed to try and prove this guy was standing here or whatever.
17:02
The exhibit section's job was to make a model of the crime scene to show in court.
17:09
and, you know, they could make models that were small.
17:11
They could make life-size models of things.
17:13
This was their whole, basically a set department for the FBI.
17:17
And what Clyde would get these guys to do is just knock up,
17:21
oh, J. Edgar needs a birdhouse.
17:24
In fact, he needs a new porch.
17:25
Can you guys come and knock up a new porch on the front of J. Edgar's house?
17:29
Can you guys come and do this?
17:31
You know, he needs a gift.
17:33
Or this, you know, this friend of J. Edgar's needs a gift.
17:37
can you knock up a you know a little cabinet for them and that kind of thing and he's just
17:42
going and ordering these things and one of the best stories is um uh the exhibit section guy
17:50
guys were going and building a porch on the front of jay agarhoover's house uh and one of jay agarhoover's
17:56
neighbors came over and went you guys are doing a great job you know can you give me a number like
18:00
a business card that i can call up your uh you know your secretaries and book you guys to to
18:05
come and do a portrait of my place?
18:07
And they're like, actually, we all are FBI agents.
18:11
We're not
18:11
going to come around to your place.
18:13
We're doing this for the director.
18:14
Amazing.
18:15
But it was just
18:17
tremendous.
18:18
Amazing.
18:18
I'd love it if because they are only used to making temporary exhibits,
18:23
they made it all out of balsa wood and a strong wind blows and the balsa just goes scattering.
18:28
Yeah.
18:29
It's all made of newspaper and twine.
18:32
That reminds me of the ballroom that Trump is building,
18:35
which is another thing that I have loved hearing you opine about.
18:38
And we'll just bounce around, but if you want to go anywhere,
18:40
go there because it's all interesting.
18:42
And the flack that Trump has got is that, you know,
18:45
this is all his self-indulgent attempt to build a ballroom.
18:48
I hadn't realized until I heard your episode about it
18:51
that his infatuation with a White House ballroom
18:54
predates his own run for the presidency.
18:57
Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.
18:58
He called up Barack Obama as chief of staff
19:02
and offered to build a ballroom
19:03
because he's so good at building beautiful ballrooms.
19:06
That's right.
19:08
And they politely declined, the Obama White House.
19:11
Well, I'm not even sure that you could say that they declined.
19:13
I think they just went, what?
19:15
What?
19:17
What are you saying?
19:18
You know, it was 2011 when Donald Trump starts calling them
19:21
because basically the White House has one large room
19:25
and this is the large room that you see.
19:28
They do press conferences in, that kind of thing.
19:31
It's called the East Room.
19:31
It can seat about 200 people.
19:33
But anything bigger than that, they either have to do it off-site
19:38
or what the Obama administration was doing is they were putting up
19:41
big tents basically on the south lawn.
19:44
Like a big white marquee thing.
19:46
Totally, like a wedding marquee really.
19:47
Right.
19:49
To host the Prime Minister of India.
19:50
She should have got the FBI set builders to do it.
19:52
She should have got the FBI set builders.
19:54
Absolutely.
19:54
Yeah.
19:55
I mean, the exhibit section.
19:56
I mean, they're just sitting there waiting.
19:57
We haven't had a porch in so long.
19:59
That's right.
20:00
Ever since J. Edgar.
20:02
We're never getting called on.
20:03
Clyde died in the 70s and we haven't heard from him.
20:07
So he would do that.
20:08
And Trump had watched a couple of these tent events on the TV and went, the White House needs a ballroom.
20:17
Calls up David Axelrod, one of Obama's most senior officials and goes, I could do a tremendous job, that sort of thing.
20:28
I'm great at ballrooms.
20:30
and you can come down in Florida and see the ballrooms that I've built
20:33
at Mar-a-Lago.
20:34
They're fantastic.
20:35
I could do one, you know, free of charge to the White House.
20:40
And Axelrod kind of went, I have kind of, you know,
20:46
like, you know, we're doing like the Affordable Care Act.
20:49
Yeah, we're quite busy.
20:50
We're dealing with Congress.
20:52
We've got a bit going on right now.
20:54
We're not going to think about the ballroom.
20:56
um but and at the time of course he was just a he was a reality television host and like a kind of
21:03
a butt of jokes in new york as like a yeah guy who puts gold on everything and yeah it's like
21:09
why would you even think of him being involved in a construction at the white house but now
21:12
they built they start building the this huge ballroom you're not offended by this because
21:18
the white house has been basically completely rebuilt throughout the 20th century right i mean
21:23
What's the scale of, you described some of it, but I can't remember.
21:25
Like 100 years ago, the White House was just what?
21:31
So at the start of the 20th century, the White House was just the residence.
21:36
So this is the middle building, the most famous, you know,
21:39
the bit with the columns and the windows.
21:41
The beginning of the West Wing.
21:43
Yes.
21:43
Ironically, not the West Wing, though.
21:45
It's not the West Wing, but it's the building that you see
21:48
that gets blown up in Independence Day.
21:50
That's right.
21:50
It's the one in all the photos.
21:52
So that was the residence.
21:53
And initially it was expected that the president would live in there and all of his staff would work with him in there and they would host events and that kind of thing.
22:00
And it's a reasonably large, you know, mansion, but it's not, you know, it doesn't have much office space.
22:07
And so basically Teddy Roosevelt built the West Wing as a place for the president to work.
22:13
Which is a separate building?
22:14
A totally separate building, but connected by a sort of like, well, they call it a colonnade.
22:19
But a little walkway that you sometimes see photos of.
22:23
Obama smoking on or something.
22:24
Yeah, yeah.
22:25
A walkway.
22:26
The press briefing room is also there in that sort of narrow bit of the building, but it's
22:30
basically a corridor that connects it to the West Wing.
22:34
And Teddy Roosevelt built the West Wing, and then 30 years later, Franklin Roosevelt came
22:39
in and went, I don't like it.
22:40
Was the bedroom moved to the West Wing, or is the West Wing just for working?
22:44
The West Wing is just business.
22:46
Yeah, okay.
22:46
So the Oval Office is in the West Wing, and all of the staff of-
22:50
So where did presidents work from before the West Wing was built?
22:54
In the residence.
22:55
In the residence itself.
22:56
They worked from home sort of a situation.
22:59
They lived upstairs.
23:00
They went downstairs to work and host dignitaries.
23:06
Okay, so now they just live in the house.
23:08
They work in the West Wing.
23:09
That's right.
23:11
But even the West Wing, so Teddy Roosevelt built the West Wing,
23:14
and Franklin Roosevelt arrived, and he went, actually, I hate this.
23:19
the Oval Office is in the wrong place, there's not enough sun, I'm moving the Oval Office to the edge
23:23
and totally gutted that thing and rebuilt it and then he died in 1945
23:28
and Harry Truman came in and went, well this whole thing's falling down
23:33
and he literally gutted the entire interior of the residence building
23:39
so the historic residence building that had been there since the early 1800s
23:47
he ripped out the entire interior of it, propped up the outside walls.
23:51
Wow.
23:51
Can you imagine if Trump did this, by the way?
23:53
Can you imagine the outrage?
23:54
Like, it's unprecedented, never been done before.
23:57
Absolutely.
23:57
But it obviously has.
23:59
Truman did it.
23:59
Yeah.
24:00
Truman basically, you know, all these famous historic rooms, the East Room, the Lincoln
24:06
Bedroom, the President's Bedroom, the Diplomatic Room, the Blue Room, all these rooms, you
24:11
You know, these famous rooms were destroyed in the 1950s and rebuilt by Harry Truman.
24:18
If I had paid a bribe to Bill Clinton to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom, as allegedly people did, then I would – well, they were his friends.
24:28
They were his donors, rich donors and friends.
24:31
I would feel ripped off that it wasn't – I would have assumed that that was the bedroom that Lincoln slept in.
24:36
No, no, it's from the 50s.
24:38
It was a 40-year-old room at that stage.
24:43
At best, Clyde and J. Edgar got up to no good there.
24:46
That's the best you could expect.
24:47
That's the historic thing, yeah.
24:49
Maybe you could find the window that goes up and down.
24:51
That's right.
24:52
And then the East Wing comes along.
24:54
The East Wing was built by Roosevelt basically to hide a bunker,
25:01
to hide a bomb-proof bunker underneath the East Wing.
25:05
But that was built in, yeah, the 1940s.
25:07
Oh, okay.
25:08
Same time as the West Wing.
25:09
Yeah.
25:09
No, no, no.
25:10
West Wing was by-
25:12
It was by Teddy Roosevelt.
25:13
It was by Teddy.
25:14
And then-
25:14
And FDR.
25:15
FDR redid the West Wing and built the East Wing in the bunker underneath.
25:18
Right.
25:19
And this was a Cold War thing of like, we can't just be sitting ducks.
25:23
Like if there's a nuclear exchange or something.
25:25
Well, it was after Pearl Harbor.
25:28
Yeah.
25:28
It was Pearl Harbor that really freaked them out.
25:30
They didn't see it coming.
25:31
They went, okay, so we have nowhere to hide the president if-
25:34
Yes, right.
25:35
Suddenly we're under kamikaze.
25:37
Of course, because FDA died before nukes.
25:40
Before the nuclear bomb, yes.
25:42
So that was entirely built from there.
25:46
There have been multiple giant renovations of the entire building since that.
25:51
So really what Donald Trump is knocking down is something that is not that old.
25:56
And in a way, doing massive renovations on the White House is the norm.
26:02
Right.
26:03
Like that's the thing that, I mean, not recently, not in the last, you know, 40 years, but knocking down big areas of the White House and rebuilding it is not that unusual.
26:12
In fact, it was, you know, basically every president in the first half of the 20th century was doing something massive to change it.
26:19
And shooting from the hip, Trump replied to a reporter's question about whether or not the construction could be halted on his new ballroom by saying, we can't halt the construction because it's not just the ballroom.
26:34
It's this huge complex underneath the ballroom that the military is building.
26:40
And it's not clear whether or not he was supposed to say that.
26:43
But it gave you and some others the inkling that, oh, maybe the ballroom is actually another East Wing kind of decoy, essentially, for an underground bunker, which is less crazy than it sounds because, do you want to tell the 9-11?
27:04
Yeah, so in 9-11, 9-11 was a genuine serious threat to the physical building, the White House.
27:14
Yes.
27:14
And to people who didn't live through it, you know, after something has happened, you know how it unfolded.
27:20
So you kind of are sanguine about it.
27:22
But when it's taking place and you live in a world in which nothing like that has ever happened, you don't know how bad it's going to be or what the follow-up is going to be.
27:29
So at each point in time, as it's unfolding, the Secret Service and everybody in government is like, how many of these things are there?
27:37
Is this just the first wave of many different waves?
27:40
Is there going to be a follow-up chemical attack or, you know?
27:43
Well, even in hindsight, it's still, you know, we know that the two flights, on 9-11, there were four hijacked flights.
27:52
Two of them went and famously, of course, hit the World Trade Center.
27:56
The other two were heading for Washington.
27:58
And their targets, we assume from the information that has been tortured out of people, I suppose, you would have to admit, has been tortured out of people.
28:09
the targets were the Pentagon, the Capitol, and the White House, whichever one they could get a
28:14
clear shot at.
28:15
And they hit the Pentagon, and there was another plane on its way towards Washington,
28:20
D.C. that was prevented from getting there by a mutiny of the passengers.
28:26
But no, the White House-
28:27
It was definitely going for either the White House or Congress.
28:30
Absolutely.
28:32
And so, obviously, the president, well, the president wasn't there that morning,
28:37
but the Vice President Dick Cheney was, and he was rushed to the FDR-built World War II-era bunker.
28:45
And they went down there and they went, what is this?
28:47
This is this, you know, antique sort of bizarre sort of really old, antiquated, not properly set up for communications,
29:00
not properly set for even the air supply system was insufficient once they started getting more and more people down there for the meetings.
29:06
the co2 levels started to increase they're like we're gonna suffocate here right so there's a
29:10
whole bunch of people there who aren't who don't get the invitation like we've all seen the movies
29:14
or the tv shows where i think there's even an episode of the west wing where you get a little
29:18
card you get a card that gives you permission to be rescued in case of a nuclear exchange yeah yeah
29:22
and not everybody does so like the secret service comes in while dick cheney is in a is in a meeting
29:28
about the about the world trade towers yes and just says you need to leave and they pick him up
29:35
They physically just grab him according to him and just lift him up and just drag him and the second lady to the bunker with a few select other people.
29:44
That's right.
29:45
And they call an evacuation of the building.
29:47
Yes.
29:47
And everybody else is running out.
29:49
Take your shoes off.
29:50
Run.
29:50
A plane's on its way.
29:52
That is the instruction.
29:53
They are given an instruction, run for your life, essentially.
29:57
Yeah.
29:58
And they get through that whole process and they come out of that going, well, that's not ideal.
30:06
The idea that you have, you know, senior government officials having to take off their, you know, heels and sprint across the North Lawn to try and get away from...
30:17
From a 757, which is, yeah, coming in hot at 600 kilometers an hour.
30:23
And only was prevented from being hit by that 757 by the incredible actions of those, the poor people on the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.
30:34
Yeah, which in turn only happened because the flight was delayed.
30:37
So thanks to the dysfunction of American air travel for that one, because they all knew that the other three had gone into-
30:45
Yes, and they heard about it.
30:46
Yes, that's right.
30:47
And it was only because they knew that they were on a suicide mission anyway that they were-
30:51
Yes.
30:52
Down.
30:53
And so, yeah, they decided that that was insufficient.
30:58
And there's a fair bit of evidence since then that the US has been trying to figure out how can we build a big bunker, a massive complex underneath the White House?
31:10
How can we convince one of these presidents to do it?
31:12
And Trump comes along and goes, sure, I'll knock the East Wing down, you dig whatever you need to down there, and then I'll put a ballroom on top.
31:20
Right.
31:21
I mean, that seems to be what is happening here.
31:24
Trump hasn't communicated it very well, and he's kind of trumping all over the ballroom.
31:30
He's talking about the grandiosity and the incredible, you know, the colonnades and the columns, and this side will be about Athens, and this side will be about Rome, and all that kind of thing.
31:40
He's being very Trump about the whole thing, but I can imagine a situation in a universe where people trusted their politicians more than they do right now, which is, of course, at least in part due to the actions of Donald Trump, where a president could go, look, this is the White House.
32:02
Currently, we're not safe.
32:03
Have you seen what's going on with drone attacks at the moment?
32:06
They can come out of anywhere.
32:08
We need to be able to keep not just me, but also all the people who work here safe, because this building is the most obvious target for an attack in the world.
32:18
We're going to knock down the East Wing.
32:19
It's only like 65 years old anyway, 80 years old anyway.
32:26
And we're going to dig a bunker underneath it.
32:28
We're not going to tell you anything about that because it's secret.
32:31
And then we're going to build something nice on top.
32:33
I mean, wouldn't the instinct of the national security establishment always be just to deny that and have the president deny it anyway?
32:39
Which they have been doing, but they can't stop Trump.
32:42
They can't stop Trump.
32:42
But the thing, it sheds new light on his constant talk about the ballroom because the assumption, the reason why, the assumption about why he's always talking about the ballroom is because he loves ballrooms and he loves designing things and he loves gold and he loves chandeliers.
32:57
That may be part of it.
32:58
I'm sure it is.
32:58
It may also be part of it that he's not very good at misdirection and he's laying it on too thick.
33:05
Like if my eight-year-old son did a magic trick and he knew that the way to pull a magic trick off was to have you look at his hand instead of like looking at his right hand instead of his left hand, he would be like, look over here at my right hand.
33:21
Look at my right hand.
33:23
It's got incredible columns and Athenian.
33:26
I've painted all the nails.
33:27
Yeah, exactly.
33:28
Make sure you're looking here.
33:30
Make sure you're looking here.
33:31
And it is possible there's a bit of that in him.
33:33
He's like, I've got to keep talking about the ballroom so that they don't know about the secret thing that's going on underneath the ballroom.
33:39
And yeah, I mean, we now know because there were various sort of historical activism societies and, you know, planning regulators saying, can you explain more about why you just knocked down a third of the White House?
33:57
And trying to get injunctions to stop the construction that went before a court.
34:01
The judge went, yeah, you can stop the construction while we figure out exactly what you're doing here.
34:07
and then basically the government said,
34:11
we've now ripped out the East Wing and we've destroyed the old bunker.
34:16
You need to let us finish.
34:19
The secret thing that we can't tell you about.
34:20
The secret thing we can't tell you about.
34:21
We really need to finish that now because we really have started.
34:24
Right.
34:25
I mean, and it's funny because you can sort of see in the language
34:29
that is coming from the adults who write the legal briefs
34:34
briefs inside the Trump administration that they're going, look, we can fight about the
34:38
ballroom later, but we really have to finish what we're doing underneath.
34:41
We have to finish the main thing.
34:42
The main thing is the thing underneath.
34:43
We really need that.
34:44
We have to finish the, quote unquote, ballroom.
34:46
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
34:47
Wink, wink.
34:49
Speaking of government secrets, the other fabulous story that I wanted to get your thoughts
34:54
on was the code breaking in the early days, right?
34:58
So people will remember the Enigma machine, right?
35:00
this brilliant Alan Turing invented.
35:04
No, no, he cracked it.
35:05
He cracked the German.
35:08
Was the Enigma the German machine?
35:10
Yes.
35:11
Right, and he cracked that machine.
35:13
And then the Brits came up with this other whiz-bang thing.
35:17
There are many, many movies about this.
35:21
I don't remember which one's which.
35:23
Yeah, yeah.
35:23
I'm sorry, Matt.
35:24
There are too many.
35:26
I even got confused about Eddie Redmayne playing a transgender woman.
35:30
But is that one of the movies about this?
35:33
It's like the same era.
35:34
It's all, there's all these, it's about 15 movies about English spies in the 50s.
35:40
What is Eddie Redmayne doing in that thing?
35:41
I can't remember that.
35:42
I don't know.
35:42
But anyway, what the fuck?
35:45
I liked the fact, I liked the double switcheroo that ends up happening in the way that spy agencies start collaborating on these encryption devices at the dawn of the digital age.
35:56
So the situation is that in World War II, the Germans are encrypting their messages to each other using this brilliant but very analog machine.
36:06
It's basically a typewriter that you set it up in a certain way.
36:11
It's got, you know, various dials and knobs on it.
36:13
And, you know, you've got a book with you that says this is the way you set it up on this day.
36:18
You know, it's the 14th of January.
36:20
We set up the machine that way.
36:22
Any messages that you get are going to be encrypted in a way that you can only read if you set up the machine in the way that you've got to set it up on the 14th of January.
36:31
So you set it all up and then you get a machine and it's gibberish.
36:35
Sorry, you get a message and it's total gibberish.
36:37
It's unreadable by anybody.
36:38
But if you type in the message into the machine, it will translate it into readable text.
36:48
Right.
36:48
But it wouldn't have yesterday and it won't tomorrow.
36:51
Exactly.
36:52
You've got the book that tells you what it has to be set to today.
36:56
Exactly.
36:56
So if anyone has the machine and the book, you're fucked, right?
37:00
Yes.
37:01
But nobody does.
37:02
Well, yes, but also you need a new book every so often,
37:06
and even just having the machine on its own without the book is useless.
37:09
Having the book without the machine is useless, all that kind of thing.
37:12
Okay.
37:13
And this was primarily used by the Germans in order to,
37:17
well, because they were having to communicate all of their messages to each other on
37:23
open air.
37:23
This is the era of they're just sending
37:27
messages out into the world that anybody could listen to.
37:31
Via what?
37:31
Radio waves?
37:32
Yeah, via radio waves.
37:33
Absolutely.
37:36
They're giving their instructions to the submarine captains
37:39
just on the radio.
37:39
Completely open.
37:40
Totally.
37:41
Absolutely.
37:41
And so they needed a way to encrypt it.
37:43
And they designed the Enigma machine and
37:47
the joint effort of Polish and British spies, basically, and early computer experts managed
37:55
to figure out a way to decrypt the messages.
37:58
This gave them an advantage that ultimately
38:00
helped them win World War II.
38:02
But the thing was, the machine, they all agreed, was brilliant.
38:06
And after World War II, they sort of made a better version of that, and then they made a
38:10
better version of that.
38:11
And then there was basically, eventually, in the 1970s, a machine
38:14
that was still this analog thing that was impossible for anybody to crack.
38:19
It was utterly impossible.
38:21
You know, there were more combinations than atoms in the universe that, you know, that
38:26
there could be.
38:26
And it was utterly impossible for anyone to be able to spy on anybody else.
38:31
And so basically what happened was the CIA and the West Germans, you know, they created
38:40
a company that said, actually, those things are totally out of date.
38:45
Those analog machines, you can't trust them anymore.
38:48
Absolutely useless machines.
38:49
Please, you know, you should buy our digital versions of this.
38:53
And this was a supposedly independent company, right?
38:55
Nobody knew that it was created by the CIA.
38:59
Exactly, yes.
39:01
It's just this new whiz-bang tech startup at the dawn of the computer.
39:04
Well, they actually bought an existing company.
39:07
So they bought an existing company, took it over and went, okay,
39:10
Uh, we're, we're, everybody needs digital things.
39:14
It all needs to be digital.
39:15
Sure.
39:15
And so they're sending out, they're sending out, you know, to all of their, you know,
39:19
partner agencies, uh, all the people that they wanted to spy on, they're sending out
39:24
these machines, um, which are basically sending a message that is to anyone else encrypted,
39:31
but to the CIA, you might as well just be sending them in, in, in open unencrypted text.
39:36
The CIA is sending a phony encryption machine that encrypts it for everybody else apart from the CIA.
39:43
And everybody else is trusting that this company, which I guess they had to not know that it was a CIA-fronted company, or did they think that the CIA was sending?
39:55
No, they didn't know it was a CIA.
39:56
It was a Swiss company.
39:57
It was a Swiss company.
39:58
Okay, yeah, good.
39:59
And I guess because they bought an existing company, you could trace the company back and go, like, obviously it's not phony.
40:05
No, no.
40:05
It was already set up.
40:06
The company used to send us these great machines.
40:08
Right, yeah.
40:09
And now they're sending us these digital machines that seem even better.
40:11
So they secretly bought the company and made phony machines that they could read.
40:15
And so at some point, there were like scores and scores and scores of countries that all thought they were encrypted.
40:22
Absolutely.
40:22
And the CIA was just able to read without even decrypting basically anything.
40:27
I mean, it was just like reading all of their messages.
40:30
That's right.
40:30
They were reading all their messages.
40:32
and the statistic that came through was that at one point,
40:36
sort of in the 80s, roughly like 50% of the information
40:41
that the NSA was getting, you know, of the secret information
40:47
that the NSA was getting from anywhere was just straight
40:49
from these machines.
40:51
And 90% of what the West German intelligence agency knew,
40:57
they knew only because these machines were telling them.
41:01
amazing because you know you've got the you know the whatever country uh you know the uh iranian
41:07
uh you know the new iranian revolutionary uh the you know the iran after the revolution
41:15
sending these messages the ayatollah is sending these messages going oh thank goodness we've got
41:19
these machines no one will ever know never be able to read it's just like ayatollah says this
41:23
you know and it was just it's just an extraordinary thing and and basically the the extraordinary
41:29
thing about it is that they never abandoned this system while it was still possible.
41:34
In 2018,
41:36
basically the CIA went, well, nobody's sending encrypted messages over these antiquated
41:41
typewriters anymore.
41:42
They're just sending encrypted messages over their phones.
41:45
WhatsApp
41:46
is encrypted.
41:47
There's no need for us to do this.
41:49
And so they sold the company just to somebody else
41:52
and someone else was just like, oh, I'll just take up this.
41:54
It seems like a pretty successful
41:55
company.
41:56
Yeah, how did they get caught?
41:57
How do we know
41:57
about this?
41:58
Did they just declassify it?
41:59
They were just like, you got us.
42:02
No, no, they went, look, lol.
42:03
Okay.
42:05
Sucks to be you.
42:06
You guys never figured it out.
42:07
I mean, there must have been some freedom of information
42:09
expiring, presumably.
42:11
They must have been coming up on the due date
42:13
for revealing that.
42:14
It reminded me also
42:15
of the Hezbollah pages, which
42:17
people recall the exploding
42:19
when all the pages, well, the
42:21
phones exploded first.
42:23
No, no.
42:24
No, no.
42:24
So
42:24
So the sequence is basically that the boss of Hezbollah became convinced that using mobile phones was unsafe.
42:38
Right.
42:38
That the Israelis were able to tap the information that we were sending to each other over our phones, which to a certain extent is extremely true.
42:46
The Israelis have really very high quality and very high tech signals intelligence systems that is able to gather information from people's phones, even if it is being sent over WhatsApp or whatever.
43:02
And so the boss of Hezbollah said, look, the phones aren't safe.
43:06
We need to switch to something that we know that the Israelis can't mess with.
43:11
and so
43:12
he
43:14
said, well, let's go use Pages
43:16
because Pages are entirely safe.
43:18
Now, for the younger listeners,
43:20
a Pager, I mean, we're
43:22
only just old enough to have
43:24
even experienced Pages,
43:26
I guess.
43:27
I remember my dad
43:28
when I was little had a Pager because
43:30
if he needed to go to a casting
43:32
call or an audition, his agent would
43:34
beep a Pager and it would say
43:36
call agent on a little
43:38
screen and then he would go to a
43:40
landline telephone with a wire that goes to a wire that goes to a wire that goes to his agent
43:46
and he would dial his rotary dial phone.
43:50
Pages were, we put out an episode about this and we've
43:53
had people coming back and say, look, we do still use pages.
43:57
When you are at a restaurant and you go
44:01
and order at the bar and then you take that little machine, the little buzzer back to your table and
44:07
you wait for it to buzz that's a pager you know it looks different now but that's that's essentially
44:12
the level of technology that a pager is um some of them the ones that hezbollah were was using
44:19
did have the ability to receive short messages yes my dad's did it had a little screen which
44:25
makes me a bit confused about if you can do that then why can't you just send text messages like
44:30
you know what i mean like something about it being analog or something i'm not sure there's some
44:36
And this has always been the case.
44:38
It's like through the 90s and 2000s, it was genuinely considered by most intelligence agencies that pages were, for whatever reason, safer system than I suppose the typewriter machines that the CIA could just read what you were saying immediately.
44:53
Certainly than that.
44:54
Yes, I don't quite understand why it's more secure than a BlackBerry, but I guess people-
44:57
I'm not sure.
44:57
Or whatever the device was at the time that Hezbollah was getting worried.
45:02
So Hezbollah made this decision and they contacted a person who they had previously bought pages from and the person said, you're calling it a perfect time.
45:14
I've got a new line of pages and I'm willing to give you a bunch of them for free and you can decide if you like them and then you can buy some more if you're interested.
45:22
And Hezbollah is like jackpot.
45:24
And they bought a bunch of these pages.
45:26
Little did they know that in between the last time they bought pages from this woman and now, she was no longer working for the Taiwanese company that makes the pages.
45:38
She was now working, well, she didn't know this, but she was working for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and the pages.
45:47
But the fact that she didn't know that is also interesting and rhymes a bit with the American and West German thing of just buying the other company.
45:56
Like, had Mossad bought a pager company?
45:58
Like, how did she not know who she was working for?
46:00
Who did she think she was working for?
46:01
There was a long chain of shell companies and corporations.
46:05
The company that she thought she was working for was a Hungarian company, but it was actually owned by Mossad.
46:13
Whether they actually had any office space in Hungary or not is a bit unclear.
46:17
But presumably she's been headhunted or something by that company, right?
46:20
So, I mean, Mossad has probably set up a trust in, you know, some tax haven or something, and then that trust owns a company that's registered in Switzerland, which owns a trust that's registered in the Cayman Islands, which owns a company that's registered, and you follow the chain all the way down.
46:38
And eventually you get to some completely opaque Hungarian pager company
46:43
whose kindly representative goes to her at this pager company
46:47
where they know Hezbollah has bought pagers before and says,
46:50
why don't you come and work for us, knowing that Hezbollah trusts her.
46:55
Yes.
46:57
Quite the honeypot.
46:58
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
47:00
And so anyway, she says, you know, you can buy these pagers
47:04
and I've got a special deal where you can have a bunch for free
47:06
and then they take her up on it
47:11
and little did they know, of course,
47:12
that the pages that they were buying,
47:14
the batteries had three ounces of,
47:17
three ounces or three grams,
47:18
a small quantity of plastic explosive in them.
47:21
But enough to blow the limbs off the person
47:23
who's felt it is on.
47:24
Yes, absolutely.
47:26
Enough to do grievous injury or kill
47:28
the people who it explodes next to.
47:32
One of the extraordinary,
47:33
um uh well in fact it's quite similar to the the porch to clyde tolson and jay gahoover's porch
47:41
they this uh the woman the company the fake hungarian pager company started getting inquiries
47:48
from other people being like we hear your pages are great and you've got a free deal
47:52
a deal to get free ones uh could we possibly buy a bunch of these pages and the israelis are like
47:58
oh no oh no and so they said actually these pages cost ten thousand dollars each or whatever it was
48:06
and so they had to do it they had to do surge pricing essentially for the people that they
48:10
didn't want to kill right uh so that they could continue just just attacking um hezbollah and so
48:18
they they um they managed to get all these pages into the hands of hezbollah operatives who all had
48:23
got rid of their phones they were only using pages they were carrying pages on them at all times
48:28
and then one afternoon, I pressed the button.
48:31
In, I guess, 2024 probably,
48:33
or it must have been just a few months after October 7th, right?
48:38
Yes.
48:38
So maybe the end of 2023 or beginning of 2024.
48:41
It was late 2024.
48:42
2023 was October 7th, so maybe late.
48:45
Oh, was it a year after?
48:46
It was a year after.
48:47
Okay, yeah, amazing.
48:48
And then a few days later, what blew up?
48:51
Well, they went, oh, no, all the pages can't be trusted.
48:53
We're going to have to use our walkie-talkies.
48:55
So they started using their walkie-talkies,
48:56
little do they know that the walkie-talkies were also bought 10 years earlier from a Mossad
49:02
company.
49:02
It's a long game.
49:03
It's a very long game.
49:04
I mean, you've got to have some respect for the long game.
49:07
I mean, absolutely.
49:09
It's an extraordinary thing, and it's the exact same kind of, they call it a supply
49:14
chain attack, as the-
49:16
The enigma, the non-enigma.
49:18
The non-enigma machine.
49:20
But the fascinating thing about it for me is that this is an intelligence organization
49:24
going, we know that people are going to be worried about us finding information out about
49:32
them.
49:33
So how can we make it so that the thing that they will do in order so that we can't spy
49:39
on them, we give them that, you know?
49:43
Yes.
49:44
And it wasn't just that.
49:45
It's something that was being done quite a lot at the time.
49:47
And the FBI was also selling to organized criminals an app and a phone, a special encrypted phone, which would allow them to communicate with each other apparently without anybody finding out.
50:04
But it was in exactly the same as the cryptography machine situation.
50:08
It was a company that the FBI had created and was selling these phones that were basically just texting the FBI directly everything that these criminals were doing.
50:17
People might remember this.
50:18
The app was Anom, right?
50:20
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
50:21
As in anonymous, presumably.
50:23
Yeah.
50:24
And it was meant to be more secure than Signal or Telegram or one of those kind of secure messaging things.
50:31
Is that right?
50:32
So basically the thing is those secure messaging apps are basically impregnable.
50:39
If you and I send each other messages over WhatsApp, they cannot be read.
50:43
The issue is that if someone gets your phone, then the messages are all sitting there on your phone.
50:48
Yes.
50:49
Whereas these phones-
50:50
If they can hack into my phone.
50:52
If they can hack into your phone.
50:53
But if they take your phone, if the FBI takes your phone to Apple, Apple will go by all means.
51:00
Will they?
51:01
There was a big court case over it.
51:03
I mean, maybe Apple won't, but Google has history of doing this.
51:06
Yeah, yeah.
51:06
But I thought that, yes, I thought Apple refused,
51:08
and then there was a whole court case over it about what the result of that court case was.
51:12
I thought, yes, I thought that Apple...
51:14
Maybe it didn't.
51:15
Yeah, anyway.
51:16
But, I mean, WhatsApp isn't Apple.
51:20
I don't know.
51:21
No, that's right.
51:22
So it probably sits...
51:23
But it would have to be sitting unencrypted on a WhatsApp server somewhere.
51:28
Yes.
51:28
Well, they have to get the phone.
51:30
It has to be the phone.
51:30
It's only unencrypted on the phone.
51:33
So they have to get access to the phone.
51:35
You don't know what phone the person you're texting is going to get it from.
51:41
You don't know if your wife knows the code.
51:42
There's a billion different things you don't know.
51:44
You don't know if someone is going to be able to, while the phone is unlocked, create like a mirror of the phone or something and download it and then have another phone.
51:51
Whereas the point of this was that it was literally just a phone that if you put the wrong code into it one time, all the messages on it are wiped.
52:00
because the criminals were like, well, why do I even need the full back catalogue of my messages?
52:06
Like, do I need to, you know, I'm not sending, you know, invoices to people.
52:10
I don't need to be able to search.
52:12
It didn't really matter.
52:12
It was just a way of being able to communicate to each other in real time.
52:16
Totally securely.
52:17
So a NOM was a hardware device as well as a piece of software.
52:20
Yes, it was, yes.
52:21
And criminal networks all over the world became besotted with this way of communicating with each other
52:26
because it was a new vanguard of security that was completely impregnable by intelligence agencies and police forces.
52:34
The only problem being, as you say, it was created by Australian and American intelligence.
52:42
It was created by the FBI.
52:44
It was in partnership with the AFP, interestingly enough.
52:48
The AFP being the Australian Federal Police, our FBI.
52:50
Indeed.
52:51
The reason that they were in partnership with the AFP is because the FBI realized that doing this to Americans in America would be a violation of their constitutional rights under, you know, it would be an illegal search.
53:07
The Fourth Amendment.
53:08
You can't just randomly read people's text messages because you have a hunch.
53:12
You have to have reasonable cause.
53:14
Yes.
53:15
There are some things the U.S. Constitution is good at.
53:18
Yeah.
53:19
It's a real mixed bag.
53:20
So out of all of the, yes, I mean, this is a clear example where American libertarians can own the rest of us by saying like all of the rest of these countries were able to be wantonly spied on by their police forces.
53:32
But in the United States, the FBI could not deploy its own shiny, beautiful tool.
53:37
It couldn't take its own train set out of the box and set it up and use it because they knew that the Supreme Court would strike it down.
53:43
The FBI, in fact, set up an incredibly elaborate system so that messages being sent by American criminals using the phone would never be stored on a server that was on American soil.
53:57
They had offshore servers in order to try and comply with the – it's an extraordinary example of how much the FBI has changed since the days of J. Edgar Hoover.
54:07
Yeah, right.
54:07
J. Edgar Hoover, when they were basically just filling Martin Luther King's house with tape recorders.
54:12
Yeah.
54:14
Well, you would probably be able, maybe, I mean, I think the problem with Anom would be the randomness of it.
54:23
You'd probably be able to bug a civil rights leader who's suspected of a crime.
54:28
Like, I'm sure that Trump's FBI director could get away with targeting a specific person who is an enemy of the state.
54:36
Yes, but they couldn't just fill the entire country with-
54:39
Exactly.
54:39
You can't just throw these mobile phones out to everywhere and then just randomly read.
54:45
Like, the suspicion has to come before the collection.
54:49
Whereas in a country like Australia, where we don't have a codified Bill of Rights like that, they're allowed to just spy on us.
54:54
And so most of the people who were caught were Australians or in other countries.
54:58
Yeah.
54:59
And just explain the moment of being captured, because it was quite a bombshell.
55:03
I mean, I remember I was working at the ABC at the time and I was like, this is fucking cool.
55:07
It was extraordinary.
55:08
Just one day, the AFP just rock up at the houses of hundreds of bikies and just go, huh.
55:15
We've got every single text message.
55:17
Are these every text that you've sent for years?
55:19
Yeah.
55:20
And we're able to bust all these networks.
55:22
Suddenly, one morning, it was an extraordinary moment.
55:24
Yeah, it was one of the biggest moments of law enforcement that I can remember ever happening in our lifetimes.
55:29
where it's just like, and again, this kind of, the fact of the ingenious honeypot thing
55:36
where like the thing that they think that they're using is actually the thing that has
55:39
done them in makes it all the more satisfying.
55:44
There's just an extraordinary amount of irony that they seek security and the thing that
55:49
they get, they would have been better off just sending text messages to each other using
55:54
their normal phone.
55:55
Exactly.
55:55
I mean, it also just makes me realize if someone comes offering you something that seems like it's going to protect you, just be careful that they're not the person who you need protection from.
56:04
Well, but the fascinating thing with the ANOM device was that it was extremely expensive.
56:12
They basically sought to convince them that it was real.
56:16
Right.
56:16
By making it so expensive.
56:18
Right, right.
56:19
It was thousands of dollars.
56:21
And it was, you know, a heavy monthly subscription bill.
56:24
Right.
56:25
For this system.
56:27
All of which went to the FBI.
56:28
Straight into consolidated revenue.
56:32
But in fact, in all these situations, the Israelis made money, earned money from the pages.
56:38
The CIA earned money from those encryption devices, millions of dollars, and just goes into their consolidated revenue directly from the people they're spying on.
56:48
It's fabulous.
56:49
I love it.
56:50
Um, speaking of, uh, shrewd before we leave Mossad, um, uh, beautiful women being employed by, uh, Israeli, as Israeli spies in order to, like, this is, I love, I love how bond it is.
57:02
Yeah.
57:02
Like, give me an example.
57:06
So there's this extraordinary example that, in fact, you are, we are sitting in Woolloomooloo.
57:10
Yes.
57:11
This story starts just a couple of blocks away from here, um, at a King's Cross church.
57:18
Mm-hmm.
57:19
This is the red light district of downtown Sydney at the time.
57:23
Yes.
57:24
Probably.
57:25
Yes.
57:26
Romelu being a neighbourhood of central Sydney.
57:29
Yes.
57:29
Far from the Opera House.
57:30
Indeed.
57:31
So just a few blocks from where we're sitting in a Bible study group at this church, this fellow by the name of Mordecai Vanunu, basically they were having a conversation about, you know, ethics of various news events and that kind of thing.
57:46
And he kind of went, I have, I'd be interested, I have in my possession a whole bunch of photos of a secret Israeli nuclear weapons facility that I used to work at.
58:01
I have a roll of film with all these photographs at them.
58:03
And I feel like they're pertinent to our conversation.
58:06
And I'll go and develop them.
58:07
Maybe I could put on a slide night for the Bible study group.
58:11
He didn't.
58:12
He did.
58:13
He wanted to show the Bible study group his.
58:15
Yes, that's right.
58:16
Secret.
58:16
espionage.
58:17
That's right.
58:18
Well, he didn't see it as espionage.
58:19
Israel's top secret.
58:21
He at the time didn't really, I mean, he was strongly
58:26
conflicted by what he saw at that place, but he wasn't
58:29
sure what he wanted to do with the information.
58:31
He'd taken these secret photos.
58:33
Was he Australian or he was just an Israeli guy?
58:34
No, he was Israeli.
58:35
He was an Israeli.
58:36
What was he doing here?
58:37
Well, he left.
58:38
He left Israel.
58:39
He quit.
58:40
He was quite morally conflicted by what he had experienced
58:43
while working at this site, at the Dimona Nuclear Research Facility,
58:52
which he had taken photos of evidence that this was a nuclear weapons facility.
58:57
Yes, and in case people don't know, everyone knows that Israel has nuclear weapons.
59:02
They're not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,
59:05
which would prohibit them from having nuclear weapons if they were a signatory.
59:09
But like all international treaties, it's a bit weird because you have to opt in
59:12
into the thing that would prevent you from doing the thing that you,
59:14
if you're doing, you won't opt into.
59:16
Yes.
59:18
But they have never admitted it.
59:20
Yes.
59:20
And their official position is just one of ambiguity.
59:24
Yes.
59:25
But they have, what, 50 nukes or something, or 20 nukes,
59:28
or whatever it is.
59:29
It's not zero.
59:30
It's probably, it's almost certainly not zero.
59:32
And so this guy had actually done what for an Israeli spy
59:38
or a military person is kind of unthinkable,
59:40
which is to flip that ambiguity and turn it into a certainty
59:44
by providing physical evidence that, as far as I'm aware,
59:49
did not exist and still does not exist to this day
59:52
of the reality of Israel's nuclear program.
59:57
Yes, so he'd taken these photos.
59:58
He had one roll of film with photos on it,
1:00:01
which he had brought in his baggage when he moved to Australia.
1:00:04
He left Israel, moved to Australia,
1:00:07
and started going to this church.
1:00:10
and in the middle of the Bible study conversation,
1:00:12
he was like, well, maybe I could, you know,
1:00:16
I could, you know, show you guys some of the photos
1:00:19
that I took inside the secret.
1:00:20
You can show your vacation pictures.
1:00:22
I can show you a top secret nuclear installation.
1:00:24
As you do at a Bible study, you know,
1:00:25
it's a totally normal thing.
1:00:26
And so he went to a King's Cross news agent,
1:00:31
sorry, a chemist to get the photos developed.
1:00:35
And he was, you know, planning to show them
1:00:37
to the Bible study.
1:00:40
group.
1:00:41
I mean, it's quite a complicated story as to what ended up happening, but basically he ended
1:00:46
up being in touch with the Sunday Times in London, were going to publish his photos.
1:00:55
And he traveled
1:00:56
to London as part of the reporting process.
1:00:59
He'd gotten in contact with a journalist and that kind
1:01:01
of thing, kind of against his will.
1:01:03
It's a complicated story, but he eventually ends up in
1:01:05
London and is on the verge of this massive reporting thing where he was going to reveal
1:01:15
as a whistleblower, basically, this information in the Sunday Times.
1:01:21
And then he met this beautiful woman.
1:01:25
And she was so beautiful and beguiling and, you know, she was just incredible.
1:01:30
And he'd met her by accident.
1:01:32
And she was this American woman and she was, you know, he just bumped into her on Trafalgar Square and she went, you know what, we should go on holiday to Rome together.
1:01:43
And he's like, you know what, absolutely, we should go on holiday to Rome together.
1:01:45
That sounds great.
1:01:46
The journo who was reporting on this is like, please don't go on holiday to Rome.
1:01:51
With a beautiful woman you just met?
1:01:52
With a beautiful woman.
1:01:53
And he's like, but she's...
1:01:56
A little Jew like me with a broad like this?
1:01:59
What are you, kidding me?
1:02:02
anyway so uh he goes on a holiday to rome and uh they arrive at their you know their
1:02:07
accommodation in rome and uh he finds himself unconscious and uh then finds himself on a
1:02:14
cargo ship on his way to israel and then he finds himself in israeli
1:02:18
uh prison for many years and then under house arrest and um still unable to uh to leave israel
1:02:25
he's still alive but uh yes that that is something that you know there's many
1:02:30
stories yeah from musad history of them of them pulling off it's so badass i mean i just you know
1:02:36
it's sad for him but also i mean the idea that he would just like his his dick would just lead him
1:02:44
to like to run to rome and you know then well the she'd slip something in his drink he falls asleep
1:02:52
he wakes up in a cargo ship it's like it's so it's it's great and he's like oh shit i'm back in his
1:03:00
um i mean the thing was apparently uh the it was it was incredible skill by her yeah basically
1:03:09
making it seem like it couldn't be anything but a chance encounter and probably making it seem like
1:03:15
he was the one who doing the pursuing i mean i've always thought that's really interesting i've
1:03:18
thought about this encounter many times over the years because it's so cool it's just such a cool
1:03:22
spy caper and i've imagined the training that she would have had and the practice that she would
1:03:29
have had in um just giving enough of a flirtatious glance to lure this you know horny guy over to
1:03:36
talk to her because you're probably not going to just go up to him and go you know i find you so
1:03:40
attractive would you like to go to rome yeah exactly that's right it would be a great game
1:03:45
of cat and mouse yes and he absolutely thought that he was he was entirely in control of the
1:03:50
situation, he's like, well, it couldn't be a trap.
1:03:52
I mean, I saw her.
1:03:54
Exactly, that's right.
1:03:55
Yes, she didn't want anything to do with me initially.
1:03:57
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:03:58
I had to convince her.
1:04:00
This brings us to another section of your book about assassinations.
1:04:05
So, Litvinenko, the Spitalfields.
1:04:09
Is it Spitalfields?
1:04:10
Where is it?
1:04:10
No, I'm getting my British places confused.
1:04:13
Salisbury.
1:04:14
The Salisbury.
1:04:15
um again just like there are too many movies about 1950s british spies there are too many like
1:04:22
crazy stories about russians you know suddenly falling ill for mysterious reasons um uh the one
1:04:30
of the common themes about this is that like it's a sort of a way of sending a message to everybody
1:04:35
else that you know you don't want to cross putin or you don't want to cross you know the because
1:04:40
you might just drop dead somewhere.
1:04:43
You suspect that there's also just a whole lot of bungling,
1:04:46
which has led to the fact that we even know about these things anyway,
1:04:50
or that we even know why they happened or how they happened?
1:04:52
Yeah, absolutely.
1:04:53
I think because we did a lot of reporting on Litvinenko.
1:04:59
The assassination of Alexander Litvinenko was in the mid-2000s, 2005, I think.
1:05:05
But the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal,
1:05:10
who was a Russian defector
1:05:12
and a double agent
1:05:14
who was then living in Salisbury
1:05:16
in 2018
1:05:18
was a massive story at the time
1:05:20
because he was poisoned
1:05:21
with a nerve agent
1:05:24
that had never been deployed
1:05:26
anywhere in the world
1:05:27
and only existed in Russia
1:05:30
called Novichok
1:05:31
and
1:05:32
when was that?
1:05:33
it was 2018
1:05:34
so yeah
1:05:35
so it was
1:05:35
yeah late 2018
1:05:38
And the thing was, at the time, and I think this was my opinion at the time as well, I thought Russian guy gets poisoned after defecting and-
1:05:51
By defecting, just to clarify, he was a spy?
1:05:54
He was a spy for Russia?
1:05:55
Yeah.
1:05:56
No, no, he was a Russian-
1:05:57
He was recruited?
1:05:58
He was a Russian sort of diplomat agent, sort of spy-
1:06:00
Oh, I see.
1:06:01
Okay.
1:06:01
Who basically then started feeding information to Western intelligence.
1:06:06
Yeah, okay, right.
1:06:07
And then was captured by Russia, put in jail in Russia, and then traded with a bunch of Russian spies back to the West.
1:06:16
Okay.
1:06:17
So it was a prisoner swap, and then he was free.
1:06:20
Yeah.
1:06:21
But not so free.
1:06:22
Yes, yes.
1:06:23
Because, of course, like many of these ex-Russian agents do, he then sort of started consulting and going and doing...
1:06:32
Right, right.
1:06:33
Meeting with Western agencies in order to talk about how the Russians work and that kind of thing.
1:06:38
They really didn't like that.
1:06:39
And so he and his daughter end up poisoned, but extraordinarily they survive this chemical weapons attack in Salisbury.
1:06:50
And at the time, most of the commentary was, and I think this was my opinion as well, that this was basically Putin signing his name on this.
1:06:57
don't mess with me, don't betray Russia, don't be a double agent,
1:07:04
otherwise this is what's going to end up happening to you.
1:07:08
And I think that was what a lot of people thought at the time.
1:07:10
I mean, it's what I still think because I haven't read all of your books.
1:07:13
Sure.
1:07:13
Claude wasn't able to articulate your argument sufficiently
1:07:16
to convince me otherwise.
1:07:19
Because why are you such a crazy nerve agent?
1:07:22
Why wouldn't you just – if you wanted to get away with it,
1:07:26
Like the nerve agent to me says you want everybody to know.
1:07:30
The thing was both with that case and with the Litvinenko case.
1:07:34
Just explain Litvinenko as well.
1:07:36
It was a while ago, but it was also really cool.
1:07:38
Yeah, Litvinenko was a similar situation except it happened,
1:07:42
he was genuinely a former KGB agent who became a critic of Putin
1:07:48
and then defected to the West.
1:07:50
And he was killed by basically radiation poisoning.
1:07:54
He had a bit of polonium, which is an extraordinarily dangerous and deadly element that only is made in one place, and it's in Russia, in his tea and died of radiation poisoning three weeks later.
1:08:10
um there's an amazing feature article about the science of the discovery uh that he was i don't
1:08:18
know where it was where i read it but the this the kind of blow by blow of the doctors yes and it was
1:08:25
it was a last it was a real hail mary pass where like at the very after they had exhausted every
1:08:30
the doctors didn't know what was what was wrong with them looked like radiation poisoning but
1:08:33
there was no radiation there was nothing they're looking for thallium they're looking for all these
1:08:37
Nothing there.
1:08:38
And then on a kind of a whim, they sent a sample of something to the lab that had produced Britain's atomic weapons or something?
1:08:47
Yes, which was in Salisbury.
1:08:49
Oh, right.
1:08:50
Okay, randomly.
1:08:50
Just purely coincidentally was also in Salisbury.
1:08:54
Yeah, the thing with both that and with Skripal is figuring out that it was the Russians was much harder than it seemed from the reporting at the time.
1:09:06
Right.
1:09:06
Looking into, like, absolutely you're right with Litvinenko, the only reason that they were able to figure out what actually did kill him is he was so healthy when he was poisoned that he survived about another week beyond what anybody else, anybody else would have died after two weeks.
1:09:28
He managed to live for three weeks after being poisoned.
1:09:31
And in that time, they managed to sort of, they sort of developed this theory that maybe it's polonium.
1:09:36
And I mean, no one's ever been poisoned by polonium in global history, but maybe it's that.
1:09:43
And they managed to get him, in order to test that it was polonium, because it's such a tiny element and it's so difficult to find, they needed him to produce a full litre of urine.
1:09:53
And this is a man that is almost dead.
1:09:56
Wow.
1:09:57
And they managed to get enough liquid into him through his kidneys and managed to produce a full litre of urine and send it to this place.
1:10:05
A litre for American listeners is a couple of pints, I guess, is it?
1:10:09
Yeah, nearly two pints.
1:10:13
And he managed to produce this, which was quite a lot if you're nearly dead.
1:10:20
and they got it from him just before he died
1:10:25
and then they took it off to the lab
1:10:27
and they managed to figure out what it was.
1:10:29
And then once they knew what it was,
1:10:32
they were able to trace sort of basically
1:10:34
where the polonium had been all over London
1:10:35
because it left this signature that they were able to look for
1:10:38
once they were looking for the right type of radioactive particle.
1:10:41
And had he been to tea with somebody in London?
1:10:44
Yeah, two Russian...
1:10:45
He'd been consulting with somebody and they'd had tea?
1:10:47
Yes, yes.
1:10:49
In fact, it had took three attempts for them to kill him.
1:10:52
They brought polonium to England three separate times.
1:10:55
And we know this because of the trace amounts of polonium that were discovered sprinkled around London.
1:10:59
It was like breadcrumbs all over London.
1:11:05
It's just cool that you could just be like walking down Tottenham Court Road, not unaware that there's a tiny fragment of polonium just like blowing around.
1:11:13
And the amount of investigation that they did, they found it in their hotel rooms.
1:11:19
They found it on the taxi seat.
1:11:22
They found it in a room that they had met with Litvinenko on, on these seats.
1:11:26
So we know it was these two because these two had it.
1:11:29
And they found it at the strip club they went to.
1:11:31
And they found it in all these different places.
1:11:35
I love imagining the people who brought the polonium in to kill him, into Britain, like the border security TV shows in Australia where people try to bring illicit things in.
1:11:45
You've just got a suitcase with a little block of polonium in it and the border security guard is like-
1:11:51
No, not a block.
1:11:51
So what have you got?
1:11:52
We are talking a micro, micro nanogram.
1:11:56
How do you keep it without, I guess you have a little glass vial.
1:11:59
Yeah, yeah.
1:12:00
But it's totally so small and undetectable.
1:12:03
and the other interesting
1:12:04
I've learned many things
1:12:05
about Polonius
1:12:05
this is great
1:12:06
the other interesting thing
1:12:07
I still want to know
1:12:08
how they
1:12:08
I mean
1:12:08
like do they shove it
1:12:09
up their bum or something
1:12:10
no they just carry it
1:12:11
you just carry it
1:12:12
into England
1:12:12
yeah
1:12:13
what if you get it frisked
1:12:15
there's nothing to find
1:12:17
well there's still
1:12:17
a little glass vial
1:12:18
with something suspicious
1:12:19
in it
1:12:20
but you can't see
1:12:20
anything in it
1:12:21
it looks
1:12:22
the glass vial
1:12:22
would look empty
1:12:23
I don't know
1:12:24
whether it was
1:12:24
in the glass vial
1:12:25
or what
1:12:25
but it would look empty
1:12:26
whatever it is
1:12:26
it's that small
1:12:28
it's like
1:12:31
smaller than a grain of salt
1:12:32
We are talking significantly smaller than a grain of salt.
1:12:36
Sounds clunky to work with in the sense, sounds fiddly.
1:12:39
They did poison themselves.
1:12:40
Yeah.
1:12:41
Did they, the poisoners?
1:12:42
Yes, yes, of course.
1:12:44
Yeah.
1:12:44
They were in hospital.
1:12:45
How would you even, when the tea is being served, how would you even know whether you've
1:12:49
successfully deposited the polonium in the tea if it's smaller than a grain of salt?
1:12:52
It seems that they and the assassins in Salisbury years later didn't realize the gravity of
1:12:58
what they were dealing with because all of them ended up poisoned.
1:13:02
All of them ended up very sickened in hospital.
1:13:04
My boss tell me bring here and put in tea.
1:13:07
So I do.
1:13:08
Yeah, exactly.
1:13:09
And yeah, no, they didn't do that.
1:13:12
It wasn't good.
1:13:13
Okay.
1:13:14
But they, yeah, this incredibly tiny thing.
1:13:21
And it was incredibly difficult for them to find.
1:13:23
Because one of the extraordinary things about polonium is it gives off alpha radiation.
1:13:28
And I didn't really know what that meant.
1:13:30
I don't know what that meant.
1:13:31
Alpha radiation as opposed to beta and gamma radiation.
1:13:36
I don't know what the difference is specifically, but only in the sense that beta and gamma radiation, if there was a block of polonium sitting on this table in between us, you and I would be getting irradiated by that.
1:13:46
Right.
1:13:47
But alpha radiation, basically the thickness of our skin, the thickness of our clothes, a piece of paper is enough to protect us from it because it has such a short wavelength that it can't get through anything, basically.
1:14:01
and the only way that you can uh that the only thing that it's if you ingest it it bounces around
1:14:08
basically it's got nothing else to bounce off apart from your tissue right and that's how it
1:14:13
kills you so it's it's it's only dangerous if it goes into your body but if it goes into your body
1:14:19
but it's so tiny and strong that it's gonna go into your body and you're going to die yes absolutely
1:14:23
if you ingest it um but these guys you know managed to sort of just get enough on whatever
1:14:28
Right.
1:14:28
So your counter theory to the Putin sending a warning theory is we could easily be living in a parallel universe in which we had no idea how these people died and they just died from mysterious circumstances and also didn't reveal anything.
1:14:45
Well, they thought that they were looking for all these more common poisons and they couldn't figure out what it was and they were kind of running out of ideas.
1:14:51
And then with the Skripals, clearly the intention was to poison him as he was going.
1:14:59
They put it on his doorknob at his house.
1:15:02
They wanted him to get it on his hand, get the nerve agent into his system and then die in his house.
1:15:09
Right.
1:15:10
The thing was, he went home, opened the door, went, you know what, I'd rather go for dinner.
1:15:15
and went out and went to a restaurant
1:15:17
and then had a full meal at the restaurant.
1:15:19
Apparently he was very rude to the waitstaff for some reason.
1:15:23
May have been not feeling all that well.
1:15:24
May have been feeling poorly.
1:15:25
But then went out and sat on a park bench outside the restaurant
1:15:30
and killed over there.
1:15:32
Killed over there and died.
1:15:32
Well, no, he didn't die.
1:15:33
No, no, he didn't die.
1:15:33
He's the one who survived.
1:15:34
He didn't die because people were like,
1:15:36
this guy's frothing at the mouth, get him to the hospital,
1:15:38
and so he survived.
1:15:39
But if he'd fallen at home, he would have died at home.
1:15:42
they would have had no idea what had killed him because they wouldn't have known to check for this poison that has never been used.
1:15:48
Whereas it was such an unusual situation and he was alive and able to talk about what he'd been doing and that kind of thing.
1:15:55
And the other extraordinary thing was that the only way they were able to find the guys who had done it
1:16:03
is because the British police had been experimenting with this idea called super recognisers.
1:16:13
so they had been trying to uh use technology on cctv cameras to identify people and go oh that's
1:16:22
that guy that's that guy that's that guy it wasn't working it wasn't reliable enough and it wasn't
1:16:26
being able to it wasn't able to pick people up and so what they did is they started um they started
1:16:32
screening british police agents sorry police officers testing their ability to recognize faces
1:16:40
And it turns out that a very small proportion of the human population has some sort of a genetic mutation or whatever it is that makes them unbelievably good at remembering faces.
1:16:54
And so they, over several years...
1:16:56
I do not belong to this subclass of people.
1:16:58
No, no, no.
1:17:00
Me neither.
1:17:02
Mind you, they don't say that they're good at matching faces to names.
1:17:07
but they're really good at going that face i'm gonna look for that face and so they had this
1:17:12
team of people that they called super recognizers and they just sat them down in front of every bit
1:17:17
of cctv footage that they had from salisbury over the two days beforehand and they just sat there
1:17:23
and watched every single angle of cctv that was available in salisbury and eventually when those
1:17:29
two guys were here yesterday and they were here for a short period of time why was what's the deal
1:17:35
with that and here they are at gatwick airport three hours later what's the deal then they
1:17:40
managed to piece the whole thing together from that incredible why can't facial recognition
1:17:44
software do well maybe it can now but in 2018 it was it didn't have that capacity um amazing to do
1:17:50
it and the only reason they were able to do it is because because the the guys had killed him in his
1:17:55
in his suburban house, tried to kill him in his suburban house.
1:17:58
So there was no CCTV around his suburb.
1:18:01
They arrived at a train station.
1:18:02
They walked out into Salisbury and then like went off into the suburbs
1:18:06
of Salisbury and then they caught the train back a little bit while later.
1:18:10
It was only because they were able to sort of recognise them
1:18:13
and where they went in various places and do that,
1:18:18
that they were able to crack the case.
1:18:20
But one of the points that I sort of make in this section
1:18:23
of the book is that there's so much technology that we have introduced these days that is
1:18:30
designed to prevent terrorism and make terrorism more difficult, that is also making being
1:18:37
a spy clearly much more difficult as well.
1:18:40
Right down to the little biometric chips that are in the-
1:18:47
In your passport.
1:18:47
In your passport.
1:18:49
those have been causing massive problems for the israeli government in particular because israel
1:18:56
so every country has the ability to make their own passports if they if the australian government
1:18:59
wanted to make a fake josh passport give you a different name and a different face and a different
1:19:06
biometric code and all that kind of thing to send you overseas to spy on someone they could do that
1:19:11
of course they could and i'm sure they do not for me but for no no but the thing is that israeli
1:19:16
passports are not accepted in most of the countries that Israel wants to spy on.
1:19:21
Right, because they don't recognise Israel's existence.
1:19:23
That's right.
1:19:24
And so there are a whole bunch of countries around Israel that they really want information
1:19:28
on that they can't make fake passports for.
1:19:31
Yeah.
1:19:32
So what Israel had been doing up until the late 2010s...
1:19:36
I see where this is going.
1:19:38
Is they basically...
1:19:38
You make them a Belgian passport or something.
1:19:40
Exactly.
1:19:40
They've been borrowing real Belgian passports, adjusting them and, you know, putting different
1:19:45
people's faces on them and then sending their spies off to do things.
1:19:50
But they basically,
1:19:52
the existence of these biometric chips that have been installed in, you know, gradually every
1:19:58
country now has these chips, has made it infinitely more difficult.
1:20:02
And in fact, one of
1:20:06
Israel's attempt, well, successful assassinations of a Hamas agent back in 2010, they figured out
1:20:14
that it was Mossad because Mossad had so few passports that they could still use
1:20:21
that they were reusing passports.
1:20:24
Oh, wow.
1:20:24
So they were basically using the same passports over and over to get into the UAE
1:20:29
in order to carry out this assassination.
1:20:33
And basically they used them so many times that the UAE was able to go,
1:20:38
why do these people keep coming in following this guy?
1:20:41
It's the same group of people every time.
1:20:43
They're coming back over and over.
1:20:45
And if they had more passports, they wouldn't have been found.
1:20:49
So they can kind of pattern match.
1:20:50
And when you say they were using the same passports,
1:20:52
are they the same passports with the same names and the same photos?
1:20:55
Yes.
1:20:55
Or are they the same passport numbers with different people switched out?
1:20:59
Same passports, same names, same photos, I believe.
1:21:00
So why are the – I mean, I would have thought that if they're so good
1:21:04
at signals intelligence and, like, tech stuff,
1:21:06
and they can create the little worm that blew up the Iranian, you know,
1:21:09
nuclear facilities in, what, 2009 or whatever it was,
1:21:13
uh,
1:21:13
Stuxnet,
1:21:14
then you'd be able to,
1:21:16
because the biometric chip,
1:21:17
what does it have on it?
1:21:17
It just has my face,
1:21:18
my name,
1:21:19
my date of birth,
1:21:20
my passport number,
1:21:21
probably,
1:21:21
right?
1:21:21
Thumbprints as well.
1:21:23
Uh,
1:21:23
I think it's got your thumbprints on as well.
1:21:26
Or some countries do at least.
1:21:27
I'm not sure what it is that,
1:21:28
that makes it so difficult,
1:21:30
but apparently it's,
1:21:30
well,
1:21:31
apparently at least in the early 2010s when,
1:21:34
when this happened.
1:21:35
Well,
1:21:35
maybe this is just what they want us to believe.
1:21:37
Well,
1:21:37
perhaps.
1:21:38
Now they can,
1:21:38
we think you could reprogram a biometric chip.
1:21:40
Well,
1:21:40
apparently,
1:21:41
I mean,
1:21:41
apparently they've,
1:21:42
Specifically, these biometric chips, the reason that they've all been adopted, they're invented by a Malaysian company in the early 2000s.
1:21:52
And the reason that they've been adopted everywhere is because apparently they're so secure.
1:21:57
Well, it's certainly a lot harder than just using a razor blade to cut out the photo and stick another photo in and then re-laminate it.
1:22:06
My favorite story that I came across about passports is...
1:22:10
The Koreans?
1:22:11
The Koreans, yes.
1:22:12
Tell me.
1:22:12
I love this.
1:22:14
So in the early 2000s at Narita Airport in Tokyo, the passport staff and the diplomatic staff found these two young Korean boys traveling into Japan on Brazilian passports with a large number of adult male bodyguards.
1:22:41
bodyguards and they went, something's wrong here.
1:22:44
Something's up.
1:22:45
What's the deal with these two dudes?
1:22:47
Send these guys to secondary screening.
1:22:49
Yeah, yeah.
1:22:49
They figured out that it was Kim Jong-il.
1:22:52
Sorry, it was Kim Jong-un and his brother Kim Jong-nam, the sons of the then North Korean
1:22:59
dictator Kim Jong-il.
1:23:01
And of course, Kim Jong-un then went on to become the-
1:23:03
The great leader.
1:23:04
The great leader.
1:23:05
The great leader.
1:23:06
And so it turns out that they had been traveling into Japan frequently over their childhood
1:23:11
to go to Disneyland in Tokyo.
1:23:14
And they really loved going to Disneyland
1:23:16
and they wanted to go there.
1:23:17
And so they would...
1:23:18
It's great.
1:23:19
It's great.
1:23:19
You get yourself a Brazilian passport.
1:23:21
Yep.
1:23:21
Because I would imagine that of all the passports in the world,
1:23:23
a North Korean passport, probably the least useful passport.
1:23:28
Instantly flagged, I would have thought.
1:23:30
You're going straight to secondary school.
1:23:31
I don't think you can do any...
1:23:33
I mean, other than maybe enter China,
1:23:35
I don't think you'd be able to enter anywhere on a North...
1:23:38
There's no point in even applying for a visa.
1:23:41
No, I don't even know if they have them.
1:23:44
No, I mean applying for like an Australian visa from your North Korean passport.
1:23:49
I'm just saying, does North Korea even make passports?
1:23:52
They don't let people leave.
1:23:53
That's true.
1:23:53
Yeah, exactly.
1:23:54
That's right.
1:23:54
They would only need it for four people.
1:23:56
Yeah, yeah.
1:23:57
So yes, you get your Brazilian passport.
1:23:59
You get on your plane to some third country, maybe Brazil.
1:24:04
Yes, anyway.
1:24:05
But don't bring the entourage.
1:24:06
Well, they would generally be coming from China, so they'd go through China.
1:24:09
But they were children.
1:24:10
Yeah.
1:24:11
So they had to, someone, adults had to go with them.
1:24:13
And so they had this entourage of dudes.
1:24:15
And anyway, so the thing is then fast forward about 20 years and Kim Jong-un killed Kim Jong-nam.
1:24:23
Yes.
1:24:24
He had him assassinated in Kuala Lumpur airport.
1:24:28
And the reason that the Malaysian authorities were able to positively identify Kim Jong-nam was because the Japanese had Kim Jong-nam's biometric data from his attempted visit to Disneyland nearly 20 years earlier.
1:24:45
Amazing.
1:24:46
And so they put it on something and they went, bring, this guy's – we pinged this guy trying to get to Disneyland.
1:24:54
Right, because presumably he was in Kuala Lumpur also as a fake.
1:24:59
He was under a Chinese passport.
1:25:01
Under a Chinese, a fake name.
1:25:02
So, right, random Chinese dude dies in Malaysia.
1:25:07
They don't know who he is, but he matches.
1:25:09
Yeah, they put his fingerprints in.
1:25:10
He matches a Brazilian bloke who was in Japan 20 years before.
1:25:15
Yeah, we know this guy.
1:25:16
Same fingerprints.
1:25:17
Amazing.
1:25:18
And now the biometric, presumably chip, is going to ruin all of that.
1:25:21
I mean, how are the Kims going to travel?
1:25:23
by a very, very fancy train.
1:25:25
Yes, I know.
1:25:26
It's a beautiful train.
1:25:27
I mean-
1:25:27
Yeah.
1:25:28
It does have a magnificent train.
1:25:29
Just like J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson.
1:25:32
There you go.
1:25:33
I'm sure they loved traveling by train as well.
1:25:34
Well, they did, didn't they?
1:25:35
I mean, that was part of your reporting that they loved.
1:25:38
Back in the heyday of American rail travel,
1:25:40
they would get their own suites.
1:25:43
A couple of years ago, I was in the United States for the election,
1:25:48
and I was doing most of my first bit of reporting in Michigan
1:25:53
and then I had to do the actual election night I was in Washington
1:25:58
and the ABC was going, okay, well, let's book you flights
1:26:00
from one place to the other and that kind of thing.
1:26:02
And I went, you know, there is a train.
1:26:05
And so I took the train.
1:26:08
Wow, from Detroit to?
1:26:09
Well, you can't get it from Detroit because, you know,
1:26:11
Detroit, not by no other trains in Detroit.
1:26:15
Why not?
1:26:15
Well, because it's the Motor City, baby.
1:26:18
Oh, I see.
1:26:19
Yes.
1:26:19
Okay.
1:26:19
Yes.
1:26:19
They love their cars.
1:26:20
There's a train.
1:26:21
I believe there's one train a day that goes to Chicago and none others.
1:26:26
So I had to get a bus to Toledo, Ohio, which wasn't that far.
1:26:30
So I got a bus to Toledo, Ohio, and then I got on the train from Toledo to Washington,
1:26:36
D.C.
1:26:36
Wow.
1:26:37
And I have never slept better in my life than on that rocking sideways.
1:26:43
You were rocked like a baby.
1:26:44
I was rocked like a baby.
1:26:45
Like a sweet baby.
1:26:46
All the way through Pennsylvania, and I woke up in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
1:26:51
Great.
1:26:52
And I woke up, and I look out my window, and there's the Shenandoah.
1:26:54
I was in-
1:26:57
A J.D.
1:26:57
Vance novel.
1:26:58
Well, I was in a J.D.
1:26:59
Vance novel, or I was in Country Roads by John Denver.
1:27:03
Yeah, that's great.
1:27:04
I mean, I do think it's quite expensive.
1:27:06
I think the public broadcaster has probably overpaid in comparison to what a flight would cost.
1:27:12
in comparison to a flight, but it was also a night of accommodation.
1:27:15
Ah.
1:27:17
Fair enough.
1:27:17
And I did, that was how I was able to sell it to them because I was like,
1:27:20
you're going to have to, you'll save a night of accommodation at one end
1:27:24
or the other and the flight cost, and that adds up to more than the train ticket.
1:27:27
That's true.
1:27:28
Well, it certainly depends where the night of accommodation is.
1:27:30
If it's in Washington, D.C., it's a saving.
1:27:32
If it's at the Motel 8 in Toledo, Ohio, probably get a good deal on that one.
1:27:37
Yeah, possibly, yeah.
1:27:38
I've always wanted to do that.
1:27:38
I mean, I got the train a lot between Boston, because Sean, my husband's from New Hampshire,
1:27:43
so New England, so Boston, New York, DC, all that.
1:27:47
But that's a very kind of unromantic business, you know, fast train sort of experience.
1:27:54
Yeah.
1:27:54
It's all very efficient.
1:27:55
I'd love to get the shitty sleeper, you know, in the middle of America.
1:27:59
It was-
1:28:00
Something I've never done.
1:28:00
It was beautiful.
1:28:01
And in fact, well, the reason that I was really keen to do it is because I wanted to meet
1:28:05
people on the train.
1:28:06
I wanted to, and I did, I interviewed people on the train.
1:28:08
Yeah, right.
1:28:08
Just at the breakfast table, I met some really interesting people.
1:28:12
The people who wouldn't speak to me is that there were a number,
1:28:16
a reasonably large number of Pennsylvania Dutch.
1:28:20
Really?
1:28:20
Of Amish people?
1:28:21
Yes, there were Amish people on the train.
1:28:23
Wow.
1:28:25
Apparently, they used the train quite a lot.
1:28:28
It's not a machine in there?
1:28:30
I'm not sure what the definition of machine is.
1:28:32
I guess they would have talked to you, but not to your machine,
1:28:35
microphone machine.
1:28:36
Yes.
1:28:36
They were quite friendly, but they wouldn't be on tape.
1:28:39
Yeah, right.
1:28:41
But I was keen to get their opinions on the election,
1:28:44
but they wouldn't, well, they also didn't want to talk about that.
1:28:48
Pretty understandably.
1:28:50
But apparently, yes, they're pretty frequent on the rails.
1:28:53
They travel up and down the country.
1:28:55
Fabulous.
1:28:56
I love how, like, let's just say backward,
1:28:59
probably shouldn't say that,
1:29:00
but backward communities manage to rationalize modernity in certain ways.
1:29:04
It's like the Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn who were, like,
1:29:07
they'll you know they can set devices to sort of do their device use for them and i'm like but hang
1:29:12
on why is the device that will turn your light off for you not a device but the light switch is a
1:29:17
device if you can't use you know but they're all these or like in the muslim world where you're not
1:29:21
allowed to pay interest if you're a sharia but there are whole financial institutions across the
1:29:27
muslim world that just call it a different thing and you're not technically they're not technically
1:29:30
lending you money but they're lending this other thing money and then that thing is like giving you
1:29:34
the money and you're like, I'm pretty sure the creator of the universe is smart enough
1:29:38
to catch you out.
1:29:40
I don't think your scam is fooling, if it's not fooling me, it's not fooling Yahweh or
1:29:46
Muhammad.
1:29:46
My favorite instance of this is Japan.
1:29:49
This isn't a religious thing, but betting on poker machines is illegal in Japan.
1:29:56
There is no, well, there may be casinos, but on the street corner, you can't have pokies
1:30:01
in the pub.
1:30:02
and so the Japanese do this thing where they play pachinko,
1:30:05
which is a, basically it's a poker machine.
1:30:07
Right.
1:30:08
I mean, it involves ball bearings.
1:30:10
It's unbelievably loud.
1:30:12
But they play this game and it's basically an arcade game
1:30:16
and you get tickets and then you can go to the attendant at the front
1:30:20
and the attendant at the front will give you,
1:30:23
in exchange for your tickets, a beautiful plush toy.
1:30:27
And wouldn't you know it, Josh, across the road from the pachinko place,
1:30:31
is a place that buys plush toys.
1:30:35
And they only buy plush toys, and they only buy certain plush toys.
1:30:39
You can't just walk in there with an old bear.
1:30:40
No, no, no.
1:30:41
You have to walk straight across from the pachinko place,
1:30:43
and then you cash out.
1:30:44
No gambling.
1:30:45
No, no.
1:30:45
It was a gift.
1:30:46
It was a gift.
1:30:48
And so, yes, there is a full trade in Japan of people winning plush toys,
1:30:52
walking across the street, exchanging it for cash,
1:30:54
and then presumably that person at the cash place just brings the toys.
1:30:58
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:30:59
Pachinko place.
1:30:59
Yeah, the stuffed toys at the Pachinko place are going on a constant little journey across the road.
1:31:04
I love it.
1:31:05
One of those places is probably a Mossad or CIA front.
1:31:08
And there's, you know, in 10 years' time, we'll find out about that actually the stuffed toys have the recording places in them.
1:31:14
It wouldn't be.
1:31:15
I'm not sure it would be the best idea.
1:31:17
You'd only get intelligence on people while they walk across the road from one place to another.
1:31:20
While they're giggling happily about their winnings.
1:31:24
Matt, lovely to talk to you.
1:31:25
Thank you so much for stopping by.
1:31:26
Is there anything else you want to pitch about if you're listening?
1:31:28
The book.
1:31:30
Oh, look, it's a fun book.
1:31:31
It's a book that I write in the early part of the book.
1:31:33
This
1:31:34
is not a book.
1:31:34
I'm not advocating for anything in this book.
1:31:36
I'm not trying to make you care about
1:31:39
things.
1:31:39
I'm not trying to make you change your mind about things.
1:31:42
This book is all about making
1:31:44
you a better dinner party guest and having interesting stories to tell people at dinner
1:31:50
parties.
1:31:51
That's the entire aim of this book.
1:31:53
It's not going to change your entire life,
1:31:57
but it's hopefully will tell you some interesting stories.
1:32:00
Well, if people liked the stories today,
1:32:02
then they can read them again in the book or...
1:32:05
Only a few of them.
1:32:06
Only a few of them.
1:32:07
Yeah, yeah.
1:32:08
Fabulous.
1:32:08
It's called, if you're listening, Declassified by Matt Bevan.
1:32:11
Thanks, Matt.
1:32:12
Thank you, Josh.