The Team House
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2022–2024
1:46:39 · 118K views · Dec 18, 2021
A long Team House podcast interview with James Lawler, a former CIA operations officer who led counterproliferation work against the A.Q. Khan nuclear network. He discusses HUMINT, WMD and how such operations were run.
HN recommends it as an in-depth look at the mechanics of intelligence work from a veteran who ran a nonproliferation operation.
4 comments from Hacker News
For anyone is into this kind of thing I would suggest checking out The Team House on YouTube which has a lot of very in-depth interviews with some very recently retired CIA folks talking about their experiences in the field. Given a lot of the crazy shit I hear come up in the comments here every time the CIA tends to get mentioned in almost any context this might actually be a good resource for a lot of folks here to start separating fact from fiction. I’ll drop a couple of my favourites here but they must have at least 20 of them by now. Doug London [LINK] This guy had a really long career at CIA in the particular job that you all think of when you think of a “spy” that spanned around 30 years from memory with 9/11 occurring right in the middle of his career. He talks a lot about not only how that changed the face of the agency but about all the mistakes that got made along the way and how the wheels fell off the truck with things like the rendition programs etc. Overall, it’s a great self reflective and critical look at the agency from a very senior person on the inside. Jim Lawler this video This guy is probably the most “spooky” kind of CIA guy I’ve ever seen them interview. Even to the point that he is rather unusual amongst his peers if his reputation is to anything to go by. You can immediately see why he was so good at his job almost from the start. Like Doug he was also VERY senior and at the pointy end of the spear as they say. The later stage of his career was focused
I think you might be a bit hung up here on the word software which in your defence is not the correct word here. Replace it with “operation” and it’s not at all a crazy number to suggest that an incredibly complicated multi year multi national intelligence operation to disrupt a covert nuclear weapons program inside of an actively hostile nation who have a serious counterintelligence and counter espionage apparatus ended up costing that amount. You end up coming to the conclusion rather quickly that it’s actually great value for money. While not at all about this particular operation but if you want to hear someone who actively ran another incredibly successful nuclear non proliferation operation inside of CIA I’d recommend checking out this interview with perhaps the “spookiest” CIA person I’ve ever seen this video ?
Here are two very in-depth interviews with two recently retired individuals who get into a lot of the mechanics of how that works in reality. Doug London [LINK] Jim Lawler this video
Are you ignoring his more recent history, like the part about being the cofounder of SOFREP? The Team House podcast which he runs has also featured enough ex-CIA guests that he certainly has some very solid contacts & knowledge both. At a quick glance: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] this video [LINK] [LINK] Not only experienced CIA in there, but also from the same group there are published authors on CIA history.