- Popular culture is full of famous spies, from James Bond to Jack Ryan.

But today's guest paints a more complete picture of the world of espionage based on his personal experience over 28 years as a national security professional.

He's Sean M. Wiswesser, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat theme music) (upbeat theme music continues) (upbeat theme music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University, And my guest this week is Sean M. Wiswesser, a former case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency.

He's now the author of a new book, "Tradecraft, Tactics and Dirty Tricks, Russian Intelligence and Putin's Secret War."

Sean, welcome to the show.

- Thank you, Jim.

It's an honor to be with you and your viewers.

You know, I've been a lifelong fan of PBS, and it's many programs including your program.

So, glad to be with you.

It's an honor.

Thank you.

- Well- Well, it's a real pleasure to have you here, and we wanna note upfront that your views expressed today are yours alone and not those of the US government or your former employer, the Central Intelligence Agency.

So, with that, - Yeah, thank you.

- with that paperwork outta the way, as it were, the book is really a fascinating read, particularly for anybody who's interested in history or intelligence, particularly your descriptions of those tradecraft and those dirty tricks, as you call it.

Why write this book and why write it now?

- Well, thank you Jim.

Thank you for the question.

The motivation for the book came, you know, when I retired out of CIA in 2023, and I didn't really have, didn't really have a burning desire to write a book at that time, but they say, you know, advice I've gotten from mentors in my career, and when I went through the War College Program, I went through the Air Force Air War College, you know, the advice was "Write the book that only you can write."

And so I had a concept of writing a book on Russian intelligence tradecraft, which is unique.

As you probably know, Jim, a lot of espionage books are focused on an individual case.

For instance, the Rick Ames case, CIA traitor, or Robert Hansen, the FBI traitor, whatever the case may be, or it's a survey of the history of CIA, the history of the KGB, the history of the Russian SVR, but it's, as far as I know, and our former Deputy Director of Operations, Mike Sulick, who wrote the foreword to my book, mentioned neither of us were aware of a book on just tradecraft.

So, it's 10 chapters focused on how the Russians do espionage and intelligence operations with a particular focus on hybrid war.

Putin's Secret War as the subtitle of the book, is how he's engaging the Western War, and we're not really focused on that.

So, that was what I wanted to focus on the book as education on the threat and on the tactics of our adversary.

- And we'll get into some of that in a minute, but I wonder if you could say too, a little bit about the unique and specific challenges of being a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, and writing a book about Russian tradecraft.

This has to be a review process that this goes through, I'm sure, in order for you to publish it.

- Yeah, you know, there is CIA employees, like all members of the intelligence community.

We have a lifelong obligation to have our work reviewed by the US government, make sure there's no classified in it.

And I did that and I complied.

There's a disclaimer at the start of the book and everything I say related to the book, thank you for sharing my disclaimer.

The views are mine alone.

But the process I will say was not as tedious as I was concerned it might be.

CIA worked with me.

They, I think they saw the intent of the book.

They don't ever endorse the book of any authors once they leave the agency, but we went through several drafts, and they worked with me to try to see that I was focused on the only damage being to our adversaries, those that are targeting and doing damage to the United States and not to our own government.

It's an apolitical book.

It's got absolutely zero political commentary.

It's entirely focused on our adversary.

So, that was an additional burden to go through that clearance process.

It took many months in addition to actually writing the book.

But I was glad to comply with that and know that I wasn't by accident even sharing anything classified.

I took the utmost concern and one of the utmost protection for the Russian intelligence agents that I worked with and handled in my career, as I mentioned in the introduction of the book.

So, I think we did it the right way.

- That's tremendous.

So, you know, the, you make a point in the book of distinguishing between the American practice where intelligence is sort of analytical and not about prescribing policy or executing policy per se, and the Russian experience where it is, they sort of, it's a glove and hand sort of situation.

I wonder if you could describe in general terms, what do you think Russian foreign policy is now towards the United States and how do the Russian Intelligence Services contribute directly to that?

- Yeah, Jim, very good question.

Thank you for giving me a chance.

You know, the first chapter of the book, I talk about some of the history and evolution of the modern Russian Intelligence Services.

There are three principally, the FSB, that's the internal service, the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service, and the GRU, which is the main military intelligence service.

They operate very differently than the intelligence community in the United States.

And, you know, we swear an oath to the Constitution of the United States, I took that very seriously in my career.

Everyone that I ever worked with at CIA, and I did a lot joint duty work in my career, a lot of work with FBI and other agencies.

I mentioned a lot of that in the book.

We swear an oath to the Constitution.

We're not perfect, but for the vast, the majority of my career, I did not see politicization within the intelligence community.

I was honored to work in a community that was focused on our adversaries.

I hope and believe that is still the case.

I'm very much against politicization at the leadership level or at any level in the intelligence community.

And there's been some problems with that over the past decade.

But again, my book's apolitical, but fundamentally the Russian Intelligence Services, there's no such a limitation.

They are about the regime, Jim.

They're about protecting Putin and keeping Putin in power.

So, they don't swear an oath to any constitution in Russia.

Their oath and their allegiance is to one, to their leader Vladimir Putin, and then to their services and their regime.

And then there's another loyalty they have that I spend a lot of time talking about in the book, and that's corruption.

That's feeding their own pockets, and those are their services, which is rampant across all of the Russian government.

In terms of their policy, it's pretty simple, Jim, and I know we're gonna talk about this some more.

America for the Russian Intelligence Services is the (speaking in Russian), the main enemy.

As one Russian Intelligence Service officer that I mentioned in the book I worked with, he was helping the United States.

He eventually defected to the United States, and he told me earlier in my career, "Make no mistake about it, for the Russian services, for us," as he said at the time, "the United States was, is, and always will be the main enemy of the Russian Federation."

So, there's no terrorism being the top concern for them.

There's no focus on proliferation, or attacks within or without Russia.

It's on countering the United States and our policies.

- Is it because we're the other big dog?

Like why is that the case?

- I think part of this, Jim, you know, I studied Russian language and culture and history and I have a deep appreciation for it.

I have a great love and respect for Russian literature.

I was a Russian literature major.

My wife is part Russian and she's also part Ukrainian.

I spent a lot of time as a student and then professionally traveling in the former Soviet Union and across Russia.

There's a deep seated insecurity though with the Russian people with regards to the West.

This has been written about for decades and really goes back hundreds of years, to the time of Peter The Great.

You know, when he famously wanted to build St.

Petersburg on the Baltic Sea, he wanted a window on the West.

There's always been a obsession with the West and perceptions of Russia in the West.

But in Russia, you know, the United States, see.

when I was there as a student, then professionally throughout my career, the United States heads up the news every single night in Russia.

It's all about what the United States is doing and what, and the propagandized version today of the news in Russia, and particularly for the past couple decades, what they believe is the problem with the United States as a loan superpower.

So, that's a constant obsession, and that bleeds down into the Russian Intelligence Services.

There's a deep, deep insecurity of those services wanting to counter the United States and counter democracy around the world.

Now, what I like to say, Jim, why I can summarize it, that for Putin as president of Russia and for their Chinese, strategic partners, as they always advertise it, they can't tolerate democracy.

Neither Xi Jinping in China, nor Vladimir Putin want functioning, prospering democracies around the world because they are threats to their regimes.

- You know, so you mentioned, we can't talk about this topic obviously without talking about Vladimir Putin.

And the fact of the matter is that he was a career intelligence officer in the KGB and then the FSB.

What does that mean for the regime that the head of power, the seat of power in Russia, is controlled by somebody who has that background?

- So, Putin is a Chekist, and he would agree, if we were interviewing him right now, Jim, he'd be nodding his head and said, yes, "I'm a Chekist."

He's proud of it.

What's a Chekist?

So, the Chekist are from the tradition of the Cheka, the first forerunner of the KGB after the revolution, or as a revolution started in Russia, that the Cheka or the (speaking in Russian) was the special committee for the protection of the revolution.

It's a much longer version of the name.

So, the Cheka was the first security service that headed by Iron Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Vladimir Putin, and his comrades from the security services they run the Russian government right now.

Everyone in the ruling elite, what he calls his (speaking in Russian), the strongmen, that term of itself is very revealing.

Jim, just imagine if we had a president that referred to his cabinet, "They're not my cabinet, they're my strong men," the (speaking in Russian), that's what Putin calls his ruling elite.

So, they have a mentality.

I believe it's very important.

I use a lot of Russian jargon in my book.

I try to talk a lot about this history and culture because the (speaking in Russian) that are ruling Russia right now, they have allegiance to a culture of thuggery within Russia.

Remember that the (speaking in Russian) and then the OGPU and the KGB, the successors, of the early intelligence services, these are the same thugs that killed and murdered millions of their own people under Stalin and his purges.

You know, I could never understand, and I met many Russian intelligence officers, I would ask them, I don't understand how on the 20th December, every year you'd drink a toast to Felix Dzerzhinsky responsible for the murder of millions and millions of Russians, and other peoples of the Soviet Union.

And they would just smile and they say, "Well, that's, you know, the founder of our services."

It's a disregard for morality and humanity, Jim, it's an allegiance to these services, to the Chekist mentality, to the idea that they are the elite of society.

It's very Orwellian, in many senses.

So, that's the world that Putin came from in the KGB.

You mentioned he headed the FSB, the Internal Security Service.

It's important to understand their mentality because I think for decades now in the West, we haven't understood his and their mentality enough.

- Well, you know, the book begins, early in the book anyways, you describe the day in the life of a Russian intelligence officer, and one of the characteristics of that existence you describe is corruption.

What's the corruption that you're describing and what does that mean then ultimately for the practice of intelligence by the Russians?

- So, the Russian Intelligence Service is first and foremost individually, and as services, and "Organy," as the Russians call them, organs of the state.

The very term itself is revealing.

Americans wouldn't tolerate the FBI or CIA, or other agencies of our federal government being referred to as the organs of power.

That's, in a democracy, that's a very antithesis of protecting and serving the people.

But in their system, it's perfectly normal, Jim.

And so the corruption bleeds from the very top down to every layer of Russian society.

And this is a legacy of the Soviet Union, which was completely a corrupted state.

You know, my wife grew up in the Soviet Union.

Her father was an officer in the Ministry of Interior of the Soviet Union.

And he told me many times, of course I've gotten to know their family very well over the years.

He said the system was completely corrupt.

He worked on the second floor of the local government, the KGB was on the third floor.

He said, "The only difference was they were more corrupt than we were, (Jim chuckles) because they're one floor up."

Everybody involved in the government was stealing from the government.

The old Soviet saying, "You know, if we're not stealing from the government, we're stealing from ourselves."

That's a part of Russian society.

So, what I offer in that first part of the book, Jim, I want the readers to focus on, and I hope some of your listeners will consider buying the book and reading some of the many anecdotes in it.

Russian intelligence officers are obsessed with scams and scheming.

It's constantly a part of everything they do, so that it just bleeds through and infects all of their intelligence work at all.

They're trying to make money, they're trying to finance themselves and their comrades back home.

And that filters up in the state to the highest levels of the regime.

- So, you spend a little time too, talking about what it looks like when the Russians identify somebody, and try to recruit them to serve Russia.

Generally speaking, what do those tactics, what does that tradecraft look like?

- So, one of the primary differences between the United States, our intelligence services and those of our adversaries in particular the Russians, is they use what they like to call (speaking in Russian), or compromising operations.

That's what they call it.

They use financial motivations, but they'll also use espionage, or what's sometimes called sexpionage.

The Russians call them "Swallow Operations."

I talk about in chapter six of my book.

So, the Russians are interested in extorting and coercing for collaboration.

In the West, we believe it's much better to use the carrot versus the stick, as it were, Jim.

So, we believe that if you use compromise or you uses extortion, that may last for a while, but always the person that's helping you is gonna try to find a way to get out of it and to get back at you for extorting them.

The Russians have no such qualms.

All of their intelligence operations for the most part are based on very base motivations.

It's money and greed.

It could be sex or coercion, as in either you work with us and we'll kill you, or we'll kill members of your family.

And that for them has happened for generations.

Going back to the time of the early KGB under Stalin, as I said in the purges, you either cooperated with the regime or you were executed in the halls of Lubyanka Prison, which is the modern headquarters of the FSP, by the way, they work in the same building.

Tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands died in.

So, it's extortion, it's a culture of compromising and then forcing people to collaborate with them, and that bleeds into their espionage operations.

Not to say they haven't had successes, Jim, and we can talk about some of 'em.

I mentioned those in my book.

- Yeah, - The Russians have some strengths too, and one of them is compartmentation, how they handle penetrations of foreign governments.

But, in general, those are the differences.

How they work versus how we work.

- Are there characteristics of a traditional mark?

- In what's that?

Sorry, Jim.

Maybe a- - In terms of when the Russians are looking for someone that they might try to recruit, whether through extortion, or bribery or the threat of actual violence.

Are there characteristics of the person that they're trying to target for that recruiting?

- Well, I think that's something that intelligence services do probably have in common.

You know, there's motivations that are referred to as MICE, you know, money, ideology, compromising, or Russians use the K in (speaking in Russian) or ego.

I think the Russians, if you look at some of their most notorious spies in American history, particularly penetrations of the US government ego is huge.

You know, Rick Ames was a traitor to CIA.

I've talked about it in my book.

Robert Hanssen, who betrayed the FBII, Jim Nicholson, who betrayed CIA as well, they all had tremendous egos.

They were doing it for financial reasons as well.

But the Russians, in their operational notes, in their operational methodology that you see when they were exchanging information with these agents early in working with them, and I give some examples in the book, the Russians liked to play on ego, you know, they love to play on Robert Hanssen, you know, "Oh, you're mastering this craft so well.

You're doing such a good job of helping us understand, you know, the US government."

And they did the same with Rick Ames.

So, I think ego is something they play on heavily, but again, the Russians tend to focus on the compromising angles, whereas we tend to focus.

And I spend time at the end of my book in particular, Jim, as you know, we've worked with hero spies.

We work with truly tremendous spies that have helped United States like Adolf Tolkachev, the so-called billion dollar spy.

And he was motivated for ideology.

And that's a whole different thing.

When somebody's motivated because they wanna destroy a system like the evil, corrupt Soviet or Russian system.

To me, that's a much higher level of motivation.

I've been honored to work some cases like that in my career.

- Do the Russians only focus on recruiting folks with access to secret information?

Or they are also interested in, you know, folks from civilian businesses as well?

- Yeah, good question.

The Russians will recruit any American that they believe might have access to military, government, or commercial information.

There's a big distinction between the United States and our foreign adversaries, including even some members of NATO.

We are prohibited by law from engaging in corporate espionage for the sake of US companies.

That's a big, big difference.

The Russians, for instance, have no such inhibitions.

So, they will get engaged in espionage to steal corporate secrets and then sell them from the SVR, the foreign intelligence service.

They'll sell them to Russian companies, or as I said, with the corruption being at an individual level, they'll also steal secrets that if they can't use it for the state, they'll sell it privately as well.

- Yeah.

- We would go to jail for doing that.

But there are countries in the world that allow spying on companies and selling corporate secrets.

The United States is not one of them.

If it's not in the interest of the United States and not in the interest of our federal government and protecting our citizens, then we can't engage in that espionage.

But the Russians have no such inhibitions.

So, the short answer, Jim, they will recruit Americans at any level, and we're aware of espionage cases where they'll recruit a low level, what we would think a soldier in the US military we wouldn't think would have access.

They'll recruit them just for the sake of having an American that's betraying their country.

That's a great deal of prestige for the Russian Intelligence Services.

Same for a business person, a member of an NGO, et cetera.

- You know, so one of the tactics that you describe is the use of so-called illegals.

What does that mean in the context of Russian intelligence operations?

And can you give us an example?

- Yeah, great Jim, and that's a great follow-on question.

We're talking about recruiting.

So, Americans protecting themselves.

You know, a foreigner who is potentially cozying up to an American business person overseas, doesn't have to be a Russian citizen for them to be a Russian intelligence officer.

So, an illegal or an illegal, the term comes from operating illegally abroad under a false identity, not affiliated with Russia.

So, these were the 12 Russian illegals that were wrapped up in 2010.

Most of them were traditional, or what we call staff illegals, meaning they had false identities.

Most of them had transited Canada and then set up false identities in the United States, and then they presented themselves as American citizens.

The famous TV series, "The Americans" was based on that case, and some of the tradecraft used.

So, to elaborate a bit, some of those illegals brushed up against US government, or think tanks, or business people.

And they, the folks that they came up against were none the wiser.

They had no idea that they're talking to a Russian official.

Illegals, traditionally, their training pipeline is many, many years.

Yuri Drozdov, I talk about in my book from director at S of the KGB.

His typical training timeline was at least seven years for an illegal, where they would spend a lot of time on language, culture.

And so illegals are a fundamental bedrock of Russian intelligence.

They're one that president Putin himself has a personal affinity for.

He idealized a hero of his growing up was a GRU illegal fictionalized hero named Stierlitz from some novels he read by a Russian writer called Yulian Semyonov.

And so Russians are always gonna use illegals.

They're always gonna use non-official covered officers operating abroad to try to carry out espionage.

It's up to us in the West to be aware of the tactic and to counter it.

- You know, the book is full of so many important topics.

You talk about sort of street work, you talk about wet work, you talk about dirty tricks.

I wanna talk about active measures.

We got about five minutes left in the show, and this is a topic that, as a scholar, I'm profoundly interested in.

But let's talk specifically about what active measures are and how they manifested in the American elections in 2016 and 2020.

- Well, thank you, Jim.

This is one of the reasons I wrote the book.

This is Russian active measures and their intelligence services engaging in them are an existential threat to the United States, just as terrorism is and was.

When President Bush said that Al-Qaeda hates us because we're free.

The Russian Intelligence Services hate us because we're free and they hate us as democracies.

They're active measures in Russia, and they also call them measures of support are designed to support their maligned influence and their malign policies.

The idea of it is, in the words of Lenin, one of the first leaders of the Soviet Union.

Lenin said, "Let's make use of," what he called (speaking in Russian), useful idiots.

"Let's make use of people in the West that we can get to do our policies for us and take on board what we're trying to accomplish without them even knowing it."

So, active measures are intended to use misinformation, disinformation, and political messaging, whether the target is aware of it or not, in order to achieve Russia's aims.

In 2016 and in 2020, the Russians were heavily involved in using active measures, not for or against any one candidate.

I am convinced from all three decades of my experience in the intelligence community, the goal was to disrupt and undermine our very system, Jim, of democracy.

It was to breed distrust in the electoral system, which they don't use and they don't believe in.

And unfortunately, to a large degree, they were successful because to this very day we have Americans arguing about the 2016 and 2020 elections, and whether voting systems were compromised when they weren't, when the Attorney General of the United States, Mr.

Barr said himself, "Nothing was compromised in terms of voting systems."

But the Russians sowed a lot of distrust using social media, platforms like Facebook.

And I referenced the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and DNI reports from 2016, which were both bipartisan at the time, Jim.

And I believe with every foundation of my experience of 30 years doing this, that was their goal and that's what they were trying to accomplish.

And we as Americans have to be more aware of it in order to counter it.

- So, you know, the, you cite some great examples of bipartisan, you know, nonpartisan reporting on this issue.

In addition to what you do in the book here, are there other examples in the West of Russian active measures being employed in electoral context?

And I'm wondering specifically about Brexit.

- Yeah, absolutely Jim, thank you.

This is an old tactic.

One of the things that I'm disappointed in, in the dialogue in the United States is not pointing out.

Active measures go back decades and decades, even before the Soviet Union and the Russians were engaging in these types of tactics.

This old hack for Russian security services dating back to the Czar.

During the Cold War, active measures were used heavily in the developing world, in particular.

KGB tried to influence elections and influence politics in Africa.

So, these are not new tactics.

In 2016, they did the same thing they were doing in the United States.

They did it in the UK.

And the Russian trolls that were interfering in the media, Jim, they argued both sides of issues.

So, what does that tell you?

If they're arguing both sides of Brexit on the extreme elements of both sides, they're doing it to disrupt the very system of democracy in the UK.

And that's what the British official government report found.

And that's where our official government reports found, is that they were meddling on both sides of the same issues.

Sometimes on Facebook, for instance, down to the same very minute they were doing it.

And that's what the reports found.

That's what Facebook's own investigation found.

A lot of that unfortunately has been lost in a later commentary, but we need to focus again on what they're doing and what they're trying to do to America.

- So, we got about 30 seconds left for this, Sean.

We're in an election year, midterm election year here in the United States.

Should we expect to see these tactics again?

And what can we as citizens do if we see it?

- We will see more of it, Jim.

The Russians believe in active measures.

It's a fundamental bedrock of their intelligence services.

What we can do as Americans is two things.

One, try not to react emotionally to things we see online.

That's what active measures are built on.

And I talk about in my book, how they're specifically done, their actual steps in doing active measures.

Number two, question the soursening.

Now more than ever, question the sourcing of your news.

Have a critical mind, whatever the content is coming from, ask yourself, is it a real person?

Is it a real outlet?

And not react emotionally immediately when we see it.

And those I think are really fundamental things that Americans can do and we can be smarter about going forward.

We have to.

The threat from cognitive warfare is out there, Jim.

- Sean Wiswesser, the book is a public service.

It's "Tradecraft, Tactics and Dirty Tricks."

Thank you for sharing some of that with us today.

That's all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media, or visit salve.edu/pellcenter.

Or you can always catch up on previous episodes.

And thank you for spending some time with me this week.

I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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