The Rosenbergs | Inside the CIA | 5

0:00Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. From Audible Originals, I'm Lindsey Graham and this is American Scandal. In June of 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for spying on the United States. They were accused of helping funnel America's nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Neither was a trained intelligence officer. They were an ordinary couple who became the only US civilians ever executed for spying during the Cold War. Their story reveals the personal

1:02cost of espionage, not just for the people who steal the secrets, but for everyone drawn into this world built on deception, uncertainty, and decisions that carry enormous consequences. These stakes make it incredibly rich territory for stories both real like the Rosenbergs and fiction, stories of superhuman spies and world-saving missions. My guest today has lived in both worlds. David McCloskey spent nearly a decade as a CIA analyst before turning to fiction, where he's become a best-selling author of spy novels. He's also the co-host of The Rest Is Classified, a podcast that explores the real history of espionage. We'll talk about what it's really like inside the intelligence world, how the Cold War changed espionage, and whether spies like the Rosenbergs truly shaped the course of history. Our conversation is next. Hi, I'm Lindsay Graham, the host of American History Tellers. In our latest series, a police raid on a New York City gay bar in 1969 ignites a series of demonstrations lasting six days and marks

2:08a turning point in the fight for LGBTQ rights. Listen to American History Tellers on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. James Arthler Ray was a charismatic self-help guru who promised his followers a path to wealth and enlightenment by becoming the best versions of themselves, but not all who followed him finished their journey. For the Best Bingeable Series, listen to the Audible True Crime Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. David McCloskey, welcome to American Scandal. Lindsay, great to be here. Thanks for having me. So let's start with your experience at the CIA. You were hired as an intern when you were just 19. I'm wondering what that onboarding experience was like, specifically the lifestyle polygraph you were forced to take. Yeah, so the agency obviously has an interest in doing a significant amount

3:09of vetting of people that it brings onboard. So you initially apply and it sort of feels like a normal job to start where you send in, I was a sophomore at college at the time, so you send it writing samples. They see your resume such as it is at that point, your grades, etc. It's pretty normal stuff. They do an interview and then from that they give you or if you get through, they give you a conditional offer of employment and then from there the fun begins and that's the point where they give you kind of a full background investigation. So quite literally they sent investigators out to talk to your friends and your neighbors and your family, very intrusive. They do a psychological examination. They do more interviews and the worst part, the most interesting part, is the polygraph and there's different flavors of polygraph. And you mentioned a lifestyle polygraph, which is the most intrusive. And that's really all about

4:11establishing some facts around your background and whether or not you've lied on your application, of course. But it's also about asking you, for example, you know, do you work for a foreign intelligence service? Have you done anything nasty on government computers or computer networks? That kind of thing. And it's all yes or no questions, but it can take hours because you're having a conversation with the polygrapher about the question in advance. So for example, they might say, okay, I'm going to ask you a question about whether you've committed property crime. Is there anything you want to talk about in advance to answer that question? And if you happen to be like me and you've, you know, done a little bit of light pranking that may have ended in windows being smashed or some sort of light property damage, you might raise that with them and they say, okay, that's not the kind of thing I'm talking about. I'm talking about Arson and blah blah. So you can confidently answer no to the question. But then what they do is even if you don't have anything to hide, they really push the fact that you are lying to put pressure on you and to see what comes up.

5:17So in some ways, and I think actually the core of the experience is to put you in a very uncomfortable position and see what comes out. And so you can sit for multiple of these. They could take three or four hours. It's a, you know, I would say it was one of the more stressful experiences of my young life, but somehow I made it through and then got in and, you know, was an analyst there. But it's an unpleasant experience to sit for one of those things. It sounds like practice for an interrogation. What do you think they're selling you? You know, they're different, a lot of different jobs at the CIA. And I was applying for an analyst job. And so I think what they're looking for are really a lot of critical thinking and writing skills and interest in the broader world and how it works. And importantly, I think they're looking for, especially when you're hiring young analysts, they're really looking for someone who's kind of a blank slate who they can teach. And so there is a behavioral aspect of I think looking for coachability. Is this someone who we could bring in

6:20and actually school and how you become an analyst? But the job of a CIA analyst would be very similar to going to work as a, you know, journalist of the newspaper or a researcher to think tank. So it's a very similar kind of critical thinking writing set of skills that they're primarily hiring for. What are you talking about analysts? Well, you've anticipated my next question because I wanted to know with a little more detail what an analyst at the CIA is and how closely they might relate to what we think of as a spy. Definitely not a spy. I think that's really important. And in fact, the word spy gets overused and used as shorthand when you're talking about anyone who's connected at all to the intelligence business. The way it's used inside CIA to be quite honest, it's not used inside CIA. But the correct way to label someone as spy would be the foreign asset who is providing us with the information. They're the one who's doing the SPDOSH. The analyst is an analyst.

7:20The case officer who runs that asset, you know, be it in Syria or Russia or Germany, wherever it might be. That person is a case officer, they're an intelligence officer, they're not, they're not actually a spy and they're not an agent. That's also a misnomer. The analyst though, I think the best way to think about that job is that it is, it is a version of clandestine journalism. You're doing a lot of the same things that an investigative reporter does when they're putting together a big story. You're using a bunch of different sources. In this case, it could be human sources, but it could also be intercepts, signals, intelligence, satellite imagery, press reporting, diplomatic cables from our embassy in that country or the region. You're using all of that information. Some of it is fragmentary, some of it's going to be contradictory, some of it's better than others. And you're answering a question that's really important to policy makers. So you're basically taking a big national security topic, like for example, I worked on Syria,

8:20while I was at the agency. And in the early days of the Arab Spring, one of the big questions was, well, how long can Bashar al-Assad hold onto power? And so you're answering the question like that in written form using all of those different sources and putting it in very simple economical, precise language for the president or other senior policy makers or intelligence officials, so that they can make better decisions about the world. Much of the same way that an investigative journalist would put together a story for a newspaper so that readers could have a better understanding of what's going on in the world or the economy or whatever. So that's essentially what an analyst does. Just a quick follow-up on an analyst's job. Of course, some of the best investigative journalism happens with Shulah the reporting, how many of your sources are discovered or found by the analyst? Well, you hope none, but that doesn't always happen. It's not a particularly safe job to commit treason, right? If you think about it, you zoom all the way out and say, what is the CIA doing with

9:24these assets? I mean, we are recruiting them to steal secrets for us. So they're doing something that their country is almost always illegal. In some cases, it can lead to long prison terms or even the death penalty, protecting that source, protecting that asset is fundamentally one of the key, if not the key rule, that the CIA and case officers follow with their handling and asset. So you're communicating with them and meeting with them, using forms of trade craft to keep that association clandestine. And that usually works, but obviously with really committed, really effective counterintelligence services like you have in China or Russia or Iran or Cuba or North Korea, the way you go about doing that can be very difficult, very dangerous. And as a result, sometimes assets are caught. So Julius Rosenberg and his brother-in-law David, given the definition of spy that we've just

10:28established, would probably fit the definition. They're less secret agents, but informants working for a foreign government. Yeah, exactly. We would call them in our parlance, they would be assets of, I believe they were assets of the Soviet MKVD. I mean, the recruitment, I think, predated the KGB itself. But yes, they were assets or agents of Soviet intelligence, precisely. So one thing that is obviously striking about the Rosenberg story is the torn family tragedy at the center of it. David ultimately betrays his own sister to save his wife. And it seems that almost anyone in the intelligence business has to make or probably has to make enormous personal sacrifices or faces dilemmas like this. Was that true of yourself as an analyst or others you worked with? It definitely was not true of me as an analyst, although, you know, obviously you're working at a very secretive environment. And so the things that you're doing day to day,

11:28you can't really share with people around you. It's not a normal job where you can kind of come home and really talk openly about what you may have done at the office that day. So everybody involved in the business has to deal with that in some way, shape or form. I think the Rosenberg case is a striking and really tragic demonstration of betrayal of the business, but it's also quite exceptional. When I think about the case officer as the agency officer is that I know, I can't think of an analog. I can think of cases though where case officers have lost assets, assets who've been arrested or killed. And there can be a sense of, you know, deep loss. And certainly the part of those assets, family is a sense that what they did often in secret was a betrayal, betrayal of family and marriage and country. And so that's certainly true. But I think one of the misconceptions about the spy business is that the case officers, the intelligence officers are walking around sort of betrayed and deceiving everybody all the time. And I think that's

12:32not true. I actually think that the reality of the business, the paradox of the business is that it is cloaked in secrecy and deception. And yet at the core of it, the bond that holds the asset to the handler and the asset to the intelligence service that he or she is working for is really grounded on a tremendous amount of trust and openness. And, you know, in the best cases, a large degree of honesty about the shared mission. So this concept that there's sort of constant betrayal in the business, it does come from somewhere at the Rosenberg case highlights it very well and very starkly when you're talking about that foreign agent or asset because what they are doing day in and day out as part of this relationship is betraying the organization they work for the country they live in and oftentimes friends and family. So that, that is true. But it's not as true for the actual intelligence officer who works for the CIA or, you know, British SIS or

13:36the Soviet NKVD or whatever it may be. What if AI could recreate the voice of somebody you loved who died? What if it destroyed your reputation with words you never said? And what if you fell in love with something that was never a mark for now and in my brand new audible original podcast, I'm traveling the globe to investigate the very personal ways. AI is already changing our relationships, our memories, and our sense of what is real. Unreal. Listen now on audible. James Urtheray was a charismatic self-help guru who promises followers a path to wealth and enlightenment by becoming the best versions of themselves. But not all who followed him finished their journey. After Ray appeared on Oprah, thousands flocked to his events. But what many people didn't know about were his more extreme methods. Methods that push his followers to their limits,

14:38giving some the transformative experience they envisioned, and killing others. For the best binge-bel series, like the one I just told you about, listen to the audible true crime podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can get all episodes early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. You use the phrase shared mission and many spies, especially of the Cold War period in which the Rosenbrook were operating, seem to have real ideological conviction. From your experience, what do you think drives most spies to take on such enormous risk? Well, it is certainly true that ideology can play a significant factor in the decision. I think it's less true today than it was during the Cold War. I think that today it is perhaps a bit more mercenary than in those decades. But there's an overused, but I think

15:45directionally correct acronym about what drives people, what compels people to spy, and it's mice, M-I-C-E. M is money, I is ideology, C is control or coercion, and E is ego. Money, obviously, people can do this because they have massive debts or they want to fund a particular lifestyle. Ideology is the Rosenbrook case shows. You have communists working inside the U.S. technical military establishment. The Congress is also true that in Russia and the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, you have Russian intelligence officers and scientists who felt that the Soviet system was rotten and wanted to work to help the United States undermine it. They're very ideologically driven cases that bump them. Coversion or control, frankly, less commonly used by Western intelligence services, but the Russians use blackmail, Compromot, having leverage over people to get them to spy for you. Intelligence officers are

16:45people with access to secrets who feel slided by the organization they work for, passed up for promotions, not given favors. That kind of stuff can actually also be very potent and very visceral for people and thus a real impetus to spy. It's always more complicated than any of M-I-C-E acronym, any of those single letters. It's usually a stew of a lot of different things, but that gives you some sense of the different reasons why. And as we said in the Rose Ideology, it can be a factor. In this Cold War period, this is probably the most frightened and paranoid that America and probably the Soviet Union has ever been. What role did spying have in that paranoid? Did it cause it or was it caused by it? Well, it's a great question. My sense of the Rose and Burg case is it drops at a particularly sensitive time in the Cold War. Soviets have just tested an atomic bomb. The Korean War has kicked off at this point. We're a few years away from

17:50Sputnik and the space race. And when you zoom all the way out, you don't really have a set of rules yet for this conflict. And so it's this very heady period. And I think one of the things that the Rose and Burg case in particular does is it demonstrates that there can be enemies within, which had been a fear prior, but this is a sort of visceral demonstration of just how penetrated the US military industrial establishment could be. And so I think it, you know, for my sense, is that it takes on a life of its own and sort of feeds the idea that there are enemies everywhere. And that you can't know, we don't know the full extent of how many other spies like this are there. And certainly that the Soviets had very effectively penetrated the atomic bomb program. And so if you take that as a case study, you think maybe it's the same at the CIA, maybe it's the same at the State Department, maybe it's the same at the FBI. And I think it fuels an incredible panic that is definitely out of proportion to the actual scale of the threat, but it demonstrated

18:55practically that there was one. And so it is a bit of a chicken and an egg thing, but I think my read on kind of frankly that the witch hunts to come afterward are that it dramatically amplifies a fear that existed. It was probably to some degree understandable and reasonable, but it blew it up into something that had its own energy and that blew the threat out of all proportion. In this Cold War moment and in the mid 20th century, the CIA is both an ambitious and overreaching organization. We can point to the 1953 coup in Iran, the 1954 coup in Guatemala, the Bay of Pigs. This is a moment maybe in which the organization is trying to professionalize to gain a playbook. What is your assessment of how well the CIA fulfilled its mission in this period? I'll give you a bit of a controversial take, which is I think the CIA did pretty well in this period. And I think they evaluated against the sort of directives in orders, frankly, that it's giving by

19:56by the way now. I think the 53 coup in Iran is successful. Guatemala's successful. Bay of Pigs isn't. But I think in the covert action front, the CIA in those years was sort of finding its way at what it meant to be a global intelligence service and what it meant to resist Russian expansionism and active measures all over the world. And so I think, in real back at that period, I think a scant in many respects, it's just how activist it is and how secretive the CIA was and frankly how unaccountable it was. This is a period where there's really no scrutiny on its budget and there's really no congressional oversight whatsoever. This is a period where there aren't memoirs written by former CIA officers. We don't have, you know, former CIA analysts going on podcasts in this period to explain the other workings of the place. So it's a deeply secretive place. But I think, you know, it's sort of finding its way at what it means to both from a covert

20:57action standpoint, underbited resist Soviet expansionism and then at the same time, how do you develop an information advantage over our adversaries? And we can't give it perfect marks for that period. And obviously there's a tremendous amount of excess that happens. I mean, goodness gracious. You know, I don't know how much you covered it in your program, but your MK Ultra, which is this journey into trying to find ways to actually control, you know, essentially do mind control. It involves the CIA at one point becoming the largest purchaser and supplier of LSD in the entire world. It ends up with a whole bunch of law breaking. So, you know, it's very much a mixed record over this period with a lot of stains on the agency's record and rightly so. But I think my view is that you have to evaluate it at the context of the time and at the context of the time. Yeah. As you're talking about the Rosenberg story, it's a time of deep uncertainty about what the Cold War actually is and who the Russians are, what they want, and a time when we were actually

21:58quite similar to the Russians in terms of military and technical capabilities. And it was not at all clear who was going to win the Cold War. You've detailed that in this period that the CIA was largely unaccountable and gave it a great example in MK Ultra. So it's no surprise that the CIA did come under scrutiny in the 1970s with the church and then the pipe committee hearings both investigating abuses by the US intelligence community. What were some of the major lessons of those hearings and what changed afterward if anything? I think the big lesson was in an open society. You can't have completely secretive, largely unaccountable intelligence organization that when that happens, there will be abuses. And the most egregious ones to buybinder actually not the foreign adventures. The really awful stuff is when the agency, I mean, repeatedly over the course of the 50s and 60s, you know, broke its charter and did things like essentially ran mind control

23:01experimentation on American citizens without their knowledge. Wrote reports as spied on the domestic anti-war movement under the fig Lee for in some quarter suspicion that it connected to foreign communists opened male domestically of American citizens. And you know, in the case of Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon papers had agency psychiatrists right up a psychological profile of an American citizen that was was intended to be used to tar him publicly by the White House. So to my mind, those hearings uncorked all of this and revealed that when you have an intelligence service that is totally secretive and really only accountable to the president and a very small number of congressional leaders, very small, that it's going to do bad things. And so I think the reforms coming out of that, they do go a long way toward making sure that there is a much more sort of sophisticated and institutionalized congressional oversight. I think tilt the balance back toward a bit more openness so that the intelligence service of the democracy can be held

24:06accountable to the laws and norms of an open society. So I think the reforms of the 70s are sort of very necessary in that respect to protect the constitutional rights of American citizens and what can happen when an intelligence service gets out of control. Can it's over? The universe seems bigger. You feel different. You feel like you have no idea where you are. Audible. Stories that speak to you. One company changed the artificial sweetener industry forever by deleting four words from a tagline. Sales, skyrocketed, rivaled sued, and a multi-billion

25:10dollar war was on. Hey there, I'm David Brown, the host of the podcast business wars. Every season we bring you the true stories behind the companies that shape our world. Their rivalries, their reinventions, and their spectacular rises and falls. In our new season, we're diving into the bitter battle to own sweetness. When scientists discovered that chemicals could deliver the taste of sugar with none of its calories, sweet and low, equal and splendour fought for space on table tops, in diet sodas, and on gross restores shelves across America. But as health scares hit, and regulators came knocking, the fierce competition between the top three artificial sweeteners turned ugly. Make sure to follow business wars wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of business wars early and at free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app, or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. Let me ask you what you think of the term intelligence failure. It's been used quite often whenever we

26:14contemplate the ability for our government to predict or prevent things like 9-11, the intelligence that led to the Second Gulf War. But it's a term that's thrown around, often like fraud waste and abuse. It seems like it's a catch-all. I'm just wondering from someone on the inside, how well the job is a CIA doing? It's hard to answer because it depends on the topic. What the CIA exists to do, and this is overly simplified, but there's basically two things. It exists to conduct covert action, so to do things deniably at the behest of the president that are intended to advance US national security objectives. That's one thing. CIA is very, very good at actually carrying that out, whether the covert action achieves the policy objective, I think it really depends and quite often it doesn't work. The other side of it, which is the biggest part of the business, is how do I collect enough information, secrets? How do I go out and steal secrets? So that when I look at a topic like Iran or China or Russia,

27:20North Korea, whatever it might be, that we have an information advantage over our adversaries and competitors. That is really dependent on geography and in the issue. For example, there can be some countries where we actually have, because we have recruited human assets who are in positions of power, because we have figured out creative ways to intercept the signals inside those systems, we can have a tremendous information advantage over that government or over its institutions. There are other places that we don't have that insight, and so it's an unsatisfying answer, but it depends. I think when you get to intelligence failures, it is a word to your point that is is thrown around a lot, but basically what they come down to is either a failure of collection or a failure of analysis. Let's say that we actually don't have a lot of great sources on North Korea. I'm making this up. I don't know. But if you don't have a lot of good sources on North Korea,

28:25if you don't have the signals intelligence platforms to have it intercept, it's a leadership communications, military signals, you know, you could have a black box where we're not collecting the information that we want or we need about Kim Jong-un's plans and intentions with regard to the nuclear program. And so therefore, if something happens, we miss it, and we miss it, it's an intelligence failure because we didn't collect it. We didn't have it, right? Downstream from that, you can have failures of analysis where you actually had the information, but you didn't interpret it in an appropriate way. And, you know, a rock WMD is a great example of both of those things happening at once, where it was a failure of collection and that we had actually not penetrated Saddam Hussein's regime effectively. And it was also a failure of analysis and that the analytic products that were being put together, albeit with fragmentary and contradictory and sometimes quite lousy information, came to judgments that were not, in my opinion,

29:27you know, not defensible on the basis of the information they had. And it wasn't because they assessed that Saddam had WMD. I actually think every intelligence service, Western intelligence service thought he had the weapons. It was a question of how you caveat and sort of attach a confidence level to that judgment. So policymakers understand the degree of confidence that you have that this may be so. So that's an example where collection and an analytical failure combine to produce an overall intelligence failure. While you were at the CIA, how would you actually communicate this uncertainty or the probability of this versus that? It sounds simple, but it wasn't done inside the CIA holistically until after a rock WMD, but you attach confidence judgments to your analytical lines. So if, for example, you might take a look at the information that you have and you'd say, okay, we think Saddam has an active chemical weapons program, but we have a low confidence in this judgment because, and then you'd say, well, we actually don't have a

30:31source inside his inner circle. Or we have dated reporting on this, you know, it's seven, eight years old. Or we think he's actually running a deception campaign against us. And thus, it makes it harder to evaluate the intelligence that we have at our disposal. And so you'd attach a confidence statement to it. And, you know, of course, policymakers don't like that because they just want the clear answer, but in the world of intelligence analysis, there rarely is one. So for years, historians have debated the true impact of espionage and certainly in the Rosenberg case, whether for example, it helped other countries build a nuclear weapon or not. Or maybe it would have happened regardless just on a different timeline. Given your experience in the CIA and as someone who continues to work in the espionage business and some capacity, what's your assessment of the intelligence community? writ large. Has it altered the course of history? Is there a case for spying? I think that at particular moments in time, the right intelligence has done things like give a

31:37president insight into what's coming and then allow them to shape a national security response that has changed the course of a conflict. For example, our ability to predict accurately that Putin was going to invade Ukraine enabled us in those early days to build a coalition of partners who were committed to stopping that aggression, however they could. Has that changed the course of history? I'm not sure it's a counterfactual, but was it important in developing the response to a massive geopolitical development? Yes. You know, on the counterterrorism side, there have been numbers of attacks stopped mid-planning because of the US intelligence community or foreign partners. So intelligence, you know, sometimes spy fiction sort of paints the whole thing at a negative light, say, okay, what's the point of all of this? Does it really matter? And I understand that perspective, but I think at certain times and certain places, it absolutely has made a massive

32:38difference. And I think the biggest difference at banks is a really quiet one, which is secretly, it helps ideally when an intelligence system is functioning well. It gives our policy makers secrets from other countries, and then that enables them to make better decisions about our national security policy with respect to those countries. And that is not something that is visible to the public, and it's not something that very frequently produces some kind of earth shattering change, but it helps us day to day as we manage the national security affairs of our government. So I think intelligence absolutely makes a difference. I think it's very valuable, but I think that it's not a cure-all for our national security policy makers. I mean, it's not something that's not a silver bullet, right, for any national security problem. And sometimes, depending on the issue you're talking about, it may not actually be that helpful at all, but it just really depends on the context you're talking about. David McCloskey, thank you so much for speaking with me today

33:42on American Scandal. Lindsay, thank you so much. It's been great fun. Thanks for having me. That was my conversation with David McCloskey. He's a former CIA analyst, turned novelist, and the co-host of the podcast, The Rest Is Classified. From Audible Originals and Airship, this is Episode 5 of The Rosenbergs, who are American Scandal. In our next series, in the early 2000s, competition for spots at America's top universities reached new clients. Students and their families felt increasing pressure to stand out from the crowd, and in that anxiety, one charismatic college counselor saw an opportunity. Exploiting every loophole in the system, he claimed he could guarantee his client's admission to elite universities for a price. His illegal scheme would make him rich, but when it was exposed, it would bring down some of the biggest names in America. American Scandal is only possible because of listeners

34:43like you, so thank you, and don't miss an episode. Be sure to follow American Scandal on Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts. An Audible subscriber can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and add free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app, or by subscribing, on Apple Podcasts. And to find out more about me, including my other podcasts, my live show, the history tours I'm arranging, and all sorts of other things, go to historyishuman.com. That's historyishuman.com. American Scandal is hosted, edited, and executed produced by me, Lindsey Graham for airship. This episode was produced by John Reed, senior producer Andy Beckerman, managing producer Emily Burr, audio editing by Muhammad Shahzib, music by Thron, sound designed by Gabriel Gouw, executive producer for airship is William Simpson, executive producer for Audible is Jenny Lauer Beckman, head of creative development at Audible Kate Naven, head of Audible originals North America, Marshall Louis, chief content officer Rachel Guiante.

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