Episode 56: Robert Wallace on a Career in Intelligence and The Spy Sites Series and Spy Craft

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Loop.Com hello, I'm Bob Gourley, the Chief Technology Officer of OODA llc. I'm here today with Robert Wallace. Robert, how are you doing today?

Good morning. I'm doing very well, Robert.

It's great having you here for a lot of reasons. One, you have a phenomenal career in the intelligence community. I want to talk about. Also you're the author and co author of books, seven books, including this fabulous series called Spy Sites.

These are like one's children. You can never not stop talking about them once you have them.

Yeah, your children are beautiful too, Robert. I would not say any of these were an ugly baby. So that's a, that's a great thing. Before we get to the books though, I wanted to ask about your career. That was you had a career in the intelligence community. But I wanted to ask if you would start us off at your foundational story. How did you get into the intel community?

Bob I think truth in advertising, I've had an accidental life. And the reason I am pretty sure, although I've never had this officially stated, is that I got into the intelligence community because I got drafted in 1968. I was in graduate school at the University of Kansas at the time. And while I wasn't a conscious draft dodger, I certainly was aware of the draft and I was quite happy to accept that series of student deferments that were available to us at the time. 1968, the spring of 1968. I had, of course, completed my undergraduate degree in history and political science. I was in the political science program, a PhD program at the University of Kansas in my second year. I got a surprise letter in the mail in April which said, you are reclassified 1A now, 1968. If you were reclassified, if you were 1A, you were gone. There wasn't any real question about that. Nevertheless, I came from a farm. I grew up on a farm in central Kansas. And the county draft board at the time was composed of three people, one of whom was a local farmer who was well known to our family. In fact, my father and the chairman of the draft board had gone to high school together. So I was aware that you could appeal these classifications. And I did. And the draft board said, fine, you know, come and meet with us. Which I arranged to do and talked to the draft board and I said, well, gentlemen, you know, I'm in the PhD program at the University of Kansas. You know, I'd like to, I want to get a degree. I want to be a teacher. I want to do good things for America's education. And they said, fine, thank you, please step out. We'll consider this. Called me back in in about five minutes, and the chairman of the board said, well, Bob, we've considered this. And Lincoln county this year has a quota of one for the. For the draft. And there are two people. It's a small county. There are two people that are really eligible for it. You and one other young man who just graduated from high school. He hasn't had any years of college education. You have six. And six years of college education is enough for anyone from Lincoln County. Well, within a year, I was in Vietnam. Yeah.

Fascinating.

Just to conclude that story, I was hired by the CIA after I was out of. Out of the army. And I really believe, because I had no other real qualifications to be an intelligence officer, my whole world was studying state and local government in college. But I think my combat experience in Vietnam was the, if I could use the word triggering, triggered the decision for them to hire me.

Did they come out and find you, or did you run towards them?

I was at the Fort Hood in Texas finishing up my military obligation, and I went to Austin where there was a recruiter, Bill Wood, and talked to him. Now, why did I go to the CIA? Because I had written a number of letters to several. To many different organizations in the United States based on a book I had got at Fort Hood, which said Careers in America. And it started out Abbott Laboratories, Burlington Northern Control Data Corporation, Central Intelligence Agency, Data General. It was alphabetical. And the CIA was one of those that responded and said, hey, we'd like to interview you.

That's cool. Great title for a book, too. Careers in America, CIA?

Why not? As I say, it was quite accidental, I think, all of those events. And I did read the report that Mr. Wood wrote on me after the interview. And to summarize it, it said, I don't really see any specific reason that we should hire this guy, but he looks like the kind of person who would work well in our organization.

Interesting. And then from there, what was your career like in CIA? I know that there must be stuff you can talk about because you have an approved bio that's in the back of most of these books. I see.

Sure. I had one of those kind of mixed careers, if I could call it in the CIA. Over the course of the next 33 years, beginning in 1971, I had about 13 different jobs, as I kind of can count them up, some of them being Relatively similar, such as my five different assignments, field assignments, and then a series of management assignments in Washington. The CIA career was really determined, again, more by chance than by any specific planning. I was originally hired undercover. After a year, year and a half in the agency, I joined what was then known as the Domestic Contact Service, which was an assignment not undercover. So I became an official CIA person. About 10 years later, I went undercover again and had several years undercover. Then when I became the director of the. Or the deputy director of the Office of Technical Service, I was out of COVID again. So in and out of COVID over the years. Of the 13 what I would consider major assignments that I had, two of them I disliked intently, and of those two that I disliked intently, probably both were the most learning experience that I had in the organization or subsequently. They proved themselves to be really important for future work that I did.

You know, it's interesting. There may be a lesson in there if we could examine that a little bit closer. So you get sent someplace. Probably didn't volunteer for it. You were ordered to do these jobs was not very enjoyable while you're doing it. But you left with new talent, new skills, new mental models. What was it that was good about those?

Well, rather than saying ordered, let's say I was assigned to these. The various. Various locations. The first assignment that I said was learning but not enjoyable, was to one of the domestic locations in the United States. The environment there, the management environment, was such that it just was not very conducive, I would say, to harmony among the folks who worked there. It was just a very difficult management situation, not only for me, but for some other people who were there. So that was an experience that I think gave me a lot of management lessons, both positive and negative. The other assignment that I didn't want, and perhaps the characteristic of both of those assignments that I didn't want, was I went from a job that I really did like and was doing very well in, too. As the organization says, it is in the agency's interest that you be reassigned. So, okay, that's a euphemism for many different rationales. But in that second job, that was with the comptroller's office at CIA. And I'd really had not had previous responsibilities with budgets, with numbers, although I was interested in them. I briefly worked for H and R Block back in the day, back when I was younger. So I kind of like numbers and that sort of thing anyway. But the whole process of knowing within government how monies are obtained, how they're allocated, how they're defended, how they're lost. That was something I learned in the Comptroller's office that I would never have known otherwise. In addition, the Comptroller's office gave me great visibility and interaction with the two congressional committees, the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Those kinds of contacts were again subsequently valuable in my Office of Technical Service assignment. And I have remained friends with several of those staffers from the committees to this day.

Well, Robert, I know you know the government does budgeting and accounting and contracting and all those related functions very differently than industry does. But there's some analogies that I have seen. One is whether you're in government or industry, people look at the Comptroller's office as that's overhead. We need to keep it as small as possible because we need the right tooth to tail ratio. We need more people out doing ops. So there's always this pressure to draw down on resources of this critically important function. And I've seen in too many cases in government that that that becomes too small and the people cannot really function well enough. And it hurts you long term. It hurts your strategic planning and ability to get the right resources in the right place. And I think that's very similar. It's a similar danger in industry. Companies need to cut their overhead. That's just a fact. Spending money comes out of profit. But if you don't invest in doing it right, you're going to hurt yourself.

I cannot make the comparison to industry because I really haven't worked the industry side of that equation. I will say a couple of things. I think that at least in government, this axiom that the amount of activity of any particular job expands to fill the time that is available. And in these kinds of staff like functions, that seems to be especially true. So I've long been an advocate of looking first at your staff functions as the place for major inefficiencies in organizations. Now having said that, I'm quickly going to pivot to your point about the financial end of these organizations and particularly large organizations are just critical if you are serious about getting a mission done. Because in almost every case the funding for the missions and especially in a government organization like an intelligence organization is not easily measured by some output metric. There are a jillion different non measurable values to what an intelligence organization does. And I think people are right in pushing such an organization very hard to articulate what your value added is. But the value added cannot easily be measured in terms of number of widgets and the cost per widget.

And Robert, this is all kind of building up to this position you had at the Office of Technical Services, ots. You spent seven years there. Right. Well, first, can you tell us what is the Office of Technical Services?

The Office of Technical Service at the CIA is, without too much of an exaggeration, the Q Branch of the US Intelligence community. The Office Technical Service was formed initially under a bit of a different name, the Technical services staff, in 1951. And it was the first technical component of CIA. That really comes as a surprise because during the Second World War, the OSS, the Office of Strategic Service, had a significant technical arm that developed all kinds of gadgets and capabilities for the war, for oss, for the partisans, for covert military operations. But when CIA was formed in 1947, interestingly, there was no technical component that was part part of the CIA. There were a couple of people that were around the creation of CIA, at the creation of CIA, one named Admiral deflores. And Admiral deflores was, was the. Was an advocate for creating some kind of a technical unit at CIA. It never happened until after the Soviets exploded their atomic weapon in 1949. And then people started to get more serious about technology. By 1951, I guess the time was right. And that office was created with a group of about 40 people, very, very small office. But then that, that continued then for the next 50, 60, 70 years as the Office of Technical Service.

Great, thanks. Good context. I can only imagine that must have really also been accelerated in what they do after the launch of Sputnik.

What happened really was as technology continued to expand or become more and more part of the US Intelligence effort, various components within this Technical Services staff begin to be spun off to have their own programs. So while the U2 program, that's the reconnaissance aircraft program that developed the U2 spy plane first flown in 1956, that program had its sort of germ within the Technical Services staff, but then spun off to be a program that not only developed the aircraft, but also the first CORONA satellite. That was one major example of a spinoff from the Office of Technical Service. Another spinoff was the CIA's move into Mazent, into the measurement and analysis business with the development of sensors that originally started within the technical people at ots, spun off into another major component. So the Office. The point is that the Office has been the incubator of many of the major technical programs that have then followed in the CIA and the intelligence community.

And then, Robert, you joined them when? In the mid-90s.

I joined them in 1995. I was in the comptroller's office and in the comptroller's office. Before that assignment, I had responsibility for all of the programs within the Directorate of Operations. In the summer of 95, the newly appointed Deputy Director for Operations called me and said, I'd like you to go over to ots. They have a vacancy as a Deputy Director at ots. I want you to go be the Deputy Director. My response was, you know me. My entire background is liberal arts. I have no technical skills. My wife will validate that immediately. I don't even change the oil in my car. When we changed oil in the car, there was a time, maybe you're old enough, Bob, to remember, when we actually had to change the oil in the car. He said his response was, Bob, I have 600 exceptional engineers and scientists and technician and craftsmen over in ots. You're not going over there to be an engineer. You're going over there because I know that if they develop a gadget and you understand how to work it, and it will work for you, it's. It will work for any of my agents anywhere in the world. So that's your job at ots. Make sure that what you give us as the Director of Operations is a gadget, a widget piece of system that our agents around the world can operate. Right?

And so that's fascinating. I think there's management lessons there too. This is more about leadership than the technical management. You're not creating the tech, you're leading and setting the vision for this organization.

I think that is. That's an important element of it. I think another important element is to be able to ask the right questions and, you know, how one develops the capability of being able to ask the right questions. I don't know that I can give you a treatise on that. But in most cases, the right question that a liberal arts guy can ask an engineer is not describe to me how it works, but describe to me why it works and why it will meet the particular need that we are talking about. The clarity of the requirement becomes just so critical, I think, for any of the technical devices that we manufactured.

Great, that's good context. And part of me was thinking maybe some of this was from your farming background. You need to know BS when you see it and ask the hard questions.

Well, fortunately at the farm, BS was maybe more clearly seen, more clearly identified. And some of there are people who are quite skilled in making you think in the world of bureaucracy and making you believe that BS is spaghetti sauce because it has some of the similar consistencies and appearance. But to that particular question, I think I'll go back to my experience at Fort Hood, Texas, as I was back, back from Vietnam and I had a few months to finish up with my obligation. So I went to Fort Hood, Texas and was assigned to the NCO Academy as an instructor. And my job was to instruct these NCOs in writing. Now, the army being the army, it provides you the curriculum, it provides you the material. All you have to do is deliver it. The curriculum, though, has stayed in my mind for 50 years since. And that was the curriculum was to be a good writer. There are three points. The first is clarity. The second is clarity. The third is clarity. And this certainly applied to, I think, the work at ots where the clarity of requirement was just imperative if you were to get the gadget, if you were to get to the equipment. Correct.

And this maybe is a good segue into some of the books that I want to discuss and get some insights into. But first I wanted to ask any other lessons learned from your time as a leader in the agency, Any kind of leadership or management tips that you left the agency with that you can share with us?

Most, most of these, I think have to do with common sense, but. Maybe applied common sense. One of the things that I think I realized fairly early, but was reinforced the more senior I became, was the importance of middle management or first level management in an organization. I have threatened to even try to write a book or write a manuscript along that line, because wherever you sit in an outfit, wherever I sat in the CIA, let me be specific on that. It seemed to me that our results were always determined not by strategic plans, not by motivational talks, not by papers that we wrote, but by the quality of work that was done at the field, at the analytical, at the basic level. And that work was almost always, I think, the result of effective first line management, effective middle management, if you will. The managers don't produce an organizational product. Other, other, other people do that. And the people do that at the, at the working level. When, whenever I talked with a person who was about to leave the organization, and particularly high quality people who were about to leave the organization deciding to do something else, the reason they left was almost invariably because of their management, Their first line management. Rarely was it about the job, rarely was it about the hardships or demands of the job or the amount of work, or that it was about the relationship with that first line manager. So that kind of became a key part of my thinking. And the other assignments that I had. Bob.

Yeah, that sounds so relevant. Thinking back to both my career, but seeing many other large organizations in government and in industry, I think it's a very relevant lesson for any leader or manager in any major corporation today. You can get the vision, you can see the things that are presented to the board. You can talk about it, you can invest in it. But if you don't communicate that broadly and create a vision that people can understand and collectively move towards, there's no guarantee that you're going to be able to execute on the plan.

So you might be surprised to know that I made two mistakes during my career that I'll talk about, that I'm willing to talk about. I don't know whether these are mistakes in the sense or not, but one of the things that I wished I had done more effectively when I was in that level of middle management, at the office director level, I had five divisions that worked under me, and so I had directors of those five divisions. What I realized a little too late, I think, or what I realized later than I should have, is one of the demands, one of the requirements that I should have put on those five to a greater level than I did was that requirement to show me at the end of your performance period, what you have done to help the other four divisions of ots. And conversely, I should have asked each of those division chiefs, give me examples of what your other division colleagues have done during the past year to help you achieve your mission. This is not coordination. This is actually helping other components of the same organization to achieve the corporate objective. I wished I had done that more aggressively.

Robert, I also want to start. I want to ask you more about the books, too. And first I want to say congratulations. It's just really, you've built this body of work. That's incredible. They're really great reads, all seven of your books. The ones I like the most are the Spy Sites series. But also after I saw that there's this new Netflix series, Spycraft, and it was based on a book that you co wrote with Keith Melton.

Yes.

And I saw that. I saw so many people I have met in my life and my career. You were excellent in that, by the way. So was Keith. Bob Bigman was there, John Sano, Bob Gosler. These are great, great experts in our art and craft, including people who know the history and can point us to what's going to happen in the future. I saw that and I thought, yeah, I know that book. But I realized I hadn't read it yet, so I rushed out ordered it and just finished reading it. It was a great history of the gadgets that were created, the technical approaches and the methodologies used by leaders who implement these gadgets overseas. So well done on that book.

Well, thank you for that. This was one of those which, again, I talked about my accidental life. I was with a case officer, a Soviet division case officer, while I was still working at OTS one day, and he said to me, you know, Bob, the reason we were able to prevail in Moscow in terms of being able to run operations within the Soviet Union was entirely because of what those guys at OTS did. And that story has never been told. So once I retired and was able to link up with Keith Melton, Keith said to me, well, you know, we can put that story together, because I, Keith Melton, because of his significant collection of artifacts. I have the artifacts and you have the stories. So. Well, I didn't have the stories, but I did know the people who had the stories. And in fact, it, I think, turned out to be a really significant contribution to that element of. Of intelligence.

Let me mention something else, Robert, because there's a theme that comes through in the Netflix series and also in the book, and that is that it's not just about the innovation and the technology. It's not just about applying it. It's applying it ethically. And I think that's very important to consider because our way of life here in the United States and other open, free democracies is one that's centered on privacy and civil liberties and freedom and respect for law. I see, because of this book and the Netflix series that the CIA really does care about ethics. And of course, there have been missteps through the missteps that some of them were because of ages ago. People who were leading the agency came out of a world war and thought, that's just the way you do things. Or perhaps there's missteps because there was just human mistakes. But throughout all of it, there seems to be this desire to return to what the public would want us to do. So that's a key takeaway I had from both the book and the Netflix series. And it made me want to ask you about your view of ethics in intelligence.

The ethics of intelligence has been a matter that I've given. I'd say I've given substantial thought to that over the years, in part because of my own personal Christian faith that I have have seen evident in many other officers who have worked at the CIA. The ethical basis for all of this work, for this intelligence work at the CIA is grounded on the American experience in terms of we have government for good. We don't have government for control. We don't have government for personal power. We have government for the good of our people, for a government that is one based on liberty, based on freedom, based on respect for the individual. It's in that context that I think we can work ethically within the CIA to preserve and to extend that kind of a social ethic both here at home and abroad. Right.

Well put. That's real well put. Another thing I really like about the book is it points forward now. It was written, you published it maybe 2008. So it's already deep into the Internet age. There's already this coming wave of Internet of things devices. We are unfortunately, at the time this was published, seven years into this global war on terror, and there's a dire need for more advanced technologies. That's also. I mean, the space age has already taken off, and by then you have global commercial satellite communications available to deployed forces. So it's a very technological environment when the book was launched already. So I wanted to ask you this. It's been 11 years since you published this. The world has changed even more technologically. It's an era of quantum computing and quantum security and artificial intelligence, biohacking. Is it time for an update to the book?

It well may be time for an update to the book. And Bob, if you want to do that, I'll encourage you and be very supportive of your efforts. Two points I would make. One is that while the technology has changed for every generation and sometimes has changed during generations, the fundamental purpose of intelligence, and particularly the COVID side of intelligence, remains the same. We try to determine what secrets an adversary has that would be detrimental to our interests. And we try to promote our interests in particularly, in an intelligent sense, in those areas that would be our adversaries. So those two elements of intelligence, of espionage, remain absolutely the same. The technologies, you can be assured, we can be assured that every new technology will be rapidly exploring, as rapidly exploited as possible, not only by our intelligence service, but by intelligence services worldwide. The difference of this. Of this technology that we call digital technology, or cyber, or describe it however you want, is that the technology itself is not secret, like nuclear technology. If you make that comparison, early nuclear technology was secret. The Russians had. The Soviets had to steal the technology from us at Los Alamos, at Oak Ridge. And in terms of the digital technology, however that's known. It's known to us. It's known to our adversaries it's known in the private sector maybe even better than in the, in the government sector. So that's been a fundamental change in where the core of technology might lie. It doesn't lie in government anymore. So now we're really talking about exploitation of the technology, not the technology itself.

Yeah, that really is a huge, huge shift. And I wonder what does this mean for the OTFs of the future? It seems like they're going to need to keep doing more and more outreach to industry. I see a lot of that going on already. But it seems like they'll continue to have to change to be mostly about scouring the market to see what's available commercially.

The history of OTS goes back, as I mentioned earlier, to OSS in the Second World War. And that was when the pattern of cooperation between government and industry began. And in terms of the spy gadgets that throughout the decades that followed, there has always been a very close relationship, a quiet non public relationship between industry and the design and development of, of some of these spy gadgets. You are absolutely correct in saying that it appears going forward that kind of relationship needs to be even deeper. It is compounded significantly by the fact that many private companies are now multinational companies. So how does a, an intelligence service that is really focused on America, that is US focused, how does it work with a company that is multinational? A question, Bob, that in retirement I don't have to solve.

Right. Robert, I want to talk a little bit about the spy site series too, because hands down, this is my favorite and not just the favorite of your books, but maybe some of my favorite books of all time. And let me tell you why. My favorite, by the way, is the Washington D.C. i just, I like it because, well, I live in this area. But you just came out with the Philadelphia one. So the DC one you published in 2017 with Keith, and then you followed that a couple years later with one that focuses on New York City and the spy sites around there. And then you just released one on Philadelphia. And let me tell you first why I like this series. Every single one of them. You can, if you're a nerd like me, just read it front to back. You have organized it based on time so I can read starting in the early days, go through the Civil War, go through World War I, World War II, up to today in all three of those regions and learn stories about what happened in those time frames and where in geography it was. You can see pictures of the buildings or locations of where things happened. So you can read it front to back. Or you can just have it laying around and pick it up and turn to any page and read one short story if you just have a few minutes of reading time. So that's a second way you can use it. It's also a travel book. If you plan on going to one of these cities and want to build a travel plan, you can pick this up and figure out the places you want to see if you are a spy nerd. Well, those are my reasons. I like all three of these books and I just thought I'd start with that comment. Now, with that said, the reason I like the DC one so much is, well, I live in this area and I'm able to read things. And, you know, I realized that the Congressional Country Club was one of the OSS training sites frequented by Wild Bill Donovan himself. And I'd been there to events before but didn't realize the rich history of that place. And you go there and sure enough, there's pictures of him and a statue of him and some of the stories, and it's really wonderful treatment in the book. And then another OSS training site is just a little bit south of where I live, down near Quantico. And you can go to the state park there and visit these facilities where young men were sent through before they go off to World War II. And on a maybe a worse darker note, you can also read where some of the real traitors to the nation passed secrets to enemies of the country. And you could see the hotel where they were or the bar where that was done. But just very fascinating. And I want to ask your favorite story from each of these books, but I also want to say why I like the New York book was similarly going way back to the Revolutionary War. This was the center of a lot of spying that was critical to General Washington's ability to outthink the British and understand when to withdraw and when to attack. His ability to figure out what was going on was absolutely instrumental to him marshaling his forces and able to eventually achieve victory at Yorktown. So great treatment there, but centered on New York City. So anybody who's in or going to New York can pick this up and read about the spying activity going from the Revolutionary War all the way up through the Cold War to today and then Philadelphia. I was surprised there at the rich, rich spy history going back to the Revolutionary War. Of course, I knew that's where a lot of this started, but I had no idea the depth of spying that really originated from there. It really is the birthplace of the American intelligence community, as you guys so accurately write.

Bob, I thought if I was to give that series a different name, I think it would be your Neighbor is a Spy is what I would entitle the books, regardless of which city you lived in. The prevalence of espionage, I guess at one level shouldn't have surprised me, but on another level it did, because this is not something that is really talked about too much in the history books, except as individual major cases. But I suspect that the officers, the special agents who work in the FBI are just shaking their head and they said, you know, you are so naive, Bob. Of course, all this has been going on all this time. Philadelphia. Let me really underline what you said on Philadelphia. The Founding Fathers were spies. I mean, that's what they first were. They were spies, and then they were insurgents, and then some of them became associated with the military, and then they became the Founding Fathers. You know, that was sort of the progression. Philadelphia also has to me that fascinating piece going into World War I, the years between the war and World War II, the element of German espionage in Philadelphia, that again, I just really hadn't thought about Philadelphia being both a place where the Germans looked to find and recruit spies and. And actually then a target for German sabotage as well. So that element of the German intelligence activity in the United States in the first four decades really of the 20th century was pretty remarkable to me. New York, arguably, after the creation of. Of the United nations, has become espionage central for the world. What we maybe didn't talk about as much as we could have in New York was the spying of other countries on other countries. Because of the UN sitting there and all of the countries being represented at the un there's substantial spying that occurs in New York that doesn't have or has very little to do with New York except. Or the United States, except for the locations. Washington as a book again, since I live here, just the breadth of the. The spy activities, the different kinds of spy activities in Washington impressed me. Everything you want, from collection to assassination to lovers to recruitments to technology demonstrations, all of that exists in Washington, right? Yeah.

And I is a fascinating read to me, all three of these, and I enjoy it. But now, as I read, I also try to think through what kind of lessons do these stories of spying past and present, have for business decision makers today. And I think it underscores a couple for me. I wanted to ask your response to one is, no matter what business you're in, you need to understand there's something about human nature. People want to find out what you're doing. And this could be your competitors or just people. You really need to protect what you want protected. And in this digital age, it's extremely important to protect your computers and keep them from being intruded because people want to know there's something about human nature. They want to spy. And the malicious actors will not mind breaking the law in order to steal your secrets. So that's something that just jumps out at me from the history of intelligence. Another thing is you need to understand the value of information to your own organization. Now, companies, it's probably wrong to use the word spying or espionage because that implies governmental authorities. But companies need to collect information. They need intelligence on their environment and the competitive things going on in their industry. So you need an intelligence program. Even though it is not breaking into other people's systems or conducting espionage. You need to be able to manage your information and make sense of it to drive decisions. Well, those are two things that jump out at me from the history. And I think one of the reasons I'm so interested in continuing the study of this intelligence world is to find lessons like that. Am I? I'd like your response and reaction to that.

Robert, you mentioned earlier the whole matter of ethics and ethics and intelligence, and I think this applies in the commercial world as well. Decision makers at the corporate level indeed will want to know what their competitors are doing and how do you do that? Ethically, there probably is a little different standard of ethics in terms of business ethics as contrasted with government ethics. In most cases, a business is not charged with protecting the safety and security of a nation of a large community.

Community.

The value, I think, of intelligence for companies probably relies more on the analysis of information that is legally available to companies than the stealing of information from another company. That would be my overall perspective. The world of analysis is not my background, but I would think that people who come out of that world would make a significant contribution to the business intelligence world.

Okay, makes a lot of sense. Another thing I look for when I read history is lessons of the relationship between the intel community and industry. There's a lot of that in your books too. And one that I just learned about you wrote about in the Philadelphia Spy sites book. There was a guy named Robert Morris who is known as a historical figure. He signed the Declaration of Independence and he signed the Constitution. What was not known was his work in establishing our intelligence services, including taking his own money and fronting that to guys like General Washington. An early example, I think, of showing the American industry support to intelligence Services. Now, that kind of thing doesn't happen today, but different kinds of things do. I have seen venture capitalists, for example, who have their own money to invest on whatever they think is good. And they listen to problems in the Department of Defense or the intelligence community. They invest their own money to solve those problems, to create a commercial capability that can then be sold to government. And I think in some ways these guys are descendants of this guy Robert Morris that you write about in the Philadelphia spy sites.

We didn't exactly describe Robert Morris as the evil, as the Dr. Evil of the time, but probably some newspapers would have described him as that if they had been writing his profile. So Robert Morris had a reputation that wasn't always seen by everyone as the most ethical. But Washington understood that Morris was somebody who was not only committed to the patriot cause, but also had the means to support him. That is Washington in a time of dire need. And then Washington then subsequently publicly acknowledged Morris's substantial effort. No, we can't. The laws prohibit the intelligence community from taking funds from private, private folks. Today your funds have to come through the. Appropriately, through the appropriations process. But I'll just. If you have a moment, just one example. While I was director of the Office of Technical Service, we had a technical project that was, was running over budget. It was really an important one. We weren't quite sure if we could close the gap, the technical gap that we needed. Senior management decided that they would not fund the project anymore because it wasn't going to. Going to succeed. I was on the other side of that equation, as was one of my senior engineers. And he said, look, the company we're working for, they are so close, working with, are so close to getting this done. We really need to continue it. I met with the CEO of the company and I said, so here's our situation. The folks, they're not going to continue to fund this project for the next six months when we think that we could close the technical problem. If the technical problem is closed, I'm speaking for myself, I'm certain that we will want to order a good quantity of these projects, of these, these gadgets. And he said, I understand. And he said, we'll see what we can do. And so for the next six months he operated, continued that project with no assurance that he would ever be compensated for the work that he's done and that he did. In fact, it came out exactly as we, as we had hoped, and I would add, became a critical piece of technology for the prosecution of the war on terrorism.

After 911 yeah, see, that's great. And that is a. That underscores the point of how important it is to be able to work with industry. And it comes back also to our discussion throughout this of ethics. Having a good ethical background must make that so much easier to have that kind of dialogue. People know you and trust you and can have that kind of conversation, I.

Think so if you have a shared ethical background and ethics is very complicated, as you know, and you know, there's an element of cultural reality in ethics as well, as well as just how would I say, you know, individual perceptions.

ROBERT in our remaining few minutes, I wanted to ask another question, if that's all right. I just. You write so many books. You must read all the time. I wanted to ask what else you've been reading lately or if you have any books you could recommend to us to that you think would be helpful for us to learn more about the intelligence community or protecting secrets or leadership or management.

I have thought that given the sort of, how would I say, controversial times in which we live, there are folks who see matters kind of completely differently and there's not necessarily the middle ground or compromise that maybe some of us thought in the past was better than it is today. I don't know whether that's true or not. We tend to forget history that doesn't sort of conform to our own preconceptions. The answer to your question is yes. One book that I would recommend that everyone read is by the late Dr. Jerry Harvey, who was a professor at George. At the George Washington University. It is entitled how come Every Time I Get Stabbed in the Back My Fingerprints Are on the Knife? It is a wonderfully insightful set of. Of essays about how we deflect responsibility from ourselves, how we so easily assign blame to another party or another person, and how dysfunctional that makes our relationships going forward. So how come Every Time I get Stabbed in the Back, My Fingerprints Are on the Knife? By Jerry.

That's a good one. I'll look that up and make sure we have a link to that in.

Our show Notes, a second book that I read many years ago, and more for the concept of the book than for any specific how to within the book is one by Tom Peters, best known for In Search of Excellence, that was written in the mid-1980s, but he followed up that up with a book called Thriving on Chaos. And I found the Thriving on Chaos concept and some of the ideas that he presents there to be incredibly valuable in whatever job I had because most of them seem chaotic or if you would. Or at one point or another, they would devolve into chaos. So it's not, Peters argues, not the matter of chaos is bad, but chaos is reality.

I love that book too, Robert.

How do you survive in that kind of. Or how do you thrive in that kind of environment?

Let me mention one of the things I like about the book so much is Peters mentions the OODA Loop, which of course, we named our company as an homage to this OODA concept of Colonel John Boyd. Boyd and Peters had meetings and discussions, and it was wonderful learning that Boyd, this creator of the OODA Loop, had this influence on Peters and was referenced in Thriving on Chaos.

A third book that I have recently read. Actually, it's not. It hasn't been published yet. It's a book that will be published in, I believe, in April or May of this year. It's by Dr. Eric Cole. It's called Cyber Crisis. Now, I could have given Eric a little help with naming the book, I think, because Cyber Crisis. Oh, man, you know, this is some geek story. No, not at all. Dr. Cole is remarkable in his ability to articulate the challenges of living in this cyber environment in a way that even a liberal arts guy like myself can understand. Eric both explains the situation, the circumstances that we were in, and he also suggests, again, a way for us to work within that. Work productively and confidently within that environment. So it's called cyber crisis, Eric. Dr. Eric Cole.

Yeah, thanks for that introduction and endorsement of that book, because I did hear it's coming out and I know Eric, I think the world of him said, highly regarded professional, extremely smart, and smart as a practitioner too, so really knows how to defend enterprises. And I look forward to that book as well.

My final suggestion, and this is one that belies my background, I suppose a bit, as a historian, but, you know, we always tend to think that our circumstances are the best ever or are the worst ever. And an author by the name of Eric Larson published a book a couple of years ago called the Splendid and the Vile. This is an account of Churchill during the winter, during the fall and winter of 1940, and then the winter and spring of 1941, with England being bombed nightly daily by the Germans and the uncertainty of what was going to happen in this war, America was still on the sidelines. And I just thought, particularly at Christmas time last year, things are tough here with coronavirus and all of those, with the election controversies. Well, you know, things were really, really bad in England in 1940, and literally people didn't know whether they were going to survive or whether their nation was going to survive. And I thought the historical context of being reminded that people have faced equally difficult and anxiety ridden times before is just a real reminder of our humanity and our linkage with history.

Robert that's very well put. And that's another good one I'm going to have to dig up and read myself. That sounds really, really good. I've thought of Churchill myself. As we've looked through the past almost a year now, this pandemic, being with us and wishing that we had a global leader like that who could express things in ways that brought everybody together to move forward in this mess. So we'll definitely, definitely read this one. Well, Robert, I appreciate the time. Today we covered a lot. We covered your background and foundational stories, some of your management lessons learned from the CIA, a bit about this fascinating office of ots. We talked about your books, especially my favorite the Spy Site series. And through that I just personally really wanted to say I appreciate what you've done and look forward to your next book whenever that comes out. And Robert, thank you very much for this.

I really appreciate has been an honor to be invited and to be your guest. Thank you Bob. Thanks for listening to this Ooda Loop production. For the latest analysis on cybersecurity technology and global risks, please visit www.ooda loop.com.