Between Two Nerds: The intelligence cult

Summary

Risky Bulletin – "Between Two Nerds: The intelligence cult"

Podcast by Risky Business Media
Date: June 2, 2026
Hosts: Tom Uren (A) and The Gruck (B)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Tom Uren and The Gruck dive into a provocative question: Are intelligence agencies akin to cults? Spiraling from a friendly jab in a previous episode, the duo examine the similarities (and crucial differences) between the culture of intelligence agencies, especially around "the mission," and traditional definitions of cultish behavior. They debate motivations, ethical boundaries, the worldview created by intel work, the importance of oversight, and the contrast with other mission-driven communities like privacy advocates and even terrorists.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

What Does It Mean to Call an Intelligence Agency a "Cult"?

• Defining "Cult":

  • Gruck struggles with the right vocabulary to describe the all-encompassing worldview within intelligence agencies, clarifying he means no negative connotation.

    “There’s this all-encompassing worldview that takes over and it’s so total that...everything you encounter has to be filtered through this worldview before you can ingest it.” (B, 01:07)

  • The "mission" becomes the primary filter through which all actions are justified.

• Mission as Compensation:

  • The drive to “do the mission” is often cited as compensation for less competitive salaries in public service.

    “You could make more in the private sector, but you couldn’t do the mission in the private sector...it’s acceptable that you don’t get paid as much because you have the mission.” (B, 03:12)

• Practical Examples:

  • Counterterrorism as Defining Mission:

    “The classic example when I was in Defence was counterterrorism. Like, that's a pretty clear mission. People would get burnt out there...” (A, 03:37)

  • Less Visceral Missions: Missions like enforcing utility patching are less likely to trigger this sense of personal sacrifice.

Comparing Intelligence Agencies to Militias and Terrorist Groups

• Indoctrination & Ethical Boundaries:

  • Tom compares classic cult definitions to military and defense departments:

    “That struck me as exactly the same as a Department of Defense or an armed forces...and those organizations spend a lot of time indoctrination.” (A, 04:47 and B, 05:21)

  • Comparison to terrorist groups: Both sides justify drastic actions (even killing and dying) for their view of “protecting their community,” though the moral boundaries and oversight structures in Western militaries are designed to limit abuses.

    “People who do that are not doing it because they want to blow the fingers off little girls. They do it because they want to protect their community...It’s just that they have a different idea of what the community is and a different idea of what they’re trying to achieve.” (B, 05:22)

• Asymmetric Warfare:

  • Different cultures have irreconcilable definitions of a “just war.”

    “When you come from, say, a uniformed military that has the idea of here’s the rules of war...and then you have a group of people who have a different vision...you disagree fundamentally on what you’re engaged in.” (B, 06:52-08:11)

Privacy, Encryption, and Other "Worldview Silos"

• Conflicted Relationship with Encryption:

  • Intelligence agencies are pragmatists regarding encryption: they need strong encryption to protect assets and to break it to do their job.

    “I never felt like we had particular roles, like making sure that Australian government encryption was good ... and another role was to break other people’s encryption...It was never, we’ve got an overriding position on whether encryption is good or bad.” (A, 10:20)

  • Privacy advocates, by contrast, are described as holding a more “cultish” absolutist stance on encryption.

    “Part of their argument, I think, is that...if you outlaw crypto, only outlaws will have crypto. And this is what I’m getting at. This is, I think, the thing of, like, this is the worldview, this is the cult position.” (B, 09:14-09:42)

• Filtering the World:

  • Gruck suggests both privacy advocates and IC people filter all input through their core worldview, a hallmark of “cultic” thinking.

Self-Awareness, Sacrifice, and Potential for Abuse

• Sacrifice and Trade-offs:

  • Intelligence professionals make conscious trade-offs (e.g., lower salary for higher purpose). Awareness of alternatives doesn’t negate commitment.

    “I think what made people leave was that they felt that they weren’t able to achieve that mission. And so things like bureaucracy and red tape and poor management...” (A, 15:54)

  • Gruck distinguishes between accepted sacrifice and obliviousness; both can still indicate cultic devotion.

• Political Neutrality and Legal Boundaries:

  • Conversation on how political motivations can creep into “national security” work, but strong culture and oversight generally keep activities within legal/ethical lines.

    “People were very accepting of our position is to help Australia. The government says that these are the missions that will help Australia. We will do those missions regardless of whether...the population thought that this was a pretty crap mission...” (A, 17:25)

  • Example of Australian intelligence carefully documenting and authorizing sensitive operations, in contrast to other nations’ intelligence services where political spying is normalized.

    “Part of the mission of the Indian IC is to spy on the opposition for the party in power.” (B, 20:17)

Ethics of Human Intelligence

• Human Intelligence (HUMINT) as "True Cult":

  • The emotional/ethical burden of HUMINT operations—recruiting people to spy, risking their lives—demands an intense personal commitment.

    “If you are in HUMINT, you have to take someone, make them your friend, and then convince them to betray their country.” (A, 25:24)

  • Example of a Soviet defector exploited and sent back home to likely death by a CIA officer convinced of the mission.

    “They sent this kid back into Russia...he’s never heard from again...they believed that what he could do there would be more important for them than his life.” (B, 24:27-24:54)

  • Balancing commitment with duty of care:

    “...the HUMINT people I know, they’ve spoken about almost, I think the words they’ve actually used are, almost a sacred bond between an agent and...so if they’re getting agents killed all the time, that’s extremely bad for business. So the example you’ve described seems almost out of character or from a different time.” (A, 26:16)

Linguistic Limitations and Takeaway

• "Cult" as Imperfect Analogy:
  • Gruck reiterates that “cult” is the best available word to describe a thought-world where everything is filtered through “the mission,” but it doesn’t quite fit the intelligence community given the pragmatic, rational-minded culture (at least in the Australian context).

    “I don’t necessarily like it. But on the other hand, you know, when we describe, like, the HUMINT or the terrorists or other ICs, you can see how it’s a cult, but I think it’s, it’s probably unique amongst all ICs that ASD is a rational group of normal people.” (B, 27:40)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the difficulty of being objective in defense and intelligence work:

  “It always felt that there was a pressing need at that time. This was after September 11th and those people were working there all the time.” (A, 03:37)

• On the IC’s approach to encryption versus privacy absolutists (who get accused here of being the real “cult”):

  “You didn’t—like, the tenet of the IC is not like, we live or die by encryption...it has to be subordinate to that, to the mission...” (B, 11:18)
  “So I wasn’t in a cult, but those privacy advocates are, which just goes to prove that I’m right.” (A, 11:07-11:16)

• On sacrifice and motivation compared to classic cults:

  “In a true cult, you’re willing to make sacrifices.” (B, 13:42)
  “In an intelligence agency, the commitment to mission, you are willing to make sacrifice.” (A, 13:58)

• On operating boundaries and oversight:

  “You can imagine an alternate world where...the culture in defense and in the whole Australian intelligence community would be, if we’re going to spy on the partner of an opposition politician, we are going to make sure that every single I is...the director would be getting the minister to sign it and making sure...” (A, 19:27-19:53)

• Gruck’s conclusion—tongue in cheek—about Australian intelligence:

  “I think it’s probably unique amongst all ICs that ASD is a rational group of normal people.” (B, 27:40)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:31 – The “cult” joke and Tom’s initial strong reaction
• 01:07-02:54 – Gruck’s definition of “cult-like” worldviews in the IC
• 03:12-04:47 – Mission as motivator and counterterrorism as example
• 05:22-06:45 – Comparison to armed forces, indoctrination, terrorists, and just war
• 08:11-11:05 – The agency’s mixed relationship with encryption, and absolute worldviews
• 13:44-15:54 – Sacrifice, self-awareness vs. true cultishness, causes for leaving service
• 17:25-18:45 – Political effects on missions, limits of obedience, examples of overreach
• 20:17-21:27 – Example: Indian intelligence, political spying as explicit mission
• 22:34-24:54 – Rationalization, CIA ethical boundaries, and true cost of “the mission”
• 25:24-26:44 – HUMINT, sacred bonds, cultural/temporal change in behavior
• 27:40 – Wrap-up and Gruck’s closing remarks on “rational” intelligence cultures

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Tone & Language

• The conversation is sharp, witty, and loaded with friendly banter, dry humor, and honest introspection, typical of the "Between Two Nerds" style.
• Both hosts are careful to clarify when they're “steel-manning” a position or being tongue-in-cheek, and the conversation is rich with examples from real-world intelligence experiences.

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Summary Takeaway

"Between Two Nerds: The intelligence cult" offers a nuanced, humorous, and insightful look at the culture within intelligence agencies, teasing apart earnest devotion to mission from unthinking cultishness. It questions where to draw the line between healthy commitment and dangerous groupthink, leveraging comparisons to privacy movements, terrorism, and the broader defense establishment, and ultimately argues that self-awareness, rules, and rational debate are critical safeguards in any high-stakes mission-driven community.

Transcript

[A]

Hello everyone, this is Tom Uren. I'm here with the Gruck for another between two nerds. G', day, Gruck. How are you?

[B]

Good day, Tom. I'm fine. And yourself?

[A]

I'm well. This week's edition is brought to you by Truffle Hog. That's the application that can sniff out secrets and identities, wherever they are, and make sure that you can keep them safe. Find [e-mail]. so last week, sort of midway through the episode, he started telling me that I was in a cult because I worked in an intelligence agency.

[B]

That's what friends are for, man.

[A]

You know, and I had a fairly like, for me, strong reaction to that. I don't think that I was in a cult, but some of the elements that you were pulling out, like, they're right, they're true. There's a way of thinking about the world. So we're going to spend this episode

[B]

explaining why that's absolutely not a cult.

[A]

That's right. Explaining why I am right and you are wrong. So let's start with what you meant by calling intelligence agencies a cult.

[B]

So the problem is, I don't know a different word that quite captures it. And so I don't want any of the pejorative or any of the like. There's no negative connotations in what I'm saying. What I'm just trying to capture is the idea of that there's this all encompassing worldview that takes over and it's so total that it, everything that you encounter has to be filtered through this worldview before you can ingest it. Right. So if you, if you're doing something and in, in the case of the ic, that worldview is like the mission, which is, it's partially patriotism, it's, you know, various other things of, you know, feeling that you're protecting other people and so on. Like, it's, it's a bunch of things that feel very good when you're doing them, I assume. Right. Like, you don't think, like, finally I can go and I can, I can read private citizens emails. This is what I've been waiting for my entire life. Right. You're there going like, you know, I'm going to do something to keep people safe in the best way that I can possibly. And it's, you know, it's, it's a tough job, but someone has to do it and whatever it is that comes through. But you, you have this view of everything that you're doing is for the mission and.

[A]

Right.

[B]

We think that that's.

[A]

We were talking about in the context of pay and that because you valued that mission, that ability to contribute to, I guess, national security, which is a bit abstract, but I think I was

[B]

going to say, like, that's too abstract. Like, I don't. I don't think anyone's. No one's doing that with national security as the thing that they feel good about what they're doing. That's just a label for.

[A]

I think it's like more protecting the country and people. Yeah, that's what I think that is. The smaller, like, zoomed in view of national security, that was definitely a thing. And I think at the discussion. And we had quite a long discussion after we stopped recording about this. Yeah.

[B]

Part of what I was getting at is that when you have the mission, that can compensate for salary in a lot of ways, because you could make more in the private sector, but you couldn't do the mission in the private sector. You wouldn't be able to contribute to protecting, you know, your community and all these. Like, you can't do that. And so it's acceptable that you don't get paid as much because you have the mission.

[A]

Yeah. So the classic example when I was in Defence was counterterrorism. Like, that's a pretty clear mission. People would get burnt out there because that really was something that it was very hard to do outside unless you were in some other government body. It always felt that there was a pressing need at that time. This was after September 11th and those people were working there all the time. And so that, I think, is an example of the type of mission that you can feel is unique to that audience. Organization.

[B]

Right. I mean, if you were on the. Making sure that utility companies applied patches in a reasonable time, I suspect that you could. You could find something just as fulfilling in the private sector.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, there was lots of different missions. That was one, I think, where it's particularly stark that you can contribute in a direct way.

[B]

And. And it's like. It's visceral, I think, because if you get it wrong, people die on tv. And that's a very. I could have done something about that feeling.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. So I just looked at definition of cult. Merriam Webster. And the first definition is a group, such as an organization or religious sect with tenets and practices regarded as coercive, insular or dangerous. Now, that struck me as exactly the same as a Department of Defense or an armed forces. And those organizations spend a lot of time

[B]

indoctrination.

[A]

Well, yes, that's true.

[B]

It is, yeah, yeah. And in a clinical sense, not a, I mean like the whole like boot camp, we tear you down and rebuild you. Like that's indoctrination. This is going to be problematic for us. But the comparison I want to draw is to like terrorist groups because that's also a life and death commitment. And the people who do that are not doing it because they want to blow the fingers off little girls. They do it because they want to protect their community. Right. It's the same, like it's the same thing that they believe as people in the armed forces believe. It's just that they have a different idea of what the community is and a different idea of what they're trying to achieve. Right. Rather than.

[A]

Well, I think the Australian and well, probably western militaries have a, you know, that's the reason you have laws and authorities and this is what you can and can't do. And things like rules of engagement in

[B]

control of the military so that there's oversight beyond just.

[A]

And I mean let's do fundamentally like I think you're right, it's about we are willing to kill people and die for a particular cause, but it's all those limits, structures, rules. They are trying to draw a boundary between what is a good cause and what is a bad cause.

[B]

Right, right, right. And so I would like both to

[A]

yourself and to the other party.

[B]

This is actually slightly interesting because it gets into one of the problems with asymmetric warfare is not necessarily just the, like, just the methods of warfare. It's that when you come from say a uniformed military that has the idea of here's the rules of war, here's how you treat prisoners, here's how you do like a stand up battle tanks through the folder gap. You have this vision of what a war is supposed to be and it's a just war and it's okay. And then you have a group of people who have a different vision of what war is. They don't have tanks, they don't have an air force. So they don't see a just war as this sort of stand up knockdown battle between two states. They can't. They see a just war as something that fits their cultural idea of like whatever it may be. Like oh, if people from outside the village show up, anything you do to them is okay because they're outsiders. And so you can have people whose idea of just war includes killing all prisoners because. Right, that's a thing. And so you end up with this, this mismatch like the thing that you're doing, like you disagree fundamentally on what you're engaged in.

[A]

Yeah. So what this makes me think of is actually like privacy and encryption advocates. So in the Taliban. Yes, exactly, exactly. In asd there was, I guess you'd call it a love hate relationship with encryption. So parts of the business, yes, encryption is good because we want to protect our interests, our communications, government communications, whatever. And then another part of the business which I was closer to was that we want to break other people's encryption because it's terrible and we hate it. It stops us doing what we need to do. And that is, I think, a very realistic position. Like it's a pragmatic position. Yet there are people in the world who believe that all encryption is good encryption and don't seem to be willing to acknowledge that it can be used for bad purposes or that maybe, perhaps this is a bit unfair. Maybe they're arguing that good encryption on the balance is good.

[B]

So I would steel man that position, saying that the benefits to society overall from strong encryption outweigh the downsides of a few bad actors having some protection. Part of their argument, I think, is that I'm going to say it feels a little bit like the Second Amendment, people saying if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.

[A]

Right.

[B]

If you outlaw crypto, only outlaws will have crypto. And you can see how. And this is what I'm getting at. This is, I think the thing of, like, this is the worldview, this is the cult position. Once with the Second Amendment, people are in the same way. They have this worldview of how things are. They have this lens and it's this adoption of the idea that we are so right that anyone, like any information that comes in has to be filtered through the how does this prove we're right? Filter. Right.

[A]

And like, I think in that example, in an intelligence agency, I never felt like we had, we had particular roles, like making sure that Australian government encryption was good was a role and another role was to break other people's encryption. I think the motto, what was it? Reveal their secrets, protect our own. Like that sums it up very neatly. But it was never. We've got an overriding position on whether encryption is good or bad. It's got uses in particular places. And so that feels very unculty. It's not, It's a pragmatic approach to the problem you've got at hand. It's not a this is a good thing.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Or this is a bad thing, per se. It depends on the situation.

[B]

Yeah. I agree, but.

[A]

I see. So I wasn't in a cult, but those privacy advocates are,

[B]

which just goes to prove that I'm right.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Not. Not surrender your parade too much. I think that part of. Part of the tenets of your cult is that encryption is a tool that can be used for good or bad, and that's it. Like, it's not a. It's not a. You didn't. Like, the tenet of the IC is not like, we live or die by encryption. Like, whether it's legal or not, that's the thing that we care about. That wasn't the central pillar. Right. Like, it's one of the things that helps you protect the community in two different roles. And so it has to be subordinate to that, to the mission, to this vision of what you're doing. Whereas for people who believe that protecting privacy is their goal, they can't have a pragmatic view to encryption because it would admit that their goal is not the ultimate correct goal.

[A]

No, no. I think you're arguing that they are in a cult, and I'm not.

[B]

Absolutely. Absolutely. That's so, like, encryption is a good one because you can see the cult, like, behavior of one side, whereas the other side is very like, guys, guys, come on, it's not that serious. You know, this is a matter of just protecting the community. I don't know why you're like, we see your position, but you have to understand that, like, that's like, that mission is subordinate to our mission. If you think about, like, ours is obviously a more important one than yours. And so our perspective is true.

[A]

You very rarely hear it framed like that, actually. But it's quite good. I like it.

[B]

And not to cause too much controversy, but that is how you get terrorists blowing the fingers off little girls. Like, that's. They come up with this view of, like, look, sometimes there have to be sacrifices made in order to achieve your political goals of a free and united New Zealand, for example, or, you know, whatever, you know, free Tasmania or a united Victorian province.

[A]

Right. So you're not specifically talking about privacy advocates. No, it's the. In a true cult, you're willing to make sacrifices.

[B]

You're willing to make sacrifices.

[A]

Yeah, right.

[B]

Absolutely right. And it's not even the, like, I'm willing to fight to your last drop of blood. Right. Like, you're not sacrificing other people. You're willing to make sacrifices yourself. And that's because you have this.

[A]

Yeah. So I guess this is one element which it did seem that in an intelligence Agency, the commitment to mission, you are willing to make sacrifice. So the people in CT you worked from tremendously hard. Many people were relatively underpaid compared to what they could get outside. And that was a trade off that people. But, but people were aware of that trade off and they accepted it. Whereas it seems to me they weren't

[B]

cheated going like, wait a minute, if I'd just gone around the street, I could have made ten times as much.

[A]

Yeah, but it seems like in a true cult you wouldn't even be aware that that is a trade off. It would just be right. We are doing the right thing regardless.

[B]

Right. Well, I mean, I think that's, that's just aspects of some types of cults.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So I don't think awareness is like this. This awareness of sacrifice is itself a critical element of whether it is a cult or it isn't.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Because if you're devoted to it, simply being aware of the alternatives won't matter. Right. Like if you're in IC doing it, if you're on the CT mission and you suddenly find out that you're making 10% less than you could if you worked for like JP Morgan, doing analysis of, you know, whether companies should move into Africa or not. Right. You wouldn't go like, oh my God, the, the IC has been cheating me all this time. I can't believe I was here saving people's lives when I could have been out there writing PowerPoint slides, deciding whether companies should do something or other. And I could have made 10% more. That is. Damn it. Those bastards, they got me. That wouldn't have mattered. I don't think that would be a thing that leads to job dissatisfaction sufficiently for them to table flip and leave.

[A]

Yeah, I think what made people leave was that they felt that they weren't able to achieve that mission. And so things like bureaucracy and red tape and poor management. But so the, you know, if you can't achieve mission, your mission goals, I may as well go work somewhere else.

[B]

All the sacrifices and things that you're willing to put up with in order for mission, Right? Right, exactly. You have something that you believe in.

[A]

So one of the interesting things I noticed while I worked at Defence was that there was very, very little discussion about political politics. Like in the time I was there, which was many, many years, I think maybe I had like two or three political discussions ever, which is extremely unusual because like that's.

[B]

And it came up because you were reading some private citizen's email and they had some really bad opinions

[A]

and there were missions There that I wouldn't have said were necessarily national security missions. Like, they had more political valence than national security.

[B]

Not that they weren't national security adjacent.

[A]

It wasn't like totally transparent, but there was definitely one political party that would benefit more from that mission being successful than another.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That's a bit vague, but I think

[B]

it'll have to do. The details don't really matter.

[A]

Yeah. And I think the reason for that is that people were very accepting of our position is to help Australia. The government says that these are the missions that will help Australia. We will do those missions regardless of whether, you know, 5, 10, 20% of the population thought that this was a pretty crap mission in terms of not the most important thing that we could be doing, not the highest priority thing that would actually help Australia.

[B]

Right. And I mean, I wonder. So, like, we talk a lot about how, like, there's these legal frameworks to keep the IC in check. And I'm not discounting that. But I'm. I'm wondering this. Probably if the legal framework sort of didn't exist, there would have to be, I suspect, some line at which, you know, where it goes from. I can see how one party might benefit a bit more to. You want me to spy on the opposition and tell you what their plans are for.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Whatever. Right. And that would be. You would understand that that is no longer a part of the mission. Like, that has somehow crossed a line that you wouldn't need illegal. It wouldn't need to be legally. Oh, that's. You know, that's dubious. I don't know if we could do that. You'd just be like, no, that's wrong. That's not. That's not.

[A]

Yeah, There was actually, while I was there, there was an allegation that asd, we had been spying on the partner of the Shadow Minister of Defense, I think it was at the time, she was ethnically Chinese. And so the allegation was that there was some links to the Chinese state and that we'd taken it off our own bet to go and spy on her. And they were all like, in your

[B]

copious free time, you're just like, hey, we're not doing anything Thursday. Why don't we just get together and go and spy on some random Chinese?

[A]

I think it's an interesting example because you can imagine an alternate world where she was and there was a justification. And the culture in defence and in the whole Australian intelligence community would be, if we're going to spy on the partner of an opposition politician, we are going to make sure that every single I is.

[B]

Triplicates will be in triplicates crossed.

[A]

You know, the director would be getting the minister to sign it and making sure. Look, the minister signed it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I'm not responsible for this.

[B]

Yeah. Every sentence and every single thing will have two lawyers. Initials right next to it to make sure that it passes muster.

[A]

Yeah. But you can also imagine in a different world that there must be cultures, intelligence cultures, where it's. Oh, yeah, we'll do this.

[B]

So this is actually an interesting thing because part of the mission of the Indian IC is to spy on the opposition for the party in power.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It's to keep.

[A]

Incredible. It's like mindless.

[B]

Yeah. And I, I don't know where that comes from. And according to a book by a head of raw, which is the right.

[A]

What was it? Analysis Wing and something like that.

[B]

Yeah. It's basically, it's. It's the CIA and the FBI of the Indian. I see. Like, they have a. A fairly broad remit that's internal and external. And I think it might also be like they do the, the SIGINT and all. Like, it's, it's very, very broad. But I was reading his book and, like, he starts out with the. Like, we're unique because part of our mission is to spy on politicians. Like, we're meant to do that. And I don't know what the historical reason for that is. I assume that it's something that they feel is justified, like comes from somewhere that makes sense to them.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. So. Okay, let me ask you a question. We've been speaking together for quite some time now. Do you think I come across as a member of a cult or even a former member?

[B]

No. So, again, I feel that the problem here is that that cult has got the sort of negative connotation, because I wouldn't even say that when you are working in defense that you were in a cult in the sense of, like, you know, wearing blue robes and, you know, huffing gas because, like, Comet Hale Bopp is coming around or whatever. Like, it's. It's not quite like that, but that you. You had like this, like this thought world, this, this, like you, you lived in this.

[A]

So I guess it would be a world where invading other people's privacy is okay and in fact, desirable for the particular purpose. And then there's this whole framework, I guess, like a Defense Department where there's rules and procedures and oversight where it's to say this is okay rationalizes all these.

[B]

Exactly. So based on this Rationalization angle, I'd say, like, for example, if you look at the CIA in like the 60s, this sort of human anti communism organization that was willing to do whatever it took to stop people from living in a communist utopia or, you know, whatever the, the mission was that they believed in so strongly. And so I've read a lot of memoirs and one of them included this guy talking about how he ended up feeling a little bad about it afterwards, like once he'd retired. But at the time what had happened was this sort of young man had somehow, like he. So the, the CIA guy was stationed on the border here, somewhere near the border. And this young man had managed to cross over, you know, however many miles of minefields and, and barbed wire and, and dogs and, and guards and all this stuff. And he had made it out. He had like a, a suitcase with like two shirts in it, and it, it made it out of the ussr and he was in this free country and he just wanted to live there, but he'd had to leave his family behind because it's a fairly arduous trick in that. And so the CIA guy was like, you know, what you need to do is you need to take this radio and you need to go back into Russia and I'll send you some tasks and you'll do them and you'll send the replies to me on the radio and here's how you use the radio and all that stuff. Here's 20 bucks, you know, in, in rubles and the chocolate bar and good luck to you. And they sent this kid back into Russia where he contacted them once with a different voice, you know, like, greetings, comrade, this is I, the person who has escaped glorious Russia. And I would like to, you know. And then he's never heard from again. And so.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Obviously they'd taken this guy who'd managed to escape and they sent him to his death because they believed that what he could do there would be more important for them than his life. Individually, it's good for you to have escaped and all this stuff, but what are you going to do out here? Whereas if you go back, you could be helping us with the mission. So, yeah, you have to believe in what you're doing.

[A]

I can't remember what the event was. There was some event I was at and I, I quite clearly remember the director of DSD at the time talking about how compared to HUMINT Signals Intelligence was the Clean and Ethical Intelligence Service. And his point was like, similar but different to that story in that if you are inhuman, you have to take someone, make them your friend, and then convince them to basically betray their country.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so that those other people again, the huminters, they seem like the true cult.

[B]

Them. Yeah, like that's obviously a cult.

[A]

And the privacy advocates and the, oh totally.

[B]

That's very cult like behavior. They're willing to sacrifice the greater good for privacy. Maybe not exactly how they would phrase it, but, but yeah, I think, I think doing human, you absolutely need to be very, very committed to this because of the like, because of the stakes involved. Right. Like you're not just like betraying your country, which is, you know, I, I, I assume that's a bad thing. It's. If you get caught, they will kill you.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Which I know is a bad thing.

[A]

Now, now to sort of counterbalance that, the humint people I know they've spoken about almost, I think the words they've actually used are almost a sacred bond between an agent and, and so they, and that makes sense actually because the, if they're getting agents killed all the time, that's like extremely bad for business. So the example you've described seems like almost out of character or from a different time.

[B]

It was from a different era. But that was like, that was not the sort of thing that would become public in the same way as like, like that wouldn't be publicized inside Russia either. Or just they would have, they wouldn't publicize the sky or whatever. Like it wouldn't become a big story. So it wasn't, those were different times. I guess the problem is that there's not another word that sort of captures that sense of like everything has to be filtered through this worldview, that everything has to fit into this understanding of the world. So I use cult and I, I don't necessarily like it. But on the other hand, you know, when we describe like the, the humint or the terrorists or other ICs, you can see how it's a cult, but I think it's, it's probably unique amongst all ICs that ASD is a rational group of normal people.

[A]

This is exactly the answer I was looking for. Thanks, Greg.

[B]

Thanks a lot, Tom.