The Spy Who Sold Nuclear Secrets to Iran | How a CIA Spy Recruiter Helped Stop Dr Strangelove | 4

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "The Spy Who Sold Nuclear Secrets to Iran"

The Spy Who, Episode 4 (May 19, 2026)

Host: Raza Jaffrey
Guest: Jim Lawler (Former CIA Operations Officer)

Episode Overview

This compelling episode brings the series to a close by exploring how the CIA confronted and dismantled the nuclear proliferation network led by A.Q. Khan—a network that clandestinely sold nuclear technology to Iran and other regimes. Former CIA operations officer Jim Lawler, who spent much of his 25-year career recruiting foreign spies and countering nuclear threats, reflects on his journey into espionage, the mechanics and moral dilemmas of spycraft, and the high-stakes operations that may have prevented a nuclear crisis. Through candid anecdotes and behind-the-scenes insight, Lawler sheds light on intelligence cooperation, personal motivation, and the future of global threats.

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Lawler’s Path to the CIA

• A chance encounter leads law school graduate Jim Lawler from the family business to the CIA.
  • “I backed into this profession by accident... I went to this interview and the interviewer, a gentleman named Mr. Bill Wood... said, ‘Jim, have you ever considered the clandestine service?’ ... I didn't even know what the clandestine service was.” (04:08–04:42, Lawler)
• Family ties and dissatisfaction with business eventually drove him to accept the CIA opportunity.
  • “I was more miserable than I wanted to be the rest of my life... I sometimes ask people if they've ever been in a family business... I bet you I can guess why, it's an F word: Family.” (05:04–05:46, Lawler)
  • His wife's ultimatum finally got him to reapply: “Do something about it or stop your belly aching.” (06:10, Lawler)

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Early Days & Developing Tradecraft

• Entry into intelligence during turbulent times: Lawler joined in the wake of the Church Committee hearings, Iran's 1979 revolution, and widespread skepticism concerning CIA activities.
  • “Not a period of good press for the CIA particularly, was it?” “Oh, no... but I was intrigued by the job... I just wanted to make something, do something meaningful with my life. And, yes, patriotism played a role.” (07:36–08:13, Lawler)
• Initial failures and learning curve: Lawler recounts his first recruitment pitch—an outright failure—then describes persistence and relationship-building leading to an unexpected success.
  • “My first recruitment pitch had gone down in flames... but at the next dinner he said: ‘That offer you made me last Friday, is that still good?...’ There’s never just a single motivation for espionage.” (12:44–14:35, Lawler)
• Discovery of the key motivator for espionage:
  • Introduction of the MICE acronym (Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego)—with Ego being the most powerful, in Lawler's view.
    • “That's the most powerful motivator at all. People do things for ego. Revenge is partially ego. You've been dissed, you've been disrespected, and your ego has been hurt... I'm like their therapist. They trust me.” (15:42–16:16, Lawler)

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Moral Responsibilities and Protecting Sources

• Obligation to recruited assets:
  • “It's one of our most sacred obligations is to protect our sources. And I mean that with my whole heart.” (17:10, Lawler)
• Lawler details efforts (sometimes reaching the level of presidential advocacy) to extract asset members of the AQ Khan network who faced arrest after serving as sources: “It was agony for me... I gave my word... and ultimately we did do it and we got them out.” (17:18–18:27, Lawler)

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Dismantling the AQ Khan Network

Formation of the Counter-Proliferation Division

• Lawler becomes acting Chief of Operations after being repeatedly passed over for promotion: “If you look up politically correct in the dictionary, my face isn't going to be there.” (19:18–20:09, Lawler)
• Division is tasked to “penetrate and disrupt the Iranian nuclear weapons program.” (20:17, Lawler)

Intelligence Cooperation with the UK (MI6) and Israel (Mossad)

• Creation of cover entities to infiltrate proliferation networks—necessitating transparency with allied intelligence agencies.
  • “I briefed both organizations and then ultimately it became apparent... I needed some MI6 help. And... we had more transparency... than any time since World War II.” (21:19–22:58, Lawler)
• Notable quote: “Better declared than dead.” (21:51, referring to coordinating with MI6 and Mossad rather than risk agent lives)

The Libyan Operation & High-Stakes Decision-Making

• Lawler managed a small team during a period of extreme international pressure following 9/11.
  • “We had definitive proof A Q Khan was going to be selling nuclear weapons technology to Libya... If we try and stop it now... it's like if you turn a light on in the kitchen and you see roaches, they run for cover.” (23:00–23:52, Lawler)
• Breakthrough came by ‘cold-pitching’ sources inside the Khan network: Lawler returned to the field himself due to the operational risks to embedded assets.
• Working closely with trusted colleagues and rehearsing every scenario contributed to recruitment success: “Confidence is everything when you go into a pitch.” (25:12, Lawler)
• The denouement: lawler describes the moment the Libyan nuclear supplies were intercepted: “There’s a picture of me holding one of these things, and, yes, I was dancing a little jig.” (26:43–27:06, Lawler)

The Catastrophic What-If

• Reflections on what might have happened had the Libyan program not been thwarted.
  • “If you and your team had not stopped Gaddafi from getting nuclear weapons, he would probably have taken those nuclear weapons and used them either on his own people or against some European countries.” (27:12–27:38, Lawler)

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Motivations and Reflections on Nuclear Threats

• Early inspiration: reading Hiroshima left Lawler determined to prevent nuclear destruction—"I hate nuclear weapons, but I would never propose we unilaterally disarm..." (27:45–28:34)
• The risk of a “nuclear pandemic” if Iran succeeded in acquiring a bomb: regional proliferation among Middle Eastern states would make a nuclear exchange or accident far more likely. (28:41–29:28)

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The A. Q. Khan Legacy

• Khan as “a combination of Robert Oppenheimer, George Washington, and Elvis” in Pakistani public opinion—untouchable and idolized. (31:05, Lawler)
• Lawler acknowledges U.S. and Western inattention during Khan’s initial thefts but explains the geopolitical realities: “There was only so much that the Agency could do pressure wise... Pakistan was assisting us in Afghanistan.” (32:25, Lawler)
• Khan “took proliferation private”—the first to transform a state nuclear program into a for-profit clandestine network. (32:31, Lawler)
• Lawler never met Khan, but respected his boldness in orchestrating global black-market deals. (33:15–33:45)
• On whether others like Khan will emerge: “You could very well have a very powerful Chinese or Russian general who sees a way to make a profit out of selling... the technology.” (33:47, Lawler)

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Broader Threats and the Evolution of Espionage

• Lawler expresses greater fear over biological warfare: There are no choke points as with nuclear material, and the knowledge is widely distributed. AI could exacerbate synthetic pathogen threats. (34:22–35:13)
• Changes in tradecraft due to digital footprints and pervasive surveillance: “You get in, you get out, try as quickly as you can and not attract attention.” (35:43–36:55, Lawler, echoing Mossad’s principles)
• Despite new challenges, the intelligence field remains a creative, high-stakes endeavor.

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On Writing Spy Fiction & Final Reflections

• Lawler now writes fiction inspired by true events—his latest novel, The Traitor’s Tale, draws from the real-life story of a wrongly accused CIA officer. (37:10–37:44)

The Enduring Importance of Intelligence Services

• Lawler explains the historical necessity of intelligence agencies, tracing their origins to failures like Pearl Harbor:
  • “I get a lot of pleasure and satisfaction out of, you know, defending democracy... It’s what I call psychologically righteous.” (38:30–39:21)
• Both Lawler and the host reflect on cycles of crisis, resilience, and the ongoing need for strong intelligence—especially with the rise of Chinese and Russian espionage. (39:32–40:23)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “When I really am focused, you know, my recruitment record is well over 90%—so I’m convincing people to do things that sometimes are really not in their best interest.” (11:03, Lawler)
• “People do things for ego... The people I recruit, again, I'm like their therapist. They trust me.” (15:42–16:16, Lawler)
• “Better declared than dead.” (21:51, responding to whether to share covert identities with allies)
• “If you try and stop it now... if you turn a light on in the kitchen and you see roaches, they run for cover.” (23:52, Lawler)
• On A.Q. Khan: “He was a national hero in Pakistan. ...sometimes I like to say, you know, A. Q. Khan was like a combination of Robert Oppenheimer, George Washington, and Elvis.” (31:05, Lawler)
• “I hate nuclear weapons...” (27:45, Lawler)
• On the new world of espionage: “You get in, you get out, try as quickly as you can and not attract attention.” (35:43–36:55, Lawler)
• “Defending democracy, defending our freedoms... It’s what I call psychologically righteous.” (38:30–39:21, Lawler)

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Key Timestamps

| Topic/Quote | Speaker | Timestamp | |------------------------------------------------|--------------------|---------------| | Lawler’s accidental CIA recruitment | Lawler | 04:08–06:03 | | First failed recruitment/learning MICE | Lawler | 11:27–16:44 | | Sacred obligation to protect sources | Lawler | 17:10 | | Joining Counter-Proliferation | Lawler | 19:18–20:17 | | Transparency with MI6/Mossad | Lawler | 21:19–22:58 | | The “roaches in the kitchen” analogy | Lawler | 23:32–23:52 | | The big win: Libyan operation “little jig” | Lawler | 26:43–27:06 | | Reflection on A.Q. Khan’s status | Lawler | 31:05 | | On novel writing: The Traitor’s Tale | Lawler | 37:04–37:44 | | “Psychologically righteous” career reflections | Lawler | 38:30–39:21 |

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Conclusion

Jim Lawler’s candid, often self-deprecating insights turn the mythos of espionage into a very human story of risk, persuasion, and profound responsibility—the stakes being not just national security, but the fate of millions. The episode closes reminding listeners of the enduring (and evolving) importance of intelligence agencies in a world where new threats, from nuclear to biological and digital, continuously emerge.

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Transcript

[A]

Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of the Spy who ad free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app.

[B]

I'm Raza Jaffrey and this is the Spy who an Audible original. Thank you for joining us for our final episode of the Spy who Sold Nuclear Secrets to Iran. We hope you've enjoyed the series as we've shared the story of A. Q. Khan and the dismay dismantling of one of the most dangerous nuclear weapons networks in history. Who knows what might have transpired if this technology had been successfully shared with the regimes bidding for it. It's a privilege then, to round off our season talking to the man who spent much of his career confronting this possibility, subverting the attempts of the players in our story to achieve their aims and so perhaps preventing a nuclear pandemic. As CIA operations officer for 25 years, our guest today specialized in recru foreign spies. He says, to be quite blunt about it, I'm expected to manipulate people, exploit people, subvert people, suborn people, convince them to commit treason, to become traitors to their countries, to literally betray a trust, and to give me secrets to which they have access. And I found out not only was I pretty darn good at it, but I enjoyed the hell out of. Gives me great pleasure to welcome our guest Jim Lawler to the show.

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[B]

Jim, hello. Whereabouts in the world do we find

[D]

you Today, Well, I am in a part of Bethesda, I think, dc not far actually from the church. I go to National Presbyterian Church, but I live in McLean, Virginia, about 25 minutes away.

[B]

All right. Is it nice to still be close to the center of the action there in Washington?

[D]

Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is. I'm only about 20 minutes from CIA headquarters. Whenever I need to go in, which isn't very often these days, but back in the day when I did, I occasionally, actually more than occasionally, I'd ride my bicycle from my house to CIA headquarters and it'd take me about 15 minutes.

[B]

Do you still get pangs to turn that way and go up the driveway of the CIA building?

[D]

Sometimes. You know, the fact that I can't run operations anymore, that's one reason why I write spy novels. I recreate operations and I live vicariously through the characters in my novels.

[B]

I've always wanted that, you know, like how you can go from such a high octane environment like that, you know, you must have had to make some pretty extraordinary decisions in your day. What does that look like for a spy after, after those years are over?

[D]

Well, you become an adrenaline junkie, you know, you really, you really enjoy it. In fact, if there wasn't any risk or danger to it, I wouldn't want to be doing it. I wouldn't be interested.

[B]

Right. But I'd love to begin with is something I mentioned in the introduction. I said that you weren't always set for a life in the intelligence services. Is that true?

[D]

Well, it's 100% true. Actually, I backed into this profession by accident. I was in my last year of law school at the University of Texas in Austin. And like anybody in their last year of law school or graduate school or business school or whatever, you're only interested in one thing, and that's finding a job. Yeah, absolutely. So I was interviewing with a lot of law firms and lo and behold, I saw a poster that said that the CIA was coming to campus to interview for attorneys for the Office of General Counsel. Because the CIA, like any large organization, needs attorneys to either keep it out of trouble or in the CIA's case, sometimes to get it out of trouble. So I went to this interview and the interviewer, a gentleman named Mr. Bill Wood, we got about a minute and a half, two minutes into it, and he said, jim, have you ever considered the clandestine service? Now, this was in 1976, and not much was known about the CIA. And so I truthfully said I didn't even know what the clandestine service was. And he said, well, I can't tell you much about it, but he said, I think you'd be good at this. So I was intrigued, and I took the application home and thought about it. But reality hit me as I walked in the door of my apartment with my wife, because my wife's mother was very ill, and there was no way we were going to move away from our hometown of Houston, Texas, all the way to Washington and then thousands of miles overseas. So I returned that application the next day, and instead of doing that, I went into the family business of steel components for metal buildings. And I made a lot of money, more money than I'd ever make again in my life. And I was more miserable than I wanted to be the rest of my life. In fact, I sometimes ask people if they've ever been in a family business, and the ones who have been and are no longer in it. I said, I bet you I can guess why it's an F word. Family.

[B]

And so, sure enough, the CIA became your family instead.

[D]

Yeah, well, after three and a half years of complaining constantly to my wife, she said, one day, she said, jim, either do something about it or stop your belly aching. So I wrote Mr. Wood a letter and told him that the timing three and a half years earlier wasn't right, but now I'd like to pursue the opportunity he discussed. And it was only a few days later that I received a phone call from a young woman, and all she said was, Mr. Wood received your letter. Could you meet him next Thursday at 3pm at the Holiday Inn on the Gulf Freeway in the lobby. And I showed up, and Mr. Wood and I talked, and he asked me to come to Washington a couple of weeks later for about three days of testing. I came back, went back for another two or three days of testing, including the psychological exams, the shrink exam, the polygraph examination. And a few weeks after that, they called me up and invited me to come to Washington and be a GS11, which is roughly equivalent to the military rank of a captain, and to become a CIA case officer, which I had no clue what that meant.

[B]

This is. This is like. This is what we took in late 70s, early 80s. I mean, late 70s in terms of the kind of reputation of the CIA. There was all that domestic surveillance exposure that was going on. It was the Hirsch reports in the Times and assassination plots with Castro. How did you feel about getting involved with the organization at that time? Were you all in for your country, or were you thinking, this is, you know, this is something I've got to Rethink here?

[D]

Well, that's an interesting question. Maybe I've always been a salmon who swims upstream. I don't know. But yeah, I mean, the church committee had been back in 76, there was a lot of, you know, the Agency was taking a lot of flack.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

Iran was overthrown and. Or at least the Shah was overthrow overthrown in the late 70s, 79. It was a very turbulent period.

[B]

Yeah. And not a period of good press for the CIA particularly, was it?

[D]

Pardon me? Oh, no. Well, we rarely get good press in any event, but I was intrigued by the job and I just wanted to get away from the family business and make something, do something meaningful with my life. And, yes, patriotism played a role. I had not served in the military. We had a strong military tradition in my family, but I had not served in the military, so I had that need.

[B]

Did you know early on that you're going to get posted to Europe straight away?

[D]

No, not really. In fact, Europe was my second choice. I really wanted to be posted to Moscow and work against the Soviet target. That was my top choice. Europe was my second choice, and I think Latin America division was my third choice. And turned out I didn't get my first choice. And that actually was a blessing because if you're serving in Moscow, you rarely would meet a clandestine asset. And my strength in my career has always been recruiting and running clandestine assets. So by ending up in European division, even though it was not my top choice, it was really probably in my life's career, it was the best choice.

[B]

Did they see that in you from that very first interview then?

[D]

That's a good question. Nobody's ever asked me that before. They. They might have. You know, it's funny, when about a year or two after I had joined the Agency, I ran into a gentleman in a hardware store not far from our house in McLean, Virginia, maybe, like I said, maybe 10, 12 minutes from CIA headquarters. And he came up to me and he said, jim, you may not remember who I am, but I was the last guy that interviewed you, and I asked you to tell me why it was so important for you to be a member of the CIA. And he said, you launched into one of the most powerful and impassioned soliloquies I've ever heard. And I knew we needed you, but what you don't know is we were going to turn you down. Up until that moment.

[B]

Do you remember that soliloquy?

[D]

I just spoke from my heart about how I wanted to serve our country, how I, you know, it would mean a lot to me to be able to pay back the many blessings that our country has bestowed upon me and my family. And I just launched into it. And subconsciously or consciously, I use something that I talk about in my books, and that's called the metaphysics, which is like an invisible neural link between you and the person you're trying to recruit or persuade.

[B]

How do you talk about this? It's like the Obi Wan Kenobi effect.

[D]

It is, yeah. It's paranormal, I agree. In fact. But I've had it come up time and time again. Where I've used it requires a lot of focus. But literally, if I go into it and you're there, you and I are going to be in a different plane of existence. And, you know, we could have fires and explosions going off and you and I wouldn't notice it.

[B]

Did you know you had that skill then? I mean, this was like, this is in your recruitment meeting. I mean, that's a heck of a thing for a 20 something to be able to do.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, but again, was it conscious or subconscious? I don't know. But I. When I really am focused, you know, my recruitment record is well over 90%, so I'm convincing people to do things that sometimes are really not in their best interest. To commit treason, you know, to betray their countries, to put their careers and their lives at risk. And that takes a lot.

[B]

Very early on, you must have experienced some failure. You must have experienced some things to help you learn how to be a better spy. Like what were those early days like in Europe? Your first postings, as you say?

[D]

Yeah, well, on my first tour, I had not recruited anybody in the first, and I didn't have any prospects on the horizon. I received a classified message from CIA headquarters that announced that we were about to engage in some very high stakes national security negotiations with a certain foreign country in the next year. And we had no sources to tell us what their negotiating strategy was. So therefore, all of you case officers, if you have met a person from this country holding the following type of position that has this type of access, please pursue that. And I had by chance met a person fitting that category. Exactly. So I called him up and we started, you know, in a sense, dating. I mean, we were having lunches together and dinners together, and I thought, okay, I can convince this guy. So I took the guy to a restaurant and it was pretty blunt. When I pitch somebody, it's pretty obvious you're being pitched to commit treason. And the guy looked at me and he said, Jim, you and I are friends, but what you're proposing, that would be morally wrong.

[B]

What was your counter to that?

[D]

Well, I just sat there and shut up. And after that dinner where my first recruitment pitch had gone down in flames, I finally got the courage up to call this guy just to make sure maybe that we were still friends. And I said, we had a good time the other night at dinner. I was wondering if we could go out again this coming Friday and do it again. And to my great relief, he said, jim, I was thinking the same thing. So I go to this second dinner with the only expectation that I can somehow apologize to this guy and smooth any turbulent waters.

[B]

Really? Really. Did you not go there hoping you can recruit this guy all over again?

[D]

Well, no, but this is not a recruiting thing. This was where I was going to be down on my knees begging this guy to forgive me, that I had misread signals and I felt terrible about it. I mean, I was really going to,

[B]

because I get the sense that when Jim's got hold of somebody, you don't let go. You're not called Mad Dog for nothing.

[D]

Yeah. Well, we got to our table and the first words out of his mouth, to my amazement were, jim, that offer you made me last Friday, is that still good? And he said, what you don't know is my wife has announced that she wants a divorce and I can't afford to pay her the alimony to which she's entitled. Plus put my two high school age boys in private schools when we go home next summer. I can't do that unless I accept your offer, even though I know it's morally wrong. And so the very next day, I met him, and he gave me a stack of maybe 5 or 6 inches of classified material from his embassy. And then I learned that there's never just a single motivation for espionage. He said, as he was handing it to me, he said, let me tell you why I'm doing this. It's because I hate my ambassador. He steals credit for everything I do and everything everybody else in my embassy does. And he goes around this country as if he's God's gift to my country, and he's not. And as I handing you this classified material, it's as if I'm kicking that son of a bitch in the face. And I took the material from him and I said, bring me some more and let's kick him again.

[B]

And this is where your MICE technique comes in, I guess.

[D]

Yeah, MICE is an acronym that they teach you at our training facility at the Farm M I C E M is for money. I is for ideology. And I've had a certain number of people I recruited who told me the reason they were doing this was maybe they hated communism or they hated their country's nuclear weapons program. And I feel like they probably are truthfully telling me that partially is true. But it's like a thin veneer on the real emotional motivations. The C in MICE is for coercion, and I will not deny that the Agency has tried using that in the past. I don't want to use it. And it's not for a moral reason. It's because I don't want somebody who's a rattlesnake in my backseat. I want to be able to trust the person I've recruited and have them trust me.

[B]

You mean there's more chance of them becoming a double agent?

[D]

Absolutely, it does. They'll desert you at the first chance if they're coerced. And so finally you come to E in mice, and that's ego. And that's the most powerful motivator at all. People do things for ego. Revenge is partially ego. You've been dissed, you've been disrespected, and your ego has been hurt. And the people I recruit, again, I'm like their therapist. They trust me. They will tell me things that they won't tell their spouse, their loved ones, anybody else. But they trust me, and they want to have a listener.

[B]

So which of those MICE acronym letters applied to you?

[D]

Probably ego. We all have. I'm not ashamed to say.

[B]

Right.

[D]

Oh, no. I had to take a 50% pay cut to join the CIA, and part of it might have been ideology because I'm patriotic. There was no coercion. Not at all. But ego. I think most case officers have a healthy ego, and I'm certainly one of them.

[B]

But did anything go wrong to the point where their cover was blown essentially very early on, and you realized that you recruited someone, it was difficult for them to exist in that country anymore. I mean, the CIA are notoriously. Not notoriously. Quite the opposite, actually. Are very good, from what I understand, looking after their own. They're unlike other security services who leave you to the wolves if something goes wrong. They're known as being very good at looking after people once they're recruited. Right, Exactly.

[D]

It's one of our most sacred obligations is to protect our sources. And I mean that with my whole heart.

[B]

Were you able not to protect anyone ever?

[D]

Some members of the AQCON network whom I recruited, and they were Arrested because they were proliferators. They really were. Why do you think I was recruiting these people? I mean, we don't recruit nuns and Boy Scouts. We recruit people that are. Have got information we need or doing stuff that they shouldn't be doing. And so we got the first couple of these three people out. But the third one, it was taking months and months and it was really agonizing for me because I had given these people security guarantees, or not guarantees, but promises that we would do everything on their behalf. And sure enough, finally, former President Bush's father, the senior President Bush, former President Bush called the President of this particular country and said, you need to let this guy go. He ultimately did the right thing. And guess what? The government said, you know, you're right. And so they got him out of prison and we were able to honor our security commitments. But it was agony for me for those months where, you know, I gave my word, I gave our director's word that we would do everything possible. And ultimately we did do it and we got them out.

[A]

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[B]

So you mentioned AQ Khan. Love to talk to you a bit about this. When did you first get the call inviting you to be part of the team?

[D]

Well, I was. It was in 1996, I believe. I had been trying for a particular position in the Counter Proliferation Division. And then when we formed Counter Proliferation Division, I became the acting Chief of operations. And three times I tried to become the total chief of operations. And I was turned down because who got the job? It was another officer. And the reason he got the job was because he was political. And I'm not political. If you look up politically correct in the dictionary, my face isn't going to be there. So I literally was going to resign. I wrote out a letter of resignation. I was holding that letter in my briefcase when I got a call from the division chief. He calls me up to his office and he said, look, Jim, I want you to do something else. I want you to penetrate and disrupt the Iranian nuclear weapons program.

[B]

At the time, I mean, you say you're not A political animal in that way, but presumably in the position that you were in, you were forced into those situations. I know with the A. Q Khan case, there must have been pressures internationally on you at the CIA. You know, the differences between MI6's idea of how we should be proceeding with this and the CIA's ideas. You must have had meetings where you were defending your position.

[D]

Well, I had to brief MI6 on what was going on because we had created entities that looked, for all intents and purposes, to be proliferators. Well, okay, MI6, there's two organizations out there that are going to have those entities under a tight scope, and that would be both MI6 and Mossad. And so I went to both organizations, told them that these, if they came across this entity, it was ours, my people were in it, and that we were doing everything to disrupt the nuclear programs, not to assist them.

[B]

2. You only have what I think you said somewhere about 10 people working on this. How did it feel having to share that information now with a whole other foreign intelligence service when you know how tight knit your group is?

[D]

Okay, well, so what happened was we had, you know, the NSA and GCHQ work very tightly together, and we got an intercept that laid out a conversation between my people in one of these entities and people inside of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization. And I look at it and I thought, my God, if I'm reading this, who else is reading this? And of course you look up and you see, well, GCHQ collected it, so, you know, MI6 is reading it. And then I thought, well, and guess who looks upon things like this out in the Middle east and will kill my people? And that would be Mossad. So I wrote to the head of the program, he was working for me that was running these entities, and I said, I feel obliged to declare this to both MI6 and Mossad. And he wrote me back a very short cable and it said, better declared than dead. So I worked together with, I briefed both organizations and then ultimately it became apparent to me that I needed some MI6 help. And so we became partners. They were junior partners, but we became partners on this operation. And I have to say, we never once in the years that we were working together did we disagree. I think we probably had more transparency between our two organizations than any time since World War II when OSS and MI6 were running joint operations together. I had total confidence in them, they had total confidence in me.

[B]

But there must have been enormous pressure on you at the time.

[D]

Not until 9 11. Because when 9, 11 happened. Then the pressure escalated considerably because we had already had definitive proof that there was, that A Q Khan was going to be selling nuclear weapons technology to Libya, and Libya was classified as a rogue nation, supporter of terrorism.

[B]

But were they not asking you at the time to, you know, there must have been the conversation about whether you had to act, I mean, to shut down the networks or let it play out and actually, you know.

[D]

But I had. I had the confidence of Director George Tenet, who appealed to his counterpart at MI6, Mr. Dearlove, Richard Dearlove, and to the President of the United States, and then to the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Tony Blair. Just let this play out because if we try and stop it now, my illustration, it's like if you turn a light on in the kitchen and you see roaches, they run for cover. And if we had done this prematurely, that's what would have happened.

[B]

What was the breakthrough for you in the case? What was that moment when you went, we've got it, we're on our way now with this?

[D]

You know, I had to. Basically, I came to the conclusion that the best way to stop it would be to recruit sources inside the network and have them stop it. But, yeah, we had to have the key people that A Q Khan had in the network. And so I had to cold pitch these people.

[B]

And wasn't it pretty rare at that time for you to be out in the field, actively involved?

[D]

Well, I had been back at headquarters at that point nine years and, you know, running this operation and other operations. And we couldn't have somebody else do it because our entities that we had in the field had contact not only with the Khan network, but with other proliferators. So we couldn't have one of them jeopardize that platform.

[B]

Blow their cover.

[D]

Blow their cover. So I had to come out of the wings, basically, and do cold pitches. But we had enough information on these people that we collected for a long time, and I'd actually run it past our operational psychologists to have them comment on what the key points I should touch. So it gave me a lot more confidence. And confidence is everything when you go into a pitch.

[B]

Must have been one of the most important meetings of your career. Were you anxious about it?

[D]

No, I actually had with me a very good friend who was a member of our general counsel, but he had been acting as an operational officer. His name's Peter Comfort, and Peter and I are both runners. And so I would practice the pitch on him in the mornings when we were running, and he would Hit me. Basically, like sparring, you know, he would hit me with every objection that he could think of. And it really helped me know, knowing that he was there. And so when we did the pitches, he was by my side. Now, you never want to pitch two people at once, but you can have a colleague there. You do the pitch, the colleague is there for support. And it worked perfectly. In fact, at one point, when I pitched the first guy and he said, could I think about it? And I said, no, if you leave this room, then certain phone calls are going to be made and I can't guarantee your security. And at that point, Peter said, look, you need to listen to him. He has appealed to the seventh floor to give you this very attractive offer. And so that's when they caved.

[B]

So I heard you did a little jig by the side of the container when the Libyans finally threw their arms up in the air, right?

[D]

I did indeed.

[B]

What was that moment?

[D]

That was wonderful. I mean, we found, you know, the containers, the five containers had more nuclear equipment in them than any time in history. I mean, hundreds of thousands of pieces of parts for centrifuges. And so there's a picture of me holding one of these things, and, yes, I was dancing a little jig.

[B]

What did you think would have happened if the Libyans had got what they wanted?

[D]

So an analyst, years later, in the year 2012, which I believe is when Gaddafi was overthrown, he came to me. I was already retired by that point, but this analyst came and said, jim, if you and your team had not stopped Gaddafi from getting nuclear weapons, he would probably have taken those nuclear weapons and used them either on his own people or against some European countries. And I thought, you know, I bet you're right, because he was so desperate.

[B]

Is that what drove you through all those years, through all of A. Q. Khan and even the proliferation beforehand? I mean, were that what your sleepless nights were.

[D]

Yes. I mean, when I was a teenager, I read John Hersey's book Hiroshima, and the thing that still resonates with me is there's a passage in the book about three unfortunate citizens of Hiroshima who essentially were disintegrated and all that was left of them was shadows cast on a wall. And I thought, how would you like to be just a shadow etched into concrete because your body was between you and the blast for microseconds, and the rest of the wall was bleached, and all you have there is a shadow. And so I, you know, I. I hate nuclear weapons, but I would never, ever propose that we unilaterally disarm because countries like China and Russia and others would take advantage of that.

[B]

Do you think my generation has become too kind of comfortable with the threat?

[D]

Well, you're probably seeing this in Iran right now. How comfortable are you that Iran could have been developing nuclear weapons? And people sometimes ask me about that. And I always tell them, you know, the thing about Iran developing a nuclear weapon is not so much the threat that that presents vis a vis Israel, because Israel, as we know, probably has 150 nuclear weapons and could wipe Iran off the map. But what I'm concerned about. What I'm concerned about is if Iran develops a nuclear weapon, we're going to have a nuclear pandemic in the Middle east and suddenly the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Turks, the Egyptians, every other country with means in that area is going to want a nuclear weapon. And then the chances of a nuclear

[B]

exchange goes up logarithmically and a nuclear accident as well.

[D]

An accident? Yeah. They don't have the same care and knowledge and experience that we have. In fact, I think it's well known that even though we don't like the fact that Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons, we have offered them advice on safekeeping and safeguards. We don't want one of these weapons going off because let's say a weapon goes off by accident in Pakistan, who are they going to assume that was from? From India immediately. And that would ignite a war on the subcontinent, a nuclear war with hundreds of thousands, millions of people at.

[B]

What did you feel when you saw A. Q. Khan retract his confessions all those years later?

[D]

Well, it didn't surprise me. I mean, he, he was caught red handed. In fact, George Tennant told me that when he basically briefed Pakistani President Musharraf in New York at the Waldorf Astoria, Musharraf's first comment was, I'm going to kill that son of a. Because there was no, no love lost between Musharraf and Khan. And George Tenet said, no, sir, we don't really want that. And so we put him under house arrest for the next five years and he couldn't get rid of the guy. He was a national hero in Pakistan. In fact, sometimes I like to say, you know, A. Q. Khan was like a combination of Robert Oppenheimer, George Washington and Elvis.

[B]

He was so popular and still is to many people.

[D]

Yeah, too. I mean, he was a healer. He was the savior of Islam, you know, and, and so. So President Musharraf couldn't execute the guy, he probably could have arranged an accident, which is what he was hinting at strongly. But instead he put him under house arrest and that was about as, as good as he could do.

[B]

Were you taking flack at the time at the CIA for not paying enough attention to AKU Khan being able to give Pakistan the bomb early on?

[D]

Yeah, they'd already. He had, you know, Kahn had worked for the Urenco. He was a subcontractor to the uranium enrichment company there that was based in the Netherlands. You know, that's a joint venture between the UK the Netherlands. And Kahn stole all those designs for the centrifuges and took them to Pakistan. But I wasn't involved. I was overseas. It was already a done deal by the time I got back. Now, one could rightfully say though that the Agency was not paying attention to what was going on. At the same time, however, you might remember that Pakistan was assisting us in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan and getting the Soviets out of Afghanistan. So there was only so much that the Agency could do pressure wise to prevent. Pakistan could do nothing to prevent Pakistan from acquiring nuclear weapons capabilities.

[B]

So you must have had a huge file on this guy by the time you were working with him because they knew about him.

[D]

It had cobwebs. I mean, it was. Yes, but what we found out was not that this was inward proliferation. He was not just acquiring it from Pakistan. He took proliferation private. And this was the first time in history that anybody had done that. And of course he had the advantage of being the head of Kahn Research Laboratory. And I often analogize, you know, if his name had been Henry Ford ii, do you think anybody that works for Ford Motor Company would question the President on what he's doing? And so Khan, he had every, all these means at his disposal to do this. Now he wasn't doing this for Pakistan, he was doing this for his own enrichment. Absolutely. His ego and his pocketbook.

[B]

Do you, did you ever get to interview him?

[D]

No, no, no, no.

[B]

Would you have liked?

[D]

I would have kind of liked to. I mean, the man was supposedly very charismatic, a networker. He was not a brilliant nuclear scientist. He was a metallurgist. He was good. But he himself was not a brilliant nuclear weapons designer. What he was, was a brilliant networker and he was gutsy. I jokingly talk about him, but I have to say I respect him. I respected him.

[B]

Is he a one off? Are there others out there, do you think?

[D]

Well, the senior levels of the Agency asked me that and said, is there another Dr. Khan out there? And I said, and probably you might look at some Russian generals or some Chinese generals that are wanting to do this for either ego or money or both. You could very well have a very powerful Chinese or Russian general who sees a way to make a profit out of selling either fissile material or actual weapons or the technology, you know, depending on what they have access to.

[B]

And do you think we're in a better or a worse place now to try and stop that?

[D]

I don't know. I hope so. I mean, you know, it's. Well, actually, what troubles me more than just nuclear proliferation is proliferation of, say, biological warfare.

[B]

Right.

[D]

You know, in nuclear warfare, nuclear weapons, you always have a choke point. That choke point is fissile material. If you don't have either U235 or Pu239, plutonium 239, you don't have a weapon. But in biological warfare, there's no real choke points, and the knowledge is almost ubiquitous. And there are thousands of people all over the world that have the requisite skills to develop a very devastating biological weapon. And now with AI, the possibilities of developing a synthetic pathogen scares the heck out of me.

[B]

I know you're not an active part of the security services, but how do you feel it's changed since you were there? Do you think there's been seismic change since you left? I mean, think about it now. Like, social media wasn't really getting going by the time you left, but how do you even come up with a cover story now? There's your digital footprint all over the world. How do you cross borders without people knowing about you? How do you start a business that's selling weapons and go under the radar anywhere where people have been looking for your footprint for years?

[D]

I'd say carefully. Well, I agree with you. And I hearken back to a counterintelligence principle that Mossad has, and that's called swiftness. You get in, you get out, try as quickly as you can and not attract attention. And about 10 years ago, there was a Mossad attack on a Hamas financier in the United Arab Emirates. There was a lot of criticism after they got in. They actually killed the guy, and they got out. And I said, look, you know, the fact is that they were caught on camera, that their alias documents were blown and things like that. And I said, well, that's a lot of that Monday morning quarterbacking. But we've got to remember the head of that team accomplished three things. Number one, and the most important thing, he got his team in and out safely all of them got in and out. Number two, they got their target, and they basically gave a signal to Hamas that, it doesn't matter where you are, we'll get you. And thirdly, it was a brilliant operation. And so what if they burned some alias documentation? That's what it's for. So, yeah, it's a challenge, you're right, but it's also a challenge for the Russians and the Chinese and everybody else, and we have to be on the forefront of being more creative.

[B]

In recent years, you've started writing novels. Can you tell us a little bit about the latest one?

[D]

So, my latest one is the Traitor's Tale, and it was based on an unfortunate incident, a tragic incident that happened back in the 90s where a CIA officer named Brian Kelly was accused of being a mole for the Russians. So I based the Traitor's Tale on a thing where a senior case officer, a very successful case officer, is accused of being a mole. And so then the novel takes off from there as he ostensibly is working for the Russians.

[B]

Well, thank you, Jim. I say this carefully because you might have been using your mind control on me, of course, all the way through this, but I do think you have the most extraordinary mind. I already do. To have witnessed what you've witnessed, witnessed through the years, and to have served as you've served through the years, it's. Yeah, it's beyond extraordinary to me. It takes real courage to do what you've done, and I'm very grateful that personally that you were there for us all, as you were. When you look back on your career and all those extraordinary moments you've been part of, and you think about the times you've lived through with, well, the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of modern terrorism. Is there any perspective that you'd like to leave our listeners with, like how we should think about the role of the intelligence services today?

[D]

Well, we definitely need the intelligence services. We were created after the disaster of Pearl harbor, where we had very little advance warning, or what advance warning we did have. It simply wasn't passed up the chain of command. And so that led to the creation of the OSS during World War II, which worked very closely with your intelligence service with MI6. And then in 1947, it was thought that the CIA, you know, we need to create a CIA because we were faced with Soviets who were threatening to basically absorb all of Europe. And I get a lot of pleasure and satisfaction out of, you know, defending democracy, defending our freedoms. And I got special satisfaction out of defeating the spread of nuclear weapons. It's what I call psychologically righteous.

[B]

I got incredible kind of comfort from something you said a moment ago, actually, when you were talking about things change, like these moments will pass. Do you feel like we've been here before, where we are at the moment?

[D]

Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, the agency went through terrible times at the end of the 70s. We had a director who fired seven or 800 people. So it's called the midnight massacre. Things go in cycles and eventually, hopefully it won't be a tragedy, which will cause whatever the administration is that's in power to see. We really need to have a strong intelligence community, but we do. And I have a lot of sympathy for my colleagues who are in the FBI. They're facing a lot of Chinese and Russian escape espionage, especially Chinese espionage in this country that are stealing our intellectual property and our research and development. It's the FBI opens a new case every day on some, you know, Chinese intelligence officer or someone working for them.

[B]

Well, thank you, Jim. That's a fascinating and incredibly powerful note to end on as well. Jim Lawler, thanks for joining us.

[D]

Thank you for having me on.

[B]

Next time we open the file on Vaclav Jelinek. The Spy who Stole a Son.

[A]

Follow the Spy who on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of the Spy who ad free by joining Audible.

[B]

You've been listening to the Spy who, an Audible original. Have you got a spy story you'd like us to tell? Email your ideas to thespywhoaudible.com the spy who is hosted by me, Raza Jaffrey. It's a Yellow Ant production. This episode was written and produced by Liam Garrow and researched by Louise Byrne. The senior producer was Jay Priest. The sound designer was Joshua Morales. Music supervision by Scott Velasquez. For Friss? N Sink. For Yellow Ant, the executive producer was Tristan Gonran. For Audible, the executive producers were Estelle Doyle and Theodora Lenovis.