Julian Fisher (107:42)
Because I try to find stories from my personal life and then from my professional life which illustrate the principles principles that I outlined, which are the principles being the the agent recruitment cycle. So targeting culture, targeting, use of COVID cultivation, elicitation, assessment and motivations, recruitment, debrief and detection of deception and use of tradecraft, obscure running. So I sort of go through the the nine separate skills that are involved in the recruitment of an agent and the running of an agent in a secure way. And in each of them I try to tell a story which is relevant both for my personal life to show how it can be applied in non intelligence settings and then from professional life. And there's one particular one which is I think shows the power of targeting. And that's when I was in Zimbabwe, Harare, and this was Shortly after the 2008 election, which had been particularly bloody. I mean it had been, you know, I think it's fair to say that it was probably one of the most violent elections Zimbabwe ever had to deal with. And I Was visiting for various reasons. But one of the things I wanted to do was to see a friend of mine. And that friend was a senior figure in Zanu pf. Zanu PF been the ruling party in Zimbabwe. And Zanu PF had its headquarters, I kid you not, on a street called Rotten Row in Harare. And I went down to Rotten Row and my friend's office was on pretty much the top floor. Not quite top floor, sort of third one down of this. Not quite a skyscraper, but nine floors or whatever. And I went and met him. We'd known each other, evolved, let's put it like that. We had a good catch up. We had tea and cake and warm Fanta, all the things that you expect when meeting a senior African official. And then as I came out, I was thinking about taking the steps down because I can be a little bit claustrophobic. But the lights in the stairwell were out. So I thought, well, I better, I'll just jump, you know, Hell, it's only a short ride in the elevator. So I waited for the elevator to arrive. Doors opened, nobody in there. Get in. Went down one story and the doors opens. Two gentlemen in suits, quite tatty suits, but suits nonetheless. Got in. I thought, okay, that's good. At least I've got some company if we get trapped and I have to spend half a day here because, let's put like this, they wouldn't have engineers out very, very quickly. And an electrical cutouts are quite common at that point in Zim. But at least I'd have some company. But then behind them in trooped a group of God knows how many Zanu PF Youth Leaguers. Now Designer PF Youth League. They use the word youth in a fairly loose sense. So it was anybody sort of under 40 really. And one of their roles, apart from organizing community events and football games was beating up the opposition. So they would often get groups of youth leaguers together to go down to opposition rallies and knock heads together. One of their favored weapons was one of those curved blades. Conjure pangas. Yeah. Which have been used. I mean, you see those in use of cutting hedges. But they were also very frequently used in the, the Rwandan genocide. So that's quite chilling weapon to see in somebody's hand. And there were a lot of them in the hands of these youth leaguers as they climbed it. And they were all high as kites or drunk. I could smell this evil local brew on their breath. So I was like, you know, this is, I think probably advisable if I just keep Myself, to myself here. I don't want to draw any attention to myself. So sort of shrunk into the corner, doors closed, we went down about half a floor, and suddenly the weight was too much and the whole thing jutted to a halt. And then the lights went out. So we were there in pitch dark, surrounded by these youth leaguers. And given my claustrophobia, I thought, I just need to have some light. So I had, again, fairly rudimentary foam, but there was a little torch thing at the top of it, so I put that on just so I could see what was going on. And of course, I, in so doing, did that thing which I said I shouldn't do, which is draw attention to myself. So suddenly there's this whole group of slightly inebriated, or rather inebriated youth leaguers branching their pangas and looking. I mean, they weren't branching. They. The place was packed, so they wouldn't have been able to brandish, but they were sort of, you know, chaining their eyes on me and wanted to know who I was and what I was doing. And it's important to understand at this point, Britain was not well regarded in Zimbabwe government circles. And so, in fact, we were the. We had been put up as the bogeyman. Yeah, the former British colony politics, Former British colony, all of that stuff. So there was a lot of question about, what is this British man doing here? You know, are you spying? Who are you going to. You know, all this stuff, the usual stuff. And so I thought, well, okay, I need to do. I can't say I need to do. I thought I need to do what Mayor taught me to do, which is to find an ally. But by this point, it was. It was almost ingrained that I would look for allies and I would look target. So I scanned around and of course, the two. Very quickly it occurred to me there's only two people that I'm actually going to be able to engage with here in any meaningful way other than conflict. And that's the two gentlemen wearing suits. And I thought also given that they're wearing suits, they're quite likely to be quite senior, so there might be some deference shown to them. So I needed to find a way of engaging with. With them. And I noticed on the lapel of one of the two, he had a. A little enamel badge, and it just said United. And I worked out that that must be Manchester United. It must be sort of half a broken badge. Half a badge for Manchester United. And because I knew that British soccer was immensely popular in that part of the world. And I knew that the most popular team was Manchester United. So I was able to work out, that must be who we're talking about here. So I sort of looked over to him, caught his eye, and I just simply said I had no idea whether there had been a recent game or not. But I took a gamble. I just said, how was the game the other night? And there was this, like, pause. Everybody sort of looked at him, and then he laughed and he said, oh, yeah, it was great, but, you know, Rooney could have played better. You know, he's one of the best players in the world. And then somebody else said, from the youth league, no, no, no, it's not Rooney. Rooney's not the greatest. Ronaldo's the greatest. And suddenly we were into a debate about something I know nothing about, which is soccer. I just learned literally nothing about it. I think. I don't think I've ever seen. Maybe I might have seen a couple of matches of the World cup or something on occasion, but it's just not something I know anything about. But it was my gamble to say, you know, tell me about the game the other night worked, and it got the whole debate going about soccer and drew all the attention away from me. And by the time he got. We got moving again, which wasn't actually as long as I feared. It was about sort of half an hour to an hour later or so. I'd actually made quite good friends with the. The guy who was wearing the United badge, and he went on to become quite. We stayed in touch, and he became quite a powerful, useful source of mind. So that was a. That was a miniature example of using targeting in the moment. It's. And the lesson in there is you're looking for something with. Which matters to somebody else on which you can engage them. And the really key point is you don't necessarily. You don't have to be an expert, because guess what? People who are experts on their subjects that fascinate them are very happy to tell you their view. So you can spark a conversation. If you've got your targeted learn right, you can come. You can win a. Win an ally, win over an ally relatively easily by appealing to their areas of interest and asking them to educate you. And that's something which I found fairly common across Africa, actually. You know, there's a. Africa is a very, very diverse place. So I always hesitate to generalize. But I think I'm right to say, generally, Africans are incredibly welcoming, and they are very eager, usually, to help. Of course, it's not always the case and sometimes it goes very badly wrong. But I found appealing. Finding out what your interlocutor is interested in and asking them to talk to you about it is a very powerful technique. Not just in Africa for of course, but it seemed to work particularly powerfully in Africa because of that sense of wanting to educate, wanting to help, wanting to support and wanting to be welcoming.