The Trump Dump: Sources and Methods

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

You don't do the spying. You get other people to do the spying. You pay them. You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Scott LaFoy 0:27

And I'm Scott LaFoy, producer for the Arms Control Podcast and master's candidate over at the Georgetown University Center for Security Studies.

Jeffrey 0:34

So what did you think of the Trump dump?

Scott 0:40

The Trumped Up was interesting. I'm always skeptical of this sort of thing. It's basically like a raw group of human intelligence and rumors intelligence produced by a private guy, which means it's real liable to be distorted, misinformation, or just wrong. It's raw data. It's interesting, though. It was certainly funny.

Jeffrey 1:06

It was strange. Yeah, well, you know, he's the, he's the, he's the, you know, the president-elect of the United States is Peotis. He's putting the P in Peotis. Well, so I, I thought it, I thought it would make a good podcast because the public discussion of those documents. Doesn't seem to be very informed by how intelligence communities operate.

And that's something that we have to know about because we study something that's secret.

Scott 1:46

Yeah, that's generally been my reception to it too, is people seem to either just discount it entirely or accept it entirely. And there's not much analytic process going on.

Jeffrey 2:01

Yeah, I thought that was really interesting. I mean, so one thing that I noticed that people didn't really understand is this idea that, well, everybody keeps talking about it like it's the CIA or MI6, but it's a retired case officer. Oh, you know what the first thing is. People don't understand what an agent is. People keep saying CIA agent or MI6 agent.

Yeah, it's not what an agent is, officer. Yeah, because the officer runs the agents, right? You're not people who work for people who are in the clandestine service aren't spies. They employ spies. You know, it's like that, what's that great George Patton quote, you know. You know, you win the war by making some other son of a bitch die for his country, right? Yeah, you, you don't do the spying. You get other people to do the spying. The trick is to be a manager. Yes, manage that. Yes, and, and, and, and that's what this retired guy is doing for a private client, which is another thing people may not totally get, is the concept of private intelligence, which does exist.

Scott 3:28

And is a very curious and honestly a really interesting business field, industry. I'm not even sure how big the private intelligence industry is, but is a fascinating thing overall when everyone gets into it.

Jeffrey 3:46

Oh, I mean, it makes sense, right? I mean, if you think about what we study as not just being nuclear weapons, but you think about it as being public policy, the public policies that we're interested in and the people that we talk to have all kinds of insight for people whose businesses are affected by public policy, right?

Like, you know, for example, okay, the South Korean president, it turns out she's a lunatic. And... And while I certainly can't claim that I knew the full extent of her lunacy, it was certainly something that was well known in circles of those of us who follow South Korea's policy toward North Korea, that she had some very unusual habits, right?

And it was clear that there was a lot of stuff that was going on offstage. Right. You know, I mean, the reports that she would, you know, take her work home at night and, you know, would come back, you know, with comments, you know, and people were always like, she doesn't work in the office. So like, who's doing the work?

Is she doing the work? Is somebody else doing the work? And the answer is, yeah, someone else was doing the work. Right. And and so while we didn't know the full extent of it, you know, there's nothing in her very public meltdown that wasn't. Rumored, right, among those of us who study North Korea policy. And I presume that would have been pretty useful corporate intelligence, too.

You know, that there was this stuff going on. And I guess several corporations figured it out and figured out who to make the bribes to.

Scott 5:15

Chairman Lee's son, I believe, or Chairman Lee of Samsung Group's grandson, I think, just got his arrest warrant and did his perp walk this morning in Korea, Korean morning, I believe. Yeah.

Jeffrey 5:27

You know, I actually had a very similar experience like this in the early months of the Obama administration, which while in retrospect, that first year of the Obama administration will look like a model of an orderly and well thought out transition. At the time it actually wasn't right. And, and I was at this conference with people who follow economic issues.

And you know, I was talking about all of the I thought poor decisions the president was making about nuclear policy where he was basically setting himself up for what I think turned out to be the pretty unremarkable nuclear legacy that he leaves. And that it was driven by not really understanding how government works and not really understanding which positions matter and really thinking that – You're St. Barry of Prague.

You stand up on the dais and you give the speech and magically all this stuff happens. But but it doesn't. Right. There's a bureaucracy that that you have to radiate power through. And he didn't seem to know that. And I finished explaining this. And and all these people who were serious economic players, much richer than I am.

Much richer than I will ever be. you know, they just were laughing because they were like, we thought it was only on economic policy that he was like this. you know, and so it seems to me that, that, you know, that this idea that you know, that what we study it. Okay, we study nuclear weapons, but ultimately, the way I think about it is we study how governments make decisions about nuclear weapons, and that requires studying how governments make decisions.

Scott 7:15

There is an Office of Net Assessment person that has to be listening to this, just being like, yeah, this is what I've been waiting for from the Arms Control Wong podcast.

Jeffrey 7:24

Don't make me say mean things about Andy Marshall.

Scott 7:28

But yeah, there's a big systems, processes, and organizational theory type of thing that goes behind all this.

Jeffrey 7:35

Yeah, and so ultimately, you know, the thing about the Trump dump that I think is so interesting is, you know, you have a case where his – it seems like initially it was a political opponent who was a Republican and then the client shifted to a political opponent who was a Democrat, hired one of these private companies that replicates the functions of an intelligence community in terms of – Running agents, and that person went and used communications with a number of sources of varying reliability and credibility, I think, and produce this series of reports, which, you know, people are so focused on the reports as though they are a, as though they're an assessment, right?

But they're just, they're just raw data.

Scott 8:29

Yeah, it's like ore. You have to run it through a foundry to get the good stuff out of it, and there's going to be a lot of chaff you move in the process.

Jeffrey 8:37

Yeah, when I was looking at the documents, I was really struck by... The similarity to this one document that I have, which is about China's nuclear program, where in the 1960s, the U.S. got access to a guy who worked at a shipyard in China, a military shipyard. And he reported, you know, based on allegedly firsthand knowledge that China had nuclear armed torpedoes.

Scott 9:13

Right. Which would be a big revelation if it was true and a big thing to act upon, but...

Jeffrey 9:19

I think it's not true. And I have seen other references in Chinese materials that suggest that there was some discussion of nuclear-armed torpedoes. Right? And so it's not... Like, it's pretty clear as far as I know, and I think this is... At this point, we're as close to certain about this as we ever will be. China never produced or deployed nuclear-armed torpedoes.

But... You know, the fact that he was wrong, it doesn't really mean he was wrong. Like, it means he didn't have the story exactly right. Right. But we don't know what he was confused about, right? We don't know if, you know, there was some kind of test, right? Or maybe it was a regular torpedo that had been considered for nuclear.

Like, you just, you don't know. So we have this document that's wrong, right? But it's not trash, right?

Scott 10:11

Yeah, it's a valuable data marker. There's documents I use that are declassified that have the CIA making the same mistakes. I think we talked about this in an earlier podcast. CIA analysts saying, no, we're not going to get a Chinese nuclear test for years. And then getting one very, very soon after that. But that doesn't mean the document's useless.

It gives us a good insight into analytic methods, what this organization thought at the time, what they were working with, how they could be wrong.

Jeffrey 10:42

Yeah, and so it was really interesting to me to see people trying to take what are really – and there are multiple sources, right? Every one of these documents – I shouldn't say every one. I think some of them are the same people – You know, you have this set of basically interviews, right? And it's what this guy heard in Moscow or heard from people who, who, who run around in those circles.

And it seemed to me that there were, you know, any number of possibilities, right? And I, I think I came up analytically with four of them. I don't see what you think. Right. So possibility one is I have to say it for conceptual clarity. Possibility one is he's running a paper mill. He's just making all this stuff up out of whole cloth.

Scott 11:26

Just literally lies.

Jeffrey 11:28

Right. That happens, right? You have to be careful about that. People run paper mills where they know what the client wants to hear, and so they just churn out garbage that confirms what the client wants to hear to keep the money going. This is a big problem in post-war Europe, actually, because there was such an enormous desire for intelligence on the Soviet presence in Eastern Europe.

And there were so many immigrants who needed money that you had a big, big paper mill problem. I don't think that that's the problem here. Yeah. You know, the guy has a pretty decent reputation, and I would guess, you know, he probably has enough contacts that he can generate interesting information without making it up. But, you know, for conceptual completeness, one is it's a paper mill.

You know, two is his sources like the fact that he takes them to nice lunches, gives them nice gifts. And so, you know, he's not running the paper mill, but they are either inventing or embellishing stories in order to keep the whatever relationship he has with them going. Right. Which is always going to be a problem. I don't know if you've noticed this, but like.

A friend of mine says, you know, defectors are like fish. They're best fresh.

Scott 12:52

Oh, that is sad. I know exactly what you're talking about. That makes me a little bit sad. But that's something I've heard before. There's been a couple defector books that have been debunked for North Korean defectors because it turns out that they're... If you're paid to tell your story and you're paid more because your story is exciting and people want to hear it, then you may start generating additional exciting stories.

Jeffrey 13:16

Especially once you run out of the real ones.

Scott 13:19

Yeah.

Jeffrey 13:20

Well, do you remember Khadir Hamza?

Scott 13:25

I do not.

Jeffrey 13:27

Oh, he wrote a book called Saddam's Bomb Maker.

Scott 13:31

Oh, no, no.

Jeffrey 13:32

He was in the Iraqi nuclear program, but he continued to tell stories over time because he wanted the book deal. Of course he did. And in the end, the book is just a pack of lies. So you need to get the defectors when they're fresh. When they before they have run out of good stories and before they know what you want to hear.

And so, you know, you always run into that problem. And we'll get to this. None of this is his fault. Like his job is to collect this information. We'll talk about, you know, there's an analytic process that needs to be applied. But like this is just the risk you run. Trying to get information. So, so one is paper mill.

Two is the fishy defector. And then, and then I, you know, the third is that these are really stories that are going around Moscow, but maybe they're fake. Like people gossip. Right. And I mean, the joke I always come back to is people sincerely believed or wanted to believe and spread that ridiculous story about David Cameron

Scott 14:43

Having sex with a pig's head or whatever that ridiculous story was to the point where he had to deny it right it's pretty like I think this would be the actual definitional rument like intelligence based on rumors that people do believe and the sources may believe but belief does not translate into truth necessarily it's just something that may or may not be true but the sources believe it to be true and the stories may be popular

Jeffrey 15:12

And it's not necessarily a bad thing to know that a particular rumor is going around, particularly if that is going to have some impact. I mean people may choose to believe things on the basis of rumors and act on that. And if that's their operational code, right, then you need to know that. I mean – I think we're all familiar with the fact that Stalin had plenty of actual warning about the coming German invasion, but he just refused to believe it.

Scott 15:49

Yeah.

Jeffrey 15:50

You know, he had all of the factual information he had, and maybe a little closer to home, I think there was enough information to know that Iraq did not have nuclear weapons.

Scott 16:00

Yeah. Yeah.

Jeffrey 16:01

And that didn't matter because that's not what certain people believed.

Scott 16:06

Yeah, there had been a sort of a pre-decision in certain cases. And it won't, you know, all the intelligence in the world won't make a difference if the actor in power or, you know, a group of actors in power has already made their choices.

Jeffrey 16:18

Yeah, that's not hookers peeing on a hotel bed and it's not, you know... It's not inserting your penis in a pig's mouth, but it is a great example of people's beliefs affect their decision-making. And so you need to know what those beliefs are, even if they're not always grounded in fact. So that was the third, right? So it's paper mill.

It's bum sources. It's real rumors that may nonetheless be false.

Scott 16:45

And then I think the fourth is some of it may be true.

Jeffrey 16:49

Right. Maybe not the hookers on the bed, right? But there's a lot of reporting in there about the politics inside the Kremlin and the way in which different factions in the Kremlin felt about the prospect that the electoral – Gambit was succeeding and the question of whether it was succeeding at a cost that you know it seemed that some Russians felt maybe was in the long run not going to be worth it which I have to say I think is true right I mean I think that it's undoubtedly a big coup for them at the moment that this guy that they support gets elected but regardless of how much involvement they had in that You know, they better hope that there is never again in the United States of America a Democratic president.

Scott 17:48

Yeah.

Jeffrey 17:49

Because there's going to be some payback.

Scott 17:52

And just like, not passing a judgment as to what was true and what's not, Putin did get to make a statement the other day about how awful the Trump dump was and how he then got to defend the legitimacy of the American election. So, man... If it wasn't intentional, just such a lucky shot there to have a Russian president get to have a valued opinion on the legitimacy of a U.S. election.

Jeffrey 18:20

Well, what I thought was the best part was that we got a Russian president to go on record defending the honor of Russian prostitutes. Because as you know, Scott, they are the very best in the world. Yeah.

Scott 18:36

I just can't even turn on the news anymore because the statements are just getting weird and funny.

Jeffrey 18:43

Yeah.

Scott 18:45

They're just strange. Oh, and one other thing on the sort of four categories that I feel was like a systemic shift to mention is that at each of those levels of truthiness or untruthiness, to use Stephen Colbert's word, the untruth or truthiness of it can be deliberate or malicious.

Jeffrey 19:04

Exactly.

Scott 19:04

But it does not necessarily have to be that way. If you spread a rumor knowing that that rumor then gets picked up in intelligence sources, that is a form of counterintelligence. There is a whole thing of spreading disinformation that does affect these, especially in raw intelligence. Raw intelligence is, I'd assume, particularly vulnerable to disinformation. And it takes the analytic process to figure out if you're being, you know, are you being disinformationed?

Are you intentionally being misled? Can you overcome that? Or is the existence of that disinformation helpful if you can identify it?

Jeffrey 19:46

Yeah, I think that's right. And ultimately, what struck me about our public discussion of this data dump was that, you know, people were treating the reports, you know, these individual reports that are basically summarized transcriptions of meetings, people are treating them as though they are a finished analytic product. And that's... That's a mistake, right? Like, yeah, like they don't even have confidences on them. If I remember correctly, it's not sitting in front of me, but I don't, now that I think of it, I don't remember any of those stories actually having a listed confidence. Yeah, did they? I don't recall. I don't recall seeing that. I mean, I, you know, I treated them like.

I mean, I treated them like what they are, which is a kind of series of interviews of people who claim to know something about what's going on in Russia. And my reaction to that was, well, this is all very interesting. And I can't see who the sources are. And so it's hard for me to do my own independent verification.

Yep. Right. And that's not even just like... You know, I think we have this idea that verification is you trust the person, you don't trust the person. But actually, you know, it's more complicated that it's like, is the person in a position to know, you know, if the person is getting in some cases, you know, it's very clear the person is repeating information that secondhand, which like you got to do, because, you know, if it's a meeting, it happens in the Kremlin.

And there are five people in that room, and none of those five people are willing to talk to you, but one of them has a big mouth and talks to their friend Vasily. And he's willing to repeat it to you, unless you get a bug in the room. That's the best you're going to do, bucko.

Scott 21:39

Yeah. Second and third hand becomes the closest you're going to get. That's why this is ruminant and human and not factual reportage. It's reportage of people's beliefs and statements. It should be treated as such.

Jeffrey 21:52

And so... You have to then apply an analytic process to it. I actually have a very good example of that from the United States, which made me very happy. There is an article by the great Elaine Grossman, who used to write for – there used to be this thing called Global Security Newswire, which was a national journal publication on nuclear issues, which was just great.

Sadly, it ceased operation. But she had this amazing scoop, which was a story I had also heard. About a meeting. And this meeting was a meeting in which Bob Gates, at the very beginning of the Obama administration, despite the president's public no new nuclear weapons pledge, which has no technical meaning, and I have my complaints about it, but whatever, everybody, I think, understood what the president meant.

And Gates tried to resurrect the reliable replacement warhead. Oh, and and he had worked out and Clinton backed him. And, you know, and, you know, so whatever, I heard the story and the way I heard the story, even remember, Dennis Blair was the DNI at the time. Blair was like, you know, well, so I should say this.

So Biden was there and Biden is the one who like squelches it. Right. And it's like. Like, you know, whatever. Gates says that we need this. And Clinton says that sounds like a good idea because, you know, she's already planning to run for president in eight years. And Biden's like, no way. That's exactly not what the president wants.

And the world would be outraged if you do this. And I think Denny Blair was like, you know, we could have the IC do a study on, you know, foreign reactions. And Biden's like, I don't need your study. Like – Like, I know this is a terrible idea. And, you know, that was enough pushback that the idea got dropped because, you know, Gates's gambit failed.

And so she wrote this up. Right. And people denied it. People denied it like like crazy. You know, this absolutely did not happen. And I know who told me the story. So I believe it. Right. And, you know, Elaine went out and did her own reporting. And I believe Elaine. Well, like. Three years later, a friend of mine who worked in the Senate on a totally separate issue, not nuclear in any way, shape, or form, calls me up and is like, dude, I was on a conference call with his boss, a senator, and Biden.

And I was like, yeah. And he's like, Biden told the story. And so apparently Biden opens a story like, the best thing I ever did for Barack Obama, he doesn't even know, right? And it's that, you know, that, and then proceeds to tell this story about how Gates, this meeting sprung this idea, and Clinton was there, and he like jumped in front of it, and he beat back Denny Blair, and it's, you know, basically this person tells me back the same story, right, that Elaine reported and that I had heard.

And like, you know, like that's, I think, a pretty good example where like, OK, so I have an account of somebody who said they were in the room, but I wasn't in the room. I don't know that that person's telling the truth. Right. That story could be secondhand. Right. And then I have this other version of events where it's a friend of mine who's repeating a Biden story secondhand.

Scott 25:39

Right. But, you know, I I think it's true. Yeah. A friend you have confidence in.

Jeffrey 25:47

Right, but like, I'm actually translated in the parlance we've been using, a source you have confidence in, in your managerial collections, exactly. You are managing your human but you know, that's all really indirect, right? And you know, yeah, and who knows, and you know, it's, it's easier to believe because it's all plausible, right? It's not Russian hookers peeing in a bed, but it poses the same epistemological challenges, I think.

Scott 26:14

Yeah, and it's, it's, this is why the IC does confidences is because it's, you know, how good do you feel? And when I say feel, don't send me an email and say, well, we actually have, you know, categories, and we have, it's not about feelings. It's okay, I know it's how, how well do you, as an, and does your analysis generate something that you actually feel? Scott, yeah, I'm shocked that you're worried that people are going to police our language.

Oh, that's true. That's sarcasm. No, that's sarcasm.

Jeffrey 26:48

I get angry emails all the time. You said it this way. Like, I was talking. My God. Oh, people police my language all the time. Yeah, it's hard. Hard to do a podcast.

Scott 27:01

We should just forward them to the armscontrolpodcast at gmail.com and I will read them.

Jeffrey 27:06

Okay, well, so I'm sorry. You were talking about confidences. Well, I was going to nitpick. Not you, but the intelligence community. I always get in trouble with this. You know, after the Iraq debacle, they went from they added this separate confidence language, but they still use estimative language about things that are likely.

Scott 27:30

Right.

Jeffrey 27:31

And I have a real analytic problem with this. Like, if I have low confidence in a judgment, I can't see how I could say that that thing is probable.

Scott 27:50

Oh, so beyond just like, you know, fact versus possible and probable. You mean when someone gives a low confidence of a probable event?

Jeffrey 28:01

Yeah, I think one of the examples was it was probable that some nuclear material had gone from the former Soviet Union to Iran, but they assessed that with low confidence.

Scott 28:15

Yeah, that's something I...

Jeffrey 28:18

I think the word for that is plausible, right? Like, it's not really a... This is possible, but I don't... I can't say... I don't see how you go from plausible to probable if you stay at low confidence. I understand what they're trying to do, that you're trying to, you know, mitigate. You're trying to say, like, well, I don't have great evidence, but this is the most likely answer.

But I feel like some of that language is, is a little bit difficult.

Scott 28:47

Yeah. It creates its own little, like self-referential network of things being like, well, how can you be probable? Like a probability is a probability. You can't give me a low chance of 90% probability. Like, do you, does that mean that? And I mean, I guess that ultimately means like when you calculated your probability, You calculated it based on stuff you don't have faith in is I guess what that's supposed to be.

It's like a heuristic. It's supposed to be a shortcut to understanding a thing based on like a proxy variable. It's just, that's confused.

Jeffrey 29:20

Yeah. So, well, this is, but this ultimately I think gets to this big question about these documents, right? The Trump dump, which is you're going to have all this information about Mm-hmm. But I think also some of that confidence comes from the analytic process. And I think this is a really important distinction that I rarely see talked about, but I think is one of the most consequential things in the nuclear field, which is the United States has an intelligence community that produces analytic products.

That's their main deliverable.

Scott 30:05

Right.

Jeffrey 30:05

Right. Like all of the human and technical intelligence, as amazing as it is that it is collected, What I think is truly amazing about the United States intelligence community is how it then gets filtered through an analytic process that produces these judgments.

Scott 30:22

Right.

Jeffrey 30:23

In much of the rest of the world, that is not how it works. In my understanding is in Russia, they do reports. So, for example, you know, the story that, you know, you hear is there are all these underlying documents. Right. And they get summarized in a couple of paragraphs and presented to the president. Like, like that's an analytic process.

Like, so we know who this guy is. We know who the sources are. You know, this is what we can check out. This is what we can tell you isn't true. And this is our judgment about that information, you know?

Scott 30:52

Right.

Jeffrey 30:53

And, and often that judgment will be something like, well, he really does have a lot of connections in, in Moscow. And, and, and that's, you know, born out in this way. And it's also the case that people think that But regardless of whether he does or not, you know, maybe, you know, whatever, the Russian hooker's on the bed thing, that's not true, but whatever, that story's going around.

You know, something like that, right?

Scott 31:15

There's a value added in it. Like, there's an additional thing.

Jeffrey 31:19

Yeah, my understanding is in Russia, they just give them the reports.

Scott 31:23

Oh, like a raw report of, like...

Jeffrey 31:25

Yes.

Scott 31:26

Oh, no. Yes, exactly. Decision makers have to be their own intelligence analysts.

Jeffrey 31:33

Right, which they are bad at.

Scott 31:35

Yeah, which, like, there's a reason that's a specialized job.

Jeffrey 31:39

And you engage in all kinds of confirmation bias, right? And you are the kind of person who cannot easily be contradicted.

Scott 31:52

Yeah, which is a bad combination.

Jeffrey 31:55

Right. And so if you do any work with Russian intelligence estimates of foreign countries, which we do, because I spend a lot of time looking at what they say about Korea and a lot of time what they say about about China. And I've been in conversations where very senior Russians have sort of not sort of. I mean, they said, you know, this is based on, you know.

Most secret data, you know, I'm really I'm really giving you the good stuff, right?

Scott 32:18

You know, and then it's just this pile of crap, right?

Jeffrey 32:23

You know, I got I just I just, you know, and you can't interrogate it at all because it's like it's a pile of crap. And then it's like, well, OK, but like I have this technical information, like I have a picture of the missile, you know, like, you know, and then it comes back like, well, it's, you know, from one of our sources.

And obviously I can't tell you. And that's like, well, that that doesn't help me. Right. And and I think it is that straight reporting. And so, you know, from a nuclear perspective. You know, that makes the Russians really tough to deal with because they, I don't think, have very accurate views about other countries' nuclear forces. And that leads to them both making weird decisions about us, but, you know, weird decisions about China and North Korea.

Scott 33:09

Yeah, and that's borne out. And I know I have a lot less experience than you, but the few times I've had, like, contacts with Russian analysts and Russian sort of decision-making types, that pretty closely goes to what... They were all positive experiences, but it does fit that framework pretty well.

Jeffrey 33:24

Oh, yeah. They're nice, sweet people who just have terrible method, right? They have a bad habit. And that bad habit is so ingrained organizationally that, you know, it's really hard to say, well, General. I know you're old enough to be my grandfather. And, you know, there are large periods of... Modern history in which, with a word, you could have ended my life and the life of every person I know.

But I did get a philosophy degree at Augustana College, and I can tell you that is some pretty shitty epistemology.

Scott 34:05

That would be... Just try that sometime at a roundtable. Like, I'd just love to see...

Jeffrey 34:10

I did.

Scott 34:11

Oh, no.

Jeffrey 34:13

I mean, I was a little nicer about it than that, but yeah.

Scott 34:16

I would just love to have a translator turn around and be like, epistemology. No, I'm walking out here.

Jeffrey 34:22

We had a meeting, which the general contours of the meeting are public, so I can tell you about that, where we presented open source data about North Korea's programs to some Russians, and they presented their own presentations, which... We're nominally about open source data, but they kind of gave us the wink, like, yes, it's open source. We are opening the source as we speak.

So we put our slides up, and this guy starts taking pictures of every single slide. And we are like, okay, first... This is not a laundered CIA publication. This is our open source information. This is all on the website. And second, I will send you my slides.

Scott 35:08

You can have these.

Jeffrey 35:09

Didn't believe us. He still took a picture of every single slide.

Scott 35:12

I just imagine there's like in the Russian reporting field, just be like, yeah, but if I take a picture of it, print it, scan that picture. It goes into a report. Put in a report. It'll look like I spied on someone and I get a bonus.

Jeffrey 35:23

It's a report. Yep. Yep. I'm pretty sure our presentation became a report, you know, and and and, you know, like it's OK. I mean, fine. Right. But I mean, I do think that ultimately that that that's the problem. It's funny to me that, you know, in a media sense, we're interpreting these documents wrongly, but in like the same way that the Russians would.

Which is like, oh, I'm going to go through the reports. And it's like, don't do that. Maybe if you know a lot about Russia, maybe you should sit and sift through the reports and try to figure out who the sources are based on the fragmentary information that was made available. And then maybe you can reach some kind of broad analytic judgments.

But like... If you are not a professional analyst of one type or another, either the type employed by the US government or an academic or – like if method isn't your field, like –

Scott 36:31

Yeah, it's almost like it's really bad when, like, CNN or Fox is giving you an intelligence analysis produced in-house. Like, I don't have a lot of trust for the CNN intelligence analysis team.

Jeffrey 36:47

No. And, you know, I mean, I see this all the time. I mean, this is the podcast we're not going to do this week. Right. But but it does come up where, you know, I was telling you there are these documents that got released to support this idea that the Israelis sold a particular missile to the or were going to sell a particular missile to the Shah's Iran.

Right.

Scott 37:07

Right.

Jeffrey 37:08

And and people quite rightly pointed out that those documents did not say that. And as it turns out, there are other documents that do. Right.

Scott 37:15

Right.

Jeffrey 37:15

And and so but it's not about like being right or wrong. It's about like having good method, like misinterpreting a document to fit your preexisting belief is not validated by your preexisting belief being right.

Scott 37:27

Pretty definitionally circular.

Jeffrey 37:28

Yeah, like, you gotta have good method, and you gotta be willing to be wrong for the right reasons, which is a big fight I have with a colleague all the time. Because he gets, you know, he has sources in a particular country. And he's always, like, correcting me, like, yeah, but, you know, the real story is this.

And that's like, I... I wasn't in that meeting. Like, I don't know that guy. And, like, you're asking me to base my entire belief system on, like, crap you just told me. You might be right, but, like, that's not a good way for me to live my life.

Scott 37:55

Yeah. And if you're wrong with good methods, you can, you know, hypothetically, if one is an analyst, they want to be right for the correct reasons. And when they are wrong for the correct reasons... They want to be able to dissect their mistake, figure out where the mistake was, fix that part up, pack it back up, and work towards better analyses either in the future or recovering something in a new product.

The goal isn't to boost one's credibility. It's to actually have good enough methods that you're trustworthy.

Jeffrey 38:27

And, you know, along that lines, I think one of the objections that people lodge to this Trump dump is that it contains all of these salacious things that in many cases seem like they are unlikely to check out. But if he were... Like, that's a sign that he's reliable, right? He's not... Collating the, you know, or curating the information he's giving you, or he was giving his employer, the whole, the whole range, right? And, and to be a savvy consumer, the employer should have given that information to someone who then did an analytic product, and, and for all I know, maybe, maybe he did, although I, I actually like my analytic product to be separate from my, my collector.

Scott 39:13

Yeah, there should be at least a marker between the two, if not fully different reports.

Jeffrey 39:20

But I don't want the collector to filter out things.

Scott 39:25

No, you want the whole raw thing. That's not his place.

Jeffrey 39:30

It's just that the policymaker, or in this case, the news consumer, doesn't need to get the raw data. You need that interim step that we do in the United States, but that they don't do in Russia, which is you need an analyst. You need someone whose job it is to take all of that raw data, plus all of the other information that's available ambiently, right?

Like, there's other stuff. You know, like, the FBI allegedly is supposed to be checking this stuff out. Like... You know, whatever. So Michael Cohen has either said he hasn't been in Prague since 2001 or he's never been in Prague in his life. That is in principle a knowable thing.

Scott 40:07

Yeah. Someone in the United States database system has that piece of data and that's just about finding it.

Jeffrey 40:13

Right. And so, like, I don't know if it's true or false or partly true or, you know, like, but like that's a knowable, answerable question. And you can then go check it out. Right. And if he hasn't been there, yeah. Hasn't been there or at least hasn't been. I mean, you'd have to. Europe. Right. You can't can't necessarily track somebody's movements unless you are making an effort at it.

Right. Because you can travel.

Scott 40:39

You can establish confidence and a probability for.

Jeffrey 40:42

Exactly. Exactly. Like because there's like a two week window, I think, listed in the documents. You know, it's like late August or the first week of September. It's like, OK, fine. Well. Was he in the country or out of the country? You can answer those questions. So I think as I just kind of step back about all this, I understand why this person was collecting this information.

And I understand why this person was alarmed by this information. And I don't necessarily believe everything in it. And it seems to me that it's an interesting piece of this discussion. I mean, I'm clearly like, okay. You know, whoever dropped it to BuzzFeed.

Scott 41:24

Known intelligence and outlet. Yeah, I mean, they knew that they were going to humiliate Trump, right, in, in like five years, if BuzzFeed does not have a top 15 intelligence revelations, number three will shock you, as listed by BuzzFeed. Like, I am confused by the leak, but at this point, the amount of data BuzzFeed seems to be getting, because they put out another, like, a Trump associates, like, web chart thing a couple, like, I don't know, maybe today or a couple days ago, and I was like, you.

Jeffrey 41:53

What is happening this is this what it looks like when you watch a news organization you previously not respect like become relevant it's so confusing so I I'm I mean now I I don't want to distract from the pod but you know I always ask that in my talks at I used to give a talk every every year at Stanford about about new media and I was asked who reads BuzzFeed and turns out well-to-do educated people don't read BuzzFeed And it's like, so you're, like, I don't know if you're missing out, but at least from a getting your perspective across, like, you are missing out.

Scott 42:36

Yeah.

Jeffrey 42:37

Like, people read BuzzFeed. Like, the fact that you don't doesn't mean people don't. And so, you know, if you're only going to publish in, you know, if your fallback after the New York Times is a very nice regional paper. Yeah. Like, that's fine, but you would reach more people with BuzzFeed. You should just do that.

Scott 42:58

Yeah. Well, I mean, like, I think there's a really concrete example for, like, at least for domestic, you know, this isn't intelligence stuff, but, like, what was it when John Edwards had an illegitimate child? Wasn't that story broken by, like, a straight-up tabloid in the United States?

Jeffrey 43:14

Yeah. Although, I think it, wasn't it, was it the Inquirer? Which, you know, is Trump territory now.

Scott 43:20

Is it really?

Jeffrey 43:22

Oh, you know this. No, this is like a thing. No, no, the publisher, I think, is a friend. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, the National Enquirer is pro-Trump.

Scott 43:31

I haven't been grocery shopping and looked left in a while to see that particular. I also am not caught up on my soap opera deaths.

Jeffrey 43:40

I am mostly like slapping tiny hands away from candy. I don't slap hands. I shouldn't say that. I slapped a hand once and I really regret it. But this is an interesting opportunity to discuss this because we do, I think, those of us who study nuclear weapons and really study how governments make decisions about nuclear weapons do have to interact with intelligence issues all the time.

Yeah. And while by no means are we in any way, shape, or form intelligence analysts, it's a community that we have to sort of understand. And it seems to me that some of the public discussion about intelligence matters does seem a little disconnected from what I know.

Scott 44:29

I actually find MSNBC to be the number one source of intelligence analysis available to the public right now.

Jeffrey 44:40

Oh, you're awful.

Scott 44:41

Just, man.

Jeffrey 44:43

Yeah. But hey, the Slack channel's going great.

Scott 44:46

Yeah, I love our listeners so much. They are a lot of fun. I'm really glad we started that Slack channel. I'm really glad we're engaging with listeners. They're a fun bunch. And it's good because when I wanted to engage with the Arms Control Wong podcast, I had to volunteer to produce it. So I think it's a lot easier to just join the Slack channel.

Jeffrey 45:08

Yeah, you know what I feel like our Slack channel is? It's like the virtual equivalent of... Double I double S in London back in the day, or, or the Council on Foreign Relations, it's like a, it's like a cool virtual meeting space for people who care about strategic issues. Yeah, I, I've really, I've really enjoyed having, having that community in my life.

Scott 45:32

Yeah, they're a good bunch of people with very good insights and good commentary. It's a lot of fun. We're going to start putting up some KMLs and KMZs for people to play with in Google Earth and stuff. It's a fun group. Everyone go to Slack. Go to our Slack channel. It's cool.

Jeffrey 45:49

So listeners, if you like the podcast, consider supporting us through Patreon and you can gain access to the Slack channel. Or consider leaving us an iTunes review, which I think really helps get the word about the podcast out.

Scott 46:01

It does. It factually does. Just so everyone knows, that's how you get up on the iTunes charts, which auto-generates advertising via the iTunes program for us. So please do. Reviews are really helpful.

Jeffrey 46:13

Hey, Scott. Thanks for joining me. And thank you for listening.