The content of Dark Areas includes topics and subject matter that may not be suitable for all audiences. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast and do not represent those of AudioChuck or its employees. Information discussed by the host and interviewees includes content related to crimes against children, abuse, acts of terrorism, and violence. Listener discretion is advised. When you look at a group of people, random faces passing by at the mall or on your commute, what do you see? Who do you think these people are? Random strangers, colleagues, friends? Would you think for a second that any of them could be a spy? A government agent planted strategically to reap information. Well, start believing in the unlikely, because in today's episode, we're entering the dark arena of espionage with former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Porter Gooss..

The real threat to our security isn't the danger of bankruptcy. It is the danger of communist aggression. If communism is allowed to absorb the free nations one by one, then we would be isolated from our sources of supply and detached from our friends.

When United States President Harry Truman spoke those words in 1952, it was at the start of the Cold War. For those of us who don't remember that chunk of history reading from grade school, the Cold War was a long period of time where tensions were growing more and more strained between the United States, its allies, and communist countries, particularly what was formerly the Soviet Union. And that summation is putting it lightly. Five years before making that speech in 1952, Truman created a government organization known as the Central Intelligence Agency. It had a few names before that, but by 1947, it became those iconic three letters, the CIA. Pretty much from the moment that he took office, President Truman had grown more and more suspicious of communist foreign nations and feared that communists could and would infiltrate the United States. So he created the CIA to preempt those threats and tighten up US national security by collecting information, performing analysis on that information, and conducting covert actions to safeguard America's secrets. In other words, secret agents and spies began operating for the United States, and they took direct orders from the President. One of those spies was Porter Gooss.

Certainly in my early years, the Cold War was raging, and the consequences for getting caught in the spy business were very dire, particularly in the U. S. S. R. The clandestine service was the clandestine service for a reason. We didn't talk about it. We didn't even admit it. We had some agencies involved that we didn't even admit existed.

Because our interview was recorded at a time when Porter and I were both quarantining during the COVID-19 pandemic, he and I spoke over the phone. He's retired now and in his early 80s, so he wanted to keep a safe distance and I agreed. It took a few emails and phone calls before we were actually able to coordinate our schedules, sit down and have an official interview. And Porter seemed to take a liking to our conversations right away. We built this rapport, and sometimes I honestly felt like I was talking to a grandfather or something, and he, in return, was respectfully educating a grandchild. But instead of us discussing family or personal topics, we were discussing the dark world of international spying. It was truly a first in my career as a journalist. Porter told me that he hasn't spoken this detailed on the record about spying or CIA business in four or five years, mostly because he doesn't trust media or journalists anymore. But I guess for this podcast, he changed his mind. I was definitely eager to get started. I mean, how often is it that you can convince a former spy and director of the CIA to talk about...

The CIA is a line of work? For the first few minutes of our interview, I just listened and Porter defined the CIA as he knows it.

Well, the CIA is an evolving organization that's absolutely essential to the United States of America. It is an overseas mission-based agency that has wonderful Americans in it who understand that we need foreign intelligence. We need to get sensitive information to our leadership, and we need to do it in as benign a way as possible.

According to Porter, that's only possible if human beings go onto foreign soil and spy.

I don't care whether you call it espionage or spying or anything else. Gathering information from people who want to do harm to you is just basically a survival matter. That CIA is an overseas agency. Its mission is overseas. Cia is not authorized to operate in the United States. It's only authorized to operate overseas. And it is true that the CIA has given a lot of latitude. Its officers are given extraordinary latitude to break laws in other countries, but not to break the laws of the United States of America.

To be a successful spy, the likes of, say, Jack Ryan or Jason Bourne, Porter says there's one skill that's highly valued.

Human relations, people who can understand other people and understand their motivations and understand how you can have a relationship with people and get them to share confidentialities with you that are very, very important. And sometimes that's done on an receptive basis, and sometimes it's done on a very straightforward basis. When you've got somebody who you can't trust, how you can nevertheless manipulate that person to provide information that's useful to you without getting hurt.

Manipulation, a lie every day to keep a ruse going, that seemed to be the key to spying. Porter's answer definitely intrigued me. How do you manipulate someone or a group of people without them suspecting that you're using them or trying to get sensitive information from them? It seems risky. And psychologically, it was a dark concept. In fact, a little inceptiony.

Human intelligence is the bread and butter and the main goal of the Central Intelligence Agency, and it always has been. Trying to understand what other people are thinking is important, and particularly if it's malevolent thinking and they're going to try and do damage on you, you want to find out what that's about ahead of time if you can so you can forestall it. In the intelligence world, you're betting your life on some of the judgments you make.

Every decision a CIA agent makes, their life, and many more people's lives are riding on individual moment-by-moment choices. Porter says it's actually rare that agents reveal themselves in the ways movies, books, and TV portray them. Jason Bourne and Jack Ryan-type actions could blow an operative's cover, probably get them killed, or worse, start an international war. So in reality, the CIA has strict policies on how operatives can defend themselves in the field.

The policies, you can't shoot unless you've been shot at. The due process here is you have to prove you've been shot at before you can fire back. You can imagine what fun that can be just using that as an example. I'd say, Okay, well, I want you guys to go over there and round up this group of bad guys, but I don't want you to fire any shots. If you're shot at, you could shoot back, but only then.

So what Porter is suggesting is that CIA agents aren't running around loose with guns, shooting their way through terrorist organizations. The killing is going to happen, but he says it's left to other government agencies.

The agency business is to get the information, is to acquire information. That's what we're trying to do. We're not trying to arrest criminals, which is the law enforcement people and the FBI, we don't do that. And we're not trying to do combat. Killing people is the military's job, not our job.

An agent's top priority is to stay hidden as much as possible to avoid danger and compromising their missions. When became the CIA's director in 2004, and he first laid eyes on a batch of recruits about to ship out from headquarters in Langley, Virginia, he defined them as the epitome of covert.

It looked like a crowd of people you might see shopping in a mall. You couldn't tell. They were all dressed differently. They were all ages, same sizes.

If one of those agents covers were blown, death is pretty much imminent.

The degree of dangers that has to do with the type of target you're dealing with. If you get caught or if you get unmased in using it in the intelligence term, not the political term, if you get caught by a foreign agency in a hostile country, you can have very bad consequences.

Very bad consequences. I wanted to know the depths of just how perilous spying across the globe can be. And that conversation quickly and ironically circled back to the reason Porter and I were interviewing over the phone, a global pandemic.

Biohazard or chembiohazards, chemical warfare, biological warfare, where there are actually countries, including the United States of America, that are interested in understanding things that are lethal that necessarily do not have an antidote.

Now, Porter didn't go as far as to say something like COVID-19 is a weaponized virus in an unseen international war. But he did hint to the possibility. He told me that after years of working for the CIA and directing it, he knows for sure that covert operatives worldwide are sent on missions all of the time to gather intelligence on bio weapons. This includes viruses and weaponized diseases. Spies working those missions are in serious danger every moment they're operating, especially if they've been directed to keep their cover for long periods of time.

The pandemic, if you're getting information about that, of course, you're exposing yourself, presumably, to the virus. Trying to get information like that is obviously very dangerous and not only to your health, but if you get caught trying to swipe that information, the consequences, I think, would be terminal immediately.

It was a dark thought. Porter says secret missions to find out if diseases or poisons can be turned into weapons have been going on since the Cold War. He wouldn't go into detail about any specific operations he worked on because they're classified. But he confirmed that world leaders are always considering bio-weapons real threats. He says any time a major world epidemic hits and nation turns against nation, and populations and economies plummet, there is a good chance spies are operating in the shadows, funneling information to world leaders so that each country has knowledge of what the other is doing, and if a weaponized virus is being used as political leverage. When the stakes are that high and there's a possible scenario where a bio weapon could be at play, no one is outside of the spy game. No one is untouchable. That's something Porter found out in one of the scariest ways possible. I was in.

The hospital for quite a while with an undiagnosed illness, and there was a suspicion about a mark on my arm. I had a very, very severe health condition. And suddenly, I mean, it rendered me unconscious. It's 1970.

And a rainy day in London as Porter Goss arrives in a car to a hotel. He's been an operative for the CIA nearly 10 years at this point. He wrapped up a stint of missions in Latin America and South America, and the London hotel he's at is a pit stop on his way back to Washington, D. C. As he makes his way toward the hotel's revolving door, he notices nothing out of the ordinary. Sure, maybe there's a few people idling out front under the awning, but that's normal for a hotel. That everything is normal. A few hours later, Porter boards a flight back to D. C. Within hours of that, nothing is normal.

I happened to be back in Washington on consultation and exhibited some signs that it's out that I had a very, very severe health condition. Suddenly, I mean, it rendered me unconscious, that tried to severe. I was in the hospital for quite a while with an undiagnosed illness, and there was a suspicion about a mark on.

My arm. Small, almost undetectable, some mark noticeable on a section of flesh on his arm. Porter couldn't investigate further. He blacked out, and doctors continued for days to try and keep him alive. No matter what they did, they couldn't diagnose what was wrong with him. All they knew was that he had come down with something that mimicked a severe blood infection, and it was causing his organs to systematically shut down. But what was the source? That was the big question. No one knew. When word of Porter's condition got back to his supervisors at the CIA, theories began to emerge, dark theories.

That was about the time the stories were circulating in London about the umbrella, the Russians using a poisoned umbrella to poke somebody. I had been in London. That story, the conspirates, pulled that story together.

Possibly poked with a poison tip hidden in the end of an umbrella. That's the story, or so it goes, that many people within the CIA said was the reason for Porter's grave illness. But Porter himself, he doesn't believe that. On the record, his official answer as to what caused his dire brush with death is it's still a mystery.

Do I think that there's any truth to that? No, I don't. I don't know what caused me a bill. I was very ill and that terminated my career in the agency, actually. I was so sick and I was lucky to survive it. Very lucky. It was a very small percentage of people who have survived the degree of illness I had.

There's no doubt, though, his illness, whatever caused it, ended his spy career, at least as a field operative. He left the CIA in 1971 and got out of government service. He bought a home on Sanabell Island in the Gulf of Mexico and eventually worked as a reporter for the local newspaper there. A drastically different lifestyle than the one he'd lived throughout the 1960s. Porter couldn't stay away from civic service long, though. He became a county commissioner in the 1980s and went on to run for Congress and won in 1988. From there, he sat on intelligence commissions throughout the 1990s. And as the world transitioned into the early 2000s, Porter remained a loyal Republican supporter of President George W. Bush. Leading up to the year 2000, Porter says the US began to change how it was reviving and allocating intelligence assets in other countries, something Porter supported.

By the time we got to the Clinton presidency, we had hollowed out our intelligence capacities overseas very, very dramatically. Part of it was because there were people in this country who felt spying is a bad thing and telling them don't spy.

In the immediate wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks, Porter expressed that he felt the CIA should reexamine its tactics on how to infiltrate terrorist organizations, and America should have more flexible laws on what intelligence operatives are allowed to do.

It's hard to get your mind wrapped around the fact there are people who want to kill you out there just because you're you. That's a very foreign thought to most people. But it is part of radical theology or ideology that because you aren't like us or don't believe us and so forth, you don't deserve to live, we're going to cut your head off. Okay, those people need to be taken out of the equation. Now, how do you do that? Well, you find out about them and you isolate them or you incarcerate them.

Porter got the chance to emphasize his position in a greater role when President George W. Bush nominated him to be the director of the CIA in August 2004. When he accepted that role, Porter promised to reform the agency, but it didn't take long before he found himself having conflict with several senior officials there. Porter says a lot of the people in the CIA's administration at the time who resigned after he became director opposed the Iraq war. He says while all of this political jockeying was going on in the mid-2000s, the CIA was deeply involved in tracking and apprehending wanted terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. At least one operation going on to find Bin Laden under Porter's supervision ended with several CIA agents dead and a hard lesson learned.

Very, very sad case was one of the worst of the agency's history. A person was brought in who was supposedly an asset, and he was going to help us find Osama bin Laden. There was a group of agency officers involved who were going to meet with this guy. He came up, he had an explosive vest on him, and he blew himself up and killed a bunch of agency personnel and others. That was a case of basically being deceived by a double agent.

A double agent taking out a squad of CIA personnel and Bin Laden no closer to being caught. The aftermath of that failed mission forced Porter and those left in his administration at the CIA to ask some serious questions.

Why did we trust that person? Was there too much wishful thinking involved? Did we really have good reason to believe that this guy was the real thing and was going to give us the information on where Osama bin Laden was? Those are the kinds of questions that haunt you in the intelligence world. Can I trust these people?

The United States war on terror continued to put pressure on the CIA. Porter, once again, found himself in an all too familiar place. The crosshairs of potential would-be assassins.

I understand my picture was in a cave somewhere in Tora Bora. Obviously, the terrorists knew about our chain of command and who I was. As the United.

States continued to seek ways to expose terrorist organizations in the early 2000s, Porter Goss found himself a target. He was still in the spy game, just on a new level.

You have to do business with unsavory characters, I guess is the term that's often used. Those would be the despots and the tyrants and the megalomaniacs and want to do harm on a global basis, means you're going to rub shoulders with some really seedy people.

His routine was once again, always looking over his shoulder, planning his routes. Did we go.

From point A to point B by going to point C and F first in order to confound somebody who is going to get us to be point A and point B? All of those things happen surely. If you take a job as a director of the Central Intelligence Agency and you travel around the world and you meet with different kinds of people, there are certain things that can happen to you.

Fortunately, nothing lethal happened. If being cautious of assassins looking for him wasn't stressful enough, the more public image he now carried as CIA director also made him a target for eyes in Washington watching his every move. Pretty much from the moment he became CIA director, Porter says he faced scrutiny. Some scandals reported by CNN and Time magazine include how Porter mishandled the treatment and alleged torture of enemy prisoners captured by the US. Cnn reported that Porter ordered dozens of videotapes of CIA prisoners being tortured be destroyed. Porter contests a lot of stories like that, and he wouldn't confirm anything for me, but he remains a vocal advocate that a lot of the CIA's work should always be classified as a means to protect national security.

The public's right to know is abridged. We have a right to know, but we don't have a right to know everything. And we know that is so because we have laws in the past that said we could classify information as long as we do it properly and for good reason.

In May 2006, Porter made a big decision.

This morning, Director Porter Goss offered his resignation as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He's got a five-year plan to increase the number of analysts and operatives, which is going to help make this country a safer place and help us win the war on terror.

That's President George W. Bush announcing Porter's resignation in 2006. That move officially ended the former spy's career in the intelligence world. In the years since, Porter has strongly opposed any suggestion that the CIA at any point in its history has been a dark agency and that it allows agents to operate with little oversight. He says that's a false image, wrongfully portrayed by certain media reports as well as pop culture.

I don't think the agency does anything that it is not permitted to do under the law. And if it does, if an individual in the agency does do something that is not permitted under the marching orders allowed in the agency and they are caught, they will be brought to American justice. And I have seen that happen any number of times.

He admits, though, the shady image of the CIA that people base many conspiracy theories on will probably never go away. A lot of people have a distrust for government intelligence agencies and sometimes for good reason, mostly over the issue of privacy. I specifically asked Porter if modern advances in technology have created a gray area in which the CIA can operate. Can the agency's access to satellites, data mining, cell phones, and databases allow it to operate outside of the law? In the event that laws aren't specific enough about privacy. Could this make a spy's job easier and give them more reach to surveil in the name of national security? This is a topic I often find myself thinking about a lot. I mean, as of this recording, I've used a cell phone, laptop, and other technology to produce it. What's to say I'm not being monitored right now talking about this very sensitive topic? Porter couldn't answer my question directly because he says he doesn't work in the intelligence world anymore, but the answer he did give me was interesting. All he would say is that technology for spies and the CIA has advanced a lot, and according to him, that's a good thing, as long as US laws are not broken.

It has.

Certainly changed how operations happen. Operations support because technology is very, very different, as you can just imagine through just think of yourself... Think of the iterations of your cell phone, then think of the iterations of your cell phones, and the degree of security you have here and there, and what you can do and what you can't do with a cell phone. Those kinds of technology, some of which I probably don't even know about, are so extraordinary and have made the collection of information very much more robust and hopefully more secure. The problem is nobody has an advantage for very long in the intelligence world before the other guy gets it, too. So the advantage is tend to cancel them out, but you have to keep up.

So what is the CIA doing nowadays that helps it keep up with other intelligence agencies? That's the million dollar question. The answer, I'd surmise, is classified. Is the public always going to be left in the dark when it comes to the details of what dark spaces the CIA might be operating in? Probably. And that's how Porter and I ended our interview. Maybe it was just my brain going wild. But I swear, before we hung up, I heard a faint clicking on the other end of the line. Then nothing. Yeah, probably just my imagination. This episode of Dark Areas was written and produced by Delia D. Ambra, with writing assistant from executive producer, Ashley Floors. You can find pictures and all of the source material for this episode on our website, darkarenas. Com. Dark Arenas is an audio Chuck original show. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?