True Spies: Debriefs - Douglas London on empathy
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If you can hear me, take an encryption button off the drive. Hello, True Spies listeners. You might notice that things are a little different this week. In over 200 episodes of True Spies, we've heard from some amazing people. And we wanted to hear more. So did our subscribers. So with that in mind, you're about to embark on our first ever True Spies debrief.

Here on The Debrief, we catch up with some of our favorite guests from the True Spies archive for a deeper look at the themes, events, and insights that fascinate them. If you like what you hear, subscribe to Spyscape Plus for more exclusive debriefs at plus.spyscape.com. That's plus.spyscape.com.

In this debrief, Morgan Childs, one of the producers of True Spies, speaks with Douglas London.

You might remember Douglas from the True Spies episode, "Allied with Al Qaeda," which premiered back in November of 2021. As a CIA operations officer working in an undisclosed location in the Middle East in the year 2000, Doug turned a key facilitator for Al Qaeda into a trusted asset for the American Intelligence Agency.

And over the course of their time together, the two men formed an unlikely bond. Doug now works as a commentator, an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown, and a fellow at the Middle East Institute. In December of last year, he published a piece in the newsletter Spy Talk, arguing that, in his words, empathy is vital for U.S. leaders to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Morgan Childs caught up with Doug to hear about the role of empathy as tradecraft and how a more empathetic approach might make a difference in the Middle East. Doug, thank you for being here. It was such a treat to talk to you in 2021, and it's a pleasure to have you back. Well, thanks so much for having me back. Always my pleasure.

We're talking about empathy today, both as a component of conflict resolution, but also as a tool in the spies' arsenal and sort of an important piece of tradecraft. And the last time that true spies listeners heard from you, you talked about recruiting a key asset around 2000, around the turn of the millennium.

And if you would, I would love for you to give listeners a sort of reminder of who your asset Yusuf was and also maybe how unlikely it was that he came to work for you. Well, Yusuf is really a great example of empathy and empathy as a tool in espionage and as a tool for anyone trying to understand others, really, whether it's the intelligence world or otherwise. Yes.

Yusuf was an al-Qaeda facilitator. And what I mean by that is he was a member of the organization. He wasn't someone who shot people or blew people up, but he enabled those who were doing the shooting and blowing up. And he had provided that support in several countries around the world to some successful and some not successful al-Qaeda operations.

We were, the CIA, aware of an individual by Acuna, which is a nickname that Arabs will give. It's usually a nickname for your oldest son or your oldest child. It's Abu, but it's also sometimes from where you are, like Abu Ahmedaki. If I was the American and they'd say, oh, he's the American, it would be a nickname like that.

And Yusuf sort of fell in our lap in a fortuitous way in that he wound up in the country where I was serving. I was chief of station there. We were running some traces, as we normally did, on individuals coming into suspect extremist milieu, which were either certain mosques, societies, NGOs at the time. Again, this is before 9-11, but after the East Africa bombings and after the strike on the USS Cole in Yemen.

And we just got an interesting hit on him without any definitive certainty based on his profile, because Yusuf was a chap who actually moved around with his family. He was from a particular Arab country. He had a unique look about him and a unique professional profile. So we were suspect that maybe this mysterious fellow that we've been seeing pop in and out of these various countries where al-Qaeda had executed operations was in our place.

And to sort of cut to the chase, after a great deal of attention and running intel operations against him through agents we try to put in his orbit, through listening to his phone conversations and following him around, we were pretty sure that this was our guy. And the approach that I made with my team was, at its heart initially, coercive just to get in the door where we had partners from local security service detain him.

And then I spoke to him with the prospect essentially of either talking to me and working for us or allowing local authorities to deport him to one of the various unpleasant countries where he was wanted.

And this doesn't sound empathetic, does it? Because it's not at the outset. It was just getting the door. But once he agreed, which actually typically al-Qaeda folks do agree, it's their train to do so to feign cooperation and minimize their role. I spent a lot of time in private with Youssef demonstrating that

there was something serious I could provide for him. Youssef was in my country in the first place because he was trying to get away from it all. He had a family, he was worried about his kids, he believed in the cause, he hated the United States and the West, but he was sort of at the end of his rapidly fraying rope. And he had money issues, medical issues with his kids, education issues, all of which I said, you know,

I want to partner with you. I know giving him sort of the excuse that you're not a killer yourself. How can we help each other? And I think I have a way. And over time, I sort of demonstrated to you just by understanding his world and his needs, a means for him to work with me and the CIA in providing intelligence about his al-Qaeda associates.

which led to a great number of successful operations and disruptions of acts that they were going to carry out against innocent people. I think one of the most remarkable parts of this story, I just went back and listened to it again, and of course there are many remarkable parts to the story, but the fact that you came to like Yusuf before you even met him in the sort of assessment process, I wonder what about him made you identify with him, even though he was clearly a dangerous guy and somebody whose ideology didn't line up with yours?

You know, I spent most of my adult life in the Muslim world and the Arab world and such like that. And I have a great fondness for the people and the culture and the history and the way they act.

And Yusuf was everything that drew me to this part of the world. He was a funny guy, a great personality. He was self-deprecating in a lot of ways in his humor. He was generous in many ways. And I know all of this sounds kind of odd when you're talking about somebody whose profession was to help kill people.

But that's the thing about human beings and human nature, isn't it? And I think it kind of gets to the heart of the requirement for empathy. People don't see themselves as bad guys, you know, terrorists, even criminals. They see themselves as being on a course of life that they're either forced upon or that they choose willingly to

And they play with their kids and they take care of their elderly parents. And, you know, they're people just like we are. And there was, you know, this sort of warmth about Yusuf that was kind of hard not to like him that I got to know from a distance at the outset.

But as we'll talk about, there's a great sharp dividing line between empathy and being able to understand people you deal with and see the world from their eyes and condoning their behavior, particularly when it's bad, or finding yourself manipulative, manipulated, if you would, by caring for them and not being able to distance your personal empathy or interest in them from the professional mission at hand and what the reality is.

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I'm curious about this, the split between your role as a professional, as a spy, and who you are personally as Doug London, who's like a lovely guy I've had the pleasure of speaking with before and whose good character comes through in his book. How much of the success of your recruitment of Yusuf and your working relationship with him

How much of that was a function of your training and how much of that was your own distinctive personality? It's a great big composite, isn't it, Morgan? I mean, just like actors play different roles, they're, you know, showing parts of themselves in the role. I think as a case officer, as a spy, dealing with people from all walks of life, from all cultures, from all sorts of backgrounds, you have to find a way to relate to them and

and allow them to relate to you. We talked in the CIA about a case officer having to be interested, right? You're interested in the people you're dealing with. You show that interest, but you're interesting. There's something about you that intrigues your counterpart to want to engage with you as well. So in order to strike that level and get to a relationship, which will be increasingly intimate, and I don't mean in a romantic nature, but I mean in a very emotional nature, intimate,

You can't do that without some sincerity, in fact, a fair bit of sincerity. So you have to reach down into yourself and show parts of yourself and actually expose certain degrees of vulnerability, but all rather carefully controlled. So you're playing a role in your knot because you can't be so artificial that you won't come across with the sincerity you need. So absolutely, the CIA will train people.

case officers to use those skills, to relate to people, to hone their rapport, to understand, you know, how best to relate to different people in different ways. And there are certain kind of ideas we talk about, and it's, you know, I'm not talking about spying, but businessmen talk about health, wealth, and family, right?

Those are the things that appeal to people. I mean, that's what we do as well. But you can't be the used car salesman where you're all glad handy and just talking and joking around and being the center of attention. Your job is to make your counterpart, the person that you're developing or recruiting or running as an agent, is the center of attention and you're the supporting actor. So how on earth is this taught? What does this look like in practice at the farm?

I know we've talked about it before, Morgan, and the idea, can you teach empathy? Can you teach empathy?

how to relate to people. To a great extent, I think people are or are not empathetic. And you see it. You know, you just talk to people and you meet people. And there are those who immediately are relatable. And there are those who just have no idea the world in which you operate and protect and actually don't care. But you can also teach that. You can explain that. The idea, and I think people in your audience would have heard,

heard about red cells or red teams, right? The idea of being the enemy in a war game or being in the competition in a business world or being the rival, right? To simulate them. You can't simulate your rival or your counterpart without looking at the world through their eyes. Similarly,

You can't persuade someone to commit treason, to spy, to risk their life, perhaps their family's lives and everything they have and everything they've known without being able to see the world from their eyes to understand how is it I could reach out to that person? How is it I could find what's within them?

to motivate them, to incentivize them. Because the CIA, despite my initial entree to you, does not use coercion. We would not want to meet a Russian intel person in Moscow if they were being blackmailed. I wouldn't want to meet a terrorist in Karachi or a Hezbollah terrorist in Beirut if they were being coerced into cooperation. So we need to try to find a way where they want to, where they are essentially volunteering

to take these risks because you found that relatable place to them where it becomes almost as if it's their own idea, almost as if it's them taking advantage of the opportunity to achieve something they can't otherwise do without working with you and the agency. Of course, in that particular case, you had to cook up an idea. It wasn't, there was, you used the word manipulation. Just to be clear here, sometimes that has to be concocted on the spot. Am I right?

Yeah, and I think we look for that in candidates who can do the job. We look for people who are able to, you know, we say adapt to dynamic circumstances. Those are the buzzwords, aren't it? But it really just means being able to deal with things that are thrown at you that you didn't plan for, that you didn't expect. How do you handle adversity? How do you handle a challenge? Do you freeze? Do you think?

And I guess, you know, a good case author is somebody who's creative, who's able to think out of the box. And, you know, y'all get scared, everybody gets scared, but who's able to sort of channel the energy from pressure or confrontation and think of, you know, okay, how do I get myself out of this one, right? And you can see any number of, you know, funny rom-coms or other movies where people come up with capers.

You know, how do I come up with some crazy idea to get in front of somebody or to persuade them to do something that's in my interest? And it's very much the same thing. And it's about, you know, being creative, being flexible and being able to always see opportunity even where there's challenges.

So it's more than that. I mean, you write in your book that a case officer is akin to a priest, a rabbi, or an imam. A priest, a rabbi, or imam because the degree of empathy that's required is so high and the degree of trust that's required. You talk about some of these assets confessing to their faith.

to their handler, right? Is that the right word? Yeah, that's fine. That's a good term. You talk about some of these assets confessing to case officers and to their handlers. And it's such a strong statement and really makes me wonder how many case officers come to the agency with that kind of skill set.

You're looking for the no judgment zone. The CIA is not dealing with people that are all necessarily good in our standards of good and evil and bad and not. Yusuf was a terrorist. He was responsible for the deaths of a lot of people. He had blood on his hands.

But I had to find a way that Yusuf and I could relate to each other where he felt so totally comfortable to confess his greatest sins. And getting there requires a lot of peeling of the onions and requires that dynamic, that atmosphere where the individual believes this is my safe space.

I can do or say anything to my case officer because he or she is not going to judge me. We're not going to condone them when they say, oh, well, you know, I blew this person up or I cheated on my wife or I did this. But we're going to listen. We're going to hear them out. And we're going to express that empathetic understanding of, yeah, I see how that occurred. And you can do that without being a cheerleader for their sins.

and strike that relationship where you are the only person they can tell everything to. And who better is that than their spy, their handler? Because that's the one person they know will keep their secrets, won't tell anything that they've done, will always be there for them, advocate for them.

protect them. So in a lot of ways, it does have that sort of religious connotation that I always kind of sensed that, you know, a cleric has in that room with their parishioner, because where else is that, you know, relationship where in their case, it's the two of them and God, right?

So it's a little bit different. It's the two of us in the CIA, and the CIA is hardly God, but it's this still great power behind the handler that the agent knows is going to always be there for them come what may. What a tightrope to walk in. It also sounds like just exhausting work.

Yeah, you know, we talk about soul catching, right? That a lot of this to truly recruit agents is really, you know, collecting their soul without the Grim Reaper connotation, isn't it? But you can't do that without

exhausting some of your own soul. You can't do that without a price, especially when you do it over the years. And I loved my career and I spent 34 plus years in the CIA. And I describe myself often as sort of the player coach.

Because even though I held senior positions, I was chief of station several times and a senior department chief, I always kept my foot in operations. I was recruiting and handling agents until the day I crossed the Great Seal and left the building because I loved it. But at the same point, I was emotionally and mentally fried after coming on four decades of doing that. And today, my kids and my family calls me, oh, he's a recluse. He doesn't want to come out of the house because...

You have to use energy. You have to expend a great deal of energy, as you suggested, in order to create that relationship to the degree you require. And does it ever happen that that level of empathy comes to interfere with the work that a case officer is doing for the agency? Empathy in itself is always fine. It's that line between empathy.

detachment and what we say, falling in love with your agent. And I don't mean in a romantic sense, but falling in love with your agent where you just, you know, you innately believe whatever your agent tells you. The other side of this relationship is you want the agent to fully trust you, fully believe in you, but you as a handler, you can never fully trust your agent because life happens. People get caught.

right? And if you get an agent gets caught and they're told, you know, you either cooperate with us against the CIA or we'll kill you or kill your family, of course they're going to cooperate. People's lives change. So what might have motivated them to work with an intelligence service changes. You know, they no longer have to worry about their kid's tuition. Their wife has recovered from whatever the medical issue. They've gotten their revenge against the organization which did them wrong. And now they just want to move on. So

to really evaluate the agent. And part of that whole, you know, clerical analogy I gave you, it was so that you as a handler can best protect them, test them, understand what's going on. So you could, you know,

orchestrate the kind of tradecraft and sometimes countermeasures when you think they're under suspicion that's required for the case. So the case officer has to be the very first one to identify any warts in the case, to challenge any anomalies, to go ahead and look for things that just don't make sense. So the difference is you're

You're always empathizing in order to do that, but you've got to be careful not to overly sympathize. And as we say, fall in love with your case where you start becoming blind to faults, where you start writing off things that should be warning signs that something's wrong, that maybe the agent has been caught, maybe the agent has been doubled, maybe the agent lost their access.

got fired and have been making up all this information they've been giving you. And you can't do that if you fundamentally love your agent. You can like them, enjoy their company, but never love them. And that's why we're constantly testing our agents in ways hopefully they don't realize.

but generally to make sure that they are being truthful to us, they are being accurate in what they're describing, because we have to stand behind their intelligence. We have to depict their information to our consumers in terms of how we rate a source for veracity and reliability and authenticity. And you can't do that if you've so fallen in love with your agent that you're no longer able to see the good from the bad. What do those tests look like?

Well, I can't get into details of the operational test. Some of them are obviously really rather passive and inane, but an agent claims a certain access. An agent claims to work in a certain job or have certain connections. So there are ways that one can challenge that agent to really demonstrate that they truly have that access, that they truly work in a certain place, that they truly have those relationships.

And simply responsiveness to tasking and responding to things that they should be able to, sometimes knowing what they should and can't be able to respond to and how they fare are all sort of subtle tests. So we have sort of passive, subtle, and more active tests to concurrently make sure that the agent's everything he or she claims to be.

So I'd like to shift gears a little bit and talk about the work that you're doing more recently. You wrote a piece for the newsletter Spy Talk at the end of last year, calling for more empathy on the part of American leadership in addressing the war in Gaza. Talk to me a little bit about how empathetic shortcomings might be hindering U.S. decision making.

Well, it's not that there are just as you're making it, it's so many people's decision making. One can say the reason that Israel failed to expect and anticipate the attack from Hamas was the failure in a lack of empathy. They had a great deal of intelligence that was mostly technical and digital, but they had convinced themselves by projecting their own logic that Hamas had no interest in starting another war, that they were focused on governing, they were focused on just

improving the economic situation there. And by this point, there were 18,000 visas issued to residents in Gaza now traveling back and forth and bringing money back in. I think the United States does that likewise too often, where when we look at a case like Iran or even Russia, we're too quick to project all

our values, our culture, and our logic in trying to understand what's driving decision-making and what we might anticipate over time. The United States was exceptional in being able to identify and anticipate Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

And was the only intelligence agency, the only government that actually did so. But then got it wrong in terms of projecting a quick Russian victory, the Ukrainians would fall. Because we really didn't get in the minds of how they think, how they were going to operate. We do the same thing, I think, on occasion when we look at, OK, how do we...

bring this war to an end in Ukraine, how we bring the war to an end in Gaza. And we think, again, projecting our own logic of, well, here's what they want. You know, they don't want to just fight on and on, and they don't want to expend too many casualties, and they want to preserve their power. Without understanding, there's history, there's culture. When you look at the Middle East crisis, you look at the Arab-Israeli conflict, there's not like years or decades, there's thousands of years of history and culture. There's such...

blood in the water that no decision is going to fit our Western logic. Similarly, when we look at Putin in Russia, this is a Cold War era KGB guy. That's the way he thinks. It's not paranoia or craziness. He just simply accepts that the West, led by the United States, is

out to get him, that he always has to be in a constant state of conflict with us. And he's not likely to ever believe he can strike an accord with us or the Ukrainians. And again, you can extend the same logic to Iran, where Iran believes they must continue to be in confrontation with the United States to preserve their revolution at home. Because once again, we're the great, not just a great threat, Satan, we're the big threat. And without understanding that, it's kind of hard to negotiate

It's kind of hard to relate to in another government and to look at intelligence and look at the circumstances in this sort of red cell, empathetic way that you're going to make the better decisions going forward. I think listening to you talk, I hear some of this is a failure of understanding and some of it is a failure of empathy. And I wonder if you could, I hadn't asked you to talk about this, but I wonder if you could parse out the difference between the two and why both are necessary. Yeah.

I might fail you because I see so many ties between them. Understanding is related very much to just knowing facts on the ground and detail and data.

How many people? How many tanks? What's the economy? What are the empirical drivers out there in the environment? And we do that as intelligence services. And we collect intelligence, both clandestine and that's overt. So much of the information on atmospherics or economics is out there and it's available. And you can see things playing out on the ground. But then relating that data to...

a path going forward to projecting how governments and leaders will move forward on those empirical data points in terms of economy and strength and population and issue, that's where the empathy really plays because you now have to look at the same data sets but from their mindset, their mentality, their calculus, and all of that is shaped by their experiences

their culture, their history, that comes as a people. How do Russians look at this? How do Iranians look at this? But also as individuals, when you're looking at how does Putin look at this? How does Netanyahu? How does Khamenei and Sinwa in Gaza? Because

will look at the same data sets and go, well, obviously they're going to make a deal or not make a deal, as the case may be, because they can't afford to go longer. They need this. They need that. Because once again, we're projecting our values, our calculus based on our experiences. And that's where the absence of empathy complicates. Even when you've got great intel, you've got great data, but you're not using it in the greatest effect.

You wrote, there can be no end to this bloody contest without a safe space for communication beyond the eyes, ears, and pressure of politicians and their domestic constituencies. What does that look like in practice?

So I'm a spy, right? That's what I did. So that means I'll talk to anyone, anyone. I'll talk to my enemy, my enemy's enemy, whatever, because there's always a value in communications. There's always a value in exchanging thoughts, even if you know they're lying to you and they're fabrication.

particularly when there's opportunities one-on-one and you get to sit down with people and talk to them. And I know from at least what I've seen in the press, a lot of our back channels have been through proxies, third parties, if you would, the Omanis, the Swiss, what have you and such like that. But there's

always a value because even if you're not looking them in the eye, there's sometimes messages within what they're communicating. And, you know, going back way back, even before my time, frankly, the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was this case where we were communicating with, you know, the Soviet leader, Khrushchev, and there were letters exchanged, there were communications exchanged, and there were two communications, historians will recall, and they were vastly different.

because there were subtle messages and then not so subtle changes that our leadership, our intel community interpreted in a way, luckily correctly, to make the right moves in trying to avoid what was then the closest we'd come to a nuclear war over the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I'm a great believer in that. I think people are really quick to think, oh, communications is condonement. It means we're okay with what they've done. We're okay with the killing and the bombing and what have you. Hardly. Not at all. But it means you need to separate and detach your own emotional sentiments and

Every side has one in whatever conflict and be able to communicate and see how can I make the most of that communications, either my messaging to them to signal something or to interpret their messaging to me. And because emotions do get high, that's that's doesn't always play well. And people sometimes I think, unfortunately,

interpreted in, well, if you're talking to them, you're basically agreeing or condoning or saying they have a right to have done whatever they've done. And as a spy, I would tell you that's not my perspective at all. This strikes me as a fairly optimistic point of view. And we should say we're speaking at the beginning of May. You know, ceasefire negotiations have dragged on for months where demonstrations on college campuses have reached a fever pitch. How are you feeling about

Argument aside. Yeah, you know, the Middle East is a volatile and unpredictable region and unpredictability leads to miscalculation, which is all the more reason for some form of communications and some messaging and communications that is, in fact, predictable. You know, say what you're going to do and do it good, bad or indifferent.

The challenges in this region are, in this particular crisis, are so complex because you can't look at the challenges the Palestinians are facing and go, "Well, obviously Hamas leadership just wants to stop casualties."

You know, from their very clinical perspective, they have highlighted the issue in Palestine. That's what people are talking about. They weren't not that long ago. They've sort of derailed the normalization that was going on between Israel and so many of the Middle East countries. So are Hamas's leaders willing to sacrifice more and more people, including civilians, because they think it's achieving their political aims? I think there has to be an allowance for that. Will Netanyahu

escalate? Will Netanyahu continue and even supercharge the war and maybe open up a front with Iran because he feels he's in political crisis and that the only way he could stay in power is to have this existential external enemy? I mean, these are things that, again, relate to the whole idea of empathy to understand that

They're looking at the same consequences and circumstances, but they may be looking at it very differently than we are. So when we are formulating our position, how can we incentivize the belligerents in this case to come together to stop the bloodshed? There's got to be a more deeper understanding than just what the clinical data provides you. So this is keeping you busy these days. What's on your plate and how is this war and the other conflicts going on in the world? How are they keeping you busy?

Keeping your schedule full. I teach at Georgetown, so I teach a class each semester. And due to that and my experience, I'll sometimes go to speaking events and I speak at a number of universities. I was just recently speaking at Yale University, which was great. My first time in the Ivy League, kind of cracking that ceiling. And it's interesting to me.

see and hear what the younger folks were thinking, folks who are super smart, smarter than I ever was at their age, and I would have never competed with them effectively to get into the CIA. But I see to the point of our conversation today, how much emotion is driving people's thoughts and how there's such...

of institutions from where people get their news and their information such that whoever has the narrative is basically seizing upon relating to people's sense of hurt, emotion, victimization, or what have you, as opposed to trying to relate what the reality is, because reality is very much in the eyes of the beholder. So I'm out there doing what I can to try to offer some insight to people

Let's look at the world from the roles of everyone involved, not approving or disapproving, but at least trying to find some understanding so that we could find common ground and a means to move forward. And that's everything from the students on campuses here to the people fighting wars abroad.

Thank you. I know it's a big task on your plate and I really, really appreciate your taking the time to come and speak to us again. Well, it's a pleasure, Morgan. Thank you so very much for the opportunity. Is there anything else you want to say while we're still rolling?

You know, it's going to be hard to crystal ball because you really can't what's going to happen. And as great as intelligence is, there's always the human dynamic and understanding what's in somebody's head and heart requires a lot more intimacy than you can from reading in a newspaper or being thousands of miles away. Thank you so much for tuning in for The Debrief. We're so happy to have you along for the ride.

We hope you enjoyed that conversation between our producer, Morgan Childs, and Douglas London. If you liked what you heard, more debriefs are available exclusively to Spyscape Plus subscribers. You'll also be able to access other premium series, like The Resume-Off Files, our ambitious retelling of Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes.

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