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Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Rie Gaillan. Today, I'm joined by John Cyford,

forward policy and intelligence expert who served 28 years in the Central Intelligence Agency's National Clendestine Service,

including a tour at the CIA's Moscow station. His articles have been published in the New York Times,

the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Politico, Foreign Affairs, and other outlets. He also regularly appears on MSNBC,

CNN, NPR, and PBS NewsHour. He's the co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment, a global production company run by former senior intelligence officers from the US and UK and experienced Hollywood producers.

John, welcome to the show. Thank you. Glad to be here. So you have a lot of unique experience as someone having not only served in the National Clendestine Service as an officer for the CIA,

but also in the crucible that is Moscow. So let me ask you, there are the so-called Moscow rules that I think forward intelligence officers have to really contend with.

So tell me a little bit about your experience there because I want to use that as the beginning of our conversation about obviously what's going on between Russian Ukraine, but what was your sense of the place when you were there, which is a pretty general question, but also give us a little sense of what it's like to live and work in such a denied area, I guess you'd call it.

Yeah, in fact, that is the term we used to call it. And so inside the Clendestine Service, which is the espionage arm of the CIA, not the analytic side of the science and technology side,

but the spy running side of the agency. There's sort of a variety of different sort of tribes and cultures, even inside the Clendestine Service. So there's the people, the Near East people who spend most of their career, sort of in them at least and working those areas. There's Africa, people are South America, people Asia, people in Chinese experts.

The people who work in Russia, it's sort of a different sort of kettle of fish. So in a lot of places, you know, CIA case officers are living overseas and our job is to meet foreign people to try to develop relationships with people who might have access to information. We can't get any.

There are other way recruit them hopefully and then run them secretly as spies for the United States. Moscow on the other hand is a very, very different situation in the fact that the Russians are obsessed with spying. They're obsessed with conspiracies and they're obsessed with security and these issues.

It's essentially a state almost run by the security services.

When frankly Vladimir Putin is a career KGB officer and he's continued with the Soviets did of keeping sort of what used to be called the KGB now their internal external security services and sort of the forefront of everything they do their foreign policy and their domestic policy.

So in a place like Moscow, a foreign diplomat or certainly a foreign intelligence officer if they know your intelligence officer is monitored constantly. Your house will be wired with audio and video.

Essentially everything you do will be monitored. You'll probably be followed everywhere you go. It's not hyperbole. I think when I was there for a couple years.

I don't think there was ever a time that I didn't have full time surveillance people following me everywhere tracking everything.

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