Welcome to Citizen. Today we have a special guest, former CIA operations officer Brian

Dean Wright, you're also the host of the Wright Report.

That's it. That's it. Man, thanks so much for having me here.

Yeah, so let's get, let's start with the background. Where are you from?

How'd you get into the government service?

Yeah, so I'll tell you, I grew up in a very small town in Easton, Oregon, and then the

North Central Idaho-Lewiston. In fact, folks who know Evan Haper might know,

Lewston, Idaho, that's where I'm grown up with that guy. So then I left and I went to college

at Gonzaga University. I had this bug for international affairs. I wanted to travel the world,

and so I decided, you know, I'm an alumnage of ship and I leave the Northwest and

apply to the CIA. So I did and they accepted me, and then I was off to the races, and that was about

gosh, two months after 9-11. So that was a wild time for those of us who remember those early days,

a lot of very intense training, of course, and then getting out of the field and doing the work.

So that was the beginning, the genesis of getting into Intel work and military service,

and then I left them in 2015 and tried to, well, no longer avoid cameras, and I would get in front

of them, which was a really strange transition, but it's been about seven years or so since then.

Yeah, so what you were recruited kind of out of college, which is pretty common, obviously,

they want to get you before anybody else gives you some bad habits and shit, but

what kind of assumptions did you have about what it was going to be like and how wrong

were you about all those things? Man, right? So everybody thinks about probably military service

or Intel, like the movies, right? They're like, hey, James Bond and Jason Four in those guys.

And you know, there were shades of that that were true, but for the most part, that wasn't it.

...