This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Mission Implausible is now something you can watch.

Just go to YouTube and search Mission Implausible Podcasts or click on the link to our channel

in our show notes.

I'm John Seifer.

And I'm Jerry O'Shea.

We have over 60 years of experience as clandestine officers in the CIA,

serving in high-risk areas all around the world.

And part of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.

Now, we're going to use that experience to investigate the conspiracy theories everyone's talking about,

as well as some you may not have heard.

Could they be true, or are we being manipulated? I'll find out now on mission implausible. Today's guest is David McCluskey,

a longtime friend of the pod. David's a former CIA analyst, a best-selling spy novelist these

days, and co-hosts of the popular The Rest is Classified

Park. David has written some of the most convincing modern espionage fiction around, including

Damascus Station, Moscow X, the seventh floor, and most recently the Persian. So today we're going

to talk about spy fiction, real intelligence work, and what the public gets wrong about CIA

and how current events look when you've spent time inside

the business. Also, we promise not to ambush him again like we did last time. We realize that

ambushing a professional analyst is just too easy. There's no challenge to it. So welcome, David.

I didn't promise. Yeah, Jerry hasn't promised. I'm already regretting the decision to return

...