This is No April Fools joke. Our March membership campaign was so successful that we're extending it through the entire month of April.

Enjoy 50% off the regular monthly or annual membership price.

Visit the DSRNetwork.com slash buy and enter code No Fooling One Word to receive 50% off our regular membership price of $50 per year or $5 per month.

Members receive access to bonus content and ad-free listening experience, exclusive blog posts, and invitation to join the DSR Slack community and more.

This is a limited time offer, so act now. Visit the DSRNetwork.com slash buy and enter code No Fooling to receive 50% off. Thank you.

12, 10, 28, 2, 23.

This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our super secret studio in the third sub-basement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington DC and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world.

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the podcast. I am your host David Rothkopf and we are here today with two friends so that we can have a conversation about all issues that pertain to intelligence.

We've been wanting to do this for a while. It's kind of an experiment. We think it's a big issue and we think it's undercovered or maybe not covered in exactly the right way.

I am joined by Mark Polymeropoulos and John Cipher, both of whom are veterans of the Central Intelligence Agency with long experience overseas and here at home. Welcome, gentlemen.

Thank you, David. Nice to see you. Nice to be here. Mark is a long-term colleague and friend, so it's always nice to see him.

Well, it's something I know a little bit about from having followed you guys in your appearances in the media and on Twitter and the things that you have written.

But the audience doesn't know us that I thought, oh, these guys are really interesting. I'd really like to go and talk to them and pick their brains a little bit one day and I say to you about the email and you said, oh, let's have lunch.

And then Mark, John said, let's have lunch at the Vienna Inn, which is in Vienna, Virginia and it's a pretty unassuming place. Why did he make us do that?

Yeah, Mark's been through a lot in his professional life and a lot of hard places and dangerous places. But one of the things that he's always felt a kinship to was his home in Vienna, Virginia, which is essentially a bedroom community outside of Washington, but there is a dive bar there that's long been known as sort of a CIA haunt.

And he lives nearby. And so that tends to be the place where he does business. He sets up and people come through to see him. They sell his book there. They got stuff from him on the walls there. It's kind of gross in that sense. But otherwise, it's a great place.

I will say that I wore a Vienna Inn baseball hat during an entire year when I was chief of power military base in eastern Afghanistan. And that hat hangs on the wall right now.

In the V.I., the famous old Taliban, which was the bar in the station in Kabul, which also has a legendary status. Someone had actually taken a Vienna t-shirt and put it up on the ceiling.

And so there's certainly a connection to the agency.

It's a place where a lot of us would meet when we come back from overseas tours. There's hardly a day when you go in there. You don't see someone either for current or former agencies.

So, you know, it's the cheers of the intelligence community of the agency. But it also is the heart of Vienna, Virginia, too, which is a nice little town outside of DC. And I think it is my office now. John is right.

Yeah, well, it's not the food that brings people there. Although I do like the chili dogs, frankly.

...