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00:01 – Lauren Anderson
I’m Lauren Anderson. Welcome to the Steady State Sentinel Podcast. We’re doing something a little bit different today – we’re turning the tables. We did one episode like this, and we thought it would be both interesting and fun for our supporters, listeners, and watchers to learn a little bit about each of the co‑hosts. You hear us interview people, but you don’t often hear from us.

I was very lucky to have been interviewed by Peter Mina a short time ago, and now I have the distinct pleasure of turning the tables on Jim Lawler, another one of our colleagues and a friend of mine – actually the person responsible for me being a part of the Steady State and the Steady State Sentinel.

So I’m going to give you a little bit of Jim’s bio, and then we’re going to get into a conversation that I’m sure you’ll find really interesting.

Jim served for over 25 years as a case officer with the CIA, including as a member of the CIA Senior Intelligence Service. He recruited foreign spies all over the world, but by far most of his work was in the area of weapons of mass destruction and nuclear proliferation. In fact, Jim led the team – it’s known as the A.Q. Khan Network – that dismantled the world’s largest and most dangerous black market for nuclear weapons technology. This is a really big deal. Former deputy CIA director John McLaughlin called this operation “the closest thing I have ever seen to a perfect intelligence operation.”

Since leaving the CIA, Jim has not been sitting around enjoying retirement. He is a prolific speaker across the United States. He teaches both students and people still within the three‑letter agency world. He’s an author – he’s written three fiction books, and we’re going to touch on that a little bit. He’s just an extraordinary human being.

Jim, it’s great to have you. But before we jump in, one of the things I’d like to observe is that too often – and you and I know this – we’re known by our three‑letter agencies, and that’s where we work, but it’s not who we are. I think it would be great to know a little bit more about you beyond that. You’re a human being, a mentor, a dad, a grandfather, a great friend – there are so many aspects to explore. So what I want to start with is something Peter did with me: tell me a little bit about young Jim Lawler and what drew you into public service.

03:12 – Jim Lawler
Thank you for those kind words, Lauren. I grew up in Houston, Texas, and went to undergraduate school at Rice University. Then, for lack of anything better to do, I went to law school. I was in my third year of law school at the University of Texas in Austin, and like most third‑year students, I was focused on one thing – finding a job. I was interviewing with a lot of law firms, and lo and behold, the CIA came to the University of Texas looking for attorneys for the Office of General Counsel. Like any large organization, including your organization, the FBI, CIA has to have attorneys to either keep it out of trouble or get it out of trouble.

I went to this interview, and we got about two minutes into it. The interviewer was a gentleman named Mr. Bill Wood, and he said, “Jim, have you ever thought about the clandestine service?” This was 1976, and not much was really known about the CIA. I said, “I have no idea what the clandestine service is.” He said, “Well, I can’t tell you much about it, but I think you’d be good at this.”

I took the application home. I was intellectually curious, but reality hit that night. My wife Ellen’s mother was very ill, and there was no way we were going to move away from Houston, thousands of miles away, much less overseas. So the next day I returned that application. Instead of going to the CIA, I went into a family business. I’m not sure how many of our listeners have ever been in a family business, but I always ask audiences: if you’re no longer in a family business, I bet I know why – it’s the F‑word: family.

I loved my dad and my two brothers, and we were in a metal components manufacturing business that my dad had started. I was running it and even managed to triple sales in a short order, but I didn’t find it psychologically satisfying or meaningful. I was making a lot of money – more than I’d ever make in the rest of my life – but to me it was meaningless. After three and a half years, coming home and complaining almost every night, my wife Ellen – who has a lot of patience – finally said, “Jim, either do something about it or stop your bellyaching.”

That was impeccable logic. You don’t have a right to complain if you’re not willing to do something about it. So I kept Mr. Wood’s card. I went into my office that night and typed out a letter to him – this was before Al Gore invented the internet. I said, “You said I might have a future at the CIA three and a half years ago. The timing wasn’t right, but now it is.” My mother‑in‑law had passed away a few months earlier, so I no longer had that constraint.

I mailed that letter, and only three days later I received a phone call at my office. A young woman who never identified herself as with the CIA said, “Mr. Wood received your letter. He was wondering if you could meet him next Thursday at 3 PM at the Holiday Inn on the Gulf Freeway in the lobby.” I said yes. That phone call took about twenty seconds. I went to the meeting, we spoke for about two hours, and he said he’d like to fly me to Washington in a couple of weeks.

I did – three days of testing. Came back for three or four months, then they invited me back later for two or three more days of testing, including the infamous polygraph. Which, by the way, if any of your listeners think it’s a lie detector – it’s not. It’s a stress detector. Or as I refer to it in one of my spy novels, it’s a colonoscopy of the soul.

07:43 – Lauren Anderson
It’s so true. Having been through that process, it is not pleasant.

07:48 – Jim Lawler
It is not pleasant. But I got through that, got through the shrink exam – which is even more amazing – and a couple of weeks later I got a phone call offering me a position as a GS‑11 operations officer, or case officer. Same thing.

The amazing thing, Lauren, was that most people when they take a job know what the expectations are. I didn’t have a clue. I was so anxious to get away from Houston and that boring job that I thought I’d take a job on the planet Neptune – it didn’t matter, just something to get me out of Houston. I accepted that job offer not knowing what they wanted me to do. On February 19, 1980, I swore an allegiance to the Constitution, just like you did.

I pretty soon found out exactly what the CIA expected me to do. To be blunt: they expected me to manipulate people, to subvert people, to suborn people, to exploit people, to convince people to betray their countries, to commit espionage, to literally commit treason – to become our spies. I found out not only was I pretty good at it, but I enjoyed the hell out of it for 25 years.

09:23 – Lauren Anderson
We actually have a lot of commonality. People have in their minds what they think the CIA does, what the FBI does, but we’re both involved in the business for slightly different reasons – sometimes the same – of talking with people and gaining their trust so they tell us things they shouldn’t. You did it around the world. I did some of it in the United States. It all comes down to people and relationships. I think that’s something that would be interesting to explore.

I know you’ve shared with me that your great‑grandfather fought during the Civil War on the side of the Union and did some remarkable things. You had three key lessons that you shared with me – I’d love you to talk about them, because they really play into how you conducted yourself during your CIA career and since.

10:29 – Jim Lawler
Absolutely. My great‑grandfather was General Michael Kelly Lawler. He led a charge north of Vicksburg at the Big Black River Bridge – totally without orders – but it was successful. He was a renegade. You may notice some family similarity. He saw an opportunity and led one of the few bayonet charges in the Civil War. A lot of people think there were a lot of bayonet charges – no, not really. He and his brigade crossed an open field during a pivotal time when Confederate lines were repositioning, smashed into them, and took over 1,800 prisoners – more prisoners than he led men into battle.

He adopted the same three‑part strategy that General Grant did: move swiftly, seize every opportunity, and do the unexpected. I like that simple three‑part strategy: moving swiftly, doing the unexpected, seizing every opportunity. I posted it on my office wall at CIA and tried to emulate it – going out and doing the unexpected, seizing opportunities, and serving our country.

11:59 – Lauren Anderson
When did you first hear stories about your great‑grandfather? Ten‑year‑old Jim? Twelve‑year‑old? Or did it sink in later?

12:17 – Jim Lawler
I think I was in my early teens, but it didn’t really sink in until my twenties. My dad talked about him – it was his grandfather. General Lawler passed away in the 1880s or 1890s, so none of us really knew him. His sword and medals burned up in the family farmhouse in a fire in 1947, I believe, in southern Illinois.

But I’ve been to the battlefield at Vicksburg and walked the same ground where he led the charge. A National Park Service ranger gave my two brothers and me a personal tour, and the ranger said General Lawler was one of his favorite generals. There’s a bust of him at the national battlefield.

13:20 – Lauren Anderson
That’s amazing. So let’s move from that to the whole “people” thing. I know you’re a great teacher, and you’ve talked about categories revolving around relationships. You spent your entire career trying to get people not only to betray their country, but to tell you things they wouldn’t tell anybody – putting their own lives and their families’ lives at risk. Talk to us about those human elements and how you balance that: you have people, you have trust, you want to gain their trust, but you want them to betray someone else’s trust.

14:13 – Jim Lawler
You’re right – that is ironic. You’re getting them to betray a trust, but you want them to trust you, and you need to trust them. It all comes down to the foundation of any human relationship: trust.

I frequently cite what in my opinion are the qualities of a top‑class recruiter – whether CIA, FBI, or DIA. I’ve taught hundreds of officers from all three, and the three best recruiters I ever taught were one from each agency. On an individual basis, some FBI agents were fabulous recruiters.

I identified ten qualities that make a top‑class operations officer or recruiter. The first is curiosity – I’m naturally curious about people; that’s sincere. The second is keen listening ability – you don’t recruit people when you’re talking; you recruit when you’re listening. The third is extreme empathy – getting inside somebody’s head and feeling what they feel. I never recruited a happy person – you recruit people under stress.

15:44 – Lauren Anderson
How would you describe the difference between empathy and extreme empathy?

16:05 – Jim Lawler
There’s a difference between being empathetic – thinking you know what someone is feeling – and being an empath. An empath actually feels it. You are inside that person’s heart, head, and emotions. You know what the stress is – you’re feeling it. I can compartmentalize so it doesn’t wear me out, but to actually feel what they’re feeling and share that – I’m taking that burden from them – I’m trying to relieve that stress. The perfect ops officer would be a complete empath. They’re there, they know how to take those feelings on, and of course the person they’re trying to recruit is grateful that somebody now understands them. It could be their best friend, their spouse – nobody understands them like this particular case officer. I want them to feel like they can share anything with me. I had one asset who said, “Jim, when you’re talking, it’s like my brain is in a warm waterbed.”

The fourth quality is patience. Some of the recruitment pitches I botched were from being impatient. I give a lecture I call “My Favorite Failures” – I identify why a pitch went wrong, because you learn more from failure than from success.

17:43 – Lauren Anderson
Completely. We get so focused on success and leadership, and we don’t talk about failures – but that’s when people grow, whether they want to acknowledge it or not.

17:57 – Jim Lawler
The fifth quality is persistence or resilience – to keep going after somebody even after they’ve turned you down. I can tell a story if we have time.

18:23 – Jim Lawler
My first tour: your career can be made or broken on that first tour, depending on whether you recruited anyone. We got a classified message from headquarters saying we were going into a series of high‑stakes national security negotiations in about a year, and we had no sources on the other side to tell us their negotiating strategy. So they outlined the profile of the type of person we needed.

As luck would have it, I had been in a ski class with a gentleman who met those criteria exactly, just a few weeks earlier. I began what we call the developmental stage – befriending the person, understanding them, seeing what their stresses were, looking for vulnerabilities. I was a first‑tour officer. We developed a very good relationship. He liked me a lot.

I got it into my naive head that I could recruit him simply on the power of my personality and our friendship. Now this is naive to the extreme. If you and I are buddies and I ask you to commit treason, chances are you’d slap my face and walk away.

Before a CIA officer can pitch someone, he has to run the recruitment pitch past headquarters – outline financial commitments, a consulting fee, etc. Headquarters, my naive boss, and I all approved this cockamamie plan. So I pitched him, and he said, “Jim, you and I are friends, but that would be morally wrong.” It didn’t work.

Fortunately, I shut up. A few days later I started thinking: we have a saying in the Directorate of Operations – it’s okay to get turned down, but not turned in. If he complained to his ambassador that young Mr. James Lawler, third secretary of the U.S. embassy, had propositioned him to commit treason, it would not go well. I didn’t mention that he was the number two man at the embassy – the deputy chief of mission.

And his ambassador had a terrible reputation as a loudmouth. I could envision him storming into our ambassador’s office, pounding the desk, saying what an outrage it was. I could even see headquarters backing away from the scheme and leaving me twisting in the wind.

So I called him after two or three days – first good sign: he didn’t hang up. I said, “We had such a good time the other night – I was wondering if we could go out this coming Friday.” He said, “Jim, I was thinking the same thing.” Good. My only goal at that next meeting was to apologize – to grovel if I had to – for being so boorish as to proposition him to become a spy.

We met. The waiter dropped menus off. The first words out of my friend’s mouth: “Jim, that offer you made me last Friday – is that still good?” I said, “Well yes, of course it is.” He said, “What you don’t know is that the day after that dinner, my wife announced she wants a divorce. I can’t afford to pay her the alimony she’s entitled to, or put my two high school‑age boys in private schools when we go home next summer, unless I accept your offer. I know it’s morally wrong, but I don’t have a choice.”

One thing you learn in law school: if the judge rules in your favor, shut up and get out of court quickly. I met him a few days later and he brought out a stack of about five or six inches of classified material. Then I found out there’s never a single motivation – he said, “Jim, let me tell you why I’m really doing this: I hate my ambassador. He claims credit for everything I do. When I hand you this material, it’s as if I’m kicking that son of a bitch in the face.”

I said, “We’re on the same team. Get some more and let’s kick him again.” People can rationalize because they feel betrayed first. He was betrayed by his ambassador, and he’s evening the score – he can cope with that. Another way I like to do it is to convince them they’re now on a new team – my team.

That was where persistence paid off. Had I not pitched him at the first meeting, he would never have volunteered.

24:50 – Lauren Anderson
Wow.

24:58 – Jim Lawler
The other qualities: creativity, careful observation of stressors – you don’t recruit happy people, never. The eighth quality is a harsh term – ruthlessness. But by that I mean never forgetting why you’re doing this – you’re doing it for the national security of the United States. Mediocre case officers fear rejection – I tell students if you’ve never had a pitch rejected, you haven’t pitched enough people. They also fear the person will say, “You’ve been doing this all along just to steal secrets.” Well, that’s part of it. Ruthlessness means being focused and accepting what comes.

The ninth quality is having a persuasive personality – being trustworthy. When I pitched some members of the A.Q. Khan network, an older gentleman came back the next day and said he told his wife he agreed to my proposition, and she asked why. He said, “Because I trust Jim.”

The tenth quality is something kind of scary – I call it the metaphysics. A top case officer has the ability to effect an almost invisible neural link into the other person. You could be on another planet – explosions going off – but it’s just you and him, and you’re in a different plane of existence. I talk about that in my novels.

27:36 – Lauren Anderson
That’s a great bridge because your third novel – your most recent one – tells a story based loosely on real life: a threat from inside the agency, and not looking at who you’re getting to spy, but when somebody with whom you work is spying for the enemy. We both know an individual named Brian Kelly, and there was a longtime investigation that both the CIA and the FBI were involved in – that turned out to be Robert Hanssen, the worst spy in FBI history, who spied for the Soviets and then the Russians for many years. It took so many years to identify him because he was good at it – a whole lot of good people were looked at, and their lives were ruined. Can you talk about that in the context of your novel, and then I want to move to trust and what we’re seeing today.

29:11 – Jim Lawler
If I can preface: the Hanssen case was solved by a friend of yours and mine, Mike Rochford. He recruited a former KGB agent who gave us the voice tape and the fingerprints of Robert Hanssen. Over several days, pitching and repitching this Russian – the Russian threatened to report him to the New York Times. Finally, the Russian said, “If I was going to do this, it wouldn’t be for that amount of money,” and named a higher price. Rochford, without approval, doubled or tripled the offer. Then he said, “Okay, so who is it?” The Russian said, “I can find out.” And he did – he passed the identity to a case officer in Moscow. The tape was played at the FBI director’s office, and one agent said, “God damn it, it’s Bob Hanssen.”

My novel is a spin‑off on the Brian Kelly case. A top case officer is suspected of espionage himself – he goes through counterintelligence purgatory, where friends treat him like a leper. But he has friends – the chief of counterintelligence believes in him, and they orchestrate their own double‑agent operation.

The most famous Russian double‑agent operation, “GT Prolog” – a senior KGB officer volunteered to our chief of station in Moscow. There was controversy over whether he was bona fide. Headquarters doctrine was that the KGB would never dangle a staff officer because they’d be afraid he might actually cooperate – so therefore he had to be genuine. In fact, he was a dangle. He exposed our best exfiltration plans, learned our methodologies, affected Moscow station so badly that several officers resigned. It was a brilliant operation – designed by a man named Rim Lazilnikov, whose first name is the Russian acronym for “worldwide revolution.”

32:52 – Lauren Anderson
One thing that gets lost – espionage is unique because of the degree of secrecy. If you tell one other person, you risk being found out. The complexity and sophistication of running an espionage investigation is incredible – it requires patience. The investigation to identify the spy in the FBI or CIA lasted well over a decade.

33:42 – Jim Lawler
Yeah, it really started back in the 1980s. The Russians had two key spies: Hanssen and Aldrich Ames. They had access to – the fact that ten of our Russian assets were shot, based on information from both. I have to hand it to the KGB. Nothing makes me feel better than getting validation from a separate source. Ninety‑nine percent of the time, these cases are solved when you recruit a spy on the other side and they say, “You’ve got a problem.” That’s almost invariably the case. The John Walker case came to light because his angry ex‑wife called the FBI. But that’s the exception.

One of my friends – the most sacred commitment a case officer makes is the security of his source. I have a friend who recruited a source who was shot. He asked me to walk around the building with him – he said, “If it hadn’t been for me, he’d still be alive,” and he wept. That is a sacred vow.

36:00 – Lauren Anderson
It’s completely sacred. One of the other things Hanssen did – in addition to what you shared – he started providing assessments of his colleagues. I worked with Bob Hanssen day in and day out at FBI headquarters for four years.

36:24 – Jim Lawler
I’d love to read the SVR file on you.

36:26 – Lauren Anderson
When I found out – I was on temporary duty in Tel Aviv when we found out in early 2001 – I literally got up and went to the bathroom and almost vomited. Not only had he been spying all those years, but he’d been compiling information on where he saw vulnerabilities in all of us. I have no information he gave anything about me personally, but the mere fact he would do that – to this day it makes me sick.

37:09 – Jim Lawler
They were running him professionally. If I were the KGB handler, I’d have done the same – give me all the details about your colleagues that might give us an edge for recruitment. Never underestimate the enemy.

37:34 – Lauren Anderson
The Russians are really good at what they do, and the Chinese too. You can’t ever underestimate them. I’d like to pivot – because we’ve both lived through the fear and destruction when you think you’ve got somebody inside doing compromising things. But now we’re seeing erosion internally coming from leadership – from the administration. That unraveling of trust, that fear, is coming from the top. It doesn’t matter what political party – when somebody decides certain things are more important than doing the work, it chips away at trust. I’d love your take on what’s happening today and what it might take to move forward.

38:54 – Jim Lawler
Sadly, we’re creating a lot of targeting opportunities for the Russians and Chinese. People are being fired, being let go. You don’t recruit happy people – we’re creating a lot of unhappy, highly qualified people. Only a small percentage will commit espionage, but as Paul Redmond used to say, it’s an actuarial certainty – with the number of people with clearances, even a tiny fraction is a sizable number. If you’re upsetting people, making them feel disrespected, you’re creating CI nightmares. I always respected my assets – something they couldn’t get from their own organization. This administration appears to be deliberately shooting ourselves in the foot. It’s very sad.

40:18 – Lauren Anderson
It’s creating an environment of fear – people looking over their shoulders. The very things we know exist in Russia, China, Iran, North Korea – the thought police concept. You can’t be honest. It’s a chilling effect. I never thought I’d see the need for a support organization for FBI employees to get legal help, mental health assistance, and help finding another job because they’ve been fired. I have such a hard time digesting this.

41:16 – Jim Lawler
The intelligence community has always prided itself on speaking truth to power – telling the president exactly what we find, not what they want to hear. That is the real failing of an intelligence organization if it doesn’t do that. In the front of our hall at CIA is a quotation from the Book of John: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” That’s our motto. I’ve heard from officers that they’re being very careful about what they say because they don’t want to be categorized as “deep state.” That’s sad.

When I was running the A.Q. Khan operation, I briefed Democrats and Republicans. I had 100% bipartisan support. I couldn’t tell the difference between them – they asked, “Do you need more resources?” It wasn’t this combative partisanship. It should be us against them – and “them” means the Russians, Chinese, Iranians – people who would really wreck our lifestyle. If we’re not allowing all qualified players to do their best, that’s terrible mismanagement.

43:04 – Lauren Anderson
I also dealt with the Hill – in investigations and headquarters assignments. You couldn’t tell which party someone belonged to unless you looked at their nameplate. National security was paramount. Partisanship had nothing to do with it. It’s disappointing to see this turn of events.

43:46 – Jim Lawler
Up until 2016, I neither knew nor cared what the political affiliation of any colleague was. It never came up. We served the national security, we served the Constitution.

44:12 – Lauren Anderson
That’s so important. I want to talk about the positive. What gives you hope? What makes you feel good – like, we’re going through a rough spot, but we’ll come out the other side?

44:49 – Jim Lawler
I still mentor a lot of young people interested in careers in CIA, DIA, or FBI. I say there is some chaos now, but it doesn’t really affect junior officers – it’s more the senior levels. I encourage them – it was a wonderful career. How many careers are there where nineteen mornings out of twenty you can’t wait to get to work? When I was interviewing, my last interviewer was Ted Price – a GS‑13 who later became DDO. He took me to the CIA cafeteria, bought me a Coke, and said, “Jim, let me tell you how much fun this job is – every two weeks I’m surprised they pay me.” I thought, “I want a job like that.”

I still mentor a lot of young people. I look at their resumes, meet for coffee, talk to them – and I mentor some who are in the organization. I encourage them to ignore the political buffoonery and focus on their job.

46:15 – Lauren Anderson
You’re somebody who clearly cares about having a positive impact. Your conscious decision to continue in this role is so important. That’s what we want to see in our leaders – focus on what’s important and the mission. We’ll always have disagreements, but we keep our eye on what matters.

47:08 – Jim Lawler
That’s exactly right. I’m still in touch with a lot of CIA colleagues, and I know you are with Bureau folks. One of my delights after retirement was teaching FBI, DIA, and CIA – I’ve made a lot of friends in those organizations. There are tremendously talented people there, and I hope they continue to do their jobs and ignore the noise in Washington.

47:46 – Lauren Anderson
I agree. That’s such a great way to end. What’s up next? Where can people find you, in addition to your books?

48:01 – Jim Lawler
All three of my books – Living Lies about the Iranian nuclear weapons program, In the Twinkling of an Eye about a Russian‑North Korean biological weapon conspiracy, and my latest, The Traitor’s Tale about treachery within the CIA – are available on Amazon. I’m working on my fourth novel with Johanna McCloy – she’s the daughter of a former deep‑cover officer. It’s a story about a retired non‑official cover officer and his daughter, written from alternate points of view. He lost contact with two Russian assets, and it bothers him. He retires, then eighteen months later, one of his “loose threads” comes back.

You can email me or contact me through the Steady State.

49:23 – Lauren Anderson
When are we going to see one of these turned into a movie or Netflix series?

49:27 – Jim Lawler
I’d love that. A lot of friends say it’s like a movie in their head – that’s exactly how I write. I don’t claim to be Faulkner or Hemingway, but I think I’ve got the storytelling qualities of a Grisham, maybe. The spy author I admire most is John le Carré – his are all about the human angle. My books are about why people do what they do.

50:06 – Lauren Anderson
Thank you so much, Jim, for sharing your time, experiences, and views on life. I learn something from you every time we talk. It’s been delightful to have you.

50:25 – Jim Lawler
Thank you, Lauren. I appreciate your kind words.

50:28 – Lauren Anderson
For everyone else, this is the Steady State Sentinel. I’m Lauren Anderson. Please let us know what you think – we want feedback. We’re on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, our Substack, our website. We want to hear from you for future ideas. With that, we’ll end this podcast. Still standing watch, holding fast. Thanks, everyone.

This transcript includes AI generated material