The former chief of counterintelligence for the CIA, looks back on his 30-year career with the agency and discusses how he coped with the moral dilemmas of spying. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
You go into this line of work, you have to know and accept that you will be doing things that you would not ordinarily do.
But the way we rationalize that, the way my wife rationalized it, the way I rationalized it, the front end, was it, all right, we will do those things, lie, cheat, steal, manipulate, coerce, because we sincerely believe we're doing those things for a greater good and we believe that that makes them morally justifiable.
Spying is ancient.
It's biblical.
And where would we be without intelligence?
I shudder to think about America's safety in the long run if we had not had good intelligence.
And how do you get intelligence?
Through deception.
There are few more mythologized posts in all of espionage.
Chief of Counterintelligence for the CIA.
This week's guest, James Olsen, reached that position towards the end of a 30 year career with the Agency.
Much of it served alongside his wife Meredith, also a CIA officer, in Paris, Moscow, Vienna and Mexico City.
Olson was later asked by former US President George H.W.
bush, himself a former CIA director, to teach counterintelligence at the Bush School at Texas A and M University.
James Olsen is the author of Fair Play, the Moral Dilemmas of Spying and To Catch a the Art of Counterintelligence.
I'm Andrew Miller and I spoke to James Olsen on the Big Interview.
James Olsen, welcome to the Big Interview.
First of all, I want to start, actually at the start, if you could tell our listeners how and when you first joined the CIA.
It's a bit of an unusual story because I was not expecting that kind of a career at all.
I had graduated from university, then I went into the United States Navy.