China’s Brain Warfare Program: “The Darkest Thing I’ve Ever Come Across” | Annie Jacobsen

Annie Jacobsen (0:00)

It's the darkest thing I have come across in all of my reporting. The Chinese have discussed brain warfare, the idea that perhaps you can degrade cognition. It is more sinister than anything I have ever thought about in my 20 years, that you can make civilians dumber.

The war theater becomes a giant test range. There is a company who does a demonstration about electronic warfare. You know what, I'm sorry, I'm not going to actually.

Imagine right now how dangerous drone swarms are to the Defense Department. Multi-thousand swarm drone swarms. Now imagine a technology where you can push a button and drop all those drones out of the sky. And imagine that the Defense Department doesn't have the contract on that technology. And if you're me that says, Whoa, I don't understand why the DOD doesn't have the contract. And they say, we don't know either, but we certainly know that Saudi is a great client for us.

Dalton Fischer (1:17)

Holy shit. NRO is really classified.

Annie Jacobsen (1:22)

I have a feeling that they know more than everybody. You said satellites can see everything. There's one place satellites cannot see that is underground. For example, I'll tell you something about Delta. Los Alamos has a, you could call it a tier one component that goes after nuclear weapons. They generally use Delta. I remember this so clearly because I get this emergency text. And it said, I'm being sent to Iran. I'm probably going to die.

I have sent you a letter to give to my wife.

Dalton Fischer (1:57)

Yeah, for people that aren't familiar with you or your work by now, you are a Pulitzer Prize finalist, New York Times bestselling author, and your eighth book, Biological War, a scenario is terrifying just like the rest. But anyway, some of the subjects that you cover are including Darpa, the CIA is kind of interwoven into all of it, nuclear war, really, really fascinating stuff. And I think I was telling you offline, like if I were to craft a podcast guest in a lab that like scratches as many itches as possible for me and my audience, I really think you're pretty damn close. So I've been really excited for this and I'm really glad we were able to finally make it happen. I appreciate you coming out.

Annie Jacobsen (2:37)

Thank you for that lovely introduction.

Dalton Fischer (2:39)

Yeah, absolutely. So maybe, and we kind of started talking a little bit offline about some of the agency stuff and there's, like I said, it kind of rears its head in all of your books in some way. So I guess what got you interested in reporting on CIA?

Annie Jacobsen (2:58)

Well, first of all, it's incredibly interesting. As you said, I've written eight books. I've been at this for 20 years and all of my books interweave, in essence, the military and the intelligence community, the CIA being one part of that very multi-headed, almost hydra-headed intelligence community. We can get into that. There are at least 17 intelligence agencies.

The way that I weave together the stories keeps me really seriously curious because you learn one thing and then you realize there is another door and another door and another door and another door. But they all weave together this idea of national security, which you hear a lot. I'm often called a national security reporter. But I think just as interesting is the fact that the intelligence community is feeding the military with what's called ISR. Of course, everything is an acronym in the military intelligence parlance. But ISR stands for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance.

In essence, it asks, like, what's going on, where is it going on, and who's doing it? It's a military term. It's most certainly an intelligence community term. And so when you think of that at sort of the 90,000-foot lens, all it becomes much easier to do reporting, for me, because I know where to look, because I know what I'm looking for.

Dalton Fischer (4:38)

So, and it's, you know, it's funny you mentioned that. Like, the CIA and the intelligence community overall, like, they were founded to be in the business of stealing secrets, right? To, would you not agree with that?

Annie Jacobsen (4:50)

Well, keep going.

Dalton Fischer (4:51)

What I was gonna say is that it's morphed, and we could talk about the ground branch stuff and the paramilitary stuff overall, but it's kind of changed over the years, at least from the periphery of somebody who's not been involved, but would you disagree with the fact that that was what it was founded on?

Annie Jacobsen (5:05)

Okay, so you're saying that the intelligence world was created to steal secrets, right?