CIA Conspiracies, the Real ‘Lioness’ Teams & Iran Threats: Former Targeting Officer Brittany Butler

Brittany Butler (0:01)

If I was, let's say, Russian state intelligence, or if I was the Iranians or whatever, and I wanted to weaken the United States, I would know that a divided United States is a weaker state, and that would provide the right conditions for me to assert myself as the next superpower.

Andy Stumpf (0:26)

Welcome back to Change Agents in Ironclad Original, presented by Firecracker Farm. Today's guest is novelist and former CIA targeting officer, Brittany Butler. Brittany has years of experience recruiting spies and dismantling terrorist networks overseas. She is the novelist behind the books, The Syndicate Spy and The Patriot's Daughter, and you can find more of her writing on intelligence and current events on her substack, From Spy to Suburbia. Let's get into the show.

We're going to open with the description, a broad description of your newest book, The Patriot's Daughter, because I want to dive into this topic and get your thoughts onto the reality of this. But the summary is this. When a wave of Russian cyber attacks ignites a nationwide disinformation firestorm, the United States is pushed to the brink of civil war. As states defy Washington and militias rise, the CIA races to expose the source behind the unrest before the country collapses from within. How fictional do you believe this to be in your mind?

Brittany Butler (1:33)

For my readers, what I really wanted to do was to write something like, if I was called back to the CIA and I was going to go on a mission today, what would it look like? Now, I worked in the counter-terrorism center for basically my whole career, and I never worked on the Russian target set. But I feel like if I was to go back, it would really look a lot like this, like tackling disinformation, tackling these what we used to call hard targets at the CIA, like Iran, Russia, China, more of the long-term foreign intelligence collection objective.

And how we go back about that mission. And that's why I wanted to make that kind of like the premise for the book, so that my readers could experience like, okay, this is what it would really look like if I worked at the CIA today. And I wanted to carry them through a mission, not like the mission I was on in the early 2000s, but what would the mission look like today? And so it challenged me to think about that problem and to think about what that would look like. And of course, like, I'm always, you know, listening to the news, like all of us, and I'm maybe analyzing it a little bit differently from your average person. So I took kind of tidbits of this and that, that I was kind of learning and gleaning from the news, and I created this kind of alternate reality, but it was very believable, I feel like, in a lot of respects, because I feel like I could see it happening within our country.

And what I feel like is the biggest threat to our country is disinformation, to be honest, in terms of how it can create these divides and how it can deepen divides. So I wanted to really lean into that. So that's where I came up with the idea for the book.

Andy Stumpf (3:26)

I agree with you. We're actually, I think, more in touch and have more readily available access to information, probably than ever in the history of humanity. But I don't know if we're any more informed. I know a lot of people who think that they're incredibly informed, but they're actually in echo chambers. And they don't understand the rudimentary. Everybody wants to blame it on the algorithm, which apparently is this guy with a mustache that he waxes, who's just trying to upset people's brains. But the reality is the devices and the social media networks and even the news, traditional media outlets, they just want you to consume more of whatever it is they're putting out. And so they feed you more of what you engage with. They're looking at your device, they're looking at the data.

And they're pitching you more of what you choose to engage with.

So I think people have way more hand on the wheel than they would think. My question is, I can see this being possible. What type of disinformation do you think that a Russia or China, where would they start? What would they try to do to push the US to a brink of civil war?

Brittany Butler (4:28)

I think anything that really divides us, right? I think this idea that I kind of focus in on the book is this divide between the federal government and maybe local and state. The 9-11 Commission Report kind of touched on this a little bit, but I think it highlighted a larger issue that we're dealing with today. Is this just like general distrust of our government leaning into that? If I was, let's say Russian state intelligence or if I was the Iranians or whatever, and I wanted to weaken the United States, I would know that a divided United States is a weaker state, and that would provide the right conditions for me to assert myself as the next superpower if, for example, you're Russia or China or whatever.