How Bad Intelligence Helped Sell the Iraq War | Luis Rueda (throwback episode)

**Jack Murphy** (0:01)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 254 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park, and our guest on tonight's show is former CIA officer Luis Rueda.
You guys missed the pre-conversation that we just had about the Roman Empire in ancient Greece. Maybe we'll get back into that one. But Luis served as the head of operations in Iraq, chief of station in New Delhi, lots of assignments in Central and South America, was there for the invasion of Grenada. A very extensive career at Central Intelligence. Luis, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

**Luis Rueda** (0:36)
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

**Jack Murphy** (0:39)
I'm going to hit you up right off the bat. Tell us about where you grew up, how you grew up, and how that took you towards the CIA.

**Luis Rueda** (0:49)
That's a story. I was born in Cuba. We had to flee immediately after the Bay of Pigs.
And we ended up in Miami for a while. And there's a whole lot of detail in there.

**Jack Murphy** (1:04)
Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt, but when you say I had to, or your family had to flee right after the Bay of Pigs, it sounds as if maybe you had family members who were involved.

**Luis Rueda** (1:14)
Oh, yeah, my father and an uncle were involved in what passed for the anti-Castro underground on Island in Cuba. And the whole Bay of Pigs invasion had been compromised from the get-go.
My father and uncle were going home after work one day, and some woman from the town they lived in right outside of Havana came running up and said, don't go back into town. They were arresting all the men. They know what's coming.
So they spent the night at the cemetery and then got refuge in the Brazilian embassy. After a few months, they let them go and they landed in Mexico. And interestingly enough, at the foot of the stairs as they came off the plane was a State Department counselor officer from the US. Embassy and said, would you guys like to go to the United States? And they said yes, and there we were. We moved up there, moved to New York. I grew up in an extremely anti-communist household, as you can imagine, with a sense that not only were we engaged in a life or death struggle against communism, but we owed the US a lot for having taken a sin. I think every male member of the family volunteered for the military when they got asylum in the US. And so, I grew up with that sense of, I owe the country and we really are in a struggle that if we lose, we're screwed. So I thought of, you know, what I want to do. And the agency offered that, and it also offered the ability to pick up and move every two or three years. You know, I get bored easily and it's hard to stay at the same job or the same place for long. And the agency offered to, you know, a young guy, they offered adventure and excitement.
So I joined.

**Jack Murphy** (3:19)
When did the idea, I mean, I understand the motivation now when you describe it. Like, when did this sort of come up on your radar? I take it when you were in college, did you interface with like an agency recruiter?

**Luis Rueda** (3:32)
That's very prescient of you. I had a Russian history professor who looked, there was a big image of Teddy Roosevelt. And he sort of suggested and directed me toward, I might be interested in this kind of work and this field.
And I suspect he might have been spotting for the agency, I don't know, I can't say, but he steered me. And in my senior year, I applied. And knowing that the process took a while, usually it takes about a year just to get in. And I remember having received a letter from the agency and it scheduled an appointment for me at the federal office building at that time at the World Trade Center for an interview. And I went down there dutifully, you know, the interview was at two o'clock in the afternoon, I got there early, and I couldn't find the office. It was, you know, I had a number and I kept looking, there was no number. I couldn't find it for the life of me. And I was now, at this point, I was late. And so in desperation, I walk into a nearby office, which is the Wildlife Licensing Office, where they give you the fishing license and all this kind of stuff. And I asked the lady behind the counter, I said, look, I'm looking for room, whatever it was, 221 She goes, oh, sweetheart, you want the CIA? Yeah, they're in the office between the broom closet and the bathroom.