James Olson teaches classes on intelligence and counterintelligence at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He does so with the authority of someone who went undercover around the world for three decades to gather foreign government secrets for the Central Intelligence Agency and who eventually became the agency’s counterintelligence chief.
Olson understands Russia better than most Americans, after spying on the Kremlin with his wife, Meredith, during a particularly tense chapter of the Cold War, in the 1970s and ‘80s.
He talked with The Dallas Morning News about life as a spy, the top espionage threats to the U.S. and the potential fallout of the war in Ukraine for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The interview has been edited for length.
You were finishing law school when the CIA approached you about becoming an operative. How is being a spy in the real world different than how it’s portrayed in fiction?
Well, the fictional portrayal of us spies is sometimes Hollywoodized and glamorized. There is some of that. It is an exciting career. It’s not risk free. A lot of it is just hard work and seeking out every possibility that you can to collect intelligence for our country. And sometimes that’s slow. Sometimes it’s not so slow, but it is a career that requires a lot of patience, a lot of hard work, a lot of ingenuity.
You led a 31-year career undercover. To the extent that there is a daily routine for a spy, what did your life look like?
The daily life of a spy is really looking for recruits. Our business, our bread and butter, is to find foreigners who have access to information, secret information that our country needs for its own security. And our job is to induce them to cooperate secretly with us and to pass us that information.
We have to use a lot of psychology. We have to be able to read people. We have to be able to identify what it is that we can offer them that might convince them to commit treason because it’s generally treason against their own country when they’re cooperating with us. To risk their lives, because they are putting their lives in our hands when they cooperate with us.
That takes a lot of subtlety. It takes a lot of skill. It takes a lot of preparation. You just don’t go into a meeting like that, where you’re going to try to recruit someone, without very careful planning. Our country needs to have sources of intelligence who are right in the middle of things who can tell us what the opposition’s intentions are, what their capabilities are. There’s no substitute for a human spy.
In your experience, what are the things that convince most people to do this, those who accept?
Money. Quite often the motivation is venal. They want to enhance their living standard by secretly cooperating with us. And we will pay top dollar for good intelligence. You can get rich working with us if you have access to really vital intelligence.
Sometimes they want resettlement in the United States. The people we recruit are called agents. Sometimes these agents simply identify with American values, and they are ideologically inclined to cooperate with us.
Many of these people that I worked with — for example, Russians — were secretly anti-communist. They saw how their system was oppressing their own people. They saw how much of a lie their whole ideology was. They wanted to strike back against what they saw as the oppressiveness, the injustice of that system.
Many of the Russians I worked with very courageously decided that a good way to do that was by cooperating with the CIA. I had tremendous respect for people in that category. They were ideological spies. They weren’t out for themselves.
In fact, some Russian spies that I worked with who were in that category refused any payment whatsoever because they did not want to taint the purity of their motivation. They saw themselves as patriots for the Russian people.
Tell me about the time that you tapped into top-secret cables from the Kremlin. How did you manage something so delicate without being discovered?
I was the first officer to go down the manhole in Moscow in this cable-tapping operation. And to do that, of course, I had to get free of KGB surveillance, and my wife and I were under constant surveillance the whole time we’re in Moscow.
So it took some very clever tradecraft to break surveillance. It involved disguise; it involved manipulating and defeating the KGB surveillance teams. But once I got free of surveillance and once I was in disguise, then I was able to proceed to the hole and to go down and to conduct that operation.
It was, if I may say so, a brilliant technological achievement. I received the Intelligence Medal of Merit for my role in that operation, but I didn’t think I deserved it. I just did what I was trained to do. The people who deserved the medals were the engineers who had the audacity even to conceive of an operation like that.
It was a fine operation, and it lasted for about five years. And then Edward Lee Howard, a CIA officer who was being prepared for an assignment to Moscow and had knowledge of that underground cable-tapping operation, defected to the Russians. And so we lost it.
That must have been very disappointing.
It was devastating to lose such a valuable source of intelligence for our country. But even more devastating was something I attribute to Edward Lee Howard — and even more so to another CIA traitor, Aldrich Ames — and that was the fact that they identified these courageous Russians who were working secretly for us. And by doing that, of course, they were condemning them to arrest, interrogation, torture and execution. And so traitors like Howard and Ames weren’t only betraying our country, but they were also murderers.
Many of these Russians I had worked with personally, and so it was a devastating loss for me in human terms. Those murders of our Russian agents for me were like deaths in the family. We have an emotional tie to these people that are working secretly for us. We feel very profoundly our responsibility to protect them. That was the lowest point of my career, when we lost all those Russians.
What parallels and differences do you notice in the Kremlin’s behavior during the Cold War compared to the Russian aggression that we are witnessing today?
They have not changed at all. Their leadership is of course ruthless. Vladimir Putin is obsessed with America and is sending spies into the United States at very high levels. He’s very, very aggressive in that regard. I think the only possible change is that they’re even more aggressive now and sending even more intelligence personnel into the United States.
Do you think we have been effective in responding?
Counterintelligence has been insufficient to meet the threat. And I’m speaking not only of the Russian threat, which hasn’t gone away, but I’m speaking even more specifically of the Chinese espionage threat.
We are being overwhelmed by foreign spies. And at the end of the Cold War, there was a reallocation of resources. We thought that we could redirect our efforts away from communist Russia, toward things like counterterrorism, counternarcotics, nonproliferation, organized crime. Those were all valid targets, but unfortunately, in the process of redirecting resources, we took resources from counterintelligence.
We as a country are losing the counterintelligence wars. The adversaries are stealing our secrets. They’re stealing our technology. They’re subverting our citizens. They’re interfering in our elections. They’re violating our intellectual property rights. It’s unprecedented, and we’ve got to stop that. We’re not doing enough. China is by far the No. 1 threat.
What should be the response to bolster our counterintelligence?
We need more resources. We need more personnel. We need a stronger commitment to counterintelligence. I was very disappointed when it was just announced that the [Biden] administration has eliminated what was called the China Initiative. This was a program set up in the Department of Justice with the FBI to specifically target Chinese espionage on university campuses, in our high-tech corporations, all around the country.
I applauded that effort because it was a serious effort to step up our game against China. The explanation was given that in too many cases the FBI was focusing on ethnic Chinese. So there was a concern that it might be racial profiling.
But we as counterintelligence officers cannot and should not ignore the reality of how the Chinese intelligence services operate. They target ethnic Chinese. They target Chinese Americans. We [in counterintelligence] of course will do everything we can to ensure that we’re not treating people unfairly, that we are not in fact engaging in racial profiling, but good counterintelligence requires us to respond to how they’re targeting.
As you watch the war in Ukraine, what keeps you up at night?
How vicious [the Russians] have proven to be. How ruthless they are. Vladimir Putin has no respect for human life, for international law, for national sovereignty.
I first began following Vladimir Putin when he was still a lieutenant colonel in the KGB in East Germany, back in the 1980s. And we knew already back then what he was. We knew he was a killer.
If you cross Vladimir Putin in today’s Russia, there’s a good chance you’ll turn up dead. But what I would like to point out, and this is my analysis: He has made a fatal mistake. He will not survive Ukraine.
He’s vastly underestimated the Ukrainian resistance. He’s underestimated the unity and the resolve of the West. He can’t stop the flow of weapons into Ukraine. And even if he defeats Ukraine militarily, he’ll be faced with an occupation that he cannot sustain against a population that absolutely despises him and everything Russian. The best he could hope for would be a guerrilla war on a scale that I think would be comparable to Afghanistan.
The Russian people will turn on Putin. They’re already doing that because it is hurting them financially, economically, as far as their international reputation, their ability to travel. But the power of overthrowing him, the people who overthrow him are not going to be part of a popular uprising. It’s going to be the people at the top, the people around Putin.
The situation in Ukraine looks grim. What gives you hope?
I’m just absolutely inspired and moved by the courage of the Ukrainian people. It is an absolutely beautiful thing to see. I think the Ukrainian people will eventually prevail. They’ll eventually recover their freedom, their independence, because it is an unstoppable force.
And they’re getting a lot of outside help. And I praise everybody who’s doing that — our own country included — the humanitarian assistance, the military assistance.
As many others have argued, I would like to see a total [worldwide] embargo on Russian oil and gas because that would strangle the Russian economy. And that is, I believe, the best hope we have of stopping all of this. That is Putin’s Achilles’ heel.
