"Hey, I'm Bob Baer." "I was a consultant on RED." "I was brought in because I spent 21 years in the CIA." "And I left the CIA in 1997, after a failed assassination attempt on Saddam Hussein." "I figured when I got off the airplane and was met by the FBI, investigating me for attempted murder, it was..." "You know, when your employer is trying to put you in jail, it's time to move on." "So anyhow, that's why I'm here." "(INHALING DEEPLY)" "I like the beginning of this." "This is very true to life." "The retired CIA officer, living in a suburban home, Northern Virginia, Maryland." "It's very mundane after your departure." "It's a good setup because, you know, it's like, what do you do after you spend a lifetime in the CIA, except try to stay in shape," "try to put everything out of your mind, and deal with the bureaucracy?" "943-66-2291." "Pension Services, please." "WOMAN:" "Thank you, Mr. Moses, please hold for your representative." "BAER:" "And that looks like the government." "Miles and miles of pods." "(PHONE RINGING)" "Now, see, if he would have retired from the CIA, he would have had a cover." "And this is what this woman would have been, taking care of his retirement checks." "And she would have never known who he was" "or what he had done." "When you retire from the CIA or leave the CIA, you leave undercover." "And that means you can tell nobody what you did." "And they actually give you a piece of paper saying what you can tell people." "It's usually some very banal thing, like, you know," ""International Consultant."" "It could have gone either way." "How's your day going?" "My day?" "My day sucks." "Your day sucks?" "Yeah." "Right now I just want to travel." "I'm thinking Chile." "Sounds like an adventure." "I don't know." "You ever been to Chile?" "Yeah." "BAER:" "You know, it was fun." "Consulting on the movie," "I went up to Toronto and talked to the actors about their motivation, who they were." "And I talked to Bruce Willis." "I mean, he was really interested to know, what is an operator?" "How does he look at the world once he gets out of the CIA, or just in general?" "And he fits the part well, because you're just sort of pissed off." "You know, you're coming out." "You've served the worst places in the world." "People don't know what you're talking about." "And they have this very politically correct view of the world." "And you don't know what to say to them." "I mean, you can't go to your neighbor and say," ""Hey, you know, I was an assassin for the CIA."" "You know, once you do this kind of work, you know it doesn't much impress people." "If it does, it impresses them for about a minute, and then they move on." "So here he is, stuck in suburban Maryland." "It's gotta be Maryland, but who knows." "Maybe it's Toronto." "But it looks like Maryland." "Yeah, and he's saying that, "Here's my life until the end."" "When I was in Iraq, I had a so-called license to kill," "which gave me authority, as the chief there, to use violence, if necessary, to get rid of Saddam Hussein." "– FRANK:" "Did you start that new book?" "– I did." "And, what's it called?" "It's called Love's Savage Secret." "Nice." "Is it any good?" "It's terrible." "I love it." "It's awful." "BAER:" "That's one thing about CIA people is they never read fiction on spying." "It's just unpalatable." "Actually the CIA people that write fiction, including myself," "I wonder if their fiction is unpalatable." "But anyhow..." "I'll leave that for another time." "My landlady keeps trying to set me up with her bridge partners' kids." "She just told me she thinks I'm gay." "I try not to judge." "What?" "Shut up!" "I'm not gay." "So here's something weird." "I'm actually gonna be in Kansas City next week." "In person?" "Mmm-hmm." "Wow." "That could be a bad idea." "It could be." "You still there?" "Yeah." "Yeah." "Why don't you call me when you get to town?" "BAER:" "You know, I was up in Toronto at the beginning of this, and it was amazing the preparation that goes into one of these movies." "There was an entire team up there that dealt nothing but weapons." "And, having spent a little time around weapons," "I'm familiar with them." "Automatic weapons and rockets and the rest of them." "And I was talking to these guys, and it was amazing what they knew." "Their knowledge went way beyond mine." "The rate of fire, who manufactures what, what year a FAL stopped being made, and on and on and on." "I mean, it was truly remarkable." "These people knew their guns." "And it was important for Bruce Willis." "I mean, he knew guns, too." "He's been around them." "And they had the..." "Wasn't it..." "For days in advance they had the martial arts people preparing for the moves." "Now here we go." "The entry team." "Yeah, this is very real, using fiber optics to look around corners, under doors," "through air conditioning." "It's hard to tell what they're gonna do here." "It looks like they're trying to kidnap the guy, because they've got" "a syringe." "And that's the only reason they'd send a team like that." "If they were gonna assassinate Bruce Willis in this scene, they would simply do it from a distance, with a sniper rifle." "MAN ON RADIO:" "Come in, Unit One." "Come in, Unit One." "Unit One, respond." "BAER:" "I like these..." "These delayed detonators, in case the ammunition here" "is going to draw the team in." "It's exactly what he wants to do." "He's got his passports." "Of course, you know, when you leave the CIA, you'll leave with," "you know, 20 different passports." "But you have to leave them all behind." "And they have a very good record of them." "And they're in aliases, different names, foreign passports." "But they're very" "conscious about getting all these things back." "They just don't want CIA people taking the tricks of the trade or their tools out and using them privately." "So Bruce Willis, if he had been around a lot, could have picked up some of his own passports." "I used to..." "You know, diplomatic passports, keep them hidden." "And you always have a stowaway pack." "Money." "Cash." "Credit cards, you don't want to touch them." "And we're gonna see this in the course of the movie." "Credit cards, cell phones, anything with a digital fingerprint will give you away." "If I have your name and telephone number, or cell phone number, within five minutes I can find out where you had dinner last night, simply by pulling up your Visa card." "And this is exactly what would happen to somebody on the run, like Bruce Willis." "They would come after any indicator that he's left behind." "Family, friends, they're all untouchable for him right now." "Hey, aren't you going to invite me in?" "BAER:" "If he's gone to Kansas City, best way to go is a bus." "Get on a Greyhound bus." "Doesn't matter if it takes two extra days to go there." "You can't get on an airplane." "The reservation systems are instantly available to the FBI." "Who's gotten on." "And you have to use a driver's license to get on, of course." "He would never touch this." "Never touch a cell phone or a reservation." "Hey." "BAER:" "You know, watching this, it's hard not to watch the movie, because it's very good." "The avocado?" "BAER:" "If you start with that initial scene, where you have the takedown of Bruce Willis' house, and, for me, who watches a few of these movies, you can start to suspend belief right from the beginning," "and you can continue it through." "You can't go back and forth." "But this one works." "And that shootout in front of his house, of course, the police would have been there in five minutes." "Chances of getting away would have been close to zero." "But that's okay." "This is a movie." "It's the way it's supposed to be." "Why would anyone want to kill me?" "Because we've been under surveillance." "They've been listening to our conversations." "Why?" "BAER:" "This is good." "Very good." "This is exactly what you assume if you're a CIA operative is your phone is tapped." "I spent 21 years in the CIA assuming my phone was tapped, all my conversations were recorded." "Every single conversation I held was couched in those terms." "If I wanted to hide where I was going, I would tell somebody on the phone, it doesn't matter whether it's your mother or your family, that you're going to the beach, when in fact you're going into the mountains," "just simply to mess up the people that are watching you." "And here he's thrown the cell phones out of the car." "Good move." "...sitting somewhere, comfortably and look back on this as the great, big adventure that it is." "(MUFFLED MUMBLING)" "(ANGRY MUMBLING)" "(YELLING)" "BAER:" "Now he's off to reassemble his network, which is what would happen if someone got in trouble." "For instance, I'm out of the CIA, but I keep a whole bunch of people on my Rolodex who can do particular things." "If you need a Russian ship tracked in the Crimea," "I know who to call." "If I need something from Moscow, takes me five minutes." "One person can't do it all, so you use your friends and former colleagues." "And it's also a question of people you've actually served in the field with, you trust." "You know what they'll do under pressure." "You'll know who would dime you out to the FBI and who wouldn't." "No, I should be on time tonight." "Milk, two percent?" "Okay, love you, bye." "Listen." "I can make you rich." "Don't you know who I am?" "Of course, I do." "(CHOKING)" "BAER:" "In this first hit, of course, we're establishing that we're dealing with assassins here and making it look like a suicide." "This is off the books." "Total blackout." "BAER:" "Yeah, "off the books."" "You know, believe it or not, there are things off the books." "When I first came in the CIA," "I was 22 years old." "I wanted to know things." "And of course, one was the Kennedy assassination." "And I found one of the main files, a reference to it, and it was being held in archives." "But a special archives." "And you call it the back room." "What I did was try to call it up, and it turned out that the file, the Kennedy file, was called "black-taped."" "That means there was only a certain number of people who could look at it, and they were on what was called a bigot list." "And I was not on that bigot list, of course." "I was 22 years old." "So one day I was at Saturday duty, and I went up to the Director's office for a piece of paper, and I stuck in there a piece of paper, knowing that he wouldn't read it," "releasing the file to me." "The Kennedy file." "He signed it, it came back." "I sent it to the back room." "And in 24 hours, a response came back," ""File can no longer be located."" "I don't believe in conspiracies." "But I do know that information does disappear." "And there are all sorts of operations that are run off the books." "I had a case, when I left the CIA," "I was in charge of the Caucasus and Central Asia." "And we had a case being run there, and even though I was a senior officer at that time," "I was not allowed to know what the case was." "All I know is people were traveling out to my area, and they had encryption devices on thumb drives." "So even though they were carrying their communications into CIA stations, they were coming in encrypted." "And they would come back to Washington double encrypted, and only a person with the same thumb drive back in Washington could read it." "So when I would see this message traffic going back and forth, it was just garbled." "Everything." "I couldn't understand anything." "Unbelievable." "BAER:" "A lot of CIA operations, the most sensitive ones, stay off computers." "Completely." "They're done on paper, it's handwritten." "Or it's carried back and forth by courier." "So, you know, if the FBI were to show up at the CIA and say," ""We gotta look at your files about a possible crime,"" "they'd sit down at a computer, type out whatever they needed to." "And the chances of them coming up with, would be close to zero." "Simply because there are so many compartments within the CIA." "The people only that are read into a case will actually know about it." "This used to be a gentleman's game." "BAER:" "This all goes back to the Cold War, where the KGB was all over Washington." "It had moles in the government." "We knew about them." "And the only way to protect information was to compartment it." "And it worked." "I mean, until today, the real story of catching the CIA mole, Rick Ames, has never come out." "It never will come out." "You'll see various versions of it in books, and in FBI press statements and the rest of it, but they're all completely inaccurate." "Which I think is fascinating." "The greatest mole in American history," "Americans don't have a clue how he was caught." "So you have all these sort of false histories." "Another thing we did, if you were in the field and you had a particularly sensitive case, and that's..." "I'm talking about, you were about ready to recruit a foreigner, like, let's say a KGB officer, and it started to go well, the entire..." "What we call the development process, you know, trying to bring this guy over to your side." "What you would do is fly back to Washington and say," ""Hey, tell your boss, this case is gonna go."" "And he'd say, "Okay, fine."" "And what they would do is set up a completely separate, secret channel, which you could report the facts of what were going on," "but you'd use the old channel, which was widely distributed, to say, "This case has fallen apart." ""The guy is not calling, returning my phone calls." ""I don't know what to do." "It's over, it's done."" "And so, as far as the officers in the CIA that..." "Just the people on the desk, they'd think the case fell apart, and that would be the end of it." "So Moses made 22 calls to Pension Services and that didn't stand out to you?" "Unbelievable." "BAER:" "Cell phones are the worst." "They're the great betrayers." "Never commit a crime with a cell phone." "Never use a cell phone." "Never even try to use a prepaid cell phone." "You simply can run algorithms through all calls in a certain area, connected to all prepaid, and you'll start to see patterns." "And you can undo people, even though they think they're anonymous, with a prepaid cell phone." "I gotta say, I think you're pretty amazing for breaking free and keeping it together like you did." "That's impressive." "I'm gonna go back and get my purse..." "I can have somebody bring it downtown for you." "– Get in the car!" "– Ow!" "Let me go!" "You're hurting me." "(SCREAMING)" "(ENDERCOTT GRUNTS)" "Am I gonna die?" "No." "You just need some sleep." "I may vomit." "Wow, this is just like Love's Savage Secret." "I am high." "You have such beautiful green eyes." "BAER:" "What I like about RED is it just never slows down." "Just when you start to establish a relationship, the action starts again." "It's great." "For an ex-spy, these movies that are action-oriented," "they're just much better." "A spy's life is really a lot about waiting." "It's a lot about going out, picking people up in cars, debriefing them, following false leads that go nowhere." "It's fairly routine." "Going through paper." "So when you see a drama, it's just so much more entertaining." "And when you have these two characters, both want something." "You've got Cooper, who's trying to make a career." "You've got Bruce Willis saying, "Yeah, I made my career, so what?"" "And you have Cooper, who's young," "and he believes in the system." "He believes the system plays with a straight bat." "And it's gonna take a lot to convince this guy that it's corrupted." "OFFICER:" "Freeze!" "Put your weapon on the ground!" "Put your weapon on the ground now!" "BAER:" "As is the case with a lot of people." "When I first came in the CIA, I sort of believed everything." "I was 22 years old." "I believed I was protecting national security." "I believed the politics stayed out of it." "Didn't matter whether you were Republican or Democrat." "There were a lot of liberals." "I just thought, you know..." "I did not question what I was doing at all." "And even when the facts started to go against my beliefs, it just..." "It's not enough to change your opinion." "You had to get older." "You had to see things." "You had to see people's motivations." "And you had to see people were making careers." "And they didn't much give a damn about what they were doing." "See, a guy like Moses would go to the shitholes of the world, you know, for a couple of reasons, to get away, to make a difference, not to be bored," "and he'd have absolutely no use for the headquarters types." "So it looks like none of our dreams are coming true, at the moment." "Sorry about that." "Thanks for saving me." "I guess." "No problem." "Not my best first date." "Not my worst, either." "BAER:" "This is hilarious." "Until we find out who's trying to kill us, you're gonna have to stay with me." "For how long?" "BAER:" "You know, the crucible that holds this movie together is, the fact is, they need to answer a question, and that really drives the narrative in this." "And on many levels it's plausible, because you've got so many actors in the system who want different things." "And what we're gonna find is that Bruce Willis understands there's..." "There's political motivations behind this." "You can't just go around duct taping everyone." "People are basically kind of decent." "That hasn't always been my experience." "Let me try and talk to her." "– What?" "– Just let me do it." "They told me to be patient." "The police have done nothing." "BAER:" "You know, this whole thing about The New York Times harkens back to a past era when in the old days the CIA station chief anywhere in the world would have coffee with the New York Times correspondent." "Wherever he was." "They'd exchange information." "You know, nothing sensitive, but just to, sort of, catch up on the politics." "And often The New York Times was drawn into operations, you know, often unintentionally." "There was a New York Times correspondent who was involved in the coup against Mosaddeq in Iran in 1953." "Actually played a key part in that." "So what we're seeing here is..." "I mean, look, you've got to look at journalists as in a sense, they're spies, too." "A good investigative journalist is trying to go get a story." "He's running the same risks." "He spends his life dealing with a lot of people that are crazy, or frauds, or whatever." "And that one story comes along, and you do anything to get to it." "(SPEAKING MANDARIN)" "I really like this, where he interjects with Mandarin." "Moses does." "It's good, because it just tells us, "All right, this guy is really..." ""This girl is starting to understand he's seen a bit of the world." ""And he's gonna be of some use." "But she's starting to be of use, too."" "You can see how their characters are coalescing." "Unbelievable." "Hank Maestriano died 2 weeks ago." "Car crash." "Daniel McGinty." "Heart attack." "Last week." "(WHISPERING) But if this is a hit list, why is this guy still alive?" "Gabriel Singer." "Flies cargo planes." "That's a good question." "(BUZZING)" "Hell of a mess." "Come on." "(DIALING)" "Joe Matheson, please." "Hold on." "Marna." "Hello?" "BAER:" "So here he's stepping out of the trade craft, it's called, in the sense that he's using a cell phone, but, you know, what else..." "You don't have a choice." "I mean, he can't very well run out of the library and get a..." "I mean, these are limits of film." "You can't get on a pay phone, or you don't have time to..." "For instance, in a library you would steal somebody's phone." "But, you know, that's just an extra scene." "Frank Moses is not a retired analyst who's never worked in the field." "This guy has a history." "CYNTHIA:" "That's a file number." "You need to visit the back room." "You're going to meet the Records Keeper." "BAER:" "That's true." "Anytime there is a sensitive operation inside the CIA, there's what's called a back room, where very sensitive files are kept." "You simply cannot leave these things around the building." "Even though they're in safes, you need a recording, who has seen the file, when they saw it, what reason they saw it." "They have to be on the bigot list to look at the file." "And what this does, is allows the CIA, if there's a compromise, it allows it to go back and piece it back together." "You know, who knew what, and when." "And then once you get into indices, it shows, you know..." "Then you can get into this whole world of credits cards, cell phones..." "And if you've got a mole inside the CIA, or any part of the government, you can start to figure it out." "Simply, again, running these algorithms through the databases." "He got old." "Then some thumb-sucker came along and tagged him "RED."" "Red?" "Yeah." "RED." "R-E-D." ""Retired:" "Extremely Dangerous."" "BAER:" "RED doesn't exist." "Yeah." "They don't make them like that anymore." "BAER:" "That's what the old-timers would say." ""They don't make them like that anymore,"" "which just pisses the young people off to no end." "I want NSA telephone surveillance, voice recognition..." "FRANK:" "We have to find Marvin Boggs." "Marvin died two years ago in a fire." "Yeah." "Marvin has died many times." "Oh, can we have that one?" "BAER:" "I once worked with a guy..." "He's out of the CIA now." "He's actually overt, so..." "He used to repossess cars in Baltimore when he went through college." "He's about 6'2"." "Very Irish." "And it was the worst part of Baltimore." "And this was the days before illusion vans." "And they brought him in the CIA simply because he could hotwire any car at any time." "And we were in Beirut, and we had an EE boat, escape and evasion boat, and we went down to the harbor and we had to take it out." "And it was a very large boat." "Sophisticated electronics." "And anyhow, we were missing one of the keys to one of the engines." "And John stuck his head under the dash of this boat, and hotwired that thing in five minutes, and hooked up" "all of the speedometer, and the rest of it." "It was amazing." "It was very fast." "Anyhow, so this reminds me of that, when they steal this boat." "You know, anytime you can, if you're trying to go off the grid, you wanna steal things." "You don't want to rent them." "You leave a record." "But if you steal them, use them for an amount of time before the police can catch up, it's the best way." "You know, if you're in Newport Beach and you're leaving the airport there, if you really had to make a break for it, you'd want to go where they have the valet parking in front of the airport." "Just grab one of those cars and take off." "Simply so you wouldn't have to rent one." "Why do you live here when you have the other place?" "Let's put it this way." "When the helicopter passed over the house last year and I could feel their eyes on me." "Wet like peaches." "I have a list here." "It was written by a reporter who's now dead." "Along with everyone whose names are on that list." "Well, almost everyone." "Frank, how many times have I told you?" "You cannot trust the system!" "I told you when you're in the system, they switch the flip and you're done." "Man, satellites, cell phones, chips, net, the web, the dentist..." "Marvin!" "BAER: (CHUCKLING) This is the way I sound, I'm sure, sometimes." "But you know what?" "It's quite amazing, when the system chooses to focus on a person, or a group of people, you can pretty well," "you know, find them and find out what they're doing." "To hide these days, in this digital age, you really do have to go off the grid like this, like the Unabomber." "As it turns out, he really was being given daily doses of LSD for 11 years." "– In that case, he looks great." "Yeah." "– Fantastic." "Got it." "Guatemala." "Fall 1981." "Five of the guys on this list were there, not including us." "San Benito." "Just outside." "Injun territory." "Yeah." "Was a little village." "Everybody was killed." "Civilians." "They told us, "Go in there." "Clean it up." ""Make it look like it never happened."" "You think everyone on this list was there?" "Damn it." "Damn it!" "Do you know what's wrong with this country?" "They're all trying to kill us?" "Exactly!" "BAER:" "This is hilarious." "You know, when you talk about the CIA, you get these reactions like... (CHUCKLES)" "People look at you like you're a little bit nuts." "Who's she talking to?" "Just take it easy." "Frank, we gotta get rid of this broad." "I know a great place, just up the road." "Lots of alligators." "We're not getting rid of the broad." "I like her." "Okay?" "What's the angle?" "No angle." "I like her." "BAER:" "I trained down in Florida when I first came in." "They turned us loose in cames," "M-16s in Ten Thousand Islands." "One of the most miserable places in the world." "Mangrove swamps, sand gnats, which ate you all night, and just left us..." "And alligators, once you got into the swamps." "I think what it was, the CIA training had a lot to do not so much with preparing you for operations as it did for..." "To see who broke under the pressure." "Even, you know, fairly mundane things, like filing reports, they would..." "You know, you would have a meeting during the day, you'd come back to one of these phony bases." "We had these in the South." "This is during training and..." "You would type up a report, and you'd get done about 10:00 at night, and then your boss would say, "This is unacceptable."" "They'd hp it up." "And you'd go until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, rewriting the thing." "And it wasn't so much the report was bad." "It was just to see who could withstand the pressure and who couldn't, and that was very important." "The CIA, what they didn't want to happen is to figure this out when you're in the field, to crack, 'cause that's where you cause problems." "And it was amazing the number of people that washed out of the course, who were not certified." "And they were usually sent to be analysts, or they went into administrative work." "Or they just left the CIA altogether." "The attrition rate of the CIA is extremely high." "In fact, it's..." "I don't know how high it is, 'cause it's one of the great secrets, how many people actually make it, let's say, through the first five years." "You know, it's..." "A lot of famous people that I've run into say," ""Oh, yeah, I spent a year in the CIA and I just didn't like it."" "Or something like that, and left." "Big broadcasters, journalists, academics." "Right?" "Gabriel Singer?" "What's this about?" "Guatemala. 1981." "San Benito." "I can't talk to you." "Pair beats ace." "I got one for you." "What did this twice-decorated, west Texas Jew-boy Marine pilot say to the Chinese New York Times reporter?" "I give up." "Nothing." "I didn't tell her a damn thing." "The reporter's dead now." "And everyone she spoke to is either dead or a target." "That includes you." "Oh, Christ." "They had me fly this guy out there in the dead of night." "Hairy little airstrip in the middle of nowhere." "He was CIA, some dorky little spook in a suit and tie." "Remember that guy?" "– Black glasses." "– Yeah." "He was giving the orders." "GABRIEL:" "He picked up a package and I flew him back out." "What was the package?" "It wasn't a what." "It was a who." "Frank!" "Frank!" "It's that helicopter." "We're in an airport." "So..." "BAER:" "God, this is hilarious." "November niner 748 Charlie." "November niner 748 Charlie." "BAER:" "Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean you're wrong." "FRANK:" "Is that a 4?" "This is a 4." "Charlie." "Is that a 7?" "What is that?" "GABRIEL:" "I'll tell you what it is." "(GUNSHOTS)" "I told you she shouldn't have made that phone call!" "MAN:" "We lost visual on target." "All right." "Shake the tree." "– You'll pay for the breakage?" "– Yeah, Roger that." "BAER:" "All this camera stuff, of course, now is all in black and white, but, you know, we can't have that in a film." "It would run from the helicopters to any ground surveillance, satellite surveillance, into a big room." "It's called a fusion center." "And some of it would be thermal, some of it wouldn't." "At a point like this they would have Predators flying over." "She called me an old man." "Pig!" "Open the pig!" "BAER:" "See, he's firing an M-4." "The preferred weapon of spooks is an HK MP-5." "Grenade launcher, which doesn't jam up as much." "Grenade!" "MARVIN:" "Damn satellites!" "Boop to that!" "BAER:" "Yeah, see, the smoke in the thermal would mess up the satellites." "FRANK:" "You okay?" "MARVIN:" "Yeah." "Come on, come on." "Hey." "All right?" "BAER:" "Now, standard operating procedure when you're in a gunfight in the CIA is a gun is meant to give you time to get away." "There are no duels." "You do not try to get all the bad guys." "You want to put down enough lead to run for it." "Another rule was, any time the guns come out, you're in big trouble." "It's a huge public relations mess." "So try to get away, but, of course..." "That's a good scene." "I like that." "Old man, my ass." "God damn it!" "– Smoke and thermals." "Obstructed view." "– Signal's fading." "BAER:" "This would be the fusion center." "Nice shot." "– Thanks." "– We should get out of here." "(SIRENS WAILING)" "You really know how to show a girl a good time, Frank." "I will kill you, Marvin." "Take it easy, man." "She likes you." "(SIGHS)" "BAER:" "This is what I like about these narratives," "I know I'm a bit of an amateur, just every 10 minutes, you have a bit more of information." "The viewer's gotta know what's gonna happen next, right?" "We know this much." "There was a guy that landed in Guatemala." "Can't remember his name and there was some extraction, get some guy out and it's..." "And now we're gonna up the tension, breaking into the CIA." "...then there's only one place that we can go to find out why they're coming after us." "Yeah." "We're gonna get killed there, for sure." "In or out?" "No." "Of course I'm in." "I'm just saying." "BAER:" "You know, the Russians actually broke into the CIA." "It was the old days, when they thought that no one would even ever try." "You had guards downstairs." "You had a badge." "It was a green badge then, with your picture on it." "That's all it was." "And it was before any sort of digital controls." "And what happened was, the Russian..." "It was just with supreme confidence, just came by, and flipped his American Express card." "It was a green American Express card." "He'd done something to distract the guards." "The guard was looking the other way, saw this flash of green, and waved him on." "They actually caught him on the fifth floor, wandering around, before they ran him away." "That was before 9/11." "That's when busses used to come to the CIA." "Yeah, it's not possible now." "When you come in, you've got badges and you've got codes." "Plus, you have to get through the front gates." "Not everybody can do that now." "You have to have a badge." "Tell Ivan Simanov that Frank Moses is..." "(DISTORTED ECHO)" "Frank Moses is here to see him." "BAER:" "Which just brings us to this scene." "The Russians." "That's who you'd go to if you wanted to break in." "IVAN:" "I have to say this is the last thing I expected when I got up this morning." "I have many times dreamed of killing you." "But now" "you are a pensioner." "Couple of years now." "Time passes." "As we get older, things seem less important." "BAER:" "He would know who the KGB chief in Washington was." "He would know to ask by name." "And he would know what his history was." "– He was a pig." "– He was my cousin." "BAER:" "The Russians have great break-in teams, by the way." "And it was odd." "We knew when they were coming into town because they were all bald." "Didn't have a hair on their head, and the reason was because they would get into safes by putting a plate behind them, and radiate them with cobalt 60." "I think that's what it was." "And it would show the combination on the plate." "But, of course, they had no protection against the radiation, and they'd lose their hair." "But they're very good, though." "The CIA had its own break-in team." "Very good as well." "You basically could get into any bank in the world." "Or anywhere." "Drink." "Who are we drinking to now?" "Veronique." "She was mine." "– Impossible." "– Yes!" "Whatever she got, it was worth it." "(SIGHS)" "I miss the old days." "I haven't killed anyone in years." "BAER:" "Yeah, we all miss the Cold War, don't we?" "We knew what side we were on, what the stakes were, who the bad guys were, and everybody played by rules." "KGB and the CIA never assassinated each other." "It was just, sort of, an unspoken rule." "There was never any violence of any sort." "Cracks." "Codes." "ID swipes." "All of it." "Amusing as this would be, it is beyond my reach." "(SPEAKING RUSSIAN)" "A favor from Frank Moses?" "BAER:" "That's where I spent 21 years." "That's the old building." "That's where the VIPs go." "Here's the director's garage, which you have permission to get in." "You'd show an ID, or they'd have your plate ready." "Military comes in a lot." "I remember one time, I was at my desk, I was working on Iraq, and I got a call from the director's office and said," ""There's a four-star general coming in to see you." "He wants to talk about Iraq."" "And I said, "Well, what am I gonna talk to him about?"" "And he says, "Well, how we're gonna get rid of Saddam." "What else?"" "I said, "I'm not prepared for this." And this was the commander of" "Joint Special Operations Forces." "And pretty soon I hear two Cobra helicopters coming in, flying low over the Potomac." "They come up, rise, come down, and land behind the building in the parking lot." "These guys actually came in with combat helicopters." "They were in full combat gear." "And the general's aide, honest to God, had a dueling scar across his face." "It was amazing." "I don't know what they thought about the CIA but I didn't..." "Didn't really have much of a plan for Saddam." "(SCAN WHIRRING)" "Have a good day, sir." "Gentlemen." "(LAUGHING) My God!" "BAER:" "This reminds me of the director's elevator, which goes from the basement directly to the seventh floor." "It's monitored by security cameras." "And the director can just bypass the rest of the building to get up to his office." "Yeah, see, it's got seven floors." "They got it right." "The Russians give you the code?" "No." "Changes every six hours." "BAER:" "This is absolutely a hilarious scene." "Absolutely hilarious." "And it pretty well tells you, security is only as strong as it is at its weakest point." "Come on." "Mr. Moses!" "Been a long time." "I'm gonna need to see that Guatemala file." "Guatemala?" "BAER:" "When I left the CIA, I was awarded an intelligence medal." "And I was told about this, but you're not allowed to take these things out of the building." "So..." "They're held in safes like this." "And supposedly, you can let your family in, they can look at the medal, and you can..." "I don't know what you do with it, but anyhow, I had some people actually go get it for me, inside the CIA, and bring it out to me." "So I still have it till this day." "It's all based on friendships." "Oh, I should tell you, there's a new guy came down here yesterday looking for your file." "Name of William Cooper?" "6'1"?" "Cute hair?" "Hair was cute." "(BOTH LAUGHING)" "But I thought he looked a little tough, though." "BAER:" "It's all who you know." "That's what the CIA is really about." "It's about relations, and maintaining them." "It's not about technical penetrations." "It's not about satellites." "It's about human relations." "Knowing the world, knowing people, know where to go for answers." "And this is what we're seeing with Moses here." "(BACK IN THE SADDLE PLAYING)" "Bad move, Grandpa." "I'm back" "I'm back in the saddle again" "I'm back" "I'm back in the saddle again" "WOMAN:" "Just looks completely different than his profile picture." "Peeling off my boots and chaps I'm saddle sore" "Four bits gets you time in the racks I scream for more" "Fools' gold out of their mines The girls are soaking wet" "Not tongue's drier than mine I'll come when I get back" "Kordesky trained you?" "Yeah." "I trained Kordesky." "(GROANING)" "I'm back" "I'm back in the saddle again" "(SCREAMING)" "BAER:" "CIA operatives do not keep weapons in their offices." "But anyhow, we needed that for the movie." "Seal the building." "Bald, white male, 50s..." "BAER:" "They got the badge right." "The blue badge." "That's good." "Hi." "(ALARM BLARING)" "We should go." "We should go now." "BAER:" "You see everybody evacuating during the fire." "You see a lot of, you know, bureaucrats." "The CIA is made up largely of very smart people who are bureaucrats." "They analyze information." "They read foreign newspapers." "They're not going around wheel-kicking people and the rest of it." "That's a very small number of people that actually get out in the field and do paramilitary operations." "I can't stop the bleeding." "BAER:" "This is Fairfax Fire Department." "I don't think the CIA's got a fire department." "I'm pretty sure it doesn't." "So they would have to call in..." "If there was a fire, they would call in the fire department, who would actually be escorted by security officers," "which is the case here." "And this would be, you know, I guess the opposite of a Trojan horse, where you're getting out of the building dressed up as a fireman." "Which is all very plausible in the sense of, you need a diversion to carry off something like this." "Marvin?" "There's still something wrong with this guy's head, Frank." "FRANK:" "You're really something, Joe." "Marvin, you okay?" "I don't want to talk about it." "Joe?" "Joe who was dead Joe?" "– She with us?" "– Yeah." "Not dead." "Just retired." "I guess calling wasn't an option?" "– Can we go?" "– Yeah!" "JOE:" "You let yourself get shot?" "God damn it." "(YELLING IN PAIN)" "CYNTHIA:" "Out." "– You okay?" "– Thanks, Doc." "What did he get?" "I have no idea." "You just had your ass handed to you by a goddamn retiree." "BAER:" "That's hilarious." "Inside the building, it's a joke, "The retirees."" "The moment you're out the door in the CIA, you're pretty much done for it." "You can come back for ceremonies, and the rest of it, but they look at retirees as living in a different generation." "The whole idea they had spent years in Vietnam, and Laos, and Guatemala, and in the middle of the Cold War, and were a pretty tough set, it's just irrelevant to the new generation coming into the CIA." "They think they're dinosaurs." "And they're fighting different wars." "Afghanistan, Iraq." "Different ways of doing things." "And so they would have this disdain for retirees." "Then we all get shot." "I'll just go in by myself." "Want a vest?" "(SIGHING)" "Wouldn't do any good." "BAER:" "And I'm not sure how Victoria got this house, but that doesn't matter." "It's a pretty house." "Frank Moses." "Hi, Victoria." "Are you here to kill me?" "No." "You've been shot." "Tell Marvin to stand down before he gets hurt." "BAER:" "That's Marvin in what's called the ghillie suit." "They've got leaves and webbing, and the rest of it." "Who's the girl?" "She's with me." "– JOE:" "Vicky." "– Joe!" "Oh, Vicky." "Sexy as ever." "You old snake charmer." "Sarah, this is Victoria." "Best wet work asset in the business." "And a true artist with an RPN." "What's that?" "I kill people, dear." "You were lucky." "How'd you do it?" "– What?" "– How'd you make the transition?" "Here you seem so calm." "At ease." "BAER:" "It's good." "It's good." "You know, the transition." "How do you make that transition?" "So many CIA people, they get out, and they end up living in Washington, waiting for a contract with the Department of Defense," "with a big corporation." "Northrop, it doesn't matter." "And they tend to re-circulate the same stories." "Talk about the way things were." "And it's hard to get out." "I've seen a few of them go up to New York." "But more often than that is they're off looking for an adventure." "I've got friends that are working in Somalia, Iraq." "They just..." "It's just hard to settle down." "See, they can't go back in the CIA, they end up working for Blackwater." "It doesn't matter where." "Just to keep the adrenaline rush going." "What?" "BAER:" "A lot of people will actually go back on the CIA in contract." "Just to be part of it." "They just don't adjust to running a UPS franchise, or something." "The entire back half of the Guatemala file has been blacked out." "BAER:" "Guatemala file redacted." "But there's a list. 11 names." "Plus one that's been redacted." "All dead." "Except for Frank and Marvin." "All the names on the reporter's list are in the file, too, but she has an additional name." "Alexander Dunning." "Somebody's protecting him." "Dunning is the CEO of Browning-Orvis." "Gangsters." "FRANK:" "Defense contractor." "Very connected." "If the CIA is protecting him, he's under surveillance." "We could go see him." "You're not going without me." "JOE:" "Well..." "We're getting the band back together." "That's nice." "(CELL PHONE BUZZING SOFTLY)" "BAER:" "This is an interesting turn in the film." "You've got William Cooper, who's got kids and a wife, and a suburban house, and is grounded, and the main characters in this, the retirees, are..." "Don't have families." "Very interesting." "VICTORIA:" "The FBI has a lookout position on the east perimeter." "MARVIN ON RADIO:" "Copy that." "(CLEARING THROAT)" "Alexander Dunning." "Pleasure to see you, Secretary Baptiste." "(IN FRENCH ACCENT) The pleasure is with me." "They're in." "Frank said you wanted me with you." "Yes, I thought it might be nice to have a bit of girl time together." "Get to know each other." "And I just wanted to tell you that in all the years I've known Francis," "I've never seen him like this." "So if you break his heart," "I will kill you." "And bury your body in the woods." "Wow." "Okay." "Oh, this is gonna be fun." "ALEXANDER ON RECORDING:" "Here at Browning-Orvis, we have a longstanding commitment to humanitarian causes because exemplary corporate citizenship is our highest calling." "As a company with global reach and global interests..." "BAER:" "When I was in the CIA, the first thing they did was, they sent us down to Office of Technical Services, where they learn how to work in disguises." "They would give you moustaches and beards." "And they actually have a philosophy behind this, and that was to distract the viewer, and that could mean anything, like wearing a gold tooth." "Because if you're talking to somebody, let's say on a bus, and you've got a gold tooth on, that's the only thing they'll remember." "In my case, they gave me huge glasses with big frames, and it just made you look like a nerd." "In fact, when I came in the CIA, I came in in disguise, in the sense that they made me grow a beard, they put these glasses on me with big frames, dyed my hair and combed it the other way." "And this is in CIA training, so that the other trainees wouldn't recognize me when I was out in the field, or when we went off in different directions." "I was going to deep undercover assignment." "You got a little skeptical about disguises because they were, really, a pain." "Especially in hot climates." "You could not keep on moustaches." "The glue would melt, and they would come half off." "And that actually happened to me once where the moustache dripped and sort of came off on one side." "We used a lot of semi-automated masks, which you'll see in movies." "They're latex masks that will go all over your face." "We had a case, I remember it was hilarious, in Africa, and the operative picked up his asset, this African, in a very bad neighborhood." "And he couldn't go in as a white man, so he put on this latex mask of a black man's face." "And it worked fine." "Picked the guy up." "They drove around." "They got out on a country road, and he let the guy off, and he continued a little farther down the road, and pulled off his mask so he could go back home to see his family." "And what he didn't know is there were two policemen in the bushes, relieving themselves, and they saw this." "And they both defected from the police." "They thought they'd lost their minds." "...you can't touch me." "Sure, we can." "BAER:" "So a lot of what you do in the CIA is role-playing, where you're pretending to be somebody you're not." "And I used to do that, even practice on airplanes." "And what you didn't want to do on an airplane is engage in a conversation with somebody." "So I would get on an airplane to France or some place and say I was an actuary." "Estimated spans on people's lives." "That would end the conversation." "Or I'd be overseas, and I would pose as an arms dealer." "I'd have to have a certain familiarity with certain kinds of arms, but you don't have to actually know how to work them." "You're a salesman." "You just basically have to know prices, delivery dates, free on board, and terms like that." "And end user certificates." "When I was in Beirut, I..." "If you've seen this movie, Spy Game," "I actually did drive a taxi in Beirut." "In the sense that there was a lot of old Mercedes around there called Servis." "They'd put four or five people in them, and you'd drive them around town, and they fit in everywhere." "And to get around Beirut during the war, I wanted not to look like a diplomat, or anybody else, so I drove this taxi around." "I would actually pick up fares." "You can get away with these things." "I speak Arabic, but I have a few letters I drop." "And it's odd because the letters I drop are the same letters an Iranian will drop." "And again, when I had a beard in Beirut, and I had stolen diplomatic plates," "I would go to Syrian checkpoints and pass myself off as an Iranian diplomat." "I speak French, but I don't speak it well enough to pass myself off as a Frenchman with anybody who knows French." "So I could only use that..." "Assuming that reality in a country like India where people wouldn't know the difference in accents." "We're in position." "Perimeter's set." "No one's getting out." "BAER:" "Now this would..." "I see what they're doing here, but the FBI and the CIA would never coordinate an on-the-ground operation like this." "The FBI would say, "We're in charge." "We've got the domestic mandate." ""We're not gonna have some CIA guy tell us what to do."" "They wouldn't even let him on the area, but you need this to make it work." "You don't have people killed." "I have people killed, I'm the bad guy." "Remember?" "(SNORES)" "Not worth a bullet." "(PHONE RINGING)" "Hello?" "How's retirement, Frank?" "It's been a real blast." "If we have to come in there and get you, it's gonna be messy." "You bet." "Real messy." "I've got my orders, Frank." "They come from the Vice President." "He's ordered these hits to cover up the war crimes he committed in Guatemala." "I find that hard to believe." "How did you know you'd find me here?" "Some anonymous untraceable tip?" "Here's the deal, Frank." "You're gonna walk out that front door and give yourself up." "You have my word no one will shoot you." "I'll personally take you in and you will get to tell your side of the story." "You got 60 seconds to decide." "BAER:" "The CIA does not negotiate deals." "We don't have negotiators." "We don't have hostage negotiators and such." "The CIA has a hostage rescue team." "It operates overseas." "But they don't do the negotiations." "It's just simply for..." "You do break-ins." "And in this case, you would be coming through the doors with charges, flash-bang grenades, gas." "But you don't really negotiate." "Remember that the CIA has no legal authority to operate in the United States against American citizens." "That's strictly done by the FBI." "You'd have the CIA coordinating on an operation like this, but they wouldn't in any sense be commanding it, to go in." "Been wild." "Wild and crazy." "But I wouldn't want it any other way." "BAER:" "What you have at the CIA, what's fascinating about the place is a lot more flexibility." "There's less bureaucracy." "Because you're operating overseas, you can get away with things that you wouldn't ordinarily." "For instance, the break-in teams that would break into banks and other embassies, they use techniques that are just sort of unknown to the FBI." "Because they're dealing with foreigners." "And they're also dealing with..." "You're not dealing with American laws." "Get behind." "BAER:" "In some CIA bases, the Air Force would come down, or the Army, and they would train on helicopters because they could do contour flying, flying close off the ground, which they couldn't do on regular military bases," "'cause the CIA didn't follow those rules that the military had to." "They will also..." "The Delta Force and the SEALs will go to CIA bases to use exotic explosives." "Delta Force isn't good at making car bombs, the CIA is." "They teach people, it's sort of the best training you can get." "Often we would do training in Washington, especially on surveillance operating against the FBI." "They'd have these two teams, the CIA against the FBI in Washington." "Spy versus spy, moving around." "It was good practice for the CIA officers, to know when they'd picked up surveillance." "It was good practice for FBI to work against professionals." "It was also good..." "A technique that was particularly good is a green officer would be sent out in the streets of Washington to pick up what's called a dead drop, for instance." "He'd pick it up and he'd be walking away, and all of a sudden, five Crown Vics would come around the corner, sirens on, lights on." "They would take the CIA officer, throw him up against the car, handcuff him, and he'd say, "Hey, wait, this isn't part of the scenario." ""I work for the CIA." And they go, "Yeah, show me your badge."" "And there are no such thing as CIA badges." "And they'd throw him in the back of the car and say, "We work for DEA." ""You just did a drug transfer."" "What they did was just to see the reaction of the CIA officer having been arrested." "And believe it or not, a lot of these guys wouldn't make it." "Not to push the bounds of propriety, but don't you think we ought to discuss the fact that the CIA's being used by the Vice President as his personal hit squad and that they'll do whatever they can to find us and kill us?" "Options?" "We could go public." "Yeah, right." "That didn't work very well for the reporter." "BAER: (LAUGHS) Yeah, going public." "When you're in national security, you can't go public." "You cannot take on the White House." "Even four or five CIA officers, because they will simply be blasted off the air by the bully pulpit, the White House." "So with these guys, they've uncovered a conspiracy, and yeah, you could go to The New York Times like in Three Days of the Condor, but it just doesn't work." "No one would believe something like this was going on." "They'd be discredited as kooks." "And what we're seeing here is these people are being forced into only one option, and that's taking the problem on head-on." "...outside my house drinking vodka." "Three bullets in the chest." "When I woke alive," "I knew she still loved me." "Or else it would have been the head." "BAER:" "You tend to get caught up in the movie, the narrative, and you forget the unlikely scenarios." "But that's the power of this movie." "Or the enjoyment of it." "With a small dedicated group, there is nothing that cannot be accomplished." "Let me be blunt." "BAER:" "After the Cold War, 1991, the CIA and the KGB were at peace in all sorts of ways." "We closed down, all but closed down on collection on Moscow." "There were a lot of initiatives working with the Russian government." "I was in touch with the Russian government, working with them." "They facilitated all sorts of things." "I worked with the KGB on the border with Tajikistan." "In fact, I have a medal from the KGB." "We were doing counterterrorism in Afghanistan." "The military was wide open." "I used to go parachuting with the Russian Special Forces and the KGB." "They'd give me guns." "They were..." "One thing I liked about the Russians is they had a nice set of assassination weapons." "And they were what's called subsonic bullets that you could put in," "7.63, you could put in a Montblanc pen one of these rounds." "You would unscrew it, and you could fire this thing, and it was absolutely silent, but had the power of an AK round." "And now you have her." "BAER:" "In Afghanistan, those years with the Russians, where they got very good at assassinating people." "Killed a lot of people." "They were a tough bunch." "They never did trust us, though." "And until this day, of course, they don't trust us." "But even the '90s, the average Russian KGB officer thought that they were stabbed in the back, and that the CIA was responsible." "So when they'd look at a CIA officer, they'd say," ""Hey, you got us, but this war is not over."" "Russians were quite remarkable intelligence officers." "I ran into more than a few of them who spoke American English." "They'd learned it, they hadn't lived in the United States, at a school in Moscow, where they spoke with an Indiana accent." "And you just simply couldn't tell." "They would come to the United States, they would know the country inside and out." "Very sophisticated people." "Well educated." "They were a formidable opponent." "We had Russian-speakers, but they were usually descendants of white Russians, Russian émigrés." "And they spoke Russian at home." "A language like Russian," "Americans just don't have the patience to spend five years of doing nothing but learning Russian." "So, we always spoke with an accent and we weren't..." "And also the Russians were very good at surveillance." "In Moscow, they would put our officers under 24-hour surveillance, follow them everywhere." "They would use techniques of breaking off, picking up with a new team, using the militia men, using overhead, using beacons." "And for us to do like, make a meeting, or put down a dead drop, would often take us a week in Moscow, just to do that." "We had certain techniques to counter them." "For instance, we would have..." "We would issue our officers dogs." "So they were going out in the street, so they would be going out late at night in parks, and they had justification for doing it." "We got to the point where we were under such heavy surveillance that we were using identity transfer." "And what that was is, there would be a party in Moscow." "Two different officers would coordinate arriving in their own cars with their own wives." "But once they got into the party they would go into the bathroom and they would put these latex masks on so they would be changing identities with each other." "And the guy who wasn't under surveillance would be able to go out with his colleague's wife, drive away from the party as they're going home." "But from there, he would then go back out in Moscow, make his meeting, and confuse the Russians." "It worked." "But he's about to cross a line from which there's no turning back." "BAER:" "Years and years of training it takes to work in Moscow." "You need to tell me everything you know." "BAER:" "The difference with the Russians is that, especially during the Soviet Union, people were delighted to end up in the KGB." "That was as good as you could do in society." "They didn't have anything like Wall Street." "So they wanted to go in the KGB." "It let them go overseas, they earned an extra salary." "They could buy foreign goods, come back with them." "Always a formidable..." "And they're very good, until this day." "She's never gonna trust us." "I can't blame her." "The tip off was a trap." "Someone's got us dancing like marionettes." "BAER:" "Today, in the CIA, there's sort of a war of sexes." "And, in the sense that the women who apply to the CIA are smarter, they do better on tests, and they're starting to rise faster." "And it just..." "We find that women are just more thorough than the men." "So you see more and more managers are women than in the old days." "When I came into the CIA, there just were no female managers." "None." "There were no female chiefs of station." "There was nobody." "And that started to change in the '80s." "And today, I'd say it's about 50-50." "Swedish K." "Now that is exciting." "BAER:" "Swedish K. It's a Steyr." "We used to use lots of Swedish K's." "It's a good weapon." "– Make yourself at home." "– The Vice President's gonna love this." "BAER:" "When I came into the CIA, I was sent to a paramilitary course where they taught us to do ambushes and kidnapping." "We used an extraordinary amount of explosives to do a good ambush." "What you want to do is get a convoy, get it so it's going through some sort of defile with steep banks on each side, or a bridge." "And blow the beginning of the convoy up, and the end of it." "So there's no escape." "And then use overwhelming firepower to take over the guard force." "Thank you." "(BEEPS)" "Oh." "I'm sorry." "Sorry." "Silly." "Thank you, ma'am." "– Thank you very much." "– MARVIN:" "You're welcome." "BAER:" "We spent a lot of time, also, figuring out how to defeat security systems around the world." "Plastic guns, improvised explosives, how to get an airplane, how to get through security with a gun." "Raptor is cleared for entry." "After you, Mr. Vice President." "EMCEE ON MICROPHONE:" "A true war hero, a fabulous friend and a wonderful leader." "And so it's with great pleasure I introduce to you," "Vice President Robert Stanton." "(CROWD APPLAUDING)" "MAN:" "I love you, sir!" "Thank you, everybody." "Thank you so much for being here." "I'm gonna keep this short and sweet so you'll actually write those checks you've been promising." "(ALL LAUGHING)" "BAER:" "The first director I worked for was George W. Bush." "Actually a delightful man." "George H.W. Bush, sorry." "He was the director of the CIA and he went on," "I think, to be ambassador in China, and then he, of course, became president." "Bush has always had a big interest in the CIA." "We've had a great journey together." "But I firmly believe that the best is still to come." "God bless you all." "God bless America!" "(PLAYING JAZZ MUSIC)" "BAER:" "Through our training, what we got very good at was dealing with locks." "I mean, locks were always a problem." "And you see often in films where people are coming in with the torsion bar and the picks, and what you always wanted to do is pick a lock to decode." "And that means you had to figure out where the pins had to be positioned, and then make a key." "Because you often had to go through that lock more than once." "And if you had to pick it every time, that was a problem." "It just took too much time." "You ran the risk of getting caught." "Look at Watergate." "They broke in, and they used tape to hold the lock back." "That's something the CIA would..." "A professional would never do." "You'd simply pick a lock, get the key, you could go back often as you wanted." "Or if you needed to get in fast, why pick a lock?" "Just drill it." "You have a silenced drill." "You walk up to the lock, you drill it very quickly, the pins fall in a pin tumbler, the lock's open, you can go back and forth." "Even a better technique was simply to take clay, and you could stick it in the lock." "And you could figure out, from the key way, what the rest of the code was." "Or, more advanced these days is you can see what's on the inside of a pin tumbler with a laser," "and that will go to a computer and you can make your key and get back in." "You'll have to turn around." "No, it's fine." "It's all right." "I'm sure I'm allowed." "You'll have to go back up, ma'am, or I'll have to treat you as a threat." "Where exactly is the threat?" "BAER:" "You know, when I came in, we actually had British instructors that got through the American security clearances." "Same way with New Zealand, Australia." "Always worked very closely together, rarely kept secrets from each other." "It was often, we went to the British and would tell them, simply because Americans were not..." "Were suspect in certain countries." "We used a lot of French, Belgians, Chinese, especially American Chinese who spoke Mandarin." "They were less threatening than American males, for instance." "We used them all the time." "Move!" "Move!" "Move!" "BAER:" "You would find British citizens that could, for instance, get in the tribal areas of Pakistan much more easily than Americans could." "They've been up there, or..." "Brits of Pakistani origin could go up there." "What the CIA also likes to do in cases like this is use improvised explosives." "What I mean by that is, you can take, for instance, flour, and spread it in a couple rooms in a building like this, for a diversion." "Once it gets in the air, it's an oxidizer, and then you can use a detonator to explode it." "Get back up in here to the north stairwell, now!" "(HUMMING)" "BAER:" "Pen guns." "We always had a lot of pen guns." "Pen guns are good." "Ah, yes." "BAER:" "Or putting detonators in pens and things like that." "Move to the other limo." "I'll cover you." "(WHIMPERING)" "BAER:" "Command detonator." "Command detonators are risky because a stray signal can set off a car, or whatever your bomb is." "You need all sorts of security codes or security measures to make sure they don't go off prematurely." "Here we go." "Here, you got the CIA guy pulling his gun out in a domestic situation." "It's just not gonna happen." "Outside!" "BURBACHER:" "Secret Service, everybody down!" "(KITCHENWARE CLATTERING)" "(WOMAN SCREAMS)" "(GUNFIRE)" "Cover us!" "We're moving now!" "Come on!" "Move!" "Go!" "BAER:" "The CIA, it runs off the whole idea of compromising communications, and communicating securely." "In a situation like this, they would want to have encrypted radios." "Or they would want to get inside the Secret Service's encrypted radios, where they have Motorolas." "Simply because you've got to know what the other guys are doing." "And anytime you can decode those crypts..." "Or beacons are another important aspect to track cars..." "Surveillance is done best with using beacons, as well." "Simply because you want to stand off." "You see so many Hollywood versions of surveillance where the guy is right on your car." "It just doesn't happen that way." "You've got cars pulling off, you've got more cars coming on." "You've got what's called waterfall surveillance, where you're actually running the surveillance teams at the person, from the front." "So they don't suspect anything." "What they taught us to do for that kind of surveillance is to look at the shoes, because people rarely change shoes." "If a surveillance team is coming at you, a waterfall surveillance, for instance, they'll be walking toward you, they'll peel off, they'll get in vans, they'll go up ahead of you to start all over again," "because it takes hundreds of people, and in the vans, they'll change clothes." "So you have to look for characteristics of these teams." "As I said, the shoes, which they wouldn't change as much." "Freeze!" "BAER:" "Also, the whole idea of tracking communications is vital." "And you would look for incidents." "Let's say you're gonna turn a corner, and you've got a scanner in your ear." "You're listening to it." "You want, as soon as you turn the corner, you're looking for evidence that someone's tracking you turning that corner." "And you can actually track this stuff on a computer, to find out whether you're under surveillance." "It gets very complicated, and it becomes very sophisticated in situations like this." "I wanna know what the hell that was all about!" "BAER:" "You get to the point where even a car becomes unusable." "In a lot of places in Asia, our officers..." "We'll rely on female officers riding bicycles." "Simply because they fit in with tens of thousands of people riding bicycles." "And the local service would find it impossible, mentally, to think that a woman would be a case officer." "(STANTON GROANING)" "Who are you?" "One of the men you ordered killed." "I don't know what you're talking about." "Guatemala." "BAER:" "On all these Secret Service cars, they would have beacons." "You'd be able to pick these things up with satellite, or scanners, in Chicago." "You would have a limited amount of time to be driving around in this car." "I'm sure we can negotiate something." "Starting to come back to you now, is it?" "If you're looking for revenge..." "This is not about revenge." "Are you gonna kill me?" "Not just you." "(CELL PHONE RINGING)" "Yeah?" "I'm at the Evanston power plant." "You have 15 minutes to bring me Sarah." "Or I kill the Vice President." "He just made contact." "He wants the girl." "Evanston Power Station. 15 minutes." "You better alert Secret Service." "CYNTHIA:" "Copy that." "Secret Service is en route." "BAER:" "I have about 20 explosives experts that I can call up, former FBI, former CIA, and say, "All right, tell me about this particular oxidizer." ""Will it work?" "What sort of detonator do you need?"" "And that's what I'm talking about these networks." "You go out, and the answers you don't have yourself, you have people that would." "Same way with, for instance, getting a trace on somebody inside the government." "You call up, you ask a favor." "As long as it's not crazy, they'll do it for you." "That's what the whole concept behind this movie is, is these people have all these vast resources." "They could pull something like this together." "Hey, tough guy." "Surprised to see me?" "What the hell's this?" "Alex..." "Just give him what he wants." "I can't do this anymore." "You ordered these killings, not me." "I don't want to have anything to do with this anymore." "BAER:" "Somebody being drawn into this world, it has to be done gradually." "You first of all don't believe it exists." "Shut up." "BAER:" "And obviously, Mary-Louise Parker is figuring out this is all real." "But remember, in the plot of this movie, he's fallen in love with her, and he's gotten her into trouble." "So at this point, he has no choice but to take care of her." "In the real world, you tend to drop people once they got into trouble." "But, you know, this is a love story and the only way to save her is if she comes along." "I tore up all those checks." "I know." "BAER:" "We used to rope in people all the time." "I mean, believe it or not, I'd use my mother." "And she certainly was not an innocent in the sense of Mary-Louise Parker." "But a man and a woman are much more innocent, or a man and a mother, simply because people don't believe you're up to anything bad." "My mother would come visit me and I would tell people she's in town." "We'd go out to dinner." "Children are a wonderful cover." "Babies." "People pushing a baby carriage." "Going on a tourist bus with a bunch of American tourists in weird parts of the world." "My first time I went to China, I went on a tour." "Simply because you need the cover as opposed to as a male." "(CHOKING)" "They taught my wife, who used to be in the CIA, she was a shooter, how to kill somebody with a number two pencil." "You jam it up through the hard palate, up into the brain." "But you don't want to break the pencil, then it sort of defeats the purpose." "But you don't want to hit it at an angle." "It will break the pencil, and not go up into the brain." "Thanks." "This gonna be a problem?" "No." "I got it..." "Grandpa." "(GUNSHOT)" "Feel better now?" "Yeah." "Wanna get pancakes?" "BAER:" "We had a course at the CIA, they would train you to knock somebody off the road at 60 miles an hour, in a car on a freeway." "The amount of time and the amount of ammunition to teach somebody how to shoot out of a moving car is amazing." "When you think about it, how many people get to practice that?" "Not many." "I don't think the FBI does." "But your entire aim shooting out of a car is completely thrown off." "Unless you've actually done it, and fired a Glock from a car, over and over again, the chances of missing the target are pretty high." "Yes." "We can go." "BAER:" "My wife went through one of these courses where they..." "She went for like six months, did nothing but shooting." "Then what they do in the shooting course is they spend a lot of time shooting under adverse conditions." "Setting off grenades, flashing lights, explosions, heat and cold..." "When they trained us, what they always did is got your heart up over 140." "Simply because that would reproduce combat..." "A combat situation." "I mean, rarely do you ever stand in front of a target and get to calmly shoot at something." "Once you step into this narrative of adventure and step out of the world of reality, I mean, there's some real things here." "The narrative works, even for an ex-spook like me, and that's why I like it." "It's a good movie." "It's a great movie." "And for me, what hits home are the characters." "Looking at the guys still inside the CIA, saying, "God, who are these kids?" ""And don't they know anything about the way the world works?"" "And what's going to happen to this generation, with William Cooper?" "This movie is about William Cooper." "His education." "Being the smart, young operative, who's introduced into the world the way it really works." "And that's the way things are." "By the time you leave the CIA, it's not so much a question of being jaded, but you are pretty well aware that the world doesn't work the way it seems to." "And you see Mary-Louise Parker." "She's following a character arc here, too, where this world doesn't exist for her, and all of a sudden, as anybody would, she's dragged into it." "And how does she react?" "And you got Moses, Frank Moses, looking at her, and she's ready for it." "She doesn't run and actually enjoys it." "And so that's why, I see the warmth on the screen between the two of them." "Because, you know, he's saying, "Hey, she's pretty cool, you know."" "You see exactly what the writers did with this." "It works." "It really does." "This is Robert Baer." "I hope you enjoyed this." "I did."