EP 066 Dan Kaszeta: Chemical and Biological Defense Specialist, Ex-Pentagon, Ex-White House Staff, Ex-Secret Service....(and he made Chat GPT safer)

Dan Kaszeta is a specialist in defence against chemical, biological, and radiological weapons and warfare. Although he has lived in London since 2008, the first part of his career was in the United States. He earned a BA in Political Science and Russian language from Texas Christian University. After graduation, he was commissioned as an officer in the US Army in the small but highly skilled Chemical Corps. Dan was honour graduate of his lengthy training course at US Army Chemical School. After only brief active service, he was reassigned to the Army Reserve and spent over a decade in reserve and National Guard assignments while pursuing a civilian career.

He subsequently moved to Washington DC and was awarded an MA in International Affairs from George Washington University. The Tokyo Sarin attacks in 1995, combined with scarce chemical weapons expertise, meant that in early 1996 he took up the post of Disaster Preparedness Advisor at the White House Military Office, where he had responsibility for chemical and biological preparedness and training for the office of the President. After the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax terrorism, the responses to which he was heavily involved in, Dan transferred to the US Secret Service, where he joined the team protecting the President and the White House complex from chemical and biological threats.

In 2008, Dan relocated to London. From 2008 to 2011 he worked for Smiths Detection, managing their chemical warfare detection business in Central and Eastern Europe. Since 2011, he has been an independent security consultant and author.

He is the author of numerous articles and his recent publications include: ‘CBRN and Hazmat Incidents at Major Public Events: Planning and Response’ (Wiley, 1st ed 2012 2nd ed 2022), ‘Toxic: A History of Nerve Agents’ (Hurst, 2020) and ‘Forest Brotherhood: Baltic Resistance against the Nazis and Soviets’ (Hurst, 2023). Mr. Kaszeta has been selected as a Writer-in-Residence at Gladstone’s Library for 2024. 

Security Circle ⭕️  is an IFPOD production for IFPO the International Foundation of Protection Officers

Transcript

0:02

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Yoyo 0:39

Hi, this is Yolanda.

Dan 0:40

Welcome. Hi, I'm Dan Kaita.

Yoyo 0:44

Hi, Dan. Welcome to the Security Circle podcast. Now, ifpo is the International Foundation for Protection Officers, and we want to thank all of our listeners around the world, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, and however you listen. Thank you so much for listening and being a part of this journey. We're dedicated at Ifpo to providing meaningful education and certification for all levels of security personnel and make a positive difference to our members' mental health and wellbeing. Now, I've got a very special guest with me today. I say this all the time, it's like, I'm Michael McIntyre. I dunno if you know his comedy sketch, Dan, but every time he opens up to an audience, he'll say, let's pick a random place like Norwich. He'll say, Norwich my favorite place in the world. Yeah. And I do this, I have very special guests every single week. But Dan cutting to the chase here a little bit. It's not often I get to speak to a chemical biological defense specialist. Do you put that on your cv?

Dan 1:38

Well, yeah, I do. And I, it puts me kind of in a very small circus where I'm one of the only clowns, for lack of a better term, niche. Niche. Niche, I would say. I'm in a niche. Yeah. I'm in a niche that I'm in a small niche where everybo, well, if you think about it, think of it as a circus text. And I've been here long enough that I'm basically the head of the circus because most people in chemical and biological defense try to, I don't know, tunnel out of the tent, cut a hole in the side, you know, fake their own death, do anything to get out of it. And over the. Yeah. Oh. Over the course of 30 years all my escape attempts failed. So I decided to stop trying to escape and become the, I don't know, whatever you want. Head monkey, chief clown, circus elephant, whatever you want. You know, legal juggernaut is one of my latest titles.

Yoyo 2:26

So to those that don't know, like me, I admit, you know, I'm on this podcast with a lot of people who all have a very specialist subject matter that I profess to sometimes not know very much about. But I certainly can say that I don't know a lot about chemical and biological defense specialism. What does that really

Dan 2:43

mean? Well, I mean, maybe the best way is because it's evolved over the course of my career. So maybe give you like the five minute sort of, blitz through how I got to where I am now, which is one part conspiracy, one part my own effort and probably 98 parts, Forrest Gump. Yeah. Okay. So it all started at about the mid 1980s when I was looking at finding ways to pay for university. I was doing well in school, but my father had started his own new business. There wasn't huge, vast amounts of money to send me to an expensive university. So I was either gonna have to go to the actually quite cheap state university, 20 minutes down the road from the house and live at home, or find a way to pay for it. So this being the Cold War, the 1980s Ronald Reagan President, there was a lot of money going on military scholarships. Okay. And so I applied for scholarships to go off to university, to you know, I applied for a Navy one, an Air Force one, an Army one. The Air Force only wanted technical disciplines, and I was really interested in like history and politics and languages. The Navy came back to me and said, well, you know, maybe and the Army said, well, yeah, we'll give you a scholarship, but we really would need you in science or engineering. Now I mentioned that to our next door neighbor who was closest thing you'll ever meet to John Wayne, Colonel Bob Sweeney, retired Green Beret Colonel Bob next door. He says, Dan, you got a funny East European last name. We got a Cold War going on. You tell the Army you wanna learn Russian, they'll give you all the money you want. And he was right. Yeah. So I went back to the Army and said, oh, well, how about if I study Russian? Oh, that's a different deal son. Would you like to sai language aptitude test. And I sat this thing called the D lab, the defense language, aptitude, battery. And I knocked the socks outta it. So much so that they were trying to talk me out of Russian into something. Oh, how about Arabic or Chinese? No, Russian's fine. I actually really interested in learning or to speak Russian. So off I went to university at, in Texas Christian University, which my scholarship was good at any university that had an Army Cadet Corps and could also teach me Russian. The US university system has this major minor thing. So my major is political science. My minor is in Russian. And what does this have to do with chemical weapons? Nothing, but I'm getting there. Okay. So I spent four years in university doing army reserve stuff, you know, really much on the career path to get commissioned. When I was done with university as a lieutenant in the Military Intelligence Corps, I spent. Years learning to speak Russian, you know?

Yoyo 5:18

Oh, you've even got the nice tone for it. Yeah.

Dan 5:19

As they say, I have face for radio. So 1987 and 1991 were the years I was in university, I was getting to do really cool army stuff in my time off, I went to Arctic warfare school in Alaska. That was cool. And I got assigned to an army reserve intelligence unit where we did things like, you know, radio direction finding and, you know, stuff like that. And then of course, It's December, 1990. In May, 1991, I'm due to graduate, get commissioned as an army lieutenant. So December, 1990, we all open our envelope to sea our assignments, and mine is US Army Chemical Corps. What the,

5:59

is

Yoyo 5:59

that, yeah, like, is that such a thing?

Dan 6:02

Well, well, yeah. Yeah. It's the branch of the US Army that protects the military against chemical and biological and radiological hazards at the time is called N B C, nuclear Biological Chemical Defense. And what was going on at the time? Well, this is the autumn of 1990. We were having this massive buildup because we were gonna go invade, you know, Kuwait and liberate Kuwait to go kick Hussein's, you know, tax side and The Army was having a panic about lack of preparedness against chemical weapons because it had spent the last previous five years, years kind of, sort of neglecting that. So, by no logic other than well, he is clever enough to learn Russian in four years. He must be clever enough to learn about chemical weapons in six months. So, here you go, kid. That's literally all the logic to it. And when I went off to eventually off to Army Chemical School after university rather, a lot of people were in the same boat. I wasn't even the only Russian linguist in my class. There was this other guy yeah, there we were collecting our Russian language, pay$75 a month extra, you know, and there's a another guy, he was a Persian, he was a Farsi speaker. He was getting his language paid. We would all basically, you know, rejects from the military Intelligence Corps because the Cold War was allegedly over and they needed us in chemical weapons. And there you go. That's how it started. And then started my various escape attempts. You know, my first escape attempt. I got off of active duty as soon as I could because the Army was shrinking, you know?'cause by the time I got through all this training, that whole dust up with Sta over, you know?

Yoyo 7:33

Tell me, Dan, did you ever use your Russian with anything?

Dan 7:37

I did go to Moscow for six months when I was working on my master's degree and, you know, okay. Yeah. But I've never really used it professionally in anything other than like, really occasionally reading a few books and stuff. I mean, you know,

Yoyo 7:48

You see. I had the same mindset as you when I was in school in the eighties. I had the option to go the down the German route where everyone else went. And I always had to, you know, some might say I always to bug the system and do something different, but I think I always believed in doing things differently and not going along with the herd. And so I took Russian as well in school. And it came in quite handy when I was in the police. And we were we were arresting you know, Latvians or Lithuanians. Allegedly, but it turned out they were Russian. And I could tell,'cause I could determine the dialect that they were speaking,

Dan 8:22

you're not the top ski. No. You, no,

Yoyo 8:24

it's, no, it was, there's a story about me being in custody in this particular person needed to secure a bail address to be able to be released. And he's begging somebody on the phone. He's going, PJ, push Olster. I said, this was, this guy's a Russian, you know that.

Dan 8:38

Yeah. No I'm half Lithuanian. No self-respecting Lithuania would ever say pta that environment. No, exactly. Yeah. So anyway, so I take the first exit I can, out of this, I go to Washington, dc I be, I basically leave active duty to become a reservist, the equivalent of the Territory Army. So I'm still doing army chemical course stuff on the odd weekend. And I get a master's degree in international affairs. I try to find a job, you know, I'm a failed spy. I applied for the ccia A, they didn't want me. You know, it's like, listen, kid, we got, we're taking all of our Russian speakers and putting'em in the typing pool. What do you want? You know, it's such

Yoyo 9:18

a shame they're lost. But then maybe you'd have found that a bit du anyway. Oh

Dan 9:22

yeah. Who knows? And you know, I applied to join the F B I that didn't work. What? Yeah. The early nineties were a time of great budgetary drawdowns to Washington DC

Yoyo 9:33

Ah, but what did change at all was coming up, yeah. Was nine 11. It was, yeah.

Dan 9:39

Nine 11. Well, even before that. Even well before that. Okay. Alright. So, make a long story short, I ended up in this kind of, I mean, irrelevant, but, you know, not terribly exciting job as a defense contractor working in the Pentagon. Okay. Oh,

Yoyo 9:53

let's talk about that.

Dan 9:54

Oh yeah. It's a big five sided. Five sided, 29 acre, you know, office building. And I was doing stuff in chemical and biological defense not terribly exciting stuff. I was making a lot of PowerPoint slides. And then all of a sudden in 1995, these, dare I say it strange radical religious balloons in in Japan, the Amish en cult perpetrate a s attack in the Tokyo subway system.

Yoyo 10:24

Oh, that's a right. Long time ago that, yeah,

Dan 10:27

1995, March of 1995. And there I am, like the one guy in the river that said, you know, actually I know a fair bit about Sarah. I, you know, held it in my hand. I mean, gloved obviously back in training, you know? Yeah. You, I, how, yeah. Yeah. I inventoried a lot of it, you know, I mean, you know, I mean, I know about Sarah and all of a, and sort of being the one guy in the room that knows about it. All of a sudden, these. I got someone from higher up and, you know, the Pentagon, literally higher up. I'd been on the first floor. Next thing you know, I'm on the third floor and, you know, I have a room with a window and which is rare, you know, and a, a pay rise. And all of a sudden I'm doing really interesting stuff in the Pentagon. But still at kind of a dead end. But I, at this point, all of a sudden, US bureaucracy is starting to take seriously the idea that chemical and biological weapons are useful for terrorism, not just an old, outdated former warfare that, you know, we're mostly not worried about. And so all of a sudden there are far more interesting jobs in the federal government coming open. And I applied for basically everyone I found. And I, you know, I ended up getting hired by the White House in 1996.

Yoyo 11:34

Okay, so who's in the government? Who's in the presidency in 1996? Then that's gonna be Bill, bill Clinton. Oh, that's Bill Clinton, 1996. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Dan 11:44

Yeah, so it's a long time ago. So I got hired into the Clinton White House as a civil servant, not as a you political appointee. Yeah. To effectively be the C B R N. Chemical, biological, radiological nuclear, yeah. Defense Advisor. Or did

Yoyo 11:56

you have to practice that a lot in the mirror to stay it that good?

Dan 12:00

No, I've just been saying it for 20 odd years. Yeah. Don't even get, don't even get me started on the phrase weapons of mass destruction. I hate it. We're not gonna use it. We're not even gonna go there. So, yeah. No, C B R N. So I spent six years in this branch of the White House called the White House Military Office, which was a in some ways is a contradiction'cause it's full of military guys who mostly don't wear uniforms. Okay. And there, there is a, actually a civilian employee at the White House Military Office, but I was also a military guy still in the reserves on my spare time on the weekends. So, you know, So

Yoyo 12:34

did you ever get, did you ever get to meet Bill Clinton? Oh yeah. What's he like?

Dan 12:38

Dan? It'll be late to his own funeral. You know, we talked about him having his own time zone Clinton's standard time. I only met him a couple times. You gotta realize it was a bit, I, you know, my, when I say I work in the White House, I worked for the White House. I worked in the new executive office building, which is a fairly odine off 10 story office building across the street from the White House. But, you know, you know, I mean, and you know, I got to know all the president's military aids, you know, things like that. And I got to do a lot of things. I mean, I, you know, fly on Air Force, one flew on air. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

Yoyo 13:14

That's cool. What's it like on Air Force One? Is it a smooth

Dan 13:17

ride? Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, I mean, guys like me and the one time I flew was way back in like, way, way back with the Hoi pallo, but even then, that's like basically business class, you know? Yeah. I suspect those airplanes are really starting to show their age now. But, you know, anyway, but you know, I mean, I did the, I did an awful lot of stuff, some of which I can't talk about, you know, still, you know, at the White House military office and

13:41

Yes.

Yoyo 13:41

Forever. You mean can't talk about it forever? Well,

Dan 13:44

there's a lot of stuff I can talk about now because it's just obsolete outta date, you know? Yeah. Or has already been, you know, blown, you know. But I, so I, I guess the thing to say about that is I was a bit smart on chemical and biological stuff, but there I was age 27 being thrown into the deep end. Wow. All right. But because I worked for the White House, I could go to any training course. I wanted to, I could summit any classified training manual out of the vault that I wanted to. I had a tremendous amount of authority because, you know, somebody rings up in the White House and says, Hey, can you slip me into the next training course? Yeah. They'll do it. Okay. Yeah. And so I, I got myself sent all kinds of training courses and I, you know, and I talked to the, you know, basically the world's leading experts in a variety of subjects and say, all right, you got an hour. Get me smart on this. And I developed a lot of contacts with other departments and agencies.'cause there weren't, this was, there weren't a lot, even then, there weren't a lot of people in my circumstance, you know? Yeah. So I gotta know people in the circumstance. And so, I mean, I'll give you an example. Russian biologist defects, well guess who gets to go talk to him? The guy from the white. Alright. Yeah. Okay. You know, so things like that. And so I was privy to a fire hose of information and to this day I'm grateful for that. And I, you know, I did things like, well, we don't make chemical weapons anymore. We don't make biological weapons anymore. But the guys who used to do that for the federal government are still around. Let me go talk to these oldies. Yeah. And so I learned a huge amount. You know,

Yoyo 15:24

What ha up until that point,'cause we'll stop there in, in the journey. We'll move on in a second, but up until that point, what were we learning about biological and chemical weapons? The weapons, the true threat, I guess, of the CAPA capacity they had to really inflict

Dan 15:38

harm. Okay. You want the real answer? The real a the real answer is the US walked away from both categories of weapons in the 1960s. For a variety of reasons. But the big, the biggest reason is that they weren't very reliable. They were entirely dependent on a bunch of environmental variables that you couldn't control.

Yoyo 16:00

Okay. I e in the, you talking about which way? The wind storage. Yeah. All safe. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan 16:06

And things became quite a liability versus you know, so there was a point, there was a point at which, alright, well sort of two different pathways. Let's talk about the biological stuff first. Yeah. Biological stuff. First of all, the US biological program the majority of the effort on it was based actually on on anti-cultural agents, not on actually making people sick for one thing. It's less glamorous. So, but. It was never highly resourced. And President Nixon took one look at it when he came into office in 1969, said, this is pointless. We're getting outta this business. And they did. Despite whatever conspiracy theories weirdos would tell you the US totally got out of the the biological weapons business between 19 62, 69 and 1972. The chemical stuff was viewed as well. We need this kind of as a placeholder, as a political deterrent, as a bargaining chip against the Russians. But basically from, as every year passed from 1969 onward, the stuff became less and less and less useful. Okay, so the point, by the time I'm in the Army, the late eighties, early nineties its only purpose is as a bargaining ship. Okay. And that's it. It fulfilled that role because I mean, a lot of this has to do with the fact that actually conventional weapons became far more dangerous and cheaper. From the 1960s onward and in, in both exciting and dull ways. I mean, honestly, I mean, if you're worried about Russians in tanks well, guess what? The tank driver has a gas mask and he has a hash. He closes the hash, so you're not gonna get'em with chemical weapons. Okay? But, you know, a nice little guided missile, you could blow up the tank. All right. So the lethality of the precision, and importantly the reliability and predictability of the conventional forms of warfare from the late 1950s on through the 1960s got to at least parody with chemical weapons. And then sort of from a, there's some magic tipping point somewhere around 19 66, 19 67, at least in the Army, where all of a sudden somebody, everybody looks at the numbers and looks at each other and says, why are we bothering with this chemical crime? And then there's the whole expense factor. It's like all of a sudden it's you know, the stuff only works one day in four because we need the right weather conditions and it doesn't really do what it says on the tin. And costs five times as much. What the heck are we doing? Yeah. Yeah.

Yoyo 18:27

So, and no one wants an incident to happen accidentally on Homeland, right?

Dan 18:33

No, exactly. Yeah. Exact. E, exactly. You know, and God only knows there's enough sci-fi films to start out that way. I mean, well, and you also have to, you have to under, you also have to understand, you know, the 19, like in the 1960s is the point at which the environmental movement is taking off in the us. Yeah. There's such a thing as nimbyism. All of a sudden communities don't actually want this stuff stored in their backyard and they don't want it traveling through and on truck and rail. They don't but also by the same token, they don't want the army to be getting rid of it the way the army was doing, which is dropping it in a deep part of the sea. So, you know, this stuff becomes a liability. Now when you start looking at it from a terrorism standpoint there was a point at which up until, honestly, up until that Tokyo stuff. It Terrorism. Terrorism with chemical and biological stuff was a real rarity. I mean, there was one incident in the 1980s where a extremist group in the US spread some food poisoning. It made 750 or so people sick in an attempt to affect the local election. Did kill anybody. It wasn't their intent. They were trying to influence the local turnout in a local election. But there, these things were rarities, okay? And they still are rarities for reason. I, again, comes down to the bombs and bullets versus weird exotic chemicals. You know, let's let let's look at the, these guys in Tokyo, they spent about 50 million US dollars, okay? To kill 14 people,

Yoyo 19:58

which isn't cost effective. And there's no return on investment on that. Is there, if you're thinking about this from a business perspective, and all terrorism groups have a business bottom line.

Dan 20:07

Well, yeah.'cause you know, at the end of the day, Al-Qaeda's got a spreadsheet. Okay. Yeah.

Yoyo 20:13

And with 50 million, 50 million US dollars, you can do an awful lot of things. Can.

Dan 20:17

Yeah. Yeah. And I have to say that the the arm Ricky Cult in in Japan pursue chemical weapons from a non-financial perspective for quite perverse ideological reasons, because they're Shoko Sahara, the madman that ran the cult, you know, had a vision and said that's what they should do. Okay.

Yoyo 20:35

It's he doesn't come across incredibly reassuring as a fellow. Does he really? No.

Dan 20:40

No. Total. Total wacko. Total.

Yoyo 20:42

So I bet he doesn't get invited to many birthday parties then.

Dan 20:46

And no, because he's well dead. He eventually, the Chinese, I sorry, the Japanese judicial system caught up to him and executed him after many years of him sort of pleading not guilty and dragging it all out and all that. The Japanese. Criminal justice system moves extremely slowly if you actually insist on having a trial, actually don't confess.

Yoyo 21:05

So, so have you, can I ask Dan, at this stage, have you done any research at this point into the mindset of somebody who wants to use chemical and biological weapons as a terrorism tool? Have you looked into the, kind of the ideology?'cause this isn't something that you can put down to mental health and the way that you can put down a mass shooting is quite often put down to mental health, and you cannot be sane to do something like that. But what's the ideology in the mindset of somebody who wants to do real harm using chemical and

Dan 21:31

biological? the thing is, I don't think we have enough example points to draw a huge general rule in this, thank goodness. Well, yeah. Well, it's true. So we got this guy, Shoko Zaha, who is, at the end of the day, he was a narcissist and built this whole cult, I mean, literally a cult of personality around him. And had quite bizarre, strange religious beliefs. And he thought that the end of the world was coming anyway. Well, it was for him, but you know, then, you know, we got this guy, for example, Dr. Bruce Ivans. He was the guy who did the anthrax terrorism in the us. He is, his case is different. He was a specialist in Anthrax. And he is sort of, he ticks a couple boxes. He's your known wolf because he operated completely alone. He's a classic insider threat because he worked for the US government in his case, I think has a lot to, is a bit like the Pyromaniac firefighter you know, Because we know this does exist. There, there are fire, there have been firefighters out there who set fires because they want to go be the guy to save the day. His various ideas to combat anthrax were not being taken very seriously by the federal government. He wasn't receiving the budget he wanted to. So, he took advantage of the post nine 11, you know, hysteria that was going on in America and, you know, ended up killing some people with anthrax. Whether or not he actually wanted anybody from to die, don't know. It, that was a very boshed investigation by the time thing, the gears ground round to actually collaring him, he got wind of it and killed himself. So, a lot of the evidence against him, it was never really tested in court. Some of it could easily gotten thrown out. A lot of it. In fact, a good defense lawyer probably could. Off in a plea deal for manslaughter or possibly a diminished capacity. I don't know. But he was a, you know, retrospectively looking at his life, he had a lot of strange things going on. He had a lot of mental health and substance abuse issues. We don't know the extent of his internal demons. That other case I was telling you about, which was the in a place called the Daals, Oregon and I think it was 19 83, 83, 84, something like that. Again, it was a religious cult, the Rajni cult. They weren't looking to kill anybody. They weren't looking for a way to suppress voter turnout and making people sick because they contaminated, you know, four salad bars at very popular restaurants with salmonella and made a lot of people sick. So, because they were running their own candidates in local elections and they wanted to win, so they wanted to suppress the, you know, the turnout of everybody else. You know, and that's a rational calculation. I mean, you know, so tho those are three examples we have to look at. We have individual examples where chemical and biological things have been used as, you know, assassination tools. Sergei Scribal there was a guy named Giorgi Markov, who was killed in in, in, in London, 1978. Again, by, by, by secret Services you. Assassinations, then that becomes basically part of a menu that's not the same thing as sort of as an area effect level.

Yoyo 24:29

it's a bit James Bond, isn't it really? When you see that sort of stuff going

Dan 24:33

on. I'm firmly of opinion that something like Sergei scribble and using the exotic poison invented by the Russians is meant to send a message. Because if Sergei Strip fell over dead from a heart attack, nobody would've thought anything of it because, you know, yes. Or he got run over in traffic'cause he looked the wrong way. Or even if he got stabbed, you know, you know, or

Yoyo 24:51

dying a mysterious plane crash.

Dan 24:54

Yes. Yes. Yeah. Well, you know, as they say in Russia, well, in the rest of the world you upgrade windows and Russia windows upgrade you.

Yoyo 25:07

That's actually really funny. Yeah. So listen, when you were at the White House, you know that, how do you remember back then how you felt being there, what it was like?

Dan 25:16

Oh yeah. I, it kind of went to my head, well, at first and then sort of reality comes crashing down in that, you know, shit, I have a really hard job to do, actually. Not much guidance. And then I said, well, I mean, they're not telling me what to do because I'm I get hired'cause I'm the smart guy and I'm not as, I'm not as smart as I think I ought to be. So I went through this whole, you know, I went through the whole Dunning Kruger, you know, you know, you know curve, you know, the, you know, thinking I knew everything and realizing I don't know anything at all. And then say, well, how I gonna get smarter on this? And also dealing with institutional rivalries. Being a young guy in an office full of people a lot older than me. You know, I mean, I learned a, I learned a. And you know, I still got a lot of friends who think highly of me from those days.

Yoyo 26:02

So then even at that young age, you're seeing the Clinton administration move out and you stay there, don't you, when the Bush administration moves in? Yeah. What was that like?

Dan 26:11

Yeah. Well it was interesting because it was a lot shorter than normal because that was the gore, that was the Gore Bush election that was contested, went to the courts, you know, the hanging chadds, all that. So there was a much shorter transition period. So I. You know, it was interesting because literally you have to box up every record in your office, you know, and send it off to the archives and things like that, you know?

Yoyo 26:34

But what about if you still need it?

Dan 26:36

Well, in which case you make a copy. Okay. You know, those are, yeah. So, yeah, exactly. Those are us who staying there, you know, we make a copy, send a copy off to the archives, but somewhere off in the in the William Clinton, you know, you know, presidential library in Arkansas, there's a bunch of my old documents. You know, so that's kind of cool. Yeah. And then there's a whole, there, there's a whole learning curve of breaking in the whole new administration and briefing a lot of new people and all that. And what's,

Yoyo 27:01

What was the tone like then? Because they both have very different political ideologies, the Clinton and Bush administration. What, how did you have to adjust.

Dan 27:10

Well, I mean, the big shopping system was that George Bush actually turned up on time and went to bed early. Okay. You know, and if something was on the calendar for 9:00 AM on, on Monday morning, it happened 9:00 AM on Monday morning, you know, and you know, I, there I he had more discipline to his diary. And

Yoyo 27:28

Bush would've loved it that you went to university in Texas as well.

Dan 27:31

Yeah. And to be honest, I didn't have a huge amount of contact with these higher ups until the nine 11 stuff happened, which again, is sort of eight months into this whole thing. All of a sudden there I am working, you know, I'm working in this office that is, it's called Presidential Contingency Programs. It was, it's called something else now. And we have a huge contingency happening. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And so a black swan. Yeah. Well, and then of course, you know, a month later we started having anthrax bores turning up and people turning up in hospitals sick with anthrax. That was a interesting period. The thing is, I was kind of already clutching a parachute at this point, so to speak, because I'd applied to go and transfer to the US Secret Service. Right. And my paper, my paperwork was actually in the summer of 2002. And I would've probably, you know, I probably would've shifted over probably autumn of 2002 if nine 11 hadn't happened.'cause that literally paralyzed the secret hiring processes. Every man and woman did the trenches, you know? So, yeah. Yeah. So by the time that all got sorted I didn't end up I didn't end up leaving until May, well, actually, May, 2002, sorry. I May, 2002 is when I switched to Secret Service. So I had, my paperwork had been in May, 2001. So May, 2002, you know, I switched over to the US Secret Service for honestly more money, a slightly better retirement package a badge and a gun. Oddly, no arrest authority, more than any sort of citizen, you know, I, because I wasn't a, I wasn't a criminal investigator, special agent, you know, I was this weird, you know, technical specialist. And so I went to this thing called the Hammer Team, which stands for some made up acronym, Hazard, hazardous Agent Mitigation and Medical Emergency Response, which is effectively this, you know, great. Four or five men, depending on time and history, a four or five person team that travels around with the president to provide chemical and biological and radiological support. You know, and sounds exciting, but it's an awful lot of sitting in a black van doing nothing.

Yoyo 29:40

Yeah. Waiting.

Dan 29:42

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I got a lot of cool training too, you know? You know, I spent my first whole year at the Secret Service mostly going to training courses, you know? I mean, I graduated from the emergency medical technician course, which was, which is cool because, you know, you know, I learned to pick locks, you know, cool. I got really good at shooting a pistol. You know, I, you know, because the Secret Service is extremely high standards on that, or understandable reasons. Yes. You know, I got to go blow things up, you know, I got to do all kinds of cool stuff, you know, but, you know, but then I get sort of thrown into the operational, you know, rota, and then your life goes completely to hell. You know, we had a joke at the time that we were just a van away from history.

Yoyo 30:26

Yes. But look you are there now, you've gone through the Pentagon, into the White House for two separate presidents terms. And then you've gone into the Secret Service. Isn't there a, isn't there a part of you at that time thinking, well, I've pretty much done it all, either. I don't really think there's much more for me, aspire

Dan 30:42

to. Well, there is some of that and there's a point at which after, you know, three or four years of, you know, being a van away from history and having no life and traveling a lot and lots of overtime and night shifts and, you know, you know, traveling in the back of a cargo airplane to South Africa and, you know, all kinds of stuff, you know, it sounds glamorous. It isn't, you know, you really actually become an expert on, you know, hotel points and airline points and how to which, how to sweet talk your way into an upgrade. So you might be able to get some sleep. Things like that, you know, you know, Burnout sets in and you know, there's a point which I was getting very jaded. You, I mean, I you work at the White House, you get the sense that you're at the center of the universe, okay? And you work in a job where literally you're standing in the next room over from the president a lot and you know, the president's a by first name basis and you know, cabinet secretaries and first name basis. You speak your bad Russian to Condi Rice. You know, because she speaks bad Russian too. Russian's better than mine, but, you know, you know, things like that, you know, the last thing Conez Rice ever said to me is, damn, we gotta stop meeting like this. Yeah. And in some basement somewhere, you know? Yeah. Neat. Yeah. Yeah. So, so there's a point where it's, you know, the coolness is long since, you know, wore off and then, you know, you realize that, you know, your personal life has gone to hell. At this point I'm still single. But the guys, the guy, the guys I work with, I'm not surprised. Yeah. The guys I work with there was one guy famously Jimmy, I'm not gonna mention his last name because he's the kind of guy, if he's still out there, he'll turn up at G S X and he, the guy was slagging me, Jimmy, you know, basically I, you know, he had, he. Really worked. All the overtime God could give him mostly to pay off his four ex-wives.

Yoyo 32:38

He could have had such an easier life just looking after. Yeah.

Dan 32:40

I just look around the office of the, look around my office in the technical security division of the Secret Service. Like, guys, why don't you just each like, get$20 each paycheck and put it in a coffee can and just have your own divorce lawyer on retainer. I mean, serious. Seriously, you just, you know, develop your own little insurance scheme here.'cause you're only,

Yoyo 33:01

you know, maybe a bug off for buy one get one free sort of thing.

Dan 33:04

Yeah. Exactly. You know, you heard every story possible. A guy comes home, a guy comes home and looks through the bills and realizes, he's been paying for, somebody to clean the swimming pool, but they don't even have a swimming pool. True story.

Yoyo 33:19

So what happens then? You're in the Secret Service, it's kind of, you know, six years, my understanding is, and then it's kind of burnout. You're not really having a great quality of life. What do you decide to do then?

Dan 33:30

Well, I jumped ship and moved to England because I met a along the way. I met a nice English gal who's now my wife. Okay. And a lot of long distance stuff. And honestly, it was not gonna work for her to come to Washington and be married to some secret service guy. You know, so, She was just gonna be, you know, miserable as a Northern Virginia housewife, you know, geez, it didn't seem like her thing. Anyway, but here's an opportunity to actually move to London. So I became one of those immigrants in the Daily Mail Ranch about, you know, so I went and applied for a fiance visa. Got it. You know, once I had that ink dry, I, in my passport, I, you know, went to the Secret Service personnel division, said, fine, I'm leaving. And turned out I actually had enough time in the federal government.'cause some of my military time had also counted I could technically have what they call a partial deferred retirement. Haven't been drawing a pension, but I am eligible for a civil service pension at age 62. So I was like, guys, which I should imagine

Yoyo 34:27

looking at you as years away, to be honest,

Dan 34:29

Dan. Well, no. I'm actually 54, so it's not, I've had medical conditions that run longer than that, those eight years, I see that pension coming, you know? But yeah, so I moved to the uk. I got married I live here in Pimlico.

Yoyo 34:41

And I take it, you know, if the American president could trust you, then I'd take it, we could hear too, in relation to offering you, right, of course. Right.

Dan 34:49

Well, yeah. This was my last failed attempt, escape outta the chemical biologic by, and this is my most clever tunnel out of the, you know, I moved to the UK and tried to do what every guy that does, who leaves with the Secret Service, try to find a job in corporate security. Now the problem was, it was 2008. It was the financial crisis. Those guys were the first guys to jump, get thrown out the window. Yeah. I mean, I had a lot of interviews, but it was like, yeah, we're not hiring or geez, that we had to close the, we're downsizing, you know, we're you throwing, I mean, I had some interesting interviews, I had a couple job offers. I mean, critical infrastructure protection for Thas water. Oh, there's literally a shitty job. Got a actually very good offer within the chemical and biological stuff. It's like Smith's no escaping. Yeah. Smith's detection, which makes things like chemical warfare detectors, Dan, come work for us. We'll give you a lot of money and you can be a sales representative and all over Europe for us. So I did. Yeah. Yeah. It was by no means perfect. I worked in Watford. Apologies to anybody from Watford listening to this. I just did not Watford and I did not see eye to eye. Well Watford, it's aion to grow up with, to appreciate it. Seriously. You know, and there are places like that in America, Toledo, Ohio. People love Toledo, Ohio. But you know, you have to grow up with it. You know, it's, you know, it's, Watford wasn't my thing. So after three years I said, you know, I'm tired of selling hardware. Why don't I go sell ideas? And so I write books, you know, write articles, do consulting work. A good year, it pays reasonably well. And a bad year, it pays almost nothing. So I mean, that's the nature of consultancy. It's all over the map. So, if you get a good, if you get a good sort of mine, a good vein of consulting work you run with it as much as you can because you, it could dry up save some day, you know? But this isn't a consultancy advice podcast. This is a Secure Sector podcast. Wow.

Yoyo 36:46

Finding quite useful actually.

Dan 36:48

Yeah. Since 2011, I have been an independent consult writer because I've always been interested in history. I've basically become one of the great and only historians, easy to become a great historian. If you're one of the only ones of chemical biological warfare, there aren't many people who are, in that. Sphere. I tend to know them all. And so I, I wrote a book called Toxic on the history of the only history of nerve agents ever written, and I occasionally had to have odd jobs to either fill the time or, make up the budget. For three and a half years I worked part-time at St. Martin, the Fields Church here in London. During the height of the pandemic I put that old emergency medicine course I went to in the Secret Service to good work and, became a part-time vaccinator. I jabbed 1094 people. Cool. That's the sort of thing that really makes the nutters on Twitter upset at you. I became a, I don't know how I became a Twitter social media phenomenon. I have somehow anyway and then, I do what I can in my little niche and then I don't know where you,'cause I know you're gonna bring it up. Then I got into, most recently I got into a huge argument with the, with British government. Yeah.

Yoyo 38:01

Y yes. We'll talk about that and then we'll talk about Salisbury. But yeah. Okay. So tell me the story from the beginning.'cause this did get you quite a lot of notoriety in the

Dan 38:09

press, didn't it? Yeah. It's just the only, I mean, it's the only, probably only time in my life that Dan Kaita and Staman Rushdi are gonna be all on the front page of the times. But there I was. Hey, take it where you can get it. I could say, alright. So over, over the years, one of my consulting clients has been rui, the Royal United Services Institute, which is, it's a, not only is it a think tank, it is literally the oldest think tank in the world. It's the premier sort of defense. Defense, terrorism, world Affairs, sort of think tank. Right. On Whitehall I did some consulting work with them on a fairly niche topic, whether or not North Korea has chemical weapons. Okay. And I got, one of the titles I hold now is Associate Fellow at sci. It's not, I'm not a Rui employee. That's sort of a, I mean, it's, it is an arm length relationship. It's, I mean, so think of me as sort of a, consultant on speed dial. So if they need me to do something or reservist, if you will, Yeah. And so one of the, so one of the thing, it's the RCI equivalent of a special constable. I could be I could be thrown out there to represent the brand or not, depending on the needs of the institution. Okay. Gotcha. So in. 2021, I guess it was all those lockdown years and all the covid years fused together in my mind. In 2021, they said, Dan, we need you to go and to this conference. Okay? It's a chemical demilitarization conference. Now demilitarization is a funny word for basically what do you do to get rid of old chemical weapons? Like decommission them. Yeah. How do you make the chemicals safe? How do you destroy them? Environmentally friendly Or if you're, like, if you're in the western fronts in you know, Belgium or France, how do you find them? Because they're probably unexploded under a farmer's field, things like that. They do get dug up from time to time. They get found in China all the time.'cause the Chinese left some there. I, the Japanese left some there in the second World War. So I got frog marched off to this conference. And when I say this is a boring conference, I mean that in every definition of boring, first of all. I mean, there's 109 slide presentations on drill bits to bore into chemical weapons. So, literally bore, is that a

Yoyo 40:17

pun? Drill bits to

Dan 40:18

bore into yeah. Do keep up yoyo. And also literally it's quite, I mean, even for a guy like me who gets really excited about this stuff, it was pretty dull. Okay. So, and I gave a presentation and because of travel restrictions and time, the whole thing was done on Zoom. So I gave a 20 minute uncontroversial presentation. Fine thought, nothing of it. Well, this year, as in 2023 the UK government is hosting this conference again, and they're hosting it in purpose. And it turns out that they're hosting it a nine minute walk up the street from my house here in Victoria. And in January this year, they said, well, Dan, we really want you to come. And I'm like, I really don't wanna, and there was a lot of back and forth, and basically they begged me to come and give a updated version of my previous presentation, like, fine. Because it's not really out of my way, it's just up the street anyway. Yeah. All right. Fine. Then in April, I get the stinkiest email I've ever seen come out of a UK government official in my life. Really? Dan, we're canceling you. You can't come. We've looked at your social media. Your social media is critical of UK government policies and UK government officials, so you're not allowed to talk to the government anymore. I'm whoa whoa.

Yoyo 41:34

What was wrong with your

Dan 41:34

social media? All things go through my head. First of all, you couldn't find, well, I've been slagging off the government, like 91% of the rest of you know, you, you know, all attempts to figure out exactly which one of my tweets offended them. They've been very, you know, subject access requests, freedom of information. They seem to have completely forgotten which of them you know, they can't tell me, which is a bit suspicious. But, you know, yes, I have been harshly critical of the sitting government for a long time, for a variety of reasons. At. Shall I say, has everybody else? Second, you know, we have freedom of speech. We have a freedom of belief. We have equality in this country. You know, I have the right to call Jacob Reese mga haunted pencil if I want to. Okay. A

Yoyo 42:19

haunted what?

Dan 42:20

Pencil?

Yoyo 42:23

I've never heard that before.

Dan 42:24

Yeah. And if I wanna retweet if I wanna retweet a series of tweets visually comparing Nadine Doris to famous car crashes, you know what? Actually, it's my right to do that. And none of that bears on me talking for 20 minutes about whether or not Egypt is gonna join the Chemical Weapons Convention, which is what I was gonna talk about. Yes. Okay. My, I wasn't even going to talk about the UK or UK government or UK policy at all. Okay. But they're like, oh no. You just can't be trusted anymore. This is like, as I put it to several other people, this is like, being thrown off of a bakeoff because one year you supported Tran Mayor. Okay? It's a category. It's just an absolute category error. Yeah. And you know what, if I've been going to conferences for my entire career, if somebody if I had a reputation as the guy who sort of, now that I have your attention, let me talk about, just stop oil. No, I mean, nobody could point to any incident where I went off the rails at a conference, you know? I mean, there was the one conference in Switzerland once where I was a bit ill in the morning and I missed two brief. But hey, you know, these things happen. No, I'm not a responsible speaker at at conferences. As one of my colleagues. One of my colleagues who is actually a serving military officer, he says, I don't understand this, Dan, because actually you're a goddamn delight.

Yoyo 43:48

I like that. Not dead bad delight. is it because you're in a na like you're an American? I dunno if that's got something to do because in the esta form, I had to put down my social media handles in case I was slagging off the American government on my social media. Like, you know, I'm sorry,

Dan 44:05

but no, honestly, and I don't believe I, I don't believe in that either, so, so that's tough.

Yoyo 44:10

Dan, the form wouldn't let me progress unless I put one social media handle. So if I wasn't on social media, yeah, I would've really struggled to complete the form.

Dan 44:21

Put Jacob Reese mugs on there. So instead of taking this lying down and laying back and thinking of England, I said, this ain't right. And I showed it to a bunch of people, academics and such who said, oh God, this is awful. That's wrong. Yeah, and it's wrong on a lot of levels. And sort of, I showed it to about 10 different people and every, each one of those 10 sort of looked at it from a different angle and said, yeah, it gave me an all new reason why I was wrong. And so I fought back. So far I've won. So, I've got, first of all, the government didn't admit to these policies but I had the smoking gun email so they couldn't not admit to having them. And questions were raised in parliament, not just a by numerous different political parties. And then I, you know, crowdfunded and got a very good solicitor. And three three barristers and a paralegal informed what James O'Brien has now called the legal juggernaut. And I have been trampling them. I have been absolutely monstering them at every con every contact point between my legal team and the government, they have surrendered and coughed up more stuff.

Yoyo 45:23

So what's the outcome then? Does that mean that they can't prejudice against you for your opinions by, in the future and booking you for events? Or is that bridge kind of burn now?

Dan 45:32

I don't know because actually I've got them to I got them to do what I thought was almost impossible to get out of the UK government. I got government lawyers to write to me in writing admitting that they had breached my human rights and had acted unlawfully in doing this. And I got an actual apology outta the arm of the m o D that had uninvited me. I got an actual quite fullsome written apology. And not only that's all well and good but we got the cabinet office and 14 other departments to tear up these social media due diligence policies. Yeah.'cause these were awful policies. And they were not meant to be seen by the public. And the minute you start looking at them, they're truly awful. They extend the public sector. You know, the civil service, duty of impartiality to private citizens and parliament never voted for that. These are policies saying you, Yolanda, you're not allowed to actually have and express, you know, anything that's an impartial opinion about a government policy.

Yoyo 46:28

Well, blow me down. That's not gonna happen. Is it? Change

Dan 46:33

countries. Exactly. Exactly. And again, not to keep quoting myself, I mean, but you know, I said it several times. I'm half Lithuanian. I could smell Stalinism. The whole thing has a myth of stalinism about it. It's just awful. And it's written it's written by people who assume they're gonna be in power forever. What happens if there's a change in government, then nobody could talk to anybody.

Yoyo 46:56

I don't think it's competent enough to be Stalinism.

Dan 47:00

No. It's sort of low grade CISM. Yeah. No,

Yoyo 47:05

I don't even think it's that. I just think, I think that they had a single, it's like. Most policies that go wrong are created without considering the impacts that they can have. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. Holistically is that they create, and I think they didn't think about that. It's quite obvious to see that they created a policy for a certain belief and reason not realizing that it has a greater impact. Yeah. so you won? I won and

Dan 47:30

I've won on, I've won for other people too, because the thing is, we've rattled out a lot of information on other people who were affected by this, some of whom at the time did not even know they were affected. Oh, wow. So, yeah. Yeah. And I've encouraged a lot of other people to put in subject access requests and find out that they, and indeed were subject to this. Because, you know, you're right. The whole thing is sort of half-assed. I mean, surely the first aspect of a blacklist is not tell anybody that they're on the blacklist. If they didn't want me to speak, why did they invite me in the first place and then publicly uninvite me? I mean, there, and they could've delicately said, Dan, oh, cock up in the genuine, would you mind not coming? You know, anybody who looked at the email chain when I was first agreeing to go would easily see. I didn't really want to go. They kind of begged. I mean, this is just, the whole thing is just, it's an omnis shambles. It's it's one of those, it's one of those fractal diagrams of incompetence. Every angle you look at it, screw your eyes up. It just looks stupid.

Yoyo 48:29

Yeah. So what's next for you then, Dan, now that you've beaten the government?

Dan 48:34

Yeah. Well, I've got a I've got a, my, my first ever non-chemical, non-biological book out. Just launched last week. It's called the Forest Brotherhood. It's about my ancestral homeland, Lithuania, Lavia Estonia, and people who, it's basically a history of resistance against both Nazis and Soviets. It's a, it's, in some senses it's a traditional military history book. In some senses it's, filling in the gap because there's not a lot written in English about that part of the world. And with an actual shooting war going on in Ukraine, this is all of a sudden people are actually more interested in this stuff, you know? So we'll see. I gotta promote that. I got launch events for that coming up. I. I got a book project, I'm writing the history of tear gas and pepper spray and self-defense sprays. Yeah. But yeah, that sounds boring, but I'm gonna make it actually really interesting'cause I'm got a lot of social history in on it, you know? Yeah. And importantly tasting notes because I've been exposed to a lot of tear gas over the years, so, you know. Yeah.

Yoyo 49:32

I, in the police, I had a little bit. It doesn't help. It doesn't help when you are chasing a bad guy down the middle of a stationary motorway. In the middle of two lanes of cars stationary. I hasten to add, and my colleague, my police officer partner, she was spraying the offender who was making off and the wind was blowing in my doctors. Oh, see,

Dan 49:56

there you go. You're right there with one of the reasons why chemical weapons are a little bit variable and unpredictable. Oh, yeah.

Yoyo 50:03

Well, or maybe it's just because, at some point the message needed to click in, how effective is this going to be if I spray this here and now spray, and does it have an effect on anybody else in the immediate vicinity? Yeah. And there's me running down after her crying,

Dan 50:18

obviously. Would you like to get interviewed for my book? I can give you three paragraphs in my book on this episode alone. Fabulous. As an example. Yeah,

Yoyo 50:27

perfect. Just crying. It was just so funny. And I could see more spray coming, you know, it was like in slow motion. And fortunately, the force that I was with, we didn't use these traditional CS spray that other forces in the United Kingdom used. We use a pepper spray, which is supposed to be less, but it's still bloody evil. Yeah. And then I was in a nightclub once back in 1996 where people were letting off pepper, I don't know what they call them, pepper bombs or something. Now that was quite debilitating because my first instinct was to sort of kneel on the floor. I don't know why. And to try and catch my breath. And every time I breathed it felt like there were sharp. Yeah. Trickles in back of my throat. Like needles. Yeah. In the back of my throat. Yeah. And it's, and somebody literally grabbed my elbow, kind of pulled me up and just took me out. I just didn't even feel it. It froze me.

Dan 51:26

you could see, you can see how, you know, pepper spray or tear gas in the wrong environment can actually cause cause fatalities because of causing a stampede in a crowded nightclub. Uhhuh. Yeah. I believe this is, this has happened in South Africa, actually. Okay.

Yoyo 51:40

Yeah. Well, tell me about that.

Dan 51:41

I, well, I, it's a, it's an incident I need to follow up on, but okay. In the I believe it happened in the town of, believe it or not, east London, there was an East London in South Africa. That's what the place is called. And there was a bunch of people who died in a nightclub and it was, oh, a chemicals in a nightclub killed people. And like, I think, and I gotta investigate this incident some more. I saw my list of things to do. I think it may have been a stampede, crowd crush type situation in a unlicensed, venue, which not uncommon in South Africa, probably only one exit, that sort of thing. Yeah.

Yoyo 52:14

Quick question then. So over the years let's just go through a little bit of overall stuff, because over the years, I should imagine there has been, A greater amount of product being created. That creates a greater uncertainty in relation to its safety and security of its location. Then you've obviously got the, sell by dates and then you've got disposals to think about. So it's not an easy process. I get it. And I understand that from the nuclear industry as well, in the same way it requires an awful lot of thought and preparation. Are we safer now than we were say, pre 9, 11, 25, 30 years ago? Yeah,

Dan 52:52

for a lot of, for a lot of reasons. For a lot a lot of reasons. First of all, there's less stuff in circulation than there was. Alright. The old Oh, that's great. That's reassuring. The old Cold War stockpiles are gone. Alright, so there's there are a few sort of unknowns on the map. We don't really know about North Korea for example, but, there's, there, there are, there's also, we're looking, like I said before we can actually look at. Points at which terrorist groups have considered these things. Nah. Not worth it, you know? Yeah. Things like that. Is that because

Yoyo 53:22

of the, is that, let's think practically,'cause this is a security listenership, is that because the acquisition is harder or the policing of it is harder or it's more expensive? Why are terrorist groups thinking there are more effective ways to occur to instill

Dan 53:36

hafi? Well, I'cause I, because I think it boils down to predictability and variability because you can spend an awful lot of money and your device just doesn't work or doesn't work as intended. Okay. Or work. Yeah. Interesting. It works as intended, but the environmental conditions are not ideal for it. So, for example, I mean even the ricchio thing, those guys by all guys in Tokyo, by all accounts, had enough saren, they could have killed many thousands of people and they only killed 14. Okay. Because they totally bought the delivery. Okay.

Yoyo 54:08

That's high maintenance then this

Dan 54:09

product. Oh, yeah. Well, well, but also chemical. We actual military style chemical weapons are the, are the result of lots of engineering design work and lots of trial and error to get all the variables right. The, when the US was designing, a for example, a yeah, a, an artillery shell full ofs. They came up with a, a liquid that was a sa stimulant to behave just like saren and did a lot of test firings a lot over years and then test firings with the real thing out in the middle of nowhere in, in Utah where it wasn't gonna hurt anybody except a few rabbits in the cage. Okay. And so the things that were actually military chemical weapons were designed with a lot of research and development and a, at a product development cycle some guy knocking together a device in a shed somewhere. It doesn't have that. Okay. And so you get to a point where, yeah, he could get lucky, but he could also actually kill himself in his shed. Yeah. Or, kill himself on the way to delivering it or anything like that. Now that can all happen with explosives too, but the thing is, there's a much broader body of knowledge with explosives in the, in both the criminal and the terrorist underworld. Okay. Yeah. And explosives do follow some more widely Understood, principles and procedures. Okay. It's the old, surely you know how to fit a timer joke. Yeah. And so there, there's a much wa there's a much wider body of knowledge on that. Okay.

Yoyo 55:38

Going back to Saren gas. Yeah. And other types of toxic gases, to the novice. We know they're harmful, but Yeah, we are one planet. And I take it, everything that's, that saren is a manufactured gas. Like, I wouldn't even know what it is. I wouldn't even know. It's

Dan 55:54

made of even, I'm gonna even correct you. It's a liquid, actually, Sarah, guess it's a liquid. It's a misnomer. Yeah. So,

Yoyo 56:00

so is this manufactured or is it found naturally? No, it's

Dan 56:03

manufactured. Okay. But there are things that are, there are things that are naturally found that are actually quite dangerous. You know, like arsenic? Well, yeah. I mean, here's here's the thing. The entire universe is made outta chemicals, okay? Yep. Virtually everything that is a chemical, very few chemicals are truly non poisonous. Okay. I mean, water. You drink enough water, it will kill you. Yep. Okay. Salt You eat enough salt, it'll kill you. Anything Kill you? Yeah. A

Yoyo 56:32

nutmeg. Yep. Oh yeah. Nut makes a poison. Yeah. Oh yeah.

Dan 56:35

So the difference between something being inert and something being a poison is dose and context. Okay. Gotcha. All right. There is a safe level of se one molecule of sein is not gonna affect you. Okay? Yeah. You know, a gram of sein will surely kill you all right. And between that one gram ofs and the one molecule, there's a curve and that curve has a different shape depending on what you do With that, I mean, There you go.

Yoyo 57:07

so we're pretty evil as a human race really creating such nasty things, I think, anyway. But,'cause they're not just used to protect, they're used to harm in, in, in the same way that a rock and Yeah. Is used to build and it is used to harm. But also let's talk about chat. G p t, this wonderful AI tool. You, you were involved, weren't you? Tell me how you've been involved with the

Dan 57:28

team there. Well, that's, well that's a good one. I, I don't know how they found me. Maybe'cause it's not hard to find me.'cause I am LinkedIn maybe. Yeah, LinkedIn, Twitter. You know, let's find the king of nerve agents. All the popular news

Yoyo 57:44

stories that are going

Dan 57:45

on there. Yeah. Open ai. The guys behind chat. G P T found me and said, Dan, we need you to try to see if you can poke holes in chat, G p T. So I've done a bit of that. Yeah. With the

Yoyo 57:54

intention of,

Dan 57:56

well, with the intention of helping them develop procedural handcuffs, you know? Yes. Say that. So, so that, right now, if you ask Che g pt g p t to, you know, make a, give you a recipe to make a pot of sein no, it's not gonna work. Okay.

Yoyo 58:14

That's good. We'd like

Dan 58:15

to hear that. You can't even get it to give you a a mango be a novel with this processes or a bedtime story with it. I, because I've tried all these you know, sneaking around sneaking around trying to backdoor the whole thing, you know, you know, chat, G p D is, you know, at the end of the day, it's a glorified I'm a cynic about it. It's a glorified Google. Okay.

Yoyo 58:38

All right. You're clearly not using it right then. Well,

Dan 58:42

Where I worry about, yeah. I mean, where I worry about is Chad g teaching somebody how to pick mushrooms, you know? Oh, really? Yeah. You can ask Chad g p t to generate a Yeah. That's the latest thing. You, I, mushrooms weren't in my, weren't in my remit on this. It was in a very narrow box. But, you know, somebody somewhere got Chad g p d to come up with pictures of mushrooms that you could pick. Well, some of those mushrooms are not the ones you want to pick or even touch or eat. Yeah. oh,

Yoyo 59:09

There was a case recently wasn't there in the UK where a woman had poisoned her family at dinner with mushrooms, They're not able to determine yet whether it there was intent there or

Dan 59:21

whether Oh yeah. Exactly. You know? Yeah. Mushrooms are dangerous. They

Yoyo 59:27

are indeed. And, okay, so wrapping up, let's talk about Salisbury. We all know what happened in Salisbury, but I'd love to hear it from you.

Dan 59:36

Okay. Well, okay.

Yoyo 59:38

And one thing, how do you get nerve agents over, through, through from one country to another? Not that I wanna learn how to do it, but surely this has gotta be a very difficult process.

Dan 59:48

No. I mean, at the end of the day, they're liquids and they're not liquids with magic tendencies. It's not like they're corrosive or explosive or flammable. The end of the day it's a liquid. So you stick it in a vial and stick the vial in your baggage. Or if you really don't want to worrying or actually if you're the state security services of a foreign country, you just send it send, and you're really actually worried about you guys getting caught and, no, just send it through diplomatic pouch, so here's what I think happens. I think this stuff got sent in a, this Nova Chuck agent, which is a type of nerve agent, a fairly sophisticated type of nerve agent. It is a, it's a liquid. It survives a long time in the environment. So it would be good for contaminating something like a door handle for a week or two, easily. So I am thinking this stuff got sent by diplomatic pouch to the Russian embassy.'cause that stuff doesn't get searched. Somebody from the Russian embassy met these two guys and gave it to them, or somebody from the Russian embassy put the stuff in a dead drop where they go, went and collected it. And they did a reconnaissance visit to Salisbury, to Sergei SSRI's house. They came back the next day. Also to Salisbury both times, going the wrong way to go see the cathedral, you can literal see them going out and turning left, you know? Because, in 2019, I actually walked the pathway that they walked just to check, you know, really? Okay, cool. I went out to Sergei sri's house, so, and time, how long it would take and all that. So they went out and speared his door, handle Sergei well, while Sergei scr was out, because nerve agents absorb through the skin, take hours. They're not instantaneous. that's like a, that's like a myth because stuff absorbed through your skin does take hours. We don't, I'm not sure how much he actually absorbed through his skin enough to make him quite seriously ill, probably enough to kill him. What really saved Sergei and Yulia was the fact that, you know, they actually went out and went to dinner as opposed to staying at home. They just stayed at home. They probably would've both dead on the sofa watching telly. Wow. Yeah. The fact that they collapsed in a public place is what saved them, because that got them the attention of the emergency services. Yep. Now we have this other mystery vial, the same stuff that ended up killing, Dawn Sturgis and making Charlie Rally very ill. I'm gonna suggest my hypothesis on that was probably that more than one container, this stuff was sent in. And that might have been like a backup stash. Okay. That maybe was even hidden in a dead drop somewhere. And, you know, weeks or months after the incident, you know, somebody from the Russian embassy, a Russian agent went out to get rid of it, you know, and pitched it in a bin where it was found. You know, if that bin had been empty and had gone to landfill, you know, nobody had ever known, you know, clearly somebody in their decision process hadn't thought of somebody rummaging through the bin, you know? That's what I thought happened. You know, Dawn Sturgis died because she actually got a lot more of it on her. She sprayed it on her, literally on her wrist and rubbed it in and got a good inhaling in her face. And so she got, oh dear. Yeah, she got a much more massive exposure than the others, you know? Again, a lot of credit to the hospital in Salisbury saved their lives except for Dawn. I mean, Dawn lingered on for a few days, but she was, yeah. And by the, but also, that's the other thing. Nerve agents up to a point, up to yeah, up sort of up to the dawn Sturgess point are quite medically treatable things now. They will mess you up. They'll mess you up in a lot of different ways. But there's life-saving medication that will save your life. And that's what saved, that's what saved Yulia. That's what saved Sergey Sri. That's what saved Charlie Rowley. the the the piece the policeman who got got exposed he had quite a minor exposure, it was still affected by it. And again, modern medicine, helped these people. But I also think that, I mean, Sergei Sri, we've not seen him. He's somewhere in protective custody. No doubt. I mean, wouldn't you be if yeah, literally the largest country in the world was trying to kill you? Yeah, but also it's possible he's not very well off. I mean, nerve agents can have a lot of serious effects on you, both physically and psychologically. And I don't blame him for keeping a low profile, even if he, you know, even if, you know, even not factoring in all the other things. But also if you think about it, whether or not he actually survived or not, maybe that's not even the point of the whole thing perhaps. The method was the message. And the message was, every so often the Russians really put fear into the wealthy diaspora and prevent further turn codes.'cause at the end of the day, this is a guy who had been a double agent. He had been working for m i six and then it got arrested and spent time in the Gulag. And the only reason why he got out was as part of a spy swap, you know? And so ev so, you know, the Russian intelligence services are very vindictive. So, maybe this is not even about Sergei scribble. This is to prevent future, betrayals

Yoyo 1:04:51

well, and to protect their national security as well. Well, yeah,

Dan 1:04:54

Exactly. Although by the time they got him, he would've anything he would've had to say, he would've already said, if they had really not wanted him to speak to the West, they wouldn't have traded him. Yes. Oh my

Yoyo 1:05:05

God. Yeah.

Dan 1:05:05

Boom. Yeah. He would've had, he would've slipped and fallen on the way to the airport. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. He would've choked on a chicken bone,

Yoyo 1:05:12

Yeah. No, he, his luggage, his luggage would've landed, but he wouldn't have.

Dan 1:05:15

Yeah. No, he got literally traded you. He got traded. He got traded, you know, in a classic Cold War style spy swap at the Vienna Airport, you know, interesting. So, anyway, so I probably kept you online for a lot longer than you thought. Yeah.

Yoyo 1:05:29

Listen, thank you so much. Thank you. Really, Dan Aziza, for just taking us through a whirlwind tour of chemical and biological warfare right through your career. It's been fabulous. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you. Alright,