“The oil thing is just one of those sort of evergreen kind of theories that people reach for overseas and also to an extent here. And it's because it's the way conspiracy theories often are. It's a bit dumb and it's not really based on anything, but it makes you feel clever. You're looking at the big picture and you're in the know. We're focusing on all these pesky facts and details. But you've lost the big picture here, which only I understand.”

…well. And then a lot of the things that the Iranians said, the sort of North Vietnamese had said, you know, a decade or more earlier and now you get things with, you know, with the Russians and you have all these kind of leverage points with social media where you can just kind of mess things up.

So it kind of bounces, it bounces back and.

No, it's exactly true. We don't want to keep you too much longer. And you've written these incredible books, often on the agency and other things as well. The First Casualty and the new book. And sometimes there's so much insider knowledge in there that often CIA officers don't know the whole story…

I have a question.

Did the agency help with any of this? What is their take on what you're finding out and what you're writing, if there is such a thing?