David McCloskey Sunday Times bestselling spy novelist and former CIA analyst who wrote for the President's Daily Brief and served on field rotations across the Middle East.

“I think any ambitious underling should take a lesson from this, which is when ambiguous guidance comes down from on high, treat it as a yes. Get ready for yes.”

The Rest Is Classified · Geopolitics & World Affairs · November 2026

Context

The Watergate burglars had pitched their break-in plans to Nixon's circle and got neither a yes nor a no. McCloskey notes they treated the ambiguity as a green light and started recruiting.

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Transcript

The Rest Is Classified Around 41:28 into the episode

Speaker 3

The Hunger Games, Sunrise on the Weeping, November 20th, ADP D13.

Gordon Corera

…and spas and beachfronts. Wait, I'm not done. Stop cutting the priceline! Welcome back. G. Gordon, Liddy, Howard Hunt have been given a kind of ambiguous answer, haven't they, David, from the top Nixon officials. But they're not going to take that as a no. They're going to get ready to push ahead.

David McCloskey

That's right. I mean, I think any ambitious underling should take a lesson from this, which is when ambiguous guidance comes down from on high, treated as a yes. Get ready for yes. Yeah,

Gordon Corera

treat it as a yes. Get

David McCloskey

ready for yes. So while they wait for a decision from the attorney general of the United States on whether breaking and entering should be permitted under their gemstone plan, they get the infrastructure in place. So February and March, Hunt and Liddy basically run a cross-country recruiting trip.

Gordon Corera

Traveling first class. They travel

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from The Rest Is Classified

“This is not espionage in the sense of going after deep intellectual property of a company, for instance, or classic national security secrets. It's about understanding the commercial direction and relationships of NVIDIA: who's it selling chips to, who might it be selling chips to, but also understanding Jensen himself and what his relationship with Donald Trump is, what he's lobbying for.” — Gordon Corera, The Rest Is Classified

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