Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [43]
I scanned their faces again and said, “Well, being that you’re not being too cooperative with me, it’s going to be difficult for me to cooperate with you.”
But I got the gist of what they were after. All their questions centered around how we campaigned, how we achieved what we did, and did I think we truly could win when we went into it from the start? In short, how had the independent wrestler candidate pulled this off? I’d say it couldn’t have been terribly productive for them. Some questions I answered and some I didn’t, sometimes just out of spite: “I don’t feel like answering that.” Give back a little of the arrogance they’d shown me. But they were always very cordial and proper. It wasn’t like anyone raised their voice to me, or tried to make me feel that somehow I was being interrogated. But it was one of the strangest experiences of my life. When I left that day, I pondered the meeting all the way back to my house, about a forty-five-minute to an hour drive, depending on traffic. I felt baffled. Somehow, I had to find out more.
I sat down in my study, and called my friend Dick Marcinko. I figured if anybody whom I knew operated around the CIA, he was probably the guy. Even though Marcinko is now out of the military and in the private sector, he’s still fairly well connected in those circles. He’s the author of the Rogue Warrior books, and he created the antiterrorist SEAL Team Six unit.
When I reached Dick at his home, and told him the scenario of what had transpired, he started laughing.
“Why do you think this is funny, Dick?” I asked.
“Well, I’m not privy to exactly why they were there,” he said, “but I could give you my educated guess.”
I said, “Well, that’s better than I’ve got. Give me your thoughts.”
He said, “They didn’t see you coming. You were not on the radar screen. And, all of a sudden, you won a major election in the United States of America. The election caught them with their pants down, and their job is to gather intelligence and make predictions. Now, next to Bill Clinton, you’re probably the most famous politician in America.”
Then Dick added this: “I think they’re trying to see if there are any more of you on the horizon.”
Which I don’t blame them for. It’s like when you’re on a SEAL team and you get caught up in some type of ambush that you weren’t expecting. The first thing you do upon completion of that “op” is dissect what happened, so you’ll never get caught like that again. Because the next time, you may be dead. So I can’t begrudge them doing their jobs. But it was still very weird. I guess they needed information so that they could be fully prepared to know if it was going to happen again. Or did they need the information to eninsure it would never happen again? Was I that much of a threat?
It wasn’t long after that meeting when I found out something else. I won’t mention any names, in light of the “outing” of Valerie Plame. But I was stunned to learn that there are CIA operatives inside some state governments. They are not in executive positions—in other words, not appointed by the governor—but are permanent state employees. Governors come and go, but they keep working—in legitimate jobs, but with dual identities. In Minnesota, this person was at a deputy commissioner level, fairly high up.
Here’s how I found out about this: The CIA person contacted my chief of staff, who then set up a meeting between the three of us. My chief of staff and I were informed that only we would know of the operative’s identity, nobody else in state government. Later, when there was a change of status, I was also briefed by the new CIA person.
No one ever made me swear that I wouldn’t talk about this and, now that I’m out of office, maybe I’m taking a chance. But I want to get it on the record. I could only speculate about other states, but I’m