In the audiotape recorded at the Commonwealth Club on June 2, 2006 and transcribed below, Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga (MAMZ) of DailyKos states that in 2001 he began training to be a "secret agent" for the US Central Intelligence Agency and that "when the Dean campaign took off" (which happened at the very end of 2003) MAMZ chose to work with that campaign rather than to be a CIA agent, potentially infiltrating that campaign and the blogospere in general.
QUESTION: Not long ago, liberals loathed the Central Intelligence Agency as the enemy of democratic governments and they installed dictators around the world, and these days you read the papers and people on the Left are rallying to the defense of the CIA and are indignant when the CIA is politicized. How did this come about, that suddenly liberals are championing the CIA:
MAMZ's ANSWER: I don’t know. You know I.
QUESTION: Do you find it stranger or ironic, this sudden love for the CIA?
Moulitsas ZÚÑIGA'S ANSWER: You know . . . coughs . . . I think a lot of the people that did have problems with the CIA, I mean it was a very vocal minority.
MAMZ's ANSWER: You know . . . coughs . . . I think a lot of the people that did have problems with the CIA, I mean it was a very vocal minority. I think most people really didn’t think about it all that much. Right? It wasn’t really on their radar screens, ah, in the way that now it is, because now we are in this huge war, and it was the CIA that was warning the Administration against invading because, there were no weapons of mass destruction.
Here’s a little secret I don’t think I’ve ever written about: But in 2001, I was unemployed, underemployed, unemployed. You know I was in that . . You all have been there “dot com” people? Kinda like, in between jobs, doin’ a little contract work and . . . kinda. So, you know. That’s where I was: in this really horrible netherworld of ‘will I make rent next month’ and . . .
So, I applied to the CIA and I went all the way to the end, I mean it was to the point where I was going to sign papers to become Clandestine Services. And it was at that point that the Howard Dean campaign took off and I had to make a decision whether I was gonna kinda join the Howard Dean campaign, that whole process, or was I was going to become a spy. (Laughter in the audience.) It was going to be a tough decision at first, but then the CIA insisted that if, if I joined that, they’d want me to do the first duty assignment in Washington, DC, and I hate Washington, DC. Six years in Washington, DC [inaudible] that makes the decision a lot easier.
[ . . .] This is a very liberal institution. And in a lot of ways, it really does attract people who want to make a better, you know, want to make the world a better place . . . Of course, they’ve got their Dirty Ops and this and that, right but as an institution itself the CIA is really interested in stable world. That’s what they’re interested in. And stable worlds aren’t created by destabilizing regimes and creating wars.
Their done so by other means. Assassination labor leaders . . . I’m kidding!
[ . . . ] I don’t think it’s a very partisan thing to want a stable world. And even if you’re protecting American interests, I mean that can get ugly at times, but generally speaking I think their hearts in the right place. As an organization their heart is in the right place. I’ve never had any problem with the CIA. I’d have no problem working for them . Moulitsas ZÚÑIGA at the Commonwealth Club.