A talk with former CIA officer Kent Clizbe about his exposure of Wayne Simmons, a man who spent more than a decade on Fox News posing as a CIA counterterrorism expert—but who was a fraud and serial liar.
And we talk about how that case mirrors what we see with self-proclaimed behavior expert Chase Hughes, who claims to be in possession of advanced, top-secret military intel and techniques, but who is a clear fraud.
Topics discussed: how Kent met Wayne Simmons; why Kent suspected quickly he was a fake; how Kent’s intuition about Wayne relates to Kent’s system of holistic contextual analysis; and the negative impacts on Kent’s life from questioning Wayne Simmons. We dig into the psychology of belief and gullibility, the social and career incentives that keep scams alive, and why fans and followers resist evidence even after it’s laid out clearly. This will be one of two talks with Kent Clizbe: the second one will focus on his view of the importance of nonverbal behavior in law enforcement and credibility assessment scenarios.
Episode links:
- YouTube (includes video)
- Spotify
- Apple Podcasts
Related resources:
- Kent’s write-up on Chase Hughes
- Previous episode on Chase Hughes’ lies
- Kent’s book on credibility assessment (which includes criticism of nonverbal behavior applications)
TRANSCRIPT
(Transcripts are done automatically and do contain errors.)
Kent Clizbe: This guy was on Fox News seen around the world for 13 years, and he was touted as a C, Fox News’s, CIA counter terrorism, Islamic extremism expert… 13 years, CIA, people saw him all over the world. Not a peep. Nobody ever said a word. After he’s arrested many CIA people, uh, came to me and said, oh, yeah, yeah, Uhhuh. Yeah, I, I had questions about him from the beginning. Bottom line is nobody said anything. Nobody did anything except me.
Zach Elwood: That was ex-CIA officer Kent Clizbe, talking about a popular Fox News contributor, Wayne Simmons, who claimed to be a former CIA operative but who Kent helped expose as a serial liar and fraud. A 2016 NYT article covered how Wayne Simmons was exposed. On Kent’s site, he references that article, writing:
The shocking story of how Kent uncovered and brought down an in-your-face fraudster–on a par with Bernie Madoff.
For 13 years, Fox News, the political/military establishment, and millions of Fox News viewers were scammed.
Kent Clizbe, applying his proprietary Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment technique, revealed the fraud in minutes.
How could millions of Fox viewers–including legions of former, retired, and current CIA officers–be unaware the network’s leading “CIA counter-terrorism expert” was a fraud?
Isn’t the CIA’s job to vet people? To be sure they are who they say they are?
The answers will shock you. One man grasped the truth. And he pursued it to its conclusion.
Kent recently reached out to me regarding the con artist Chase Hughes, whose many lies and unethical behaviors I exposed in 2024 on my podcast. Kent had been interested in outing Chase as a fraud and then saw that I’d already done a lot of that work.
So in this episode we’ll talk about Kent’s work in outing Wayne Simmons; how he was introduced to Wayne; what it was that quickly tipped Kent off that Wayne was a fake — and how that immediate sense of fakery relates to Kent’s own credibility assessment method, which Kent has written a book about. We’ll talk about the pushback Kent got from powerful people in the government who knew and supported Wayne Simmons, and how his efforts to expose Wayne affected Kent’s life. And we’ll talk a bit about Chase Hughes: how Chase Hughes’ claims of expertise in military and intel and psy-ops areas map over to Wayne Simmons’ lies. Although if you really want to know about that, I recommend reading the expose on my site behavior-podcast.com; go to my site and search for ‘chase hughes’ and look for the piece titled ‘The many lies of Chase Hughes’.
Kent is a harsh critic of self-proclaimed behavior experts, in general. He argues that systems for assigning meaning to “nonverbal behavior” — specific body and face movements — is worse than useless in law enforcement- or espionage -related work, or other high stakes real-world environments. In Kent’s book Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment: A Reality-based Alternative to Deception Detection, he lays out an overview of the work of the well known behavior researcher Paul Ekman and makes the case that Ekman is an irresponsible liar and con artist. I have to say that I largely agree with Kent; Kent is of course not the first person to call Paul Ekman out for bad science; there are many fellow researchers who have harshly criticized his work. On this podcast, I’ve talked to respected deception detection researcher Tim Levine about the weakness of Ekman’s work. Kent’s view of Ekman is a lot more pessimistic than most, but I think he makes a great argument for why we should see Ekman as an extremely untrustworthy person – someone who the record shows is not interested in the truth and much more interested in promoting himself as a genius.
This episode will only be the first part of our talk, though; this talk will focus on the frauds Wayne Simmons and Chase Hughes. The second episode that I’ll air in a couple weeks or so will focus on nonverbal behavior and its role — or its non-role — in law enforcement and credibility assessment scenarios. So look for that later.
Here’s a bit more about Kent’s career from his website kentclizbe.com:
Kent served as a staff CIA case officer in the 1990s, and as a contractor after 9/11. ** He has worked in various capacities in intelligence positions in Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. His specialty is Counter-terrorism and Islamic Extremism.
Kent has also worked Counter-intelligence, Counter-proliferation, Counter-narcotics, and other targets. In addition to extensive liaison work with foreign intel services, he has worked in the US Intel Community in inter-agency, inter-governmental intelligence operations since 9/11. He was awarded the Intelligence Community Seal Medallion, the highest civilian intelligence agency decoration for contractors, for his counter-terrorist operations in the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia. His work in the Philippines was described in an article by Mark Bowden in the Atlantic Monthly in March 2007, “Jihadists in Paradise.”
Okay here’s the talk with Kent Clizbe:
Zach: Hey Kent, thanks for joining me. Sorry I said that right as you drink
Kent: to be with you today, Zach.
Zach: Sorry, I said that right as you were drinking coffee. That’s alright. Uh, good. Off to a good start, but we’ll keep going. That’s kind of funny. Uh, okay. So yeah, maybe we could start out with, uh, what, what made you, uh, what got you reaching out to me if you’d care to share that, uh, story.
Kent: So I’ve been following Chase Hughes for several years.
Uh, I was introduced to him. Probably four or five years ago, uh, by some former associates of his. So I, they, they had given me a background on Chase Hughes and I, I had never heard of him, so I had started following him and, uh, did a little bit of due diligence and saw that he was, uh, he, he was not what he claimed and that whatever it was he was selling was snake oil.
Um, I’m sort of one of my, uh, one of my, uh, interests, professional interests is exposing people like that. So I had been developing a dossier on him. It had fallen to the back of my, uh, of my things to do. I have other things going on, and I hadn’t heard of him or seen anything from him in quite a while until late 2025, probably in the fall, early winter sometime, uh, I saw an interview of him, uh, that he did on some national podcast.
It was either Joe Rogan. Was he on Joe Rogan?
Zach: Yeah. But late, uh, yeah, he was on Joe Rogan. He was also on some other big ones like Diary of a CEO, uh, which is pretty popular.
Kent: Yeah, some actually I don’t see any of those, but I saw a clip, uh, of what? Of a big one, and I’m pretty sure it was Joe Rogan, but that’s when it suddenly hit me.
What in the hell? I thought this dude was gone.
Zach: Yeah,
Kent: I thought, I thought he faded away and here he is showing up on this very high profile, uh, uh, uh, media. So I went back and started, you know, re re reenergized my Chase Hughes, uh, project. And in the course of that I did a couple searches. Is anybody else looking at Chase Hughes?
And boom, uh, you showed up. Uh, Zachary Elwood, uh, poker Tell Guy, uh, has a a
Zach: I got my own dossier.
Kent: Yeah. Had had a fantastic article on your substack or your, your, uh, your website. And as I read that article, I was like, man, this guy has done way more than I have you. Your dossier, your, your background, your, your analysis of Chase Hughes was extensive.
And that’s when I reached out to you, uh, to said, just, just offer my. Uh, let you know there’s a kindred soul out here who’s, who’s also offended by the Chase Hughes scam. And, uh,
Zach: yeah.
Kent: Wanted, wanted to see if we could somehow collaborate.
Zach: Yeah, there’s, and as I told you and other people, it’s like, we need more people talking about it.
’cause he’s, he’s continuing to peak in the, uh, popularity, which is kind of amazing. Um, amazing what he’s been able to do in that regard. But, yeah. Another funny thing too, when, you know, you, you reached out to me via LinkedIn last, like a month ago, and I had missed your message, and then I randomly unrelated, stumbled across your work because I was doing some research on Microexpressions and, you know, Paul Ekman’s work the other day and saw your critiques of him.
So it was kind of funny that we ended up connecting because we, I was, I was reaching out to you and you were reaching out to me, which is, you know,
Kent: totally independent of each other, coincidentally reaching out to each other at the same time. Yeah, that’s, there’s, there’s some kind of karma or something there it was meant to be.
Zach: Yeah. Uh, and maybe we could, uh, I mean we could talk about Chase for a long time, but we’ll leave that aside for now. But I, I wanted to ask you about your work outing Wayne Simmons. Uh, that that was a, that is just a very interesting case and I, and I had not, somehow, I had not heard about that at all when you, when I looked into what you had done, I think there’s a, is was it a New York Times or some article about you exposing him or helping expose him?
Kent: Yeah. Yeah. There was a, a front page on the New York Times Sunday magazine.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Kent: Uh, story extensive went into great depth of
Zach: That’s
Kent: great. I I, I didn’t like the headline, uh, something like, uh, the Operation to Out A Fox News.
Zach: Uh,
yeah.
Kent: I
Zach: didn’t like that headline either. I was like, what? That is not at all.
Like, it made it sound like there was something, uh, uh, you know, underhanded going on. It’s like that.
Kent: I didn’t like the headline
Zach: either. Yeah. Uh,
Kent: but so I, I, I, I worked really closely with the guy that wrote the article and the guy that wrote the article totally understood. And if you read the article, uh, it is not an operation to out a a Right.
A Fox News commentator. It was a expose a liar and account exposure of fraud.
Zach: Yeah. Yeah.
Kent: And so, so it turns out that the guys that write the headline are totally separate from the guys that write the article, but
Zach: Right. Anyway, yeah. I’ve had that experience too. Uh, yeah, I was wondering, yeah, maybe we could, uh, I mean, there’s so much to say about, just about the Wayne Simmons thing too.
We could spend a long time with that. But I, I am wondering, I mean, people should definitely read that article and, and look into that. It’s a very interesting story, but I wanted to ask you about that. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you, fairly quickly, what, what instincts you had about how, uh, he was likely a fraud and how quickly you knew that and what those circumstances were.
Kent: Yeah, so I, I think really the most important. Takeaway from that. The, the, the operation that I ran, if you want to call it that, to expose Simmons as a fraud, was the fact that this guy was on Fox News seen around the world for 13 years, and he was touted as a C, Fox News’s, CIA counter terrorism, Islamic extremism expert, CIA offices at that time during the Global War on Terror, all had big screen TVs that were on all the time, and many times kind of depending on the politics of the, uh, of the management.
But uh, at that time, Fox News was probably predominantly the choice for running 24 7 on these TVs and in headquarters head, CIA headquarters. There’s Fox News is on everywhere. C the Counter-Terrorism Center everywhere. It’s on 13 years. This guy. Was blatantly in your face. It’s not like he’s hiding, you know, sneaking around in the backyards, whispering in people’s ears.
Hey, I’m a CIA guy. Let me give you a secret. He was in your face, Fox News Day after day after day, 13 years, CIA, people saw him all over the world. Not a peep. Nobody ever said a word after he’s arrested many CIA people, uh, came to me and said, oh, yeah, yeah, Uhhuh. Yeah, I, I had questions about him from the beginning.
Bottom line is nobody said anything. Nobody did anything except me. The, as soon as I, I, I met him. A, a mutual friend introduced us. I, I didn’t have cable, didn’t watch Fox News. Don’t watch Fox News. So, never heard of him. Never seen him. Our mutual friend said, Hey, you guys are just alike. Counter-terrorism operators, you guys.
Oh, I, you gotta meet him. He is plugged in. He is a cool dude. Sure. Let’s have lunch.
Zach: Quick, quick question.
Kent: Sat down.
Zach: Quick question, Kent. Yep. Did you, did you have suspicions about him based on, you know, your read of the situation before you met him, or did your suspicions ar No. Okay. Yeah, go ahead.
Kent: I, I did, I did no due diligence before meeting him.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Kent: I, uh, I just took the word of, uh. This mutual friend who now is clear, uh, had no idea what he was talking about, and he was misrepresenting himself as well. I knew, I knew the mutual friend through at the time. I was, uh, uh, teaching, instructing, facilitating instructional, designing in, uh, intelligence training for both civilian and military human intelligence.
Uh, I, I knew him through a professional, um, um, organization, intelligence educator. So International Association for Intelligence Education. I knew him through that, had never met him, but assumed his. There’s, there’s no, no reason that I needed to do due diligence on this guy, but I assumed his competence turned out he’s, he’s totally incompetent, and he was a borderline fraud himself.
He was a, turns out he was a, a, a a, an air force cop who was, uh, spinning him trying to create a new, uh, a, a new career spinning himself as an intel guy. But anyway, so he introduced me. I, at the time, I took his word for it. Yeah. My colleague, mutual friend says, I should meet you. I didn’t do due diligence on Wayne.
All I knew was the sort of headline. Wayne Simmons, uh, CIA counter-terrorism expert, uh, he’s on, been on Fox News for the last 13 years. So that, that was, that was the setup when I sat down to have lunch with him.
Zach: So yeah. And then so when you met him, you fairly quickly had a sense that, that things were off based on what he talked about and the way he talked.
Yeah.
Kent: As soon as we started talking, um, he, he, there there’s, I I, I call it, it’s like when dogs sniff each other’s butt, that’s it’s butt sniffing. When you’re, when you’re a CIA officer and you meet some another CIA officer, there’s sort of, it’s not standard, but, you know, you, you, you ask about assignments, you ask about training.
When did you go through training? Uh, where were you stationed? Did you know somebody that, you know, Joe, who was stationed there the year before?
Zach: Right.
Kent: Um, which yeah, the
Zach: language they used to describe the positions, that kind of stuff. Yeah.
Kent: Yeah. It’s the context. It’s, it’s what, what I ended up at the time, I had, I, I had in my head my system of credibility assessment, but I had never, it, it, it was all, um.
Implicit, I never explicitly
Zach: Yeah.
Kent: Extracted it from my head and said, okay, here’s how I do credibility assessment. I did extract it and make it, IM, uh, explicit later, and now I can use that. That language is, I had a gut feeling. And what a gut, your gut is based on contextual. It, it’s, it’s the, uh, sum of your experiences in context.
Zach: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Kent: So your gut, my gut is totally useless in brain surgery. If I sat down with a brain surgeon or somebody pretending to be a brain surgeon, and he starts babbling about, whoa, you know, I was cutting into the hypothalamus the other day and the vagus nerve was blah, blah, blah. I’m like, yeah, okay.
Sounds good to me. Right. Because I have no contextual expertise.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Kent: My contextual expertise, uh, I is, was totally wrapped around Wayne Simmons scam. Mm-hmm. I, I have a gut for that context.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Kent: Uh, when, um, I can smell a rat. Because of my gut, because of my contextual competence.
Zach: You know, the domain, it’s like domain specific knowledge,
Kent: domain specific.
Exactly. I call that context. Yeah. It’s it’s cultural language profession. Uh, so this guy had no clue. He was, I I was at the time, uh, formulating the explicit, uh, form of my credibility assessment. Mm-hmm. Uh, approach.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Kent: Mm-hmm. And his case was, was just this, it was like a god-given case study of here you go, man.
Apply your expertise here.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Kent: Mm-hmm. So here that, that’s a long, long description of why I knew he was a fraud within five minutes.
Zach: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Kent: He was, he had been, turns out who he fooled and who he scammed were military guys. He had a very, uh, high level network in the military. Hi. His sister was an under Secretary of defense.
She was like rumsfeld’s, admin guru. Evidently she went everywhere. Rumsfeld went. She went, she was Assistant Secretary of Defense for admin or something like that. Simmons was a. Lifelong screw up. He’d been kicked out of the Navy in, uh, in, in, in basic training. He had been arrested multiple times for DUIs.
He had been, uh, he had some kind of record with, uh, dealing drugs. It appears to me, looking back at it now, his sister wanted to help him, and he may have spun a story to her that he was CIA and she went to Rumsfeld and said, Hey, my little brother Wayne, you know, uh, he’s, he, he’s, he’s fallen on hard times, but, you know, he was a 30 year CIA guy, and he really could use some help.
And that then comes the global War on Terror. And, uh, Rumsfeld is his, is his angel, is his top cover. And Rumsfeld was tied in with Fox News. And that just, he, he, he had, he had Rumsfeld’s Rumsfeld was vouching for him.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Kent: And everybody in the DOD in, in the military was terrified of Rumsfeld.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Kent: If Rumsfeld said it, it’s, it’s from, from God’s mouth to Rumsfeld’s ear.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Kent: It’s, it’s may as well be the word of God. Mm-hmm. So the, the military was terrified. Uh, of, of Rumsfeld. And if he, if he vouched for Simmons, then Simmons was what he said he was.
Zach: Right.
Kent: That, that’s, that’s what I discovered as, uh, as this went on.
Zach: Yeah.
Kent: So he was used to, so the reason I give you that background is he was used to conning military guys and military guys have this, um, ha have a misconception or a stereotype or a idea.
They think they know what the CIA is and what CIA officers do, but they don’t, they, they may as well, they, their, their concept comes from watching movies, generally speaking.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Kent: Mm-hmm. So Simmons was able to use his top cover from Rumsfeld with the military’s misunderstanding of civilian intelligence and scam his way.
Right, right. Through anything that the military touched, he was able to be the CIA guy in there. So I’m not, I, I’ve been in the military. I, I, I’m also, I also have military, uh, expertise. I have the con contextual competence, so you can’t scam me military stuff either. But he was trying to scam me at just like he scammed the military guys and.
Uh, it, it was alarm bells go off within five minutes before they even brought my water in, in the restaurant. I knew this, this motherfucker is, is trying to play me for a fool.
Zach: Yeah.
Kent: And, and the only thing I, I, I don’t, I don’t have a temper, but the only thing that pisses me off is somebody trying to play me for a fool.
He did. And that pissed me off. He didn’t know it.
Zach: He played a lot of millions of people for a fool. Yeah. Uh, I want to, I want tie some, he didn’t
Kent: know it.
Zach: I wanted to tie some of the things you said into the Chase Hughes stuff because there’s a lot of overlap here. Uh, so for example, I’ve had a couple people, uh, who, who were ac were actually did work in military and intel kind of things, reach out to me and say they, either they or people they knew had encountered Chase Hughes at events and tried to talk about like these, the alleged experience, you know, military government experience that Chase Hughes claims to have had in, you know, Intel or interrogations or PSYOPs or whatever the various things that he claims to have had.
And, and, uh, it was very clear, like they, they were, they, their bullshit meters immediately went off too, where they’re like, this guy didn’t talk about it in any sort of way that made, made sense. You know, their bullshit meters went off. Uh, then you also have the aspect of Chase, you know, claiming that he has these, some, some of these books.
And, and things on his site and things he talks about where he is like, these are top secret military secrets that I’m sharing. You know, this kind of Jason Bourne kind of stuff. And it’s like, sort of like you said with, uh, Wayne Simmons, it’s like if these were, uh, you know, really, uh, top secret things that required a lot of clearance to have, like, would he, he can just hand these out on his site or give, you know, give them to people and there’s no problem.
Like, that alone is a sign that something’s off because like, the military is not just gonna let somebody like, share all these alleged top secret, uh, things, which kind of corresponds to what you were saying about Wayne Simmons over 15 years claiming to be this like, you know, into all this espionage, espionage stuff.
But like, nobody talks about ’em or, you know, nobody. He, and, and he’s talking about these things openly. Um, so just to say there can be these various clues and then you also have, I think there’s also the fact that this kind of, you know, the espionage, uh, CIA type of things kind of lend themselves to bullshitters because it’s kind of a perfect cover where people can say like, oh, of course you can’t find any evidence of me doing that.
I was so, you know, it’s undercover stuff. It’s plausible deniability stuff, uh, which is what, you know, Wayne Simmons did. It’s also, uh, what I think what Cha Chase used. I haven’t heard him do it recently, but it’s also what I see a lot of his fans say. They’ll be like, oh, he was just so deep undercover.
Nobody knows about the stuff he’s done. I’m like. Okay. Uh, yeah. Right. It’s,
Kent: yeah. That, that is, that is exactly Simmons’ approach as well. Right. And yeah,
Zach: even when he got arrested and such. Yeah. Yeah.
Kent: Say again?
Zach: Even when he got arrested and afterwards he was trying to say like, oh, I, you know, and he never, he never went back from his story because he was like, no, I was just doing such top secret stuff and nobody, uh, knew what I was doing.
You know, nobody can talk about it, blah, blah, blah. You know, e
Kent: except, yeah, absolutely. He, he, uh, till today, uh, I, I haven’t seen anything from him in a while, but even while he was in prison and when he got outta prison, same thing is I’m, I’m on a quest to, uh, to, to exonerate myself. I am who I said I was.
That’s, that’s the last I heard from him.
Zach: Yeah. Yep.
Kent: Except, uh, I ran an operation with, with my, uh, my buddy who was an old boss of mine in the CIA, uh, he was retired at the time. He’s passed away since. Um, but, uh, he, he was, he was a real 30 year veteran, had done everything in the, in the agency, been everywhere, manager level, highest, highest kind of manager level.
And I, I convinced him, uh, that Simmons was fake. He was a Fox News watcher, and he had, he as a veteran, CIA, uh, officer accepted Simmons because. There are many compartmented operations that not everybody knows about. And that’s, that’s what my friend Jim assumed is Yeah. You know, it doesn’t sound right, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.
Uh, Fox News has to be vetting their people as this is his thinking.
Zach: Right.
Kent: Fox News has to be vetting their people. They wouldn’t let a fake on. And I, yeah, I knew pretty much everything, but not everything. And maybe he was in one of those compartment operations. So when I first started, uh, doing my vetting of Simmons and reaching out to my network of, of former CIA officers, I talked to him and it took a little convincing.
I had to present it. I I, he wouldn’t just say, oh, yeah, your gut told you he was fake. I had to, I had already built a dossier that, that showed, uh, convincingly that, that Simmons was a fake. So I, I got him onto my side and I was in touch with Simmons on Facebook and Simmons would, uh, chat every now and then.
You know, he didn’t know I was gathering details. And, and I, I, uh, suggested that he meet. A fellow, CIA officer, my friend Jim. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Uhhuh, he, you know, he is Simmons was happy to, to network. So I put those two together and then Jim and I came up with a, uh, an approach in effect, it was an operation.
Mm-hmm. It was an operational approach. I, I did, I did the turnover, and then I sat back and let, I, I was kinda like good cop, bad cop. Uh, Jim established a relationship with him, started talking, and then he started asking very, uh, specific vetting questions. The, the best one is, um, every CIA officer has an employee identification number.
If you are an employee, you have an EIN. It doesn’t matter what your status is, what your cover is, doesn’t matter if you’re deep, dark, undercover, triple secret, or you’re a knock, you are, uh, overt, you’re covert. You have an EIN that is your agency identifier, and everybody knows it off the top of their head.
So Jim started asking him things like that. What’s okay, Wayne, what’s your EIN Who, who was your, you were a knock. Who was you not there. There’s a trade craft of running knocks. Uh, every knock will have an inside officer handler who takes care of his admin stuff, meets him occasionally, they swap receipts or, uh, or, or advances or whatever.
What’s your EIN Who was, who were your handling officers through your 30 year career? You know, you’re handling officers. They are, uh, your lifeline to the bureaucracy, to your career, you know, e everything there, there’s all the admin issues. Um, your pay, your advances, your expenses, your retirement funding, all of those things come up all the time, and you’re dealing with them as a knock through your handling officer.
Jim starts asking him these questions and very quickly it got, um, it, it got, uh, uh, uh, uh, aggressive and finally, uh, Simmons, you know, became very defensive. And this is all [00:27:00] on Facebook chat. So we have the transcript. Sim Simmons gets defensive and says, oh, you, you know, you don’t trust me. I am who I said I am, blah, blah, blah.
They come back the next time and maybe a day or two later, Simmons had time to sleep on it. And Jim tells him, Hey, Wayne. You know, you’re, you never, you’re not CIA and you never were. It’s very obvious. And he and Wayne in the chat says, alright. Yeah, I, I admit it. I I will never again, um, present myself as a CIA officer.
You were right. And, um, and, and Jim said, okay, well you need to make a public announcement or something like that. And at the time, I was writing a, um, an article to go out to expose him. And that was the final piece that I needed. I, his, I have a transcript of his admission.
Zach: Yeah,
Kent: you got the confession
Zach: put in there.
Yeah.
Kent: Confession. Put it in the article. Send it to and send it to Simmons. It said Simmons. I’m gonna, I’m gonna publish this as soon as possible. Give you a chance to respond. And, hi. His response was, this is bullshit. I never said any such thing. If I did, I retract it. I was a 30 year knock and you are gonna pay for it.
Frisbee, uh, you know, a, a threat. He followed through on that threat he had. He did have a very, and he still has, he has a high level network of military. It’s pretty much all military. There’s one CIA officer who, uh, a woman who’s been totally on his side, just unbelievably, but the, the rest are at retired admirals, retired generals, you know, four or five stars, uh, you know, the, the highest level, uh, military brass.
Um, and, and he was connected throughout the media. So when he said, I’m gonna, you’re gonna, you’re gonna, you’ll hear my response. So his buddy, the one that, um, that introduced us the next day, published an article in an online, uh, uh, military Special Forces military soft rep. It was, it was, back then, it was widely read, and I don’t know if it’s still read, but, um, article denouncing the attacks on Wayne Simmons.
Uh, and I don’t think they, he, he, he mentioned me by name, but it, it was clear exactly who he was talking about. And then when I tried to place that article exposing him, everybody, no one would accept it. None, none of the usual websites that I had published on would accept it. So he did use his military contacts to, to shut it all up.
Zach: Right.
Kent: Uh.
Zach: He, um, and, and maybe you could talk briefly about, I mean, did he make your life harder? Did, how hard was it for you? Did you suffer much or did you just kind of like, were, were you thinking like, well he eventually the truth’s gonna come out, talk, maybe you could talk a little bit about that process until he got in trouble eventually.
Kent: Well, well after that, um, that, that I was pretty much blackballed, uh, I was not able to, uh, place any more articles, uh, until I, I don’t know if it was a year, maybe, maybe a year and a half before he, that, that before he, uh, um, spread the word that I was, you know, harassing him or whatever, or that there was a, an operation to, to denigrate him.
And he was, uh, and his great reputation, um, I, I wanna say it was a year, maybe more before the FBI contacted me and I shared my dossier on Simmons with them. And he was arrested probably within a several months after that. Uh, but in that time I was unable to, uh, place any articles anywhere. I was, I was the real deal.
I was a real, uh, CIA counter-terrorism expert. I’ve done the operations, I’ve been all around the world. Uh, Islamic extremism, counter-terrorism, uh, counterintelligence, and, uh, in, in, in, instead of, and, and there’s many other people like me as well, who lost opportunities because of Simmons.
Zach: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Kent: Um, not that he was, he was bad badmouthing them specifically, but he was filling a slot that could have been filled by a real person.
Zach: Right.
Kent: But yeah, he, he, uh, blackballed me, him and his military buddies blackballed me and I was unable to publish anything and nobody wanted, wanted anything to do with me until he was arrested. Uh, and that was sort, sort of indication, my vindication.
Zach: Yeah.
Kent: And then when that New York Times article came out, you know, then it was, everybody knows.
Zach: Did you start getting, uh, any, any media invites when you got vindicated? Did you appear on any,
Kent: um, those, or you got, got contacts from people who, uh, from media who never would’ve been in touch with me before?
Zach: Hmm.
Kent: Uh. The, my, the, my previous places that I had, uh, websites that I had wrote for, none of them called up and said, oh, hey, sorry about that.
Uh, can you, can you give us something new that that didn’t happen?
Zach: Mm.
Kent: Uh, but, but it did open up a whole new, whole nother channel of, you know, the, the New York Times article ended up opening eyes of say, uh, um, producers of like, I, I think that they, they did a couple podcasts. Uh, they, they, there may have been some kind of, I don’t know if, if like Discovery Channel or somebody did something on it.
I, they, they did do a, a, a couple of shows on an operation I did in the Philippines. So I’m getting kind of confused. I confused the two. I don’t know. I don’t know what they, but it did open up, um, a lot of publicity for my, my skills.
Zach: Yeah, it seems like you could write a whole book just about the outing of, uh, that person and Yeah.
That, I mean that whole story is, is so interesting and just talking about, yeah. Maybe you could work Chase Hughes in there too, if you do. I mean, I still think you should. I still, I mean, I still think you should do your own, uh, e expose of Chase Hugs. ’cause, because we just need more people talking about these people.
I mean, the thing I’ve, I’ve told you and other people is like, a lot of people think like. Oh, I did the work. You know, other people don’t have to do it. But it’s like, I, I get people reaching out to me, chase Hughes fans that are like, you’re just a bitter person lying about Chase Hughes. If it was, if it was really a story, you’d have more like, uh, journalists and, uh, you know, people with experience, uh, covering it, talking about it.
So just to say, I think the more the merrier because I, I think there’s a lot of people that, it’s kind of like this assumption thing you were talking about with Wayne Simmons, where it’s like, people will will say to me and publicly on these Reddit threads, they’ll be like, well, if Chase Hughe was really such a fraud, you wouldn’t have like Joe Rogan promoting him.
You wouldn’t have diary of a CEO guy. You wouldn’t have Dr. Phil. You wouldn’t have these guys who work on this behavior panel show wouldn’t work with him. And I’m like, well, it’s clearly wrong because he’s clear, clearly a fraud and a, a serial liar. So you have to examine your assumptions about, uh, what’s going on there because your assumptions are, are leading you way astray.
Yeah. Yeah.
Kent: I mean, people don’t want to admit that they’ve been, that they have been played for fools. That they have been scammed.
Zach: Yeah.
Kent: I mean, there’s so many case studies like this and Simmons is a great one. Mm-hmm. Because the exact same, uh, the exact same responses when when I expose Simmons is same thing.
People don’t want to believe it. They’re bought into it. Bernie Madoff. And that’s billions of dollars. Perfect example, you know, these, these, chase Hughes is is a, is is small fry. Yeah. Simmons is small fry.
Zach: Yeah.
Kent: They, Bernie Madoff was billions of dollars and people didn’t want to hear it. It’s, oh yeah. He’s got, he, he can beat the market consistently.
No freaking way.
Zach: Yeah.
Kent: You know, anybody who has, who’s ever put their money in a bank account or who’s ever bought a share of stock knows nobody can consistently create that kind of return. But people, especially those who were in on it, who had, who were getting their paper profits. Right. So people who are somehow invested.
Zach: Yeah. They’re invested financially or emotionally or something. It’s like you believe or you have
Kent: money ethnically too. Yeah. The Ponzi schemes are, are almost, they started out at, uh, the Ponzi was an ethnic Italian and he preyed on the Italian immigrant community. Uh, Madoff was an ethnic Jew. He preyed on the Jewish community.
He, he was a huge, uh, donor to all kinds of Jewish causes.
Zach: It’s like he’s one of, he’s one of us. He won’t, you know, he’s, he, it increases the loyalty aspect. I mean, we see this with the political polarization aspects where people are more likely to believe people who they see as, like on their side, on, uh, for any.
Cause or, or, yeah. Goal. Yeah.
Kent: And once they’re invested emotionally or financially, it’s very, very difficult to bring people around to the truth. So it’s a a a long way of saying, you know, confirming what you’re, what you’re saying is with, with Hughes is that these people who are bought into the cult, whether financially or emotionally, don’t wanna be told, don’t want, they, they don’t, not just told, they can’t, cannot process it intellectually or emotionally.
Right. I mean, there’s, back in, back in the, I guess seventies and eighties, there was a whole, uh, industry of, uh, deifying, or I can’t, I forget what they call it. They have, they have a deprogramming.
Zach: Yeah,
Kent: deprogramming, yeah. Yeah. Deprogramming. Which is, they, you know, they, there’s these, uh, different cults back then, and I’m, there’s cults now.
Mm-hmm. The same way. But maybe they’ve made it illegal to kidnap your kid and, and deprogram him. But I, you don’t hear about it anymore. But they used to be a big industry of kidnapping. Usually young adults who had been, who had been recruited into cults and deprogramming them. And that deprogramming process was long and arduous and not always successful in effect.
You know, they, they, they put ’em in prison. They, you know, they put ’em in, lock ’em up in a hotel closet or something and separate them from their cult experience. It’s the same thing with Hughes or Simmons, or Madoff or Ekman, acolytes. They’re so invested emotionally, financially, intellectually, they cannot see reality.
Zach: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Kent: I give up, I, I, I never even try to, um, deprogram someone. I just, I see my role. I’m really good at vetting, uncovering the truth, and laying it out there for people to see. Um, I cannot co change someone’s mind. Uh, I don’t think I, if they, if they see the truth and they decide to change their mind, fantastic.
Zach: Yeah.
Kent: But
Zach: it’s hard.
Kent: I don’t know. I, I might be, I might be up for, uh, starting a new deprogramming service.
Zach: Well, you know, uh, you, I don’t know if you know, but Chase Hughes claims to be an expert cult deprogram or too, that’s one of the many things he claims he’s an expert.
Kent: you are kidding me.
Zach: No, that’s one of the things, there’s a Reddit, there’s a Reddit thread joke.
There’s a Reddit threat about him being an expert, cult de programmer. People are like, is he really? And you know, it’s just, he’s claimed to be an expert in literally everything psychology related. It’s just, it’s so funny, you know? Uh,
Kent: Pitiful. Pitiful.
Zach: That was a talk with ex-CIA officer Kent Clizbe, author of Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment: A Reality-based Alternative to Deception Detection. I thought the book was good; it includes a lot of interesting stories from Kent’s career and from the spycraft trade in general. You can learn more about him on his website www.kentclizbe.com.
In a future episode, I’ll share the second part of this talk where Kent and I discuss nonverbal behavior and its non-importance, as Kent sees it, in determining veracity and credibility.
This has been the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. You can learn more about this podcast at behavior-podcast.com.
Thanks for listening