Special Operations, Cobert Espionage. The Team House with your host Jack Murphy and David Park.
Hey, guys, welcome to the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with co host David Park. Our guest tonight is j R.
Seeger. Jr.
Served as an Army infantry officer and then went on to have an extensive career in the Central Intelligence Agency, which included leading paramilitary teams, one of the first teams into Afghanistan, amongst many other postings around the world as a chief of station, chief of base, all sorts of interesting things that Jr. Will be able to get to in varying levels of detail as he's allowed.
He is also an author.
He's an author of the Mike Force series, and he is the author of a steam punk series. This is a school for the Great Game and I, uh, well, Jr. I've wanted to interview you. I've wanted to have you on the show for a long time. I really appreciate you doing this.
Well, it's my pleasure, guys. It was the reason I didn't have any idea. You interviewed a teammate of mine and you looked right in the camera and said, hey, JR.
If you're watching I want to.
Talk to you.
So that's actually why I'm talking to you today.
You're talked about what we had Justin on.
That's right, absolutely, Yeah, Justin.
Sapp we had on a little while back. He was great. We had him in studio.
So for folks who are watching, Justin was assigned to Special Forces, but was detached to one of the CIA paramilitary teams in Afghanistan, Alpha Team. The Alpha Team leader was this guy right here, Jr. So that's why I wanted to have him on the show.
They are let's kick it off. I'd like to hear a little bit about your origin story.
We asked our guests to tell us a little bit about their upbringing and sort of that path that took them into governmental service, in your case, into the Airborne Infantry then the Central Intelligence Agency.
Okay, well it's not terribly exciting. I mean, basically, I grew up in a blue collar family. My dad was a railroad engineer, grandfather was a railroad engineer.
You know.
There, it was just a blue collar family. I grew up in a little, tiny rural town. It's today it's not quite as rural as it used to be, but it was a rural town outside of Buffalo, and then my folks made it very clear I was going to college. I mean it was just like there there was no I mean, I was either going to go to college or they were going to knife me in my sleep sometime, you know. I mean it was really that that straightforward, and I I was fine with that. I mean I
was not a terribly interesting kid. I mean I had school, and I had sports. I played soccer, and I was a wrestler.
That was it. So Honestly, if.
It hadn't been for the New York State Regions Scholarship, I'm not sure I could have afforded to go to college right after high school. But I did, and I was able to go to a small school college called
Eisenhower College. Now, for those of you who might look it up, you won't find it because Eisenhower College folded in the in the late nineties or mid nineties actually, And you know, it was a school that was designed at the request of President Eisenhower to create a cadre of people who were experienced in world events and worlds. It was called World Studies. And one of the reasons it wasn't terribly popular is because you didn't get you didn't get any electives until you were in your second
semestery of your junior year. But I mean, I you know, to give you a feeling for how the school started. Class one in the big lecture hall was on the creation of the Chinese Empire, and then class two was on.
Confucianism, and then class three.
Was on Chinese literature, and then class four was on you know, was and and it went across the world. So we learned about not just European history, but Asian history, African history, and African culture, African art, Asian art, Asian culture. So it makes me an, actually a pretty good cocktail. A party guy. I can talk for about a minute about just about anything, uh, you know, And more than once in my career I have looked a guy in the eye had said Majong. Yeah, I know what majong is.
I've always wanted to play majoh. And then of course I go home and open up my books and figure out what the hell majong is?
Is it a what is it? Is it a sport? Is it a game? Is it a board game? What is it?
But anyhow, uh I mentioned and I've spent a little bit of time focusing on that school, because the only reason I ended up in the CIA is because of Eisenhower College, and not the way you think.
Anyhow, I went to I went out of college.
I then went to graduate school, where I came to the realization that I was a pretty good student. I was a terrible scholar.
Uh.
I learned that lesson when the I had the department pulled me aside and said, you know, Jef, your grades are really good.
You're never getting a degree here.
So I mean, you know, you don't have to throw a brick through my window to make me realize I need to go away. So after my master's he got the chairman of the department got me a job as an archaeologist, and I was an archaeologist for a year in Wyoming. This is nineteen nineteen seventy nine nineteen eighty two. Things happened the course during that time period, the hostage crisis in Iran and the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. And I had always been interested in thinking about how I
was going to do service. In fact, while I was in grad school, I sent a note to an application to the CIA. In the old days, you had to mail it in and I got a letter back that said no, thank you.
So I was like, okay, I guess that.
You know, that's so far my career progression is really working well for me, right, everything's everything's doing fine. I keep asking for stuff and people keep saying no.
So then.
I joined the army and that was our shock. To my wife, she was my girlfriend at the time, she was like, you did what.
Yeah.
I enlisted in the Army as a private and went to Fort Knox, Kentucky in basic training as a twenty six year old, and then went to a CS and went on to you know, Airborne School, ranger school, all that stuff, and then did four plus years with the eighty second as an Airborne Infantry officer and then progressively a couple of other staff jobs before I was getting
ready to go on to the advanced course. And I guess most of your folks would know that unless you're really, really good and you're an OCS officer, you're at the bottom of the pile. And I used to think that was just you know, prejudice, but I understand now, having done a long career in the federal government, that they're just amortizing their investment, right costs a lot of money to put an officer through West Point and a lot
of money to put them through ROTC. I got commissioned after four and a half months as an E four A specialist, so it didn't cost them very much to put me into that commission source. So I am trying to figure out what's going to happen to me when I'm working in my office at I was the the S three air in my battalion, which is, you know, in an airborne battalion, there's got to be an NCO and an officer who designed all the jumps and get
the airplanes and get the parachutes all that stuff. And I get a phone call says, hey, Captain Seeger, we understand that you're thinking about, you know, what's going to happen next, and we we'd really like to talk to you about an opportunities in CIA cold call. And I'm thinking, really like, really, this is how you do this, right? So I turned to my partner in crime at the time and E seven that I've done a lot of other kinds of stuff with him, and I said, Jim,
here's the deal. They want me to meet this guy at a hotel if if I end up face down on the Cape Fear River tomorrow. I want somebody to know what the hell was going on. So anyhow, that was just that, that's sort of what happened. I wasn't it was a real deal, and I was puzzled for years as to how I was approached. Well, it turns out, uh so many years later that classmates of mine at Eisenhower College were already in the CIA because their parents
were in CIA interest. And in those days, that's, you know, not the only way that things could be done, but it was one of the ways that.
Things we've done today.
Of course, for anybody who is interested, you go online, and like every other part of the federal government, you apply online and the process then goes into a you know, a protected environment. But there you can't you know, refer anybody.
What happens is they you go on you know, the applicants go online, which is a good thing because quite honestly, if you have these referrals, everybody looks ends up looking like the next guy, right, I mean, you know, and we need all kinds of different people in the CIA today. And so anyhow, that was my entrance into the CIA. I worked into a training program which the selection process.
I don't know what it is now, but the selection process when I was going through, I started in April of eighty five and I was certified as a case officer in June of eighty six, so it's approximately a year plus of different steps along the way. And then by that time I was married and I had convinced the agency. Actually I walked into a personnel office and said, this is my wife's resume. You can see that she's
really the smart one of the two of us. And they looked at the resume and they said, you're absolutely right. We're interested in her because she is much smarter than you are.
Hired her.
And then as to onward assignments, basically there were two different outfits that were two different parts geographic divisions. They don't have those things anymore, but they were in the old days. There were geographic divisions and the director of operations. There are two geographic divisions who were asking me if I was interested, and I basically told them, whoever hires my wife is.
The one that's going to be, you know, on the list.
So it turned out that it was near East Division, and which was actually okay by me because I'd already served. When I was in the Army, I served in the Multinational Force of Service in Egypt. So I thought, that's cool. I mean, I get it. I mean Arabic's tough language, but I can do that. So I get off my you know, one week leave after this months of training, and I go in and they said, good news, you've got an onward assignment. Bad news, you're late for language school.
And I'm like, okay. Oh and by the way, it's going to be a Dari and I'm like, okay, not having a clue what Darry is not a clue, So I said okay, and they said, well, you know you're late, get down to the you know, State Department, because that's where the Dari language school is.
Check.
And so what I found out was, of course it's Afghan Persian. And all my peers who were onward going on to onward assignments and they were going to study Chinese and Arabic and Russian. They were like, oh, Jay, you're so screwed. I mean, you were no one is going to care. You know, you're going to finish off a tour someplace and then you're never going to be able to use your language again, You're gonna have to study another one. I was like, well, you know, orders
are orders. I mean, I just came out of the army. I know, I don't don't. My hair hadn't even grown out yet, you know, I get it orders or orders, and so of course it. You know, in the long run, Afghan Persian turned out to be a pretty good language to have.
Yeah, so what was that first assignment? Then you said you were in the Near East Division. What did that look like for you? In what year was it by that time that you after you finished you graduated your sinning?
Well, okay, so I went to my first assignment in eighty seven because it was a year long language program. And as I told you earlier, I have to just sort of be generic. Sure it was it was in South Asia. You can do them, you can do the math, and I was. I was assigned instead of a standard sort of conventional tour. I was assigned because I had
the Afghan Persian. And for those of you, for you know, your your listeners who don't remember this time period, the Soviets had occupied Afghanistan and they were fighting the Afghans across the entire country. So I was sent in along with a couple other people to UH to meet with Afghans, Afghan resistance guys. Now, this was not in any way, shape or form associated with the the paramilitary weapons program that we had at the time, and that's you know,
it was super secret then. But you know, let's face it, once you start to deliver Stinger missiles into Afghanistan, it's kind of a clue who's in charge.
We've had Bass Basil on the show before, who may have mentioned a little bit about that.
Yeah, exactly, Well, bas was one of the guys actually, Baz and Uh there was my very first job, uh in the agency, before I was in the pipeline, was down in the sub basement in the building with guys like in fact, with baths and a number of other guys.
We refer to ourselves as the methane breeders.
Because of course, you know, would say it's a heavy gas and it goes down into the basement.
Anyhow, So I spent three years.
Meeting Afghans night after night after night who had just come out from a war zone and we're willing to talk about what they were doing. And so that's what I did. I debriefed soldiers. Basically, it was a very unconventional sort of environment for me, and that was my
first tour. You know, if you no matter how bad your language might be, if you meet guys like six nights a week for three to four hours in a night, pretty quick you get you know, unless you really a dim you get to you know, you get pretty good at the language. So that's that's sort of where it was. And I was finished my tour. I had a I
got into a tiff with any division. It was my fault, uh really quite honestly, because I told him that I would had been working with sad guys and I wanted to go work an sad And they said, you don't seem to understand, young case officer.
We you you're an any guy. You're going to be an any guy. Okay. Uh?
Well, anyhow, Uh, for all of the things that we can say bad about Sada Hussein, the fact that he invaded Kuwait actually made my life much easier in one respect, which was uh, they had a job for me, which was a crummy what what I they thought was a crummy job.
It was a great job for me.
I was in a desert shield, desert storm in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. There was no other agency officer there that could work with the Saudis and work with the military. So, uh, that's what I did. For a better part of the year. I was the uh you know, this is a classic sort of story. People say,
how can this possibly be? But it's a classic. It's kind of like the story, Uh, there's a there's an old story about Texas Rangers, and there's a story about in the in the twenties, there was a you know, there was a a riot a in Waco, Texas and it was a one riot, one ranger exactly, you know. And so the idea is is that I was the the agency l and O for eighteenth Airborne Corps, first Marine Expeditionary Force and UH eight the first tack Fighter Wing.
So I kept pretty busy during that time period. It's mostly because of my background. It was mostly associated with what at the time was called force protection but really was counter terrorism counterintelligence stuff. And did that for until I know, returned and then they by that time all.
Was forgiven and.
Mary's Division said we've got another job for you and your wife because we're a Tanem couple, which makes life kind of complicated. I had told them they could send me anywhere in the world so long as there were two jobs. So they said, we got a job for you. And it was a It was actually a very very cool job.
It was in a.
Specialized it would have been called it was a specialized. This is a long time before these kinds of things happened before, where it was a station going after Near
East rogue state proliferators, terrorists and counterintelligence officers. So I did that for four years, working my way up from being a line case officer through to managing a team hunting one of these rogue state well all the rogue state intelligence services basically that we were working after, so both their military and their civilian services.
Which was great.
It meant being on the road about twenty days a month, so if you can do the math, it means, you know, I was home on weekends and leaving every Monday.
And in this was a tandem a tandem tour.
So it was my wife.
If you're gonna ask my wife, it is what's what's called the Reports and Requirements officer Now it's called now they're called a CMOS. I guess right, and uh, you know, the only reason to go out and do stuff, of course, is to produce reports. By this time in my career, I'd come to the realization that although every case officer has to be a both a hunter and a handler, I come every case officer, by their second tour, ought
to know which they're better at. And I'm a I'm a better handler, quite honestly, And you can, I can, I can basically squeeze intelligence out of just about anybody.
And can you tell us sort of you know, in like case officer vernacular or whatever, what the difference between a hunter and a handler is?
Okay?
So so in you know, in the spy world, there are two things that have to be done right. One is produced intelligence, and that's done by people who are handlers. You debrief people, you keep them on board. You make sure that they are are productive, that they're safe, that they understand what they're supposed to do for us, right.
But you're always you always need new.
Business because you know, guys uh decide somewhere along the way they don't want to do it anymore, or they want to retire, or they want to or they get caught. So you always have to have new business. As well, so the hunters end up finding and recruiting the new spies. Now, most hunters prefer to just once they once they've recruited a spy, they prefer go and recruit another spy because it's.
What they like to do.
And then, man, that's not to say that you can't in the CIA as a case officer, you must be able to do both, right, But you know, pretty quick, like I say, early on, you figure out what you're better at, and I.
Was.
I'm not doing it at all anymore, but I was better at producing intelligence, taking the requirements, designing them so that the debriefing makes sense, doing it in language, and keeping the asset safe because that's our primary director, right, I mean, more than anything else. The CIA is a place where you were expected, more than anything else to keep your asset alive and safe. Teach them how to
be safe, as they don't know. It's not their profession, right, So it's it's our trade craft skills that we use to do that.
And then afterwards you had a more conventional tour in a South Asian country.
Yeah, I was, you know, I was a base chief, running you know, regular espionage operations. Uh, And I mean it was. It was a good tour. I mean, it was an okay tour I did. I did two years there and uh, I mean I can't really talk very much about the cases, but I mean basically it was classic spot assessed, developed, recruit, and handle and then manage young case officers who are spotting, assessing, developing, and recruiting. Uh.
And it and as as was pretty typical of the time. Uh.
You have to remember that we're talking about now. Now, we are talking about the post Cold War world. So there's lots of different kinds of people who five years earlier would have been great targets and are now our allies or at least at least our neutrals. And then but there's always going to be targets out there, and of course if you and also you're always going to be looking at local targets if you can. It depends
on the It all depends on the security environment. And I was in a pretty rigorous security environment, so we didn't do a lot of that stuff. We did in awful lot of third country national stuff. But you know, I mean during all of that time there, actually just before the conventional tour, during the other tour, I got grabbed up and opened up a provisional station.
In the former Soviet Union. Wow.
So that was another one of those classic sort of stories of hey, who are we going to send to this Oh, we'll just send this guy. Why, well, because he's reliable, but he's also disposable, you know. I mean it just it is. When I was sent to there was you know, a bunch of teams all going out. Right, There's nineteen ninety two, the USSR had collapsed. All of these places are opening up, and I'm getting my in brief and I'm looking around with all the other guys that are there.
There's nobody who was from Russia.
House like, it's all of my pals who were in like had been in Southeast Asia or Africa or any or someplace like that. And you know, okay, you know it turns out, of course, Afghan Persian is actually pretty well translates across to the other side of the border. Not I mean, if I had spoken Russian it would have been great, but I didn't, But I could speak Afghan Persian, and so you know, Afghan Persian works pretty well for COGICs.
It will.
You can get along with Uzbeks, you can get along with Turkmen all those those southern Central Asian countries.
Did they also send you Jr.
On a job like that because they figure, oh, this is an army guy, like he can sleep in the dirt, like use a rock as a pillow.
Like, you know, it's not that big a deal.
Well, it's that, I mean, that's true. But it's also because most of these places, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union were at civil wars, right, I mean so so yeah, a lot of the kinds of things I did there. And it wasn't for very long until the station was formalized, but you know, as a provisional station, it was really nineteenth century sort of intelligence. It was like, gohst buy the land, go out and see every day you're like, walk out on the street, see who's shooting
at somebody else? Uh, you know, get in a car, figure out where the shooting stops. Give us a better feeling for what's going on. It really wasn't an espionage tour. And and you know fair enough, I mean, my my successors, you know, or the people who opened up the station afterwards, they you know, they were able to to conduct conventional espionage that just wasn't what they asked me to do.
And uh that was a good thing, because isn't what I.
Do nowt out of curiosity. When you say that, like in all these former USSR Soviet Union countries that nobody was from rush House or the people were't from rush House. Is that because they were all drunk wondering what had happened to their career and their life with the Soviet Union.
No, Actually it was because they were in Moscow, Okay, right, I mean they were they were doing U in Moscow or in Saint Petersburg, or in places where the KGB was running away too, you know, I mean there was there were lots of There were lots of It was.
The collapse of the USSR was a you know, it was a catastrophe if you were a KGB agent, right, I mean because even if you were only in the First Chief Directorate, which was the Foreign Intelligence Service, you couldn't say to you like your neighbors, oh I'm with a I was with the KGB, because they're going to think about the other side of the KGB, which was the you know, the toutalitarian U terrorizing people stuff. So there was a lot of work to be done in
those places. It just wasn't going to be in the FSU, which is fine because turns out, of course, the FSU turns out to have been a fascinating place for or the for the agency, and for State Department for that matter, and for the military. I mean, you know, one of the things that if you read like Toby Harden's book, or if you read Doug Stanton's book about about the operations in Afghanistan, the one of the odas Oda five nine five had just come back from working with the Uzbeks.
So I mean, you know, it turned out to be a really important It turned out to be a really important thing to build a network of allies during that time period. I take no credit for that might because they were just the guys who were eventually were in charge were still shooting at each other when I left, but but eventually, I mean, you got to start with a footprint someplace, and that's what we did. You know, a lot of times it's the it's just the footprint,
that's all you do. And you got to be ready for the fact that it's not always you know, great intelligence operations or great paramilitary operations.
Sometimes it's just spade work.
Right, and then after that you had a couple of state side tours.
Yeah, yeah, we did well, I mean the state side tours. I mean, so two things. By that time, I was relatively senior, so I was managing the teams, not necessarily a station, but flyaway teams, and we were just using the US as a start point to go after all kinds of different sorts of targets all over the world.
My team wasn't the only one that did that, I mean, but that's that was the States that in the meantime while since I was you know, not doing a lot of that flying away some but not as much because I had to be home managing and talking to guys, making sure that they followed all the TDY rules, make sure they don't get caught all that.
So what I did was I.
Was responsible for working with the FBI on counter terrorism stuff. At the time, counter terrorism was this is the late nineties going into just before well I was. I was
in stateside for through nine to eleven. But the the FBI had, you know a challenge because before nine to eleven, the idea was that the that counter terrorism was something that was really hard to prove and it was really hard to build networks the way the FBI is really good at building networks on other kind of criminal enterprises.
I mean, the FBI.
Don't ever think that if the FBI is after you, you won't get I mean, I'm just here to tell you their work is exceptional.
But it was a challenge.
And here I was a guy who had spent basically from nineteen eighty seven until I arrived in California in nineteen ninety seven, I'd been a guy who had, you know, worked with on terrorist targets. That's what I did, and I was building a network of flyaway guys who were doing counter terrorism missions. So I could go over the FBI and sit down with the FBI senior managers and say, Okay, here's here's how.
We would do it.
I don't have any idea how you can do it, but at the very least I can tell you what the bad guys are doing out there in their efforts to come here. So that was, you know, that was part of my work that I did just before nine eleven jr.
And then could yeah, take I mean, this is a little bit of a segue, but maybe worthwhile we want to take maybe just a moment to explain to people, because I think the public has this perception, largely because of the movies, that the CIA has a very robust and intrusive presence domestically in the United States. Could you explain how that works in real life, I mean, the realities of the limitations that you have as you know, any sort of state side assignments.
Well, sure, I mean, first of all, there is I mean, like, as I said, the team that I was managing, they were I mean the only reason they were state side is because we had great airports, right, I mean, that's that's what we did. We flew out from stateside to someplace else and that's great.
I mean it was.
I mean, let's face it, as the counter intelligence environment has become progressively more difficult, it's really hard to.
Do some of the thing.
In fact, it's impossible to do some of the things that I did in Europe back in the early nineties. Can't do it because of what's called ubiquitous technical surveillance, right, right, that had just that had just started in the end of the nineties, but it was already we knew that our work was going to be limited unless we did something like start and finish from the USA.
Now.
In the meantime, our work with the FBI was exclusively and I can't speak for what it's like now, but our work for the FBI was exclusively to help them understand the target set. We weren't allowed to talk to Americans at all, I mean at all unless The only time I ever talked to an American was when I was with an FBI agent, and we would talk to an AM He'd show his creds and I'd show my
creds and there was no sneaking around. And that was really rare because quite honestly, the FBI, if they're building a case, they really don't want any complications. They want two special agents who are trained to do the right thing.
And we're not.
I mean, CIA guys aren't trained to do I mean we're trained, you know, to steal things and break things. I mean basically, right, that's our job abroad. And so no, there is not a robust CIA presence in konis continental United States. And what it is is maintained in a
structure that is through our FBI partners. The FBI, by the mid nineties had what they call the Joint Terrorism Task Force which would have been in each of their field offices, So there would have been sheriff's deputies and police departments and and uh you know members of NCIS and members of OSI Air Force. Uh intelligence, Uh, well counterintelligence aren't. And we were just there to to provide
a context. If they wanted to talk about something that was going on someplace else, we could use our electronic capability to pull down that data. And the data are important when you're building the case, no question, But a lot of times, at least in you know, post nine to eleven or pre nine to eleven, I didn't even
know what the cases were. It was completely out of my h you know, they wouldn't talk about it, and rightly so, because you know, if you want to put a guy in to if you want to try a guy for some kind of crime, the last thing you want to do is have in the discovery process some data that says, oh, yeah, and there was this shmoe from the the I.
A right, the right, and you're you're living under a cover and an alias and so on. So it's not like you can take the stand under oath under your real name and offer testimony.
Right, and we're still of course, is that as you said in the you know, the movie presentation of what agency officers, what what we're like is a you know.
Is terrible.
I mean, it's just absolutely terrible in a criminal you know, in a criminal court. So we just didn't The FBI, you know, was was more than happy to be to work with us, but work with us in a way
that was consistent with what they needed to accomplish. Now, I won't you know, I don't want to leave this subject without saying, and the FBI would help us if they had a case that went overseas, if they didn't have a you know, an overseas footprint, and they and they thought that they could help us while we were working abroad. Then absolutely our partners in the FBI did that too, right, So it was a it was a
mutually beneficial partnership. But it wasn't something that my the guys were working for me were going to spend their time doing, because they were busy hustling new cases, producing intelligence, doing all that stuff.
Right now, in terms of like working with the FBI when it came to overseas counter terrorism, because obviously the CIA doesn't have any arrest authority and the FBI did if you know, they can show it, like, was it was it acceptable for you know, the titles the CIA worked under for for you guys to run your intelligence operation and then bring in the CIA or i mean the FBI, Like, how is that evidence?
How is that like custody of evidence?
And how how when you built your case were you sharing it with them? Were they allowed to use your information by US legal standards?
No?
The answer, the short answer is no.
That Actually, let me just say to both of you, you know it's important for you to know. I'm going to reveal a secret to you, right, So CIA Case Officer Class one hour one. The answer to all questions is it depends. Let's just so you know, right, And of course that's because we're always working with humans, and
humans change over time. But in the case of the FBI, basically what you would be looking at in a case of overseas, the intelligence network that you build then becomes something that the that might be shared both with the FBI and with a local law enforcement edity that would be partnered with the FBI. So, so what's going on abroad is not about I mean, I mean and I was never involved in counternarcotics or any of that kind of stuff where we you know, where bad guys get
grabbed and brought to the United States. I was involved in counter terrorism stuff, and what would happen would be the case would be built. Uh, we'd be producing great intelligence and then anything that we could share with the FBI, that the share that the FBI could share with the service, or we could share with the service for that matter, if the FBI didn't what didn't have a footprint in the country that we were in, then we would because at the end.
Of the day, uh, you know, I mean there's.
The motto of the counter Terrorism Center, right, preempt, disrupt, defeat. So if you can disrupt the counter a terrorist network in a third country long before they are any threat in the.
United States, absolutely you do that. Right.
And if that means bringing in a liaison service, if it means partnering between a liaison service and the FBI and a CIA entity, good great. Actually, so I hope that sort of answers That means it's complicated, right, I mean, it is complicated, and every case is different, That's why
it depends. But the vast majority of the stuff that we were doing on counter terrors some cases was producing the intelligence that then could be passed to a liaison service either directly with you know, because I was to give you a feeling for this, I was declared to like I think my last count was twenty two different liaison services. So so you know, if you could pass the intelligence, you would. If it made more sense to pass the intelligence through the FBI, and the FBI was there,
you would. I mean, it's it's all you know, it's one team, one fight in that sense, there's there's no real downside to that.
Yeah, let's get into the run up into nine to eleven jr. Because you're already working counter terrorism, making these trips overseas kind of like where were you at around that period of nine to eleven?
Where was your head at? What?
What?
What were the cases you were working? Was being laden in al Qaeda on your mind at that time?
What? What was kind of your world at that point?
Yeah?
Well okay, so just prior to nine to eleven, I had I had made a couple of trips out to Uzbekistan uh for something I mean it was associated with but not focused on us.
Have been laden, right, U? Some have been laden?
However, had become a for for counter terrorism center. Some have been lauden had been you know, like Target one. Everybody knew that it was. It was absolutely part of our mission set. Now, a lot of what I was doing wasn't necessarily it was associated. We used to call it, right, it was Islamic extremism, and you know it and we you know, we knew it was al Qaeda, but a lot of the al Qaeda network wasn't in fact calling itself al Kaeda at the time. I mean, ben Laden
had this headquarters in Kandahar. They had had training camps in other parts of Afghanistan. We were certainly doing what we could understand that and work against him. A lot of the kinds of things that I was doing in in tash Kentworth was associated with rebuilding networks against Afghans or with with Afghans, so the Afghan resistance, and people don't I mean, people often ask me like, how in the world could you put you know, nine to eleven happens.
You know, two weeks later we've got a team inside the ponds here and then you know, another week later you're flying out to tash Kent, and then two weeks after that the Team Alpha Team goes in, how can that possibly be? And the answer is, because we were running cases all the way through the nineties. It wasn't that we expected nine to eleven. It was what the CIA does is is you build a case, you run
a case, you keep a case running. You get those folks used to seeing you with the understanding that sometimes the intelligence is good, sometimes it's bad, but generally speaking, it's that sustained relationship over the years. I mean, small joke.
I gave this presentation to a bunch I've done this with a bunch of Special Forces groups, and I was given the presentation about this and I finished, and I'm walking out to get a cup of coffee, and the guys are walking out to get away from me, and I hear one of the younger Special Forces guys go like, who is that guy anyhow? And one of the older guys goes, man, you don't know that cat Man Jr. Is the forest gump of Afghanistan. Now I'm hoping, I'm
really hoping. In the largest scheme of things. That was because I had been to a lot of different kinds of stuff. Right I met with Masoud in the nineties. I had worked with a bunch of different guys in the resistance in the eighties, and so the idea was that, you know, I just maybe it was because I was stubborn, Maybe it was because I like working with Afghans, maybe it's because I had the language. But I kept doing it,
and I wasn't the only one. I mean, by no means was I the only guy doing the same thing who were just stubborn and kept working the Afghans whether the United States government cared or not. And now the CIA cared, and our intelligence that we were producing at the time in the nineties, you know, it was not it wasn't going to end up in the Presidential Daily Brief. It just wasn't. What it was doing is it was
building that understanding of the complex web inside Afghanistan. So, yeah, we've been we'd focused on it for a long time.
Did you during that time, especially after like the Russians left Afghanistan, when there was a period where was there a time when you had to sell Afghanistan to management and say, we still need a presence there, we still need to know what's going on.
Well, what you do you don't, I mean, the answer is sort of kind of right, I mean, what you do is you sort out if the if the seniors aren't interested in it. Used to be a joke in the State Department. Actually one of the jokes this is in the in the seventies, and the joke was if you wanted to joke about somebody doing something that was absolutely of no interest to anybody. The argument that the
line was, so, what's the political situation in Afghanistan? I mean, that was literally what State Department officers said when they were when they were trying to tell one of their their junior officers, what you're talking about? Nobody cares about, right, But the good news about Afghanistan, well, it was a
terrible news. But from a standpoint of the United States government, there was a very quick transition from you know, the the problems associated with a civil war, right, because that's what happened when the Soviets left, it was a civil war. But pretty quickly after that people were interested in Afghanistan because it was the center of narco trafficking and then shortly after it being the center in narco trafficking, which it stayed throughout the entire Taliban era. It also became
one of the centers of counter terrorism. So as a case officer and a manager of case officers, we always wanted to make sure that we weren't just doing something because it was something we wanted to do. You don't commit espionage because it's a cool thing to do. It's just not because you're putting a person at risk, whoever that is that's producing that intelligence. We're regardless of where they are, they are being put at risk. So you
better have a reason behind it, you know. The truth is is that Afghanistan had sufficient reasons for all those years that you could always say, Okay, yeah, I know it's a country that has no economy, and I know that it really doesn't nobody really cares about it. But it's the primary producer of black tar opium. Oh well, yeah, that's disruptive, so yeah, we want to do something about that. Oh by the way, it's where ben Laden's headquarters is now,
and he's training people. Long before we thought he was training people to attack America, he was training people to attack people all over the world, basically the entire West, So it was not a real problem.
So when nine to eleven happens, was all these images of Masad and the northern alliance bin Laden was this what immediately came to mind, And if you could, I think we talked about this with with Rick Prado a little bit, but if you could talk to us a little bit about what it was like inside CTC and SAD that day.
I can't tell you because I was on TDY in California. I was in California, I was driving, I was I was actually driving with my wife going to the FBI, and I got a phone call on the mobile phone saying from the regional boss saying, turn on the radio. And we're like, okay, you know, or we're in the middle of nowhere, We're probably she said, it doesn't matter, turn on any radio station.
So that was, you know, as soon as nine to eleven happened.
I mean we all, I mean basically all of us who had been doing the counter terrorism gig knew it was al Qaeda and it was designed and perpetrated by Ben Ladden. Now just because I mean, is what I thought, right? I mean, in the CIA, you got to make a very significant distinction between what you think and what you know. What you know is based on intelligence that you have either collected or somebody else's collected. It might be human, it might be Sigan, it might be something else. That's
what you know. But all of us who have been working these targets for five years new or at least we thought, we certainly thought that it was ben Laden.
So it took me.
I mean, as we're driving, my wife turns to me and goes, you realize, you know, you're going to get on an airplane as soon as you can. They're going to call you back. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I know that. It wasn't like it was the first
TDY I disappeared on. But you know, for a few days, I was able to close up some cases that that had been because you couldn't travel unless you drove someplace, and so I traveled to a bunch of different FBI units that were working cases and try to help them work through what they're what they were doing because their world changed completely.
Of course.
And then as soon as the.
As soon as you could fly, I was called back to Washington and that's when I By that time, CTC Special Operations CTCSO had already been established, and I had a little sad face because I thought that I was going to go out with the team that went to the punch. I mean, I had helped set up the team that went to the pond ch here, I'd met Masu, I'd done all that stuff, and I get back and uh, they already gone.
What was that that Jawbreaker?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly it was. It was actually, you know, officially titled the Northern Afghanistan Liaison.
Team, and Jawbreaker was Nault three. So I'd been on Nault one.
I'd had some of my guys, my flyaway guys, on Nault two, so I felt a little bit of of ownership. Well that was you know, slapped out of my head pretty quickly. Uh and uh, I was I was terrified that I was going.
To end up.
You know, I was back in the basement because that's where the the space was, and I thought, for sure, I'm going to be you know, doing uh all the all the kinds of stuff that that headquarters, all the important stuff, right, the logistics, the the management, but still not the cool guy stuff. And let's face it, you know, we all, given an opportunity want to be cool guys. So even at forty six, which is how old I was at that point in time. So but as soon as they started the as soon as you know I
got my in brief. They were like, oh no, no, no, don't you worry. We're putting together another the first team that's going to go behind the lines, that's you, and Sad has already got the team assembled. Alex was my deputy and he was already assembling a team. Justin was there by the way, just a small sidebar to show how small the world is. Justin Sapp's dad was my instructor at the farm, so so you know it was
it is a small world, Eddihow. The point is is that I start figuring out, Okay, we're going to go, how are we going to get in? And we can fast forward to that process. The only thing that's really fun or an interesting really the rest of it, it's just sort of administrative stories. But an interesting story is the day before I left, so I went out a
day about actually a week early to Tashkent. Alex was assembling the team, assembling the weapons, assembling the como, assembling all of that, which obviously wasn't going to go on commercial. So he was assembling the equipment and the team that was going to go out on an agency bird. I went out commercial to tush Kent. But the day before I went out, it's a Sunday. There's you know, I mean, the team down in the basement that's managing CTCSO is
working diligently, but it's basically an empty building. And in I'm sitting in front of a picnic bench because you know, it's a folding classic plastic picnic bench, because that's all there was in the basement. And I'm working through my notes and trying to figure out what we're going to do now next when incomes Director Tenant co for Black and Hank Crumpton. And I have known I've known Hank a little bit. I've known Koe for oh, I don't know at that point, fifteen years or so. I mean,
it's a small world. So Director Tenant comes in. He's a big, burly guy. You've probably seen pictures of him at the very least, and he walks over to you know, the map that's at the table, and he goes, come here, Jah, I want to tell you what I want you to do.
I'm like, yes, sir, I think I know. He says, why, I want to be clear.
I want you to be clear about this, yes, sir, So he takes and because he's a big, burly guy, he takes a very large hand and puts it over all of northern Afghanistan and he says, Okay, Jair, listen, here's the deal. These are the five provinces of Afghanistan that you're responsible for. I want you to destroy the Taliban and capture or kill any Al Qaeda you could find. Yes, Sir, it was okay. Just wanted to be clear. He got
up and left. That was it. That was my I mean, you know, in the army we talk about commanders in tent right, right. I mean, you can't ask for better commanders in tent right than that.
In my opinion, Hey JR? Can you fix Afghanistan for us? If you could have that done by the end of the week, that'd be great.
Thanks man.
Luck Well, I mean, it wasn't only not all of Afghanistan, just five problems. I mean I have eight guys, right right, so you know, by the way, I mean, of course, at that point, I didn't know how it was going to get in. I didn't know what I was going to do when I got in. But he didn't care about that part because he was certain that I was going to make it work. Yeah, and you know, I guess if any of your your your listeners have read either Doug Stanton's book or Toby Harden's book. We were
able to do that. Now, sadly we lost one of our guys while doing it, but we were able to accomplish that in probably much shorter time. I mean, when Alex and I talked about this, you know, we just said, you know, we're going to be in for a year. I hope you're prepared for a year. And I've told this to lots of people over time. This was a you know this, the success in the Fall of two thousand and one is a function of three things.
Right.
It's a function of a CIA network, it's a function of ODA capabilities, and it's a function of US air power. Now you might say, well, what about the locals. Absolutely, the locals are a centerpiece to this, But the locals had been fighting the Taliban for the better part of three years and making and having almost no success along the way. So it was the addition of those three resources working together in collaboration, but not necessarily you know,
trying to do the same thing. Everybody was doing something different. Is how we were able to accomplish what got accomplished, and I mean we inserted on the sixteenth of October. ODA five nine five I think came in on the night of eighteen nineteen, so two days later, two and a half days later, ODA five three four came in, about two weeks later, the the the ODC came in about another week after that, and in the space of so we and we rolled into Mazar Sharief on the tenth of November.
Yeah, could you tell us about your team at Alpha team, kind of your planning process and insertion and kind of how that played out.
Well, yeah, I mean, like most agency stuff, it's just sort of informal. So I had I was in Tushkent for like a week ten days, well about a week before before Alex was able to come in. So I spent that time period doing a couple of different things. The first thing was to work with the both the station there and with the Uzbek service to get in contact with with Abdu Rashido Stamp because he was the one guy that we had up in the north that we that was working behind the lines that we knew.
I mean, there were other guys working behind the lines, but he was the one that we knew. So I started getting into a conversation with him on satellite phone. And he's a character and a half. I mean mostly if you've read anything about him, you know that. And you know early on he uh. So I decided, because I knew that they had no encrypted comms, I wasn't going to give my true names. So I decided I was my my nom de guerre was going to be
Baba John, which just means grandfather. So we're talking back and forth and he says, you know, Baba John, I'm ready. I mean, we're ready for you, but we want to want you to know it's a little different here in Afghanistan. And I was like, yes, Commander, I kind of know that. And he's like, well, no, let me just explain to you. So what we call an armored personnel carrier, you call a horse, and uh, you know, I was like, got it right.
Check.
But so so I've so I know, I got a guy at the other end. Now I got to get in. So we have some resource, some agency resources there, but nothing that will get us in deep enough to where we want to go. And I've got a couple of guys from the from the agency from s A D Air branch, and I find that the at the at the Toashkent Airport, actually the military side of the Tashkent Airport is an old Soviet aircraft kind of looks it's a it's a biplane sort of.
It's a Its use is in the old Soviet days.
It's used as a crop duster and moving people around and so it's it's an Antonov too. It's been around for a very long time. But I thought it was kind of cool because it looked like a lifesander. Now, for those of you who don't know what a lysander is, it is the aircraft that virtually all of the s OE and the OSS guys who didn't go in by parachute into France went in by lysander. It's an it's a high way stole aircraft. And I thought, how cool would this be?
Right?
I mean, this is like right out, I mean we're already CTCSO right, So, I mean, which is what ossso SO is where they took the name from. So Okay, I go to the our crew, our air branch guys, and I go, what do you think? And they said, I don't know, we'll go check it out. They come back that afternoon. They said, we'll fly anything, but we cannot fly that. That airplane does not that's not safe.
And that said a lot to me because I'd flown a bunch of different air branch aircraft and a bunch of different aircraft air branch pilots who will fly anywhere and do just about anything, and I thought, who I guess that didn't work out. So we're still puzzling over this, and Alex gets in and we're doing all the other sort of team and isolation stuff that an s F team or a MARSC team would be doing, right, we're doing you know, everybody's doing the checking weapons, checking comms,
everybody's cross checking. What are you going to be able to do? We're getting our our our medic mark is giving us sort of basic this is your medic kit, this is my medic kit. This is what's going on. And I'm just puzzling with Alex. I'm like, we got to get in, but we can't walk in. I mean there's this river and we can't drive in because we can't cross the bridge because the Taliban owned the bridge. And he was like, well, let me get down to Carshaknabat.
You know, I've still got some contacts down there. See what I can do. Remember now, Alex was a was a retired senior sergeant major. I mean he'd been a sergeant major in like multiple units in uh in the military, okay, multiple special forces units, multiple soft units. So he had a couple of contacts. So I said, excellent, you know we can I got you know, the the agency pilots will fly you down there. That's not a problem. So he goes down like the next day, he's magically said, hey,
we're good to go. Uh I've talked to John mulholland and uh, we're you know, we're good to go. We got we We're going to fly in on the the night Stalkers are going to take us in.
I'm like sweet.
So we get down to we then we all fly down to tash to kku Z and go into isolation. And I go over to the night Stalkers and fold up my map and I say, I take my little fat finger like right out of Ranger school, point to the place. I that's that's where that's where our uh are Elsie is.
Going to be.
And they're like okay, and They're like, how do you want to get there? I'm like, guys, you're the pilots. I have no idea. I'm not gonna I'm certainly not going to try to tell guys from Task Force one sixty how to fly helicopters and where to go. All I want to do I've pointed once again feels that's where I want to go, and they're like, okay, any other thing, anything else.
I said, well, I don't know if.
We're going to have a reception committee, but you're not taking us back right this bird. Your birds are going to be empty when you go home. We'll getting off and if there's no reception committee, we'll figure out what we're going to do at that point, and they looked at me. Clearly, they looked at me, and they're like, oh boy, sure, this guy's nuts, but you know what, it's a mission. It's a really good mission. We're doing it. So there was some weather issues, like there always is
in Afghanistan. So we were actually supposed to go in first the night of thirteenth and then the night of the fourteenth, and eventually the weather cleared up and we ended up in the night of the sixteenth and so that's how we got I mean, that's I have a whole story about getting in, but I that maybe just answers at least the front end of your question. Is there something else you wanted to talk about as far as kku z first.
Before before we move forward, I just want to ask you because you were, like you were working Afghanistan in hindsight, like in retrospect when people go through the records, and I'm not talking about the you know, the hijackers here in the United States, but was there ever any indication or ever any any intelligence that like looking backwards, that that people could have predicted. Was there any way to tyl like Masud's death on the nine to what was going to happen?
Or was it just a completely closed loop at that time?
I mean I wasn't involved in the headquarters analysis of that, So I mean the short answer is I don't know, Okay. I can say that certainly ben Laden made no secret about the fact that he was going to attack Americans, not necessarily America, but he had named US in nineteen ninety eight as the main enemy, and of course he had attacked the embassies, right, so he got the Nairobi and the darbombings, and then he attacks the USS call very clearly he was going to live up to his
statement that he was going to attack Americans. Now the nine to eleven side of the house, I don't know, I mean, I really don't know. I certainly don't have any I mean, the stuff I was working with the FBI was more focused on possible other kinds of infiltration. Remember the nine to eleven hijackers are are Arabs, and they were on legitimate visas, right and and really not associated in any way, shape or form that we could.
I mean maybe in hindsight somebody's looking up and figured it outright, but certainly not not from my perspective, right.
And I like in h and that's why I say, like in hindsight, it's it's always easier or PC like it seems obvious or whatever. But you know, I don't think that people understand sort of the massive intelligence requirements that are placed on you know, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and you just can't collect on every single
individual in the world. I was just wondering if if it had ever if I if especially in Afghanistan at time, like if we had access to those camps if we had sources, or if they were just so insular, insular and isolated that that there was no way to sort of predict that.
I have no idea.
Yeah, I mean, I really don't uh that that camps were that Ben Lawden and his crew. Remember Ben Laden was the figurehead, but he had a very sophisticated crew of guys who understood counterintelligence. Why do they understand counter intelligence because they had been on the run, they'd had like half a dozen services trying to kill them for almost a dozen years.
Right, right, And so.
How they protected their intelligence, how they how they protected their operations is I just wasn't involved in it.
So I'm not even going to try and answer that question.
Well, the Afghans, like even you know, during warlike they had fairly sophisticated counter as well, just because of their dealings with the Russians, whether they were trained by Russians or working against the Russians like they were not. You know, you think of Afghanistan as a non you know, not a very advanced country, not very technological, but they've been doing this for ages.
Oh yeah, I mean this is part of the great game, right, And I'll give you I'll just give you one little tiny vignette that teaches you this kind of stuff. This goes back to the eighties. So I was I. I had a case that was that I had turned from being a case about about combat operations into a penetration of the Afghan Ministry of Defense, the DRA Ministry Defense. And it was a complicated thing because we had to do I mean, the communications network was unsophisticated. We were
getting intelligence I got. I was able to get a document copy camera into Cobble. I was getting document film out of Cobble. And the very first time that I got one of those things, I was sitting there with a guy who was managing I mean the Afghan who was managing this network, and we're sitting drinking tea, and of course we're eating you know, the classic sort of pistachios and almonds and raisins and all that stuff Coot exactly Mulber's.
And he said, so, how do you like the mix? And I was like, okay, it's great. He said, is it salty or sweet?
And you know, of course I'm thinking maybe this is a rapport thing, right, So I'm saying, well, I find it kind of salty.
And he said exactly. And that's our signal that.
The material that was shipped out and smuggled out through three different smugglers was untouched because every one of the guys in the network had to include something and each of them knew what it was going to be. The last one was a mix of twot raisins and salty nuts, and I was like, dang, you know, this is like right out of Rudyard Kipling. Yeah, you know, it was really right. So, yeah, they understood, they still understand how
to do this properly. But in the case of the al Qaeda guys, you know, Afghans weren't allowed into the al Qaeda basis, right, I mean they at all. So that would have meant that we would have had to have recruited years before an Arab who was being vetted for a mission that nobody knew about.
Yeesh. You know.
Yeah, that's that's asking a lot.
Yeah, So just real quick for the viewers out there, I just wanted to plug our Patreon.
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So JR.
Tell us the story about the about the infiltration, then behind enemy lines with one sixtieth.
The assertion was, I mean it was I mean, first of all, by now we're like an hour in, you realize I am basically not a cool guy.
Okay.
Now, Alex was a cool guy, and most of my team was filled with cool guys. I mean real guys. I mean guys who, uh you know, who had done this. We had one who had you know, a ranger who had been in Mogadishu.
You know.
I mean we're talking about people who had seen the elephant. Is the way it's presented. Now, I'd had people shoot at me, but it's a different thing. I mean, it was an espionage thing as opposed to a cool guy thing. So, uh we load onto it's you know, it's a classic sort of story of we walk out it's the middle of the night, and we load onto our two helicopters we have.
Uh So, there's eight of us.
So there's four and four and a couple of Pelican cases and our rucksacks and uh so the door closes. John Mulholland h was was there. I think I think Justin said I knew that John pulled him aside. I didn't know what he said. You know, of course, you know, Justin told you right, don't die, is what is what John said. But so we close the doors, and you know, the birds take off and and head into the darkness. And I'm I've got headset just like this, uh sort of except nicer.
Uh.
And so I'm doing you know, I'm talking to the pilot and command and the crew. I don't have the colms out. I can hear the colms out, but I actually can't. They're not gonna let, you know, a guy like me talk out. So the first thing that happens is we're flying into the night, and all of a sudden, I'm listening to the guys are.
You know, they're they're cool guys, and they're.
And and they've done a bazillion different kinds of ops, so they're they're not in the least bit bothered. And all of a sudden I realize they ain't talking much. And then I look out my I'm I'm looking I'm sitting on you know, looking out the left door. And I realized we are about like, I don't know, it seemed like within touching distance. Of course it wasn't. It was probably forty feet from the tail of a of an MC one thirty because we were refueling to get
into Afghanistan. And so you know, the guys are kind of nervous about this because it's in the dark. They're doing it with nods on and so, and we're right on the Afghan border. So success, right, both birds refuel. The MC one thirty pulls away, and some detached voice from on high says, congratulations, gentlemen, you've just conducted the first combat in air refueling for the regiment.
Good luck, And I thought, this is like right out of a movie.
Later I found out that we had like aircraft stacked up to the sky for this operation. It was the only operation taking place that night, right, So we had uh a jstars, we had the inner refueling, we had three different C one thirties, we had we had fast movers.
We had a lot of aircraft with us. So anyhow, as soon as that happens, the guys just dropped down onto the deck and we cross over the Amu Daria and head into Afghanistan in the pitch stark and you know, it's it's up and down because there's a lot of mountains there. So I'm looking at the watch and I'm and i'm I'm listening to the guys talker.
They're the the.
The co pilot is telling the pile in command and the crew sort of the countdown as far as how long it's going to be before we.
Hit the LC.
And uh, what I'm thinking about is, uh, one thing, right, just one thing, which is there are two door handles on a black Hawk. One is the door handle that opens the door. The other one is the door handle that releases the door in an in an accident. Now I know, I mean, I hadn't worked with one sixtyth, but I worked with a lot of pilots of all sorts. I realized none of them want to leave parts of
their airplane behind when we pull away. So I'm, you know, I'm staring right at that making sure I grab it right handle. And it's pitch black. I can't see, and I don't have my k noods on. It's you're really black, and and the guys are counting it down and they're like, OK, JIR, We're one minute out. So so I said to the guys, well, okay, I key the mic and I say, okay, guys, like thanks to the ride. We'll see on the other side.
And I was just getting ready to take the headset off, because that's the other thing you don't want to do. It tells people right up front that you're not a cool guy when you like get off the helicopter and you still have the headset on your head, right, That's that's not going to work. So okay, fine, Just as I'm about to take the headset off, I hear the
pilot commands say hey JR. I think we're here, and I look out over his shoulder and out there is what looks to be like about two tennis courts lit by about fifty sixty what light bulbs. Because I had tried to talk ghost them into, you know, doing some sort of American I mean, I had my ranger handbook. I know how to set up an elsie, and I've been telling him how to you know, do all the stuff, and he was like, no, no, don't worry, it'll be
set up. And I'm like, okay, I guess I'm just going to have to take your word for it, And in fact it was absolutely set up.
So our bird lands. The second bird, of course, hovers over.
It's got the miniguns looking at any kind of because we still don't know good guys, bad guys, could be anybody might be a mistake. We're in the right place for sure. I'm not worried about that one. So I opened up the door, I grabbed the right handle, I got the headset off. Now the agreement was I was
going to get out of the helicopter. Everybody else was going to stay in the helicopter until we confirmed that we had a real reception committee and not Taliban, Because I mean, I was confident that since right over my shoulder was a minigun, I was confident that it was that if there was problems, I wasn't going to have to worry.
About, like shooting it out.
But I didn't want everybody out of the helicopter while a shootout was taking place. Right So I look out, and what do I see in the dust the helicopter course blazers still turning is like about fifty people who looked like the sand people from Star Wars.
Right.
They're dressed in these long it's called Chapon's that just it's the long jacket. They've got the you know, the cumber bun. They got knives, and they got guns, and they got turbans, and I could just barely see their
eyes and they start walking towards the helicopter. Now, you guys know, and most of your audience probably knows, when a Blackhawk is on the ground, hovering the front the blade is only about six feet you know, forward, and it is really a bad thing to start a an insertion by, you know, a bunch of guys.
That are supposed to be helping you getting killed.
So I go running out there outside the blades and I lean over and I put up you know, the classics sort of all everybody in the world knows, stop right the hands out stop?
And I say stop.
Of course, nobody can hear me because the helicopter, and all of a sudden I realized, you know, everybody in front of me is sort of bend over holding their hands out. They're assuming it is some sort of you know, take me to your leader sort of greeting, because after all, we are aliens. And while they're not shooting at me, So I turn around and give Alex a thumbs up, and he starts to unload the bird. And as soon as he starts to unload the bird, the guys start
walking forward again. And I bend over and I put my hands out and yell stop, and they bend over and put their hands out and stop. We could have done this all night long, but I decided that it was probably better for me to walk to the very front grab the guy who looked like the leader. I grabbed him by the collar of his chapon. I took a knee. I pulled him down to take it me. Everybody took a knee, and so the helicopters, you know,
we offload both birds. And for you know, anybody who's been an assertion, whether it's day or night, when the helicopters are gone, because you're hearing, has been affected by this very loud noise of turbans.
It seems like there's absolute silence.
Yeah, there's just absolutely It's like you're you've got earplugs in or something.
And uh.
I look over at the guy that I've grabbed and he pulls down his Uh. He's he's got his turban wrapped around his face. And I've got my goggles and I pull my goggles up and he says, Baba John, welcome to Afghanistan. We must have tea. So uh that was our uh, the beginning of the adventure. And in fact we did have tea, interestingly enough, and this just people say, you know, these guys are you know, sophisticated and unsophisticated.
There's big arguments about this.
Those them had decided he could have brought us in to an Elsie on his turf, but instead what he did is he brought us in on an Elsie on his Shia allies turf to allow the Shia to feel like they were to get the bragging rights for the fact that they brought the Americans in. I thought that was just pretty clever. So we ended up having tea at the Adam madrasa run by the Shia leader Mahakek, and then we loaded up into trucks and we went to those dumbs headquarters, which was deeper into or closer
to the front lines, let's say. And then eventually, of course, when we brought brought five nine five in used an Elsie that was Dustan's Elsh right in front of what we you know, where we were based out of which we called the Alamo, which was you know, it was very like a little Nativity scene. It was a you know, we had a major It was a little stables that had been abandoned and so there.
Was room of the inn for the Americas.
And so that's where we spent our next the first few days.
And at this point, I assume you're getting the way of the land, starting to assess everybody alive.
You're still there? What, Yeah, I missed you.
Uh, I was just asking.
I mean, at this point I assumed that you were kind of getting the way of the land and assessing the state of the Northern Alliance, the state of the Taliban, and how you're going to live up to Director Tenants directive to you know, take care of this broad Taliban problem here in northern Afghanistan.
Well, you know, the great thing about Dustan is is that you know, he was trained. He's a military guy, right. He found it amusing that he he knew. How he knew, I don't know, but he knew. He says, you know, Baba John, I know in the eighties you were trying to kill me. I think that's pretty amusing. Here we are now together. So, uh, you know he he already had a plant his baby. He rolled out the first night right now, Dhostom, as near as I could tell,
never slept a whole night. If he ever slept more than an hour the whole time we were rolling, I never saw it. But so the first night he rolls out this map that's the size of a you know, a six or five x ten carpet hand drawn of Afghanistan. And he says, look it, here's the deal. If we take Mizaar Sharif, Kobble will fall. It's just that simple. Now, I'm not going to argue with the guy, right, I'm thinking, well,
you know, historically that's true. When when when Mazarre Sharif fell to Masud's guys, it was after you know, this is after the Soviets left, the dra was done, and in fact they were then able to roll in from Jabal Saraje right into Cobble. So yeah, I get it. But he had a you know, he said, so here's who we're working with, and here's where they are, and here's where we are, and we need you know, it's a classic sort of warren Zevon right, without the lawyers.
We need guns and money, right, and so I'm like, well, I've brought money, and he said, that's a good start, you know, And shortly afterwards we start delivering guns and bullets as well. Nine five comes in and as soon as nine to five comes in, they're bringing in tea lamps, so they're bringing in lasers, which is, you know, really
good because trying to do air strikes. Well, the United States military at the time, now it changed over twenty years of war, but the United States military at the time were like, no, if you can't give me absolutely the grid coordinate down to you know, a ten meters square, we're just not going to drop any bombs. And we're like, well, you know, that's going to be kind of hard because we're sitting up in the mountains looking at these guys
with binoculars. But once nine to five and three four came in with tea with soft lambs, it was it was all over for the Taliban. But what was most interesting about this was that the Taliban in the north, I mean, there were there were serious Taliban bad guys. I mean they're they're back in power and cobble, but the vast majority of their foot soldiers were just that they were foot soldiers. They were what the British would
call levies. They were either you know, kidnapped and told that they were going to fight or die, or they were given a small amount of money. And you know, sixteen year old kid, you give him a Kalashnikoff, you give him a Toyota High Loucks, and you say, you can terrorize anybody in the neighborhood as long as she's call yourself a Taliban. Generally speaking, he's going to say that's.
Cool, right.
But the thing about it is, hardly anybody, you know, truthfully, hardly everybody's more than willing to kill for jihad, but hardly anybody I ever met in Afghanistan wanted to die for job. Some did, but not very many. So what we were able to do with do Dostam was the one who had the best connections. Was he call the guys up on radios and say, hey, you know, you're on the wrong side of the history here and I will, in fact, I and I can pay you to be
on the right side. And the first time he tried that, the guys would say, you know something, rude guy.
I was listening to him.
I was sitting right next to post them on the radio and they're saying something rude to him and that he would turn to Mark Nutch or whoever with nine to five was there that day, and he'd say, see that that's right over there, that's.
Where I am. That's the guy I'm talking to.
And so they'd put the soft lamb laser designator on that and squish, you know, the guy would would go, would be done. And then he'd call the guy next to him to the right or the left of that line and say, hey, mom, And you know, I was just talking to Abdul and I offered him a deal and he basically wasn't much interested. But you know, I'm hoping that you have seen what happened to Abdul and you'll come to our side. And pretty quick, that's exactly
what happened. A lot of the Taliban levies were like, I'm not dying for these guys from Condahar. I'm from around here, right and uh. And if I can, if I can be financially successful as well as be on the right side of history.
I'm in.
So that's basically what happened. And it was, you know, one after another after another. Uh, slowly but surely, that. As I said that mix, our work was to keep the resistance guys fighting each other. Now, the Shia and those times were close, they'd always been close, but the Shia and those times weren't very close to the Tajiks Mahmadata,
so we had to constantly work on that. Meanwhile, we needed to send a team to Bamyan so that another SF team could come into Bamiyan, So that was we split the team and sent h Justin and mike' span and Mark in a jeep into the Bombia. That's you know, so they went out, they went out and disappeared for weeks because it was a long drive and they were doing exactly what we were doing. And then we realized that we were never going to get real success with Ata until he had his own agency team and his
own uh Oda. So we split the team again and that became then Bravo team, and that was three guys, and then when Oda five three four came in, two more ground branch guys and a medic came in and helped set up that team. So in the space of at the end of the first two weeks, we were split all over there the country right we were in all kinds of different directions. Three no, no less than three at a time, but a lot of times two
or three guys going to do something. As I said, we we uh you know, rolled into miss miss Archery fell on the tenth of November and we rolled into bizarre and uh it was like, uh, you know, it was one of those things that you I mean, no pictures were taken, but it was kind of like the films you've seen of the liberation of Paris without the Champagne. So you know, men and women throwing rose petals at us, women you know, throwing their burkas underneath the jeeps so
that they would be driven forever destroyed. Uh, cheering crowds. I mean, it was all liberation of Paris, except it was the liberation of miss Archery.
It's incredible to think of.
I mean.
And from there, what was the next step was on the.
Well for us, the next step we still had a couple of provinces to take care of, right, Uh so the first province, the first set of provinces that we had to take care of, were really not liberations but just announcements. So Justin and I jumped in the jeep with Dostam and we went to the three provinces.
To the west.
The first one, of course, was was his old province Chiles, John sorry Pool was there, and then Maimanah as well. So we did did basically a grand tour, saying, by the way, the reason that Taliban are gone is because they ain't coming back. They're they're done. And Dostam was of course the big the big winner there and it was his turf, so I wasn't surprised at that part. Uh classic sort of uh you know story again, a small bit of humor.
So we're driving.
Along, we were blast along on this highway that goes from Missar Charief to Chevakan and uh, you know, I'm still kind of nervous. I mean, there's still Taliban out there. And Justin's to my you know, so I'm a lefty, so I'm on the right seat looking out the window.
Justin's on the left seat looking out the window behind Doos Dominus driver And all of a sudden and we've got, you know, a truckloaded guys in front of us and a truckload of guys behind us, and all of a sudden, the trucks absolutely screech to a halt and go into a herring bone, classic sort of military herring bone. All the guys in the pickup trucks jump out and disappear, and I'm like asking thhost. I'm like, what's going on. He's like, Baba, John, don't worry. I'm like, yeah, okay,
but you know, I'm kind of worried. He's like, no, don't worry. And all of a sudden, like in a very short amount of time, all these guys come running back into their truck. They come to our truck and they start handing us melons and those some goes we always stop here. This is the best the whole region. And I was like, okay, you know, I guess you know what, what the hell? But the last, of course, the last big UH problem was UH was well, there's two problems. There was There was UH some goan which
still had a Taliban in it, and Kundus. So Alex took a team to Smogan and started working on the distribution of resources money, guns, bullets and bring it in an oda there and Kundu's was supposed to be well, you know the problem was that dostm and Ata had been convinced by Mulla Fozzle, the head Taliban guy that the Taliban wanted to surrender, but if they didn't accept, if if most of them Anata didn't accept the surrender, then they were going to have to fight house to house.
And he said, neither one of you guys wants to be the butcher of Kundus. Well, okay, so, uh, none of us, not none of us Americans were all that excited about any of this. But you know, it's it's exactly what Lawrence said, right, it's better for the locals to do what they do, you know, it's it's it's.
You know, for you to do it for them exactly.
So we're like, you know, what are we going to do? I mean, we can't, uh, we can't. We don't have an invasion for us. Right, We've got ODA five nine five, We've got O d A five three four, and the commanders that they're working with they want to arrange, you know, go with the surrender.
Well, you know, both.
Doug Stanton and and Toby's books talk in detail about the fact that it was a completely false surrender, and.
It was.
I mean from the standpoint, I mean it was horrible. I lost a man, Afghan's lost some of our closest allies. Dave almost was killed. We were almost killed out in Kundu's because it was at ambush there too, though we had AC one thirties on our side. So it didn't work, you know, it didn't work out so well for the Taliban. But the point is that, whether you like it or not, it was an exceptionally sophisticated deception operation because they had convinced the two major you know.
Afghan allies to.
Drive right into a trap that was going to kill him right and would have killed him if it hadn't been for AC one thirties and the fact.
That we had you know, we had the UH at that point.
It was Max Bauers who was the battalion commander for these guys, and UH Sergeant Major v Hill, Mario ve Hill and their coms network with the authority to call in airpower like right away.
Otherwise you wouldn't be talking to me today.
We still would have won the battle, but I'd be dead, no question in my mind about that. And uh so that's what happened. I mean, you know again, I would point your your uh your listeners to reading either one of those books because they go into significant detail about about that, and it's it's a tough story to read and it's not a great story to talk about.
Yeah.
Yeah, when we talked to both Toby and Justin, I think that really came through about like SPAN's death and just what a horrible day that was.
Yeah, and you know, I mean I so, Uh, Scottie and I made it back for day two of that operation, and Uh and Alex drove up from Sammagan.
So Alex and I went.
Were in the fort when Mark Mitchell the night that Mark Mitchell won his Distinguished Service Cross with the with the team. It was a pretty spooky thing. The Taliban, or it wasn't Taliban, it was the al Qaeda guys. We're using all of the resources that were available. I had never really thought that you could direct fire direct lay a one twenty two rocket, but I guarantee you it was either that or they were using explosives to send telephone polls over my head. I'm not sure which
it was. Either way, it was pretty scary. Yeah, but you know again, AC one thirties won out the day and the Air Force saved our lives.
Could you tell us a little bit more about like how that came about well.
Okay, So so I get back to Scotty and I came back from Kundu's. The guys who had been in the fort that day, to include the SBS team had were all coming back rolling in. They they well, they looked exactly like what they were. They had been buried alive because the Jadam had hit the fort and buried him alive. They dug their way out, and they were coming back trying to figure out what they were going
to do. And the the part of the fortress that overlooked that truly overlooked where the where the the the al Qaeda guys were was not where they had been, and they didn't know quite how they were going to get in there. And uh so Alex and I gotten a jeep uh and drove over there and we you know, shouted from the from the ramparts, Hey, we want to come up, and they said, come on up. So we climbed up the ramparts, went through a drainage hole and
came up to where our Afghan allies were. And I mean, these are the same allies we've been with now for six weeks. So they were all like, hey, Baba John, good to see you. You know, bullets flying everywhere, and uh, I'm like, okay, here's the deal. Uh, you know, if you can hold these guys in place tonight, we're going to bring in airpower. And they were like, absolutely, we can hold these guys inside these walls. And they'd already seen what airpower did, so you know it was they
were like, come on back. So then we you know, climb over the walls, down through the drain pipe, up you know again, jump the jump in the jeep, go back to where everybody was set up and Mark and a combat controller and one other guy. Then about nine o'clock that night, we loaded the jeep back through you know, same story, right up the walls, through the drain pipe, up were the walls, and in and tell the commander, okay, we're going to start bringing in airpower. And he was
like that's good because they found mortars. And just about the time he got mortars out of his mouth, round started landing on the parapet around us, and we were like, well, that ain't good. I've seen good before, and that ain't it. And I turned to Alex and said, you know, Alex, I don't have my ranger tab the high under. I mean if I did, I wouldn't be worried. But I don't have it with me. So he was like, yeah, I don't have my sf TA with me either, So
you know, we'll just we'll just stick here. And you know, it's really up the Mark at this point and the combat controller to do the job. I mean, there's no sense in. I mean, we couldn't see the bad guys. They could see us well, I mean we could have gotten stood up on a paraprit shot our aks.
But like, why so Mark called.
In the the AC thirties they made two runs. This is about the same time that the guys are shooting mortars at us and the one twenty two's and just about anything they could find. They were doing direct lay on us.
And finally I.
Remember Mark talking to the aircraft and saying, guys, I know you have to rotate back through right.
You do.
You're doing your rotation because the all the guns are on the left side of the aircraft. But you just need to know you need to finish this this time because the last couple of rounds, mortar rounds are only landed about like fifty meters from us. They've got they're walking the mortars in on us. Now, I didn't hear what Mark. I mean, I heard what Mark said. I don't know what the Air Force guy said, but absolutely
they came roaring in. And for those of you who remember it, if you've ever seen the final scene from Apocalypse now when the arc light comes in and the entire sky turns orange, well, to this day, I don't know what they hit. I think they hit the cheese charges and then that kicked off all the other kind of mortar rounds and everything else.
The entire the entire end of.
The fortress where the bad guys were just exploded into into fire. So I turned to the Afghan commander and said, you know, I think our work here is done. We're going to go come back tomorrow, and I need to find Mike. We still, I mean until, I mean, I wasn't willing to say that Mike was Kia until we knew he was Kia. Because Mike had been such a power in so many different ways and so good at
what he did. I thought, even if he was wounded, and he could have easily crawled into a space and hidden, and then the guys would never have found him.
So until we actually found Mike's remains. I mean, I was.
Really committed to to hoping. Of course, you know now we know from Dave's debrief and everything else, that didn't work out that way. But anyhow, we left the next day. The whole team now is crawling in because we think we're just going to edit go into the fortress and you know, do our post blast analysis. I would climb into the fortress doing the same thing again, and the commander goes, I say like, so, why aren't you down
in the area. He says, well, it turns out that and then just as he said, you know that, you know, two mortar rounds hit on the parapet again. He says, yep, they're still firing mortars at us. I'm like, oh, great, well it's daylight. And he said, yeah, we're going to bring in We've got a we've got a t Sist two. We're going to bring in a tank, and we've got troops all along the parapet. We're just going to start opening up on these guys. And and you know, it takes.
It took all that day and they still ended up, you know, the guys, the al Kainda guys retreated into the what's called the pink House, which was it was pink and then what was really clever. I would never have thought of this, but the Afghan thought of it. They brought in a fire truck and started to flood the Pink House. And remember this is November, late November, it's cold at night, and by the next day the guys were hypothermic. They were no longer combatants, and they
were pulled out of the pink House and grabbed. And then by that time a good chunk of Dostom's team were there. Dostom was still in Kundu's dealing with the Afghans there, but they put him into trucks and they took him to Sheppergun And that's basically the last of the story, except when the medic in nine to five identified John Walker Lynn. Then they brought him back to
actually to the Turker School where we were headquartered. I made sure that my guys didn't didn't talk to or do anything with Mike Span with John Walker Lynn for two reasons. One, I was afraid they would do him harm right, but more more importantly, having worked with the FBI, I knew that if any of us were involved in this at all, the defense team would immediately say that, you know, we were somehow perfidious, and so.
We didn't do anything.
Admiral Kallan understood it as well, because he'd been you know, Seal Team six commanders, so he'd had a lot of work in this weird world of counter terrorism and criminal enterprises all that, and so he just put guards on the room that that John Walker Linn was there until they could fly in from At that point, they flew him in from Tashkent, some Army ce I D guys and then the Army c I D guys matched up.
They also had some n CIS guys there, and they put him on a bird and took him out of there, and that was that was the last I saw them, Jr.
You know, the John Walker Lynn, the so called American Taliban amazingly out of prison now.
Uh yeah, he's taken up some writing, a little bit of writing, and.
Has accused the CIA and the Army of committing work crimes out there.
And I'm just curious what you think.
Of of John Walker's account of how that went down out there that those few days.
You know, I I honestly I haven't followed any of that. I mean I'm sorry, I can't. I can't stomach the guy. Yeah, you know, and uh, you know, the only thing that I know about that guy.
Is after the fact.
I talked to some of the FBI guys who did the initial interview with him, and they showed me some pictures and they said, they showed me the pictures of when he was first, you know, first brought out and interviewed and he I think you've seen some of those pictures because they've become part of the of the story. But anyhow, like half of his face looks really dirty
and the other half looks sort of dirty. And the FBI guys I talked to said, well, that's because that's what happens when you you know, have a good stock world on an AK forty seven and all that carbon from those from those rounds start start, you know, comes out. Because AK forty seven's for everybody who's ever fired one, you know, they're sort of I mean, they're designed to be loose so that they can be so that they can be shot in any environment. That's why they are
so popular all over the world. But it was you know, carbon from the so I have not followed John Walker lint I mean, I'm sorry, I can't. I can't brain myself to do it. I'm an old guy, the geezer. Uh he he is a trader, uh the end, you know. I mean, I'm not going to judge anything else about him, And what he wants to talk about now is between him and he's a he's a mom, so it's between him and his god, you know.
Really fair enough j R.
But on a saturer note, how how did you guys get our resolution on on Mike's span and evacuate his remains?
Well, we we went in, I mean after that, after the the guys had been pushed into the pink house, but before they were pulled out, we walked at the the Afghans. Of course, you know, see a good chunk of the of the folks who were who were actually the fighters are fighters on the ramparts were Shia, right, they were because it was the Shia that had been had had well Bazaars Reef was a Shia talent before the Taliban took over. So they were always the guys,
and they knew Mike very very well. Mike had been Mike and Justin and Mark had been our focal points with the with the Shia resistance and then with the Shia when we started to rebuild. So they went in on their own, found him UH and brought him out in a stretcher, and so we didn't have to go searching for him. They had already brought him right out to the entrance of where the big gun fight had
taken place. And UH then we UH recovered Mike. We had a you know, a classic American UH uh bag that put him in, brought his remains to the UH, brought his remains to the the Turker School, put him in a space where we could do a quiet time with him. And then that night half the team UH loaded up with Mike's remains, loaded up and do a C forty seven and flew back to Kku.
Z Alex was on that.
You know why half the team well, you know we had not been we had you know, we hadn't been relieved. We were still doing stuff across the board. So it was half the team needed to go because half, I mean, Mike was buried, buried before I even got back to Konis.
But we needed half the team needed to stay to continue to work the stuff that we were doing, which was building something resembling a legitimate not government exactly, but at least in a legitimate order, and also hunting down the last of the Taliban and the al Qaida guys who were now on the run in samagan.
Jar.
How when you.
Talk about like building not the legitimate governmentybe a legitimate coalition or whatever.
How tough was that?
Because even though these warlargs like Dustom and that they were fighting the Taliban, they they were all there wasn't like a national identity for them. They were also fighting for themselves and would just as easily turn on each other if they thought they could get away with it.
How was that for you?
Trying to orchestrate that or manage manage those relationships.
It was something that of course, you know, this goes back to experience in the eighties, right. I learned a long time ago that there comes a point in time where you can't you can you need to be polite, but you need to draw a line in the sand. And I made it pretty clear to the guys early on, actually, uh well before we had entered Massaari Shrief. Let's just say that if they didn't cooperate, we were all going home. There'd be no more money, no more guns, no more odas,
no more anything. And then if so, you know, and if that was what they were they were committed to do. We weren't going to get in the way of it, but we certainly weren't going to help them, and so they took it to heart. I mean, they didn't have to, I get. I mean, I don't know if I was uh blunt or if I was you know, just looked sincere or what. But it was like one on one with these guys. Uh. I've had guys in the past
when I was doing this. I mean say, you know, really with just like you're surrounded by bad guys and you're saying it like it's our job.
It's what we do.
Right, it's all you have too, Yeah, well it is.
And it's not like they're going to kill me because that would also you know, and and the relationship. So they could grumble about it, but they had seen what was what was successful now, you know is and what we said right up front was look at once, we're once the talibant.
We're only here to.
Get these guys out of here. It's really up to you to figure out what you're going to do next.
And uh, you know.
My own I mean, I've only done Afghanistan Afghan since nineteen eighty six, so I'm not going to pretend that I am like a real you know, cultural expert, like you know, from Harvard or Yale, because I'm just a kid who, you know, blue collar kid who just lived with these guys for years.
But there is no such thing as an Afghan.
Right right, There's there's absolutely no such thing as an Afghan.
The only Afghan I ever.
Met was Amarula Salid, who was, you know, the last vice president of Kalb but before that, he was the head of the National Defense you know, the the.
National Directorate of Security.
And before that he was one of of Masud's guys. I mean, he was actually a very close to Maud and was one of the guys that traveled with Masoud when Maud was going back and forth between the Panshir and dou Chambay. To me, folks, he's the only Afghan
I ever met who was an Afghan. All the rest of them, all of the rest of them are tadjiks Uzbek's Hazara push tunes and there's two different I mean and that you know, people say push things but you know the truth is that the push dune of let's say, Jalalabad can barely understand what the push dudents in Condahar say, and neither one of them can understand what the push dudents from Memors say. I mean, it's not a country.
National geographics done, the maps. You know, they had a flag, and so by definition Americans think that they're a country. But you know, they are neither a nation. Oh they were a state certainly, but they were not a nation state, right, and the folks in the north nor I mean, remember when the winter comes, you can't drive from Kabble to Missouri Shrief, right, the roads are closed. There's no way to get through the Hindu kush. Even today they have
to fly. So what we had to do was convince all these guys that, regardless of what they thought of each other, and they didn't like each other, that's for sure, right, that that they needed to collaborate, cooperate if they wanted the country back.
And they did.
I mean, I don't just because they grumbled doesn't mean that they didn't do their job. They did their job in ways that were you know, exactly what you could have asked for.
Right, What was the next phase for Alpha Team after that whole incident, after Mike's band's death and resolving the situation at the prison. I mean, as you said, you were continuing to do things. The mission wasn't over. So what was the next step.
Well, the next step was to you know, to build to work with all three of our Afghan allies to make sure that there weren't Taliban, uh, you know they I guess the only term I could think of is is a term from you know, from World War Two. We wanted to make sure there were no war wolves out there, right, that not everybody was worried in forty five that there were Nazi war wolves out there hiding out, just waiting to come.
So we did that. We Uh, we were involved with.
The ODA that was down in Salmangan, working with us Mailei's totally different culture as well.
Uh. And then that you know, for me, my job.
Towards the end was to be sort of uh the intelligence diplomat. I worked a lot with Admiral Kaland as we built airfields, and we worked with the commanders trying, you know, the three leaders to try and make sure that they continue to collaborate and cooperate, dividing up the city. How you do police work, you know, I mean I don't mean like a police force, but you know, making sure that there aren't checkpoints that are hostils with each
other across the town, all that stuff. And then you know, our allies started to roll in and uh so, I mean we had lots of ally guys already. I mean the Brits were our shoulder to shoulder with us, but I mean the the other allies, the Jordanians, special forces came in, the French aviation folks started to come in. Eventually Christmasare Schrief was was run by a German unit.
Uh So that at the very end the job was just there were there were five of us left, and uh the five of us carved up every day a little piece here, a little piece there, trying to do all of those things until we were relieved in place in the mid in mid December, and you know, did the did the handshakes with our the really the new team, and introduced them to all the other, you know, the
guys that we've been working with all this time. And then we boarded a an agency uh twin otter and left CA or left Bazaars Reef and headed back to Kkuz.
And you had a few more years left at the CIA before retiring in two thousand and seven. I believe you finished as the Deputy of Operations of CTC.
No, well, I mean I did.
I mean, first of all, you know that wasn't my last trip to call, right, I mean or Afghanistan. I made like five different trips TV wise for lots of different kinds of projects over time as we worked with the station.
Now by that time the station set up.
It's a big station, but there were certain things that cooperation, collaborations, some other stuff.
There's some training that I was involved with.
After in two thousand and four, I was pulled back to headquarters after seventeen years kicking and screaming, but orders or orders, and I went back into the basement. Of course, it only goes I was. I was given an office in the basement to do some other stuff that was nothing to do with Afghanistan. And then I ended up as a h the chief of ops for a geographic division for about six months and then I got promoted.
Shocked everybody myself included, and I got grabbed up to go to CTC CGC is a big place, right, I mean there were at that point in time, there's over not quite four thousand.
People in the CTC mix.
Now, that doesn't mean that there were four thousand people working in headquarters. There are four thousand people doing the CTC mission. Are you still there?
Yeah? That you lose you okay, yeah, okay.
So anyhow, the operations office, so I was I was one of the two deputy chiefs of operations, and then we had a chief of Operations and he had a deputy So I was partnered with Doug Wise. So Doug and I, uh split And you've had Doug on on on the on the on the podcast.
He's coming back in a few weeks.
Uh.
We got on scheduled for the twenty second.
Yeah, excellent.
Well, anyhow, he and I divided up the day to day management of CTC in half. So, uh, I ended up with a you know, a bunch of different parts of CTC and then the the Uh, the CTC director wanted to have a a syops program, a robust syops program going after countering violent extremism.
Uh.
So I wanted to call it the you know, political warfare Department.
No, that wasn't going to work. That sounded too political.
Uh So we ended up calling it the Strategic Communications Department, and I was listed just so I could go over the State and not be laughed out of a building. They listed me as a deputy director of CTC for Strategic Communications. So I spent the tail end of the last eighteen months of my career managing teams that were
all over the world. Is again kind of, you know, the same sort of story over and over again that were working on what is what would have been called in the old OSS days black propaganda, and you know, and black propaganda is designed to undermine the morale of the bad guys, as opposed to psyops or strategic communications that the military and the State Department were doing, which was to bring guys onto our side, right, to convince people on our side.
And also that the bad guys don't know where they information is coming from, as opposed to like say the Broadcasting Board of Governors, where it's very clearly coming from the United States.
What you guys are doing is concealed.
And what we're doing, I mean what basically what we're doing is telling them, in a sense, a modified truth, which is your leaders are making themselves rich while you guys are being asked to be martyrs. Yeah, you know, and which is all true.
Yeah, that's not really modified truth. That's kind of the truth.
That is the truth.
But it has to come from some place that doesn't say United States of.
America doesn't have CIA all over it.
Right, that's right. So we did.
We did a variety of different, very creative things. I take I mean no credit for this other than getting money to make it happen.
I mean the I had a.
Team of exceptionally smart folks, and then because I knew I was going to leave soon, have Alex to take over for me. So we ended up at the end of I ended up at the end of my career with Alex as my deputy again, which was great. And then he took over my job when I left.
That's pretty cool. So retired in two thousand and seven.
And tell us a little bit about what your life has been like post retirement. I'm sure your your wife is happy to have you at home a little more often and getting into writing.
Your pretty very prolific writer.
Yeah, well, let's start with you know, I this this trade, this blend of intelligence and special operations. It's it's very addictive and it's very hard to just go cold Turkey. So for years I worked very hard with the Army and the Special Operations community to try and do some training for them, cultural training. I'm an anthropology by training, so cultural training on how to work with the locals.
I mean, obviously Robin Sage, they teach how to work with the locals, but I'm like down in the tactical this is how I worked with the locals, as well as how to work with the CIA, because working with the CIA is a challenge because it's another culture entirely.
And you know, it might seem easy when you're in a forward operating base and you've got a base chief and maybe one it's another thing entirely when you're going to fly into a station, an established station, and you're going to be talking to people who are interested in conventional intelligence operations because that's their job. So I spend a lot of time working on that and still do a little bit of that. And then about five years
ago I started writing. And it seems more profic than it is because Mike.
Four had to go through two years with the sensors.
Oh really, and then and then uh, it's the sequel. Friend or foe was twenty eight months with the with the sensors, and then eventually what happens is I guess I just warmed down or they just figured out I'm not going to quit. And I also crack that, you know, got the code, right, I got the code. I understand how to write to make sure that the sensors legitimately.
I mean, I'm I.
Signed a document in nineteen eighty five, right, they could they could watch everything I wrote forever. So it isn't like I don't understand that it's the rules.
I get it.
But it seems like if you look at like, you know, like nine books since twenty nineteen. Well, no, actually I started writing Mike four in twenty and fourteen, okay, finished it, finished it in fifteen, and then had to find get through the sensors, and then after the sensors had to go through and find a publisher. So meanwhile, while I'm doing all that, I'm still writing. So it looks like I'm creating these things. Now, those people who have read it will say it's sort of slap dash anyhow, But.
I mean the point is that it is. The publication date doesn't reflect what happens.
That makes sense.
So I was just going to say for audience, who doesn't know, because we've had people on who've written autobiographies and whatnot, and we've talked about the pre publication review board at the CIA that has to review their stuff and make sure it's not classified. But you might not know in the audience that even if you write fiction, they have to go through it and check it to make sure that you haven't spilled any secrets in your fiction.
Correct, correct, and you know and fair enough.
I mean, at the end of the day, you know, there's an entire you know, there's an entire part of the CIA that does open source intelligence and it you know, for years and years and years, the KGB was doing open source intelligence on all of their officers who were in North America. That's what they were doing. So yeah,
the pre publication is a fair requirement. I think what happened to me was that I hit it at a time just about the time that a bunch of very senior people legitimately wanted to write essays and articles and books about their careers. Whereas so what would happen would be I mean, I don't know this for sure, but my guess is my fiction kept getting back down to the bottom of the pile. Because, let's face it, if a former director wants to write an editorial that's going to the New.
York Times, that's a whole lot more.
Important than me writing about a fictional character who is a special operator, right, I mean, it's just totally different.
So Jared, please, I'm I'm going to talk about your other series and I'll ask you questions about it, but please tell us. We haven't had a chance to read this one, so please tell us about Mike four. It's it's there are six books in the series.
Seven now and it's not another one just came.
Out, and it's about a family whose history and Special Operations intelligence goes back to World War Two.
Correct?
Correct?
So the basic story is, Mike Fuur is the call signed for a female special operator who is on a surveillance detachment.
Okay, leave it at that.
For those for folks who know what we're talking about, they know, but that's what the that's what the Policy Review Board wanted it to be called.
So fair fair enough.
So she's in a surveillance detachment, very successful and but very aggressive. Now you might say why a female character, Well, partly because I met a ton of female operators and a ton of agency females, and you know, you'd look around in the fiction try and find some in fiction.
Right.
Anyhow, she is this the daughter of a tandem couple, and she's the granddaughter of an OSS commando SO who also then becomes a CIA off so very senior and ends his career CIA officer. She doesn't want to be in the family business, so she you know, goes through selection and ends up in this surveillance detachment in Jalalabad.
She ends up walking into an ambush and it becomes a what is known in the wounded warrior world as BTK below the knee amputee and just like many btks from Iraq Afghanistan, the Army, after she is healed as much as a BTK can be healed, says to her, Okay, here's the deal. You can either get one hundred percent disability and start a new life, you know, go back to college, go do something else, or you can stay
in the fight as an intelligence officer. And we're going to send you to the farm and you're going to learn, you know, CIA tradecraft, and you're going to be one of our that is the Special Operations Community Intelligence officers. Well, you know, Mike Forrest spent her whole life trying to
dodge the family business. But given a choice between staying in the fight or not staying in the fight, she chooses to stay in the fight, and she ends up working in a team that is a Special Operations Intelligence, human intelligence counter terrorism collection team. Now people say why a BTK. One of the training programs I was in after I retired was down at Fort Wachuka and I was doing, you know, my cultural stuff, but we were doing it out.
This is back in the day when Iraq and Afghanistan.
The guys who were doing intelligence had to be able to get out into the literally out into the field. So I was working students one after another and evaluating them after the fact. It's a five day, six day program, and you know, because I was an outsider, at the end of that program, I would give them a one on one. Hey, this worked well for you, this didn't
work so well. And like you know, I learned through all the leadership training I've ever given and ever taken that you know, it's it's really good to unkey the mic and listen for a while. Now those of you who have been listening to me for now two hours are wondering about that. But nevertheless, so I went to one of these guys and I said, so you have anything you want to say, because he had done very well and I didn't expect him to say anything more
than thank you and go. He's like, man, this is tough. This was really hard, and I was like, dude, it's supposed to be hard. That's the whole point. And that's when he rolled up his pants leg and showed me that he was a BTK. I had walked this guy all over southern New Mexico and he had never said anything and had done his job on his own, all alone, face to face with me giving him a hard time.
And it was at that point I realized.
That is one you know, this is in the eighty second when you say that that guy's as hard as woodpecker lips. Yeah, you know, I mean he was one hard character. Well, years later, when I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to move this character from this side of the house to that side of the house, it only seemed fair to make sure that there was a person there who was a BTK who said right
up front, I'm not a victim. I am a person who is still in the fight, and I will remain in the fight until I retire.
And you know, the.
Special Operations community, the Army as a whole is filled with people right now who are gravely who were gravely injured in a rocker Afghanistan and are still in the fight. And God bless them for that, because most folks don't even know that they're that they are wounded warriors because they don't tell anybody, They don't ask for any any pity. They just want to do their job. So that's that's Mike four goes through a bunch of different stuff. There's
seven in the series. Six of them are about Mike four, and one of them is entirely focused on a prequel about her grandfather.
Because through the series you.
Find out that there's a vendetta between a Russian family of spies and an American family of spies, and book four reveals, actually Book three reveals that the origins of that vendetta.
So, guys, so check out if you I mean, check out the Mic Force series. I'm going to talk about a school for the Great Game which to me is a mix of Kipling Hopkirk The Great Game.
Uh uh, it's got.
It's steampunk, like it says, it's a steampunk rise novel, but it's also like a Philip K. Dick like alternate alternative history or alternate history. It's it's a fascinating book that draws on real history of the world. It's basically The Great Game, but more in a steampunk environment where it's a little bit of Ian Fleming, where mysticism and mentalism actually exist. I mean, it's a fascinating book. Where did this come from?
Because there's two of these, there's actually I'm working on the third one.
We're in will I on a regular basis.
You know, my wife's an artist, and all of the illustrations in that book.
Are from her.
Oh cool, So.
But you know, I'll regularly say to her.
Recently, I'm saying like, I'm going back to my office and back to nineteen fifteen, because book three is set in World War One. So what I'd like to tell people about this series is, if you can imagine Rudyard Kipling's Kim meeting stan Lee's Doctor Strange. Yeah, yeah, that's the story.
But there's Ian fleming that there's there's Her Majesty's Secret Service.
Oh well yeah, well, well here's the here's the deal. I mean, when in the eighties, when I was in f you know, doing the Afghan stuff. One of the things that I really believe in is if you're going to do this trade, you have to understand history. Whatever
culture you're working against, you have to understand history. So the good news is when the Brits left the subcontinent, they left behind the print plates for all of their old books, and so you could buy in books you still can buy in bookstores memoirs of you know, twenty years on a Kiber, this and that and the other thing. Well, a lot of those books include these statements that, you know, the guy dyes his skin with walnut oil and puts
on the local garb and disappears in the crowd. Well listen, bullshit, trust me. Yeah, I mean exactly. I mean, I speak the language pretty darn good. I grew a beard that looked like zz top. But let me tell you, I didn't fool any locals, right except maybe at a distance where if they were looking to shoot somebody.
They might not shoot me first.
They'd shoot me eventually they were not going to shoot me first.
So okay, fine.
So but I thought to myself, Okay, well I know it's not true, but what if it was true. Well, if it was true, somebody would have to teach these guys to do this stuff. So I created the school right where they were being taught how to disappear into the crowd, how to run their operations against the Russians. Now by the second book, they're Russians and the Brits are allies, and they're running their operations against the Germans, as they are in this new book too. But it's
a fun book. It takes a lot longer to write because I put real people into the story, and those real people kind of have to be where I say they are, right, because most folks are going to wonder about who are these people? And in today's world of Google and Wikipedia, people are going to really quick no if I was completely off base, right, So I do.
I do a fair bit of research.
But of course, as I said, I bought a whole bunch of books from that time period and brought them back to the States. My office has got probably five hundred books of background stuff that I can use.
It just means I have to be a student again. That's all.
Well, what's so fascinating about it?
Is it like in a lot of like in some ways, if you took out the fictional elements, the characters, the you know that, you know, the steampunk, you know, the you know, the magic or whatever, it's a history book.
Like there's so much rich history in it.
About Afghanistan, about like there are so many things and I'm like, oh my gosh, like you know.
You're talking about the possible.
Oh yeah, I mean when I'm talking about the Waziris and the Mansuits, and that's absolutely the Waziris and the Marsuits were regularly causing trouble up on the and the Fata.
Well you know.
And and the thing about the mysticism is interesting. I got that from there was a h An adventurer, a Belgian adventurer that went up into Tibet in the thirties.
Oh and he came and he came.
Back and wrote this book about all those things that I'm talking about, right, all the the you know, the the uh being able to jump long distances and being able to be untelepathy and all that stuff. Now another you know short you know, reality story. I have a friend who I worked with for years and years and years, Special Forces guy was also an Olympic kayaker, and years later he was hired by National Geographic to be a
scout for them. They were going to sport a sponsor a team that was going to try and and and whitewater raft, so rafting on the headwaters of the Ganges all the way from Nepal down to Calcutta. Well, you know, my friend Wick, he uh, and he's a writer as well. He's he's now, of course we're all geezers, so we can't be adventurers anymore.
We have to write.
But he was doing this and he was you know, of course he doesn't speak Nepali uh, and he doesn't speak kindy. So so what he did was on his first leg of the whitewater, he hired a young man who was from the University Katmandu, spoke good English uh and was a comparative religion guy, which in University cat And who meant he was comparing red hat white hat Buddhism.
But anyhow, Wicks, you know, spending his time with this guy and at one point he says, after some weeks and he's made friends with the guy look at He says, I don't want to insult you, but I've been reading for years about the fact that, you know, Tibetan monks could could you know, astral project from one monastery to
another monastery, and you know all that stuff. I've read this book about this guy who says he's seen all this stuff, like really, And the young man said, you know, yeah, absolutely, there's you got to separate facts in fiction, right, I mean, it's our religion is our religion, and we believe these things and some of these things, he says personally, and
then he he you know, raises his hand. He says, I've never seen a monk Levita anymore than up the height of my shoulder, and and wiccoes, all right, then that answers the question, you know.
So so I just.
Put that stuff in because it's fun, it's you know, and it gives me an opportunity to get some of the characters out of jams. Sure that would they would otherwise, you know. And and partly it's true that if you are able to, i mean, disappearing in the crowd is one thing. But there's plenty of stories of modern stories about snipers disappearing into ground that nobody would expect they could disappear too, right, And that's because.
What well, I mean, it's it's because.
They understand how the adversary's mind works. So if you look like something that the adversary expects to see, then you are. You're not invisible in the sense of doctor Strange invisible, but you are invisible to your adversary.
Because I don't see you. Right.
It's also like it's just a fun element to the story.
Let's jump into the user questions here. Let's try to get through these for JR.
Okay, Jerry, thank you very much.
Do you have knowledge about operations some moom back in nineteen ninety in Iraq?
No, I mean, I'm not a I'm a Central Asian guy, So I'm sorry, I can't.
I can't speak on.
Iraq at all. My I made two trips to Iraq, and neither one of them were in that time period. I mean I made two trips in the Rock because I had some of my black propaganda team there, so I was in Bagdad and Ramadi a couple of times. But no, sorry, I I'm not trying to dodge it. I just don't know anything.
About it, and you know, as you weren't trying to judge. It's totally cool.
We get it, John Verre, but we know you John Pierre, thank you very much.
Keeping people safe. Last year was reported that the agents.
Made to call out on the loss of too many informants? Is the is the cause the tougher environments or the lack of talented handlers?
And I'm going to add on to this order, is there do you think that there are other issues?
Well, first of all, right, the whole idea of what's called uts right, ubiquitous technical surveillance makes it exceptionally hard to do the old kind of trade craft I did.
Right.
Then you add to that, how are you going to communicate with these folks if you can't see him face to face? Well, then you then you enter another piece of Now you're into another world where cyber operations and cybersecurity and everything else. So I think that what happens is we go through it is and I don't want to make light of it because it's people's deaths, But it is a competition, just like it's a competition between
stealth aircraft and air defense. You're constantly competing with your adversary who's trying to get better to defeat you, and then as they start to defeat you, you have to figure out new mechanisms, new means to get through it. So I think probably the answer is the technology is moving so quickly now that it's really hard to do the job that I mean, you couldn't do the job
that I did. Really, honestly, the sort of trade craft I used might as well be you might as well be talking about the nineteenth century.
Right, Yeah, Rowdy's incoherent rambling.
Thank you very much for your donation. Very good podcast.
Thank you.
I spent a good bit of last night actually doing some more research on early two thousand and one operations. Interesting listening to someone who is on the ground watching it all unfold. And thank you very much Jr. For being here and for sharing your experiences with us and with our audience.
Like, well, it's my you know, I won't say a pleasure because it reminds me of a death of a teammate, but it is nice to be able to now, twenty years later, be able to talk about something and tell people, how to explain to people how complicated it is. It's not it's not easy to do this stuff, and it requires time on target. Yeah, you know it, two thousand and one didn't happen because of two thousand and one.
It happened because of we were doing in the nineteen eighties.
Right, And you could say the same thing about what happened in Iraq.
You could say the same thing today. Probably.
I mean, I don't know anything about Ukraine except what I read the newspaper. But my guess is some of those successes are probably associated with a partnership between the Ukrainians and some part of the United States government.
Right, just say it, right that the foundation has been there, Sassar an Omen, thank you very much for the donation. Thanksteam House. Your content never disappoints. Thank you that with We're all broke my heart in your opinion? Does this so this is your opinion. It doesn't have to be based on anything you do or don't know. Does CEI have plans in supporting the resistance Afghanistan?
Yeah?
Would you think about would you think that the agency would have plans in supporting the resistance there?
Or do you think that would probably just pull up?
I mean again, it's been years and years since I've been I haven't been in the building and only that as a guest, and that was five years ago. So I mean, so that's again, let's go back to what I said before. In nineteen eighty nine, theoretically we stopped being in contact with Afghans? Did we stop? Were we and we like stop the whole program? Did we stop working with Afghans?
Well?
No, you know, now it's complicated by the way that everything has happened in Afghanistan. But you know, in nineteen ninety one and ninety two, we were still contacting Afghans in the middle of a civil war. In nineteen ninety eight, I was still contacting Afghans when the Taliban were in charge. So I can't imagine that there aren't people in the agency working this problem set. However, I want to reinforce to your to your to the folks who write and to you guys. I don't know, right, I'm a geezer.
I am long out of practice. I mean, it was amazing. I tell people. When I tell people I was riding on you know, on horses at forty six, they roll their eyes at that. You can imagine. You can imagine at sixty seven how useless I would be in that game, so nobody is much interested in what I have to think or say.
Yeah, Stuart, oh, thank you very much for the donation.
We really appreciate it. Jr.
Thanks for telling the stories of the accomplishments of you and your team.
Makes me proud.
Well, thank you very much for saying that. It's the that time period was something that was really something and it wasn't just remember we were Alpha Bravo, but it was I mean, if you haven't read the books, I mean, Foxtrot and Condihar is about uh Echo and Fox Fox Trot teams. Uh, there's there's a you know, there were a bunch of I mean, Fox Trott was probably the last of the teams that was behind lines. Uh, but there were teams. I mean we were we were just
two of all those others. And I would have to actually get my fingers and count on my toes to try and figure out how many. But because I'm I'm not real good about the alphabet and all that. But I'm just saying there were a lot of guys out there who committed to this and did very much the same sort of stuff we all fought in this battle, along with the odas, along with the Rangers who went into Condohar early on along with the you know this special boat Service guys that you know were with me
for weeks. Uh, so you know it's it's a good thing.
Scotchy, thank you very much for the genation.
How does black propaganda work when the enemy enemy knows who it's coming from. I want to have more effective trash talk in video games.
Well, the enemy can't know where it's coming from. That's the whole point, right, So what you do in black propaganda is, let's I'll just give you a generic example. So if I well, I mean, you don't have to do a generic example. We could do what the Russians to talk about what the Russians did in sixteen, So they created fictional Americans to reside on the web to say whatever they wanted to. Because they were fictional, they could say whatever. And the idea was to create controversy,
to create hostility on the web. So sometimes those fictional Americans were pro Hillary, sometimes they were pro Donald Trump.
Sometimes they were neither. And they were doing wedge issue stuff, whether it was gun control or abortion or Christianity or whatever that in today's world, it's really it's not easy, but it is much easier to create fictional characters than it's ever been before that are that are that appear real, right, I mean with with Ai especially, you can look like or that that fictional character can absolutely look like he's
writing to you right now, uh huh. And and the time stamp is going to be right, and the IP address is going to be right, all of that stuff. So I would say to your to the it's about making sure that they that you are not who you say you are.
So Scott, you need some sock puppet accounts exactly when you're trash talking and gaming, you need to create some sock puppet accounts to create controversial topics.
I got one last question from Isaac. It's a little bit of a long one, but he says, dear mister Seeger, I'm twenty nine years old in my second year of university getting my bachelor's and Computer information Systems. After that, I want to get my master's in cybersecurity. When I'm done,
I want to apply for the agency. I would be happy doing clandestine services, being a case officer or cyber ops officer, but I want to work, do the work like you did, and go into ground branch but I'm afraid of hitting the same roadblocks as when I tried to enlist. I could not enlist in the army because I didn't qualify for medical waivers, even though I'm not medically restricted at all. The recruiter described to me that a MEPs doctor did not want to take the chance
on me. Also, I had a record for misdemeanor, which has been resolved for a long time. What can I do to make the agency see me and increase my chances of getting in? Do they care if people were never honorable students because I'm not. Does even asking questions a lot format like this hurt my chances?
What do you think? JR?
Okay, First things first, nobody in either the CIA or the FBI is going to look at anybody who's still an undergraduate. What we want to see is a person, and again I've worked with FBI recruiters just as much as I've worked with CIA recruiters. What we want to see as a person who has finished school and then gone to do something else. Because let's face it, when
you're in college, you probably don't meet nasty people. You may think they're nasty professors, but you don't meet challenging nasty people, and you're going to be in the CIA or the FBI, You've got to understand that perspective.
So start with that.
So basically, what they want to see is four year degree followed by some work. Actually they'll be fine with a two year degree followed by some work. Doesn't have to be military, work, doesn't have to be could be anything.
I mean, it just needs to be work.
Then the other part of this, which is important to realize, it's totally different from my world. Everybody applies online. Everybody, and so tell the truth when you apply, show them what you have done, and then hope for the best. Because it's a it's a it's a rigorous selection process, and it is you know, the vetting process starts with checking to see if what you put online is true.
Anybody who might.
Try to make their resume better than it really is probably is immediately going to get rejected. So just tell the truth, do your job, get it, go to school, go to a graduate school. While you're in graduate school, get a job that would be associated with your with your career, and then apply. What's the worst that can happen, right, you know, I mean really, but it's not a secret. You just go online to CIA dot gov or FBI dot gov. It's right there, the applications right there.
Do it.
And in your case, you did apply, you got rejected, and then later on, when you weren't even looking, they called you. So it's sort of it's one of those things where just because you get told no the first time, like, keep living your life and gaining the experience, keep doing things.
Absolutely, and I can understand now looking back on it, why they weren't interested in me in nineteen seventy eight because I'd gone to graduate school and I had just started working period. Right I was in Wyoming working, but I hadn't really proven that I could actually hold a job all that well. I mean i'd proven that I could go to school. Well that's great, lots of people go to school. And you're right, it wasn't until after I had been in the army. And of course it
was just literally dumb luck. But that you know sometimes, you know, Louis Pasteur said something that I like to use this quote a lot, which is fortune favors the prepared mind. Okay, so if you're prepared, then when luck does strike, you know, I mean, you're more likely to succeeed than if the guy who hasn't thought it through.
Yeah, JR, I really appreciate you taking the time. I know I've kept you like way long, almost like three hours here tonight. Again, really appreciate your time and telling the story. I hope people check out the mic for series, oh.
And and the school for the Great Game. Guys, this is a really enjoyable read. If like yeah, I am.
Enjoying that, they'll link to the books is down the description of this video so you can find it right there. Next week, we're going to have a one to sixtieth guy on he flew MH forty seven's for one sixtieth. Excited to talk to him on Friday next Friday. We're also a bit at the end of an era here. We're moving studios, so by the end of this month you're going to see episodes in our new studio. This place is going to be shut down.
Jack and I were just looking at emails or earlier we've been We've been in here for like four years altogether.
Yeah yeah, yeah, so and Jack the Smith, thank you very much for the donation.
We deeply appreciate it. JR.
I would love I know, you split your time between two different locations. When the next time you come through the Greater New York metropolitan area, like sometimes this fall or this winner. I'd love to have you in our new studio because you're also a bit of a historian, and I would love to have you just sit down and discuss the history of CIA paramilitary operations or just CIA in general, because you have so much information about that and you've studied it so closely, you're so passionate
about it. I'd love to continue this conversation, you know later on in this year.
Well, I'll be happy to Justin's already invited me to come to New York and talk to him as well, So, you know, I think we'll make it, make it work.
I'm not sure when.
Uh uh, you know, that's a that's the great thing about being a mere wretched federal pensioner.
I don't actually have a schedule.
Maybe maybe we can have both you and Justin come in at the same time. That would be amazing.
Yeah, uh, okay, guys, well it's been my pleasure and uh and and good luck as you move studios.
That's pretty cool.
Yeah, thank you. We're really excited about it. And all the things that to come. It's gonna be awesome.
JR.
Thank you again, and everybody else out there. We'll see you next Friday. Have a good weekend okay out here.
Thank care, JR.
Thank you JR.