FBI Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) Sniper | Chris Whitcomb | Ep. 231

Special Operations, Cobert Ashby an eye the Team House with your hopes, Jack Murphy and David bark Hey, guys, welcome to episode two hundred and thirty one of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park and we're really happy tonight to have in studio with us. Christopher Whitcomb. Chris served in the FBI as a special agent as a member of the Hostage Rescue Team HRT, involved in all sorts of national level operations, and then went on

to have a very interesting career outside of the FBI as well. He actually retired on nine to eleven on September eleventh. So it's very interesting period of time that you kind of cross pads. And as I was telling you before the show, your book came out like right after nine to eleven, Cold Zero, your memoir, and I read it as a senior in high school, like I and I loved it. I thought it was so awesome.

And so You've been on my radar for a very long time and I'm glad we could like make this happen All these years later, there's still parts of your book that kind of like resonate in the back of my mind. From you know now, twenty years ago. Yeah, it's hard. I mean it's so long ago. I always say I forget the lead character's name, and which is true. But I think history is important in the world that you guys document on the show. And I got to start out by saying,

I'm huge fans. I was. I was, really I couldn't believe it when you called me up and invited me on the show. I'm a huge fan. I think it's remarkable what you do to document all the heroes and the remarkable human beings that are out on the line doing what they do for this country. And anyway, I really really appreciate you bringing me. I got to give a quick shout out to sponsor of tonight's show, Augustus Precious Medals. Go check them out out Augusta Precious Medals dot Com. Appreciate

it, guys. So Chris, I mean, yeah, man, I mean, this is like right in our wheelhouse. I'm really glad to have you here today. Let's start off talking a little bit about you know, your background, your your origin story as it were, how you grew up, your upbringing, and like how that sort of led you towards uh, you know, eventually federal law enforcement. I guess I'll warn you right off the bat. We talked a little bit about this, but my story is

very odd, and for a period of time it made sense. Small town kid joins the FBI, ends up making the hostage rescue team, and during that time was involved in a lot of really high profile and some notorious cases or actions over a course of time. And then when I left the FBI, and I resigned on nine to eleven. Coincidentally, by the way, it was horrible. Nobody ever wants to leave the war on terror on nine

to eleven. That was horrible. We'll come back to that later. But then the story after that is really kind of wild, and I guess we'll get there, but start out, you want me to talk about yeah, and we're gonna you know, we want to spend a sort of the majority of the show talking about your post FBI career because it's fascinating and it's it's an angle of like the intel world that doesn't get talked about often, if

at all, So that'll be great. But we do want to talk about, you know, your time in the FBI, what it was, What year did you go into the FBI? I'm joined in nineteen eighty seven. Yeah, I was twenty seven years old. And when when I was twenty seven getting to the FBI, I think is a crazy part of the story. I grew up in a small town in northern New Hampshire at the ski

area. Small town meaning two hundred and fifty three hundred people home of I was born in Bethlehem and then in a town called Frank Cooney the skier, a Cannon Mountain skier, and Frank Cooney in New Hampshire, home of Bodie Miller, who's the most successful ski year in ski racer in American history, but also home of four FBI agents. I was the fourth FBI agent to come from this tiny little town, which sounds very odd and uh and I always say that I was. I was born on a Thursday to seventeen year

old sweethearts, exactly nine months after the junior prompts. So my uh so, not only did I start out in a small town, but austor beginnings. I suppose My dad was a My dad and mom dropped out of high school. My dad was a ski patrolman at Cannon Mountain and worked summer's mowing ski slopes with a sling blade, a scythe, a handsaw for like a dollar eighteen an hour. So it was a It was an incredible youth.

It was a great place to grow up because everything was outdoor. You know, in those days we had one television channel and all we did was hike, rock climb, ski, race and spend our time outdoors. So, you know, I spent my youth outdoors with no parental controls whatsoever, you know, for better or were. So I grew up in New Hampshire and then went away to college and really never came back after that. And so you joined the FBI at age twenty seven? What I mean? I take

it you had to go to college first. Three. I mean there's different ways to get into the FBI. You could go become an accountant, a lawyer, or have some sort of law enforcement background. I mean, what was the path you two? Yeah, I think people probably find it interesting. I think many shows I watch, I think a lot of people would say, ask this question or ask that question because a lot of people don't really know. There are a lot of myths flying around the FBI or the

CIA or military. But the FBI has very basic rules. I never applied to the FBI. I was living in Washington, DC writing speeches. I was a speechwriter for a member of Congress named Silvio Kanti was a chairman of the Appropriations Committee. And I was fighting boxing out of a gym called Finlay's

Boxing whatever in northeast Washington. There's a rough place, really rough place, and I went sparred one night and this guy named Big Bob Moore knocked me the fuck out, I mean cold, and so I was a little dizzy. I go home, sit down. I was married. My wife was reading a book and she said, hey, you got mail, and I said, okay, whatever. I checked the envelope and it was from the FBI. So I just got knocked out. I was twenty seven years old.

I think what most people would, Why the hell is the FBI after me? You know? So I opened it up and it was an application. So she had seen you talk about recruiting. How do you get recruited to this, and how do you get recruited to that? In my case, she watched a television commercial on local TV in DC. They were recruiting Spanish speakers and I said, I don't speak Spanish, and she said, well, one's that is, when has that ever stopped you? You know, give it a try. So I ended up in the FBI kind of

by accident. And then the process you apply, you take a test, If you pass the test, you go on to a background investigation. Then they get an interview. And in this case, it was interesting because going back to my youth. At the time, the Washington Metropolitan Field Office in Washington, DC was at a place called Buzzard Point and it was a hellhole. I mean, you didn't want to get down there unless you are already

had a gun. It was a pretty rough spot. Go in, go up to the whatever seventh floor, sit down at the table in a conference room with you know, the President and the Attorney General with pictures on the wall and the big FBI seal, and I'm wearing a suit, and you know, I'm thinking, how do you get in the FBI? It just seemed kind of odd. And there were three people that did the interview.

And we go through the whole interview and tell all the stories in the background investigation, and one and we got to the end and this one agent, the lead agent in the interview, said, uh, I had told him that this story about the CIA. I guess should back up at some point toub about that, but I was really should have gone into the CIA. I should have applied to the CIA, and I told him that. He asked me why I wanted to be an FBI agent, and I said,

well, I don't know. You know, I think I might want to go into the CIA as well. And he said, well, why didn't you go? He said, I know why he didn't apply to go to the CIA, and I said, you do and he said yeah, because the CIA doesn't take people who have used illegal drugs. And I thought shit. When I was in college, like most people in college, and I didn't want to go into the FBA. I never thought about it. I was in this band called Doctor Neptune and the Rare Organs, the College Ban.

We did Frank Zappa covers and uh, you know, I might have dropped a bullet two every you know, every once in a while, but you didn't inhale. I never inhaled r I had inhaled the shit out of it. But anyway, so he was so he was a great guy. And he said, look, the FBI has changed his policy and they allow experimental use of marijuana but not within the last three years. And he said, so, I'm going to say that again. The FBI allows experimental use

of marijuana, but not in the last three years. So let me ask you, mister Witcam, have you ever tried illegal drugs? And I thought, I've tried it, experimental use of marijuana, but not within the last year. So he goes, fantastic yet, and he said, because if you make it, you know, if you get hired, you'll be the fourth FBI agent from frank Coneina, Hampshire. And I thought, well, that sounds almost impossible to believe because it was such a small town. But

then it goes back to this story. When I was growing up in this tiny town, the FBI agent that I knew was living in town. His name was William Sullivan. William Sullivan had been the number two assistant director behind j Ed Gohoover in the FBI during the co Intel years. He was in charge of domestic intelligence gathering Martin Luther King, He was in charge of the

Kennedy assassination investigation, and he was air apparent to j Edghover. He gotten some kind of a pistoon match with Jedghoover and jedghover looked over him handpicking his successor. So William Sullivan said, screw it. He retired, He wrote a book, and he retired in Sugar Hone, the Hampshire. He was scheduled two weeks before the Senate hearings on the Kennedy assassination to go and testify before the United States Senate that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill JFK by himself,

it was a conspiracy. And two weeks before he scheduled to testify, a guy that worked for my dad shot him and killed him in a hunting accident, and that was big news in frank Conis, Hampshire. I didn't notice you didn't do the accident, No, because I know the kid, the guys. He's a really really nice guy. And the guy's dad was a state trooper. He's a remarkable guy, great guy. It was just

it was a tragic accident. But when people talk in my life, and I've been involved in a lot of things in life, but people talk about conspiracies. I always look back on that and think to myself, you cannot tell that story and say you've got to have the right that's the way that goes. But to grow up in a town that's small and where you know

everybody. I knew the chief of police, this guy Barney Young. As it turns out, there was another FBI agent named Tim Casey who was at the chief of Police's house the night that William Sullivan was shot and killed. The next morning he was hunting season and you put all of it together and it's just it's one of those stories. It has not been widely written about, but it is a compelling conspiracy. It's and it's not a conspiracy. It's just a tragic accident. But that's, you know, that's kind of

whey that world works. So Tim Casey, William Sullivan, h the FBI agents, the gentleman that was interviewing me at the when I got in, and I was the fourth. I don't know about anybody since then. So that was that small town. But what was really remarkabout it remarkable, I think, is that an adjacent town, Land affterw Hampshire even smaller. The man that I grew up calling uncle Harold's name was Harold Janine. Harold Janine doesn't mean much now, but at the time he was kind of Bill Gates

and Elon Musk and several others all put together. He started a company called itt Itt now as Community Colleges or something. Yeah. At the time it was the world's first multinational corporation. They had Sheridan Hotels, they had Avis Renakar, they had Continental Bakery. They made wonderbread and Twinkies Wow. They made Cony shock absorbers. They made the tele communication cables that go under the North Atlantic. They were the biggest multinational corporation in the world. He was

the chairman of the board and the CEO. And he had had a farm which they called the farm which comes in later on this hilltop in hand and excuse me, on land after New Hampshire, and that's where I grew up. Harold Janine paid the CIA in nineteen seventy Harold Janine paid the CIA one million dollars in cash to overthrow the government of Chili. And this is widely written about New York Times books, and the CIA I think did not take

the million dollars in cash because they got onto it. Somebody discovered it ahead of time, but it was widely written about at the time. But the government was overthrown. Salvadori Enda, the president of Chili, was killed and hit squads came after Uncle Harold. They blew up the Itt Office building, Madison Avenue, Manhattan, and they came to kill him. He and his bodyguards went to the farm in New Hampshire. So I grew up with those guys. I grew up with Jerry Sabbatino, who we called Bullet, who

had because odd Job was already taken. He looked he looked just like Odd Job. And so I grew up with all of these guys coming and going at all hours a day and night, briefcases and limousines, private jets. He had a Grumm and Goose, an amphibious plane that would land in the water in the Connecticut River and take off. It was It was pretty incredible and everything that goes with it, Like we there's a pool room, right, I mean, this was a mansion. It was a really remarkable place.

And we were playing one day and we found this secret door in a closet by the in the pool room, full of all these eavesdropping devices, you know, the pelican cases, full of all of these weird looking guns and stuff. It was pretty incredible. And to hear the stories that he would tell about the way the world really worked. I was thirteen, twelve, thirteen years old at the time, but I remember it very well. And he hired a guy named John mccoone, who called Jack. Jack McCown

was the most recent director of the CIA. So Harold Janine was intimately involved and historically documented as the private arm of the CIA at a time when that's what was like David Rockefeller or Ross Perrot in later years. Exactly right, exactly right. So, I mean he had started out at Bell and Howell, and he had worked classified projects all the way back to World War Two.

So to grow up in a tiny town with those stories about the guy that worked for my dad shooting the number two guy in the in the FBI, and uncle Harold, who was literally the the cliving in a Spye novel. For a twelve year old kid during the height of the Cold War, I mean, I'd duck and cover in, you know, in school, and I'd go home and we would check it out as fucking secret stashes of guns and closets, and all his bodyguards would teach us how to shoot.

It was. It was really remarkable way to grow up. So then I went away to school and that's how I found my way back in that office at Buzzard's point. So one of the things that stands out in my mind again, you know, after I've read your booking like two thousand and one, was you're going through your FBI training and your instructors are trying to drill into you like, hey man, this isn't like the movies. You're you're not a g man with a Tommy gun shooting up gangsters. It doesn't work

like that. And then you get to your first station, your first day as an actual FBI agent out somewhere out in the Midwest. As I recall, Yeah, can you tell us a little bit about that day. Yeah. So, for those who have ever thought about joining the FBI, you give up your entire life and you go to the academy at Quantico. The CIA has basically has two academies, right the Farm and Harvey Point and other places here, schools and stuff like that, But the FBI has one.

The academy. It's on the Quantico Marine Corps reservation. You show up with a suitcase, you check in on a Sunday night, and you stay there for now. I think it might be eighteen weeks. When I went through, it was sixteen weeks. So you live there for four months and you never see I didn't see my wife, I didn't see my had a brand new baby. I didn't see him at all. And you live there and uh, you know, it's it's it's very different. You really consumed by

that world. Then one day they give you orders. In this case, it was Kansas City. I didn't even know what Kansas City was. I mean, I show up in Kansas City, checked into the Adams Mark Hotel or something, and I'm looking out over the sea. I remember very clearly. We've driven from Quantico to Kansas City and a Jeep c J seven with a lift kit and a canvas top, miserable drive with a baby who was like eight months old and my wife was pregnant with the next one right nowhere

conditioning in July, and we roll up there. She's tough as nails and uh but that's where it started. So check in, you look out over the city and say life a fighting crime, you know, And at the time it was it was kind of cool. So the next day go into the office, You sit around and you look at read the newspaper, have a cup of coffee, like you think of a you know, sitting around an FBI agent. And so it was like ten o'clock in the morning or

something like that. I was in the I was in the bathroom, standing at a urinal. This guy, Roger came in said, hey, kid, let's go. We we got a situation. And I was on the bank robbery squad. Now, when you go in the FBI, you could work a lot of different classifications. You could work violent crime, you could work white color clime, you could work invest applicants, you could work a million different things. I just got lucky ended up on a bank robbery squad

for what I wanted to do. So we jumped in the car. And now, remember going Before going in the FBI, I'd been all over the world. I mean I'd probably been to twenty countries at that point. I'd lived in LA and I had a lot of experiences before I went in. So and I had been a speechwriter for a senior member of Congress. I'd go to every Thursday. We'd go to the Oval Office, to the to

the White House. My boss had a nineteen sixty eight gto judge with factory flames on the side, a red gto with a white convertible top and I'd get in the car with him when we drive down Pennsylvania Avenue, turn left into the White House park in front of the Oval office. It was cool, I mean it was remarkable. So I get in a car with the supervisor and with the squad supervisor and with the ASAC. The ASAC is the Assistant Special Agent charge, like the number two and one of the number three

guys in the office. And I'm in the back seat right so I'm thinking, cool, I'm riding with the big boys, first day on the job, and just complete moron. I was an idiot, complete idiot. We roll up on this thing and the bank robber squad had found a guy in a house and they thought he had kids in the house with him and didn't want to have a hasted situation, so they put together a ruse where they dressed two guys up, they dressed two guys down, and they went to

the front door with like a TV or something. There was selling raffle tickets for a Literal League giveaway or something. They knock on the door, the guy comes out, Oh, I'm sorry. We were all stationed around like because a big HiT's gonna go down. Right, We're taking down this armed bank roarber, armed and dangerous, and there are streets shut down and people

hiding behind trees like you see, and I'm thinking cool. The door opens up and this guy comes out with this big chrome you know, three fifty seven forty four magnum whatever, and it was on man. It was the guys dive off and everybody's piling out of their cars with their shotguns and it's going down ten o'clock in the morning, the mean streets of Kansas City.

And I remember clearing the backseat of the car coming around, and they teach you to kneel down behind the tire because bullets go through sheet metal, obviously, And I'm behind there and I've got my gun and uh, you know, trying to draw a beat on the guy. And all of a sudden, I hear somebody yelling wick um, wick um, and I'm thinking, am I supposed to charge the house? I'm like, you know, I'm

the one who's gonna save the day. And it was the boss. It was the Asac and he goes, you put that fucking gun back in your holster and you hide behind that tire, and I don't want to see you again, and I'm I mean I was destroyed. I was ruined. So I go, what am I going to do? So I sat down behind the tire and then everybody else who's there, who's fully involved in this thing, and it was a pretty big deal and they all see me and they start screaming at me, what the hell is wrong with you? Get your

gun out, getting the fight. So the bosses yelling at me to hide, and the rest of the crew is is calling me names but not joining the fight. So it was that was quite a first day on the job. I love the idea of like your first you know, your first day on the job. Everybody has this image in the cells and it sounds like you're getting called up to the show. Like they see like they see how cool I am. I'm they recognize talents exactly right, Like, let me

just think about it, getting called by name up to the show. It doesn't matter what you go into, any brands of the military, ating laws and whatever else you think. When you join, you're a special. You're special. I mean they give you a badge and a gun. Yeah, and you've got thirty statutes that you can enforce. You know, you're the guy who's supposed to save democracy, the hero in the Western world, and it happens. It's not like I gotta wait two years before I get involved

in something. It's day one, ten o'clock in the morning. It's not your first cup of coffee. The next thing you know, you're in this but row down. But but it's just it's just the reality. It's like it reminds me of Star Wars, whereverybody feels like, you know, they're Luke Skywalker and you know they're usually like read two or whoever gets blown out or you're like, yeah, but the idea that I'm getting called up and then from put your gun away, it's like, oh shit, yeah.

But well, in my case, I was an idiot, complete one, but I didn't know what to do. But you know, it worked out and they sent me. The FBI has offices field offices around the country, and they have satellite offices they called resident agencies, and it was a resident agency about two hours south, two or three hours south in Springfield, and they sent me down there and then it was four years of just incredible work. It was just it was a dream come true. Flip me read these

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eighty three percent. That's just two dollars and three cents a month, and you also get four extra months completely for free. But you must go to pia vpn dot com slash the team house for a truly private digital life. So, Chris, when did HRT first come up on your radar? Like that even becomes something you hear about in those days? Very different world. Back then. In those days, nobody really knew a lot about anything.

I mean, now we live in a magic age of information. You guys, as in this podcast bring the average person face to face with remarkable human beings who've done incredible things. Right, None of that existed back then,

even within the FBI. So all I knew about the Hostage Reski team at the time, and we're talking now nine ninety one, nineteen ninety all I really knew was there was a group at the FBI Academy who had a compound off in the woods, off to the side, and they had helicopters, and they wore No Mac's flight suits, and you'd see him in the gym or in the cafeteria. You did, people to talk kind of in hush

tones about them. You didn't really know much about it. So the way the FBI works, in particular at that time, they would they the FBI would move new agents or excuse me, would move agents based on the needs of the bureau. So if you had been a certain amount of time in one office, they could arbitrarily move you without much notice at all. So after four years I got a call from Kansas City and they said, look

at your time's up. You're going to rotate out and you're gonna go either in New York or to la I had two sons at the time, Mick and Jake, and it was great. I mean, working in the FBI at that time in Springfield, Missouri was kind of the white picket fence, right. I had a nice house. You worked essentially from eight to six or something like that. It was really a straightforward job, and you're kind of a small business person, a contractor really in the sense that you go

find your own cases. You don't just go in In a bigger city, it's different New York Field office, it's very, very different. But a resident agency, you would have a case load in my case, maybe twenty twenty five case or something like that, and I could go out and work a bank robbery suspect in the middle of the ozark someplace by myself and not see anybody else. So it was a great gig. My gig was up. I didn't want to go to New York and I didn't want to go

to LA. Talked to Rose, my wife, and said, what are we going to do? And I had heard about knew something about this hostage Rescue team and they had a selection once a year and the selection came in March. So I said, I'm going to try out. So I applied, I got a try out. I went back to Quantico, I made it through the tryout, and I somehow got picked for the team. That's how it happened. And what year was that? Ninety one? So yeah, and this was also I mean you didn't know it at the time,

but coming up on like a pivotal time of American history. Uh. You know, we've had Danny Colson on the show, who you know, has created HRT. We've had Gary Nosner, yeah, who was one of the negotiators. So do you want to start talking about a little bit about, you know, what was going on domestically at that time and sort of like what HRT's portfolio looked like at that moment. Yeah. Two things. One, the United States government at that time looked at terrorism as a domestic law

enforcement function, and it was the domain of the FBI. It was a federal offense terrorism at large. So at that time, just for example, on nine eleven, well I'm skipping ahead. Let me come back and just say that at that time I joined HRT nineteen ninety one, they were about seventy seven zero designated terrorist organizations throughout the world, one of which was Al Qaeda, just one. I mean, they might have been number thirty down

the list. There were Red brigades, and there were endless numbers of them, and they were prolific. In the nineteen eighties, hijacking was a regular occurrence and they I mean, anybody that goes back and does a research. Terrorism was a completely different world than it is today. Something would happen all

the time. There would be a bombing, a hijacking, a murder, or something really extraordinary, and the United States government looked at it as a criminal, criminal enterprise that would be investigated by the FBI and prosecuted by United States attorneys. That's the way the system worked, Okay, So anywhere we found terrorists, we would go and get them, like the weatherman and the weatherman, I mean there were so many. I mean, yeah, but

we would then, Yes, Irish Republican Army Black September Red Brigades. I think I'm shun Rico was a little bit later, but there were so many of them. My point being that prior to nine to eleven, it was not the per view of the military. It was almost exclusive the FBI. So we the FBI would work with the CIA in terms of putting together different actions, especially outside the United States. And one myth many people think the

FBI works inside the United States and the CIA works outside. Couldn't be further from the truth. The FBI has legal attaches or field offices throughout the world, and we can chase, investigate, and help prosecute crimes wherever they occur in the world involving Americans. Okay, so that's one aspect of what HRT did at the time in the early nineteen nineties. And then also we would work anything that was a high profile crime that would escalate to that point.

People think various things about HRT because it's very very poorly understood. The Hostage Resky Team is not a swat team. They are not a negotiation element. They are a tactical hostage rescue component. That is, and people talk about Tier one. Yea, I don't even know what that means. There are certain entities people who say that term don't know what it means. Yeah, I don't even know where that came from. In the nineteen nineties, there

were three tactical elements the United States relied upon for in extremist violence. Delta Force or whatever the unit or Combat Application Group in the day, it was still called Delta Force, Seal Team six with DEV group, and because of a lack hall the Possecommatatas, the United States government could not send military in a law enforcement crisis in the United States. So if you had a hastage situation, well, I'll use the Olympics, the Olympics in Los Angeles.

Coming out of the Olympics in Munich where all of those athletes were killed in the terrorist action, the United States government didn't want that to happen. So the Attorney General at the time went to Fort Bragg to see a demonstration by Delta to show how they would resolve a hastage situation for the Los Angeles Olympics, which was nineteen eighty four I think was eighty four eighty six, So

he went down. It was a very famous story, and he went up, I mean it was Delta, right, I'm sure it was a remarkable demonstration. Went up and said, fabulous. The only thing I don't see is handcuffs. Were the handcuffs And the guy, one of the operators, looks at him and goes, I don't know what you're talking about. We

give them all too right here, right, the handcuffs. And he thought to himself, as Attorney General, you know, the number one law enforcement agent agent opera official in the United States, and he said, okay, we can't have that. So, and I've said this before. When Delta started as a hostage rescue component, not even a special warfare component, but

a specific entity, they had to invent all that shit. They invented CQB, they invented fast roping, they invented tactical rapping, they invented all of those different things, and a lot of that came out of the swap community. So when Delta started, they pioneered those tactics based on what had come from the Los Angeles Swat Team Los Angeles Policeman squat Team, and received a

lot of help from the FBI. And I've said this before, and I hope I'm right, But I've been told by numerous sources that most of the original Delta guys came through the FBI Academy undercover in order to work in that world, right, which will come back, because I truly believe you never

know who the fuck anybody is anyways. But so anyways, when HRT, excuse me, when the US government decided to get ready for the Los Angeles Olympics, they decided to put together a civilian component that became HRT, and they had to put it someplace, so they put it in the FBI. So they created a civilian version of Delta, same weapons, tactics, same command structure, even a very very similar selection process. And they built and they built that put it in the FBI, and that started. Danny Colson

started that nineteen eighty three. So I always found it interesting. Fascinates me about HRTs. They have that counter terrorism capability that you describe, but they're also cops. They can investigate crimes, collect evidence, make arrests. Well, the short answer is yes. So you have people who ask me, what are the legal justifications and it is Title eighteen us COO. Title eighteen provides for certain capabilities and authorizations for federal law enforcement. And you could have

a special agent in different agencies. But the special agent people always say, what's so special special about you? Right, you're not going to trail apark at two in the morning. And that's the first thing I always say, what's so special about you? That's the that's the authorization, and the specific designation is eighteen eleven. That is a specific designation that you can carry a gun and you have arrest authority and all of that. The FBI has certain

criminal violations that they investigate, one of which is not murder. Murder is not even a federal crime except in certain applications I mean, like political violence, political violence certain judges. Yes, exactly right. So you have late, local, state, and federal organizations. Each has their own jurisdictions. The FBI has a specific one has a set of specific Did they also get

involved where in it's across state lines? Like yes, that's how it originally started that if you have a crime in Iowa, you can't chase across state lines to another And Jed Goober what started as the Bureau of Investigation before the Federal Bureau of Investigation was designed to allow an entity to chase crime across borders, and then it went from their financial crimes, financial instruments, things like

that. So at the time terrorism was considered a federal crime, the Hostage Rescue Team was a highly evolved tactical component that could chase anywhere in the world any crime involving an American, specifically terrorism, with the idea that if someone were taken hostage, you would need somebody to go in and resolve it, and that's what they did. So when I joined HRT, that was their

primary operation. Coming back to this the second point, which is some of those crimes escalate too unusual circumstances, which is where this conversation always goes, which is Ruby Ridge and Waco. Right, I was a both. Some people may have seen the Netflix documentary Abound Waco, and I will say two things. One that I'm sick of talking about it, but I understand that

it is a pivotal thing in America and history. And I fully understand that it is a hot button issue that I hate to talk about just because I have to go over and over and over and over again. But it's a tragedy. I mean, eighty five or eighty seven people or something like that I died at Waco and on both sides enforcement and the civilians inside, and the same with Ruby Ridge. So they are events that I remember in a lifetime of events, but they are events that stand out as pivotal moments in

American history, and I respect that. I try to do my best to explain my perspectives, fully aware that there are many different perspectives. So if you have any questions about did you watch the documentary? Yeah, did? What did you think of it? Do you think it for people who are curious about it or want to know more that it's a good source of information for them. The director's name is Tilla Russell. He's a brilliant guy. He did an impossible job, and I think it was if I could leave

any lasting testament to Wakele, that would be it. I think he did a brilliant job in a theatrical setting, meaning you know, we had to present it in three hours, and you can't tell something that lasted that long.

You could do three hours just on the last morning. So there are lots of things that I would have talked about in the documentary, But there's lots of things that Branch Davidians would have as Well, so I thought Till a remarkable job, and I think it was a very fair and very balanced way of saying everybody dicked up. I mean, it was a it was a mess. It was awful, had tragic consequences for federal law enforcement officers, and for for women and children and and men that died in that thing.

It was a It was awful, and the same with the same with it would be rich Well in the it's the documentary is called American Apocalypse. Yes, yeah, if people want to go and check it out on Netflix. I've I've watched it. It's definitely worth worth your time. Well, I guess, well, one of the one of the big things that you know, I think it's kind of a kind of shocking or interesting to hear

you know, your part in it. I mean you were a an HRT sniper on both events, and you talk at one point about having David koresh himself in your sights and how that's kind of like something that haunts you even even today. Yeah, I wouldn't say, han, I think maybe the show made it sound like that. Yeah, yeah, that's not what's your perspective. My perspective is this that we had a specific mission. And you

guys know this mission, right. The objective is to go in and kill the bad guys, and you save the good guys and you go home. That's it. You're you're a strike a fast action asset. We didn't. We were not designed to go in and say, dropped the gun. We were not designed to go in with smoke and mirrors. And it was a last resort. So typically at that time, Delta or six or HRT would be held in reserve until every other thing, every other option had failed.

There were no more options. At that time, negotiation was just becoming a big deal. Gary probably talked about this. It was a new construct. It was a new concept that you could talk somebody out of a situation, because, let's face it, what the Texas Rangers and law enforcement through the Wild West, up through the Prohibition errors with al Capone and the Saint Valentine's Valentine's Day massacre, law enforcement up to a certain point in American history was

we're the good guys, you're the bad guys. Do what we say. We're going to kill your right. When we got to that point nineteen ninety two, ninety three Waco first, were we origin and Waco were right together. When we get to that point, we the United States government had new assets, specifically the Hostage Rescue Team, and did not as a government as a country, really have a strong sense of what we would do with them.

And I'll say it for this very specifically. At that time, in the early nineteen nineties, the most prevalent conversation about what was wrong in America at the time was what was called white nationalist, white supremacist organizations like the Covenant, the Sword in the Arm of the World of Mission Danny was involved in, and there were a lot of those organizations that came out of what was called the Turner Diaries. There was a book called the Turner Diaries,

and it was the end. It was Zionists occupied government. It was a big deal. And people don't know those things now, so they don't put it in that frame of reference. Domestic terrorists based on white supremacist, white nationalist identity politics movement was the singular focus of federal law enforcement at that level at that time. So when we went to Ruby Ridge and we went to Waco, they were wrapped within a national sentiment that you've got these crazies living

out in the woods or living out in the field and they're dangerous. I'm not saying that's the reality of it. I'm saying that was the perception that they had these training camps that they're basically preparing to that's exactly conduct violent accents. That's exactly right. So we now know Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris in the Harris family. That's not the that's not it at all. But we didn't have the information at the time. We the hosted Rescue team had information

that we got from other entities. And I mean we didn't even have We had no Google, we had online based, computerized system of gathering information. It was it was primitive. You were reliant on the agency, the organization, right, And I talked about in the ATF right well, one was the marshals and one was the ATP. Well, the ATF at wake Marshals and ATF it was an ATF investigation. It became a marshal's response because they were supposed to go into the arrest. But they were both non FBI cases.

But because you escalate the latter, remember that we had the United States government had one counter terrorism excuse me, had one tactical asset that was the hostage Rescue Team, and it could go anywhere. It could go to a to a county in Tennessee, it could go to a federal UH install, to an airport, and to JIKI standard. It could be absolutely anything.

So it was a time in American history where a set of circumstances met with a set of demands that led to a set of failures that was still talking about thirty years later. Did that lead to I don't know about the overall FBI that specifically for the hostage Rescue team. Did that lead you guys to distrust of other agencies, you know, whether it was the ATF for the

marshal or even local law enforcement. The idea of you guys landing on the ground and not having a recall from reading your book from cold zero, I mean, if I recall correctly, I mean expressed even like outright anger with the negotiators that there you guys were did not have good comms with each other. Well, it's very tough, and I'll say this a couple of things. One, I was a member of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team a long

time ago, and it is a very different entity. It is a remarkable organization that you should have somebody newer on to talk about what they do and how they do it and the endless series of successes that they've had. Right, there were a remarkable group of people that I'm no longer part of. I was a member of that team at a time in history that people still

too to talk about. But you should really have an HRT guy we're talking about, Yeah, Well, I mean there's some truly some remarkable human beings. I mean, these guys, we can tell stories about who they are and where they come from, but they're just anyway. I'll go back and say at that time my personal perspective, and everybody has a different perspective on

something like that. For example, at Ruby Ridge, I heard more gunshots and testified before the Senate that I heard things that nobody else did because the way sound moves in mountains, everything is a little bit different. My perspective at the time in Waco was that we were going in to kill the bad guys and save the good guys. That night, I was on a climbing trip. As I said in a documentary, we had a climbing team, and I grew up rock climbing. We had a climbing trip in Phoenix,

Arizona, and Tucson. I guess, and we went back up too. Or we flew to Waco and the rest of the team hadn't come in, but they came in later that night. There were seven of us that arrived first at Waco, and I thought we would do what we were supposed to do. At the time, negotiations was becoming a much bigger play, and negotiation is, in my opinion, always the best way to go. Loss

of life and a military action is part of the process. Loss of life and a law enforcement organ and a law enforcement action in the United States of America is a It's bad, it is costly, it is irrevably. It lasts in ways that surprised me. Now we're talking about this thirty years later. It causes lasting harm to everyone. Yea, to everyone. So my lasting harm was saying I thought we were gonna go in, We were gonna do what we did and resolve it and go home. It didn't work that

way. We stayed, and then you have I don't want to use an improper metaphor, but if you have the shop trip of a spear or whatever, the metaphor you want to use and you just lay it there. Eventually it's going to rust, or eventually it's going to get lost, or it's going to get knocked around, whatever metaphor you want to use. And it just became a two month long babysitting enterprise, and everything broke down. It broke down within the FBI, It broke down within the federal government, Janet

Reno and the Attorney General, Bill Clinton, the president. It became political. It became everything that it was not. And so I have my perspectives. I don't think anybody should really care what my perspectives are. I did my best. Yeah, I did my job. And then the last day, the ship storm went down of heroic proportions. It was awful and that part was not really talked about in the show. But when we started the

operation the last day, so we go in secure the compound. The United States government, through the FBI hostage negotiators tried to talk this thing out. Everybody came down. The director of the FBI wanted to come down, The sheriff was involved, everybody was trying to get involved in this thing. We just sat and watched. We would do whatever anybody wanted. So we had

armored vehicles. Everybody's seen the videotape. The last day, six o'clock in the morning, we are told that we're supposed to insert gas into the building to force the people out of the building. And that's where you see the tanks going up to the building construction the cev's construction engineering vehicles. Instead of turret mounted guns, they had turret mounted gas projectors, poked holes, put

in gas. The moment they pierced the skin, the branch Davidians opened up on us and hosed us thousands of rounds for hours at a time, and we wrote it out. I mean, I was sitting behind a plates of steel and sand dikes. It was no it's no threat. Nobody shot back. Took a cease fire about ten in the morning, ceasefire from now and uh. And then after negotiations broke down again, we started inserting gas again and then the fire started in the place burned down. So it was that

last morning. It started about six in the morning and it ended about noon. And I remember you talking about, you know, watching the compound burn to the ground and you came down out of your sniper hide with your partner, your sniper partner and standing there, like, what are you thinking as you're like watching this this catastrophe. What I say would not come across.

Well, so I'm not going to say anything about it. I mean, when you sit there and you count fifty one days and all the shit that you go through not knowing what's going on, and what you think about the world, and what you think about right and wrong, and what you think about those children that you'd see every day, I mean they I have photographs

of everything. I have a complete archive of every photograph taken during wake, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of photographs, and I I you know, I showed some of them to tell them, not all of them, but a few of them. But I have a series of photographs of this little kid, probably four years old, little blond headed kid, and he's wearing a red puffy jacket. It was cold, right, It's March, February, March, and the mighty men David Koresh's soldiers, his branch Davidian followers.

I shouldn't call them soldiers, says he called them mighty men. I will call them branch Davidians would come to the window and hold this little kid up as a human shield. And taunt us, or they'd have their guns and they set up their sniper hides, and they were very militaristic in their own right. We knew they had grenades, we knew they had two fifty cows because we saw them. They were very, very, very heavily armed.

But to see these kids and to see them in the windows every single day, we all had kids, we all had families, and then that last day realized that they're all dying. There's no way a human being, in my opinion, can go through something like that and not stumble fall down a

little bit. I mean, it's that That's sort of what I was what I was trying to ask, Like, as a as a cop, you know, you have this as an HRT agent, you have this vision in your mind of like, we're the good guys, We're here to save people. Yes, I mean did standing there watching that? I mean, did it? Did it change your view either of yourself or of your country or of that of the Bureau. Now it didn't. It didn't change any sense of myself or the mission or the people that I worked with, because I

believed in them, I believed in myself. I still do. I still I believe in the heroism of all who serve first responders, and I mean across the board. I come from a family of fireman and military, law enforcement. Anybody to put their ass on the line in the cause of good and my book is a hero and I will always believe very very strongly that those guys rank among the very best, because not only could they have done

anything else in life. Just getting into the fbis kind of hard, right, I mean, you gotta have a master's degree and you got to you got to live a good life and stuff. Getting to HRT is harder. I mean, getting on HRT is hard. There was thirteen thousand FBI agents and this fifty guys, fifty shooters on HRT. In my opinion, there's some of the most remarkable human beings I've ever met in my life. The smartest, the fastest, the most dedicated. They're devoted at the risk of

their own life. And you know, I say it, a significant number of HRT operators have died in training. Yeah, it's a very very dangerous job, and you have to commit in ways that most people don't even think about. And you have to do that for a reason. And the reason is good and when you do something you think is in the name of good that turns out to be something different, it really makes you think what went wrong and how to make it better. Well, and that's one of the

things that uh, you know, the HRC has. They have an incredibly difficult job because a lot of times they can face the exact same threat profile of somebody and the military special Operations unit, but without the lethal recourse, right, you can't if you start taking fire from an objective, you can't step back and then bomb the objective. You know, there's well and we don't. I mean, we didn't have suppressive fire, right. I mean, let's just let's just take a Waco. Let's say let's say they shot

ten thousand rounds. Nobody fired a shot back. Not one. Now, people would argue while we were in tanks and we were behind sandbags, and I would say, you're absolutely right, that's why we didn't shoot back. But you know, I walked out at the end. I talked about it in the documentary. I walked out when the fully the building was fully involved and I walked out of our position to cover just to watch the fire. I mean, I was dumbfounded. Nobody could believe that the place burning,

and you saw it on television. It was a horrendous fire. Yeah, And I walked outside and I was standing there next to a guy that you used to work with, and we were standing there shoulder to shoulder, and a guy cranked off around and it went right between our head. And anybody who's ever been in any kind of live fire situation, you know, you know, you feel the vapor trail going past your head, and that snapped, that hype supersonic snap. And it's not that he almost killed us.

I mean, you know, it's not the first time I was almost been killed. But it was that the building was fully involved in flames. And I said this in the documentary, The guy that tried to kill me, that almost did kill me, had to have been fully involved in flames. When he pulled the trigger. His legs were on fire, his arms were on fire, his clothes were on fire. And the last act he took as a human being on the planet Earth was to try to kill me.

So, you know, I always say, in terms of commitment, you can look at Waco anyway you want, but law enforcement is a very very difficult function in a lot of different ways, and we did have military situations outside Waco and didn't have the same things. We had flash bang grenades instead of frag grenades, right, we didn't have we could not use suppress a

fire. We had helicopters and saws and sixties and fifties and everything else, but very very carefully prescribed rules of engagement on how we could use them. So it's a very tough thing. And you know, as a sniper, a lot of people you've had on with snipers, you talk about it,

and I've talked to various people. In a military application, you can have two guys stand by side by side in the combat situation and you shoot somebody with a fifty eight at a thousand meters and if you hit the wrong guy, it's still wins, right, Right, if you shoot somebody in a law enforcement action and it's two twin brothers and you shoot the wrong twin, even if a good shot you get the wrong guy. If you fuck up

for any reason whatsoever, you're probably going to jail. You're definitely going to get civil action. You're probably going to lose your job, and it's going to ruin your life. So you say I'm gonna take this job, and I'm going to give up my family. I'm going to do all these things to make these sacrifices, and the margin of era is so small it's hard even to explain. Yeah, And so I'm not saying that's a bad thing.

We all take that risk understanding that is the liability. But I think people outside of Waco and Ruby Ridge, I'm just saying, there are human beings working today and tonight in the military and law enforcement, first responders of every kind, who put their lives on the line, who take extraordinary chances, make extraordinary sacrifices, and occasionally they get it wrong. Yeah, because it's it's what humans do. Ye. So final thoughts on Waco and Ruby

Ridge. You know, from your perspective, I mean big takeaways, lessons learned, things that changed within the organization. In the aftermath, everything changed, everything change, the world changed. The first thing, the first and most obvious change, was the creation of the Critical Incident Response Group, the mechanism within the FBI where the federal government said, we are going to pull all of the component parts together and we're going to create a super unit that

can look at all eventualities so that we never fuck up again. In those ways. So what do you need in a crisis situation You need to resolve You need to deal with the criminal with the what are we gonna call the psychology the threat, the psychology of the threat, but the human mind, the human construct of decision making in a situation, the first thing you want

to do is figure out who they are. So we have the behavioral scientists or what we call profilers, the profiles, a national what most people call profiles. That unit is part of critical critical Incident Response Group. The negotiators who take that information and time proven methods of influencing behavior to try and resolve the thing peacefully. Those guys are part of that organization. If that fails, you need a tactical component to save those lives, and that's the hostage

rescue team. And then there's a logistical component. There's there are other components, all brought together are palletized air mobile. At a moment's notice, they can get on the ground and address a situation in a coordinated manner to try and prevent that from happening. And they've been remarkably successful. I mean, if you look at what's happened within the FBI, within federal lawnforcement writ large since nineteen ninety three, in thirty years, it is a remarkable history of

extraordinary successes. Yeah, we don't talk about wacos because there haven't been anyway in thirty thirty years. And wasn't the bunker boy, wasn't that what an incredibly heroic When you actually look at what happened, I got goosebumps on the back of my neck. That's why I say you should talk to real HRT guys. You should talk to current HRT guys. I mean, you know,

I'm old school. The new guys have tactics, they have techniques, they have process that didn't even exist in those days, and that's why they're so successful. But when you look at what's been printed about what happened with that bunker and how they went down excuse me, and save that child, it was remarkable. I mean these guys jumped into a phone booth and a live fire gunfight. Yeah, I mean you talk about having a knife fight

in the phone booth. These guys had fully automatic weapons and it was wired to blow up, and they jumped in there, and I mean they're literally gunfighting hit I mean holding each other and feeling body parts to know where to shoot. So the success is I come on these shows and I feel really badly about it because I go on and I talk about something that's a that's a failure thirty years ago, and I say, talk to the heroes, talk to the remarkable guys and ostrage rescue team that did this today, and

they will. I mean, you'll get them on. Yeah, we'd love to. We'll want to hand it off to the guys that really do Yeah. Now, and they're there. And here's here's the other thing. And this is true about the military, is true about true about the intelligence community.

It's true about the law enforcement community. Is that you're always going to hear about the failures, and and everybody who's going to judge those organizations based on their failures, you know, whether it's a single competent abuse of situation, whether it's Waco, whether it's you know, like my lie or you know or or you know, even in the grade that Danny Coulson talked about, where they diffuse the situation successfully, and there is no laws of way

like those judge. I hadn't heard of that. It's not newsworthy, it's one exactly one the successful operations generally won't even get acknowledged because they were successful and they just happened. And two, it's just not news where that nobody wants to really, unless it's something like the Bunk Roar, where it's you know, this insane situation and these these men act with these outrageous courage. But generally, like most situations, if it if you resolve a situation safely,

that's not sex. Nobody's going to print that. That's not sexy. First of all, HRT has been involved in more than eight hundred, eight hundred tactical resolutions in the last thirty years since Waco eight hundred and how many of you heard about zero, Well, you heard about the boy and the bunker. Yeah, you don't hear about him because they're successful, right, and that kind of a track record eight hundred and zero, right is I don't even know how to put that on. My sense, correct me if

I'm wrong, churis. My sense is that they often try to blend in with the local law enforcement guys and you just never really know. Okay, So here's the perfect example, right, and this is where we're gonna go somewhere down the line. So in my crazy life. We haven't got two yet. I ended up in Patriot Day, the movie about the Boston marathon bombing, right Buddy, Mine's a movie director, and I ended up righting part of it, and I ended up being playing a guy they call the

Virginian. His name is Derek. I'm not going to say his last name, but he was the head of a hostage rescue team component that went into Boston to get the Sarnev brothers. Once they'd been identified, they found one of the kids in the boat in the backyard. And maybe you've seen the movie. If you've seen the movie, there's there's a Netflix documentary on the

Boston bombing too that okay, I found very interesting. Okay, Well, these guys came in and it was funny because he's thinking, can a fast rope in and and uh, you know, saved the day for Boston. What they came in in a minivan. They got to Boston, all the rent at cars were taken, and so they showed up at the gunfight in a minivan and went out and instead of coming in and saying, like you see in the movies where the FBI, we got it, boss, you

know, and whatever you hitting the piston match. They went in, talked behind the scenes with the Boston police entities, not just a Boston police department, And you talk to any of them, and I have. I've talked to them all and dragged beer with them, and you know the time I was up there for the movie, which was two months or whatever. And to a person, they'll all say the same thing that who were those guys?

They were remarkable that the way they came in out of nowhere, they contributed, they helped to resolve it in a professional, tactical and silent manner, and disappeared without a press release. And I think to this day you would talk to anybody involved in that situation and they'll still say the same thing, who were those guys? Yeah, And that's what you want, an entity that is so good even to this And I'll say this, Once HRT got the guys out of the boat or they talked to him, a negotiator

who happened to be this remarkable guy. He was an HRT operator, became a negotiator, left the team, became a negotiator, and he talked him out of the boat and HRT affected the catcher. But rather than hook the guy up and take him away, the best known terrorist in America at the

time. Once it was resolved in the backyard, away from the cameras and away from everybody else, they turned it to a component of all the different law enforcement organizations who went in handcuffed him and took him out themselves and brought him to justice. Meaning they went in resolved and disappeared. And what the quiet professionalism you would most want in an entity like that. There were absolutely remarkable group of guys, Yeah, that have been very badly misunderstood, mischaracterized,

and I hope that changes. But another moment, you know, kind of wrapping up the HRT stuff, another moment that stands out all these years later from from your book is you talked about being down, you know, behind your long gun out at the range one day shooting. You're going to the Marine Corps Scout sniper cours as I recall, Yeah, I graduated Marine cors Scot Sniper school, and so you're you're out there on the range shooting and you said you got up and you just realized that they you were,

you were done. You had proved everything you felt you had approved to yourself behind a rifle. Well, could you talk a little bit about like what that moment was. I mean, you said also quitting HRT was like one of the hardest decisions of your life. Well, I wrote a book about it, you know. But the book came out twenty three years ago. Yeah, twenty three years ago, and not happened after that. Well you can see it had like an outsized, you know, impact on a teenage

Jack Murphy. You know. Yes, these things stand out my mind. No, and listen, what I wrote about it at that time was accurate, It was honest, and I'm and I stand by what I wrote. There was a day when it was over. It was more complex than that. And here's why. Yeah, I way it out. Man, when you're an FBI agent and you want if you're an FBI agent, you can't have an outside job, right, you can't work on the side to make more money. You've got to get anything has to be approved. If you

write a book, you're stepping in ship. Yeah, you just can't write a book if you're an FBI agent. But what we haven't discussed yet is I didn't want to become an FBI agent. I wanted to write books. I grew up. I thought it was going to be. I was a speechwriter. I went to Californity to be a rock star right out of college. Right I went to California be a rock star. I didn't work out very well. So I served and I was a bartender and I wrote.

I got my first gig writing for Orange Coast magazine, Big Deal. I wrote about alternative energy in the eighties. Right then I got hired from there to teach English at a boarding school. So I went to the Berkshire School in western Massachusetts, and I taught English and ran the theater program. That's what I thought I was going to do with my life. I had no interest in all this other stuff. Then I went from there to a newspaper.

We're going to get to the rest of the story. I went to the North Adams Transcript in North Adams, Massachusetts, and I became the city hall reporter, so magazine writer, rock filled rock star magazine reporter, English teacher at a boarding school, newspaper reporter. I left the newspaper reporting job for a couple of different reasons. And the guy that took my job was

Danny Pearl. Daniel Pearl, Yeah, he took He took the city hall reporting job the North Adams Transcript. He was even the same fraternity I was in. I was Aha Alpha Delta Phi fraternity in college, and so was he. These these bizarre parallels that kind of follow through my life. But I left the newspaper and I got called by this congressman who said he had read an article that I had written about him, and said, hey,

you want to come to work for me. But I said, all right, I got on a bus, or excuse me, I got on a train and I went to DC and I wrote speeches. So it had all been writing, it had all been chasing art, It had all been something that had nothing to do with law enforcement, but always with the CIA and the back of my mind because of Uncle Harold. I mean, I literally grew up at the farm with surrounded by guys with weird guns and recording devices

and people coming from Chile to try to kill him. And I mean you can read about all this in the New York Times, in various books. I'm you know, I'm not exaggerating. Any of it was wild. So anyway, so I got into the FBI and it went from there, but that's not where it was originally intended to go. So while I was in

the FBI. I continued to write after Ruby Ridge. I wrote a novel called Rules of Engagement, and it was basically about a white supremacist group and a guy goes in undercover and had a lot of overtones of Ruby Ridge. I kind of played it out in a novel. Couldn't sell it, couldn't get arrested. In those days, you would send out a self draft stamped envelope in a query letter and they would stack some of them. You know, it's just the stories were ridiculous. Couldn't do anything, and then one

day, well backup on a second. So I wrote one of these. I wrote this novel. One of the guys on the team had gone to law school with a guy named let's called Joe. He's gone in law school with a guy named Joe. Joe had moved to Hollywood and he was trying to make it as a screenwriter. My buddy said, I'll introduce you guys, maybe you can turn a novel and a screenplay. He did. We tried. He introduced me to another guy who will call him Pete. His

name is Pete. He's a big movie director at the time. He wasn't at the time he was an unemployed actor, and then they introduced me to this person and that person, and it was this who's who of household names who were just getting started. Tayleyoni and Jason Patrick, Christy Turlington, this guy Terry Quinn, this New York City firefighter, Terry Quinn is one of

the most remarkable guys you ever met in your life. He would have Cindy Crawford would come up to the firehouse and cook dinner and they and he had one of the hottest clubs in New York. He's a prince of the city. And everybody, Eric Roberts and Vince Vaughn, I mean, anybody that was big in those days all came through that circle. And they all started out with this guy in the FBI who had a forty five and was, you know, flying around the world doing all this weird shite. So somehow

it all came together where I was on the hostage rescue team. I had written a book that took me to Hollywood, and all of a sudden, I'm hanging out with people at the time who were just trying to make it and now they're all huge stars, including one who I met at the Mercer hotel. So I mean everybody as a clubhouse, right, we had a clubhouse in la and a clubhouse in New York. The clubhouse in New York

at that time was the Mercer Hotel when it opened. For those who don't know, SOHO in the late nineties was kind of a hellhole, right, it was. The Gougenheim was there. He had Lucky Strike and Finelli Bob the bartender at Finelli's right. And but for those who don't know, the Mercer Hotel was Andre Blaje opened this really swine hotel and you had to be somebody to stay there. And I got to stay there because all my friends were somebody, right. I was just a mutt. I was an idiot.

And so one day I go up. I had just come back from Yemen. I'd just done a gig in Yemen, which I'd like to talk about, and so I go up, and I think we would go up have these fascinating dinners. I was up one dinner and one night it was lou Reid and Henry Kissinger at this Turkish restaurant. I mean, you never knew who was going to show up. It was wild and it was you know, it was three years or something. It was a long So anyway, I go to the Mersey Hotel, just got back from Yemen. It's

almost Christmas. I go, what do we doing tonight? Big dinner party. He says, no, we're playing cards, and I said, whatever, We go up. We're having a card game. All the boys coming in. One guy, you know, meeting all these guys. One of the guys's Red Pitt, one of the greatest guys in the world. All the ship that you see, you know, the pikey look, and you know, the tongue and his teeth and stuff like that. He's just a guy. He's just a fucking incredible actor, but just a guy. If

he was sitting here now, he'd be like whatever. Anyway, in that card game, I ended up winning eight thousand dollars in cash I didn't even have. I had a two kids, a government job, a mortgage. I don't even think I had the money for the buy in. I went eight thousand dollars and the next morning I sell my first book and I get

an agent. I get The whole thing came together just like that, so I couldn't get arrested selling the novel that I meet all these guys in Hollywood have this insane three or four or five years and then I saw my first book at a card game with Brad Pitt and uh and then everything changed, everything everything, And that's what would the you know, your decision over. Yeah. So so I did not retire from the FBI. Have to be

quite yet fifty and twenty, and I think I was. I think I had eighteen years in government service because I was so amidst all this Hollywood partying and shin digs. I mean, what was the the Yemen job that you went hit on? In between this one particular job was the cold the coal bombing? And I'll say this just because you know we talk about Ruby Ridge and Waco. Oh what I was going to say, The reason I started up talking about this book is the FBI said you can write this book.

And I've got to go back in time and say, people have said, well, why would you write a book about HRT? Why would you write a book about the FBI? And the reality is that I've not talked about much in public, But the reality is that the FBI was us Right, you say they did this, and that's bullshit. The FBI at the time

was the three of us. Literally, I mean it's guys. I knew everybody right, and these guys, this group of friends, these group of people that I was the new decided it would be a good idea to support a book that wrote in realistic terms and honest ways about the good parts of the FBI coming out of Waco and coming out of Ruby Ridge and looking at something that was a positive way where a small town kid from New Hampshire grows

up, joins the FBI and has all these experiences. So when Cold Zero came out, it was fully one hundred percent sponsored and backed by the Federal burb of Investigation, meaning specific individuals at headquarters who supported this to the point where they even brought Brian Williams and NBC News and all these other entities down to go through the shooting house. They rolled out the red carpet to try to support the book when it came out. So I've not talked about that

in great length, but I didn't. I didn't do just the book just for those reasons. It was a fully supported public relations support from the FBI. So the book came out, and the book was scheduled to be released on September twelfth, two thousand and one. So, like I said, you can't write a book and stay in the FBI. So I had to resign. So I said, Okay, the book's coming out on September twelfth, So I put in my resignation and I was in London the two weeks

before nine to eleven. I flew back to the United States on September tenth. I got back at midnight September tenth, two thousand and one, on a seven forty seven, sitting right behind the upper deck, right behind the cat the cockpit, and the door was opened. In those days in two thousand and one September tenth, two thousand and one, you could go and sit A first class passenger could sit in a jump seat on the flight deck

behind the captain of a seven forty seven landing at Dullas Airport YEA. And I was sitting in my seat holding a wood handle serrated edge state knife, looking at the back of the captain's head, thinking this is unseat. The

saying right and terrors, I mean, hijacking was already a thing. So that I got home, got a few hours sleep, and went into my office at the Critical Incident Response Group on September eleventh, sign to sign your papers, basically saying goodbye everybodek And I was supposed to go to New York that afternoon to do Larry King Live because that was part of the press junket.

And September twelfth and next morning was my first book signing at the Borders at the South Tower Mall at the South Tower of the World Trade Center the next morning. So then I have the exact same experience you and everybody else had. Sit in my desk. I had three televisions in my office talking to the guys about how we got to do something about state knives and seven forty seven. Somebody goes, holy shit, look at that, and we

all had the exact same experience at the same time. So now I've got to leave the FBI on September eleventh, which feels kind of like what you would expect, you know, made me want to throw up. It was it was. It was a horrible moment. And then going to New York. I did go to New York, and then you see the smoke coming up from the towers, and so I guess we can move on to something else. But questions before we get to the next stage the Yemen. Oh,

the Yemen. I'm sorry, so Yemen. That particularly Yemen trip was the USS coal bombing. And because the FBI investigates terrorist acts, Remember what I was saying, that terrorism want to mary enterprise American citizens. Someone in the federal government decided that it was the purview of the FBI, not NCIS

or other organizations. But I want to bring it up for this reason because we talked now after the two longest wars in American history, and all the things that we should have learned since two thousand and one in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I went and I just got to point this picture. We the FBI flew a component on A there's probably a C five. I guess whatever. I think I went over on A. I might have gone over on a different hot but went into land still Germany Ramstein and interviewed some of the

sailors had been blown up. And I wrote about it in the book and about what it was like to watch that skiff run out toward the USS coal with a guy in a bow waving and smiling and then detonating the bomb and blowing everybody up. And I'm talking to this guy and his face is half blown off and he's all fucked up, and he was courageous, he was composed, and all we wanted to do is give us information so we could

find them. Cut on another plane flew into aid and Yemen. When we flew into aid and Yemen, the Yemeni military locked on us with surface to air missile radar. We did a combat spiral, you know, we bit on those things there. Unpleasant landings right, and slammed down on the runway and promptly sit there for four hours on the plane because the many military came out and circled the plane with belt fed machine guns and wouldn't let us off

the plane. Eventually somebody prevailed. We got off and they took us to the Aidan hotel and then they surrounded the hotel with guys with machine guns. But it was not tell them that you were coming. Well, they did tell them we were coming. But okay, we're getting there, and there's a point in this whole story, the point in the story. Well, so now we get in the hotel, we being I don't know what it was, maybe two hundred FBI agents or something like that, and but we

can't leave. But this I bring this up because this is how so many operations I've worked on in my life went before we got it all figured out. I mean, we did things in those two wars that got threings straightened out. In those days, it was not. And here's where we're going. So in Yemen, they chew the ship called cotton, right, they call it mirror there, but it's cotton. It's the same thing, and uh, you know, it turns your mouth all arms and you get all

fucked up. And these guys had they had I don't know that. I think they had. Mostly they had pkms, and I think they had some douscas to some dshk heavies and most of their stuff was Russian, including the anti aircraft stuff was rushing. So we get in, We go in the hotel and you go in there's a little bit of a lobby. There was a bar. Now it's a dry country, but they had a bar and then cafeteria, and the Yemenes had decided to let the bad guys in,

so but they wouldn't let us out. So we're in there and we all got M four's and forty fives and they've all got a K forty seven's and beards, and we're sitting and we're having breakfast together. So there's a table of us and a table of them, and you know you're ready to go, and they're ready to go. And it was like that day after a day, and they could come and go all day want and it was the same people. You could look out and you could see the coal, you

could see the ship with a hole in it. So this is where the story's going. So I want to tell the whole story. But one of the weirdest gigs I ever played, they had had a bar in there, and the head of the hotel had gone to the Cornell School of Hotel Operations, or I mean American. I went in there one one night and there

was a band playing. Now granted there's nobody there, but there's a nine piece band playing and I see a guitar leaning it up on an amplifier, and I'd like to play guitar, And I said, hey, I think they'd let me sit in. So I go up on the stage and my buddies are mortified, Right, what the fuck are you talking about. You're not going to go up and play guitar in a band? But I did, and so we play Proud Mary keeps On, or we played some like,

you know, many music, and then they played Proud Mary. And then this guy looks at me. Didn't speak a word of English, and he goes Hotel California, and I'll go, I know that one didn't speak any English whatsoever. We start the intro and he's and he starts singing on the dog does it in my hair. We're playing and ripping it up, and here come two Russian belly dancers who were doing a little hooking on the

side in the hotel. And I'm standing on stage and I'm look out and here's a bunch of my it's like four or five guys at a table over here with them fours. And here's a table over here with a bunch of guys with beards in a K forty seven's And I'm playing Hotel California with two Russian hooker belly dancers and a bunch of guys who don't speak English. And I'm thinking, man, this is great, you know, yeah, yeah, Jack Murphy, And I'm gonna tell him this story. You can't make

it up. And I'm thinking this is awesome. So I go back. Everybody takes off. I go back. Oh, I had the m force slung around my back and walk down our stage, go to the elevator, and we had the sixth floor. The entire entity had the sixth floor, so we'd get we were hot sheeting bed so you get eight hours in a bunk and then you'd sleep. Yeah, unpleasant way to get your rest.

But so I walk up, take the elevator to the sixth floor and it opens up in the hallways kind of a why two hallways like why wings and there is a Marine Corps fast team there with a sixty behind sandbags pointed at the elevated door. So it's like for me, you know, it's twenty feet away, and you get an eighteen year old kid staring at you at one o'clock in the morning after I've been drinking two borgan playing with the house

band. We're going to Sigon. We're going to Sigon, right, and I'm and I just smile and say, hey, guys, you know, can I get your coffee or whatever. So the bunks were all down this wing. The other wing was all the different entity, so their hotel rooms. So it's FBI, CIA, d I A NCIS. It was just

alphabet soup all the different offices. And then at the end they had moved the embassy from Snaw down to the hotel, and the ambassador's name was Barbara Bodine and she had come down, so she was running all in country operations from that hallway in that hotel. And I get off and I still have this. I was looking at it the other day. I get off the elevator and I'm walking down the hall just to see what's going on, you

know, like you hang it out in the command center. And it hands me a piece of paper and it says, I can't remember the exact words, but it says something like, uh, we have received information that the element that blew up the coal is coming this way with a band full of explore. They're gonna blow us up, right, And I go, uh oh, And it says, you know, destroy this or something like you're not supposed to say, because yeah, yeah, exactly, because the whole

fucking thing was was wired right. They told us everything was video and audio. It was a fuck show. Ulous. So the the FBI program was run by a guy named John O'Neill. John O'Neill, contrary to what Richard Clark or any of these other guys say nothing against Richard Clark. I liked the guy. But what these guys say. John O'Neill was the guy that knew terrorism. He ran the what at the time was called the UBL Task Force Sama bin Lad Task Force in New York Field office. And he was

the guy. Right. We would go and support of him, but he was the guy, so he was running the investigation. Barbara Bodine despised him, and anybody knows John O'Neill, A lot of people despised him, or a lot of people loved him too, right, but they were big personalities and they hated each other, and he would call her it was it was

ugly, right. So once the word got out that they were coming to blow us up, the US government didn't want to have two hundred and more FBI agents getting blown up at a hotel to go with a coal bomb. Here, it looks bad on TV, right, looks bad. If if you're me, you know it's whatever. So so here's the way it goes from here. And this is so many operations I've been involved with the exact same way. So John O'Neill says, fuck this, you're not going to

kill any FBI agent's on my watch. He calls the National Security Council. The National Security Council calls the Pentagon. The Pentagon says, yeah, we'll go get those guys. But they locked on our C five with a surface to air missile radar. When they come in, tell them to turn that shit off. Barbara Bodine says, I'm not telling them to turn what to

do with their missile radar. And in a hallway at the Aiden Hotel, under the circumstances that I described, you've got the Department of Justice at war with the Department of Defense at war with the Department of State, with Barbara Bodine, the ambassador who is the queen of the country, that's her country, and John O'Neill, who was the king of all that he surveyed. He was a big personality, screaming you mother, screaming all these insults.

And I was into mediary and I was the guy two New Yorkers fighting over a parking right and I'm standing there and I'm trying. So I would talk to her. Then I would talk to him, and then the CIA would come up and say you got to do this, and the d I A and the MCIs is pissed off because it's you know, there were sailors that were killed in the thing, and it was absolutely insane. It was mayhem. So eventually they ended up they being somebody I don't even know who it

was, eventually ended up putting on us. In a little bit of a convoy. We drove out to the port at in the dark. We got on a fifth a couple of amphibious landing vehicles, and we go out over the horizon pitch black, and I'll never forget it. You guys do this all the time, a lot of your years ago. You know what's so big about that? But I had never seen the nose of a naval ship open up. It was the I think it was a Duluth, the USS

Duluth. It was a helicopter carrier. And I remember, I don't even know where we're going, right, I got an M four and I'm going to and I'm with a bunch of people. I don't even know whether we could have been going to Africa for all I knew. I didn't know where

we're going. And I look, somebody goes holy shit, and I look up and it was just like a James Bond movie where the front the nose of the ship opened up and we drive these amphibious vehicles up in the ship and then the nose comes down and then the red lights come on, and

you know, and then white lights and stuff like that. And we hung around there for I don't know, we floated around for a couple of weeks maybe, But I saw them when they came up with the ship that sunk down underneath the coal, lifted it up and floated it back to the States. But so that particularly Yemen mission was interesting in a lot of ways.

It was tragic in obvious ways, but it was interesting other ways, primarily because everybody who thinks that what we do for a living is all one lockstep, smooth operation, it's it's never that. It's just in my experience, Yeah, it was the clusterfuck every time. Why did you going in that the Yemen military, the Yemeny military, the government was willing to be so hostile towards you, And what was the US's responses to that? Response to

that? Given it, you guys were there to do an investigation and you couldn't do it right. I think my personal perspective was I did so many of them in so many places. I just didn't give a shit. I just assumed whenever I showed up someplace, we can talk about classifications, and we can talk about whatever. But my world was so bizarre that, you know, I would show up for dinner with Madonna, and then I would show up in Yemen watching a fist fight between the ambassador and the head of

the FBI. Yeah, it was. Everything was so bizarre. I didn't I never wanted to know anything. I just wanted to do what I could do. Yeah. I just wanted to do my little part, yeah, and then go on to whatever the next, whatever next was. So I wonder if you ever crossed paths with Gary Harrington. He had some interesting Yemen stories about that time. I'm sure I did. I had. I still have a pass to the embassy in Sanah, so I probably at some point

did. That's the other thing. You know, I'm already taking too much time. But we haven't got the classifications or names yet. Which is I mean, we've talked about everything I didn't want to talk about so far, but the really crazy shit. You keep asking me these questions and I want to tell you the answer, But I've got to make sense of him somehow. The thing about HRT at that time was we were involved in everything, right, it didn't matter what you were. So people, can we just

go to classifications? Absolutely so classifications as you guys well know, you get into these gigs and you get a t SSCI, right, that's that's basic. There's only three real classifications. Right. And but when you get in that, if you get in various programs, you get read into different permissions, and some of them could be very broad, like Q. Right, Q is DOE because Department of Energy needed help moving, locating, dealing with

nukes in various ways. That was our gig, right, So you got to get QUE, and I say, I bring up Q. For this reason. When I got Q, you could say Q and you could say Clarence. If you said Q clearance in the same in that combination, it was a felony, right, So I go, well, why do I want that? Right? I don't want to. I don't want to. Why do I give a shit? I don't want to do this, Clarence. You get into this weird position where you can't say what your job is,

your own colleagues, you can't talk to anybody. Yeah, which is which is going back to Germany in a second. So it's okay with Q because that's one thing. But then you get ready in on a on a specific like all these parts, a special access program that is one thing.

Here's one one example. I don't know what I can say about this, but I was involved in this one thing that you could research it and google it and you could find little bits and pieces about that involve I'll just say that it involves Osama bin Laden in Sudan when he came out of Sudan in ninety six, when he went to Afghanistan. There was an aspect and I almost say anything about it, but it was it had a had a special access handle, right, And I was watching some Billy WASH's book. He

talks about it. Oh he does well at the Hunt for Bin Laden and Sudan. Does he name that program? I don't, I don't, probably not, but Hunt Thing the Jackal is his book he talks about being there. So let's just say hypothetically I was somehow involved in that. I was watching back in the day when I was doing a lot of TV. I see this guy come on and I've never seen him before, and he's doing

MSNBC or Fox. He's one of those things. And he's getting up there his first time on TV, and he goes, yeah, blah blah blah, and he spits out that fucking name, that specific thing, and I almost choked on my brought worst or whatever the hell I was doing at the time, and I thought, I can't believe he just said that on national television. And then I realized at that time how impossible it is to keep

track of secrets because there are so many of them. I mean, when I think about how many programs I've been involved, like darper projects or specific missions, were specific programs that are that are like like some of those things only last for a day or a week or a month, and some of them lasts longer. But anyway, classifications. While I was on HRT and then afterwards after I left, that became a huge pain in the ask because every time you get one, it's more it's more ways to fuck up.

Yeah, right, yeah, And here's where So I end up on another gig, and I was doing something in Germany and we were on the economy, so I think we were working in Ramstein, but we were living in one of those little towns one of those little villages around there, and uh I was in It was the end of the day. It's probably eleven o'clock at night, and we're in one of those little rath skullers drinking beer and we had these two NSA guys who in my experience were most often staff sergeants

in the in the Air Force right there cover because official cover. Yeah, they're administered by the Air Force. Yeah, or were they actual Air Force? A lot of time, yeah, a lot of times you might actually be yeah, exactly, Yeah, it wasn't necessarily come yeah, and uh I got to when one of the thing to go back to in a minute.

But so anyways, so it's eleven o'clock at night on a Thursday night, having a couple of beers with the boys, because you know, you're not on twenty four hours a day forever, and uh so these guys came up. I knew who they were. I knew they were somehow involved with us, but they were in a different side of things. But I basically knew what they were. It wasn't a skiff, but it was a secure

comms thing that they were doing. So they go up and they go, sir, we need to talk to somebody who has this, and they set it out loud in a bar, and my first reaction is, where's the camera? Yeah, my first reaction is that they were setting me upright, because even when you're in something, they'll still run ups on you just to fuck with you, to make sure that you're credible. So I'm sitting in this bar and and I just had this weird moment where I thought to myself,

what do I do? I mean, do I dim these poor kids out? Because just trying to they're trying to find somebody that they can pass the COLMS traffic, you know, for whatever else. But you just you end up in those things all the time where you never I personally, in my experience, running across all of those different things, I wouldn't know if you were part of the gig, or if you were on the gig just to test me because you wanted to get me off the gig. And it

just became insanely confusing. I've heard that so many times that in those little like that world of SAPs, that it becomes kind of like cutthroat because like as far as like being being read onto all of these programs, some people perceive that its power, and there's always someone who wants to fuck you off of the program so that they can have it right. Well, plus there's guys, and all they do. Their entire job is just to go in

and try to find guys to to wash them out. Yeah, that's all they's It's like the internal affairs offer, but not just not just investigating, but actually offering bribes to see what you just do. That's exactly right. Their entire job is a control officer, is to find vulnerabilities in the program.

So now I'm in Gramstein, Germany, getting ready for a real gig, sitting there talking to my buddies, and these two staff sergeants come up and they either stepped on their dick in a really bad way or they're stepping on my dick in a really bad way. And I had no clue as to what it was. So those become a big, big problem, became a problem with me, names and programs because just two quick examples, maybe we're going off track here, No, okay, it's your track, So

there is true. I mean, I know we're doing this thing, but you know, we don't whiskey and cigars and this guy's talking right, But so anyways, the first one I used to work, I used to go to the farm a lot, not the farm in the Hampshire, but can't Perry. And because they you know, at the time, in the early days of HRT, there was a killhouse at Fort Bragg, there was one at Little Creek, there's one at HRT. And they had one a very very crude one. I think it was made out of canvas at Camp Perry.

But they had that track and you can shoot and use any kind of explosions you want on the track, and we would use that so we would just circle around. Everybody would oh and we had the air the aircraft fuselages at Davis month and for practice and CCP on planes. So one of the first times I go down to Camp Perry and we're running. Uh we were doing these. We used to wrap axles with decord or flexi linear and blow the wheels so that you could stop somebody if you're like doing some kind of

an interdiction, right and uh, so we're out. It's hot July or August and Virginia. We're covered in spawling and you know, a mess, but you got to eat lunch. So we go up to the cafeteria, and you go into the cafeteria like any of the cafeteria at the farm, and were standing in line, and we were all were in no Max flight suits tied around our waist, and you would never tell anybody who you were, right, never. They told us not to say anything to anybody.

And so we're standing in line and there's these two chicks in front of us, and they're looking and they're talking, and they're looking and they're talking. And this buddy in my Charlie, was a real good looking guy, and so I just figured they were hitting on him or something. So finally they turned to him and they go, who are you guys anyway? And you know, they're wearing their Royal Robin's cargo pants and a Polo shirt, and Charlie doesn't know what to say, so it looks at him. He goes,

we're with the Justice Department. She goes good cover, and you know, it goes through. And I realized sometime around that time that nobody is anybody. I mean, I would tell somebody on this, and somebody would tell that we did a thing one time. I don't I'm sure somebody, maybe somebody who would watching this say or were part of it. But we got ready to do a hit one time in a Caribbean island through a d E A referral. So d EA had found some violent gang that was doing

some drug thing. I have been Saint Thomas, Saint Croix was, I mean, you guys were down in Puerto Rico a lot too. Back in the Yeah, we were everywhere. I mean just traveled. I think some of those years we were on the road three three twenty days a year. It was constantly gone. So anyways, but it was it was a delta app up. It was a delta like some some kind of a training thing.

It wasn't a real thing, but we almost went down on a d E A referral to shoot it out with Delta on Saint Thomas or Saint Croix because we just didn't have the comms in those days. Someone didn't deconflict it. Yeah, I don't even think they knew it. They didn't even have that term rights, right, It was just you just didn't have There were no colms. There was just it was a very very very different world of those days. So talk to us about you know, getting into all this

uh this murky world. Tell us about you know, September twelfth, and you know, driving down the street Langley and the pah So for whatever reason, and by the way, do you want to drink? Do you want? I think it's time? Do you do you like rocks? I don't care whatever you got, No, we have just pour something in that one

right there would be fabulous for anybody doesn't know what's going on. I purposely did not want anything to drink for a certain amount of time with you hooligans, Like, there's no point in adding alcohol to one of these conversations, okay, which is what we're known by known for by the like. I've watched it a million times. Yeah, I watch all your shows. Thank you, and I'm a huge fan. I think you guys do a remarkable thing for America to give people an idea. You bring people in in their

own words, they tell what they've gone through. My experience is probably only my experience. Everybody I've ever worked, will you know that's not the way I remember it, But that's you know. The beauty is you bring in everybody. But the thing is we wouldn't be here without people like you coming in and willing to share your stories. I think you know we are humble paupers in the presence of people like you. I mean, okay, let

me just back up a second. Let's suggest something. If people really know what you guys did and do and are, I'm the humble popper and it's I'm an inteloper. I shouldn't even be here. No, I mean every guy we have on here, no matter like how girls, how heroic they were, and girl, it always always plays like, oh man, you have some like real heroes on there. Yeah, I don't think I should

be on there. And I'm like, yeah, like Dave said, I'm like I was like a arranger and a green beret for like a short period of time and a little microscopic slice of history. And I mean, I'm just flattered to that these people give me the time of day, and I like done this dragon, so like everybody's cooler than me. I've just seen so many guys come on this show, and there's no point in going through

the names, but that are just absolute. They're remarkable human beings, extraordinary patriots, and I want to know what they did and how they did it in a respectful way. I Mean, nobody's in here telling secrets and and blowing various things. Nobody's getting anybody in trouble or anybody hurt. But if you don't record history, yeah, then you're gonna do it to repeat.

Yeah, how can you be How can you turn around and say, hey, the American public doesn't understand what we do as rangers or FBI agents or seals or whatever the hell it is if you don't talk about it at all, if you just maintain that like wall of secrecy, then yeah, of course the public has a total misunderstanding of yeah, you know what these groups

do. And also, like you say, it's it's not just pr but it's history, it's I mean, you know, I think Jack was fortunate enough to get a lot of interviews with you know, the some of the last living OSS guys A while ago OSS guys. Not No, I thought you had a few interviews. I mean, I've interviewed some people from way

back in the day, mostly mostly starting with the Vietnam era. But I mean, I mean, yeah, I've been very fortunate to interview like a lot of the ogs who like stood up Blue Light and Delta, like there's a red imagine if we could you know, get you know, like the OSS on interviews, or if we had guys from War one, if you know so much what we learned from history is written by historians and not the actual people who so tell us. But anyway, you retire and drive down

the street with your resign. Thank you, David. Anybody who listened to this thing, every detail, they'll say, that's not right, right, No, you resign. I want to make sure that I that I say that I resigned for sixteen years, but I did right card game with Brad Pitt September twelfth. I wake up at the Mercall Hotel and I go, fuck, what do I do now? Right? We're going to war like the world's on fire, and you just left the job that would would have

put you there. Yea. And not only that, but John O'Neill, who had done within Yemen, came back to the United States, gotting a piss and match with the Bureau and retired. He took a job and you may know the story, but John O'Neill was the head of the UBL Task Force, who was the number one guy in my opinion, in my opinion, in the United States government when it came to al Qaeda, big personality,

whatever you want to say, about John. He left the FBI and he took a new job as director of security at the World Trade Centers. In September eleventh, with his first day on the job, and he died in the attacks. So any sack of shit that tells me some conspiracy theory about nine to eleven and we knew this and we don't it makes my blood boil. Yeah, I mean, September twelfth, I've got to figure out

a way back into the war. And it just so happened that I had spent a good deal of my time in other government agencies because we collaborate, right, So you could be in the FBI and you could work with other agencies, one of which was the CIA. So I said, okay, I got an idea. So when I sold my first book in those days, if he sold the book, you gotta you know, publishing a book is one thing, selling this another thing altogether. You got to get on

all the shows like this show. Right back in the day it was the Today Show, Oprah or whatever the case was. So back then, if you got if you published a book and a magazine exerpted you a book, that was a huge deal. At the time, there was Esquire, Vanity, Fair, Playboy, Maxim. There weren't many time, Yeah, because I still read Time. I don't know, But I mean to have your book reviewed or feature magazine, yeah, I mean if they review it,

that's good. I mean if they review it favorably, that exp They actually took chapters and they published them in the magazine, which was a big deal at the time, GQ magazine. As absurd as that sounds, and as much shit as that caused me with everybody that I knew, you know, you don't want to be right, it was. It was awful, but at the same time it was good. It really helped, and the bureau supported that. Like as your author was perfect as yes, as a former

action guy. It was horrible, and I showed you right. They put me on the inside cover. I showed you the picture and I was like in a jungle and I had this shirt on and too much shit in my hair. It was just it was a glam shot me and you were a sex bomb in that photo. I'm gonna hang that up on the wall here. It was horrified, but it happened. The good news was the guy that ran GQ magazine is a guy named Art Cooper and Art Cooper had a kung fu grip. I mean he was among guys who were camouflage, Tidy

Whitey's, Mark Wahlburg models and stuff like that. Among magazine publishers. He was a stud, a remarkable guy. I loved him. And so anyways, he invited me over to his office. I'm sitting in his office, had his incredible bar chain, smoking cigarettes, and he goes, hey, you want to go to go to Afghanistan and find Bin Laden. And I thought to myself, And now this was like a month after so this is maybe the first week in October after nine eleven. And I thought to myself,

yes, I do, so I go. I know just what to do. So I went down. I went home. That was in New York. I went back to I was living still in Virginia, and I got my car and I drove out to Langley. And I told you this story before, but this is what a moron I am. So let's say that I had a pass. I had a haul pass at Langley, right, and then there's one primary entrance what is it one twenty three, one twenty three, I think, right into the main gate. Yeah, and

the main gate there's two lanes going in. There's a guard shack on the right, and then if you're a visitor, you just go around back, you park your car and you go in and you sign in and you go in. Right. So I at the time, I had a portion nine eleven, and so I'm hauling ass up there, and I've got my sniper partner on a cell phone, one of those no keias like it had the black and white screens, you know. Yeah, and I've got I've got the top down, yeah, and I've got I was listening to Ludicrous.

I'll never forget it. I've got don't ask me why, but I had Ludicrous pumping. I had this big subwarfer in there, and my partner, sniper partner, and is given me incredible amounts of shit. You you know about the GQ things saying everybody hates me and you know, kids show my face there anymore. But we have a tea time, we're playing golf that Saturday. Yeah, he's just fucking with you though, right he was, because he's a great guy. Yeah, I'm sure there was a lot of

concentation. Yeah, And and then I've got Art Cooper. You know, back in those days, you have a little car phone right on, like a little it's like a landline, but it was in your car. Yeah, right, So I've got one on each ear and they're yelling at me, and I'm feeling happy because I got a war back. I gotta find a way to back into the war on terrorism. I got a press pass

to Afghanistan and GQ is sending you there as a journalist. Right, Conde Nast is going to pay my first class air, fair and reasonable expenses to go find bin laden check. So I roll up one hundred and ten miles an hour, pull off the exit, I go through the gate the way I've always gone through the gate. I get to the gate and I realize

I don't have a pass anymore. I'm out. I go fuck hit the brake and or I hit the clutch, and they're very close together on that car, and I locked up the tire, shift into reverse, back up, go around back park to go in, and go in like a visitor, and I'm looking in the rear view mirror and here comes a swat team MP five's leveled at my head. They surround the car, you know,

doing a felony car stop on me at the main gate. The CIA headquarters and because you know, I wasn't thinking, but anyway, I knew the guys and it all worked out just fine. I go in and this woman, I know, this, this friend of mine. A hero. This woman, she should be on your show. She's absolutely crazy. She's a She was a colonel in the army who had two high speed parachute failures, one of which put a steel plate in her head. Is titanium plate in

her head, and she would get vertigo real bad in certain situations. And you guys probably know there's there are certain configurations at Langley that I've never seen them printed anywhere, so I'm not going to say what they were, but this, you know what I'm talking about. The there's place as you walk

in Langley that are really weird geographically geometrically like they look similar. Anyway, the point of the story was she the only way she could get through these places in the building was to walk with their hands closed with their eyes closed on the walls. So we'd have to walk down the hallways so that she wouldn't pass out and throw up because of the steel plate in her head. She was incredible. Anyway. The point of the story is she'd set up

on lunch. So we go into they have three I think there's three administrative dining rooms there. It's like a d R one, two and three or something like that. But anyways, so we go not to the cafeteria at Langley, but go to one of the big wig dining rooms with a linen table cloth. I'm looking out into the you know, over the Potomac through the woods, and I'm thinking, man, I've arrived. Yeah this is I haven't got to the Madonna story. Yeah that's a fucking hysterical story.

But see, I shouldn't have done this even yet. So anyways, we go in and I go, so these two guys she's with me, and these two guys I do not know, but I know who they are. And so we're eating broccoli and sir waying tips or whatever else, and I say, here's my plan, and I remember very clearly. The guy looks at me and he's nodding his head, and he goes, maybe you have

forgotten a couple or haven't thought about a couple of things. One, the United States government has sixteen intelligence agency and B fifty two bombers, five brands of the military, and B fifty two bombers. He said, the CIA gathers intelligence for clients that include the White House, the FBI chases thieves. And I go, well, I guess you put me in my place, but you know how we are, right, which is not what I was really thinking. And I said, well, yeah, I get that interesting,

but maybe you haven't thought about this. And I went over the plan again and his buddy goes, wow, okay, that makes great sense. So he pulled out a car and he wrote down a number and he said, go see this guy right now. I'll tell him you're calling. So I got in my car. I drove from the Pentagon and I went into the Pentagon and there's some guy. I have no idea what he was, but I only remember this. He had this heavy, heavy Boston accent.

And I grew up in the Hampshire, right, so I know Boston accents. So he's I walk in there and he's got on a like this shitty look at nit tie, like with a square nittie, and he's got on his shirt, his shirt sleeves rolled up, and he's got three watches on his arm. And I go, hey, how you doing? I said, you from Boston and he said, no, he goes talking. Anyways, he was. I still have no idea who he was. I assume he was some aspect of d Ia, but you know, I still don't

know who he was. But he put the whole thing together, and so I flew to London. I flew to at the time you could go through his you could come through his beck Stand and you could come down to Jikistan, which was a very very long overland drive and it was dangerous, but each had plus is a honus. But it was Bekistan. At the time, Victoria Tenzing had put together the MBED program. So they were putting guys like Carldo Rivera and what's her name? Who is that chick with the blond

here? I'm sorry that was unkind, not that she was incredibly famous and very Ashley Danfield. Oh she was huge. Yeah. Anyway, these guys were getting all the great slots. So I decided to go into Islamabad and then go north through the Kibra Pass. But when I got there, they were killing everybody that was coming through the Kibra Pass, so I couldn't get there. So what do you do. The first thing you do is you go to the embassy. Right, So I checked into the hotel and everybody

was there and all the Western news outlets were there at the hotel. So I go to the embassy. I've got a meeting at the embassy, and we all know who's at the embassy and put the whole thing together. And I remember I walked in there. Can I tell the story, Yeah, it's a I tried not to swear in this thing, but I gotta tell this. Oh, you can swear like this is there's we're an adult channel. So well, I'll just tell nobody under or at the age of eighteen

or sixteen or whatever. So my partner and I don't know how to describe this guy, but this guy was before he joined the FBI, he was a controller for a company in San Diego. It's a very very, very smart fucking guy. And he had a solid gold rolex. I don't know what model was, like a date jest or something, but solid gold, which he wore on HRT and every most of the guys on HRT. Some of the guys on HRT had Rolexes, but they weren't solid gold, right, there was like a sub or, right, and so, but he

was an incredible guy. And he was unbelievable with a rifle. I mean he was just incredible. So great guy. So my partner. So the point of the story is this. So his somebody he had worked with was now working in the league at in Islamabad, and he'd set up a meeting. So I go in to see him and this your guys. And so I go into this office and it's got all the GSA furniture and he goes, hey, what's going on? He goes, how do you know?

I said, how do you know? Buck? And he said, well, they were they were agents together in San Diego and they played together on a softball team and the softball team was called my dick is so hard, I don't have enough skin left to close my eyes. And I said, I look kind of men a goal? What who would even think of something like that? And why would you say it to me? In the league at in Islama? Bade you know. It was just such weird things happening.

And and I look over and on his desk he had that book, the first book, and he had a copy of GQ magazine opened to the and it said that part of it said has on license to kill? No has the ability to kill and the license to do so, and he had highlighted it with a yellow magic marker. Oh my god, I am the world's biggest moron. Absolute fool. So anyways, the point in the whole story is that the agency guy says, you know, this country is a

dry country. You're gonna need some leverage. I'll be right back. So he goes and he gets me two bottles of Johnny Walker black, which in Islamabad, I'm sure you know it is the goal. Yeah, So because I had to get a multiple entry piece or whatever. So I get my two bottles of Johnny Walker and I go back to the hotel. And there were two bars in Islamabad. One was at that hotel, one was at the other hotel, the other Western hotel. So here's the point of the

story. So I've just I've got this buddy of mine who is ah he has a very very famous girlfriend. I told you who he was, who his girlfriend was, right, and he's got it. He's a very he's a I don't know how to describe this guy. He's there because he's my buddy and he's taking photographs for GQ magazine because he's a really great photographer. But he's also a bad, bad dude. I mean he's fearless and he's good anywhere you want to go. So we go back to the hotel and

he's an extremely worldly guy. So we go down to the basement. He gets in about three fit fights trying to find a drink. We go into basement as a bar, and you've got to sign in a testing that you're not Muslim in order to own to buy a drink, right, So he says, fuck these guys. So he signs in as our buddy, the

movie director. He would always call himself Elbolaggio, like his undercover name when he's going to a UFC fight, and he checks into the Four Seasons, right, So he signs in as El Bolaggio and I signed in as Team Rope Header. We'll get to story something that's like one of my cover identities. Says that I was a cowboy, you know. And so we signed into this book and we go into the bar. Were the only two guys in the bar, and they have this stuff is called I think it's called

Murray. You are are ee Gin vodka whiskey beer all on the same manufacturer and it's manufactured by Pakistani's even though it's a dry country. Oh interesting, So you can't buy any booze in Pakistan except the booze they make, which I still have not figured out. So we're sitting at the bar and Joe says, get any women around here, and I said, Joe, come on, man, relax, you know we've got a job to do. He goes, shut up with let me work. So he ends up it's

Ramadan. He ends up negotiating one of the bottles of Johnny Walker black for like the bartender sister and like four of her best friends. And Joe cut this shit out. You know it's ridiculous. But now eleven o'clock or twelve o'clock at night, we've had six or seven beers. The guy comes walking in. This is all the same day. Arrive, check in, go to the embassy, get the booze. Joe's trying to trade it during Ramadan.

And it's now almost night and I haven't slept for three days. And a guy comes in, taps me on the shoulder and he goes mister Christopher or something like that, and hands me a piece of paper and walks away. And just like a bad movie, it says meet at this address. The fuck is this? So we go upstairs, walk outside, get directions, walk four blocks and we're standing midnight in Islamabad on a street corner and a car pulls up, a sedan like a Toyota Corolla, and the and

the guy basically says get in the car. And I'm thinking to myself, We're not getting in the car. Yeah, And then I think to myself, well, how do they know who we are and what are we doing here? Maybe maybe we should get in a car. But my point is, this is in the from the embassy bar, right, This is no, no, no, no, this is in the hotel hotel bar okay,

with no other Westerners, zero other people. So the point of the story is I'm going from being part of an organization that, through my clearances and through my covers and through all this insane shit I did around the world, all this stuff was great as long as you trust your backstop. Right, you know who gave you the cover, and you know who's the Blockbuster

video card and somebody else's kid and your credit card age. Yes, you know it's all backstop, and it's all right, and you know the people you're interacting with have that code like having Ramstein and if they say something that's yeah, you know, it all makes sense. There's a transition where that's I realize I'm not in that world anymore. Right now, I'm just the moron who's decided he's trying to do this by himself. Right. Oh, I forgot to tell you there's nobody coming for you. Okay, Yeah,

I forgot to tell you. When he gave me the two bottles of Johnny Walker black, he said, listen, dude, he said, I don't He said, I don't know what they told you. But there's no we're not giving you a blood hit, and we're not giving you a phone number to call in West Virginia for Xville. You're on your own. There's no CRRAF, nobody's coming to get you. You can go on your own. We're not going to stop you, but you need to know nobody's coming to get you. And I go, okay, that was it. So then

I end up in this car. We drove outside, like on the other side of the mountains, outside of his Lamabad, and we end up by this time it's probably one o'clock in the morning, and we end up pulling into a polo club. It's it looks like a country club and you know and oh cricket. Yeah. Yeah. So one o'clock in the morning, pulled into this country club and there's three protos parked in a you know, in a dirt lot. So we walk in this building and a guy points

to Joe and says, you sit over there. And I walk in and I walk in and there's this guy and he's wearing I forget what the hat is called, but you know, different tribes who were different types of hats, and he's wearing a specific hat that meant something. I just don't remember what it was. And he and he points down. I sit down at the table. Guy brings tea, thinking, okay, this is going pretty well, and he goes is he goes, do they call people team rope

heaters in Northern Virginia? And I and he and I looked down and he's got a copy of my passport on the table and he knows that I just signed in to the bar as Team roll Petter and he's telling me he knows where I'm from. You it was I, SI guess right. So we had a stern talking too, and then they were incredible in how they set up and interact fixers and everything else, and so Joe's sitting there like, so the girls are like now now. When he said in northern Virginia though,

was was because you were there under very real journalists to cover. Yes, right, you were there as a journalist, yes, with with the proper backstops, because that was the real thing. Correct. Did did they know? Why did he say northern Virginia then, because the CIA is in Northern Virginia, right, But did did did they know? Like, were you able to talk your way out of that and say I'm just here as a journalists? There was no there was no talking. I don't know that

I said anything. Yeah, you know, I think I had my tea and I nodded, and he just basically said, you know, we're on He said something like I think he said, Miss Shariff, you should recall that Miss Shariff came to power through force. I think he said we're a very old country, or he said we're a very new country and a very old part of the world. That's exactly what he said. We're a very new country and a very old part of the world. And then he said

something about Miss Shariff. But he was just basically telling me, don't suck around. Yeah, don't wuck around. We're on it right. Yeah, as it turns out, I mean, I found this out after the fact that in anybody that was involved in that from the CIA side, or from the FBI side, or from the military side, or for anything else at that time, no matter what your gig was, and I know this now after the fact, no matter what your gig was at that time, there

was ship going on that you did not know about. Unequivocally. I don't care who you are or what you say. I know you've had those guys on the show. I'm huge fans of enormous respect that there was, no matter who you were, there ship going on you didn't know, but you weren't read on. Yeah, And my thing was very specific, so to

be, because there's not about the stories. The bottom line was I was supposed to go first to Peshawar and then because the the Kibra pass was closed down and my job was to go to Deer in a Northwest Frontier province, and I met a cleric who took us to an overland route to rat to the north, a real fucking off grade place, and there there is a very there's a there's a story that you guys may know about where what was the name of that fucking town outside of Deer I can't even remember now,

But there was another town that something happened at that time with a military operation that crossed over with some people, which there are there are references to it. I don't know what it was, but I know they were there there. Yeah, I mean, there are a couple of different things. I mean, it could have been a rator. There's like some stuff where like drones went down and stuff had to be recovered. No, no, this was a transport of people across. But I don't want to get into that

because I don't know what it was. I don't want to say anything. And I know something happened and I was there. Are you talking about when they brought the al Kada guys from Afghanistan and the Pakistan? Yes, yeah, Miller talks about that when Okay, So anyways, it was at that time at that place and so, but it was a specific it was a specific mula who was taking people from Pakistan over and he went in like the legend, not the legend, but the roomor at the time, was he

took thirteen thousand people over when he came back with five. You know, it was one of those stories, who knows what the numbers were. But he was a problem. So the my my my hypothetically speaking, my intention was not to try to stop him, but to try to get an idea of who these people were and where they were coming from. Right. So, anyways, the point of the story is spent time there and then went very very unpleasant time there, then went back to his Lama Bod where I

got really bad dysentery. Flew to Quetta and the south drove from Quetta to spend Baldock crossing over at the West Trauma crossing going up to Condahar when the fighting moves south, and that's uh, that's the last story there. And here it is. We get there, sick as a dog. I'd been in a in a like a safe house, huddled around a tot, a floor, a hole in the floor, delirious for three days with fever.

And I get in the back of yet another Toyota Corolla and we make our way over and uh, and get to the border crossing and anybody that spending that border cross and there's nothing there. It's like talcum powder. You know, it's like the whole south of moon dust, the moon dust, right, everybody knows the moon dust. So but there were the refugees will come across and a lot of the guys that were getting in the fighting, we're coming across the border too to try to get help in in uh in Quetta,

right, it was just like three hours away. So anyways, the point I mean, Quitta is the port's town in ports city in Pakistan. Right, it's not a port, it's inland, but it's a it's a it's a huge transport facility. And uh, I don't even remember landing there. But so but I'll just end the story here about how how how the thing worked out. So then at that point had been there quite a long time. We killed two different guys with cars. I mean, we hit

two different guys with cars. And there's a lot I'm not telling you about, a lot that I'm not telling you about. But we got this uh, like I was telling you before, we pull into this thing, and it's now seven o'clock at night, it's dark, it's Ramadan, so you can't eat. I'm sick. The driver uh stops at the Sindom block building. You can see the border, and uh, we're supposed to meet a guy named Zeke, a warlord name or Zeke that I don't want to say

world. He was a you know what I mean he was he was a local leader. Yes, he was a local an influence. He was an influencer. Yeah, he was not a fixer. He was the fix. Right. This is a real fucking deal, right, But we're three days late. So we pulled into this send the block building. Stop the story here. So Joe and I get out of the car and we walk in and the driver is kind of our translator, fix or whatever else. And walk inside and there are like three four tables off to the to the right

hand side. Everybody has an ak and a beard and show walk committees. But we're dressed local too, right, But I look like a diamond and a goats ass. I mean, I looked like a complete utter idiot and Joe. And Joe looks very plausible because he's got a beard, he's swarth, he's like savit guy, and he's got a camera, so he looks

plausible as a journalist. So we go over to the side to order some tea and there's nobody there, but on the wall was a framed, not a framed, a big poster like you'd have behind like I had behind my bed when I was a little kid. And it was Clint Eastwood from the Dirty Harry movies with a forty four magnum pointing it like most people have seen that poster. Yeah, And I look at Joe and I go, what the what's he doing in you know, the on the border crossing into Afghanistan?

And right next to him was an eight by ten glossy of Assama bin laden with it with an ak car being pointing it at Clint Eastwood's head, and I go, you can't make this ship up. It was just absurd. So we walk over and sit down in a corner, sweats dripping off my face. I look over. They're all staring at us, and all of a sudden, one of these guys stands up. And Joe had a casting company, was a casting director in Hollywood, but he said it looked

like Cat Stevens on crack, and it did. He was mangy, it looked like he had rabies. And the guy picks up his ak in his hand and a chair and so it's I'd say, it's a big room, so probably twenty twenty five feet from that pot of tables to where we were sitting. He brings a chair in the middle of the room. There's nothing there, it's just open space in middle room, puts his chair down and goes like this like he's eaves dropping, like he's listening to us. And

I go, look at the what's going on with this guy? What an idiot? And uh. Then he picks up his chair and he walks the rest of the way to the table, puts his chair down with his knee touching Joe and says, who are you guys? Kind of like that, I mean, not much of an accent. And Joe thinks about it for a minute and he goes, suis journal least Joe doesn't speak French. I always say that he like he has occasional dinners at tour Dargan. He has

reef Ghosh hair. Right, he's wearing a proud of jacket right right, And I go, oh fuck, and uh, and I say, you know, I don't feel like I mean, yeah, he goes, you're French, and I said maybe. Joe said weird, but I couldn't tell because all the blood shunted into my Nutsack couldn't hear anything, right, And so so I go, We're we're dead now for sure? Yeah, right, because he doesn't speak French. This guy, I'm sorry, this guy spoke French. He spoke English and he spoke French and he was one of

them. So I go, who would have thought that? Yeah? So I go, okay, Well we're gonna die. I know we're gonna die. And the only thing I've got is a fighting chance in this thing is if I can get in those guys and get one of those ak's they're shooting at each other, and maybe I'll get some of them. But it came to that. You know, every time you get in a fistfight and there's

that moment just before the first punch lands and you know it's on. It's just nobody's bleeding yet, right, We're there, right, So I go, okay, I just say anything that Joe, I stood up, Cass Steven's on Crack is still sitting there, and get up, walk across the room. As I'm walking straight at him and they're all staring at me, and I'm delirious, sweats pouring off me, trying to close the distance. Because they've got the weapon exactly right, because I don't, you know,

the Danny Pearl thing. I didn't want my head shopped up, right, I said, I'll die. I don't want to die get my head cut right. It's a ship way to go. Yeah. So I go by the door and I forget to say, this door was literally shit, you not had like a swinging swinging doors with a couple of movers broke out. So I look out and I see in the parking lot there was one bulb over a gas pump and the car's gone. The driver's gone, so the part the parking lot's empty. So it's not just me and Joe in this

room with these guys. And I go all right, and then you know, you put together a five paragraph order and I'm thinking, you know, it's three hours back, and it's it's I'm doing math, and the math sucks flapping, flapping, I'll flapping and I know I'm flapping, but I'm too sick to care because I think I've really got one shot at this thing, and fucking I mean, if I'm gonna die, it's not gonna get my head shopped on, not getting on my knees, not getting my knees

right. So anyways, I walk up to the table and these guys are looking at me, and I don't know what they're thinking, but they got these looks on your face, like who is this fucking retard? And I get up to the table and one of the aks was on the table and it was had the boltop you know the flip switches down right. So I'm thinking, I don't have to do anything. I just got to grab it

and pull a trigger. And so the guy looks up at me, who I kind of thought was the leader, and he puts his hand on his like his finger on the pistol grip, and he looks at me and he goes. And then two guys stand up and they go and watch and walk over to the door. And I go, oh, I mean, what am I gonna do now? So I walk back to the table. I get back to the table and cast Stevens is standing there and picks up his chair and he walks back. And Joe looks up at me and he goes,

he's gone his knee. The driver. I go, yep, he goes, wit. I gotta tell you, the spy ship's getting pretty fucking old. It was the only thing he said the month we were there or whatever, five weeks were there, the only thing he said, and all the ship that we've been through, and and I always said, the first rule of not letting people know you're in the intelligence community is not making obvious lies about not being an intelligence community. You know. So anyways, obviously

I survived. And but that was This is one of those like programs that some weirdo and some sub office somewhere authorized in those fearful days after nine to eleven that never ever, ever would have gotten approved. Otherwise, if the Pentagon hadn't just had a hole blown in it, there's no way somebody would have signed off on this. I don't think anybody did sign sign off on Let's see. I think somebody said. The guys I had lunch with said okay, I get it, but I don't want anything to do with it.

Go see this guy. And I went to see that guy, and I think he thought I came from there, didn't know how. Yeah, hooked this guy up. We got up. Yeah, we got him. We got him. And he didn't have to hook up ship because I got myself there. All he had to do was put together the pieces it's like I'm hiking the Appalachian Trail, people a stage in food as I go home, right, So the fixers and the places to stay and guns, I mean, that's another thing when you do things like that. If you've got

a gun, you're only two things. In a situation like that, you're either media or you're not right. And if you've got a gun, you're not you're not media right, right, And there's times when a gun would help you fight in a situation maybe like that, probably not, but you know, two or three guys at a roadblock or something like when I went to someone right there. But the but in that situation. The point I think in this whole story is that was the first time I realized that I

could build a world around what I knew of your world. I knew what you guys agency Special Worse is Delta Seal Team six, all the agencies, all the teams, all the countries. And at this point I'd probably been to I'd say at least forty five or fifty countries doing different things. Yeah, and I knew what I could get away with, and I knew how

to work around those different things. And then it goes back to Uncle Harold paying the CIA a million dollars building his own private enterprise, and that that's really what it became. Yeah, a month after I got out of SO so Joe, because we haven't really talked about it. You know, you

mentioned Joe was with you and that he was the photographer. Had he had an intel background or or was he just you just kind of brought him on and I just brought him on. Joe had no background in anything, but he had spent a great deal of time at HRT, So had Al Balagio. So my director friend. Those guys were there and they knew that world. Sorry, well, probably want to turn it off anyways. But no, no, no, he was. I mean he's a remarkable guy.

He can tell his own story, he can write his own five books, he can. I mean, his life is so fucking aile it makes me look like an amateur hour. But he was that guy that could survive in any situation. And there were there are a lot of others. I mean, there's some other stories that through this, like Misadventure, you sort of realized that you could create like an intelligence platform. That's it, and and here's where it goes. I figured a way to make money off it.

I figured out a way not to because you can. What people don't realize about the intelligence community, in my in my opinion, in my experience, based on my twenty something thirty something years in that world overtly and obliquely,

is that, uh, it comes It all comes down to tasking. There is benign intelligence, human intelligence gathering that gives nobody heartburn, right, like National Resources Right, Yeah, like n R. If you're working an NAR thing, you can an intelligence agency can gather information from somebody who is not otherwise involved in the game in any way. They don't have any training, they don't have anything. They just fly on a regular basis to Indian and

come back. You have a meeting and you feel like a patriot and you get some information. Right, there's that aspect. The moment you turn to tasking, bells go off, it's espionage. It's espionage. Right. As soon as they tell you to do something, right, and it could be any day now, there's eighteen intelligence agencies. As soon as you do something. It all comes down to tasking. What I realized early in the game, and I'm talking October two thousand and one, was that there is a

line in between. If you know it well enough, if you know the system and you know the players, and you know how everybody works what they want, you can be a patriot. You can have a hell of a time, and you can make a little money. And does that does that come from knowing what the taskings would be, knowing the requirements so you don't need to be tasked. You can say, hey, I'm either you say it or you just do it, but I'm going to get this information.

But nobody's ever tasched you on it. That's correct. But I knew the task so when i'm when I presented a plan, it did not need to be signed off on by anyone. It was plausible and it provided benefit to someone without any downside whatsoever. I mean, if I died, if I had gotten my head cut off and said of Danny Pearl in Lahore and I've been there are many plenty of times, yeah, and it could have happened. When I went out to the polo club, that could have happened.

I'm just a lucky fuck. That's all I canna say. But if you know and listen, there are probably people watching this right now who are CIA case officers, operations officers at b I Agents, Delta Force operated Seal Team six guys. They've all got stories on the side, They've got everybody's got a story where they were a little bit off to the side, and you know that, right, and there are all things that don't make sense. What I found a way to do and did it for a very long time

time, was to work in between those things. It's very smart because it's very because again it's like, hey, especially when you're getting the journalistic top cover, when you're like, hey, I'm going to be doing this thing. I'm going here, I'm going to talk to these people. I don't want any task, but I'm curious. I'm curious, like what what types of things you guys are interested in this area that I'm gonna be It was

kind of it was not even that it was that idea. Yeah, when I when I first introduced my plan, I'm not going to talk about what I actually did or how I actually did it, but I think it was clever, yeah, and I think it benefited in significant ways. Is if you're in the intelligence community, like you had a very minimum needle waver to use journalistic cover, like that's like one of it's like using uh, it's like using red cross as cover, like if there are things that are members

of the clergy. Yeah, journalists, it's just not yeah, it's not. Well, I got bad news for you, gentlemen. That's where this goes. Well, So the curious thing is, I don't remember seeing any articles written by Chris Whitcomb. Yeah. Were they out there? Oh fu yeah, yeah, I wrote. I wrote. I wrote for the New York Times. I had an op ed contract with the New York Times. I wrote about all aspects of this stuff. From New York Times. I

wrote about I wrote for like the Sunday Magazine section. I wrote for fious things, but I wrote. I think I wrote six six different articles for GQ. But that whole thing was it was a horrible article because it was I got back, like editors and writers. I'm a writer who does all these things, but writing is important to me. And I got back and Art Cooper assigned this editor. And I'm not going to make statements about men,

females, uh, you know whatever. Else. All I can say is this editor was trying to make sense of my article, the subtext of what you and I are talking about right now. How And she left after I got to piss and match with her, she left and went to Red Book Magazine and started editing cookbook recipes. Right, so you take a cookbook recipe editor from Red Book Magazine trying to make sense of me and all the

ship that I did, right, Yeah, the articles written it. I mean, it's got pictures of me wearing all the vocal garb, like that picture that I sent you with the whatever the fucked up head the head gear that was one of those things up there. And there's like there's this one place where I was sleeping in a in a goat shed, and you know, there was this anyway, just to wrap the story up, this guy Zeke came in after the whole thing happened when I almost tried to get in

the gunfight in the corner. He came in, and those were his guys, And what I had manufactured to be great drama in life in reality was his guys watching over us. Oh. I just didn't realize it. Yeah, you know, and then and I was okay from that point on. I mean, I was okay because the other elements, but it wasn't. Those guys were not the threat that I thought, even though it was a legitimate concern, you know. So, yeah, that's a pretty wild ride.

Well it hasn't even started yet, man, I mean that was just that was the dry run. That was like the fucking that was you. That was proof of concept. That Yeah, that's all concept. When you when you came back to the debrief, you like, how did that work? What can I say about that? I came back to the States and I had to present I had to write an article for GQ magazine. I know that sounds absurd, but I did. And the first thing we did was go to la I mean it literally flew from Okay, we shouldn't tell

all these things. But so the thing about Joe is, Joe was the first guy I ever knew that had an American Express Black Card. Remember when those first came out, there was invitation only. Yeah, right, you couldn't get one. If you wanted one, you didn't have a chance they would call you up and invite you. Joe was one of the first guys I ever knew that had a black card, and he had a cell phone

with overseas coverage. The black card meant you had a concierge, right, so you'd call a number and he'd go mister Joe and he'd say, I need a vegetarian restaurant and her rot and you know in in some like some Acacia t or something like right, and uh, because you know, I told you he had just come from Madonna's wedding and his girlfriend was like this household name right. So anyways, we get on a plane. Uh fuck one more. We're gonna have to cut this thing off pretty quick because I'm

gonna have another Scotch and it's gonna go south. So anyways, just to close up the Afghanistan story, we go back to he found. He calls his concierge and he gets us two tickets on a seven forty seven one hundred, one hundred out of Islamabad Airport and uh, we take off. Now, I haven't taken a shower in a month. I'm not exaggerating. I mean I looked like I mean it was. It was. This whole thing was much worse than I'm letting on. It was much worse. I'm just

I don't want to make the whole thing about one story. But so anyways, he would always say at claridges and for those who don't spend a lot of time in London. Clarridges is one of the great hotels on Earth. I mean, it's the bar and Joe the bartender, he know, he knew everybody, you know, mister so and so and uh So we go there and let's say, I went, I'm not gonna tell you all those

stories. But so we go back from London after a stay at Claridges, take a shower and get regrouped, fly to La and he sets up a dinner with this U with all these actresses in uh this place called the Buffalo Club, which in Santa Monica, California. It was a it was kind of a secret restaurant in those days, but put together by Tony Jerkovic, who created Miami Vice and he was one of the biggest television producers of the nine. He's huge guy, and he started this a little restaurant. No

Son Buffalo, New York. No, No, he was from Buffalo and New he called at the Buffalo Club. But it was on Olympic Boulevard in Santa Monica, California, back when that was still a shithole. So there was this little, hidden, secret restaurant in Santa Monica that you could only get into if you knew where it was if you knew somebody, it was one of those secret places. Yeah, regular people can't go. So but we had our own table, right, I mean like permanently. So we

go in there. I'm just trying to wrap up the story. So we go in. We're eventually going back to Langley, eventually going back to the CIA. So we fly to Clarridges and we have this big time in London. Then we fly to la and he puts all these actresses together because he's a casting director and I mean some really household names. So we have it. We have a nice dinner and we're telling stories. And he was a

ladies man, as I may have mentioned. And one of the ladies was a bartender at the Buffalo Club who we had a liaison with in the Men and the Gentleman's restroom the previous night. Good conversation, last room, good conversation, intellectual. Yeah, And so he had gone to a private event in a garden out behind the place while we're having a conversation. So we're

having this meeting. We're having a dinner in a booth at the Buffalo Club with all these actresses and I'm trying to tell this story to them, and they keep saying, wit cut to the chase, was you know, how the fuck did you escape? And you know whatever. So anyways, the point of the story is Joe goes back and he gets a piss and match with the bouncer, who was a large man, a pretty boy, like

a Hollywood bouncer. You know, they're like one minute they're in a runway show, in the next minute doing a UFC fight, right, And so I'm we're holding court and it's fairly late. We've had a couple of cocktails, and I'll never forget it. I see Joe coming around the corner and he's walking straight at me. And Joe would always start the fights and then point to me. And we all like to fight, right, some of

us like to fight a lot. So he comes comes walking straight at me, goes, wait, we got a problem, and I go, I'm sure we do. So we walked to the front. Now, the Buffalo Club is a is an elegant, little hole in the wall restaurant and there's a little tiny bar in the front, maybe four seats, and you would walk in off the street and you get a table. Right, So we walk up at this by this by the time we get up there, the bouncer has come around the corner from the garden party out back who wouldn't let

him see the woman that he had interesting liaison with. And I look at this fucking guy and he's so big. I mean, I'm not a shrimp, right, I'm a fairly good sized guy, and this guy was huge. And he was so big Joe's maybe like five ten. He was so big that Joe had to jump up in the air like he's trying to dunk a basketball, just to punch him in the mouth. And he locked him. I still remember, you know that sound. And he clocks this guy, and the guy just looks at him, like, what are you an

idiot? And then he looks at me and I don't want anything to do with any of it, right, But it's on, right, So it goes to the floor and it's on, and you know, it's two on

one and we're losing, and it it's not pretty. So all of a sudden, I hear somebody start yelling, yelling, yelling, and I look up and it's Tony Jerkovic, who is the biggest producer and the biggest TV producer in Hollywood, Miami fis and I mean, like analyst shows and he goes, Joe, you're out of here, and nobody fights in the buffalo called you're a band, You're band, full of life, and Joe goes, you can't ban me. I built this place. He goes, you

didn't build fucking anything. You're out of here. So then we're out in the sidewalk, sitting on the sidewalk, you know, trying to get a ride home, and all the weight and the famous actresses are all gone because I think we're a bunch of morons. So then I got on a plane and I fly back to Langley with all the film of all the things we haven't you know, I mean there's things you gather, yeah, visually.

Yeah. And so I took, you know, a couple of things for GQ, for the photographs for the magazine article, and they kept all the other film. They kept all the film, and he was furious about he's furious to this day, he's furious that they kept all this film. But then the only thing that was interesting there is that sometime after that, I did a like a group debriefing, a lecture. I did a lecture at this you know, a lecture Hall, and I was. I was shocked.

To this day, I'm shocked at how many people came. I was really, really, very very surprised. To this day. I don't know why that many people came to the lecture because it seems like they would have known that stuff. So anyways, that that was the That was the my transition from the FBI into the world in October and November of two thousand and one. So that's your first trip, and then you know, things continue to pop off. Of course, two thousand and three happens the invasion of

Iraq. Yeah, how how does this thing progress? Okay, you build this as you build this capability slash business. I mean because it is a business now at this point it is a business. But I didn't think of it as a business. I thought of it. There's a disconnect in my mind. This is like old school like French jet birds that like go into the private sector after World Wars. I mean, it's a little bit of like it was. It's a little bit of like Dewey Claridge like setting up

Yeah, you know, I'll tell you what it was. It was a moron who didn't know any better. I just thought I can do anything I want in the world. Hold my beer. Yeah, and I did. I did. So I moved to New York. I didn't move New York. I built or I got a place in New York on the Upper West Side, and I went to work for NBC. So I worked for MSNBC NBC so I did. I did the Today Show. I don't know how endless times did the Today Show. Matt and Iron k I've got the best

Katie kirks Or in the history of the world. But I don't forget to that. So get us there walking, We'll walk us in. Maybe we'll maybe we'll save that for a bonus segment. Oh my god, we got a lot for the bonus segment. Yeah, we just wasted two hours talking about Waco and Ruby Rich and we apologize for that. No, no, but nobody knows the stories. I mean. So yeah, anyways, Okay,

So I come back and here's where we go from there. The last thing that I built in the FBI before I left was called the Strategic Information Management Office, Critical Incident Response Group, Negotiators profile is hostage rescue team logistics. All the different agencies whenever we went to a crisis. The biggest problem was controlling information, which is the media, and what do we know about the situation, how do we want to control the information which is the lifeblood

of any crisis. Information is And it can become like I don't I don't know precisely what you're talking about, of course, but like it can become an issue like if the press is recording the operator's staging to go in and well here's a perfect example. Uh, Puerto Rico spent a lot of time in Puerto Rico. There's an island called viz Vicz. There's a bomb site

for the navy, and the people of Vics didn't like that. Right, You're you're blowing up all these like endangered birds and some non gelatinous foremennifference and it's like all this all this ship that you get, right, it's crazy. So we fly in what's the helicopter with the chinook with chok? Yeah, so I remember we fly in, We do this big assault into the island and we're on the chinook and I get off and off the back and it was the island had all the soil was kind of flinty. So maybe

you guys have seen that. You see it in a rock in Afghanistan or in a rock. It's a dust stop. Yeah. No, it lights the light, the lights the end of the blades on. Yeah, so you get yeah, it's beautiful. Yeah, it's beautiful. So get the whole thing. We couldn't land because it was dust. The point of the story is there was this one op just as an example, in Vicks Island.

We fly into Vicks and they had these I think there were two s cong They had some protesters, and the protesters were on the beach and they said, we want you to come and arrest us on national television. So they called NBC, ABC, CBS, everybody came down there with the camera crews and they were saying, we are going to watch the next Waco. We're gonna watch these guys come in. And they had sling shots and spark

plugs. Right, I mean, I get an M four and a bag of grenades, right, and they've got sling shots with spark plugs and to United States congressmen. So all that's going to happen is they shoot us with a sling shot and somebody does something stupid and the FBI is back twenty years right, So I said, wait a minute, let's relax you a little bit. We know what they want, we know how they plan to do it. All we've got to do is walk down there, get all the

media together, and say, come with me. We want you to record everything that we're going to do. So we went up to them and said, the SWAT guys were pissed. All the the San Juan Swat guys will piss Fuck these guys. We're gonna we're gonna make an example of them. And I said, maybe it's not the way it's gonna go down. De squads and police force you down, no foster, no solid public, no. But I listen, you know, I didn't have anything to prove.

I'd already been through wake up. But I did not want another debacle for me or for the FBI. I love the FBI, I believe in the FBI, at least in those days. I didn't want that to happen. So I said, look, let's do this. Let's just think about this. Let's walk down. We'll bring the media with us. I'll go up to whoever it was at the time, you know, all the famous people, And I said, we go up. So we walked up to them, and I said to the to the two congressmen and the people with the

sling shots and the and the spark plugs. I said, these are flex cuffs. We're gonna put them on you and we're gonna walk you out of here. And they said, no, you're not. Whatever else, So I put the flex cuts. All they wanted to do is beyond national news. So we put the flex cuffs on them, but didn't tighten them up so if they dropped their hands they would fall down on the ground. So

we put the flex custs because that's what they wanted. But then they realized they looked like complete morons because they I mean it looked like a blacksmith, like a wizard's apron, you know, hanging off their wrists. And it diffused the situation. There was no fight, nobody got hurt, nobody caused any problems whatsoever. All the media had no story to write at all.

Then I found a deuce and a half someplace. It was like a bomb target, and got it running, drove it up, put all their ship in the back, and drove it back to the airport and away they went. And it was no story whatsoever. So realizing that nothing really matters unless it appears on the news right or in those days, right now with social media with their else right or your show, but back in those days,

and that changed the show. So this lightning boat goes back to the seventh floor of FBI headquarters saying, wait a minute, you did what you know, but it was a different way of thinking, and all of a sudden, these are awesome, thank you, They're good, are very fantastic, They're really tasty. So that was a paradigm shift in the way we looked at things. Yeah, but it came through the Strategic Information Information Management Office.

And here's where it gets a little weird. Perhaps during my time I may have come across the fourth psychological Operations element and perhaps they are the craziest motherfuckers I've ever met my entire life. And I'll say this. When you join the FBI, you go through sixteen weeks or academy. It might be eighteen weeks. Now, you go through the farm, you go through you know, it's different because the CIA training case officer training is a little bit

different. It's a little fragmented, right, But you go through operator training school, you go through any program that you guys have been through, and they have a timeline, it's usually not that long. Psy Ops basic school is forty three weeks, yeah, four three weeks away from your family, away from any There are some true believers in that outfit, and there's some wild outfits. In my personal opinion, in my personal experience, I think

I've worked with everybody around the world. We haven't got to it yet, but I've worked with everybody. Is rarely is the Turks, the South Africans, the anybody. I don't give a shit who you're talking about. I've worked with all of those intelligence organizations up until about a year and a half ago. In my opinion, those Psycho those psy OPS guys are some squirrels. I mean, there's some one of the Psyops guys. The Army Psyops

guys are like widely misunderstood and even derided. You have the letter for Chris Oh, it's right here, and even derided in the Special Operations community, and a lot of people I think don't really understand what they do. A lot of them. There are a lot of CIA details that they work.

A lot of people don't get that. And if you know those guys through what they're you know most people think of it just as pamphlet drops, but there's a lot of other stuff going on, and they are and they are so controlled, like psyops in the military in particular, are so controlled because it would be like you would be like shooting around from a sniper rifle and then an atomic blast going off as a results. Yeah, they're literre like

left and right limits. And another thing they do is that a lot of people don't realize this, even produce films anti extremist films around the world that show up in places like Indonesia, Kurdistan else that's one of their critical languages when you join. They have a certain number of critical languages. Indonesia is one of those languages. And I'll say this the based on my experience, and I don't know shit compared to I know what I don't know. They

have white, gray, and black categories of operations. Right, white is the pamphlet drops, gray is the movies. The black shit is when you don't know where it's coming from. In my opinion, that's some of the wildest shit that I've done in my life, that aspect of it, and some of it's weird. So anyways, the point of the story is that I put this all together and I said, look, what we really want

as a government is to protect Americans. We're patriots. We believe in what we do, and we believe that is good, and we believe that good is going to make America whole so that our kids can go to sleep at night. That's why we all serve and die if that's what it takes, right, I found a way I felt that I could contribute. In terms of information management, It's not new. I mean we've been doing that. Propaganda's been around forever, not always well, but not always well. But

look, and it's not even government. It's a public relations advertising. It's advertising, it's marketing. It is human being. It is trying to manipulate human beings to do what you want them to do right right, And it's not it's not even done best by government. It's done best by corporations because they make money. I mean, look at bud Light, the debacle they went through. That was a simple mistake that cost billions of dollars and everybody

knows that example. They even went back in history, any government, kingdom, any populace who thought that their ruler was ordained by God or part of some historic lineage. They were sold, right, they were SOLDI sold the bill of sale. You know, it's yeah, it's it's good marketing. It's good marketing. But I think everything in life comes down to objective and you've got to believe. I believe a certain subset of things about human beings, and when it comes right down to it, they are as old as

human beings and it's never changed. Human beings do what's in their own best interest. It might be Mother Teresa helping people in the ghettos of Calcutta, it might be a politician running for office. Human beings do what's in their best interests. There is an underlying sense of truth. That truth is objective, and it is different to people that right now in America, you're right or leftter. You believe Joe Biden is the truth, you believe Donald Trump

is the truth. And it's about split down the middle, and you believe in the truth, and that is your obligation, your duty to try and sway opinions on that. Right. So, whether it's trying to sell a used car or whether you're trying to make, you know, a political debacle seem good. So I look at all those things and said, Okay, let's put those together, and let's say that we understand certain things through math. I love math, right, so we all know the algorithm. Google

came up with the algorithm that's changed the world. And it can tell you what you want to listen to on Spotify. It can tell you the tea house mostly, the team house mostly, it tell what ads you want to see. All of those things. But it's not about the math. It is not about the underlying reality. Is about understanding human beings. Humans are

so fucking simple. I used to do party tricks. I got to dinner party, and I would and I would leave the room, and or you would leave the room, and then we would all get together and you would tell me what you want me to get him to do when he comes back, and you'd come back and sit at the table, and I would get you to do what the table told me to get you to do. Or detection of deception. It's it's very very simple. But we've gotten to a

point in American culture where we can do that very very well. It's not just about math anymore. It's not just algorithms. It's more complicated than that. But I first learned that from fourth I use that and built that, and then I took that private when I when I went which is which is where we go from here? So what was that intercedition? The intersection is media the intersection, and here's how it and here's how it goes wrong. I was one of many many people. People let me go back and they'll

say, what's he talking? I'll say, what I'm talking about is Victoria Tenzingg. That was a name, right, the woman the Flak of the Pentagon who came up with the MBED program, which was an enormously effective way of mixing reporters with the people who were keeping them alive while they were getting a story. It's a brilliant idea. She's a brilliant woman. You get the reporters to start relating to the soldiers Stockholm syndrome by proxy. It's a

very very simple human construct. There's a brilliant idea. I have enormous respect for that woman and what she's done. Whether you believe in what she did or not, it was a very effective model, right that works in a private sector or not. Then you go to you look at what happened after nine eleven with Fox News, Rupert Murdoch was brilliant in the sense that he said, I am going to ride nationalist, patriotic pride to a billion dollar

pay day. You can hate Robert Rupert Murdoch, but what he did was brilliant. And here's here's what I'll Shortly after nine eleven, I'm gonna say two thousand and three, maybe I had worked at for NBC. So I was doing daily I was on MSNBC every day all day. I was on The Today Show, Meet the Press, Nightly News, all of those shows, and CNBC, of all people, CNBC came to me and said, hey, at the time that the talent coordinator at a at NBC was a

woman named Elaine. I'm not gonna say her last name, but she was a brilliant woman. I thought the world of her. She hired all the everybody from Matt lower to whoever, and she said, Okay, we're gonna do a show on CNBC. I don't know why. It's called Checkpoint CNBC. It's every day at six o'clock and I was going to co host it with Martha McCallum, who was now at Fox News. Right. She didn't know I was a co host. I think she thought I was just in

some goofball sitting next to her every day, which I probably was. So I had I had a daily news show on CNBC where we would interview basically this but on cable news. So I did that. So again, I can't say how I did this because I don't want to get anybody in trouble. But let's say again that I understood the mechanism of the FBI, I understood the mechanism of the Defense Department, and I understood the mechanism of the

CIA. And I knew people at all of those organizations, and I knew what they did, how they did it, and what they wanted to achieve. That makes sense, Yeah, it's a fairer. So I called him up and I said, I now not only am on TV every day on all these other shows, but now I have a daily format that I can help shape opinion of what's going on in the world of terror, the global War on Terror, but the world of military operations. And it was a

big problem because they were because George Bush declared mission accomplished. Remember on the Rialship, it started to slide very bad. Is this related to the military analysts program? There was no program. This was me This was no program. I mean, it's very simple from a world that we all know very well, which is regimented, like nothing happens without a piece of paper. Not this is me saying I'm going to do this. It's not about tasking.

Remember we always got back to tasking. You do not have to task me. I'm telling you what I want to do, and I will do this if you give me X and X as a phone call. So I remember very clearly numerous conversations over the course this went on for two or three years. Right, So when something happens, you need to wait, Like

here's a perfect example. This is not in affairs. There was a there was a story that came out with the Secret Service had a bunch of guys in South America I think it was Columbia, right, and they got a little jam. Right. So when I went on and this, I didn't call the Secret Service, I didn't call anybody, but I said, I know a lot of Secret Service agents. I love those motherfuckers, and I love what they do and how they do. It's such a hard job.

It's a thankless, brutal, endlessly difficult job. And there's some really really great patriots and so I went on and I said, what you don't know is X, Y, and Z, and I said it as loudly as I could, as often as I could, and it went away. I'm not saying it went away just because of me, but I did my part. They didn't have a program where they would trying to manipulate the media. I was in the media and I knew that how to manipulate opinion, and I did it. So that was an example. But there are a lot

of agencies, and I know a lot of people at those agents. I mean, I know this is like a murky world that we're describing here about. I mean, are you just going on television and giving your opinion, your expert opinion as a former law enforcement official, or are they giving you talking points and telling you what to say, because those are two very different things. Yeah. So I started doing all these shows and one day I got a call and I know I didn't answer to your question. I'm fully

aware I didn't answer your question. And I got a call from this guy and he says, hey, I gotta you know you and fantastic, and I get a little story for you. Story is the USG just rolled up some I have Bin Laden's son. You may remember that story. You might have been part of that up. I don't know. And I said, okay, you want me to go out with this And they said, we're not saying that, but I'm telling you what just happened. And it's going to be this, this, and this, and the president is going to

make an announcement. And I said, okay, So the way a TV show works is this the way TV shows work that I worked in work this way you get you go in. I would get on a bus or car service. At first, I'll get in a car from my apartment in Upper West Side, New York. I would go to CNBC a c NBC World

headquarters, and I would sit at my desk. I had a desk right next to Joe Kernan, and I mean literally we're adjoining and all the people that you see there, you just I mean you work with them every day, the personalities, but there's really great people and very smart, very smart. So I go on and oh, so you go into this office from my show see at Checkpoint CNBC and you sit in the producer's office with ten people, and they go, what are we going to do today? And

somebody would go, well, what's the New York Times doing? And you check the New York Times, what's the Post doing? And check the Post. Then ultimately they would say, what's Fox doing, because that's all that mattered, because they had all the ratings. You want to generate ratings so you can sell advertising, so that you make money, so that you do what's in your own best interest, which is build your career. Right.

That's all people need to understand about the media is that it's all about money. It's the product is news. The product or the result is money. That's I mean, that's the only reason they're not doing it to keep you informed. They're doing it for bigger bank. Listen, I remember Columbia Business School, I mean Columbia Journalism School. Columbia Journalism School used to be the arbiter you want to I didn't go to Columbia Journalism school, but but you

know, yeah, I'm just saying, yeah, the Columbia guy. Yeah right, I'm just saying that there was a day when the Fourth Estate would find stories about Watergate that would splash presidents. I was thirteen years old when Nixon resigned. I remember that very very well. Those days are gone, Yeah, the poolishers. If you do a list poolishers have been received in journalism in the last five years, it is it is a debacle, is a disgrace, right, And a lot of them were like are for stuff

that has since been debunked or all of them? Yeah, I mean, excuse me, I'm sorry, not all of them. Many of them have become shameful, but they're not taking them back. My point is this that we'd have a meeting in the morning, we put together a story based on what other people were doing, and it would feed itself because ultimately, you're trying to make a show that people watch, so that you record the ratings

for advertisers who pay, who make money for all the people involved. That's the whole point, and that's the way a show would happen every day. So we'd go in and we put together a show. Ultimately I'd end up in front of a camera, reading a teleprompter and doing some kind of a story about that. And I did a lot of them, like I flew in a in the back of a what has a backseat? And at fifteen fourteen fourteens do and I think I have sixteen I think it was sixteen.

I can't remember. I get, we need to get we need to ask Alexon. Yeah, yeah, but yeah I did. I did a million story. These weren't stories that I said at a desk and with a teleprompter. I was going out like like I went to Guantanamo Bay, right, I went to GITMO. Now I knew everybody. I knew. I knew people at GITMO that we're doing the investigations. I didn't say anything, but there was. I spent two years at the FBI Academy after HRT, where

I taught interrogation. At the FBI Academy, I was pretty good at it and uh and I taught interrogation to various other agencies, including the CIA, which called it elicitation. Prior to enhanced interrogation, the CIA used to call interrogation elicitation and they had some funky ways of you say what you want about interrogation. The FBI interrogates people and puts them in jail for life. It's hard to get somebody to say, yes, I committed this crime, knowing

that if I say it, I'm going to jail for life. That's difficult. They're very, very good at what they do. They're very it's a difficult art form, and they're very good at it. The CIA didn't have that consequence part of nine to eleven. You know, it was a very very different thing entirely. But anyway, the point of the story is that going into media and having a platform where I was on television every day in different media, and what I said mattered to a certain extent, where I

could do this. I would go on TV and I would specifically and intentionally say X, because I would sit back and wait for you to go on TV and say X, and then you would go on TV and say X. Because human beings are extremely predictable and they will follow what benefits somebody else. And I'll say this, if you look at society today, you look at misinformation and disinformation. Those terms did not exist six months ago, a

year ago, didn't exist. Somebody made those terms up to exemplify something they didn't believe in. Once you come up with a word that people can get behind, or you can look in any aspect of sidy like like right now, one of the big phrases is unpack. Let's unpack this, right, That'll be a big thing for a while. It used to be cool beans or sort of burnt your cookie. Cookie. Yeah, there's always something and you can follow that path through culture, right, like this song, the

song the guy just came out with Richmond North of Richmond. Yeah, that lit fire. Everybody in the world had to be part of that, because that's the way it is. Masks for coronavirus. There are predictable behaviors. You can call it whatever you want, to collective, somebconscious, you can call it whatever you want. Human behavior is incredibly simple to predict and if you can predict it, you can shape it. And if you can shape it, you can benefit whatever program you want. Right, But to what

end? I mean, what what is it? What end? That's what? Right? And the problem what we believe about the world is that I don't hold a single belief that I think is wrong. Otherwise I wouldn't believe it. Right. So but but what I'm saying though is right. But what I'm saying, though, is that whatever I believe, I believe fervently. Otherwise, you know, I because I don't think I'm dumb. No human being, no human being thinks they're dumb and that the ideas they hold

are wrong. So once we make an emotional decision or get behind an idea, we hold on to that idea with tenacity. Yes, but what a lot of people don't realize is how simple the mechanism. Yeah, people are dumb. I mean, well, well, I don't people are impression Yeah. I don't think people are dumb. I think people are pretty dumb. I just people are impressionable. I think that it's been shown that people make emotional decisions in the middle of the logical structures to support that decision. But

we're all saying the same thing, just using different words. But but but I don't think what I'm saying is I know how to shape it. Yeah, and but again, what what is it we're trying to shape? What is the end? Whatever? You're objective and who? But you had a specific objective? Yes, I did, because my objectives was what I perceived to be patriotic obligation to make the world a better place for people that I

loved and cared about. I wanted your children, my children, people that I love to be safe in a world that, for a long time was pretty fucking scary. That was my personal opinion. I'm not saying it was right or wrong. I'm just saying that's what I believe to be the case. And I think a lot of people joined the military, joined the law enforcement, joined the cause because they believed, for a long time, from two thousand and one, maybe ten years, believe that we were vulnerable,

believe that the United States needed people were scared. People were scared. They people people join Antifa and the you know and and they you know the problem like they believe, like they have. They are every every bit as certain in their beliefs that they're making a better world. Right again, whether it's Antifa or Proud Boys or whomever, they believe that they are making the world a better place. Yes, based on I don't want even want to say

facts. I want to say based on their filters and perception of what is wrong in the world. True, but that perception, excuse me. The mechanism, in my opinion, that mechanism is exactly the same for every human being. Right. There's just there's a part of your mind. And my wife's a PhD in psychology. I'm not, but she knows what that place in your brain is called. There's a place in your brain just like the

mammalian reflects fight or flight. Some people fight, some people flight. There's a part in your brain where you say I am right and I want to I want the world to be right. So you could be. It could be a missionary and a religion. It could be a you know, Russia as a monolithic, monolithic threat to the United States. Could be what we feel about China, could be all those six It doesn't matter. The mechanism is exactly the same in the human mind. It just takes a different direction.

It look like wrestling. When I was a kid, I loved wrestling. So you see Hulk Hogan stand up against Randy man Savage over Miss Elizabeth. Remember that that big that terrible, terrible time in American history. Yeah right, Yeah, it doesn't matter if you were behind Hulk Hogan or if you were behind Randy Macho man Savage. And I know this is absurd, but a metaphor is a metaphor, right, it doesn't matter. It's bud light taste great less filling. My point is this that human beings have the

same exact mechanism. You're a Yankees fan, you're a Red Sox fan. Human beings need a monolithic threat to align themselves against right, and always have since the beginning of time, always will when you understand that, and you understand that you want to shape how that picks aside that can be incredibly yeah. Powerful, It's that idea that we all want to belong to something, and in order to belong we have to other. So it doesn't matter if

it's the chess and Checkers club. Oh I'm in the chess club. Look at those fuckers in the checkers you know, checkers club. Or if it's you know, America verse China. And again I'm not breaking I'm not I believe that American is a beacon of light and has been. Yes, but there are probably people in China think that too, But but we don't.

We don't have wagers in torture camps, so fuck them. But but the thing is is that and and you know, like I know, one of the parts of the brain is like the reticular activating system or reticular activation activating system, which is it allows us to see we see in the world, like if I have a jeep, all of a sudden, I see everybody driving a jeep because that's sort of oh look, even though there aren't any more jeeps on the road now. But if I'm for Trump, or if

I'm for Biden. I'm only going to see the ship that supports yes, like it just my brain filters it. I see the stuff that supports my views. But both sides are doing the exact same thing. They just drive different conclusions. Right when you understand that you can be more effective at it. And we're coming up on that now, we're coming up on in a presidential election, and it's say what you want. People talk obliquely about a

culture war. I think war is not an is not an understatement. I think it is a very significant time in American history, at least in my life. I lived through the sixties, I lived through the Nixon resignation. I've lived through some tumultuous times in the United States. In a history of United States, I think right now is a very difficult one. Yeah, but we all believe the same way. We all believe the same way about

different things. In my opinion now having been in the media and and understanding how to form these opinions, because do you see this as a political divide or that the politicians are utilizing this divide because they already have sort of the party right, if we were like the Republicans and the Democrats, the GOP and the dncales say, aren't that different in the sense that they eat at the same places, they send their kids the same schools. Is this Do

you feel as though this is a mechanism they use? I don't. I strongly believe there is no they. Okay, I really believe there's no they. I talk to people all the time and they'll say I believe this, and I'll say, well, why do you think that? And I said, because they say this, they say that, I go, who is

they? Nobody can ever define they right, because it's more uncomfortable to say it's us, it's us right, there's there's just there is no I could never get four FBI agents to decide where they were going to go for lunch. So putting together a conspiracy where everybody has this secret cabal and they're putting together these nefarious beliefs, it's really hard to put together. Now, I did that myself, but that was one human being moving a message because I

understood things. And granted, I mean I've been talking for a long time. Uh, it's it's more complex than than than what I've said thus far. But but I believe this, very very strongly, that human beings believe that they're doing good and and I don't even I think even Ted Bundy, in his own fucked up way, thought it's good that I'm gonna eat this guy, right, I mean that's what we do it, No, I really do. Yeah, I mean I think human beings. I did this

this thing for HBO called Police and Thieves where I went to. The idea was, I was going to take you as a viewer, and I was going to go around the world to places where I've done bad things, like Indonesia, Detachment eighty eight and uh, this group the hung La in Columbia, right, yeah, the crazy eighty eights, Yeah, crazy eights. But so I I went to Columbia and back to bow Guitar right from the old days in the old world, and got two guys together, two guys

named El Diablo, right one. El Diablo was in this. I don't even know how to describe these guys. They were an entity. They were a US government backed gorilla entity. They lived in this villa up on a hill overlooking Bow Guitar, and they had a weight room, a bunch of chickens, some pit bulls, and a really great bar. And all they did was fly out and kill people, right, and I worked with them. So I went back and I found a guy named El Diablo and we

started talking about killing people and death and what it's like. Then I went into the favelas, which nobody fucking goes into the favelas, and I found a guy that was supposed to be the bad guy and his name was El Diablo. Right, So I've got an El Diablo who was supposed to be the worst of humanity, and I've got an ld Blow who is supposed to be the beacon of hope for society. And it was like talking to the same guys. They were both great guys, and to a certain part of

humanity, they were both scary as fuck, you know. So, I guess what I'm trying to say for people trying to make sense of my point is this that human beings since the beginning of time have been very predictable. I mean, let's just say hypothetically that you believe in Adam and Eve, Right, Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, there was a murderer, a victim, a woman who might have might not have banged a snake, and a guy who got reminded these naked, right, and it's got to

wear fig leaf. Right. I'm saying that if you take the first four people hypothetically, you know, a foundation of two primary religions in the world, and you look at the first four people, they had some issues. Yeah right, I don't think we've ever made that much of her recovery. So we do the best we can to raise our kids with right and wrong, to love each other, to be kind to other human beings. And you know what, if we think they take a step across the line,

We're going to shoot him in the head with the two two three. You know, it's are we right or the Chinese right, of the Russians right of the Colombians right, or the we haven't got to Somalia. All the time I've spent I've seen. I was in Kosovo during the war. In Kosovo and I walk across the bridge and there's this old man. I'm an old man, but he was like older than me, and he's crying, and through the interpreter go up to him and say, what's you know,

what's the problem. And he pulls his pants down, and the bad guys said, cut off his pecker. Here's an old man just walking down the street and they pulled his pants down. They cut off his pecker. I go up in the mountains and I found it looks like the sound of music. It's terroll and some of the most beautiful places you ever seen in your life. Chalets and the sound of music, Julie Andrews singing, and it

was fucking beautiful. Right. These guys came in. They killed eight members of a family, and they stuffed them down the well to ruin the water, so when the family came back, they couldn't drink the water. I go to Somalia, and I've had all the experiences that people have in Somalia which are unpleasant. I go to Indonesia. I lived in in East team Or. I had a company in East team Or. I lived there for seven years. I got two guards outside my office, like my primary guys,

my close quarter guys, the guys who protected me. One of them chops off the other guy's head with a machete, Like from me to that wall. It doesn't matter if you're black, white, yellow, red, whatever, it doesn't matter. Human beings do a lot of really bad stuff to each other. Yeah, but we're also capable of love. YEA so how do you find the line between the two and how do you end up in our world trying to make sense of it so that we can protect.

So how does all of this evolve? I mean, you're a media personality that you're saying that you're not receiving taskings but guidance perhaps, and that evolves in you're you know, you're building this intelligence platform. You said you're all over the world with I mean, how does how does this sort of evolve over the years as the world in terror progressive? I wouldn't say it was

that I built an intelligence platform. I think there's a there's you know, there's a selfish aspect of it. And you know, backup on a second, you know I did. I've done a couple podcasts by accident. Mike Glover, who I met whatever, I did his talk to him, And when I talked to him, it was an entirely different thing. I didn't talk about any of these things. We just talked about it was like a historic thing. Right. He's a remarkable guy, an incredible patriot, an

entrepreneur, remarkable in a million ways. And then my daughter somehow called up Andy Stump and said whatever, and he said, Hey, come on out. So I flew out to Missoula and I talked to him, and I didn't go very well because I had taken my sons to a war zone, and in each team wars, it was another thing altogether. But I guess what I'm trying to say is I've talked to a couple of people about these, about various things, but I've never gotten to I mean, I've way

way over outstayed my welcome here. Look you have not well, we don't want to keep you. Nobody's gonna want No, it's not me, guys. I'll sit in and drink scotch with you all night. But we haven't even got to the to the heavy ship at all. But what I'm going to say is this that I spent in the evolution of my process went from

two thousand and one to about two thousand and six. Somewhere in that line, I went from saying I'm a patriot going to go to Afghanistan and try to contribute to the global war on terror in a way that is maybe maybe it's creative, certainly productive, and that people think is good people in organizations. I think it is helpful, But then I end up more and more with dinner with Madonna and card games with Brad Pitt and and dinners with with

all of these other household names who are remarkable in their own way. I mean, they're they're incredible, but the world is exactly the same that the difference between getting a Q. Clarence and getting dinner with Madonna is there is no difference. Right, You've got it. You've you've got to learn certain behaviors. You've got to keep your mouth shut in certain situations, obviously not

this one. And you've got to think on your feet in creative ways because they live in a world that is completely closed off from the reality that we see. It's not their fault. You just can't be one of those people and think you're going to have a normal life because you walk out in you know, you go to Soho for dinner at Indosheen and you know you get one out indoshing. But you know what I mean, whatever, nobody or

whatever. Yeah, it used to be Rayos. Now you can buy Yeah it used to you know what's so fucking funny In the day it was Rayos, right, there was six tables, right, right, I know, an eight month wait list. Yeah, you know when in those days when I was in that world there, I would never wait in line for anywhere if I couldn't get in. Somehow I want nothing to do with it. But Rayo's was kind of the spot that was kill the last place. And

now you can buy Rayo's sauce at fucking price, Chopper. Yeah, you know the world's change, so time the war is dragging on here. I mean, walk us into the heavy shit since you brought it up. Okay, the heavy shit is that in two thousand five, I had written three books and my my ultimate world was to make it as a writer, have a decent life. Was a writer. I hated TV. I hated TV from the day I started. I hated the makeup. I hated the falseness, the lights come on, you talk, you go back. I hated

everything about it. I think it's a scuzzy, vapid in human I'm not a fan of television in the old school, right network TV into case will news. The only thing that saved us as a species is podcast like This Week can talk long form and actually give people something to talk about. They might hate me, they might find it's fascinating, but at least they have a legitimate position based on a long conversation. So as two thousand and five

I wrote my third book, everything was great. I wrote a fourth book and it eight shit and basically my publisher dropped me. And here's why. I don't know, here's why, but here's what went wrong. I think when I was in the FBI, I could write about things that were non classified Cold zero, I wrote, I could write fictional accounts of things that were classified. Most of the stuff I did was classified. So I said,

okay, I'm going to tell those stories. So I wrote a novel called Black, which is Black Operations, and I wrote the sequel, which was called White, was like clever thing on words. White. I said, I'm gonna talk about things that I've done on the classified side. I'm gonna fictionalize them. As long as they're in the public domain, it's okay. So I wrote about like a sonic cannon that I developed with DARPA,

a project which is now used in SWAT teams. Right, you can get riot control with sound, right, or maybe even the maybe even the Havana syndrome. The agency guys that you know that head brain stuff. So I wrote a novel about that one thing I stepped over the line is the most bizarre things that I've ever been associated with. Even more than PSYOPS is FEMA, the Continuity Government plan. Right. People talk about all these classics, they talk about all this FEMA has got some fucked up shit going on.

No, I'm dead. I mean, you guys probably know what I'm talking about. I actually don't. Outside of like all the Oh my god, let's let's unpack that. I unpacked it one time and it ruined my life. I'm not going to pack unpack it again, but I'll tell you the basics of what happened. So let's say, hypothetically speaking, that you'd googled Mount Weather, right. Mount Weather used to be a really secret place. It's not. It's not that secret anymore. I mean you can google it,

right. I only talk about shit that you can that's in the public domain only. So I got this wild hair, and I was I was writing a book in the New York Public Library, the Rose Reading Room in the New York Public one of my favorite indoor spaces, and I said, you know what, Mount Weather is a crazy place and I can't write about it. But if I go out there and I look at it, and I see it. Whatever I can write about it, right, So I go, okay, cool. So I take the train to DC, I

get in the car, and I drive out to Mount Weather. For people who don't know, you can google it right. Mount mount Weather is where Cheney went on nine to eleven, right after nine to eleven. It's a government evacuation. It is. It is a secure location. But that's really not what it's about. I mean, that's really not why I'm Mount Weather exists and there are all these names for it like site this and aspect are, and they've got all these fucking it's a bunker where the government can consul

Mountain, like like Norad or whatever. Yeah, yeah, it's yes, it's like Norad, right, but it's you can you can get some stuff on Google. So I said, okay, listen, I've been there a bunch of times, usually in a helicopter, but I know how to get there. I'm gonna jump in my car and I'm gonna drive out there. So this is this is hysterical, but it's true, you know, in

all these risks. So I drive up there, and you drive up this dirt road, I mean you'll literally drive up dirt like a gravel road and you get to the top of this mountain and you when you get close, there's all this chain link fence and on one side is chain link fence and a certain type of the insulation. On the other side is a whole different fucking game, like doors and weird access points. Right. So I drive up to where it. I know the entrance. I've never dreined there,

but I've flown in there. So I get up there and there's a guardhouse. I mean it's literally now this is two thousand, I think two thousand and four, so it's only three years after nine to eleven. We've got two wars going on. We've invaded a rock. It was a hot time, right, So if you are one of the most secretive installations in the United States, you would think it would be kind of locked down, kind of heavy. That's what I was thinking. So I drive up and I

shouldn't be laughing. Maybe I should be laughing. This is what happened. So I drive up in this rent a car and there's the guard check or the chain link fence ends and there is a turn off and there's a guardhouse. But the guardhouse looks like a guardhouse at like a the neighborhood pool, right. I mean, it's just this like an eight by eight little guardhouse.

And there's a woman there who is wearing a two tone polyester in a form light brown and brown like you would see in a sheriff's department anywhere else, right, only only worse. And she's got a couple badges and whatever. So I pull up and I'm looking over there, and I know what's over there because I've been there, but I can't write about it because it's secret, right right, Like there's like I can say this because I said this in the book, but I can say this because I think it's it's

online. There's a house and it's not really a house. It's a it's a house to cover a ventilation shaft from satellites. So if you look down from Sputnik or whatever the fucking rests are flying these days, it looks like a house, but it's you know, it's it's a The whole thing is fake, right, It's it reminds me of the house and resident evils, right right, Yeah. So I drive in and I go up to the gate. Excuse me. I go up to the guardhouse and I go,

hey, how are you doing? And this woman looks at me and she said, sure, good. Did you forget your idea again? And U if I had said yes, maybe it's good to see I forgot my id I could have driven in and just wandered around right, and I knew where to go. And I said, well, no, not really. I said, I'm a novelist and I'm writing a book, and I know that if I come out and I can see this, then it's legal for me to write about it. And it looked like she looked like I pulled a

gun, a big gun. She shit herself, and maybe she'll watch this and goes, I remember that asshole, And so she stepped back, kind of staggered back, and I think she pressed a butt. She did something. I forget something, And literally it was like like a bad movie. It was that fast. There's two suburbans, blacked out suburbans pulled in behind me, out of nowhere, and they get out of the car. They walk up and then they motioned, I don't think anybody ever said anything to

me. I don't think they said a word. And they took me to a like a trailer house, you know, you go to a construction site. They get a temporary building. It's got that fucked up looking siding, the white pebbles side never you know. And I go in there and they asked me for my idea. I gave him my id. I knew the game, so I was being professional and nobody ever said a word to me. And when I asked a couple of questions, they handed me a business card of a number to call, and I said, okay, thank you

very much, and I left. So the story is not about that. The story is that I was a complete nutter fucking moron, and I wrote about it in a novel in that book right there, white right, And in my experience, I don't about yours. In my experience, there is a line, and when you step over that line, somebody who doesn't look like anybody is going to tap you on the shoulder and say no. And somebody tapped me on the shoulder real fucking hard, and that was the enemy.

That was the end of it. So that was the end of your writing career, writing career, or you're I would think your intelligence business was over, but no, because no it wasn't. Because my my intelligence business was okay. But they didn't want to write no more. I'll tell you where it goes. That was the end of my That was the end of my writing career because all of a sudden, I was writing about something that I stepped over the line. I didn't know that I stepped over the line.

I did not do it intelligence. Well, yeah, that's the thing with a lot of people in the intelligence communities. You don't you don't know where that well, you don't know, like I don't know what mechanism,

like what their publication review board is like. But we've talked to people on here, like with the CIA and with the CIA, apparently even if you write a book, if you know, one of our prior CIA guests had written a book on fiction, a fantasy novel that had nothing to do with the CIA and no details was over technically there's still was supposed to send that in and get it. Yeah. Yeah, like allowed to write a single

thing. But let's sort of like unpack that a little bit. That the continuity of Government program, Like for people who are watching this have no idea what we're talking about the continuity of government protocol is that if we as a country suffered at nine to eleven, and if somebody had gone into the Capitol Building and incapacitated the elected government of the United States. We as a country need a way to move forward under the provisions of the Constitution in order to

remain it was. It was designed for nuclear war. It was designed for has other yes, but nuclear war. That's another thing I want to talk about real quick, Okay. It was designed for nuclear war because nuclear war used to be the end all. Yeah, right, it used to be. When is the last time you have heard anyone in a public forum talking in real terms about nuclear war? I mean, like like elected officials,

like in anybody. I mean, when's the last time anybody talked about North Korea being a threat, or about Russia being a threat, or about about China being a threat. Nobody's been talking about it, but I will say that it and like about what rain Like New York came out with their first one day, Yeah, one day, and you know what, that was a way way, way low appointed official making a colossal fucking mistake. The

world has changed. I mean, I'm not gonna I'm not going to qualify this or come up with any of the provisions, but I am going to say unequivocally that what we look at as a government, as a threat has changed in terms of what we tell the public. And this is not me talking. This is me saying, if you're watching this thing, look at it. Look at it in the terms. When is the last time you

heard anybody talking about blowing up the North Stream pipeline? Right? When is the last time you've heard anybody talking about North Korea launching missiles with nuclear weapons? The conversation has changed in fundamental ways in the last eight to twelve months. I'm not saying what it is. I'm not saying that. I am saying that we as a country look in different terms at threats and seems like people would ask why, dude, So as a country, as a populist,

you're not saying the politicians or the administration or anybody else. You're saying that the populace responds to the threats. I'll ask you. Are you saying that the the the populace response to the threats that the media tells them are threats. I'm saying that the conversation has changed, and I can't tell you why, but I can tell you what I used to do right, and I can tell you that we're better at it now. Than I was then,

right, Well, I mean in the media. I mean Tucker Carlson was in the media this week talking about We're going to have a nuclear war with Russia. But he's not in the media anymore. He got fired. He's in the media. Yeah, in the media. Look, I mean, yeah, he's You could argue that he's bigger than he was. I mean Tucker Carlson. Yeah, whatever you feel about it. I mean,

I think there's a lot of talk about war. That's but again, you're talking about Tucker Carlson, somebody who is not in in mainstream He is not on a corporate owned network news. I mean, to your point, right after the war in Ukraine started, or a few months after, New York came out with the first sort of like public service announcement for nuclear war, there's nuclear threat, and then it disappeared like immediately it was an accident.

Somebody very low in a total pole made a colossal mistake and it evaporated very quick, and someone in the media decided to pick up on it, and if they had maybe that it would listen. You know, I've just used as an example, and I don't know the answer. I'm not I don't really have a position. But I remember very clearly the way the system worked. When I was on television every day for five years, almost six years. I knew all the people involved. I knew Jim Mikolschewski, I knew

Pete Williams, I knew Jim Stewart. I knew all of those guys. You know, I didn't know them all well, but I knew some of them well, and I knew how they worked. So do you have If you're the Pentagon correspondent, you have an office at the Pentagon, and you go in and you want to feed a story every day because that's your job, right You get paid a certain amount of money. So you go up and you talk to whoever the flag is that the Pentagon, You say I

need a story today, and they would come up with something. They turn to spig Off and they turn to spig it Off. That's exactly the way it works at every agency. And if you're a reporter, you know, on day one you're looking for a Pulitzer Prize. Three days later, you're just trying to feed your kids. You're trying to put food on the table. It's just a job. It's just a job, and If you do it properly, you can keep your job and you can work and you can

get promoted or whatever else. If you do it improperly, you fucked. And that's the way the system works. I was a reporter and I got my information that way. I controlled the information two reporters, and I knew the information that way. And when you say properly or improperly, do you mean if they're a great investigative journalists or do you mean if they follow their

marching orders. Seymour Hirsh is a great investigative reporter. And half the people if you said Seymour Hursh's named half the people to one hundred people, fifty of them would probably say complete crackpot. Fifty of them would probably say genius, hero of the American information system. Right. I don't think there is a way for an investigative journalist to do their job today in an effective way. And I will say, look at and this is not a political thing.

I'm not saying if I'm a Trump guy or Biden guy, whatever else, it doesn't matter. But if you look at the hatchet job that was the Russia investigation and where that came from and the people that won Pulitzer prizes from that complete utter fraud, not intentional. I'm not saying these reporters woke up and said I'm gonna commit fraud. I'm not saying that at all. But I'm saying those stories are proven through investigation not to be accurate and falsified.

Do you think that's a problem with people in government who are providing guidance everybody in government is trying to get I'll go back to what I said before. Human beings act in their own best interest. If you are a patriot, administration journalists are following what is in their best career interests. Human beings

do what's in their own best interests. It's not bad. I'm not saying it's bad, but I'm saying, if you wake up in your what's your named Korean Jompierre the Yeah, If you wake up in the morning, what is your job? It is to say Bidenomics work? And you know, Joe Biden is not this, and he is this, and it's you know whatever. That's her job, and that's their thing. If you are on the Trump side and you wake up every morning, you're trying to do the

exact same thing. And I'll go back to what I said before, The human mind is the same. How you decide to exercise that process is different. So in my opinion, based on my experiences, I did my best to influence opinion based on what I thought was right as what I perceived myself to be a patriot and a good father and you know, in a loving human being and a good person. Right, I mean, I'll shoot you in the head. But if I'm going to try and do something for humanity,

and I ain't gonna do it right. So my point is that I went real deep in that process, right, And I think now looking at what's going on right now, I think people really think it out, Like like maybe I came up with some ideas, but now it's a whole different Really, they've perfected it. And like even two thousand and eight, two thousand and eight, in my opinion, will never happen again. I have friends, very very wealthy friends, billionaires, and I'll ask them about it.

I don't want to get into this, but I know people who were in the left seat with a hand on the stick in two thousand and eight shearson the splash of the economy, right, And I know where they are now and they did not suffer, right, I mean, I know them personally, like hanging out and have dinner tomorrow, right, And and I'll look at it and say, two thousand and eight helped the financial world perfect what they fucked up in two thousand and eight, and politicians have now perfected

things that they fucked up in the past. Yeah, So yeah, I just I just think right now, and maybe this conversation is getting over sideways, but what it came to in my life experience was that I found a way to work as an individual doing what I thought was best in a world. I understood what you guys understand very well, which is the mechanism of organization. I understood in my own mind. I understood the CIA and the d i A and the NSA and the FBI and the Army, Navy,

Airforce, Marines. In my own way. I understood those things, and I knew how I learned how to work between them in effective ways. And we haven't even gotten to I mean, right now, we're at two thousand and one, right, But I mean, isn't isn't part of the problem though, that these journalists are being fed stories, and these stories are being placed by the intelligence communition in major papers. I know it's the way it

Isn't that a problem? And it's a problem in the sense that these journalists published these stories, these editors published these stories, but they don't understand the backroom politics that are going on inside these offices at Langley at DD that those stories are being given them for reasons they do not comprehend in any sense. I don't think that people do. Here's the thing. Let's say that the three of us are the cabal, right, and we're gonna like the Wizard

of Oz at wheels and levers, and we're shaping all this opinion. Right. We're going to do this for a certain amount of time, and we're gonna move on to the next job. We're gonna do a great job for two years, and we're gonna get promoted. We're going to get a new special access program Moniker, and we're going to get read into a new permission. We're gonna get promoted. We're gonna go on to the next thing.

There's nothing behind that. It's the problem. My experience in life is that there is other than a continuity of government plan, which is genius, in my opinion, is brilliant. There is no fucking way to run the world with politicians. Politicians come and go. Right now, we have Mitch McConnell and the Senate who freezes up, cannot form a sentence. He is the majority leader minority leader in the Senate United States Senate. He came out former

sentence. The doctor just yesterday declared him. Find it's all good, never mind, go home, don't care about it. On the other side, you've got Diane Fine, who is exactly might might be a little bit worse off. You've got Fetterman. I was flying out here, right, I'm so fucking excited you guys brought me out here. I appreciate it that I flew out here, big thing in the airport, showing this Fetterman on the

cover of Time magazine as a testament to man's ability to overcome depression. And I'm thinking to myself, maybe you know, thank God, you wish the guy the best. It's all great, But should Diane find Stein and Fetterman be members of the United States Senate with their various issues, and should Mitch McConnell, and what's this guy Santos who is out of control on the Republican side. It doesn't matter. You've got the same issues on the Republican military,

everything everything. Yeah, judging either and I'm saying it doesn't. And the American people. I think this is the the the the challenge that the American populace face with social media, because like we've had political parties in the past, we've had this political divide and and whatnot. But I think that

it in days gone by. And I could be fantasizing, because you know, I wasn't alive in the fifties, but I believe that there was always a healthy distrust of the government where yeah, we want our guy to do be this, or we want our you know guy to be that. But now it's almost as if we don't we will allow our side, whoever our side is, to get away with anything as long as it's our side and justifies the means. Ye. Meanwhile, meanwhile, all the politicians are voting

to remove you know, insider trading restrictions on themselves. Meanwhile, they're extending the Patriot Act every year, every year, and it's I don't think I don't think it all seems like a tool. I don't know that they're so all in so nefarious as to you know, be conducting this big op against the human But people want power. Like you said, people do what's in

their best interest. And if politicians can make eleven million dollars from you know, buying Nvidia after they pass a bill, then they're going to do that. Yeah, listen, go say what I said before. People do what's in their investors. It's not a bad thing. It's just if you understand that you can keep your Yeah, you know, I mean you can sell them a refrigerator, sell them a car, Yeah, get on a podcasting

run for president. I mean you can. You can sell them, you know, a congressional bill that restricts their fears and so anything else you want to get into any any more heavy show to have come. I want to keep it keeps because you talked about the tap on the shoulder and how that ended your career, as can you and you talk about that a little bit

more. I don't know how to say it because I'm not sure I truly understand it to this day, but I can say that I had a moment after Mount Weather where I was advised that I wasn't as smart as I thought I was, that I was not as clever as I thought I was and

that. But the problem was when I when I had that moment, I felt really badly because I really truly wanted to do the right thing right, and I really truly thought that I was doing the right thing, and I was told by this entity I was, I was the information was conveyed by the entity that that was not accurate, that I didn't really know what the fuck was going on, and I had stepped over the line, and that was it. That was over. Did you feel as though you had barely

avoided jail time? No, I don't think. But how did they I don't think I've ever been It's never been a jail issue as far as I'm concerned. It was never an over at issue. It was never something they could jail me for. How did they kill your career as a novelist? Though? If you write books, great, if you can publish books better. But if you publish books, you got to sell books, right. I mean I got a certain amount of money for that book, and I

got a certain amount of money for that book. And I got a certain amount of money for that book. I would not have gotten that amount of money for another book. Because they put the word out that you were persona non grata. I don't think it's a word. I don't know the answers. I don't know, but I can tell you what happened. I don't know the mechanism, but I know how that. I know the mechanism,

but I don't know how it happened. In my money, like, I know one person who writes novels and he had to clear his books both through d D and CIA, and the mechanism they used was, you know, DD has the first purview or as a CIA has a second, and then I say no, CIA has to have it. And so they basically found a way to fuck him because both entities were saying we have to have the first look. Yes, and that's the way they essentially shut him down and

stop him for listening. The mechanism is way stronger than I think. I'm clever, like I'm a moron in certain ways. I mean, I got a couple of things up my sleeve, but it all comes down to objective. In two thousand and six, if I had wanted to write another book and publish another book, I would have had a zero chance. And I

had everything. My agent at the time was one of the I would argue that I don't want to exaggerate, because I would argue that she was probably one of the top three agents in the world because of her position at the time. My publisher at the time, my first agent. Excuse me, my first editor is now the or until recently, the publisher of all of time warned books, I mean these people, you didn't get any better.

I got, I got the fun I got the Illuminati. Yes, listen, I'm not saying how I sold a book after winning eight thousand dollars in a card game with Brad Pitt, But I got fucking everything. I got the lunch at four Seasons, I got the GQ excerpts, I got the agent and the book. These guys, Robin Webstone, two with the great fucking guys in my life. I'm incredibly grateful to them, how they helped

me out. I got everything, the whole fucking Enchilada, and somehow I blew it and how I'm not entirely sure the mecham and I'm not entirely sure what. Who did? What? How said? I can tell you what happened. So anyways, I went to Somalia and I did this fucking insane gig and Samalia, and I got stuck at K fifty, you know, the second best airport in mogid Issue with no with no passport and no money and no technical How the fuck do you not have a passport? They took

it. I mean, I mean, listen a lot of I've I've heard guys on here talk about Samalia. I might argue, I would always argue that that that I'm the only person. I'm the only American that ever fought his way into mobid Issue. I think that's accurate. Like, I know, we haven't got there yet. In two thousand and six, I came. I just I said, I'm fucking done. I was. My life was over. My New York life was over. TV was over, books were over. I was over. I was a speaker's bureau. It was

over. I was literally I was a dead man to the world in two thousand and six, and I said, all right, I got an idea. I'm gonna go to Samalia. The US government has stood up the Transitional Federal Government from put it together in Nairobi. The biggest problem in two thousand and six was bad guys were going from Iraq and Afghanistan into the Saudi Peninsula down through Saudi into Yemen, and it's I think it's like twenty two miles

from uh in a skiff from Somalia from Yemen. It's a short, it's it's I mean, you could do it in a fucking robot, right and once you get into Somalia, you're fucking you're free. Right after ninth, after the black Hawk down, there was nobody there, I mean, there was nobody there. So the US government put together Transitional Federal Government. They

sent him into Nairobi. They built him. There's a lot of guys from Minnesota did d asper right, the Somali's well educated, successful businessmen who had been fucked out of by warlords, out of all their money. So the US government sponsored it, the United Nations backed it. They all got together and buy do with Somalia in February, like February twenty six of two thousand and six, and I said, you know what, here's here's the last story, because you guys gotta get rid of me. It's fun way too

fucking long. And we got questions for you too, all right. So so I mean we haven't even got to the fucking we're bringing you back, just you know, no, I mean, oh what, no, I'd love to yeah, but I'm just saying people, there's no fucking way any he's going to listen to me anymore. But we haven't even got to the great Ship yet. But anyway, So the point of the story is I

came over this idea and I said, I gotta figure out. I knew all these guys, right, a lot of guys that we haven't got to yet, five eyes, guys like Australians and Brits, and we haven't even got to them yet. But so I came up with this idea. You gotta hear this idea. So I go, all right, I'm fucked in New York, right, I'm fucked in DC, I'm fucked in America. What am I going to do now? Because the people who really matter, I've decided they put the the fucking fit print you thumb. Yeah, yeah,

you have the scarlet letter now the scarlet let. Yeah. So I go, okay, So I knew that the USG was going to stand up the Transitional Federal Government in baidoas Samalia because Mogu was too hot. It's like this fifteenth Transitional Government. Yeah, yeah, fifteenth exactly right. So The

idea is that the bad guys were coming across Saudi Peninsula. They were going across the streets at I'm in into Somali Land, then into Somalia once you were in your off grid, because after nine to eleven, we had very, very very meager resources in Somalia. Right. I know you've had guys on here, they've talked about it, but nobody's going to come on here and say we knew what was going on in Somalia. Nobody. So I said, okay, So I got I got my shots up to date,

and I flew into Nairobi. Right. I love Nairobi. I'm a big fan of Nairobi. So I always stay at the six eighty Hotel because that's where all the spooks in Nairobi. They in East Africa. They all stay at that ship hole. It's on Kenyatta Boulevard and it's it's a fucking hysterical place you gotta go at all time. So there's only two clubs I ever really wanted to join in my life. One was Hell's Angels and two was the East Africa Flyers Club at Wilson Airport, which is the civilian side of

Nairobi. Airport. Right, So Bluebird Air flies all the cought flights. They've got a bunch of king Air five hundreds and they fly all the Cot. And you know COT's got a shelf life was like eight hours. Oh I didn't know that. Yeah, it's like eight hours. So you fly it up. They would cut My dealer never tells me how well your dealers would tell you. So so I go, look, I'm a huge Hemingway nut. Right, I'm all my life. I'm my Hemingway night. So

I go, okay, Hemingway had this big thing in Kenya. So I fly anyways, I fly in. I gotta tell you this one quick story. So I fly in, and I've got this guy and his name is for Raw for Raw. Back up at the time, in two thousand and six, I bought a house in the Hampshire. Right, a couple issues move the family into Hampshire and this great place. So I'm watching black Hawk Down. Black Hawk Down's got this great scene where for Raw? Now,

what's his name? Not for our Indeed, Osman Aliato. Osman Aliato is in the in the Baccara arms market reading you, I say today, right, go back to black Hawk Down. And all of a sudden he goes, he walks over to a prado. He gets in this prodo and he's driving out of town. He's right a red dirt road through Somali. Right,

it was actually in Morocco, but Ridley Scott shot in Morocco. So he's driving down the road and a fucking black Hawk comes down and a couple of Delta guys tag him with like an I think it was like an M fourteen saw it off or something. Yeah, And they tag the engine thing and there's oil on the thing. And I'm in Hampshire and I'm watching this with my sons, Mick and Jake. Bad motherfuckers, these two guys. And so they so Mico's dad will will a three o eight break an engine

block? And I said, no, no, sir, no sir. But it's a movie, right. So the black Hawk lands, the prado comes to a stop. They kidnap Osman Aliato and they take him to Sam Shephard, right, and Sam Shepard goes to him and and he goes, you bunch of Arkansas white boys, you come in here thinks this is your war. This is not your war. You know that it was a great scene, right, and Ozma Aliato is uh, you know, he's a great act right. I forget his name, but the whole thing. So

anyways, we will watch this movie. Let's say it's a Wednesday night. Forty eight hours later. I'm in the Westlands in Nairobi, right, and I'm meeting with this guy for Raw, and I've got a plan, one of my plans, one of my famous plans. Right, So I'm talking to Ozma. I'm talking to this guy for Raw. Was a lieutenant under what was that guy's name. Who's the guy for Rah? Now? Yeah?

Under indeed? Okay, So he was in the Somali Army, a lieutenant under add and knew him very well, and he went to Syria and received intelligence training from the muhabor Rat. It's in fucking in Syria, right, he's my guy, so I hire him and this guy for Raz the ship. He was a linguist, so he spoke English, he spoke Somali, he spoke all those clicking languages like uh like the Swahili. But I mean, this guy was shit. This guy was such a bad dude.

So we're sitting in the Westlands and we're putting this plan together. So I'm getting ready to go into Somalia and I and I hear somebody yelling witcom. The Westlands is like a shopping mall with a bunch of outdoor cafes and stuff. So having a cup of coffee, and uh, I hear somebody owned witcom witcom, And I look up and here comes a guy from HRT. This guy, I'll say, his name is Ricky. Right, he's a man of color, and Ricky everybody loved Ricky. He was an incredible guy.

Big, big, jacked up guys like two sixty doing like two hundred and fifty milligrams of susting on every three days, wearing his little sister's medium sized tea, and I mean, he's jacked hiss shit. And he comes up and I go, Ricky, what the fuck are you doing here? Right? And he goes, oh, you know whatever. He had left the bureau when he'd gone to work for Triple Canopy or whatever else. So

he was working in country. But he's got a place in Nairobe. He moved his family in to n Iirobe, so we can go back and forth. So he comes up and then this guy comes up and he goes. This guy comes up and he's got oh, he's wearing a he's wearing a Big Johnson T shirt, Big Johnson, remember that Big Johnson stupid Yeah, it was a goofy T shirt company and a bing golf advise, a big golf eiser with no no fucking top on it, just a visor. And

he's wearing bud shorts, beauty t shorts. You know, they got a buckle in the front, and they got they got fucking fanny packs on with you know, with the pack meyer grip showing out of the fanny packs whatever. And there's other guys with him, and he's got this this handlebar like village people mustache, and he's got a list he's gotta fuck listen. So these guys come up and I go, Ricky, what the fuck's going on? Man? And so he looks and he goes, what are you doing

here? And I said, you know, business, And he looks at Farrah and I go, this is John you know he works for Google or you know whatever else. So we have that moment. And then the guy with a lispez athla you know, and whatever. It was one of those moments. So I went to the store and I bought a bunch of tampons and duct tape because I wouldn't carry they didn't have like that. Gel. Tampons are easy, right, right, so I'd carry duct tape and tampons.

Yeah, we're talking about wound managed wound manage, right, Because if I'm going in and I get shot, there's no hospitals of smat. So then I ran at hundred seventy two b Assessna and I fly in and long story short, next next time we talk, I get stuck there, I get stuck. The idea is this, Somalia has a translational federal government.

A government needs GDP. GDP Somalia has the longest coastline in Africa, meaning they have the longest legitimate fishing grounds in the Indian Ocean, which is rich. The Chinese want it. So if I can sell the coastline of Africa in grids to China, that's money for the transitional federal government to stand up and run with GDP in Somalia. Right. The idea is the US government wants a government that can tamp down the warlords, find the bad guys,

and get a toe hold in Africa. Were dreamcasting here? Yeah? No, no, this is real shit. So well, yeah, you're right, it's mcast. But I thought it was real shit because I'm delusional fifteen times times, sev seventeen times. Not saying that your plans dreamcasting. I think the government's dream That's what's dreamcasting. That's exactly right. Yeah, that the face ringing or whatever. Yeah, but you know I always said, fuck it, I'm gonna give it a try. Yeah, So I fly.

So it was like seven thousand dollars or something like that to hire this plane to fly from Nairobi from Wilson, you know, like the Wilson Flyers Club where Hemingway used to drink. Right. For me, it was all about Hemingway. But I just want to be Hemingway. So listen, seriously, it gets better. So I go, fuck it. So I fly into buy Doa. For those who have not been to buy Doa, it's a ship stain on the world. There's nothing there. It's been fucking blown

to the ground and everybody. So the first thing I did was hire a technical. Right, so I've got like, I got like two I think I had two P two p k ms. I had an M sixty. What's that go for a day? To hire a technical? Five hundred bucks. That's outstanding. That's new teamhouse floor right there. If you want five hundred bucks. If you want to know how much you get a technical, well, no, that was two thousands six. I don't know what it

is now. Two thousand and six. A technical was five hundred dollars a day you get. I think I had two pm p k ms. I think I had. I know I had one M sixty because it caused me a lot of grief because I'm thinking, where does an M sixty come from? Right? Right? That really bothers right? Yeah, So I had the M sixty and then and I had there's like a technical mark that you isn't like avis technicals or something like how do you hire a technical when you

I'll tell you where. A tall, skinny white boy goes to Buidoa, Somalia with a shutload of money in their sock. Yeah, technicals up here out of nowhere, fucking magic here out of nowhere. Yeah they were standing when I get there. Somalia really might be one of my favorite places on Earth, just because it's like a last type of thing. Like they've got different classes of people and I know we're getting to the end. The people

got to go home. But but different classes of people. And they had this one class of people that were kind of like gypsies, fortune tellers, and they would cast spells. Right, so I could go to them and say, I'm going to pay you a certain amount of money and you can cast a spell on such and such a person. But the same people would have the genital mutilation. So they have like a fourteen year old girl selling Chinese watches and ambulance to cast a spell when the village senior was cutting off

for oh, with a broken piece of glass from a bottle. Yeah, I mean, it's fucking bizarre somalia. Yeah, it's it's it's it's primal. So anyways, the idea was to the issue was pirates, right, the pirates. The only reason the Chinese wouldn't buy the fishing rights is because

of the pirates. But you had to Naval task force in Jibouti. So if I could put together the whole package, then the an aspect of the intelligence community I'm not gonna say, which would work with the naval task force to tamp down to patrol the coastline closer, to shut down piracy, to sell the fishing rights to the Chinese to produce GDP, to stand up a federal government and give the USG a decent go at fighting terrorism. Yeah,

that was the idea. Didn't go well, it didn't go well. No, no, So i read on one seventy two and I fly in and I land in, buy Doah, and I've got a certain amount of money, and they ain't no ATMs, there's no credit cards. Right, there's nothing. Right. You get a certain amount of money today, you've got five hundred bucks. Tomorrow you're dead, right, dead right. I got to that point. So I didn't like where I was in my own right

because you know, it was untenable. But the government didn't like it because all of a sudden, the government this me gets kidnapped by El Shabab and tortured to death. It does not look good for the transitional federal government. So all of a sudden it went within a very short period of time, meaning like an hour, they realized that I was there. They being else. Bob realized I was there, and they were coming up to get me

because I had great value to them. An intelligence component of the United States government was trying to put together various interests to work a stabilization program for the transitional federal government. And I was a big fucking problem. So I ended

up in a space between the wall of a mosque. I mean, and that's saying stuff because a mosque and BIOISIMALI is not really much, right, It's like a loud speaker and a fucking remains of a broken vall of that's been chopped up with RPGs, right, And I'm hiding in this thing. There was this little piece of corrugated tin, and they give me two bottles of Nestly water, because you find Nestli water anywhere you go, right anywhere in the world. Thank God that this really nice guy. This guy,

I've got pictures of all this. I'll show you these pictures after we're done here. But this guy that was there was a guy that had started like a bed breakfast for the government, except a bed and breakfast was a pile of rubble with like some blue paint, right, And he had he had survived various wars, but he took a fucking hard frag to the face, so he had I mean, he was gnarly to look at. He had

a real problem of his face. And so anyways, I got stuck between under this piece of corrugated ten And then finally I was running out of money and I said, I gotta make a run for it. I mean it was it's a long walk back to Nairobi, so my only choice was to go to Mogue because it was the only Oh I'm sorry, I forgot to say. Every day the King Air. The plan was that an intelligence community, an intelligence component would fly Bluebird Air would fly King Air five hundreds caught

flights in the morning that was eight hours. Then an intelligence capability would hire them for the second and third shifts and they would just fly the planes around, moving guns and warlords and trying to put the whole thing together right. They decided they didn't have room for me, so I would get up every morning with my technical and I would go to the Baidoa Airport, which is

nothing but a dirt strip with a pilot rubble there. It was like one tree and we'd go out there and all the technicals would line up to go out and get the cot because that was the only money. The plane would land. They'd throw off the bales a cot. The guys would run up, grab their ship and go sell it. I'd go up to the plane. The pilot would come out and say, fuck you white man, go away, and the plane would fly away. And that's a ship feeling.

Now I've got five hundred dollars less, five hundred dollars less, five hundred dollars less. My socks getting empty, right, So finally I had no place to go. I got one day left, so I said, I'm going to make a run for it to Mogadishu. I didn't know how far it was to Mugidissue. I didn't know what was there. When I got there, go to the Modishu airport, which was closed due to you go

to check points. You know, you get hung up at checkpoints with a like a twelve year old with a AK forty seven yea and my technical. So I'm in a Toyota Corolla. The technical would try to catch up. They would scream at each other. They yelled at like the twelve year old doesn't care if I go through or not. But oh, I forget to tell you. Osman Aliato, the guy from black Hawk down, I met him like. So I'd go from the Hampshire to night to Nairobi and then

into Baidah, and I'm in this warehouse. I got a fucking picture of him with me, and he's stayed in there. Not in a fucking montage walking suit with short sleeves and epaulets. He's got on a fucking suit from Herodge and he's wearing Aramis cologne, right, And I'm in this warehouse with him. It's one hundred and four degrees and I'm going, what the fuck? And I'm shaking his hand Osman Aliato, the guy from black Hawk down, I'm going, what the fuck is going on here? But anyway,

the point of the story is that I eventually ended up in Mogue. They shot out. They shot out the window of the to Corolla, which is a problem because then they could see me right ahead right head reflective windows. And so I get to the airport and I see that there was whatever that plane from dB Cooper, the one with the stairs that come down like a DC tannery and I can see it. So have you guys been to Swelling?

No? Okay, So so mog you know, got Mogadishu Airport right, uh main airport, And then about I have like twenty five miles south is this place called K fifty And K fifty is an old Russian airstrip and it's literally a red dirt strip and a bunch of shrub brush, and then a couple of tents and piles of rubble and fifty guys with machine guns who all want to know what this fucking retard me. You can't say retarding this guy? Whatever this me? You're a fender yourself, yea, he goes.

And so they're all looking at me, and I'm going and the only reason and I know, I'm looking at them, and they're looking at me, and I'm thinking, the only reason I'm alive is because the Agency is making deals with all these guys trying to put together what turned out to be the Second Battle of Mogadishue, and they're all looking, going, can we take him? Can you take him? Nobody knew who I was there with,

and that's what saved my life. So anyways, the guy came out, Oh, they didn't want to cut off the money tap, Well, they didn't know who I was there, right, right, So it's like your crew didn't want to take a chance you steal me, but I had, But the agency was paying you, and then the agents are going to pay you to kill you, right, So I think it was confusion. It was it. So anyways, the point of story is that so I said, you know, I gotta get on that plane. It was a

charter plane. It was not a scheduled flight. There were there were no planes and mogad issue that day zero, but there was this one plane. And I still have the ticket, but it's not a ticket, but I still have the handwritten thing. But anyways, the part of the stories that came out and they said how much money do you have? And I had six hundred bucks left, My technicals gone, the car's gone, I'm all by myself. So they took I gave him six hundred bucks. They came

out, they searched me, They went through all my ship. They stole the duct tape, like they left the tampons. But oh well, that's another story. But I had some guys with some real health issues. So they search, They search your stuff just to make sure that you had nothing else of value. No money, Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I I was wearing a nice watch. But they do we have questions for Chris. We do should probably roll in the Chris were we are like,

we guys, I know this is way the fuck it happens. It happens sometimes. Everybody who watched this show knows I'm a talker, like I'll go all night like Jackson one who's good about keeping us like on the rails. But the other thing is is is we just like we want you back and want to hear Yeah, we can do it against all of this. Well, the crazy shit we haven't got to you know. It's just that's why I've been trying to get to crazy shit for like four hours. Well

this is the start of the crazy. But it's all been good though. It's okay. The crazy shit we haven't got to you yet. Is I moved to Asia after Somalia because I needed a war that I could survive. Was just madness? Just shut up? Have you back next time and we'll talk about that. We'll talk about South East Team or was madness? I was called key to Belong Keita Belong is number one ghost because I was the number one ghost. I was number one ghost man Casper but not so friendly,

right, I was not friendly? Jackson? Thank you so much. How much A Black and White was based on your overseas hr keats. Did you prefer domestic opts or renditions? And why Also, we need another Waller novel. That's a really nice guy. I don't know who he is, but I mean anybody even knows. First of all, Waller is a real guy. He was an NSA guy, great guy, a great friend,

and that's why I used his name. But they were one percent, uh, I shouldn't say one hundred sent They were very literally really based on my life. Harold Janine Uncle Harold that I grew up with was the industrialist, the kind of the protagonist guy that was based on his life. And Black was stories that I couldn't tell when culture, why do you think? Why do you think like you didn't get the tap on black and white but you did on your fourth book. No, I got it on white. Oh

you got it. I didn't get a tap on black because it was you know, it's not a big problem. I stepped on some dicks of white. Jackson, thanks again. What was the hardest part of selection? And an ots n ots is a new operated training school. I don't think there was anything hard hard about them. It was I've never been really good at anything athletic except violence. I mean, I'm I was like a C lacrosse player and a C football player. And a C. I was never really

get anything. I just had endurance. You know, you guys know Q course or the long walk. It doesn't matter what you go through, it's endurance if you just can shut off pain. Yeah, that's it, Jackson. Thanks again, we have some part of yours outside. It sounds like, as an early plank owner of the team, what has impressed you most about the team today and the direction they have taken since you left. I

could not make HRT today. They would hand me my fucking bus ticket in a banana sandwich and say, what you know, leave me alone there there. They've evolved in ways that are remarkable on so many levels. I almost feel embarrassed that I, you know, I get to meet you guys because I was on HRT. But I'm just you know, there's so much better.

But I think that's true of of I think anybody that was part of any force prior to the GWAK, you know, and looking back, because the training technology has changed, you know, just technology has changed, knowledge has changed. I mean all of these units are doing things. Yeah, I mean Jack's ranger of Italian experience and who the rangers were then was way different and way better than what it was not. The Rangers weren't great when

I was there, but they didn't have that Giott experience. So I think that's different than it is today. I think that's true of anywhere you look well. Have enormous respect for these guys. And I just hate this, you know, I don't I don't want to step on there. You know whatever, Marco, thank you very much. Have you ever worked with Army CID and if so, what was your honest opinion of the agents? I love CID and I'll tell you Randy Mullins and Willy rawl I worked at Fort

Leonard Wooden, Missouri with those two guys. They were both wore on officers. Willy Rowl ran the entire operation and I they had shitty suits. They were Polyesta suits like ninety nine dollars. And Randy Mullins, I love the guy. Randy Mullins had a car like his main personally owned vehicle, and he had a bumper sticker that said, this is not an abandoned car, please don't tell it was in forty seven coats of bondo. They made no

money and they were true patriots. I love those guys, so I loved my experience with cid IS as some of the greatest people that I've ever worked with, dedicated, capable and great guys. Uh, Lewis asked us, thank you very much. What lessons do you learn an HRT UH that the general public could benefit from knowing? Oh my god, great question. The short answers, I don't know. I don't know that I have a huge

that I have a great opinion of the general public. To be honest with him, I mean, I'm not really a humanist and I and I've lived a really fucking weird life. And HRT Delta, Marco, Seal Teams, Rangers, special Operations, the Marshals, the Bore Attack. I mean, I could talk for hours and hours about all the great people I've met working

for different organizations that have devoted themselves to a greater good. I don't see that in general, you know, in general population, I think you try hard, you do the best you can to be a good human being, and uh and you hope it works in my opinion, cat Chaser, thank you very much for the cat sticker RS. Thank you very much. Thank you for mentioning John O'Neill thought provoking conversation. John O'Neill is an American hero, gave his life to gave it his life to the fight on al Qaeda,

and it's just bizarrely ironic that they killed him. Yeah, I mean it's crazy. He fought his entire life against al Qada and he died in the World Trade Center bombings. It's crazy, Kay, Jam, thank you so much, echoing the rust and peace for John O'Neill, shout out, thank you for the unique kend or Chris, And there's an asterisk on unique. I don't know if there's something I gotta say to anybody that's still hanging on here. I apologize for the rambling. I mean, I've got sorry.

The problem with my life is it's it's so widely unwieldy and and it's hard picking a couple of things to talk. Chris again, just you and me here. I'm a rambler too, so I'm right there with you. You don't have to apologize for a thing. There's so many fucking stories that I don't know how to get there. We'll do it again next time, and we we'll hit up all the other sidebars. Okay, damn, thank you so much. It can be another three and a half hour show like

I'm down come back to discuss the topic of propaganda. Pre uh pre whiskeyed in the meantime, about to send Jack and David minimum fifty questions I have for you on the topic. Uh slant like the is that's that's the hours true right Slante st Yeah. Thanks Mohammed Sabanni. Just for the record, whoever wrote that half Irish got the shamrock on my sleeve Mohammed uh Sabanni, thank you very much. Thank you for the sticker. I think we got

a couple more after that. Thank you for the sticker. So one of the things people can do instead of making comment is they just put a sticker, which is like a little like I'll show you right here. It's just that it's just somebody like donating without really having a comment, but just like being generated. Very generous for us, helping us like buy booze and pay the rent. Uh. I want to get this right, do daf fuck down anyway? Thank you very much, teamhouse killing as usual. Thanks Fellas

dog Point, Thank you. What do you think made you attract to a life adventure? Were you looking for inspiration for writing at first or was it something more personal? Great? Great, great, friging question. It was personal looking for a life adventure. I was two things. One, I wanted to be Hemmingway by A. Curtz going up the heart of darkness. Ye, so you know, as a writer, those things are important to me. And I just happened to be born into a place where there's nothing

else to do. I mean, from the time I was a little tiny kid. I mean it's like five years old. I would go in away in the morning, and I would come back if I was hungry. So I lived my entire life in the mountains. I mean, did you were when you were doing that? Were you were you there as an outdoorsman, sort of a naturalist enjoying what you were or were there fantasies around what you were doing? Both? Great question. Both. I had my mind tends.

I'm a romanticist to a certain extent. I wanted to be uh. I literally wanted to be a under Stemon Way. I mean he lived a life of extraordinary adventure other than smoking a shotgun in Cortlin, Idaho, July third, nine sixty two. Other than that, I kind of dug his whole thing. I had shitty taste in women, you know, But like when I was my junior in high school. I drove from from Hannover to Hampshire to Key West, Florida to drink in a titty bar across the street

from where he wrote The Snows of Killamancharo. Right, I mean, I mean, who does that when you're fucking seventeen years old? Yeah? I was into it. I was way into it. I wanted the life of adventure. I wanted to go out and break and heal at the broken places. Yeah. I wanted to go home and write it all back. It's fantastic. It's it's interesting too, because there was a whole generation, not even a generation because obviously him like I don't want to say necessarily Caroact,

but Andrew Thompson, but but Jack Jack London. Yeah, like like there, I guess it's worthy. Yeah. They they saw the world. They saw the world. It's it's hard to see the world that way anymore. Yeah. People were people forget now, you know. I've told a lot of stories about things. They were before the internet. They were before cell phones the way we see him now. When I first went to Morocco in nineteen eighty, it was dangerous, right, and that was just Morocco.

I mean, now you go there and you have dates and take a photo tour of the rolling Stones and go surfing. Right, I did go surfing here. But but in those days it was a very different world. There there were no uh snapchat h shuffle dance videos, you know, overlooking Mogadishu Airport with a bunch of like gluten free chefs who were you know what I'm saying. We live in a different world now. In those days, adventure meant something right, because if you fucked up, you were dead. Right.

Look look what I was gonna say, go back to Somalia real quick. Two guys in my crew. One guy had just really fucked up cut on his hand and I was trying to debride with a little bit of iodine. The other guy maybe sixteen years old, seventeen years old, and he was he was laughing at the guy with a cut on his hand, and I go, what are you laughing at? I mean, you know, through a translator, he pulls up his leg he had Beatu pants on.

Pulls up his leg and he had what looked like a rubber band around his leg and bones like his fucking tib fib bones to his boot, there was no flesh. He got hit with a grenade and the flesh died and atrophied, and and they were going to cut off his leg, and he said, no, I'm leaving this life with this leg one way or another. So somehow, because the world is weird, somehow his leg had healed around the bone and he was walking around on two fucking bones like a pig.

So anyway, the point of the story is, you know, a lot of the stuff that I did in my life, there was no there was no backstop. You know, it was just it was simple. It was

analog. It was not a digital world. Do you do you think that like, I mean, obviously we still have space, we still have the ocean, But do you feel like, especially with the Internet and with like Wikipedia, like you know, if you've never been to the you know, to the Nile or to the Amazon or whatever, like you can just kind of look at all up, you know, see travel videos on YouTube or whatever, do you feel like it's removed some of the mystery and some of

the towns in life. Percent Look, you know, I we haven't got to this point yet, but I've I've been to I don't know what the numbers, but I'm guessing it's like eighty countries every continent except Antarctica. And I've been a lot of places. But you go to the you go to the Istanbul airport, there's two, not one. There's two fucking Krispy Kreme donut shops in the Istanbul airport, right, I mean Istanbul is the like the center of the Silk Road. It's like the center of commerce for the

world. And it's two. I mean, maybe it's right that there's two Krispy Kreme donuts. I'm just saying that they that world's gone right, it's right. The world of discovery and exploration, it's hard, man. You gotta go deep in the ocean or far into outer space. Yeah, uh, Mohammed's SAPANI thank you very much. Someone's coming to take that ghost title one day, you Patriot drinks on me when I see you, gentlemen cheers. As a young businessman, how should I best fun and shape new politicians

and crush the socialist left? Jesus. My daughter Chelsea, who I love dearly, said Dad, No matter what, don't mention these fucking things. Right. One of them was politics. I'm not gonna say and that's fair, and we we generally like we try to avoid that on our show. But let's say it's not the socialist last or the the capitalists. Right. Let's say, as a young business person, how would somebody going up go about buying politicians? Well, you buy them. You know, it's just

a campaign contribution. That's pretty simple. Yeah. I mean, you know, I've got a great buddy in Hartford, Connecticut, and I'm I love this guy. And he paid a little here, and he paid a little there and found out he shouldn't have. You know, he did it honestly, he did it righteously. It's hard, man, it's really fregetting hard getting all the rules right. So great question. I love the entrepreneurial spirit. I don't know. I don't know how you buy them. Our our

audience outside love, they love you. I've kept you here is so freaking late. Nobody loves me. I think it's we got to wrap it up for you, poor guys. I think it's just a way of wait. One last question ye hey, do you have you checked patron? He's asleep? Yeas one last questionnaire? Uh, Gene, Kylie, thank you very much. Will the current focus on white nationalism leads to results similar to those

in the nineteen nineties. Great another, I mean, some really brilliant questions, and it's really cool to know that your audience, we have the smartest, the incredibly smart people. Right. My position is this that I think that the white nationalist you know, I didn't make up that phrase, but that phrase, in what it common means, commonly means in the nineteen nineties, had a basis in the Turner Diaries, and it had a basis in

the Zionist occupational government. It had a certain legitimacy, and somebody has come up with a way to re manufacture that. I don't think because you vote for Trump and this is not politics, that you are automatically a white anything, right, Right, I mean I watch YouTube and I watch black people

and brown people, and red people and yellow people and various colors. Would or else that like Biden and like Trump, that the world is changing and it's not just because you're a person of a particular color you have a particular affiliation. It's not that way anymore. So saying okay, I'll lend on this. My mother is a piece of work, all right. My mother is a piece of work. My mother called me up one day and she said she was in a rant about something. She is way left, she's

on a rant something. And she said, she said, all those racist gun carrying military people. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, who wo Mom, what the fuck are you talking about? What about a military person would be anything. I mean, I know military people that are left, right and in between. It's not a political issue. You join the military because you're a hero, because you believe in the greater good of humanity, in my opinion. And I said, what are you

talking about? And she said, well, you know, it's all the same thing, these right wingers. If they like guns, they hate this right and I and I thought to myself, oh my god, I've known this woman all my life. There's some really sideways thinking out there. So anyway, I don't think white nationalism these days is anything. I think it is a they're usurping a term that meant something thirty years ago. Yeah,

well, there's something to distinguish between nationalism and white nationalisms. Exactly. What is the nationalist? Because you love you a country, because you believe in what makes this a great place to live. Right, I've been a lot of places. I've been to, some good places and some shitty places.

I don't know of a place that I wish I lived other than the United States, right right, we have a remarkable constitution that guarantees freedoms that we should be proud of and enjoy, in my opinion, and protect, and a lot of people die to protect those rights. Right now, I'm right there with him. I mean, obviously we're not perfect, because the country is just humans, and humans are never perfect, but the Constitution ensures that we're as close to that as we can be. I wish i'd did that.

I agree. Check if you knew John O'Neill, Alice Huffon, but you pretty much. O gotta say thank you for asking that question. When I go down on the list of people I've known in my life the benefited America who were heroes and do it who did extraordinary thing, Alice Font would be at the top of the list. Alison I met in Yemen, who was a junior FBI agent who was working his way up, and he is one incredible guy. If you could get Alice Font on this show, it

would be remarkable. For are you still in touch with him? Help us? I'm not because he left the FBI, he went to the New York he worked for some aspects of the NYPD and there he built a terrorism aspect within uh in New York. But I mean Alice Safon is is he's a hero. It's easy to bandon that round. Like anybody serves in the military as a hero, maybe Alice Safon's hero. I mean he almost you know, he lived or died to protect Americans, and and he came from you

know, a different route than a lot of people would. So anyway, all this spot was an FBI agent who worked counter terrorism, and he worked ebl and he was who worked with John O'Neill. And that is it. And all right, well we killed something. We will we will, We'll do it again. Name we can do it quick right now if if you know, Jack can go home and and uh, Chris and I'll sit here d drink and talk. We get drunk all night. No, No, I mean we should do it a second episode at some point. But I

mean, this was this is a good time. Man. I'm glad that we have also wide ranging conversations. I will say, the really great stuff we haven't got to yet. Seven years in Asia in Indonesia and where it goes after that. We'll do it next time, We do it next time. Yeah, all right, guys. So also, uh we have cold zero No no, no, those are ancient. I don't want to matter. It doesn't matter. I get zero out of those books. I don't

make any money, no nothing. I just you know, in the publishing industry, they say, if you out earn your advance, you didn't get a big enough advance. Right, So yeah, I read. I read these two. I read both. I brought those books for you guys. Put on your shelf, score your literary guys. And because it tortures me that I have to, you gotta put that next to we'll put it right

next to know heroes. But anyway, if you guys want to know more about Chris, if you you know, I want to see, yeah, the old Chris a book that Yeah, I mean, there's a Chris of his time. But there's another one coming now. The new one is Crazy, the book that's coming out now. I just finished it. I submitted

it to Random House. It's called Anonymous Mail, and it is very specific details about the stories, some of the stories I've told and the stories that I have not told Yet it's about what happens to a person in our world that falls too deeply into it, the anonymous male aspect of it, and and and how you come back out of it, because you know, I went through what everybody does, the suicide and you know, all of those

things. I feel like I have some perspectives on that. But the new book is about that probably six months all right, we'll talk about that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, But honestly, Uh, if you want to read a book uh that gets somebody canceled by the US government, that got me canceled by the US government, read White. And if you want to understand why, better read Black. And if you want to know what type of person writes a book like books like these, read Cold Zero and they're

all antiques like me. All right, guys, Uh, thank you, thank you everyone for joining us. Man. Well, well we'll do this again with Chris and we'll see all of you guys again next Friday. So thank you for joining us. Thank you for something shorter, maybe