MARSOC Intel Operator in the NSA | John Hackett | Ep. 351

Plenty of stuff to talk about here. We'll talk about you and then we'll talk about your books and the theory behind your research. So thank you for joining us and coming in studio today. Yeah, thanks for having me. Happy to be here. Yeah, So it would take it

from the top if you tell us a little bit about you know, what was it like for you growing up and like what sort of like took you towards the Marine Corps. So I grew up in Maine, way up north Caribou Mainz. Like most northeastern city the United States, a lot of snow loved the snow. Then we moved to Connecticut when I was about ten years old, and from there I met a couple of different people in the military, especially World War two and Vietnam people because

I was that era. And I had a history teacher, mister Donahue, who fought in the Chosen Reservoir in the Korean War as a marine, and he was so down to earth, like a really nice guy, and you wouldn't imagine if he met him on the street that he had fought in the Chosen Reservoir, you know, like fighting in reverse and all the stuff that they were doing. So that's that's one guy that was like in the back of my mind, like something about him. I like

that guy, you know. And then I met a family friend who fought in the Battle of Pelulu World War two, and he actually had a katana of one of the last guys that he killed on the island and he had it in his house. His name's Butch Watkins. He has two silver stars from that battle, and like all he's a crazy background. But if again, if you met him on the street, you wouldn't know that that guy

did that. He was like, you know, if your car's broken down, he'd go over and stop and like help you fix your tire, even though you're a stranger, like that kind of guy. But you got to think, like back to that time, you know, he was doing that stuff.

And there were people in my family who had been in like World War Two and things like that in the army, Like my grandfather was in France during the liberation of France, which is cool and awesome, but like there's something about the army where it's just kind of like the army goes rolling along, but there's a difference with the way the Marine Corps is and like like these two individuals, for example, like there's something about them that's more than just the military, you know. And I

also like to be like a high achiever. I was thinking, like what's the highest thing I can do right now? And I was kind of a bad kid in high school, so like I stayed back in twelfth gradecause I didn't go to school for an entire year. I just didn't go and my mom was too busy working, Like the trumant officer would come and I wasn't home, and you can't do anything about that. So I couldn't go to college right away. I'm like, how do I get out

of here? Well, I could do that Marine Corps thing, and so that's that's why I joined the Marine Corps, getting out of my town in Connecticut basically. And you came in the Marines doing scene. Yeah, so I didn't

even know what that was. I knew I wanted to do something kind of like unconventional and unique, because that's kind of the way I grew up, was just like almost no rules, no boundaries, you know. And I didn't want to be boxed in the military ken box you in. But I told her recruiter, like, I don't want to be boxing. You gotta find somewhere else for me. So he's like, okay, take this test, the ASFAB the entry test, And back then it was on a like a you know,

black and white screen old computers, you know. And I'm doing the test, and I'm doing the math test, and like the science tests, I'm answering the questions. They keep getting harder. I'm like, am I stupid? And I thought I got like a zero, you know, like I thought it did really bad. And they gave me the sheet and apparently I did really well. And I didn't know this, but the as bab back then. I don't know if it still does. They give you more difficult questions the

more you answer correctly, Oh I did. I had no idea and I just thought I was dumb the whole time, you know. And I'm like looking at guys next to me, like are they all answering these correctly? Like what's going on here? You know? But then they're like, yeah, you can't do infantry because your score is too high. You can't do this because of this and this, And I'm like, okay, well, I don't even know what to do anyway, because I don't know anything about this, Like we'll just you know,

sign this contract. Hey, don't worry, and so yeaheah, yeah yeah. So I did making our numbers. Oh yeah yeah. And actually he kept calling me, he's like, you want to go to boot camp like a little earlier because he had like a monthly quota. He's like, need to get you as soon as possible, you know, are you really serious about it? You show me you're serious. So I did actually went earlier. So I went there in October two thousand and four to boot camp and uh that

was in Paras Island, good time. And then at the end of boot camp, I found out what my job would because I didn't even know like that contract I signed, no clue what it was, and like, hey, you're going to Pensacola, Florida. Well, we did Marine Corps combat training, which is what the the you know, non infantry guys do. They're like very basic. It was still like Vietnam era stuff. Back then. It was like two thousand and three, two

thousand and four. We had like the old flackjackets, the tricolor flackjack like covers your whole body and all that, you know, and the h hardness chest brig that they used to wear back in the day. So we're doing all that like nonsense, like patrolling around like idiots. And then even though the war had already taught us stuff, we weren't learning those lessons yet, and like teaching us to do like the Turkey peak but with a long gun, which is so stupid. It was just like dumb stuff. Anyways,

They're like, yeah, you're going to Pensacola after that. So I went to Pensacola, where the NSA actually teaches like a joint school to teach singgan collectors basically, so singles intelligence collectors. They collect foreign intelligence on nation states and any other target that we need, and so we learned

all that stuff. And at the time, they were transitioning from the old way of doing sigan like against the Russians back in the day, to a new way of doing it, which was all digital because before that there was a lot of Morse code, especially during like the nuclear period, because Morse code is the only thing that will vibe a nuclear strike as far as communications are concerned. So like Russia, China, North Korea, and the United States

all have Morse code backup systems. So of course that's a target that'd be very interesting to listen to, right because you could know what they're going to do in the event of a nuclear attack because they're always practicing

that stuff. So we learn how to do that. We also learn how to do something called hand graphic analysis, where you listen to some stuff over satellite communications and you actually take a piece of graph paper and write down the bits on it and figure out where the bits start and end, and you can actually decrypt stuff this way. And I'm way over simplifying it, but we did that for like three months while there's a ton of trigonometry involved, and I am not good at math,

so that took me a long time to master. I was spending a lot of extra hours in the schoolhouse. Eventually got it. The reason you trigonometry is because you can actually figure out like the angle, the amplitude, all these different things about the signal if you just do the math on it, really, which will help you solve the equation and figure out what part of this signal is protecting the data? What part is the actual data, Like what's the nuclear communication in there, and what's just

the error correction stuff on the outside of it? And when you collect it, you don't know. You just see zeros once. So you got to figure out, like, first of all, where does it begin, because that will tell you everything else about the sequence and all that. And we were doing this on a piece of graph paper. They don't do that anymore.

portion of this stuff. Okay, what we were learning at Pensacola is like broad oh interesting, from satellite communication interception all the way down to like tactical radio interception to digital communications, analog communications. We were using oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers and like all this stuff. It's fascinating. Yeah, And then so I did that, and I was the honor graduate in the class, which meant I get to pick

my duty station. And they listed all these places, and I thought to myself, like, I don't want to go to a Marine Corps unit even though I'm Marine, because I know if I go to Marine Corps unit, I'm gonna get boxed in. So I was like, what's the least Marine Corps thing I can do? There was this thing on there that said NSACSS, which is National Security Agency Central Security Service Hawaii, and I was like, I'll

do that. So I went to Hawaii to work in the tunnel, which is there's a walkway three quarters of a mile undergroundunderneath the pineapple field that people who work there will know exactly what I'm talking about. It's a dull pineapple plantation that the US government leases the soil underneath, and we have a gigantic three story building buried underground. It's no longer functionally, actually close a few years ago, so I can talk about it now. But it was

a huge collection site. Thousands of people worked there twenty four hours a day, mostly monitoring Chinese and Russian stuff

and North Korean stuff. So I was on a mission there monitoring some nuclear stuff and both listening to audio like you're talking about, but also looking at digital satellite communication, ship boarding communication, all this stuff because these countries have the nuclear triad, right, They've got subs, they got aircraft, they have ground launched all this, all this stuff, and they're communicating all the time. So we want to know

what they're doing, just like they want to know what we're doing, right, because I mean, the whole point of intelligence is to reduce uncertainty because that makes a decision easier to make. So that's what we were doing out there. A lot of interesting things happen out there. One that stands out to me is one of our targets was using that old fashioned method of communication I was talking about, and we were using the old fashion method of breaking

the code. And it was Christmas Day two thousand and five, I think, and I was on watch, was like three in the morning, and I decoded the message and it was a bunch of at symbols in the shape of a Christmas tree, and it said Merry Christmas, Americans. Holy shit, And I'm like, what am I even doing here? Why are you so secretive? If you know, like you know, I know, we know, like it was so like I felt dumb, you know, but it was kind of cool.

And then you know, that kind of stuff went on for a little while, and then my three years there was up, so I had to go choose another station, and again I did not want to go into a Marie core unit, so I went to NSA headquarters and I actually got to work on a more advanced collection capability called expeditionary singgent kind of like exploiting targets that are like very specific with basically manufactured devices and kind of form factor stuff depending on what the mission is.

So you know, for example, I can take a picture of the soil from space. See there like a rock formation, so I know what those rocks look like. I can use some other measurement and signature intelligence to figure out

what the soil is composed of. Then in the laboratory, I can reproduce that sand and that stone and put a listening device inside of it and then kick it out an airplane into that country and it looks like a part of the desert that belongs there, and like you wouldn't know that unless you cracked it open that it was not that. So that's the kind of stuff we were doing up there, which is really interesting, and

it was definitely the direction I wanted to go. Problem is, the more advanced I got in these things, they further from a window I became, and like the less sunlight I would see, and you know, I felt like I need to get outside and touch grass because I'm going to become like a shriveled vitamin D deficient in person pretty soon. Here, you weren't the guy that they sent up the telephone pole to the wire, you know, deep deep deep in the You were like a skiff within

a skiff within a skill. Yeah. Yeah, it was actually funny because back then we hadn't like locked down like it was before Edward Snowden's, Like, things weren't as locked down as they are now. And uh I was a sergeant at the time, so I would just go around the NSA and the OPS building where I worked, and I would go into random conference rooms and just listen to meetings that were going on, and like nobody asked you if you were supposed to be there or not.

Like I would just sit in the back with a notebook and pretend like, yeah, I'm supposed to be here, because I was. I was like so interested, like what's going on in here? You know? And like back then you could do that. You could just like go sit in on something I got. I used to sit on General Ordierno's IRAQ update, the mnf I update every week, and like I wasn't supposed to be there, but it was really cool. So the way that you found your

way out of singing out of the caverns of the skiff was you made this interesting transition. I don't think too many people make. We've interviewed one or two, but not many people who go from singant to human. How did that take place for you? So I was wondering what will I do next, and the way our promotions work, I could see it coming where I was not going to be able to do operations anymore if I stayed Singan. I was like, how do I keep doing operations? Well?

Human is there. I didn't know very much about it. I kind of took a risk on it and just said I'm gonna try it. If I don't like it, then I'm going to suffer. But if I like it, it might be cool. So I went. We did a screener. They do like a board where they sit down. They used to interrogate you for like eight hours with a group of dudes sitting across the table from you. Now

it's not like that anymore. But I did that past the screener, went to the school and had no clue what I was about to learn, and so it was kind of a shock. I just was trying to get out, kind of like when I joined the Marine Carps, trying to get out of Connecticut. Similar thing where I was like, how do how do I pivot out here? And it was the right move?

ten years and then got rid of it. But like let's say you're a first attendant out of Quantico and your mos is going to be Cihuman officer. You would go through the class with us and listed just like the rest of us, like kind of like through a soft training where it's like there's no the rank is not important. What's important is the training. You know. It's very similar to that. The warrant officers have to come later. So you know, you graduate, get a couple of deployments

under you. It used to be you need like three or four deployments during the war. Now that the war is over, like nobody's deploying, so they're just letting people go in. But it used to be a lot more competitive. They used to reject people all the time. Those warrant officers would become the team leaders and you'd have like between three to five CI Human collectors and a team leader on top, and then you'd go deploy to do either direct support or general support to a unit that

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one free for their Stopbox Pro. That's ten percent off and a free Stopbox Pro when you use the code House at STOPBOXUSA dot com. Discover a better way to balance security and readiness with stopbox and what was your first assignment once you got into the human field. So I went to Afghanistan. That was like at the height of Marine Corps involvement in Afghanistan. Went there in twenty eleven. I was there for a year. Went to Helman Province,

super interesting experience. I went there with multiple functions, so I was general support to the area that we were in. We were in Regimental Combat Team five, which was a portion of Helman kind of south west Ish all the way down to the Pakistan border. So I was doing

interrogations in our debt FAC. I was going on raids with our Aerial and Addiction Forces, which is a out there and like looking for dudes crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan with drugs, you know, land the helicopter right in front of the car and grab the dudes, take the drugs, go back. I would talk to him for a little while and be like, yep, you're going to bogram, you know, and then send them out or let them go, depending on what was going on. Did that at the very beginning.

Then our policy in Afghanistan change. About halfway through the deployment. They started shrinking down base footprints, so they were closing down some of the bases like Dell Around, for example, they shut that down send a lot of those guys to Camp Leatherneck. They sent us to Camp Leatherneck. I was at Camp Dwire before, so when we went to Leatherneck,

the mission change more to a CI focused mission. But I still had all my source network that I had developed in Southern Afghanistan, which was really helpful because one guy that I had been working with. It's kind of unusual, especially in the military, to do a cold bump with a guy, which means your very first contact, run it all the way through to recruitment. Usually that doesn't happen. Usually it's multiple handlers are doing this over time, and

then finally maybe the guy gets recruited. But this one particular source I had, I actually the week after I showed up, I met him, started developing him, and was able to recruit him in October the next year. So it's like less than a year. I was able to move through the entire recruitment cycle, which was like unheard of, especially in your first deployment. So when I transferred up to leather Neck, that guy stayed on my books, and I'm glad he did, because there was an attack in

Camp Bashion in September twenty twelve. He had been reporting on that attack from February twenty twelve. He was giving information on the vehicle to be used, like a high lux white and red High Lucks pickup truck. He knew

exactly where the safe house was, where they'd be staging at. He knew where they actually were going to come up to the fence line. And the guys actually did a three They did three dry runs cutting the fence, using very good methods to cut diagonally across the fence and the base. They ran all the way up and tagged their hand on the aircraft there and ran back just to make sure they'd be able to do it. Nobody

caught them. The reason nobody caught them is because there were Tongans guarding those posts, and every other post had a silhouette, not a person. During this whole time, we've been telling General Kurganis, who was the major General in charge of the Marines there in RC Southwest, Hey, this is attack's going to happen, Like tell them in February, tell them in March, tell them in April. Like every month we were updating him, like, hey, we got even

more information now we even know. We had a video of them training with In the video, there's a map of Camp Leatherneck Ambassi and they're aircraft on the map and the guy's there with a little stick like back in the old days teachers. He's like pointing to the points of entry and like the actually the place they had already dry run. He's pointing to that like you know,

going through the whole thing. The guys are all sitting around like watching like school children, and we're showing them like, hey, we have like direct evidence that's going to happen. And this source is like an A one source, like very highly credible, very good veracity, like we've tested, we off seest them a lot of times. Very responsive. He's like, no, I know this base is impervious. There's no way they could get away with something like this. And we were like, sir,

they already have three times. They've done a dry run successfully three times during the day, not at night, right, and he kept pushing back. It came around like July, I believe, maybe early August, and finally we got a report from that source saying the attack will be in September. Because Prince Harry is at the base. So they had this plan like in their pocket for over a year and they weren't doing it. They were waiting for like an opportunity where it would make the most impact. Which

totally get that. Prince Harry was very vocal about his visit to the base. It was like widely covered in the news. Even wrote a book about it later, you know. But that drew their attention. They said, what if we could kill him. He was actually staying over by the Danish tents, which was pretty far away from the aircraft. They were able to go in and destroy the aircraft. They killed two Marines. These guys were on PCP and a bunch of other drugs. They were getting shot like over

and over, and they kept going like zombies. It was crazy. The only way they were killed is when they were cut in half by the fifty calls from the helicopters, and the helicopters took time to figure out that this was going on. And you had one dude cut in half from the waist down, crawling like eyes wide open, trying to get a grenade out and open it, like didn't know his body was gone, you know. And the other thing is the guys they selected for this were

mentally challenged. Yeah, they picked them this way on purpose obviously. Then they put him on drugs, and then they sent him on a suicide mission. Right. One guy survived. We called him Stumpy because he lost his hand during the fight. He was the one we interrogated, so my debt fact actually got him, and he was very mentally challenged. And it's sad because like, this guy obviously didn't believe in anything that was going on. He was just mentally challenged

and convinced this is what you're going to do. Put on drugs, that's what you're doing. And while we're talking to him, we're trying to get him to talk, and he's like kind of cage. He doesn't want to talk. And finally we're thinking, like, how do we get this guy to communicate? And one of the other interrogators gave him a marker and he just starts drawing, and he

starts drawing that map that was in that video. And I got to rewind a little bit because in July that year, my partner and I the counterintell agent, we're going around the base and Camp Blaveneck was huge at the time. There was like three to five thousand people at any given time living on that base in a small town. Well, there was a bus that would take third country nationals like Pakistanis and other people around the base.

And there were maps that said, you know, this is the chow hall, this is the aircraft, this is the blah blah blah. Those maps were secret no foreign maps that the Army Corps of Engineers printed out, cut the classification off of, and then slipped into a plastic thing and then screwed them up all over the base. Right.

My partner and I went around and picked up over sixty of these maps, right, And we brought the actual stack of maps with us to this one meeting and we brought it to hit the general like, these are classified maps. Here are the originals we found with Buckeye imagery, which is classified imagery right here, And here's the map that's printed. It's the same, it's just missing this. And he's like, well, how are my guys going to know how to get around the base. We're like, sir, this

is classified information. You can't release it to third country nationals, especially Pakistanis, who we already know are doing things over the border. Right, And he's like, but how will the third country nationals know how to get to the defact the chow hall and you know, to the gym like this is what this is what he was saying. It was like shocking to me. Okay, fast forward to the attack. Stumpy in his pocket is one of those maps, and it's just like mind blowing, you know.

a one star broad Meadow I believe his name was. So. Right before that attack happened, like two weeks before it happened, the maw commander, that general came to visit us at Camp to Wire because we were doing some stuff down there with the Afghans, and we had reports that the Taliban wanted to kill a general like generally they didn't know which one or anything, but like target of opportunity, like hope it happens, you know, And we were telling

that general like, hey, just so you know, the Taliban has been thinking about attacking a general, and no generals had visited this base in a very long time. If you come there, you're probably going to trigger an attack because they're gonna know that you're there. Give this giant entourage and he's like, no, no, no, I have to see the troops. I have to see the troops. So he goes there. He went to the Afghan side of the base, which was separate from our side of the base.

There's this massive crowd of Afghans like on top of him, you know, because it's kind of like they're very excited all this stuff. And this one guy comes running up from behind and like plows his way through the crowd and he's got one of those stick minds that the Russians had back in the Cold War in Afghanistan, and he like lights it off and it blew his hands off. Didn't kill anybody because it was it wasn't a dud,

but it was like not functioning order or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, So like if that thing had worked, he would have killed that guy, that same general that got relieved later on for not listening to us about the other attack. You know. So that's some of the frustrations out of that deployer. And after that Afghanistan deployment, when was it

that you went over to Marsak? So the following year. Actually, Scott Stalker was the Marine in charge of assignments for enablers to Marsak at the time, and I called him up and I said he was a master sargant at the time. I said, Master Sergeant, you know, I'd really like to come over to Marsak. I've heard a lot of things because I actually worked with them when I was in Sycad back during Debt one. I was making stuff for their unit and I said, you know, I'd

love to come over there as a human guy. And he was like, Okay, let me see. Uh do you want East Coast or West coast? It was at the time when it was split across the coast, and I was like, well, I'm already in Camp Pendleton, California. Would be awesome. He goes, why don't you open up a marine online? So I opened up like our It's like the thing the Marines used to look at all their personal information. He's like, do you see any orders in there? And I was like yeah, he gave me orders over

the phone, which was crazy. So they, you know, they risk on me. I went over there and just up the road it was. It was fantastic and greatest five years of my twenty years in the Marines. With enablers, they don't let you stay more than five years, so I stayed literally exactly five years and zero days over there. And you said something like you were part of a pilot assessment and selection course. Yeah, so in twenty thirteen

they were piloting this assessment selection for enablers. So obviously not as hardcore as the operators, but they what they were trying to do is like, you know, week from the Chaff kind of thing, because at the time, there was a lot of unknown about Marstock, at least in the conventional side, like what is this place? So a lot of people were going there that might not have

belonged there, So they're trying to filter that. So a lot of physical stuff, a lot of psychological stuff, but packed down into about seven day periods, so it's not as long as others. It was pretty grueling though for the time that it was. We slept like one or two hours a night the whole time, exhausted, a lot of like Okay, run down to the beach and I'll swim a kilometer out there. Go over here, put on your cameis, go run to the pill go do pool

pte now go. Like it was like thing after thing after thing, you know, Like in midnight, we're going up over the Reaper, which is this really high inclined hill in Kent Pendleton, and as we're going up there, then we get ce us gas blown up on us, and then suddenly we got a casualty and then oh man, now there's some ammocans you got to carry too, and like the whole thing, you know, so like they were just throwing stuff at us the whole time, and like

guys were getting injured. Almost everybody made it. Only a couple of guys didn't. I think there was like fifteen of us total, and then like two or three didn't didn't make it. But it was all the enablers at the time. They were going through so like intelligence analysts, dog handler, EOD. So they all the all the dynamic people together and uh, it was it was pretty interesting. They actually did a good job of like monitoring it and and kind of adjusting it. So like, for example,

they had this like mental task. It was like the second to last day where they brought us into this conference room and they took a trash can full of intel reports and the guy stood up on the table and just dump the intel reports out all over the table. He's like, you have one hour to figure out when the attack's going to be. And like all of us like look at each other like ah man a right here we go, like we're all trying to read, like

we can't read because we're tired. And me and one other guy who had worked on Asia stuff before started realizing like, oh, this is like an abusayaf thing from the Philippines. And actually he knew the thing that it was about, and I knew the thing that it happened

before that that caused it. So like he and I were over in the corner like putting stuff together, and like they could see that through the glass and they came in and like pulled me and him and one of their dude out like, hey, guys, come to this other room. So they pull us over this other room and they're like, you have a new problem. You have this spaceship with I can't reader the exact things, but it was like there's a woman on there, she's forty three,

she had a miscarriage. There's a man who's five foot ten and has a history of cancer in his family, and like they all these like interesting like things with each person, like pick nine out of the fifteen that can go to Mars and live there. And so like that was the problem. Like what so we're like we're trying to figure it out, you know, And they wanted us to use certain analytical techniques to like very quickly solve a problem. And actually we had a pretty good

solution to it. So it's kind of it's very interesting. It was like the physical stuff and there was like a mental thing in between each physical thing. It's like forcing you to use your brain even though you're tired, So it's pretty cool. Then they did away with it because there was too much attrition for their liking, and instead of like calibrating it, they just got rid of it, which is unfortunate. And from there, I mean, you did

a whole bunch of deployments all over the place. I mean, where was the first one that they sent you off to? So the first one was really interesting. It was to Indonesia, but it was supporting a Jasok preparation of the environment activity. And I didn't know that. I had no clue about any of this stuff. And they said, hey, you know you've been selected to do an interview. This is how it started. I'm like, okay, Like, but you can't do it in your uniform. You need to be in a suit.

It's going to be at some early time in the morning. Came or what it was. It's because I was getting interviewed from a guy in Hawaii that was at the Joint Intel Support Element over there in sock pack and I get on there and it's him and some other people. He's a civilian guys talking to me, and they're like, what do you know about jam Islamiya? What do you

know about Abusayav? What do you know? Like they're asking me like all these questions like like boom, boom boom, and I'm like answering to the best my ability, and like what do you know about these strategic things and these tactical things, like they're trying to like figure out stuff, and I feel like I didn't know anything, but I got the job. I don't know Wow or who else they talked to, but anyways, I got that. And they're like, now you're going to go to Sockpack for an unknown

period of time. We'll determine when you're ready to go. So I went to Sockpack, and uh, for ninety days I worked with that guy that interviewed me. His name is Dan. He is like the Indonesia expert in sock Pack, amazing counter terrorist analyist and uh. He actually was not in the military or the intel community at all. He was a dendrologist major like studying trees in college and

his master's degree in Indonesia. He like knows Bahasa Indonesia, he knows like other local dialects and somehow, like you know, one thing led to another and he started working for the government. So he's like a true cultural expert, which is really helpful. And he said, look, I know you don't know a lot about Jemmi Islamia, but I need you to master it in three months. I'm giving you

ninety days. You can be in the skiff as much as you want or as little as you want, and at the end, you're going to brief the sock pack commander,

Admiral Kilrain about what you learned. And then he let go of me for the next ninety days and I just went in there like twelve to fifteen hours a day reading every report since two thousand, I think it was no actually from nineteen ninety one until twenty fourteen, which is when I was there, and I learned a lot about Jemmislimia, and I learned that there's a certain pattern about how they do their attacks compared to how they split into new groups, because they have a history

of splintering into smaller groups, and there is a huge correlation between these two conditions, which is very fascinating. And I briefed that to the admiral and he said that he'd never heard that before and that was that was great, And he looked over to Dan. He's like, what do you think, Dan? And Dan's like he can go on

the deployment, which is pretty cool. Yeah. So then that, like I mean with the Filipino groups too, is that like they split off because like there's like a piece deal is about to go in, and there's one group or one faction that feels like they're not getting a big enough slice of the pie. Like, well, from your analysis, why was that taking place? It's actually more a diversionary because if we're putting they know how we work. We

know like, for example, al Qaida is an organization. Well, if there's a new group called JEM or JTWJ or whatever, we're like, well, that's not al Kaieda, right, and then like three years later like, oh wait, it is al Qaida, right, you know. Right, So they understand that, and they're very good at like splitting off at the exact moment where it makes sense for them to do that, and that group becomes a target later and then that group disappears and then this one comes up, and like it's the

same two sense, you know. And actually Humbali, who is in jam Islamia, was one of the original AQ dudes. He was Indonesian. He's in Gitmo right now. He's still one of the last people in Gimo. He was arrested I think in Thailand. Yeah, that was an interesting thing. Yeah, And I mean I've tried to like figure out exactly how that happened. Maybe you know better than I do, but there were rangers standing by in case things went sideways. Yeah, that was the criff On one Charlie one one probably

uh no, no, no, Ranger battalion. Oh okay, yeah, because I actually know the guys. Oh yeah, Yeah, there was a whole thing they went to timely in to do a j set, but there was a whole option to like switch it from training to live yeah, like actually issue them live ammunition. This was like two thousand and four. Yeah, that that happened, yep, And that that did not happen. They did not ever flip it green. I think it was a liaison ye thing that they arrested that guy

over there. Yeah, it's fascinating too. I mean the whole Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia thing, I think it's like little understood or like poorly understood about like how pivotal the Jumma Islamia and other groups that were associated with them were to like the Bojinka plot, which was the original aircraft plot and all those things those were like planned in Southeast Asia, like the physically they were into Southeast Asia planning and stuff like Khalei Shik Muhammad also

was over there in Bangkok, you know, in Marwan yep, all those Singaporeans Malaysians yep. Yeah, really fascinating. So yeah, that deployment was basically working at the embassy in Jakarta and it was me and an operator paired up and we would go around the country and look at places to do preparation the environment tasks, so like operational preparation the environment, which means setting the condition so that other forces can commit and do stuff. So big focus was

like ports. For example, we wanted to have certain ports that we knew we could press a button and that port will be available if something happened, something like of a crisis happened. Let's say a hostage was going on. We need that to be secure so we can get to that airfield near this area and like without any hiccups, let it happen. So that's what we were doing over there. It was really cool because we were actually partnered with station, like our desks were in station spaces and the analyst

I was paired up with the agency analyst. His name was also John, like me, but this guy was way different than me. He had a PhD in Islamic theology from Harvard University and this guy he was younger than me, and he knew like the deepest, deepest backstore of every single character in this counter terrorism story. It was crazy, like just the level of knowledge that he had. I felt like this big city next tip, you know. But it was an awesome team to work on because there

are people like that on that team. That's pretty cool. So it was all like kind of ope, like just in case there's an emergency, yep. So we do the whole range of things from like driving from point A to point B to see how long it takes to drive during the day, like kind of mundane stuff like going out and trying to measure like the height of

this stuff. So we knew if a helicopter could land there these things to like more advanced stuff like we actually flew up to Natuna Basar, which is an Indonesian island in the South China. See it's the only Indonesian

territory in the South China. See. We went up there to do pe tasks, but we also had a secondary task to look at the Chinese overflights that were going on because China was like routinely invading their airspace every second day, so we actually got up there, and another third task we had was to confirm the location of a radar that the Indonesians had, and the Indonesians were

like super hesitant to let us see it. So we had to figure out a way to like get a photo of us like with them with the radar in the background, which is what we actually ended up doing. So we got the picture, and they were really upset that we were trying to find like they knew we were trying to do it, but we never like openly

set it. I mean, I'm a little surprised that the Indonesians gave you as much freedom and free access as they did, like from what I've been told anyway, that it's okay to like meet privately, but they're much more hesitant to have like a public relationship with American officials. It's funny you say that. So into Tuna Basar, it was only one hotel, It's a very small island, and the people onto Tuna Basar were not happy that we were there, Like the government people were not happy were there.

We actually had liaisons with us from Jakarta, but they weren't happy they were there either. And so like we're rolling around the island, like taking pictures and like doing stuff. You know. We had this aircraft called Non standardy Aviation, which is like a small little prop plane. We're like flying around the island taking pictures, like doing stuff, and

then we'd land. Well, one day we went out on the other side of the island, like two hours the other side of the mountain, and we'd come back and there's like, you know how you get that feeling like something's weird. Come to the hotel, go to the front desk. The lady like looks up, doesn't speak, and it like looks back down or like somebody's in here, you know. So like go up to my room. I had brought a suitcase and I had some other stuff. It's like dumped out in a pyramid on my bed, and there

is a memory card on top of my clothes. It was a blank memory card because I had the real memory card in my camera, right, I had a backup that was blank, and I think they were pissed that it didn't have anything on it, and they like left their calling card like we knew you had a camera. Like okay, you know, like what are gonna do about that? Right? Right, there's just like a really interesting experience. What is their

intelligence services? Like, is it composus? So Capasus is their special forces, which is actually for a while it was blacklisted because in Tamar they did a lot of stuff. Yeah, there's a little there's a little bit of like a prisoner execution happening. They're pretty heavily tainted. Yeah. Well, actually we came up with a solution for how to work with them still, so in twenty fourteen, we had to cut off if they had graduated from their academy before

two thousand and eight, we couldn't work with them. They graduated after we could, And then two years ago they just eliminated the entire blacklist. So now all of CAPOSUS is available because the President of Indonesia was in Capasus in Teamor and he was one of the guys that was implicated, so he can't blacklist him, you know, he's the president. And so what was the second one after Indonesia? I mean, you spent some time in West Africa, so

that came later. I actually I came back from Indonesia and at the time it was twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, when Isis was really morphing into this new thing. So twenty fifteen, I come back and they're like, hey, do you want to go on another deployment right now? And I was like yes. So they're like, we're going to

send you to the Middle East. We're not exactly sure if you're going to go to Syria, Iraq or Lebanon yet because things are so dynamic right now, like at that time, like we didn't know what we were doing, like where to go and stuff like that, and so I said okay. So I started working up with a team a hotel company at Marsak and while we were working up, they were doing a deployment flarization training where they basically go out like practice the full mission profile

in the United States before they go overseas. On that DFT, one of the helicopters crashed, the Raider seven helicopter, so we lost a big portion of our company's expertise. And also those guys that died were in leadership positions within their teams, so they had to completely restructure a lot of hotel companies teams. So I got pulled off of the Iraq deployment put on the Lebanon deployment as a

result of this. So I went to Lebanon in early twenty sixteen, and we were working with Lebanese special forces and the Magawirra Baja, which is the Lebanese Navy seals basically, and also the Mukafaja, which is like their ranger unit or kind of like a strike force, if you will, and we were training them but also at the same time enabling them. There were some other tasks we had in Syria that we weren't going into Syria. Instead, we were going up to the last line of cover and

concealment with our partner force. They would go over there and do stuff we would also. It was a very interesting time. We would actually enable some of our enemies to do things to ISIS at that time. Is pretty interesting, controversial period of time. But we weren't like directly involved in that. But we weren't doing things to help. Like the Battle of Kuserra up in northern Lebanon where hes bullet defeated ISIS. You know, that wasn't like they weren't alone,

you know doing that. Yeah, I mean it became like you know, how we outlied with the Taliban against ISIS later on, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's interesting.

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just tell you oneleb story please yeah, move on. So we were doing visit board search and seizure training with the Lebanese Special Forces and we actually boarded a Chinese vessel that was parked in Patroon, which is the town in Lebanon, and the Lebanese are going up a caving ladder, which is this very narrow ladder in the width of your foot, and we're behind them as they're coming up off their rigid hole inflatable boat. They're going up the

caving ladder. It's a pretty high boat. I mean it's a shipping vessel, you know, And the dude goes almost to the top, this one soldier and then he loses his footing and the way. You know. Sometimes they're called the Lebanese Special Forces, and some of them are really badass, but they're not all that way, just like any partner force, where like some guys are just there because there's someone's

cousin or brother or whatever. Well, this guy was one of those guys, and he was wearing his helmet in such a way where like it wasn't clipped on to his chin, it was clipped on under here, and his rifle wasn't secured properly, and so like he flips backward, his kevlar goes back over his throat and starts choking him. He's like choking out up there upside down on the caving ladder, like I don't know, fifty feet off the ground or off the water, like swerving like this right

over the whole of the boat. And if that dude fell, he would be like squashed like a grape on that because the front of the boat is metal. Yeah, so that's happening, his rifles swinging around like this, you know, And so we actually had to go up the other side of the boat and come rescue him from the top down. And we're just thinking, like one of these guys have to actually do one of these things. You know. Yeah, that was crazy. So like that was like two weeks

before I left Lebanon. But yeah, in Lebanon, they're like, hey, because things are so dynamic in Iraq, are you willing to just go straight to Iraq instead of going back home? I was like yes, So I went directly to Iraq, like I flew from I think I connected in Jordan on an ENSAUV of the non standard aviation into Baghdad and then up to Reveal and then at that time we had just got an authorization to start doing a

lot of air strikes. So my mission up there was human triggered strikes, where basically I have a source or a principal Asian who has his own network that's sitting outside of a building and can see there's fifty guys, bad guys meeting in there, and he's giving me information about it. Once we feel good about the information or that the place is safe, then I'm gonna be the one talking to the air officer. They're gonna start sending up aircraft and they're gonna blow that building up and

kill those guys. So that's what that deployment was was one after another after another and after another, and actually not just our deployment, but that like six month period right before we retook Mosol, that the area we were in was around Mosol. Right before we retook Mosol, like the Joint Special Operations Task Force had killed like thirty thousand people in air strikes, just like those air strikes and that was mostly all of guys doing human triggered

strikes all around northern Iraq. It was a really interesting period of time. And this is also is this the deployment where you met your missus? It is, yes, tell us about that because I think that's an interesting story. Yeah. So I was working with the a Lebanese guy who was helping us in a support capacity out in Herbel in Dream City, which is like the nice part of Rebel And he had a huge mansion and he used to have talking about that part of the of Verbil

that looks like Abu Dhabi. Yeah, yeah, real nice area. It's got the guys with the ak standing outside to make sure nobody unwanted goes in there, like not bad guys, but just the unwashed, you know. So they would let us in, so we'd go in there, and this guy used to have dinner parties and his you know, his big courtyard that had these like high walls and everything so nobody could see in. And there's probably like twenty

or thirty people there. And we're around this like very long table and there's only one open seat, and I'm sitting next to that open seat. It's like ten o'clock at night, and she walks in on the other side and there's nowhere for her to sit, so she comes and sits next to me, and we start talking. And

like I said, it's like ten o'clock at night. We talked to like three or four in the morning, just me and her, and like if you like you know when you do those like time laps and like everyone's leaving, but you can just see like people leaving the table over time, and it's just me and her like yapping the entire time. And we just talked for hours. And I'm like, she's amazing. And I think she had the same thought too, because now we're married. But she's an

Iranian and she was actually interble working. She'd been living there for a few years. She was there when Isis came all the way up to the edge of herbel and she couldn't go home because she felt unsafe in Iran. So she was basically trapped in herbel right while Isis was coming up there pretty crazy time. And she's been through a lot on her own too, And we were able to get her to come to the United States. She got her green card and she got her citizenship

last year, so really awesome. Yeah, yeah, it's a wild story. She didn't feel safe going back home because she has involved in some counter regime activities. Yeah. You know people in Iran. Most people in Iran do not like the government. Yeah, and they will take to the streets to tell you that. You know, they're very proud of saying what they believe, even if they get punished or hurt for it. The problem is the government is going to hurt you. Yeah,

and people disappear all the time. So she was concerned. Back in two thousand and nine during the Green Revolution, John Boshi sobs. She was in that protest. A lot of Iranians were in that protest, and she didn't feel safe staying in the country after that protest because they were like rolling people up on the streets and they were just disappearing. You know, we're getting pushed off of buildings and like all kinds of crazy stuff. And so she went to Iraq because as an Iranian she can't

really go anywhere else easily. Yeah. I mean, she's not from an affluent family. She's not the son or daughter of some Ayatola who can just go to Canada America and go to college like most of them do, or live in Paris and having Instagram accounts like they do. So she had to like really make her way out. And yeah, she went to Reveal doing you know, small jobs there and that's when I met her. So you

guys are in love. It's great, but I do have to ask, like was this with the c I guys like crazy about this that one of their humantors is dating a Persian. Oh yeah, you have no idea? Yeah, nice bump, Yeah exactly. Yeah. Yeah that's you know, that's when the ignorance comes out too, because like my assignmus manager called me up like three years later and he's like, hey,

are you aware that you're affiliated with an Iranian? And I was like yes, And I'm like, first of all, why are you calling me my assignment's manager, Like you're not even involved in this, you know, and like who is talking to you? And like what's going on here?

I hope the government changes and I know me too. Okay, So you meet your future wife and as you come back home, I imagine carrying on this long distance relationship. And I know from my own experience getting a green card and immigration is that nightmare? Yeah, what's going on with the rest of your career in the Marine Corps as all that's going on and transpiring. Yeah, So twenty sixteen, I'd come back from Iraq and actually I was in

Turkey and Injulik Airbase. This is July twenty sixteen, and there was a coup and they told us to lock down and we couldn't leave the hotel. And it turns out that the leader of this coup was the base commander for inter Lick, which is where we have some very sensus stuff for NATO. But it's just wild to be like the guy with his finger on the button. Besides Airedwan, he's like, the closest dude to these things

is the one with the coup. They rounded up and killed like three thousand people in like a month that they blamed this coup on. And they actually blamed it on a guy based in the United States exactly the Gulanists, the Ghulanistas. Do you believe that? I don't think so, but that happened, and so flew home. Then as soon as I got back, I actually went into our team room and we had a big whiteboard and there was the deployment schedule up there, and I was like, man,

that was an awesome deployment like the Iraq one. And I looked up there and I'm like, there's a lot of cool stuff going on in Africa. And I asked our operations officer, like can I go on one of these? He's like, yeah, but you just got back and I'm like, I don't care, I'll go right now, and he's like, all right, you're going to Senegal. So I worked up and went to Senegal right after that. And what were you doing in Senegal? If I remember, there's an Elevenese

presence there. Yeah, so I was actually working with the Senegalese Special Forces, the FSS. And there's also a team that was going into Mali at the time because MANUSMA, which is the UN mission in Mali, a lot of the West African countries were actually like the ground forces for that UN mission and they were doing combat operations in Mali. So what we would do is train them in our countries that we were partnered with. Those guys

would then go for three months or however long. Was this part of like one of those like constructs like Amy Salm and some of the others. Yes, okay, yeah, it's like it's like an official UN mission exactly, just like that. Yeah. But it's the weird thing is like all the training in preparation is not in Mali. It was outside Mali, at least for the military part of it.

And then we would send the guys in there and they would go work with the Malians and stuff like that and try to figure the situation out, which they didn't do a very good job at And how did you like the car? It was a really interesting experience. Some say it's a good introduction to Africa, and after going to some other countries in Africa, I mean that's

pretty true. I remember when I was landing in Waga Doogu and Burkina Fossil, I'm like, where am I There's not any pavement anywhere in the capital city, and then Nicher similar situation like whoa. But actually I liked Morocco a lot more than Senegal, even though you know, Dakar is a pretty easy city to work in, to live in.

Just something about Morocco is different, like the mountains, the Atlas Mountains, Sahara Desert, you know, and the Moroccan special forces we worked with were really good people, like very good unit that we had. You ever see the movie I watched it the other day, rewatched it The Man Who Would Be King? No, I've never seen that with Sean Connery and Michael Kinan. It's supposed to be in Afghanistan, but it was actually filmed in Morocco. I gotta watch it. It's a fun movie.

So Burkina Fasso is interesting. There was a team up on the Mali Burkina Fosso border, up in a place called Kaya, which is like right up there on the border, and this was an army team that was there and we found out that they hadn't been debriefed on anything they were doing, and they were doing a lot of stuff in Mali, and at the time, we're like trying to figure out more about what's going on in Mali because our partner forces weren't involved in the things we

wanted them to be involved in, and we were worried about Al Kaida, and there's other groups there in Mali as well that we're trying to figure out what's going on, like Jane m and the the Mira Batun was another big group that we're looking for. So I went up there for a couple of weeks and just spent every day debriefing the team guys on what they'd been seeing and doing in Mali and sent all that reporting back. And that was the first time we'd ever actually had

reporting from that area of Burkina Fasso about Mali. So that was like a very fulfilling trip, even though it was short at school. So they were doing like human collection up there, so they were actually working with people there. They weren't human people there, you know, guys, and nobody was talking to them, you know, because they were up there. That was actually around the same time that remember the

Green Bray got strangled by the guys Logan Melgar. Yeah, so one of the guys on my team was actually in that room, Kevin Maxwell. That happened at that time, at exact time, so like our task force got shook up quite a bit, so they started moving us around and things were changing very rapidly at that time. Any other West Africa adventures you want to tell us about, you know, Morocco was probably my favorite, like I said,

really interesting. I actually went from the top of the country to the bottom, and it's twice the size of California, And that was a really eye opening experience because I had always thought Western Sahara was a country, because that's what the maps say. But then you go to Morocco and you ask a Moroccan is there such thing as Western Sahara. They're like, no, there's only southern Morocco. And that was a very interesting thing because the West, I

think we don't understand that dynamic very well. We talked to an Irish guy who's part of the UN mission there, like I don't know, five episodes ago. Yeah, yeah, really interesting. There was an Irish guy in Lebanon, actually that was there. It's not related to that, but he owned a bar in Beirut and he had been there since the nineteen eighties because a lot of the ira guys went to Lebanon and fought against the Israelis. Yeah, and that guy

stayed behind and opened a bar. Like just interesting, that's crazy. And then there's also like some other sort of like this is more not not administrative, but just the way that things get done, in the way these missions get done. The one twenty seven Echo program you mentioned, there's also a Delta Echo Fox Trot yep. I mean they're controversial in some quarters. I mean, we want to explain like the reality of what those programs are and you know

what your thoughts are about them. Yeah. So the thing is, we have foreign partners we want to work with in the conventional military. Usually that's a military unit. So like if I'm from the fifth Artillery Brigade, I'm going to go to a country that has an artillery brigade and train them on how to use their stuff and then we work together. That's pretty normal. Well, the one two seven Echo thing was like, it's so this is a legal authority that Congress says, here's money to do this thing.

We're authorizing you to do it. And for a long time they didn't have that. There were some other authorities like twelve oh seven, twelve oh six, twelve o eight, which were these other like disparate authorities that kind of worked together, but they weren't really meant to work together for a while, and they were trying to make us so that we could partner with entities that were not exactly the traditional entities. They aren't the fifth Artillery Brigade

in Estonia. Instead, they're an irregular force in Southeast Syria. That's got some questionable background, and we're not sure what's going to happen when we leave Syria. Like this is the kind of people that we're trying to work with because the enemy in my enemy is my friend, and they are the ones closest to the problem that we need to solve right now. So it's kind of an expeditionary requirement, like we need to cut the timeline on vetting these guys because the big controversy with one two

seven ECHO, there's no human rights checks. There's no way heave adding there is not, So that's a problem. Of course, isn't the other controversy that these units get op cond to the United States? Right because they're working for us essentially, And that's how this law has changed over time. So like from twelve oh seven and twelve oh eight, one of them was equipment and the other one was training. With the new law one two seven ECHO, it's equipment,

training and operations. And there's been two other things added, which is the Delta and foxtrot. Foxtrot is preparation of the environment activities that is now codified in law. For a long time, it wasn't and actually when I was Indonesia working on a Preparation the Environment mission. There was no law that said you can do preparation the environment, and it was very sketchy. The COCOMs didn't have like don't they have like the Human Intelligence Executor and all

these other OPE authorities. So we were working under the ct exord, the counter Terrorism Exort, and the Al Qaeda Exword AQ Exword, which had language in it that said you could do these things, but there was no law because that's just the military saying that's not a law, all right. Yeah, So like there was no like thing to draw that from that would say like, hey, actually

it's legal and there's money for it. Yeah, And that's what these these authorities do is they give you money and permission to go do something, right, So that didn't exist in twenty fourteen twenty fifteen, So we were doing stuff. We actually had a piece of paper. It was a

one page piece of paper. So if a congressional delegation came, we would give them this piece of paper that explained what preparation of the environment is, and they said like advance force operations, INTEL operations, and operational preparation in the environment, each with one paragraph and That's what we were to describe to the Congress visitors, right, which is crazy because there was no law. So we were basically telling them like, hey, can you let us do this? This is what we

think we're supposed to do. But then they eventually made it into a law. It was a slow process where it kind of transformed over time. This last Defense Authorization Act last year or this current fiscal year is the first time that the Preparation the environment one is actually in there. So now it's okay, after twenty years of doing it, it's okay. You talked a little bit. I

mean maybe for folks you can describe a little bit of what ope is. I mean you described it. I think when we talk about Indonesia. Is there anything else you want to tell people that like what that means? Because a lot of things can be rolled up, you know, even the term operational preparation of the environment that could even that could potentially include you know, kinetic lethal absolutely, absolutely, yeah. Yeah,

So there's another part of preparation. There's three buckets, Like I said, Intel Ops, Advanced Force operations, and operational preparation the environment. Advanced Force Operations is the really interesting one. From a kinetic perspective. For example, when we invaded Iraq in two thousand and three, there was advanced force operations going on in Iraq for a very long time before we invaded, basically preparing the environment for the moment that

the President said go to war. All this stuff would fall into place and just happen. And it wasn't by accident that those things happen. And that's what preparation the environment does into it. For a large scale conflict like that, or for some smaller raid like for example, a hostage rescue. Well, you need to have an airfield, you need to have

basing access and overflight. There are all these things that have to be ready to go tonight right now, like within hours, and the teams are like all over the world doing that. And the thing is like you don't know exactly what mission you're ready ing right right, So you're like, Okay, I'll do this this landing survey, I'll do this route reconnaissance, and like I'm not sure if

these things work together. But some planner at whatever CoCom and whatever socom desk is taking all that stuff and like weaving it together within like three to eight hours or twelve hours or whatever it is before they're like National Mission Force is going in to do this tomorrow or this morning or whatever, and they're taking all that stuff you've collected over time and putting it together. Yeah. So if the president pushes that button, everything's ready to go. Yep,

and it's really fast around the world. We talked to somebody maybe a year ago now he's a human or talking about doing the ope for the Solomani strike, and I think they were like when it happened, they were like, oh shit, like that's what we were doing. Yep. Yeah, uh okay, And so tell us about kind of like finishing out your Marine Corps career and then you went to work with the DIA, right, So I went to DIA while I was still in So I left Marsak, and my common theme is I didn't want to go

to a Marine Corps unit. So I've actually only spent one year at a Marine Corps unit in twenty years. The rest of the time was somewhere else. So after Marsok was ending, I was like, first of all, I want to stay, like you can't stay. So I hit my five years and zero days and I wanted to go. I screened for this program at DIA and the Director of Operations to go to Defense at TACHE office, which

is unusual for an enlisted person to do. So I went from very clandestine, low visibility stuff all the way at to strategic level over declared activities in a country, plus some other things that supported that right. So I actually went to Jordan to US Embassy Imon. We were supporting not only Jordan but also the Syria mission because in twenty twelve Syria closed US embassy, Syria closed and Damascus went to two different countries, Jordan being one of them.

So we were supporting half of that mission as well. And there was a lot of stuff still going on with the Syria and especially southern Syria. There was a covert operation called Timber Sycamore that went on for quite a while, and there's a lot of support in Jordan

for that. That infrastructure existed even after the covert operation ended, so we were helping a lot with some of the things that still existed in those structures, basically working with guys inside of Jordan, then working with them inside of Syria like at Tenef Garrison atg and also up in northeast Syria like Haseka and all those places and kind of continuing our operations there separately from what the old covert action was that failed essentially and was closed down

in twenty seventeen. Hasako is YPG. Yes, Yeah, yeah, Actually I was on a team where there was one of our guys on the same task force that he was in a picture in the media and he has a YPG patch on. This was when Obama was saying there are no troops on the ground in Syrias back to twenty sixteen, and we're like looking at ourselves, like looking at our He's like, no boots on the ground. We're like, my boots on the ground in Syria, you know, like

you're saying, we're not here you doing you know. It was just a weird time. Yeah, I was there at twenty fourteen in Hasaka. Okay, so you're working now for the defense at attached to the data YEP out of an embassy. What's that job entail? Because you say that this is like more over, like you're going out there and talking to government officials and things like that. It was really fascinating. I'll talk about the training first because it was very unique. So it's at DIA, it's a

Joint Military attach h school. I think it's four months or something like that. They basically teach you how to be a diplomat, which sounds simple, but that means like teaching you how to use a crab fork properly, you know, or like these like very interesting utensils. You're actually graded

on it. They bring in a wardrobe specialist to talk to you about why your suit sucks, and then they tell you, like how to cut this better so it looks better for you, Like all the stuff from there, all the way, there's a seer portion to it that is a huge surprise. Towards the end, the black hood goes over your head. Yeah, and they do it to the spouse's too.

And then you go to your country and you learn your actual mission in that country because it's very unique, and Jordan is an interesting one because it supports so much in the Middle East. We joke that it's like the world's largest land based aircraft carrier because that's where most of our jets are in the Middle East, besides the Katar But you know, so we're supporting that mission for Jordan, but we're also supporting the Syria diplomatic mission.

So there's like stateless Syrians in Jordan that we're part of the resistance to us that we supported, so we would have to also meet with them too. And a day in the life is basically you're wearing a suit all the time everywhere. You're driving armored vehicles, You've got escorts, security. You're also setting up visits. So like if let's say the Secretary of Defense is coming to visit the country, you alone are setting up that visit. There's no like

entourage to help you. So like you're the guy that's planning the aircraft landing. You're talking to the ice guy to get the correct correct amount of ice for the aircraft or the jet, like everything about it, plus the dinners, the security detail. You're going and investigating the hotel top floor, middle floor, bottom floor. You're getting other places, you know,

for their comm suite. You're getting all that stuff booked out, and you're the guy doing it, like the point man, and they would rotate it around the office so that like, okay, you just got the sectaff this month, all right, dasdy Middle East is coming for you. You're gonna do that next month. The CoCom commanders coming out, you got that, Like they'll just we're just rotating all the time handling these diplomatic visits or this distinguished visits. At the same

time we're meeting with our host nation liaison partners. So like the Defense at Tesche office represents the Secretary of Defense in that country, so you get to liaison with the Secretary of Defense equivalent in that country, usually a Minister of Defense. That's your primary contact, not his staff him. Right, So like on a weekly basis, the sdo DAT is

going to meet with that guy. And in Jordan, that's pretty big because they're coordinating a lot of stuff around the area, especially ship visits for the Marine Corps Navy side,

so a lot of those ships come to port in Akaba. I guess who gets to organize those ship visits? You know, one of US gets to pick like, Okay, the cure star is coming, you got it, and you got to go do all the diplomatic communications with the host nation, the ministry and all that at the same time that you're doing your overt collection activity, at the same time that some people are doing clandestine collection as well in that same mission, so you have like multiple hats. It

was a very busy time. Yeah, I can only imagine. And what was your impression of some of these programs we had jetting into Syria? I mean, as far as the efficacy of some of those programs, it was very interesting. At the time that I was there, we had one major group left, the Magawirathaua the m AT, who was like a last vestige of the old program, and they're basically just like professional smugglers who really benefited from all the ammunition we gave them, and they didn't really do

much counter terrorism. And at one point, especially like twenty one after we killed Solomoni, you know, Iran obviously responded to that. They Iran fled so many guys into Syria and that camp was surrounded by Hesbela Hesbela Syrians that supported Iran. There was like a ring around that base. It was completely ineffective, and so we got our guys stationed there training the mugwir thaua to do what I don't know, because they're completely surrounded. There's no way they're

going out on any operations whatsoever. Right. And then the next thing you did was teaching a counterintelligence human. Yeah, so I went back to the schoolhouse that I had gone to a long time ago, and I taught there, teaching interrogations kind of intelligence surveillance, detection routes, source handling. We do the whole gambit, you know, because we have

both CI and HUMID. So the way the course is designed, it starts out very basic, like friendly four ste briefing, kind of like what I was talking about in Berkina fossl wor you're just like, hey, what kind of airplanes did you see? That's how it starts out, and it just keeps advancing and advancing. Then you get to interrogations, and that's kind of the filter point where we drop

a lot of guys. Interogations is more dynamic, so you have, as an instructor more freedom to say that that student probably shouldn't be here, So you filter out quite a bit of people in interrogations. The ones that survive that

then get to do source handling. So we go into military source operations first, which is you know, recruiting assets to support military defense collection things, and we move into more advanced primary or principal Asian operations, where we have the students running a guy who's got several guys under him that the handler can't see or communicate with, and that's one of the more complex ways to handle a source.

So that's kind of towards the end of the course they're doing that, and then they do covert communications like dead drops, brush passes, brief encounters, things like that, and they finish out the course doing a final exercise that's about a month long where they're doing the full range of trade craft and they use the entire Hampton Roads area to do this, so it's you know, it's an artificial geography that they have and there's role players and

bad guy land. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah exactly. Yeah, it's a lot of fun for the instructors. The students are under a lot of stress. Yeah that's awesome. Yeah, and then you ended up retiring as a master sergeant I did. Yeah, Yeah, Well, what was like, I mean, you came up on your twenty and you didn't want to go back to the normal Marine Corps. That's what I'm what I'm thinking, So

I actually, you're exactly right. I was talking to the assignments manager and he's like, yeah, I got to give you orders to North Carolina to be the intelligence chief for this thing. And I'm like, I'm not doing that. Yeah, I don't want to do that. That would be a huge downgrade from the trajectory I've been going on. He's like, you have to give back to the Marine Corps. I'm like, I'm sure you can find someone that will go to North Carolina. I'm sure there are people in North Carolina

that want to stay in North Carolina. Right. He was like, no, no, no, you can't do that. I'm like, what about these other four assignments that I listened off. Some of them are kind of concessions, like maybe he would say, yes, he rejected all of them. He's like, if you don't accept North Carolina, then you're gonna get retirement in lieu of orders, which is a thing in the Marine Corps like if you reject orders and you're at retirement, they forced retire you.

That's what happened, because I'm not going to camplshit. Yeah, I think he thought I was bluffing. I wasn't bluffing. So we'll talk about your post service life a bit. But before we go there, I want to talk about your book, and I want to chop it up a bit about the theory of a regular war because this was you know, when you open up a book like this and this could be a pretty dry book about doctrine,

you know, where's he going with all this? But actually I was I thought this was a great book, Thank you. I was really fascinated by it. And I think that the reason why I liked it was because you challenged the orthodoxy. Yeah, and you were willing to confront some of the failures of the past twenty twenty five years that we've had in the military with counterinsurgency theory. And you know, some of the younger people don't even remember.

There's this whole field where people call themselves Koynistas. Yeah you remember that shit. I do. So anyway, let's let's jump into it. Counterinsurgency theory, the theory of irregular warfare. It's fraught with problems. There's a lot of over philosophizing

that takes place. One of the things you talk about is like all the lingo, we're kind of baffling each other with bullshit ye words like kill webs cray zone, conflict and like all these where we're reinventing terms for you know, guerrilla warfare, things that have always been around.

Start wherever wherever you want with that. As far as some of the problems and the faulty assumptions that we've made as we approach the theory, I'd like to starting before that, what caused your what was the genesis of

you writing this? Like where did that idea start? So I was doing some personal research on the five Pillars of a Regular Warfare, which is like a very doctrinal Joint Pub Three Tax zero type thing, and I was like, okay, so there's like counter insurgency, there's counter terrorism for an internal defense, you know, like all those things. And I'm thinking, like, this isn't actually like what's going on. These are just descriptions of operations, and I'm like, okay, let's find out

what's going on, like with the people. And the more I was reading, the more I was realizing, like that doesn't exist in military writing. It exists in like sociology or political science, where they're like talking about some conflict in some country, but the military is not looking at that. They're just looking at like, Okay, we've received information that we will now do this, how do we do it? Like they're skipping the first part where you need to

like figure out why is this happening? Because if you can just solve that, a totally different outcome. It's not going to be perfect. It's not going to be like you won the war, but it's going to probably be different than if you just oh, I'm a hammer boom. Everything is a nail, right, And that's basically what we do with our doctrine. So I wanted to research more, and the more I was researching, the more I just started taking notes and thinking about it. I had a

lot of assumptions that were incorrect. When I started out, I was a lot like these thinkers. When I first started, I was like, Oh, yeah, there's got to be some like esoteric something you know, And that's not correct. That's not true. Instead, it's human beings want certain things. When they don't get certain things, they have reactions to those things.

It's extremely basic, which sound like when I say it sounds very simple, it's not simple, especially when we don't look at it simply, you know, we come to it like, oh no, it's very complex. It's very difficult to solve. Oh this is a thousand year old problem between this party and this party. You know that's not true. It's because this country invaded in this year, and then these people reacted to that invasion and they don't like this

other country invading their country. And then there's remnants that are now trying to take power because there's an imbalance in what's going on here. I mean, it's like super simple when you look like that, when you add like names of countries onto it, and I'd be like, oh, no, that's the country I like. I can't disagree with that because I like them, you know. So that's kind of what pushed me to research as deeply as I did. I read about five hundred books over a thousand journal articles.

Like I was like steeped in this for a long time. It just so happened that COVID kicked off right after I started doing my research for this. I was like, this is the perfect time to spend twelve hours a day, reading every single day until this thing is over. I had no idea obviously when it would be over. So I did that the whole the whole time code was going on, I was, I was researching every day. Please say how many books and how many articles? Around five

hundred books and about thousand journal articles. And and I love, I love.

failed coin efforts. Then he taught the Americans how to fail at coin also in his And it's funny because so they failed in Vietnam. In Algeria him specifically, I mean he was at the Battle of Dan Bampoo. We're talking about Roger Trinkiar here, battle of Dam Pimpoo. The Vietname has completely overwhelmed this massive French conventional force, and he, you know, tail between his legs, went to Algeria the

dirty war starts. He fails at that, even after torturing all these guys, still not getting any help and information from that. And then he turns to the US Army and says, now that you've taken on our Vietnam problem, let me teach you how to solve the Vietnam problem. And that's how we learned our interrogation techniques at that time was from this guy. And if you look at his books during that time, like the early two thousands, that guy's name was everywhere. Trink hear, David Galula, all

of them like oh wow, these guys are geniuses. But then you go back and look like trink here, for example, was out fighting in the Katonga secession in Congo, you know, fighting with a criminal organization against the congalse Like this is the guy right there? Are you sure you know? Yeah? I mean it was like learning to eat soup with a knight. Yeah, the accidental gorilla. They're all all these different like thought leaders at the time. Yeah. What do

you think went wrong? Though? I mean, what were the faulty assumptions that we took into the war on terror that didn't pan out for us? I think we in the West have a problem with mirror imaging, where we not only do we see the enemy as we see ourselves, we want them to be like us. And like, even with new information, we still are like, no, no, no, they

have to they have to want a democracy. They have to want like how we look at their at them and we when we put them up on a PowerPoint slide, we structure it like a military table of organization and equipment. It's like, wait, I'm not sure that's how the Taliban works. Yeah.

large Afghan National army for us. Right. So when you ask a Taliban guy like, oh, who's the shadow governor of this province? Like that doesn't mean anything to him, But there is no shadow governor. He is the governor, right right, Like why are we calling him that when that's not what he is. But we'd have to admit that it's actually illegitimate that we were there, Like, you know,

totally understandable why we went there. But the problem is how we're framing our discussion of the things the conditions that are there. You know, Like you have an Afghan that's running a village. It doesn't matter where he came from or if he's Taliban or not, Like, why is he running the village way he is? Why do the people think this about him or that about him? Like we're not looking at it like that. Instead we're like, well, no, he's a Taliban guy. He's a bad guy.

they're the same Mujahideen. We didn't fund the al Qaeda, you know, or create al Qaeda the way some people would would assert. But you're right, we set the conditions. We normalized these wlawless, armed groups running around against the end. Well, we also allowed the Pakistanis to tell us everything to do in the nineteen eighties, like they were leading the show.

They're like, oh yeah, this group over here, you should work with them, this group, Let's definitely give them weapons, you know, without really asking many questions about it, because our goal was to defeat the Russians, right, it wasn't just stop insurgence, right right, yeah, yeah, right, yeah, but that short sighted us again. It will bite us, and

it bites us every single time. One of the assumptions you point to in the book that you alluded to a bit, but I think it's important to put our finger on is that one of our assumptions is we start with this idea that the insurgency is illegitimate and the government is legitimate. Yeah, but you and others I've read over the years point out, like in Afghanistan is a great example that you mentioned that a lot of

times this isn't the case. Yeah. Yeah, there's there's ungoverned spaces or semi governed spaces, especially in Africa for example, like you go out to southern Algeria, there's a whole state within a state down there that believes that it's the Surawi Democratic Republic, right, the SADR, if you ask them, that's what they are. If you ask the Algerians, that's what they are. If you have some Rocans, that's not

what they are. Right. But really all it's all about perspective, and that's a lot what I talk about in the book is like where does sovereignty lie and is it viewed as legitimate by that specific observer, Because it doesn't matter how we observe it. What matters is how are they observing it? And we need to understand that and then work within the conditions of their vision of it. And if we don't, we're just gonna be solving a problem the way we wish we could solve it and

not the way it should be solved. Right, you get pretty in depth into the theory you want to tell us about the dysfunctional sovereign and the liminal sovereign and some of these concepts that you win in your book. Yeah, So the young governed space as I was talking about, it's kind of that liminal sovereignty. Like if you go to see the FARC in Columbia, for example, they govern

a space or they used to. Right, yeah, exactly because the government, the legitimate quote unquote government cannot reach that space because of the way the terrain is structured specifically, and also because of local support and other things. That's sovereignty over terrain. That the cup that the legitimate government cannot control, so someone else is filling that space. And a liminal space is basically a gap, something filling in there, and that's in that case the farc and in other

cases it's cindera luminoso in Peru for example. Right, not because people love these groups, but because there is no other sovereign to look up to, like, well, how else are we gonna have law and order? How else am I gonna be able to take my trash out and make sure it goes away. I was in Lebanon for a while when the government was not picking up garbage.

This is a big thing in twenty sixteen, and there was like garbage lining the streets because society no longer had the ability to move trash, which is something very simple. But think about how that will affect a lot of other things in society. Right, we don't think about it like that. We're like, well, let's have an election and that guy's going to be the president, and we're gonna support him, like Honey Karzai for example, We're gonna support

that guy. Well, what about the other people and how do they actually govern themselves? Typically? You know, then there's social order where the way the government and the people are structured is different in every country is everywhere? I mean, a country is a made up thing, you know, let's be honest, Like, the concept of a country is pretty new. It's four hundred years old. The Treaty of West Valley in sixteen forty eight is what made states. There were

no states before that didn't exist. Even when you read like macis the Prince, there was no such thing as a state. There were really powerful cities like Florence, which is where he was. There wasn't like Italy, right, there

were not until like late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds. Yeah. Yeah, So those are things that I think we ignore a lot, which is problematic because we look at our country that we have now we say, we have this wonderful country, which we do, we have this amazing constitution, but we forget like how did we get that, How did the revolution that we had go? How could it have gone sideways? You know, the Constitution is not something that was agreed

upon by everyone that was at the convention. It was actually a fight document and the result was disagreements on a paper. That's what the Constitution is. Like the Constitutional Convention, almost everybody disagreed on something, and that document that came out of it is because people finally compromised. But then we go to place like Afghanistan and we're like, here is your new constitution we have written for you, right, Like,

how do we expect them to do that? If we couldn't even do that, you know, and we were fighting

over it. You know, there there were loyalists that were supporting the British and while we wrote the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence obviously, you know, but going back to that, the Declaration of Independence, if you read it, it has exactly the same stuff in it that a lot of these revolutionaries today say, you know, we want to shake off the burden of this and that, and you know, have our freedom and the ability to determine our own X, Y and Z, like these are just

basic things that people want. And if there's group A and group B, and group B is doing it faster and better and more trustworthy than Group A, they're probably going to pick Group B, you know. And if we're Group A, we're kind of out of luck in that situation, just like Afghanistan, where like we're supporting the wrong side essentially, like it's not going to be the winning side, especially when you pull the structures away, which is us, and it just collapses.

kind of view these things through a moral lens, yes, like and a cultural moral lens. Really it's like does their culture mirror hours? Do they do things that are would be acceptable here? And in the answer is no, then they're obviously bad people.

empower the military to actually ask why. It's not designed to do that for very obvious reasons, especially in a conventional war, you don't want people asking if you don't want that private on the front line. Are you sure we should go to that trench? Right? But in a non conventional situation, in a regular situation, or like when sovereignty is broken down, we need to really analyze that. In the military. We don't need to rely on someone else somewhere else saying here's a policy, go do it.

We should be able to ask them why is the policy like that? And that is actually not that controversial because if you look at the State Department, they have something called the Descent Channel where they're allowed to dissent all the way up to the Secretary in an official channel that has archived and actually George Kennon's Long Telegram was one of the original Descent Channel telegrams. Is very long.

It's why it's called a long telegram. But there was another one about the Syria policy during Operation Timber Sycamore, where the State Department said, this is really stupid. The way you're armoring these guys is going to end up falling back on you. These guys are affiliated with all News for Refront and all Kaida and you know it. And they wrote that in this dissent Channel memo to the Secretary and it's been declassified. You can actually read

it now. But why can't the military do that? Right?

five hundred guys. That's one general for every squad. That is absolutely insane. It was it was nuts, Like to get author's age. Like those strikes I was telling you about. I was doing dynamic strikes, which means within like twelve hours we're hitting the target. There was also deliberate targeting, which is like days or weeks. Right, you had to get like five different generals to approve your deliberate strike, and each general had a different reason for being the

one consulted. So like this guy is to determine whether this is a residential facility. This guy is to determine the right level of men, women and children in the house. This guy is the one that gets to determine the time of day. Like they had distributed among all the generals. Everyone gets credit exactly, well exactly, so many generals and not enough jobs. Absolutely, you know, it's everybody's kind of washing each other's. Oh yeah, they're no general left behind. Yeah, exactly.

The other thing that you know you mentioned in your book and we talked about before the show a little bit, was talk about the special forces side of things, unconventional warfare and the assumptions we get into going into that. Yeah, the opposite of counterinsurgency. Now we are the insurgence. Yeah, I mean, insurgency is basically a people rebelling against the

existing sovereign, which is something I talked about in the book. Well, unconventional warfare is us supporting them doing it, right, So if we're doing it, then it's okay. We're like, yeah, this is a legitimate unconventional warfare operation. If we're on the other side, though, if we're like the counter insurgents, they're like, oh no, that those insurgents are really bad, you know. So it's really interesting, like are they bad just because we're on the other side, right, and we're

afraid to ask ourselves that. Right. And the new book you have coming out, Iran's Shadow Weapons, that's coming out this summer. Yep, you just got the proof copy, Yeah, today, tell us what that book's about. Yeah. So, I think a lot of people misunderstand Iran for various reasons. It's kind of looked at as this like evil monolith that's like God's fingers coming to take over the world and

all this, and I think that's a huge misunderstanding. And what the book does is it looks at what is the regime actually doing and thinking, not just at like a strategic level of like big picture stuff, how are they actually spotting assessing and recruiting sources. How do they run SDRs, how do they pick safe houses and keep safe houses? How do they do kidnappings inside the United States? Like nitty gritty details and the really unique thing about

this book. First of all, nothing like this exists in print. I guarantee you because I've read everything else just like this book other one. I did the same thing for this one. I read literally everything out there, including in other languages, to a lot of Farsi sources in this But the big piece is I got a bunch of stuff declassified. So there's a lot of stuff appearing to the public for the first time that was top secret, secret,

no foreign ACCM. A lot of protected information that's now available showing things we knew, like for example, during the Iran Iraq War, we supported Saddam Hussein and we supported Iran. We supported Iran with Iran Contra and some other programs. We also supported stim Hussein because the goal there was not to defeat Saddam Musin or defeat Iran where each

other down exactly, is to bleed them out right. But with this declassified stuff, you can see way more detail about like how that actually happened and the Iran Contra issue was only like one of many programs we had. And this is for the first time that people are gonna be able to read about this. And that's just one example. What were the other programs, like weapons programs also? Yeah, so actually, even after the war ended, we actually worked

with the IRGC in Bosnia to arm certain Muslims in Bosnia. Yeah, exactly. And all the memos between Clinton and his staff are now released that are discussing that. In fact, the Italian president was sitting in the Clinton's office saying, you know, you can try to tell us not to give the weapons to the Iranians, but we know that you're doing it too. It's very fascinating stuff that no one has seen in public. Geez. And when does the book do out.

It's coming out probably early August. Okay, I got the proofs. I got to hurry up and do an index for it. That's actually they could go. We'd love to have you back in to talk about that. I'd love to. It's so fascinating. And you're now at Yale law, so I'll go to Yale in August. Oh, okay, you're getting ready for that. I'm in a holding pattern, right, now just waiting for that. So how long's law school? Three years? Three years? Yeah? And what are you like interested in?

You know, you have this extensive national security background and now you want to go and you know, take the bar exam, become a lawyer. What are you going to go into next? Do you think? So? I like doing hard pivots, So I'm gonna do like a ninety degree pivot away from the military and government unless I'm on the other side. So I want to work in a

big law firm, either doing like international arbitration. Like recently, Facebook has had some problems in Ireland because they avoid US taxes by being in Ireland, but Ireland has some issues. I would be an attorney representing Facebook fighting Ireland essentially, which is kind of cool that like international level or doing things like export controls. So there's a lot of stuff that has dual use, which means it can be used for civilian purposes and it can be used for

military purposes, like countries' nuclear programs. For example, Iran has a lot of stuff from Germany and the United States in a lot of their nuclear facilities. So let's work on the export controls of that and see how we can fix that problem or make it so that certain countries like Great Britain for example, has easier access to certain US technology that's national security and nature. But i'd be representing like the company for example, Boeing or Lockheed

or something like that. And you're also involved in the Irregular Warfare initiative, that's right, Yeah, what is that? So that's a collaboration between Princeton University and West Point. And there's a podcast that's actually how it started, the Irregular

Warfare Podcast. And then there is a series of articles that are published online kind of like the Small Wars Journal, and actually recently we've paired up with them to do like cross collaboration of sharing each other's articles, and it's allowing practitioners anders in the field to kind of come

together and talk about these issues. You know, Like recently we had an article about Boko Haram, like up to date, we had one as soon as the India Pakistan thing kicked off, we had an author in India writing an article about what's going on in India on the Indian unconventional warfare side, So very interesting. It's not just US authors, so it's mostly US authors, but not you know, strictly, so pretty interesting space to kind of share that information.

It's a nonprofit so it's just there for people to read, and it's actually open to anyone to submit articles if they want to, depending if it matches up with what we're looking for. But yeah, all very irregular stuff, so special operations on the military side all the way to some of the issues like I talk about my book, like the breakdown of society and what do we do about that kind of things. I mean, we covered a lot of ground here in a relatively short period of time,

and thank you for sharing your experiences. Like is there anything else that you know we haven't talked about that you'd really like to discuss anything we overlooked. I think I would like to discuss the Iaron stuff in another episode, because that will go on and on. Okay, Yeah, shoot me a copy of the book when it comes out, or an advanced copy, and yeah, I'd love to read it. It sounds really interesting. Yeah. I actually have the IRGC station in Vienna line and block charted out completely. It

tells you exactly who's who in the embassy and holy shit, fascinating. Yeah, Okay, I'm excited. It's amazing. Yeah too. Yeah, I'll get you on anything else. Do you like, where can people find you on the web? Where can people find your books? So I have a website Jonathan W. Hackett dot com. I've got my books listed there, and any podcasts I've been on are also there. Best place to contact me

is LinkedIn. I'm the Jonathan Hackett on LinkedIn. The the yeah, because Jonathan Hackett was taken so I was like, all right, well I'm the Jonathan Hackett so that, yeah, LinkedIn is the best way. That's how I found you. Actually, that's how I found you, and that's how I found Millburn too on LinkedIn. Cool man. So, yeah, thank you for telling us about your career and you know, your academic works and everything else that's going on. And yeah, we'd

love to have you back to talk about this second book. Yeah, I appreciate the time. Yeah, absolutely, man. Otherwise, we'll see all you guys next time. Hey, guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for a moment about how you can support the show. If you've been watching it enjoying it, but you'd like to get a little bit more involved and help us continue to do this.

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