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Slash The Teamhouse, Special Operations, COBT Spionage, The Team House with your host Jack Murphy David Park.
Hey everyone, welcome to episode three hundred and seventeen of The Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave and we're very pleased to have on the show tonight. Wade Ishi Moto. He's the author of the in Taku Code. I just finished reading this last night.
The headline here.
Is Delta Force's intelligence officer doing good in secret. Wade served in Vietnam with Special Forces, went on to become one of the original members of Delta Force, was a part of Operation Eagle Claw, the Desert One incident, and has gone on to do many other amazing things during his career.
And we're excited to have you on the show. Wade. Thank you for joining us tonight.
Well, I thank you for having me on excepch an honor.
Yeah, really, And so let's start off at the beginning.
Wade, I want to hear about your upbringing and growing up in Hawaii and sort of what your childhood was like and how that began to sort of take you towards the military.
Well, I was very fortunate to be born and raised in Hawaii, and in particular the kinds of neighborhoods I grew up in. Because the neighborhoods I grew up in were very diverse. We had people in many races. We all got along with each other. But what I learned was how to take care of others and how others took care of me, and that made a big impression on myself as far as the military was concerned.
During the Korean War, a gentleman.
By the name of Francis Takemoto, who had fought in World War Two with the four to forty second Regimental Combat Team. Was a lieutenant colonel in the Army National Guard, and he commanded a battalion and at the end of the valley I grew up in, it was a National Guard shooting range and he would drop by and pick me up when his battalion went up there for marshmanship training, and I got introduced into initially firing an one car being and then graduating to be able to fire an
m one garand rifle. So the military was really sort of imbued in me even before that, being raised during.
World War Two.
But nonetheless that really made a difference in terms of my wanting some day to be in the military.
You mentioned I think the term in your book is it hanai extended family hanai.
Yes.
I was very interesting to read about that in your book and all the people that were around you and your family, and it sounds like, you know, kind of an ideal childhood it was.
It was a great place to grow up.
It was semi rule when we moved into Koli Old Valley, which is on the eastern side of Oahu, and now it's all residential, but initially there was a truck farm as you started proceeding up.
The valley on the main highway, and then.
A dairy, two chicken farms, another dairy, and a small pig farm. It was very rural, and that set a different kind of tone in terms of crowing out.
You learned how to work, you.
Learned how to work around animals, You learned how to make a living for yourself.
And how did the idea of joining the army come to you? As you know, as you've become a young man eighteen nineteen years old, how does that come up on your radar?
Well?
When I was in high school, my intentions actually were to join the Air Force. After I graduated, along with one of my buddies in high school, and my parents pled with me to go on to college, and I did so, somewhat reluctantly, but nonetheless I did.
And make a.
Long story short, after two years, a professor of mine, Colin Kapra Johnson, confronted me one day and called me stupid, and I was about ready to knock his block off, but I said to myself, he's trying to tell me something. In short, what he was trying to tell me was that my grades were too low to get me into graduate school, and that for me to succeed in international relations,
I needed to have a master's degree or hire. So what that turned out to be was I was working sixty to eighty hours a week trying to put myself to school. It was a private school called glus and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and he said, you need to transfer, and I did, and then I got too
smart for my own briches. I tried to invest my summers savings on the ponies at Hollywood Park in Inglewood, California, lost it all, shrugged my shoulders because I had learned resilience as a young man, and said, well, it's time to go in the military. I actually intended to go into the Marine Corps, but when I went in and found the Marine recruiting station, there was a sign out to lunch and it was mid afternoon, and I said, what the hell this is? So I said, okay, I'm
going to go in the Air Force again. As I found the Air Force recruiter, they were co located with the Army recruiter and on the second story of a building. As I walked up the stairs, I felt this tamp on the shoulder and it was an Army Master sergeant and he said, well, the Air Force recruiter is busy, come on in, sit down, relax.
He saw me a bill of goods.
And I was in the Army and your first assignment, if I recall correctly, you were assigned to a military police company. And I guess this would have been in the nineteen sixties. It sounded like a very wild time to be in the United States Army.
For you as a young man, it.
Was sort of a crazy time because you know, we're still getting over the Korean conflict, if you will, and other things were happening with the Soviet Union in those days and in particularly in Cuba, so there were all kinds of different kinds of interesting things that were happening. But you know, one of the most interesting things that happened to me with that military police company is we were guarding Joe Volachi, who was the first mafia figure that was made to.
Like witness protection for Congress.
Not made too, he actually volunteered to testify before Congress, so we were guarding him.
That's so he was like in the witness protection program on your base.
Yes, And we never knew it in the MP company for about three months, but then two of our MPs found out they went to one of the well known publications at that time, the Saturday Evening Post, and spilled the beans and the promo. Marshal on Fort Mollins went sky order and he ordered us to build sandbag machine gun emplacements, have patrols and emplacements around the stockade where Volacchi was being held, and we went into a high degree of preparedness.
If you will.
And you know, I noticed from the book it seems like you always had some other ambitions for what you want to do with your army career, and the next stop for you is to become a counterintelligence agent.
That's true, and it was a matter of Church Police Company.
Commander initially was a gentleman by the name of Walt Jenkins. He had been a master sergeant during World War two in the Korean War and then somehow got commissioned and he was one of my mentors and took care of me.
He wanted me to go to OSS.
I refused to do so, so he came up with this idea, along with another one of my mentors, Bill Fitzpatrick, that I should go to and become an Army criminal investigative agent.
And they found out that they thought that it was all Greece.
They found out I was too young, but they also found out that I could get into Army intelligence school, and so they arranged for me to do so, and off I went without understanding what the hell I was getting.
Well, tell us what you were getting into, because I think your first stop was Korea.
As a CI guy.
Yes, and that was the greatest because I got assigned to the one ninety first Military Intelligence Detachment, which was in support of the first Cavalry Division, and our commander was a major by the name of Tom Hondo, and Tom took a liking to me, but that also meant that he pushed me very hard, and so he asked me to be the covering counter intelligence agent for the three battalions we had north of the Imjin River, and
those basically were sacrifice battalions because had the North Koreans invaded, they would have been cut off and never been able
to get back across the Emgin River. But they were at a high readiness stage in terms of future combat and patrolled the military zone every day, and so it was a great place for me to be and amongst all the other things, Ondo made me the unit photographer, So I was doing counter intelligence and intelligence photography of different sorts, and so I was able to do every facet that a counter intelligence agent does, to include recruiting, recruiting sources.
So it was just a phenomenal experience.
I thought that was a really interesting part of your book that you mentioned. During this period, the DMZ wasn't quite as built up as it became in later years, and so you guys were able to send agents north, but the North was also sending infiltrators south.
Correct.
Yes, Normally what the North Koreans would do is they would come up with three man teams y three. It's one of the known facts in terms of commonist organization and insurgency that you have an odd number because then you never have a split vote, if you will have either unanimous or two against one.
Okay.
So in our case, what we were doing was basically sending individuals across.
And I want to get into your service in Vietnam. But as we begin to talk about Vietnam and how you transition into special forces, I also need to ask you what is the Intaku code?
If you can tell people what that is.
Okay in toku.
Yeah, the in toku code is something I picked up in my martial arts experience, and there was a little phrase written by a gentleman by the name of Koichi Tohe, who was one of the ranking aikito masters in the world, and so he created this thing called in toku doing good in secret. And basically what it says is so evil, reap evil, so good, and the harvest will be good. So whatever you say can never be done away with. But the whole intention is to do good for other people.
And that is something that I had lived with even before I began my study of aikuto.
And that's something you took with you through your career, as it's really evident in the book.
So talk to us about Vietnam.
Well, initially, when I went into Vietnam, I went in essay.
It was an interesting experience because.
I came out of Hawaii and I was a staff chergeant at that time, and I had six young soldiers that had never seen combat or never been overseas other than Hawaii in their lives before.
So I took care of them.
And when we landed at Tomson Nut there was nobody to greet us, and it was on a president's birthday in February of nineteen sixty eight, after ted after the Tet offensive.
So the young men with.
Me were quite nervous, so I said, I gathered them around and I said, okay, you guys stayed right here, and they asked me, sorry, why right here?
And I pointed to a hole in the ceiling and I.
Said, that's probably where one twenty two millimeter rocket has come to, and the chances of another rocket coming through that same damn hole are about ten million to one.
So you guys stay here.
I'll find somebody to take care of us, and I went off. I finally found somebody and they transported us to Long Bin, which was the replacement depot for US Army Vietnam. And I requested assignment to either the fifth Special Forces Group or the twenty fifth Infant Infantry Division, and instead they were going to assign me to the US Army Vietnam GI Section Rear Echelon Organization right there at Long Ben, and.
I protested, but they said you have to go.
So I had very good fortune because I walked in and lo and behold, there was now a major who I had known as a captain in Korea that was in charge of the.
Operation that I was supposed to be working in.
And I pled with him and he looked at me and he said, okay, I'll let you go provided you do one thing. I said, what's that, sir? He said, you spend the day with me talking about old times. I said, you got so he lived up to his word. He released me again. I went back to the replacement depot and I said fifth SF Group for twenty fifth
Infantry Division. They put two and two togethers and he sent me to the five twenty fifth and my brigade, which I ended up in what they called the counter intelligence Team the Train, which covered a five province area doing offensive counter intelligence. So we were recruiting agents and that was our stock in life and our mission.
That was the B fifty seven program.
No, this was second Battalion well CEI team the Train part of the second Battalion five. So I made and I had an agreement with the operations officer for the battalion that if I gave him six hard months, he would release me.
And I had the privilege of working with.
A very great warrant offerer by the name of Bill Miller, and Bill and I were out ranked. He as a warrant officer was outranked by other officers, and I, as a staff chergeant was out ranked a couple other enceals. But we were the ones that had the experience at human intelligence, and so the officer looked at us to be able to turn that whole thing around because it was candidly not quite productive before Bill Miller came in along with myself and took charge of it. So after
six months, I went back to the battalion. The operations officer had changed and they were to I don't want to swear, but less than honorable person in charge, and he literally called me crazy. He literally forced me to go and get a psychiatric evaluation, which I did and of course got a clean bill of health, with a psychiatrist asking me, you need to tell that major to
come in here and get consoled himself. I said, I can't do that, sir, you know, so I went back, showed my clean bill of hill and the son of a bitch still would have released me. And again, you know, sometimes your life runs in luck. So I protested and filed a complaint. They sent me to the brigade headquarters in Saigon, and there I was met by Colonel Mankin, the deputy commander, and again he professed that he did not want to release me, regardless of the gentleman's agreement
that I had with the previous battalion operations officer. And then he asked me one question, which was very fortunate, and he said, so who are you going to work for in the fifth Special Forces Group? And I said, well, I'm not quite sure, but the one that arranged it was Chief Warren Afthor Clarence Kawaki Goshi and Colonel and got very silent, and then he looked at me and he said, you know, Chief Kawahigashi taught me everything I knew when I was a young lieutenant during the Korean War.
He said, it's only because of him that I'm going to release you. And I said to myself, Hell lujah, you know lucked out again. So I was off to the fifth Special Forces Group, signed in in August in nineteen sixty eight, and stayed there until March of nineteen seventy, and actually had intended to extend again, or had extended again, but my cousin, who was like a brother to me, was killed with the one zero first Airborne Division in Vietnam, and my startant Major made me come back on emergency
permanent changes station orders. That in short was you know, the a little bit shy at three years that I spent in Vietnam.
Well, before we move on, I got to ask you if you can tell us about B fifty seven, what you guys were doing there and leading into the Green Beret case, which you know is pretty well known I think by a lot of people.
Right.
So B five to seven was started circle nineteen sixty five nineteen sixty six, and its whole mission in life was to gain intelligence on Cambodia, tactical intelligence. But the way we're going to do business was not to go in ourselves, but to recruit indigenous personnel Cambodian's, Montagnor's, Vietnamese, whatever that would cross into Cambodia and collect the intelligence
for us. So initially there was another portion of B five seven called Project Cherry, which recruited units of Cambodians to go into Campbodia, but that, for whatever reason, was disbanded and we stuck with trying to recruit indigenous agents. We operated out of ten Special Forces camps strung out along the Cambodian border all the way from Hatien in southern four Core up to.
Duco In or Douklap in three Cores in Vietnam.
So normally we operated with three to four people on a team. One would be a radio operator and one would be a special forces person trained in intelligence, and the other probably would be a military intelligence person. And if we had another one, it could be either a special forces or an intelligence person. So we use interpret of principal agents which we recruited, and they became our way of finding indigenous sources and handling them.
And it sounds like it was overall a really good program, but unfortunately it sounds like you also experienced where it started to come off the rails a little bit with Alvin Smith.
Yes, in terms of success, what we were told later was that on any given day, B five seven would collect seventy five percent of a youthful tactical intelligence on Camp Odio, and on its worst day no less than.
Twenty five percent.
So we were quite a productive unit for being of such small size. So we had an operation co located at Mokua and Tantree in four Corps. Smith was supposed to be a case officer at one of them in mokuah He, after six months had been totally unsuccessful in terms of getting.
Any agent operations started.
He had an interpreter personable agent, so we brought him back to headquarters and we found out that this guy was lazy. He candidly was incompetent, and nonetheless he was looking for a way to justify his failure at mokuah And one day we had received a Cassetta film thirty five millimeter film out of our station in Lockdon, which
is far away from mokwah Ok. It's located in three corps, and our photographer and myself developed the role of film and started printing the pictures out and Smith came by and started pointing at one and said, this is my man, This is my man.
And I said, what the hell are you talking about?
And he pointed to an indigenous Vietnamese that was seated in and amongst a number of Vietnamese, and I said, what the hell are you talking about? So I pulled out his interpreter of principal agents, Dozia, and I saw actually no likenings likeness of the person in the picture
and the picture of his interpreter principal agent. So Smith then went to the operations officer of B five to seven and the commander and tried to get them to act on it, and they refused to Why they refused to, actually, I do not know, because of the fact that they were gone within a month, they were close to rotating back to the States and did so. The new commander came in with a new operations officer and they fell hookline and sinker for Smith's story, And there's a protracted
number of events that happened after that. Basically, they lure the interpretive principal agent into Saigon, luring him telling him that they had a new job for him, and they started interrogating him. They drugged him, they brought him to the train, put him in a connic container in the heat of July and Vietnam, and again started interrogating him. And twice they put him on a polygraph machine and twice he showed deception in the cator. Well, I contend
who wouldn't under those kinds of circumstances. But nonetheless, the hierarchy in B five seven designs that they're going to do away with him, and initially they went to the CIA and tried to get the CIA to take Twin off of our hands, and basically the CIA said he's not our guy, it's your problem, and then they were correct, and so ostensibly our ops officer, Budge Williams asked them,
well what would you do in our case? And ostensibly again the the base agent in the train at the train base where the CIA said well, we might consider doing away with him with extreme prejudice, but he never said they would, so that was in William's mind, and they concocted a way that they were going to get rid of Chin, which basically was to take him out in the train baying, shoot him in the head with a suppressed weapon and then dump his body overboard with
chains and to weigh his body down in a mail bag, and they did so. Smith was part of that, and then a month later he started being anxious, having anxiety and thinking that he was next on the list to be assassinated, which was total mallarchy, but nonetheless he turned himself in to initially to the Army and then to the CIA, asking for asylum, and that opened up the case, and the case went on for several months and finally Coach Martiall charges were going to be placed against eight individuals,
to include Colonel Barbara, who commanded the fifth Special Forces Group.
In October.
Thanks to President Nixon and the intercession of the Army Secretary Stanley resor General Abrams in Vietnam was shold to drop the charges, and they were dropped and the eight people were freed. They were also free to continue their military careers. The only one that didn't was Colonel Role because ostensibly what they asked him, where do you want to be a signed He said the fifth Special Forces Group and they, you know, the power to be said colonel, we can't do that.
You know that.
So he said, I retire. But everybody else did not have to leave the military story.
It sounded like there were also some over zealous prosecutors that made a lot of mistakes and overstepped, and you know that they tried to coerce and intimidate you as well.
It wasn't so well. What I was told by.
An individual in the Judge Advocate General's office at in Long Ben was that beware of the chief Defense attorney, because he's working for the prosecution. Everything you tell him, he's going to tell the prosecution, I said, I got you, okay.
So I asked this.
Young gentleman who was a specialist Worths class from New York. He was a lawyer, but decided to get drafted rather than serve as a lawyer in the military because he knew he would be assigned as a legal clerk and would not have a long term payback to the military. So after two years you could get out. So I wrote a message to him, tell him how the two Criminal Investigation Division BOSOS had botched the investigation by making threats, false promises and tried to use coercion. And he got
that to the defense attorneys. And so when I testified, they confronted the presiding officer in the Article fifteen investigation with that Shapman. And they also rate the CID guy over the cold and concerning his methodology.
If you will, so, I mean, quite an adventure through Vietnam and your time there, and you know the next place you were at Special Action Force Asia over in Okinawa and bouncing around some other places in the region. I'd love to get you to tell us the story about how you met your wife in Korea.
Well, out of the first Special Forces group we went up on an annual exercise called Full Eagle, and my shard major was a good friend by the name of Corned Beef Holiamau.
He had a colorful nickname.
So Julian Hollimam knew that I had been in Korea before, and he asked me, He said, do you know anybody that can help us out in terms of some services that we need? And I said yeah, And just by chance, a gentleman by the name of Kwan that I had known all the way back in nineteen sixty four was the area exchange manager out of Oaksan Airbase. So I went to see Kwan and I said, okay, con can you help us?
He said, well, what do you need?
He said, well, my start major wants a Roachi coach you, which is a rolling canteen if you will, that brings you little goodies to eat as well as toiletrees to sell.
He wants that to come up at least once day. And he needs.
A laundry because wait, we need to get our uniforms clean. He said okay, And so I joke with Kwanna and I said, whatever you do, send a good looking woman with you. So lo and behold, my wife shows up winning the laundry collection point.
And that's how we met.
And what really made me take a liking to her is one the evening I walked in to where she was working and there were another number of Korean Special Forces soldiers around her giving her a hard time, and she had a couple of hot tea in her in her hand and she immediately threw it at them, and I said, that's my kind of gal.
And you guys, you know she she joined this adventure you were on through the rest of your military.
Career, absolutely and has been my pillar for over fifty two years of marriage.
Amazing.
So the next place you were at, assigned to the Special Warfare Center, start to tell us a little bit about that. As I recalled you had you held both enlisted and officer ranks at the same time active in reserve. Tell us a little bit about that period of your life and meeting Charlie beckwith and how that came onto your radar.
Okay, Well, I came back out of Okinawa not knowing if I could run or jump out of airplanes again, as I was in a camp for six months after civility, breaking my leg on a parachute jump on Okinawa. So I was assigned to the Special Forces School and the start major was named Henry's Gerniac. And I went to Zerniac and I said, turn Major, I don't no if I can jump. I don't know if I can run again. I am certainly going to give it everything I have. And he looked at me. He said, dumbass. I didn't
hire you for your looks. I hired you for your brains. You assigned to the Opson Intel Committee. Yes, Major, So I struggled to get back into shape. I was selected as a Special Forces School Instructor.
Of the Year for nineteen seventy four.
And there's another long story, but I had been behind on promotions. And the reason why was the Army went to centralized records and in my centralized records for four pieces of paper with the most condemning one being my selection for the first Advanced Noncommissioned Officer Educational System class and no completion certificate. Well I didn't even know I had been selected because I was on Okinawa. Well, anyway,
that was quickly rectified. I was quickly picked up to make Master Chargeant and then I found out that there were no slots available in Special Forces. For another, a new master chargeant. Special Forces had declined from a high of around twelve thousand in Vietnam to less than four thousand at that point in time in nineteen seventy five, so there was no slots available. And two things happened.
They told me you might as well caut on retiring out of the assignment you're going to, which was in a reserve officer training course assignment at the University of Santa Clara, because the guy before you spent six years there.
And I said wow.
So I went around Fort Burg at the time to say goodbye to some of my old friends, to include our Major Arab Zaki. And Zaki had been and took a direct commission in Vietnam at the same time. I had been offered a direct commission and I had refused. He took it, and so I went to say goodbye to Arab and then I teached him and I said, so, why did you lower yourself to become an officer?
And he looked at me and he said seven hundred. And I said, what the hell are you talking about? Seven hundred?
He said, dumbassd seven hundred dollars dollars a month I said, you was our major seven hundred dollars a month.
I said, well, I'm a bitch. I guess I should have done it.
He said, well, look here, there's a Reserve Commission board meeting right now. If you get your paper worked together tonight, I will get you before the board in the morning.
But you got to get your paperwork together tonight. And I did. It.
Took quite a lot of effort, but you know, my typing and writing skills came to the forefront. So I was ready passed the board with flying colors and received a reserve commission as a captain in infantry. There was no Special Forces branch at that time, and so off I went on the ROTC assignment. And later in nineteen seventy seven, when Delta was about to be started, I was selected to go to the Army Sergeant Major Academy,
which I was. I called it extortion for a whole bunch of reasons, and I did not want to go, but nonetheless I was forced to go. The day I reported there, my old boss on the Opson Intel Committee for a foreman said call beck with and I said why. He said, because I told you to him. He said, okay, Forrest. I called beck With, and he, in typical Beckward fashion, said asked.
Me, are you ready, boy? And I said, sure, I don't know what you're talking about. You goddamn know when I'm talking about.
You the intel You long story short, when I had left the SF School on that ROTC assignment, I had prepared a three page letter for Colonel Beckwith pointing out some ways that the Opton Intel Committee could improve without bad mouthing anybody, but you know, coming up with some plans and rationale.
In terms of changing around.
And he took that too hard, and so I became his first choice to be the intelligence toward major for the Delta Force.
Those early days, I mean were very interesting both there are a lot of interesting people in the unit, but also interesting things happening as we're trying to develop this counter terrorism capability. Do you want to tell us a little bit about, like who were the people in this unit, how did your training begin, what it was like standing up a unit from scratch essentially?
Well, the good thing, the longest story is that you know Beckworth, when he relinquished command of the Special Forces School in late nineteen seventy six, was given authorization by then Major General Bob Kingston, who commended the JFK Center and in fact was the only general officer in all of what they call special operations today. But General Kingston authorized Beckwith to do a study to create a small British Special Air Service type organization within the US Special Forces,
and so Beckwith was doing that. Then a couple of things happened. This was late seventy six when he was
given that authorization, so he's working on this study. And then in March of nineteen seventy seven, so called Hanafi Muslim incident happened in Washington, d C. Where the Hanafia Muslims, a splinter group with the Nation of Islam, took over three buildings in downtown Wall, Washington, d C. And the federal government was paralyzed in a Washington Metropolitan Police Department had no capability to do surgical hostage rescue, so a call was made to General Kingston and asked if he
could send his special forces up there to resolve the incident. And Kingston very honestly answered, only if you want the lives of all the hostages to be at risk, because he knew special forces and the US Army did not have a surgical hostage rescue capability. So but at that point Kingston then turned to back with and said change your focus and start working on counter terrorism.
And Beckwi did.
He formed four others around him, started Major William Country Crimes, then Major Lewis Burris and Marion lieuten Colonel Kurt Hurst and Chuck Odrizi who was a Captain of AJA at that time, and they formed a study group and they started putting together how they were going to start Delta, what kind of people they needed, how are they're going to do recruiting, how they were going to do operations, how they were going to do assessment and selection, because
that was something Charlie Beckert adamantly insisted upon. So it was those five individuals that are most important in the
formation of the Delta Force. And what happened then is in October of seventy seven, bequd happened to be in a Pentagon when Green shoots group of nine the German counter Terrorism Force took back to hijacked airliner in Mogadishu, Somalia, with the help of the British Special Air Service, and one of the questions that was floating around in the Pentagon and National Command authority was what is a flash bang?
And the only guy in the building in the Pentagon that knew what a flash bank was was Charlie Beckworth. And that made a name not only for Charlie but for the organization that he was working on funding founding. So orders were cut and those orders were somewhere around nineteen November nineteen seventy seven to actually create the unit. But that unit was going to be created even before that because it had the support of the Army Deputy
Chief of Staff or operations plans. But the name of then Lieutenant General Edward Meyer that knew he was going to be the next Army chief of Staff and did.
And some of the interesting guys thought, I believe Charlie's first deputy Dick Potter.
Yes, absolutely a superb person, officer, planner and the patriot.
I've spoken to him on the phone before. He is a great guy.
I did not know that he socked someone in the Cross Creek mall Invil.
Dick Potter played football at at college in Michigan that no longer has a football program. But he's a character and hard hardest woodpecker lips, as they say in one of my best friends in life.
Potter went on to command Tense Special Forces Group, of course, and another interesting character Herman Adler.
Oh, Herman the German.
Yes, yeah, Herman unfortunately passed away a few years ago, but you know, he.
Emigrated from Germany.
He had a Volkswagen koga Wagen, and so you know, we used to teach him about being a crowd and still wanting to be in the Nazi Army. He was originally from Munich and still had family there.
But Herman was really another.
You know, most of our people initially were very acquired, very humble, wanting to do a job, not seeking to make a name for themselves, but to do something interesting for the country. And Herm Dick Potter. I can name tons of others who were in the same boat.
Another thing I'd like to ask you about, because you spend some time on this in your book. There was this question at the time can Delta operate domestically in the United States? And there was some back and forth about this topic. I just wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that conversation and how that evolved over time.
Yes, well, there were people, yeah, I.
To be honest, I guess the people were split on whether we should have a domestic mission or no game.
At the time, it was overseas terrorism that was dramming of the wall and you can't do everything. And in order to do things domestically, what you needed was to have the Posse Comitatis Act waived or the Insurgency Act implemented by the President of the United States. That was going to be very problematic, and you know, we simply well, we needed to concentrate our efforts overseas, and eventually that
planned out. We had worked very closely with the FBI from day one, even before day one when Beckwett had the Special Forces School. Okay, so, but they could not get that warrewithal to start what it's called today the Hostage Rescue Team and their Critical Incident Response Group.
It took them some years to gain that authority.
And there's another story about how that happened. But one of the most two most influential ones were John Otto, who had been the Special Agent in charge in Chicago and in a year encountered two acts of Hubble Croatian terrorism in Chicago and later became the executive Assistant Director of the FBI.
And the other one was Jim.
Mackenzie, who was the assistant director for Chronicle and the training side of the FBI, and he later would become a special Agent in charge of a major field office. So those two were very influential in terms of bringing the FBI around to understanding that they needed a hostage rescue team and dedicated capability.
I will just point out for our viewers out there, we've had Danny Colson on the show twice. That's right, if you guys want to go back and look at that, and also Mike Vining who was one of the original Delta members as well, so you could find those preview episodes.
Danny Colson was one of the guys responsible standing up the hostage rescue team.
The story is fantastic, Wade, You.
Right about Danny doing an exchange with Delta at one point.
Yes, yeah, well you know, Danny.
Came in as I afterthought, I'm being blunt about it, okay, because the movement within Division six and Jim McKenzie was led by something called SORE his Special Operations. It was a unit anyway, and I forget what it was, but they had guys like John Simioni who became the first tipaty, but Jim was John was a former Saint Louis, comp rough and rugged guy and not you know, suitable too
candidly command yah and Colton was. Colson was an up and comer in the FBI, and so he was picked particularly to leave the hostage Rescue team.
Perfectly.
Yeah, no, I'm sorry, go ahead, I interrupted you please go ahead.
Initially, what the FBI wanted to do was to do sort of a walk before you run things, So they sent five guys down to Delta to spend a couple of months with us, led by Danny Colson. Sammy Only was another Jamie Ashton who was their major briefer.
Preacher for years, was another Tom.
Nicoletty, and then who never became part of the hostage rescue team, but then Jeff mcwaymeyer. And Jeff had been the SWAT team leader for the Washington Field office and had been the league on a mutual exercise I said, we did called Operation Masquerade that proved the capability of Delta and the need for the FBI to do something different other than their regional call outs. And so those five people were to form the cadre, if you will, for the HRT and did with the exception of Tom Nicoletty.
So while all this is going on, Delta is getting stood up and validated. And this was something interesting that I didn't know. The first mission that came across their desk was the kidnapping of Ambassador Dubs in Afghanistan, and then like a day later the embassy in Taran get seized.
Tell us what that timeframe was like.
Well, it wasn't quite that close, but.
You know, we were alerted to the kidnapping of Ambassador Dubson in Afghanistan, and we started scrambling trying to get ourselves out of Fort Bragg and before we could even get off the ground, Dubs hid. Ambassador Doubbs had been killed in Afghanistan, so that canceled that mission a game. In February of nineteen seventy nine, you know, the US Embassy in Tehran was taken over for the first time. The Ayatola interceded and had it immediately turned back to
the US government. But the only sticky wicket being they kept one Marine security guard, Kim Kraus, hostage for about a week and they finally released him. But nonetheless, we knew there was just a forerunner to what was going to happen in Iran later, and we had for permission to go in and do an extensive survey of the embassy and its surrounding areas and to be able to
respond accordingly. The State Department approved giving us what they call country clearance, but believe it or not, the United States European Command that had overview of Iran at that point in time denied.
What is called theater clearance.
So we were incapable of going in and doing a detailed survey of the embassy grounds and the embassy itself, and that cost us.
It cost us peak time.
So when Delta was formed, General Meyer had made us do an initial assessment process in July ofineteen seventy eight, whereas what Beckett had asked for was two years in order to develop a so called full operational capability, which would have been nineteen seventy nine. So in nineteen seventy we passed that. By the way, in nineteen seventy eight and a so called operation called Operation Blue Light was
forced to close. So in nineteen seventy nine, General Meyer, now the Chief of Staff of the Army, it comes up with a plan for us to do an international validation because he understood what it would bring to the United States of America if we had international personnel that voults for the organization.
So we did a exercise at.
In South Carolina, and the international validators included Ulrich Wegner, the first commander of the grensh Youth Group of nine, the German CT Force, Christian Pluteau, the leader of their John Darmay International.
Connor Terrovison Team, and.
Johnny Wance, Brigadier Johnny Wants, who had previously commanded the British twenty second Special Air Service and was ahead of their special forces at that time as a brigadier general. So those were our three key international validators, but it also included senior people from a whole range of US government organizations and we passed. Ironically, we passed on the fourth of November nineteen seventy nine, which was the day that our embassy was taken over again.
Unreal anyone, So you are a intelligence officer in Delta, you guys are doing this real world mission. I mean, this is you know, you guys are really breaking ground here, doing something that no one's really done before.
Can you tell us what it was?
Like building the intelligence packet around this operation during the planning phase, how you went about, you know, putting all of this.
Together, you mean initially.
Or initially for when it was still riceful before Eagle Clack.
Okay, so even before Eagle well, you know, you have to go back and look at when we started in nineteen seventy seven, the total number of dedicated terrorism analysts in the entire United States government with less than twenty one twenty one entire US government.
Okay.
When we created Delta, I brought in four analysts, so now the count became twenty five. So there was no extant terrorism database. The RAND Corporation had sold a bill of goods to the United States Air Force and the Defense Intelligence Agency, and what they taught it as a database was in fact just a compilation of events.
That's not a database.
So we worked with the Defense Advanced for Research Projects Agency on creating a true database that could be churched and with anal analysis in place within those search fields. So that was one of the major things we did. We also began very unique relationships with a number of intergovernmental agencies, to include the FBI, CIA, the Department of Energy because of their Nuclear Emergency Search Program and the Federal Aviation Administration because they are they're hijacking and they
had principal responsibility in those days. So we had to work hard at establishing all of these relations to include with the Department of State, and so fast forwarding when the embassy gets taken down in November nineteen seventy nine, very quickly we were told that we needed to break
all our contact with the Department of State. And at that point in time nineteen seventy nine, the best analysts of terrorism in the United States government were found in the State Department Diplomatic Security Wants Center, and there were about six analysts here that absolutely were doing a superb job. They were led by Telford, a former regional security officer, former Marine, and he knew what the whole needed to
be done and his people did too. So when they would analyze a terrorist event, they would have drawings, cheumatics, listing of weapons, you know, looking at their methodologies, et cetera, and so forth, so more than just a compilation of something that happened. So now we were told that we needed to break our relationship with them and then not contact them.
The reason why was that.
Irris Fans the Circtarian State and his deputy Warren Christopher, had declared that they were adamantly opposed to the use of any US military force to deal with the situation in Iran, Okay, and so.
Whether it was.
President Carter or whoever, but the hierarchy declared that we needed to break those relationships with State Department, and we did.
Warren Christopher, well, I was just going to say, Warren Christopher went on to screw up in Bosnia, too, didn't they?
Yeah, thank you, yeah.
But but anyway, when when when the embassy went down, we needed to know a whole until because of the lack of preparation, we found that there were no good blueprints on the embassy.
What happened was CIA and NSA got together.
They called some of their people that had served in that embassy before. They got pictures, they got sketches, they got all kinds of things, and they put together a marvelous model, skilled model within a month of the event game. And they also, even though we didn't have per se blueprints, we started having information on doors, door the way doors open, locks and so on and so forth, not as good as we would have liked.
To have had, but far better than nothing. Okay. So then there was the issue of how many hostages are there? That took almost two weeks to determine.
And in and amongst that time, it was also found out that in addition to the sixty six Americans that were taken hostage inside the embassy, and that the Ministry of Point Affairs on that day, that there were six others that the Canadians were hiding out.
Joe.
But then we needed to find out what are their medical conditions, and that took time. We needed to find out how can we get into.
Iran and out of Iran?
And that took time and time and time, and so it was a very tedious and it took a lot of hours to get our plans together.
One fascinating detail that I, again was unaware of when I was reading your book.
Could you tell us about.
Bob Plan, Great American? Yes, Bob during World War Two was part of the Office of Strategic Services and served in Yugoslavia.
Game He later became a what they call knock nonofficial cover operative for the CIA and had gone into retirement. And he was retired in Trieste, Italy, right on the border with the former Yugoslavia, and they literally brought him out of retirement. Now I don't know why they brought Bob Plan in particular out of retirement, but they.
Chose the right guy.
He had the skills, he had the courage, and he went into Tehran several times, with the first time being close to December of nineteen seventy nine. It took the agency that amount of time to find somebody suitable to send it to Tehran. And you know, I can't go into all the details as to what above try, but he tried to make contact with the hostages and had
some success. He had a whole bunch of logistics things that he needed to do, like find a warehouse, fine trucks, fine fuel for the rescue attempt.
He did that in a first class manner. He did reconnaissance.
Just too much to expect from one person, but he did what he could.
He was the embodiment of the in Toku code.
Absolutely, you know, very quiet, uh I did you know describing the book how I first met him. You know, stupidly, I say stupidly, But we were allowed to fit any resource that the agency was going to put in direct support of US, and Bob Plan was one. So I came out of isolation and up to Washington, d C. To have given the name of a motel that still exists, and went there to meet Bob Planned. Knocked on the
door and heard a gruff voice say come in. And I went in there and sitting in a dark corner is Bob Plan looking at him and he's got an our old face and you know, sun Tan And so I went up. I introduced him myself to him. He stood up and in his gravelly voice, he started talking to me. And I asked him. I said, I understand you were in retirement. Where were you in retirement? So rather than say tree, yes, he said in the Mediterranean.
And for whatever stupid reason, the movie the Guns are Never all flashed in front of my mind and I'm saying, Bob Plan looking like Anthony Quinn, you know, the partisan that went in and helped destroy these German placements. In the movie guns are never And I said to myself, this is going to work.
This is a gun. Yeah.
Out of curiosity you were since you were in the intel shop, I'll ask you this.
I know it's close hold.
But were you aware of the efforts of grill flame while you were a grill flame project.
The operation plan called for one MC one thirty combat talent. The operation plan called for one MC one thirty combat talent to lift off in our head of the other one thirties that we're going to leave Monster Island.
And the reason why was that they would be able to go in.
And if we crash landed on the surface, then the mission would be aborted. Okay, but if we landed safely, then the remotely triggered landing lights would be checked out and roadblocks. They went around in an oval and lined up to land again, and they did successfully. It was a rough landing, according to most I did not think it was a rough landing.
I was standing on the.
Rear of the aircraft at the ramp, so I don't know if my adrenaline was flowing so fast or whatever, but I did not experience a rough landing. But everybody else later told me, yeah, it was a.
Very bad landing.
So we started attaching the clamshell, rear doors start opening, and I had after the crew chief to signal beam when they were about to stop.
And so when I got the signal from him, I.
Had worked out a plan with staff chargeant Little John, my ranking ranger, that we would then exit the aircraft. He would move forward and I would go to the
rear to establish initial security. And that was very fortunate because shortly afterwards I'm in the rear or to the rear of the aircraft and I hear Bob Rubio, one of my rangers, come up on me on a motorcyclone, and the next I get on the back of the motorcyclone and the next thing we see on the lights of a Mercedes bus coming down through down the road. Little John fired M two O three forty millimeter grenade wrong.
It impacted in front of the bus.
The bus came to a stop and I said to Ruby, I said, Rube, let's go. We can't wait on our other two, who were Kurt Massey and Mike mcgirham. They were airstircling a little slow getting off of the airplane, so we started taking off down this dirt track on a Yamaha motorcycle.
He looks that back at me and he said, sir, and I said, I see him. Groupe.
Well, we saw were the lights of a vehicle coming at us, So I said, go left, go south, lay your bike down, grab one of your light anti tag weapons that were strapped onto the handlebars of the motorcycle, and come up on me, which he did. I told him move forward to me. They cover behind the burm. The burm was where a road grader had put up about a one foot berm on the side of the road, and Rubio did so. I'm standing in the middle of
the road shick thing where the vehicle to stop. I know it's a truck because of the height, its spread of the lights. I can't tell you, honestly how fast that truck is coming. I know I am illuminated by his headlights. He's still coming. I opened fire with my M sixteen, knowing in my heart I can't stop a damn truck with an M sixteen, And I had a flashback to Vietnam, which is another story that not pertinent.
But.
And the rules of engagement were minimal use of force. So I'm firing at the radiator in the headlights. And I finally said f this, and I raised my point. I aim, he's still coming. Room sure cockula ready, sure fire womb guys, whore A flame is going up the back of a three thousand gallon fuel tanker. The truck did not explode, mind you, okay, but what the hell else can go wrong? So I said, Rue, keep me covered.
He's lying behind the berm and I try to do move in on a circle to keep from being directly illuminated as I instead of moving forward. And as I came in from the side, I saw another similar truck gasoline tanker come up behind him, and I ran back and to get Rubio, and I said, there's another truck behind her. He said, sir, if somebody just jumped out of the cab on the first one. I said, okay, let's go grab the motorcycle. It took a number of
kicks before the damn thing kicked over. That Rubio is something with his night vision gorgos, and I said, what's the matter. He said, my mvgs aren't working, sir. And I went like this, and I said, son of a bitch, I had given up my mvjs because we were short of equipment. And I'm cussing myself, but I said, okay, we had infrared paper taped over the headlight.
So I said, Rue, just give it your best.
And take off, and if you go out ten minutes or ten miles and can't catch it, come on back, which he did, and he was not able to catch a second vehicle had too much of a head start on us.
But I'm saying, what the hell else can go wrong?
And in reality, the only other thing that well, only two other things went wrong were the helicopters.
Were late coming in.
And then one end corner had hydraulic problems and Ed Seffert, who was the helo squadron commander, declared that it was unfliable, that was imminent failure, and so we were down to five flable and the mission was aborted. Then the next thing that went wrong was when Jim Schaeffer was attempting to fly his helicopter back to the Nimitz, he collided with an Easy one thirty with Delta's Peace Quadron on board, and that led to the death of three Marines and five Air Force people.
And it was a little bit dicey, as I recall for you during the exfiltration as well.
Yeah, I you know, originally I was assigned three rangers for whatever reason they decided, I don't know who they were candidly, but I was reinforced with seven other people. So now I had including myself, a total of eleven and two motorcycles. So when the mission was supported, or even before it was supported, I started shuttling.
My people back two at a time, one on the back.
Of the two motorcycles I had, and so I was the odd guy out. I was walking backwards down the road to keep my eye out towards where vehicles might come from came, so I was unaware of the crash of the helicopter into the one thirty. There was a lot of noise out there, so more noise was meaningless to me in terms of a crash game, and I certainly did not see the fire that ensued because I'm walking backwards.
Game, I might not have made it all if it weren't for.
The good work of Carl Savory, who was our acting surgeon, who made a jerk by the name of Johnson come back on his cheap to look for me.
One more time.
Otherwise I'd have been left on my own.
You guys evacuated back began planning a second attempt, honey Badger, but by that time the hostages had kind of been spread around, you suspected, and a hostage rescue effort would be not really possible.
Correct, Yeah, you know, because they were scattered through the seven wins, And yeah, it would have been very problematic to go after three to five of them and to see the others undoubtedly be killed in the aftermath.
There was one more army adventurer I'd like to ask you about, and that was I guess the next mission that the unit rolled into, which was potentially rescuing American POWs in Laos.
Yeah, that was a sad concoction, a lie ye feed by the retired Special Forces lieutenant colonel who I can only have despicable words to describe him.
Yeah, but he lied.
He continued with his lies even after the mission was called off because of the lack of true intelligence and the fact that it was in fact known that he had lied about crossing into laws, but he continued to pursue what he wanted to do. And are the rumor mill had it that he got over a million dollars each from Clintwood, Clint Eastwood and Bill Shafter on.
His lies.
To fund his supposed rescue effort.
Yeah. Yeah, and having supposedly seen live American POWs inside.
You point out in the book that the intelligence was pretty shaky from the get go. I mean there was an imagery analyst who thought that the shadows of the people in this area were tall enough that they were Caucasian.
I mean, this is kind of flaky.
Right, absolutely. And the other one was.
Suppose it be fifty two stamped in the grass around the compound. You know, first off, you had to strain yourself to believe that says B fifty two. And even if it did, what the hell's a meaning? It made no sense?
And I mean.
I gather from your opinion way that you don't put any stock in this idea that there were American POWs left behind after the war.
No, yeah, yeah.
I tend to agree with you based I was a little bit too young for that, but based on everything I've read and everyone I've talked to.
You know, we had some defectoris I forget how many?
Garfield?
Yeah, m but I you know real po ws well, you know, efforts ever since then have continued continually debunked live po ws, least in Vietnam, and after the Paris Accords and the return of our po ws.
Talk to us then a little bit about retirement.
How did how did you sort of end your career in the Army.
Unfortunately, I retired very angry. I just couldn't described as Boso Johnson who had become the Delta Deputy commander without being either Delta qualified or Special Forces qualified.
And and yeah, it was a lousy officer.
He allegedly won the Defense Distinguished Service Cross in Vietnam.
I don't know if he did or not. We all I know is he was a lossy officer.
So General Doger was kidnapped in Italy, and normally I was one that would be.
Selected to go on a so called advanced party.
So I walked into Johnson's office and I see this black kit bag with a black uniform, a black suppress MP five, a black helman, and I said, what the hell is this? And he looked at me and said, well, you know, I said, no, I goddamn don't know.
Well, we got to be ready for I said, go f yourself.
You know you're not goddamn qualified, you know, And besides that, you don't understand what the hell we're going there for. We're going there to support the US embassy and the Italian government, and if the Italian Italian government wants us, then we would consider a hostage rescue.
But you're not qualified, so why are you going with all this crap?
And I walked out through my retirement papers and was based on another thing that was happening where the Joint Special Operations Command J two was accusing me of sabotaging a program that I had created. I was very angry. And you know, the term PTSD did not exist in those days, but I had it. And in my case, as I found out later, the manifestation that I have in terms of PTSD is called anger. And my anger was ready to literally knock the block off or kill
this J two or Johnson. And I said, I can't do that for my wife. It's time to go.
And I mean, I guess it's somewhat ironic.
After retirement, you found yourself working for Charlie back with again.
Yeah, it it was. It was tough, very honestly.
Charlie tried to pull the wool over my eyes on several things. I never told him, you know, go pound sand because I know what you're doing.
But I did know what he was doing, like lowering my salary and so on and so forth. But you know the bottom line is I still wanted he to succeed. And the business to succeed.
But it came down to the point that there was no way in Hill that it was going to succeed. Charlie just simply was not a good business man, you know. And the kinds of things that we had intended to do, we're not doable unless we had a base upon which to lean on to pay the light bills, the salaries,
et cetera. And instead of seed money, what we literally had was a desktop loan, which when the First National Bank of Midland went under, the government investigators literally found that desktop loan in the president's desk of the First National Bank, a milan and they were going to call our company on that loan and have us pay attack and we're not able to do so, so shrug get my shoulders. It was on to something else.
And you found some work with the Department of Energy and a number of other different contract and positions, and I mean one of the things that came out through your book. And not all of these contractor jobs you had, but many of them. You sound very frustrated with petty bureaucrats, nepotism in the ranks, how people are being promoted.
Yeah, as well as ethics immorality.
Yes, yes, and that continues to bother me, you know, because I see people that get positions of authority without any decent qualifications. And it happens in every administration. So I'm not picking on Republicans who have Democrats. I'm not picking on Biden or Trump or anybody.
But it happens.
But it is frustrating, okay, because there are ways where the system can work, where you do legitimate election based on qualifications, but a lot of times that those times happened, and that's just the way the world goes wrong.
I guess we can get a little bit more into it.
But you know, you did continue to do some good and secret But one thing I wanted to point out and ask you about was after nine to eleven, you started going on Fox News as a sort of military analyst, and I wanted to ask you what it was like to be this person that had lived your life sort of in the shadow as an intelligence professional and now being on television in front of a camera telling talking about this stuff.
Okay, Well, my motivation to go on Fox was because there were too many talking hits that absolutely had no concept of what they were talking about. Yeah, and they were lying, they were embellishing things, they were trying to make themselves look good. You know, my intent was to counter what they were doing without revealing classified information.
And you know.
Some people may disagree with me, but I think I did that very well.
Yeah.
We saw, you know, like Wayne Simmons and others that might gain national notoriety on these shows who were completely had completely falsified backgrounds.
Yeah. Yeah.
There was a guy named Custer, former ranger, you know Custer. Later under his company Custer Battles, was brought under chargers for contract fraud in Iran for providing something like two hundred vehicles without engines, with his claim being this contract did not specify working engines.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
Yeah, I remember for his security company in Iraq. I heard that like guys would show up and they'd handle like these old ratty beat up a k's with a couple of like rusted out magazines, and it's like and like this is their security contract.
Yeah. Yeah, and yeah, there were there were other people that.
To include some high ranking offers, Tom Lieutenant General retired Air Force Tom McInnerny, Oh my gosh, then the Director of the Joint Staff. He didn't have a clue in terms of what he was talking about. And so, yeah, you know it was, like I say, my motivation was to counqure these talking heads that at no basis in fact for what they were talking about, but without revealing classified information.
I was pushed hard several times on Fox.
Oh, tell us about this, tell us about that, and you know I would just smile and see, sorry.
But you did go on to do some I mean, some frustrations, but also it sounds like some good work at ASD. Solik, the Assistant Secretary of Defense Special Operations of Low Intensity Conflict for our listeners out there in office in the Pentagon.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, it was a mixed bag because you know, the Assistant Secretary was someone that I had hired to replace me in Delta, and I had nurtured him through all these years and when he got the call asking him if he was prepared to be nominated, allegedly, he called me and said, you're the first guy I have talked with. Okay, not allegedly, that's what he to me. When he called me, he said what do I do? I said, you take that damn job? Well, are you going to come in
and help me. I said, I will come in and help you, provided you allow me to do one thing.
And that has to build you a strategic plan.
Okay, well, God bless Tom O'Connell. He renemed on that, and he renemed on a number of other things.
That I wanted to do.
But regardless, I still was able to do a lot in hasty sould. And so when I walked away from that organization, I held my head hyh.
But there were things.
That still required fixing that I could have fixed along with the hope of others, all the way back in two thousand and four, five, six and seven.
Why do you think there's this bureaucratic resistance to that effort.
With I'll describe a phenomena that I've seen so many bureaucrats come in, whether it's in the private sector or in government, if they get handed something that they don't know anything about. Instead of trying to learn, they try to hide their inabilities and their lack of knowledge.
And one of the ways they do.
That is to create different ways of describing something where there's no need to change the terminology.
So the best example I can give you is in the Pentagon there was a retired Navy camp and who only became the principal Deputy under Secretary of Defense for policy because his wife worked for Donald Rumso and said she would have to terminate because her husband was being moved, and Rumsho said, I can't have you leaving and made him hire as retired navy captain who had never done policy in his life, as a principal the number two
in defense policy. It's so he could not comprehend what unconventional warfare was, so he created a term called irregular warfare, and all his psycho fans ran around kissing his you know what, saying, oh irregular, I said, you know, describe for me what the hell irregular warfare is. Well, you know, no, I don't know. You know.
It's the difference between irregular and regular warfare. Well, and I get all this tap dancing. And for seven years there was a one paragraph definition and JCS publication one, the deal d Dictionary. And now you've got people trying to say whatever the warfare is.
It was a waste of.
Time as well what I call forcing others to learn, okay, and you try not to show your stupidity by creating new terminology and causing people to run off and try to deal with your terminology because you're in a position of authority and power, and that, as you can tell, greatly angers me. And it's one of the reasons that of government is non effective when they put the wrong people in George.
Yeah, you point out a few examples in the book where like people are getting hired because like this person's having an affair with this person and so they're hiring. It's like, oh my god, really.
Yeah.
Yeah, And you know, I tried not to name names for the most part, because you know, my intent would to talk more about.
The good people. Yeah, yeah, I get it, and I hope I did that.
You know. Yeah.
So I think we're going to have some questions from our viewers and listeners. But my last question tonight, Wade for you is I'd like to ask what inspired you to write the in Toku Code, After you know, again spending your life in the shadows, what made you decide to come forward and tell your story?
The long story was, I made an agreement.
On March first, two thousand and seven, over seventeen years ago, okay, and it was with a friend by the name of Mizuho Bobrowski. Mizuho had been adopted by a Navy sailor, was of Japanese ethnicity, became a naturalized citizen, came in to ask Special Forces, and recharge with Special Forces as a sergeant first class.
He had ten percent disability from the Veterans Administration, which means he was not getting anything. Okay.
His wife was fighting breast cancer and his daughter was enrolled in an expensive East Coast university, and.
He needed to make some more money.
So what Mizuho was doing to make money was he was a photo journalist going back to Japan, and so he had this idea, if I write the book, he'll get it translated, he'll get it published, and he'll make well. He wanted me to make the money, but I was more concerned with him getting the money to take care
of his family, and so we made that agreement. When March the first, two thousand and seven, clearly remember the day he went home to Los Angeles in early April, started having stomach pains and by mid late April was dead of rampant pancreatic and liver cancer that had ecstaticized throughout his body. So I lost the interests to write the book. But over the years, I've had so many of the people I've done to.
People, I felp.
To say, write your book because there are plenty of lessons to be learned from your life. And so I finally said, Okay, I need to get off my butt and get it done.
And I did, and I you know, throughout this interview we really just covered the wavetips. There's much more in this book in the in Toku code. I hope you guys will go and pick it up.
It's out.
Now, what kind of questions do we have from our listeners?
So what is the pass rate for getting into Delta? And the question is more about like Green Beret and Delta and then if they fail, is there like shame when they go back to their units?
Okay?
From early on, you know, And I can't tell you exactly what the or.
A Green more Rangers, Yeah, Green Bray and Rangers. I'm sorry, I don't know if I said that, goohead.
Yeah, okay, I can't tell you exactly what the past rate is for for Delta. In the early days, it was somewhere between ten and twenty percent, with every class being different. Okay, but sell them if ever over twenty percent. It's a grueling process in terms of Special Forces. Thanks to Dick Potter when he was in the deputy to Jim Guess at the Special Forces Command, he came up with the idea that SF needed an assessment and selection course, which they came up with and stick to to today.
I understand their pass rate is significantly better, but I don't know again what the exact percentages are, but it is significantly better than the Delta assessment and selection process.
And then outside of just the initial selection, you would also like OTC itself was very challenging, and so guys would would wash out of that for marksmanship or whatever else.
Right, yeah, absolutely, So the whole idea was, you know, just because you passed the assessment and selection, you were still not a full fledged member of the unit until you successfully completed OTC.
Solly, thank you.
Would a better quality of soldier be produced by the Delta selection if they incorporated jungle training like the SAS into their selection.
Well that that was a a hard thing to contend with because you know, as we looked at the SAS selection, there are different phases to include a jungle phase and other phases. So we decided, Charlie Beckworth decided we did not need that in Delta because our mission was not to.
Be as broad as the SAS mission is.
Even though we might have to operate in the jungle or whatever, but our basic mission was counter terrorism and the basic premise was that for the most part, we're going to do.
That in urban areas.
And even with what the events in Afghanistan and Iraq in Suria, when they're doing their operations, for the most part, they're still conducting them in urban areas. So why then did we need those jungle skills? Not to question anything SAS was doing, but their purview is totally different.
M Corbyn, thank you.
What did discovering the in TACU code impress upon you?
Well, when I came across it, it verified It's something that I had already believed in for years, that is being humble, helping others and understanding that once you open your mouth, those words never go away. So you better watch what the hell you say, you better stand behind what you say, and you better mean what you say. And so I've lived by that code for a long period of time.
Yeah, Zachary mccoyth, thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Let's raise a glass to those who aren't here.
But paid the ultimate sacrice so we could be Thank you guys. Great episode of great show USMC. So thanks, Thanks Zachary, Joe's got you. Is it true that Dick Metali has played a big part in helping back with train and shape the first Helta operators.
With all due respect to Dick, who was a great friend, he did not, okay. He was brought in basically as a consultant into the off section of Dilton.
The way he was used, for the most part.
Was because of his charisma to do a lot of briefings to senior officers and two different organizations. Because he would, you know, walk into a room and because of his charisma and because of what had been written about him previously, everybody would just nod their head in agreement. And I used to tease him, I said, you know, you're like Miss America walking into a room, you know, and giving
a briefing. All the males are going like this, not because they agree with her, but they're scanning her up and out, you know.
And he laughed, and it was a standing joke.
Was there.
We've just recently heard you know sort of about the tension between back With and the Blue Light guys. Were you kind of involved? Were you around that when it happened?
Yeah?
Absolutely, And you know, to be blunt and candid about it. What the Blue Light people were made to do was once they were told that they had to disband, is they were forced to come to a briefing where Beckwith was going to try and recruit them for Delta Game. So they came in with a chip on their shoulder because they had believed that they had an opportunity to gain the CT mission. Frankly, that was not true, okay, And I can give you all kinds of evidence to
prove what I'm saying, but that's not the point. The point is they came in with a chip on their shoulder. The second point is that Beckwith blew the damn briefing.
Okay.
He could not answer their questions. One of their basic questions was, why should would we go through your assessment and selection. We're Vietnam veterans, We've done this. Some of us went into the Santi raid, We've done that, and on and on and beck we just could not answer their questions in an understandable fashion.
So it's kind of a two way issue, absolutely, you know.
And you know, unfortunately.
I lost some lifelong friends who were on blue light that would never talk to me after that.
That's terrible. Yeah, it's unfortunate that, Adam, thank you very much.
My first time seeing Wade was seeing him testify to Congress about the ATS raid on Waco. Can I ask how cooperative the ATF were with it with his work?
Frankly, after we did the report.
I'll tell a story and I'll name a name, Okay, Jerry Petrelli was one of the leaders of that operation.
He was the.
Resident agent in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the time the raid occurred, and because I lived in Albuquerque, I was able to meet Petrelli later on, and you know when we met, he called me a whole bunch of names, and he said, you son of a bitch. You know, I read your report well with a microscope, and he said, you son of a bitch. You were right, and we
became good friends after that. The unfortunate thing with AHTF was that the two leaders, Winoski out of Houston and Sara bend his ashach to Houston.
Were not good leaders.
Very inexperienced, and then in the aftermath they should have been taken to court because they altered evidence for no good reason whatsoever. What they did was they altered the operations plan again for no good reason, because that operations plan was not going to make what they said, what they tried to.
Do fail or do better, you know.
But anyway, So, but everybody else on that ATF effort gave it their best.
And I mean there were some true heroes there. You know.
There's a video which shows a female agent with an arm in her her hand and the army is raised, and she's compressing a wound that were the other the wounded agent would have bled to death, and she held it on him, couldn't find a tourniquet for almost an hour.
Wow. Yeah, you know.
And there was a former Loraine Kenny, who was a lieutenant and who had fallen between the two buildings and lay there with broken bon bones and wounds for the number of hours it took to call the truth. And I mean Kenny King, I believe it was his name. But you know, I had nothing but good thing to say about the ATF agents.
It was their leadership that I have questions about.
Yeah, uh.
And then last one here Green, thank you very much. Hey, Way, just curious, despite Delta not having a jungle phase, does that mean they don't train for jungle SR patrol skills during or after uh, during or after OTC?
I don't, you know, candidly, I don't know what they're doing or not doing today.
I don't have a need to know.
All I know is that in preparation for that lotion thing, we did do some jungle training.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's it seems like and again I don't know what they do either, but it seems like it could be one of those more uh, you know, mission based type training efforts. Uh. Yeah, you know they're they're they're good at what they do, and you know, you take what they do and apply it to different environments. You know, it's the environmental challenges that they need to learn to overcome. Right, Gee, was there anything on Patreon?
Okay?
Okay, so Waite, thank you so much for spending your evening with us and telling us your story and telling us about the in Toku code.
Well, I hope you've enjoyed it, and more so, I hope your audience enjoyed at all.
It was terrific any final thoughts you want to leave us with before we get going, anything that you wish I had asked that I didn't.
No, Well, the only thing I hope is that the readers will walk away saying we need to do better as individuals in terms of providing military, national, or public service to our nation. This is a great nation, God bless America. We need to get with the program and not be about ourselves.
I hope people will go and pick up the INTKU codes out now and we will be back on Friday with I believe Andrew Bragg, eighty second airborne veteran who served overseas in Afghanistan.
And that's it.
That's for it for tonight, Wade, thank you very much for joining us.
Okay, thank you, gentlemen.
Have a great night, such a pleasure. Thank you.
Okay, bye bye