CIA Paramilitary Team Leader | JR Seeger (throwback episode) - The Team House

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Special Operations, Cobert Espionage. The Team House with your host
Jack Murphy and David Park.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Hey, guys, welcome to the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy
here with co host David Park. Our guest tonight is
j R.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Seeger. Jr.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Served as an Army infantry officer and then went on
to have an extensive career in the Central Intelligence Agency,
which included leading paramilitary teams, one of the first teams
into Afghanistan, amongst many other postings around the world as
a chief of station, chief of base, all sorts of
interesting things that Jr. Will be able to get to
in varying levels of detail as he's allowed.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
He is also an author.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
He's an author of the Mike Force series, and he
is the author of a steam punk series. This is
a school for the Great Game and I, uh, well, Jr.
I've wanted to interview you. I've wanted to have you
on the show for a long time. I really appreciate
you doing this.

Speaker 4 (01:13):
Well, it's my pleasure, guys. It was the reason I
didn't have any idea. You interviewed a teammate of mine
and you looked right in the camera and said, hey, JR.

Speaker 5 (01:23):
If you're watching I want to.

Speaker 3 (01:24):
Talk to you.

Speaker 4 (01:25):
So that's actually why I'm talking to you today.

Speaker 3 (01:32):
You're talked about what we had Justin on.

Speaker 5 (01:35):
That's right, absolutely, Yeah, Justin.

Speaker 3 (01:36):
Sapp we had on a little while back. He was great.
We had him in studio.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
So for folks who are watching, Justin was assigned to
Special Forces, but was detached to one of the CIA
paramilitary teams in Afghanistan, Alpha Team. The Alpha Team leader
was this guy right here, Jr. So that's why I
wanted to have him on the show.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
They are let's kick it off. I'd like to hear
a little bit about your origin story.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
We asked our guests to tell us a little bit
about their upbringing and sort of that path that took
them into governmental service, in your case, into the Airborne
Infantry then the Central Intelligence Agency.

Speaker 4 (02:15):
Okay, well it's not terribly exciting. I mean, basically, I
grew up in a blue collar family. My dad was
a railroad engineer, grandfather was a railroad engineer.

Speaker 5 (02:27):
You know.

Speaker 4 (02:27):
There, it was just a blue collar family. I grew
up in a little, tiny rural town. It's today it's
not quite as rural as it used to be, but
it was a rural town outside of Buffalo, and then
my folks made it very clear I was going to college.

(02:48):
I mean it was just like there there was no
I mean, I was either going to go to college
or they were going to knife me in my sleep sometime,
you know. I mean it was really that that straightforward,
and I I was fine with that. I mean I
was not a terribly interesting kid. I mean I had school,
and I had sports. I played soccer, and I was

(03:10):
a wrestler.

Speaker 5 (03:11):
That was it. So Honestly, if.

Speaker 4 (03:15):
It hadn't been for the New York State Regions Scholarship,
I'm not sure I could have afforded to go to
college right after high school. But I did, and I
was able to go to a small school college called
Eisenhower College. Now, for those of you who might look

(03:36):
it up, you won't find it because Eisenhower College folded
in the in the late nineties or mid nineties actually,
And you know, it was a school that was designed
at the request of President Eisenhower to create a cadre

(03:57):
of people who were experienced in world events and worlds.
It was called World Studies. And one of the reasons
it wasn't terribly popular is because you didn't get you
didn't get any electives until you were in your second
semestery of your junior year. But I mean, I you know,

(04:17):
to give you a feeling for how the school started.
Class one in the big lecture hall was on the
creation of the Chinese Empire, and then class two was on.

Speaker 5 (04:31):
Confucianism, and then class three.

Speaker 4 (04:34):
Was on Chinese literature, and then class four was on
you know, was and and it went across the world.
So we learned about not just European history, but Asian history,
African history, and African culture, African art, Asian art, Asian culture.

(04:56):
So it makes me an, actually a pretty good cocktail.
A party guy. I can talk for about a minute
about just about anything, uh, you know, And more than
once in my career I have looked a guy in
the eye had said Majong. Yeah, I know what majong is.
I've always wanted to play majoh. And then of course

(05:19):
I go home and open up my books and figure
out what the hell majong is?

Speaker 5 (05:23):
Is it a what is it? Is it a sport?
Is it a game? Is it a board game? What
is it?

Speaker 4 (05:28):
But anyhow, uh I mentioned and I've spent a little
bit of time focusing on that school, because the only
reason I ended up in the CIA is because of
Eisenhower College, and not the way you think.

Speaker 5 (05:46):
Anyhow, I went to I went out of college.

Speaker 4 (05:48):
I then went to graduate school, where I came to
the realization that I was a pretty good student. I
was a terrible scholar.

Speaker 5 (05:57):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (05:58):
I learned that lesson when the I had the department
pulled me aside and said, you know, Jef, your grades
are really good.

Speaker 5 (06:04):
You're never getting a degree here.

Speaker 4 (06:07):
So I mean, you know, you don't have to throw
a brick through my window to make me realize I
need to go away. So after my master's he got
the chairman of the department got me a job as
an archaeologist, and I was an archaeologist for a year
in Wyoming. This is nineteen nineteen seventy nine nineteen eighty two.

(06:30):
Things happened the course during that time period, the hostage
crisis in Iran and the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. And
I had always been interested in thinking about how I
was going to do service. In fact, while I was
in grad school, I sent a note to an application

(06:51):
to the CIA. In the old days, you had to
mail it in and I got a letter back that
said no, thank you.

Speaker 5 (06:57):
So I was like, okay, I guess that.

Speaker 4 (06:59):
You know, that's so far my career progression is really
working well for me, right, everything's everything's doing fine. I
keep asking for stuff and people keep saying no.

Speaker 5 (07:11):
So then.

Speaker 4 (07:13):
I joined the army and that was our shock. To
my wife, she was my girlfriend at the time, she
was like, you did what.

Speaker 5 (07:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (07:22):
I enlisted in the Army as a private and went
to Fort Knox, Kentucky in basic training as a twenty
six year old, and then went to a CS and
went on to you know, Airborne School, ranger school, all
that stuff, and then did four plus years with the

(07:43):
eighty second as an Airborne Infantry officer and then progressively
a couple of other staff jobs before I was getting
ready to go on to the advanced course. And I
guess most of your folks would know that unless you're really,

(08:04):
really good and you're an OCS officer, you're at the
bottom of the pile. And I used to think that
was just you know, prejudice, but I understand now, having
done a long career in the federal government, that they're
just amortizing their investment, right costs a lot of money
to put an officer through West Point and a lot

(08:27):
of money to put them through ROTC. I got commissioned
after four and a half months as an E four
A specialist, so it didn't cost them very much to
put me into that commission source. So I am trying
to figure out what's going to happen to me when
I'm working in my office at I was the the

(08:49):
S three air in my battalion, which is, you know,
in an airborne battalion, there's got to be an NCO
and an officer who designed all the jumps and get
the airplanes and get the parachutes all that stuff. And
I get a phone call says, hey, Captain Seeger, we
understand that you're thinking about, you know, what's going to
happen next, and we we'd really like to talk to

(09:11):
you about an opportunities in CIA cold call. And I'm thinking,
really like, really, this is how you do this, right?
So I turned to my partner in crime at the
time and E seven that I've done a lot of
other kinds of stuff with him, and I said, Jim,
here's the deal. They want me to meet this guy

(09:34):
at a hotel if if I end up face down
on the Cape Fear River tomorrow. I want somebody to
know what the hell was going on. So anyhow, that
was just that, that's sort of what happened. I wasn't
it was a real deal, and I was puzzled for

(09:55):
years as to how I was approached. Well, it turns out,
uh so many years later that classmates of mine at
Eisenhower College were already in the CIA because their parents
were in CIA interest. And in those days, that's, you know,

(10:17):
not the only way that things could be done, but
it was one of the ways that.

Speaker 5 (10:22):
Things we've done today.

Speaker 4 (10:23):
Of course, for anybody who is interested, you go online,
and like every other part of the federal government, you
apply online and the process then goes into a you know,
a protected environment. But there you can't you know, refer anybody.

(10:45):
What happens is they you go on you know, the
applicants go online, which is a good thing because quite honestly,
if you have these referrals, everybody looks ends up looking
like the next guy, right, I mean, you know, and
we need all kinds of different people in the CIA today.
And so anyhow, that was my entrance into the CIA.

(11:08):
I worked into a training program which the selection process.
I don't know what it is now, but the selection
process when I was going through, I started in April
of eighty five and I was certified as a case
officer in June of eighty six, so it's approximately a

(11:32):
year plus of different steps along the way. And then
by that time I was married and I had convinced
the agency. Actually I walked into a personnel office and said,
this is my wife's resume. You can see that she's
really the smart one of the two of us. And

(11:52):
they looked at the resume and they said, you're absolutely right.
We're interested in her because she is much smarter than
you are.

Speaker 5 (12:00):
Hired her.

Speaker 4 (12:01):
And then as to onward assignments, basically there were two
different outfits that were two different parts geographic divisions. They
don't have those things anymore, but they were in the
old days. There were geographic divisions and the director of operations.
There are two geographic divisions who were asking me if
I was interested, and I basically told them, whoever hires

(12:24):
my wife is.

Speaker 5 (12:26):
The one that's going to be, you know, on the list.

Speaker 4 (12:30):
So it turned out that it was near East Division,
and which was actually okay by me because I'd already served.
When I was in the Army, I served in the
Multinational Force of Service in Egypt. So I thought, that's cool.
I mean, I get it. I mean Arabic's tough language,
but I can do that. So I get off my

(12:53):
you know, one week leave after this months of training,
and I go in and they said, good news, you've
got an onward assignment. Bad news, you're late for language school.
And I'm like, okay. Oh and by the way, it's
going to be a Dari and I'm like, okay, not

(13:17):
having a clue what Darry is not a clue, So
I said okay, and they said, well, you know you're late,
get down to the you know, State Department, because that's
where the Dari language school is.

Speaker 5 (13:29):
Check.

Speaker 4 (13:31):
And so what I found out was, of course it's
Afghan Persian. And all my peers who were onward going
on to onward assignments and they were going to study
Chinese and Arabic and Russian. They were like, oh, Jay,
you're so screwed. I mean, you were no one is
going to care. You know, you're going to finish off

(13:51):
a tour someplace and then you're never going to be
able to use your language again, You're gonna have to
study another one. I was like, well, you know, orders
are orders. I mean, I just came out of the army.
I know, I don't don't. My hair hadn't even grown
out yet, you know, I get it orders or orders,
and so of course it. You know, in the long run,

(14:14):
Afghan Persian turned out to be a pretty good language
to have.

Speaker 2 (14:17):
Yeah, so what was that first assignment? Then you said
you were in the Near East Division. What did that
look like for you? In what year was it by
that time that you after you finished you graduated your sinning?

Speaker 4 (14:30):
Well, okay, so I went to my first assignment in
eighty seven because it was a year long language program.
And as I told you earlier, I have to just
sort of be generic. Sure it was it was in
South Asia. You can do them, you can do the math,
and I was. I was assigned instead of a standard

(14:55):
sort of conventional tour. I was assigned because I had
the Afghan Persian. And for those of you, for you know,
your your listeners who don't remember this time period, the
Soviets had occupied Afghanistan and they were fighting the Afghans
across the entire country. So I was sent in along

(15:15):
with a couple other people to UH to meet with Afghans,
Afghan resistance guys. Now, this was not in any way,
shape or form associated with the the paramilitary weapons program
that we had at the time, and that's you know,

(15:35):
it was super secret then. But you know, let's face it,
once you start to deliver Stinger missiles into Afghanistan, it's
kind of a clue who's in charge.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
We've had Bass Basil on the show before, who may
have mentioned a little bit about that.

Speaker 4 (15:50):
Yeah, exactly, Well, bas was one of the guys actually,
Baz and Uh there was my very first job, uh
in the agency, before I was in the pipeline, was
down in the sub basement in the building with guys
like in fact, with baths and a number of other guys.

Speaker 5 (16:12):
We refer to ourselves as the methane breeders.

Speaker 4 (16:14):
Because of course, you know, would say it's a heavy
gas and it goes down into the basement.

Speaker 5 (16:18):
Anyhow, So I spent three years.

Speaker 4 (16:22):
Meeting Afghans night after night after night who had just
come out from a war zone and we're willing to
talk about what they were doing. And so that's what
I did. I debriefed soldiers. Basically, it was a very
unconventional sort of environment for me, and that was my

(16:47):
first tour. You know, if you no matter how bad
your language might be, if you meet guys like six
nights a week for three to four hours in a night,
pretty quick you get you know, unless you really a
dim you get to you know, you get pretty good
at the language. So that's that's sort of where it was.

(17:08):
And I was finished my tour. I had a I
got into a tiff with any division. It was my fault,
uh really quite honestly, because I told him that I
would had been working with sad guys and I wanted
to go work an sad And they said, you don't

(17:31):
seem to understand, young case officer.

Speaker 5 (17:34):
We you you're an any guy. You're going to be
an any guy. Okay. Uh?

Speaker 4 (17:41):
Well, anyhow, Uh, for all of the things that we
can say bad about Sada Hussein, the fact that he
invaded Kuwait actually made my life much easier in one respect,
which was uh, they had a job for me, which
was a crummy what what I they thought was a
crummy job.

Speaker 5 (18:01):
It was a great job for me.

Speaker 4 (18:02):
I was in a desert shield, desert storm in the
eastern province of Saudi Arabia. There was no other agency
officer there that could work with the Saudis and work
with the military. So, uh, that's what I did. For
a better part of the year. I was the uh
you know, this is a classic sort of story. People say,

(18:24):
how can this possibly be? But it's a classic. It's
kind of like the story, Uh, there's a there's an
old story about Texas Rangers, and there's a story about
in the in the twenties, there was a you know,
there was a a riot a in Waco, Texas and
it was a one riot, one ranger exactly, you know.

(18:48):
And so the idea is is that I was the
the agency l and O for eighteenth Airborne Corps, first
Marine Expeditionary Force and UH eight the first tack Fighter Wing.
So I kept pretty busy during that time period. It's
mostly because of my background. It was mostly associated with

(19:13):
what at the time was called force protection but really
was counter terrorism counterintelligence stuff. And did that for until
I know, returned and then they by that time all.

Speaker 5 (19:29):
Was forgiven and.

Speaker 4 (19:32):
Mary's Division said we've got another job for you and
your wife because we're a Tanem couple, which makes life
kind of complicated. I had told them they could send
me anywhere in the world so long as there were
two jobs. So they said, we got a job for you.
And it was a It was actually a very very
cool job.

Speaker 5 (19:52):
It was in a.

Speaker 4 (19:56):
Specialized it would have been called it was a specialized.
This is a long time before these kinds of things
happened before, where it was a station going after Near
East rogue state proliferators, terrorists and counterintelligence officers. So I

(20:17):
did that for four years, working my way up from
being a line case officer through to managing a team
hunting one of these rogue state well all the rogue
state intelligence services basically that we were working after, so
both their military and their civilian services.

Speaker 5 (20:40):
Which was great.

Speaker 4 (20:44):
It meant being on the road about twenty days a month,
so if you can do the math, it means, you know,
I was home on weekends and leaving every Monday.

Speaker 3 (20:56):
And in this was a tandem a tandem tour.

Speaker 5 (21:04):
So it was my wife.

Speaker 4 (21:06):
If you're gonna ask my wife, it is what's what's
called the Reports and Requirements officer Now it's called now
they're called a CMOS. I guess right, and uh, you know,
the only reason to go out and do stuff, of course,
is to produce reports. By this time in my career,
I'd come to the realization that although every case officer

(21:29):
has to be a both a hunter and a handler,
I come every case officer, by their second tour, ought
to know which they're better at. And I'm a I'm
a better handler, quite honestly, And you can, I can,
I can basically squeeze intelligence out of just about anybody.

Speaker 6 (21:49):
And can you tell us sort of you know, in
like case officer vernacular or whatever, what the difference between
a hunter and a handler is?

Speaker 5 (21:59):
Okay?

Speaker 4 (21:59):
So so in you know, in the spy world, there
are two things that have to be done right. One
is produced intelligence, and that's done by people who are handlers.
You debrief people, you keep them on board. You make
sure that they are are productive, that they're safe, that

(22:20):
they understand what they're supposed to do for us, right.

Speaker 5 (22:27):
But you're always you always need new.

Speaker 4 (22:29):
Business because you know, guys uh decide somewhere along the
way they don't want to do it anymore, or they
want to retire, or they want to or they get caught.
So you always have to have new business. As well,
so the hunters end up finding and recruiting the new spies. Now,

(22:51):
most hunters prefer to just once they once they've recruited
a spy, they prefer go and recruit another spy because it's.

Speaker 5 (23:02):
What they like to do.

Speaker 4 (23:06):
And then, man, that's not to say that you can't
in the CIA as a case officer, you must be
able to do both, right, But you know, pretty quick,
like I say, early on, you figure out what you're
better at, and I.

Speaker 5 (23:24):
Was.

Speaker 4 (23:24):
I'm not doing it at all anymore, but I was
better at producing intelligence, taking the requirements, designing them so
that the debriefing makes sense, doing it in language, and
keeping the asset safe because that's our primary director, right,

(23:45):
I mean, more than anything else. The CIA is a
place where you were expected, more than anything else to
keep your asset alive and safe. Teach them how to
be safe, as they don't know. It's not their profession, right,
So it's it's our trade craft skills that we use

(24:06):
to do that.

Speaker 2 (24:09):
And then afterwards you had a more conventional tour in
a South Asian country.

Speaker 4 (24:15):
Yeah, I was, you know, I was a base chief,
running you know, regular espionage operations. Uh, And I mean
it was. It was a good tour. I mean, it
was an okay tour I did. I did two years
there and uh, I mean I can't really talk very
much about the cases, but I mean basically it was

(24:38):
classic spot assessed, developed, recruit, and handle and then manage
young case officers who are spotting, assessing, developing, and recruiting. Uh.

Speaker 5 (24:48):
And it and as as was pretty typical of the time. Uh.

Speaker 4 (24:54):
You have to remember that we're talking about now. Now,
we are talking about the post Cold War world. So
there's lots of different kinds of people who five years
earlier would have been great targets and are now our
allies or at least at least our neutrals. And then

(25:15):
but there's always going to be targets out there, and
of course if you and also you're always going to
be looking at local targets if you can. It depends
on the It all depends on the security environment. And
I was in a pretty rigorous security environment, so we

(25:36):
didn't do a lot of that stuff. We did in
awful lot of third country national stuff. But you know,
I mean during all of that time there, actually just
before the conventional tour, during the other tour, I got
grabbed up and opened up a provisional station.

Speaker 5 (25:54):
In the former Soviet Union. Wow.

Speaker 4 (25:56):
So that was another one of those classic sort of
stories of hey, who are we going to send to
this Oh, we'll just send this guy. Why, well, because
he's reliable, but he's also disposable, you know. I mean
it just it is. When I was sent to there
was you know, a bunch of teams all going out. Right,

(26:17):
There's nineteen ninety two, the USSR had collapsed. All of
these places are opening up, and I'm getting my in
brief and I'm looking around with all the other guys
that are there.

Speaker 5 (26:31):
There's nobody who was from Russia.

Speaker 4 (26:35):
House like, it's all of my pals who were in
like had been in Southeast Asia or Africa or any
or someplace like that. And you know, okay, you know
it turns out, of course, Afghan Persian is actually pretty
well translates across to the other side of the border.

(26:59):
Not I mean, if I had spoken Russian it would
have been great, but I didn't, But I could speak
Afghan Persian, and so you know, Afghan Persian works pretty
well for COGICs.

Speaker 5 (27:11):
It will.

Speaker 4 (27:12):
You can get along with Uzbeks, you can get along
with Turkmen all those those southern Central Asian countries.

Speaker 3 (27:23):
Did they also send you Jr.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
On a job like that because they figure, oh, this
is an army guy, like he can sleep in the dirt,
like use a rock as a pillow.

Speaker 3 (27:30):
Like, you know, it's not that big a deal.

Speaker 4 (27:32):
Well, it's that, I mean, that's true. But it's also
because most of these places, right after the collapse of
the Soviet Union were at civil wars, right, I mean
so so yeah, a lot of the kinds of things
I did there. And it wasn't for very long until
the station was formalized, but you know, as a provisional station,

(27:54):
it was really nineteenth century sort of intelligence. It was like,
gohst buy the land, go out and see every day
you're like, walk out on the street, see who's shooting
at somebody else? Uh, you know, get in a car,
figure out where the shooting stops. Give us a better
feeling for what's going on. It really wasn't an espionage tour.

(28:18):
And and you know fair enough, I mean, my my successors,
you know, or the people who opened up the station afterwards,
they you know, they were able to to conduct conventional
espionage that just wasn't what they asked me to do.

Speaker 5 (28:32):
And uh that was a good thing, because isn't what I.

Speaker 6 (28:35):
Do nowt out of curiosity. When you say that, like
in all these former USSR Soviet Union countries that nobody
was from rush House or the people were't from rush House.
Is that because they were all drunk wondering what had
happened to their career and their life with the Soviet Union.

Speaker 4 (28:53):
No, Actually it was because they were in Moscow, Okay, right,
I mean they were they were doing U in Moscow
or in Saint Petersburg, or in places where the KGB
was running away too, you know, I mean there was
there were lots of There were lots of It was.

(29:13):
The collapse of the USSR was a you know, it
was a catastrophe if you were a KGB agent, right,
I mean because even if you were only in the
First Chief Directorate, which was the Foreign Intelligence Service, you
couldn't say to you like your neighbors, oh I'm with
a I was with the KGB, because they're going to

(29:35):
think about the other side of the KGB, which was
the you know, the toutalitarian U terrorizing people stuff. So
there was a lot of work to be done in
those places. It just wasn't going to be in the FSU,
which is fine because turns out, of course, the FSU

(29:56):
turns out to have been a fascinating place for or
the for the agency, and for State Department for that matter,
and for the military. I mean, you know, one of
the things that if you read like Toby Harden's book,
or if you read Doug Stanton's book about about the
operations in Afghanistan, the one of the odas Oda five

(30:20):
nine five had just come back from working with the Uzbeks.
So I mean, you know, it turned out to be
a really important It turned out to be a really
important thing to build a network of allies during that
time period. I take no credit for that might because

(30:44):
they were just the guys who were eventually were in
charge were still shooting at each other when I left,
but but eventually, I mean, you got to start with
a footprint someplace, and that's what we did. You know,
a lot of times it's the it's just the footprint,
that's all you do. And you got to be ready
for the fact that it's not always you know, great

(31:08):
intelligence operations or great paramilitary operations.

Speaker 5 (31:11):
Sometimes it's just spade work.

Speaker 3 (31:13):
Right, and then after that you had a couple of
state side tours.

Speaker 4 (31:18):
Yeah, yeah, we did well, I mean the state side tours.
I mean, so two things. By that time, I was
relatively senior, so I was managing the teams, not necessarily
a station, but flyaway teams, and we were just using
the US as a start point to go after all

(31:41):
kinds of different sorts of targets all over the world.
My team wasn't the only one that did that, I mean,
but that's that was the States that in the meantime
while since I was you know, not doing a lot
of that flying away some but not as much because
I had to be home managing and talking to guys,
making sure that they followed all the TDY rules, make

(32:02):
sure they don't get caught all that.

Speaker 5 (32:05):
So what I did was I.

Speaker 4 (32:07):
Was responsible for working with the FBI on counter terrorism stuff.
At the time, counter terrorism was this is the late
nineties going into just before well I was. I was
in stateside for through nine to eleven. But the the

(32:29):
FBI had, you know a challenge because before nine to eleven,
the idea was that the that counter terrorism was something
that was really hard to prove and it was really
hard to build networks the way the FBI is really

(32:51):
good at building networks on other kind of criminal enterprises.

Speaker 5 (32:55):
I mean, the FBI.

Speaker 4 (32:56):
Don't ever think that if the FBI is after you,
you won't get I mean, I'm just here to tell
you their work is exceptional.

Speaker 5 (33:04):
But it was a challenge.

Speaker 4 (33:06):
And here I was a guy who had spent basically
from nineteen eighty seven until I arrived in California in
nineteen ninety seven, I'd been a guy who had, you know,
worked with on terrorist targets. That's what I did, and
I was building a network of flyaway guys who were

(33:27):
doing counter terrorism missions. So I could go over the
FBI and sit down with the FBI senior managers and say, Okay,
here's here's how.

Speaker 5 (33:38):
We would do it.

Speaker 4 (33:39):
I don't have any idea how you can do it,
but at the very least I can tell you what
the bad guys are doing out there in their efforts
to come here. So that was, you know, that was
part of my work that I did just before nine
eleven jr.

Speaker 2 (34:01):
And then could yeah, take I mean, this is a
little bit of a segue, but maybe worthwhile we want
to take maybe just a moment to explain to people,
because I think the public has this perception, largely because
of the movies, that the CIA has a very robust
and intrusive presence domestically in the United States. Could you
explain how that works in real life, I mean, the

(34:21):
realities of the limitations that you have as you know,
any sort of state side assignments.

Speaker 4 (34:27):
Well, sure, I mean, first of all, there is I mean, like,
as I said, the team that I was managing, they
were I mean the only reason they were state side
is because we had great airports, right, I mean, that's
that's what we did. We flew out from stateside to
someplace else and that's great.

Speaker 5 (34:47):
I mean it was.

Speaker 4 (34:47):
I mean, let's face it, as the counter intelligence environment
has become progressively more difficult, it's really hard to.

Speaker 5 (34:57):
Do some of the thing.

Speaker 4 (34:58):
In fact, it's impossible to do some of the things
that I did in Europe back in the early nineties.
Can't do it because of what's called ubiquitous technical surveillance, right, right,
that had just that had just started in the end
of the nineties, but it was already we knew that
our work was going to be limited unless we did

(35:22):
something like start and finish from the USA.

Speaker 5 (35:27):
Now.

Speaker 4 (35:27):
In the meantime, our work with the FBI was exclusively
and I can't speak for what it's like now, but
our work for the FBI was exclusively to help them
understand the target set. We weren't allowed to talk to
Americans at all, I mean at all unless The only

(35:52):
time I ever talked to an American was when I
was with an FBI agent, and we would talk to
an AM He'd show his creds and I'd show my
creds and there was no sneaking around. And that was
really rare because quite honestly, the FBI, if they're building
a case, they really don't want any complications. They want

(36:16):
two special agents who are trained to do the right thing.

Speaker 5 (36:20):
And we're not.

Speaker 4 (36:21):
I mean, CIA guys aren't trained to do I mean
we're trained, you know, to steal things and break things.
I mean basically, right, that's our job abroad. And so no,
there is not a robust CIA presence in konis continental
United States. And what it is is maintained in a

(36:43):
structure that is through our FBI partners. The FBI, by
the mid nineties had what they call the Joint Terrorism
Task Force which would have been in each of their
field offices, So there would have been sheriff's deputies and
police departments and and uh you know members of NCIS

(37:04):
and members of OSI Air Force. Uh intelligence, Uh, well
counterintelligence aren't. And we were just there to to provide
a context. If they wanted to talk about something that
was going on someplace else, we could use our electronic
capability to pull down that data. And the data are

(37:26):
important when you're building the case, no question, But a
lot of times, at least in you know, post nine
to eleven or pre nine to eleven, I didn't even
know what the cases were. It was completely out of
my h you know, they wouldn't talk about it, and
rightly so, because you know, if you want to put
a guy in to if you want to try a

(37:49):
guy for some kind of crime, the last thing you
want to do is have in the discovery process some
data that says, oh, yeah, and there was this shmoe
from the the I.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
A right, the right, and you're you're living under a
cover and an alias and so on. So it's not
like you can take the stand under oath under your
real name and offer testimony.

Speaker 4 (38:11):
Right, and we're still of course, is that as you
said in the you know, the movie presentation of what
agency officers, what what we're like is a you know.

Speaker 5 (38:24):
Is terrible.

Speaker 4 (38:25):
I mean, it's just absolutely terrible in a criminal you know,
in a criminal court. So we just didn't The FBI,
you know, was was more than happy to be to
work with us, but work with us in a way
that was consistent with what they needed to accomplish. Now,
I won't you know, I don't want to leave this

(38:48):
subject without saying, and the FBI would help us if
they had a case that went overseas, if they didn't
have a you know, an overseas footprint, and they and
they thought that they could help us while we were
working abroad. Then absolutely our partners in the FBI did

(39:08):
that too, right, So it was a it was a
mutually beneficial partnership. But it wasn't something that my the
guys were working for me were going to spend their
time doing, because they were busy hustling new cases, producing intelligence,
doing all that stuff.

Speaker 6 (39:26):
Right now, in terms of like working with the FBI
when it came to overseas counter terrorism, because obviously the
CIA doesn't have any arrest authority and the FBI did
if you know, they can show it, like, was it
was it acceptable for you know, the titles the CIA
worked under for for you guys to run your intelligence

(39:47):
operation and then bring in the CIA or i mean
the FBI, Like, how is that evidence?

Speaker 3 (39:53):
How is that like custody of evidence?

Speaker 6 (39:55):
And how how when you built your case were you
sharing it with them? Were they allowed to use your
information by US legal standards?

Speaker 3 (40:04):
No?

Speaker 5 (40:04):
The answer, the short answer is no.

Speaker 4 (40:07):
That Actually, let me just say to both of you,
you know it's important for you to know. I'm going
to reveal a secret to you, right, So CIA Case
Officer Class one hour one. The answer to all questions
is it depends. Let's just so you know, right, And

(40:27):
of course that's because we're always working with humans, and
humans change over time. But in the case of the FBI,
basically what you would be looking at in a case
of overseas, the intelligence network that you build then becomes
something that the that might be shared both with the

(40:50):
FBI and with a local law enforcement edity that would
be partnered with the FBI. So, so what's going on
abroad is not about I mean, I mean and I
was never involved in counternarcotics or any of that kind
of stuff where we you know, where bad guys get

(41:11):
grabbed and brought to the United States. I was involved
in counter terrorism stuff, and what would happen would be
the case would be built. Uh, we'd be producing great
intelligence and then anything that we could share with the FBI,
that the share that the FBI could share with the service,

(41:32):
or we could share with the service for that matter,
if the FBI didn't what didn't have a footprint in
the country that we were in, then we would because
at the end.

Speaker 5 (41:41):
Of the day, uh, you know, I mean there's.

Speaker 4 (41:47):
The motto of the counter Terrorism Center, right, preempt, disrupt, defeat.
So if you can disrupt the counter a terrorist network
in a third country long before they are any threat
in the.

Speaker 5 (42:03):
United States, absolutely you do that. Right.

Speaker 4 (42:06):
And if that means bringing in a liaison service, if
it means partnering between a liaison service and the FBI
and a CIA entity, good great. Actually, so I hope
that sort of answers That means it's complicated, right, I mean,
it is complicated, and every case is different, That's why

(42:27):
it depends. But the vast majority of the stuff that
we were doing on counter terrors some cases was producing
the intelligence that then could be passed to a liaison
service either directly with you know, because I was to
give you a feeling for this, I was declared to

(42:48):
like I think my last count was twenty two different
liaison services. So so you know, if you could pass
the intelligence, you would. If it made more sense to
pass the intelligence through the FBI, and the FBI was there,
you would. I mean, it's it's all you know, it's
one team, one fight in that sense, there's there's no

(43:09):
real downside to that.

Speaker 2 (43:11):
Yeah, let's get into the run up into nine to
eleven jr. Because you're already working counter terrorism, making these
trips overseas kind of like where were you at around
that period of nine to eleven?

Speaker 3 (43:23):
Where was your head at? What?

Speaker 6 (43:24):
What?

Speaker 2 (43:24):
What were the cases you were working? Was being laden
in al Qaeda on your mind at that time?

Speaker 3 (43:30):
What? What was kind of your world at that point?

Speaker 5 (43:33):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (43:33):
Well okay, so just prior to nine to eleven, I
had I had made a couple of trips out to
Uzbekistan uh for something I mean it was associated with
but not focused on us.

Speaker 5 (43:50):
Have been laden, right, U? Some have been laden?

Speaker 4 (43:52):
However, had become a for for counter terrorism center. Some
have been lauden had been you know, like Target one.
Everybody knew that it was. It was absolutely part of
our mission set. Now, a lot of what I was

(44:13):
doing wasn't necessarily it was associated. We used to call it, right,
it was Islamic extremism, and you know it and we
you know, we knew it was al Qaeda, but a
lot of the al Qaeda network wasn't in fact calling
itself al Kaeda at the time. I mean, ben Laden

(44:34):
had this headquarters in Kandahar. They had had training camps
in other parts of Afghanistan. We were certainly doing what
we could understand that and work against him. A lot
of the kinds of things that I was doing in
in tash Kentworth was associated with rebuilding networks against Afghans

(44:57):
or with with Afghans, so the Afghan resistance, and people
don't I mean, people often ask me like, how in
the world could you put you know, nine to eleven happens.
You know, two weeks later we've got a team inside
the ponds here and then you know, another week later

(45:18):
you're flying out to tash Kent, and then two weeks
after that the Team Alpha Team goes in, how can
that possibly be? And the answer is, because we were
running cases all the way through the nineties. It wasn't
that we expected nine to eleven. It was what the

(45:39):
CIA does is is you build a case, you run
a case, you keep a case running. You get those
folks used to seeing you with the understanding that sometimes
the intelligence is good, sometimes it's bad, but generally speaking,
it's that sustained relationship over the years. I mean, small joke.

(46:08):
I gave this presentation to a bunch I've done this
with a bunch of Special Forces groups, and I was
given the presentation about this and I finished, and I'm
walking out to get a cup of coffee, and the
guys are walking out to get away from me, and
I hear one of the younger Special Forces guys go like,

(46:29):
who is that guy anyhow? And one of the older
guys goes, man, you don't know that cat Man Jr.
Is the forest gump of Afghanistan. Now I'm hoping, I'm
really hoping. In the largest scheme of things. That was
because I had been to a lot of different kinds

(46:50):
of stuff. Right I met with Masoud in the nineties.
I had worked with a bunch of different guys in
the resistance in the eighties, and so the idea was that,
you know, I just maybe it was because I was stubborn,
Maybe it was because I like working with Afghans, maybe

(47:12):
it's because I had the language. But I kept doing it,
and I wasn't the only one. I mean, by no
means was I the only guy doing the same thing
who were just stubborn and kept working the Afghans whether
the United States government cared or not. And now the
CIA cared, and our intelligence that we were producing at
the time in the nineties, you know, it was not

(47:36):
it wasn't going to end up in the Presidential Daily Brief.
It just wasn't. What it was doing is it was
building that understanding of the complex web inside Afghanistan. So, yeah,
we've been we'd focused on it for a long time.

Speaker 6 (47:56):
Did you during that time, especially after like the Russians
left Afghanistan, when there was a period where was there
a time when you had to sell Afghanistan to management
and say, we still need a presence there, we still
need to know what's going on.

Speaker 4 (48:12):
Well, what you do you don't, I mean, the answer
is sort of kind of right, I mean, what you
do is you sort out if the if the seniors
aren't interested in it. Used to be a joke in
the State Department. Actually one of the jokes this is
in the in the seventies, and the joke was if

(48:34):
you wanted to joke about somebody doing something that was
absolutely of no interest to anybody. The argument that the
line was, so, what's the political situation in Afghanistan? I mean,
that was literally what State Department officers said when they
were when they were trying to tell one of their
their junior officers, what you're talking about? Nobody cares about, right,

(48:57):
But the good news about Afghanistan, well, it was a
terrible news. But from a standpoint of the United States government,
there was a very quick transition from you know, the
the problems associated with a civil war, right, because that's

(49:21):
what happened when the Soviets left, it was a civil war.
But pretty quickly after that people were interested in Afghanistan
because it was the center of narco trafficking and then
shortly after it being the center in narco trafficking, which
it stayed throughout the entire Taliban era. It also became

(49:43):
one of the centers of counter terrorism. So as a
case officer and a manager of case officers, we always
wanted to make sure that we weren't just doing something
because it was something we wanted to do. You don't
commit espionage because it's a cool thing to do. It's

(50:05):
just not because you're putting a person at risk, whoever
that is that's producing that intelligence. We're regardless of where
they are, they are being put at risk. So you
better have a reason behind it, you know. The truth
is is that Afghanistan had sufficient reasons for all those

(50:26):
years that you could always say, Okay, yeah, I know
it's a country that has no economy, and I know
that it really doesn't nobody really cares about it. But
it's the primary producer of black tar opium. Oh well, yeah,
that's disruptive, so yeah, we want to do something about that.

(50:47):
Oh by the way, it's where ben Laden's headquarters is now,
and he's training people. Long before we thought he was
training people to attack America, he was training people to
attack people all over the world, basically the entire West,
So it was not a real problem.

Speaker 2 (51:04):
So when nine to eleven happens, was all these images
of Masad and the northern alliance bin Laden was this
what immediately came to mind, And if you could, I
think we talked about this with with Rick Prado a
little bit, but if you could talk to us a
little bit about what it was like inside CTC and
SAD that day.

Speaker 4 (51:25):
I can't tell you because I was on TDY in California.
I was in California, I was driving, I was I
was actually driving with my wife going to the FBI,
and I got a phone call on the mobile phone
saying from the regional boss saying, turn on the radio.

(51:47):
And we're like, okay, you know, or we're in the
middle of nowhere, We're probably she said, it doesn't matter,
turn on any radio station.

Speaker 5 (52:00):
So that was, you know, as soon as nine to
eleven happened.

Speaker 4 (52:04):
I mean we all, I mean basically all of us
who had been doing the counter terrorism gig knew it
was al Qaeda and it was designed and perpetrated by
Ben Ladden. Now just because I mean, is what I thought, right?
I mean, in the CIA, you got to make a
very significant distinction between what you think and what you know.

(52:26):
What you know is based on intelligence that you have
either collected or somebody else's collected. It might be human,
it might be Sigan, it might be something else. That's
what you know. But all of us who have been
working these targets for five years new or at least
we thought, we certainly thought that it was ben Laden.

Speaker 5 (52:50):
So it took me.

Speaker 4 (52:52):
I mean, as we're driving, my wife turns to me
and goes, you realize, you know, you're going to get
on an airplane as soon as you can. They're going
to call you back. And I was like, yeah, yeah,
I know that. It wasn't like it was the first
TDY I disappeared on. But you know, for a few days,
I was able to close up some cases that that

(53:15):
had been because you couldn't travel unless you drove someplace,
and so I traveled to a bunch of different FBI
units that were working cases and try to help them
work through what they're what they were doing because their
world changed completely.

Speaker 3 (53:32):
Of course.

Speaker 5 (53:34):
And then as soon as the.

Speaker 4 (53:38):
As soon as you could fly, I was called back
to Washington and that's when I By that time, CTC
Special Operations CTCSO had already been established, and I had
a little sad face because I thought that I was
going to go out with the team that went to

(53:59):
the punch. I mean, I had helped set up the
team that went to the pond ch here, I'd met Masu,
I'd done all that stuff, and I get back and uh,
they already gone.

Speaker 3 (54:11):
What was that that Jawbreaker?

Speaker 4 (54:14):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly it was. It was actually, you know,
officially titled the Northern Afghanistan Liaison.

Speaker 5 (54:20):
Team, and Jawbreaker was Nault three. So I'd been on
Nault one.

Speaker 4 (54:27):
I'd had some of my guys, my flyaway guys, on
Nault two, so I felt a little bit of of ownership.
Well that was you know, slapped out of my head
pretty quickly. Uh and uh, I was I was terrified
that I was going.

Speaker 5 (54:43):
To end up.

Speaker 4 (54:43):
You know, I was back in the basement because that's
where the the space was, and I thought, for sure,
I'm going to be you know, doing uh all the
all the kinds of stuff that that headquarters, all the
important stuff, right, the logistics, the the management, but still
not the cool guy stuff. And let's face it, you know,

(55:05):
we all, given an opportunity want to be cool guys.
So even at forty six, which is how old I
was at that point in time. So but as soon
as they started the as soon as you know I
got my in brief. They were like, oh no, no, no,
don't you worry. We're putting together another the first team
that's going to go behind the lines, that's you, and

(55:28):
Sad has already got the team assembled. Alex was my
deputy and he was already assembling a team. Justin was
there by the way, just a small sidebar to show
how small the world is. Justin Sapp's dad was my
instructor at the farm, so so you know it was

(55:48):
it is a small world, Eddihow. The point is is
that I start figuring out, Okay, we're going to go,
how are we going to get in? And we can
fast forward to that process. The only thing that's really
fun or an interesting really the rest of it, it's
just sort of administrative stories. But an interesting story is

(56:10):
the day before I left, so I went out a
day about actually a week early to Tashkent. Alex was
assembling the team, assembling the weapons, assembling the como, assembling
all of that, which obviously wasn't going to go on commercial.
So he was assembling the equipment and the team that
was going to go out on an agency bird. I

(56:33):
went out commercial to tush Kent. But the day before
I went out, it's a Sunday. There's you know, I mean,
the team down in the basement that's managing CTCSO is
working diligently, but it's basically an empty building. And in
I'm sitting in front of a picnic bench because you know,
it's a folding classic plastic picnic bench, because that's all

(56:55):
there was in the basement. And I'm working through my
notes and trying to figure out what we're going to
do now next when incomes Director Tenant co for Black
and Hank Crumpton. And I have known I've known Hank
a little bit. I've known Koe for oh, I don't
know at that point, fifteen years or so. I mean,

(57:17):
it's a small world. So Director Tenant comes in. He's
a big, burly guy. You've probably seen pictures of him
at the very least, and he walks over to you know,
the map that's at the table, and he goes, come here, Jah,
I want to tell you what I want you to do.

Speaker 5 (57:33):
I'm like, yes, sir, I think I know. He says, why,
I want to be clear.

Speaker 4 (57:38):
I want you to be clear about this, yes, sir,
So he takes and because he's a big, burly guy,
he takes a very large hand and puts it over
all of northern Afghanistan and he says, Okay, Jair, listen,
here's the deal. These are the five provinces of Afghanistan
that you're responsible for. I want you to destroy the

(58:00):
Taliban and capture or kill any Al Qaeda you could find. Yes, Sir,
it was okay. Just wanted to be clear. He got
up and left. That was it. That was my I mean,
you know, in the army we talk about commanders in
tent right, right. I mean, you can't ask for better
commanders in tent right than that.

Speaker 2 (58:21):
In my opinion, Hey JR? Can you fix Afghanistan for us?
If you could have that done by the end of
the week, that'd be great.

Speaker 3 (58:26):
Thanks man.

Speaker 4 (58:27):
Luck Well, I mean, it wasn't only not all of Afghanistan,
just five problems. I mean I have eight guys, right right,
so you know, by the way, I mean, of course,
at that point, I didn't know how it was going
to get in. I didn't know what I was going
to do when I got in. But he didn't care
about that part because he was certain that I was
going to make it work. Yeah, and you know, I

(58:49):
guess if any of your your your listeners have read
either Doug Stanton's book or Toby Harden's book. We were
able to do that. Now, sadly we lost one of
our guys while doing it, but we were able to
accomplish that in probably much shorter time. I mean, when

(59:12):
Alex and I talked about this, you know, we just said,
you know, we're going to be in for a year.
I hope you're prepared for a year. And I've told
this to lots of people over time. This was a
you know this, the success in the Fall of two
thousand and one is a function of three things.

Speaker 5 (59:34):
Right.

Speaker 4 (59:35):
It's a function of a CIA network, it's a function
of ODA capabilities, and it's a function of US air power.
Now you might say, well, what about the locals. Absolutely,
the locals are a centerpiece to this, But the locals
had been fighting the Taliban for the better part of

(59:56):
three years and making and having almost no success along
the way. So it was the addition of those three
resources working together in collaboration, but not necessarily you know,
trying to do the same thing. Everybody was doing something different.

(01:00:18):
Is how we were able to accomplish what got accomplished,
and I mean we inserted on the sixteenth of October.
ODA five nine five I think came in on the
night of eighteen nineteen, so two days later, two and
a half days later, ODA five three four came in,

(01:00:39):
about two weeks later, the the the ODC came in
about another week after that, and in the space of
so we and we rolled into Mazar Sharief on the
tenth of November.

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
Yeah, could you tell us about your team at Alpha team,
kind of your planning process and insertion and kind of
how that played out.

Speaker 4 (01:01:10):
Well, yeah, I mean, like most agency stuff, it's just
sort of informal. So I had I was in Tushkent
for like a week ten days, well about a week
before before Alex was able to come in. So I
spent that time period doing a couple of different things.
The first thing was to work with the both the

(01:01:32):
station there and with the Uzbek service to get in
contact with with Abdu Rashido Stamp because he was the
one guy that we had up in the north that
we that was working behind the lines that we knew.
I mean, there were other guys working behind the lines,
but he was the one that we knew. So I
started getting into a conversation with him on satellite phone.

(01:01:57):
And he's a character and a half. I mean mostly
if you've read anything about him, you know that. And
you know early on he uh. So I decided, because
I knew that they had no encrypted comms, I wasn't
going to give my true names. So I decided I
was my my nom de guerre was going to be

(01:02:18):
Baba John, which just means grandfather. So we're talking back
and forth and he says, you know, Baba John, I'm ready.
I mean, we're ready for you, but we want to
want you to know it's a little different here in Afghanistan.
And I was like, yes, Commander, I kind of know that.
And he's like, well, no, let me just explain to you.

(01:02:39):
So what we call an armored personnel carrier, you call
a horse, and uh, you know, I was like, got
it right.

Speaker 5 (01:02:47):
Check.

Speaker 4 (01:02:48):
But so so I've so I know, I got a
guy at the other end. Now I got to get in.
So we have some resource, some agency resources there, but
nothing that will get us in deep enough to where
we want to go. And I've got a couple of
guys from the from the agency from s A D

(01:03:10):
Air branch, and I find that the at the at
the Toashkent Airport, actually the military side of the Tashkent
Airport is an old Soviet aircraft kind of looks it's
a it's a biplane sort of.

Speaker 5 (01:03:29):
It's a Its use is in the old Soviet days.

Speaker 4 (01:03:33):
It's used as a crop duster and moving people around
and so it's it's an Antonov too. It's been around
for a very long time. But I thought it was
kind of cool because it looked like a lifesander. Now,
for those of you who don't know what a lysander is,
it is the aircraft that virtually all of the s
OE and the OSS guys who didn't go in by

(01:03:55):
parachute into France went in by lysander. It's an it's
a high way stole aircraft. And I thought, how cool
would this be?

Speaker 5 (01:04:04):
Right?

Speaker 4 (01:04:05):
I mean, this is like right out, I mean we're
already CTCSO right, So, I mean, which is what ossso
SO is where they took the name from. So Okay,
I go to the our crew, our air branch guys,
and I go, what do you think? And they said,
I don't know, we'll go check it out. They come
back that afternoon. They said, we'll fly anything, but we

(01:04:26):
cannot fly that. That airplane does not that's not safe.
And that said a lot to me because I'd flown
a bunch of different air branch aircraft and a bunch
of different aircraft air branch pilots who will fly anywhere
and do just about anything, and I thought, who I

(01:04:49):
guess that didn't work out. So we're still puzzling over this,
and Alex gets in and we're doing all the other
sort of team and isolation stuff that an s F
team or a MARSC team would be doing, right, we're
doing you know, everybody's doing the checking weapons, checking comms,
everybody's cross checking. What are you going to be able

(01:05:10):
to do? We're getting our our our medic mark is
giving us sort of basic this is your medic kit,
this is my medic kit. This is what's going on.
And I'm just puzzling with Alex. I'm like, we got
to get in, but we can't walk in. I mean

(01:05:31):
there's this river and we can't drive in because we
can't cross the bridge because the Taliban owned the bridge.
And he was like, well, let me get down to Carshaknabat.
You know, I've still got some contacts down there. See
what I can do. Remember now, Alex was a was
a retired senior sergeant major. I mean he'd been a

(01:05:53):
sergeant major in like multiple units in uh in the military, okay,
multiple special forces units, multiple soft units. So he had
a couple of contacts. So I said, excellent, you know
we can I got you know, the the agency pilots
will fly you down there. That's not a problem. So

(01:06:15):
he goes down like the next day, he's magically said, hey,
we're good to go. Uh I've talked to John mulholland
and uh, we're you know, we're good to go. We
got we We're going to fly in on the the
night Stalkers are going to take us in.

Speaker 5 (01:06:33):
I'm like sweet.

Speaker 4 (01:06:35):
So we get down to we then we all fly
down to tash to kku Z and go into isolation.
And I go over to the night Stalkers and fold
up my map and I say, I take my little
fat finger like right out of Ranger school, point to
the place. I that's that's where that's where our uh

(01:07:00):
are Elsie is.

Speaker 5 (01:07:01):
Going to be.

Speaker 4 (01:07:02):
And they're like okay, and They're like, how do you
want to get there? I'm like, guys, you're the pilots.
I have no idea. I'm not gonna I'm certainly not
going to try to tell guys from Task Force one
sixty how to fly helicopters and where to go. All
I want to do I've pointed once again feels that's

(01:07:24):
where I want to go, and they're like, okay, any
other thing, anything else.

Speaker 5 (01:07:28):
I said, well, I don't know if.

Speaker 4 (01:07:30):
We're going to have a reception committee, but you're not
taking us back right this bird. Your birds are going
to be empty when you go home. We'll getting off
and if there's no reception committee, we'll figure out what
we're going to do at that point, and they looked
at me. Clearly, they looked at me, and they're like,

(01:07:51):
oh boy, sure, this guy's nuts, but you know what,
it's a mission. It's a really good mission. We're doing it.
So there was some weather issues, like there always is
in Afghanistan. So we were actually supposed to go in
first the night of thirteenth and then the night of
the fourteenth, and eventually the weather cleared up and we

(01:08:13):
ended up in the night of the sixteenth and so
that's how we got I mean, that's I have a
whole story about getting in, but I that maybe just
answers at least the front end of your question. Is
there something else you wanted to talk about as far
as kku z first.

Speaker 6 (01:08:32):
Before before we move forward, I just want to ask
you because you were, like you were working Afghanistan in hindsight,
like in retrospect when people go through the records, and
I'm not talking about the you know, the hijackers here
in the United States, but was there ever any indication

(01:08:53):
or ever any any intelligence that like looking backwards, that
that people could have predicted. Was there any way to
tyl like Masud's death on the nine to what was
going to happen?

Speaker 3 (01:09:05):
Or was it just a completely closed loop at that time?

Speaker 4 (01:09:09):
I mean I wasn't involved in the headquarters analysis of that,
So I mean the short answer is I don't know, Okay.
I can say that certainly ben Laden made no secret
about the fact that he was going to attack Americans,
not necessarily America, but he had named US in nineteen

(01:09:32):
ninety eight as the main enemy, and of course he
had attacked the embassies, right, so he got the Nairobi
and the darbombings, and then he attacks the USS call
very clearly he was going to live up to his
statement that he was going to attack Americans. Now the

(01:09:58):
nine to eleven side of the house, I don't know,
I mean, I really don't know. I certainly don't have
any I mean, the stuff I was working with the
FBI was more focused on possible other kinds of infiltration.
Remember the nine to eleven hijackers are are Arabs, and

(01:10:19):
they were on legitimate visas, right and and really not
associated in any way, shape or form that we could.
I mean maybe in hindsight somebody's looking up and figured
it outright, but certainly not not from my perspective, right.

Speaker 6 (01:10:34):
And I like in h and that's why I say,
like in hindsight, it's it's always easier or PC like
it seems obvious or whatever. But you know, I don't
think that people understand sort of the massive intelligence requirements
that are placed on you know, the CIA, the FBI,
the NSA, and you just can't collect on every single

(01:10:54):
individual in the world. I was just wondering if if
it had ever if I if especially in Afghanistan at time,
like if we had access to those camps if we
had sources, or if they were just so insular, insular
and isolated that that there was no way to sort
of predict that.

Speaker 5 (01:11:15):
I have no idea.

Speaker 4 (01:11:16):
Yeah, I mean, I really don't uh that that camps
were that Ben Lawden and his crew. Remember Ben Laden
was the figurehead, but he had a very sophisticated crew
of guys who understood counterintelligence. Why do they understand counter
intelligence because they had been on the run, they'd had

(01:11:37):
like half a dozen services trying to kill them for
almost a dozen years.

Speaker 5 (01:11:41):
Right, right, And so.

Speaker 4 (01:11:45):
How they protected their intelligence, how they how they protected
their operations is I just wasn't involved in it.

Speaker 5 (01:11:53):
So I'm not even going to try and answer that question.

Speaker 6 (01:11:56):
Well, the Afghans, like even you know, during warlike they
had fairly sophisticated counter as well, just because of their
dealings with the Russians, whether they were trained by Russians
or working against the Russians like they were not. You know,
you think of Afghanistan as a non you know, not
a very advanced country, not very technological, but they've been

(01:12:18):
doing this for ages.

Speaker 4 (01:12:22):
Oh yeah, I mean this is part of the great game, right,
And I'll give you I'll just give you one little
tiny vignette that teaches you this kind of stuff. This
goes back to the eighties. So I was I. I
had a case that was that I had turned from
being a case about about combat operations into a penetration

(01:12:48):
of the Afghan Ministry of Defense, the DRA Ministry Defense.
And it was a complicated thing because we had to
do I mean, the communications network was unsophisticated. We were
getting intelligence I got. I was able to get a

(01:13:10):
document copy camera into Cobble. I was getting document film
out of Cobble. And the very first time that I
got one of those things, I was sitting there with
a guy who was managing I mean the Afghan who
was managing this network, and we're sitting drinking tea, and
of course we're eating you know, the classic sort of

(01:13:32):
pistachios and almonds and raisins and all that stuff Coot
exactly Mulber's.

Speaker 5 (01:13:39):
And he said, so, how do you like the mix?
And I was like, okay, it's great. He said, is
it salty or sweet?

Speaker 4 (01:13:51):
And you know, of course I'm thinking maybe this is
a rapport thing, right, So I'm saying, well, I find
it kind of salty.

Speaker 5 (01:13:58):
And he said exactly. And that's our signal that.

Speaker 4 (01:14:04):
The material that was shipped out and smuggled out through
three different smugglers was untouched because every one of the
guys in the network had to include something and each
of them knew what it was going to be. The

(01:14:25):
last one was a mix of twot raisins and salty nuts,
and I was like, dang, you know, this is like
right out of Rudyard Kipling. Yeah, you know, it was
really right. So, yeah, they understood, they still understand how

(01:14:47):
to do this properly. But in the case of the
al Qaeda guys, you know, Afghans weren't allowed into the
al Qaeda basis, right, I mean they at all. So
that would have meant that we would have had to
have recruited years before an Arab who was being vetted

(01:15:08):
for a mission that nobody knew about.

Speaker 5 (01:15:12):
Yeesh. You know.

Speaker 4 (01:15:13):
Yeah, that's that's asking a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:15:17):
Yeah, So just real quick for the viewers out there,
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Speaker 3 (01:15:23):
I know, they threw it up on the screen.

Speaker 2 (01:15:25):
If you guys are interested in getting the episodes of
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you supporting the stream.

Speaker 5 (01:15:36):
So JR.

Speaker 2 (01:15:36):
Tell us the story about the about the infiltration, then
behind enemy lines with one sixtieth.

Speaker 4 (01:15:43):
The assertion was, I mean it was I mean, first
of all, by now we're like an hour in, you
realize I am basically not a cool guy.

Speaker 5 (01:15:55):
Okay.

Speaker 4 (01:15:55):
Now, Alex was a cool guy, and most of my
team was filled with cool guys. I mean real guys.
I mean guys who, uh you know, who had done this.
We had one who had you know, a ranger who
had been in Mogadishu.

Speaker 5 (01:16:08):
You know.

Speaker 4 (01:16:09):
I mean we're talking about people who had seen the elephant.
Is the way it's presented. Now, I'd had people shoot
at me, but it's a different thing. I mean, it
was an espionage thing as opposed to a cool guy thing. So,
uh we load onto it's you know, it's a classic
sort of story of we walk out it's the middle

(01:16:29):
of the night, and we load onto our two helicopters
we have.

Speaker 5 (01:16:35):
Uh So, there's eight of us.

Speaker 4 (01:16:36):
So there's four and four and a couple of Pelican
cases and our rucksacks and uh so the door closes.
John Mulholland h was was there. I think I think
Justin said I knew that John pulled him aside. I
didn't know what he said. You know, of course, you know,

(01:16:58):
Justin told you right, don't die, is what is what
John said. But so we close the doors, and you know,
the birds take off and and head into the darkness.
And I'm I've got headset just like this, uh sort
of except nicer.

Speaker 5 (01:17:17):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (01:17:17):
And so I'm doing you know, I'm talking to the
pilot and command and the crew. I don't have the
colms out. I can hear the colms out, but I
actually can't. They're not gonna let, you know, a guy
like me talk out. So the first thing that happens
is we're flying into the night, and all of a sudden,
I'm listening to the guys are.

Speaker 5 (01:17:37):
You know, they're they're cool guys, and they're.

Speaker 4 (01:17:39):
And and they've done a bazillion different kinds of ops,
so they're they're not in the least bit bothered. And
all of a sudden I realize they ain't talking much.
And then I look out my I'm I'm looking I'm
sitting on you know, looking out the left door. And
I realized we are about like, I don't know, it

(01:18:00):
seemed like within touching distance. Of course it wasn't. It
was probably forty feet from the tail of a of
an MC one thirty because we were refueling to get
into Afghanistan. And so you know, the guys are kind
of nervous about this because it's in the dark. They're
doing it with nods on and so, and we're right

(01:18:24):
on the Afghan border. So success, right, both birds refuel.
The MC one thirty pulls away, and some detached voice
from on high says, congratulations, gentlemen, you've just conducted the
first combat in air refueling for the regiment.

Speaker 5 (01:18:45):
Good luck, And I thought, this is like right out
of a movie.

Speaker 4 (01:18:50):
Later I found out that we had like aircraft stacked
up to the sky for this operation. It was the
only operation taking place that night, right, So we had
uh a jstars, we had the inner refueling, we had
three different C one thirties, we had we had fast movers.

(01:19:10):
We had a lot of aircraft with us. So anyhow,
as soon as that happens, the guys just dropped down
onto the deck and we cross over the Amu Daria
and head into Afghanistan in the pitch stark and you know,
it's it's up and down because there's a lot of
mountains there. So I'm looking at the watch and I'm

(01:19:31):
and i'm I'm listening to the guys talker.

Speaker 5 (01:19:34):
They're the the.

Speaker 4 (01:19:36):
The co pilot is telling the pile in command and
the crew sort of the countdown as far as how
long it's going to be before we.

Speaker 5 (01:19:44):
Hit the LC.

Speaker 4 (01:19:46):
And uh, what I'm thinking about is, uh, one thing, right,
just one thing, which is there are two door handles
on a black Hawk. One is the door handle that
opens the door. The other one is the door handle
that releases the door in an in an accident. Now

(01:20:11):
I know, I mean, I hadn't worked with one sixtyth,
but I worked with a lot of pilots of all sorts.
I realized none of them want to leave parts of
their airplane behind when we pull away. So I'm, you know,
I'm staring right at that making sure I grab it
right handle. And it's pitch black. I can't see, and

(01:20:32):
I don't have my k noods on. It's you're really black,
and and the guys are counting it down and they're like, OK, JIR,
We're one minute out. So so I said to the guys, well, okay,
I key the mic and I say, okay, guys, like
thanks to the ride. We'll see on the other side.
And I was just getting ready to take the headset off,

(01:20:53):
because that's the other thing you don't want to do.
It tells people right up front that you're not a
cool guy when you like get off the helicopter and
you still have the headset on your head, right, That's
that's not going to work. So okay, fine, Just as
I'm about to take the headset off, I hear the
pilot commands say hey JR. I think we're here, and

(01:21:16):
I look out over his shoulder and out there is
what looks to be like about two tennis courts lit
by about fifty sixty what light bulbs. Because I had
tried to talk ghost them into, you know, doing some
sort of American I mean, I had my ranger handbook.

(01:21:37):
I know how to set up an elsie, and I've
been telling him how to you know, do all the stuff,
and he was like, no, no, don't worry, it'll be
set up. And I'm like, okay, I guess I'm just
going to have to take your word for it, And
in fact it was absolutely set up.

Speaker 5 (01:21:54):
So our bird lands. The second bird, of course, hovers over.

Speaker 4 (01:22:00):
It's got the miniguns looking at any kind of because
we still don't know good guys, bad guys, could be
anybody might be a mistake. We're in the right place
for sure. I'm not worried about that one. So I
opened up the door, I grabbed the right handle, I
got the headset off. Now the agreement was I was

(01:22:20):
going to get out of the helicopter. Everybody else was
going to stay in the helicopter until we confirmed that
we had a real reception committee and not Taliban, Because
I mean, I was confident that since right over my
shoulder was a minigun, I was confident that it was
that if there was problems, I wasn't going to have

(01:22:42):
to worry.

Speaker 5 (01:22:43):
About, like shooting it out.

Speaker 4 (01:22:44):
But I didn't want everybody out of the helicopter while
a shootout was taking place. Right So I look out,
and what do I see in the dust the helicopter
course blazers still turning is like about fifty people who
looked like the sand people from Star Wars.

Speaker 5 (01:23:01):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:23:02):
They're dressed in these long it's called Chapon's that just
it's the long jacket. They've got the you know, the
cumber bun. They got knives, and they got guns, and
they got turbans, and I could just barely see their
eyes and they start walking towards the helicopter. Now, you
guys know, and most of your audience probably knows, when

(01:23:24):
a Blackhawk is on the ground, hovering the front the
blade is only about six feet you know, forward, and
it is really a bad thing to start a an
insertion by, you know, a bunch of guys.

Speaker 5 (01:23:42):
That are supposed to be helping you getting killed.

Speaker 4 (01:23:45):
So I go running out there outside the blades and
I lean over and I put up you know, the
classics sort of all everybody in the world knows, stop
right the hands out stop?

Speaker 5 (01:24:04):
And I say stop.

Speaker 4 (01:24:07):
Of course, nobody can hear me because the helicopter, and
all of a sudden I realized, you know, everybody in
front of me is sort of bend over holding their
hands out. They're assuming it is some sort of you know,
take me to your leader sort of greeting, because after all,
we are aliens. And while they're not shooting at me,
So I turn around and give Alex a thumbs up,

(01:24:28):
and he starts to unload the bird. And as soon
as he starts to unload the bird, the guys start
walking forward again. And I bend over and I put
my hands out and yell stop, and they bend over
and put their hands out and stop. We could have
done this all night long, but I decided that it

(01:24:49):
was probably better for me to walk to the very
front grab the guy who looked like the leader. I
grabbed him by the collar of his chapon. I took
a knee. I pulled him down to take it me.
Everybody took a knee, and so the helicopters, you know,
we offload both birds. And for you know, anybody who's

(01:25:09):
been an assertion, whether it's day or night, when the
helicopters are gone, because you're hearing, has been affected by
this very loud noise of turbans.

Speaker 5 (01:25:21):
It seems like there's absolute silence.

Speaker 4 (01:25:24):
Yeah, there's just absolutely It's like you're you've got earplugs
in or something.

Speaker 5 (01:25:30):
And uh.

Speaker 4 (01:25:31):
I look over at the guy that I've grabbed and
he pulls down his Uh. He's he's got his turban
wrapped around his face. And I've got my goggles and
I pull my goggles up and he says, Baba John,
welcome to Afghanistan. We must have tea. So uh that

(01:25:52):
was our uh, the beginning of the adventure. And in
fact we did have tea, interestingly enough, and this just
people say, you know, these guys are you know, sophisticated
and unsophisticated.

Speaker 5 (01:26:07):
There's big arguments about this.

Speaker 4 (01:26:09):
Those them had decided he could have brought us in
to an Elsie on his turf, but instead what he
did is he brought us in on an Elsie on
his Shia allies turf to allow the Shia to feel

(01:26:30):
like they were to get the bragging rights for the
fact that they brought the Americans in. I thought that
was just pretty clever. So we ended up having tea
at the Adam madrasa run by the Shia leader Mahakek,
and then we loaded up into trucks and we went
to those dumbs headquarters, which was deeper into or closer

(01:26:52):
to the front lines, let's say. And then eventually, of course,
when we brought brought five nine five in used an
Elsie that was Dustan's Elsh right in front of what
we you know, where we were based out of which
we called the Alamo, which was you know, it was
very like a little Nativity scene. It was a you know,

(01:27:13):
we had a major It was a little stables that
had been abandoned and so there.

Speaker 5 (01:27:18):
Was room of the inn for the Americas.

Speaker 4 (01:27:21):
And so that's where we spent our next the first
few days.

Speaker 2 (01:27:25):
And at this point, I assume you're getting the way
of the land, starting to assess everybody alive.

Speaker 5 (01:27:30):
You're still there? What, Yeah, I missed you.

Speaker 3 (01:27:32):
Uh, I was just asking.

Speaker 2 (01:27:34):
I mean, at this point I assumed that you were
kind of getting the way of the land and assessing
the state of the Northern Alliance, the state of the Taliban,
and how you're going to live up to Director Tenants
directive to you know, take care of this broad Taliban
problem here in northern Afghanistan.

Speaker 4 (01:27:49):
Well, you know, the great thing about Dustan is is
that you know, he was trained. He's a military guy, right.
He found it amusing that he he knew. How he knew,
I don't know, but he knew. He says, you know,
Baba John, I know in the eighties you were trying
to kill me. I think that's pretty amusing. Here we
are now together. So, uh, you know he he already

(01:28:10):
had a plant his baby. He rolled out the first
night right now, Dhostom, as near as I could tell,
never slept a whole night. If he ever slept more
than an hour the whole time we were rolling, I
never saw it. But so the first night he rolls
out this map that's the size of a you know,
a six or five x ten carpet hand drawn of Afghanistan.

(01:28:34):
And he says, look it, here's the deal. If we
take Mizaar Sharif, Kobble will fall. It's just that simple. Now,
I'm not going to argue with the guy, right, I'm thinking, well,
you know, historically that's true. When when when Mazarre Sharif
fell to Masud's guys, it was after you know, this

(01:28:55):
is after the Soviets left, the dra was done, and
in fact they were then able to roll in from
Jabal Saraje right into Cobble. So yeah, I get it.
But he had a you know, he said, so here's
who we're working with, and here's where they are, and

(01:29:18):
here's where we are, and we need you know, it's
a classic sort of warren Zevon right, without the lawyers.
We need guns and money, right, and so I'm like, well,
I've brought money, and he said, that's a good start,
you know, And shortly afterwards we start delivering guns and

(01:29:40):
bullets as well. Nine five comes in and as soon
as nine to five comes in, they're bringing in tea lamps,
so they're bringing in lasers, which is, you know, really
good because trying to do air strikes. Well, the United
States military at the time, now it changed over twenty

(01:30:00):
years of war, but the United States military at the
time were like, no, if you can't give me absolutely
the grid coordinate down to you know, a ten meters square,
we're just not going to drop any bombs. And we're like, well,
you know, that's going to be kind of hard because
we're sitting up in the mountains looking at these guys

(01:30:20):
with binoculars. But once nine to five and three four
came in with tea with soft lambs, it was it
was all over for the Taliban. But what was most
interesting about this was that the Taliban in the north,
I mean, there were there were serious Taliban bad guys.

(01:30:41):
I mean they're they're back in power and cobble, but
the vast majority of their foot soldiers were just that
they were foot soldiers. They were what the British would
call levies. They were either you know, kidnapped and told
that they were going to fight or die, or they
were given a small amount of money. And you know,
sixteen year old kid, you give him a Kalashnikoff, you

(01:31:05):
give him a Toyota High Loucks, and you say, you
can terrorize anybody in the neighborhood as long as she's
call yourself a Taliban. Generally speaking, he's going to say that's.

Speaker 3 (01:31:15):
Cool, right.

Speaker 4 (01:31:16):
But the thing about it is, hardly anybody, you know, truthfully,
hardly everybody's more than willing to kill for jihad, but
hardly anybody I ever met in Afghanistan wanted to die
for job. Some did, but not very many. So what

(01:31:37):
we were able to do with do Dostam was the
one who had the best connections. Was he call the
guys up on radios and say, hey, you know, you're
on the wrong side of the history here and I will,
in fact, I and I can pay you to be

(01:31:58):
on the right side. And the first time he tried that,
the guys would say, you know something, rude guy.

Speaker 5 (01:32:05):
I was listening to him.

Speaker 4 (01:32:06):
I was sitting right next to post them on the
radio and they're saying something rude to him and that
he would turn to Mark Nutch or whoever with nine
to five was there that day, and he'd say, see
that that's right over there, that's.

Speaker 5 (01:32:20):
Where I am. That's the guy I'm talking to.

Speaker 4 (01:32:23):
And so they'd put the soft lamb laser designator on
that and squish, you know, the guy would would go,
would be done. And then he'd call the guy next
to him to the right or the left of that
line and say, hey, mom, And you know, I was
just talking to Abdul and I offered him a deal
and he basically wasn't much interested. But you know, I'm

(01:32:47):
hoping that you have seen what happened to Abdul and
you'll come to our side. And pretty quick, that's exactly
what happened. A lot of the Taliban levies were like,
I'm not dying for these guys from Condahar. I'm from
around here, right and uh. And if I can, if

(01:33:07):
I can be financially successful as well as be on
the right side of history.

Speaker 5 (01:33:15):
I'm in.

Speaker 4 (01:33:16):
So that's basically what happened. And it was, you know,
one after another after another. Uh, slowly but surely, that.
As I said that mix, our work was to keep
the resistance guys fighting each other. Now, the Shia and
those times were close, they'd always been close, but the

(01:33:39):
Shia and those times weren't very close to the Tajiks Mahmadata,
so we had to constantly work on that. Meanwhile, we
needed to send a team to Bamyan so that another
SF team could come into Bamiyan, So that was we

(01:33:59):
split the team and sent h Justin and mike' span
and Mark in a jeep into the Bombia. That's you know,
so they went out, they went out and disappeared for
weeks because it was a long drive and they were
doing exactly what we were doing. And then we realized

(01:34:20):
that we were never going to get real success with
Ata until he had his own agency team and his
own uh Oda. So we split the team again and
that became then Bravo team, and that was three guys,

(01:34:40):
and then when Oda five three four came in, two
more ground branch guys and a medic came in and
helped set up that team. So in the space of
at the end of the first two weeks, we were
split all over there the country right we were in

(01:35:01):
all kinds of different directions. Three no, no less than
three at a time, but a lot of times two
or three guys going to do something. As I said,
we we uh you know, rolled into miss miss Archery
fell on the tenth of November and we rolled into
bizarre and uh it was like, uh, you know, it

(01:35:23):
was one of those things that you I mean, no
pictures were taken, but it was kind of like the
films you've seen of the liberation of Paris without the Champagne.
So you know, men and women throwing rose petals at us,
women you know, throwing their burkas underneath the jeeps so
that they would be driven forever destroyed. Uh, cheering crowds.

(01:35:47):
I mean, it was all liberation of Paris, except it
was the liberation of miss Archery.

Speaker 3 (01:35:54):
It's incredible to think of.

Speaker 5 (01:35:55):
I mean.

Speaker 3 (01:35:57):
And from there, what was the next step was on the.

Speaker 4 (01:36:02):
Well for us, the next step we still had a
couple of provinces to take care of, right, Uh so
the first province, the first set of provinces that we
had to take care of, were really not liberations but
just announcements. So Justin and I jumped in the jeep
with Dostam and we went to the three provinces.

Speaker 5 (01:36:23):
To the west.

Speaker 4 (01:36:25):
The first one, of course, was was his old province Chiles,
John sorry Pool was there, and then Maimanah as well.
So we did did basically a grand tour, saying, by
the way, the reason that Taliban are gone is because
they ain't coming back. They're they're done. And Dostam was
of course the big the big winner there and it

(01:36:47):
was his turf, so I wasn't surprised at that part.
Uh classic sort of uh you know story again, a
small bit of humor.

Speaker 5 (01:36:57):
So we're driving.

Speaker 4 (01:36:58):
Along, we were blast along on this highway that goes
from Missar Charief to Chevakan and uh, you know, I'm
still kind of nervous. I mean, there's still Taliban out there.
And Justin's to my you know, so I'm a lefty,
so I'm on the right seat looking out the window.
Justin's on the left seat looking out the window behind
Doos Dominus driver And all of a sudden and we've got,

(01:37:21):
you know, a truckloaded guys in front of us and
a truckload of guys behind us, and all of a sudden,
the trucks absolutely screech to a halt and go into
a herring bone, classic sort of military herring bone. All
the guys in the pickup trucks jump out and disappear,
and I'm like asking thhost. I'm like, what's going on.

(01:37:44):
He's like, Baba, John, don't worry. I'm like, yeah, okay,
but you know, I'm kind of worried. He's like, no,
don't worry. And all of a sudden, like in a
very short amount of time, all these guys come running
back into their truck. They come to our truck and
they start handing us melons and those some goes we

(01:38:05):
always stop here. This is the best the whole region.
And I was like, okay, you know, I guess you
know what, what the hell? But the last, of course,
the last big UH problem was UH was well, there's

(01:38:26):
two problems. There was There was UH some goan which
still had a Taliban in it, and Kundus. So Alex
took a team to Smogan and started working on the
distribution of resources money, guns, bullets and bring it in
an oda there and Kundu's was supposed to be well,

(01:38:49):
you know the problem was that dostm and Ata had
been convinced by Mulla Fozzle, the head Taliban guy that
the Taliban wanted to surrender, but if they didn't accept,
if if most of them Anata didn't accept the surrender,
then they were going to have to fight house to house.
And he said, neither one of you guys wants to

(01:39:12):
be the butcher of Kundus. Well, okay, so, uh, none
of us, not none of us Americans were all that
excited about any of this. But you know, it's it's
exactly what Lawrence said, right, it's better for the locals
to do what they do, you know, it's it's it's.

Speaker 3 (01:39:33):
You know, for you to do it for them exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:39:36):
So we're like, you know, what are we going to do?
I mean, we can't, uh, we can't. We don't have
an invasion for us. Right, We've got ODA five nine five,
We've got O d A five three four, and the
commanders that they're working with they want to arrange, you know,
go with the surrender.

Speaker 5 (01:39:57):
Well, you know, both.

Speaker 4 (01:39:58):
Doug Stanton and and Toby's books talk in detail about
the fact that it was a completely false surrender, and.

Speaker 5 (01:40:10):
It was.

Speaker 4 (01:40:12):
I mean from the standpoint, I mean it was horrible.
I lost a man, Afghan's lost some of our closest allies.
Dave almost was killed. We were almost killed out in
Kundu's because it was at ambush there too, though we
had AC one thirties on our side. So it didn't work,
you know, it didn't work out so well for the Taliban.

(01:40:33):
But the point is that, whether you like it or not,
it was an exceptionally sophisticated deception operation because they had
convinced the two major you know.

Speaker 5 (01:40:49):
Afghan allies to.

Speaker 4 (01:40:53):
Drive right into a trap that was going to kill
him right and would have killed him if it hadn't
been for AC one thirties and the fact.

Speaker 5 (01:41:00):
That we had you know, we had the UH at
that point.

Speaker 4 (01:41:05):
It was Max Bauers who was the battalion commander for
these guys, and UH Sergeant Major v Hill, Mario ve
Hill and their coms network with the authority to call
in airpower like right away.

Speaker 5 (01:41:22):
Otherwise you wouldn't be talking to me today.

Speaker 4 (01:41:24):
We still would have won the battle, but I'd be dead,
no question in my mind about that. And uh so
that's what happened. I mean, you know again, I would
point your your uh your listeners to reading either one
of those books because they go into significant detail about
about that, and it's it's a tough story to read

(01:41:49):
and it's not a great story to talk about.

Speaker 3 (01:41:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:41:51):
Yeah, when we talked to both Toby and Justin, I
think that really came through about like SPAN's death and
just what a horrible day that was.

Speaker 4 (01:42:02):
Yeah, and you know, I mean I so, Uh, Scottie
and I made it back for day two of that operation,
and Uh and Alex drove up from Sammagan.

Speaker 5 (01:42:15):
So Alex and I went.

Speaker 4 (01:42:17):
Were in the fort when Mark Mitchell the night that
Mark Mitchell won his Distinguished Service Cross with the with
the team. It was a pretty spooky thing. The Taliban,
or it wasn't Taliban, it was the al Qaeda guys.
We're using all of the resources that were available. I
had never really thought that you could direct fire direct

(01:42:41):
lay a one twenty two rocket, but I guarantee you
it was either that or they were using explosives to
send telephone polls over my head. I'm not sure which
it was. Either way, it was pretty scary. Yeah, but
you know again, AC one thirties won out the day
and the Air Force saved our lives.

Speaker 2 (01:43:04):
Could you tell us a little bit more about like
how that came about well.

Speaker 4 (01:43:09):
Okay, So so I get back to Scotty and I
came back from Kundu's. The guys who had been in
the fort that day, to include the SBS team had
were all coming back rolling in. They they well, they
looked exactly like what they were. They had been buried
alive because the Jadam had hit the fort and buried

(01:43:33):
him alive. They dug their way out, and they were
coming back trying to figure out what they were going
to do. And the the part of the fortress that
overlooked that truly overlooked where the where the the the
al Qaeda guys were was not where they had been,

(01:43:56):
and they didn't know quite how they were going to
get in there. And uh so Alex and I gotten
a jeep uh and drove over there and we you know,
shouted from the from the ramparts, Hey, we want to
come up, and they said, come on up. So we
climbed up the ramparts, went through a drainage hole and

(01:44:19):
came up to where our Afghan allies were. And I mean,
these are the same allies we've been with now for
six weeks. So they were all like, hey, Baba John,
good to see you. You know, bullets flying everywhere, and uh,
I'm like, okay, here's the deal. Uh, you know, if
you can hold these guys in place tonight, we're going

(01:44:41):
to bring in airpower. And they were like, absolutely, we
can hold these guys inside these walls. And they'd already
seen what airpower did, so you know it was they
were like, come on back. So then we you know,
climb over the walls, down through the drain pipe, up
you know again, jump the jump in the jeep, go
back to where everybody was set up and Mark and

(01:45:07):
a combat controller and one other guy. Then about nine
o'clock that night, we loaded the jeep back through you know,
same story, right up the walls, through the drain pipe,
up were the walls, and in and tell the commander, okay,
we're going to start bringing in airpower. And he was

(01:45:30):
like that's good because they found mortars. And just about
the time he got mortars out of his mouth, round
started landing on the parapet around us, and we were like, well,
that ain't good. I've seen good before, and that ain't it.
And I turned to Alex and said, you know, Alex,

(01:45:51):
I don't have my ranger tab the high under. I
mean if I did, I wouldn't be worried. But I
don't have it with me. So he was like, yeah,
I don't have my sf TA with me either, So
you know, we'll just we'll just stick here. And you know,
it's really up the Mark at this point and the
combat controller to do the job. I mean, there's no

(01:46:11):
sense in. I mean, we couldn't see the bad guys.
They could see us well, I mean we could have
gotten stood up on a paraprit shot our aks.

Speaker 5 (01:46:19):
But like, why so Mark called.

Speaker 4 (01:46:23):
In the the AC thirties they made two runs. This
is about the same time that the guys are shooting
mortars at us and the one twenty two's and just
about anything they could find. They were doing direct lay
on us.

Speaker 5 (01:46:39):
And finally I.

Speaker 4 (01:46:40):
Remember Mark talking to the aircraft and saying, guys, I
know you have to rotate back through right.

Speaker 5 (01:46:48):
You do.

Speaker 4 (01:46:48):
You're doing your rotation because the all the guns are
on the left side of the aircraft. But you just
need to know you need to finish this this time
because the last couple of rounds, mortar rounds are only
landed about like fifty meters from us. They've got they're
walking the mortars in on us. Now, I didn't hear

(01:47:10):
what Mark. I mean, I heard what Mark said. I
don't know what the Air Force guy said, but absolutely
they came roaring in. And for those of you who
remember it, if you've ever seen the final scene from
Apocalypse now when the arc light comes in and the

(01:47:30):
entire sky turns orange, well, to this day, I don't
know what they hit. I think they hit the cheese
charges and then that kicked off all the other kind
of mortar rounds and everything else.

Speaker 5 (01:47:43):
The entire the entire end of.

Speaker 4 (01:47:46):
The fortress where the bad guys were just exploded into
into fire. So I turned to the Afghan commander and said,
you know, I think our work here is done. We're
going to go come back tomorrow, and I need to
find Mike. We still, I mean until, I mean, I

(01:48:07):
wasn't willing to say that Mike was Kia until we
knew he was Kia. Because Mike had been such a
power in so many different ways and so good at
what he did. I thought, even if he was wounded,
and he could have easily crawled into a space and hidden,

(01:48:29):
and then the guys would never have found him.

Speaker 5 (01:48:32):
So until we actually found Mike's remains. I mean, I was.

Speaker 4 (01:48:36):
Really committed to to hoping. Of course, you know now
we know from Dave's debrief and everything else, that didn't
work out that way. But anyhow, we left the next day.
The whole team now is crawling in because we think
we're just going to edit go into the fortress and

(01:48:56):
you know, do our post blast analysis. I would climb
into the fortress doing the same thing again, and the
commander goes, I say like, so, why aren't you down
in the area. He says, well, it turns out that
and then just as he said, you know that, you know,
two mortar rounds hit on the parapet again. He says, yep,

(01:49:19):
they're still firing mortars at us. I'm like, oh, great,
well it's daylight. And he said, yeah, we're going to
bring in We've got a we've got a t Sist two.
We're going to bring in a tank, and we've got
troops all along the parapet. We're just going to start
opening up on these guys. And and you know, it takes.

(01:49:40):
It took all that day and they still ended up,
you know, the guys, the al Kainda guys retreated into
the what's called the pink House, which was it was
pink and then what was really clever. I would never
have thought of this, but the Afghan thought of it.

(01:50:00):
They brought in a fire truck and started to flood
the Pink House. And remember this is November, late November,
it's cold at night, and by the next day the
guys were hypothermic. They were no longer combatants, and they
were pulled out of the pink House and grabbed. And

(01:50:23):
then by that time a good chunk of Dostom's team
were there. Dostom was still in Kundu's dealing with the
Afghans there, but they put him into trucks and they
took him to Sheppergun And that's basically the last of
the story, except when the medic in nine to five

(01:50:47):
identified John Walker Lynn. Then they brought him back to
actually to the Turker School where we were headquartered. I
made sure that my guys didn't didn't talk to or
do anything with Mike Span with John Walker Lynn for

(01:51:08):
two reasons. One, I was afraid they would do him
harm right, but more more importantly, having worked with the FBI,
I knew that if any of us were involved in
this at all, the defense team would immediately say that,
you know, we were somehow perfidious, and so.

Speaker 5 (01:51:29):
We didn't do anything.

Speaker 4 (01:51:31):
Admiral Kallan understood it as well, because he'd been you know,
Seal Team six commanders, so he'd had a lot of
work in this weird world of counter terrorism and criminal
enterprises all that, and so he just put guards on
the room that that John Walker Linn was there until

(01:51:51):
they could fly in from At that point, they flew
him in from Tashkent, some Army ce I D guys
and then the Army c I D guys matched up.
They also had some n CIS guys there, and they
put him on a bird and took him out of there,
and that was that was the last I saw them, Jr.

Speaker 2 (01:52:13):
You know, the John Walker Lynn, the so called American
Taliban amazingly out of prison now.

Speaker 3 (01:52:19):
Uh yeah, he's taken up some writing, a little bit
of writing, and.

Speaker 2 (01:52:24):
Has accused the CIA and the Army of committing work
crimes out there.

Speaker 3 (01:52:29):
And I'm just curious what you think.

Speaker 2 (01:52:30):
Of of John Walker's account of how that went down
out there that those few days.

Speaker 4 (01:52:36):
You know, I I honestly I haven't followed any of that.
I mean I'm sorry, I can't. I can't stomach the guy. Yeah,
you know, and uh, you know, the only thing that
I know about that guy.

Speaker 5 (01:52:47):
Is after the fact.

Speaker 4 (01:52:49):
I talked to some of the FBI guys who did
the initial interview with him, and they showed me some
pictures and they said, they showed me the pictures of
when he was first, you know, first brought out and
interviewed and he I think you've seen some of those
pictures because they've become part of the of the story.
But anyhow, like half of his face looks really dirty

(01:53:14):
and the other half looks sort of dirty. And the
FBI guys I talked to said, well, that's because that's
what happens when you you know, have a good stock
world on an AK forty seven and all that carbon
from those from those rounds start start, you know, comes out.
Because AK forty seven's for everybody who's ever fired one,

(01:53:38):
you know, they're sort of I mean, they're designed to
be loose so that they can be so that they
can be shot in any environment. That's why they are
so popular all over the world. But it was you know,
carbon from the so I have not followed John Walker
lint I mean, I'm sorry, I can't. I can't brain
myself to do it. I'm an old guy, the geezer.

(01:54:01):
Uh he he is a trader, uh the end, you know.
I mean, I'm not going to judge anything else about him,
And what he wants to talk about now is between
him and he's a he's a mom, so it's between
him and his god, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:54:17):
Really fair enough j R.

Speaker 2 (01:54:26):
But on a saturer note, how how did you guys
get our resolution on on Mike's span and evacuate his remains?

Speaker 4 (01:54:38):
Well, we we went in, I mean after that, after
the the guys had been pushed into the pink house,
but before they were pulled out, we walked at the
the Afghans. Of course, you know, see a good chunk
of the of the folks who were who were actually
the fighters are fighters on the ramparts were Shia, right,

(01:55:00):
they were because it was the Shia that had been
had had well Bazaars Reef was a Shia talent before
the Taliban took over. So they were always the guys,
and they knew Mike very very well. Mike had been
Mike and Justin and Mark had been our focal points
with the with the Shia resistance and then with the

(01:55:23):
Shia when we started to rebuild. So they went in
on their own, found him UH and brought him out
in a stretcher, and so we didn't have to go
searching for him. They had already brought him right out

(01:55:43):
to the entrance of where the big gun fight had
taken place. And UH then we UH recovered Mike. We
had a you know, a classic American UH uh bag
that put him in, brought his remains to the UH,

(01:56:05):
brought his remains to the the Turker School, put him
in a space where we could do a quiet time
with him. And then that night half the team UH
loaded up with Mike's remains, loaded up and do a
C forty seven and flew back to Kku.

Speaker 5 (01:56:28):
Z Alex was on that.

Speaker 4 (01:56:31):
You know why half the team well, you know we
had not been we had you know, we hadn't been relieved.
We were still doing stuff across the board. So it
was half the team needed to go because half, I mean,
Mike was buried, buried before I even got back to Konis.

(01:56:54):
But we needed half the team needed to stay to
continue to work the stuff that we were doing, which
was building something resembling a legitimate not government exactly, but
at least in a legitimate order, and also hunting down
the last of the Taliban and the al Qaida guys

(01:57:17):
who were now on the run in samagan.

Speaker 5 (01:57:21):
Jar.

Speaker 3 (01:57:22):
How when you.

Speaker 6 (01:57:23):
Talk about like building not the legitimate governmentybe a legitimate
coalition or whatever.

Speaker 3 (01:57:27):
How tough was that?

Speaker 6 (01:57:29):
Because even though these warlargs like Dustom and that they
were fighting the Taliban, they they were all there wasn't
like a national identity for them. They were also fighting
for themselves and would just as easily turn on each
other if they thought they could get away with it.

Speaker 3 (01:57:47):
How was that for you?

Speaker 6 (01:57:49):
Trying to orchestrate that or manage manage those relationships.

Speaker 4 (01:57:54):
It was something that of course, you know, this goes
back to experience in the eighties, right. I learned a
long time ago that there comes a point in time
where you can't you can you need to be polite,
but you need to draw a line in the sand.
And I made it pretty clear to the guys early on, actually,
uh well before we had entered Massaari Shrief. Let's just
say that if they didn't cooperate, we were all going home.

(01:58:24):
There'd be no more money, no more guns, no more odas,
no more anything. And then if so, you know, and
if that was what they were they were committed to do.
We weren't going to get in the way of it,
but we certainly weren't going to help them, and so
they took it to heart. I mean, they didn't have to,

(01:58:46):
I get. I mean, I don't know if I was
uh blunt or if I was you know, just looked
sincere or what. But it was like one on one
with these guys. Uh. I've had guys in the past
when I was doing this. I mean say, you know,
really with just like you're surrounded by bad guys and

(01:59:06):
you're saying it like it's our job.

Speaker 5 (01:59:09):
It's what we do.

Speaker 3 (01:59:11):
Right, it's all you have too, Yeah, well it is.

Speaker 4 (01:59:15):
And it's not like they're going to kill me because
that would also you know, and and the relationship. So
they could grumble about it, but they had seen what
was what was successful now, you know is and what
we said right up front was look at once, we're
once the talibant.

Speaker 5 (01:59:34):
We're only here to.

Speaker 4 (01:59:35):
Get these guys out of here. It's really up to
you to figure out what you're going to do next.

Speaker 5 (01:59:42):
And uh, you know.

Speaker 4 (01:59:46):
My own I mean, I've only done Afghanistan Afghan since
nineteen eighty six, so I'm not going to pretend that
I am like a real you know, cultural expert, like
you know, from Harvard or Yale, because I'm just a
kid who, you know, blue collar kid who just lived
with these guys for years.

Speaker 5 (02:00:03):
But there is no such thing as an Afghan.

Speaker 4 (02:00:06):
Right right, There's there's absolutely no such thing as an Afghan.

Speaker 5 (02:00:11):
The only Afghan I ever.

Speaker 4 (02:00:13):
Met was Amarula Salid, who was, you know, the last
vice president of Kalb but before that, he was the
head of the National Defense you know, the the.

Speaker 5 (02:00:26):
National Directorate of Security.

Speaker 4 (02:00:28):
And before that he was one of of Masud's guys.
I mean, he was actually a very close to Maud
and was one of the guys that traveled with Masoud
when Maud was going back and forth between the Panshir
and dou Chambay. To me, folks, he's the only Afghan
I ever met who was an Afghan. All the rest
of them, all of the rest of them are tadjiks

(02:00:51):
Uzbek's Hazara push tunes and there's two different I mean
and that you know, people say push things but you
know the truth is that the push dune of let's say,
Jalalabad can barely understand what the push dudents in Condahar say,
and neither one of them can understand what the push
dudents from Memors say. I mean, it's not a country.

(02:01:15):
National geographics done, the maps. You know, they had a flag,
and so by definition Americans think that they're a country.
But you know, they are neither a nation. Oh they
were a state certainly, but they were not a nation state, right,
and the folks in the north nor I mean, remember
when the winter comes, you can't drive from Kabble to

(02:01:38):
Missouri Shrief, right, the roads are closed. There's no way
to get through the Hindu kush. Even today they have
to fly. So what we had to do was convince
all these guys that, regardless of what they thought of
each other, and they didn't like each other, that's for sure, right,

(02:02:01):
that that they needed to collaborate, cooperate if they wanted
the country back.

Speaker 5 (02:02:07):
And they did.

Speaker 4 (02:02:08):
I mean, I don't just because they grumbled doesn't mean
that they didn't do their job. They did their job
in ways that were you know, exactly what you could
have asked for.

Speaker 2 (02:02:20):
Right, What was the next phase for Alpha Team after
that whole incident, after Mike's band's death and resolving the
situation at the prison. I mean, as you said, you
were continuing to do things. The mission wasn't over. So
what was the next step.

Speaker 4 (02:02:36):
Well, the next step was to you know, to build
to work with all three of our Afghan allies to
make sure that there weren't Taliban, uh, you know they
I guess the only term I could think of is
is a term from you know, from World War Two.
We wanted to make sure there were no war wolves
out there, right, that not everybody was worried in forty

(02:02:57):
five that there were Nazi war wolves out there hiding out,
just waiting to come.

Speaker 5 (02:03:03):
So we did that. We Uh, we were involved with.

Speaker 4 (02:03:07):
The ODA that was down in Salmangan, working with us
Mailei's totally different culture as well.

Speaker 5 (02:03:14):
Uh. And then that you know, for me, my job.

Speaker 4 (02:03:19):
Towards the end was to be sort of uh the
intelligence diplomat. I worked a lot with Admiral Kaland as
we built airfields, and we worked with the commanders trying,
you know, the three leaders to try and make sure
that they continue to collaborate and cooperate, dividing up the city.
How you do police work, you know, I mean I

(02:03:41):
don't mean like a police force, but you know, making
sure that there aren't checkpoints that are hostils with each
other across the town, all that stuff. And then you know,
our allies started to roll in and uh so, I
mean we had lots of ally guys already. I mean
the Brits were our shoulder to shoulder with us, but

(02:04:04):
I mean the the other allies, the Jordanians, special forces
came in, the French aviation folks started to come in.
Eventually Christmasare Schrief was was run by a German unit.
Uh So that at the very end the job was

(02:04:24):
just there were there were five of us left, and
uh the five of us carved up every day a
little piece here, a little piece there, trying to do
all of those things until we were relieved in place
in the mid in mid December, and you know, did
the did the handshakes with our the really the new team,

(02:04:47):
and introduced them to all the other, you know, the
guys that we've been working with all this time. And
then we boarded a an agency uh twin otter and
left CA or left Bazaars Reef and headed back to Kkuz.

Speaker 2 (02:05:04):
And you had a few more years left at the
CIA before retiring in two thousand and seven. I believe
you finished as the Deputy of Operations of CTC.

Speaker 5 (02:05:16):
No, well, I mean I did.

Speaker 4 (02:05:18):
I mean, first of all, you know that wasn't my
last trip to call, right, I mean or Afghanistan. I
made like five different trips TV wise for lots of
different kinds of projects over time as we worked with
the station.

Speaker 5 (02:05:33):
Now by that time the station set up.

Speaker 4 (02:05:34):
It's a big station, but there were certain things that cooperation, collaborations,
some other stuff.

Speaker 5 (02:05:40):
There's some training that I was involved with.

Speaker 4 (02:05:45):
After in two thousand and four, I was pulled back
to headquarters after seventeen years kicking and screaming, but orders
or orders, and I went back into the basement. Of course,
it only goes I was. I was given an office
in the basement to do some other stuff that was
nothing to do with Afghanistan. And then I ended up

(02:06:08):
as a h the chief of ops for a geographic
division for about six months and then I got promoted.
Shocked everybody myself included, and I got grabbed up to
go to CTC CGC is a big place, right, I
mean there were at that point in time, there's over

(02:06:29):
not quite four thousand.

Speaker 5 (02:06:30):
People in the CTC mix.

Speaker 4 (02:06:33):
Now, that doesn't mean that there were four thousand people
working in headquarters. There are four thousand people doing the
CTC mission. Are you still there?

Speaker 5 (02:06:43):
Yeah? That you lose you okay, yeah, okay.

Speaker 4 (02:06:46):
So anyhow, the operations office, so I was I was
one of the two deputy chiefs of operations, and then
we had a chief of Operations and he had a
deputy So I was partnered with Doug Wise. So Doug
and I, uh split And you've had Doug on on

(02:07:06):
on the on the on the podcast.

Speaker 3 (02:07:08):
He's coming back in a few weeks.

Speaker 6 (02:07:10):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (02:07:11):
We got on scheduled for the twenty second.

Speaker 5 (02:07:13):
Yeah, excellent.

Speaker 4 (02:07:17):
Well, anyhow, he and I divided up the day to
day management of CTC in half. So, uh, I ended
up with a you know, a bunch of different parts
of CTC and then the the Uh, the CTC director
wanted to have a a syops program, a robust syops

(02:07:41):
program going after countering violent extremism.

Speaker 5 (02:07:45):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (02:07:45):
So I wanted to call it the you know, political
warfare Department.

Speaker 5 (02:07:50):
No, that wasn't going to work. That sounded too political.

Speaker 4 (02:07:54):
Uh So we ended up calling it the Strategic Communications Department,
and I was listed just so I could go over
the State and not be laughed out of a building.
They listed me as a deputy director of CTC for
Strategic Communications. So I spent the tail end of the

(02:08:16):
last eighteen months of my career managing teams that were
all over the world. Is again kind of, you know,
the same sort of story over and over again that
were working on what is what would have been called
in the old OSS days black propaganda, and you know,

(02:08:37):
and black propaganda is designed to undermine the morale of
the bad guys, as opposed to psyops or strategic communications
that the military and the State Department were doing, which
was to bring guys onto our side, right, to convince
people on our side.

Speaker 2 (02:08:56):
And also that the bad guys don't know where they
information is coming from, as opposed to like say the
Broadcasting Board of Governors, where it's very clearly coming from
the United States.

Speaker 3 (02:09:06):
What you guys are doing is concealed.

Speaker 4 (02:09:09):
And what we're doing, I mean what basically what we're
doing is telling them, in a sense, a modified truth,
which is your leaders are making themselves rich while you
guys are being asked to be martyrs. Yeah, you know,
and which is all true.

Speaker 6 (02:09:29):
Yeah, that's not really modified truth. That's kind of the truth.

Speaker 5 (02:09:33):
That is the truth.

Speaker 4 (02:09:34):
But it has to come from some place that doesn't
say United States of.

Speaker 3 (02:09:37):
America doesn't have CIA all over it.

Speaker 5 (02:09:39):
Right, that's right. So we did.

Speaker 4 (02:09:42):
We did a variety of different, very creative things. I
take I mean no credit for this other than getting
money to make it happen.

Speaker 5 (02:09:51):
I mean the I had a.

Speaker 4 (02:09:52):
Team of exceptionally smart folks, and then because I knew
I was going to leave soon, have Alex to take
over for me. So we ended up at the end
of I ended up at the end of my career
with Alex as my deputy again, which was great. And
then he took over my job when I left.

Speaker 3 (02:10:13):
That's pretty cool. So retired in two thousand and seven.

Speaker 2 (02:10:17):
And tell us a little bit about what your life
has been like post retirement. I'm sure your your wife
is happy to have you at home a little more
often and getting into writing.

Speaker 3 (02:10:27):
Your pretty very prolific writer.

Speaker 4 (02:10:30):
Yeah, well, let's start with you know, I this this trade,
this blend of intelligence and special operations. It's it's very
addictive and it's very hard to just go cold Turkey.
So for years I worked very hard with the Army

(02:10:53):
and the Special Operations community to try and do some
training for them, cultural training. I'm an anthropology by training,
so cultural training on how to work with the locals.
I mean, obviously Robin Sage, they teach how to work
with the locals, but I'm like down in the tactical
this is how I worked with the locals, as well
as how to work with the CIA, because working with

(02:11:18):
the CIA is a challenge because it's another culture entirely.
And you know, it might seem easy when you're in
a forward operating base and you've got a base chief
and maybe one it's another thing entirely when you're going
to fly into a station, an established station, and you're
going to be talking to people who are interested in

(02:11:41):
conventional intelligence operations because that's their job. So I spend
a lot of time working on that and still do
a little bit of that. And then about five years
ago I started writing. And it seems more profic than
it is because Mike.

Speaker 5 (02:12:02):
Four had to go through two years with the sensors.

Speaker 4 (02:12:09):
Oh really, and then and then uh, it's the sequel.
Friend or foe was twenty eight months with the with
the sensors, and then eventually what happens is I guess
I just warmed down or they just figured out I'm
not going to quit. And I also crack that, you know,
got the code, right, I got the code. I understand

(02:12:32):
how to write to make sure that the sensors legitimately.

Speaker 5 (02:12:37):
I mean, I'm I.

Speaker 4 (02:12:38):
Signed a document in nineteen eighty five, right, they could
they could watch everything I wrote forever. So it isn't
like I don't understand that it's the rules.

Speaker 5 (02:12:52):
I get it.

Speaker 4 (02:12:54):
But it seems like if you look at like, you know,
like nine books since twenty nineteen. Well, no, actually I
started writing Mike four in twenty and fourteen, okay, finished it,
finished it in fifteen, and then had to find get
through the sensors, and then after the sensors had to

(02:13:15):
go through and find a publisher. So meanwhile, while I'm
doing all that, I'm still writing. So it looks like
I'm creating these things. Now, those people who have read
it will say it's sort of slap dash anyhow, But.

Speaker 5 (02:13:30):
I mean the point is that it is. The publication
date doesn't reflect what happens.

Speaker 3 (02:13:40):
That makes sense.

Speaker 6 (02:13:42):
So I was just going to say for audience, who
doesn't know, because we've had people on who've written autobiographies
and whatnot, and we've talked about the pre publication review
board at the CIA that has to review their stuff
and make sure it's not classified. But you might not
know in the audience that even if you write fiction,

(02:14:04):
they have to go through it and check it to
make sure that you haven't spilled any secrets in your fiction.

Speaker 5 (02:14:10):
Correct, correct, and you know and fair enough.

Speaker 4 (02:14:13):
I mean, at the end of the day, you know,
there's an entire you know, there's an entire part of
the CIA that does open source intelligence and it you know,
for years and years and years, the KGB was doing
open source intelligence on all of their officers who were
in North America. That's what they were doing. So yeah,

(02:14:36):
the pre publication is a fair requirement. I think what
happened to me was that I hit it at a
time just about the time that a bunch of very
senior people legitimately wanted to write essays and articles and

(02:14:58):
books about their careers. Whereas so what would happen would
be I mean, I don't know this for sure, but
my guess is my fiction kept getting back down to
the bottom of the pile. Because, let's face it, if
a former director wants to write an editorial that's going
to the New.

Speaker 5 (02:15:16):
York Times, that's a whole lot more.

Speaker 4 (02:15:20):
Important than me writing about a fictional character who is
a special operator, right, I mean, it's just totally different.

Speaker 6 (02:15:29):
So Jared, please, I'm I'm going to talk about your
other series and I'll ask you questions about it, but
please tell us. We haven't had a chance to read
this one, so please tell us about Mike four. It's
it's there are six books in the series.

Speaker 5 (02:15:45):
Seven now and it's not another one just came.

Speaker 6 (02:15:48):
Out, and it's about a family whose history and Special
Operations intelligence goes back to World War Two.

Speaker 3 (02:15:55):
Correct?

Speaker 5 (02:15:56):
Correct?

Speaker 4 (02:15:57):
So the basic story is, Mike Fuur is the call
signed for a female special operator who is on a
surveillance detachment.

Speaker 5 (02:16:07):
Okay, leave it at that.

Speaker 4 (02:16:09):
For those for folks who know what we're talking about,
they know, but that's what the that's what the Policy
Review Board wanted it to be called.

Speaker 5 (02:16:20):
So fair fair enough.

Speaker 4 (02:16:22):
So she's in a surveillance detachment, very successful and but
very aggressive. Now you might say why a female character, Well,
partly because I met a ton of female operators and
a ton of agency females, and you know, you'd look
around in the fiction try and find some in fiction.

Speaker 5 (02:16:44):
Right.

Speaker 4 (02:16:45):
Anyhow, she is this the daughter of a tandem couple,
and she's the granddaughter of an OSS commando SO who
also then becomes a CIA off so very senior and
ends his career CIA officer. She doesn't want to be
in the family business, so she you know, goes through

(02:17:08):
selection and ends up in this surveillance detachment in Jalalabad.
She ends up walking into an ambush and it becomes
a what is known in the wounded warrior world as
BTK below the knee amputee and just like many btks

(02:17:30):
from Iraq Afghanistan, the Army, after she is healed as
much as a BTK can be healed, says to her, Okay,
here's the deal. You can either get one hundred percent
disability and start a new life, you know, go back
to college, go do something else, or you can stay

(02:17:50):
in the fight as an intelligence officer. And we're going
to send you to the farm and you're going to learn,
you know, CIA tradecraft, and you're going to be one
of our that is the Special Operations Community Intelligence officers. Well,
you know, Mike Forrest spent her whole life trying to

(02:18:11):
dodge the family business. But given a choice between staying
in the fight or not staying in the fight, she
chooses to stay in the fight, and she ends up
working in a team that is a Special Operations Intelligence,
human intelligence counter terrorism collection team. Now people say why

(02:18:37):
a BTK. One of the training programs I was in
after I retired was down at Fort Wachuka and I
was doing, you know, my cultural stuff, but we were
doing it out.

Speaker 5 (02:18:50):
This is back in the day when Iraq and Afghanistan.

Speaker 4 (02:18:53):
The guys who were doing intelligence had to be able
to get out into the literally out into the field.
So I was working students one after another and evaluating
them after the fact. It's a five day, six day program,
and you know, because I was an outsider, at the

(02:19:14):
end of that program, I would give them a one
on one. Hey, this worked well for you, this didn't
work so well. And like you know, I learned through
all the leadership training I've ever given and ever taken
that you know, it's it's really good to unkey the
mic and listen for a while. Now those of you

(02:19:36):
who have been listening to me for now two hours
are wondering about that. But nevertheless, so I went to
one of these guys and I said, so you have
anything you want to say, because he had done very
well and I didn't expect him to say anything more
than thank you and go. He's like, man, this is tough.
This was really hard, and I was like, dude, it's

(02:20:00):
supposed to be hard. That's the whole point. And that's
when he rolled up his pants leg and showed me
that he was a BTK. I had walked this guy
all over southern New Mexico and he had never said
anything and had done his job on his own, all alone,

(02:20:21):
face to face with me giving him a hard time.

Speaker 5 (02:20:26):
And it was at that point I realized.

Speaker 4 (02:20:29):
That is one you know, this is in the eighty
second when you say that that guy's as hard as
woodpecker lips. Yeah, you know, I mean he was one
hard character. Well, years later, when I'm trying to figure
out how I'm going to move this character from this

(02:20:50):
side of the house to that side of the house,
it only seemed fair to make sure that there was
a person there who was a BTK who said right
up front, I'm not a victim. I am a person
who is still in the fight, and I will remain

(02:21:14):
in the fight until I retire.

Speaker 5 (02:21:16):
And you know, the.

Speaker 4 (02:21:17):
Special Operations community, the Army as a whole is filled
with people right now who are gravely who were gravely
injured in a rocker Afghanistan and are still in the fight.
And God bless them for that, because most folks don't
even know that they're that they are wounded warriors because
they don't tell anybody, They don't ask for any any pity.

(02:21:38):
They just want to do their job. So that's that's
Mike four goes through a bunch of different stuff. There's
seven in the series. Six of them are about Mike four,
and one of them is entirely focused on a prequel
about her grandfather.

Speaker 5 (02:21:55):
Because through the series you.

Speaker 4 (02:21:57):
Find out that there's a vendetta between a Russian family
of spies and an American family of spies, and book
four reveals, actually Book three reveals that the origins of
that vendetta.

Speaker 6 (02:22:16):
So, guys, so check out if you I mean, check
out the Mic Force series. I'm going to talk about
a school for the Great Game which to me is
a mix of Kipling Hopkirk The Great Game.

Speaker 3 (02:22:33):
Uh uh, it's got.

Speaker 6 (02:22:38):
It's steampunk, like it says, it's a steampunk rise novel,
but it's also like a Philip K. Dick like alternate
alternative history or alternate history. It's it's a fascinating book
that draws on real history of the world. It's basically
The Great Game, but more in a steampunk environment where

(02:23:00):
it's a little bit of Ian Fleming, where mysticism and
mentalism actually exist. I mean, it's a fascinating book. Where
did this come from?

Speaker 4 (02:23:10):
Because there's two of these, there's actually I'm working on
the third one.

Speaker 5 (02:23:14):
We're in will I on a regular basis.

Speaker 4 (02:23:17):
You know, my wife's an artist, and all of the
illustrations in that book.

Speaker 5 (02:23:21):
Are from her.

Speaker 3 (02:23:22):
Oh cool, So.

Speaker 5 (02:23:24):
But you know, I'll regularly say to her.

Speaker 4 (02:23:27):
Recently, I'm saying like, I'm going back to my office
and back to nineteen fifteen, because book three is set
in World War One. So what I'd like to tell
people about this series is, if you can imagine Rudyard
Kipling's Kim meeting stan Lee's Doctor Strange. Yeah, yeah, that's

(02:23:49):
the story.

Speaker 6 (02:23:50):
But there's Ian fleming that there's there's Her Majesty's Secret Service.

Speaker 4 (02:23:55):
Oh well yeah, well, well here's the here's the deal.
I mean, when in the eighties, when I was in
f you know, doing the Afghan stuff. One of the
things that I really believe in is if you're going
to do this trade, you have to understand history. Whatever
culture you're working against, you have to understand history. So

(02:24:16):
the good news is when the Brits left the subcontinent,
they left behind the print plates for all of their
old books, and so you could buy in books you
still can buy in bookstores memoirs of you know, twenty
years on a Kiber, this and that and the other thing. Well,
a lot of those books include these statements that, you know,

(02:24:41):
the guy dyes his skin with walnut oil and puts
on the local garb and disappears in the crowd. Well listen, bullshit,
trust me. Yeah, I mean exactly. I mean, I speak
the language pretty darn good. I grew a beard that
looked like zz top. But let me tell you, I
didn't fool any locals, right except maybe at a distance

(02:25:05):
where if they were looking to shoot somebody.

Speaker 5 (02:25:07):
They might not shoot me first.

Speaker 4 (02:25:10):
They'd shoot me eventually they were not going to shoot
me first.

Speaker 5 (02:25:14):
So okay, fine.

Speaker 4 (02:25:15):
So but I thought to myself, Okay, well I know
it's not true, but what if it was true. Well,
if it was true, somebody would have to teach these
guys to do this stuff. So I created the school
right where they were being taught how to disappear into

(02:25:35):
the crowd, how to run their operations against the Russians.
Now by the second book, they're Russians and the Brits
are allies, and they're running their operations against the Germans,
as they are in this new book too. But it's

(02:25:56):
a fun book. It takes a lot longer to write
because I put real people into the story, and those
real people kind of have to be where I say
they are, right, because most folks are going to wonder
about who are these people? And in today's world of

(02:26:18):
Google and Wikipedia, people are going to really quick no
if I was completely off base, right, So I do.

Speaker 5 (02:26:26):
I do a fair bit of research.

Speaker 4 (02:26:28):
But of course, as I said, I bought a whole
bunch of books from that time period and brought them
back to the States. My office has got probably five
hundred books of background stuff that I can use.

Speaker 5 (02:26:39):
It just means I have to be a student again.
That's all.

Speaker 3 (02:26:43):
Well, what's so fascinating about it?

Speaker 6 (02:26:46):
Is it like in a lot of like in some ways,
if you took out the fictional elements, the characters, the
you know that, you know, the steampunk, you know, the
you know, the magic or whatever, it's a history book.

Speaker 3 (02:27:01):
Like there's so much rich history in it.

Speaker 6 (02:27:03):
About Afghanistan, about like there are so many things and
I'm like, oh my gosh, like you know.

Speaker 3 (02:27:08):
You're talking about the possible.

Speaker 4 (02:27:09):
Oh yeah, I mean when I'm talking about the Waziris
and the Mansuits, and that's absolutely the Waziris and the
Marsuits were regularly causing trouble up on the and the Fata.

Speaker 5 (02:27:18):
Well you know.

Speaker 4 (02:27:19):
And and the thing about the mysticism is interesting. I
got that from there was a h An adventurer, a
Belgian adventurer that went up into Tibet in the thirties.

Speaker 5 (02:27:33):
Oh and he came and he came.

Speaker 4 (02:27:35):
Back and wrote this book about all those things that
I'm talking about, right, all the the you know, the
the uh being able to jump long distances and being
able to be untelepathy and all that stuff. Now another
you know short you know, reality story. I have a

(02:27:57):
friend who I worked with for years and years and years,
Special Forces guy was also an Olympic kayaker, and years
later he was hired by National Geographic to be a
scout for them. They were going to sport a sponsor
a team that was going to try and and and
whitewater raft, so rafting on the headwaters of the Ganges

(02:28:21):
all the way from Nepal down to Calcutta. Well, you know,
my friend Wick, he uh, and he's a writer as well.
He's he's now, of course we're all geezers, so we
can't be adventurers anymore.

Speaker 5 (02:28:37):
We have to write.

Speaker 4 (02:28:37):
But he was doing this and he was you know,
of course he doesn't speak Nepali uh, and he doesn't
speak kindy. So so what he did was on his
first leg of the whitewater, he hired a young man
who was from the University Katmandu, spoke good English uh
and was a comparative religion guy, which in University cat

(02:29:00):
And who meant he was comparing red hat white hat Buddhism.
But anyhow, Wicks, you know, spending his time with this
guy and at one point he says, after some weeks
and he's made friends with the guy look at He says,
I don't want to insult you, but I've been reading
for years about the fact that, you know, Tibetan monks

(02:29:25):
could could you know, astral project from one monastery to
another monastery, and you know all that stuff. I've read
this book about this guy who says he's seen all
this stuff, like really, And the young man said, you know, yeah, absolutely,
there's you got to separate facts in fiction, right, I mean,

(02:29:45):
it's our religion is our religion, and we believe these
things and some of these things, he says personally, and
then he he you know, raises his hand. He says,
I've never seen a monk Levita anymore than up the
height of my shoulder, and and wiccoes, all right, then

(02:30:07):
that answers the question, you know.

Speaker 5 (02:30:09):
So so I just.

Speaker 4 (02:30:11):
Put that stuff in because it's fun, it's you know,
and it gives me an opportunity to get some of
the characters out of jams. Sure that would they would otherwise,
you know. And and partly it's true that if you
are able to, i mean, disappearing in the crowd is
one thing. But there's plenty of stories of modern stories

(02:30:37):
about snipers disappearing into ground that nobody would expect they
could disappear too, right, And that's because.

Speaker 5 (02:30:48):
What well, I mean, it's it's because.

Speaker 4 (02:30:52):
They understand how the adversary's mind works. So if you
look like something that the adversary expects to see, then
you are. You're not invisible in the sense of doctor
Strange invisible, but you are invisible to your adversary.

Speaker 5 (02:31:11):
Because I don't see you. Right.

Speaker 3 (02:31:13):
It's also like it's just a fun element to the story.

Speaker 2 (02:31:16):
Let's jump into the user questions here. Let's try to
get through these for JR.

Speaker 3 (02:31:22):
Okay, Jerry, thank you very much.

Speaker 6 (02:31:24):
Do you have knowledge about operations some moom back in
nineteen ninety in Iraq?

Speaker 4 (02:31:31):
No, I mean, I'm not a I'm a Central Asian guy,
So I'm sorry, I can't.

Speaker 5 (02:31:37):
I can't speak on.

Speaker 4 (02:31:38):
Iraq at all. My I made two trips to Iraq,
and neither one of them were in that time period.
I mean I made two trips in the Rock because
I had some of my black propaganda team there, so
I was in Bagdad and Ramadi a couple of times.
But no, sorry, I I'm not trying to dodge it.

(02:32:01):
I just don't know anything.

Speaker 3 (02:32:02):
About it, and you know, as you weren't trying to judge.
It's totally cool.

Speaker 6 (02:32:05):
We get it, John Verre, but we know you John Pierre,
thank you very much.

Speaker 3 (02:32:11):
Keeping people safe. Last year was reported that the agents.

Speaker 6 (02:32:13):
Made to call out on the loss of too many informants?
Is the is the cause the tougher environments or the
lack of talented handlers?

Speaker 3 (02:32:24):
And I'm going to add on to this order, is
there do you think that there are other issues?

Speaker 4 (02:32:31):
Well, first of all, right, the whole idea of what's
called uts right, ubiquitous technical surveillance makes it exceptionally hard
to do the old kind of trade craft I did.

Speaker 5 (02:32:45):
Right.

Speaker 4 (02:32:47):
Then you add to that, how are you going to
communicate with these folks if you can't see him face
to face? Well, then you then you enter another piece
of Now you're into another world where cyber operations and
cybersecurity and everything else. So I think that what happens
is we go through it is and I don't want

(02:33:09):
to make light of it because it's people's deaths, But
it is a competition, just like it's a competition between
stealth aircraft and air defense. You're constantly competing with your
adversary who's trying to get better to defeat you, and
then as they start to defeat you, you have to

(02:33:32):
figure out new mechanisms, new means to get through it.
So I think probably the answer is the technology is
moving so quickly now that it's really hard to do
the job that I mean, you couldn't do the job
that I did. Really, honestly, the sort of trade craft

(02:33:53):
I used might as well be you might as well
be talking about the nineteenth century.

Speaker 6 (02:33:57):
Right, Yeah, Rowdy's incoherent rambling.

Speaker 3 (02:34:05):
Thank you very much for your donation. Very good podcast.

Speaker 5 (02:34:08):
Thank you.

Speaker 6 (02:34:09):
I spent a good bit of last night actually doing
some more research on early two thousand and one operations.
Interesting listening to someone who is on the ground watching
it all unfold. And thank you very much Jr. For
being here and for sharing your experiences with us and
with our audience.

Speaker 4 (02:34:27):
Like, well, it's my you know, I won't say a
pleasure because it reminds me of a death of a teammate,
but it is nice to be able to now, twenty
years later, be able to talk about something and tell people,
how to explain to people how complicated it is. It's
not it's not easy to do this stuff, and it

(02:34:51):
requires time on target. Yeah, you know it, two thousand
and one didn't happen because of two thousand and one.

Speaker 5 (02:34:59):
It happened because of we were doing in the nineteen eighties.

Speaker 4 (02:35:02):
Right, And you could say the same thing about what
happened in Iraq.

Speaker 5 (02:35:05):
You could say the same thing today. Probably.

Speaker 4 (02:35:08):
I mean, I don't know anything about Ukraine except what
I read the newspaper. But my guess is some of
those successes are probably associated with a partnership between the
Ukrainians and some part of the United States government.

Speaker 6 (02:35:23):
Right, just say it, right that the foundation has been there,
Sassar an Omen, thank you very much for the donation.
Thanksteam House. Your content never disappoints. Thank you that with
We're all broke my heart in your opinion? Does this
so this is your opinion. It doesn't have to be

(02:35:46):
based on anything you do or don't know. Does CEI
have plans in supporting the resistance Afghanistan?

Speaker 4 (02:35:52):
Yeah?

Speaker 6 (02:35:52):
Would you think about would you think that the agency
would have plans in supporting the resistance there?

Speaker 3 (02:35:57):
Or do you think that would probably just pull up?

Speaker 4 (02:35:59):
I mean again, it's been years and years since I've
been I haven't been in the building and only that
as a guest, and that was five years ago. So
I mean, so that's again, let's go back to what
I said before. In nineteen eighty nine, theoretically we stopped
being in contact with Afghans? Did we stop? Were we

(02:36:23):
and we like stop the whole program? Did we stop
working with Afghans?

Speaker 5 (02:36:29):
Well?

Speaker 4 (02:36:30):
No, you know, now it's complicated by the way that
everything has happened in Afghanistan. But you know, in nineteen
ninety one and ninety two, we were still contacting Afghans
in the middle of a civil war. In nineteen ninety eight,

(02:36:50):
I was still contacting Afghans when the Taliban were in charge.
So I can't imagine that there aren't people in the
agency working this problem set. However, I want to reinforce
to your to your to the folks who write and

(02:37:13):
to you guys. I don't know, right, I'm a geezer.
I am long out of practice. I mean, it was amazing.
I tell people. When I tell people I was riding
on you know, on horses at forty six, they roll
their eyes at that. You can imagine. You can imagine
at sixty seven how useless I would be in that game,

(02:37:34):
so nobody is much interested in what I have to
think or say.

Speaker 6 (02:37:38):
Yeah, Stuart, oh, thank you very much for the donation.

Speaker 3 (02:37:41):
We really appreciate it. Jr.

Speaker 6 (02:37:44):
Thanks for telling the stories of the accomplishments of you
and your team.

Speaker 3 (02:37:47):
Makes me proud.

Speaker 4 (02:37:50):
Well, thank you very much for saying that. It's the
that time period was something that was really something and
it wasn't just remember we were Alpha Bravo, but it
was I mean, if you haven't read the books, I mean,
Foxtrot and Condihar is about uh Echo and Fox Fox
Trot teams. Uh, there's there's a you know, there were

(02:38:13):
a bunch of I mean, Fox Trott was probably the
last of the teams that was behind lines. Uh, but
there were teams. I mean we were we were just
two of all those others. And I would have to
actually get my fingers and count on my toes to
try and figure out how many. But because I'm I'm
not real good about the alphabet and all that. But

(02:38:33):
I'm just saying there were a lot of guys out
there who committed to this and did very much the
same sort of stuff we all fought in this battle,
along with the odas, along with the Rangers who went
into Condohar early on along with the you know this
special boat Service guys that you know were with me

(02:38:56):
for weeks. Uh, so you know it's it's a good thing.

Speaker 3 (02:39:01):
Scotchy, thank you very much for the genation.

Speaker 6 (02:39:03):
How does black propaganda work when the enemy enemy knows
who it's coming from. I want to have more effective
trash talk in video games.

Speaker 4 (02:39:14):
Well, the enemy can't know where it's coming from. That's
the whole point, right, So what you do in black
propaganda is, let's I'll just give you a generic example.
So if I well, I mean, you don't have to
do a generic example. We could do what the Russians
to talk about what the Russians did in sixteen, So

(02:39:37):
they created fictional Americans to reside on the web to
say whatever they wanted to. Because they were fictional, they
could say whatever. And the idea was to create controversy,
to create hostility on the web. So sometimes those fictional

(02:40:04):
Americans were pro Hillary, sometimes they were pro Donald Trump.
Sometimes they were neither. And they were doing wedge issue stuff,
whether it was gun control or abortion or Christianity or
whatever that in today's world, it's really it's not easy,

(02:40:28):
but it is much easier to create fictional characters than
it's ever been before that are that are that appear real, right,
I mean with with Ai especially, you can look like
or that that fictional character can absolutely look like he's
writing to you right now, uh huh. And and the

(02:40:52):
time stamp is going to be right, and the IP
address is going to be right, all of that stuff.
So I would say to your to the it's about
making sure that they that you are not who you
say you are.

Speaker 6 (02:41:06):
So Scott, you need some sock puppet accounts exactly when
you're trash talking and gaming, you need to create some
sock puppet accounts to create controversial topics.

Speaker 2 (02:41:16):
I got one last question from Isaac. It's a little
bit of a long one, but he says, dear mister Seeger,
I'm twenty nine years old in my second year of
university getting my bachelor's and Computer information Systems. After that,
I want to get my master's in cybersecurity. When I'm done,
I want to apply for the agency. I would be
happy doing clandestine services, being a case officer or cyber

(02:41:36):
ops officer, but I want to work, do the work
like you did, and go into ground branch but I'm
afraid of hitting the same roadblocks as when I tried
to enlist. I could not enlist in the army because
I didn't qualify for medical waivers, even though I'm not
medically restricted at all. The recruiter described to me that
a MEPs doctor did not want to take the chance

(02:41:57):
on me. Also, I had a record for misdemeanor, which
has been resolved for a long time. What can I
do to make the agency see me and increase my
chances of getting in? Do they care if people were
never honorable students because I'm not. Does even asking questions
a lot format like this hurt my chances?

Speaker 3 (02:42:16):
What do you think? JR?

Speaker 4 (02:42:18):
Okay, First things first, nobody in either the CIA or
the FBI is going to look at anybody who's still
an undergraduate. What we want to see is a person,
and again I've worked with FBI recruiters just as much
as I've worked with CIA recruiters. What we want to
see as a person who has finished school and then

(02:42:41):
gone to do something else. Because let's face it, when
you're in college, you probably don't meet nasty people. You
may think they're nasty professors, but you don't meet challenging
nasty people, and you're going to be in the CIA
or the FBI, You've got to understand that perspective.

Speaker 5 (02:43:06):
So start with that.

Speaker 4 (02:43:07):
So basically, what they want to see is four year
degree followed by some work. Actually they'll be fine with
a two year degree followed by some work. Doesn't have
to be military, work, doesn't have to be could be anything.

Speaker 5 (02:43:25):
I mean, it just needs to be work.

Speaker 4 (02:43:27):
Then the other part of this, which is important to realize,
it's totally different from my world. Everybody applies online. Everybody,
and so tell the truth when you apply, show them
what you have done, and then hope for the best.

(02:43:50):
Because it's a it's a it's a rigorous selection process,
and it is you know, the vetting process starts with
checking to see if what you put online is true.

Speaker 5 (02:44:04):
Anybody who might.

Speaker 4 (02:44:07):
Try to make their resume better than it really is
probably is immediately going to get rejected. So just tell
the truth, do your job, get it, go to school,
go to a graduate school. While you're in graduate school,
get a job that would be associated with your with

(02:44:29):
your career, and then apply. What's the worst that can happen, right,
you know, I mean really, but it's not a secret.
You just go online to CIA dot gov or FBI
dot gov. It's right there, the applications right there.

Speaker 5 (02:44:44):
Do it.

Speaker 6 (02:44:45):
And in your case, you did apply, you got rejected,
and then later on, when you weren't even looking, they
called you. So it's sort of it's one of those
things where just because you get told no the first time, like,
keep living your life and gaining the experience, keep doing things.

Speaker 4 (02:45:01):
Absolutely, and I can understand now looking back on it,
why they weren't interested in me in nineteen seventy eight
because I'd gone to graduate school and I had just
started working period. Right I was in Wyoming working, but
I hadn't really proven that I could actually hold a
job all that well. I mean i'd proven that I

(02:45:22):
could go to school. Well that's great, lots of people
go to school. And you're right, it wasn't until after
I had been in the army. And of course it
was just literally dumb luck. But that you know sometimes,
you know, Louis Pasteur said something that I like to
use this quote a lot, which is fortune favors the

(02:45:45):
prepared mind. Okay, so if you're prepared, then when luck
does strike, you know, I mean, you're more likely to
succeeed than if the guy who hasn't thought it through.

Speaker 2 (02:46:01):
Yeah, JR, I really appreciate you taking the time. I
know I've kept you like way long, almost like three
hours here tonight. Again, really appreciate your time and telling
the story. I hope people check out the mic for series, oh.

Speaker 3 (02:46:16):
And and the school for the Great Game. Guys, this
is a really enjoyable read. If like yeah, I am.

Speaker 2 (02:46:23):
Enjoying that, they'll link to the books is down the
description of this video so you can find it right there.
Next week, we're going to have a one to sixtieth
guy on he flew MH forty seven's for one sixtieth.
Excited to talk to him on Friday next Friday. We're
also a bit at the end of an era here.
We're moving studios, so by the end of this month

(02:46:46):
you're going to see episodes in our new studio. This
place is going to be shut down.

Speaker 3 (02:46:51):
Jack and I were just looking at emails or earlier
we've been We've been in here for like four years altogether.

Speaker 6 (02:46:56):
Yeah yeah, yeah, so and Jack the Smith, thank you
very much for the donation.

Speaker 3 (02:47:00):
We deeply appreciate it. JR.

Speaker 2 (02:47:03):
I would love I know, you split your time between
two different locations. When the next time you come through
the Greater New York metropolitan area, like sometimes this fall
or this winner. I'd love to have you in our
new studio because you're also a bit of a historian,
and I would love to have you just sit down
and discuss the history of CIA paramilitary operations or just

(02:47:24):
CIA in general, because you have so much information about
that and you've studied it so closely, you're so passionate
about it. I'd love to continue this conversation, you know
later on in this year.

Speaker 4 (02:47:36):
Well, I'll be happy to Justin's already invited me to
come to New York and talk to him as well, So,
you know, I think we'll make it, make it work.

Speaker 5 (02:47:44):
I'm not sure when.

Speaker 4 (02:47:46):
Uh uh, you know, that's a that's the great thing
about being a mere wretched federal pensioner.

Speaker 5 (02:47:51):
I don't actually have a schedule.

Speaker 3 (02:47:54):
Maybe maybe we can have both you and Justin come
in at the same time. That would be amazing.

Speaker 4 (02:47:58):
Yeah, uh, okay, guys, well it's been my pleasure and
uh and and good luck as you move studios.

Speaker 5 (02:48:05):
That's pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (02:48:06):
Yeah, thank you. We're really excited about it. And all
the things that to come. It's gonna be awesome.

Speaker 3 (02:48:11):
JR.

Speaker 2 (02:48:12):
Thank you again, and everybody else out there. We'll see
you next Friday. Have a good weekend okay out here.

Speaker 3 (02:48:20):
Thank care, JR.

Speaker 5 (02:48:21):
Thank you JR.

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CIA Paramilitary Team Leader | JR Seeger (throwback episode)

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}CIA Paramilitary Team Leader | JR Seeger (throwback episode)