20+ Years in the CIA & 16 Years as CSO of Microsoft | Mike Howard | Ep. 321

Mike Howard is the former Chief Security Officer (CSO) at Microsoft for 16 years, with previous careers at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for 22 years and in my youth, a few years with the Oakland, California Police Department. https://www.mikehowardauthor.com Order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse ___________________________________________________ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnPodcast/featured —————————————————————- Today's Sponsors: GhostBed⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 50% OFF!!! Mando ⬇️ https://shopmando.com Promo code "TEAMHOUSE" for 40% off your starter pack. ____________________________________ Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— To help support the show and for all bonus content including: https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [email protected] 0:00 start Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Jack Murphy?

  Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month, and when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad-free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers, but this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House channel and podcast if you'd like to, and we really appreciate that. So go and check us out at patreon.com/theTeamHouse.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Special Operations. Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park.

• 1:30Jack Murphy?

  Hey folks, welcome to episode 321 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park, and our guest on tonight's show is Mike Howard. He is a retired CIA Operations Officer. We're really excited to have him on the show tonight. I'll kick it over to Dave for a shout out to one of our sponsors.

• 1:47Speaker 03

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• 3:14Jack Murphy?

  So Mike, thank you for coming on the show tonight. You know, you got introduced to us by Rick Prado, which is apropos because we're here smoking cigars and he's one of my two or three go-to guys for cigar recommendations.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  That's racist.

• 3:30Jack Murphy?

  Because he's Cuban?

• 3:32Speaker 04

  Okay, I'm leaving the show now. I can't be on a racist show.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  I know.

• 3:39Jack Murphy?

  So Mike, tell us a little bit about, you know, how you grew up and how that took you towards governmental service.

• 3:47Speaker 04

  Okay, good. First of all, thanks to both you, Jack and Dave, for having me on. It's an honor and I'm just looking forward to this conversation. I really appreciate your backgrounds and everything you did to serve our great nation. So thank you for that.

• 4:03Speaker 04

  Well, I grew up, I was born in Waltham, Massachusetts. I'm an Army brat. My dad did 20 years in the Army. He retired as a Sergeant First Class. He had kind of an unusual career. We, I barely know Waltham. California is what I consider home. He went from Waltham to move the family to

• 4:26Speaker 04

  Fort Lewis, Washington State, and then eventually ended up in Fort Ord, California. And that's the area that I call home on Monterey Peninsula. He did a tour of Vietnam sixty-seven, sixty-eight, and then an unaccompanied tour seventy-one to seventy-two to Germany. But like a lot of the NCOs on the block, and it was later in life I realized how unusual it was. He was basically stationary there in Fort Ord, so that was home. And I'm half-Japanese, so my mother, he met my mom when he was stationed in Japan back in the day. And obviously she immigrated to the US.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  And we grew up in a nice little suburban community called Marina. We lived on base for a little while, and then they built this city called Marina. And a lot of the GIs could, wanted to move off base, so they went there with their spouses and raised their kids there. And in terms of, and I had a really normal, middle-class upbringing. You know, I used to get everything. I was an only child. I had a brother that he died when I was five years old. When I was five years old and he was four years old. We were, we were actually back in Germany when I was a kid. I can get into that a little bit.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  But in terms of how I ended up with, you know, thinking about the government, it's, it's, it's, I guess it's unusual. I was one of those kids that always knew what I wanted to do. And I think it's because I probably watched too many cop shows back when I was growing up. I'm sixty-eight right now, I'll be sixty-nine in August, so I was born in fifty-six, so I grew up with, you know, Dragnet. All these shows from the late fifties, detective shows, cop shows, and I just, I watched them. I think at one point, my mom told me that when I was, I don't know, I don't know, a little bit. And my dad came home from work and he said something to me, and I wasn't listening to him. I was just watching focused on some cop show. So that's all I always wanted to be.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  And when I, like, birthdays and Christmas, you know, I always wanted a, you know, detective guns or, or army, you know, toys and all this other kind of stuff.

• 6:40Jack Murphy?

  Were you interested, like, were you, I just wanted to interrupt real quick. I just wanted to ask, like, were you into, like, Bruce Lee and things like that? Because I'm, I see that.

• 6:47Speaker 04

  Karate, Aikido stuff behind you. Yeah, that came later in life when I realized that I had no physical skills like playing football or basketball and the only thing that I was ever good at was that and that was age fourteen, but I'll kind of progress to that. But yeah, so I always know what I wanted to do. And even in the eighth grade, I was a library assistant at a junior high school. And I always remember the librarian Frances Brown, her husband was the resident agent for the FBI for Monterey County. And she gave me all this information that he would provide for me. And he actually, I asked if he would come to school and speak to the students and all that kind of stuff. So I was always into, I even got to the point one time in my life when I was probably ten ish.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  I asked my mom for a map of the US and in my little simple brain, I would write to, I don't know, let's say Alaska State Police, do you know Alaska? Hi, my name is Mike Howard. I'm ten. I want to be a police officer someday. Could you send me any information? And holy smokes, I was getting letters and packages all the time with patches and information. Even, I even wrote to Scotland Yard and I wrote to the Texas Rangers and the Mounties. And so I was always kind of really, really into that, thinking that, you know, I was always going to be a police officer someday. I tried my hand at football, you know, when I was in junior high school. Sucked at that. Played tennis. I was, I loved tennis, but I was kind of, I, I, I,

• 8:19Speaker 04

  I played on the freshman high school tennis team, but I was kind of like on the C team. But then I, some friends of mine, I grew up in that town called Marina, some friends of mine said, hey, you know, at this junior high school, which I'd gone to, Los Angeles Junior High School, they said every Tuesday and Thursday, there's this thing called the Marina Judo, Jiu Jitsu and Karate School. And we're taking it's pretty cool, right? And I had, I'd taken a Judo course in Monterey, but they were really tournament oriented and they really didn't give a crap about folks like me. They just, I didn't have an innate talent for that. So we, my mom took me out of that one, but I tried, I went into this one.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  And it was like the greatest thing since sliced bread. We had a head instructor, John Chauhoon, and several other instructors. And they taught, unlike today, I think, in a lot of martial arts schools. They taught not just the techniques of martial arts, but the philosophy. And I remember as a kid, you know, fourteen year old kid, he asked us our very first lesson. You know, we had gees and white belts. And so what's the first lesson in martial arts? You know, in our little pea brains, he said, oh, you know, you get to defend yourself and fight and blah, blah, blah. I said, no, you run away. And we looked at each other like, oh, we don't want to do this because that was the Bruce Lee craze, right? That was the beginning of the Kung Fu craze and all that. And we wanted to do that.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  And he said, no, you run away because what we're going to teach you, you could kill somebody. So you run away until you can't run away and you have to defend yourself. And that started this long arc. I probably did martial arts from the age fourteen till, oh, fairly active into my fifties. You know, when I was at Microsoft, running their executive protection unit. But it was the only thing physically that I ever took. It was like fish in water. I loved every aspect of it. And being half Japanese, obviously, I loved, I loved that, the history of it. You know, the samurai and the warrior, the Bushido code, as well as learning all of that. So that was, that was a seminal part of my, my life.

• 10:27Speaker 04

  Then went off to college in San Jose State. Always wanted to go there because they had arguably one of the best criminal justice programs in the country. So I majored in criminal justice with an emphasis in law enforcement. And then my minor was sociology because I really kind of dig the way, how people think in, you know, population wise and how that affects what's happening in the world.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:53Speaker 04

  And I, I went through three and a half years and it was.

• 10:57Speaker 00

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• 11:26Speaker 04

  When this thing, I don't know if you guys know California in terms of the politics, but back then there was something called Proposition 13 that was gonna come around the pike, right? So Proposition 13 was initiated by a legislator in California called, was, was the Howard Jarvis Act. And what it effectively would have done, did, it would have cut property taxes, which in California fueled a lot of the public safety. So fire, police, emergency services, etc. So I had a professor in college who was my favorite professor, he's deceased now, God rest him, Tom McNerney, he'd been a former Oakland police officer, detective, was injured on the job.

• 12:09Speaker 04

  They were surveilling auto burglary theft ring, and he got in front of one of the cars, blasted at it, and the guy hit him and, you know, shattered his leg. He survived, but he left on disability and went to teach at San Jose State. And he was one of the coolest professors too, because, kind of getting aside, but it's worth noting, he tried to bring a lot of realism into class. Like, he would bring prostitutes that he knew from back in the day in Oakland into the classroom to talk to us impressionable college students about what it's like to be a hoe on the street.

• 12:47Speaker 04

  His, every year, there was a guy named Mel Wald who was with the San Francisco Police Department. He wasn't a cop, but he was in the S and M community. And he was San Francisco Police Department's liaison to the S and M. So if they, if there was some, you know, auto asphyxiation kind of thing, and homicide came in in San Francisco, and they had to determine whether or not it was that or whether it was a murder, they'd bring Mel in. So every year, Tom would bring Mel over, and Mel would bring one of his slaves. And they would have the full, now, mind you, the first time he did this, I was, I think I was a junior, or maybe sophomore in high school.

• 13:30Speaker 04

  And he's bringing in, I swear to God, he, Mel brought in like dildos and slideshow and restraint devices and explaining how all these things work. And we're kind of looking at each other, and we're getting credit for this, you know? And he would, but he tried to bring the realism into the office. And I thought that was so cool. But he told all of us as seniors, he said, "Look, this proposition is going to pass." And those of you wanting to go into police departments realize that if you wait till this thing passes, you probably, they won't be hiring, there'll be a hiring freeze, which he was right. So I left college with a semester left, which was obviously a consternation to my parents. But I left to join the Oakland Police Department. I applied to a lot of departments in California,

• 14:15Speaker 04

  but got picked up by Oakland and I finished my degree on the job. And hence started my three years, it was seventy-seven to nineteen eighty when I was in Oakland. And it was, it was, it was a job of a lifetime. I, I loved every aspect of it. Oakland at that time had about a thousand officers. Now I think they're down to six hundred something. I mean, they're really woefully understaffed. And, but it was Oakland still Oakland. It, there are some nice areas up in the Oakland Hills, but, and around Lake Merritt, kind of the middle of, of West, West Oakland. But it's all, where I worked in West Oakland, there were pimps and prostitutes, gangs, ghettos,

• 15:00Speaker 04

  they call them the hood now. There were just a lot of stuff going on. So I got a, in one year, in my first year as a rookie, I probably learned as much as a lot of folks that had been in smaller departments, they were ten years.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:15Speaker 04

  And, you know, I can remember, and stop me if I'm.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  No, Mike, I wanna, I just wanna ask you, because you know, you, when you were growing up, you had this fixation with police. Was there, cause I know that, and there were a lot of cop shows from, you know, the sixties and seventies, SWAT came out and stuff like, was there a certain type of policing that you thought you wanted to do? Like, did you wanna be a beat cop? Did you wanna be a detective? Did you wanna be a special tactics guy? Like, is there, was there something in your mind you wanted?

• 15:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I always wanted to be a detective, you know, I thought and because when I was growing up, that was before obviously SWAT, you know, I remember SWAT as a teenager. Uh, but I always wanted to be a detective. I thought the coolest things were to be a detective. And then eventually my, my goal in life was eventually to leave the police department after retirement, become a private eye. Uh huh. And, uh, I always, that, that was kind of the goal. Yeah. And, and at one point I toyed with, uh, joining the bureau, being an FBI. And even when I was a cop in Oakland, uh, you know, the bureau has a program where if you do three years in professional capacity, whether it's, uh, law enforcement or basically you can be a school teacher, you, you then can apply to become an FBI agent.

• 16:29Speaker 04

  But, yeah, I always thought I'd, I'd stick with the, I always know, I always wanted a big city though. I always wanted a big city department. I never want to work for, uh, a small town. Not taking anything away from small town cops, they're risking their lives too. But I just think you learn a lot more, uh, when you're doing what we did in the big city on a daily basis. Uh, you're making car stops every single day. I mean, you're doing, you know, I remember they had a program in Oakland, I don't know if they still have it, where once a year they would bring officers from different parts of California, smaller departments to ride with us. And I had this one guy, he was sergeant, so this is my, starting my second year. And he rode with me and he, great guy, nice guy. He was a sergeant from, I think someplace in

• 17:13Speaker 04

  Northern California, had been on 10 years. And we're rolling on Saturday and we're rolling to, you know, 459 burglary in progress and, or 187 murder or 211 robbery in progress. And we're just, and at one point, we're, there's a burglar in this one kind of factory area, so we set up a perimeter and we're getting ready to call in the dogs and the helicopters and, and he looks at me and he said, you guys do this all the time? And it just always struck me, right? Yeah. This dude has been 10 years. And, and, and again, in my youth, I'm thinking, wow, that's, he's asking me that. And I said, yeah, we, this is kind of the SOP, right? This is what we do. But it also gave me an appreciation of the education I got, the street education I got, uh, while being with Oakland. Uh, officer safety.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  Was paramount, you know, how you make a car stop, how you approach a car, how you, how you arrest a suspect, search a suspect, approach a suspect. I remember that even to the days when I was in the agency, at one point when we were actually, I'll talk about later, training, you know, foreign liaison personnel, but I, I, I'll always remember those lessons from Oakland and how they drummed Officer Safety into you from day one. They told us in the academy, you may never fire a weapon, but you'll pull your weapon out every day and guaranteed you'll be shot at or people are gonna try to stab you and shoot you and that kind of stuff. And they were right. I mean, usually you go weapons out a couple of times a day. And unlike today in some jurisdictions where every time you

• 18:40Speaker 04

  pull your weapon out, you have to fill out some stupid form, you know, there, you know, that back then you could actually, you could be a cop. I think in a lot of places in this country, you're not allowed to be a cop anymore, for political reasons, obviously. But yeah, so I did that for, for three years thinking, hey, this is my career. I'm gonna do this or maybe I'll go to the bureau. But then one day on my off day, I'm an avid reader and I picked up a book called Piercing the Reich by a guy named Joseph Persico. And it was all about the formation of OSS in World War II and how we learned from the Brits, you know, Special Operations Executive and all those folks that taught OSS what

• 19:22Speaker 04

  they needed to do. And then how OSS penetrated first Nazi occupied Europe and then Germany. And I was reading this, I'm thinking, oh, this is pretty cool stuff, right? And I, and I was a fan of I Spy and James Bond and all that stuff as well, growing up, like probably all of us were. And back then, believe it or not, the CIA had a presence in most federal buildings. So I went across the Bay Bridge one day on, from Oakland to San Francisco on my day off and went and go sought out CIA office. And at that time, getting towards 1980 Reagan, you know, had, had, uh, was taking office. Reagan was rebuilding military, law enforcement, intelligence capabilities after basically been decimated under the last regime. And they said, we could use someone.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  In your capacity as a former law enforcement. And so, you know, I did all the forums and it took a little bit over a year to get through the background, the polygraph, all that stuff and entered what they call the Office of Security. And I didn't know anything about it other than what they told me. And Office of Security provides security for CIA facilities and personnel. Originally, I was going to be one of those guys they called Casey's cops. So William Casey was Director of CIA at the time. He had run European operations for OSS under Donovan in World War II. Made his bones making money on Wall Street, big time Republican.

• 20:52Speaker 04

  Reagan tapped him to be campaign manager. And so when Reagan, you know, got in Reagan asked him, what do you want? I said, I want to be Secretary of State. He said, well, I've given that to George Schultz. What else do you want? I want to be head of CIA, but I want to be in the cabinet. All right. So Casey was the first DCI, Director of Central Intelligence, who was a cabinet official. And one of his ideas was to get a bunch of former cops and other people and go snatch and grab bad guys around the world, right? Which sounded good to me, but I guess it didn't sound good to Congress at the time. So they put the K-bosh on that one. So I ended up with Office of Security, which was great. I mean, we did investigations. I mean, it wasn't the sexiest thing in the world.

• 21:34Speaker 04

  The best part was what they called operational security work. This is when you would protect defectors. You know, if our guys bagged a defector and they brought him into the US or some other place, we'd be armed and to protect that defector over a period of time until while they were being debriefed. And I guess one of the, one of the, the, the main aspects of that was what they used to call a confrontation. This is in Washington DC. So back then, if we had Vladimir from the Soviet Union as a defector, the Soviets under protocol rules had one shot, legitimate shot, to convince Vladimir to come back to Mother Russia.

• 22:18Speaker 04

  And this took place at State Department. And we would have, you know, the asset in a safe house. And the idea was to provide, you know, escort, army escort to State Department. But the trick was, because we knew they would try to surveil us back to the safe house. So try counter surveillance back to the safe house. And it got hairy too in the State Department because, you know how it goes. You guys, you know, I'm preaching to the choir. They say, we really want you to come back, Vladimir. But, you know, anyway, here's a, here's a picture of your aunt this.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:49Speaker 04

  And your brother this.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:51Speaker 04

  And they're okay. I'm sure there'll be no retribution. Now, we wouldn't do anything to them, but I don't know what the neighbors would do. You know, all that kind of stuff.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:58Speaker 04

  And, and we worked with the Bureau a lot on that. And it was a lot of fun. We had a Libyan defector one time. He was pretty cool. He stole a MiG and flew it into Greece. So we did, yeah, you know, we did. And he was, he was, all he wanted was pan pizza, by the way. Every night when we had it. So what do you want? You know, I want the pan pizza. Again, pan pizza, okay, great, you know? But that was a lot of fun. But then, uh, officer security at the time was run by well-meaning people who are woefully ignorant of the real world. The first time I did, uh, operational security work, I was in what they call WFO, Washington Field Office. And we're going to protect a defector.

• 23:41Speaker 04

  And remember, they, they usually get former cops or, and one, one of our colleagues was a former US Marshal. So you used to get folks like us, familiar with firearms, to be on these details. And I remember the ASAC, Assistant Special Agent in Charge, opened up the drawer one day. And he gave us, we were carrying Model 19s, right, Valours. Smith and he, he gave us these baggies. And each, and a baggie had like five rounds. And we kind of looked at us and says, well, these are, these are, this is what you're going to load into the thing. He actually said thing. And I said, well, there's, it's a six. I said, no, no, you can't have six in there because it, you, you might go off if you have a six in there. And I was going, oh my God.

• 24:24Speaker 04

  These were leaders, right?

• 24:27Speaker 03

  Was that, can I, can I ask you real quick? How was that? Was that challenging? Because the CIA generally cannot be armed within the United States, right? Like, you know, the Jason Bourne, like... CIA officers running around everywhere. And I know that like the CIA has their police, like their, their gate guards and people like that. But for you guys who are running these protected details and whatnot, were you like federally, federal law enforcement? Like, how did that work for you? Was it tricky?

• 24:58Speaker 04

  You know, at the time, I didn't know. I, I assumed that there was some special dispensation. You know, I actually can't tell you to this day if there was. I, I, I think it was from a legal standpoint. I think our legal folks were able to work with DOJ to say for, for, for these things and for like these things, protecting the DCI, you can be armed. But you're absolutely right. We normally couldn't be. And, uh, um, but that led me to, and some others to join the DCI, we call DCI Security Staff. Sometimes we call it DCI Slave Staff because we were carrying bags as well as protecting the dude, you know?

• 25:37Speaker 04

  But, uh, we were, uh, we were, so William Casey was the director and he, uh, we were on his detail. So kind of, you know, the Secret Service of the CIA, we traveled domestically with Casey and Deputy Director John McMahon, uh, who was a great guy, uh, all, all over the world. And, you know, we went to the, we were credentialed at the White House. So we worked with the Secret Service all the time. We'd go to Capitol Hill, Pentagon, uh, State Department, DoD all the time. And it was a great, it was a, a great two years. Casey was a very interesting fellow because Cold Warrior. And he loved the agency, especially loved the DO, the operations side of the house. Uh, he tolerated us.

• 26:20Speaker 04

  Uh, but, uh, and, and I remember for two years, he could never, I would joke with my wife all the time. He could never remember my name. Like, my name is Mike, but every morning he said, "Good morning, Bob", because he'd talk like, "Good morning, Bob. Good morning, sir." For two years, I'm Bob, right? But he, but he loved, he loved, he loved the Cold Warriors, you know, the operations officers working in the field. And it was a, and we got to see the world and it was, you know, we were treated very well. We flew out of Andrews in a, in a special plane with a VIP package. And, you know, it was, it was, it was a really great experience to work with a lot of different, it was kind of my first inkling of working with foreign liaison.

• 27:03Speaker 04

  Cause if we went to South Korea, we worked with Blue House and some of those other folks, Korean CIA and et cetera. So my first experience working with foreign liaison personnel. And I loved it. Now, we were, the, the, the leaders of Officer Security at the time routinely called us cowboys, crybabies and gun nuts because they, they didn't know anything about guns. They, they, they grudgingly had to do this in terms of protecting the director because that was the mandate from on high. But they didn't really want that, that, that responsibility. But it was, it was a great time.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  And then I think I was talking to Dave earlier, but one day towards the end of our tour, there's four of us and all of us were former law enforcement. My best friend Scott Kefir, former LAPD Bomb Squad and two other guys, all law enforcement. And we were working on a Saturday and Claire George, who's since deceased, legend in the agency, mostly Europe, Europe, but was the director of operations at the time, the DO, always wore these cool looking Italian suits with the hankies and all that. But just an old fashioned Cold Warrior, but great guy. He came up to us one day and says, oh, hey, Casey's guys, how you guys doing? I said, yeah.

• 28:22Speaker 04

  He said, well, you know, um, there is a, there's a thing that we're forming up called CTC. And CTC is Counterterrorism Center and I think you guys would be good for it.

• 28:39Speaker 04

  And we thought, wow, interesting. So he, we got some entrees into this one particular unit and met with a guy named Bill Servanak, we'll talk about in a little while, who's a mentor to many of us, and ended up making the jump to the dark side. And it was, as we call it, and it was, it was probably the best career move I ever made, at least in terms of the agency. Because while I enjoyed my time in OS security, you know, the main part of the agency, when I say main, I don't denigrate any other part of the agency, we all work together to protect our country, but, you know, the, to me, the heart and

• 29:23Speaker 04

  soul are the operations folks, you know, the ones that actually go out and spot assist, develop, recruit assets, or run covert operations, or whatever, special activities. And so, we went to a unit that was under this Bill Servanak, and Servanak had been a Marine in Vietnam, he fought in the Battle of Way, he was one of our paramilitary guys, and he'd been, I think he was a captain when he left the Corps, and then, really great career, big guy, burly, but just had a heart of gold, taught me so much about leadership. And we worked for him, and our job was to go around the world to train foreign liaison detail,

• 30:07Speaker 04

  protective details, in protective operations, whether it's motorcade, shooting, self-defense, first aid, you know, searching for bombs, advance work, all that kind of stuff.

• 30:19Jack Murphy?

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• 32:15Speaker 03

  Real quick, before we move on, I had made a note, and I think we skipped it. You said that there was a really important leadership lesson you learned when you were a cop.

• 32:24Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, right. Sorry.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I'm sorry that I missed it.

• 32:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, so, so I'm a cop in Oakland, and in Oakland, you know, you have this big bag you carry with you in your car, including a big copy of the penal code because, you know, part of the, it's a six-month academy, and there's obviously a huge section on law. And like I said, we had a lot of prostitutes on my beach, San Pablo Avenue, which went up all the way up from Oakland to Berkeley. And we were always chasing these folks all over the place. We'd drive and they'd run into these ready hotels, and we'd have to chase them and all this other kind of stuff. So one day I see these three gals, and by this time, you know, they know me, I know them by name. I got to the point where if I pulled over a car... And there was like a a a hooker and and and a trick.

• 33:12Speaker 04

  If I shot in my spotlight, back in their head, I knew who that trick was, who the hooker was. I could just tell, right? Because you bust them enough times. But I remember, I was thinking, okay, so six forty seven P C. A penal code of uh in the state of California was prostitution. And so I thought, is there something else I could get him on, right? So I'm reading the penal code and and I find something. It says when two more people are gathered together to commit a criminal act. You know, they're in violation of the law. I said, aha, my little twenty one year old brain, very, you know, enthusiastic cop. And I get out of the car and and they say, yeah, Officer Harris. And said, okay, you guys are under arrest.

• 33:55Speaker 04

  And and they said, yeah, six forty seven, right? Because they knew the penal code as well as we do, right? They got busted on it all the time. I put him in the back in the cage and I said, no, it's like four oh eight or whatever, four oh seven, four oh eight. And they said, what the hell is that? I said, yeah, you know. And I read it to him. So I take him to uh, actually, at that point, we used to have a what they call paddy wagons. They come around and pick the prisoners up to keep the officers on the street. And then they would take the prisoners to jail. At that time, we were under uh this D O J program, which was actually pretty cool, where it was kind of like. I don't know. It was like, it was like, what's the word I want to try? It's it was an incubator thing for what's now what they have computers in cars, right?

• 34:39Speaker 04

  We we call it Digicom. And it had a little screen and you could send little messages to each other in the car, right? And I got a I got a now we call them text message from uh my sergeant, Dave Nishihara, great guy. And uh, you know, ironically, I'm half Japanese and he's Japanese, right? And uh, he he asked to meet me at a particular intersection. So I go there and we used to call him Nish and say, hey, Nish, what's going on? He said, you know, those two hookers you got, you you bagged? I said, yeah, I said, you gotta cut, we cut them loose. How come?

• 35:16Speaker 04

  I said, because I had, I cited penal code, he said, Mike, that is the riot act, right? That's unlawful assembly. You know, right? And I'm thinking, my ego is deflated, thinking I was very ingenious and inventive. And he said, okay, look, two things. You should have thought this one through a little bit more. He said, I'm not gonna write you up. He said, but if you, I said, because I, he said, I know why you did what you did. You know, you're doing it for all the right reasons. You just stepped in it, right? So it cut these gals loose. But he said, you know, you've got a great record so far, blah, blah, blah.

• 35:58Speaker 04

  But he said, look, if you have questions, just call me, contact me, whatever, just ask, right? So that, I think, when I, when I speak on leadership, to me, that was a lesson in what I call forgiveness. Right? Because if I think about it, the trajectory of my life in terms of me being able to take risks, which I, I did later in life, whether it was government or business, might have taken a different turn, right? Because had he not slapped my hand, but then forgiven me and said, okay, go forth and do no more harm.

• 36:37Speaker 04

  Maybe in the agency, I would have thought about doing a particular operation or something and I'd say, nah, I'm not gonna do it. Or in business, I'm gonna try this new initiative, but nah, because it might fail or something, or they might get mad or something, it might be too risky, right? I'm not a risk averse person by nature, but, and my mom was a worrywart, so I probably have a little bit of that. And I think, to me, I carry that, that's how I can remember it at age 68, when that was, happened to me when I was 21 years old. I can remember the, the, the power of forgiveness and understanding. And so I tried to put that to work every time, you know, when I started becoming a leader,

• 37:19Speaker 04

  first in the agency, then at Microsoft, is to remember that if well-meaning people are doing good things, yes, there are times when you have to discipline, and there are times when people are gonna have to, be taken to task for doing something egregious. But there are also times when the art of forgiveness needs to come into play in order to... Rebuild somebody so that they're willing to take calculated risks that might help the cause, the enterprise, the, you know, whatever you're involved in. So that was the lesson I learned from Nishihara.

• 37:52Jack Murphy?

  So take us to this new unit that you guys are standing up where you're gonna train foreign liaison.

• 37:58Speaker 03

  And did they, did they, did they send you guys to the farm for that? Did they put you in the DO pipeline? Or how did that work for you guys?

• 38:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, so back then, I know they don't have it now. They called, they had categories. So, you know, your kind of your, your mainstay case officers were category Bs.

• 38:17Speaker 04

  The spot assess, develop, recruit and, and report, you know, and then your CAT Cs were like Rick and I were at one point CAT Cs called special skills officers. And that could be anywhere from coming in like you guys from special ops to law enforcement, whatever, right? And so you're a special skills officer. They brought us in cold. We, we hadn't gone to the farm yet, you know, they brought us in because they knew, because we had done the work.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 38:46Speaker 04

  We could train the foreign personnel. And what they did along the way, because the secondary, actually, I always told you that was, that was the secondary part of the job. The first part of the job was to spot assess and develop these students, because usually they're the best of the best of their presidential security details, to help spot assess and develop for them for the station and point out to the station in the month or two months that we're there, hey, this person has potential, this person is a little disgruntled with career trajectory, but very smart. So our job was to help assess. So they, they put us eventually all through the farm, but through a program they used to call OCA, Ops Course Accelerated. So it was like 10 weeks, kind of

• 39:30Speaker 04

  a condensed version of what, you know, they get in, in the farm for field trade craft. But we do all the same things, you know, we, you do all the spotting, assessing, development, recruitment exercises, counter surveillance, you know, all that kind of stuff. And because, because we used to joke with our CAT, CAT B colleagues, he said, you know, we do what you do, but you can't do what we do, you know, that's, that's the difference between the two of us. But, um, yeah, so they would, we would do that. And it was, it was, it was a lot of, it was a lot of fun, number one, traveling. I did a lot of work in Africa. My first trips were always, my first trip was to Zaire. To train President Mubutu's detail, being a dictator, but he was our dictator, obviously,

• 40:10Speaker 04

  you know, because we had a war going on in Angola. And I trained his unit and did a lot of what they call Francophone Africa, so Gabon and, and Conde Creek, Guinea, and we did Nigeria. And then end up going to South Africa during apartheid, which was very interesting, being, you know, African American. And so we traveled on dip passport. We used to joke, I slapped that dip passport right on my forehead, right as we entered the country. But they actually considered me, I was told by state embassy folks, well, you're considered an honorary white person. Well, thank you. I always wanted to be the one.

• 40:50Jack Murphy?

  Did, Mike, I want to ask you, when you did these jobs in Africa, did you work with Willie Murkerson at all?

• 40:57Speaker 04

  Willie Murkerson? Man, that's a name from the past. I didn't work with him there. I worked with him later on in life in the agency when we were in recruiting. I did, I did a gig in recruiting and he was in recruiting. You know Willie?

• 41:11Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, I've, I've met Willie and me and my colleague are kind of like writing his biography, I guess you could say.

• 41:18Speaker 04

  Oh, cool.

• 41:19Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I was just curious because he, he was in Sudan when they were evacuating the Falasha Jews and all that kind of stuff.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  Right, right. Yeah, Willie, I haven't heard that name. Well, I literally have not heard that name in, in a long time.

• 41:33Jack Murphy?

  Oh, he's, yeah, he is a, an incredible guy. And as I understand, the last I understood it, they were relooking at his distinguished service cross from Vietnam to see if it needs to be upgraded. So we'll see what happens there. But so apartheid, South Africa, that, yeah, that must have been an interesting experience.

• 41:56Speaker 04

  It was, I mean, I have to imagine, you can imagine, I had a little trepidation going in there. I went with a former Secret Service guy, Mike Mastervito, who was one of our contractors in our unit, and he had started Intel Division for Secret Service. But we were in South African Airlines, and I'm thinking, oh, we're going to Nazi Germany, right? But it was because we were actually there to train the folks in Swaziland, which is just south of South Africa. We were training the Royal Swazi Police. Obviously, we had to work through the station in Pretoria. And I remember, we considered South Africa, just like Russia and China, denied area, simply because, obviously, their embargo and everything else we had on that country.

• 42:41Speaker 04

  So, under surveillance from the time we were there. And I was actually, I was seeing a gal that was at the embassy there in Pretoria, and I remember going to her house, and South African police were, you know, they made no bones about the fact that they were there, just letting us know, right, that they were there. But what struck me as interesting, like, when the embassy folks would take us out to, like, a shopping mall to have lunch or whatever. And they must have thought I was Jesse Jackson or something, because, man, the, like, general managers would come by, "Is there anything we can help you with? Is, are you okay?" "Yeah, I'm fine, man, I'm just having dinner." And it was, it was funny, and that aspect, because, you know, they had all joked and said, "Look, you're, you're an American black."

• 43:25Speaker 04

  They know that, they want to put the best foot forward to show that they're not, you know, racist or whatever. But then you look right outside the window, and you see all the, all the, all the black Afghans, and they couldn't go in, into that restaurant, they couldn't go where you were. And at one point, I remember, the embassy said, "We're gonna go to this concert in this area called the gray area." The gray area was where whites, blacks, and, and Indians, there were a lot of Indian, Indians in South Africa, still are, would mix. And there was, there's a, there used to be a band called Johnny Clegg and Sabuka. Johnny Clegg, and if you guys have never heard Johnny Clegg, you should, you should listen to some of his stuff, it's awesome. It's kind of a blend of rock music and Zulu.

• 44:08Speaker 04

  And he, his band was a, a, a mixture of both, and he learned Zulu dancing, and he would incorporate it into his concerts. But they said, "Look, we're going into this gray area, we're gonna see the concert." There's a chance that the South African police will come and bust us, which they didn't that night because it's illegal, right? For races to mix. So we went there, we saw the concert and but again, it was kind of like, okay, that's interesting point of reference. And then the embassy, it was Easter and they said, hey, we're going to a nearby country, Lesotho, to a hotel there on, you know, the Easter holiday. You guys are visiting, want to come with us? So we did so caravan.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  We're getting in the hinterlands of South Africa before we get into Lesotho. They had to stop for gas. And it was kind of like what you see back in the sixties in the South, right? During Jim Crow, there's white and colored. Well, I can't read Afrikaans, but I know white and the other, right? So I jokingly said, I put the passport right here and went into the white bathroom, you know, and did my thing, you know? And then get back into the car. But again, it was just, it was interesting frame of reference and I went twice to South Africa, but it made an impression, obviously, on us. And it also taught us that as a country, we were doing the right thing and putting an embargo on them for what they were doing to their own people.

• 45:36Speaker 04

  And they were killing them, imprisoning them without a cause, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I did a fair amount of work in Africa. But then, you know, they knew that I loved, my bosses knew I wanted to go to Asia, it being, you know, half Asian. So I spent a lot of time in Asia. We trained Lee Kwan Yoo's unit in Singapore. We trained, we helped prepare the South Korean forces, combined forces before the eighty-six Olympics. We trained at this, they used to call it the seven oh seven. So you guys are appreciated. South Koreans, yeah. They were, yeah, you guys know, yeah. So we trained at their compound and did all that stuff.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  And that was combined with the police intel seven oh seven. And so, you know, did a lot of work in Asia. And at one point, Bill Servanek, I mentioned again, again, he's kind of like, He's kind of like Sergeant Ishihara, another person that really made an impression on me in leadership. I had never been a leader, I never really thought about leadership. I was really enjoying just individual contributor and just doing the job. And one day he calls me in, he calls Scott K. for who I mentioned before, and he said, "Look, I'm gonna make you guys team leaders." And so now we're gonna lead the teams overseas to do all this kind of stuff. But he said, "You know what?

• 47:00Speaker 04

  One thing you guys need to remember," and I always remember this, he said, "Up until this point, you have the right to be selfish." What he meant by selfish, he meant selfish in a good way. It means you want to grow your career, you want to be promoted, you want to, you know, obviously you want to be recognized and just move up, move up the ranks and get paid more, all that good stuff. And that's all fine, that's great, we all want that. But he said, "Now you've got to flip that around as a leader. You've got to learn to be selfless, right? So now, it's not about you first, it's about your team, right? It's about the troops first, it's about what they need, you know? You know, what are their personnel issues? What are their professional issues? How do you mentor them? How do you get them to where they want to be? How do you discipline if you have to discipline?

• 47:45Speaker 04

  That all is part and parcel, he said, "You've got to flip that switch." And I kind of knew what he meant, and obviously over a period of time, I really understood what he meant. And to me, it's one of the, it's one of the things that people in leadership positions, some people don't ever get, right? They still haven't made that switch, it's still all about them first and not about the troops first. And, and so, and Colin Powell had a great phrase, "The field is right until proven wrong." And I always thought, you know, coming from General Powell, that was an awesome statement. And it's, it's really what Servant Act back in the day was talking about.

• 48:25Speaker 04

  You know, that if you equip your team, you train them, you mentor them, and you let them do their jobs, you don't micromanage them, you pull the reins if you need to pull the reins, otherwise you let them do their work. And, and as he said, you know, "Look, if your troops do a good job for you..."

• 48:43Speaker 04

  You'll get promoted, you'll get all the things you want, right? Right. But that was the first leadership position I had. And once I had a taste of it, I realized, yeah, I like, I like leading, you know, I like, I like the responsibility. You guys know, you're leaders, a two-edged sword, right? There's a good part about it, but then there's the other part. Right. And you just gotta take the good with the bad. So I did that for two years. And then I, I wanted to go, I wanted a PCS assignment to the, permanent change of station assignment to Asia. And I ended up working in Asia Vision, just on a rotation to the Philippine desk.

• 49:25Speaker 04

  And I worked the Philippine desk for a year, which was again, you know, they, a lot of the line folks at that time in the agency considered us knuckle draggers, right? Because, you know, you guys do all the shooting and all the driving and cars and blah, blah, blah. So, sitting at a desk with a guy named Ken Diggler, who was a branch chief, and he was a category B, straight case officer, but he was great. He had a lot of patience with me. I thought I knew how to write cables. I didn't know how to write cables for shit. He taught me how to write cables and ops reports and, you know, the meetings at headquarters that I was never privy to because we were always in an outside building and that other unit was serving at. So getting back to the main shed and just kind of understanding how that works was a great education.

• 50:09Speaker 04

  But that was a time when we had two bases in the Philippines, Subic Naval Base and Clark Air Force Base. And our main opponent there was New People's Army. It was armed wing of the commies part of the Philippines. And I remember getting, and I, I spent a year there prior to PCSing to Philippines in 89. But I remember, I was like, and you guys will remember this, is when Nick Rowe got killed. And, right, you remember that. And I remember got a call one night from Ken, he said, you know, Nick Rowe was just assassinated, right? So he was working for Just Mag, Joint U.S. Military Assistance Group, and he got killed by the NPA. And so when I flew into Manila, you could cut the

• 50:53Speaker 04

  fear with a knife, right? Because they had killed, they killed, you know, Colonel Rowe there in the heart of Manila, but at the same time, they'd been killing airmen and naval personnel outside of Clark and Subic, you know, left and right, as well as killing Philippine military, police, government personnel in Manila and other parts. And the NPA were very good. They had the Sparrow units. They were very good at what they were doing. And so my first, I was, that was before Prado. Prado got there the year later. I was working with a different group. I was with liaison branch, they called it. You work with Philippine liaison. We were declared to the Philippine government, which meant that we were probably blown in terms of the MPA because we knew they were infiltrated. Right.

• 51:38Speaker 04

  So we were the only ones allowed to be armed, full-time in the station. But our station chief, Ted Grohl at the time, I met him one time when we took Casey to Bangkok. He'd been the COS there, and now he was COS. And they said, okay, you work in liaison branch, you'll liaise with the Philippine National Police, you'll liaise with the NICA, the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency, their version of CIA. But they also, because of my background, they wanted me to figure out security for the embassy, because they didn't have their own embassy. They had the RSOs, right? Right. But they didn't have their own station security personnel. And the RSO shop that

• 52:19Speaker 04

  time was really good. Guy named Phil Jornland, he really wanted to liaise with us, the agency. And when I, once I got to know him, we hit it off very well. So we sent out, we called for a first counter-surveillance team to help protect our, and it wasn't their bread and butter, right, to do protection. But everyone on the surveillance, counter-surveillance team, at that point, Bill Serbin, like I mentioned, had been moved to another organization, which...

• 52:50Speaker 04

  They were the counter surveillance organization for CIA and for under CTC. And I asked for them to come out. So Servanak and a bunch of guys came out and they were all former South African special forces and, you know, all these other folks in there. And so their job, my job was to kind of oversee their activities until security, the old office of security could come up with a group of shooters that could come out and actually do the protection piece. So my first year was really a

• 53:21Speaker 00

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• 53:51Speaker 04

  A lot of that. And of course, at that point, it was almost like they put everything they could into that one year, the man upstairs. You had, you know, I was under two coup attempts, you know, under the president there. And then we had earthquake, we had, you know, all kinds of things going on. At one point during one of the coup attempts against President Aquino, they sent 200 Marines in from Subic to ring the embassy. And I remember we had an OP on top of the embassy. And one of the coolest things that I saw, remember during that time was

• 54:32Speaker 04

  the rebel Philippine jets were strafing a nearby island that we could see from the embassy.

• 54:40Speaker 04

  All of a sudden, you know, Aquino asked, wished for help, and so they scrambled jets out of Clark. And the jets just kind of did one pass, two pass, and then all of a sudden Philippine just just took off, right? And, uh, and so that was, uh, you know, that I was doing a lot of that sort of non-traditional case officer work. Uh, though we did have to extract the case officer behind, you know, enemy lines. He was with a, some of his assets, the family, and couldn't get through. So we brought in, you know, we, we kind of loaded up armored vehicle weapons. And we figured out a way to get to him and figure out a way to get back to the embassy without, you know, getting shot and, uh, and noticed. And that was kind of the first year.

• 55:25Speaker 04

  Uh, the second year, uh, new regime, and that's when Prado came in, a guy named Dave Nolan. I don't know if, um, Rick mentioned Dave, Dave had been a Lerp in Vietnam. And he's deceased now, but the dude was a character, man. I mean, the guy was, if you looked at him with his pictures in college, he looked like Charles Manson, right? Druggie and all this other kind of stuff. The dude's, hi- his, his daddy at one point had been coming out of West Point. His, his brother, um, I guess he'd been in eighty second airborne. Dave was black sheep of the family, uh, busted in the seventies for stealing cars.

• 56:07Speaker 04

  Given an ultimatum, go to jail, go in the army, went in the army, gone into the Lerp's. Did a lot of bad shit in Vietnam, you know, in terms of, you know, fighting bad guys. Hero in my opinion. Became a drill sergeant for a little bit, left the military, went to University of Miami. That's when he started looking like Charles Manson, you know, dope and all this other kind of stuff. And somehow, I don't know how the hell he passed polygraph, but he got into the agency, right? And, uh, when we met him, he had taken over from the previous, uh, so we worked in liaison brass. So he was the new chief liaison brass. Prado was there and not taking anything away from the old regime, but this is like a breath of fresh air. Cause they were people that spoke my language, right? They were all, but you know, you know, Prado's background, we all.

• 56:52Speaker 04

  We all thought alike. We spoke, we understood each other. And we weren't averse to kinetic stuff and it was really cool. And he was, again, another,

• 57:03Speaker 04

  both Prado and Dave really, I think, lent a lot to my leadership, you know, career acumen, whatever you want to call it. But then I really got involved in a lot of the sort of the line case officer stuff. I was running assets and, you know, got away from that security stuff and really, really, we were taking it to the NPA big time. We had, we were able to, because you know how it is in embassies or even with joint operations, you know, it's sometimes hard to wrangle all these people together, even though you have a common enemy. But we were able

• 57:40Speaker 04

  to get Air Force OSI, NIS, no, NCIS, Diplomac Security, RSO SHOP, and the Agency and the Bureau to work together on combined operations. We run counter surveillance operations on choke points in Manila where we knew the bad guys would probably set up if they're gonna try to attack Americans, right, coming in. We'd have decoys and we even had a program which was really cool. One of my assets was a former, was a member of the military intelligence in the Philippines. And at that point, the Philippines military, they were trying to run what they call a returnee

• 58:21Speaker 04

  program, where you take NPA shooters that wanted to come back into the fold, become good citizens or whatever, and try to rehabilitate them, but they didn't have the money and the resources, blah, blah, blah, but we did. And so what we would do is, use the Philippine military as a cutout to our asset, and we would put these guys back on the streets to see, because we couldn't spot bad guys, because they were so embedded, but they could. And one time, they actually were able to find a group setting up, doing some surveillance, setting up for a hit. So that was really cool. We were able to stop that kind of stuff. But we're doing all that kind of stuff. Plus, I think I sent you a picture, you know, where we had a new Sigan boat that was going to

• 59:05Speaker 04

  hopefully do some DFing with bad guys up in Indian country. So Prado and I went up there and we were able to go with the Philippine Navy SEALs and try to, you know, and we had the tech guys on there trying to work their stuff. And the one thing I remember about that was not so much, you know, just going after bad guys was, we had all these, you know, new buoyancy compensator devices and all this cool stuff. And we get on the deck the next morning and it's all these, I don't remember, do you remember a show called Sea Hunt?

• 59:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:39Speaker 04

  Okay, so you remember Lloyd Bree's had on the steel tanks?

• 59:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:42Speaker 04

  That's what they had, steel tanks, you know, and so we were looking at each other like, okay.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:47Speaker 04

  And so we put the steel tanks on and go diving and stuff like that, but it was a, it was a, it was probably two or three tours crammed into one tour, just because of everything went down. Plus Mount Pinatubo went down, we had everything.

• 1:00:00Jack Murphy?

  You were with Rick when the volcano exploded and what, you had to go to Clark and remove some equipment or something?

• 1:00:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, the ashes had actually crushed a couple of the buildings there that we had.

• 1:00:10Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:00:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, we had to go there.

• 1:00:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think this is kind of an interesting piece of history, it sounds like, because, like, when we think of the modern agency, you know, we've talked to people who were GRS and paramilitary, CTC, you know, these things, but it sounds like back then, there weren't like these super clear divisions of, because some of the stuff that you did sounded more like GRS, which, you know, doesn't go into ops now, right? But, but you guys, because you were special skills, you know, you had more of this flexibility to move in and out of these different roles.

• 1:00:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, you're a hundred percent right. In fact, we like to say that the first group of people we brought in from the Office of Security after the counter surveillance team was released, you know, and they brought in the, was kind of the, eventually the impetus for what became GRS, you know, to bring in armed personnel to protect folks. But you're right, there was a lot more autonomy back then to be creative. I think because there was, there was, there was a threat, we needed to take care of that threat. Now, certainly there was bureaucracy. I remember Dave, so, believe it or not,

• 1:01:30Speaker 04

  even in a danger post, we were considered behind Bogota, so we were the number two danger post at the point in the US and in the world. So, back then, the agency gave you Browning High Powers, fine weapon, right? And, and shotguns, but.

• 1:01:47Speaker 04

  First of all, most case hours, the only time they ever shoot is in the farm. They never shoot anyway, and they don't. So it was kind of like, you might as well give them a hammer and they could just throw the hammer because they're never gonna deploy their weapon fast enough. But then Dave said, you know, this is bullshit. We need shoulder weapons. So he went to headquarters, well, cable to headquarters, we want, we want MP5s. And it all damn near took the act of God, right? But we got the MP5s into town. It brought us some folks from Ground Brats to train us over at Clark. And then we carried those and we were driving armored cars. And, but it was, it was that kind of thing. I can't say it was cowboy, but it was cowboy-like.

• 1:02:27Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 1:02:29Speaker 04

  We knew our lane. We were credentialed by the locals to, to carry everywhere where they give us, you know, credentials. So whenever a corrupt cop would stop us and try to take bribes, we'd just show them this and they'd leave us alone.

• 1:02:40Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Speaker 04

  But yeah, you're absolutely right. It was, there were not these clearly defined things. We, we, we made it up as we went. We didn't, I mean, we didn't go too far off the reservation in terms of doing something that would be harmful or that would be foolhardy.

• 1:02:59Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:03:00Speaker 04

  But we were certainly given the autonomy to make the right decisions.

• 1:03:03Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. How, how would you assess the effectiveness of these operations against the NPA? Because they're still around today up north, but today, nowadays, I mean, I don't think anyone sees them as like a credible threat to the Filipino government. What do you see that as far as, you know, their strength when you got there and, you know, where you, when you left?

• 1:03:26Speaker 04

  Sure. Again, you know, so I remember we had at one point, we were talking to, thanks to NIS, now NCIS, we talked to a former NPA hitter.

• 1:03:42Speaker 04

  And he killed Buku people back in the day, right? But I remember him saying, you know, we just, we saw these cars coming around every so often, but we didn't know, like, we see these cars, they look like Americans. They didn't look like regular, you know, embassy people. We might see them one day, and then we wouldn't see them the next day, and then we'd see them the next, you know, another day. That was the counter-surveillance, right, that we were doing in Manila, which we then expanded to, with OSI's help, to Clark and then to Subic, right? To that methodology of keeping them off base, because what they were used to was the uniformity of embassy folks, Navy personnel, Air Force personnel, leaving their house at a certain time, going through a certain place. And unfortunately, that's what got Colonel Rowe,

• 1:04:27Speaker 04

  was that he was going, unfortunately, the same time, same place, and they, they, they hit him on that day. And so, our job was to keep them off balance, so that if they saw what they thought might be security or somebody one day, they never know when they'll see it again. And so, we had a particular schedule. So, to answer your question, once we started, really got rolling on that, and again, it was a joint operation, we, there was never any American ever hit again in Manila. And the numbers of naval personnel and Air Force personnel and Clark went down considerably. I mean, when, we had a Marine Expeditionary Force come in one time in Subic,

• 1:05:10Speaker 04

  and I was staying at Subic for, you know, a couple of weeks, working with NIS, and we were, we were patrolling the streets, armed, you know, looking for NPA folks. And they knew it. They knew we were looking for them. So, yeah, the, obviously now, back then, it was the NPA and CPP communists, part of the Philippines. We, they still had a separation, a separation, a separatist group in Mindanao, right? Which now, of course, the Islamic threat is, takes precedence now

• 1:05:46Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:05:46Speaker 04

  in the Philippines over, over the communist threat. So, do I have empirical evidence that our efforts stopped them? No, I don't have empirical evidence. I, I know, I have anecdotal evidence saying that we didn't get, there were no Americans killed

• 1:06:01Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, contributing.

• 1:06:02Speaker 04

  in Manila. Yeah.

• 1:06:04Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Speaker 04

  I mean, I hope it worked out.

• 1:06:07Jack Murphy?

  What was the next stop after the Philippines for you?

• 1:06:13Speaker 04

  So after that, I went back and I became, oh, I became Servanex Deputy in that counter surveillance group. So that was another taste of leadership. And, you know, I learned to do the headquarters thing and staff meetings and this and that, but it was good. It's great education. And then, uh, from there, I took, I, I took kind of this detour, which a lot of my operations colleagues said, that was stupid, Mike, you know, because you're gonna hurt your career. So a gal named Sally Werner, who I had worked with, I'd met before, she was, uh, she was GS 15 case officer. She was working in our

• 1:06:57Speaker 04

  Office of Personnel, in what they call Career Development Branch. And, uh, and, and so she, uh, she called me one day and she said, let's go have lunch. You know, Jose Rodriguez, right? Obviously, right? Uh, and Jose was actually in charge of all that at the time. And they, they had a conversation with me and they said, look, we want to start up something good for DO officers, like career development. There's, there's been no career development track. You kind of apply for jobs and blah, blah, blah, you know, and, you know, we want a more streamlined, organized. And so would you be willing to come over to help us formulate that? And I, you know, part of me said no, because I wanted to stay

• 1:07:42Speaker 04

  in operations. But a part of me said, which I'm glad, because it really helped me out later in life, said, you know, I'll give it a shot. And again, there were a lot of naysayers, because that didn't ever happen back then, you know, operations stayed in operations. Just like leaving, to your point, what you said earlier, when we were talking before the podcast, leaving Officer Security and going into the Operations Director, it just didn't happen. Right. So I said, yes. So I, I took a rotation to Personnel. And it ended up being very eye-opening for a number of reasons. Uh, they were interested in mentoring. So we helped put together, brought us some experts. We put together the first mentoring program within the DO, which is really good, because, you know,

• 1:08:26Speaker 04

  You know, it's like special operations or like law enforcement. We're fearless, you know, nothing can ever get us down. You know, but there are times we need to talk to somebody. Or you need some counseling, you need to bounce something off of somebody. So having a mentor, and it was voluntary, you want to sign up for a mentor, sign up for a mentor. Usually as officer senior to you to help you in your career or other issues that you're dealing with. We all sign up for it and to this day I still have mentors and I still mentor people. And so that was number one. The other thing we put together, a career development program that was computerized, that would help officers determine, you know, okay, what is your ideal career path? And what would it take to get you there?

• 1:09:11Speaker 04

  And we would, you know, try to help kind of formulate, what are the things you need to do? What assignments do you need to have? What experiences do you need? Even to the point of, you know, from a political standpoint, like who do you need to get to know? And who do you, you know, that kind of stuff? How to influence, how to let people know about you, that kind of stuff. And so I did that for a better part of like a year and a half. And it was gratifying. And then, so I decided, I'm going to ride this puppy a little bit longer. So then an opportunity came up to go to the IG Inspector General's office as an investigator. And I said, okay, I'm going to try that. So, because I had friends that were from OS that were up there.

• 1:09:55Speaker 04

  So I went there and I did that for a year. Now, I like doing the cases. It was fraud, waste and abuse. We work with DOJ a lot, so kind of the internal affairs of CIA. And you got to mirandize people and, and actually it was funny. One of my instructors in police academy in Oakland was a guy named Sergeant Lyman Hubbard. He was a great guy. And then, you know, when I left the department, went to the A D C, you know, I'd lost track of Hubbard. And one day I saw him, this is before I went to, you know, to the I G. I saw him in the parking lot and found out he'd joined the agency. Um, his dad actually had been, um, one of the Tuskegee Airmen back in the day.

• 1:10:38Speaker 04

  And, uh, he, he worked in Latin America and he actually ran the farm at one point. But when I was with the I G, there was some investigation. And he was one of the people brought in to be interviewed. So I said, hey, Sergeant Hubbard, you know, and then I had to remember, oh, I gotta be professional. Yeah. I'm supposed to be impartial. Uh, but I did that for a year, but one, one thing I found out, uh, in that, in that job was I was an individual contributor. Now I had a boss, you know, he's a well-meaning, great guy, but he was not a great leader. Right? Uh, didn't fix things that needed to be fixed. Wasn't high on building up teams, et cetera, et cetera. And so I realized at that point, cause I had no power authority to do anything, just do my job. I realized at that point, I will never be an individual contributor again.

• 1:11:23Speaker 04

  I'll always take a leadership position where I can try to influence things in the right direction. Uh, so the next job I took was in the Office of Military Affairs, O M A. It was created after the first Gulf War when there were a few, some disconnects between, uh, uh, D O D Military and the Agency. So it was a pretty cool setup. You had, you had two O sixes, you know, so you had, uh, you had an Army Colonel, uh, her name, Colonel Quirk, who became Brigadier when I was there. And, uh, Marsha Buckel, who I remember when I was in the Casey days, uh, she was a Navy captain.

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• 1:12:30Speaker 04

  She used to run the I C Intelligence Community Building there in D C. So they ran their shops and.

• 1:12:40Speaker 04

  One part of the shop was our, they, they, they, there were DCI representatives. So we had DCI representatives out of OMA and all the major military commands to, you know, help coordinate, you know, obviously between the, the agency, uh, station and, and DOD. So Colonel Quirk and his folks ran that. And then Captain Barkel and her team, uh, ran the education program. So let's say, let's say you had, uh, defense, defense attachés that were going overseas, right? They would come to OMA and get kind of a briefing, dog and pony show on this is how, these are how stations work.

• 1:13:23Speaker 04

  And this is kind of what case officers do, this is what the agency does. And they bring in all different parts of the military to go through this education. I was brought in as the XO. Um, you know, the organization was run by a DO officer, Tom Cilio, who'd been one of our national resources, our domestic arm. Number two was a, uh, DI intelligence analyst, a senior. And then, but they didn't have, they kind, they kind of didn't have anybody to, to kind of ride her, or herd over day-to-day things like admin or finance or this kind of stuff. And so, not that I was an admin and finance person, but they wanted somebody to coordinate, make sure everybody was talking to each other. And it was a great job. I enjoyed the heck out of it.

• 1:14:07Speaker 04

  I learned a lot, uh, learned a lot, obviously about military. Uh, you know, I'd worked with the military in the past, but you know, you look, you get really in-depth. And, uh, we even went to DIA to brief some of the DI folks on what we do in the agency. Uh, but it was, it was, it was a really good assignment and it was, it was, I really enjoyed doing that. Um, and I did that for a better part of a year and got things together and got everything coordinated. Then I had the urge to go back to operations. And then I went back to, uh, the DO, uh, and I took over what they then called the other world branch. So this was all non-Islamic terrorists.

• 1:14:48Speaker 04

  So, you know, Red Army faction, PKK out of Turkey, and Telmo Tigers, all these other different groups. I kind of worked that for a year as the branch chief. And then my last assignment in the agency was I was able to, I talked to the chief of NR at the time, National Resources. So National Resources, for those of you who don't know, I know you guys know, but it's the domestic arm of the agency. So the agency has no remit to conduct intelligence operations per se, the way MI5 does, say, in Britain. MI5, people think, oh yeah, they're like the FBI. No, they are CIA, but they're domestic. They can

• 1:15:32Speaker 04

  do everything MI6 can do, but they do it domestically. We can't do that here, right? So what we do is we work with the Bureau on possible targets and we work with business, right? If there are business people that are willing, let's say, in their travels and they have access to different information, to give us information, or atmospherics, or personalities, we kind of report on that. So there was an opening in Pittsburgh, and at that point Pittsburgh had five states underneath it, and I took the job. So I took a domestic assignment and went up to Pittsburgh and got there in 2000. And it was, you know,

• 1:16:12Speaker 04

  I loved it. Great assignment, nice office, great team of people. We worked, did a lot of interesting things. But obviously the seminal moment was 9/11.

• 1:16:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:23Speaker 04

  I was there with 9/11 when I was in the office. I actually invited some CTC folks on a TDY to visit the station and kind of brief my team on, because I didn't have any really CT folks there, talk to them about CT issues. And I remember welcoming the CT folks, CTC folks, and then went back to my office and, you've heard all the stories, the same things, like, hey boss, check out CNN. So we check it out, first plane hits, and then second plane hits, and then we know. So I evacuated. The station, call Washington, evacuate the station. And then I contacted our, uh, my colleague at the FBI, uh, Jack Shea, who was the special agent in charge, and said, "Jack, you need help?" He said, "Yeah." I sent half my team over to the Bureau and they worked, they kind of worked that case because one of

• 1:17:08Speaker 04

  the planes went down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. So that was kind of, that was kind of what we dealt with for, uh, kind of the, the rest of my tour. Uh, did go to, was called into Washington along with other domestic chiefs of station to, uh, testify in front of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on what we're doing post nine eleven and to work with the Bureau and that kind of stuff. So that was an interesting experience. And then, um, I was gonna leave Pittsburgh. I had put in for two onward assignments.

• 1:17:43Speaker 03

  Hey, Mike.

• 1:17:44Speaker 04

  One was.

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  Mike, before we move on from there, because I'd like to ask your sort of impression and your experience at NR, because, you know, speaking to people in the past, you know, the, the agency working with the FBI in NR, you know, sometimes there are issues, there are difficulties in, in culture, there are difficulties in the way the agency does things.

• 1:18:06Speaker 04

  Who has what lane?

• 1:18:07Speaker 03

  You know, whose lane is what?

• 1:18:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  But you came from a law enforcement background. So do you feel that it was easier for you than it was for like some, some case officers who maybe never had, who didn't have that background?

• 1:18:22Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I think for sure, we, again, we spoke the same language. Uh, once Jack and his team knew my background, uh, and then, you know, there was kind of this respect, but I respected them as well, right?

• 1:18:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:36Speaker 04

  And, you know, Jack was really good because he understood from an intelligence and analysis capability, uh, unlike what they have now, uh, they didn't have that, right? And so they needed that. We actually helped them post nine eleven. CTC actually sent people to the Bureau to help them start what is now their intelligence, you know, division, right?

• 1:18:58Jack Murphy?

  Intelligence directorate.

• 1:19:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, to your point, yeah. And I always thought, you know, this, this BS about, you know, and it's not always BS. Yes, you're right. There's been some of this, but at the street level, usually not so much.

• 1:19:12Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:19:13Speaker 04

  Um, and to me, if you can just remember how it was on the street when you were working with another organization and then when you become a leadership position. That shouldn't change. Yeah, I get it, the bureaucracy and blah, blah, blah, but the mission stays the same. You're going after bad guys, you know, and the whole thing is let's get the bad guys, let's cut out the bullshit. Um, but yeah, it, it, that was never an issue with me.

• 1:19:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:19:38Speaker 04

  But I could see how it could be an issue if you come in straight from the case officer world and, you know, we used to say case officers were kind of the jet jockeys of the D O, right, or the agency. And the shit doesn't stink and blah, blah, they know everything and they speak languages and they may look down on some of their law enforcement brethren.

• 1:19:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:56Speaker 04

  Um, and that will come across.

• 1:19:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:19:58Speaker 04

  Uh, and that's not the best way to get the mission accomplished, right?

• 1:20:01Speaker 03

  Right. And I think like, I think, you know, like we've heard in the past, like sometimes, you know, like the CIA's job, like they, they don't break American laws in the United States, but, but they're always breaking, you know, other countries' laws in those countries. And so then you take that person who's been overseas, you know, working, you know, in, in that type of environment and then bringing them to the U S. And sometimes the FBI say no, like that's, we, like, we can't do that here.

• 1:20:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:20:32Speaker 03

  You know, and so I, I figured that with your background, you had a, you know, had a firm grasp on what the legalities were.

• 1:20:39Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, but, you know, that, the, you know, your psychological profile, when you come into the agency is they're looking for people that are straight line, gonna follow agency rules and be willing to break the laws of other countries.

• 1:20:52Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:20:52Speaker 04

  I mean, that's just, it's just the way it is. But yeah, I mean, to me, I don't know, may, maybe I got a simple brain, but it was never that complicated.

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:00Speaker 04

  I knew my lane. I knew what I could or couldn't do, but I also knew how much I could push it, um, to, to hopefully get the job done with our, with our brethren. Oh, can I ask you guys something?

• 1:21:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:12Speaker 04

  I don't know if this has ever been done before, but if I were to walk over there and grab a bottle of bourbon so I could fill up again, would that be?

• 1:21:18Speaker 03

  It, it has been done without an announcement before, so absolutely.

• 1:21:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. I'm trying to, I'm trying to follow protocol.

• 1:21:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Uh, who do we have coming up, uh, next week, Jack? Do you remember?

• 1:21:27Jack Murphy?

  Uh, on Monday.

• 1:21:28Speaker 03

  On Monday.

• 1:21:29Jack Murphy?

  Uh, oh, um, that, that, uh, a former CIA woman, Michelle Rigby Assad.

• 1:21:38Jack Murphy?

  She's gonna be on the show on Monday.

• 1:21:39Speaker 03

  And guys, make sure, please, like and subscribe and then also check out our Patreon and

• 1:21:46Jack Murphy?

  And take a look at We Defy the Lost Chapters of Special Forces History. It's up on Amazon now.

• 1:21:53Speaker 04

  Okay, back.

• 1:21:55Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:21:56Speaker 04

  All right, so then came the other, probably the big seminal moment of my life. I had put in for two onward assignments. One, they had just opened up Chief's Station in Wellington, New Zealand, and then Deputy Chief in the Philippines. Because I had spent so much time in the Philippines, both PCS and TDY, I didn't wanna, I didn't wanna go back there. So I put in for, I put in for both and the East Asia Division Personnel Officer calls, hey, you got both of them. Which one do you want? I said, I want Wellington. And then about, I don't know, I was always elated. Just couldn't wait to go. Then I get a call, maybe two weeks later, from, from Washington.

• 1:22:41Speaker 04

  And I get this, you know, hey, Mike, how many, how many, how many? I said, oh, here we go. And he said, you know that assignment in Wellington? Yeah. I said, you don't have it anymore. And I said, okay. So somebody came out of the war zone, right, and knew the DDO at the time.

• 1:23:02Speaker 04

  And whispered in his ear and said, I'd like to go to Wellington. I said, well, Mike's got that. But they took it away from me. So at that point, I was, I was married to a gal named Karen, who was retired agency, right? She just retired. And we talked it through and, you know, do I wanna go back to Washington and do that again? By that time, I had 22 years. And I could have gone back and written it out, but there's really nothing more I really wanted to do, wanted to stay in the field. And so I reached out to my friend Steve Einzel, who I had met in the Philippines back in the day. We did a lot of ops together.

• 1:23:45Speaker 04

  He was the special agent in charge of the NIS office in Manila. Great guy. Born and raised in Nebraska, cowboy, just, you know, and we clicked. In fact, I forgot this part. Remember, I told you they only gave you the Browning High Powers, right? In Manila? And when I got to know Steve, he said, "That's it? That's all you have, is all we have in the house." And at that point, I was living off-compound. We had security guards because we were a liaison branch. So again, because you're liaison branch, you're supposedly, you're known to the Philippine government. You figure they're penetrated. So the security guards are worthless. You know, they would run away if bad guys came, right? But they were just window dressing. And so one Sunday, because Steve and I lived in the same neighborhood,

• 1:24:29Speaker 04

  he knocks on my door, his big ditty bag, and he plops it on the floor. And I unzip it, and holy smokes! There's a shotgun, ammo, Uzi, lots of ammo. He said, "That's for you." I said, you know, he got it from their armory because they were allowed to carry shoulder weapons and all these kinds of stuff. And this is, remember, these were the days, this was the year before Dave Nolton and Prado showed up and we get the MP5s. And so I'll always be in debt for him because you know he's breaking the rules doing that, giving someone in another agency their weapons, right? And so he was the only one, so go back forward now. He's the only one I knew that had left government service, went to work in the private sector for Kroll,

• 1:25:14Speaker 04

  you know, the private security firm, and then started his own consulting firm out of Nebraska. So I reached out to him, and I told him what happened. And he said...

• 1:25:27Speaker 04

  Mike, I got, um, I know of a position of chief security officer at Wrigley in Chicago, but I'm a California kid. I ain't living in Chicago, right? So he said, let me introduce you to a headhunter. And again, government guy, I don't know jack about headhunters. I said, how much does that cost? Cause I'm not getting paid that much, right? Even as a GS15, they don't get paid that much. She said, they get paid by the company. So he introduced me to a guy named Jerry Brennan. And I guess he had told Jerry my background. Remember, I'm still undercover. So I have to be careful what I say and blah, blah, blah. But, um, I cannot, I cannot control what Steve said to him about me.

• 1:26:12Speaker 04

  And so he called, we talked to the great guy, we're friends to this day. And a lot of us that were chief security officers owe our careers to Jerry. He's very well wired. And we talked and he said, look, uh, Steve told me about you. I have, there's two things. There's a position of chief security officer in some company in Los Angeles. To this day, I can't remember because the next thing he said was, there's a position in running the executive protection program as a director at Microsoft. I remember that. And I said, okay. But he said, I am not, unfortunately, I'm not being paid by Microsoft to staff that position. I just know about it.

• 1:26:54Speaker 04

  And knowing your background, what Steve told me, I thought might be a fit. But then he says, but you know, this is the name of the personnel person. I was, her name is Suzanne. I always remember her name to this day, great gal. And she's the one staffing it in their HR department. But you're gonna have to make up a story. Can you make up a story about how you found out about this job? I said, did Steve tell you who I work for? Of course I gotta make up a story about how I found the job, right? So I made some bullshit story about how, you know, found out from secret service contacts about this blah, blah, blah. And I called her. We had a great, really nice conversation. And she said, do you have a resume? I said, no, I don't have a resume.

• 1:27:39Speaker 04

  I can send you something about my skills, but I can't send you a resume. And she said, okay. So I did that, right? Because I can't give anything classified, blah, blah, blah. And so they flew me out to Redmond, Washington, suburb of Seattle, where Microsoft has this campus. And I went through a series of interviews with everything from a general manager who was going to be, at the time, it was interesting. So Gates never wanted security. Until you probably heard about this infamous incident where he got slammed with a pie in Europe on a trip. And the border director said, no, no, no, because that could have been acid, it could have been anything. Right.

• 1:28:23Speaker 04

  You are going to have executive protection. So they started this executive protection unit. And my friend to this day, Charlie McNerney, who was the GM, and he wasn't security. He rolled up in an organization under a VP named Rick DiVannuti, who, under Rick, they had a lot of different verticals. One of them was IT security, that was the physical security. They just gave it to him, right? And Charlie realized, I don't know anything about this world. And the unit itself was dysfunctional. And I'll tell you why in a second. But he said, he probably told Rick, we need to get somebody that knows what they're doing.

• 1:29:02Speaker 04

  And so I talked to him and Rick, the VP and HR, and ended up talking to both Steve Ballmer, who was the number two at the time, his admin assistants, who were the gatekeepers, and then Bill Gates's admin assistant, Christine Turner, who definitely held the keys to the kingdom, right? And then I go back home to Pittsburgh. And mind you, because I'm still working, right? So I'm taking a red eye back from Washington State so I can go straight to work, you know, so that nobody knows anything about it. Then about a month later, and by, oh, they had me staying at the, like a Courtyard Marriott or something like that at the first time.

• 1:29:46Speaker 04

  So then the second time, I get a call from Suzanne. She said, okay, we want you to come back and we want you to meet with Gates himself, one-on-one.

• 1:29:59Speaker 04

  Obviously, I'm floored, right? Right. And, and so he gave me a couple of weeks and I studied everything I could about him. I read everything I could about Gates. All I knew was what everybody knows, he created Microsoft and Windows.

• 1:30:12Speaker 04

  So I fly out there and I remember calling my then-wife Karen and they put me up this place called The Woodmark, which is like this fancy hotel, you know, summertime, because they always recruit in summertime because it's Seattle weather sucks. So they recruit you in the summertime thinking, oh, this guy has got to bring it. Right, right. It comes September, you know, it's like, what the hell happened to the sun, right? And so I, I called her, I said, something's up because they got me, I'm not in the courtyard anymore. So I meet, I meet with Bill for 45 minutes and it was really an interesting conversation. He had my sort of qualifications there and we, we started talking.

• 1:30:53Speaker 04

  One of the things I remember him asking me was, he said, so I've had all these Secret Service people coming in and, you know, applying for this job and they've shown me their books and they've, this president and that president and blah, blah, blah. So why should I hire you?

• 1:31:08Speaker 04

  And I said, the difference is I can do what they do. There were times when we were working with Casey that we had to have that kind of full package look, you know, with the earpiece and all that kind of stuff, motorcade. But a lot of times we're sliding in and out of countries covertly, right? And we're still on him. He may not know we're around and sometimes he does know we're around. And I said, that's what we can do for you. We don't have to be onerous. We can give you whatever protection package you deem necessary, but that we feel that we can protect you. Right. And, and then he started doing this, I remember, he started doing this, he started in this rocking motion. And had I not known, had not read about it, I would have thought, uh, I'm talking to you, man. What's going on? You're doing all this rocking stuff?

• 1:31:53Speaker 04

  And what I found out was it was, it was, it was kind of an offshoot of Asperger's or something like that. But it meant he was into the conversation. Like he was really into it. The other thing I, I found out about Bill was that. Mike Howard was the only thing in his world for forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes and one second, I didn't exist. So as soon as the interview was over, I go, "Well, thank you." And he's just on his way, right? He's gone. And I don't know whether or not, I mean, I did my best. And I don't know if I had gotten, but on the way to the airport in my rental car, I got a call from Suzanne, HR person. She said, "He likes you." And I said, "Well, is there anybody else in contention?"

• 1:32:36Speaker 04

  And she had to play the part of like, "Oh, there's a couple more people, but he really likes you." At that point, later on, I found out I was the only one, right? And then I get the notification from Microsoft about a week later. "Hey, want to hire you as Director of Executive Protection? They've sent a package to our townhouse in Pittsburgh with, you know, the best of Seattle with salmon and this and that and the other thing." And then, you know, obviously all what they were going to compensate me for. So started a whole new career. Now, mind you, I didn't retire. I needed to stay another, what was I? Maybe I was forty-five-ish or something, but I needed to stay another five, six years to get full retirement.

• 1:33:17Speaker 04

  And of course, just like when I moved from operations to going to HR back in the agency, I got the same, you can't leave. You know, you're throwing away, I could take everything I'd put into the system, but I wasn't going to get pension.

• 1:33:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:33:33Speaker 04

  But there, but there was something in me that said, you know, this was the right move, right, to do. And it was a risk, it was a leap. I didn't know anybody at Microsoft, I didn't, you know, I knew I could do the job. I knew you put me in an Indian enterprise, I could figure it out at some point. I'll figure it out. But I, I, I went there and the, the unit was well-meaning people, but broken.

• 1:33:57Speaker 04

  They were the only armed unit within Microsoft. You know, a lot of executive protection units in corporations are armed. And I didn't know that because I didn't know anything about private sector. They were armed and we had our own little gym downstairs. You could practice martial arts, go shooting, you know, and qualifying, all this kind of stuff. But holy smokes, there was no direction. Security in itself had no direction. When I came on board... My boss Charlie took me to a staff meeting with, you know, so you had Rick DeVinoody, or the overall VP of the organization we belong to, all the other general managers, and then there were directors like me that reported to the GMs.

• 1:34:41Speaker 04

  And he said, I want you to just sit in on a staff meeting, just see what it's like. And the person that was in charge of security, overall security at the time, remember, executive protection was a slice of security, was at the table. I didn't know him, again, nice guy, but I remember DeVinoody going around and, okay, typical staffing, so, hey Sally, so what's going on, and Joe, what's

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• 1:35:35Speaker 04

  going on, Charlie? And he goes to, I won't name him. So, who are you again? Said, oh, I run security. Oh, you're the guys that drive around in those white cars? Because we had white vans at the time, it says Microsoft Corporate Security. And I thought, holy smokes, this dude is not a player, right? He doesn't even know his name. And your only point of reference are you the people that run around in their white cars?

• 1:36:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:36:03Speaker 04

  And so, okay, so that was one point of reference. And then I get to the executive protection, and first trip I took with them, I got to know everybody, and you know, they had some decent backgrounds. And we get to Las Vegas, actually. It was, they call it CES now, Consumer Electronics Show, but back then it was called Comdex. And Bill used to do all the keynotes, so we'd fly him in. And so he finished his keynote.

• 1:36:35Speaker 04

  And we have him at MGM Grand and there's a behind a big call it the mansions is where all the high rollers live and stay. And we're with all the strap hangers. So you've got, you know, PR and legal and all these folks and PR folks say, hey, Bill may want to walk the casino floor just to stretch his legs. We usually give him a baseball cap. That's his disguise, but everybody knows who he is because, you know, he's the rock star of nerds, so all the nerds know who he is. And, and I swear to God, when, when, we'll let you know in 15 minutes, he goes in and comes back, the PR person said, okay, five minutes, Bill's gonna come out.

• 1:37:18Speaker 04

  My guys, I had three guys with me, they, they lit out. One guy, I've got a plant right here, I kid you not, went right behind the potted plant, they like hid. And PR didn't hide, the admin folks didn't hide, legal didn't hide. And so I asked, so what's going on? You know, because we walked, we eventually walked him around and he was, you know, the rock star, signed autographs. And I said, he doesn't want to see us, he doesn't want us to be around. I said, that makes no sense. And I said, the reason why he doesn't want to see you around is because you're running away from him. He has no respect for you, right? So I started setting up with Christine Turner, his admin, one on ones with Bill and just

• 1:37:59Speaker 04

  walk him through, you know, on a quarterly basis, you know, kind of setting the benchmark. And so like, this is, this is what we want to do, this is our MO. Like one of the things, he would drive from his house in Medina, which all the, all the kind of, it was a millionaire billionaire place in the suburbs of Seattle. He'd drive, before I got there, they gave him an armored Lexus and he would drive from there to Microsoft campus, but take the same route every day. And so I said, you should change your routes. He says, I don't need to change my routes, you know, I don't always go the same time anyway. Okay, so fine. So I said, give me a month and I'll come back. So we set up an OP at this Tully's Coffee Shop.

• 1:38:42Speaker 04

  And obviously, same time, give or take, you know, a few minutes to go by the same, our, our OP. And so we took pictures. He's a, he's a, he's a data-driven person. So a month later, we could show him the pictures and we say, this is you. So all we want you to do is every couple of weeks, take this, these other alternate routes, right? He said, where are you guys gonna be? I said, we're gonna do what I talked about when we, I interviewed you. We're going to be around, but you won't see us. We're not gonna be having tail car. So we set up different, you know, choke points along the way. So as his car goes by, we know that he's going by. So it's not onerous. It doesn't feel like we're on him, but we're, but we are on him.

• 1:39:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:39:26Speaker 04

  And so he bought off on that. But I think one of the things, he respected credibility. And he, he, he did like people afraid of him. And that's what happened with executive protection. They were so afraid. They're afraid of Christine Turner. Oh, she yelled at us. Yeah, she's the, she's, if she's yelling at you, it's because Billy yelled at her.

• 1:39:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:39:48Speaker 04

  So the idea is to recruit her on our side to advocate for, if, unless we stepped in. If we stepped in it, then we own it, then we should take the hit. But otherwise, if there's a misperception about our role, make sure Christina understands it, then she could be our advocate. So Christine and I ended up having a really great relationship. And it took better part of a year. Well, we got, we got the organization in tow to the point where, um, Bill, before he left Microsoft to go do foundation work, his, uh, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation full-time, had a party just for, you know, kind of, you know, in, in private sector, we call it a cost center, the, the salespeople, the people make money and, uh, sorry, profit center, people make money.

• 1:40:33Speaker 04

  Cost center, folks like security that don't make money. And, um, he had a meeting, uh, uh, a, a, a party at Microsoft campus for all the folks that supported him, like legal, personnel, security. Took pictures with all of us. And I remember he sent me an, a note. He had one, he's not one for flower. He just said, hey, thanks, Mike, for, uh, showing me that you can do security with, and letting me do my business. That was paraphrasing, but that, that meant a lot to me. It was kind of a de-icing on the cake in terms of all of our efforts.

• 1:41:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:41:04Speaker 04

  Um, and then around that time, I got a call from Charlie and he said, Charlie's.

• 1:41:13Speaker 04

  He said, "We want to put you in charge of all of security," at that point, right? You've been the chief security officer. And so, that's when I took over all of Microsoft's security. The physical security side of the house. The logical IT side of the security was separate. But we had a joint committee so we could force multiply on different issues affecting Microsoft. And so, now was, again, a time of looking at our organization. We had, at that point, we had nineteen people, right? And Microsoft had forty-one thousand people at the time, but within another year or two, we had grown to eighty thousand.

• 1:41:54Speaker 04

  When I joined there in 2002, we had no footprint in China, no footprint in India. In two years' time, we were starting to grow. And I realized that, we were then called corporate security. We were very US-centric. We had an operations center at Redmond that was woefully inadequate. From a technology perspective, for a company that is technology savvy, we had sixty different pieces of technology bolted on. None of them synced with each other. It was ridiculous. We had some people around the world, but there was no common strategy. They just kind of did their thing. And so, you know, it takes a while to get the lay of the land.

• 1:42:38Speaker 04

  So, I got to know everybody. And at one point, I had nineteen direct reports, which is too many. But that was the way I got to know folks, you know? I waited. I believe in leadership. Don't just come in and just, you know, start making changes. You have to get the lay of the land and then figure out where you're gonna go. And we had a come-to-Jesus moment with the nineteen folks because with my background, I realized we needed to globalize our organization. We needed boots on the ground overseas, obviously. We had them, but there was no synergy between our folks, Microsoft businesses, and headquarters.

• 1:43:17Speaker 04

  And I, we needed a common strategy. But there were some people that were fighting that because back then, if we had like a threat of violence case against an executive in London, we'd fly investigators over from the US, which was dumb, you know, you needed investigative personnel. We needed replicate what we had in Redmond out into the region. So you'd have investigative personnel, crisis management personnel, technology folks, you know, that kind of capability. So number one, we don't have to be fine back and forth. Number two, you have people that work there, that work with the regional BPs and presidents and businesses. So they get to know the businesses, they get to know them. They speak the language in many cases around the world. We don't

• 1:44:02Speaker 04

  speak that language, but we hire people, like in India, we hire former Indian military intelligence or whatever that speak the language, understand the culture. So, but some people were fighting that. They wanted to keep it US-centric. We had a, it was fun. It was a come to Jesus debate, knock down, rock'em, sock'em debate, but ultimately I called the ball and we changed our name to Global Security. And it was a, it was a fun ride. We ended up, you know, I believe, and I think a lot of my fellow CSOs would tell you, at one point, we were the number one global security organization in the world. We ended up building

• 1:44:44Speaker 04

  three global security operations centers, one in Redmond, Washington, one in the UK, one in Hyderabad, that had the best, the best of our products as well as partner technology. But more importantly, they were interconnected, right? True interoperability. We were, if, if Redmond went down, for instance, to catastrophic incident, earthquake or whatever, either Hyderabad or UK could access any camera on Redmond campus. Wow. You could dispatch radio over IP, and we would do demos on this too, to visitors. We would, if, if, let's say there's a, there's a fight going on in Redmond campus, right? But we can't respond at, at the Redmond G-SOC.

• 1:45:28Speaker 04

  The, let's say Hyderabad or London, they know because of the technology we have, they know what units are working in Redmond, just like we know what units are working on the campuses around the country. They could dispatch radio over IP, that unit to go take care of Tree Eyes, that situation. We could lock down doors, we could do all that stuff, true interoperability.

• 1:45:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:50Speaker 04

  And it was, uh, it was the biggest ask I, I made, uh, to Steve Ballmer. And I remember spending months, uh, we did a zero-based study of our technology to determine that this is what we needed. And we went up to Steve Ballmer, who was then the, uh, the CEO, made the ask, he approved it. At that point, it was like 25 mil and, uh, and I remember because I'm a government guy, right? So I remember my bosses at the time, I said, you know, this, when I proposed it to my bosses, this thing's gonna cost 25 million dollars. And I, I kid you not, they said, okay, that's a lot of money, but you know, in the true scheme of things at Microsoft, that's a rounding error, right?

• 1:46:35Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:46:36Speaker 04

  It just always struck me like, okay.

• 1:46:39Speaker 03

  It's, it's interesting because, you know, when you look at the world of like a corporate security or personal security, right? When you think of like, um, musicians or these people, like you think, they don't have enough money to actually do security right, right? I mean, they hire people that they know or whatever, but to have the size of the team they want, the resources, like a lot of them, they're never gonna pay that much money. And then you look at different companies as they scale, and here you are really at the top of the pile and you're making this 25 million dollar ask. And like you say, like, security is a, it's a cost, it's, you can't show profit. And a lot of companies don't wanna, they don't wanna bite that bullet.

• 1:47:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:47:22Speaker 03

  But here you are with this company that's like, let's do it right. How do you sell that to them? Like, how do you say, we know that there's no profit, and if nothing bad has happened in the last five years, people will say, nah, do we really need it?

• 1:47:35Speaker 04

  Right. No, that's excellent question. And, uh, the way we approached it is...

• 1:47:41Speaker 04

  Look, for instance, part of the ask was to get, we had, I don't know, thousands of cameras around the globe, right, for our campuses. And we did, before we did all this stuff, we kind of looked at the cameras and said, okay, so you have an incident where someone gets assaulted and you check the camera coverage, the camera's broken, right? And part of this effort was to use technology to ping these cameras on a regular basis, if you get the right cameras, to see which one is working, so it's not a manual process. To me, it's not a scare tactic, but it's like, okay,

• 1:48:22Speaker 04

  we are your security experts and we've also gone through a third party that has recommended that we engage in this activity. You could say no, but these are the risks if we don't, right? If we can't respond appropriately to a crisis and someone gets hurt. It's not number one thing is someone gets hurt. But obviously, brand reputation and all, so that kind of stuff takes a hit. Plus legally, you, you know, somebody could sue you because you were told that these are the possible risks, but you decided not to do it, right? So that was part of it. But what happened, and it's really interesting you mention that, once we got the G-SOCs

• 1:49:01Speaker 04

  up and running and we proved ourselves in the Arab Spring when we stood up seven crisis management teams in the region, evacuating people out of harm's way, safe houses in Egypt for our personnel, all this kind of stuff, and we were able to manage it with our operations centers, keeping everything coordinated, all the information flow up from the head shed on down, so we had one version of the truth. And we had a crisis management team together with the different verticals in the company, legal and HR, real estate facilities, and, you know, they would say, well, I heard this, we heard this, and say, no, no, no, no, we have one version of the truth that we're sending up to the CEO, and that's based on intel, not based on conjecture, not based on who

• 1:49:45Speaker 04

  you heard from Uncle Joe or whoever, it's based on intel that's been vetted, as much as it can be vetted, and that's what we're sending up. So we proved our bones in that. And so, to your point about profit...

• 1:50:04Speaker 04

  We were benchmarked by a lot of people because we actually were able to turn ourselves into a virtual profit center. And so we approached, well, I approached, I was in DC one time and there was a, we have a Microsoft Government Affairs Group out of DC and they're all former, you know, DoD military. And their job is obviously sell, you know, our stuff to the Navy, the Air Force, Marines, Army, whatever. And I met with this guy who was a former commander in the Coast Guard. We just happened to shoot the bull and I mentioned the G-SOC and, you know, he came out to take a look at it. And he said, you know what? So we kind of concocted this idea.

• 1:50:48Speaker 04

  So we have an executive briefing center at Microsoft and traditionally they would take, say, their clients as well as other sales groups, bring their clients, go to the EBC, we call it, Executive Briefing Center, and be subjected to some boring ass PowerPoint about PowerPoint, you know? You know, it's like, okay, that's dumb. But he said, what if we were to show the power of our Microsoft technology and some other partner products in a real live environment? And even if they're not security people, right? You could just show the power of that technology and how you can, it's all about integration, right? Not one-off silos when it comes to technology. So we toyed with that and my, my technology team and I and my leadership team got together.

• 1:51:32Speaker 04

  We put together this pretty cool dog and pony show where we walked them through our, our journey from the standalone center that had 60 different technologies. We even had a room, we call it the Bubble Boy Room, we show, it's like from Seinfeld. We would show this poor guy, he was monitoring our executive protection stuff back in the day when I got there in 2002. And because, but the A-trax system was so screwed up that they had like a list bubble around us, so we call them the Bubble Boy Room. And we would show them all that and the sticky notes and all the, the stuff, the antiquated stuff. And then we showed them, you know, what we have now. Everything's computerized, everything's streamlined.

• 1:52:15Speaker 04

  And we, we would do this dog and pony show where, what I described to you, we would simulate an incident where a red man is out. And we, whatever the incident is, whether it's India or UK, they could hear. India, UK, radio over IP dispatching our, our, our team to triage an event. And plus the fact that we could, you know, it was all mobiles. We just, we could, we could take our laptops, you know, and maybe nowadays that's not so innovative. But back then, being able to just take your laptops and go to a conference room and all of a sudden your G-SOC is up and running again if your building's been messed up. Right.

• 1:52:56Speaker 04

  We had a car crash, some drunk driver crashed into our building where our G-SOC was. Fire and firefighters came and put it out, but we had to take our G-SOC folks and go to, and that was one of the things we showed. But what we started doing, so then the government affairs folks started bringing clients from DOD. And so my ask was, let's say the Navy Department decided, we're going to then, you know, we like what we see at Microsoft, we're going to purchase a three-year license for software. Cause that's how it was back then. And I don't know how it is now. And if, let's say that it was like a $5 million, $10 million, whatever it was.

• 1:53:38Speaker 04

  My only ask was, would you give us, if, and I was a big if, if you believe our, our, our demonstration, our participation helped you seal the deal, would you at least give us credit for what we call soft dollars? Right? Meaning we, we could capture that as helping with the sale. And he said, no, I have no problem, you know? They still get the real money, so. Right. And their bonuses and all that stuff. And so we, we noodled on that for a while and we came up with a program, we call it revenue influencing. And we started expanding that to not just the government sales, but you know, office, windows,

• 1:54:20Speaker 04

  all, you know, all these different groups within the company would come in and, and we would then ask the question after, you know, did you make the sale? Yes. Would you give us credit? Yes. And so at one point, we'd been credited with millions of dollars with the sales, helping with, with the company. And we could capture that. And at that point, we were in the finance organization. My boss was the chief accounting officer and he'd come over from Dow. So he had a good appreciation of security and he told me, he said, I've never seen anything like this where you guys are actually helping the company. Right. Money and, you know. Right. And I, I, I told my team, look.

• 1:54:58Speaker 04

  It's great we're doing this because now we feel like we're contributing beyond, above and beyond security. Right. We're contributing to the core competency because my mantra was always we're business people first. Business just happens to be security.

• 1:55:12Speaker 04

  But we also got smarter. If we brought in a team from Windows and they bring their clients, we hear their conversations, we understand, you know, kind of what the clients are looking at, what office team is looking at. That makes us smarter as business people, right? Right. And so the other thing is that, as, you know, they use that term a lot, business enablers. But it gave us a lot more credibility within the C-suite.

• 1:55:38Speaker 04

  Because we would purposely target different VPs within the company every year to come to the G-SOC, go through the demo, knowing that they would evangelize with us. Right. Wow, that ripple effect, right? And you gotta check these guys out. And it worked. It worked. And then we expanded it overseas. We had Microsoft Technology Centers. We asked the Technology Centers could we do these dog and pony shows there? So we were able to expand that. And it was a really, it was a really cool and fun time. And the other, the other part of it was,

• 1:56:13Speaker 04

  there are a lot of people even in corporate America today that don't, that really think security is just the, the guys in the white vans. Uh huh. My, my, my current wife, Janice, I'll tell you about her in a little while. We were, we met in college and we separated and then we got back together forty three years, forty one years later. But when I told her I was Chief Security Officer, she actually thought I was like Paul Blart, you know, my detective. Because she didn't, she didn't know what a CSO was. Right. And I go, oh, that's, that's nice. You have, you probably have stars and all that kind of stuff, you know?

• 1:56:45Speaker 04

  Because people don't, when we were briefing these folks on first, besides the G-SOC, we briefed them on what we did. And people don't understand, yeah, we patrol campuses. We also are involved in kidnapping, you know, so kidnapping and extortion issues. We're involved in threats of violence against our employees. We evacuate people out of harm's way. We have our own technology team. Of course, we have executive protection. We have crisis management groups. We've got, you know, and they didn't realize we did all of these things. If a Microsoft employee is kidnapped, we work with our K and R providers to try to get them out of harm's way.

• 1:57:21Speaker 04

  I've got a really great story if you want to hear about one of those things. Okay. Yeah, hit us up. So Libya, I didn't even realize, we had an office in Libya when Gaddafi was still, you know, in charge. Why, I don't know, we're selling software there, but anyway, we had a general manager there. We later found out it was part of the anti-Gaddafi resistance, and his sister was in Seattle, is part of it, right? So, kind of get where the story is going. And one day, we find out that he's been kidnapped, like, nobody knows where he is. And of course, you know, the C-suite, everybody, they go, they go high order, and we're tasked, obviously, with finding him.

• 1:58:03Speaker 04

  And we get our Carstens management team together, we're trying to work this out. And one of my guys, Mike Foyan, he's a former French Foreign Legionaries, tons of experience in the international realm. He and I primarily kind of worked this with a lot of folks, but, and there are all, you know, you get all these people from the company that say, you know, "I know somebody, why don't you talk to somebody?" And they'll get them out right away. I said, "Okay, we'll talk to them," and they find out their information like three or four years old, right? And finally, the head chef just said, "Just let them do their job, because it's going to take time." But what we found was, we found, we spread the word out amongst our Middle East offices

• 1:58:47Speaker 04

  about what happened. This one woman in our office in Jordan, in Amman, said, "I have a neighbor and a friend, somebody I know, that used to be the Jordanian ambassador to Libya." And we said, "Oh, well, that's interesting." So, we asked, "Do you think he'd be amenable, you know, to us talking to him about it?" So, we approached them, and we asked them, "Do you still have contacts in the Gaddafi government?" "I do." And he, "Would you be willing to go in?" So, he did. He went in for us, and did some digging, and stuff like that, and eventually found out where the person was.

• 1:59:28Speaker 04

  And we eventually, through some negotiations, were able to get that person out. And, but it was the wildest, who knew that we had an office in Libya? And of course, this person would be part of the Gaddafi resistance. He's lucky he wasn't killed. He was, he was beaten up and, you know, tortured pretty bad, but he, we got him out.

• 1:59:48Jack Murphy?

  It's like that, uh, Whistle Pro movie.

• 1:59:52Speaker 04

  Which one?

• 1:59:53Jack Murphy?

  What's the name of that Russell Crowe movie?

• 1:59:55Speaker 04

  Proof of Life. Proof of Life.

• 1:59:57Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:57Speaker 04

  Proof of Life, yeah.

• 1:59:58Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. It was kinda like that.

• 2:00:00Jack Murphy?

  Mike, tell us then, uh, go ahead.

• 2:00:03Speaker 04

  No, no, go ahead, go ahead.

• 2:00:04Jack Murphy?

  Well, I was just gonna ask, uh, you know, coming out off of that, talk to us a little bit about your second retirement from your second career and kind of what came after.

• 2:00:13Speaker 04

  Sure. Um, you know, once again, you get to a point, uh, and a lot of it had to do with, with Janice. So I met Janice in college at San Jose State in 1977. Uh, she's Japanese, I'm half Japanese. And as, uh, and when I went to take her on my first date, her dad, um, was cleaning his gun. And so as I like to say, he, he liked this side of me, but he didn't like that part of me.

• 2:00:43Speaker 04

  So we kinda went our separate ways after that. And I, I went to open all that other stuff. And then we both married other people. Uh, she was, she's a, she was a pilot, air traffic controller, and then became a flight attendant for American. Married another flight attendant, great guy, I never met him. Um, and then I married a guy named Karen from the agency, CTC. We didn't know it, we didn't keep in contact. And unbeknownst to me, in 2014, Janice's husband died of a heart attack in their house in Florida. And my wife passed away in 2016 of stomach cancer while I was still C, uh, CSO.

• 2:01:21Speaker 04

  Um, and so my, uh, my wife, uh, Karen was Catholic. And so, but she came from San Diego County, that's where her parents or relatives are. So I did a eulogy in Seattle, flew down to San Diego to do a second eulogy. My friend Scott, who I've mentioned several times, my best friend. At that point, he had retired from the agency also, but he was working for Will Hurd. You know, uh, Will is a retired, is former agency officer, but younger generation. Like if, if I'm Kirk, he's like the Card generation, you know? And, uh, uh, he was Congressman of San Antonio, Republican, but really cool guy, cause he crossed the lines and...

• 2:02:03Speaker 04

  Scott was doing some work for him and Scott told him about Karen passing and said, "Could you do anything?" He said, "Yeah, absolutely." So they flew a flag over the US Capitol in Karen's honor with a certificate from, this is from the Architect of the Capitol, Honor of Karen, Honor for her service to her country. So he presented it to me the next day, the day before the eulogy. I did the eulogy and then I posted it on Facebook.

• 2:02:25Speaker 00

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• 2:02:56Speaker 04

  We were Facebook friends, but just on the periphery, like never talked. And she saw that, that's the first thing she pulled up. So it must have been providence with all the algorithms, anything that could come up. And she reached out to me and we got back together again after 41 years and we're married now, right?

• 2:03:13Jack Murphy?

  That's incredible.

• 2:03:14Speaker 04

  But that's a long way of going about the fact that about 2018, I figured, you know what, there's more to life than this. I think we've built up Microsoft global security to where it needed to be. We're being benchmarked by peers and governments and a lot of other folks. I had a good succession plan and at some point, you know, you need to, you need to D D mail and you need to get out at Dodge so you can allow other people to, you know, to rise to where they want to be, you know, and grow and take over. And so financially, we were able to pull the plug and we moved to Las Vegas.

• 2:03:58Speaker 04

  I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do exactly. Just kind of kept it nebulous. And then COVID hit. And I know, well, I knew we wanted to get involved in the community. And we always were interested in, in like helping at risk youth and doing things like that. But we started getting involved in different community things, but then COVID hit. And I tried my, I decided, okay, so I'd always thought about writing a book. Uh, on leadership. And I went to, you know, on, on, um, on the Apple TV, this, this app called Masterclass and you can look up, you know, different authors and I, I, I looked up different authors and kind of figured out how they like to write. And I took an old PowerPoint I used to give on leadership and I

• 2:04:42Speaker 04

  turned, turned it to what I thought was a really good book on leadership. And a gal that I knew that I brought into Microsoft to do some productivity training for me, Laura Stack. They call her the productivity, um, pro. She's lives in Colorado. I reached out to her and I said, do you know anybody that, you know, like could help me with book writing and stuff? She said, yeah, this is a girl named Judith Biles. And they call her the book shepherd and she works with independent writers and stuff. I'll introduce her. So she introduced us. And, and as soon as I sent my manuscript to Judith, she said, you don't know how to write, do you?

• 2:05:18Speaker 04

  And that dashes my dreams, you know, and I said, I write all the time and I, I used to write cables in the agency and I write business stuff. She said, I'm talking about books, right? And what I learned is you guys, you guys know, you, you, you've written. Usually the, your first manuscript ends up on the floor anyway at some point or part of it, right? That's just part of the process of writing, but we worked with each other for a better part of a year to come up with my first book, which is The Art of Ronan Leadership. And we called it Ronan for a number of reasons. My wife actually came up with the, uh, idea because I've, Ronan means master of samurai. I think you guys know, but some folks up there may not know. And my theory is that, or thesis,

• 2:06:00Speaker 04

  is that as you grow in leadership, you're learning from different people. You always have mentors and you never stop growing. The day you, the day you say you've looked at management, the leadership thing is the day you stop growing as a leader, right? You're always learning. But at some point, you're going to chart your own path. You've learned from different people. You know who you are with emotional intelligence and all this kind of stuff. And then you're going to chart your own way of doing things. And Janice was Thank you. Well, what about Ronin? Because I got a Ronin tattoo here. I'm really heavy into the Samurai stuff. And I thought, yeah, a master of Samurai, that would be kind of a kind of cool thing. And then one day, as we're kind of finessing the book, I looked behind me and I have the Book of Five Rings

• 2:06:43Speaker 04

  by the greatest Samurai that ever lived, Miyamoto Musashi. And the Book of Five Rings, I said, okay, so I have these teaching points in the book. And as I started thumbing through, I said, well, this part of Musashi's would fit here. So we kind of added that. So that became kind of the whole Ronin leadership thing. So we published the book and people really liked it. And I realized I really like writing. I really enjoyed the process of, not the first time, we should tell me I didn't know how to write. Right, right. That first year was kind of tedious. I'd take this out, take this out, take this out. You know, but as we get to know each other, and we're just great friends now, we collaborated on a second book because the feedback on the first book was,

• 2:07:27Speaker 04

  we loved the first book, which was at a 50,000 foot level. But let's talk about, like, how, how do you, show us, tell us how to build teams and how to get a budget and how to build strategy and blah, blah, blah. So the next one was the Art of Ronin Leadership Strategies. And that was more about the sort of the down-to-earth kind of thing, right? So I thought, okay, yeah, I love leadership stuff. And I started, you know, a small podcast and a blog. And but then, kind of in the back of me, I said, I want to do fiction. So I started watching the master classes from Daniel Baldacci and, you know,

• 2:08:09Jack Murphy?

  Dan Brown.

• 2:08:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, all these, all these folks, yeah, exactly. And Lee Child and all this kind of stuff. And I'm thinking, I'm gonna try my hand at it. And I had a story that I, I, I, it came up with a story that took place in the Philippines. You know, obviously, things I'm familiar with, with the NPA. I put pen to paper and I, and then I realized I really love writing. Because I love crafting something out of whole cloth. And then that just, that became. One of my main verticals in life now is to write. I'm getting ready to publish my third. Uh, it wasn't, it wasn't gonna be a series, but now it's the third in a series. A guy named Jack Trench, who's a former CIA guy. So that was kind of one part of it. The other part of it was, you know, going back to the police thing.

• 2:08:56Speaker 04

  We had supported the Seattle Police Foundation for years when I was at Microsoft. And we knew the chiefs there very well. And came here, I asked the chief of police at the time, Carmen Best, in Seattle to introduce me to the then Sheriff Joe Lombardo, who's now our governor. So Janice and I went to go meet with Joe. And Joe mentioned about this Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Foundation that they have, similar to Seattle Police Foundation. I was never on the board with Seattle Police, uh, Seattle Police Foundation, but we always supported it. So we met with their, with their executive director. I got on the board and eventually ended up, this is, I'm finishing up my second term

• 2:09:37Speaker 04

  as the board president for the LVMPED Police Foundation. So we, we provide, you know, equipment and all kinds of things that the department needs.

• 2:09:49Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:49Speaker 04

  Uh, if you, if you remember the recent bombing, obviously, uh, at Trump Tower, when Sheriff McMail got up there and they were showing the drone coverage of that, uh, the Tesla, right? The, uh, that, all those drones are because of the foundation's efforts with, through donors to give them the technology. And they're probably one of the most technologically savvy and advanced police department in the country. So that was the second vertical. And I guess the third one was, uh, because we, we feel for at-risk youth, we started our own foundation. Uh, Mike and Janice Howard Foundation, and so we're supporting several, uh, charities that deal with at-risk youth,

• 2:10:31Speaker 04

  uh, whether it's to help support them with arts, uh, like supporting folks being, who can't, who are musically gifted, but they can't afford lessons or instruments, we kind of help them with that. Uh, another thing called Club Christ, which, uh, they have four different locations, soon to be expanded. Um, because Metro is actually getting behind this. Where we'll take an apartment, uh, building or, uh, apartment, uh, room, uh, and...

• 2:11:01Speaker 04

  It's a place for kids in really bad neighborhoods to go after school. They get some computer study, they get some snacks, they get some computer time. If they want, they can get some, you know, Bible learning or whatever, but at the end of the day, keeps them off the streets. So we're kind of supporting that. So that's, that became, that's kind of my second life. I never thought that, I thought I would just, you know, I don't play golf, so I don't know what I was gonna do, but, but that, that, that's now become kind of a, our, our life here. But I, I would say, you know, the writing is probably the preeminent thing. I'm, I love being an author and I love writing and I'm,

• 2:11:45Speaker 04

  it, it just, it's, it's a passion for me.

• 2:11:47Jack Murphy?

  I agree.

• 2:11:47Speaker 04

  And I can take a lot of the experiences that I had in life and hopefully put it to paper, you know, in a fiction form.

• 2:11:53Jack Murphy?

  Tell us the titles of your books and where people can find them.

• 2:11:57Speaker 04

  Sure. The Art of Ronan Leadership, The Art of Executing Ronan Leadership Strategies are the two nonfiction. Full Circle, which you see behind me, my first fiction, and Blood Promise. All of them you can find on either MikeHowardAuthor.com, there are links. And, and BarnesandNoble.com, you can find them there. But the easiest way to find them is just on Amazon. Just look them up on Amazon. But if you go to MikeHowardAuthor.com, you got the links that'll take you straight to the books.

• 2:12:27Speaker 03

  That's fantastic.

• 2:12:28Jack Murphy?

  Do we have questions?

• 2:12:29Speaker 03

  We have a couple of questions. I don't know if we have any on Patreon, but I'll get to the ones here. We have, M. Corbin, thank you very much. How could the agency present itself in advertising to more effectively convey a message and recruit more gentlemen of your caliber?

• 2:12:46Speaker 04

  Wow, that's quite a question. It's, it's, it's kind of hard because you're, you're a clandestine, you know, organization. But one of the things they, they could do is, you know, get maybe folks like me and other folks that have had, you know, great careers and we love, we love the agency. And, and not just, you know, people with gray hair like me, but, you know, all, all the demographics.

• 2:13:17Speaker 04

  Put together a panel, you know, which I don't think there's ever been done and just, you know, or a video and just talk about your agency experiences. Whether it was, you know, someone like me started in nineteen eighty or someone that started in, you know, the two thousands.

• 2:13:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:13:31Speaker 04

  And just talk about the benefits of it and, uh, as well as, you know, the, the, the things that you have to sacrifice. I mean, you, you, you know, it, it, they're, they're like any profession, special operations, law enforcement, what have you, intelligence work, you know, it takes a heavy toll, you know, a lot of it is all encompassing. Uh, there are heavy divorce rates and things like that. There's always the, the, that side of it, but to me, to be able to evangelize, not just the experiences that I had in the agency, but the sense of fulfillment I had in serving the country. And people ask me a lot, so, you know, what did you like better, Microsoft or, or the agency?

• 2:14:16Speaker 04

  I like the money better at Microsoft, obviously, but when it comes to fulfillment, there's nothing more fulfilling, fulfill, fulfilling than serving your country, in my humble opinion. I got, to me, that was, while we're sort of serving the cu- uh, the country at Microsoft because we obviously, Microsoft supplies a lot of the software and, and data centers, infrastructure for the government. Nothing like serving your country, but I would say that's one way, if the agency would be willing to just reach out to former folks and be able to talk about, or even, you could have a mishmash of former folks like me, again, all ages demographics, but also there are folks that not, are not,

• 2:14:59Speaker 04

  that we're not, that are not hired to be undercover. You're, you're an analyst, for instance, you're not, have them come on board and talk about their experiences of being with the agency, but just get out there and you have to get out there in ways that are different than just go to CIA.gov.

• 2:15:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:15:13Speaker 04

  You need, get out on Instagram, get out on whatever platforms that you have to evangelize where you can get the most bang for your buck.

• 2:15:21Speaker 03

  I think one of the things people would be surprised at how many different types of jobs there are at the agency.

• 2:15:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:15:26Speaker 03

  That, you know, everybody thinks of like the case officer and maybe even the analyst, but, you know, like when you start getting into like DS and T or, or the tech side, when you start getting into, you know, uh, products or, or whatever, like there's so much there, right?

• 2:15:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, part of my education was to, you know, when you, when you go to a certain location, you see what the DST can do, you know, you know, look through walls and all the, all the kind of fancy, you know, stuff that they do or the explosive stuff or, you know, but it's not just the kinetic stuff, the, the intelligence part of it, the analyst part of it.

• 2:16:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:04Speaker 04

  Or even like, you know, the, the, the security or.

• 2:16:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:09Speaker 04

  You know, there, there are so many careers there that it shouldn't keep people from applying because they think, I'm not going to be Jason Bourne. Well, hell, I'm not Jason Bourne.

• 2:16:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:16:16Speaker 04

  You know?

• 2:16:17Speaker 03

  There, there is no Jason Bourne.

• 2:16:19Speaker 04

  I'd be fired, you know, there's no Jason Bourne, right?

• 2:16:21Speaker 03

  I mean, look, they have janitors at the agency, right? Like they, they have, somebody cleans up at the end of the day. I, I mean.

• 2:16:28Speaker 04

  They have a store and they sell stuff which we didn't have. We didn't have a store.

• 2:16:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:33Speaker 04

  But yeah, to your point, you're right. There's a lot, there are a lot of careers there. But, uh, you know, and, and it's like any organization, um, you, you need a lot of people to keep the, keep the trains running. So anybody could find a good career at CIA if, if you looked hard, hard enough.

• 2:16:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, M. Corbin, thank you very much. Uh, what could go wrong with a venture capital firm funding a business that's profit model is AI smut like Civiani is doing?

• 2:17:05Speaker 04

  Wow. What could go wrong? Well, I mean, I, I think the answer is pretty, is pretty clear. Look, you know, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not an expert on AI. I've, I've been using it now in, in different, uh, ways, but at the end of the day, AI is still, in my opinion, in its nascent stages, right? And so if, if you're going to invest in an AI platform, you better have done your due diligence to the point where you, you really have a good uh, handle on pros and cons, you know, the risks and the rewards and that kind of stuff. I think problem with a lot of VCs is that.

• 2:17:46Speaker 04

  You know, they want to get on the AI bandwagon because they're they're reading in the news, the Wall Street Journal, and they're seeing, you know, Microsoft's investing in AI and blah, blah, blah. And so this sounds good. Again, the bright shiny objects that are out there are not always the best things to invest in. Uh, and to put your, your, your money into. So, I mean, the pit, yeah, pitfalls are obviously, it could be reputational. And it can be legal if it goes south, and certainly it could be financial if you've invested X number of dollars into this thing. So, uh, I love the aspects of AI that I'm, I'm seeing, like even on like, you know, the iPhone here, the new iPhone, they got some AI things embedded in. Those are little things and it doesn't cost that much.

• 2:18:30Speaker 04

  You gotta be real careful. And again, I'm not an AI expert.

• 2:18:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:18:33Speaker 04

  Uh, this is a new world to me, too. It's, it's like any other kind of investment. That's the way I look at it, that you, you go into it with eyes wide open, not thinking that you're gonna make a quick hit. And understanding that the pitfalls of the, of this thing goes south, right? And if you've, if you've thought through all those things and you're still willing to put the dollars, go do it, you know?

• 2:18:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:18:58Speaker 04

  Then at least your conscience is clear because you've done your, as much due diligence as you believe is necessary to make you feel comfortable investing in that. Otherwise, I'd stay away.

• 2:19:08Speaker 03

  Mike, I have a question for you because I, I think you're really, uh, I, I, I mean, you're at a place where you can, you have good visibility on this. You know, you, when you think of a company like Microsoft or any of these tech companies, you have physical security, right? And, and all the things that that comprises. Um, and that probably includes like insider threat and a bunch of other stuff, right? But then you also have your cybersecurity, you know, you have the people watching, you know, what's going on in the system and stuff like that. But tho- those two things have been held separately for so long. But with, you know, we're with things like social engineering, with a lot of these things, like there, there is a place where they bleed together, right?

• 2:19:50Speaker 03

  And, and how does that fusion happen? And how does like the physical security and the cybersecurity? Are, are they, is there a place where they mesh and where they get on board?

• 2:20:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, great question. There is. The security world has been wrestling with that for years. There was a time when I was CSO, earlier in my career, there was this notion of this Uber CSO that would have everything, right? And there are, there are some CSOs that have both fiscal and IT, logical security, but that's not the norm.

• 2:20:26Speaker 04

  So, the way you tackle that is, again, Microsoft's not perfect, and I don't even know if this structure is in place now, but the, the then head of IT security and I, we helped, along with some others, created what they call the Information Risk Management Council at Microsoft. It was made up of fiscal, IT, and then some of the business units that had security elements in it. And we would meet on a regular basis, number one, to talk about what our strategies were for that particular fiscal year or whatever, so just completely transparent, and what we're planning to do, where, what country, blah, blah, blah, and then see where we can de-conflict. That's kind of number one. So you have to have, and then

• 2:21:11Speaker 04

  come up with a, a common strategy to tackle security threats writ large at Microsoft, right? So, to the point where if, if, if we fired somebody and they have a, they, they, they, for some reason, they didn't turn their badge in, right? And then they try to, they try to badge in somewhere, you know, so we know about it, but shouldn't IT security also know about that, right? Right. So what, what, what's the technol, what's the technology pipe that connects the two together, right? Those are the things that, that need to be talked about.

• 2:21:46Speaker 04

  And so, to me, the remedy is, you either have one Uber CSO that takes care of everything, that has all, both verticals, or you have some kind of committee, some infrastructure, that makes sure that you are openly sharing information, strategies, technologies, because you don't want to be redundant, too. If I'm asking for a particular technology, and IT's looking for another technology, that's stupid, right? You know, I used to call it, Strategic integration, we coined that. So make sure that every vertical that you have, you know what everyone's doing, so that when you're going for an ask or you're doing something, you're doing it in a unified manner, like a unified command.

• 2:22:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:22:31Speaker 04

  So, but companies, from what I understand, are still wrestling with that, which it amazes me to this day, that they can't even put together a simple committee to de-conflict.

• 2:22:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:22:43Speaker 04

  Makes no sense. But again, I think it goes back to something you said earlier about, remember you said about bureau and agency and sometimes, you know, they don't talk to each other because they've got different cultures. And it's kind of the same thing, you know, where, you know, this is my piece of the pie, and if I give up that piece of the pie, you know, I give up some power and, you know, what if they look better than I do because they found that there's some flaws in my security thingy? But that's the whole idea of being transparent, because nobody's perfect. You know, when we had these meetings, we say we're doing X, Y, and Z, and maybe IT says, you know, but that doesn't make sense in terms of the total totality of what we're trying to do. And we have to think about that and

• 2:23:26Speaker 04

  think, well, maybe you're right. Maybe we've got to refine this, rethink this, right? As opposed to, well, this is our stuff and we're always right. And who are you to tell us that we can't do this? So that's a hurdle. But structurally, it's easy if people are willing to do it.

• 2:23:44Speaker 03

  Right, right. Makes sense. And Josh, thank you very much. Any thoughts or experience with ACES, the Aussie CIA?

• 2:23:54Speaker 04

  The who?

• 2:23:55Speaker 03

  ACES, the Aussie, the Australian, like, intelligence organization?

• 2:24:01Speaker 04

  It's funny, Janice and I just took a Christmas cruise through Australia and New Zealand. And I, last time I've been to New Zealand was in the 80s.

• 2:24:11Speaker 04

  We, we worked with them. Um, they're very capable. But one thing I remember, they're very laid back, right? I mean, like, it was like a Friday and like four o'clock and we said, okay, so what are we gonna do next? He said, hey mate, we're off duty, you know, we're gone, you know? Okay, let's go. Uh, but no, they're very, they're very capable service.

• 2:24:36Speaker 04

  And their counterpart used to be called ASIO. Uh, they're, they're kind of like the domestic. Uh, the, you know, they're very switched on. They know what they're doing. And they certainly have their share of threats. And, uh, they're, they're really great, great partners to work with. The, I had limited exposure to them.

• 2:24:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:24:55Speaker 04

  But I, I enjoyed, I enjoyed working with them and I, I, I respected the hell out of them.

• 2:25:01Speaker 03

  That's awesome. Dee, did we have anything on Patreon? Okay. Um, Mike, where can people find you? Uh, aside from just your books, but are you any social media presence or anything?

• 2:25:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, so I do, uh,

• 2:25:15Speaker 04

  uh, I have a, uh, a blog, Rodeo and Leadership Thoughts on LinkedIn. Like you just look that up there.

• 2:25:23Speaker 04

  I, uh, MikeCardAuthor.com is the best place to find me. I have, uh, I have a, uh, I do, I have an Instagram account. And I post a lot of reels on Instagram. But MikeCardAuthor.com is kind of the one stop shop. Kind of made it that way. So if you want to find any content that I have, whether it's blogs, podcasts, or what have you, uh, you can find it right there.

• 2:25:50Jack Murphy?

  And, uh, want to tell our listeners out there that we will be back on Monday with Michelle Rigby Assad, a former CIA officer, author of Get Off the X. And then on Friday, we will have, uh, Asha, who, uh, she served as a military intelligence officer and then had a position in the Biden administration. So we're looking forward to having both of those folks on here.

• 2:26:15Speaker 03

  Awesome.

• 2:26:15Jack Murphy?

  Next week.

• 2:26:17Speaker 03

  Mike, thank you so much. We really appreciate you spending a Friday night with us.

• 2:26:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, this has been awesome. Thank you so much. And I'm glad that we could share drinks together.

• 2:26:27Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 2:26:29Speaker 04

  And thank you for what you guys do. I think your podcast, I'm prepping for this. I watch your podcast. You have such a great range of people. And I know it's not easy to do this. And so I can learn a lot from you too, in terms of my own podcast. So I appreciate you putting me on here. And I love the questions. And thank you so much.

• 2:26:52Speaker 03

  Is your podcast active right now?

• 2:26:55Speaker 04

  It is.

• 2:26:56Speaker 03

  Where can people find that?

• 2:26:59Speaker 04

  Same thing, MikeHowardAuthor.com. But you can look it up. It's called Ronan Leadership Podcast.

• 2:27:04Speaker 03

  Okay. Have you put it?

• 2:27:06Speaker 05

  Cash Flow Crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:27:36Speaker 03

  Is it out on all the Spotify, on the platforms and stuff like that?

• 2:27:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's out there. But it's growing. You know, someday I'll be you, but it's growing.

• 2:27:45Speaker 03

  Well, so everybody check out Ronan Leadership Podcast.

• 2:27:49Speaker 05

  Cash Flow Crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:28:20Speaker 03

  Or Ronan Leadership Podcast.

• 2:28:21Speaker 04

  Or just go to MikeHowardAuthor.com and you'll find the link to it.

• 2:28:25Speaker 03

  Okay, great. Yeah, if there's ever anything we can do for you, when your next book comes out, whatever, we can plug it for you. Just let us know.

• 2:28:33Speaker 04

  I will. I appreciate it. It should be coming out in another couple of weeks, the third one.

• 2:28:36Speaker 03

  Awesome. Yeah.

• 2:28:37Speaker 04

  Hey, thanks, guys. Appreciate it, man.

• 2:28:39Speaker 03

  Is it available for pre-sale right now?

• 2:28:42Speaker 04

  It will be in a

• 2:28:43Speaker 05

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:29:13Speaker 04

  About five days.

• 2:29:14Speaker 03

  All right, everybody make sure you go buy the book on pre-sale.

• 2:29:18Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I'm gonna go check out the first novel, get caught up to speed.

• 2:29:22Speaker 04

  All right, thank you, brother. Appreciate it.

• 2:29:23Jack Murphy?

  Thank you much. Have a good one, Mike. And have a nice weekend out there, everyone.

• 2:29:29Speaker 00

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:29:57Speaker 05

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.