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

For two decades, Jonathan Hackett managed complex intelligence operations and special activities in dozens of countries, serving with the NSA, DIA, and Special Operations Command. He concluded his military career leading the Marines' program for allied and partner engagement, and is now passionate about researching irregular wars, ancient Mediterranean history, and interrogation psychology. Find Jon here: www.linkedin.com/in/thejonathanhackett www.jonathanwhackett.com Iran’s Shadow Weapons: Intelligence Operations, Covert Action, and Unconventional Warfare https://www.amazon.com/Irans-Shadow-Weapons-Intelligence-Unconventional/dp/1476696934/ Theory of Irregular War https://www.amazon.com/Theory-Irregular-War-Jonathan-Hackett/dp/1476689059/ Today's Sponsors: StopBox USA⬇️ Get firearm security redesigned and save with BOGO the StopBox Pro AND 10% off @StopBoxUSA with code HOUSE at https://www.stopboxusa.com/HOUSE GhostBed⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 10% off! For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics... JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouse To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video -early access to shows -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse New merch, patches, and stickers! ⬇️ https://theteamhouse-shop.fourthwall.com Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse ___________________________________________________ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured __________________________________ Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse 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 "Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio" 00:00 Start 01:09 - Jonathan's origin story. 03:16 - His start in Signals Intelligence. 9:05 - Jonathan's experiences at the NSA. 11:50 - Shifting careers to Human Intelligence. 18:30 - Recounting the Camp Bastion incident. 27:45 - Ops in Indonesia. 41:22 - Airstrikes and personal story. 58:56 - Diplomatic intelligence work. 1:06:01 - Discussing his book's critique of conflict. 1:23:47 - Details on his upcoming book about Iran. 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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• 1:33Speaker 03

  Special Operations.

• 1:37Speaker 03

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

• 1:53Jack Murphy?

  Welcome to episode 351 of The Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave in studio with Jonathan Hackett. He is a former Marine. He's the author of The Theory of Irregular Warfare, or Irregular War, I should say, and the forthcoming book Iran's Shadow Weapons, which is coming out this summer. Jonathan served in the Marines, worked in a SIGINT capacity, a HUMINT capacity, was with MARSOC all over the Middle East and West Africa, Central Africa. Plenty of stuff to talk about here. Talk about you and then we'll talk about your books and the theory behind your research. So, thank you for joining us and coming in studio today.

• 2:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

• 2:37Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. So, take it from the top. If you tell us a little bit about, you know, what was it like for you growing up and like what sort of like took you towards the Marine Corps?

• 2:47Speaker 05

  So, I grew up in Maine, way up north, Caribou, Maine, like most northeastern of the United States. Lot of snow. Love the snow. Then we moved to Connecticut when I was about 10 years old. And from there, I met a couple of different people in the military, especially WWII and Vietnam people, because that was that era. And I had a history teacher, Mr. Donahue, who fought in the Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War as a Marine. And he was so down to earth, like a really nice guy. And you wouldn't imagine if you met him on the street that he had fought in the Chosin Reservoir, you know, like fighting in reverse and all the stuff that they were doing. So, that's one guy that was like in the back of my mind, like, something about him, I like that guy, you know. And then I met a family friend who fought in

• 3:27Speaker 05

  the Battle of Pellul, WWII. And he actually had a katana of one of the last guys that he killed on the island, and he had it at his house. His name's Butch Watkins. He has two Silver Stars from that battle. And like, he's a crazy background. But again, if you met him on the street, you wouldn't know that that guy did that. He was like, you know, if your car is broken down, he'd go over and stop and like help you fix your tire, even though you're a stranger, like that kind of guy. But you gotta think like back to that time, you know, he was doing that stuff. And there were people in my family who had been in like WWII and things like that in the Army. Like my grandfather was in France during the liberation of France, which is cool and awesome, but like there's something about the army where it's just kind of like the army goes rolling along. But there's a difference with the way the Marine Corps is like, like these two individuals, for example, like

• 4:12Speaker 05

  there's something about them that's more than just the military, you know? And I also like to be like a high achiever. And I was thinking like, what's the highest thing I can do right now? And I was kind of a bad kid in high school. So like I stayed back in 12th grade because I didn't go to school for an entire year. I just didn't go and my mom was too busy working. So like the truant officer would come and I wasn't home. And you can't do anything about that. So couldn't go to college right away. I'm like, how do I get out of here? Well, I could do that Marine Corps thing. And so that's, that's why I joined the Marine Corps, getting out of my town in Connecticut, basically.

• 4:44Jack Murphy?

  And you came in the Marines doing sand?

• 4:47Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I didn't even know what that was. I knew I wanted to do something kind of like unconventional and unique. Because that's kind of the way I grew up was just like almost no rules, no boundaries, you know? And I didn't want to be boxed in. The military can box you in, but I, I told the recruiter, like, I don't want to be boxed in. You gotta find somewhere else for me. So he's like, okay, take this test, the ASVAB, the entry test. And back then it was on a, like a, you know, black and white screen, old computers, you know? And I'm doing the test and I'm doing the math test and like the science test and I'm answering the questions that keep getting harder. I'm like, am I stupid? And I thought I got like a zero, you know, like I thought I did really bad. And they gave me the sheet and apparently I did really well. And I didn't know this, but the ASVAB back then, I don't know if it still does. They give you more difficult questions, the more you answer correctly.

• 5:33Jack Murphy?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 5:34Speaker 05

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

• 5:57Jack Murphy?

  Making our numbers.

• 5:59Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:59Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 5:59Speaker 05

  And actually he kept calling me. He was like, you want to go to bootcamp like a little earlier? Cause he had like a monthly quota. He was like, something to get you as soon as possible. You know, are you really serious about it? You show me you're serious. So I did actually went earlier. So I went there in October, 2004 to bootcamp. And that was in Paris Island, a good time. And then at the end of boot camp, I found out what my job would be because I didn't even know like that contract I signed, no clue what it was. And they're like, hey, you're going to Pensacola, Florida. Well, we did Marine Combat Training, which is what the, you know, non infantry guys do, like very basic. It was still like Vietnam era stuff back then. It was like 2003, 2004. We had like the old flak jackets, the tri-color flak jackets, like covers your whole body and all that, you know, and the H harness chest brig that they used to wear back in

• 6:43Speaker 05

  the day. So we're doing all that like nonsense, like patrolling around like idiots. And then even though the war had already taught us stuff, we weren't learning those lessons yet. And like teaching us to do like the Turkey Peak, but with a long gun, which is so stupid. It was just like dumb stuff. Anyways, they're like, yeah, you're going to Pensacola after that. So I went to Pensacola where the NSA actually teaches like a joint school to teach SIGINT collectors, basically. So SIGINT, SIGINT Intelligence Collectors, they collect foreign intelligence on nation states and any other target that we need. And so we learned all that stuff. And at the time, they were transitioning from the old way of doing SIGINT, like against the Russians back in the day, to a new way of doing it, which was all digital. Because before that, there was a lot of Morse code, especially

• 7:26Speaker 05

  during like the nuclear period, because Morse code is the only thing that will survive a nuclear strike as far as communications are concerned. So like Russia, China, North Korea, and the United States all have Morse code backup systems. So of course, that's a target that'd be very interesting to listen to, right? Because you could, you could know what they're going to do in the event of a nuclear attack, because they're always practicing that stuff. So we learned how to do that. We also learned how to do something called hand graphic analysis, where you listen to some stuff over satellite communications, and you actually take a piece of graph paper and write down the bits on it, and figure out where the bits start and end. And you can actually decrypt stuff this way. And I'm way oversimplifying it, but we did that for like three months.

• 8:05Speaker 06

  That's wild.

• 8:06Speaker 05

  There's a ton of trigonometry involved, and I am not good at math. So that took me a long time to master. I was spending a lot of extra hours in the schoolhouse. Eventually got it. The reason you need trigonometry is because you can actually figure out like the angle, the amplitude, the all these different things about the signal if you just do the math on it.

• 8:21Speaker 06

  Really?

• 8:22Speaker 05

  Which will help you solve the equation and figure out like what part of this signal is protecting the data, what part is the actual data, like what's the nuclear communication in there? And what's just the error correction stuff on the outside of it? And when you collect it, you don't know, you just see zeros and ones. So you got to figure out like, first of all, where does it begin? Because that will tell you everything else about the sequence and all that. And we were doing this on a piece of graph paper. They don't do that anymore.

• 8:43Speaker 06

  So thi- this school then for SIGINT is different. It's a different focus than the voice intercept school at Goodfellow.

• 8:51Speaker 05

  So that is a complimentary school that is for the air force now, but it used to be, that school used to be an analysis school only.

• 8:59Speaker 06

  Oh, I'm not, I'm sorry, I don't mean Goodfellow. I mean, um, not Goodfellow, I mean, uh, San Angelo.

• 9:04Speaker 05

  Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, that was a follow-on school for a, like a portion of this stuff.

• 9:09Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 9:09Speaker 05

  What we were learning at Pensacola was like broad.

• 9:11Speaker 06

  Oh, interesting.

• 9:12Speaker 05

  From satellite communication interception, all the way down to like tactical radio interception, to digital communications, analog communications. We were using oscilloscopes, inspector analyzers, and like all this stuff.

• 9:22Speaker 06

  Fascinating.

• 9:23Speaker 05

  Yeah. And then, so I did that and I was the honor graduate in the class, which meant I get to pick my duty station. And they listed all these places and I, I thought to myself like, I don't want to go to a Marine Corps unit, even though I'm a Marine, because I know if I go to a Marine Corps unit, I'm going to get boxed in.

• 9:39Speaker 06

  Right.

• 9:39Speaker 05

  So I was like, what's the least Marine Corps thing I can do? There was this thing on there that said NSA CSS, which is National Security Agency, Central Security Service, Hawaii. And I was like, I'll do that. So I went to Hawaii to work in the tunnel, which is, uh, there's a walkway three quarters of a mile underground underneath the pineapple field that people who work there will know exactly what I'm talking about. It's a dull pineapple plantation that the US government leases the soil underneath. And we have a gigantic three-story building buried underground that's no longer functional. They actually closed a few years ago, so I can talk about it now. But it was a huge collection site, thousands of people worked there 24 hours a day, mostly monitoring Chinese and Russian stuff, North Korean stuff. So I was on a mission there, monitoring some nuclear stuff.

• 10:21Speaker 05

  And both listening to audio like you're talking about, but also looking at digital satellite communication, shipborne communication, all this stuff, because these countries have the nuclear triad, right? They've got subs, they've got aircraft, they have ground launch, all this, all this stuff, and they're communicating all the time. So we want to know what they're doing, just like they want to know what we're doing. Right. Because, I mean, the whole point of intelligence is to reduce uncertainty, because that makes a decision easier to make. So that's what we were doing out there. A lot of interesting things happened out there. One that stands out to me is, one of our targets was using that old fashioned method of communication I was talking about, and we were using the old fashioned method of breaking the code. And it was Christmas Day, 2005, I think. And I was on watch, it was like 3:00 in the morning, and I decoded the

• 11:04Speaker 05

  message, and it was a bunch of at symbols in the shape of a Christmas tree. And it said, Merry Christmas, Americans. Holy shit. And I'm like, what am I even doing here? Right, right. Why are we so secretive if you know, like, you know, I know, we know, like, it was so, like, I felt dumb, you know? Yeah. But it was kind of cool. And then, you know, that kind of stuff went on for a little while. And then, my three years there was up. So I had to go choose another station. And again, I did not want to go into a Marine Corps unit. So I went to NSA headquarters and actually got to work on a more advanced SIGINT collection capability called Expeditionary SIGINT, kind of like exploiting targets that are like very specific with basically manufactured

• 11:45Speaker 05

  devices and kind of form factor stuff, depending on what the mission is. So, you know, for example, if I can take a picture of the soil from space, see the, like, a rock formation, so I know what those rocks look like, I can use some other measurement and signature intelligence to figure out what the soil is composed of, then in the laboratory, I can reproduce that sand and that stone, and put a listening device inside of it, and then kick it out of an airplane into that country, and it looks like a part of the desert that belongs there. And like, you wouldn't know that unless you cracked it open, that it was not that. So that's the kind of stuff we were doing up there, which was really interesting. And it was definitely the direction I wanted to go. Problem is, the more advanced I got in these things, the further from a window I became and like the less sunlight I would see and, you know, I felt like I need to get outside

• 12:27Speaker 05

  and touch grass because I'm going to become like a shriveled, vitamin D deficient person pretty soon here.

• 12:32Jack Murphy?

  So you weren't the guy that they sent up the telephone pole to found the wire?

• 12:35Speaker 05

  No.

• 12:36Jack Murphy?

  Deep, deep, deep in the caverns.

• 12:38Speaker 05

  You were like a skiff within a skiff within a skiff. Yeah. It was actually funny because back then we hadn't like locked down, like it was before Edward Snowden, so like things weren't as locked down as they are now. And I was a sergeant at the time, so I would just go around the NSA in the ops building where I worked and I would go into random conference rooms and just listen to meetings that were going on. And like, nobody asked you if you were supposed to be there or not. Like, I would just sit in the back with a notebook and pretend like, yeah, I'm supposed to be here. Because I was, I was like so interested, like, what's going on in here?

• 13:05Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 13:06Speaker 05

  And like, back then you could do that. You could just like, go sit in on something. I used to sit on General Ordino's Iraq update, the MNFI update, every week. And like, I wasn't supposed to be there. But it was really cool.

• 13:20Jack Murphy?

  So, the way that you found your way out of SIGINT, out of the caverns of the SKIF, was, you made this interesting transition I don't think too many people make. We've interviewed one or two, but not many. People who go from SIGINT to HUMINT. How did that take place for you?

• 13:37Speaker 05

  So, I was wondering, what will I do next? And the way our promotions work, I could see it coming where I was not going to be able to do operations anymore if I stayed SIGINT. And I was like, how do I keep doing operations? Well, HUMINT is there. I didn't know very much about it. I kind of took a risk on it and just said, I'm going to try it. If I don't like it, then I'm going to suffer. But if I like it, it might be cool. So I went, we did a screener. They do like a board where they sit down. They used to interrogate you for like eight hours with a group of dudes sitting across the table from you. Now it's not like that anymore. But I did that, passed the screener, went to the school and had no clue what I was about to learn. And so it was kind of a shock. I just was trying to get out. Kind of like when I joined the Marine Corps, I was trying to get out of Connecticut.

• 14:19Speaker 05

  Similar thing where I was like, how do I pivot out of here? And it was the right move.

• 14:25Speaker 06

  Was it difficult though to, because I mean, here you are with TSSCI, obviously, you know, some SAP access, something like that. Were they very, were they reluctant to let you go from the CINN field and anywhere else, not just HUMAN, but anywhere?

• 14:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. And actually, more so, the Marine Corps was pissed that I hadn't served in a Marine Corps unit. And they were really resistant to approve my stuff.

• 14:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:48Speaker 05

  But they, they, the local leadership had no power over my package that I sent up. All they could do is non-concur, but it didn't affect the outcome. So I still got picked.

• 14:59Speaker 06

  In the Marine Corps, if I remember right, working with some guys, like, aren't most of their HUMAN tours warrants? Or is there, or I guess, can you tell us how it, how it works? Cause I'm not sure. I just remember working with some warrants.

• 15:16Speaker 05

  So there have been some changes over time. It used to actually be two different fields. We used to have CI, counterintelligence, separate from HUMAN, just like the Army.

• 15:22Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 15:23Speaker 05

  No longer is that the case. And there's actually a third field, which was interrogator translators, that they rolled all three of these into a single MOS. So what you do is you have the enlisted people there and you usually have some junior officers. They don't do this anymore. They did it for about 10 years and then got rid of it. But like, let's say you're a first lieutenant out of Quantico and your MOS is going to be CI HUMAN officer. You would go through the class with us, enlisted, just like the rest of us, like, kind of like through soft training where it's like, there's no, the rank is not important. What's important is the training, you know? It's very similar to that. The warrant officers have to come later. So, you know, you graduate, get a couple of deployments under you. It used to be, you need like three or four deployments during the war. Now that the war is over, like, nobody's deploying. So they're just letting people go in. But it used to be a

• 16:07Speaker 05

  lot more competitive. They used to reject people all the time. Those warrant officers would become the team leaders and you'd have like between three to five CI HUMAN collectors and a team leader on top. And then you'd go deploy to do either direct support or general support to a unit that needed you.

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• 19:51Jack Murphy?

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• 19:53Speaker 05

  And what was your first assignment once you got into the human field? So I went to Afghanistan. That was like at the height of Marine Corps involvement in Afghanistan. Went there in 2011. I was there for a year. Went to Helmand Province. Super interesting experience. I went there with multiple functions. So I was general support to the area that we were in. We were in Regimental Combat Team Five, which was a portion of Helmand, kind of southwest-ish, all the way down to the Pakistan border. So I was doing interrogations in our debt fac. I was going on raids with our aerial interdiction force, which was going out there and like looking for dudes crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan with drugs. You know, land the helicopter right in front of the car and grab the dudes, take the drugs, go back. I would talk to them for a little while and be like,

• 20:38Speaker 05

  yep, you're going to Bagram, you know, and then send them out or let them go, depending on what was going on. Did that at the very beginning. Then our policy in Afghanistan changed about halfway through the deployment. They started shrinking down base footprints. So they were closing down some of the bases like Delarambe, for example. They shut that down, sent a lot of those guys to Camp Leatherneck. They sent us to Camp Leatherneck. I was at Camp Dwyer before. So when we went to Leatherneck, the mission changed more to a CI focused mission. But I still had all my source network that I had developed in southern Afghanistan, which was really helpful because one guy that I had been working with, it's kind of unusual, especially in the military, to do a cold bump with a guy, which means your very first contact, run it all the way through to recruitment. Usually that doesn't happen. Usually it's multiple handlers are doing this over time.

• 21:23Speaker 05

  And then finally, maybe the guy gets recruited. But this one particular source I had, I actually, the week after I showed up, I met him, started developing him and was able to recruit him in October the next year. So it was like less than a year, I was able to move through the entire recruitment cycle, which was like unheard of, especially in your first deployment. So when I transferred up to Leatherneck, that guy stayed on my books. And I'm glad he did because there was an attack in Camp Bastion in September 2012. He had been reporting on that attack from February 2012. He was giving information on the vehicle to be used, like a Hilux, a white and red Hilux pickup truck. He knew exactly where the safe house was, where they'd be staging at. Wow. He knew where they actually were going to come up to the fence line.

• 22:05Speaker 05

  And the guys actually did a three, they did three dry runs, cutting the fence, using very good methods to cut diagonally across the fence and the base. They ran all the way up and tagged their hand on the aircraft there and ran back just to make sure they'd be able to do it. Nobody caught them. The reason nobody caught them is because there were Tongans guarding those posts and every other post had a silhouette, not a person. During this whole time, we've been telling General Kurganis, who was the major general in charge of the Marines there in RC Southwest, hey, this is, attack's gonna happen. Like, tell them in February, tell them in March, tell them in April. Like, every month we were updating him, like, hey, we got even more information now. We even know, we had a video of them training with, in the video,

• 22:47Speaker 05

  there's a map of Camp Leatherneck and Bastion and there are aircraft on the map. And the guy's there with a little stick, like back in the old days, teachers. He's like pointing to the points of entry and like, actually the place they'd already dry run. He's pointing to that, like, you know, going through the whole thing. The guys are all sitting around, like, watching, like, schoolchildren. And we're showing him like, hey, we have like direct evidence it's gonna happen. And this source is like an A1 source, like very highly credible, very good veracity. Like we've tested, we've op tested him a lot of times, very responsive. He's like, no, I know this base is impervious. There's no way they could get away with something like this. We were like, sir, they already have three times. They've done a dry run successfully, three times during the day, not at night. Right? And he kept pushing back.

• 23:31Speaker 05

  It came around like July, I believe, maybe early August. And finally, we got a report from that source saying the attack will be in September. Because Prince Harry is at the base. So they had this plan like in their pocket for over a year and they weren't doing it. They were waiting for like an opportunity where it would make, you know, the most impact, which totally get that. Prince Harry was very vocal about his visit to the base. He was like widely covered in the news, even wrote a book about it later, you know? But that drew their attention. They said, what if we could kill him? He was actually staying over by the Danish tents, which was pretty far away from the aircraft. They were able to go in and destroy the aircraft. They killed two Marines. These guys were on PCP and a bunch of other drugs.

• 24:15Speaker 05

  They were getting shot like over and over and they kept going like zombies. It was crazy. The only way they were killed is when they were cut in half by the 50 cal's from the helicopters. And the helicopters took time to figure out that this was going on. And you had one dude cut in half from the waist down, crawling like eyes wide open, trying to get a grenade out and open it. Like didn't know his body was gone, you know? Like, and the other thing is the guys they selected for this were mentally challenged.

• 24:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:38Speaker 05

  They picked them this way on purpose, obviously. Then they put him on drugs and then they sent him on a suicide mission. Right? One guy survived. We called him Stumpy because he lost his hand during the fight. He was the one we interrogated. So my death bag actually got him. And he was very mentally challenged. And it's sad because like this guy obviously didn't believe in anything that was going on. He was just mentally challenged and convinced this is what you're gonna do. Put on drugs, that's what you're doing. And while we're talking to him, we're trying to get him to talk and he's like kinda cagey, doesn't wanna talk. And finally, we're thinking like, how do we get this guy to communicate? And one of the other interrogators gave him a marker and he just starts drawing. And he starts drawing that map that was in that video.

• 25:21Speaker 05

  And I gotta rewind a little bit because in July that year, my partner and I, another counter intel agent, were going around the base and Camp Leipneck was huge. At the time, there was like three to 5,000 people at any given time, living on that base, a small town. Well, there was a bus that would take third country nationals like Pakistanis and other people around the base.

• 25:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 25:42Speaker 05

  And there were maps that said, you know, this is the chow hall, this is the aircraft, this is the blah, blah, blah. Those maps were secret, no foreign maps that the Army Corps of Engineers printed out, cut the classification off of, and then slipped into a plastic thing, and then screwed them up all over the base, right? My partner and I went around and picked up over 60 of these maps, right? And we brought the actual stack of maps with us to this one meeting and we brought it to the general, like, these are classified maps. Here are the originals we found with Buckeye imagery, which was classified imagery right here. And here's the map that's printed. It's the same. It's just missing this. And he's like, well, how are my guys going to know how to get around the base? We're like, sir, this is classified information. You can't release it to third country nationals,

• 26:26Speaker 05

  especially Pakistanis who we already know are doing things over the border, right? And he's like, but how will the third country nationals know how to get to the DFAC, the chow hall, and, you know, to the gym? Like, this is what, this is what he was saying. It was like shocking to me. Okay, fast forward to the attack. Stumpy, in his pocket, is one of those maps. And it's just like, mind blowing, you know?

• 26:48Speaker 06

  Was, was the same base commander there when the attack happened?

• 26:52Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 26:53Speaker 06

  What was his response and were there any repercussions for him?

• 26:56Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. So I don't know what his personal response was, but he got relieved of duty, which is very unusual for a general to be relieved.

• 27:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, in theater. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 27:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:05Speaker 06

  That's good to hear. I mean, because usually, I mean, I think that we're just used to those guys getting off scot-free, no matter what happens.

• 27:11Speaker 05

  It was actually two generals. So there was Kurganis, who was the infantry division commander. Then there was the Marine Air Wing Commander, who was a one-star, Broadmeadow, I believe his name was. So right before that attack happened, like two weeks before it happened, the Ma'ah commander, that general, came to visit us at Camp Dwyer because we were doing some stuff down there with the Afghans. And we had reports that the Taliban wanted to kill a general, like generally, they didn't know which one or anything, but like target of opportunity, like hope it happens, you know? And we were telling that general, like, hey, just so you know, the Taliban has been thinking about attacking a general, and no generals have visited this base in a very long time. If you come there, you're probably going to trigger an attack because they're going to know that you're there. You have this giant entourage. He was like, no, no,

• 27:53Speaker 05

  no, I have to see the troops. I have to see the troops. So he goes there. He went to the Afghan side of the base, which was separate from our side of the base. There's this massive crowd of Afghans, like, on top of him, you know, because it's kind of like they're very excited, all this stuff. And this one guy comes running up from behind and like plows his way through the crowd. And he's got one of those stick mines that the Russians had back in the Cold War in Afghanistan. And he like lights it off, and it blew his hands off. Didn't kill anybody because it was a, it wasn't a dud, but it was like not functioning

• 28:20Jack Murphy?

  proper. Or whatever.

• 28:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So like, if that thing had worked, Yeah. he would have killed that guy.

• 28:25Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 28:26Speaker 05

  That same general that got relieved later on for not listening to us about the other attack, you know? So that's some of the frustrations out of that deployment.

• 28:33Jack Murphy?

  For sure. And after that Afghanistan deployment, when was it that you went over to Marsoc?

• 28:40Speaker 05

  So the following year, actually, Scott Stalker was the Marine in charge of assignments for enablers to Marsoc at the time. And I called him up and I said, he was Master Sergeant at the time, I said, Master Sergeant, you know, I'd really like to come over to Marsoc. I've heard a lot of things, because I actually worked with them when I was in Sigint, back during Det One, I was making stuff for their, their unit. And I said, you know, I'd love to come over there as a human guy. And he was like, okay, uh, let me see, uh, do you want East Coast or West Coast? It was at the time when it was split across the coast. And I was like, well, I'm already in Camp Pendleton. California would be awesome. He goes, why don't you open up Marine Online? So I opened up like our, it's like the thing the Marines used to look at all their personal information. He's like, do you see any orders in there? And I was like, yeah, he gave me orders over the phone, which was crazy.

• 29:27Speaker 05

  So they, you know, they took a risk on me. I went over there and just up the road. It was, it was fantastic and greatest five years of my 20 years in the Marines. With enablers, they don't let you stay more than five years. So I stayed literally exactly five years and zero days over there.

• 29:41Jack Murphy?

  And you said something like you were a part of a pilot assessment and selection course?

• 29:47Speaker 05

  Yeah. So in 2013, they were piloting this assessment selection for enablers. So obviously not as hardcore as the operators, but they, what they were trying to do is like, you know, wheat from the chaff kind of thing. Cause at the time there was a lot of unknown about Marsoc, at least in the conventional side, like what is this place? So a lot of people were going there that might not have belonged there. So they're trying to filter that. So a lot of physical stuff, a lot of psychological stuff, but packed down into about seven day periods. It's not as long as others. It was pretty grueling though, for the time that it was. We slept like one or two hours a night, the whole time exhausted, a lot of like, okay, run down to the beach, now swim a kilometer out there, go over here, put on your, your camis, go run to the pool, go do pool PT.

• 30:29Speaker 05

  Now go like, it was like thing after thing after thing, you know, at like in midnight, we're going up over the Reaper, which is this really high incline hill in Camp Pendleton. And as we're going up there, then we get CS gas blown up on us and then suddenly we got a casualty. And then, oh man, now there's some ammo cans you gotta carry too. And like the whole thing, you know? So like they were just throwing stuff at us the whole time and like guys were getting injured. Almost everybody made it, only a couple of guys didn't. I think there was like 15 of us total and then like two or three didn't, didn't make it. But it was all the enablers at the time they were going through. So like intelligence analyst, dog handler, EOD. So like all the, all the dynamic people together and it was, it was pretty interesting. They actually did a good job of like monitoring it and, and kind of adjusting it. So like, for example,

• 31:14Speaker 05

  They had this like mental task. It was like the second to last day where they brought us into this conference room. They took a trash can full of intel reports and the guy stood up on the table and just dumped the intel reports out all over the table. He's like, you have one hour to figure out when the attack's gonna be. And like all of us like look at each other like, ah, man, all right, here we go. Like, we're all trying to read, like, we can't read because we're tired. And me and one other guy who had worked on Asia stuff before started realizing like, oh, this is like an Abu Sayaf thing from the Philippines. And actually, he knew the thing that it was about, and I knew the thing that had happened before that that caused it. So like, he and I were over in the corner, like, putting stuff together, and like, they could see that through the glass. And they came in, like, pulled me and him and one other dude out, like, hey, guys, come to this other room. So they pull us over this other room, and they're like, you have a new problem. You have this spaceship with,

• 32:01Speaker 05

  I can't remember the exact things, but it was like, there's a woman on there, she's 43, she had a miscarriage. There's a man who is 5'10" and has a history of cancer in his family. And like, all these like, interesting like, things with each person, like, pick nine out of the 15 that can go to Mars and live there. And so like, that was the problem. Like, what? So we're like, we're trying to figure it out, you know, and they wanted us to use certain analytical techniques to like, very quickly solve a problem. And actually, we had a pretty good solution to it. So it's kind of, it's very interesting. It was like, the physical stuff, and there was like, a mental thing in between each physical thing. It's like, forcing you to use your brain even though you're tired. So it's pretty cool. Then they did away with it because there was too much attrition for their liking. And

• 32:44Speaker 05

  instead of like, calibrating it, they just got rid of it, which was unfortunate.

• 32:48Jack Murphy?

  And from there, I mean, you did a whole bunch of deployments all over the place. I mean, where was the first one that they sent you off to?

• 32:55Speaker 05

  So the first one was really interesting. It was to Indonesia, but it was supporting a JSOC Preparation in the Environment activity. And I didn't know that. I had no clue about any of this stuff. And they said, hey, you know, you've been selected to do an interview. This is how it started. I'm like, oh, okay. Like, but you can't do it in your uniform. You need to be in a suit. It's gonna be at some early time in the morning. I can't remember what it was. It's because I was getting interviewed from a guy in Hawaii that was at the joint intel support element over there in SOC PAC. And I get on there and it's him and some other people. He's a civilian guy. He's talking to me and they're like, what do you know about Jama Islamia? What do you know about Abu Sayyaf? What do you know? Like they're asking me like all these questions like, like boom, boom, boom. And I'm like answering to the best of my ability.

• 33:36Speaker 05

  And like, what do you know about these strategic things and these tactical things? Like they're trying to like figure out stuff. And I feel like I didn't know anything, but I got the job. I don't know why, how, or who else they talked to.

• 33:49Speaker 05

  But anyways, I got that. And they're like, now you're going to go to SOC PAC for an unknown period of time. We'll determine when you're ready to go. So I went to SOC PAC and for 90 days, I worked with that guy that interviewed me. His name is Dan. He is like the Indonesia expert in SOC PAC, amazing counterterrorism analyst. And he actually was not in the military or in the intel community at all. He was a dendrologist major, like studying trees in college and his master's degree in Indonesia. He like knows Bahasa Indonesia. He knows like other local dialects. And somehow like, you know, one thing led to another and he started working for the government. So he's like a true like cultural expert, which is really helpful.

• 34:31Speaker 05

  And he said, look, I know you don't know a lot about Jama Islamia, but I need you to master it in three months. I'm giving you 90 days. You can be in the SKIF as much as you want or as little as you want. And at the end, you're going to brief the SOC PAC commander Admiral Kilrain about what you learned. And then he let go of me for the next 90 days. And I just went in there like 12 to 15 hours a day, reading every report since 2000. I think it was, no, actually from 1991 until 2014, which is when I was there. And I learned a lot about Jama Islamia. And I learned that there's a certain pattern about how they do their attacks compared to how they split into new groups. Because they have a history of splintering into smaller groups. And there is a huge correlation between these two conditions, which is very fascinating.

• 35:13Speaker 05

  And I briefed that to the admiral and he said that he'd never heard that before. And that was, that was great. And he looked over to Dan. He's like, what do you think, Dan? And Dan's like, he can go on the deployment. Which is pretty cool.

• 35:24Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 35:25Speaker 05

  So then.

• 35:25Jack Murphy?

  That like, I mean, we see with the Filipino groups too, is that like they split off because like there's like a peace deal is about to go in and there's one group that or one faction that feels like they're not getting a big enough slice of the pie. Like from your analysis, why was that taking place?

• 35:40Speaker 05

  It's actually more a diversionary because if we're putting, they know how we work. We know like, for example, Al Qaeda is an organization. Well, if there's a new group called J NIM or JTWJ or whatever, we're like, well, that's not Al Qaeda.

• 35:53Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 35:54Speaker 05

  And then like three years later, like, oh, wait, it is Al Qaeda.

• 35:56Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 35:56Speaker 05

  You know?

• 35:57Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 35:57Speaker 05

  So they understand that and they're very good at like splitting off at the exact moment where it makes sense for them to do that. And that group becomes a target later and then that group disappears and this one comes up and like it's the same dudes.

• 36:07Jack Murphy?

  Makes sense.

• 36:07Speaker 05

  You know, and actually Hambali, who is in Jamaa Islamiya, was one of the original AQ dudes. He was Indonesian. He's in Gitmo right now. He's still one of the last people in Gitmo. He was arrested, I think in Thailand.

• 36:19Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, that was an interesting thing.

• 36:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:22Jack Murphy?

  And I mean, I've tried to like figure out exactly how that happened. Maybe you know better than I do. But there were Rangers standing by in case things went sideways.

• 36:30Speaker 05

  Yeah. That was the Criff 1-1, Charlie 1-1, probably.

• 36:34Jack Murphy?

  Uh, no, no Ranger Battalion.

• 36:36Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 36:36Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, because I actually know the guys.

• 36:37Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah?

• 36:39Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, there's a whole thing where they went to Thailand to do a J set, but there is a whole option to like switch it from training to live.

• 36:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:46Jack Murphy?

  Like actually issue them live ammunition. This was like 2004.

• 36:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:50Jack Murphy?

  That that happened.

• 36:51Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 36:51Jack Murphy?

  And that that did not happen. They did not ever flip it green. I think it was a liaison thing that they they arrested that guy over there.

• 37:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's fascinating too. I mean, the whole Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia thing, I think it's like little understood or like poorly understood about like how pivotal the Jamaa Islamiya and other groups that were associated with them were to like the Bojinka plot, which was the original aircraft plot and all those things. Those were like planned in Southeast Asia, like the physically they were in Southeast Asia planning this stuff. Like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also was over there in Bangkok, you know?

• 37:24Jack Murphy?

  In Marwan.

• 37:25Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 37:25Jack Murphy?

  You know, all those Singaporeans, Malaysians.

• 37:27Speaker 05

  Yep. Yeah, really fascinating. So yeah, that that deployment was basically working at the embassy in Jakarta and it was me and an operator paired up and we would go around the country and look at places to do preparation the environment tasks. So like operational preparation environment, which means setting the conditions so that other forces can come in and do stuff. So big focus was like ports, for example, we wanted to have certain ports that we knew we could press a button and that port will be available if something happened, something like of a crisis, you know, happened. Let's say a hostage was going on. We need that to be secure so we can get to that airfield near this area and like without any hiccups, let it happen. So that's what we were doing over there. It was really cool because we were actually partnered with station, like our desks were in station spaces and the analyst

• 38:11Speaker 05

  I was paired up with, the agency analyst, his name is also John, like me, but this guy was way different than me. He had a PhD in Islamic theology from Harvard University. And this guy, he was younger than me and he knew like the deepest, deepest backstory of every single character in this counterterrorism story. It was crazy, like just the level of knowledge that he had, I felt like this big sitting next to him, you know, but it was it was an awesome team to work on because there are people like that on that team.

• 38:42Jack Murphy?

  That's pretty cool. So um, it was all like kind of OPE, like just in case there's an emergency.

• 38:49Speaker 05

  Yep. So we do a whole range of things from like driving from point A to point B to see how long it takes to drive during the day, like kind of mundane stuff, like going out and trying to measure like the height of this stuff. So we knew if a helicopter could land there, these things to like more advanced stuff, like we actually flew up to Natuna Basar, which is an Indonesian island in the South China Sea. It's the only Indonesian territory in the South China Sea. We went up there to do PE tasks, but we also had a secondary task to look at the Chinese overflights that were going on because China was like routinely invading their airspace every second day. So we actually got up there and then a third task we had was to confirm the location of a radar that the Indonesians had and the Indonesians were like super hesitant to let us see it. So we had to figure out a way to like get a photo of us like with them with the radar in the background, which

• 39:34Speaker 05

  is what we actually ended up doing. So we got the picture and they were they were really upset that we were trying to find, like they knew we were trying to do it, but we never like openly said it.

• 39:42Jack Murphy?

  I mean, I'm a little surprised that the Indonesians gave you as much freedom and free access as they did, like from what I've been told anyway, that It's okay to like meet privately, but they're much more hesitant to have like a public relationship with American officials.

• 39:56Speaker 05

  It's funny you say that. So in Natuna Basar, there was only one hotel. It's a very small island and the people on Natuna Basar were not happy that we were there, like the government people were not happy we were there. We actually had liaisons with us from Jakarta, but they weren't happy they were there either. And so like we're rolling around the island, like taking pictures and like doing stuff. You know, we had this aircraft called non-standard aviation, which is like a small little prop plane. We're like flying around the island, taking pictures, like doing the stuff. And then we'd land. Well, one day we went out on the other side of the island, like two hours, the other side of the mountain. And we come back and there's like, you know, you get that feeling like something's weird. Come to the hotel, go to the front desk, the lady like looks up, doesn't speak, and then like looks back down. We're like, somebody's in here, you

• 40:38Speaker 05

  know? So like go up to my room, my, I had brought a suitcase and I had some other stuff. It's like dumped out in a pyramid on my bed and there is a memory card on top of my clothes. It was a blank memory card because I had the real memory card in my camera, right? I had a backup that was blank. And I think they were pissed that it didn't have anything on it. And they like left their calling card, like, we knew you had a camera. Like, okay, you know, like, what are you gonna do about that?

• 40:59Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 41:01Speaker 05

  There's just like a really interesting experience.

• 41:04Jack Murphy?

  What is their intelligence services like, is it Capasus?

• 41:07Speaker 05

  So Capasus is their special forces, which is actually, for a while it was blacklisted because in Timor, they did a lot of stuff.

• 41:13Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, there's a little, there's a little bit of like a prisoner execution happening.

• 41:18Speaker 05

  They're pretty heavily tainted. Yeah. Well, actually we came up with a solution for how to work with them still. So in 2014, we had a cutoff. If they had graduated from their academy before 2008, we couldn't work with them. They graduated after, we could. And then two years ago, they just eliminated the entire blacklist. So now all of Capasus is available because the president of Indonesia was in Capasus in Timor, and he was one of the guys that was implicated. So you can't blacklist him, you know, he's the president.

• 41:44Jack Murphy?

  And so what was the the second one after Indonesia? I mean, you spent some time in West Africa.

• 41:50Speaker 05

  So that came later. I actually, I came back from Indonesia and at the time it was 2014, 2015, when ISIS was really morphing into this new thing. So 2015, I come back and they're like, hey, do you want to go on another deployment right now? And I was like, yes. So they're like, we're going to send you to the Middle East. We're not exactly sure if you're going to go to Syria, Iraq, or Lebanon yet, because things are so dynamic right now. Like, at that time, like, we didn't know what we were doing, like where to go and stuff like that. And so I said, okay. So I started working up with a team, a hotel company at Marsoc. And while we were working up, they were doing a deployment familiarization training where they basically go out and like, practice the full mission profile in the United States before they go overseas. On

• 42:31Speaker 05

  that DFT, one of the helicopters crashed, the Raider 7 helicopter. So we lost a big portion of our company's expertise. And also, those guys that died were in leadership positions within their teams. So they had to completely restructure a lot of hotel companies' teams. So I got pulled off of the Iraq deployment, put on the Lebanon deployment as a result of this. So I went to Lebanon in early 2016, and we were working with Lebanese Special Forces and the Mogowira Bahar, which is the Lebanese Navy SEALs, basically. And also the Mukafaha, which is like their Ranger unit, or kind of like a strike force, if you will. And we were training them, but also at the same time enabling them. There were some other tasks

• 43:14Speaker 05

  we had in Syria that we weren't going into Syria. Instead, we were going to the last line of cover and concealment with our partner force. They would go over there and do stuff. We would also, it was a very interesting time, we'd actually enable some of our enemies to do things to ISIS at that time, which is a pretty interesting, controversial period of time. But we weren't like directly involved in that, but we were doing things to help, like the Battle of Kusar up in northern Lebanon, where Hezbollah defeated ISIS. You know, that wasn't like, they weren't alone, you know, doing that.

• 43:41Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. I mean, it became like, you know, how we allied with the Taliban against ISIS later on.

• 43:45Speaker 05

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

• 43:49Jack Murphy?

  It's interesting.

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  Hi, I'm Jenna Ashkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 46:34Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 46:45Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 46:50Speaker 09

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• 46:56Speaker 07

  So, join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

• 47:16Speaker 02

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• 47:47Speaker 05

  Okay, so yeah, Lebanon sounds interesting and then Iraq? Yeah, so in Lebanon, we were doing the training stuff and I'll just tell you one Lebanon story before we move on. So we were doing visit board, search and seizure training with the Lebanese special forces and we actually boarded a Chinese vessel that was parked in Petron, which is a town in Lebanon. And the Lebanese are going up a caving ladder, which is this very narrow ladder, the width of your foot. And we're behind them as they're coming up off the original inflatable boat, they're going up the caving ladder. It's a pretty high boat. I mean, it's a shipping vessel, you know, and the dude goes almost to the top, this one soldier, and then he loses his footing. And the way, you know, sometimes they're called the Lebanese special forces and some of them are really badass.

• 48:30Speaker 05

  But they're not all that way, just like any partner force where like some guys are just there because they're someone's cousin or brother or whatever. Well, this guy was one of those guys and he was wearing his helmet in such a way where like it wasn't clipped on to his chin, it was clipped on under here. And his rifle wasn't secured properly. And so like he flips backward, his kevlar goes back over his throat and starts choking him. He's like choking out up there, upside down on the caving ladder, like, I don't know, 50 feet off the ground or off the water. Swiv- like swerving like this right over the hull of the boat. If that dude fell, he would be like squashed like a grape on that because the front of the boat is metal. Yeah. So that's happening, his rifle's swinging around like this, you know, and so we actually had to go up the other side of the boat and come rescue him from the top down.

• 49:12Speaker 05

  And we're just thinking like, what if these guys have to actually do one of these things, you know? Yeah. That was crazy. So that was like two weeks before I left Lebanon.

• 49:21Speaker 05

  But yeah, in Lebanon, they're like, hey, because things are so dynamic in Iraq, are you willing to just go straight to Iraq instead of going back home? I was like, yes. So I went directly to Iraq. Like I flew, I think I connected in Jordan on an NSAV, the non-standard aviation, into Baghdad and then up to revealed. And then at that time, we had just gotten authorization to start doing a lot of airstrikes. So my mission up there was human triggered strikes where basically I have a source or a principal agent who has his own network. That's sitting outside of a building and can see there's 50 guys, bad guys meeting in there and he's giving me information about it. Once we feel good about that information or that the place is safe. Then I'm gonna be the one talking to the air officer. They're gonna start sending up aircraft and they're gonna blow that building up and kill those guys. So that's what that deployment was,

• 50:06Speaker 05

  was one after another, after another, after another. And actually, not just our deployment, but that like six month period right before we retook Mosul, that the area we were in was around Mosul. Right before we retook Mosul, like the, the Joint Special Operations Task Force had killed like 30,000 people in airstrikes, just like those airstrikes. And that was mostly all guys doing human triggered strikes all around northern Iraq. It was a really interesting period of time.

• 50:31Jack Murphy?

  And this is also, is this a deployment where you met your misses?

• 50:34Speaker 05

  It is, yes.

• 50:35Jack Murphy?

  Tell us about that, because I think that's an interesting story.

• 50:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I was working with a Lebanese guy who was helping us in a, in a support capacity out in Urbeel in Dream City, which was like the nice part of Urbeel. And he had a huge mansion and he used to-

• 50:49Jack Murphy?

  You're talking about that part of the, of Urbeel that looks like Abu Dhabi?

• 50:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, real nice area. It's got the guys with the AKs standing outside to make sure nobody, nobody unwanted goes in there. Like, not bad guys, but just the unwashed, you know? So they would let us in, so we'd go in there. And this, this guy used to have dinner parties and his, his, you know, his big courtyard that had these like high walls and everything so nobody could see in. And there's probably like 20 or 30 people there. And we're, we're around this like very long table and there's only one open seat. And I'm sitting next to that open seat. It's like 10 o'clock at night. And she walks in on the other side and there's nowhere for her to sit. So she comes and sits next to me. And we start talking. And like I said, it's like 10 o'clock at night. We talked to like three or four in the morning, just me and her. And like, if you like, you know, when you do those like time lapses, like everyone's leaving, like you could just see

• 51:36Speaker 05

  like people leaving the table over time. And it's just me and her like yapping the entire time. And we just talked for hours. And like, she's amazing. And I think she had the same thought too, because now we're married. But she's an Iranian. And she was actually in Urbeel working. She'd been living there for a few years. She was there when ISIS came all the way up to the edge of Urbeel. And she couldn't go home because she felt unsafe in Iran. So she was basically trapped in Urbeel, right while ISIS was coming up there. Pretty crazy time. And she's been through a lot on her own, too. And we were able to get her to come to the United States. She got her green card. Then she got her citizenship last year. So, really awesome. Yeah.

• 52:15Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it's a wild story. She didn't feel safe going back home because she is involved in some counter regime activities.

• 52:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, you know, people in Iran, most people in Iran do not like the government.

• 52:26Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 52:26Speaker 05

  And they will take to the streets to tell you that. You know, they're very proud of saying what they believe, even if they get punished or hurt for it. The problem is the government is going to hurt you.

• 52:36Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 52:37Speaker 05

  You know, and people disappear all the time. So she was concerned back in 2009 during the Green Revolution, John Boashe sobs. She was in that protest. A lot of Iranians were in that protest and she didn't feel safe staying in the country after that protest because they were like rolling people up in the streets and they were just disappearing. You know, we're getting pushed off of buildings and like all kinds of crazy stuff. And so she went to Iraq because as an Iranian, she can't really go anywhere else easily.

• 53:01Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 53:01Speaker 05

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

• 53:19Jack Murphy?

  So you guys are in love. It's great. But I do have to ask, like, was this, were the CI guys like crazy about this, that one of their human tourists is dating a Persian?

• 53:29Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. You have no idea.

• 53:33Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 53:33Speaker 05

  Nice bump. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's, you know, that's when the ignorance comes out too. Because like my assignments manager called me up like three years later and he's like, hey, are you aware that you're affiliated with an Iranian? And I was like, yes. And I'm like, first of all, why are you calling me? You're my assignments manager. Like, you're not even involved in this, you know, and like, who is talking to you and like, what's going on here, you know? But it was like that for the rest of my career. We're like, routinely, I was having to answer for this sin of marrying or being with somebody who is from the other side, right? Which is crazy because like the Germans, Koreans and Japanese are back during those wars, there were a lot of service members that married those people. And like, that's not crazy, you know, but this is, this is the worst, you know?

• 54:16Speaker 05

  Did you see some trips to Tehran here, John? Anything you want to tell us about? I wish someday. I hope the government changes and I can do that.

• 54:23Jack Murphy?

  No, me too. Okay, so you you meet your future wife and as you come back home, I imagine carrying on this long distance relationship and I know from my own experience, getting a green card in immigration is a nightmare.

• 54:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 54:39Jack Murphy?

  What's going on with the the rest of your career in the Marine Corps as all that's going on and transpiring?

• 54:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, so 2016, I come back from Iraq and actually I was in Turkey in Indirlik Air Base. This is July 2016 and there was a coup and they told us to lock down and we couldn't leave the hotel and it turns out that the leader of this coup was the base commander for Indirlik, which is where we have some very sensitive stuff for NATO. But it's just wild to be like, the guy with his finger on the button, besides Erdogan, he's like the closest dude to these things, is the one with the coup. They rounded up and killed like 3,000 people in like a month that they blamed this coup on and they actually blamed it on a guy based in the United States. Exactly, the Gulenists.

• 55:20Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 55:21Speaker 05

  The Gulenistas.

• 55:22Jack Murphy?

  Do you believe that?

• 55:23Speaker 05

  I don't think so. But that happened and so flew home. Then as soon as I got back, I actually went into our team room and we had a big whiteboard and there was the deployment schedule up there and I was like, man, that was an awesome deployment, like the Iraq one. And I looked up there and I'm like, there is a lot of cool stuff going on in Africa. And I asked our operations officer, like, can I go on one of these? He was like, yeah, but you just got back. And I'm like, I don't care, I'll go right now. And he's like, all right, you're going to Senegal. So, so I worked up and went to Senegal right after that.

• 55:51Jack Murphy?

  And what were you doing in Senegal? I remember we talked, there's a Lebanese presence there.

• 55:56Speaker 05

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

• 56:20Jack Murphy?

  Was this part of like, one of those like constructs like Amisam and some of the others?

• 56:25Speaker 05

  Yes. Yeah, it's one of like, it's like, it's like an official UN mission.

• 56:28Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Speaker 05

  Exactly, just like that, yeah. But it's, the weird thing is like, all the training and preparation is not in Mali. It was outside Mali, at least for the military part of it. And then we would send the guys in there and they would go work with with the Malians and stuff like that and try to figure the situation out, which they didn't do a very good job at.

• 56:46Jack Murphy?

  And how did you like Dakar?

• 56:48Speaker 05

  It was a really interesting experience. Some say it's a good introduction to Africa. And after going to some other countries in Africa, I mean, that's pretty true. I remember when I was landing in Wagadougou in Burkina Faso, I'm like, where am I? There's not any pavement anywhere in the capital city. And then Niger, similar situation like, whoa. But actually, I liked Morocco a lot more than Senegal. Even though, you know, Dakar is a pretty easy city to work in, to live in. Something about Morocco is different, like the mountains, the Atlas Mountains, Sahara Desert, you know? And the Moroccan special forces we worked with were really good people, like very good unit that we had.

• 57:25Jack Murphy?

  You ever see the movie, I watched it the other day, rewatched it, The Man Who Would Be King?

• 57:30Speaker 05

  No, I've never seen that.

• 57:31Jack Murphy?

  Sean Connery and Michael Caine, and it's supposed to be in Afghanistan, but it was actually filmed in Morocco.

• 57:36Speaker 05

  I gotta watch it.

• 57:37Jack Murphy?

  It's a fun movie. Yeah.

• 57:41Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, Sean Connery is the locals. Mistake him for a god. And he starts drinking his own Kool-Aid and you can only imagine that it does not turn out.

• 57:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:54Jack Murphy?

  So then you were also, you did make your way, you said, you mentioned Niger, Burkina Faso. What were some of these other trips that you were bouncing around?

• 58:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, so Burkina Faso is interesting. There was a team up on the Mali Burkina Faso border, up in a place called Kaia, which is like right up there on the border. And this was an army team that was there and we found out that they hadn't been debriefed on anything they were doing. And they were doing a lot of stuff in Mali. And at the time, we're like trying to figure out more about what's going on in Mali because our partner forces weren't involved in the things we wanted them to be involved in. And we were worried about Al Qaeda and there's other groups there in Mali as well that we're trying to figure out what's going on, like

• 58:31Speaker 05

  J N M and the the Mirabatoune was another big group that we're looking for. So I went up there for a couple of weeks and just spent every day debriefing the team guys on what they'd been seeing and doing in Mali and sent all that reporting back. And that was the first time we'd ever actually had reporting from that area of Burkina Faso about Mali. So that was like a very fulfilling trip, even though it was short.

• 58:54Jack Murphy?

  That's cool. So they were doing like human collection up there?

• 58:57Speaker 05

  So they were actually working with people there. They weren't human people. They were just, you know, guys. And nobody was talking to them, you know, because they were up there. That was actually around the same time that, remember the Green Beret got strangled by the guys?

• 59:11Jack Murphy?

  Logan Melgar.

• 59:12Speaker 05

  Yeah. So one of the guys on my team was actually in that room, Kevin Maxwell. That happened at that time, that exact time. So like our task force got shook up quite a bit. So they started moving us around and things were changing very rapidly at that time.

• 59:27Jack Murphy?

  Any other West Africa adventures you want to tell us about?

• 59:32Speaker 05

  You know, Morocco was probably my favorite. Like I said, really interesting. I actually went from the top of the country to the bottom and it's twice the size of California. And that was a really eye opening experience because I had always thought Western Sahara was a country because that's what the maps say. But then you go to Morocco and you ask a Moroccan, is there such a thing as Western Sahara? They're like, no, there's only Southern Morocco. And like, that was a very interesting thing because in the West, I think we don't understand that dynamic very well.

• 59:57Jack Murphy?

  We talked to an Irish guy who was part of the UN mission there, like, I don't know, five episodes ago.

• 1:00:02Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, really interesting. There was an Irish guy in Lebanon, actually, that was there. It's not related to that. But he owned a bar in Beirut and he had been there since the 1980s because a lot of the IRA guys went to Lebanon and fought against the Israelis.

• 1:00:17Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Speaker 05

  And that guy stayed behind and opened a bar. Like, just interesting.

• 1:00:21Jack Murphy?

  That's crazy. And then there's also like some other sort of like, this is more not administrative, but just the way that things get done and the way these missions get done. The 127 Echo program, you mentioned, there's also a Delta Echo Foxtrot.

• 1:00:38Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:00:40Jack Murphy?

  I mean, they're controversial in some quarters. I mean, you want to explain like the reality of what those programs are and you know, what your thoughts are about them?

• 1:00:48Speaker 05

  Yeah. So the thing is, we have foreign partners we want to work with. In the conventional military, usually that's a military unit. So like if I'm from the fifth artillery brigade, I'm going to go to a country that has an artillery brigade and train them on how to use their stuff and we work together. That's pretty normal. Well, the 127 Echo thing was like, it's a, so this is a legal authority that Congress says, here's money to do this thing. We're authorizing it to do it. And for a long time, they didn't have that. There were some other authorities like 1207, 1206, 1208, which were these other like disparate authorities that kind of worked together, but they weren't really meant to work together for a while. And they were trying to make us so that we could partner with entities that were not exactly the traditional entities. They aren't the fifth artillery brigade in

• 1:01:30Speaker 05

  Estonia. Instead, they're an irregular force in southeast Syria that's got some questionable background and we're not sure what's going to happen when we leave Syria. Like this is, this is the kind of people that we're trying to work with because the enemy of my enemy is my friend and they are the ones closest to the problem that we need to solve right now. So it's kind of an expeditionary requirement. Like we need to cut the timeline on vetting these guys because the big controversy with 127 Echo, there's no human rights checks.

• 1:01:55Jack Murphy?

  There's no WHE vetting?

• 1:01:56Speaker 05

  There is not. So that's a problem, of course.

• 1:02:01Jack Murphy?

  Isn't the other controversy that these units get op-conned to the United States?

• 1:02:05Speaker 05

  Right. Because they're working for us essentially. And that's how this law has changed over time. So like from 1207 and 1208, one of them was equipment and the other one was training. With the new law, 127 Echo, it's equipment, training and operations. And there's been two other things added, which is the Delta and Foxtrot. Foxtrot is Preparation of the Environment activities that is now codified in law. For a long time, it wasn't. And actually, when I was in Indonesia, working on a Preparation of the Environment mission, there was no law that said you can do Preparation of the Environment and it was very sketchy.

• 1:02:36Jack Murphy?

  The COCOMs didn't have like, don't they have like the Human Intelligence Executor in all these other OPE authorities?

• 1:02:42Speaker 05

  So we were working under the CT Exord, the Counterterrorism Exord and the Al Qaeda Exord, AQ Exord. Which had language in it that said you could do these things, but there was no law, because that's just the military saying that's not lawful.

• 1:02:55Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:02:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, so like, there was no like, thing to draw that from that would say like, hey, actually, it's legal and there's money for it.

• 1:03:01Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01Speaker 05

  And that's what these authorities do is they give you money and permission to go do something, right? So that didn't exist in 2014, 2015. So we were doing stuff, we actually had a piece of paper, it was a one-page piece of paper, so if a congressional delegation came, we would give them this piece of paper that explained what preparation of the environment is. And it said like, advanced force operations, intel operations, and operational preparation of the environment, each with one paragraph, and that's what we were to describe to the Congress visitors, right? Which is crazy, because there was no law. So we were basically telling them like, hey, can you let us do this? This is what we think we're supposed to do. But then they eventually made it into a law. It was a slow process where it kind of transformed over time. This last Defense Authorization Act, last year or this current fiscal year, is the

• 1:03:45Speaker 05

  first time that the Preparation of the Environment one is actually in there. So now it's okay. After 20 years of doing it, it's okay.

• 1:03:51Jack Murphy?

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

• 1:04:11Speaker 05

  Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. So there's another part of preparation, there's three buckets. Like I said, intel ops, advanced force operations, and operational preparation of the environment. Advanced force operations is the really interesting one from a kinetic perspective. For example, when we invaded Iraq in 2003, there was advanced force operations going on in Iraq for a very long time before we invaded. Basically, preparing the environment for the moment that the president said, go to war, all this stuff would fall into place and just happen. And it wasn't by accident that those things happened. And that's what preparation the environment does. It can do it for a large scale conflict like that, or for some smaller raid, like for example, a hostage rescue. Well, you need to have an airfield, you need to have basing access and overflight. There are all these things that have to be ready to go tonight,

• 1:04:52Speaker 05

  right now, like within hours. And these teams are like all over the world doing that. And the thing is like, you don't know exactly what mission you're readying.

• 1:05:00Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:05:00Speaker 05

  Right. So you're like, okay, I'll do this, this, uh, this landing survey. I'll do this route reconnaissance and like, I'm not sure if these things work together, but some planner at whatever COCOM and whatever SOCOM desk is taking all that stuff and like weaving it together within like three to eight hours or 12 hours or whatever it is before they're like, National Mission Force is going in to do this tomorrow or this morning or whatever. And they're taking all that stuff you've collected over time and putting it together.

• 1:05:23Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. So if the president pushes that button, everything's ready to go.

• 1:05:26Speaker 05

  Yep. And it's really vast around the world.

• 1:05:30Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, we talked to somebody, uh, maybe a year ago now, he's a human inter talking about doing the O P E for the Soleimani strike. Yeah. And I think they were like, when it happened, they were like, oh shit. Yeah. That's what we were doing.

• 1:05:41Speaker 05

  Yep. Yeah.

• 1:05:44Jack Murphy?

  Uh, okay. And so tell us about kind of like finishing out your Marine Corps career. And then you went to work with the D I A, right?

• 1:05:52Speaker 05

  So I went to D I A while I was still a Marine.

• 1:05:55Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 1:05:55Speaker 05

  So I left Marsoc and my common theme is I didn't want to go to a Marine Corps unit.

• 1:05:59Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:05:59Speaker 05

  So I've actually only spent one year at a Marine Corps unit in 20 years. The rest of the time was somewhere else. So after Marsoc was ending, I was like, first of all, I want to stay. Like you can't stay. So I hit my five years and zero days. And I wanted to go, I screened for this program at D I A and the Director of Operations to go to Defense Attache Office, which is unusual for an enlisted person to do. So I went from very clandestine, low, like low visibility stuff, all the way up to strategic level overt declared activities in a country, plus some other things that supported that. Right? So I actually went to Jordan, to U S Embassy Amman. We were supporting not only Jordan, but also the Syria mission, because in 2012, Syria closed, U S Embassy Syria closed and Damascus went to two different countries, Jordan being one of them. So we were supporting half of that

• 1:06:43Speaker 05

  mission as well. And there was a lot of stuff still going on with Syria, and especially Southern Syria. There was a covert operation called Timber Sycamore that went on for quite a while. And there's a lot of support in Jordan for that. That infrastructure existed even after the covert operation ended. So we were helping a lot with some of the things that still existed in those structures. Basically, working-

• 1:07:02Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:07:17Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant. So I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:07:28Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 1:07:33Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:07:39Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

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• 1:08:29Speaker 05

  With guys inside of Jordan, then working with them inside of Syria, like at a TAF garrison, ATG, and also up in northeast Syria, like Hasaka and all those places. And kind of continuing our, our operations there separately from what the old covert action was that, that failed essentially and was closed down in 2017.

• 1:08:45Jack Murphy?

  Hasako is YPG?

• 1:08:47Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:08:48Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, actually, I was on a team where there was one of our guys on the same task force that he was in a picture in the media and he has a YPG patch on. This was when Obama was saying, there are no troops on the ground in Syria back in 2016. And we're like looking at ourselves, like looking at our, he's like, no boots on the ground. We're like, my boots on the ground in Syria. You know, like you're saying, we're not here. What are you doing? You know, it was just a weird time.

• 1:09:13Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. No, I was, I was there in 2014 in Hasaka.

• 1:09:20Jack Murphy?

  Okay, so you're working now for the Defense Attache, the DAT.

• 1:09:23Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:09:24Jack Murphy?

  Out of an embassy. What's that job entail? Because you say this is like more overt, like you're going out there and talking to government officials and things like that.

• 1:09:32Speaker 05

  It was really fascinating. I'll talk about the training first because it was very unique. So it's at DIA. It's a Joint Military Attache School. I think it's four months or something like that. They basically teach you how to be a diplomat, which sounds simple, but that means like teaching you how to use a crab fork properly. You know, or like these like very interesting utensils. You're actually graded on it. They bring in a wardrobe specialist to talk to you about why your suit sucks. And then they tell you like how to cut this better so it looks better for you, like all this stuff. From there, all the way, there's a sear portion to it that is a huge surprise. Towards the end.

• 1:10:09Jack Murphy?

  When the black hood goes over your head.

• 1:10:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, and they do it to the spouses, too.

• 1:10:12Jack Murphy?

  Wow.

• 1:10:14Speaker 05

  There's some very interesting stuff in there. They like, everyone does a different job in the embassy, but they teach you kind of the baseline of what all people do in the Defense Attache Office. And every embassy is different. Like if you've been to one embassy, you've only been to one embassy. And they teach you like kind of more theoretical of like the embassy writ large. And then you go to your country and you learn your actual mission in that country because it's very unique. And Jordan is an interesting one because it supports so much in the Middle East. We joke that it's like the world's largest land-based aircraft carrier because that's where most of our jets are in the Middle East besides Qatar. But, you know. So we're supporting that mission for Jordan, but we're also supporting the Syria diplomatic mission.

• 1:10:54Speaker 05

  So there's like stateless Syrians in Jordan that were part of the resistance to Assad that we supported. So we would have to also meet with them, too. And a day in the life is basically you're wearing a suit all the time, everywhere. You're driving armored vehicles. You've got escorts, security. You're also setting up visits. So like if. Let's say the Secretary of Defense is coming to visit the country. You alone are setting up that visit. There's no like entourage to help you. So like you're the guy that's planning the aircraft landing. You're talking to the the ICE guy to get the correct amount of ICE for the aircraft or the jet. Like everything about it, plus the dinners, the security detail. You're going and investigating the hotel, top floor, middle floor, bottom floor. You're getting other places, you know, for their comm suite.

• 1:11:38Speaker 05

  You're getting all that stuff booked out and you're the guy doing it like the point man. And they would rotate it around the office so that like, okay, you just got the SecDef this month. All right, DASD Middle East is coming for you. You're going to do that next month. The COCOM commander is coming out. You got that and like they'll just, we're just rotating all the time handling these diplomatic visits or this distinguished visits. At the same time, we're meeting with our host nation liaison partners. So like the Defense Attache Office represents the Secretary of Defense in that country. So you get to liaison with the Secretary of Defense equivalent in that country, usually a Minister of Defense. That's your primary contact, not his staff, him, right? So like on a weekly basis, the SDOdat is going to meet with that guy. And in Jordan, that's pretty big because they're coordinating a lot of stuff around the area, especially ship visits for the Marine Corps and Navy side.

• 1:12:23Speaker 05

  So a lot of those ships come to port in Akaba. Guess who gets to organize those ship visits? You know, one of us gets picked like, okay, the Kierstarge is coming. You got it. And you got to go do all the diplomatic communications with the host nation, the ministry and all that. At the same time that you're doing your overt collection activity, at the same time that some people are doing clandestine collection as well in that same mission. So you have like multiple hats. It was a very busy time.

• 1:12:47Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I can only imagine. And what was your impression of some of these programs we had jetting into Syria? I mean, as far as the efficacy of some of those programs.

• 1:12:57Speaker 05

  It's very interesting. At the time that I was there, we had one major group left, the Mogawira Thaura, the MAT, who was like a last vestige of the old program. And they were basically just like professional smugglers who really benefited from all the ammunition we gave them. And they didn't really do much counterterrorism. And at one point, especially like 2020, 2021, after we killed Soleimani, you know, Iran obviously responded to that. They, Iran flowed so many guys into Syria and that camp was surrounded by Hezbollah, Kataib Hezbollah, Syrians that supported Iran. There was like a ring around that base. It was completely ineffective. And so we got our guys stationed there, training the Mogawira Thaura to do what? I don't know, because they're completely surrounded. There's no way they're going out on any operations whatsoever.

• 1:13:42Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:13:45Jack Murphy?

  And then the next thing you did was teaching counterintelligence.

• 1:13:50Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yes. I went back to the schoolhouse that I had gone to a long time ago and I taught there, teaching interrogations, counterintelligence, surveillance detection routes, source handling. We do the whole gambit, you know, because we have both CI and HUMAN. So the way the course is designed, it starts out very basic, like friendly force debriefing, kind of like what I was talking about in Burkina Faso, where you're just like, hey, what kind of airplanes did you see? That's how it starts out and it just keeps advancing and advancing. Then you get to interrogations and that's kind of the filter point where we drop a lot of guys because interrogations is more dynamic. So you have as an instructor, more freedom to say that that student probably shouldn't be here. So you filter out quite a bit of people in interrogations. The ones that survive that then get to do source handling. So we

• 1:14:34Speaker 05

  go into military source operations first, which is, you know, recruiting assets to support military defense collection things. And we move into more advanced primary or principal agent operations where we have the students running a guy who's got several guys under him that the handler can't see or communicate with. And that's one of the more complex ways to handle a source. So that's kind of towards the end of the course. They're doing that. And then they do covert communications like dead drops, brush passes, brief encounters, things like that. And they, they finish out the course doing a final exercise. It's about a month long where they're doing the full range of tradecraft and they use the entire Hampton Roads area to do this. So it's a, you know, it's an artificial geography that they have and there's role players and.

• 1:15:18Jack Murphy?

  Bad guy land.

• 1:15:19Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. It's a lot of fun for the instructors. The students are under a lot of stress.

• 1:15:24Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. That's awesome.

• 1:15:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:15:26Jack Murphy?

  And then you ended up retiring as a master sergeant.

• 1:15:29Speaker 05

  I did. Yeah.

• 1:15:30Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Well, what was like, I mean, you came up on your 20 and you didn't want to go back to the normal Marine Corps. That's what I'm, what I'm thinking.

• 1:15:39Speaker 05

  So I actually, you're exactly right. I was talking to the assignments manager and he's like, yeah, I gotta give you orders to North Carolina to be the intelligence chief for this thing. And I'm like, I'm not doing that. Yeah. I don't want to do that. That would be a huge downgrade from the trajectory I've been going on. He's like, you have to give back to the Marine Corps. I'm like, I'm sure you can find someone that will go to North Carolina. I'm sure there are people in North Carolina that want to stay in North Carolina. He was like, no, no, no, you can't do that. I'm like. What about these other four assignments that I listed off? Some of them were kind of concessions, like maybe he would say yes. He rejected all of them. He's like, if you don't accept North Carolina, then you're going to get retirement in lieu of orders, which is a thing in the Marine Corps. Like if you reject orders and you're at retirement, they force retire you. That's what happened because I'm not going to Camp Lejeune.

• 1:16:20Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:22Speaker 05

  I think he thought I was bluffing. I wasn't bluffing.

• 1:16:26Jack Murphy?

  So we'll talk about your post-service life a bit. But before we go there, I want to talk about your book and I want to chop it up a bit.

• 1:16:36Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:37Jack Murphy?

  About the theory of a regular war. Because this was, you know, when you open up a book like this, this could be a pretty dry book about doctrine. You know, where's he going with all this? But actually, I was, I thought this was a great book.

• 1:16:50Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:16:50Jack Murphy?

  I was, I was really fascinated by it. And I think that the reason why I liked it was because you challenged the orthodoxy.

• 1:16:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:16:58Jack Murphy?

  And you were willing to confront some of the failures of the past 20, 25 years that we've had in the military with counterinsurgency theory. And you know, some of the younger people don't even remember. There's this whole field where people call themselves coinistas.

• 1:17:12Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:12Jack Murphy?

  You remember that shit?

• 1:17:13Speaker 05

  I do.

• 1:17:14Jack Murphy?

  Um, so anyway, let's, let's jump into it. Um, counterinsurgency theory, the, the, the theory of irregular warfare. It's fraught with problems. There's a lot of over philosophizing that takes place. One of the things you talk about is like all the lingo. We're kind of baffling each other with bullshit.

• 1:17:35Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:17:35Jack Murphy?

  Uh, words like kill webs, gray zone conflict and like all these, where we're reinventing terms for, you know, guerrilla warfare, things that have always been around. Um, but start wherever, wherever you want with that. Uh, as far as some of the, the problems and the faulty assumptions that we've made as we approach the theory.

• 1:17:56Speaker 06

  I'd like to, starting before that, what, what caused your, what was the genesis of you writing this? Like, where did that idea start?

• 1:18:04Speaker 05

  So I was doing some personal research on the five pillars of irregular warfare, which is like a very doctrinal joint pub, three tax zero type thing. And I was like, okay, so there's like counterinsurgency, there's counterterrorism, foreign internal defense, you know, like all those things. And I'm thinking like, this isn't actually like what's going on. These are just descriptions of operations. And I'm like, okay, let's find out what's going on like with the people. And the more I was reading, the more I was realizing like that doesn't exist in military writing. It exists in like sociology or political science where they're like talking about some conflict in some country, but the military is not looking at that. They're just looking at like, okay, we've received information that we will now do this. How do we do it? Like they're skipping the first part where you need to like, figure out why is this happening?

• 1:18:47Speaker 05

  Cause if you can just solve that, a totally different outcome. It's not going to be perfect. It's not going to be like you won the war, but it's going to probably be different than if you just, oh, I'm a hammer, boom, everything is a nail, right? And that's basically what we do with our doctrine. So I wanted to research more and the more I was researching, the more I just started taking notes and thinking about it. I had a lot of assumptions that were incorrect when I started out. I was a lot like these thinkers when I first started. I was like, oh yeah, there's got to be some like esoteric something, you know? And that's not correct. That's not true. Instead, it's human beings want certain things. When they don't get certain things, they have reactions to those things. It's extremely basic, which sound like when I say it sounds very simple, it's not simple, especially when we don't look at it simply. You know, we come to it like, oh no, it's very complex.

• 1:19:32Speaker 05

  It's very difficult to solve. Oh, this is a thousand year old problem between this party and this party, you know? That's not true. It's because this country invaded in this year and then these people reacted to that invasion. And they don't like this other people, this other country invading their country. And then there's, there's remnants that are now trying to take power because there's an imbalance in what's going on here. I mean, it's like super simple when you look at it like that. When you add like names of countries onto it and I'll be like, oh no, that's the country I like. I can't, I can't disagree with that because I like them, you know? So that's kind of what pushed me to, to research as deeply as I did. I, I read about 500 books, over a thousand journal articles. Like I was like steeped in this for a long time. It just so happened that COVID kicked off right after I started doing my research for

• 1:20:14Speaker 05

  this. I was like, this is the perfect time to spend 12 hours a day, reading every single day until this thing is over. I had no idea, obviously, when it would be over. So I did that. The whole, the whole time COVID was going on, I was, I was researching every day.

• 1:20:26Speaker 06

  Please say how many books and how many articles?

• 1:20:29Speaker 05

  Around 500 books and about 1,000 journal articles.

• 1:20:31Speaker 06

  And, and I love, I love, I haven't read this yet. Jack has, I will, but I love that this is, that this is what you were able to boil it down to.

• 1:20:40Speaker 05

  Yes, it's the lemonade.

• 1:20:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:20:42Speaker 05

  Out of many lemons. Yeah. But I'll say it's, it's short looking, but there's a lot in there.

• 1:20:48Speaker 06

  I think a lot of books are long because the, the author wants them to be long.

• 1:20:53Speaker 05

  Isn't that what Mark Twain or somebody said, like, sorry, I wrote you such a, a long letter. I didn't have time to write you a short one.

• 1:20:59Speaker 06

  I believe that, yeah.

• 1:21:03Jack Murphy?

  So from the, uh, bad analysis side, um, you know, you put your finger on, you know, some of these generals that came back and they wrote their memoirs and laud themselves. Uh, some of the, the coinistas also, uh, and, and then also, uh, this French dude who fought in Algeria and Vietnam.

• 1:21:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:24Jack Murphy?

  Completely failed coin efforts.

• 1:21:25Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:26Jack Murphy?

  Then he taught the Americans how to fail at coin also.

• 1:21:29Speaker 05

  Yep. In his, and it's funny because, so they failed in Vietnam and Algeria, him specifically, I mean, he was at the Battle of Dien Bemphu. We're talking about Roger Trinkier here. Battle of Dien Bemphu, the Vietnamese completely overwhelmed this massive French conventional force. And he, you know, with tail between his legs, went to Algeria, the dirty war starts, fails at that, even after torturing all these guys, still not getting any help and information from that. And then he turns to the US Army and says, now that you've taken on our Vietnam problem, let me teach you how to solve the Vietnam problem. And that's how we learned our interrogation techniques at that time was from this guy.

• 1:22:04Speaker 05

  And if you, if you look at his books during that time, like the early 2000s, that guy's name was everywhere. Trinkier, David Galula, all of them, like, oh, wow, these guys are geniuses. But then you go back and look like Trinkier, for example, was out fighting in the Katanga Secession in Congo, you know, fighting with a criminal organization against the Congolees. Like, this is the guy? Like, are you sure?

• 1:22:27Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, it was like a learning to eat soup with a knife.

• 1:22:31Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:31Jack Murphy?

  The accidental guerrilla, they're all, all these different, like, Yeah. thought leaders at the time.

• 1:22:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:22:38Jack Murphy?

  What do you think went wrong, though? I mean, what were the faulty assumptions that we took into the war on terror that didn't pan out for us?

• 1:22:44Speaker 05

  I think we in the West have a problem with mirror imaging, where we, not only do we see the enemy as we see ourselves, we want them to be like us. And like, even with new information, we still are like, no, no, no, they have, they have to want a democracy, they have to want.

• 1:22:58Jack Murphy?

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

• 1:23:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I would add to that, though, not only the enemy, but our, our partner forces, like the country that we're like, you know, to, to think that Iraqis or Afghans wanted the same thing we want is ridiculous.

• 1:23:24Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, I mean, and also like with the Taliban, the Taliban was in power before we showed up in 2001, right? Like, they were the legitimate people running Afghanistan.

• 1:23:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:23:33Speaker 05

  We got there and overthrew the government. The Taliban didn't see it as a legitimate change of power, they saw it as an invasion, an insurgency, right?

• 1:23:41Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:23:41Speaker 05

  Like, we were running an insurgency in Afghanistan, it was just with a large Afghan National Army force, right? So when you ask a Taliban guy, like, oh, who's the shadow governor of this province? Like, that doesn't mean anything to him, there is no shadow governor, he is the governor.

• 1:23:54Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:23:54Speaker 05

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

• 1:24:23Speaker 06

  And, you know, and, I mean, from their point of view, like, we went in into Afghanistan, and we won the war in the first 30 days.

• 1:24:29Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 1:24:30Speaker 06

  Our job was to destroy AQ.

• 1:24:33Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:24:33Speaker 06

  And then, once we destroyed AQ, we're like, well, why don't we just hang out for a while?

• 1:24:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:24:38Speaker 06

  And find somebody else to fight. And it was the Taliban.

• 1:24:41Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. And the thing is, I mean, the Taliban are not a new phenomenon. Operation Cyclone, I mean, we basically created them, or the conditions for them, at the very least. And even like Haqmatyar and all those guys, like, those weren't new people, you know? It's just kind of shocking to look at it, like, we live life in little chunks of memory.

• 1:24:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:24:58Speaker 05

  And we don't connect them all together.

• 1:24:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:25:00Speaker 05

  These Mujahideen were the same Mujahideen. It's not like new Mujahideen showed up.

• 1:25:04Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:25:05Speaker 05

  They're the same Mujahideen.

• 1:25:06Jack Murphy?

  We didn't fund Al Qaeda, you know, or create Al Qaeda the way some people would assert. But you're right, we set the conditions, we normalized

• 1:25:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:25:16Jack Murphy?

  these lawless armed groups running around Afghanistan.

• 1:25:19Speaker 05

  Well, we also allowed the Pakistanis to tell us everything to do in the 1980s. Like, they were leading the show. They were like, oh, yeah, this group over here, you should work with them. This group, let's definitely give them weapons, you know, without really asking many questions about it, because our goal was to defeat the Russians.

• 1:25:33Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:25:33Speaker 05

  Right? It wasn't to stop insurgents.

• 1:25:35Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 1:25:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:25:36Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:25:37Speaker 05

  Yeah. But that shortsightedness, again, will bite us, and it bites us every single time.

• 1:25:41Jack Murphy?

  One of the assumptions you point to in the book that you alluded to a bit, but I think it's important to put our finger on, is that one of our assumptions is, we start with this idea that the insurgency is illegitimate, and the government is legitimate.

• 1:25:56Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:25:57Jack Murphy?

  But you and others I've read over the years point out, like, and Afghanistan's a great example, that you mentioned, that a lot of times, this isn't the case.

• 1:26:05Speaker 05

  Yeah. And there's ungoverned spaces or semi-governed spaces, especially in Africa, for example. Like, you go out to southern Algeria, there's a whole state within a state down there that believes that it's the Sarawi Democratic Republic, right? The SADR. If you ask them, that's what they are. If you ask the Algerians, that's what they are. If you ask the Iraqis, that's not what they are, right? But really, it's all about perspective. And that's a lot what I talk about in the book, is like, where does sovereignty lie? Mm-hmm. And is it viewed as legitimate by that specific?

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• 1:28:01Speaker 05

  Because it doesn't matter how we observe it. What matters is how are they observing it? And we need to understand that and then work within the conditions of their vision of it. And if we don't, we're just going to be solving a problem the way we wish we could solve it, not the way it should be solved.

• 1:28:12Jack Murphy?

  Right. You get pretty in-depth into the theory. You want to tell us about the dysfunctional sovereign and the liminal sovereign and some of these concepts that you lay out in your book?

• 1:28:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, so the ungoverned space, as I was talking about, is kind of that liminal sovereignty. Like, if you go see the FARC in Colombia, for example, they govern a space, or they used to.

• 1:28:29Jack Murphy?

  FARC in India.

• 1:28:30Speaker 05

  Right, yeah, exactly. Because the government, the legitimate, quote-unquote, government, cannot reach that space because of the way the terrain is structured specifically and also because of local support and other things. That's sovereignty over terrain that the legitimate government cannot control. So someone else is filling that space. And a liminal space is basically a gap. So there's something filling in there, and that's, in that case, the FARC. And in other cases, it's Cinderella luminoso in Peru, for example, right? Not because people love these groups, but because there is no other sovereign to look up to. Like, well, how else are we going to have law and order? How else am I going to be able to take my trash out and make sure it goes away? I was in Lebanon for a while when the government was not picking up garbage. This was a big thing in 2016, and there was, like, garbage lining the streets because society no longer had the ability to move trash.

• 1:29:13Speaker 05

  Which is something very simple, but think about how that will affect a lot of other things in society, right? We don't think about it like that. We're like, well, let's have an election, and that guy's going to be the president, and we're going to support him, like Hamid Karzai, for example. We're going to support that guy. Well, what about the other people? And how do they actually govern themselves typically, you know? Then there's social order, where the way the government and the people are structured is different in every country, everywhere. I mean, a country is a made-up thing. You know, let's be honest. Like, the concept of a country is pretty new. It's 400 years old. The Treaty of West Valley in 1648 is what made states. There were no states before that, didn't exist. Even when you read, like, Machiavelli's The Prince, there was no such thing as a state. There were really powerful cities, like Florence, which is where he was. There wasn't, like, Italy, right?

• 1:29:57Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, not until, like, late 1800s, early 1900s.

• 1:30:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So those are things that I think we ignore a lot, which is problematic. Because we look at our country that we have now. We say, we have this wonderful country, which we do. We have this amazing constitution. But we forget, like, how did we get that? How did the revolution that we had go? How could it have gone sideways?

• 1:30:18Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:30:19Speaker 05

  You know, the Constitution is not something that was agreed upon by everyone that was at the convention. It was actually a fight document and the result was disagreements on a paper. That's what the Constitution is. Like the Constitutional Convention, almost everybody disagreed on something. And that document that came out of it is because people finally compromised. But then we go to places like Afghanistan, we're like, here is your new constitution that we have written for you.

• 1:30:41Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:30:41Speaker 05

  Right? Like, how do we expect them to do that if we couldn't even do that? You know, and we were fighting over it, you know? There were loyalists that were supporting the British even while we wrote the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, obviously. You know, but going back to that, the Declaration of Independence, if you read it, it has exactly the same stuff in it that a lot of these revolutionaries today say. You know, we want to shake off the burden of this and that and, you know, have our freedom and the ability to determine our own X, Y, and Z. Like, these are just basic things that people want. And if there's Group A and Group B and Group B is doing it faster and better and more trustworthy than Group A, they're probably going to pick Group B. You know, and if we're Group A, we're kind of out of luck in that situation, just like Afghanistan. We're like, we're supporting the wrong side, essentially.

• 1:31:26Speaker 05

  Like, it's not going to be the winning side, especially when you pull the structures away, which is us, and it just collapses.

• 1:31:31Speaker 06

  And I mean, we really have this naive, you know, kind of view these things through a moral lens.

• 1:31:40Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:31:40Speaker 06

  Like, and a cultural moral lens, really. It's like, does their culture mirror ours?

• 1:31:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:31:46Speaker 06

  Do they do things that are, would be acceptable here? And if the answer is no, then they're obviously bad people.

• 1:31:52Speaker 05

  We also do it in a really normative way where we say, you should be this way.

• 1:31:55Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:31:56Speaker 05

  Instead of saying, how would you like to be?

• 1:31:58Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:31:58Speaker 05

  We don't ask that question.

• 1:31:59Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:32:00Jack Murphy?

  What do you think is the, like, the policy prescription as far as? I mean, you could use a specific example if you want, or just like broadly.

• 1:32:09Speaker 06

  How could we do this better?

• 1:32:11Speaker 05

  I think what we need to do is empower the military to actually ask why. It's not designed to do that.

• 1:32:17Speaker 06

  It was not.

• 1:32:17Speaker 05

  For very obvious reasons, especially in a conventional war. You don't want people asking, you don't want that private on the front line being, are you sure we should go to that trench?

• 1:32:24Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:32:25Speaker 05

  But in a, in a non-conventional situation, in a regular situation, or like when sovereignty has broken down, we need to really analyze that in the military. We don't need to rely on someone else, somewhere else saying, here's a policy, go do it. We should be able to ask them, why is the policy like that? And that is actually not that controversial. Cause if you look at the State Department, they have something called the dissent channel, where they're allowed to dissent all the way up to the secretary. In an official channel that is archived and actually George Kennan's long telegram was one of the original dissent channel. Telegrams is very long, that's why it's called long telegram. But there was another one about the Syria policy during Operation Timber Sycamore, where the State Department said, this is really stupid. The way you're arming these guys is going to end up falling back on you.

• 1:33:09Speaker 05

  These guys are affiliated with All News for a Front and Al Qaeda, and you know it. And they wrote that in this dissent channel memo to the secretary. And it's been declassified, you can actually read it now. But why can't the military do that, right?

• 1:33:22Speaker 06

  It's almost though, I wonder how that would go because the military, at least I think some of the things that we feel is that. The military lied, whether they were lying to themselves or lying to the administrations. You know, we fought a 20 year war, one year at a time with everybody saying, that's great. Victory is just around the corner. They never even really, I think that a lot of what the administration were doing were based on what the military was telling them.

• 1:33:49Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, and I think there's a lot of high ranking officers, especially generals, that are very happy to have these wars because it means they get accolades, they get written up, they get all this credit and glory, et cetera. Because that's what they've been waiting their whole career for, like, hey, I've been here 40 years. It's my turn. And actually in 2016, when we were in Syria and Iraq, we had 22 generals in our chain of command of 500 guys. That's, that's one general for every squad.

• 1:34:12Speaker 06

  That is absolutely insane.

• 1:34:13Speaker 05

  It was, it was nuts. Like to get authorization, like those strikes I was telling you about, I was doing dynamic strikes, which means within like 12 hours, we're hitting the target. There was also deliberate targeting, which was like days or weeks, right? You had to get like five different generals to approve your deliberate strike. And each general had a different reason for being the one consulted. So like this guy is to determine whether this is a residential facility. This guy is to determine the right level of men, women and children in the house. This guy is the one that gets to determine the time of day. Like they had distributed among all the generals.

• 1:34:41Jack Murphy?

  So everyone gets credit.

• 1:34:41Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:34:42Speaker 06

  Well, there's so many generals and not enough jobs.

• 1:34:44Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 1:34:45Speaker 06

  You know, it's a, everybody's kind of washing each other's back.

• 1:34:49Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:34:50Jack Murphy?

  No general left behind.

• 1:34:51Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:34:52Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 1:34:55Jack Murphy?

  Um, the other thing that, you know, you mentioned in your book and we talked about before the show a little bit was, talk about the special forces side of things, unconventional warfare and the assumptions we get into going into that.

• 1:35:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:35:09Jack Murphy?

  The opposite of counter insurgency. Now we are the insurgents.

• 1:35:12Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean insurgency is basically a people rebelling against the existing sovereign, which is something I talk about in the book. Well, unconventional warfare is us supporting them doing it. Right? So if we're doing it, then it's okay. We're like, yeah, this is a legitimate unconventional warfare operation. If we're on the other side though, if we're like the counter insurgents, they're like, oh no, that, those insurgents are really bad. You know, so it's really interesting, like, are they bad just because we're on the other side?

• 1:35:35Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:35:36Speaker 05

  And we're afraid to ask ourselves that.

• 1:35:37Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:35:39Jack Murphy?

  I, and the new book you have coming out, Iran's Shadow Weapons, that's coming out this summer.

• 1:35:45Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:35:46Jack Murphy?

  You just got the proof copy.

• 1:35:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, today.

• 1:35:48Jack Murphy?

  Okay. Tell us what that book's about.

• 1:35:51Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I think a lot of people misunderstand Iran for various reasons. It's kind of looked at as this like evil monolith that's like God's fingers coming to take over the world and all this. And I think that's a huge misunderstanding. And what the book does is it looks at what is the regime actually doing and thinking? Not just at like a strategic level of like big picture stuff. No, how are they actually spotting, assessing and recruiting sources? How do they run SDRs? How do they pick safe houses and keep safe houses? How do they do kidnappings inside the United States? Like nitty gritty details. And the really unique thing about this book, first of all, nothing like this exists in print. I guarantee you, because I've read everything else, just like this book, other one. I did the same thing for this one. I read literally everything out there, including in other languages too. A lot of Farsi sources in this.

• 1:36:36Speaker 05

  But the big piece is I got a bunch of stuff declassified. So there's a lot of stuff appearing to the public for the first time. That was top secret, secret, no foreign, ACCM, a lot of protected information that's now available. Showing things we knew, like, for example, during the Iran-Iraq war, we supported Saddam Hussein and we supported Iran. We supported Iran with Iran-Contra and some other programs. We also supported Saddam Hussein because the goal there was not to defeat Saddam Hussein or defeat Iran.

• 1:37:03Jack Murphy?

  Just wear each other down.

• 1:37:04Speaker 05

  Exactly, it was to bleed them out, right? But with this declassified stuff, you can see way more detail about like how that actually happened. And the Iran-Contra issue was only like one of many programs we had. And this is for the first time that people are gonna be able to read about this. And that's just one example.

• 1:37:18Jack Murphy?

  What were the other programs, like weapons programs also?

• 1:37:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, so actually, even after the war ended, we actually worked with the IRGC in Bosnia to arm certain Muslims in Bosnia.

• 1:37:29Jack Murphy?

  ALA.

• 1:37:30Speaker 05

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

• 1:37:47Jack Murphy?

  Jeez.

• 1:37:50Jack Murphy?

  And when is the book due out?

• 1:37:52Speaker 05

  It's coming out probably early August. So I got the proofs, I gotta hurry up and do an index for it. That's actually gonna make it go.

• 1:37:58Jack Murphy?

  We'd love to have you back in to talk about that.

• 1:38:00Speaker 05

  I'd love to, it's so fascinating.

• 1:38:03Jack Murphy?

  And you're now at Yale Law?

• 1:38:05Speaker 05

  So I'll go to Yale in August.

• 1:38:06Jack Murphy?

  Oh, okay, you're just getting ready for it.

• 1:38:08Speaker 05

  Yep, I'm in a holding pattern right now, just waiting for that.

• 1:38:12Jack Murphy?

  So how long's law school, three years?

• 1:38:14Speaker 05

  It's three years, yep.

• 1:38:16Jack Murphy?

  And what are you like interested in? You know, you have this extensive national security background and now you wanna go and, you know, take the bar exam, become a lawyer. What are you gonna go into next, do you think?

• 1:38:28Speaker 05

  So I like doing hard pivots. So I'm gonna do like a 90-degree pivot away from the military and government, unless I'm on the other side. So I wanna work in a big law firm, either doing like international arbitration, like recently Facebook has had some problems in Ireland because they avoid US taxes by being in Ireland, but Ireland has some issues. I would be an attorney representing Facebook fighting Ireland, essentially, which is kind of cool at that like international level. Or doing things like export controls. So there's a lot of stuff that has dual use, which means it can be used for civilian purposes and it can be used for military purposes, like countries' nuclear programs. For example, Iran has a lot of stuff from Germany and the United States in a lot of their nuclear facilities. So let's work on the export controls of that and see how we can fix that problem

• 1:39:10Speaker 05

  or make it so that certain countries like Great Britain, for example, has easier access to certain US technology that's national security in nature. But I'd be representing like the company, for example, Boeing or Lockheed or something like that.

• 1:39:23Jack Murphy?

  And you're also involved in the Irregular Warfare Initiative?

• 1:39:26Speaker 05

  That's right, yeah.

• 1:39:27Jack Murphy?

  What is that?

• 1:39:27Speaker 05

  So that's a collaboration between Princeton University and West Point. And there's a podcast, that's actually how it started, the Irregular Warfare Podcast. And then there is a series of articles that are published online, kind of like the Small Wars Journal. And actually recently, we've paired up with them to do like cross collaboration of sharing each other's articles. And it's allowing practitioners and thinkers in the field to kind of come together and talk about these issues. You know, like recently, we had an article about Boko Haram, like up to date. We had one as soon as the India Pakistan thing kicked off. We had an author in India writing an article about what's going on in India on the Indian unconventional warfare side. It's like very interesting. It's not just US authors. So it's mostly US authors, but not, you know, strictly.

• 1:40:11Speaker 05

  So pretty interesting space to kind of share that information. It's a nonprofit, so it's just there for people to read. And it's actually open to anyone to submit articles if they want to, depending if it, you know, matches up with what we're looking for. But yeah, all very irregular stuff. So special operations on the military side, all the way to some of the issues like I talk about in my book, like the breakdown of society and what do we do about that kind of things.

• 1:40:37Jack Murphy?

  I mean, we covered a lot of ground here in a relatively short period of time. And thank you for sharing your experiences.

• 1:40:43Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:40:58Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant. So I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:41:09Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 1:41:14Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:41:20Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 1:41:40Speaker 10

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• 1:42:09Jack Murphy?

  Is there anything else that, you know, we haven't talked about that you'd really like to discuss? Anything we overlooked?

• 1:42:15Speaker 05

  I think I would like to discuss the Iran stuff in another episode because that will go on and on.

• 1:42:20Jack Murphy?

  Okay, yeah. Shoot me a copy of the book when it comes out or an advanced copy. And yeah, I'd love to read it. It sounds really interesting.

• 1:42:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, I actually have the IRGC station in Vienna, line and block charted out completely. It tells you exactly who's who in the embassy and all that.

• 1:42:36Jack Murphy?

  Holy shit.

• 1:42:37Speaker 05

  Fascinating, yeah.

• 1:42:38Jack Murphy?

  Okay, I'm excited.

• 1:42:38Speaker 06

  That's amazing, yeah.

• 1:42:40Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:40Speaker 06

  I'd love to read that, too.

• 1:42:41Speaker 05

  Yep. I'll get you one.

• 1:42:42Jack Murphy?

  Anything else, like where can people find you on the web? Where can people find your books?

• 1:42:48Speaker 05

  So I have a website, JonathanWHackett.com. I've got my books listed there and any podcasts I've been on are also there. Best place to contact me is LinkedIn. I'm TheJonathanHackett on LinkedIn.

• 1:43:00Jack Murphy?

  The?

• 1:43:00Speaker 05

  The, yeah, because Jonathan Hackett was taken. I was like, all right, well, I'm the Jonathan Hackett. So that, yeah, LinkedIn is the best way.

• 1:43:09Jack Murphy?

  That's how I found you, actually. That's how I found you, and that's how I found Milburn, too, on LinkedIn. Cool, man. So, yeah, thank you for telling us about your career and, you know, your academic works and everything else that's going on. And, yeah, we'd love to have you back to talk about this second book.

• 1:43:26Speaker 05

  I appreciate the time.

• 1:43:27Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, absolutely, man. Otherwise, we'll see all you guys next time. Hey, guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for a moment about how you can support the show. If you've been watching it, enjoying it, but you'd like to get a little bit more involved and help us continue to do this, you can check out our Patreon. It is patreon.com/the team house. And for $5 a month, you can get access to all of these episodes of The Team House ad free. The same goes with our affiliated podcast, Eyes On, with Andy Milburn, Jason Lyons, Mick Mulroy. That one, you will also get all of those episodes ad free. And you support the channel and the show, and we really appreciate it.

• 1:44:10Jack Murphy?

  The Patreon members are literally what has helped this company, this small business, survive, especially during our early years. And you are what continues to help this thing going, even as we navigate the turbulent world of YouTube advertising. So we really appreciate all of you guys. There's going to be a link down in the description to that Patreon page. And there is also going to be a link to our new merch shop. So if you guys want to go and get some Team House merchandise, we got stickers, and we also have patches. And I should mention, if you sign up for Patreon at $10 a month, we will mail you this patch as well. So we really appreciate that. But they're also for sale on the merch shop.

• 1:44:55Jack Murphy?

  And additionally, they got t-shirts up there, water bottles, a tote bag, coffee mugs, all that good stuff. So please go and check them out and support the show. We really appreciate it.

• 1:45:08Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:45:23Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:45:34Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 1:45:39Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:45:45Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 1:46:04Speaker 10

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• 1:46:41Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:46:56Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:47:07Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 1:47:12Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:47:18Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 1:47:38Speaker 10

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• 1:48:13Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:48:28Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:48:39Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 1:48:44Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:48:50Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app today.

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• 1:49:49Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:50:03Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:50:14Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 1:50:20Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:50:25Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

• 1:50:45Speaker 13

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• 1:51:21Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:51:36Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:51:47Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 1:51:52Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:51:58Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

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• 1:52:48Speaker 00

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  Zolair 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolair is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or hardened circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolair. This is an advertisement for Zolair,

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