Inside JSOC’s Most Secretive Undercover Missions | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS

Jack Murphy, Sean Naylor, and Zach Dorfman break down the hidden world of JSOC non-official cover operatives — the military’s version of deep-cover spies — and reveal how elite units conducted clandestine missions in places like Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. The episode dives into secret front companies, undercover tradecraft, failed training exercises, and why modern surveillance and AI may be making human espionage obsolete. Subscribe to The Highside here: https://thehighside.substack.com/ Find Zach Dorfman here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zach-dorfman-1a64608 https://x.com/zachsdorfman GhostBed ⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/team FOR 10% off! Support the show on Patreon:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Subscribe to our newsletter!!!! https://teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join Andy's new article:⬇️ https://warontherocks.com/the-operational-case-against-israels-gaza-campaign/ Jack's news outlet:⬇️ https://thehighside.substack.com/ Find Jon Hackett here:⬇️ Jon's Twitter: https://x.com/jonathanhackett Jon's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejonathanhackett Jon's books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0C5L659N5?ccs_id=e11a2062-f8d3-498e-bfd7-7d2f3869caf6 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejonathanhackett Twitter: https://x.com/jonathanhackett Check out Mick's new podcast here:⬇️ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/at/podcast/pub-and-porch-applied-stoicism/id1836955475 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1k3QPmkAMwnGJxMLDwUSSd?si=n6piIu8XRcag1Z0K43A3bQ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCd0Hq6QFk8CoTu5j-VU0Ong Find Mick Mulroy here: Fogbow ⬇️ https://fogbow.com/ Lobo Institute ⬇️ https://www.loboinstitute.org/ Twitter ⬇️ https://x.com/mickmulroy?s=21&t=-Ze3F_Ix2vlJ18KFvORTCA LinkedIn ⬇️ https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-patrick-mulroy-31198b52/ Bluesky ⬇️ https://bsky.app/profile/mickmulroy.bsky.social Mick’s publications ⬇️ https://www.loboinstitute.org/publications/publications-of-michael-mick-patrick-mulroy/ Whitefish security summit ⬇️ https://whitefishsecuritysummit.com Find Marc P here: https://x.com/Mpolymer Find Andy Milburn here: Twitter ⬇️ https://twitter.com/i/flow/login?redirect_after_login=%2Fandymilburn8 LinkedIn ⬇️ https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmilburn2023 Substack ⬇️ https://amilburn.substack.com/ Andy’s book ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/When-Tempest-Gathers-Mogadishu-Operations Bluesky ⬇️ https://bsky.app/profile/andy-milburn.bsky.social Find Jason Lyons here: LinkedIn ⬇️ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-lyons-666873316?u Bluesky ⬇️ https://bsky.app/profile/bgsilverback73.bsky.social "Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio 00:00 — JSOC’s Secret Spy Program Exposed 02:40 — How Delta Force Built Deep-Cover Networks Overseas 03:38 — Inside America’s Secret War in Lebanon 06:17 — Why U. S. Intel Worked With Drug Smugglers & Terrorists 11:53 — How JSOC Trains Real-Life Undercover Operatives 13:50 — Why Special Operators Fail at Acting Civilian 16:59 — The “Pedophile Van” Training Disaster Explained 19:42 — CIA NOCs vs JSOC NOCs: The Real Difference 27:54 — The Legendary Delta Operative Known as “The East European” 36:06 — The Secret U. S. Mission That Infiltrated Iran 45:14 — Fake Retirements, New Identities & Spy Cover Companies 50:48 — Is AI & Surveillance Killing Human Espionage? 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

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

• 0:28Jack Murphy?

  Shenanigan was fake retirement ceremonies that you'll have a guy who has, you know, maybe he already has his 20 years in, maybe not in the military. And they decide, hey, we're going to take this sergeant major or this lieutenant colonel or whoever it is, and we're going to put them under a nonofficial cover and send them to some part of the world to gather intelligence. They'll actually hold a fake retirement ceremony. And everyone in that guy's unit thinks it's real, thinks that guy's really retiring except for him. And then he will be given fake military paperwork, like fake discharge paperwork, so that if something, someone does look, it's like, wow, he's not in the military anymore, that's done with. And then sent out and do his mission for a year or two.

• 1:13Jack Murphy?

  And then when he comes back, he will have a second real retirement ceremony that puts him out of the military.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Eyes on geopolitics. I've got a special one today. I have Sean Naylor, Jack Murphy, and Zach Dorfman on. They are the authors of an incredible new article on the high side. Go check that out. That link is in the description. That's Jack and Sean's news outlet. They do, they do stuff that, you know, most investigative reporters or journalists don't do at all. They dig deep. They probably have some of the best sourcing too and like special operations in the national security world. This specific article was incredible. It was about JSOC NOCs, nonofficial cover. And everybody thinks when you hear NOC, you think CIA guys, CIA NOCs and stuff like that.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  But JSOC's had a pretty, a relatively robust program for going on 40 years, probably, right? Like since the eighties? Yeah. So guys, welcome. I don't even know where to start.

• 2:15Jack Murphy?

  Well, I mean, Go ahead, John. I think maybe like the genesis of the article was actually Zach approaching me. And, you know, Zach, do you want to plug your book a little bit and explain like how this article is an outgrowth of the larger research that you've been working on?

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Sure, although it's funny because I remember, it's interesting because the nature of memory being what it is, I remember both of us having a conversation and then I don't remember who actually like initiated the idea that we should, we should do this, but we were talking about the book that I'm working on, which is a history of CIA's NOC program, or it's a history of the CIA essentially through its NOC program. And then you and I were talking, I mean, I want to say almost like the, like December of last year. It was like holiday, it was like around the holidays about how, and I mentioned it to you and then you started talking about the JSOC NOC program and how the special operations world had been also engaged in the deep cover, commercial cover space for many, many years and how

• 3:12Speaker 03

  there had never really been a, you know, an exhaustive look at that, or there's certainly not been reporting on that anytime recently. And from that, we decided to kind of, you know, to start digging and through conversations with a bunch of folks in the, in the space, we, I think, I think we, you know, I wouldn't say exhaustively, but I think we, we have uncovered a good, at least first pass, you know, history of where things have, where things began and where they've gone over time and the challenges that are currently being faced by special operations folks trying to do deep cover work.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  When did this, uh, when did the program really get going?

• 3:56Speaker 04

  Probably in the, in the early 1980s. It couldn't be before the 1980s because JSOC wasn't established until December 1980. But as we, as we lay out in, in the article, JSOC had a number of operations going on in the 1980s that they used operatives under nonofficial cover or commercial cover, as it's sometimes called, for. And these stretched from Suriname to Haiti, but especially Lebanon. And Jack did a lot of reporting on the sort

• 4:41Speaker 04

  of missions that they were engaged in, the sort of people that they were in contact with in Lebanon.

• 4:48Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. And so this is kind of like the fun part of being a reporter is that you meet with some spooky character at a bar in Manhattan with a notepad and ask him 150 questions over the course of an hour. And so this person that I spoke to worked under nonofficial cover. He was a member of JSOC. He spoke fluent Greek and also learned Arabic. So he was, you know, at least trilingual. And he was, you know, based out of Cyprus. And, you know, JSOC was establishing sort of a front company, a logistics company that

• 5:30Jack Murphy?

  moved air freight back and forth from Cyprus to Lebanon. And that was kind of a way for JSOC to get into the country, to get people into the country, to get equipment into the country. And then a lot of it had to do with working through surrogates. There are different Arab groups and Christian groups that we were working with in Lebanon at that time. And the main effort really was about trying to recover American hostages that were being held in Beirut. And this was just one of those intractable foreign policy problems at the time. And JSOC at the time was nasient. It had just come into existence right on the, you know, tail end. It was created because of the failed hostage rescue in Iran, Operation Eagle Claw. So.

• 6:17Jack Murphy?

  There are a few other interesting tidbits that I think we pulled out of the stuff in Lebanon. That some Delta guys came in and working with surrogates on the ground wiped out some of the guys that had killed the CIA station chief, Bill Buckley. So there's, there's definitely some stuff that was going on in Beirut at that time. But unfortunately, as my source told me himself, he's like, we were not particularly successful in getting the American hostages out. You know, there, there were some like close calls where they're like, we think we located them. We think they're being moved from here to there. Maybe we can interdict them, but those operations just that they never reached enough. The intelligence never reached the fidelity or the threshold that would need to be met

• 7:02Jack Murphy?

  for those operations to be greenlit.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  One of the things that I found pretty like wild was like how they're working with a Lebanese, like drug smuggler essentially like, and it's just like, and me and Jack were talking about yesterday, he's like, you know, this guy was just hyper capitalists, like whoever had the green, this drug smuggler was playing ball with, you know what I mean? Like if you could pay me, I'm down to do almost anything.

• 7:29Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. And I mean, that goes back to this classic question that I know Sean and I have written about, and I'm sure Zach has probably written about, or at least encountered, is, is it moral, ethical and legal for our intelligence community to interface with known terrorists, with drug smugglers, with like really bad people? If you want to catch, you know, you know, a Pablo Escobar or a Osama bin Laden, you probably have to talk to some really bad people that are in his inner circle. Same thing with people like Soleimani, Saddam Hussein, and so on. And, you know, on one, the, the like pragmatic side of it is like, yeah, of course you go and do it, you know, you do what you have to do to get the job done.

• 8:12Jack Murphy?

  But when that comes out in the press, it doesn't look very good. Like you've been rubbing shoulders and maybe even making, I'm not saying this happened, but for instance, if you were making cash payments to an intelligence asset that had American blood on their hands, that does not look good, to put it mildly. So I don't know, what do you guys think of that conundrum?

• 8:36Speaker 03

  So I think a couple of things that are interesting that you raised. I mean, one is traditionally, and you know, my, you know, my knowledge of this is much deeper on the CIA side, just having spent a long time done reporting in this space. But one of the issues historically for the NOC program inside the agency was the, the legal concerns and the strictures regarding the actions of a staff officer versus an asset or a source, right? So it's like, it's one thing to have a source inside Al Qaeda or inside a transnational criminal organization, like drug, you know, drug trafficking organization. Different thing to infiltrate a staff officer and have that person actually be engaged

• 9:20Speaker 03

  in the space, right? CIA folks will say that post 9/11, they actually set up a very stringent regime from the general counsel's office. And I imagine this was probably the case in JSOC as well, although there's always, there's always exceptions and these exceptions, you can sometimes drive a, you know, you could drive a truck through these exceptions, right? About what you can and cannot do, but you know, the idea was that you didn't want the actual shooters, right? You didn't want to, you didn't want to recruit a shooter. You wanted to recruit a logistics guy. Logistics guys were much more or less likely to actually be the people that were, you know, that were engaged in stuff where they had American blood on their hands. CIA general counsel post 9/11 actually told people in the field, NOCs in the field and

• 10:04Speaker 03

  assets, they told case officers to tell their assets, by the way, if you are ever in a situation where you think you might be, you might be engaged in a firefight, you know, with, you know, US citizens, US troops, US personnel, you gotta shoot over people's heads. The people, the US troops firing it, you don't know that you're a NOC or that you're a CIA asset, but you, you can't try to kill them. They could try to kill you legitimately and you can't try to kill them. So it literally put people in an impossible, it put people in an impossible situation. And the CIA lawyers knew they were putting their assets and their deep cover officers in impossible situations.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  I mean, in general, one last thing, you know, having your source get close to people that were engaged in the drug trafficking business, like...

• 10:56Speaker 03

  Part of me says, okay, yeah, that's why you have people under unofficial cover, right? Like, you want to get them close to people that folks under official cover cannot get to. The defense attache in Beirut is not going to get close to that guy, right? The second political secretary, you know, in the State Department, who's a CIA officer, is not going to get close to that guy. So the reason why you choose those covers is to infiltrate those worlds that will provide you that access. But then the paradox is by doing that, you're putting yourself close to people who are doing very, very bad things, and you get that blowback, and you get that Washington Post, you know, smell test stuff.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. All new muted. Oops.

• 11:40Speaker 04

  Beg your pardon. I think it's worth pointing out that in the high side, we explored this issue some months ago with an article about sort of an elite CIA proxy force in Afghanistan, a sort of CIA elite human intelligence unit that was basically directed by the CIA, even though it was all Afghans. And they wanted to recruit, they had the apparent opportunity to recruit one of the men who was in the room when Daniel Pearl, the Wall

• 12:22Speaker 04

  Street Journal reporter, was murdered in 2002, in the months after 9/11. And that raised a lot of issues at CIA. So I think, you know, like, I mean, I'm just really trying to plug the high side here, but we, you know, we've looked into this in, you know, in one of our other, in one of our other articles. All the more reason to get a paid subscription.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, the link is in the description. I got you, Sean. Don't worry.

• 12:59Speaker 04

  Okay, thanks, Steve.

• 13:02Jack Murphy?

  So maybe we start talking a little bit about like how the military creates NOX and sort of the system in which that works because I think that's sort of like part of the the mystery of it for a lot of people. And, you know, I think in the article, we talk about both trying to take operators, you know, people who are trained special forces guys to become NOX. But also, it seems like it's really more common and more effective to use support personnel.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think the the military historically has for for for missions like this where your ability to pass as as a local or as a member of of whatever community you're supposed to be, you know, you're penetrating has to be basically perfect. The military is going to prioritize native language skills, native cultural skills and and ethnicity beyond, you know, how quickly you can get the the long walk finished to get into, you know, to get into Delta.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  So they don't want them to look like Jack, basically, like six foot, one inch white guy, 200 pounds, like.

• 14:27Jack Murphy?

  Salt and pepper hair, blue eyes.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Unless they're going into into Ireland or something.

• 14:32Jack Murphy?

  You know, Zach, do you want to tell some of the stories that you reported on about, you know, these attempts to train guys who are operators into NOX? Because I mean, I think one of the things we talk about in the article is that it's very hard to take somebody who grew up in a Ranger platoon or a SEAL platoon or something like that, and it's like team environment, and then turn them into this sort of like lone wolf intelligence operative.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  This has been a consistent, persistent problem for the JSOC NOC program for many decades, and I don't know if they've ever been able to solve it. And it may actually be the like, the great unsolvable problem. Doesn't mean that there haven't been brilliant operators. It just means that doing this at scale has been very, very difficult. I mean, it's been very difficult for CIA, too. But but I think that the.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  The history of folks, I mean, a lot of it is overt, right? And it's very hard to scrub, if not impossible to scrub. And then there's the cultural stuff, right? I mean, the joke always is, is like, you can recognize these guys because they all have the operator beard. They all, like, they're wearing the Merrell watch. They got the boots. They, like, they're all super fit. Like, they look, there's a certain type. And anybody who is trying to spot them, when you marry that up with open source data about their past, it's not hard to be like, what's going on here? This isn't legit, right? You've got, like, three guys open up a dive shop in the Maldives, and it's like, what are these guys doing here? We know something is amiss, right?

• 16:09Speaker 03

  It doesn't take, you don't have to be the world's greatest counterintelligence service to figure out that something seems wrong about a certain place and the folks that are working there. You know, when we were reporting this out, I had a source of a former contractor who, you know, described exercises that he and others would put on for operators who were looking to get into this commercial cover space. And one aspect of it was, they would, these guys would fly into, as part of the exercise, they would fly into airports in the US. And they were, the airports were supposed to be, quote unquote, "foreign airports." And it was supposed to be like, this is a, you know, this is a denied area.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  This is a, you know, "Walk through the airport, and we want to see if you can walk through the airport." And the trainers didn't, hadn't necessarily seen the guys' faces beforehand. And the trainers were saying, "I'm gonna be able to spot every single one of you." And more often than not, they would do it. You know, they would literally, they would watch, they would do surveillance on these folks getting off different airplanes from all over the country and all over the world, flying into these US airports. And the trainers would say, "That guy's an operator, that guy's an operator, that guy's clearly an operator." And so you're already, you're blown from the moment you get in. This is, we're not even talking about biometrics, we're not even talking about facial recognition, we're not even talking about GATE analysis, or whatever. I mean, this is just good old-fashioned CI work. And...

• 17:39Speaker 03

  These guys would not necessarily know how to comport themselves either. They would get dragged into secondary as part of the exercise. They thought they were, you know, they were super slick to get dragged into secondary. The folks in secondary who knew who they were, right? Um, would try to, you know, you know, ruffle their feathers a little bit. You know, one story that I was told, which is quite humorous, actually, is as part of the exercise, these guys were told to surveil a location.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  This is the best.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  I don't know, the story, the story is amazing, right?

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  Surveillance this location and do it in a way that is not going to draw attention to themselves. So they got what, you know, like a windowless van, you know, what my source said was basically like, you know, your classic pedophile van, right? And they didn't realize that where they were supposed to be surveilling was right next to, uh, like an elementary school or nursery school. And they just posted up there. And of course, all of these, all of these local moms were like, yo, who the fuck is that? You know? And they called the cops. They called the cops on these guys and the cops knock, knock, knock on the van and there's like three buff dudes or whatever, you know, with beer, it's just sitting in the van. And of course they get taken in, right? Of course they get taken into the local cops.

• 18:51Speaker 03

  And then there's this whole ordeal because if they call the FBI, they get a little get out of jail free card, right? Where, um, if they're in real trouble, they can say, hey, I'm sorry, sir, you know, Mr. Officer, like, I'm actually, uh, doing elite military training.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm one of you guys.

• 19:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, here's, you know, here's a number of a local FBI agent who can, you know, who can, uh, attest to the fact that I am in fact a employee of the US government. But you don't want to do that because then you can fail out of the exercise. So eventually after spending some time, you know, in, in the local jail or being interrogated by these police officers, they say, okay, fine, we give up. And they, you know, they admit to who they are and what they're doing and everything gets worked out and it's fine. But like, it's just an example of, I don't want to say the hubris, but just the difficulty in getting these guys in the mindset of doing something so radically different than what they've done before.

• 19:54Jack Murphy?

  Hey guys, I want to tell you tonight about my new novel, The Most Dangerous Man, coming out June 9th. I think, like a lot of you, I read in high school, the short story, The Greatest Game, which is almost a century old at this point, but it's the classic premise of man hunting man for sport. Uh, this book is based off of that a little bit, but also on stories that I have heard over the years about safari guides that have actually taken hunting parties, wealthy people, hunting poachers in West Africa. Uh, that idea kind of cooked off in my mind, um, when I was asked to write a novel and get back into writing fiction again.

• 20:36Jack Murphy?

  And this book is about a ranger with the Ranger Reconnaissance Company, who's on a mission in West Africa and gets kidnapped and hunted for sport by a group of wealthy tech billionaires. Uh, I had a lot of fun writing this book and I think you'll have a good time reading it. It's a quick, fast and furious, fast-paced action, uh, action novel. And, uh, I hope you all check it out. It's up there. Um, you can find it wherever books are sold, the hard copy, uh, the hardback, the soft cover, and, uh, also the Kindle ebook edition. And we'll have some links down in the description for you. Uh, the book comes out June 9th, and, uh, I hope you all let me know what you think of it.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Your mattress is one of those things you don't think about until it's too late, until you're waking up with aches and pains and realizing you've been sleeping on a problem for years. Today's sponsor, Ghostbed, is here to change that. And with the summer coming, there's one more thing worth thinking about: sleeping hot. If you've ever woken up in the middle of the night, overheated and uncomfortable, you'd know how much it wrecks your sleep. Most mattresses trap heat. Ghostbed is built specifically to prevent that. It's built different, baby. I had a go, I've had a Ghostbed mattress now for probably like 10 months. I love it. It's freaking awesome. Uh, I have the, the cooling thing definitely keeps it cool compared to my old mattress. I love it. I'm so happy I have it. And I'm so happy that they sponsor this show. Every mattress in the Ghostbed lineup comes with cooling technology built right in.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Not an upgrade you pay extra for. It's part of how every mattress is designed. From their entry level comfort all the way up to the lux. I have the lux, by the way, because I'm fancy. Which features their most and the Luxe features their most advanced cooling system. And if you're not sure which one is right for you, head to ghostbed.com/ team and take their mattress quiz, a few questions and you get a personalized mattress recommendation, fast, free shipping and 101 nights to try it out. If it's not the right fit, you get your money back. Simple, easy peasy, baby. Right now you can take advantage of Memorial Day pricing and code TEAM gets you an extra 10% off. When you upgrade your sleeping Ghostbed, the makers of the coolest beds in the

• 22:52Speaker 02

  world. Go get some. I love Ghostbed. That's ghostbed.com/ team and use the code TEAM, T E A M, for an extra 10% off site wide. Thank you guys for supporting the show and thanks Ghostbed for supporting the show. Love you. Bye.

• 23:08Speaker 05

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

• 23:37Jack Murphy?

  There's a, you know, I didn't mention this, it's not in the article, but I remember there were a couple Americans that appeared to be operating under some sort of official cover, diplomatic passports. They got hemmed up in Libya. This was quite a while ago. This was like 10 years ago or more by this point. And so this made the news, you know, these Americans got arrested trying to cross the border from Tunisia to Libya. What the hell's going on? The Libyans had taken pictures of these guys passports when they detained them. And I went and looked up one of the guy's names and oh, look, he had run in a marathon in Fayetteville, North

• 24:13Jack Murphy?

  Carolina, right next to Fort Bragg. So it's just, it's very hard to erase the past of someone who is a career soldier. Just their footprint is so strong and they're associated.

• 24:27Speaker 04

  ...of the military are so strong. And even those cultural things, you know, the way soldiers walk and stand and things like this, their mannerisms just separate them from the average person. I'm, I think one of the other interesting things that came out of it was the difference between how the CIA uses NOX and how JSOC uses them, which is-

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's because isn't JSOC usually it's like a short term kind of thing? CIA is usually more of a long term kind of thing.

• 24:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Is that why maybe they run into those issues because they're not like really home growing these NOX?

• 25:00Speaker 04

  Well, the short term versus long term thing is like a product of what they're trying to accomplish, really. JSOC uses NOX for targeting and for logistics too. But they're more interested of like, go in, find the bad guy, locate him, you know, that kind of thing. Or maybe drive this van around this country with some surveillance equipment in it or whatever the case may be. Or Zach, do you want to go into like kind of the difference of how the CIA utilizes them?

• 25:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, as far as I know, I mean, the JSOC folks also, it's kind of like somebody gets into country, you get arms caches, you get, you recruit a, you know, a local vet who can serve as a, you know, as a doctor. If things go like really, really south, it's that kind of stuff. It's like intelligence preparation for the battlefield, I guess, is a lot of it.

• 25:56Speaker 03

  CIA has a much different history. Traditionally, things are changing because of the difficulties surrounding what they call ubiquitous technical surveillance and just the way in which it's much harder to stay hidden than it used to be in the past. But CIA would try to nat, would try to grab people very young, put them on the deep cover NOC, commercial cover track and keep them there for their whole careers. Like no connection with the US government ever. And it was pretty successful in doing that for a long time. I mean, there are people who-

• 26:37Speaker 03

  Never went to the farm. They never set foot in Northern Virginia necessarily. They lived abroad for thirty years. They never went to Langley. They never went there after they retired. They retired undercover. Some of them never touched US soil. Um, or very, very rarely. And if so, they did it, they did it in a way that, you know, if they had a connection to South Florida. They would like go to South Florida for reasons that comported with their cover. Um, they sometimes successfully ran businesses, sometimes not. I mean, that's, that's another, that's a whole other issue, right? That I think JSOC and CIA has both had, which is like-

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. When I found this out, where you're about to say, it blew my mind. Like, somebody's working as a high-powered lawyer, let's say, and is also a NOK for thirty years and supposedly making half a million dollars a year. They can't keep the money?

• 27:29Speaker 03

  No.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  They're getting paid as like a CIA officer?

• 27:32Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Absolute nonsense.

• 27:34Speaker 03

  So there was, I mean, not to, so in the book, I get into this because in the early day, in the early days of the NOK program, I mean, I mean, early days, like nineteen fifties, like right after the CIA was founded, there were debates about this. And there were folks within the CIA that were like, if we're gonna make this work here, we need to actually let these guys make a buck doing their jobs. Because you can't have a guy be a, you know, be a, a CEO at GE abroad and working two jobs and just making a civil servant salary. It doesn't, it doesn't make sense. It also doesn't make sense as a cover mechanism, right? Because if you're supposed to be a high-roller, you gotta, you gotta have that Mercedes. You gotta have that apartment.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  You know, you gotta be able to go on vacations where people in your kind of class group go, right? Like, everything has to become part of your cover. And that has historically been an issue too. Um, and there's a lot of resentment in CIA because there was, there used to be this sense that CIA people under nonofficial cover were just kind of like gaming the system. You know, like, oh, I gotta be a, you know, I'm a big, you know, I'm a big shot. I gotta drive the Benz, right? Like, I gotta go to the south of France for three weeks because everybody else in my firm does, you know, in the summertime. Um. But yeah, I mean, over time CIA would use NOCs for intelligence gathering. They would use them to handle ultra sensitive sources. Like if somebody was recruited by a case officer under diplomatic cover,

• 29:00Speaker 03

  the moment that person was recruited, let's say it was a high level government official, right? They would not want that case officer to ever have any, any interaction with that senior government official again, right? So what they would do is they would turn that person over to a NOC, um, who had no USG connections. And that NOC would generally fly in from another country just to have meetings with that person. Um, there's a whole bunch of other stuff that CIA has done over time. It's not, that's not really the like, the core of this article. So I don't want to get too far afield, but, um, the agency had a, had a developed a much deeper, a broader theory of the case, right? A theory of the case for why you would have folks like this. Um, doesn't mean it didn't have a lot of problems.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  It just means that they had, they had decades of, of lead time on JSOC to figure this stuff out. And they had a broader set of uses for their NOCs. And JSOC came at it from a, I think, self consciously not needing it for quite as many things. Um, and it had many decades it had to play catch up. And I think it's still playing catch up. But to be honest, I think for CIA, there's also been huge issues over the last, well, arguably since its founding, but particularly in the last 10, 15, 20 years and making the program work. So it's not, you know, not to skip to the end of the article, but like there's,

• 30:22Speaker 03

  there's a lot of questions about the future of the practice in general, not just for CIA, but you know, for JSOC too.

• 30:29Jack Murphy?

  I think one of the other big differences that came out during our research was that these sort of non official cover businesses that the CIA stands up can generate profit. Whereas the military cannot generate profit. Um, one guy even told me, he's like, if your cover is a carpet salesman and you buy a bunch of Persian rugs in the Middle East, when you bring those back to the United States, they all have to go into the burn pit and be destroyed.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  Can't even take one for the house, for the crib, nothing.

• 30:58Jack Murphy?

  Even, uh, even one of the guys told me, he's like, we had, there was a mechanism to return our frequent flyer miles.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  Crazy, yeah.

• 31:07Speaker 03

  I want to just say one quick thing, which is that um that is a really important difference. And there's a there's a phrase that I heard a couple of times called non-appropriated income, not appropriated budget, and that refers to the ability to take those profits and plow them back into operational funds, but it is a black hole. Uh, and there is no, there is very little oversight over not appropriated funds or income. So if there's anybody listening to this podcast who has any experience or insight into that world, because it's a very important world, um, and it's one that gets very little attention because it tends to escape not only congressional oversight, but also oversight within the buildings themselves, because you can just take the money that you have

• 31:52Speaker 03

  earned and use it to, I don't know, purchase more real estate or go on operational missions. Like there's, we are talking, we are talking tens, hundreds of millions of dollars over time that can be, that can be earned in some of these, um, in some of these proprietary schemes. And so it's a, it's a topic that generally does not get any, uh,

• 32:17Speaker 02

  On the contras.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Yeah. Yes. That is, I think that is a great example. Now that we got to run back in the news, right? This idea that you are, you're, you're taking covert action funds that you should not, that are arguably, on the contrary, is legal from the jump, but like, and then you are plowing it into something else. And, uh, it is, it is a kind of dark side of the moon aspect to US intelligence activities.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  Um, I want to know about the East European. Tell me about that freak.

• 32:49Jack Murphy?

  Sean about that one.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Sean, give us, give us a scoop.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  You're on mute.

• 32:57Speaker 04

  The East European was the the sort of the name, if you like, or that I gave to an individual whose true identity is known by Jack and me.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  But I first encountered when I was reporting Relentless Strike, my book about JSOC. And

• 33:24Speaker 04

  some of the material in, in fact, most of the material in the article about the East European comes from the book. Because he was sort of the quintessential successful NOC. I mean, even though we had sources that were claiming, oh, JSOC, NOCs only do short term missions and so forth. This guy sort of was the antithesis of that. He had joined Delta Force early in its early in its existence. And he spoke, he was, you know, born in an East European country and

• 34:08Speaker 04

  had the, you know, had all the cultural and linguistic skills therefore to pass as a native of that country. And in addition, as with others from the JSOC and particularly the special mission unit community, he had a convenient missing part of his career. Because in the army, those folks go into something called the DAS, the Department of the Army. What's the S stand for, Jack? Do you remember?

• 34:41Jack Murphy?

  Just maybe, I can't remember either.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  But it's basically the, it's basically a restricted list of names that isn't made public. That doesn't appear in other army databases.

• 34:57Speaker 04

  This guy was sort of converted into a NOK and he had a sort of a commercial cover alias. I believe that his original, you know, country of birth, you know, helped out with this. And he traveled the world, basically, under alias, doing the JSOC's bidding. And in, you know, one of the cases that we describe in the article,

• 35:38Speaker 04

  he drove a, he drove an SUV, I believe, or certainly a car from Jordan into Baghdad, completely kitted out with hidden antenna, so that it could pick up all sorts of communications from Iraqi government types in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And then he sort of parked this vehicle there and then, you know, and then basically stayed in Baghdad for a while, again undercover, and then, and then left.

• 36:19Speaker 04

  You know, there's another episode of, again, a guy with a, I presume, a fairly long-term cover, who was leaving a country near Lebanon, but not Lebanon itself, but was passing through Lebanon as part of his, as part of his cover and was basically jumped by some guys. Now, whether this was a sort of just a street crime and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or whether this was Hezbollah or somebody like that trying to kidnap him, it's unclear. But he, you know, they had guns. He fought them off.

• 37:03Speaker 04

  He wrestled one of the guns out of their hands. But in the, in the sort of process of all of this, he got shot in the gut and...

• 37:14Speaker 04

  He had to, uh, basically go back to his hotel and then he called a US government doctor whose contact information he had and said, hey, here's my problem. You know, I've been shot. What do I do? The doctor talked him through how to sew himself up. Um, and then he continued with his mission. So, you know, he, there were all these steps he had to take to keep himself, as they say, clean. Um, and, and he did all of that, um, uh, before leaving the theater. Uh, so he went through all the steps that he would have had to have gone through had he not

• 37:57Speaker 04

  been shot. Um, despite the fact that he had a gunshot wound and then he had to fly out commercial and, uh, and, you know, finally he, he flew into a, you know, a friendly country that's not in the Middle East and got some real medical care. Uh, but that became a sort of a legendary, uh, a legendary, uh, episode. He, he was part of the, uh, sort of intelligence, uh, special ops intelligence units, uh, often referred to as task force orange. It's had a lot of different cover names over the years. Um, and, uh, he received a silver star for his

• 38:36Speaker 04

  actions. Um, uh, but the citation for that silver star is classified. Um, I found out about it many, many years ago and, and sort of looked into it. Uh, but that, that, that, you know, I was told that that's a legendary, uh, legendary case of a, of a commercial cover operative, uh, you know, getting in the shit, if you like, and then having to get himself out.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  Uh, Jack, I remember we had, uh, George Hand on. He worked, I don't know if he was a NOC, supposed, like, you know, JSOC NOC, but he was in Delta Force and he was, he would go with, like, a, a female operative to, was it Bosnia?

• 39:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was not, uh, non-official cover, I don't believe. I, I think they were under official cover, um, for the most part when they did that.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's just to say, like, there's women that are doing this job, too.

• 39:32Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think one of the more interesting aspects of this is that, you know, they recruit people from across the army and across the Navy, not just special ops guys, because they're looking for people who have those language abilities and that ethnicity that the mission requires. And then they put them through a training course, actually a series of training courses, depending on what they need. But it's interesting that, you know, a lot of them are one and dones or two and dones. So they'll go and do one or two missions. And then they're going, you know, presumably they'll get a Bronze Star and sent back to their their parent unit. So I mean, it's interesting, the way it works, you know, as one person told

• 40:17Speaker 04

  me, you know, the CIA plays the long game with these programs, but JSOC just doesn't have a long game. There's no such, there's no such thing.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  It's gotta be, it's gotta be weird. You do a couple of missions, like super squarely secret shit, and then you go back to your parent unit.

• 40:32Speaker 04

  There's, there's an even crazier story. I mean, that Sean and I will try to write about in the future about a guy who's a conventional army dude, had those language skills, that ethnicity, and the army plucked him up and put him undercover with some really bad people. And when that mission was done, he was awarded a Silver Star and sent back to his unit in the motor pool or whatever.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 40:57Speaker 04

  It was, it was a year undercover.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  Oh my God.

• 41:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  Talking about like the male female, like the TFO couple that went into Iran in 2014, and they've, they've been doing it several times since nine 11. Tell us a little bit about that, because that sounds like insane, even before, like, we had all these crazy tensions and the sanctions and everything with Iran.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Oh, Sean, you're on mute again.

• 41:23Speaker 04

  Beg your pardon, I'm trying to protect everybody from my dog Vito's barking.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  No problem.

• 41:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was a case in which Orange and JSOC writ large had been sort of pondering how to get people into Iran. And it turned out, you know, actually to be a little easier than than some of them thought. They had imagined that the easier way would be to drive overland and cross at a land border, rather than go through where you can pick up a visa as you're going through the sort of the border checkpoint. But it turned out

• 42:13Speaker 04

  that they were able to come up with cover identities that withstood the visa application process at an Iranian embassy and were able to fly in commercially into an airport. It's usually considered, that's usually considered a higher bar to get through the higher bar of security than just crossing, you know, at a desert checkpoint somewhere. But but it worked and they were able to, it was a male female couple, which as we've discussed,

• 42:53Speaker 04

  is usually is thought to attract less scrutiny than a singleton military age male or, you know, multiple military age males hanging out together. And they were able to stay in a hotel in a large, in a large Iranian city, you know, drive around. They could have

• 43:21Speaker 04

  Sort of undertaken a sort of a mission, a mission there and then to sort of collect on the Iranian nuclear program, but since that wasn't originally part of their mission, they, they chose not to, um, and they returned, uh, basically, I think the same way they, they came in via commercial, uh, uh, commercial air. And when they got back to the States, they, uh, they briefed the president, uh, on their, which was President, uh, George W. Bush, uh, at the time on, on their accomplishments. Um, but it was considered a, you know, a, a terrific

• 44:04Speaker 04

  success and a, and a template, um, uh, you know, to, to base future missions on.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  So it's safe to say we've been doing it since, ever since we saw that it's relatively easy to get in there.

• 44:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I would, I would, I would say that's probably true. I mean, with anything like this, and I'm, I'm just sort of, uh, I think stating the obvious, you don't want to do missions like this just because you can. There has to be a, a real need to do it because just because it worked the previous time, doesn't mean that somebody, somewhere in the Iranian government hasn't retroactively or retrospectively figured out what you did and taken steps to prevent it, um,

• 45:02Speaker 04

  in the, in the future. So, you know, I mean, there's some good, um, uh, fictional TV series, both Israeli and French about people conducting non-official cover missions against the Iranians, some in Iran, some, some elsewhere.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, the bureau, right? That's the French one.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  Bureau is the French one. And I think the Israeli one is called Tehran, but I'm, I'm, I'm not sure. And, uh, I mean, they're, you know, they give you a pretty good sense of just the sort of the white knuckle ride that that, that that can be.

• 45:42Jack Murphy?

  The other difference, sorry Zach, I'll let you go. There's the other difference to point out to listeners between official cover and non-official cover is that if you get busted under official cover that you're posing as a State Department person, even if you're in Moscow or somewhere like maybe you get your shoulder pulled out of the socket when they arrest you and then they dub you persona non grata and you're deported out of the country, you're going back home. But if you're under non-official cover, you're getting taken down into a basement somewhere and shot. Like the US government is not going to claim you at all. So the pucker factor in a place like Tehran has got to be incredibly high.

• 46:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's 100% true. I mean, the best case scenario is that there's an implicit understanding that, that, you know, you're actually, like you never actually admit to it, but, but Iranian or Chinese or Russian counterintelligence knows that you're actually CIA or JSOC and then there's somebody that they're willing to trade you for. But, I mean, there have been cases where there was one case of a, of a CIA knock in the 1950s.

• 46:50Jack Murphy?

  In China.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  Who, who spent a decade in a Chinese dungeon and died. I mean, the US government, they disavowed him and they just said, he's not one of ours. And the Chinese government said, we know he is. And the US government said, no, he's not. And he rotted away in the dungeon and died. I mean, it, it, it doesn't get much more serious than that. Since we're talking about Iran, I think it's pretty interesting actually because, you know, Iran, well, this is the case for the Israelis too, but we don't have diplomatic relations with the, with the Iranian government, right? So you cannot operate under a US passport. And frankly, you wouldn't necessarily want to operate under a passport of a friendly Western country either. Although.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  More or less, some have been useful, right? I mean, there have been times where we've had allies from Eastern Europe who have provided cover for people going into Iran. And you've had people that have been able to speak those languages, and so it's been like, pretty effective. But, again, these are sophisticated counterintelligence services. They know what they're looking for. And so, then you need to really think about, who do we have that can operate under a third country passport? Who is not going to attract any attention of Iranian counterintelligence? And that's really, really hard. And I don't want to take anything away from the folks that Shaun spoke about, but I think it's very illustrative that, as a mere proof of concept of getting a tandem, what they

• 48:20Speaker 03

  call a tandem couple, you know, which is like when you have two operatives, two deep-cover officers, working together, pretending to be almost always like a romantic couple, married, something like that. Going into a country like Iran, checking into a hotel and walking around and leaving unscathed was considered notable enough for those people to then brief the President of the United States? I mean, that tells you about how difficult this stuff is considered to be, how dangerous it is, and how rare it is. I mean, the truth is, is that we don't do a lot of this in denied areas because it's so dangerous, because the stakes are so high, because there is no recompense for people

• 49:05Speaker 03

  if they get caught. And there have always, there has also been periods of more or less willingness to undertake missions of this kind of dangerousness. Like, you have folks at the operator level who are willing to go in, and then you get people in the bureaucracy who pull people back. And that's been a source of attention, too, over the years.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  Talking a little bit about the bureaucracy, uh, just reminded me when, you know, the, if JSOC sets up a shell company or a fake business to a cover business to like, and starts making money or they want to make a business decision, they have to, to make that decision, they have to like shoot it up the flag, back to the flag officer to see like if it's a yes or no. And it's like, what the fuck is a one star or two star general or whatever, a Colonel? How are they making the business decision that's like happening on the ground? Like, why would that even be in like the, in the flow chart?

• 50:02Jack Murphy?

  It was described to me as, you know, you're undercover as a businessman that can't make any business decisions.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:08Jack Murphy?

  So it makes the cover just very difficult to, to work under.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  That's the cra- and isn't like the key thing, keeping your cover as clean as possible? It's like, hold on, I have to call my wife or whoever he's trying to, you know, act like he's gonna make it, you know, it just makes no sense.

• 50:23Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, there's all kinds of like shenanigans that go into trying to like maintain those covers as we found out that they'll go in and electronically, um, delete all of your records, uh, they'll go to like credit card companies and they have relationships with a lot of these companies that they're like, okay, we're, we're working with the US government. They'll delete your credit history and it's like you're born again. Um, and it creates a lot of difficulties because when you come back to the United States and you're trying to integrate back into, uh, life as a civilian, it's like on paper, you don't exist. Um, even just guys who are official cover guys that go on the DASR and they've been on that DASR for like 10, 15 years, it takes several years to just come off that damn

• 51:06Jack Murphy?

  list. And that's just official cover guys we're talking about there.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a, it's pretty unbelievable. Um, there was one other question.

• 51:16Jack Murphy?

  The other interesting shenanigan was, uh, fake retirement ceremonies. That you'll have a guy who has, you know, maybe he already has his 20 years in, maybe not in the military and, uh, they decide, hey, we're going to take this sergeant major or this lieutenant colonel or whoever it is, and we're going to put them under a non-official cover and send them to some part of the world to gather intelligence. They'll actually hold a fake retirement ceremony and everyone in that guy's unit thinks it's real, thinks that guy's really retiring except for him. And then he will be given fake military paperwork, like fake discharge paperwork. So that if something, someone does look, it's like, wow, he's not in the military anymore. That's done with.

• 51:58Jack Murphy?

  And then sent out and do his mission for a year or two. And then when he comes back, he will have a second real retirement ceremony. That puts him out of the military.

• 52:11Jack Murphy?

  But again, I mean, that, that just is again, one of these problems with finding someone who's very late in career. You know, you imagine finding a special forces command sergeant major that's been doing the job for 20 years and then trying to put them under that cover versus trying to find a kid in basic training and then putting them in that cover.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  You, uh, Jack, you mentioned about like us hitting up like credit reporting companies and whatever to like delete information. Where did you, did you say it where they do this? If even if the company says no, we'll just go in and do it ourselves anyway?

• 52:46Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I had a, I had a guy tell me that, that like, yeah, if they don't cooperate, there are like ways.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  We'll just hack into it and do it anyway.

• 52:53Jack Murphy?

  There's something that, that the nerds at the Pentagon do to delete all that stuff. And we talked about, uh, this is another facet of, of NOCs that we haven't really talked about is that when they're under a commercial cover, that cover company that they're ostensibly working for is maintained, sometimes up to 20 people are maintaining that cover. So it's super expensive to create and maintain non-official cover. It's, it's a really big undertaking and that's why, as Zach was saying, we don't do a lot of it, you know, it's not, it's not super prevalent.

• 53:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, just to, to like, put an exclamation point on what Jack just said.

• 53:35Speaker 03

  Every NOC, whether JSOC or at CIA, requires an immense amount of support. All the support people have salaries, all the support people may or may not want to be doing something with their careers that involve supporting a NOC full-time. And then you got the actual costs of the NOC, right? If you, if you're going traditional and you have somebody that's a business person, there might be those associated costs that I mentioned before, right? Kind of keeping up, keeping up the. The illusion of the lifestyle. So like one knock can be an extraordinarily expensive proposition. And if you have somebody and you have eight people supporting them and that knock, all they do is meet with sensitive sources in a couple of countries.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  And people start looking at budgets. There's the kind of, the value proposition can be very controversial. It doesn't mean that they don't have really important uses, but historically there has been a stream of thought, a very powerful stream of thought within the US intelligence community that the juice is just not worth the squeeze for Knox in general. And so, you know, for various reasons, there, there has been a lot of skepticism over the years about whether they are worth it. You have other folks who are totally, you know, evangelized about it and say, well, you know, you're not read into it, right? So there's, you get, you get into that game where it's kind of like, if you understood

• 55:02Speaker 03

  the compartments that I was read into, you would know why Knox are so valuable. But since 99% of the people don't actually know, they don't know what they don't know. And it's, it's impossible to, to, to make a, like a, an honest assessment, you know, when people just kind of, they just say, well, you don't, you know, you're not written, right? So, but overall, I would say that, that the attitude has been pretty skeptical over time and I don't think it's getting any less skeptical.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  Is that because like we're like more and more reliant on like technical surveillance rather than actual human intelligence? Cause there's no way we, we have a huge network in Iran. Like, there's no way.

• 55:47Speaker 03

  I mean, I mean, yes, that's, I mean, we, you could, we could write a, you know, we could write an entire encyclopedia worth of books, you know, on, you know, like, like.

• 55:57Jack Murphy?

  I mean, yeah, if you're a bureaucrat, are you more comfortable with like signals, intelligence and technical surveillance? Or do you want to rely on human beings which have a track record sometimes of being unreliable? And as Zach points out, costing a ton of money and a ton of grief if they get caught.

• 56:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, although of course to play devil's advocate, I mean oftentimes what the United States is relying on is human intelligence from partner nations. And it's not as if those satellites that are collecting all the imagery for the National Reconnaissance Office and all the audio and other signals intelligence for the National Security Agency are cheap either. So there's, you know, there's, you know, swings and roundabouts, there's a number of angles to this. The, I suppose, the intelligence communities, polite, politically correct responses, they

• 57:02Speaker 04

  want all sources of intelligence to feed into one big picture.

• 57:07Speaker 03

  Yes, but without question though, we have, we have grown accustomed in US intelligence to relying predominantly on SIGINT. That has not changed, that has only become more prevalent over time. We do get important human from liaison, from intelligence partners, but like what they call unilateral human sources that are like recruited and handled by US intelligence community officers from various three lateral agencies has declined significantly over time. And what that means for the future of intelligence is like, man, that's a whole nother podcast that we could talk about for many, many hours.

• 57:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, what's the case officers' union saying about this? Like, they can't be fucking happy.

• 57:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know, actually, but I don't know if, there's a lot of questions about whether those folks are going to be able to operate the way that they did, right? Because again, part of the, so if you look at one level up on this whole debate, it's about... If we can't get human the way we used to, do we need to change the cover mechanisms that we have been using predominantly in order to get closer to sources that we need, right? And so if we can't rely on being military attachés and diplomats of various sorts, do we need to move out of those embassies to then do our jobs? Nonofficial cover has always been the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow

• 58:38Speaker 03

  for folks who think that official cover is just not getting us close to the people that we need to, but it has so many problems and structural issues of its own that it has created other issues along the way. And neither has been able to come close to pacing with the technical collection capabilities that the US government now has.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's gonna be an interesting next couple of decades. Um, boys, excellent episode, excellent article. The High Side, the link is in the description. Zach, when is the book coming out about the CIA NOX? Are we working on that?

• 59:17Speaker 03

  Next summer, yeah.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  Next summer, great.

• 59:19Speaker 03

  Penguin Random House.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  The provisional title is Deep Cover, but it's, it's, I mean, I got a long way before our publication, but the book is written, it's in revisions. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a new history of the CIA through this very problem that we've been, we've been discussing, going back to the founding of it to, to today. So should be interesting.

• 59:43Speaker 04

  I haven't seen a word of it and I can already tell you it's gonna be well worth buying.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and for Team House listeners, Eyes On listeners, I want to put Zach's links in the description. He's written a couple of times, a few times with, with Jack before. You guys did the, the Soleimani Strike article, right? Credible one, another one too. Which other one have you guys worked on? This one. Blanket. This is the second one? Have you two guys done something else too?

• 1:00:08Jack Murphy?

  I don't think so.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  Okay. But the Soleimani article is incredible too. Uh, really good.

• 1:00:13Speaker 03

  Worked with Sean a bunch, worked with Sean on a big article, uh, on, uh, the first Trump administration's plans to, uh, potentially kidnap WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and some discussions they were having about even targeted, targeted assassinations. Um, so obviously.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  On Julian Assange or just in general?

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  Assange, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a smart.

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I mean, always happy to work with you guys.

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  Not high profile at all. It's smoke the guy from WikiLeaks.

• 1:00:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, well, it got stopped, but I mean, that's a whole nother discussion, you know? But it was a, it was a, it was a, it was a wild ordeal, man. They were thinking about doing gun battles to, you know, in the streets of London with, you know, the Russians that they thought they were gonna put him on a plane, send him to Moscow, but yeah.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  Was somebody smoking fucking meth before they came up with that fucking idea?

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  No comment.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  Like, what kind of fuck? I mean, how are these people like even working like in the, in the government? Um, wow.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  To ask that question is to answer it.

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Everybody, check them out. Check out Sean, check out Jack, check out Zach. Those links will be in the description. Of course, the high side, check that out. Check out their Substack. And, uh, anything else? Oh yeah, patreon.com slash the team house. You get both Eyes On and Team House episodes, ad free and early, and you help support the show. Guys, a pleasure.

• 1:01:33Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, thank you, everyone.

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:01:39Speaker 05

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

• 1:02:10Jack Murphy?

  Hey guys, I want to take a moment to tell you about the Team House Podcast Newsletter. If you go and subscribe, it's totally free and what it will do is aggregate all of our data, all of our content that we put out, the things that are on the Team House, on our geopolitics podcast, Eyes On, things that I write journalistically with Sean Naylor on the high side, anything else that we have going on, books we recommend, upcoming guests that we have coming on the show, and also filtering in some fun stuff in there as well. If you go and check it out, we send it out just once a week. We don't want to spam you guys. It's just a kind of roll up of all of our content on a weekly basis. You can

• 1:02:55Jack Murphy?

  find our newsletter at teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join. Again, the website for that is teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join. So we hope to see you there. The link will be down in the description.

• 1:03:11Speaker 05

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

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

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

• 1:04:25Speaker 05

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

• 1:05:03Speaker 00

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:05:37Speaker 05

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

• 1:06:14Speaker 00

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

• 1:06:51Speaker 05

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:08:00Speaker 05

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:08:35Speaker 00

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:09:05Speaker 05

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.