CIA Paramilitary Team Leader | JR Seeger (throwback episode)

originally aired 7/8/22 JR Seeger served as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne and as a CIA officer for a total of 27 years federal service. Since his retirement, JR has written articles and book reviews in the CIA professional journal "Studies in Intelligence" and the TE Lawrence Society newsletter. MIKE4 was his first novel and the first in a six part series about a family who have served in the special operations and intelligence community from World War II to the present. In 2020, JR has started a new series focusing on the early twentieth century competition among the great European powers. Part fantasy, part thriller, the first book, “A school for the Great Game,” looks at the first decade of the last century through the eyes of a teenager. JR splits his time between WNY and New Mexico. Check out JR's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/J.-R.-Seeger/author/B07FDKNXTF?ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true&ccs_id=a05bfcad-a836-4573-8b15-5673bcbba311 JR's website: https://www.jrseeger.com/ FOR AD FREE AUDIO VIDEO AND EARLY ACCESS TO SHOWS AND BONUS SEGMENTS WITH GUESTS. JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER! https://teamhousepodcast.kit.com/ 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.

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• 1:32Speaker 05

  Special Operations.

• 1:36Speaker 05

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

• 1:52Jack Murphy?

  Hey guys, welcome to the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with co-host David Park. Our guest tonight is JR Seeger. JR served as a Army Infantry Officer and then went on to have a extensive career in the Central Intelligence Agency, which included leading paramilitary teams, one of the first teams into Afghanistan, amongst many other postings around the world as Chief of Station, Chief of Base, all sorts of interesting things that JR will be able to get to in varying levels of detail as he's allowed. He is also an author. He's an author of the Mike 4 series and he is the author of a steampunk series. This

• 2:31Jack Murphy?

  is A School for the Great Game. And I, well, JR, I've wanted to interview you. I've wanted to have you on the show for a long time. I really appreciate you doing this.

• 2:43Speaker 07

  Well, it's my pleasure, guys. It was the reason I didn't have any idea you interviewed a teammate of mine and you looked right in the camera and said, hey, JR, if you're watching, I want to talk to you. So that's, that's actually why I'm talking to you today.

• 3:02Jack Murphy?

  You're talking about we had Justin on?

• 3:05Speaker 07

  That's right. Absolutely.

• 3:06Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, Justin Sapp we had on a little while back. He was great. We had him in studio. So for folks who are watching, Justin was assigned to Special Forces but was detached to one of the CIA paramilitary teams in Afghanistan, Alpha Team. The Alpha Team Leader was this guy right here, JR. So that's why I wanted to have him on the show. JR, let's, let's kick it off. I'd like to hear a little bit about your origin story. We ask our guests to tell us a little bit about their upbringing and sort of that path that took them into governmental service, in your case, into the airborne infantry, then the Central Intelligence Agency.

• 3:45Speaker 07

  Okay, well, it's not terribly exciting. I mean, basically, I grew up in a blue collar family. My dad was a railroad engineer. Grandfather was a railroad engineer. You know, there, it was just a blue collar family. I grew up in a little tiny rural town. It's, today, it's not quite as rural as it used to be, but it was a rural town outside of Buffalo. And then,

• 4:15Speaker 07

  I, my folks made it very clear, I was going to college. I mean, it was just like, there, there was no, I mean, I was either gonna go to college or they were gonna knife me in my sleep sometime, you know, I mean, it was really that, that straightforward. And I, I was fine with that. I mean, I was, I was not a terribly interesting kid. I mean, I had school and I had sports. I was, I played soccer and I was a wrestler. That was it. So, honestly, if it hadn't been for the New York State Region Scholarship, I'm not sure I could have afforded to go to college right after high school, but I did.

• 4:55Speaker 07

  And I was able to go to a, a small school, a college called Eisenhower College. Now, for those of you who are, might look it up, you'll, you won't find it, because Eisenhower College folded in the, in the late 90s or mid 90s, actually. And, you know, it was a, a school that was designed at the request of President Eisenhower to create a cadre of people who were experienced in world events and worlds, it was called world studies. And, and one of the reasons it wasn't terribly popular is because you didn't get, you didn't

• 5:40Speaker 07

  get any electives until you were in your second semester of your junior year. But, I mean, I, you know, to give you a feeling for how the school started, class one in the big lecture hall was on the creation of the Chinese Empire. And then, class two was on Confucianism. And then, class three was on Chinese literature. And then, class four was on, you know, was, and, and it went across the world. So, we learned about not just European history, but Asian history, African history, and African

• 6:21Speaker 07

  culture, African art, Asian art, Asian culture. So, it makes me an, actually, a pretty good cocktail party guy.

• 6:32Speaker 07

  I can talk for about a minute about just about anything, you know, and and more than once in my career, I have looked a guy in the eye and said, Mahjong, yeah, I know what Mahjong is. I've always wanted to play Mahjong. And then, of course, I go home and open up my books and figure out what the hell Mahjong is. Is it a, what is it? Is it a sport? Is it a game? Is it a board game? What is it? But anyhow,

• 7:01Speaker 07

  I I mentioned and have spent a little bit of time focusing on that school because the only reason I ended up in the CIA is because of Eisenhower College and not the way you think. Anyhow, I went to, I went out of college. I then went to graduate school where I came to the realization that I was a pretty good student. I was a terrible scholar. I learned that lesson when the head of the department pulled me aside and said, you know, Chair, your grades are really good. You're never getting a degree here.

• 7:38Speaker 07

  So, I mean, you know, you don't have to throw a brick through my window to make me realize I need to go away. So after my masters, he got the, the chairman of the department got me a job as an archaeologist and I was an archaeologist for a year in Wyoming. This is nineteen, nineteen seventy-nine, nineteen eighty. Two things happened, of course, during that time period, the hostage crisis in Iran and the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan.

• 8:09Speaker 07

  And I, I had always been interested in thinking about how I was going to do service. In fact, in, while I was in grad school, I sent a note to, an application to the CIA. In the old days, you had to mail it in and I got a letter back that said, no, thank you. So I was like, okay, I guess that, you know, that's so far my career progression is really working well for me, right? I mean, everything's, everything's doing fine. I keep asking for stuff and people keep saying no.

• 8:41Speaker 07

  So then,

• 8:43Speaker 07

  I joined the army and that was a shock to my, my wife. She was my girlfriend at the time. She was like, you did what? Uh, yeah, I enlisted in the army as a private and went to Fort Knox, Kentucky in basic training as a 26 year old. Uh, and then, uh, went to OCS and went on to, you know, airborne school, ranger school, all that stuff. And then, uh, did, uh, four plus years with the 82nd as an airborne infantry officer and then progressively, uh, a couple of other staff jobs before I, uh, was getting ready

• 9:24Speaker 07

  to go on to the advanced course. And I guess most of your folks would know that unless you're really, really good and you're an OCS officer, you're at the bottom of the pile. And, and I used to think that was just, you know, prejudice, but I understand now, having done a, a long career in the federal government, that they're just amortizing their investment, right? It costs a lot of money to put an officer through West Point and a lot of money to put them through ROTC. Uh, I got commissioned after four and a half months as an E4, a specialist.

• 10:06Speaker 07

  So it didn't cost them very much to put me into that commission source. So I am trying to figure out what's going to happen to me when I'm working in my office at, uh, I was the, the, the S3 air in my battalion, which is, you know, in an airborne battalion, there's got to be an NCO and an officer who design all the jumps and get the airplanes and get the parachutes, all that stuff. And I get a phone call, says, hey, Captain Seeger, uh, we understand that you're thinking about, uh, you know, what's going to happen next and we, we'd really like to, uh, talk to you about an op- opportunity in CIA.

• 10:45Speaker 07

  Cold call and I'm thinking, really? Like, really? This is how you do this? Right. So I, I turned to my partner in crime at the time, uh, uh, uh, E7 that I, I'd done a lot of other kinds of stuff with him and I said, Chip, here's the deal. They want me to meet this guy at a hotel. If, if I end up face down in the Cape Fear River tomorrow, I want somebody to know what the hell was going on. So, uh, anyhow, that was just, that, that's sort of what happened. I wasn't, it was a real deal and I was puzzled for years as to how I was approached.

• 11:29Speaker 07

  Well, it turns out some many years later that, uh, classmates of mine at Eisenhower College were already in the CIA because their parents were in CIA. Oh, interesting. And in, and in those days, that's, you know, not the only way that things could be done. But it was one of the ways that things were done. Today, of course, for anybody who is interested, uh, you, you go online and like every other part of the federal government, you apply online and the process then goes into a, uh, you know, a, a protected environment.

• 12:10Speaker 07

  Uh, but there, you can't ref, you know, refer anybody. Uh, what happens is they, you go on, you know, the applicants go online, which is a good thing because quite honestly, if you have these referrals, everybody looks, ends up looking like the next guy, right? I mean, you know, and, and we need all kinds of different people in the CIA today. Uh, and so anyhow, that was, that was my entrance into the CIA. I worked, uh, into a training program, which the selection process, I don't know what it is now, but the selection process when I was going through, I started in, uh, April

• 12:51Speaker 07

  of 85 and I was certified as a case officer in June of 86. So it's approximately a year plus of different steps along the way.

• 13:07Speaker 07

  And then, by that time, I was married and I had convinced the agency. Actually, I walked into a personnel office and said, "This is my wife's resume. You can see that she's really the smart one of the two of us." And they looked at the resume and they said, "You're absolutely right. We're interested in her because she is much smarter than you are." So they hired her. And then, as to onward assignments, basically, there were two different outfits that were in two different parts, geographic divisions. They don't have those things anymore, but they, they were, in the old days, there were geographic divisions and a director of operations. Two geographic divisions who were asking me if I was interested.

• 13:52Speaker 07

  And I basically told them, "Whoever hires my wife is the one that's going to be, you know, on the, on the list." So it turned out that it was near east division. And, uh, which was actually okay by me because I'd already served, when I was in the army, I served in the multinational force of service in Egypt. So I thought, "That's cool. I mean, I, I get it. I mean, Arabic's a tough language, but I can do that." So I get off my, my, you know, one week leave after this, uh, months of training. And I go in and they said, "Good news. You've got an onward assignment.

• 14:34Speaker 07

  Uh, bad news, you're late for language school." And I'm like, "Okay. Oh, and by the way, it's going to be, uh, Dari." And I'm like, "Okay." Not having a clue what Dari is. Not a clue. So I said, "Okay." And they said, "Well, you know, you're late. Get down to the, you know, to State Department because that's where the Dari Language School is. Check." And, uh, so what I found out was, of course, it's Afghan Persian.

• 15:07Speaker 07

  And all my peers who were onward, going on to onward assignments and they were going to study Chinese and Arabic and Russian, they were like, oh JR, you're so screwed. I mean, you are, no one is going to care. You know, you're going to finish off a tour someplace and then you're never going to be able to use your language again. You're going to have to study another one. I was like, well, you know, orders are orders. I mean, I just came out of the army. I know, I don't, I, my hair hadn't even grown out yet. Uh, you know, I get it. Uh, orders are orders. And so of course, it, you know, in the long run, uh, Afghan Persian turned out to be a pretty good language to have.

• 15:47Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. So what was that, uh, first assignment then? You said you were in the Near East Division. Uh, what did that look like for you? And what year was it by that time that you, after you finished, uh, you graduated your training?

• 16:00Speaker 07

  Well, okay. So I, I went to my first assignment in 87 because it was a year-long language program. And, uh, as I've told you earlier, I, I have to just sort of be generic. I, it was, it was in, uh, South Asia. You, you can do the, you can do the math. Uh, and, uh, I was, I was assigned, instead of a standard sort of conventional tour, I was assigned, because I had the Afghan Persian, and for those of you, for, you know, your, your listeners who don't remember this time period, the Soviets had occupied Afghanistan and they were fighting the Afghans across the entire country. So I was sent in, uh,

• 16:45Speaker 07

  along with a couple of other people to, uh, to meet with Afghans, uh, Afghan resistance guys. Now, this was not in any way, shape or form associated with the, the paramilitary weapons program that we had at the time. And, and that's, you know, it was super secret then, but you know, let's face it, once you start to deliver Stinger missiles into Afghanistan. It's kind of a clue who's in charge.

• 17:14Jack Murphy?

  We've had Baz Basil on the show before, who may have mentioned a little bit about that.

• 17:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. Well, Baz was one of the guys, actually Baz and there was my very first job

• 17:30Speaker 07

  in the agency before I was in the pipeline was down in the sub-basement in the building with guys like, in fact with Baz and a number of other guys. We refer to ourselves as the methane breeders because of course, you know, it's a, it's a heavy gas and it goes down into the basement. Anyhow, so I spent three years meeting Afghans night after night after night, who had just come out from a war zone and were willing to talk about what they were doing. And so that's what I did. I debriefed soldiers, basically. It was a very unconventional sort

• 18:13Speaker 07

  of environment for me. And, and that was my first tour. You know, if you, no matter how bad your language might be, if you meet guys like six nights a week for three to four hours in a night, pretty quick, you get, you know, unless you're really a dim, you get the, you know, you get pretty good at the language. So that's, that's sort of where it was. And I was, finished my tour. I had a, I got into a TIF with NE Division. It was my fault, really, quite honestly, because I told them that I, I had been working with SAD guys and I wanted

• 18:56Speaker 07

  to go work in SAD. And they said, you don't seem to understand, young case officer. We, you, you're an NE guy. You're going to be an NE guy.

• 19:10Speaker 07

  Okay, uh, well anyhow, uh, for all of the things that we can say bad about Saddam Hussein, the fact that he invaded Kuwait actually made my life much easier in one respect, which was, uh, they had a job for me, which was a crummy, what, what I, you know, they thought was a crummy job, was a great job for me. I was in Desert Shield, Desert Storm in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. There was no other, uh, agency officer there that could work with the Saudis and work with the military. So, uh, that's what I did for a better part of a year. I was the, uh, you know, this is a classic sort of story. People say, how can

• 19:55Speaker 07

  this possibly be? But it's a classic. It's kind of like the story. Uh, there's a, there's an old story about Texas Rangers and there's a story about in the, in the twenties, there was a, you know, there was a, uh, a riot, uh, a, in Waco, Texas.

• 20:12Jack Murphy?

  One riot, one Ranger?

• 20:14Speaker 07

  One riot, one Ranger, exactly. You know? And so the idea is, is that I was the, uh, the agency L and O for Eighteenth Airborne Corps, uh, First Marine Expeditionary Force, and, uh, eight, uh, the First Tac Fighter Wing. So, I kept pretty busy, uh, during that time period. It's mostly, uh, because of my background, it was mostly associated with, uh, what at the time was called, uh, force protection, but really was counterterrorism, counterintelligence stuff. And, uh, did that for, until I, you know, returned and then,

• 20:56Speaker 07

  uh, they, uh, by that time, all was forgiven and, uh, the Near East Division said, we've got another job for you and your wife. Cause we're a tandem couple, which makes life kind of complicated. I had told them they could send me anywhere in the world, so long as there were two jobs.

• 21:16Speaker 07

  So they said, "We got a job for you." And it was a, it was actually a very, very cool job. It was in a specialized, it would have been called, it was a specialized station. This is a long time before these kinds of things happened before, where it was a station going after Near East rogue state proliferators, terrorists, and counterintelligence officers. So I did that for four years, working my way up from being a line case officer through to managing a team, hunting one of these rogue state,

• 22:01Speaker 07

  well, all the rogue state intelligence services, basically, that we were working after. So both their military and their civilian services, which was great. It meant being on the road about 20 days a month. So if you can do the math, it, it means, you know, I was home on weekends and leaving every Monday.

• 22:27Speaker 08

  And being, and this was a tandem, a tandem tour?

• 22:34Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 22:34Speaker 08

  So?

• 22:35Speaker 07

  It was a tandem, so my wife, if you're gonna ask, my wife is, was what's called a reports and requirements officer. Now it's called, now they're called a CMOs, I guess, right? And, you know, the only reason to go out and do stuff, of course, is to produce reports. By this time in my career, I'd come to the realization that although every case officer has to be a, both a hunter and a handler, I come, every case officer by their second tour ought to know which they're better at. And I'm a, I'm a better handler, quite honestly. You can, I can, I can basically squeeze intelligence out of just about anybody.

• 23:20Speaker 08

  And can you tell us sort of, you know, in like case officer vernacular or whatever, what the difference between?

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• 25:23Speaker 08

  A hunter and a handler is.

• 25:26Speaker 07

  Okay, so, so, in, you know, in, in the spy world, there are two things that have to be done, right? One is produce intelligence, and that's done by people who are handlers. You debrief people, you keep them on board, you make sure that they are. Are productive, that they're safe, that they understand what they're supposed to do for us. Right?

• 25:55Speaker 07

  The, but you're always, you always need new business. Because, you know, guys decide somewhere along the way, they don't want to do it anymore. Or they want to retire, or they want to, or they get caught. So you always have to have new business as well. So the hunters end up finding and recruiting the new spies. Now, most hunters prefer to just, once they, once they've recruited a spy, they prefer to go and recruit another spy, because it's what they like to do.

• 26:33Speaker 07

  And, and then, man, that's not to say that you can't, in, in, in the CIA, as a case officer, you must be able to do both. Right? But, you know, pretty quick, like I say, you, you, early on, you figure out what you're better at. And I'm, I was, I'm not doing it at all anymore, but I was better at producing intelligence, taking the requirements, designing them so that the debriefing makes sense, doing it in language, and keeping the asset safe, because that's our primary directive. Right?

• 27:13Speaker 07

  I mean, the more, more than anything else, the CIA is a place where you are expected, more than anything else, to keep your asset alive and safe. Teach them how to be safe, because they don't know. It's not their profession.

• 27:30Speaker 08

  Right.

• 27:31Speaker 07

  So it's, it's our tradecraft skills that we use to do that.

• 27:37Jack Murphy?

  And then afterwards, you had a more conventional tour in a South Asian country?

• 27:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, I was, you know, I was a base chief, running, you know, regular espionage operations. And I mean, it was, it was a good tour. I mean, it was an okay tour. I did, I did two years there. And I mean, I can't really talk very much about the cases, but I mean, basically it was classic spot assess, develop, recruit and handle and then manage young case officers who are spotting, assessing, developing and recruiting.

• 28:17Speaker 07

  And it, and as, as was pretty typical of the time.

• 28:22Speaker 07

  You have to remember that we're talking about now, now we are talking about the post-Cold War world. So there's lots of different kinds of people who five years earlier would have been great targets and are now our allies, or at least are, at least are neutrals. And then, but there's always going to be targets out there. And of course, if you, and also you're always going to be looking at local targets if you can, depends on the, the, it all depends on the security environment. And I was in a pretty, pretty rigorous security environment, so

• 29:04Speaker 07

  we didn't do a lot of that stuff. We did an awful lot of third country national stuff.

• 29:11Speaker 07

  But, you know, I mean, during all of that time, there actually just before the conventional tour, during the other tour, I got grabbed up and, and opened up a provisional station in the former Soviet Union.

• 29:23Jack Murphy?

  Wow.

• 29:24Speaker 07

  So that was another one of those classic sort of stories of, hey, who are we going to send to this? Oh, we'll just send this guy. Why? Well, because he's reliable, but he's also disposable, you know? I mean, it's just, it is, when I was sent, there was, you know, a bunch of teams all going out, right? This 1992, the, the USSR collapsed, all of these places are opening up.

• 29:53Speaker 07

  And I'm getting my in brief and I'm looking around with all the other guys that are there. There's nobody who is from Russia house. Like it's all of my pals who are in like have been in Southeast Asia or Africa or any or someplace like that. And, you know, okay, you know, it turns out, of course, Afghan Persian is, is actually pretty well translates across to other side of the border. Not, I mean, if I had spoken Russian, it would have been great, but I didn't.

• 30:31Speaker 07

  But I could speak Afghan Persian. And so, you know, Afghan Persian works pretty well for Tajiks. It will, you can get along with Uzbek's, you can get along with Turkmen, all those, those southern Central Asian countries.

• 30:51Jack Murphy?

  Did they also send you JR on a, on a job like that because they figure, oh, this is an army guy? Like he can sleep in the dirt, like use a rock as a pillow, like, you know, it's, it's not that big a deal.

• 31:01Speaker 07

  Well, it's that, I mean, that's true, but it's also because most of these places, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, were at civil wars. Right? I mean, so.

• 31:12Jack Murphy?

  Or close to it.

• 31:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, a lot of the kinds of things I did there, and it wasn't for very long until the station was formalized. But, you know, it was a provisional station. It was really 19th century sort of, of intelligence work. It was like, go spy the land, go out and see every day, like walk out on the street, see who's shooting at somebody else, you know, get in a car, figure out where the shooting stops. Give us a better feeling for what's going on. It really wasn't an espionage tour and it, and, you know, fair enough. I mean, my, my successors, you know, or the people who opened up the station afterwards, they, you know, they were able to.

• 31:56Speaker 07

  To conduct conventional espionage.

• 31:58Speaker 08

  Hmm.

• 31:58Speaker 07

  That just wasn't what they asked me to do. And that was a good thing because it's what I do anyhow.

• 32:04Speaker 08

  What, out of curiosity, when you say that like in all these former USSR Soviet Union countries that nobody was from Russia or the people weren't from Russia, is that because they're all drunk, wondering what had happened to their career and their life with the Soviet Union?

• 32:21Speaker 07

  No, actually, it was because they were in Moscow.

• 32:25Speaker 08

  Okay.

• 32:25Speaker 07

  Right? I mean, they were, they were doing stuff in Moscow or in St. Petersburg or in places where the KGB was running away from to, you know? I mean, there was, there were lots of, there were lots of, it, it was, the, the collapse of the USSR was a, you know, it was a catastrophe if you were a KGB agent, right?

• 32:50Speaker 08

  Right.

• 32:50Speaker 07

  I mean, because even if you were only in the first chief directorate, which was the Foreign Intelligence Service, you couldn't say to your, like your neighbors, oh, I'm with the, I was with the KGB because they're going to think about the other side of the KGB, which was the, you know, the totalitarian terrorizing people stuff. So there was a lot of work to be done in those places. It just wasn't going to be in the FSU.

• 33:21Speaker 08

  Right.

• 33:21Speaker 07

  Which is fine because turns out, of course, the FSU turns out to have been a fascinating place for the, for the agency and for State Department for that matter, and for the military. I mean, I, you know, one of the things that, if you read like Toby Harden's book, or if you read Doug Stanton's book about, about the operations in Afghanistan, the, one of the ODAs, ODA 595, had just come back from working with the Uzbek's.

• 33:55Speaker 07

  So, I mean, it, you know, it turned out to be a really important. It turned out to be a really important thing to build a network of allies during that time period. I, I, I take no credit for that my, uh, because, uh, they were just the, the guys who were eventually were in charge were still shooting at each other when I left, but, but, but eventually, I mean, you, you gotta start with a footprint someplace and that's what we did, you know, a lot of times it's the, it's just a footprint. That's all you do. And, uh, you gotta be ready for the fact that it's not always, uh, you know, great, uh, intelligence operations or great paramilitary operations. Sometimes

• 34:40Speaker 07

  it's just spade work.

• 34:41Jack Murphy?

  Right. And, uh, and then after that, you had a couple stateside tours.

• 34:45Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah, we did. Well, I mean, the stateside tours, I mean, so two things. Uh, by that time I was relatively senior, so I was managing the teams, uh, not necessarily a station, but, uh, flyaway teams. And we were just using, uh, the US as a start point to go after all kinds of different sorts of targets all over the world. We, uh, my team wasn't the only one that did that. I mean, but that's, that was the stateside. In the meantime, while, since I was, you know, not doing a lot of that flying away, some, but not as much because I had to be home managing and talking to guys, making sure that they followed

• 35:29Speaker 07

  all the TDY rules, make sure they don't get caught, all that. So what I did was, uh, I was responsible for working with the FBI, uh, on counterterrorism stuff. At the time, counterterrorism was a, this is the late nineties, uh, going into just before, well, I was in, I was in stateside for, uh, through nine 11, but the, uh, the FBI had, you know, a, a challenge because before nine 11.

• 36:03Speaker 07

  The idea was that the, that counterterrorism was something that was really hard to prove. And, and it was really hard to build networks the way the FBI is really good at building networks on other kind of criminal enterprises. I mean, the FBI don't ever think that if the FBI is after you, you won't get caught. I mean, I'm just, I'm just here to tell you, their work is exceptional. But it was a challenge. And here I was, a guy who had spent basically from 1987 until I arrived in, in, in California in, in 1997.

• 36:46Speaker 07

  I'd been a guy who had, you know, worked with, on terrorist targets. That's what I did. And I was building a network of flyaway guys who were doing counterterrorism missions. So I could go over to the FBI and sit down with the FBI senior managers and say, okay, here's, here's how we would do it. I don't have any idea how you can do it. But at the very least, I can tell you what the bad guys are doing out there in their efforts to come here. So that was, you know, that was part of my work that I did just before nine 11.

• 37:28Jack Murphy?

  JR, could you take, I mean, this is a little bit of a segue, but maybe worthwhile. We want to take maybe just a moment to explain to people because I think the public has this perception largely because of the movies that the CIA has a very robust and intrusive presence domestically in the United States. Could you explain how that works in real life? I mean, the realities of like the limitations that you have as, you know, in these sort of stateside assignments?

• 37:54Speaker 07

  Well, sure. I mean, first of all, there is, I mean, like, as I said, the, the team that I was managing, they were, I mean, the only reason they were stateside is because we had great airports. Right? I mean, that's, that's what we did. We flew out from stateside to someplace else. And that's great. I mean, it was, I mean, let's face it, as the counterintelligence environment has become progressively more difficult, it's really hard to do some of the, in fact, it's impossible to do some of the things that I did in Europe back in the early 90s. Can't do it because of what's called ubiquitous technical surveillance. Right, right.

• 38:38Speaker 07

  That had just, that had just started in the end of the nineties, but it was already, we knew that our work was going to be limited unless we did something like start and finish from the USA. Now, in the meantime, our work with the FBI was exclusively, and I can't speak for what it's like now, but our work for the FBI was exclusively to help them understand the target set. We weren't allowed to talk to Americans at all. I mean, at all. Unless,

• 39:20Speaker 07

  the only time I ever talked to an American was when I was with an FBI agent and we, we would talk to an American, he'd show his creds and I'd show my creds. And there was no sneaking around. And that was really rare because quite honestly, the FBI, if they're building a case, they really don't want any complications. They want two special agents who are trained to do the right thing. Right. And we're not. I mean, CIA guys aren't trained to do, I mean, we're trained to, you know, to steal things and break things. I mean, basically, right? That's, that's our

• 39:57Speaker 07

  job abroad. And so, no, there is not a robust CIA presence in, in CONUS, Continental United States. And what it is, is, is maintained in a structure that is through our FBI partners. The FBI by the mid nineties had what they call the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which would have been in each of their field offices. So there would have been sheriff's deputies and police departments and, and, you know, members of NCIS and members of OSI, the Air Force Intelligence, well, counterintelligence arm. And we were just there to.

• 40:42Speaker 07

  To provide context, if they wanted to talk about something that was going on someplace else, we could use our electronic capability to pull down that data. And the data are important when you're building a case, no question. But a lot of times, at least in, you know, post nine eleven or pre nine eleven, I didn't even know what the cases were. It was completely out of my, you know, they wouldn't talk about it. And rightly so, because, you know, if you want to put a guy in, if you want to, if you want to try a guy for some kind of crime, the last thing you want to do is have in

• 41:22Speaker 07

  the discovery process, some data that says, oh yeah, and there was this schmo from the CIA.

• 41:29Speaker 08

  Right, right. And you're, and you're, you're living under a cover and an alias and so on. So it's not like you can take the stand under oath, under your real name and, and offer testimony.

• 41:38Speaker 07

  Right. And worse, worse still, of course, is, is that, that, as you said, in the, you know, the movie presentation of what agency officers, what, what were like, is a, you know, is terrible. I mean, no, it's just absolutely terrible in a, in a criminal, you know, in a criminal court. So we just didn't. The FBI, you know, was, was more than happy to be, to work with us, but work with us in a way that was consistent with what they needed to accomplish. Now, I won't, you know, I don't want to leave this subject without saying, and the FBI

• 42:18Speaker 07

  would help us if they had a case that went overseas. If they didn't have a, you know, an overseas footprint and they, and they thought that they could help us while we were working abroad, then absolutely our partners in the FBI did that too.

• 42:37Speaker 08

  Right.

• 42:38Speaker 07

  So it was a, it was a mutually beneficial partnership, but it wasn't something that my, the guys who were working for me were going to spend their time doing, because they were busy hustling new cases, producing intelligence, doing all that stuff.

• 42:53Speaker 08

  Right. Now, in terms of like working with the FBI when it came to overseas counterterrorism, because obviously the CIA doesn't have any arrest authority and the FBI did, if, you know, they can show it, like. Was it, was it acceptable for, you know, the titles the CIA worked under for, for you guys to run your intelligence operation and then bring in the CIA, or I mean, the FBI? Like, how was that evidence? How was that like custody of evidence? And how, how, when you built your case, were you sharing it with them? Were they allowed to use your information by US legal standards?

• 43:31Speaker 07

  No. The answer, the short answer is no. Uh, that, actually, let me just say to both of you, you know, that it's important for you to, to know, I'm gonna reveal a secret to you, right? Uh, so CIA case officer class one, hour one. The answer to all questions is it depends. So, just so you know.

• 43:55Speaker 08

  Right.

• 43:56Speaker 07

  And of course, that's because we're always working with humans and, and humans change over time.

• 44:00Speaker 08

  Right.

• 44:01Speaker 07

  But in the case of the FBI, basically what you would be looking at in a, in a case of overseas, the intelligence network that you build then becomes something that the, that might be shared both with the FBI and with a local law enforcement entity that would be partnered with the FBI. So, so what's going on abroad is not about, I mean, I mean, and I was never involved in counter narcotics or any of that kind of stuff where we, you know, where bad guys get grabbed and brought to the United States. I was involved in counterterrorism stuff.

• 44:44Speaker 07

  And what would happen would be, the case would be built, uh, we'd be producing great intelligence. And then anything that we could share with the FBI that the share, that the FBI could share with the service.

• 45:00Speaker 08

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:01Speaker 07

  Or we could share with the service, for that matter, if the FBI didn't, what, didn't have a footprint in the country that we were in, then we would, because at the end of the day, uh, you know, I mean, there, there's...

• 45:15Speaker 07

  The motto of the counterterrorism center, right? Preempt, disrupt, defeat. So if you can disrupt the terrorist network in a third country, long before they are any threat to the United States, absolutely, you do that, right? And if that means bringing in a liaison service, if it means partnering between a liaison service and the FBI and a CIA entity, good, great, actually. So I hope that sort of answers. I mean, it's complicated, right? I mean, it is complicated. And every case is different. That's why it depends. But the vast majority of the stuff that we were doing

• 46:01Speaker 07

  on counterterrorism cases was producing the intelligence that then could be passed to a liaison service either directly with, you know, because I was, to give you a feeling for this, I was declared to like, I think my last count was 22 different liaison services. So, so, you know, if you could pass the intelligence, you would. If you, if it made more sense to pass the intelligence through the FBI and the FBI was there, you would. I mean, it's, it's all, you know, it's one team, one fight in that sense. There's, there's no real downside to that.

• 46:39Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Let's get into the, the run up into nine 11 JR, because you're already working counterterrorism, making these trips overseas. Kind of like, where were you at around that period of nine 11? Where was your head at? What, what, what were the cases you were working? Was Bin Laden and Al Qaeda on your mind at that time? What was kind of your world at that point?

• 47:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, okay, so just prior to nine 11, I had, I had made a couple of trips out to Uzbekistan for something in, I mean, it was associated with, but not focused on Osama bin Laden, right? Osama bin Laden, however, had become

• 47:24Speaker 07

  for, for counterterrorism center. Osama bin Laden had been, you know, like, target one. Everybody knew that. It was. It was absolutely part of our mission set. Now, a lot of what I was doing wasn't necessarily, it was associated, we used to call it, right? It was Islamic extremism. And, you know, and we, you know, we knew it was Al Qaeda. But a lot of the Al Qaeda network wasn't in fact calling itself Al Qaeda at the time. I mean, Bin Laden had this headquarters in Kandahar. They had training camps in other parts of Afghanistan.

• 48:09Speaker 07

  We were certainly doing what we could to understand that and work against him. A lot of the kinds of things that I was doing in, in Tashkent was, was associated with rebuilding networks against Afghans, or with, with Afghans, so the Afghan resistance. And people don't, I mean, people often ask me, like, how in the world could you put, you know, nine eleven happens, you know, two weeks later, we've got a team inside the Panch here. And then, you know, another week later, you're flying out to Tashkent. And then two weeks after that, the team, Alpha Team goes in. How, how can that possibly be?

• 48:54Speaker 07

  And the answer is, because we were running cases all the way through the nineties. It wasn't that we expected nine eleven. It was, what the CIA does is, is you build a case, you run a case, you keep a case running, you get those folks used to seeing you with the understanding that sometimes the intelligence is good, sometimes it's bad. But, but generally speaking, it's that sustained relationship over the years. I mean.

• 49:33Speaker 07

  Small joke. I gave this presentation to a bunch, I've done this with a bunch of special forces groups. And I was given the presentation about this. And I finished and I'm walking out to get a cup of coffee and, and the guys are walking out to get away from me. And I hear one of the younger special forces guys go, like, who is that guy anyhow? And one of the older guys goes, Matt, you don't know that cat? Man, JR is the Forrest Gump of Afghanistan. Now, I'm hoping, I'm really hoping in the larger scheme of things

• 50:14Speaker 07

  that was because I had been to a lot of different kinds of stuff, right? I, I met with Masood in the 90s. I had worked with a bunch of different guys in the resistance in the 80s. And so the idea was that, you know, I just, maybe it was because I was stubborn. Maybe it was because I like working with Afghans. Maybe it's because I had the language. But I kept doing it. And I wasn't the only one. I mean, by no means was I the only guy doing the same thing who were just stubborn and kept working the Afghans, whether the United

• 50:53Speaker 07

  States government cared or not. And now the CIA cared. And our intelligence that we were producing at the time in the 90s, you know, was not, it wasn't going to end up in the Presidential Daily Brief. Just wasn't. What it was doing is, is it was building that understanding of the complex web inside Afghanistan. So, yeah, we've been, we've focused on it for a long time.

• 51:24Speaker 08

  Did, did you during that time, especially after like the Russians left Afghanistan, when there was a period where, was there a time when you had to sell Afghanistan to management and say, we still need a presence there? We still need to know what's going on?

• 51:41Speaker 07

  Well, what you do, you don't, I mean, the answer is sort of, kind of, right? I mean, what you do is you sort out if the, if the seniors aren't interested in, it used to be a joke in the State Department, actually. Uh, one of the jo, this is in the, in the seventies. And the joke was, if you wanted to joke about somebody doing something that was absolutely of no interest to anybody, the argument, that the line was, so what's the political situation in Afghanistan? I mean, that was literally what State Department officers said when they were, when they were trying to tell one of their, their, uh, junior officers, what you're talking about, nobody cares about.

• 52:25Speaker 08

  Right.

• 52:25Speaker 07

  But, but the good news about Afghanistan, well, it was terrible news, but the, but from a standpoint of the United States government, there was a very quick transition from, uh, you know, the, the problems associated with the civil war, right? Because that's what happened when the Soviets left, it was a civil war. But pretty quickly after that, people were interested in Afghanistan because it was the center of narco trafficking.

• 52:59Speaker 08

  Okay.

• 53:00Speaker 07

  And then shortly after it being the center of narco trafficking, which it stayed throughout the entire Taliban era, it also became, uh, one of the centers of counterterrorism. So, as a, as a case officer and a manager of case officers, we always wanted to make sure that we weren't just doing something because it was something we wanted to do.

• 53:27Speaker 08

  Right.

• 53:28Speaker 07

  You don't, you don't commit espionage because it's a cool thing to do. It's just not, you know, because you're putting a person at risk. Whoever that is, that's producing that intelligence, regardless of where they are, they are, they are being put at risk. So, you better have a reason behind it. The, you know, the truth is, is that Afghanistan had sufficient... Reasons for all those years that you could always say, okay, yeah, I know it's it's a country that has no economy and I know that it really doesn't, nobody really cares about it, but it's the primary producer of black tar opium. Oh, well, yeah, that's disruptive.

• 54:12Speaker 07

  So, yeah, we, we want to do something about that. Oh, by the way, it's where Bin Laden's headquarters is now and he's training people. Long before we thought he was training people to attack America, he was training people to attack people all over the world, basically the entire West. So it was not a real problem.

• 54:32Jack Murphy?

  So when nine 11 happens, was all of these images of Mossad, the Northern Alliance, Bin Laden, was this what immediately came to mind? And if you could, I think we talked about this with, with Rick Prado a little bit, but if you could talk to us a little bit about what it was like inside CTC and SAD that day?

• 54:52Speaker 07

  I, I can't tell you because I was on TDY in California. I was in California. I was driving, I was, I was actually driving with my wife going to the FBI. And I got a phone call on the mobile phone saying, from the regional boss saying, turn on the radio. And we're like, okay, you know, we're in the middle of nowhere, we're probably, she said, it doesn't matter. Turn on any radio station. So that was, you know, as soon as nine 11 happened, I mean, we all, I mean, basically all of us who had been doing the

• 55:36Speaker 07

  counterterrorism gig knew it was Al Qaeda and it was designed and perpetrated by Bin Laden. Now, Just because, I mean, it's what I thought, right? I mean, in the CIA, you've got to make a very significant distinction between what you think and what you know. What you know is based on intelligence that you have either collected or somebody else's collected. It might be human, it might be Sigint, it might be something else. That's what you know. But all of us who had been working these targets for five years knew, or at least we thought, we certainly thought that it was Bin Laden.

• 56:18Speaker 07

  So it took me, I mean, as we're driving, my wife turns to me and goes, you realize, you know, you're going to get on an airplane as soon as you can. They're going to call you back. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I know that. It wasn't like it was the first TDY I disappeared on. But, you know, for a few days, I was able to close up some cases that had been, because you couldn't travel unless you drove someplace. And so I traveled to a bunch of different FBI units that were working cases and tried to help them work through what they were doing because their world changed completely, of course.

• 57:02Speaker 07

  And then as soon as the, as soon as you could fly, I was called back to Washington. And that's when I, by that time, CTC, Special Operations, CTC SO, had already been established. And I had a little sad.

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• 58:51Speaker 07

  Bad face because I thought that I was going to go out with the team that went to the punch here. I mean, I'd helped set up the team that went to the punch here. I'd met Masood. I'd done all that stuff. And I get back and they're already gone.

• 59:04Jack Murphy?

  That's the Jawbreaker team?

• 59:06Speaker 07

  What's that?

• 59:07Jack Murphy?

  That's Jawbreaker?

• 59:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It was, it was actually, you know, officially titled the Northern Afghanistan Liaison Team. And Jawbreaker was NALT 3. So I'd been on NALT 1. I'd had some of my guys, my flyaway guys on NALT 2. So I felt a little bit of, of ownership. Well, that was, you know, slapped out of my head pretty quickly. And I was, I was terrified that I was going to end up, you know, I was back in the basement because that's where the empty space was. And I thought for sure, I'm going to be, you know, Doing all the, all the kinds of stuff that, that headquarters, all the important stuff,

• 59:52Speaker 07

  right? Logistics, the, the, the management, but still not the cool guy stuff. And let's face it, you know, we all given an opportunity, want to be cool guys. So even at 46, which is how old I was at that point in time. So, but as soon as they started the, as soon as, you know, I got my in brief, they were like, oh, no, no, no, don't you worry. Uh, we're putting together another, the first team that's gonna go behind the lines. That's you. And, uh, SAD has already got the team assembled. Alex was my deputy and he was already assembling the team. Justin was there. By the way, just a small sidebar to show how small the world is.

• 1:00:36Speaker 07

  Justin Sapp's dad was my instructor at the farm. So, so, you know, uh, it was, it is a small world. Uh, anyhow, the, the point is, is that, uh, I start figuring out, okay, we're gonna go, how are we gonna get in? And we can fast forward to that process. The only thing that's really fun or an interesting, really, the, the rest of it is just sort of administrative stories. But an interesting story is the day before I left. So I went out a day about, actually a week early to Toshkent. Alex was assembling the team, assembling the weapons, assembling the commo, assembling all of that, which obviously wasn't gonna go out commercial.

• 1:01:21Speaker 07

  So he was assembling the equipment and the, the team that was gonna go out on an agency bird. I went out commercial to Toshkent, but the day before I went out, it's a Sunday. There's, you know, I mean, the, the team down in the basement that's managing C2CSO is working diligently, but it's basically an empty building. And in, I'm, I'm sitting in, at, in front of a picnic bench because, you know, it's a folding classic, like, plastic picnic bench, because that's all there was in the basement. And I'm working through my notes and trying to figure out what we're gonna do next. When in comes, uh, Director Tenet, Kofir Black, and Hank Crumpton.

• 1:02:03Speaker 07

  Uh, and I, I've known, I'd known Hank a little bit. I'd known Kofir for, oh, I don't know. At that point, fifteen years or so. I mean, it's a small world. So Director Tenet comes in, he's a big burly guy, you've probably seen pictures of him at the very least. And he walks over to, uh, you know, the, the map that's at the table, and he goes, "Come here, JR. I want to tell you what I want you to do." I'm like, "Yes, sir. Uh, I, I, I think I know." He says, "Well, I want, I want to be clear. I want you to be clear about this." "Yes, sir." So he takes, and because he's a big burly guy, he takes a very large hand, and puts it over all of northern Afghanistan.

• 1:02:47Speaker 07

  And he says, "Okay, JR. Listen, here's the deal. Uh, these are the five provinces of Afghanistan that you're responsible for. I want you to destroy the Taliban and capture or kill any Al Qaeda you can find." "Yes, sir." He says, "Okay, just wanted to be clear." And he got up and left. That was it. That was my, I mean, you know, in the army, we talk about commander's intent.

• 1:03:10Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 1:03:11Speaker 07

  I mean, you, you can't ask for better commander's intent.

• 1:03:14Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:03:15Speaker 07

  Than, than that, in my opinion.

• 1:03:17Jack Murphy?

  Hey, JR, can you fix Afghanistan for us? If you could have that done by the end of the week, that'd be great. Thanks, man. Good luck.

• 1:03:23Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, it wasn't only, not all of Afghanistan, just five provinces. I mean, I could have eight guides.

• 1:03:28Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 1:03:29Speaker 07

  So, you know, uh, by the way, I mean, of course, at that point, I didn't know how it was gonna get in. I didn't know what I was gonna do when I got in. But he didn't care about that part because he was certain that I was gonna make it work.

• 1:03:42Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:03:43Speaker 07

  And, you know, I guess if you, any of your, your, your listeners have read either Doug Stanton's book or Toby Harden's book, we were able to do that. Now sadly, we lost one of our guys while doing it. But we were able to accomplish that in, in probably much shorter time. I mean, when, when Alex and I talked about this, you know, we just said, you know, we're gonna be in for a year. I hope you're prepared for a year.

• 1:04:14Speaker 08

  Hmm.

• 1:04:15Speaker 07

  And I've told this to lots of people over time. This was a, you know, this, the success in the fall of 2001 is a function of three things, right? It's a function of a CIA network. It's a function of ODA capabilities and it's a function of US air power.

• 1:04:40Speaker 08

  Hmm.

• 1:04:41Speaker 07

  Now, you might say, well, what about the locals? Absolutely, the locals are centerpiece to this, but the locals had been fighting the Taliban for the better part of three years and making, and having almost no success.

• 1:04:55Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:04:56Speaker 07

  Along the way. So it was the addition of those three resources. Working together in collaboration, but not necessarily, you know, doing, trying to do the same thing. Everybody was doing something different is how we were able to accomplish what got accomplished. And I mean, we inserted on the 16th of October, ODA 595, I think, came in on the night of 1819, so two days later, two and a half days later. ODA 534 came in about two weeks later.

• 1:05:37Speaker 07

  The, the, the, the ODC came in about another week after that. And in the space of, so, and we, and we rolled into Mazar Sharif on the 10th of November.

• 1:05:55Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Could you tell us about your team, about Alpha Team, kind of your planning process and insertion? And kind of how that played out?

• 1:06:05Speaker 07

  Well, yeah, I mean, like most agency stuff, it's just sort of informal. So I had, I was in Tashkent for like a week, 10 days, well, about a week before, before Alex was able to come in. So I spent that time period doing a couple of different things. The first thing was to work with the, both the station there and with the Uzbek service to get in contact with, with Abdul Rashid Dostal. Because he was the one guy that we had up in the north that we, that was working behind the lines that we knew. I mean, there were other guys working behind the lines, but he was the one that we knew.

• 1:06:47Speaker 07

  So I started getting into a conversation with him on satellite phone. And he's a character and a half. I mean, most, if you've read anything about him, you know that.

• 1:06:56Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:57Speaker 07

  And, you know, early on, he, so I, I decided because I knew that they had no encrypted comms. I wasn't going to give him my true name. So I decided I was my, my nom de guerre was going to be Baba John, which just means grandfather. So we're talking back and forth and he, and he says, you know, Baba John,

• 1:07:22Speaker 07

  I'm ready. I mean, we're ready for you, but we want to, want you to know it's a little different here in Afghanistan. And I was like, yes, Commander, I kind of know that. And he's like, well, no, let me just explain to you. So what we call an armored personnel carrier, you call a horse. And, you know, I was like, got it. Right. Check. But so, so I've, so I know I got a guy at the other end. Now I gotta get in. So we have some resource, some agency resources there, but nothing that'll get us in deep enough to where we want to go. And I've got a couple of guys from the, from the agency, from SAD Air Branch.

• 1:08:06Speaker 07

  And I find that the, at the, at the Toshkent Airport, actually the military side of, of the Toshkent Airport is a, an old Soviet aircraft, kind of looks, it's a, it's a biplane, sort of. It's a, it's used as, in, in the old Soviet days, it's used as a crop duster and moving people around. And so it's, it's an Antonov II. It's been around for a very long time. But I thought it was kind of cool because it looked like a Lysander. Now, for those of you who don't know what a Lysander is, it is the aircraft that virtually

• 1:08:46Speaker 07

  all of the SOE and the OSS guys who didn't go in by parachute in France, went in by Lysander. It's a, it's a high-wing stole aircraft. And I thought, how cool would this be? Right? I mean, this is like, right out, I mean, we're already CTC SO, right? So, I mean, which is what OSS SO, so is where they took the name from. So, okay. I go to the, our, our crew, our Air Branch guys, and I go, what do you think? And they said, I don't know, we'll go check it out. They come back that afternoon, and they said, we'll fly anything, but we cannot fly that. That airplane does not, that, that's not safe.

• 1:09:28Speaker 07

  And that said a lot to me because I'd flown a bunch of different Air Branch aircraft and a bunch of different aircraft, Air Branch pilots who will fly anywhere and, and do just about anything. And I thought, ooh, I guess that didn't work out. So, so we're still puzzling over this, and Alex gets in and, and we're doing all the other sort of team in isolation stuff that an SF team or a Marsoc team would be doing, right? We're doing, you know, everybody's doing, you know, checking weapons, checking comms, everybody's cross-checking, what are you going to be able to do?

• 1:10:06Speaker 07

  We're getting our, our, our medic, Mark, is giving us sort of basic, this is your medic kit, this is my medic kit, this is what's going on.

• 1:10:20Speaker 07

  And I'm just puzzling with Alex. I'm like, we gotta get in, but I, we can't walk it. I mean, there's this river and we can't drive in because we can't cross the bridge because the Taliban owned the bridge. And he was like, well, let me get down to Karshikhanabad. You know, I've still got some contacts down there. I'll see what I can do. Remember now Alex was a, was a retired senior sergeant major. I mean, he'd been a sergeant major in like multiple units in, uh, in the military. Okay. Multiple special forces units, multiple SOF units. So he had a couple of contacts. So I said, excellent.

• 1:11:05Speaker 07

  You know, we can, I, I got, you know, the, the agency pilots will fly you down there. That's not a problem. So he goes down, like the next day, he's magically said, hey, we're good to go. Uh, I, I've talked to John Mulholland and we're, uh, you know, we're good to go. We got, we, we're, we're gonna fly in on, uh, the, the night stalkers are gonna take us in. I'm like, sweet. So we get down to, we, then we all fly down to task, to KKUZ and go into isolation. And I go over to the night stalkers and fold up my map.

• 1:11:43Speaker 07

  And I say, um, I take my little fat finger, like right out of Ranger school, point to the place I, I, that's, that's where, that's where our, uh, our LZ is gonna be. And they're like, okay. And they're like, how do you wanna get there? I'm like, guys, you're the pilots. I have no idea. I'm not gonna, I'm certainly not gonna try to tell guys from Task Force 160, how to fly helicopters and where to go. All I wanna do, I pointed, once again, the LZ. That's where I wanna go. And they're like, okay, any other thing, anything else? I said, well, I don't know if we're gonna have a reception committee.

• 1:12:28Speaker 07

  But you're not taking us back, right? It, you're, this bird, your birds are gonna be empty when you go home. Uh, we're getting off, and if there's no reception committee, we'll figure out what we're gonna do at that point. And they looked at me, clearly, they looked at me and they're like, oh, boy. Sure, this guy's nuts, but you know what? It's a mission, it's a really good mission, we're doing it. So, there were some weather issues, like there always is in Afghanistan. So, we were actually supposed to go in first the night of the 13th, and then the night of the 14th. Eventually, the weather cleared up, and we ended up in the night of the 16th.

• 1:13:11Speaker 07

  And, uh, so, that's how we got, I mean, that's, I have a whole story about getting in. But I, that maybe just answers at least the front end of your question. Is there something else you wanted to talk about as far as KKUZ first?

• 1:13:27Speaker 08

  Before, before we move forward, I, I just wanna ask you, because you were, like, you were working Afghanistan, um, in hindsight, like, in retrospect, when people go through the records, and, and I'm not talking about the, the, you know, the hijackers here in the United States. But was there ever any indication, or ever any, any intelligence that, like, looking backwards, that, that people could have predicted this? Was there any way to tie, like, Masood's death on the 9th to what was gonna happen? Or was it just a completely a closed loop at that time?

• 1:14:04Speaker 07

  I, I mean, I wasn't involved in the, in the headquarters' analysis of that. So, I mean, the short answer is, I don't know.

• 1:14:12Speaker 08

  Okay.

• 1:14:13Speaker 07

  Uh, I, the, uh, I can say that certainly Bin Laden made no secret about the fact that he was gonna attack Americans.

• 1:14:23Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:14:23Speaker 07

  Not necessarily America, but he had named us in 1998 as the main enemy. And, of course, he had attacked the embassies, right? That, so we've got the Nairobi and the Dar bombings, and then he attacks the USS Cole.

• 1:14:41Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:14:42Speaker 07

  Very clearly, he was gonna live up to his statement that he was going to attack Americans. Now...

• 1:14:52Speaker 07

  The, the nine eleven side of the house? I, I don't know.

• 1:14:56Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:14:56Speaker 07

  I really don't know. I certainly don't have any, I mean, the, the stuff I was working with the FBI was more focused on possible other kinds of infiltration. Remember the nine eleven hijackers are, are Arabs and they were on legitimate visas.

• 1:15:16Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:15:16Speaker 07

  And, and really not associated in any way, shape or form that we could, I mean, we, maybe in hindsight, somebody's looked it up and figured it out.

• 1:15:26Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:15:27Speaker 07

  But certainly not, not from my perspective.

• 1:15:29Speaker 08

  Right. And I like in, and that's why I say like in hindsight, it's, it's always easier to piece it like it seems obvious or whatever, but you know, I don't think the people understand sort of the, the massive intelligence requirements that are placed on, you know, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and you just can't collect on every single individual in the world. I was just wondering if, if it had ever, if like, if, especially in Afghanistan at the time, like if we had access to those camps, if we had sources, um, or if they were just so insular, insular and isolated that, that there was no way to sort of predict that.

• 1:16:11Speaker 07

  I have no idea.

• 1:16:11Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:16:12Speaker 07

  I mean, I really don't. Uh, the, the camps were, the Ben Laden and his crew, remember Ben Laden was the figurehead, but he had a very sophisticated crew of guys who understood counterintelligence. Why do they understand counterintelligence? Cause they had been on the run. They'd had like half a dozen services trying to kill them for almost a dozen years.

• 1:16:37Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:16:37Speaker 07

  Right? And so how they protected their intelligence, how they, how they protected their operations is, I, I just wasn't involved in it. So I, I'm, I'm not even going to try and answer that question.

• 1:16:51Speaker 08

  Well, I, I'm, the Afghans, like even, you know, during the war, like they, they had fairly sophisticated counterintelligence because of their dealings with the Russians, whether they were trained by Russians or working against the Russians, like they, they were not, you know, you think of Afghanistan as a non, you know, uh, uh, not a very advanced country or not very technological, but they've been doing this for ages.

• 1:17:17Speaker 07

  Oh yeah, I mean, this is, this is part of the great game, right? And I'll give you, I'll just give you one little tiny vignette that teaches you this kind of stuff. This goes back to the eighties. So I was, I, I had a case that was, that I had turned from being a case about, about combat operations into a penetration of the Afghan Ministry of Defense, the, the, the DRA Ministry of Defense. And it was a complicated thing because we had to do, I mean, the communications network was, was unsophisticated. We were, we were getting intelligence.

• 1:18:02Speaker 07

  I got, I was able to get a, a document copy camera into Kabul. I was getting document film out of Kabul. And the very first time that I got one of those things, I was sitting there with a guy who was managing, I mean, the Afghan who was managing this network. And we were sitting, drinking tea, and of course, we're eating, you know, the classic sort of pistachios and almonds and raisins and all that stuff. Toot, exactly. Yeah, mulberries.

• 1:18:34Speaker 08

  Yep.

• 1:18:34Speaker 07

  And he said, so how do you like the, the, the mix? And I was like, okay, it's great. He said, is it salty or sweet? And, you know, of course, I, I'm thinking maybe this is a rapport thing, right? So I'm saying, well, I find it kind of salty. And he said, exactly. And that's our signal that the material that was shipped out and smuggled out through three different smugglers was untouched because every one of the guys in the network had

• 1:19:14Speaker 07

  to include something and each of them knew what it was gonna be. The last one was a mix of toot, raisins and salty nuts. And I was like, Dang, you know, this is like right out of Rudyard Kipling.

• 1:19:36Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:36Speaker 07

  You know, it was really right. So, yeah, they, they understood, they still understand how, how to do this properly. But in the case of, of the Al Qaeda guys, you know, Afghans weren't allowed into the Al Qaeda bases, right? I mean, they, at all. So that would have meant that we would have had to have recruited years before, uh, an Arab who was being vetted for a mission that nobody knew about. Yeesh, you know?

• 1:20:08Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:09Speaker 07

  Uh, that's, that's asking a lot.

• 1:20:12Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:14Jack Murphy?

  So, uh, just real quick for the viewers out there, I just wanted to plug our Patreon. I know they, they threw it up on the screen. If you guys are interested in getting the episodes of the Team House without advertisements in it, uh, the link is right down below and it's in the description if you guys want to check it out. And we really appreciate you supporting the stream. So JR, tell us the story about the, about the infiltration then, uh, behind enemy lines with 160th.

• 1:20:38Speaker 07

  The assertion was, I mean, it was, I mean, first of all, uh, you, by now, we're like an hour in, you realize I am basically not a cool guy. Okay? Now Alex was a cool guy and most of my team was filled with cool guys. I mean, real guys. I mean, guys who, uh, you know, who had done this. We had one who had, you know, a ranger who had been in Mogadishu. You know, I mean, we're talking about people who had seen the elephant is the way it's presented. Now I'd had people shoot at me, but it's a different thing. I mean, that was an espionage thing as opposed to a cool guy thing.

• 1:21:17Speaker 07

  So, uh, we load onto, it's, you know, it's a classic sort of story of we're walk out, it's the middle of the night. And, uh, we load onto our two helicopters. We have, uh, so there's eight of us. So there's four and four. And, uh, a couple of Pelican cases and our rucksacks. And so the door closes, John Mulholland was there, I think, I think Justin said, I knew that John pulled him aside, I didn't know what he said, you know, of course, you know, Justin told you, right, don't die, is what John said. But, so, we close the doors and,

• 1:22:02Speaker 07

  you know, the birds take off and head into the darkness. And I'm, I've got a headset just like this, sort of, except nicer. And so I'm doing, you know, I'm talking to the pilot in command and the crew. I don't have the comms out, I can hear the comms out, but I obviously can't, they're not gonna let, you know, a guy like me talk out. So the first thing that happens is, we're flying into the night, and all of a sudden, I'm listening, the guys are, you know, they're, they're cool guys, and they're, and they've done a bazillion different kinds of ops, so they're, they're not in the least bit bothered. And all of a sudden, I realize, they ain't talking much. And then I look out, I'm, I'm

• 1:22:47Speaker 07

  look, I'm sitting on, you know, looking out the left door, and I realize, we are about, like, I don't know, it seemed like, within touching distance, of course, it wasn't, it was probably 40 feet from the tail of a sea, of an MC-130, because we were refueling to get into Afghanistan. And so, you know, the guys are kind of nervous about this, because it's in the dark, they're doing it with nods on, and so, and, and we're right on the Afghan border. So, success, right, both birds refuel, the, the MC-130 pulls

• 1:23:28Speaker 07

  away, and some detached voice from on high says, congratulations, gentlemen, you've just conducted the first combat in air refueling for the regiment. Good luck. And I thought, this is like, right out of a movie.

• 1:23:44Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:23:45Speaker 07

  But later, I found out that we had, like, aircraft stacked. Up to the sky for this operation. It was the only operation taking place that night.

• 1:23:53Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:23:54Speaker 07

  So we had a J stars. We had the inter refueling. We had three different C one thirties. We had, we had fast movers. We had a lot of aircraft with us. So anyhow, as soon as that happens, the guys just drop down onto the deck and we cross over the Amudarya and head into Afghanistan in the pitch dark. And, you know, it's, it's up and down because there's a lot of mountains there. So I'm looking at the watch and I'm, and I'm, I'm listening to the guys talk of their, the, the, the co-pilot is telling the pilot in command and the crew sort of the countdown as far as how

• 1:24:37Speaker 07

  long it's going to be before we hit the LC. And what I'm thinking about is one thing, right? Just one thing, which is there are two door handles on a Blackhawk. One is the door handle that opens the door. The other one is the door handle that releases the door in an, in an accident. Now, I know, I, I, I hadn't worked with one sixty, but I worked with a lot of pilots of all sorts. I realize none of them want to leave parts of their airplane behind when we pull away.

• 1:25:18Speaker 07

  So I'm, you know, I'm staring right at that, making sure I grab the right handle. And it's pitch black. I can't see it. I don't have my nods on. It's, it's really black and, and, and the guys are counting it down and they're like, okay, JR, we're one minute out. So, so I said to the guys, well, okay, I key the mic and I say, okay, guys, like, thanks for the ride. Uh, we'll see you on the other side. And I was just getting ready to take the headset off because that's the other thing you don't want to do. It tells people right up front that you're not a cool guy when you like get off the helicopter and you still have the headset on your head, right? Uh, that's, that's not going to work.

• 1:26:02Speaker 07

  So, okay, fine. Just as I'm about to take the headset off, I hear the pilot in command say, "Hey, JR, I think we're here." And I look out over his shoulder, and out there is what looks to be like about two tennis courts lit by about 50, 60 watt light bulbs.

• 1:26:25Speaker 07

  Because I had tried to talk Gostam into, you know, doing some sort of American. I mean, I had my Ranger handbook. I know how to set up an LST. And I've been telling him how to, you know, do all the stuff. And he was like, "No, no, don't worry. It'll be set up." And I'm like, "Okay, I guess I'm just gonna have to take your word for it." And in fact, it was absolutely set up. So, our bird lands, the second bird, of course, hovers over, so it's got the mini guns looking at any kind of, because we still don't know. Good guys, bad guys. Could be anybody. Might be a mistake. We're in the right place, for sure.

• 1:27:06Speaker 07

  I'm not worried about that. So, I open up the door, I grab the right handle, I got the headset off. Now, the agreement was, I was gonna get out of the helicopter. Everybody else was gonna stay in the helicopter until we confirmed that we had a real reception committee and not Talaba. Because, I mean, I was confident that since right over my shoulder was a minigun, I was confident that it was, that if there was problems, I wasn't gonna have to worry about, like, shooting it out. But I didn't want everybody out of the helicopter while a shootout was taking place, right? So, I look out, and what do I see in the dust, the helicopter,

• 1:27:48Speaker 07

  of course, blazer's still turning, is like about 50 people who looked like the sand people from Star Wars, right? They're dressed in these long, it's called chepans, that just, it's the long jacket. They've got the, you know, the cummerbund, they got knives, and they got guns, and they got turbans. And I could just barely see their eyes. And they start walking towards the helicopter. Now- You guys know, and most of your audience probably knows, when a Black Hawk is on the ground hovering, the front, the blade is only about six feet, uh, you know, forward.

• 1:28:30Speaker 07

  And, and it is really a bad thing to start a, an insertion by, you know, a bunch of guys that are supposed to be helping you get killed. Hmm. So, I go running out there, uh, outside the blades, and I lean over, and I put up, you know, the classic sort of, all, everybody in the world knows, "Stop," right? Hands out, "Stop." And I say, "Stop." Uh, of course, nobody can hear me, because of the helicopter. And all of a sudden, I realize, you know, everybody in front of me is sort of bent over, holding their hands out. They, they're assuming that it's some sort of, you know, "Take me to your leader" sort

• 1:29:15Speaker 07

  of greeting, because after all, we are aliens. And, while they're not shooting at me, so I turn around and I give Alex a thumbs up, and he starts to unload the bird. And as soon as he starts to unload the bird, the guys start walking forward again. And I bend over, and I put my hands out, and yell, "Stop," and they bend over and put their hands out, and "Stop." We could have done this all night long, but I decided that it was probably better for me to walk to the very front, grab the guy who looked like the leader, I grabbed him by the collar of his Japon, I took a knee, I pulled him down to take a knee, everybody took a knee.

• 1:29:57Speaker 07

  And so, the helicopters, you know, we offload both birds, and for, you know, anybody who's been in insertion, uh, whether it's day or night, when the helicopters are gone, because your hearing has been affected by this very loud noise of turbines, it seems like there's absolute silence, right? Yeah. There's just absolute, it's like, you're, you've got earplugs in or something.

• 1:30:25Speaker 07

  And I look over at the guy that I've grabbed and he pulls down his, he's, he's got his turban wrapped around his face and I've got my goggles and I pull my goggles up and he says, Baba John, welcome to Afghanistan. We must have tea. So that was our, the beginning of the adventure. And in fact, we did have tea. Interestingly enough, and this just, people will say, you know, these guys are, you know, sophisticated and unsophisticated. There's big arguments

• 1:31:03Speaker 07

  about this. Dostum had decided he could have brought us in to an LZ on his turf. But instead, what he did is he brought us in on an LZ on the, his Shia allies turf. To allow the Shia to feel like they were, to get the bragging rights for the fact that they brought the Americans in. I thought that was just pretty clever. So we ended up having tea at the, at a Madrasa run by the Shia leader, Mahakak. And then we loaded up into trucks and we went to Dostum's headquarters, which was deeper into, or closer to the front

• 1:31:48Speaker 07

  lines, let's say. And then eventually, of course, when we brought, brought nine, 595 in, we used an LZ that was Dostum's LZ. Right in front of what we, you know, where we were based out of, which we called the Alamo, which was, you know, it was very, it was like a little nativity scene. It was a, you know, we had a manger. It was a little stables that had been abandoned. And so there was room of the inn for the Americans. And so that's where we spent our next, the first few days.

• 1:32:20Jack Murphy?

  And, and at this point, I assume you're getting the lay of the land, starting to assess-

• 1:32:24Speaker 07

  Is everybody alive? Are you still there? What? Sorry I missed you.

• 1:32:27Jack Murphy?

  I was just asking, I mean, at this point, I assume that you were kind of getting the lay of the land and assessing the state of the Northern Alliance, the state of the Taliban, and how you're going to live up to Director Tenet's directive to, you know, take care of this broad Taliban problem here in Northern Afghanistan.

• 1:32:45Speaker 07

  Well, you know, the great thing about Dostum is, is that, you know, he was trained, he's a military guy, right? He found it amusing that he, he knew, how he knew, I don't know, but he knew, he says, "You know, Baba John, I know in the eighties you were trying to kill me. I think that's pretty amusing. Here we are now, together." So, uh, you know, he, he already had a plan. His, his, he rolled out the first night, right? Now, Dostum, as near as I could tell, never slept a whole night. If he ever slept more than an hour, the whole time we were rolling, I, I never saw it. But, so the first night, he rolls out this map that's the size of a, you know, a six, a five by 10 carpet, hand drawn of Afghanistan.

• 1:33:29Speaker 07

  And he says, "Look it, here's the deal. If we take Mazar Sharif, Kabul will fall. It's just that simple." Now, I'm not going to argue with the guy, right? I'm thinking, "Well, you know, historically, that's true." When, when, when Mazar Sharif fell to Masood's guys, it was after, you know, this was after the Soviets left. Uh, the DRA was done. And in fact, they were then able to roll in from Jabal Saraj, right into Kabul. So, yeah, I get it. Um, but he had a, you know, he, he said, "So, here's who we're working with.

• 1:34:09Speaker 07

  And, uh, here's where they are, and here's where we are. And we need, uh, you know, it's the classic sort of Warren Zevon, right? Without the lawyers, we need guns and money."

• 1:34:21Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:34:22Speaker 07

  Uh, and, uh, so, I'm like, "Well, I've brought money." And, uh, he said, "That's a good start," you know? And, uh, shortly afterwards, we start delivering guns and bullets as well.

• 1:34:37Speaker 07

  9-5 comes in, and as soon as 9-5 comes in, they're bringing in T-lamps. So they're bringing in lasers, which is, you know, really good because trying to do airstrikes, well, the United States military at the time, now it changed over 20 years of war, but the United States military at the time were like, no, if you can't give me absolutely the grid coordinate down to, you know, a 10-meter square, we're just not going to drop any bombs. And we're like, well, you know, that's gonna be kinda hard because we're sitting up in the mountains looking at these guys with binoculars.

• 1:35:17Speaker 07

  But once 9-5 and 3-4 came in with T- with soft lamps, it was, it was all over for the Taliban. But what was most interesting about this was that the Taliban in the north, I mean, there were, there were serious Taliban bad guys. I mean, they're, they're back in power in Kabul. But the vast majority of their foot soldiers were just that. They were foot soldiers. They were what, what the British would call levies. They were, they were either, you know, kidnapped and told that they were gonna fight or die, or they were given a small amount of money. And, you know, 16-year-old kid, you give him a Kalashnikov, you give him a Toyota Hilux,

• 1:36:02Speaker 07

  and you say, you can terrorize anybody in the neighborhood so long as you call yourself a Taliban. Generally speaking, he's gonna say, that's cool. Right. But the thing about it is hardly anybody, you know, truthfully, hardly, everybody's more than willing to kill for jihad. But hardly anybody I ever met in Afghanistan wanted to die for jihad. Some did, but not very many. So what we were able to do with Dostum, Dostum was the one who had the best connections,

• 1:36:39Speaker 07

  was he'd call the guys up on radios and say, hey, you know, you're on the wrong side of the history here, and I will, in fact, and I can pay you to be on the right side. And the first time he tried that, the guys would say, you know, something rude, I was listening to him, I was sitting right next to Dostum on the radio, and they're saying something rude to him, and then he would turn to Mark Neuch or whoever with 95 was there that day, and he'd say, see that, that's right over there, that's where I am, that's the guy I'm talking to.

• 1:37:18Speaker 07

  And so they'd put the SOF Lamb laser designator on that, and squish, you know, the guy would would go, would be done. And then he'd call the guy next to him, to the right or the left of that line and say, hey Mohammed, you know, I was just talking to Abdul, and I offered him a deal, and he basically wasn't much interested, but, you know, I'm hoping that you have seen what happened to Abdul, and you'll come to our side. And pretty quick, that's exactly what happened. A lot of the Taliban levies were like, I'm not dying for these guys from Kandahar, I'm from around here. Right.

• 1:38:00Speaker 07

  And, and if I can, if I can be financially successful, as well as be on the right side of history, I'm in. So that's basically what happened, and it was, you know, one after another, after another, slowly but surely, that, as I said, that mix. Our work was to keep the resistance guys fighting each other. Now, the Shia and Dostum were close, they'd always been close, but the Shia and Dostum weren't very close to the Tajiks, Mohammed Atta. So we had to constantly work on that.

• 1:38:43Speaker 07

  Meanwhile, we needed to send a team to Bamiyan so that another SF team could come into Bamiyan. So that was, we split the team and sent Justin and Mike Span and Mark in a Jeep into Bamiyan. That's, you know, so they went out, they went out and disappeared for weeks because it was a long drive and they were doing exactly what we were doing. And then we realized that we were never going to get real success with Atta until

• 1:39:19Speaker 07

  he had his own agency team and his own ODA. So we split the team again and that became then Bravo Team. And that was three guys. And then when ODA 534 came in, two more ground branch guys and a medic came in and helped set up that team. So in the space of, by the end of the first two weeks, we were split all over the country, right? We were in all kinds of different directions. Three, no, no less than three at a time, but a lot of times two or three guys going to-

• 1:40:04Speaker 09

  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.

• 1:40:19Speaker 10

  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.

• 1:40:30Speaker 09

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

• 1:40:35Speaker 11

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

• 1:40:41Speaker 09

  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.

• 1:41:02Speaker 12

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• 1:41:31Speaker 07

  Do something. As I said, we, you know, rolled into Mazar Shri. Mazar Shri fell on the 10th of November, and we rolled into Mazar. And it was like, you know, it was one of those things that, I mean, no pictures were taken, but it was kind of like the films you've seen of the liberation of Paris, without the champagne. So, you know, men and women throwing rose petals at us, women, you know, throwing their burkas underneath the jeep so that they would be driven forever destroyed, cheering crowds. I mean, it was all liberation of Paris, except it was liberation of Mazar Shri.

• 1:42:16Jack Murphy?

  It's incredible to think of. I mean, and from there, what was the next step was on the Cabul?

• 1:42:24Speaker 07

  Well, for us, the next step, we still had a couple of provinces to take care of, right? So, the first province, the first set of provinces that we had to take care of were really not liberations, but just announcements. So, Justin and I jumped in a jeep with Dostam, and we went to the three provinces to the west. The first one, of course, was, was his old province, Jawsjan. Saripul was there, and then Maimana as well. So, we did, did basically a grand tour, saying, by the way, the reason the Taliban are gone is because they ain't coming back. They're, they're done. And Dostam was, of course, the big, the

• 1:43:07Speaker 07

  big winner there. And it was his turf, so I wasn't surprised at that part.

• 1:43:15Speaker 07

  Classic sort of, you know, story, again, a small bit of humor. So we're driving along, we were blasting along on this highway that goes from the Tsar Sharif to Chebaran. And, you know, I'm still kind of nervous. I mean, there's still Taliban out there. And Justin's to my, you know, so I'm a lefty, so I'm on the right seat looking out the window. Justin's on the left seat looking out the window behind Dostum and his driver. And all of a sudden, and we've got, you know, a truckload of guys in front of us and a truckload of guys behind us. And all of a sudden, the trucks absolutely screech to a halt and go into a herringbone, classic sort of military herringbone.

• 1:43:56Speaker 07

  All the guys in the pickup trucks jump out and disappear. And I'm like asking Dostum, like, what's going on? He's like, Baba John, don't worry. I'm like, yeah, okay, but, you know, I'm kind of worried. He's like, no, don't worry. And all of a sudden, like in a very short amount of time, all these guys come running back into their trucks, they come to our truck, and they start handing us melons. And Dostum goes, we always stop here. This is the best melon in the whole region. And I was like, okay, you know, I guess, you know, what the hell?

• 1:44:39Speaker 07

  But the last, of course, the last big problem was, was, well, there's two problems. There was, there was Saman Ghan, which still had the Taliban in it, and Kunduz. So Alex took a team to Saman Ghan and started working on the distribution of resources, money, guns, bullets, and bringing in an ODA there. And Kunduz was supposed to be, well, you know, the problem was that Dostum and Atta had been convinced by Mullah Fazl, the head Taliban guy, that the Taliban wanted to surrender.

• 1:45:24Speaker 07

  But if they didn't accept, if Dostum and Atta didn't accept the surrender, then they were going to have to fight house to house. And he said, neither one of you guys wants to be the butcher of Kunduz.

• 1:45:37Speaker 07

  Well, okay, so, uh, none of us, none of us Americans were all that excited about any of this, but, you know, it's, it's exactly what Lawrence said, right? It's better for the locals to do what they do, you know, it's our, it's, it's Than for you to do it for them. Exactly. So we're like, you know, what are we gonna do? I mean, we can't, uh, we can't, we don't have an invasion force, right? We've got ODA 595, we've got ODA 534, and the commanders that they're working with, they want to arrange, you know, go with a surrender.

• 1:46:18Speaker 07

  Well, you know, uh, both Doug Stanton and, and Toby's books talk in detail about the fact that it was a completely false surrender. Hmm. Uh, and, uh, it was, I mean, from the standpoint, I mean, it was horrible. I lost a man. Afghans lost some of our closest allies. Dave almost was killed. Hmm. Uh, we were almost killed out in Kunduz because it was an ambush there, too, though we had AC-130s on our side, so didn't work, you know, didn't work out so well for the Taliban. But the point is that whether you like it or not, it was an exceptionally sophisticated

• 1:47:03Speaker 07

  deception operation. Hmm. Because they had convinced the two major, you know, Afghan allies to, to just drive right into a trap that was gonna kill them. Right. And would have killed them if it hadn't been for AC-130s and the fact that we had, you know, we had the, uh, at that point, it was Max Bowers, who was the battalion commander for these guys, and Sergeant Major V. Hill, Mario V. Hill, and their comms network with the authority to call in air power, like, right away. Otherwise, you wouldn't be talking to me today.

• 1:47:46Speaker 07

  I mean, we still would have won the battle, but I'd be dead. No question in my mind about that. Hmm. And, uh, so...

• 1:47:55Speaker 07

  That's what happened. I mean, you know, again, I would point your, your, uh, your listeners to reading either one of those books because they go into significant detail about, about that. And it's, it's a tough story to, to, to read and it's not a great story to talk about.

• 1:48:13Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Yeah. When we talked to both Toby and Justin, I think that really came through about Mike Span's death and just what a horrible, uh, day that was.

• 1:48:24Speaker 07

  Yeah. And, you know, I mean, I, I, so, uh, Scotty and I made it back for day two of that operation. And, uh, and Alex drove up from Samangon. So Alex and I went, were in, uh, the fort when Mark Mitchell, the night that Mark Mitchell won his distinguished service cross with the, with the team. It was a pretty spooky thing. The Taliban, or it wasn't Taliban, it was the Al Qaeda guys, were using all of the resources that were available. I had never really thought that you could direct fire, direct lay a 122 rocket.

• 1:49:06Speaker 07

  But I guarantee you, it was either that, or they were using explosives to send telephone poles over my head. I'm not sure which it was. Either way, it was pretty scary.

• 1:49:17Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:18Speaker 07

  But, you know, again, AC 130s won out the day and, and the air force saved our lives.

• 1:49:26Jack Murphy?

  Could, could you tell us a little bit more about like how that came about?

• 1:49:31Speaker 07

  Well, okay. So, so I, I get back to, uh, Scotty and I came back from Kunduz. The guys who had been in the fort that day to include the SBS team, had, were all coming back, rolling in. They, they, well, they looked exactly like what they were. They had been buried alive because the JDAM had hit the fort and buried them alive. They dug their way out, uh, and they were coming back trying to figure out what they were going to do. And, uh, the, the part of the fortress that overlooked.

• 1:50:08Speaker 07

  That truly overlooked where the, where the, the, uh, the Al Qaeda guys were was not where they had been. And they didn't know quite how they were gonna get in there. And, uh, so Alex and I got in a Jeep, uh, and drove over there. And we, you know, shouted from the, from the ramparts, hey, uh, we wanna come up. And they said, come on up. So we climbed up the ramparts, went through a drainage hole and came up to where the, our Afghan allies were. And I, I mean, these are the same allies we've been with now for six weeks. So they were all like, hey, Baba John, good to see you, you know?

• 1:50:52Speaker 07

  Um, bullets flying everywhere. And, uh, I'm like, okay, here's the deal. Uh, you know, if you can hold these guys in place tonight, we're gonna bring in air power. And they were like, absolutely, we can hold these guys in, inside these walls. And they'd already seen what air power did. So, you know, it was, they were like, come on back. So then we, you know, climb over the walls, down through the drainpipe, up, you know, again, jump in the, jump in the Jeep, go back to, uh, where everybody was set up. And, uh, Mark and a combat controller and, uh, one other guy.

• 1:51:34Speaker 07

  Uh, then about nine o'clock that night, we load in the Jeep, back through, you know, same story, right? Up the walls, through the drainpipe, up where the walls and in, and, uh, tell the commander, okay, we're gonna start bringing in, uh, air power. And he was like, that's good because they found mortars. And just about the time he got mortars out of his mouth, rounds started landing on the parapet around us.

• 1:52:04Speaker 07

  And we were like, well, that ain't good. I've seen good before and that ain't it. And I turned to Alex and said, you know, Alex, I don't have my Ranger tab to hide under. I mean, if I did, I wouldn't be worried, but I don't have it with me. So he was like, yeah, I don't have my SF tab with me either. So we, you know, we'll just, we'll just, uh, stick here and, uh, you know, it's really up the mark at this point and, and the combat controller to do the job. I mean, there's no sense in, I mean, we couldn't see the bad guys. They could see us. Well, I mean, we could have gotten stood up on a parapet, shot our AKs, but like, why? So Mark, uh, called in the, uh, the AC one thirties.

• 1:52:49Speaker 07

  They made, uh, two runs. This is about the same time that the guys are shooting mortars at us and the 122s and just about anything they could find. They were doing direct lay on us.

• 1:53:01Speaker 07

  And finally, I remember Mark talking to the, to the, the aircraft and saying, guys, I know you have to rotate back through, right? You do, you're, you're doing your rotation because the air, the, all the guns are on the left side of the aircraft. But you just need to know, you need to finish this this time because the last couple of rounds, mortar rounds are only landed about like 50 meters from us. They've got, they're, they're walking the mortars in on us. Now, I didn't hear what Mark, I mean, I heard what Mark said. I don't know what the Air Force guys said, but absolutely they came roaring in and

• 1:53:41Speaker 07

  for, for those of you who remember it, if you've ever seen the final scene from Apocalypse Now, when the arc light comes in and the entire sky turns orange. Well, I, to this day, I don't know what they hit. I think they hit the cheese charges and then that kicked off all the other kind of mortar rounds and everything else. The entire, the entire end of the fortress where the bad guys were just exploded into, into fire. So I turned to the Afghan commander and said, uh, you know, I think our work here is done. We're gonna go, come back tomorrow and I need to find Mike. We still, I mean, until.

• 1:54:28Speaker 07

  I mean, I wasn't willing to say that Mike was KIA until we we knew he was KIA. Because Mike had been such a a power in so many different ways and so good at what he did. I thought even if he was wounded and he could have easily crawled into a space and hidden and then the guys would never have found him. So until we actually found Mike's remains, I mean, I was really committed to to hoping. Of course, you know, now we know from Dave's debrief and everything else that it didn't work out that way. Right. But anyhow, we left.

• 1:55:11Speaker 07

  The next day, the whole team now is crawling in because we think we're just going to enter, go into the fortress and, you know, do our post blast analysis. I would climb into the fortress doing the same thing again. And the commander goes, I say like, so why aren't you down in the area? He says, well, it turns out that and then just as he said, you know, that, you know, two mortar rounds hit on the parapet again. He says, yep, they're still firing mortars at us. I'm like, oh, great. Well, it's daylight. And he said, yeah, we're going to bring in, we've got a, we've got a T62, we're going

• 1:55:52Speaker 07

  to bring in a tank and we've got troops all along the parapet. We're just going to start opening up on these guys. And and, you know, it takes, it took all that day and they still ended up, you know, the guys, the Al Qaeda guys retreated into the what's called the pink house, which it was, it was pink. And then what was really clever, I would never have thought of this, but the Afghans thought of it, they brought in a fire truck and started to flood the pink house.

• 1:56:29Speaker 07

  And remember, this is November, late November. It's cold at night. And by the next day, the guys were hypothermic. They were no longer combatants. And they were pulled out of the pink house and grabbed. And then by that time, a good chunk of Dostum's team were there. Dostum was still in Kunduz, dealing with the Afghans there. But they put them into trucks and they took them to Shebregon. And that's basically the last of the story,

• 1:57:04Speaker 07

  except when the medic in 95 identified John Walker Lynn. Then they brought him back to, to, actually to the Turkish school where we were headquartered. I made sure that my guys didn't, didn't talk to or do anything with Mike Spann, or with John Walker Lynn, for two reasons. One, I was afraid they would do him harm.

• 1:57:33Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:57:34Speaker 07

  But more, more importantly, having worked with the FBI, I knew that if any of us were involved in this at all, the defense team would immediately say that, you know, we were somehow perfidious. And so we didn't do anything. Admiral Callan understood it as well, because he'd been, you know, SEAL Team Six commander. So he had had a lot of work in this weird world of counterterrorism and criminal enterprises and all that. And so he just put guards on the room that, that John Walker Lynn was there until they could

• 1:58:14Speaker 07

  fly in from, at that point, they flew them in from Toshkent, some Army CID guys. And then the Army CID guys matched up. They also had some NCIS guys there and they put them on a bird and took them out of there. And that was, that was the last I saw of them.

• 1:58:33Jack Murphy?

  JR, you know, the, the John Walker Lynn, the so-called American Taliban, amazingly, out of prison now. And writing. Yeah, he's taken up some writing, a little bit of writing, and has accused the CIA and the Army of committing war crimes out there. And I'm just curious what you think of, of John Walker's account of, of how that went down out there, that those few days.

• 1:58:58Speaker 07

  You know, I honestly, I haven't followed any of that. I mean, I I'm sorry, I can't, I can't stomach the guy.

• 1:59:05Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:05Speaker 07

  Uh, you know, and, uh, you know, the only thing that I know about that guy is after the fact, I talked to some of the FBI guys who did the initial interview with him. And they showed me some pictures and they said, they showed me the pictures of when he was first, you know, first brought out and interviewed. And he, I think you've seen some of those pictures because they've become part of the, of the story. But anyhow, like, he, his, half of his face looks really dirty. And the other half looks sort of dirty. And the FBI, uh, guys I talked to said, well, that's because, that's what happens when you, you know, have a good stock weld on an AK-47.

• 1:59:50Speaker 07

  And all that carbon from those, from those rounds start, start, you know, comes out because AK-47s for everybody who, who's ever fired one, you know, they're sort of, I mean, they're designed to be loose so they can be, so that they can be shot in any environment. That's why they are so popular all over the world. But, uh, it was, you know, carbon from the, so I, I have not followed John Walker Lit. I mean, I'm sorry, I can't, I can't blame myself to do it. I'm an old guy. I'm a geezer. Uh, he, he is a traitor. The end, you know, I mean, I'm not going to judge anything else about him. What he wants to talk about now is

• 2:00:33Speaker 07

  between him and he's a, he's a mom, so it's between him and his God, you know? Really?

• 2:00:40Jack Murphy?

  Um, and

• 2:00:45Jack Murphy?

  no, fair, fair enough, JR. Uh, but, uh, on a, on a sadder note, um,

• 2:00:52Jack Murphy?

  How did you guys get our resolution on Mike's span and evacuate his remains?

• 2:01:00Speaker 07

  Well, we went in, I mean, after the guys had been pushed into the pink house. But before they were pulled out, we walked the Afghans, of course, you know, see, a good chunk of the folks who were actually the fighters, our fighters on the ramparts were Shia. Right? They were because it was the Shia that had been, had, well, Mizzari Sharif was a Shia town before the Taliban took over. So they were always the guys and they knew Mike very, very well. Mike had been, Mike and Justin and Mark had been our focal points with the Shia resistance.

• 2:01:44Speaker 07

  And then with the Shia, when we started to rebuild Mizzari Sharif. So they went in on their own, found him and brought him out in a stretcher. And so we didn't have to go searching for him. They had already brought him right out to the entrance of where the big gunfight had taken place. And then we recovered Mike. We had a, you know, a classic American bag to put him in.

• 2:02:24Speaker 07

  Brought his remains to the, brought his remains to the Turkish school. Put him in a space where we could do a quiet time with him. And then that night, half the team loaded up with Mike's remains, loaded up into a CH47.

• 2:02:48Speaker 07

  And flew back to K K U C. Alex was on that. You know, why half the team? Well, you know, we had not been, we had, you know, we hadn't been relieved. We were still doing stuff across the board. So it was, half the team needed to go because half, I mean, Mike was buried, buried before I even got back to Conus. But we needed, half the team needed to stay to continue to work the stuff that we were doing, which was building something resembling a legitimate,

• 2:03:30Speaker 07

  not government exactly, but at least a legitimate order and also hunting down the last of the Taliban and the Al Qaeda guys who were now on the run in Samarkand.

• 2:03:44Speaker 08

  Jared, how, when you talk about like building, not the legitimate government, maybe a legitimate coalition, whatever, how tough was that? Because even though these warlords like Dostum and Otto, that they were fighting the Taliban, they, they were all, there wasn't like a national identity for them. They were also fighting for themselves and would just as easily turn on each other if they thought they could get away with it. How was that for you, trying to orchestrate that or manage, manage those relationships?

• 2:04:16Speaker 07

  It was something that, of course, you know, this goes back to my experience in the 80s, right? I learned a long time ago that there comes a point in time where you can't, you can, you need to be polite, but you need to draw a line in the sand. And I made it pretty clear to the guys early on, actually, well, before we entered Mazar-i-Shri, let's just say,

• 2:04:39Speaker 07

  that if they didn't cooperate, we were all going home. There'd be no more money, no more guns, no more ODAs, no more anything. And then, so, you know, and if that was what they were, they were committed to do, we weren't going to get in the way of it, but we certainly weren't going to help them. And so.

• 2:05:05Speaker 07

  They took it to heart. I mean, they didn't have to. I get, I mean, I don't know if I was blunt, or if I was, you know, just looked sincere or what, but it was like one on one with these guys. I've had guys in the past when I was doing this, I mean, say, you know, really with just like you're surrounded by bad guys and you're saying this like, it's our job. It's what we do.

• 2:05:33Jack Murphy?

  Right. It's the leverage you have too.

• 2:05:35Speaker 07

  Yeah. Well, it is. And it's not like they're gonna kill me because that would also, you know, end, end the relationship. So they could grumble about it, but they had seen what, what was, what was successful. Now, you know, is,

• 2:05:52Speaker 07

  and what we said right up front was, look at once we're, once the Taliban, we're only here to get these guys out of here. It's really up to you to figure out what you're gonna do next. And, you know,

• 2:06:08Speaker 07

  my own, I mean, I've only done Afghanistan, Afghan since 1986. So I'm not gonna pretend that I am like a, a real, you know, cultural expert, like, you know, from Harvard or Yale, because I'm just a kid who, you know, blue collar kid who just lived with these guys for years. But there is no such thing as an Afghan.

• 2:06:28Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:06:29Speaker 07

  Right. There's, there's absolutely no such thing as an Afghan. The only Afghan I ever met was Amrullah Saleh, who was, you know, the, the last vice president of Taliban. But before that, he was the head of the national defense, you know, the, the National Directorate of Security. And before that, he was one of, of Masood's guys. I mean, he was actually a very close to Masood and was one of the guys that traveled with Masood when Masood was going back and forth between the Pancher and Dushan Bay to meet folks. He's the only Afghan I ever met who was an Afghan.

• 2:07:09Speaker 07

  All the rest of them, all of the rest of them are Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara, Pushtoons. And there's two different, I mean, and the, you know, people say Pushtoons, but you know, the truth is that the Pushtoons of, let's say Jalalabad can barely understand what the Pushtoons in Kandahar say. And neither one of them can understand what the, what the Pushtoons from Nimitz say. I mean, it's, it's not a country, uh, you know, National Geographic's done the maps, you know, they had a flag. And so by definition, Americans think that they're a country. But, you know, they are neither a nation, oh, they were a state certainly, but they were not a nation state.

• 2:07:51Speaker 08

  Right.

• 2:07:52Speaker 07

  And, uh, the folks in the north, nor, I mean, remember when the winter comes, you can't drive from Kabul to Mazar-e-Sharif, right? The roads are closed. There's no way to get through the Hindu Kush, even today. You have to fly. So what we had to do was convince all these guys that regardless of what they thought of each other, and they didn't like each other, that's for sure.

• 2:08:21Speaker 08

  Right.

• 2:08:22Speaker 07

  Uh, that, that they needed to collaborate, cooperate if they wanted their country back. And they did. I mean, I don't, just because they grumbled doesn't mean that they didn't do their job. They did their job in ways that were, you know, exactly what you could have asked for.

• 2:08:42Speaker 08

  Right.

• 2:08:43Jack Murphy?

  What was the next phase, uh, for Alpha Team after that whole incident, after Mike Span's death and resolving the situation at the prison? I mean, as you said, you were continuing to do things. The mission wasn't over. So what, what was the next step?

• 2:08:58Speaker 07

  Well, the next step was to, you know, to build a, to work with all three of our Afghan allies to make sure that there weren't Taliban, uh, you know, they, I guess the only term I could think of is, is a term from, you know, from World War II. We wanted to make sure there were no werewolves out there, right? Right. Everybody was worried in forty-five that there were Nazi werewolves out there hiding out, just waiting to come up. So we did that. We, uh, we were involved with the O D A that was down in Saman Ghan, working with the Ismailis.

• 2:09:34Speaker 07

  Totally different culture as well. Uh, and then, that, you know, for me, my job towards the end was to be sort of, uh, you know, the intelligence diplomat. I worked a lot with Admiral Calland as we built airfields and we worked with the commanders trying, or the, you know, the three leaders to try and make sure that they continue to collaborate and cooperate, dividing up the city, how you do police work, you know, I mean, I don't mean like a police force, but, you know, making sure that there aren't

• 2:10:09Speaker 07

  checkpoints that are hostile to each other across the town, all that stuff. Um, and then, you know, our allies started to roll in. And, uh, so, I mean, we had lots of allies already. I mean, the Brits were, are shoulder to shoulder with us. But I mean, the, the other allies, the Jordanians, special forces came in, the French, uh, aviation folks started to come in. Eventually, of course, Mazar Sharif was, was run by a German unit. Uh, so that, at the very end, the, the job was just, there were, there were five of us left.

• 2:10:49Speaker 07

  And, uh, the five of us carved up every day, a little piece here, a little piece there, trying to do all of those things until we were relieved in place in the mid, in mid-December. And, uh, you know, did the, did the handshakes with our, our, the relief, the new team and introduced them to all the other, the, you know, the guys that we'd been working with all this time. And then we boarded a, uh,

• 2:11:18Speaker 07

  And agency, uh, Twin Otter and left Kabul or left Mazar Shreeh and headed back to K K U Z.

• 2:11:26Jack Murphy?

  And you had a few more years left at the CIA before retiring in 2007. I believe you finished as the deputy of operations of CTC.

• 2:11:38Speaker 07

  No, uh, well, I mean, I, I did. I mean, first of all, uh, you know, that wasn't my last trip to Kabul, right? I mean, or Afghanistan. I made like five different trips, T U Y's for lots of different kinds of projects, uh, over time as we worked with the station. Now, by that time, the station's set up. It's a big station, but there were certain things, cooperation, collaboration, some other stuff. There's some training that I was involved with. Um, after, uh,

• 2:12:10Speaker 07

  in, in 2004, I was, uh, pulled back to headquarters after 17 years, kicking and screaming, but orders are orders. And I went back into the basement, of course. It only goes, you know, I was given, I was given an office in the basement to do some other stuff, um, that was nothing to do with Afghanistan. And then I ended up as a, uh, the chief of ops for a geographic division for about six months. And then I got promoted, shocked everybody, myself included, and, uh, got grabbed up to go to CTC. CTC is a big place, right? I mean, there were, at that point in time, there's

• 2:12:50Speaker 07

  over not quite 4,000 people in the CTC mix. Now, that doesn't mean that there were 4,000 people working in headquarters. There are 4,000 people doing the CTC mission.

• 2:13:04Speaker 07

  Are you still there?

• 2:13:05Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, that's, you know, no, okay.

• 2:13:07Speaker 07

  Yeah. Okay. So anyhow, the, the, the operations office. So I was a, I was the, one of the two deputy chiefs of operations. And then we had a chief of operations and he had a deputy. So I was partnered with Doug Wise. So Doug and I, uh, split, and you've had Doug on, on, on the, on the, on the podcast.

• 2:13:31Jack Murphy?

  He's, uh, coming back in a few weeks. Uh, we got him scheduled for the 22nd.

• 2:13:35Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:13:38Speaker 07

  Excellent. Well anyhow, he and I divided up the day-to-day management of CTC in half. So I ended up with a, you know, a bunch of different parts of CTC. And then the, the, uh, the CTC director wanted to have a, a, a psyops program, a robust psyops program going after countering violent extremism. Uh, so I wanted to call it the, you know, political warfare department. No, that wasn't gonna work. That, that sounded too political. Uh, so we ended up, uh, calling it, uh, the strategic communications department.

• 2:14:22Speaker 07

  And I was listed, just so I could go over to state and not be laughed out of a building. They listed me as a, a deputy director of CTC for strategic communications.

• 2:14:35Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 2:14:35Speaker 07

  So I spent the tail end of the last, uh, 18 months of my career, uh, managing teams that were all over the world. Is again, kind of, uh, you know, the same sort of story over and over again, that were working on what is, what would have been called in the old OSS days, black propaganda. And, you know, and black propaganda is designed to undermine the morale of the bad guys as opposed to, uh, psyops or strategic communications that the military and the state department were doing, which was to bring guys onto our side, right, to convince people on our side.

• 2:15:18Jack Murphy?

  And also that the bad guys don't know where the information is coming from as opposed to like, say, the broadcasting board of governors, where it's very clearly coming from the United States. What you guys are doing is concealed.

• 2:15:31Speaker 07

  And what we're doing, I mean, what, basically what we're doing is telling them, in a sense, a modified truth, which is your leaders are making themselves rich while you guys are being asked to be martyrs.

• 2:15:48Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:49Speaker 07

  You know, and which is all true.

• 2:15:51Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's not really a modified truth. That's kind of the truth.

• 2:15:55Speaker 07

  That is the truth, but it has to come from someplace that doesn't say United States of America.

• 2:15:59Jack Murphy?

  That doesn't have CIA all over it.

• 2:16:01Speaker 08

  Right.

• 2:16:02Speaker 07

  That's right. So, so we did, we did a variety of different, very creative things. I, I take, I mean, no credit for this other than getting money to make it happen. I mean, the, I had a team of exceptionally smart folks. And then because I knew I was going to leave soon, I grabbed Alex to take over for me. So we, we ended up at the end of, I ended up at the end of my career with Alex as my deputy again, which was great. And then he took over my job when I left.

• 2:16:36Jack Murphy?

  That's pretty cool. So retired in 2007 and tell us a little bit about what your life has been like post-retirement. I'm sure your, your wife is happy to have you at home a little more often. And, and getting into writing, you're a pretty prolific author.

• 2:16:51Speaker 08

  A very prolific writer.

• 2:16:53Speaker 07

  Yeah. Well, let's start with, you know, I, this, this trade, this blend of intelligence and special operations, it's, it's very addictive and it's very hard to just go cold turkey. So for years, I worked very hard with the army and the special operations community to try and do some training for them. Cultural training. I'm an anthropologist by training. So cultural training on how to work with the locals. I mean, obviously Rob and Sage, they teach how to work with locals, but I'm like down in the tactical, this is how I worked with the locals as well as

• 2:17:36Speaker 07

  how to work with the CIA because working with the CIA is a challenge because it's another culture entirely. And, and you know, it might seem easy when you're in a forward operating base and you've got a base chief and maybe one. It's another thing entirely when you're going to fly into a station, an established station, and you're going to be talking to people who are interested in conventional intelligence operations because that's their job. So I spent a lot of time working on that and still do a little bit of that. And then about.

• 2:18:16Speaker 07

  Five years ago, I started writing. And it seems more prolific than it is because Mike Four had to go through two years with the censors. Oh, really? And then, and then it's the sequel, Friend or Foe, was 28 months with the censors. And then eventually, what happens is, I guess I just wore them down, or they just figured out I'm not gonna quit. And I also cracked that, you know, got the code, right? I got the code. I understand how to write to make sure that the censors legitimately, I mean, I signed

• 2:19:00Speaker 07

  a document in 1985. Right, right. So they could, they could watch everything I wrote forever. So it isn't like I don't understand that it's the rules. I get it. But it seems like if you look at, like, you know, like nine books since 2019, well, no. Actually, I started writing Mike Four in 2014. Okay. Finished it, finished it in 15, and then had to find, get through the censors. Right. And then after the censors, had to go through and find a publisher. So meanwhile, while I'm doing all that, I'm still writing.

• 2:19:44Speaker 07

  So it looks like I'm, I'm creating these things. Now, those people who have read it will say it's sort of slapdash anyhow, but I mean, the point is that the, it is.

• 2:19:57Speaker 09

  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.

• 2:20:12Speaker 10

  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.

• 2:20:23Speaker 09

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

• 2:20:28Speaker 11

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

• 2:20:34Speaker 09

  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.

• 2:20:54Speaker 03

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• 2:21:18Speaker 04

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• 2:21:25Speaker 07

  The publication date doesn't reflect what happened.

• 2:21:29Speaker 08

  That makes sense. So I was just gonna say, for our audience who doesn't know, because we've had people on who have written autobiographies and whatnot, and we've talked about the pre-publication review board at the CIA that has to review their stuff and make sure it's not classified. But you might not know in the audience that even if you write fiction, they have to go through it and check it to make sure that you haven't spilled any secrets in your fiction, correct?

• 2:22:01Speaker 07

  Correct. And, you know, and fair enough. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, there's an entire, you know, there's an entire part of the CIA that does open source intelligence. And it, you know, for years and years and years, the KGB was doing open source intelligence on all of their officers who were in North America. That's what they were doing. So yeah, the pre-publication is a fair requirement. I think what happened to me was...

• 2:22:32Speaker 07

  That I hit it at a time, just about the time that a bunch of very senior people legitimately wanted to write essays and articles and books about their careers. Whereas, so what would happen would be, I mean, I don't know this for sure, but my guess is my fiction kept getting at back down to the bottom of the pile. Because, let's face it, if a former director wants to write an editorial that's going to the New York Times.

• 2:23:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a little ahead.

• 2:23:08Speaker 07

  That's a whole lot more important than me writing about a fictional character who is a special operator, right? I mean, it's just totally different.

• 2:23:18Speaker 08

  So, Jared, please, I'm gonna talk about your other series, and I'll ask you questions about it, but please tell us, we haven't had a chance to read this one, so please tell us about Mike Four. It's, there are six books in the series?

• 2:23:34Speaker 07

  Seven now.

• 2:23:35Speaker 08

  And it's about a-

• 2:23:36Speaker 07

  Another one just came out.

• 2:23:37Speaker 08

  And it's about a family whose history in special operations intelligence goes back to World War II, correct?

• 2:23:44Speaker 07

  Correct. So, the basic story is, Mike Four is the call sign for a female special operator who is on a surveillance detachment, okay? We'll leave it at that for those, for folks who know what we're talking about, they know, but that's what the, that's what the Policy Review Board wanted it to be called. So, fair, fair enough. So, she's in a surveillance detachment, very successful, and, but very aggressive. Now, you might say, why a female character? Well, partly because I met a ton of female operators and a ton of agency females, and

• 2:24:28Speaker 07

  you know, you'd look around in the fiction, try and find some in fiction, right? Anyhow, she's, she is this, the daughter of a tandem couple, and she's the granddaughter of an OSS commando.

• 2:24:45Speaker 07

  So, uh, who also then becomes a CIA officer, very senior and, and ends his career CIA officer. She doesn't want to be in the family business, uh, so she, you know, goes through selection and ends up in this surveillance detachment. In Jalalabad, she ends up walking into an ambush and it becomes a, what is known in the wounded warrior world is BTK, uh, below the knee amputee. And, uh, just like many BTKs, uh, from Iraq or Afghanistan, the army, after she is healed, as much as a BTK can be healed, says to her, okay, here's the deal.

• 2:25:28Speaker 07

  You can either get a hundred percent disability and start a new life, you know, go back to college, go do something else, or you can, uh, stay in the fight as an intelligence officer.

• 2:25:44Speaker 07

  And we're going to send you to the farm and you're going to learn, you know, CIA tradecraft, and you're going to be one of our, that is the special operations community, intelligence officers. Well, you know, Mike Forrest spent her whole life trying to dodge the family business, but given a choice between staying in the fight or not staying in the fight, she chooses to stay in the fight. And she ends up working, uh, in a mo- in a team that is a, a special operations, intelligence, human intelligence, counterterrorism collection team. Now, people say, why a BTK?

• 2:26:28Speaker 07

  One of the training programs I was in, uh, after I retired was down at Fort Huachuca, and I was doing, uh, you know, my cultural stuff, but we were doing it out, this is back in the day when Iraq and Afghanistan, the guys who were doing intelligence had to be able to get out into the, literally out into the field, right? So I was working, uh, students one after another and evaluating them after the fact. It's a five day, six day program. And, uh, you know, because I was an outsider.

• 2:27:03Speaker 07

  At the end of that program, I would give them a one-on-one. Hey, this worked well for you. This didn't work so well. And like, you know, I learned through all the leadership training I've ever given and ever taken, that, you know, it's, it's really good to unkey the mic and listen for a while. Now, those of you who have been listening to me for now two hours are wondering about that. But nevertheless, so I went to one of these guys and I said, so, uh, you have anything you want to say? Because he had done very well and I didn't expect him to say anything more than thank you and go. He's like, man, this is tough. This was really hard.

• 2:27:46Speaker 07

  And I was like, dude, it's supposed to be hard. That's the whole point. And that's when he rolled up his pants leg and showed me that he was a BTK.

• 2:27:56Speaker 08

  Uh huh.

• 2:27:57Speaker 07

  I had, I had walked this guy all over, uh, southern New Mexico.

• 2:28:04Speaker 07

  And, uh, he had never said anything and had done his job on his own, all alone, face to face with me, giving him a hard time. And it was at that point I realized that is one, you know, this, in the 82nd, we say that, that guy's as hard as woodpecker lips.

• 2:28:23Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:28:24Speaker 07

  You know, I mean, he was one hard character. Well, years later, when I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to move this character from this side of the house to that side of the house.

• 2:28:44Speaker 07

  It only seemed fair to make sure that there was a person there who was a BTK, who said right up front, I'm not a victim. I am a person who is still in the fight. And I will remain in the fight until I retire. And you know, the special operations community, the army as a whole is filled with people right now who are gravely, who were gravely injured in Iraq or Afghanistan and are still in the fight. And God bless them for that because most folks don't even know that they're, that they are wounded warriors because they don't tell anybody. They don't ask for any, any pity. They just want to do their job.

• 2:29:29Speaker 08

  Hmm.

• 2:29:30Speaker 07

  So that's, that's Mike four, goes through a bunch of different stuff. There's seven in the series. Six of them are about Mike four and one of them is entirely focused on a prequel about her grandfather. Because through the series, you find out that there's a vendetta between a Russian family of spies and an American family of spies. And book four reveals, actually book three reveals that, the, the origins of that vendetta.

• 2:30:05Speaker 08

  So guys, so check out if, if, I mean, check out the Mike four series. I'm going to talk about a school for the great game, which to me is a mix of Kipling, um, Hopkirk, uh, the great game, uh, um, uh, I, it's got, it's steampunk, like it, it says it's a steampunk rise novel, but it's, it's also like a Philip K. Dick, like alternate, alternative history or alternate history. It, it's, it's a fascinating book that draws on real history of the world.

• 2:30:44Speaker 08

  It's basically the great game, but more in a steampunk environment where it's a little bit of Ian Fleming, um, where mysticism and mentalism actually exist. I mean, it's a fascinating book. Where did this come from? Cause there's two of these.

• 2:31:01Speaker 07

  There's actually, I'm working on the third one. We're, we're in world, um, I, I, on a regular basis, you know, my wife's an artist and all of the illustrations in that book are from her.

• 2:31:11Speaker 08

  Oh, cool.

• 2:31:11Speaker 07

  So, uh, so, uh, but you know, I'll, I'll regularly say to her recently, I'm saying like, I'm going back to my office and back to 1915 because, uh, book three is set in World War One.

• 2:31:26Speaker 07

  So what I'd like to tell people about this series is if you can imagine Rudyard Kipling's Kim, meeting Stan Lee's Doctor Strange.

• 2:31:35Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:31:38Speaker 07

  That's the story.

• 2:31:40Speaker 08

  But there's Ian Fleming, there's, there's Her Majesty's Secret Service.

• 2:31:44Speaker 07

  Oh, well, yeah, well, here's the, here's the deal. I mean, when in, in the eighties, when I was in, you know, doing the Afghan stuff, one of the things that I really believe in is if you're going to do this trade, you have to understand history, whatever culture you're working against, you have to understand history. So the good news is when the Brits left the subcontinent, they left behind the print plates for all of their old books. And so you could buy in books, you still can buy in bookstores, memoirs of, you know, 20 years on a Kyber, this and that and the other thing. Well, a lot of those books include these statements

• 2:32:29Speaker 07

  that, you know, the guy dyes his skin with walnut oil and puts on the local garb and disappears in the crowd. Well, listen.

• 2:32:40Speaker 08

  Bullshit.

• 2:32:41Speaker 07

  Trust me. Yeah, I mean, exactly. I mean, I speak the language pretty darn good. I grew a beard that looked like ZZ Top. But let me just tell you, I didn't fool any locals.

• 2:32:51Speaker 08

  Right.

• 2:32:52Speaker 07

  Right? Except maybe at a distance where if they were looking to shoot somebody, they, they might not shoot me first. They'd shoot me eventually, but they weren't going to shoot me first. So, okay, fine. So, but I thought to myself, okay, well, I know it's not true. But what if it was true?

• 2:33:11Speaker 08

  Right.

• 2:33:12Speaker 07

  Well, if it was true, somebody would have to teach these guys to do this stuff. So I created this school, right? Where they were being taught how to disappear into the crowd, how to run their operations against the Russians. Now, by the second book, they're, the Russians and the Brits are allies and they're running their operations against the Germans, as they are in this new book too. But, but it's, it's a, it's a fun book. It takes a lot longer to write because I put real people into the story.

• 2:33:54Speaker 07

  And those real people kind of have to be where I say they are, right? Because most folks are gonna wonder about who are these people? And in today's world of of Google and Wikipedia, people are gonna really quick know if I was completely off base.

• 2:34:14Speaker 08

  Right.

• 2:34:14Speaker 07

  So I do, I do a fair bit of research, but of course, as I said, I bought a whole bunch of books from that time period and brought them back to the States. My office has got probably 500 books of background stuff that I can use. It just means I have to be a student again. That's all.

• 2:34:32Speaker 08

  Well, what's so fascinating about it is it like in a lot of like, in some ways, if you took out the fictional elements, the characters, the, you know, the that, you know, the the steampunk, you know, the, you know, the magic or whatever. It's a history book like there. There's so much rich history in it about Afghanistan, about India. Like, there are so many things that I go, my gosh, like, you know, you're talking about.

• 2:34:58Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. I mean, when I'm talking about the Waziris and the Masud's, I mean, it's absolutely the Waziris and the Masud's were regularly causing trouble.

• 2:35:05Speaker 08

  Right.

• 2:35:05Speaker 07

  Up on the in the Fatah. Well, you know, and and the thing about the mysticism is interesting. I got that from there was a, an adventurer, a Belgian adventurer that went up into Tibet in the 30s.

• 2:35:22Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:35:23Speaker 07

  And he and he came back and wrote this book about all those things that I'm talking about. Right? All that the, you know, the, the being able to jump long distances.

• 2:35:37Speaker 08

  Right.

• 2:35:37Speaker 07

  Being able to.

• 2:35:38Speaker 08

  The, yeah.

• 2:35:39Speaker 07

  And telepathy and all that stuff. Now, another, you know, short, you know, reality story. I have a friend who I worked with for years and years, you know, a special forces guy was also an Olympic kayaker. And years later, he was hired by National Geographic to be a scout for them. They were going to sponsor a team that was gonna try and and whitewater raft. So rafting on the headwaters of the Ganges, all the way from Nepal down to Calcutta.

• 2:36:15Speaker 07

  Well, you know, my friend Wick, he uh, and he's a writer as well. He's, he's now, of course, we're all geezers, so we can't be adventurers anymore. We have to write. But he, he was uh, doing this and he was, you know, of course, he doesn't speak Nepali, uh, and he doesn't speak Hindi. So, so what he did was on his first leg of the, of the whitewater, he hired a young man who was from the University of Kathmandu, spoke good English, uh, and was a comparative religion guy, which in University of Kathmandu meant he was comparing red hat, white hat, uh, Buddhism. But anyhow, Wick's, you know, spending his time with this guy and

• 2:36:59Speaker 07

  at, at one point, he says after some weeks and he's made friends with the guy, look at, he says, I don't want to insult you, but I've been reading for years about the fact that, you know, Tibetan monks could, could, you know, astral project from one monastery to another monastery and, you know, all that stuff. I've read this book about this guy who says he's seen all this stuff. Like, really? And the young man said, you know, absolutely. There's, you gotta separate fact from fiction, right? I mean, it's, our religion is our religion and we believe these things and some of these things. He says personally,

• 2:37:42Speaker 07

  and then he, he, you know, raises his hand, he says, I've never seen a monk levitate any more than up the height of my shoulder. And, and Wick goes, alright then. That answers the question, you know? So, so I just put that stuff in because it's fun. Yeah. It's, you know, and it gives me an opportunity to get some of the characters out of jams. Sure. That would, they would otherwise, you know, and, and partly it's true that if you are able to, I mean, disappearing in the crowds, one thing, but there's plenty of stories of,

• 2:38:24Speaker 07

  modern stories about snipers disappearing into ground that nobody would expect they could disappear to. Right? And that's because. A pile of bricks. What? Well, I mean, it's, it's because.

• 2:38:41Speaker 07

  They understand how the adversary's mind works. So if you look like something that the adversary expects to see, then you are, you're not invisible in the sense of Dr. Strange invisible, but you are invisible to your adversary because they don't see you.

• 2:39:01Speaker 08

  Right. But it's also like, it's just a fun element to the story.

• 2:39:05Jack Murphy?

  Let's jump into the user questions here. Let's try to get through these for JR.

• 2:39:10Speaker 08

  Uh, okay. Jerry, thank you very much. Do you have knowledge about Operation Samu back in 1990 in Iraq?

• 2:39:20Speaker 07

  No. I mean, I, I, I'm not a, I'm a Central Asian guy, so I'm sorry. I can't, I can't speak on Iraq at all. My, I made two trips to Iraq and neither one of them were in that time period. I mean, I made two trips to Iraq because I had some of my black propaganda team there. So I, I was in Baghdad and Ramadi a couple of times, but no, sorry. I, I, I'm not trying to dodge it. I just don't know anything about it.

• 2:39:52Speaker 08

  And either you were trying to dodge it. It's totally cool. We get it. Uh, John, but we know you're not. John Pierre, thank you very much. Um, keeping people safe. Last year it was reported that the agents made a call out on the loss of too many informants. Is the, is the cause the tougher environments? Or the lack of talented handlers? And I'm going to add on to this. Or is there, do you think that there are other issues?

• 2:40:20Speaker 07

  Well, first of all, right, the, the whole idea of what's called UTS, right? Ubiquitous technical surveillance makes it exceptionally hard to do the old kind of tradecraft I did, right?

• 2:40:36Speaker 07

  Then you add to that, how are you going to communicate with these folks? If you can't see them face to face, well, then you, then you enter another piece of, now you're into another world where cyber operations and cybersecurity and everything else. So I, I think that what happens is we go through, it's, it is. And I don't want to make light of it because it's people's deaths. But it is a competition, just like it's a competition between stealth aircraft and air defense. You're constantly competing with your adversary who's trying to get better to defeat you.

• 2:41:18Speaker 07

  And then as they start to defeat you, you have to figure out new mechanisms, new means to get through it. So I think probably the answer is the technology is moving so quickly now that it's really hard to do the job that I, I mean, you couldn't do the job that I did. I mean, really, honestly, the, the, the sort of tradecraft I used might as well be, you might as well be talking about the 19th century.

• 2:41:46Speaker 08

  Right. Yeah.

• 2:41:52Speaker 08

  Rowdy's incoherent rambling. Thank you very much for your donation. Very good podcast. Thank you. I spent a good bit of last night actually doing some more research on early 2001 operations. Interesting listening to someone who is on the ground, watching it all unfold. And, and thank you very much, JR, for being here and, and for sharing like your experiences with, with us and with our audience.

• 2:42:16Speaker 07

  Like, well, it's, it's my, you know, it's, I won't say a pleasure because it reminds me of a death of a teammate. But it is nice to be able to now 20 years later, be able to talk about something and tell people how

• 2:42:32Speaker 07

  explain to people how complicated it is. It's not, it's not, uh, it's not easy to do this stuff and it requires time on target.

• 2:42:43Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:42:44Speaker 07

  You know, 2001 didn't happen because of 2001. It happened because of what we were doing in the 1980s.

• 2:42:51Speaker 08

  Right.

• 2:42:52Speaker 07

  And you could say the same thing about what happened in Iraq. You could say the same thing today on probable. I mean, I don't know anything about Ukraine, except what I read in the newspaper. But my guess is some of those successes are probably associated with a partnership between the Ukrainians and some part of the United States government.

• 2:43:12Speaker 09

  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.

• 2:43:27Speaker 10

  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.

• 2:43:38Speaker 09

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

• 2:43:43Speaker 11

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

• 2:43:49Speaker 09

  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.

• 2:44:09Speaker 03

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• 2:44:33Speaker 04

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• 2:44:39Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:44:40Speaker 08

  Just saying. Right, the foundation has been there. Uh, Seth, Seth Sarnomen, thank you very much for the donation. Um, thanks, Team House. Your content never disappoints. Thank you. The withdrawal broke my heart. Uh, in your opinion, uh, does this, so this is your opinion. Uh, it doesn't have to be based on anything you do or don't know. Does CIA have plans in supporting the resistance?

• 2:45:06Jack Murphy?

  He's talking about Afghanistan.

• 2:45:08Speaker 08

  Yeah. Would you think about, would you think that the agency would have plans to support the resistance there? Or do you think that would probably just pull out?

• 2:45:15Speaker 07

  I mean, I, again, it's been years and years since I've been, I haven't been in the building and only then as a guest, and that was five years ago. So, I mean, I, so that's, uh, again, let's go back to what I said before. In 1989, theoretically, we stopped being in contact with Afghans. Were, did we stop, were we, and we, like, stopped the whole program? Did we stop working with Afghans? Well, no. Uh, you know, we, now, it's complicated by, by the way that everything has happened in Afghanistan. But, you know, in 1991 and 92,

• 2:46:00Speaker 07

  we were still contacting Afghans in the middle of a civil war. Uh, in 1998, I was still contacting Afghans when the Taliban were in charge. So, I can't imagine that there aren't people in the agency working this problem set. However, I want to reinforce to your, to your, uh, to the folks who write and to you guys, I don't know.

• 2:46:30Speaker 08

  Right.

• 2:46:31Speaker 07

  I'm a geezer. I am long out of practice. I mean, it was amazing. I tell, tell people, when I tell people I was riding on, you know, on horses at 46, they roll their eyes at that. You can imagine, you can imagine at 67 how useless I would be in that game. So, nobody is much interested in what I have to think or say.

• 2:46:53Speaker 08

  Yeah. Um, Stuart O, thank you very much for the donation. We really appreciate it. Um, JR, thanks for telling the stories of the accomplishments of you and your team. Makes me proud.

• 2:47:06Speaker 07

  Well, thank you very much for saying that. It's, uh, the, the, that time period was some, that was really something. And it wasn't just, I remember, remember, we were Alpha Bravo, but it was, I mean, if you haven't read the books, I mean, Foxtrot and Kandahar is about Echo and Foxtrot teams. Uh, there's, there's a, you know, there were a bunch of, I mean, Foxtrot was probably the last of the teams that was behind lines. Uh, but there were teams, I mean, we were, we were just two of all those others. And I would have to actually get my fingers and count on my toes to try and figure out how many, but, cause I, I'm, I'm not real good about the alphabet and all that, but

• 2:47:50Speaker 07

  I'm just saying, there were a lot of guys out there who committed to this and did very much the same sort of stuff. We all fought in this battle, along with the ODAs, along with the Rangers who went into Kandahar early on, along with the, you know, the, this special boat service guys that, you know, were with me for weeks. Uh, so, you know, it's a good thing.

• 2:48:16Speaker 08

  Um, Scott G., thank you very much for the donation. Uh, how does black propaganda work when the enemy, enemy knows who it's coming from? I want to have more effective trash talk in video games.

• 2:48:28Speaker 07

  Well, the enemy can't know where it's coming from. That's the whole point, right? So what you do in black propaganda is, let's, I'll just give you an, a generic example. So if I, well, I mean, you don't have to do a generic example. You could do what the Russians, to talk about what the Russians did in, uh, in 16. So they created fictional Americans to reside on the web to say whatever they wanted to, because they were fictional. They could say whatever.

• 2:49:08Speaker 07

  And the idea was to create controversy, to create, uh, hostility on the web. So sometimes those fictional Americans were pro Hillary, sometimes they were pro Donald Trump, sometimes they were neither, and they were...

• 2:49:30Speaker 07

  Doing wedge issue stuff, whether it was gun control, or abortion, or Christianity, or whatever, that in today's world, it's really, it's not easy, but it is much easier to create fictional characters than it's ever been before, that are, that are, that appear real, right? I mean, with, with AI especially, you can look like, or that fictional character can absolutely look like he's writing to you right now. And, and the timestamp is going to be right, and the IP address is going to be right, all of that stuff. So,

• 2:50:13Speaker 07

  I would say to your, to the writer, it's about making sure that they, that you are not who you say you are.

• 2:50:22Speaker 08

  So Scott, you need some sock puppet accounts.

• 2:50:24Jack Murphy?

  Exactly. You need, you need a, you need a.

• 2:50:26Speaker 08

  When you're trash talking and gaming, you need to create some sock puppet accounts to create controversial topics.

• 2:50:32Jack Murphy?

  I got one last question from Isaac. It's a little bit of a long one, but he says, Dear Mr. Seeger, I'm 29 years old and my second year of university, getting my bachelor's in computer information systems. After that, I want to get my masters in cybersecurity. When I'm done, I want to apply for the agency. I would be happy doing clandestine services, being a case officer or cyber ops officer, but I want to work, do the work like you did and go into ground branch, but I'm afraid of hitting the same roadblocks as when I tried to enlist. I could not enlist in the army because I didn't qualify for medical waivers, even though I'm not medically restricted at all. The recruiter described to me that a MEPS doctor did not want to take the chance on me. Also, I had a record for misdemeanor,

• 2:51:16Jack Murphy?

  which has been resolved for a long time. What can I do to make the agency see me and increase my chances of getting in? Do they care if people were never honor roll students? Because I'm not. Does even asking questions on a high format like this hurt my chances? What, what do you think, JR?

• 2:51:35Speaker 07

  Okay, first things first.

• 2:51:38Speaker 07

  Nobody in either the CIA or the FBI is gonna look at anybody who's still an undergraduate. What we want to see is a person, and again, I've worked with FBI recruiters just as much as I've worked with CIA recruiters. What we want to see is a person who has finished school and then gone to do something else. Because, let's face it, uh, when you're in college, you probably don't meet nasty people. You may think they're nasty professors, but you don't meet challenging nasty people. And if you're gonna be in the CIA or the FBI, you gotta understand that perspective.

• 2:52:23Speaker 07

  So start with that. So, basically, what they wanna see is four-year degree followed by some work. Actually, they'll be fine with a two-year degree followed by some work. Doesn't have to be military work. Doesn't have to be, could be anything. I mean, it just needs to be work. Then the other part of this, which is important to realize, is totally different from my world. Everybody applies online. Everybody's, and so, tell the truth. When you apply, show them what you have done, and then, hope for the best.

• 2:53:06Speaker 07

  Because, it's a, it's a, it's a rigorous selection process. And it is, you know, the vetting process starts with checking to see if what you put online is true. Anybody who might try to make their resume better than it really is, probably is immediately gonna get rejected. So just tell the truth. Do your job. Get a, go to school. Go to a graduate school. Uh...

• 2:53:40Speaker 07

  While you're in graduate school, get a job that would be associated with your, with your career and then apply. What's the worst that can happen?

• 2:53:50Speaker 08

  Right.

• 2:53:51Speaker 07

  You know, I mean, really, but it's not a secret. You just go online to CIA.gov or FBI.gov. It's right there. The application's right there. Do it.

• 2:54:01Speaker 08

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

• 2:54:17Speaker 07

  Absolutely. And I can understand now, looking back on it, why they weren't interested in me in 1978, because I'd gone to graduate school and I had just started working, period, right? I was in Wyoming working, but I hadn't really proven that I could act.

• 2:54:35Speaker 09

  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.

• 2:54:49Speaker 10

  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.

• 2:55:00Speaker 09

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

• 2:55:06Speaker 11

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

• 2:55:11Speaker 09

  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.

• 2:55:31Speaker 03

  Hey guys, Lady Luck here. I just love the fall season. Cris Mornings, pumpkin spice latte, and it's the best time to cozy up and play Spin Quest. They have over a thousand different slots in all my favorite casino-style games. And they're running a deal for all new players, a $30 coin package for just 10 bucks. So this fall, grab your favorite blanket, visit spinquest.com and download the app today.

• 2:55:56Speaker 04

  Spin Quest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:56:01Speaker 07

  Actually, hold a job all that well. I mean, I'd proven that I could go to school. Well, that's great. Lots of people go to school. And you're right, it wasn't until after I had been in the army, and of course, it was just literally dumb luck. But, you know, sometimes, you know, Louis Pasteur said something that I like to use this quote a lot, which is, "Fortune favors the prepared mind." Okay, so if you're prepared, then when luck does strike, you know, I mean, you're more likely to succeed than if the guy who hasn't thought it through.

• 2:56:44Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. JR, I really appreciate you taking the time. I know I've kept you like way long, almost like three hours here tonight. Again, really appreciate your time and telling the story. I hope people check out the Mike Four series.

• 2:56:59Speaker 08

  And a school for the great game. Guys, this is a really enjoyable read if like, yeah, I'm enjoying the hell out of this.

• 2:57:07Jack Murphy?

  The link to the books is down in the description of this video, so you can find it right there. Next week, we're gonna have a 160th guy on. He flew MH47s for 160th. Excited to talk to him on Friday, next Friday. We're also a bit at the end of an era here. We're moving studios. So by the end of this month, you're gonna see episodes in our new studio. This place is gonna be shut down.

• 2:57:34Speaker 08

  Jack and I were just looking at emails earlier.

• 2:57:37Jack Murphy?

  We've been in here for like four years altogether.

• 2:57:39Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah. So, and Jackson Smith, thank you very much for the donation. We deeply appreciate it.

• 2:57:45Jack Murphy?

  JR, I would love, I know you split your time between two different locations. When the next time you come through the greater New York metropolitan area, like sometime this fall or this winter, I'd love to have you in our new studio because you're also a bit of a historian and I would love to have you just sit down and discuss the history of CIA paramilitary operations or just CIA in general, because you have so much information about that and you've studied it so closely, you're so passionate about it. I'd love to continue this conversation, you know, later on in this year.

• 2:58:20Speaker 07

  Well, I'll be happy to. Justin's already invited me to come to New York and talk to him as well. So, you know, I think we'll, we'll make it, make it work. I'm not sure when, uh, you know, that's, uh, that's the great thing about being a mere wretched federal pensioner. I don't actually have a schedule.

• 2:58:37Jack Murphy?

  Maybe, maybe we can have both you and Justin come in at the same time. That'd be That would be amazing. Yeah.

• 2:58:43Speaker 07

  Okay, guys. Well, it's been my pleasure and, uh, and, and.

• 2:58:47Speaker 09

  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.

• 2:59:01Speaker 10

  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.

• 2:59:12Speaker 09

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

• 2:59:18Speaker 11

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

• 2:59:23Speaker 09

  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.

• 2:59:43Speaker 03

  Hey guys, Lady Luck here. I just love the fall season. Cris mornings, pumpkin spice latte, and it's the best time to cozy up and play Spin Quest. They have over a thousand different slots in all my favorite casino-style games. And they're running a deal for all new players, a $30 coin package for just 10 bucks. So this fall, grab your favorite blanket, visit spinquest.com, and download the app today.

• 3:00:08Speaker 04

  Spin Quest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details. Good luck as you move studios. That's pretty cool.

• 3:00:16Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, thank you. We're really excited about it and all the things that to come.

• 3:00:20Speaker 09

  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.

• 3:00:35Speaker 10

  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.

• 3:00:46Speaker 09

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

• 3:00:51Speaker 11

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

• 3:00:57Speaker 09

  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.

• 3:01:17Speaker 03

  Hey guys, Lady Luck here. I just love the fall season. Cris mornings, pumpkin spice latte, and it's the best time to cozy up and play Spin Quest. They have over a thousand different slots in all my favorite casino-style games. And they're running a deal for all new players, a $30 coin package for just 10 bucks. So this fall, grab your favorite blanket, visit spinquest.com, and download the app today.

• 3:01:41Speaker 04

  Spin Quest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 3:01:47Jack Murphy?

  It's gonna be awesome. JR, thank you again. And everybody else out there.

• 3:01:52Speaker 09

  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.

• 3:02:07Speaker 10

  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.

• 3:02:18Speaker 09

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

• 3:02:23Speaker 11

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

• 3:02:29Speaker 09

  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.

• 3:02:50Speaker 12

  Hanging out at the pool is great. Relaxing and playing Vegas-style games on my phone at the same time. Drinking one hand and a blackjack in the other. It's all at Spinquest. Over a thousand games, including your favorite slots and table games. Be cool with this summer special. New players get $30 coin packs for 10 at spinquest.com.

• 3:03:13Speaker 04

  Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 3:03:19Jack Murphy?

  See you next Friday. Have a good weekend. Okay, out here. Take care, JR. Thank you, JR.

• 3:03:28Speaker 09

  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.

• 3:03:42Speaker 10

  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.

• 3:03:53Speaker 09

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

• 3:03:58Speaker 11

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

• 3:04:04Speaker 09

  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.

• 3:04:25Speaker 12

  Forget whatever plans you have this weekend, because you're staying at home and playing on Spin Quest. And there's never been a better time to sign up than right now. New users get $30 coin packs for just $10. All the table games you love, with hundreds of slot games and real cash prizes. That's at spinquest.com. S-P-I-N-Q-U-E-S-T dot com.

• 3:04:47Speaker 04

  Spin Quest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 3:04:55Speaker 00

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 3:05:08Speaker 01

  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,

• 3:05:52Speaker 01

  paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 3:05:55Speaker 03

  Hey guys, Lady Luck here. I just love the fall season. Cris Morning's Pumpkin Spice Latte, and it's the best time to cozy up and play Spin Quest. They have over 1,000 different slots in all my favorite casino-style games. And they're running a deal for all new players, a $30 coin package for just $10. So this fall, grab your favorite blanket, visit spinquest.com and download the app today.

• 3:06:19Speaker 04

  Spin Quest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 3:06:25Speaker 14

  Monday night brings one more big matchup to settle into. And when every play matters, the last thing you want to do is step away to figure out dinner. That's where DiGiorno comes in. Get a DiGiorno pizza ready before kickoff, then enjoy restaurant-quality taste fresh from your own oven while you stay locked into every play. Stock up on DiGiorno over the weekend so when Monday night rolls around, the only thing you sweat is the game. Shop now at the link in the episode description. It's not delivery, it's DiGiorno.