Delta Force Operator and CIA Officer | Gary Harrington (throwback episode)

original airdate - 3/13/23 I spent most of my career working in the shadows. While some of my service was spent with large groups, such as the 32nd Marine Amphibious Unit, serving in Beirut in 1982, I spent most of my career working on small teams or alone. We often lived and worked with foreign military units like a Kuwaiti tank unit in the northern desert in 1996. In 1998, I worked alone in Yemen. Trouble spots on my own became my specialty. After 9/11, I launched to Uzbekistan in the vanguard for 5th Special Forces Group and served on several teams in Afghanistan during 2001 and 2002, participating in major combat operations alongside Afghan indigenous forces. Often, my mission was to enter a country to determine if other special operations forces could safely follow and operate. If so, I would develop the situation and make ready for them to arrive. In 2002, after departing Afghanistan, I moved to a mid-Eastern location to prepare the way for the next conflict. Working independently and conducting successful, often classified missions on several continents taught me the power of prudence…and the skills that must accompany it. Find Gary here:⬇️ https://powerofprudence.com/ To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse GhostBed⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 10% off! 0:00 - Intro 00:51 - Origin story 7:01 - USMC 16:10 - FBI recruitment 18:05 - Enlisting in Special Forces 21:49 - 7th Group SF 25:00 - Hearing about Delta Force 27:22 - Delta Selection & OTC 34:00 - Invitation to leave & the aftermath in the Army 41:03 - Highly Qualified 43:38 - 5th SF Group 1:06:40 - Picked to work in a classified cell in 5th Group 1:08:22 - 9/11 & getting ready for the GWOT 1:14:50 - Setting the stage in Uzbekistan 1:23:10 - Infilling to Bagram and Tora Bora 1:34:00 - Bin Laden getting away 1:50:00 - Standing up FOB Orgun 2:09:47 - AFO in Iraq 2:13:45 - Making the jump from Army to the CIA & CIA ops 2:37:39 - Viewer questions 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.

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  Special Operations.

• 1:38Speaker 04

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

• 1:54Speaker 05

  Hey folks, welcome to episode 197 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy, here with our guest today, Gary Harrington. Gary had a really incredible career, stretching from the Marine Corps to Special Forces to Delta Force to the CIA. We're really excited to have him on the show today. And Gary, thank you for joining us on a Monday evening.

• 2:16Speaker 06

  Hey, thanks. It's an honor.

• 2:19Speaker 05

  You know, I'll start from the top like we do with most of our guests. I'm going to ask you a little bit about, you know, your upbringing and sort of that path that took you towards military service. If you could kind of lay on your origins.

• 2:33Speaker 06

  My parents were the first of their families to ever graduate high school. So my grandparents, none of them ever made it out of elementary school. I had one grandfather that was a hobo for a while. So when I grew up, it was poor, it was poor farmers. And my parents were that generation that, hey, we've got to leave the farm and do something different. My dad had served a couple of years in the Air Force, and that was the time he met my mom when he was home on leave. And I grew up, you know, it was western North Carolina. As a matter of fact, when I was young,

• 3:15Speaker 06

  we still borrowed my grandfather's mule to plow our garden. So, you know, it was, it's funny because those skills, you know, I still had relatives with an outhouse. Those skills came back to serve me well in SF, you know, when you go live somewhere in some other country and you don't have all those facilities. But, you know, military wasn't talked about a lot. My dad just did his two years in the Air Force, married my mom, worked for a telephone company. We moved every few years for that. And, you know, my parents were that generation that struggled real hard to make it.

• 3:59Speaker 06

  And improve themselves from, you know, barely making hints meet. Now, I can remember when they used to have to go to borrow a dollar from a grandfather to make it through the week. And we'd go up there and work on the garden and so we could have the garden and a hog and a cow. Helped get us through the the year. But hey, they kept digging and working, worked real hard, living the American dream. And, you know, we became middle class family, lived in the suburbs, moved around.

• 4:37Speaker 06

  I think I was one of those people that was shy. I had a upbringing that probably made, I was probably not the most self-confident person.

• 4:48Speaker 06

  Which later probably fired some of my drive and determination to do some of the things that I did. But one thing we were taught is hard work. And we were taught to take punishment. So that that all served me well in the military. And, you know, I was pretty shy and didn't think of anything about going into the military. Till I was in college at a little place called Campbell College back at the time, up near Fayetteville. And there was this, one day I was running track. There was this big giant Marine, six foot four, V-shaped.

• 5:34Speaker 06

  Officer, selection officer, walking around. He came up to me and I was a scrawny, skinny, thick glasses wearing, distance runner. And he said, hey, I hear you think you can run pretty good. I'm going to challenge you to a decathlon and you can pick eight of the events and I'll kick your ass. I was like, what? I'll, I'll, I'll pick all the events that I can do.

• 6:02Speaker 06

  And in the end, you know, I got invited to go to the platoon leaders course up in Quantico. And, you know, I hadn't really thought about the military, but I was a smart ass and I, I loved challenges. So, you know, that guy started talking about, you ain't tough enough to make it. You know, we, we exercise real hard. We push you real hard and I just don't think you're man enough. Well, that was all I needed to hear. So, uh, you know, I, I said, hey, uh, wait a second. You're telling me I can go up there for six weeks. You're going to give me clothes to wear,

• 6:42Speaker 06

  a place to sleep, and you're going to feed me? And at the end, you're going to pay me like $700? Shit, I'm there. So, uh, off I went to, uh, the platoon leaders course. Um, but you know, I, I got there and it was the discipline.

• 7:04Speaker 06

  And everything that happened sort of just changed me. I'd been an extremely,

• 7:12Speaker 06

  anxious person and you know, I had an outgoing overt personality to cover up my, shyness and anxiety. Um, I think in, in some respects, I grew up as like a long ranger kind of guy, but the man I admired was Tonto, the quiet, silent guy. The guy that my grandfather told stories about from his days of hard work and men and hobos.

• 7:43Speaker 06

  So, the discipline in the Marine Corps, I realized that, hey, I can take more shit than most people can take. And I can be better than these other people if I take more. So bring it on. Give me all you got. And, uh, it sort of just slipped a switch in me and I, I, you know, became a lot more outgoing and confident person. And from that day forward, you know, I wanted to be a Marine and, uh, upon graduation of college, I got commissioned as a second lieutenant in Marine Corps.

• 8:21Speaker 05

  And what year was that that you got commissioned?

• 8:24Speaker 06

  Uh, nineteen, well, December of seventy nine, I was one of those people that was on a little bit longer than normal college, uh, course of study. So I didn't finish in quite four years. I dropped, I had dropped out for a year. And, um, uh, so December seventy nine, and I began, um, uh, the basic school in early nineteen eighty.

• 8:52Speaker 05

  And I, where did you, uh, where did you land in the Marine Corps after getting commissioned and going through the basic course?

• 8:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, after the basic and infantry officers course, I went to Camp Lejeune, was in first battalion, second Marines, um, did a year as a platoon commander there.

• 9:11Speaker 06

  Heard about this thing called recon and, uh, got offered to try out for recon. So made it, uh, went to recon, loved that. Um, yeah, I got to go to SF scuba school, mountain climbing school, um, amphib recon school, scout sniper instructor school. I was the second officer to ever, uh, make it through scout sniper instructor school. And that was in, uh, nineteen eighty-three.

• 9:43Speaker 05

  So, so this is like the greenside recon, uh, part of the Marine Corps back in those days. And, and what was going on kind of in the world and in the Marine Corps at that time? I mean, were these like the, the Libya Beirut years?

• 9:59Speaker 06

  So I was actually the, one of the first, the first Marine in Beirut in nineteen eighty-two. So, you know, back in the eighties, let's remember back then, the eighty-second airborne was known as the jumping junkies. And, uh, you know, the, the military, you know, we, we were all suffering from the post Vietnam time and, and, uh, people looked down on people in the military. And in the Marine Corps, you know, I, Marine Corps infantry is high diddle, diddle, straight up the middle. And there weren't any wars going. And, you know, I, um,

• 10:39Speaker 06

  I did take a float, a team, my team, we went out on float to Beirut, wound up in Beirut. We were supposed to do this nice med cruise where you hit ports and have some liberty, do an exercise. But the moment we got over to the med, we charged off to Beirut and did squares in the ocean. Until it was time to go into Beirut. The first time we went was to evacuate the PLO. And then we went to take some liberty. And then we came back after the massacres and the refugee camps to start the M and F. And we stayed, uh,

• 11:23Speaker 06

  stayed in Beirut till

• 11:27Speaker 06

  probably November, uh, early November of eighty-two. And were relieved by the people that ultimately were there for the bombing.

• 11:38Speaker 06

  The next year.

• 11:39Speaker 05

  The embassy bombing in eighty-three or Marine barracks bombing in.

• 11:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, Marine barracks bombing in eighty-three. Yeah. And, you know, it's, it's interesting because in that time, you know, I was, I was, I don't know, I was an outspoken person. As a Marine officer, I had a mustache, which is not, you're not supposed to do, but I, I, uh, I chose to do so. And at one point I was told to move my recon guys because we were covering the beach. Um, and doing OPs to move into that barracks. And I said, hey, this barracks is, is, is a sitting target. And we're better off at being out front and, and doing observation. Matter of fact,

• 12:26Speaker 06

  if we took everybody offshore and put them on ships, we could put Marines on rooftops, uh, doing OPs and accomplish the same mission that we're accomplishing now.

• 12:39Speaker 06

  And I refused to move the Marines into the, um, Into that building.

• 12:47Speaker 06

  The, you know, new people came in after that and, you know, things changed and they moved into the building.

• 12:55Speaker 05

  I mean, all this, correct me if I'm wrong, Gary, but it sounds like maybe this was a bit of a formative experience in the sense that an introduction to terrorism against the United States and American personnel, but also sort of your future in scouting out locations where, you know, American forces will be housed.

• 13:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was, I mean, yes, we had no idea what terrorism was at that time and I'd been trained in, in rifle platoon and company level tactics. So I could apply them, but here we were doing, you know, essentially a police force mission and, you know, we still did our OPs and did the basics and, but it was, it was an eye opening experience. And that was the first time, you know, that I'd been in a, in an environment where you actually talked to civilians and mixed with civilians and you weren't sure, you know,

• 13:58Speaker 06

  it's like low intensity conflict, who are the bad guys and who are the good guys?

• 14:03Speaker 05

  Absolutely. And then what, what, after your trip to Lebanon, what was sort of the next stop for you as a young marine officer?

• 14:13Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, first lieutenant and, and while we were on that float, I, I had the honor and this and misfortune of being put in the position of commander of troops, which is normally a lieutenant colonel on an amphibious ship, but we were, there weren't that many of us on the ship. So I, so the captain and I had a very strange relationship because I was a first lieutenant and he and I used to go at battle each other because he'd tell me that he wanted me to order the Marines to do this or that. And I would say, no, certain things I'm not going to order the Marines to do. And so it was interesting,

• 14:56Speaker 06

  but I think that sort of set the tone. I just had this knack always most of my career of kind of bucking the, the command structure somewhat. And it was good practice to do that.

• 15:10Speaker 06

  So we came back to Camp Lejeune and you know, my time on the team or with the platoon ended and I got moved up to the training office, which I hated. My, I, I'm 26 years old. I'm, I'm, I'm a distance runner. I've been to scout sniper instructor school, amphib recon school, SF scuba school. I want to be like, you know, an enlisted guy and fight. And then they say, well, you're going to be a training officer. So I did that. Then the bombing of

• 15:48Speaker 06

  the barracks happened and they were getting ready for Grenada. And at first, they said they wanted me to take, to take over and take a platoon back into Beirut because I'd had boots on the ground. But then I think smartly, they decided that wasn't the best thing to do, to leave the person commanding that platoon with his own platoon to do that. So I stayed the training officer and eventually found out that, oh, hey, you've been promoted to captain. Now your time in the Fleet Marine Force is over. You're going to go to, you

• 16:32Speaker 06

  have two choices, Marine barracks, ADAC, Alaska, or Guam. And I said, what, what is Marine barracks duty? And they said, well, don't worry. You do that for a few years, then you hope you come back as a company commander and get some command time. Then you go away for staff again, and then you can come back in higher command jobs if you make the cut. But you know, that's not what a 26 year old guy on adventure wants to hear,

• 17:08Speaker 06

  right? So I ended up, I resigned my commission and thought about other things to do. I, I actually almost followed the route of becoming a mercenary in Nicaragua. And fortunately, that didn't work out. I think I'm glad now that that didn't. And

• 17:35Speaker 06

  Ended up being recruited by the FBI and went through their process and took their test. Till I made it to the point, the final interview where I'm sitting in front of three guys wearing suits. And they're saying, okay, you understand, and this is in the eighties and it was eight, mid eighties, early nineteen eighty-four. That the job of an FBI special agent is more admin than what you're used to. And it's a lot of sitting in the office and then you have moments where you do other things and are you ready for that? And again, I, I, I was happy, right, that I had been accepted.

• 18:15Speaker 06

  And, um, but I looked at these three guys in suits and I said, is that what I want to be doing 15 years from now? And again, I didn't think about the future. I, I thought, I don't know.

• 18:30Speaker 06

  I thought about, uh, the adventure and I, I, I guess I believed that I had a role in life and that was to be in combat. Uh, maybe I wouldn't make it out, but I didn't have a plan on getting older.

• 18:46Speaker 06

  Retiring, all that kind of stuff. So I, um, yeah, in the moment I accepted and was told, you know, I'd be getting an assignment to go to Quantico. But after I went home and thought about it, I was like, I can't do this. So I called them up and asked them if I could get out of, uh, going to Quantico. And they said, do you know how many, how few guys we can take that aren't lawyers or, um, meeting certain requirements during this time in the eighties? And I said, I, I can't help it. That's, that's, that's not where my heart is. So, um, I bailed on that.

• 19:31Speaker 06

  Then I went to enlist in special forces. Went through a MAP station, was in the process of swearing in when an officer runs in and says, hey, stop, stop, stop. You can't swear him in. And he pulled out a reg and he said, here's this one line that says, former officers of other branches of the military may not enlist in the United States Army.

• 19:55Speaker 05

  No way.

• 19:57Speaker 06

  And, and I, and that's one of the reasons I bailed on the FBI, right? And I thought, holy crap, you know, the, the rug's been pulled out from under me. What am I gonna do? But, um, you know, I fell back and I started researching and I found that the Army Reserve didn't have that one line regulation in there. So I went to Reserve Recruiter. Then he was like, hey, you're kind of splitting hairs. I said, yeah, but do you want to look at how you can do it? Cause it's not in your reg? Or do you want to look at how you can't? And I said, you're gonna go out there and hire some 18 year old off the street that

• 20:39Speaker 06

  you don't know, maybe they're a dropout, maybe they're a delinquent, whatever. I said, I've, I've proven myself. I have a career. Um, I've got a good record. So, um, you know, in the end, they, they accept me and I enlisted in the Army Reserve for SF. But to do that, I, you had to enlist in a shortage MOS. So like now I'm going to be SF. I'm like, wow, I was in recon and I had these guys, they were E twos and threes and they had a little bit of years experience. Special forces guys, they're E sixes and E sevens. They've been

• 21:24Speaker 06

  doing this years. They're going to be like ghosts moving through the forest. They're going to be like this big, you know, it's the ultimate. It's everything. And, um, so.

• 21:38Speaker 06

  I and I was really excited to become a demo guy or a weapons guy. That's what we all want to be. And they said, hey, sorry, buddy. We got all the weapons and demo guys we need. If you want to come in SF, your choice is medic or combo. And I, and I thought about the 104s and the radios we'd been humping around in my time in the Marine Corps. And I said, I sure as hell don't want to be a combo guy. So I signed up to be a medic and went through the medic course, Q course, medic course, airborne school, and wound up in seventh group as a medic.

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• 26:52Speaker 05

  So Gary, you hit the ground in seventh group. And I mean, is it what you were looking for or what you were expecting?

• 27:01Speaker 06

  To some extent, you know, going through the Q course, I was surprised how everybody kept saying, listen to the Rangers, follow a Ranger, do what a Ranger does. And I was like, to be honest, I love Rangers. They're great. But my training in the basic school, the officer infantry course, and the recon school, amphib recon school, we were really, really good at patrolling. So I'm not sure I'd learned anymore, but applied all those skills. So it was good. And then, you know, the thing that was new to me was deploying

• 27:41Speaker 06

  and working with foreign militaries. And that, you know, that was a whole new awakening at

• 27:51Speaker 06

  It kind of reminded me in my first days in as an infantry platoon commander where you had high school dropouts and I had a couple of guys that that had been given the choice of jail or the Marine Corps. So I found that some of those old skills came came in hand.

• 28:10Speaker 05

  And this is what year that you get the seventh group?

• 28:14Speaker 06

  I'm I hit seventh group probably like 85, 86.

• 28:20Speaker 05

  So the the wars in Central America are still raging pretty hot at that time.

• 28:25Speaker 06

  And that's, I mean, as a former Marine, I mean, one reason I wanted to go to SF was because during my time in the Marine Corps, I did make a little short trip to Honduras and I did meet some guys at one of those black agency sites and some of the folks they were training. That's how I almost made a misstep there and wound up working in Nicaragua. But I was so excited because I saw, you know, this is peacetime. These SF guys, they're out there doing it. And if there's anybody that's going to get mixed up in anything,

• 29:09Speaker 06

  it's the SF guys. And that's where if you want action, that's where you need to be is in SF. So I was very happy to get there. It didn't, you know, it didn't work out quite on my top, my own personal time timeframe of getting in any action. But that's how I spent my time in the seventh group.

• 29:32Speaker 05

  Down in Honduras?

• 29:35Speaker 06

  I made several deployments to Honduras and into Panama as things were getting difficult in Panama. We went down there a couple of times, got extended there.

• 29:51Speaker 06

  For several months, once as people were trying to figure out what was gonna happen and yeah, so it was that during that time is are the is the first time I heard people talk about this whole Delta Force thing. And you know, I I'd never really heard of it. Uh, now my SARM major, um, SARM major Parke was on, what does he call it? Green light team, the forerunners to Delta.

• 30:24Speaker 05

  Blue light.

• 30:25Speaker 06

  Blue light and he did not, he did not, he didn't care for people that worked for him going out for Delta. But I heard this thing, you know, and everybody that I knew kept talking about if I get in shape, you know, it it's so hard and we were on a scuba team. I was on a scuba team. Scuba teams are fit teams. We we run hard, uh, PT hard and you know, but everybody was like, I have to get ready for it when there's time. And I'm just not, I'm I'm not that way. I like challenges. I like, uh, if somebody says it can't be done, I'm the guy that that would say, well, you know, try me and let's see.

• 31:12Speaker 06

  So I heard that they gave a PT test at the old eighteenth airborne corps by the stadium there, like I think once a month or something like that, you could just show up and take a PT test. So I didn't tell anybody and I went and took the PT test, passed their PT test. You know, I I know you, we probably all know that guys game that system, right? They know what events there are and all that. I didn't know. I just showed up, you know, what do you want me to do? And some of those events, the crab walk and some of that, the the some of the runs and stuff you do, I had no idea how to do them, but they, you know, I made the PT test.

• 31:56Speaker 06

  Then they uh, send you to take all the psychological tests, review your records, all that stuff. And I wound up getting an invitation to come uh, to selection.

• 32:10Speaker 06

  So, and my SARM major did not like it.

• 32:15Speaker 06

  And I was not successful my first time, um, you know, and I think it's the way I'm wired. I I got really motivated for it. So, I mean, I was in good shape, but I started training crazy. And, you know, every other day I was rucking thirteen miles with fifty, for fifty pounds. Then I would go, um, do stairs with with a rucksack for an hour. Um, the days not on that, I would run six or seven miles. And I I was so motivated to get ready to go that I didn't realize I was putting myself in a deficit.

• 32:59Speaker 06

  I I went, uh, I went to that first selection, had one of those days where I've never had a broken compass before, but I had a broken compass. And then my backup little wrist compass on my watchband, when I went to that as the backup, it had broken off, uh, of climbing over deadfall. And, uh, had a really, really bad day up there. They kept me in, but then like the next day, you know, yeah, I was, I was cut. But they said, hey, um, you can, we like your attitude. You can come back in six, um,

• 33:43Speaker 06

  you can come back and try again if you want. I was like, sure, what's, when's the next time? Six months from now. So I said, okay, you see me in six months. And, uh, went back that second time and you know, it's, it's odd. I I was smarter.

• 34:04Speaker 06

  I, like, I saw pictures of myself after that first time. I looked like, there's a picture of me, uh, on Halloween. I I think I came back right before it was the fall course. I was unsuccessful. And I looked like an Auschwitz victim. My, my neck was all drawn tight. My, my skin was tight. I looked like an Auschwitz victim and, um, The second time I just, I didn't train like I did and I made sure I ate well and I went up there healthy and with a good weight on me and I tried to relax some, a little bit more

• 34:46Speaker 06

  during the legs and it worked out, it made it.

• 34:51Speaker 05

  And so you make it through selection and then go to OTC and I mean, what was that experience like? I mean, I, what year are we at now? 1990 or so?

• 35:02Speaker 06

  Yeah. And well, I, I got to, um, OTC was, I mean, we talk about training.

• 35:11Speaker 06

  OTC is, I mean, you shoot more rounds. Well, I forget what they used to compare it to that each individual shoots as much as or more rounds than a company of infantry does, something like

• 35:25Speaker 05

  that. Like I've heard like a million rounds you fire.

• 35:30Speaker 06

  It was something like that, you know, it, for a first couple of months, I mean, just to get your hands used to firing that much was a lot and it, I mean, it really honed your skills. I mean, special ops, special forces isn't, I don't think it's a lot of super things. It's doing the basics with a very high degree of proficiency and the OTC teaches that. There's a lot, yes, you learn CQB and some other special techniques,

• 36:11Speaker 06

  but as a lot of time is spent on doing the basics of shoot, move and communicate with very, very well. And those are the things that never leave you. All these years later, like in the agency, when I go back to weapons qual, they would always give me a hard time because I don't shoot.

• 36:36Speaker 06

  Just when it's time for the recall and they want to put me up against some Delta guy or some special ops or Ranger guy and try to egg us on to to have a shooting contest. But and but those those that you do the reps so many times that it's just ingrained in you.

• 37:00Speaker 05

  I mean, from some of the folks I've talked to, they they say like it was the time of their life, all these like counterterrorism scenarios they keep putting you through and that are challenging, but it sounds like it's it's also a lot of fun.

• 37:13Speaker 06

  Well, it's fun. But you know, one of the things that happens is, I mean, you think you've made the big time. And, you know, I'm I'm I'm one of those people that probably put too much emphasis on it. It was being that was all I wanted to be. And, you know, things about family and everything else just go away. And I by this time, I was married and had kids. And but that was what was important. I mean, you think you're going to save the

• 37:55Speaker 06

  country, you're going to be when I went to when I went to Marine Sniper School, that was the time, you know, the Ayatollah Khomeini was there. And I used to dream about lying laying behind a or lying behind a sniper rifle and seeing him through my scope and taking that shot. Well, then you go through the the OTC and you dream of doing the assault like like SEAL Team Six did to get Bin Laden, right? And it's, you know, it felt just great. And I eventually wound up in a squadron and was serving there. During my time in a squadron,

• 38:40Speaker 06

  I because I spoke Spanish, got an opportunity to go to in 1992 to a Central American country where there were some activities going on that Delta was taking part in down there.

• 39:02Speaker 06

  And during that time, um, I had a disagreement, misunderstanding with uh, the guy in charge of that. And if one thing led to another and then I got sent back home. And, um, eventually I got the invitation to leave the Delta unit. Um, you know, the

• 39:31Speaker 06

  uh, then Colonel Boykin told me, yeah, he thought about keeping me, but, uh, you know, my, somebody else, uh, down the chain that was more involved with that, uh, didn't want me around. So I got invited to take a hike and find somewhere else to live. So, yeah, that was a

• 39:51Speaker 05

  This was like a, uh, like a personality conflict.

• 39:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, it, it started, we had a misunderstanding on this, uh, uh, thing we were doing. And it blew into stuff and, and probably plus my, the way my personality is, I got phone calls that said, you can't talk about this to your wife, to your team leader, or anybody back in the States. You can't say anything. And so I was holding all this stuff inside and I couldn't understand what was happening because I

• 40:26Speaker 06

  like, well, nobody's even asking me. Nobody's talking to me. So, uh, you know, eventually,

• 40:37Speaker 06

  eventually I made a choice to talk to somebody I thought was a, a neutral person that I could speak to,

• 40:46Speaker 06

  with confidence. But then they felt there were things that they needed to tell uh, somebody else. And, and, and basically what I did was I, I sort of just threw fuel on the fire unknowingly. And, um, a lot of fingers started going back and forth. And in the end, I'm the newer guy.

• 41:08Speaker 06

  I got asked to go. And it was a devastating blow. You know, this is, I had built all my self-worth on that. And I thought, this is it. All my career, being a marine, being, uh, how I viewed my purpose in life. Everything I did was based on that. And then the day that ended, you know, what are, what are you gonna do? I, you know, you walk, some, sometimes there's things in life that hit you like that. So everything you believe, you have to question, what do I believe about myself?

• 41:48Speaker 05

  Right.

• 41:49Speaker 06

  Uh, what do I believe about how people perceive me? And, you know, my future plans and goals are gone. So I'm gonna have to start at the basics and, and, and re-figure my whole plan. And, uh, that, that's a, it's a difficult thing to do. Um, for me, it was especially hard because now you've got to go find another job in the military. And you go and they go, are you coming from Delta? Wow, yeah, good, good, we're good to have you. Uh, and, uh, and they, wait a second, wait, why, why, why didn't you leave Delta?

• 42:29Speaker 06

  And, um, you know, I, I never went into detail or tried to make excuses. I said, hey, I had disagreement. I, I got asked to go, um, take a look at my record and as a marine and as a soldier. And, and then judge me on what I do. Cause I'm, if you, if you think I'm a, you know, a shit bird, whatever, then hey, I'm, I'm happy to look for somewhere else.

• 42:59Speaker 05

  Did, uh, did the, did the unit offer you a bit of a soft landing? Because this wasn't like an ethical or an integrity issue per se. Uh, did they try to like, you know, help you find a, a new place to settle down?

• 43:10Speaker 06

  You know, to be honest, I, I, they must have. I don't remember how, how, how that happened, but I wound up, uh, for a very short time going to, um,

• 43:24Speaker 06

  The center and writing a manual on, I think, one of the first Sephardic manuals.

• 43:31Speaker 05

  Oh, really?

• 43:32Speaker 06

  Right. Yeah.

• 43:34Speaker 05

  At the, at the Special Warfare Center?

• 43:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, in 1992.

• 43:39Speaker 05

  Because there was, oh, man, yeah, so I, I probably know a bunch of people that you cross paths with. Some cool people were involved in like standing up that course at the time. And, and there, there's like a, um, I don't know how deep you want to get into it, but I, I mean, I know there was like a, a stack of, uh, SOPs that the unit used. And that had to be kind of like distilled into what Sephardic was going to teach, as I recall.

• 44:04Speaker 06

  And I didn't, I didn't, uh, I wasn't part of, I think I was dealing more with the language part of it.

• 44:12Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 44:13Speaker 06

  And dealing with a secretary there and we had, we had the documents and trying to get that turned into manual. But then after a few months, I got asked to, if I wanted to go to Norfolk, Virginia, and work as the army rep to the Naval Safety Center to oversee, uh, the diving safety of all, uh, army diving. So that was, uh, it was a different thing. I was the only army guy and I was an SF diver. But here I was with, uh, master divers, hard hat divers. There was one, um, SEAL corpsman there.

• 44:58Speaker 06

  So everybody else were, was hard hat divers. And we,

• 45:06Speaker 06

  we, we divided into little teams and we traveled around the world. Anywhere there was a US Military Command that had dive equipment. We did the inspections on the equipment and on their program and, uh,

• 45:22Speaker 06

  Some of their record keeping and did that stuff. So it was, it was an interesting time. A lot of travel involved. I got to go to

• 45:35Speaker 06

  get qualified in hard hat diving and the sea, was it CR 15, the mixed gas rig.

• 45:43Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 45:44Speaker 06

  While I was there. So it was, it was interesting and the SEALs wanted me to show up to do their inspections because the hard hat divers hated the SEALs. And always, they were always extra, extra hard on them. And so I, I did that.

• 46:04Speaker 05

  So I mean, you're also like becoming like highly qualified as a soldier between all of your Marine Corps training SF, you know, being a medic, the training you went through OTC in the unit, free fall, all this additional dive training. I mean, kind of, you were a busy guy.

• 46:20Speaker 06

  Yeah. O and I course, I went to O and I course.

• 46:25Speaker 06

  Before I went active duty. So I guess I missed the part that, so I, I came on as reservist. With 11th Special Forces Group when I signed in and went through the Q course and all that. But I was honest with everybody and said, I don't plan on remaining a reservist. As soon as I can go active, I am. And so I sort of backdoored the rules while I couldn't enlist on active.

• 46:49Speaker 05

  Right.

• 46:49Speaker 06

  I did enlist in reserves. I did get qualified in a shortage MOS. And then there was a reg that said, if you're qualified in a shortage MOS, you can come on active duty. So I, I, I hand carried my paperwork after I, I think it was after I finished O and I school. And literally in, from driving all around the country, in two weeks, I went from being a reservist to getting an assignment to the seventh group.

• 47:22Speaker 05

  I love the workarounds.

• 47:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I got to meet, I remember Henry Bone, Sergeant Major Bone. Well, for, there might be some people out there.

• 47:35Speaker 06

  He was the person I had to see to get accepted on active duty. And I was wearing a mustache. Henry Bone was the guy that he hated. He was a very regulation focused individual. And he hated mustaches and he kept staring at my mustache. And I'd heard all these stories about him and I said, Sergeant Major Bone,

• 47:57Speaker 06

  do you like, is there something wrong with my mustache? And he goes, well, you know, I think, well, wait a second. If you can just make sure it stays within regulations. As a former Marine, you know, I would expect that from you. I said, all right, I'll just shave it off. So I didn't, I didn't say you had to shave it off. I said, I don't want every time I walk around, you staring at me trying to find a hair out of place. So I'll shave it off. Yeah, so

• 48:32Speaker 06

  I lifted that dive program. It kind of got more known. And then, then people started clamoring for it and wanting that job. So eventually I got reassigned to Fifth Special Forces Group in 1996. And I showed up at Fifth Special Forces Group and in process, went to 545 as my first Fifth Group team. And Terry Peters was my, was my team sergeant. It was a great team, had a great time.

• 49:20Speaker 06

  And, you know, we, we deployed to Kuwait and did a bunch of training deployments and you know, really cut my teeth on the Middle East then got used to working with Middle Easterners. The group commander, who happened to, we both know him, have been my squadron commander at Delta, one day asked me to come to his office. So I thought, oh shit. He's, he's, he's, after all this time, he's, he's got something for me. So I went up there

• 50:02Speaker 06

  thinking, you know, I'm going to get clobbered. But what he told me was that he wanted to lead the way back to an emphasis on unconventional warfare. And, you know, would I, you know, he was counting on me to take a lead role in trying to push that effort forward. And so there was some initiatives, that was in the earlier days of the ASOC course, Advanced Special Operations Technique course. And those things, I started coordinating with the guys

• 50:40Speaker 06

  in fifth group that were kind of leading the charge on that. Steve Potite was one of them.

• 50:48Speaker 05

  And this is just to try to dip back into history a little bit, but like this is like there is a somewhat like notorious of the quote unquote like long hair teams and special forces and the guys who did like clandestine things, which is, and correct me if I'm wrong, Gary, didn't that grow out of the RST mission?

• 51:10Speaker 06

  It, it did. So at the time, there was no teams, other than the RST that were long haired teams, right? So and they were, and they were in fifth group. So we had both teams, the team that worked with DARPA and DITRA, and then the RSTs were the two kind of long haired teams. And it's kind of odd because fifth group was trying to stand up at CIF when I showed up. They hadn't done it yet.

• 51:46Speaker 05

  They were the last ones.

• 51:50Speaker 06

  Well, and, and it's funny because I showed up everybody, oh, Delta guy, you're a shooter. You're an assaulter, cat, cat. You know, you got.

• 51:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 51:58Speaker 06

  And, and that's what you are. But I was assigned to a scuba team because I was a, a DMT qualified medic. You know, you're, you're never, sergeant major is never going to let you off scuba team. And, uh, so I, uh,

• 52:19Speaker 06

  you know, I was, but I said, well, I'm assigned to a UW team and I'm throwing all my effort into that. You know, a lot of people wanted me to try to change and, and come over. I, you know, I'd been to sniper instructor school as a marine.

• 52:34Speaker 06

  But, you know, I'm a person, you tell me what my lane is, I'm gonna do my best to do that.

• 52:42Speaker 05

  And that, that was nice of the group commander, I guess, to offer some sort of reproach ma after, after a falling out.

• 52:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, uh, cause you know, technically, to be honest, that was the same guy that, uh, you know, my previous conversation with him was, I'm going to make sure you get kicked out of the army.

• 53:05Speaker 06

  So I was, uh, yeah, it was confusing, but hey, I was glad for the opportunity. And, and that's one of the things that drives you, you know, uh, to have had what I had and leave Delta the way I did. I mean, that was a big driver to me. Uh, it's like, I have to prove myself. Uh, I've got to drive myself to the ends, no matter what it takes to show that I'm not,

• 53:32Speaker 06

  just defined by getting kicked out of Delta, you know, it, for a disagreement that happened one time over a long career. And, um, so yeah, I, I, I pushed real hard at everything I did and, um, I got, I, it coincided with my first wife and, uh, deciding she had greener pastures and we did, and that, that her, uh, her role was to be somewhere relatively than with me. So about that time.

• 54:11Speaker 06

  After she left, you know, I started, I went to ASOT. And I had a very interesting time at ASOT. And I have this thing of when I go through schools, if there's something I don't like, I challenge the instructors. And so I challenged instructors pretty hard and they in turn were pretty hard on me. But, you know, it, it worked out well. And I think I probably built a reputation with some of the things that happened at school

• 54:52Speaker 06

  as being innovative, maybe having some skills. And so, you know, I finished that school. Well, then just like a month later, I got called down to SOXEND. And they were talking to me and, you know, about some classified programs that they were wanting to start. So I got selected for that, you know? And I felt, again, that's one of those things that drove me because I was like, wait a second, of everybody in all special forces and all fifth group and Delta to choose from, I'm getting chosen?

• 55:34Speaker 06

  So, yeah, I was, I was, whatever they wanted, I was like, hey, I'm up for it. So off I went to Yemen and operated there by myself for a while, waiting for a team to join me to do a demining mission. And during that time is, was my first time up close at trying to do like assessments. I was sent ahead of time to work in the embassy. And yeah, I, I spent like two months going through training and getting all the right clearances

• 56:19Speaker 06

  so I could read all the Hument and Sigent in the various offices in an embassy that hold those. And

• 56:32Speaker 06

  I was to, you know, make that assessment about the security for follow-on special forces teams. During that time that I was there is when

• 56:45Speaker 06

  the situation in Yemen first started, when Taqun 1998 first started to go downhill. The Islamic Army of Aden was posting threats against any Americans. The the line that the ambassador had and all the embassy had was Yemen is a very safe place. Yes, Al Qaeda passes through here and gets documents here, but they do nothing here. It's the peaceful place. It's like an R and R place. And, you know, Yemen is an up and coming Middle Eastern country. Matter of fact, they were planning

• 57:28Speaker 06

  on Hillary Clinton coming out to visit as first lady. And, you know,

• 57:38Speaker 06

  so the party line was, yeah, there's this, a group of like three guys with a fax machine that call themselves the Islamic Army of Aden. But they, they're not capable of doing anything. They're just a bunch of blowhards. Yemen at the time, European tourists used to go there to get kidnapped because they would kidnap you and take you down to like Hadramat region and treat you well and feed you and house you. It was kind of like a, you know, give you good stories to tell. And as soon as the government would access and give them some vehicles or

• 58:15Speaker 00

  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. 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. And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. 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.

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  See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal. ...wells, they would let people go free. So I think that figured into the ambassador and the intelligence community's assessment that, hey, nothing much is, you know, it's not dangerous here in Yemen. But during my time there, things started happening. There was a car bomb in Sanaa, out near the German consulate.

• 1:00:45Speaker 06

  There were more acts of violence, no big terror attacks or anything, but, but it, to me, it started, it was that things are escalating.

• 1:00:59Speaker 06

  Eventually, the team that was gonna participate in demining showed up and I went with them down to Aiden and we set up in Aiden and started operating in Aiden. During our time in Aiden,

• 1:01:17Speaker 06

  there was a police checkpoint that caught a carload of, well, six guys, I think, in it that had explosives, AKs, RPGs, and a diagram of the little hotel that we were renting to stay in. That, so they arrested them. Those became known as the Aiden Six.

• 1:01:45Speaker 06

  Later, like a month later, there were, the Islamic Army of Aiden did take hostages in Aiden at the British consulate, took some British hostages. And there, it ended in a hostage standoff sort of out, outside of town.

• 1:02:06Speaker 06

  It was a fiasco. The, uh, the bad guys were in a depression in a circle. They had the hostages stand with their legs spread around them and they were firing between their legs. And of course, the, uh, the Yemen army was, was not well-trained. So they were kind of in a circle, shooting, shooting at everybody there. So I think a couple of hostages were killed and not, probably some of them by, you know, friendly fire.

• 1:02:41Speaker 06

  But that changed my assessment.

• 1:02:46Speaker 06

  You know, I'm still reading the traffic and I'm seeing that, okay.

• 1:02:54Speaker 06

  It's true, Al Qaeda is not active here and but they have communications here and it passed through here. Now I have this Islamic army of Aden that has shown that they not only have access to arms and ammunition, but they're willing to take violent action and they're willing to conduct operations against Western interest. And now they may be inept and they were truly inept, but in my assessment, all that remained to happen for them to be, you know, deadly would be to either accept operational control, meaning training and direction from

• 1:03:38Speaker 06

  Al Qaeda, or from hosting an Al Qaeda cell. So now, you know, we're in 1999 and the US had just signed the agreement to allow US ships to start coming in to Aden. And but again, this for me, my assessment was all enabled by my past history, but now my time in Delta and learning about terrorism and studying terrorism. And so I think it all

• 1:04:16Speaker 06

  helped me form this opinion. The ambassador told me I was crazy. The Defense Attache quietly on the side advised me not to get on the wrong side of the ambassador to do like he and the other people, including the agency, did, which was, you know, shake their heads and say, you're right. But it bothered me. I was, as time was coming for that mission to end and go home, I was like, I think, how can I go home and something happens here to Americans, Americans lose their lives?

• 1:04:56Speaker 05

  Shades of Beirut.

• 1:05:00Speaker 06

  It was just, it reminded me of Beirut because like, okay, same, here we go, the same thing. For political reasons, she, the ambassador, did not want an assessment going out that would stop Hillary Clinton from coming out. That was the big feather in her cap. And

• 1:05:22Speaker 06

  But it bothered me to the point that I said, okay, I'm not having success through the embassy. But as an SF guy, I can write an Aryan assessment and send that out through military channels. And then I can get the word out.

• 1:05:40Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 1:05:41Speaker 06

  And I'm not violating any rule. Well, I didn't know because in my training, nobody trains you up. That I didn't realize that the ambassador has the right to see everything that's written. And to weigh in on it. And so I sent it, you know, used the Satcom and sent my report out. And informed the embassy after. And that was a pretty major thing to do. It prompted a flight by the ambassador down to Aiden. Called us all in and chewed us all out. And she said that she would rather run the risk. And she wouldn't let us have our rifles there in Aiden. With all this going on.

• 1:06:28Speaker 06

  We were pistols only and our rifles were locked away in Sanaa several hours away. And she made this statement that, hey, I'd rather run the risk of one of you getting hurt. Than the risk that one of you would hurt an innocent civilian.

• 1:06:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is sounding negligent at this point. Yeah.

• 1:06:51Speaker 06

  What, to me, it was.

• 1:06:56Speaker 06

  You know, but you're soldiers. That when you're in a foreign country, State Department has a final say.

• 1:07:03Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 1:07:03Speaker 06

  And so, you know, we went on, I left. Well, that was 1999. Now, after, we know now that in January of 2000. Terrorist and.

• 1:07:21Speaker 06

  I I saw the sigint that should have indicated something was going on. Uh, let's just say that the sigint, uh, if you go back and look at everything that happened, uh, sort of backed up my assessment. Um, but in January of 2000 was when terrorists loaded a boat with explosives and they tried to attack the USS The Sullivan's. But as they made their run towards the boat, uh, it sank. Too many explosives, not a good enough boat. It plowed under and it sank. And we never, nobody knew about that, but they recovered the explosives.

• 1:08:04Speaker 06

  And, you know, later in October, made the successful attack on the coal then. And I was, by that time I left Yemen, went back to the States and then immediately got trained up and sent as I, I guess I became the first, uh, the first guy to do these sort of, uh, classified, go somewhere, um, do your assessment using, uh, whatever techniques that you've been trained in and some classified stuff. And, uh, so I got sent back to the Middle East and I was in another country.

• 1:08:49Speaker 06

  Within when, uh, uh, the attack on the coal happened, I got flown back to SOCOM to, uh, do a classified de- deposition to go to the Coal Commission.

• 1:09:03Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:09:05Speaker 06

  But guess what? I, I thought the State Department was political. Uh, I did not know that SOCOM can be political too.

• 1:09:16Speaker 06

  Because when I, you know, I gave you a quote earlier about what the ambassador said about us and our rifles.

• 1:09:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:09:24Speaker 06

  And, and there were two points that I made on my deposition. And when I saw the final wording in my deposition, those two things were struck out. And I was like, hey, wait a second. In Delta, we do a hot wash and a hot wash is right after the training exercise. So we talked about the good, the bad and the ugly to make things better. And I thought that's what we're doing for the coal commission. And, you know, they did not want to cast any dispersions toward an ambassador or the State Department. Cause they said, hey, every J set, every SF team, anybody that wants to get in any country, you know, the State Department has to approve that.

• 1:10:10Speaker 06

  So we're not, we're not going to send this out.

• 1:10:14Speaker 05

  A, a deposition, I mean, is, is a legal document, a sworn statement. I mean, I didn't even know you could go in there and chop out parts of it you don't like.

• 1:10:28Speaker 06

  You know, what's right? I, I don't know. I, I, I know I was pissed off.

• 1:10:33Speaker 05

  I, I understand.

• 1:10:34Speaker 06

  That, cause I thought, you know, we're soldiers. We always put the lives first.

• 1:10:43Speaker 05

  And the, the truth has to be first, you know, even if it's unpleasant.

• 1:10:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, truth has to be first. So, um, yeah. You know, it was tough, but you know, I went back to, uh, to my place in the Middle East and, uh, kept doing what I was doing. I finished a year there.

• 1:11:04Speaker 06

  And so it was, that was 2000 and I came back to fifth group. At the, at the end of the year.

• 1:11:17Speaker 06

  And the project I had been doing in the Middle East was in conjunction with the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency.

• 1:11:27Speaker 06

  SOCCENT sponsored it, but I was working, doing some stuff for the J P R A. And a lot of the, some of the guys that worked at the J P R A had been guys that worked at Orange. And retired sergeant majors from Orange and they knew me and some of the stuff I did. In my classified projects, I had some successes and so.

• 1:12:01Speaker 06

  I came back to fifth group. Now I've got, you know, long hair and civilian clothes. And I showed up back at group and you might, I mean, I just landed. Well, group happened to be having a change of command ceremony. And it was John Mulholland was taking command. So, you know, I just showed in to sign in and say, okay, I'm getting the hell out of here. Cause I got to get a haircut and shave and in uniform. Well, then I ran, I ran into the sergeant majors that I, that had, that worked at J P R A.

• 1:12:43Speaker 06

  And they were, hey, welcome, you know, and, and I was, oh, we gotta, we worked with John Mulholland. You know, he was, you know, at Delta and one of the commander at Orange. So you gotta meet him. I go, I can't meet him. I'm, I'm in, ah, don't worry. He's not that way. And they took me and introduced me to John Mulholland. And, you know, I guess he put a lot of weight on them and what they said. And yeah, you know, I told him right off, hey, I, I got asked to leave Delta.

• 1:13:22Speaker 06

  But he placed what those guys said about my ethics and, and, and work ethic and abilities. Then, you know, what the paper might have said, or whatever happened those years ago.

• 1:13:41Speaker 06

  And you know, he wound up giving me an assignment, putting me in fifth group headquarters to work in this classified cell. Fifth group was the first ones to have it to kind of, there was a three man cell that kind of oversaw. One thing was the stand up of the CIF. The other was the RSTs. The other was that other team that does other, uh, works with, uh, DITRA and DARPA. And to, for all the SPECAT programs, we were the ones that sort of had

• 1:14:19Speaker 06

  the reins on those. And, you know, I don't know, John Mohan and I became pretty close. Uh, I don't know why. He, he trusted me a lot. Um, he asked my opinion a lot. We, we had a lot of heart to hearts in his office. Um, I think sometimes to the chagrin of some of the battalion commanders and, um, and, and officers, cause I, I didn't pull any punches. If I thought somebody was trying to get over or use the, like the long haired team,

• 1:14:59Speaker 06

  you know, to get away with something, uh, you know, I'd call him on it. And, um, sometimes with the, uh, stand up of the CIF, I go, hey, you ain't Delta, don't need, it's, and, uh, so, but, but you know, it, it, it worked out. And that's where I was sitting in 2001, when nine 11 happened.

• 1:15:27Speaker 05

  And what, what was that day like for you? And, and I mean, this is like a pivotal moment in fifth group history. I'd really be interested in like your perspective, like what it was like for you, but also what it was like for fifth group, uh, that, that day and the, the days and months afterwards.

• 1:15:43Speaker 06

  It's, uh,

• 1:15:46Speaker 06

  Some it goes for general humanity, you know, that was a shock to the nation and to everyone's senses. And but being a soldier, being in fifth group, being trained and having a mission,

• 1:16:02Speaker 06

  it had a different impact on me. I have the moment it happened, I actually was on my way to the Nashville Airport.

• 1:16:12Speaker 06

  I lived on a little farm outside Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and was on my way to the airport when I heard the on the radio about the first plane hitting.

• 1:16:24Speaker 06

  I had a little bit of time to spare, so I pulled in this little tiny cafe and went in and turned on their little tiny TV in time to watch the second plane hit the other tower, the south tower. And, you know, the first one, I'm debating like, you know, could it be an accident? But there's a co-pilot, there's a flight engineer. I'm not sure that it could be an accident. I think this is probably terrorism. But I'm not sure. And then I saw the second plane, boom, it's it's terrorism. And of course, then they were announcing they were going to shut down the airspace.

• 1:17:04Speaker 06

  So coming out of that cafe, I should have gone left, continued to the airport, but I knew not to. I turned right and went to group headquarters. And, you know, I just I rolled in and we started planning because we didn't know what yet, but we knew that we would be involved in some sort of strike or payback for nine eleven. And it was, instead of the panic, we were all just focused. It's like, this is what I've lived to do all my years as a Marine, all my years as

• 1:17:46Speaker 06

  in recon, in special forces, in Delta. Now is our chance. This is what I'm here for. And that's what it was like throughout group. It was, sure, we were upset, maybe a little bit angry, but it was just intense focus on what we had to do and getting ready to go.

• 1:18:12Speaker 06

  Two days later, I was on the first, when the first planes flew, I was on a plane to fly to Tampa to help plan the invasion.

• 1:18:24Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:18:25Speaker 06

  As an E7, as an E7. But, but, but because I worked in this cell handling the classified stuff, part of that was our, you know, all the Speed Cat stuff, which, you know, includes relationships with the agency and DIA and all that, which we knew would be a lead effort. So that's

• 1:18:50Speaker 06

  my, I was.

• 1:18:53Speaker 05

  And what, what was like that when you get down to Tampa and start planning the invasion? Because like some of the, the stories and we've interviewed on this show, a lot of like the, some of the first teams, another fifth group guy, Justin Sapp, we've interviewed on the show before.

• 1:19:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I, I, I Justin pretty well.

• 1:19:09Speaker 05

  You know, Justin. Yeah, I'm going to see Justin tomorrow at a charity dinner for Afghan refugees. I mean, some of, some of the, like, it, it sounds like we were going really into the unknown, that we sent the, the paramilitary teams and the initial ODAs like into this giant black hole, like where we really didn't know what was going on in there. And what, what was it like from, from your perspective?

• 1:19:33Speaker 06

  Well, I went down there with a young major.

• 1:19:38Speaker 06

  Just cut, getting, cutting his bones, you know, getting his bones.

• 1:19:43Speaker 06

  Chris, what's his last name? It was just SecDef.

• 1:19:47Speaker 05

  Chris Miller.

• 1:19:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, Chris, yeah, Chris Miller.

• 1:19:50Speaker 05

  He's going to be on the show next month.

• 1:19:52Speaker 06

  Oh, great.

• 1:19:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:54Speaker 06

  So Chris and I go there, but now let's be honest, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm a hardened NCO and still in E7 because of the way I left Delta. And, and we go down there and I'm a bit of a.

• 1:20:12Speaker 06

  Particularly if everybody's too serious, I don't like to be too serious. And everybody was serious. And we were initially told, hey, you need to plan for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time. What? You gotta be kidding me. And, uh, you know, shortly after they said, okay, we can, we're gonna scratch off Iraq. You don't have to, to plan for Iraq. But, um, you know, and as it started, everybody, you know, you imagine right after nine 11, the, um, intensity that everybody had, uh, to get started. And I remember being in this big room and everybody's waiting for a meeting to start. Nobody's there to start it.

• 1:20:57Speaker 06

  And it's just, everybody's just all tense. So I stood up on a chair and I said, you know, hey, can I have everybody's attention? And, you know, of course it's all, you know, everybody from majors to colonels, you know, a shitload of them, uh, turning their bright staring at me there. I said, now the first thing that we're gonna do is, I don't know, because I got no business. You know, I have nothing to do with this. I said, however, I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so.

• 1:21:31Speaker 00

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• 1:23:28Speaker 06

  Because at the time, they were doing that commercial.

• 1:23:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:31Speaker 06

  You know, like, tries to be an expert. And at first, everybody just stared at me. Then after a while, you know, some people laughed. But, uh, yeah, we started kicking off the planning and I returned to Fifth Group and then, um, Colonel Mulholland asked me to go with the first guys from Fifth Group out to Kashi Konabad, where we were going to set up the base. So there was an initial group of four of us that, um, that went and,

• 1:24:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was good to, because I wasn't on a team, but I got to be in the vanguard to go. And so I'd already established a record, kind of like, seemed like I was always the first person

• 1:24:23Speaker 06

  to go somewhere, sort of figure out what was going on and then

• 1:24:29Speaker 06

  prepare for other people or give a report back. And it was, it was an interesting time. We we landed in the middle of night in a, in a light rain in Karchikon, and it was the old

• 1:24:47Speaker 05

  This is Uzbekistan?

• 1:24:49Speaker 06

  Uzbekistan. And the guy, the battalion commander had

• 1:24:58Speaker 06

  gotten Mohan to, to let him go. And he was taking over as the three after we landed. Some Rangers were there, maybe some support people. And that it was pretty bare, but they just landed. So the Rangers are out on perimeter. Nobody knows what's going on. And we land in the middle of night and that, that guy's walking back and forth. And for whatever reason, I guess I'm the senior NCO. He said, Sergeant Harrington, he goes,

• 1:25:34Speaker 06

  I'm the operations officer now that we're on the ground and I'd like you to walk the lines. And I was, you know, it's like

• 1:25:45Speaker 06

  1:00 AM. We don't know where the lines are. We just landed. And I had started, you know, we landed. I did what a soldier does. I got my rucksack and got out my canteen cup and was making some coffee and cocoa.

• 1:26:03Speaker 06

  And um, and somebody came running up and said, hey, uh, the, the Colonel wants to see you. So, you know, I went there and he just walked, walked the lines. And I was like, walk the lines. I go, you can get shot.

• 1:26:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:19Speaker 06

  We don't have, we don't have a challenge and password or anything. That's Rangers out there on the line. And he's like, I don't care. Walk the lines or troop the lines, troop the lines, right? One of those, uh, officer training things you get. And I said, yeah, okay. And I walked back to my backpack where my, my coffee and cocoa was getting ready. And another guy asked me, he said, what do you want you to do? I said, troop the lines. He said, what you going to do? I said, drink my coffee and cocoa.

• 1:26:54Speaker 06

  So I put on my, my Gore-Tex and drank my coffee and cocoa. Then I took off my Gore-Tex so I could get wet. And then I went back and, uh, to where he was. And he said, did you troop the lines? I said, everything's fine, sir. He goes, outstanding, outstanding.

• 1:27:16Speaker 06

  And on from there. Uh,

• 1:27:20Speaker 06

  and, uh, you know, then things built up. The couple of days later, I drove from Karshi Konabad up to Tashkent, uh, to hook up with the agency and to facilitate the, the agency coming down to, uh, the base where we would launch the agency teams out of and support the agency teams. And so I was in that cell that stood up. I, I stood up that cell to do that, the fusion cell between the agency and the army. And of course, Justin, um, SAP had been detailed from

• 1:28:03Speaker 06

  the army to be on Team Alpha. So I met all of, all of Team Alpha.

• 1:28:09Speaker 05

  JR Seeger's team.

• 1:28:11Speaker 06

  Yeah. JR's team and Alex and, uh, Mike's band, uh, Dave, the other guys, Justin. Uh, so.

• 1:28:24Speaker 06

  You know, they got back and then the CIA started sending its teams in and we we would oversee the infill and resupply and then as agency teams developed the situation, then we started putting SF teams in with them to work with the locals. Mostly in the SF mission was mostly at that point, one, we, the medical support was key because there essentially wasn't enough medical support and the call for fire.

• 1:29:01Speaker 06

  And, you know, I think the other thing that's always short in when you stand up that many teams are commo guys. So the agency was really sort of raping fifth group and, and groups in all, taking medics and commo guys to fill out their teams. I remember Rumsfeld was, I don't want to give them any more people. And, and the things started happening in Afghanistan on the ground so fast that just more and more teams needed to go in. And I was frustrated

• 1:29:44Speaker 06

  because I'm like, shit, you know, I'm going to miss my chance. I've, I've done a whole life for this and I'm good. Like the thing at ASOT, you know, is sort of preparing a pilot team and I had, let's just say I had excelled at, at some of those actions and activities. And I thought, you know, I need to be on one of these teams. And then they started running out of, the agency couldn't get enough teams. I'm like, well, I'll take a team. I'll go. But no, no, no, wait, you can't. You're on.

• 1:30:22Speaker 05

  I, I had, I had someone tell me once, Gary, that because of the mission you specifically referenced, doing the ASOT unconventional warfare mission in the Middle East, that that actually set up fifth group pretty well to go into Afghanistan as far as like having some understanding of how to do that. And I mean, I guess you were kind of the tip of the spear for that.

• 1:30:42Speaker 06

  Well, it did as far as that part goes, but also just to be honest, any SF team, we all hated FID, right? But doing FID, whether it was Central America or in Kuwait where, you know, people don't want to work, don't work, it's a different culture, different work ethic and trying to get them to do stuff and to do military operations does prepare you for what we ran into

• 1:31:13Speaker 05

  there. Right, right.

• 1:31:14Speaker 06

  And so, you know, I was pissed. I wanted, and I guess I got bitter and I was like, well, shit, you know, I just want to go back to the States then because after I've been there and I set all this up and got everything going, I don't want to sit here and just keep watching other teams, other people go in. Then John Mulholland asked me and some other guys to come with him on his infill because we had just, just taken Bagram Airfield. So I went

• 1:31:56Speaker 06

  in with him and we were there and after a few days, it's around Thanksgiving, we'd spent Thanksgiving there on the ground in Afghanistan of 2000. The planning, it started spinning up that Tora Bora was the place where Al Qaeda had regrouped and where Bin Laden might be. So the agency was spinning up to go to Tora Bora and military was trying to figure out what we're gonna do. There had been an ODA 572 that the paperwork to chop them to the

• 1:32:39Speaker 06

  agency had been done to detail them, but that mission never came to fruition. You know, they were gonna chop the whole team to operational control of the agency, but that mission never happened. So they were there and available back at headquarters. Excuse me. So.

• 1:33:07Speaker 06

  The agency, when you know, they realized how, how big Torabora was going to be and that they weren't really prepared to handle all that themselves, asked for that team. And um, Mazzari Sharif had just happened, Spand had just been killed.

• 1:33:31Speaker 06

  John Moholland was a bit reluctant to just give the agency another, an ODA for operational control. And um, and he had some other reluctant reasons that he was somewhat reluctant about that team. But one of the guys on, on the, who was detailed from, happened to be orange to the agency, said, well, you trust this Gary guy a whole lot. What if we took Gary

• 1:34:08Speaker 06

  with the agency to serve as an advisor? Would you let us have that team then? So whatever, he said yes. And so next thing you know, without the legal paperwork to be detailed, with a handshake, they said, okay, you're now on Team Juliet with the agency and along with this ODA 572. And off we went to Jalalabad to get ready to go up to Torabora.

• 1:34:45Speaker 05

  I mean, it's wild. And I, this is cool. I've, because I've never heard this side of the story. And so, so many of the other folks that we've interviewed over the last few years. So what, what was the situation when you hit JBAD and getting ready for Torabora? I mean, you linked up with the, with the unit guys?

• 1:35:04Speaker 06

  Um, it was the, there were a couple people, actually one of the former guys I knew in Delta that was detailed to that team. And the unit guys weren't there. So I got to go in ahead of my old squadron. It was just the agency guys and us. And we went to JBAD and it was real uncertain. The

• 1:35:32Speaker 06

  The warlords there is one thing when we first went in the Panjshir and people that were aligned with Masood and hated the Taliban and hated Al Qaeda for killing Masood. You know, they were eager to get in the battle. I mean, look at what Dostum did. But as we started moving further south, that was changing. So we hooked up in Jalalabad, we were hooked up with a guy named Hazrat Ali. And they were, he just drug his, dragged his feet. He was reluctant to get involved.

• 1:36:11Speaker 06

  And let's be honest, it was the, the bags of cash that we were ferrying in that did it, you know, but, but someone that I got to do some cool stuff like you train for. The airfield in Jabad was bombed, we had bombed it out. So to get the first supplies in of uniforms, arms and equipment to outfit the force. You know, I called in the C-130s and they came in low and lapsed, or parachuted all the equipment in. And I remember being there and the Afghans couldn't believe that suddenly

• 1:36:51Speaker 06

  in the dark, out of nowhere, these planes come real low and the parachutes are coming out. And so I actually found myself dancing in a circle with, with some Afghan guys, you know, holding rifles in one hand and their hands on the other. And, you know, it was exciting times, but it was real uncertain. You didn't know who was who. Warlords were against warlords. We were in a vehicle coming back from that airfield and my vehicle made it through a checkpoint and they, we didn't, we couldn't speak language. We didn't have,

• 1:37:32Speaker 06

  I got through, but then the second vehicle behind me, they stopped. Well, you don't know who's good and who's bad. So they're stopped and it's, it's not going well. I remember getting out of the vehicle and then taking aim on the, you know, it's just some...

• 1:37:52Speaker 06

  Dude that's at the check with a couple dudes at the checkpoint and I maybe they're trying to follow orders, but maybe they're going to ambush us. You don't know who's who. And I remember this argument going on and they had an interpreter and me trying to decide.

• 1:38:10Speaker 06

  I may not be able to shoot him fast enough if he opens up. Should I shoot him now preemptively? But then what if that, you know, I cause that. So it was, you know, it was tense, but then he let him through and we went on. It took us, the agency, a long time to get him ready to move his people up to Torabora, you know, and delays were horrible. It was Ramadan when we went up to Torabora. There were so many things wrong. You had to kick and yell and plead to

• 1:38:52Speaker 06

  get them to move up. But it's Ramadan. They hadn't had anything to eat or drink all day. So when it starts getting towards night, they know that food and water are back in the rear. So anything that they made up during the day, they give up at night and go back.

• 1:39:19Speaker 06

  It's a lot of problems. I was on a OP there. We divided, we had a headquarters element that was in there and Delta came in later and joined up with them, A Squadron. And

• 1:39:35Speaker 06

  the rest of us split into OPs. We were five or six of us on OP. I think SOCOM history calls that Cobra 25 Bravo was the OP we were on. So, hey, you know, we're just, we're calling in bombs. We're designating on the base of the mountain where Bin Laden was supposed to be. It was really interesting calling fire because we were up so high on mountains, like up on the top, that when you would call for fire down in the valley.

• 1:40:11Speaker 06

  A thousand meters below you, you'd see those missiles, the bombs come beside you. You could see them coming in the air to go down in that valley. Because we were up high on their trajectory because they were dropping at twenty five, twenty six thousand feet.

• 1:40:31Speaker 06

  And we had by that time, you know, the friendly fire incident also in Mazarri Sharif.

• 1:40:41Speaker 06

  It was, I had a close call as I think it must have been like two AM. I was calling in, there was a aircraft that had a like twenty JDAMs on it. So I brought him in first to drop one or two to see if we're on target. And that went fine. So, you know, he comes out, they roll out and you have about a fifteen minute turnaround before they can come back.

• 1:41:12Speaker 05

  On a B two?

• 1:41:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, B two. And he, as he's rolling back in, I say, that was good. Drop, drop the remaining ordnance same spot. And he, he calls back the coordinates, right? And but he gives me, you know, because you, you call for fire. I had, I gave the location of the other OP. But he calls out that location as the target location. And, uh, man, you know, I remember my throat jumped.

• 1:41:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:51Speaker 06

  My stomach jumped up in my throat because I like, did I hear that right? Did I hear that right? What? And I was just screaming abort, abort, abort. And I pictured, because it was like a forty five second delay, you know, they would drop. And I was afraid he was going to say too late.

• 1:42:11Speaker 06

  But then he corrected and then he gave me the correct coordinates and dropped the ordinance. But it was.

• 1:42:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God.

• 1:42:19Speaker 06

  A big learning, a big learning incident. But, yeah, and we know now, you know, Bin Laden got away.

• 1:42:31Speaker 06

  The, one of the warlords, whether it was Hazrat Ali or the one that was affiliated with the Brits that were there on site too, covering the back end towards Pakistan. Somebody facilitated him going. And there's a book called The Hunt for Bin Laden, written by a Delta guy. It was a major on the ground there.

• 1:42:58Speaker 05

  Oh, kill Bin Laden. Yeah.

• 1:43:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, or kill Bin Laden. And, you know, he, he talks about the night that the Delta guys went forward and all the locals

• 1:43:12Speaker 06

  bailed on them and they were left, the two guys alone. One of them had, Sean was, had been on my team in A Squadron. So it was actually A Squadron that came in, my old squadron, with a few people still left on it. And that same night,

• 1:43:32Speaker 06

  the, and this is where I think that the warlords had something worked out with Bin Laden. The Hazrat Ali, the chief of the, of the Afghans, called up to his guys that were with us. We had, there were five or six Americans and we probably had 10 locals with us. Now, we wouldn't let them with us because you didn't train these guys. You didn't know who they were, good or bad. So we used them as tripwires. We put them, we were up on this knife ridge and we put them between us and Al Qaeda. We figured, hey, if Al Qaeda rolls through us, they'll hit them first. And it'd be like a tripwire to give us a little bit of time.

• 1:44:14Speaker 06

  But he told them that they had to move us off there and it was for our own safety. And so, you know, our interpreter tells us, you have to go now. You can't stay here. We're not going. He goes, no, but the general said you have to leave and we're all leaving and we said, no, we're not going. So in the end, all the Afghans left and left us up on that ridge. I guess that was a point with me because maybe the guys down in the headquarter element didn't get the whole story. But in his book, he says that, that we moved, you know, that we evacuated. We did not. Oh, wow.

• 1:44:58Speaker 06

  You know, we stayed up there and um we had movement that night down in the bottom a thousand meters below us where there were some lights and movement. And one of the guys wanted to, you know, light them up, but I was like, hey, at night with your uh M4, you're, we're not going to be effective fire and you're just going to give away our position. So, you know, we're not, but we had that movement. So I tried to call some air in, but there was happened. It was one of the few times in Tora Bora. There was no aircraft overhead that had any ordinance on it.

• 1:45:38Speaker 06

  And I was like, oh, man, you know, they're moving and we didn't know if they were trying to move maneuver on us. Um, so what can we do? The only thing I found was there was a, uh, back in those days, the drones were um not armed, not yet armed. We weren't that far into the uh development of the war on terror yet. But they sounded kind of like a AC 130. When you, if you brought it down low enough, you could hear it. So I was able to get that um that drone to come in and drop low enough that you could hear it.

• 1:46:18Speaker 06

  And then those lights that we saw down in the bottom of valley, they disappeared. So uh, so it, you know, it did its job. Um, so we left.

• 1:46:31Speaker 06

  We left Tora Bora, got relieved by some Delta guys, a couple of them guys I knew. We went, we hiked down the mountain with using donkeys to carry our backpacks. When all our gear just kept our LBE and, um, and weapons with us. And then met up with the Delta guys and then they came up to take over the OP. And they're the ones that wound up pushing further into the mountains to try to get on the trail of Bin Laden, you know, after we left. But I, I got, you know, I got to say, hey, you know, it's about time you Delta guys got here. We've already got the most of this stuff done.

• 1:47:14Speaker 05

  I'm sure they loved that.

• 1:47:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was funny. Well, and you know, and, and we'd been told this stuff about Afghan culture and what you can say and what you can't say. And it was snowing. We, when we were up in Tora Bora before we came down, it started snowing on us. Matter of fact, Delta was supposed to come in a day before and, and they radioed us that they, and I said, Hey, uh, do you have winter gear? And no, I said, well, it's snowing up here and it's just, it's gonna get really bad. So they actually delayed and somehow within 24 hours came up with all kinds of winter gear, that whole Delta supply line, you know?

• 1:47:59Speaker 06

  Um, and, but when we were doing the turnover with them, there were all these villagers there. And so we're talking to the villagers, I got the interpreter and they said, one thing you never can talk about is their women and, uh, or their religion. But I couldn't help myself. I said, Hey, I know why you guys have four wives. You can have four wives. And, you know, he's like, yeah, well, what's your reason? I said, cause it's so damn cold up there that you need a warm place to stay as you move around. So you got, you can spread four out to different places so you can get warm at night. And the, and the, the Delta sergeant major that was there was like, no, no, no, no, don't, don't say that, don't say that.

• 1:48:44Speaker 06

  But I was like, uh, well, it, it went fine. You know, they appreciated it.

• 1:48:48Speaker 05

  The joke.

• 1:48:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:48:50Speaker 05

  So after Tora Bora, um, you did like a, a, a subsequent number of deployments back to Afghanistan.

• 1:48:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, I didn't go. So I didn't even leave Afghanistan. No. Yeah, we were in a safe house in Jalalabad, our team kind of recovering from our time up there in Tora Bora. And their radio message came in, said, Hey, Gary Harrington, get back to Kashi Kana Bad and see the commander. Well, okay, how am I going to get back? So I talked to the agency and they let me hitch a ride on one of their aircraft. Of course, I had no passport or anything. And the aircraft landed in Tashkent. I had to hide on the aircraft till they went through it. And

• 1:49:43Speaker 06

  and then wound up getting on a, I think the next day, or maybe that same night, on the agency helicopter going back to Kashi Kana Bad. It was, you know, and okay, let's be honest, it was cool because it was kind of like a movie. You know, because I go by now, when I left, there was nothing. Now there's this plywood headquarters built. I go in there and I walk in, I'm all nasty and dirty. And I go, hey, I'm here to see the commander. And they go back there in office. And I walked back in there and, you know, he greets me, we have a talk,

• 1:50:23Speaker 06

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• 1:51:09Speaker 07

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• 1:52:40Speaker 06

  I'm back in the scene. It's sort of like what happened to me in Delta, but I'm the guy that's that is making the call. But so I talked to him and then we finished. And he goes, hey, now I'm putting you on another agency team called Kilo, and you're going to go to a place called Coast. So get yourself to Kabul, Afghanistan, go to the Ariana Hotel and hook up with them. That was my instructions. So I wound, I said, can I shower first? I'd like to take a shower, get cleaned up, repack my ruck. So I did that. And then I went down to the flight line, found a

• 1:53:26Speaker 06

  CH47 that was doing a checkout ride, it had some repairs and the pilots agreed to let me on it and they flew me into Kabul or into Bagram. And then I guess I got a vehicle and showed up at this, you know, rundown old hotel and joined Kilo, which Nate Chapman was on.

• 1:53:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:54Speaker 06

  I had I had met Mike Span and helped Alpha get, as a matter of fact, the picture in the CIA museum of Team Alpha, I took that picture. But now I'm on a team with with Chapman and the other guys. And, you know, they'd been together a little while. I joined late. We did. I did Christmas in Jalalabad. I did New Year's there in Kabul. And then I guess it was like about two January, the infill to coast. I'm getting ready, I think it was

• 1:54:36Speaker 06

  the night before the infill, some major from group came over to the hotel and said, hey,

• 1:54:46Speaker 06

  Colonel Mohan said, you're not to go in on the first helicopter in the coast. And I was like, what do you mean, not go in the first helicopter? He goes, no, he wants you to hold and go on the second helicopter. And, you know, I probably had a few words to say about that because I was pissed. But, you know, he's the Colonel. So he'd already had to write letters for the guys in Kandahar and enough other letters for people that weren't coming home that not while I wasn't really happy with that decision. You know,

• 1:55:31Speaker 06

  it's his call. He's, he's the boss. So I delayed. Well, then the next morning, I'm getting ready to get on the helicopter to go in. And that's when the guys on Kilo got hit and Chapman got killed. So.

• 1:55:53Speaker 06

  You know, the medevac came out that had Umbedic on it and it was a guy, a third group guy.

• 1:56:03Speaker 06

  And, you know, I went back, so dealt with that. And then I went back in that evening to Coast. And we were, you know, team was still dealing with what had happened and what we're going to do after.

• 1:56:23Speaker 06

  And that's where, you know, the agency is great at what is, what it does. And the Army Agency, the Fifth Group Agency link up was effective. But there are some things, and I think this was one of those, and some of the stuff I saw in Tora Bora, where, you know, I felt that a seasoned special ops person could have, would have made different calls.

• 1:56:51Speaker 06

  After Chapman got killed,

• 1:56:55Speaker 06

  we wound up changing, we went in backing one warlord. But after he got killed, they decided, well, that warlord isn't powerful enough in Coast. The other guy is, who we actually, everybody is pretty sure, ordered the ambush that resulted in Chapman's death. But then the agency said, we're going to back this guy.

• 1:57:20Speaker 06

  And for a while, we're going to, they wanted to back both. And from that guy's standpoint, it means millions of dollars.

• 1:57:27Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:57:28Speaker 06

  And so, you know, he's collecting that.

• 1:57:34Speaker 06

  But yeah, we, so we did the infill to Coast. But I learned the lesson, I tried to apply the lessons I learned from Tora Bora. That my job, when Mohan told me that you get there and develop the situation and make sure that this G force is ready to accept SF, train, you know, SF people to work with it and direct them. Well, now I didn't want a gaggle and I learned that, okay, one of the first things I want to do is build mobile kitchens, outfit little pickup trucks with, you know, gas stoves so we can cook forward. So the troops don't have to come back to get fed.

• 1:58:18Speaker 06

  I want to develop some sort of staff structure so that the SF guys have something to fall in on. Cause you know, these guys were, you know, had flowers sticking out of their guns. A lot of them were inoperable, but it was a joke. And, uh, and it was really funny because the guy running that agency team was a former SF guy, um, officer. And you know, they, they kept doing stuff, but they sort of were delaying on letting me get to the job of getting things structured the way I wanted to. And I'm the, the army guy

• 1:59:02Speaker 06

  there. And, um, they kept saying, tell Mohan to send us some SF. And I was like, no, no, no. And, uh, I said, not, not until we do this. I remember, uh, one big team meeting there. He said, wait a minute. So you're telling me you and E7 in the army telling all of us that it's up to you if we get SF people or not. And yeah, I think I crossed my arms and said, yes, about it.

• 1:59:35Speaker 05

  Yeah. Because you want everything set up to properly receive the team so they can be effective when they get there.

• 1:59:43Speaker 06

  We got, you gotta be effective, you know, you, you can't just jump in on a crowd of people and, and hope and pray that something's going to happen because it's not. And, and plus I'd given the, you know, the commander, my word that I would make sure that it was effective and, and, and ready. So wouldn't do that. But, um, and so that was going on and we agreed that we would send a team in. But by that point, the two warlords I mentioned, it was, uh, Zia Hine and, um,

• 2:00:19Speaker 06

  And Pasha Khan that were fighting each other, the two warlords that we were backing. And it turned into a blood feud. It was it was gonna derail everything the agency and army was trying to do up there. So I I went to that one guy, so to Zia Khan, and I said, yeah, you come from Orgun area. What if you go back to Orgun and I will take a group of people with you and we'll bring special forces into you and support you but back

• 2:00:57Speaker 06

  in your home area where you're from. So he agreed and then the agency bought in on that plan. So it was decided to split off and open up a new, a new base in Orgun. And I got to lead plan and lead the infill for that. And it's just way different than how I'd ever been trained to run an infill in recon or SF. And I had Al Qaeda was spread throughout the region. You didn't know if you were coming into a what you were gonna

• 2:01:37Speaker 06

  come into. And, you know, the the warlord had a nephew that didn't speak one word of English. And how am I gonna make an infill by helicopter in a place and ensure the most safety we can? So you you're inventing it. I trained the guy how to use an IR strobe and what we needed for an LZ, picked out the most probable place from maps and overhead imagery.

• 2:02:16Speaker 06

  And I did some dry rehearsals that, you know, to know he'd know how to set up the IR strobe. And sent him back and they had Thariyas and we had an interpreter that spoke Pashtun that we were communicating. And so we waited a few days as it got time for the, for the infill. What I told him to do was to go out and mark that LZ at night and to keep marking it every night. And we waited, so I didn't go in, we didn't infill the first day or second day, maybe. I don't remember if it's third or fourth day. And then

• 2:02:58Speaker 06

  to make the infill, I invited some of his relatives to get on the helicopter with me.

• 2:03:05Speaker 06

  So I figured I could throw a few civilians on there, kind of as an insurance policy. I want to make sure you know that I have, you know, some of your relatives on this helicopter with me. And so, you know, we set the pattern of not coming in. And then the one night we did show up and make that infill.

• 2:03:27Speaker 05

  And that was the start of the, of the base, the FOB at Ergon.

• 2:03:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:03:33Speaker 05

  Pretty much, that existed through like pretty much the whole war.

• 2:03:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was, it was interesting, you know, I, um,

• 2:03:42Speaker 06

  we, it was wild, it was kind of Wild West, you know, you want to be that guy. There's no rules, there's no other military around you, you kind of run around. We were going out and hitting, you know, I'd say hitting, not hitting. I think I was extremely successful without ever having to hit a weapons cache. Everywhere in Afghanistan had weapons caches from the Soviet, the war with the Soviets. Every little village had stuff, you would never, ever find it. But, you know, I developed this thing where we'd, we'd work with a village elder and interpreter.

• 2:04:23Speaker 06

  And we'd go there and we'd have a couple of vehicles with food and blankets and mattresses on it, sitting off backways. And we'd just go up and ask nicely, hey, you got some stuff here and it's bad stuff. Somebody could get hurt. We don't want any misinterpretations. We'd like it if you'd let us dig this up or, or help us, show us where it is. And they would do that. And then after we would recover the stuff, and would roll these trucks with all these goodies. Before, and you know, eventually got to the point you'd be finishing in one village. And here's people from another village, hey, hey, come to our village because we, we got it.

• 2:05:08Speaker 06

  And we started collecting, you know, it just kept getting more and more and more. And I started paying guys with tractors to haul artillery pieces back, back to Argoon. And I was like making a collection of big artillery pieces. It was, yeah, it was exciting days that you had. I remember when I was in Yemen, the Yemenis during the Deymane mission, had two guys vaporized in a truck carrying a whole bunch of mines. And whatever happened to detonate, detonated, the whole truck went and they were gone.

• 2:05:52Speaker 06

  And the Afghans would always pick the two lowest guys to drive the truck. And it was, you know, stuff hidden from the Soviet time. It was rockets. It was rounds. It was mortars. It was mines. Everything under the sun in, under every kind of condition.

• 2:06:12Speaker 05

  That's an Inshallah detail.

• 2:06:14Speaker 06

  Inshallah. And, and the Americans, at first I did this with, it'd be two or three Americans go. Eventually, and then we would ride in a truck and we'd make sure we stayed a couple of hundred meters from that truck. Then one day I was in there, cause now music's allowed. They had their little, their little cassette player playing the most horrible Afghan music I ever heard. But they were all excited and these two guys were in there and I felt, I felt bad for them. So I just went up and opened the door and said, hey, I'm, I'm, climbed in the truck with them. And they looked at me like, you're gonna

• 2:06:53Speaker 06

  ride in here with us? I was like, Inshallah. If you go, I'm going. And off we went. And you know, after that, the, those guys started treating me different, the Afghans. I would, when we get to where we go, I'd help them unload the truck, you know, do the manual labor. And it got to where they took it personal and they didn't want me touching anything. They started, you know, taking care of me and bring, treating me like I was one of their commanders. My experience with the guys in Tora Bora was they were so undisciplined and untrained. I

• 2:07:38Speaker 06

  expected the same here. We went out to do, what recover one cache, we thought was going to be maybe hostile. So you don't have time to train all these guys, you know. So you just let them follow me. So I remember I had them all in the back of a stake bed truck and I was in the front. My plan was we were gonna get off and we were gonna cover one ridge. Another guy was gonna take other guys on another vehicle and cover the other ridge. And the cache was in the valley. And I thought, okay, all, all you do is follow me. I'm gonna jump out of the front and run to the back. You're all gonna come out of the truck and follow behind me and I'm

• 2:08:23Speaker 06

  gonna, I'm the American, I'm gonna lead the way up the ridge. And I've got all my American gear on and.

• 2:08:33Speaker 06

  Jump off the truck and come back. Well, they're, they're jumping off the faster than I planned. And they're all coming. There's this little guy with a big beard and, uh, wearing a Soviet officer's belt buckle. And, you know, we started up the ridge and he just started barking orders and those guys were running up the ridge. And, uh, yeah, I'm carrying twice the, three times the weight they are. So I'm starting sucking the

• 2:09:05Speaker 06

  and breathing hard and trying to go up the ridge. And I thought I was going to lead them. They took off and, and left me. And I remember, um, getting, getting to the top of the ridge. And I could barely, I was wheezing and I said, uh, ridge secure.

• 2:09:24Speaker 06

  And it wasn't, it wasn't because of anything I did. They, uh, this, this group were hardened, uh, fighters, uh, from a Soviet time, you know, and they, they knew what they were doing. It was pretty cool.

• 2:09:39Speaker 05

  So I, after this whole like initial push into Afghanistan, and I mean, you were involved in it for quite a while. What kind of, what, what were the next, you know, subsequent years like, uh, as you were like in and out of Afghanistan?

• 2:09:54Speaker 06

  Well, so I didn't go, well, like for me, I, I actually jumped on another agency team for Operation Anaconda and did that.

• 2:10:04Speaker 06

  And then left, I was the, uh, last guy in fifth group to pull out of Afghanistan and went back to headquarters and I had been asked for by the agency by name this time to be detailed, um, to a Middle Eastern country to do some pre-Iraq, uh, preparation of the battlefield stuff there. So there, there's a lot of paperwork to do to prep for that. So, uh, yeah, I went home. In April of 2002.

• 2:10:42Speaker 06

  Took some leave and then started having to travel to get all the clearances and visit the places I need to visit to get detailed to the agency. So that late after the summer, I wound up being assigned to the agency for two years. So that was 2002. And I was brought there to do this, this sort of cross border thing to do the tactical

• 2:11:18Speaker 06

  side of that. You know, in the run up to the agency was collecting some information and running some low level people and there you had to negotiate. The assets had to negotiate Iraqi security. And then there was this little problem with the UN, the UN no goes on where Americans weren't supposed to be either. And they,

• 2:11:53Speaker 06

  it had been run by Kuwaitis before, cops, untrained cops with 38 revolvers. And they got hit in an ambush. They were set up by a turncoat and they got ambushed and a couple of them killed. That's when they decided they needed some experience, some tactical side to come in and take over that part. So I was working with a small group of Kuwaiti policemen and there was a case officer in charge.

• 2:12:34Speaker 05

  And you were just like doing a operational preparation of the battle space before?

• 2:12:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, my, my job was this. Yeah, my, yes, my job was to sneak in, you know, past the UN. We had some interesting times where UN troops would come, you know, it's an open desert. So you use different techniques in an open desert. And I know we were up in this tower once and suddenly some UN guys stopped in there and I'm up in the tower. I remember taking my, me and the other guy took our, the other American took our boots off to creep down this spiral stair, metal spiral stairway. And they were in, they were joking and laughing in

• 2:13:20Speaker 06

  this other room with, I think it was Dutch soldiers from the UN. And we went creeping by the door to, to get out. And, and it was guy, these were cops. So it was, it was kind of like herding goats. They were, they didn't know what they were doing, but they had some guns and they thought they were bad. So I had to keep everybody close enough that I could put hands and push somebody, pull somebody, or kick somebody to get them to do what I wanted to do. At least I thought that was a thing. I was

• 2:13:57Speaker 06

  the big badass SF guy. One time my hubris got me into a little bit of trouble because at the border between Kuwait and Iraq, there's this 15 foot deep, 15 foot wide trench and a berm. It was a tank, a tank barrier. The person that we had recovered that night, you know, my job was to get them in and get them to a place where agency people could debrief them and task them.

• 2:14:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, an asset and they were like low level smugglers.

• 2:14:37Speaker 06

  So, and then my job would be to get him back into Iraq. So, yeah, this guy had been lost for several hours down in this ditch. And so the, the, uh, the senior policeman said, oh, I know a place I, I, you know, I, I live here. I know a place we can get him back across easy. Like, okay, so we go. And I didn't see that it was, some places it was eroded down, but this place was not eroded. But he said, it's the, uh, the dirt is stick, is stiff enough. He should be able to climb.

• 2:15:19Speaker 06

  Well, you know, we held this guy by the arms and, uh, dropped him into this hole. And I'm watching through, I'm the only one with NVGs and I'm watching him struggle and struggle and struggle to try to climb out on the other side. And he's not getting anywhere. And after a while, I'm like, an Iraqi patrol is going to stop by here anytime. And we're sitting here watching this and I was like, these, these guys are all idiots, but you know, I'm a badass. And I, not only that, and not only I'm a badass, I am, uh, experienced rock climber. I, I climbed buildings and I, I know what I'm doing. So I said, I'll get, I'll get him back out and I had the guys hold me by the arms and drop me down in this hole.

• 2:16:05Speaker 06

  I go over, put the guy on my shoulders, get him up.

• 2:16:10Speaker 06

  Go back to get out. I, I went to a place where there was a 90 degree corner to try to climb out. And guess what? I couldn't get out. And now I'm like, oh, wait a second. I'm stuck in this hole and everybody's up there and the Iraqis are here and I can't get out. And I'm, and I'm, I'm supposed to be the guy that's the mature, experienced guy. And, you know, I, I think, uh, I was thinking about, oh my God, this is going to be hard to live. Cause eventually a patrol is going to come by. I'm going to get captured. I didn't think they'd kill me. I said, but I'm going to get captured. And when I'm released at the end of the war, I'm going to have to explain that I was captured because I got stuck in a hole.

• 2:16:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, I was, I was worried about that, but um, we thought about it and the other American had these hiking boots on, so had several guys undo their bootlaces and tie them all together and made a line and I was able to make a loop in the line and uh, get enough that I could get one foot enough where we, I eventually got out of the, out of that predicament, as we'd call it, I guess.

• 2:17:28Speaker 05

  And the smuggler?

• 2:17:31Speaker 06

  Uh, you know, I had gotten him back on the other side, so he, he, he was good to go and uh, we got, but the first thing I did after that was buy a collapsible ladder that I carried to the border with me every time after, after that.

• 2:17:45Speaker 05

  I was, uh, I was once detained by the Kurdish secret police who, uh, they alleged that I scrambled across that berm from the Syrian side into Iraq. Now, there's never any proof to substantiate such claims, but you know, that, that I, I spent, I spent the night in, in their jail, uh, which was a fun experience. But yeah, those, those, those berms are no joke.

• 2:18:08Speaker 06

  Well, that's, that's interesting that you got to spend the night in a jail, you know, later.

• 2:18:15Speaker 05

  So, uh, so yeah, you're doing the agency detail and then the war kicks off.

• 2:18:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, the war kicked off. Um, I went in and it was, um, you know, just a lot of interesting stuff. I, I, I went in, the former COS of Iraq was in, sitting in Kuwait and he had his uh, GRS detail that was gonna take him back in, Charlie. And um,

• 2:18:46Speaker 06

  I forget what happened, but his detail, he was gonna go in from Saudi and Iraq was still going on. I think the battle was, uh, had moved to Najaf at this point and.

• 2:19:00Speaker 06

  They for whatever whoever decided in the in the agency, he was gonna go in and get a look, go forward and meet up with a guy named Greg V that was running the show from inside Afghanistan at the time, I mean Iraq at the time. Greg V and I were lieutenants together in Second Recon Battalion.

• 2:19:26Speaker 05

  Oh, wow. Okay, I didn't know that.

• 2:19:27Speaker 06

  And I didn't, I didn't, you know.

• 2:19:30Speaker 05

  Well, no, I have asked them to come on the show before. I'm still, I'm still working it. I hope I can convince him one day.

• 2:19:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, Greg and I were were lieutenants together and I didn't see him again till 2002 Afghanistan. And the guy, the agency guy I was the tactical leader for liked me and he said, hey, you need to join the agency. Let me take you and introduce you to somebody. And I went, of course, we all had beards and civilian clothes.

• 2:19:59Speaker 06

  There's this guy, bearded guy, taking a nap. He stands up, he goes, oh, Gary Harrington, Second Rec, AA Company, Second Recon Battalion, 1983. I was like, whoa, you, agency guys must do your homework. And he said, I guess you don't remember me. And no, I didn't at the time, again, because we all had quite different look than we did as young Marines.

• 2:20:26Speaker 06

  And then after, so after that, we renewed our friendship and then we worked together in Iraq.

• 2:20:33Speaker 05

  That's cool.

• 2:20:34Speaker 06

  And so, yeah, I, I, but Charlie Sidell or Charlie didn't have his detail. But they said, hey, this guy Gary, he knows what he's doing. He can take you into Iraq. So they said, hey, will you do it? So, yeah, I, by myself on a helicopter, took him into into Iraq and for his tour and back out. I went in and out of Baghdad. I, the agency let me do things that you should be an agency certified.

• 2:21:10Speaker 06

  Um, farm certified person to do, but they, they decided I could do it. So they, they gave me a few little tests and I, I, so I was running some assets in, uh, in Baghdad in the area. I was, um, in Baghdad once with a, and hooked up with a seal. We were looking at doing a hit on a terror cell that was located by the Shia mosque. It was a shrine and this is just right after Baghdad fell. So the Shia were very happy, uh, and exuberant. And we wanted to get eyes on.

• 2:21:54Speaker 06

  So we had this rusted Toyota Corolla cruiser that we were in and I'm driving. So we kept trying to get through and the road was blocked off as we got close. So I'd back off, go around, try to come in again. Oh, the roads backed off. So finally I found a drainage ditch behind the, the shrine, straddled it with the car, eased through there. And, uh, you know, it was hard going, but I got through there. But as we rounded the corner of the building into the square, suddenly we happened on tens of thousands of Iraqi Shia. And they were having a giant, it's their first

• 2:22:37Speaker 06

  Ashura since the fall. And suddenly we're in it and I couldn't back up. It was too, uh, with a ditch and where I, I couldn't back up. And then just away, but right before the wave of people came on us, you know, it's grab the camera off the dash, you know, pull the camera down, take off your shirt. We, you know, we had outer shirts on, cover up the rifles. And, you know, there's nothing you can do when you're in that sea of people. You can't run over enough or shoot enough to get it out. And people would be plastered on us and they, you know, my big

• 2:23:16Speaker 06

  soldierly act was to look at people and smile and go, uh, uh, you know, I'm just a dumb American and like some, and they glare at you, then they go, okay. And a guy would move you a few feet. Then you'd renegotiate with the next and the next and the next. I think it took us thirty, forty five minutes to get out of that crowd.

• 2:23:40Speaker 05

  Oh, my God. Whoa.

• 2:23:41Speaker 06

  Out, you know, and I just kept picturing, you know, getting ripped apart by people.

• 2:23:48Speaker 05

  Well, there's that that famous case study about the surveillance team that was, I believe it was an IRA wedding.

• 2:23:54Speaker 06

  IRA.

• 2:23:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:23:55Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 2:23:55Speaker 05

  And they got mom.

• 2:23:56Speaker 06

  IRA wedding.

• 2:23:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:23:57Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:23:59Speaker 05

  Or it's a funeral, maybe.

• 2:24:01Speaker 06

  No, it was a funeral and we had, I think we had talked about that in Delta. And those guys, yeah, were doing surveillance and got made and pulled out of the car and killed.

• 2:24:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:24:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, that that went through, that exact incident went through my mind. I mean, we were there.

• 2:24:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, but, hey, you know, it was, it was different.

• 2:24:24Speaker 00

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

• 2:24:55Speaker 02

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

• 2:25:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:25:21Speaker 04

  Oh, I have had no luck lately. Wait, lady luck? Brett's key, I got you. I've had so much luck on spinquest.com. They have all of my favorite games, slot games. Live Blackjack, Craps and Bubble Craps. You can even get a $30 coin pack for just 10 bucks. 10 bucks for 30? I'm heading over to spinquest.com right now.

• 2:25:43Speaker 03

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

• 2:25:50Speaker 06

  We had, you know, some adventures and had fun. I had kind of made my bones with the agency. So

• 2:26:02Speaker 06

  they were supportive of me trying to come into the agency. And I finished my two years as a detailee in 2004. And it'd been running back and forth to Iraq. You know, during the day I'd be at the embassy like everybody else. And guess who else came to the embassy and was assigned there? John Mulholland again. He was working at the, I think it was the OMA office there. So we got to see each other again and

• 2:26:36Speaker 06

  worked together a little bit. And so they, the agency supported me. I came back to the U.S. Fifth group had changed significantly. All of the people were gone. They gave me a barracks room over the gym for two weeks and I just hand carried my paperwork and punched out of the army.

• 2:27:04Speaker 06

  Against advice and I didn't do all the proper things you're supposed to do when you retire. But

• 2:27:11Speaker 06

  I was by that time, I was in my 40s, 46 maybe. And the agency had a job, you know, for me. And I was like, you know, I can't, this is my chance. If I wait, I'll miss it. So I left Fort Campbell on a Friday and reported for work Monday at Langley.

• 2:27:34Speaker 05

  Wow. And what was the job?

• 2:27:37Speaker 06

  Took summer leave.

• 2:27:38Speaker 05

  What was the job they had lined up for you?

• 2:27:40Speaker 06

  Well, the job, I'd been promised, hey, case, that I'd become an operations officer, case officer.

• 2:27:49Speaker 05

  Formalized you.

• 2:27:50Speaker 06

  Yeah. And that I, you know, I'd already recruited and all that stuff, free agency and.

• 2:27:58Speaker 06

  But then I got there and they go, oh, you can start out as a GS 11 and you can't be an operations officer, you're gonna be a, a, a SUE, a support officer. And I was like, huh? What, what, what? Wait a minute. Me? Support officer? And they said, well, you're gonna have to do that for a while. And so I showed up with the Near East Division and that was my job to sit at a desk and support Iraqi Ops, write cables. And I did that. I

• 2:28:39Speaker 06

  did everything I could. I'd been fortunate over, from the time I was in Yemen to Kuwait, doing, you know, an army project to when I was detailed. And throughout that time in the war, a lot of agency people, I met a lot. A lot of them depended on me to take care of them in, in the hostile environments. So, yeah, I guess I had friends on the inside and they were telling me, you're gonna have to do two years before you can even be considered

• 2:29:20Speaker 06

  to do the training to get certified as a case officer. I'm like, but I already recruited.

• 2:29:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:29:26Speaker 06

  And they go, that doesn't count. And, um, you know, well, I wound up after six months there, getting my opportunity to, to go to the course to get certified. So I did that. And that's, we were talking 2005. And then I said, you know, cause I chose to go case officer route instead of ground branch.

• 2:29:54Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:29:55Speaker 06

  Cause I, you know, I was trying to look ahead. I was in my 40s. I was still great shape and very capable. But I was like, I gotta do this till I'm 65 or so. And I don't want to be that guy, white haired guy trying to still tote the rifle and, and hang out with the badasses.

• 2:30:16Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 2:30:16Speaker 06

  And if I'm a case officer, I can have a, I've never had, for the last 15 years, I haven't had a regular life. I can have a regular life and still contribute.

• 2:30:28Speaker 06

  So, uh, so I went that route and, um, had made him promise me that, hey, I've done a lot of war stuff for you guys. Now I want one of those embassy jobs. I want to like go to Geneva or somewhere where I can like have a good time, live a good life and all that. And so I was set to go somewhere. It was not Geneva. It was Saudi Arabia. So, uh, but it's still, it wasn't.

• 2:30:57Speaker 05

  A case officer job.

• 2:30:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a case officer job. And then, uh, after I graduated the course, the day I graduated, the, uh, division's personnel officer sent me a note, congratulations on graduating the course. He said, please come by my office at your earliest convenience about your assignment. So I showed up and I said, hey, and he goes, no, you're not going there. And I go, what am I doing? Well, uh, there's a dire need in Afghanistan and they need you and they asked for you. So you're going to Afghanistan. I go, no, I can't, not me back to Afghanistan.

• 2:31:40Speaker 06

  And they go, yep, Afghanistan. Um, it turned out it was the Greg V guy was the chief and,

• 2:31:50Speaker 06

  had some people that backed out of assignments. I still had the soldier in me where I thought, you know, when you're told you have to go somewhere, you can complain and you can say, ask them to reconsider, but you still have to go. I didn't realize, no, that's not how it is.

• 2:32:07Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. The interesting thing about the CIA is that like you're not a soldier. They can't order you to go to a war zone if you don't want to go.

• 2:32:14Speaker 06

  But I didn't know that really. So I was like, okay, but, but, and I went and it turned out it was Greg, you know, and, um, and, you know, I, I respect him a lot and, um, uh, trust him a lot and he had, he really wanted me. So I was happy to work with him and I worked with him and, you know, he was towards the last half of his tour there. So he left and was replaced by the guy who had been a team leader that I was, a guy named Chris, and I was, um, had been his tactical team leader in Afghanistan.

• 2:32:56Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 2:32:57Speaker 06

  So, so between the two of them, now I'm a case officer, but they knew me with my military skills. So I sort of went by, they gave me a sort of a different set of rules than the other case officers had. So I, I guess I had

• 2:33:19Speaker 06

  more freedom of movement and more leeway at pursuing some different kind of, you know, it wasn't the usual embassy stuff, you know, I was going after IED people and I, I was, for a while I was meeting a a guy that would bring IED trigger devices from Pakistan in. And I would meet him and give him a little bit of money and I'd, I'd take the devices instead.

• 2:33:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:33:49Speaker 06

  Yeah. And then after a while, it was funny, I got called into the headquarters and they said, hey, we have like especially trained explosive people that should be getting these. I go, what are they going to do that I'm doing? You know, I was a breach, I've been trained to breach her. I know I can take a triggering device. And they said, no, but it's, you're not qualified. And, uh, you know, it works differently in the agency about your qualifications and stuff. So,

• 2:34:19Speaker 06

  but I did that. I did some stuff where I, um, convinced some Taliban that they were on the wrong side of the fence and they should do some other things. I did a couple of the, you know, traditional case officer, uh, recruitments and hirings and all that.

• 2:34:42Speaker 05

  You also mentioned to me that there are a few stories from this timeframe that you, uh, you cleared through the PRB, uh, that I'd, I'd love to hear if you, if you can tell.

• 2:34:51Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, one of them, uh, yeah. So I, I did do some stuff with Taliban and turn in some Taliban.

• 2:35:01Speaker 06

  One of the stories that, an interesting one is that I was standing on a corner in Kabul called Masood Circle. It's right by where the US Embassy was, just outside the security zone. And I might've been breaking rules and I'm standing on the street corner with an interpreter, uh, waiting to meet an Afghan that I want to take back and interview. And you know, while you're standing there, your situational awareness is really turned on. You're scanning, you're looking, you're, you know, if, if there's anybody gonna try to come up and try to kill me, I'm watching. And as I'm doing that, while we're waiting,

• 2:35:43Speaker 06

  my attention for a brief moment went on this, uh, off to my left, a black Toyota, uh, Corolla. And, but I was like, okay, well, I don't really see anything wrong with that and back. And, you know, I was keeping scanning, but then I kept turning back to that black Toyota. And then I noticed, well, there's two guys in it. And they see me, we're about 30 yards apart. So they clearly see that I'm an American and, um, and then I, you know, but I was ignoring that little sixth sense that comes on in you because I was trying to get something done, right? So I just kept making excuses.

• 2:36:27Speaker 06

  There was a cop about 10 yards away from that, uh, that car. And I told myself, well, if there was something wrong, the cop wouldn't let them be there. Cause I thought, I'm just bothered because cars don't normally park there.

• 2:36:43Speaker 06

  And, uh, well, then the guy that I was waiting for showed up. So we turned around. The interpreter and I went back through the security zone. It's about 150 meters to the gate. We went in. And as we were coming in the gate, you know, there was just a deafening explosion and the ground shaking. And, um, the alarm went off, you know, you had to get inside the buildings and get on the floor and wait. We were probably there a couple of hours. Um,

• 2:37:13Speaker 06

  things started dying down. Um, I went to see the regional security officers there that runs security for embassies. And I asked them, I said, hey, was that a, a vehicle, a VBID? And they said, it was. Was it at Kabul Circle or Masood Circle right out here? It was, uh, it.

• 2:37:41Speaker 06

  Hit a milita- a US military convoy, killed two soldiers, injured four and killed a bunch of Afghans.

• 2:37:50Speaker 06

  And I said, oh, I said, was it a black Toyota Corolla? And the guy stopped me, he said, nobody knows that. We're just finding pieces of that. Nobody knows that. I said, well, I was there two minutes before it went off. There were two guys in it.

• 2:38:08Speaker 06

  So that, I mean, that's just one of those stories that happens. The lesson I took from that was

• 2:38:16Speaker 06

  pay attention to your instincts and if something's bothering you, you know, you need to definitively rule it out, threat or not threat, but be definitive about it. Don't let it sit there because I've many times imagined the conversation those guys had, you know, hey, let's just do it now. Uh, here's an American right here. All we have to do is touch the wires together. And maybe the other guy, well, no, they told us military convoy and but who knows if that's going to come. Here's one right now. And they didn't. Uh, the pictures that were went around the world after of that explosion, aftermath, where I was standing was just gone. It was obliterated, the tree, so everything was just, um,

• 2:38:58Speaker 06

  was just gone. Um, so, you know, fate was with me that day, even though I probably made some short, bad choices about sticking around.

• 2:39:11Speaker 05

  And then there's another, uh, another one about a asset recovery.

• 2:39:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, um,

• 2:39:20Speaker 06

  I had had some success with some, a couple ops I did with Ground Branch guys where we, um, uh, flipped some Taliban, we actually got some Taliban fighters, uh, that we did some stuff, you know, with, uh, for a while. And as a follow on to that, there was a, uh, one of the guys that was on the top 10 list.

• 2:39:50Speaker 06

  Mullah Kabir that was in Pakistan and through some people I'd been trying to reach out to him to make overtures that if he would come in and or cooperate with me, you know, I'd try to get him off the the list of that that means death because I you know, hey, if we can get you, we're going to kill you. But maybe there's another option for you. And eventually, and and and I'd had some success doing some of those ops. And we thought we were told that there that he would come in.

• 2:40:36Speaker 06

  But he was going to do so at the border of Nangarhar province and Nuristan province. And that was a back in those days, we're talking 2006, I believe. That was no man's land. It was, it was bad. I think later, a big military, US military unit got shot up pretty bad there.

• 2:41:00Speaker 06

  So we I rolled, we did this op. So it was some ground branch guys and I, we rolled in into thin skinned vehicles in the middle of the night to get in. And we had two gun trucks, so pickup trucks that had the local Afghans that the agency had trained were remained like 30 minutes behind. And our thinking, because we didn't have any air support, was that if we got hit, we would call in those vehicles and with a 20 or 30 minute delay, they could get in and provide some extra fire support to extract us. And we didn't plan on being there long.

• 2:41:44Speaker 06

  You can make an infill at night.

• 2:41:50Speaker 06

  But in those in a village or out in a remote place,

• 2:41:56Speaker 06

  unlike the SEALs and lone survivor, you know that you're going to be made and you have to get out of there. So you can get in, but the fuse is burning. So you don't have long to be there.

• 2:42:10Speaker 06

  As it started getting light, we backed up into I found some guy and we paid him some cash that he had a walled compound, so a mud walled compound. We were able to get our vehicles there. But you you know that we're still gonna get you. You can't be somewhere. And as the village wakes up and people start moving around, you know, you're essentially made. Well, this Mullah Kabeer didn't show, didn't show. I had an Afghan general with me, wearing plain clothes, who was

• 2:42:49Speaker 06

  ethnic Pashtun from that area.

• 2:42:53Speaker 06

  And he after we we had no phone coverage, even Thariya at that point, it wasn't where we couldn't hit satellites, it wasn't working. So we're getting to the point where I'm gonna have to abandon this mission. And we

• 2:43:14Speaker 06

  the general decided to go forward because he's a he's a local, he can blend. So he said, I'm gonna go forward and we were at the edge of Afghanistan. So by going forward, he was going into Pakistan. And I gave him 45 minutes. I said, Okay, I can give you 45 minutes. Go see what the deal is. Get where you can make a phone call and see if this is on or not, but we got to get out of here. The 45 minutes went by, he wasn't there. And we had to try to

• 2:43:51Speaker 06

  you know, I've got to do something by now. It's getting 10, 10:30. Surely, everybody knows we're there by now. So I know that by now Taliban, Al Qaeda, whoever knows and the question is, you know, how soon can they take action? And

• 2:44:13Speaker 06

  You know, I wanted to pull out and take the Americans with me because that's the sure thing to do. And that's what the agency would want me to do. That was the politically correct thing to do. But then there's that soldier's creed of never leave a guy behind. And I, you know, I even asked myself the question is, well, is he my guy? Or is my first responsibility to the Americans?

• 2:44:39Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 2:44:40Speaker 06

  And then this guy is an Afghan. And the ground branch guys were, were asking me, you know, it's my call. What are we going to do? And I talked with them a little bit and, and we, you know, we decided, okay, it's no longer a secret that we're here. Let's make one effort to get this guy. So we called up the two gun trucks, you know, the two pickup trucks. So we, you know, we had 12 Afghans and with each vehicle was one, if not two other ground branch guys. So we waited on them. They come rolling in.

• 2:45:19Speaker 06

  We got in front of them in our thin-skinned vehicles and off into Pakistan we go. Looking for this general. And hey, we got lucky that after we got inside and had gone just a few kilometers, suddenly this, you know, little cab car comes flying up behind us and out jumps the general and he's like crying and running up and hugging me. And he had, his vehicle had stalled near a Pakistani checkpoint and he'd been, they'd fired a couple of times and then he'd been running for the last 45 minutes.

• 2:46:03Speaker 05

  Oh, jeez.

• 2:46:03Speaker 06

  So he, so he was glad, but we, we covered him. And then, you know, thanks to the ground branch guys, uh, skill and, and the guys that they had trained, we, you know, mounted up and got back out and with no incident. You know, it was a It was just a very tense time. It had reminded me that, you know, when I talked earlier about Afghanistan, 2002, I was the tactical leader and that Chris guy that I talked about later was the team leader. And we got set up out in the middle of nowhere for this asset that was going to meet us.

• 2:46:47Speaker 06

  And he wasn't showing. And as a tactical leader, I noticed that, hey, we're out in the middle of a valley. We're in a bad spot. The people in this little outpost, there's only like five little buildings together, are disappearing. If the locals are disappearing, something is getting ready to happen. So I told him, we've got to pull out. We can't stay here. And we left and after we got back that night to our base camp, we found out that Sigent had picked up Al Qaeda comms saying that they had part of the ambush in on us. And we're waiting to put the rest of it in before they initiated an ambush.

• 2:47:31Speaker 06

  But we ended up, you know, walking out and I just thought it was a weird just

• 2:47:39Speaker 06

  sense of irony that I'd been on one side and now here I was in the team leader job. And I like it better being on the tactical side.

• 2:47:50Speaker 05

  Was that sort of like emblematic of your time at the agency that they kept you in Afghanistan?

• 2:47:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, I did. I did three tours. It's supposed to be one and not that many people even did one. And I did, I did three. The after two, I would have, I would have gotten, been able to go. But I went home on leave and actually married somebody in the agency. And she had never done a war zone tour. So they say, well, you know, you've done your share of war zone, but she's not done a war zone. And she's going to be in a war zone. So if you want to be with her, you know, because we've been in separate countries.

• 2:48:42Speaker 06

  Married in separate countries for a year. It's gonna be a war zone, Iraq or Afghanistan.

• 2:48:50Speaker 06

  I was like, hey, you know, I've already got everything wired here in Afghanistan. I'll, I'll, I'll stay in Afghanistan. So, uh, so she came out and I did my third year. It was maybe not the wisest choice I made because I didn't realize that after all those years of war zones and classified missions, just back to back to back to back. You don't realize what it does to you.

• 2:49:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:49:20Speaker 06

  And I'm, I'm now in touch with some of the GRS global support guys that, you know, were bodyguards that knew me and trusted me. In those days, they said, hey, man, that, that third year, you know, we all wondered when you were gonna buy the ticket. Cause like you're going out on your own in Kabul and driving by yourself.

• 2:49:43Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:49:43Speaker 06

  And staying at a compound and you kind of had this thing of nobody can touch you. And he goes, uh, most people don't survive that.

• 2:49:53Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:49:55Speaker 06

  But I did and, and it, it was good, but I, you know, I was done with war zones.

• 2:50:03Speaker 05

  I get it. I, um, I'm gonna, I want to ask about kind of your transition out of the agency, but I'm gonna hit you with a couple, some questions from our viewers. And let me see if I can pull these up here real quick. I know we have a handful. Uh, let's see here. Uh, Tom's asked, how does the agency have to adapt to penetrate harder targets like, uh, like nation state actors, China and Russia, um, as opposed to our GWAT experiences?

• 2:50:37Speaker 05

  And what, what from our GWOT experiences can be learned as far as like how we, I guess, I think this is a little convoluted, but I think what he's asking is how can we take our experiences in the GWOT and sort of like rejigger that to target nation states and some of the, the near peer adversaries that we're in competition with?

• 2:50:58Speaker 06

  Well, that one, that's, to be honest, that's probably a few levels above my pay grade. I think that my opinion based on what I know is the, the intelligence services have had a very hard time in our near peer countries. You know, I, I don't want to go too far in what I say, but I think we're all aware that, that we've had some spectacular failures regarding China and some other countries. And so the, you know, a lot of, a lot of our thinking about

• 2:51:41Speaker 06

  how the intelligence service goes about it, I think has to be refigured. And the model that we use in Afghanistan would not work. Now, I don't know what the special forces, whether first group or 10th group with Russia, planning is for, you know, to take it their side of the battle to, to those countries. But I don't think it, it can't be the same like command

• 2:52:19Speaker 06

  structure as it was in, in Afghanistan. And one of the big failures, I was one of the plank holders as things started deteriorating with Syria and.

• 2:52:36Speaker 06

  So I was in the midst of the decisions as, as that was ramping up. And based on my experience, I knew that whatever we did in Syria, and I'll, I'll draw the correlation to, to a near peer country, that like Afghanistan, while the agency might start it and have the legal, the legal authorities under covert actions to do these initial activities, that it's gonna inevitably turn over to fifth group.

• 2:53:16Speaker 06

  So my thinking was, at the beginning, we need to share with SOCOM and SOXENT and be tied in so that it's a seamless transition from agency to army. And, and, but that's where you get into those organizational divides and jealousies. Cause they're like, no, no, you can't eat. And I was like, let's go tell them. And, uh, uh, there was great reluctance to share much. I went down. Hi, I'm Jenna Ashkowitz. You might know me from Glee.

• 2:53:57Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:54:08Speaker 02

  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. And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you, you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. 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.

• 2:54:40Speaker 00

  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. Hey everybody, Lady Luck here. I just love the holiday season, spending time with family, sharing stories and having some holiday cheer. But sometimes when the kids get a little crazy, I love to break away, cozy up and play some Spinquest.com. 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 thirty dollar coin package for just ten bucks. So go to Spinquest.com and download the app today.

• 2:55:14Speaker 03

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

• 2:55:20Speaker 06

  For my, uh, my boss and I went down to brief General Mattis and that did not go well at all.

• 2:55:31Speaker 05

  Oh my God.

• 2:55:32Speaker 06

  Well, he was a, General Mattis is a very, very smart man and, uh,

• 2:55:39Speaker 06

  at that and, and you know, we're used to doing military briefs. So that's one of the advantages we have. Um, well, then I came back and a few months later, it was time to go to SOCOM and we'd had some, the agency in SOCOM had some difficulties and there was a, a level of distrust there. And I was like, eh, so I, you know, and by this time I'm a GS thirteen. That's it. I'm, I'm a low level GS thirteen because I've done all my time, most of my time in war zones. I, I did have one tour somewhere else and had some, uh,

• 2:56:20Speaker 06

  you know, successes, uh, in the terror arena there. But, um, so I, I, I said, hey, if anybody wants to go with me, any flag level person wants to go down to SOCOM, you're welcome to, but nobody came. So I walked into Admiral Craven's office by myself and, uh, it was an ambush. They, he was not happy with the agency and one of his key staff members.

• 2:56:53Speaker 06

  Had had it. There was a big rift. You know, I went there. His briefing table was, everybody was there. They introduced themselves. They sit me down. Then the door to his office opens. He comes in, sits in his chair, facing them, says hello. Then he spins it and looks at me and goes, and what do you want? And I was like, well, here I am, former E7, now talking to the SOCOM commander. And, you know, I said, hey, sir, at heart, I'm an SF guy, you know, and I'm here, but I'm going to tell you the truth, not only about what we have and what we're doing,

• 2:57:38Speaker 06

  but more importantly, what we don't have and what we can't do. And we got along. It sort of helped that John Mohan became his deputy and we were friends and, you know, I got some assistance from him. And, you know, off we went. But as that relates to a new peer,

• 2:58:04Speaker 06

  that there has to be a seamless off ramp. And, you know, my, I guess, maybe that's changed since I left in 2015. I doubt it, just because of legalities and jealousies and everybody's got to protect their turf.

• 2:58:23Speaker 05

  Joe asks, what is your view of oil and gas exploration in Yemen and its impact on the government and economy there? What do you, do you have any thoughts about that?

• 2:58:35Speaker 06

  Hey, Yemen has a lot of oil and it's just that the rift between the

• 2:58:44Speaker 06

  The Shia and Sunni there, we're never gonna get that. The French, uh, well, I can't remember now the name of the French oil and gas company that had the big concessions there back during 98, 99. Um, it, it doesn't matter who has the concessions and consortium there. They are not going to resolve that issue. No. And it's never going to be stable enough where anybody's going to be able to really put the infrastructure that needs to be there to be able to take advantage of

• 2:59:25Speaker 05

  it. Uh, Mitchell asks, what was the most useful thing you learned at Marine Corps Boot Camp? And I guess he's asking that helped in your later role in JSOC and CIA. Please tell us if somehow involved scrubbing toilets with toothbrushes.

• 2:59:45Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, well, involving toothbrushes. Hey, it's, it's shoot, move and communicate.

• 2:59:57Speaker 06

  It's the basics of never leave a buddy behind. It's the belief in your country and in your service and devotion to those people around you. It, it's the basics. And the Marine Corps, I felt was really good at the basics. And no matter where you go in JSOC, CIA, whatever the most complicated operation you're doing, even, you know, I've, you know, I've done operations against top tier Al Qaeda leaders. It's still going back to the basics. Taking care of people, shoot, move, communicate.

• 3:00:43Speaker 05

  Uh, this is sort of a, maybe an open ended question, but Isaac asks if you have an opinion about what we've heard about in the press about the Havana syndrome?

• 3:00:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't know about that. You know, when I first heard it, I thought it was plausible.

• 3:01:07Speaker 06

  It's also plausible to me that

• 3:01:12Speaker 06

  that could be a another or a manifestation of anxieties. You know, this is our society today is walking around with a lot of anxieties. And when you're operating in certain countries and you're undercover,

• 3:01:29Speaker 06

  particularly if there's hard targets coming after you, that that can weigh on you and change you. But but to be honest, I do not have enough information and I'm I don't. I think the medical community is still pretty divided on whether, you know, on how on on the, you know, the reality of that and the impact of it. I would believe if you showed me data, I would believe either way. Certainly, I don't put it past some countries to use a weapon like that against us.

• 3:02:10Speaker 05

  Joe's asks regarding Tora Bora, when you say Bin Laden and Al Qaeda had a good understanding of SIGINT intercept capabilities?

• 3:02:25Speaker 06

  I didn't say that Al Qaeda had a good understanding of it. We we were there were intercepting

• 3:02:38Speaker 06

  communications coming out of Tora Bora and identified Bin Laden's voice on that at certain points. And sometime between six and nine December, they stopped getting his voice. So that's when we know that he sometime in that timeframe probably left Tora Bora, which happens to be about the night they told us to that we had to get off our OP.

• 3:03:07Speaker 05

  Paul asks, do you know if any Afghans you worked with early on were able to get out out of Afghanistan? I guess when the country collapsed, I'm guessing it's hard to prove they worked with us if they worked with the agency.

• 3:03:21Speaker 06

  There's some did, some didn't. There are some people, you know, that I know of that are still there. There's a man, one of the linguists that I worked with named Rasul is active in

• 3:03:45Speaker 06

  trying to help, you know, just various groups and there's a lot of SF guys that help get people out, but there are guys that are stuck. And it's not to me just them, but their family members. There's one person I know that, hey, they're coming around now to my brother. And if, you know, it's either join or get killed. And if they ever find out that I'm in America, he's dead. So it's, uh, there's a lot. There, there are so many people that are left and, and probably a lot of agency affiliated people.

• 3:04:24Speaker 05

  Yeah. Joe's, I think you kind of answered this question, but he says, do you have a lot of exposure working with Sades or TFO during the AFO OPB mission sets? I think you sort of answered that question.

• 3:04:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I don't, I, um, the Sades, I coordinated with some of them, like mostly doing peace time stuff in Kuwait and some of the other places. Um, but not, I didn't really work with them in the, uh, in the combat phase. I, I pretty much worked with agency people in most of that.

• 3:05:03Speaker 05

  Uh, Don asks, with all of your experience working by with and through the State Department, do you have any experience or thoughts working with the Diplomatic Security Service or MSD?

• 3:05:17Speaker 06

  Hey, a lot of great guys work there. There are plenty of guys. There's Rangers, Delta,

• 3:05:27Speaker 06

  Marines, every branch of service that some of them leave, you know, mid-career and come to the Diplomatic Security Service. A guy that I trained in, trained me in martial arts, used to be their head of their martial arts program, Tony Moffness. I don't know if you guys ever heard of him, but that's, that's, that's the greatest martial artist I've ever known or seen. And he ran the DS program for a long time. So yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot of good guys there. But yeah, there's some that, that are inexperienced. In Afghanistan,

• 3:06:10Speaker 06

  they were experienced, but in places, in some other places that were not hostile, you know, it's people that have more of an admin police type background. So they're maybe not as suited in some respects to deal with a hostile environment.

• 3:06:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, I actually have a quick question before we move on to sort of your transition out of, out of governmental service. I've been working on this article lately with my colleague, Sean Naylor, for the High Side, that we've learned that the next commander of Delta is actually going to be a aviation guy who comes from Echo Squadron. I was wondering if you had any thoughts of that, as somebody who worked in this community and closely with the community, about rather than somebody who came from, you know, the traditional squadron commander position and working their way up, about an aviation guy sort of landing in that billet.

• 3:07:13Speaker 06

  Hey, you know, I think it's time. Delta's changed a lot. I actually, in the Syria stuff, went back to the Delta compound to do a briefing there in, in the run up to Syria. And, you know, when I left, it was three squadrons. I came back and it was like doubled in size. I think there was a We're with H, whatever, a bazillion squadrons, a whole bunch of different missions. And it had grown. And so with that, I believe that, you know,

• 3:07:54Speaker 06

  the guys that have to develop the operational plan on the ground, there'll still be plenty of people that can do that. But to run that behemoth now, I think that anybody that that has the proper mentality and training and experience in a joint environment is very capable of doing that. So I don't, I don't think that they'll miss a step.

• 3:08:22Speaker 05

  So talk to us. I mean, I, I believe you told me you spent about 15 years in the agency before retiring. If you could tell us a little bit about your transition to back to civilian life after all these years and a life of working, you know, sort of in the shadows.

• 3:08:39Speaker 06

  The, um, the agency.

• 3:08:45Speaker 06

  I, I, I entered this field. I, again, I, I was a young guy. I, I thought my job was to give my life for my country and never planned on surviving all that stuff and, and getting old, getting older.

• 3:09:05Speaker 06

  I pushed hard and I had

• 3:09:12Speaker 06

  that just some things in the agency started, uh, you know, going bothering me somewhat. Uh, I had a successful, uh, operation against a senior, um, uh, Al Qaeda person that sort of put me in the middle of the political aspect and at more senior levels. And I started seeing under the tent, you know, that a lot of, some of the politics involved and the decision-making process and some stuff with the National Security Council. And, you know, this whole thing about, hey, let's not tell SOCOM stuff.

• 3:09:53Speaker 06

  I, you know, I started becoming like, hey, I'm, this is bothering me. And I think I had, and then the wife that I married there in the agency, decided to move on and do something different. So, you know, I started really wondering like, what am I doing here?

• 3:10:21Speaker 06

  I've, I felt that the agency, a lot of the people in the side of the agency I was in, were fairly liberal and that, you know, I was viewed somewhat different. You know, I didn't think I was an old codger yet, but it, it just started getting where I, I started like, I don't like the politics in this. And then in my personal life, I started,

• 3:10:57Speaker 06

  I'd been on all these offensive things. It's who, how do we track down this guy? How do I get this guy? I had a few times where I did something I felt was really good, like getting a family out of a denied country. Once I, you know, that was, that was a good feeling. And I, you know, I started searching for it and there was a spiritual search for me. I'd, I'd, I'd, I'd been a believer in God and Christian, but I sure as heck wouldn't have been accused of that if anybody knew me in a lot of my military time and, and maybe agency time.

• 3:11:43Speaker 06

  And, you know, this, I started, I started having medical issues. I'd been under extreme stress in some things that we, we haven't talked about, probably shouldn't talk about. And for so many years and so long that I started having heart things. And, yeah, I started thinking this isn't for me.

• 3:12:12Speaker 06

  Right when my career after some pretty spectacular successes should have been taken off, I was like, I've got it. I've got to bail on this. And I resigned in 2015 after, I think I was 11 as a staff officer and two as a detailee. But I'd been working on and off with the agency for, yeah, 15, 16 years.

• 3:12:41Speaker 05

  And so you you sort of reconnected or made stronger connections with your with your faith?

• 3:12:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:12:49Speaker 05

  Got remarried?

• 3:12:52Speaker 06

  No, I actually, with my faith, you know, I I hope I don't turn

• 3:12:59Speaker 05

  No, it's okay.

• 3:13:00Speaker 06

  But but but I had, again, I decided I needed to be not a believer, but a follower. I needed to be somebody that made what I who I thought I was on the inside and what I believed be who I am, how I speak, and on the outside. Because I was one thing that I felt I needed to be to get the job done on the outside. And I thought I was somebody different. The truth is, you are who you are on the outside, not what you like to think you are on the inside. So I did reconnect with my faith. I decided I I probably wasn't

• 3:13:44Speaker 06

  the most qualified person to look for romantic entanglements. All the buddy, my buddies in the military say, Hey, Gary, every 10 or 15 years, don't ever get married again. Just every 10 or 15 years, give all your shit to some woman and all your money. And and don't go through that whole.

• 3:14:06Speaker 05

  Just PayPal them.

• 3:14:08Speaker 06

  So, and you know, it's a bit part of my change and my faith.

• 3:14:17Speaker 06

  I gave up on all that. And then I was at a church in McLean and, you know, met somebody there that was a godsend, you know, to me. I gave up. I was like, okay, I'm not looking anymore. And Kimberly Scott walked into my life. And so we've been together like eight years, you know.

• 3:14:44Speaker 00

  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.

• 3:14:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:15:09Speaker 00

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

• 3:15:14Speaker 02

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

• 3:15:20Speaker 00

  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.

• 3:15:40Speaker 02

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• 3:16:04Speaker 03

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• 3:16:10Speaker 06

  It's funny, because I had just rolled back my cover in preparation to leave the agency. And we agreed to have coffee to talk about church. So I met her for this coffee and she said, one of her first questions, well, what do you do? And I said, well, you're actually the first person I can tell, but I work in the CIA. She goes, oh, you know, and she was a very, she is a very sweet and innocent person. Besides what little bit of corruption I've been able to achieve. And, and she said, oh, what, I said, well, I actually was a marine officer to start off. But then I resigned and I enlisted in special forces.

• 3:16:55Speaker 06

  And then I did this thing that they call the Delta Force for a while. And then I went to the CIA and I'm in the CIA. She said, oh, and she goes back to school and some friends of her, she had a husband, a late husband who'd passed away a few years before of, of, of an illness. And they'd been trying to set her up with agency guys. Cause this teacher that she worked with, her husband was a senior guy in the agency. And they were trying to set her up. She's, no, I, I, there's a guy at, at my church and I, I think, I think I'm going to start going out with him.

• 3:17:39Speaker 06

  And they, oh, oh, tell me about him, tell me about him. And it happened to be that this woman's husband had been a ranger. And before the agency, she said, oh, well, he's, his name is Gary. He, he was marine, then he was special forces, then he was Delta Force, and now he's CIA. And then the woman looked at her and laughed and shook her head and patted her on the back and said, oh, honey, there's nobody that's done all that stuff. That's, that's, that's the kind of thing that guys tell girls when they want to get very friendly with them. But that, that's, there's no way. She said, but he seems so sincere and I met him at church. She said, nah, impossible, but give me his name and I, and I'll have my husband check him out.

• 3:18:25Speaker 06

  So she gave him my name and she said, you know, I found out much later that a couple of days later, that lady came back to her and said, oh my God, she said, not only is that true, there's way more than that. He's, you know, he's, he's done all that and a few things. So.

• 3:18:46Speaker 05

  You passed the smell test.

• 3:18:48Speaker 06

  I passed that. They did give a little bit extra report. They said, he's known as a real good guy, but he's not much of a rule follower. But he never lies. So, you know, when they, when he gets caught, he'll, he'll tell them what he did. But, um, so I, I guess I passed that test.

• 3:19:10Speaker 05

  And, and so how has quote unquote retirement been, been going for you and settling into this new life?

• 3:19:18Speaker 06

  Well, you know, I think maybe all of us can relate to that, right? It's, it's way, way tougher than I thought.

• 3:19:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:19:26Speaker 06

  And, um, and I, I like even in the agency, I, I got used to, you know, we're, we're government and I want to do good things. And when I was in the government, if I write a proposal and get a proposal and convince people to approve the proposal, I get money. Like my last year in Afghanistan, one point, whatever million dollars to set up this program. It was a very successful program. It was great. So I thought, okay, I'm going to apply to my skills to business and do that. Well, guess what? There's not a bunch of people lining up to give me millions of dollars to start a business. And at, at first I think

• 3:20:11Speaker 06

  I got pushed with, uh, you know, by that time, for whatever other reasons, I knew some people in places and they were hooking me up with security gigs. And I, so I was trying to set up a security and I would hire SEALs and SF guys, but I, I never made a success of it because by the time you pay the guys to do the work, there never was enough for me. So I couldn't live off the money. And one day I did an event for women CEOs. And when I trained them in anti assault, anti abduction, escape from restraints, situational awareness.

• 3:20:53Speaker 06

  You know, during that, one of the women came up and said, if I knew this before, I wouldn't have got stabbed and raped a few years ago. And I just liked that. I like giving to people. It made me feel that the 35 years that I spent doing the things that I did in hostile environments, living undercover, that there were things I could teach people that improve every person's life so they can take care of themselves, so they can have peace of mind.

• 3:21:33Speaker 06

  And these days, you know, look how our society is devolving and violence is at right around the corner from any of us. And people are increasingly less able to take care of it. So I kind of view it as a mission to, you know, equip people to be able to take care of themselves, just following the same principles and habits that many of us learn to live with throughout our careers.

• 3:22:03Speaker 05

  You're still doing the, do you, is this become something you do regularly, these seminars and things like this?

• 3:22:10Speaker 06

  I have in the past tended to work for, you know, higher net worth families and people that have like daughters or children going abroad to study. I started, I did do some, I've been doing some events with organizations. And I'm getting ready to launch an online course called The Prudent Parenting Course. And that's to just take parents and guide them through how to properly mentor your children so that they are self reliant for their security and safety.

• 3:22:56Speaker 06

  It's a pretty extensive course and I've spent probably two years putting that together.

• 3:23:02Speaker 05

  And where can people like find you on the internet if they want to hire you to come to speak to their group or enroll in one of these courses?

• 3:23:12Speaker 06

  Well, thanks for asking. My website is garyharrington.net and I'm on Facebook is Gary Harrington and on Instagram is the real Gary Harrington and have YouTube channel as well.

• 3:23:28Speaker 05

  And Gary, I think throughout this interview, and I'm sorry I kept you way longer than I thought we would. This has been like over three hours. But I realized we could easily do two entire episodes with you and all these stories and insights you have are amazing. And I hope you'll take me up on the offer sometime when you're coming through New York to come and join us in the studio sometime because this has been like really enlightening and enjoyable.

• 3:23:51Speaker 06

  Sure, man. We'll talk about coast some other time and the killing of the CIA officers there.

• 3:23:59Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I mean, we've, we have, we've talked to people who are involved in that and I would love to hear more from you on it as well.

• 3:24:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, thank you so much, Gary.

• 3:24:10Speaker 06

  Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity and again, thanks a lot for doing what you're doing.

• 3:24:16Speaker 05

  Absolutely, man. And for the viewers out there, thank you for joining us tonight and we will be back on Friday with Dallas Alexander, who's a Canadian JTF two sniper. Excited to have him on the show. If you want to find Gary, we'll have his links down in the description. So you can find all his information down there. And Gary, we'll have to do it again sometime, man. Thank you.

• 3:24:40Speaker 06

  All right. Thanks a lot, Rick.

• 3:24:42Speaker 05

  Thanks for your time. And all right. So we'll see all you guys on Friday. Take care out there.

• 3:24:49Speaker 05

  Hey guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for a moment about how you can support the show, if you've been watching it, enjoying it, but you'd like to get a little bit more involved and help us continue to do this. You can check out our Patreon. It is patreon.com/the Team House. And for $5 a month, you can get access to all of these episodes of The Team House ad-free. The same goes with our affiliated podcast Eyes On with Andy Milburn, Jason Lyons, McMulroy. That one, you will also get all of those episodes ad-free. And you support the channel and the show, and we really appreciate it. The Patreon members are literally what has

• 3:25:28Speaker 05

  helped this company, this small business survive, especially during our early years. And you are what continues to help this thing going, even as we navigate the turbulent world of YouTube advertising. So we really appreciate all of you guys. There's going to be a link down in the description to that Patreon page. And there is also going to be a link to our new merch shop. So if you guys want to go-

• 3:25:54Speaker 00

  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.

• 3:26:09Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:26:19Speaker 00

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you, you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. 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. America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today. 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.

• 3:27:04Speaker 00

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• 3:27:15Speaker 03

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• 3:27:21Speaker 05

  And get some Team House merchandise. We got stickers and we also have patches. And I should mention, if you sign up for Patreon at $10 a month, we will mail you this patch as well. So we.

• 3:27:33Speaker 00

  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. 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. And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. 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.

• 3:28:18Speaker 00

  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.

• 3:28:31Speaker 02

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• 3:28:53Speaker 03

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• 3:29:00Speaker 05

  Really appreciate that. But they're also for sale on the merch shop. And additionally, they got t-shirts up there, water bottles, a tote bag, coffee mugs, all that good stuff. So

• 3:29:14Speaker 00

  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. 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. And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. 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.

• 3:29:58Speaker 00

  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. Hey, guys. Lady Luck here. I just love the fall season. Kris 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. So this fall, grab your favorite blanket, visit spinquest.com and download the app today.

• 3:30:34Speaker 03

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

• 3:30:40Speaker 05

  Please go and check them out and support the show. We really appreciate it, guys. Thank you.

• 3:30:50Speaker 00

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

• 3:31:21Speaker 02

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

• 3:31:27Speaker 00

  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.

• 3:31:48Speaker 02

  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.com.

• 3:32:09Speaker 03

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

• 3:32:26Speaker 00

  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.

• 3:32:41Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:32:52Speaker 00

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. 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 Free iHeart Radio app today. 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.

• 3:33:36Speaker 00

  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.

• 3:33:47Speaker 03

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

• 3:34:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 3:34:15Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:34:26Speaker 00

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

• 3:34:31Speaker 03

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

• 3:34:37Speaker 00

  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. 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. So this fall, grab your favorite blanket, visit spinquest.com and download the app today.

• 3:35:21Speaker 03

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

• 3:35:28Speaker 00

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor

• 3:35:34Speaker 01

  Prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens. 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,

• 3:36:17Speaker 01

  or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolair. This is an advertisement for Zolair, paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 3:36:28Speaker 02

  Hanging out at the pool is great. Relaxing and playing Vegas-style games on my phone at the same time. Drink in one hand and a blackjack in the other. It's all at Spinquest. Over 1,000 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.

• 3:36:51Speaker 03

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

• 3:36:58Speaker 03

  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.