Former CIA Officer Breaks Down Source Operations in Afghanistan | Delbert Roll

Former Army officer and CIA operations officer Delbert Roll joins us to discuss his path from Third Special Forces Group to the Agency, including joining CIA just before 9/11 and working counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan. He breaks down CIA training, running sources, building targeting packages against al-Qaeda, working with JSOC and indigenous forces, and the realities of protecting assets in the field. The episode also covers covert action, counterintelligence, counter-WMD work, teaching at the Farm, CIA bureaucracy, writing after retirement, and the bizarre CIA gold bar scandal. Today's Sponsors: GhostBed ⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 10% off! Blue Chew ⬇️ https://bluechew.com/ Get 1 month free when you buy 2 of BlueChew Gold with code "HOUSECALL" For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics... JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouse To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video -early access to shows -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse ___________________________________________________ PRE ORDER JACK'S NEW BOOK "THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN" ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/803651/the-most-dangerous-man-by-jack-murphy/paperback/ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured __________________________________ Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 "Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio" 00:00 — Start / Delbert Roll joins The Team House 01:10 — Growing up in Pennsylvania and joining the Army 07:06 — Third Special Forces Group, Africa missions, and comms work in the 1990s 15:09 — Leaving the Army and trying to join the FBI before the CIA 16:04 — Joining CIA three weeks before 9/11 21:09 — The day after 9/11 and CIA’s shift toward counterterrorism 23:46 — Moving from analyst to operations officer 25:20 — CIA training and “Ranger School for your brain” 30:42 — First Afghanistan tour and arriving at a forward operating base 33:22 — Running a source operation against a senior al-Qaeda target 39:13 — Building a targeting package without GPS coordinates 44:40 — Airstrike decision, protecting assets, and the target slipping away 48:54 — Working with JSOC and indigenous forces to shut down rat lines 52:47 — CIA support to conventional Army units in Afghanistan 56:17 — Language training, European posting, and traditional case officer work 01:04:25 — Covert action, liaison partners, and gathering intelligence through proxies 01:05:05 — Counterintelligence, recruiting foreign officers, and disrupting Russian operations 01:09:07 — Counter-WMD work and handling sources without being the technical expert 01:12:50 — Teaching at the Farm and training future CIA officers 01:22:29 — CIA bureaucracy, NSA comparisons, and publication review problems 01:27:58 — Recruiting, technology, and learning how to talk around classified subjects 01:28:57 — From CIA officer to fantasy, spy, and horror novelist 01:43:42 — CIA gold bars, non-traditional payments, and final thoughts Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down rather than giving teens the answer. Study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.comPARENTS to learn more.

• 0:27Speaker 01

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• 0:57Jack Murphy?

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

• 1:41Jack Murphy?

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

• 2:33Jack Murphy?

  Hey folks, welcome to the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy, here with our guest tonight, Delbert Rolle. Delbert served as a Signals Officer and an Army Infantry Officer in 3rd Special Forces Group. He was a commo guy, and then he made the jump over to the CIA. For a short period of time, he was an analyst, and then transferred over and became an Operations Officer, and had a whole 20 years' career there, doing a lot of CT work in places like Afghanistan, but also covert action, counterintelligence, countering weapons of mass destruction, and many other things that we'll get into in this interview. Del, thank you for joining us.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  My pleasure, man. Pleasure to be here.

• 3:18Jack Murphy?

  So, I mean, the first question I always ask folks is about their origin. If you can tell us a little bit about like where you grew up and, you know, what your upbringing was like.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  So, yeah, I was born in Pennsylvania, grew up on a small farm outside of a small town in rural Pennsylvania. Not so small, not so rural anymore, but yeah, grew up on a farm, pretty normal upbringing. Basically, joined the Army really as kind of a way to, you know, see the world, if you will. You know, a lot of my free time when I was a kid, I was a voracious reader, only because it really gave you the opportunity to see the rest of the world. So, yeah, joined the Army, enlisted as a military police soldier initially,

• 4:12Speaker 03

  while I was in the reserves in college. Graduated from college, commissioned regular Army infantry. Basically spent the next 11 years, 10, 11 years.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  In the army, um, kinda got to that point where, you know, a- and you know, cause you were active duty army, e- e- ten year mark is that point where you're like, well, what am I gonna do? Right. Am I gonna stay at twenty? Am I gonna do something different? Um, and at the time, uh, I was married at the time and literally, you know, I was stationed in Fort Bragg. She lived in another state. We rarely saw each other, just because you were gone all the time and you had a serious workload. Um, and wanted to do something different, wanted to s- so continue to serve the country. So initially, um, I wanted to be an FBI agent, right?

• 5:10Speaker 03

  I was fascinated by the FBI, read lots of books on it, saw lots of movies, watched all the TV shows, uh, had been really interested in the work of John Douglas, who really, uh, he was not the pioneer of, uh, um, profiling, but like one of, one of the early guys. Um, found that fascinating, uh, and, uh, I probably had an unhealthy fascination with Dana Scully, uh, but, you know, you get that. So I, I initially put in my pocket, uh, to go to the FBI and for your, for your viewers, um, back in the day before we had computers and

• 5:51Speaker 03

  we had to like type everything, you would get like, you had to type out literally this application form. And I remember getting, getting a copy and the recruiter saying, oh, here's five. Take five, because you are going to screw this up. So, go ahead, you type that out, you submit it. That's going fine. You start with some initial interviews, you go through some testing, um, it's moving along and it's, it's, it's, it's looking pretty good. And then one day I get a letter in the mail and it says, your file has been, uh, uh, basically put on pause. Call your, your recruiter for more information. So I

• 6:33Speaker 03

  called my recruiter and the guy tells me, he goes, listen, there's a hiring freeze. So yes, your stuff is on pause. And I'm like, well, how long is that gonna take? And he's like, well, it could be three months, it could be three years, it could be six months, it could be six years. Who knows? And ironically, I have served with enough FBI personnel since then to know that in the 1990s, that was a constant thing. They would have just hiring freezes for no apparent reason. In any case, I'm sort of looking at a couple of other things, martial service, DEA, a couple of other things. It was around that time that a friend of a friend who had left

• 7:16Speaker 03

  the Army to join the agency, I was put in contact with him and he kind of talked to me about it. He goes, "So, is this something you'd be interested in?" And yes, he made that hand gesture. But it sounded like, sounded like a pretty cool thing. So again, went through the process of typing up my application, submitted that. Similar thing to what you've had other guests tell you about where you go to a hotel in Northern Virginia, then a bus shows up and takes you to a nondescript location. And you have a series of interviews and some tests and they, I don't remember exactly when they gave me the poly, but they

• 7:57Speaker 03

  did give me the poly at some point. Anyway, that goes well. And eventually you get this provisional letter of acceptance. Well, they're still doing your background check because they still got to give you a TSSCI. This goes on for like a year and I'm coming down on the point where it's like, listen, I have already told the Army that I intend to leave. I've, I've submitted the paperwork to resign my commission. What the heck's going on? And I remember calling the adjudicator and they're like, "Well, hold tight. More time

• 8:34Speaker 03

  goes by." I ended up talking to a friend, my, my father's best friend from like growing up, who had been a Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel, who knew a couple of people, got me in touch with somebody, whose real name I have no idea what it was. But I kind of watched him through, "Hey, this is the situation we're in. I'm coming down the wire." And he's like, "All right." Hold tight, let me make a couple of phone calls. Literally three hours later, I get a call from the adjudicator. I explain the situation. It's like, listen, I cannot extend my resignation again. I need this knocked out.

• 9:11Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  And, and then like a week later, boom, it's done. Um, so yeah, then, uh, left Fort Bragg, went to, um, Northern Virginia.

• 9:25Jack Murphy?

  Dell, before, before we jump into the agency training, I want to ask you a bit more about your time, um, in the Signal Corps with Third Group. This is in the 1990s at this point, right?

• 9:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:37Jack Murphy?

  And what was sort of the mission profile? Like, what was your job at that time?

• 9:42Speaker 03

  So, uh, my job as the, the combo guy was basically to do whatever the hell the battalion commander, XO, and S3 told me to do. Um, but as far as like the mission profile, that was a weird time. Because, and some people may cringe when I say this, but at the same time, folks that were there will know this is true. It had essentially become kind of like the Peace Corps with guns.

• 10:15Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Like, Third Group is Africa-facing, right? And, uh, Third Battalion is Sub-Saharan Africa. We spent a lot of time doing a lot of FID missions, right? So we did a lot of FID missions, but we also did a, a lot of demining operations. So you'd send an ODA to a given country, um, and they'd be working with contractors, but they would be leading the effort to demine, uh, the area because Africa, especially back in the 90s, was just, the 90s was utterly littered with landmines. Um, so that was a big, that was a big effort. Um, I know it could be deeply, deeply rewarding, but at the same time deeply frustrating.

• 11:03Jack Murphy?

  Sure.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  And what I mean by that is guy, an ODA would go down, right? And it's to set up the infrastructure for a demining, demining operation. And that might include, you know, building, you know, like the shack that you're going to store equipment in, or fences, or specifically radio type stuff.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  And this is where I would fit into this stuff is they go out and they set up a series of repeaters for the Motorola radios that they were going to be using with the locals to, you know, orchestrate and manage the de-mining process. And then they would rotate home and they'd come back like a month later and all the repeater towers had been torn down, the wires had been stripped out. Uh, the wires are then fashioned into, you know, little elephants and helicopters and motorcycles and they try and sell them back to the SF guys who, you know, spent like a month putting up this repeater network. Um, but that was, that was an interesting, that was an interesting period of time because,

• 12:05Speaker 03

  yeah, we had satellite communications at the time, right? But that was really kind of space available and it was not a frequently available resource. So a lot of our guys, we were making regular communications between Bragg and say Botswana, Zimbabwe, what have you, uh, with HF radio shots. Um, and it's a crazy thing because when you stop and you think about it, HF radio, it's that really long wave, uh, radio signal. And making a shot from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, all the way to say the southern part of Africa, it takes, it takes skill.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  It takes skill, it takes technical acumen to make that sort of thing happen. Um, and that was also back in the time of day where you had communications windows. Uh, you couldn't just call at any time, uh, you had specific com windows. And that was not merely just, uh, administrative purposes. It's also like the, how you're going to make that shot depending on, um, the, the various elements of the stratosphere, uh, that are going to affect that signal wave. Um, that factors into it as well. Um, but, uh, yeah, really, really cool experience. Uh, and honestly, it's the sort of thing that.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  I think help me along, help me later on down the road when you are, because I think, you know, that's the reality is that you take your cumulative experience and apply it to new things. So like when you're trying to figure out, how do I make a good, robust COVCOM plan for my asset, right? So as you're well aware, when you're planning a comms plan for, in special operations, it's based off that PACE methodology. So primary, alternate, contingency, emergency. And we use the same planning methodology, you know, when we were planning similar, you know, comms strategies with assets. You know, you get your primary

• 14:09Speaker 03

  means, your alternate means, you've got contingency and emergency, and kind of like a universal fallback. And that's designed so that regardless of what happens, you're going to be able to establish or reestablish communication with that asset. So the last thing I would say, it was interesting because at that point in time, you know, deployable computers were pretty nascent. I mean, we've had deployable computers like since World War II, but in terms of the modern era, I remember one day, the, the S3 coming to me

• 14:49Speaker 03

  and saying, I want a paperless ISAFAC. And I'm like, okay. How the hell am I going to do that? And essentially, and this is, this was before Wi-Fi, but we built a deployable local area network where you had, you know, laptops, computers spread out across the ISAFAC, all of which were connected with, no, it wasn't fiber, but you know,

• 15:13Jack Murphy?

  Cat, cat five cable.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, cat five. And, you know, we, we built a server. The funny thing was, I remember the boss saying, all right, make it happen. I'm like, whoa, how much money? How much money do we have for this? You know, like, what's the scope of this project? He goes, I'll find you some, right? And I think we got like $2,000 or something like that. It was like this.

• 15:36Jack Murphy?

  So you get to go down to Radio Shack and.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And we eventually, we, we, we made it happen. We built like, you know, one of the first deployable local area networks. And, uh, and that was, that was cool. That was a, you know, you felt like you accomplished something. After that, I went on to the 112th and had company command there. And it was great, you know, they're all great Americans, but you know, I just wanted to do something kind of different.

• 16:05Jack Murphy?

  What, what, what is that? What is the 112th? Is that like the predecessor to like the Joint Communications Unit?

• 16:12Speaker 03

  No, it's a, it's a slightly different sort of thing. So it used to be like, I want to say 30, 40 years ago, that each special forces battalion had a

• 16:28Speaker 03

  attachment, right? So sometime in the early 1990s, the decision was made to ensure that technologically speaking, that they were advancing and bringing the best, you know, to, to the fight. It was brought all together to establish the 112. So, uh, the Joint Communications Unit that you're talking about down in Tampa, that is, that is a bit more of a strategic element, and it really exists to support, you know, the much more senior elements, whereas 112th is, is really a more tactical, uh, technical communications element. So basically, and,

• 17:08Speaker 03

  and when I think back to when I was there, the tech level of technology was, you know, comparatively what they have now, we're talking about cave paintings, really. I mean, I mean, it was, it was the best we had at the time, but it doesn't even begin to compare to what they do now.

• 17:27Jack Murphy?

  Right, right. And so you, you did your company command there, and, uh, that was when you started really planning to make that jump over to the agency?

• 17:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And like I was saying, I looked at the FBI, looked at the Marshal Service, looked at, uh, looked at a couple of different things, but then really kind of got hooked by the idea of going to work at the agency. And, and I realize that's kind of vague and whatnot, but I will tell you that my career management has been a lot, very similar to that feather in the beginning of Forrest Gump. There's never been really a plan, Jack. It would be easier to, uh, you know, predict the trajectory of a ping pong ball being thrown down a sewer system. Um, yeah, I just kind of, hey, this sounds awesome, so let's go

• 18:21Speaker 03

  do it. Um, yeah, so, joined the agency, um, like I said, three weeks before the attacks. Um, that was, that was a crazy day. Um, the great irony of it was about a week before it happened, we were all sitting in the bullpen, and, uh, somebody had made the comment that how easy it would be to hijack an aircraft taking off out of Reagan, you know, and basically get into the cockpit and then just drive it into the White House or whatever. And nobody really thought anything about it. But a week later, I'm sitting at my desk

• 19:02Speaker 03

  and I'm, I'm going through, uh, basically a target deck, um, looking at collection this plan for the next seventy-two hours, you know, kind of organizing my thoughts as to what I'm gonna have to do in the days ahead. And I get a phone call from, uh, my wife at the time, and she's like, "Did you hear what happened?" I'm like, "I don't know what." And, you know, one of the, a plane struck the World Trade Center. And I'm like, "That can't be right." So, end the call, get up, walk out of the bullpen, down to the next bullpen where I know there's the TV. And I get there just as you see the second aircraft hitting the second tower. And in that moment, you kind of know, well, the

• 19:43Speaker 03

  world's just changed. Um, we're going to war, we're already at war, you know, now what? So, lots of confusion. And that day, that day was so maddeningly confusing because...

• 19:58Speaker 03

  People were reporting um all kinds of crazy stuff that they thought they there was a report of a car bomb going off at State Department. There was a report of a DC helicopter that had gone missing and possibly been hijacked. Uh, none of which turned out to be true. Eventually the decision's made. We need to evac- evacuate the agency, right? So I'm in working in analytical cell at this point. People are just running for the doors. And I'm like, where are we supposed to go? Because we're at war. Apparently the enemy's here. Um, so I just kind of sat at my desk for a while. And eventually, a spoh, a security police officer comes through and he's

• 20:43Speaker 03

  like, sir, you can't stay. You gotta go home. And so I'm like, all right. So I'm walking down, you know, down downstairs. At this point, like, the agency is like abandoned. And it strikes me, it's like, there's gotta be something I can do. Um, and I'm like, you know, we gave a bunch of Stinger missiles to Muja Dean, like, a little over a decade ago. I wonder if we have any left over, right? And so I go to find the closest spoh, the security officer, and I'm like, hey, you know, um, I just got out of the army, you know, technically I'm still in the army. Um, if you got any Stingers lying around, as one does. Um, I couldn't be in a fighting

• 21:25Jack Murphy?

  A wall hanger.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and of course, the, the guy looks at me like, you're, you're a sad little man, and you need to leave. Um, so I was told no. I was told to get the hell out of the building. So I left.

• 21:39Jack Murphy?

  That reminds me of, uh, well, a couple stories, you know, did you ever cross paths with, um, Justin Sapp?

• 21:48Speaker 03

  I know of him. I don't know him well.

• 21:50Jack Murphy?

  I, I, as I recall, he was at, I may be misremembering, um, but I'm pretty sure he was at, um, Key West at the dive school. And they call all the students out to pull like security duty after the attacks happened. And they're all kind of wondering like, what are we guarding against here? Scuba bin Laden? What's this about? Uh, or another story was, uh, and it wasn't after, immediately after the attacks. It was, it was, I think, the first State of the Union address after nine 11. And, uh, Bill Gage, Secret Service agent.

• 22:22Jack Murphy?

  Was doing security planning for it and goes up on the rooftop of one of the buildings there in DC and there was like a marine unit or something with Stinger missiles up there and they had been instructed to shoot down commercial airliners that are like coming down on on the Capitol and he was like, who gave you orders to do this? Like who authorized this? And it was just some unit that just decided on their own like contingency planning.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Bravely showing initiative.

• 22:48Jack Murphy?

  But I guess like the listeners are just pointing out like this was such a super chaotic time for some of the younger folks out there who maybe don't understand what it was like in the immediate aftermath.

• 22:59Speaker 03

  It was super chaotic because there was no clarity of what exactly was going on. There was lots of people who were trying to do the right thing, report what they're seeing. You know, people were confused and freaked out and at the same time, you know, you've got recently separated from the army knuckleheads who are like, I want to do something. I don't want to abandon my position. So yeah, all kinds of, all kinds of confusion. Absolutely nuts.

• 23:27Jack Murphy?

  What happened next for you? I mean, what was, what was the next day like at work?

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• 25:12Jack Murphy?

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• 26:27Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down rather than giving teens the answer. Study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 26:54Speaker 01

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• 27:24Speaker 03

  Um, you know, the weird thing was, I got back like the next day, right? And it was like stunned silence. You know, if you were in this, if you were in the counterterrorism center, you know, they never left. They just worked all night long, right? Everyone else was kind of like, what can we do? How can we help? Over the weeks that would come, like literally, everything started shifting to counterterrorism, right? Literally everything. That is, that is something that the agency gets criticized about, that over the course

• 28:06Speaker 03

  of the 20 years, where we basically focused way too much on CT. I don't agree with that. I also don't disagree with it. I think it's like, yeah, we did, but that's what we were told to do.

• 28:19Jack Murphy?

  You had to prioritize with, with limited resources, too.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Oh, for sure. And at some point, we could talk about like limited resources of the agency and why that kind of makes us a pain in the butt to everyone, but. Um, but like literally, you know, I was being asked to look at imagery for various islands in the Philippines, um, just like looking for any evidence of, you know, strange or anomalous activity. Um, you know, and I was supposed to be focused on the WMD program of a, of a specific country. Uh, and it wasn't the Philippines. But yeah, there was a constant shift. But the, the other thing I would say is, you know, if you were in the agency in the sixties, seventies and eighties and you didn't work against the Soviet target at

• 29:07Speaker 03

  all, I would ask, well, what were you doing? Because that was the primary, you know, issue. Now, that's not to say that you're not going to work against other stuff as well. And those things kind of fed into it. But yeah, that was the primary threat of the day, whereas counterterrorism was the primary threat of the 20 years that I was there. And yeah, and you always hope somebody was thinking about Russia and China and everything else. Um, but yeah, argumentally, that was, that was the case. But getting back to your original question, what was it like? It was a lot of stunned silence. You know, people were just kind of like, what the heck just happened? Uh, it was honestly, it was kind of like the day after Bin Laden was killed.

• 29:48Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 29:49Speaker 03

  Um, you know, you basically got up, walked around in your underwear, not knowing what the hell you were going to do for the rest of your career. Cause like all of a sudden Bin Laden's dead. Um, but I remember going to my supervisor and just being blunt. I want an immediate transfer to the director of operations and start training. And, and he was like, yeah, that's, that's, it's good to win things, you know?

• 30:13Jack Murphy?

  [laughing]

• 30:14Speaker 03

  Good to have Asper, my friend. Um, because, you know, when you join, you have a contract, right? So they, they made me do a year as an analyst.

• 30:22Jack Murphy?

  Well, why, why did you sign up as an analyst rather than going to ops?

• 30:26Speaker 03

  Didn't I tell you before about my, my professional plan was always like a feather floating around in the air?

• 30:33Jack Murphy?

  Correct.

• 30:34Speaker 03

  Honestly, it just didn't occur to me, but I, I, I think, but honestly, if I go back and I think about it, the reason why I left the military was, uh, I wanted to have a family, I wanted to put down roots, wanted to have kids. Um, I did eventually, you know, I'm, I'm a father of two sons, uh, both of which were in college. One just finished his plebe year, um, at West Point. He's currently out in the field learning, we do patrolling, loving it. Um, but yeah, that was, that was kind of why I was like, I want to contribute, but I want to do something where I can have a family. But then the war happens and you're like.

• 31:13Jack Murphy?

  There goes that idea.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like, you know, kind of going back to the movie Patton, you really want to tell, you know, your grandkids that you were shoveling shit in Louisiana when we were at war? Um, you know, no. So, um, but eventually did my time as an analyst, made it over, started going through the pipeline. Um, that, that took about a year because you, you have some initial training in the Northern Virginia area. And then you go down to the, the schoolhouse and that's, uh, you know, six months of, uh, of, uh, high intensity, uh, it's funny, sometimes people call it, you know, it's Ranger school for your brain because it just doesn't stop.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  Um, but I think I had advantage in that I was a little bit older. I was in my early to mid thirties at the time. And I say that was an advantage because most of the folks who had a little bit more life experience, right? They knew they had a job to do, right? It's like, okay, you know, I'm going to do whatever training during the day. And then at night you usually go back to your, your homeroom and you're writing reports, right? You're from your notional exercise related, um, you know, clandestine meetings and intelligence you've acquired and all this stuff.

• 32:36Speaker 03

  While us older guys are going, we'd sit down, we'd write our reports, submit them and head back to the barracks by like nine o'clock.

• 32:46Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 32:47Speaker 03

  Whereas the younger folks who were just out of college, we'd jibber jabber, chit chat, and they would be up till like midnight or later. And doing that every once in a while is fine, but you need to understand you're gonna do this day after day after day after day for months and months and months.

• 33:03Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, being a soldier taught you that.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure. And the funny thing is, like, years later, when I came back and I was an instructor, you'd see the same exact stuff. You're like watching these, like, youthful, young people who are in their, you know, mid twenties, just out of college. And over a period of a couple of weeks, you see them just get beat the hell down because they're getting like no sleep trying to write. And that's another thing is, um, don't let perfect be the enemy of good, right? Cause I would see, um, colleagues when I was a student, but then also see students was when I was an instructor who would stay up insanely late to try and write the perfect

• 33:51Speaker 03

  missive, the perfect intelligence report. And you're like, listen, you're going to run yourself into the ground and you might physically harm yourself or others if that happens. You know, you've got to like provide the raw intelligence, um, in your operational cable and get the hell to bed. That's what you need to do, because you're gonna do this tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. So that's why it sometimes gets called read your school for your brain, just because it just doesn't freaking end.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  But, uh, you know, the, the, the one thing I'll tell you about the farm experience and, um, you are gonna make friends that are gonna be your friends for the rest of your life, right?

• 34:38Speaker 03

  Ironically, Alana, Alana and I went through the same farm course together, um, a bunch of other cats, uh, Brian Hope, uh, who was like dear friend, one of my best friends. He, uh, he was in the class with us as well as a bunch of other, uh, folks. Um, ironically, Brian.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  Was killed in action almost ten years ago um this fall and uh several of us got together on Memorial Day or the day before Memorial Day uh to go see him in Arlington. So, you know, it's just really, really tight bonding experience. Um and uh it's just some great people. Um so yeah, went through the farm, then I got mowed for a year, um did that, came back and then started into a series of overseas gigs. I ended up going to Afghanistan a couple of times, um then through a language uh pro- program. Got to go to a uh a a nice

• 35:44Speaker 03

  uh clean uh European assignment, you know, where you can drink the water out of the tap, which was, which was awesome. Um did some good work there, came back and then went on to uh do a time uh stint in the in the uh uh schoolhouse and then on to another overseas war zone tour and then went on to my final gig, which was running that uh that um kind of a, it was not the farm. It was a training platform for the for the whole of the intelligence community. Um and basically I went that route to do that

• 36:28Speaker 03

  simply because by that point in time, uh the marriage had failed. I had ended up with uh primary custody of my sons and, you know, I promised him, hey, I'm not gonna move you around. Um yeah, and eventually retired. Uh again, because, you know, my son was like, Dad, I wanna, I wanna graduate from high school here. And I'm like, okay, I'll make that.

• 36:54Jack Murphy?

  Um, so tell us about that first overseas assignment, uh, it sounds like it was Afghanistan.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Um, it was, uh, it was a crazy, it was a crazy thing, right? So you, you fly over there in this contracted aircraft, you get there, you spend like a day or two at station, learning what's what, getting some in briefs, getting read on to a couple of things. And, uh, uh, I will note that Taliban was a real thing. It was real. Um, not there anymore, obviously. And then you fly out on an MI 17 in the middle of the night to your, your foreign operating base where you're gonna be. And you get there, middle of the night, you're tired as hell, you go in, you meet the

• 37:45Speaker 03

  chief, he tells you go to bed and you, you get on it the next day. Um, but it was really, I think this is gonna be the case for anyone, any type of assignment is the most really awesome, crazy, robust experiences you're gonna have is gonna be on your first tour. Because you're fresh off the farm, um, it's time for you to, uh, earn your stripes and get after it. And that would be, that would be the same whether or not you were at, in a war zone, in a semi-permissive environment or permissive environment, doesn't matter. The expectation is, once you get there on the ground and you immediately

• 38:25Speaker 03

  take your training and experience, start applying it and spotting, assessing, recruiting, developing, handling sources. Um, that one, I wanna say within, within a couple of weeks, uh, I ended up taking, uh, it was kind of a, uh, an overnight trip, if you will. Actually, it was like a week-long deployment up, deep up in the Indukush. That was pretty crazy. Um, great experience, latched up there with some military folks as well as some of our indigenous personnel. Um, really an amazing experience. Uh, within about a month and a half, though, it was probably one of the more, um,

• 39:10Speaker 03

  What's the word I'm looking for? One of the biggest operations of my career, you know, that you directly run yourself, right? Because you're going to continually do bigger things and things you are going to have more responsibility for, but you know, it's during that first tour when you run an operation in, it's like, no, you are the man, you are the one doing this, make it happen. I was having a regularly scheduled meeting with a source that I just picked up that had been turned over to me from another officer, and good individual, well vetted, well meeting,

• 39:49Speaker 03

  really liked working with us. Well, one day, we're having a meeting, and it's getting towards the end of the meeting, and I want to say this is like mid to late December timeframe, and he says to me, he goes, it's the end of the meeting, and I'm like, you got anything else, man? Is there anything else you want to tell me about? And for context, I had, before the meeting, reached out to one of the targeters that was supporting our operations at that specific base, and it was ironically Elizabeth Hansen, who was later killed in Coast in 2009. And she tipped me on a couple of things that were coming up, like there were some Pakistani

• 40:34Speaker 03

  military activities that was planned in a given region, and essentially, you know, kind of focused on, you know, taskings and requirements for this individual based off of that, because what we were expecting was, if there was military action, that there would be kind of a reflexive movement of AQ and Taliban personnel. So, the meeting goes well, given the tasking, and as we're wrapping up, I ask him, hey, you got anything else? Anything else you want to mention? And he goes, yes, sir.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  Do you know these two people? And he pulls out of his pocket these two uh paper photographs that he had cut out of the newspaper of two individuals. And he lays them on the desk, and I'm like, "Yeah, I, I, I know who they are. Do you know who they are?" And he goes, "I don't know who they are, but they, they have been in my village before." So, without getting into specific details, one was a mid-level Okada individual and one was a very senior, uh, very senior Okada individual. Um, and don't really wanna get into specifically whom, but you get the picture.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  So this indivi- this kid, this source, really had no idea who these folks were. And I'm like, "I get it." And, and one might ask the question, like, "How could you not know who this person is?" It's like, hey, you know, we live, um, we live in a world where, you know, not alw- not always does uh, uh, everybody know what's going on. So, in any case, take the information, write up a report of historical travel to this, uh, this general area. Um, but, uh, put it in, everything's fine. What's Ramadan, right? And at the end of Ramadan, there's, um, uh, Eid, which is kind of a celebratory, uh, period where, um, essentially,

• 42:37Speaker 03

  uh, you know, people are celebrating the end of, uh, the fasting period of Ramadan. And I get a phone call from him. And it's late in the evening, and he said, "You remember those, that individual that I, I showed you the picture of?" And I go, "Yeah." He goes, "He's, I don't remember if he was here or if he was coming here. I wanna say that he was there, okay? That he was there in the village." And I'm like, "Really? Huh."

• 43:08Speaker 03

  Go figure. This basically kicks off like, I want to say the longest four days of my life. Really for the next four days, we're running constant operations, connecting with him via a technical means, commercial technical means, leave it at that. Getting reports to see what's going on. So, who the individual, you know, we'll, we'll keep that discreet for the time being, but, you know, basically National Command Authority is eventually notified, probably within about 12 hours. You've got various elements of the military that are requesting RFIs.

• 43:52Jack Murphy?

  We should point out for folks, National Command Authorities is the President and the Secretary of Defense.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  Yes, sorry about that. And RFIs are a request for information or intelligence, depending on who's asking the question. But, you know, we start just this constant cadence of communicating with him, providing with taskings, taking his reporting, and we're getting really good stuff. We're identifying who are the key individuals that are visiting the village in question, what compounds they're in, you know, really solid stuff. And kind of building the targeting package that this individual of high interest is in this village. We don't know how long he's going to be in the village, but you could assume that he will probably be leaving after this religious period is over with.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  So, you know, like when I say it's the longest four days of my life, I mean, it was because, I would just be at my desk, typing reports, taking phone calls from the agent, doing all this stuff. One of the, at one point, we, we got to this, this challenge of, he would report that so and so was in such and such a compound within this village. And The challenge there was, well, that's not really helpful. What we're looking for is you know, 10-digit grid coordinates, right? So at one point, we contemplated, how could we get him a GPS? And we looked at a couple of different options to include having one

• 45:31Speaker 03

  of our indigenous paramilitary types infiltrate into Pakistan to hand off the device. But that had all kinds of risk associated with it. But what we eventually remembered was that we had a high-resolution plotter printout of overhead imagery of that village, right? And so a plotter is just a really big printer. So you're talking like a sheet of imagery that's like three feet by six feet, what have you. Now, the thing about imagery taken from a satellite is that is mensurated at an even greater degree of accuracy than the

• 46:14Speaker 03

  10-digit grid coordinate, right? So if you can identify what specific compounds, then they have all of the targeting information they need in terms of like where it is on the, on the planet Earth. So we went through basically a process of, and this took hours, of basically doing a verbal map trapping, map tracking exercise with him over, over the phone. Like, you know, I would ask him things like, okay, if you're in this compound and you're looking north, and you're right outside of it, and you're looking north, what do you see? And he's like, I, I don't know what this north is you speak of. And that

• 46:57Speaker 03

  would be, you know, something that would come up more often, you know, or frequently throughout time in, in Afghanistan was that certain concepts that are elementary to you and me don't necessarily translate. It's not part of the world.

• 47:10Jack Murphy?

  I, I was gonna say, Dell, like, you know, a lot of people don't understand, like, if you had taken that guy and had him in your office and were showing him that, you know, classified, high-resolution imagery, say, here's your village, show us what building it is, he would not recognize it or even know what the hell he's looking at because he's never in his life seen an overhead representation of his village and probably not any other village either.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  Yup, yup. No, it's totally true. Cause like, they've never been in airplanes.

• 47:41Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Uh, they, they just don't have that, that visual understanding of looking at the world in a two dimensional concept. And, and, and the other reality is there are certain things that you and I take for granted that people in the developing world, like, they don't. It's outside of their scope of exposure. At one point, I was, um, and this is completely, we'll get back to this story, but completely different operation. Um, a walking come in and we were debriefing them. In Afghanistan, uh, especially in the Hindu Kush area, you know, you get quakes all the time. Just happens all the time. So, we're sitting in this cargo

• 48:23Speaker 03

  container, debriefing him, we have a minor quake, right? And guy's eyes just get like plates. Ah, come on, man, this happens all the time. He goes, why does that happen? And, you know, he asks me through the translator, and I go back. Without even thinking of who I'm talking to, I start to explain plate tectonics theory and how the Hindu Kush, because it's part of the, you know, uh, yeah, you get the idea. I'm just like, it just rolls off my tongue.

• 48:53Jack Murphy?

  You should've just said, Allah wills it. Leave it right there.

• 48:56Speaker 03

  Well, the funny thing was, my, my, my interpreter like, looks at me like, I will try and interpret what you just said. And he tries, and then the source looks at him like, there's something growing out of my head. And he comes back to me, he goes, sir, that doesn't make any sense. I'm like, Allah wills it. And, and then he's like, oh yes, I guess. Um, and you know, the crazy thing is, these are, they're not dumb people.

• 49:27Jack Murphy?

  No, they're not, no.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  They're very intelligent, but when you don't have access to certain things, it's like, you know, it's, it's just outside.

• 49:38Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, they're, they're, they're uneducated, um, but at the same time, they have this tremendous local experience and like, as far as like, like them, uh, doing ad hoc repairs to a Toyota Hilux. Like they can do things to those vehicles. You didn't think was possible.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. No, absolutely. And they can literally make a broken down vehicle operate fully, fully operational with like bubble gum, uh, 550 cord and right? And you, you and me, that ain't, that ain't happening. That, that dead Hilux is just going to sit there. Um, but they're amazing, beautiful, wonderful people. I remember on my first tour, um, some of the locals got together and made me a birthday cake. Um, you know, and birthdays are really not a big thing there, honestly.

• 50:28Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  That's why everybody's birthday is the first of January, any given year. Uh, and the birthday cake was, it was like really a really big scone. Um, it had the density of a tile off the space shuttle. Like you could strap at your feet, rear enter the earth's atmosphere. But you know, that was the point was they're just beautiful people and they recognize that, yeah, they're just wonderful. But getting back to the original story, so we, we were able to, um, basically identify key compounds, uh, where, you know, the target is entourage, uh, where people were located. This is being reported up to the national command authority. Eventually the decision's made.

• 51:11Speaker 03

  Um, big strike and at the end of it, he wasn't there. Um,

• 51:20Jack Murphy?

  Was it an airstrike or a ground, airstrike or a ground raid?

• 51:25Speaker 03

  Uh, airstrike because it was cross border. There was

• 51:29Jack Murphy?

  Oh, gotcha.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  There was some debate of sending in a tier one elements to go across the border. There was some discussion of it, but that was the point where they were asking, they were requesting information that there was just no way my guy could possibly.

• 51:46Jack Murphy?

  Right, right, right.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, things like, well, you know, disposition of, you know, weapon systems, caliber of weapon systems, frequencies that the Q, the enemy QRF might be using. And I totally understand as a former soldier that you want that kind of intelligence, but there's no way in hell I'm going to ask him to go get that because he will utterly be fingered and he'll be dead. And it won't just be him, it'll be his family too. Um, which is something that, you know, I'm glad we're talking about it because it's something a lot of times gets missed is besides collecting intelligence for the good of the nation,

• 52:28Speaker 03

  job one of an operations officer is the safety and security of that asset. Their asset, their family, um, we take it very, very seriously. Um, so yeah, there is just like, I'm not, I'm not going to ask him that. So there you have it. Um, but at the end of the day, when the strike occurred, it was unclear where he had gone, but I think in the aftermath, he was either, either departed like an hour before or earlier that day.

• 53:01Jack Murphy?

  This, this is like HVT number two or three?

• 53:04Speaker 03

  Something like that, yeah. Uh, I've seen your, I've seen your target, right? But there was a couple of things here that I, I personally don't doubt the individual question was there for a couple of reasons, because there's never been any definitive reporting that said he was somewhere else at that day and that time, right? So, you know, that's one of those things that an absence of evidence is not evident in and of itself. Um, so there you go. The other thing was about six years later, um, I was in another location again overseas and, uh,

• 53:40Speaker 03

  There was a newspaper report about how Pakistan military moved into a certain area, certain village, they'd seized it, arrested, arrested control of it from Al Qaeda Taliban, pushed those folks out, and part of it was they discovered this kind of a cave complex in the mountain above the village. And they start describing the cave complex, and they showed some sketches of it, and I'm reading this, and this is years later, and I'm like, God, this looks so familiar. Like, why does this feel so familiar? And then eventually, I remembered that one of, I had written a report based off a reporting

• 54:24Speaker 03

  from that asset about that compound, how it was laid out, where approximately it was, how many people could be fit in it. And the point here is that his reporting and what was eventually an open source, kind of married up. So even though that high-value individual was not at the target at the time of the attack, no one's ever been able to say that it was somewhere else, and everything else that the source provided was, was spot-on authenticated and authoritative. So, so yeah, that was probably one of the bigger, bigger operations I got to do.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  Did some other good stuff that year. For a while, was working closely with JSOC elements and our, basically our indigenous troops to basically shut down rat lines that were moving troops out of Pakistan into Afghanistan. So I would basically work with my guys to develop source networks that could articulate everything we needed to know about the facilitator who was moving troops in and out. Eventually set up a targeting package for the facilitator's compound. And then when we go move on it, I would go with the paramilitary force basically to manage

• 55:52Speaker 03

  and handle that source because we wanted to get him eyes on hours before the actual hit. And then I would take control of them when, you know, once the blocking force was in place, the assault force was moving in. Because after we got the guy, our source needed to positively identify it like, yes, this is him. And we would, we basically put the source in, you know, fatigues, a lot of clover over his head to obscure who he was. And that was a pretty, pretty productive effort.

• 56:30Speaker 03

  But the thing was, you, you go, you hit a target, you remove the facilitator, you shut down the rat line for a week, and then another facilitator moves in and the whole thing starts over again. And we did that a few times that summer. And, uh, but yeah, that was the, that was the first tour. And then ended up coming back. Well, I went home for a period of time because my second son was being born. So I wanted to be around a little bit for that. Uh, went back out again, uh, then as a deputy chief of base. Um, that was a, that was a good year, but not as, not as exciting because by that point, movement was being far more restricted.

• 57:17Speaker 03

  Like, for example, during my first tour, and the first tour was just best, um, not best, I'm in a bad way, but you just get to do so much, right? Um, during the first tour, 10th Mountain went into, uh, the Pesh River Valley and basically seized control of it, reestablished a number of bases in the area. And we were able to go out with 10th Mountain. We couldn't go out on the infill. Um, we had to wait like 24 hours so things calmed down. But yeah, we went in and spent two weeks on the ground with 10th Mountain, uh, an amazing experience. Uh, I, I remember working closely with Lieutenant Colonel Cavalli, great guy.

• 58:01Speaker 03

  So we insert on this mountaintop, um, Abaskar and

• 58:06Speaker 03

  Meet with him and he's like, okay, here's the patrol base, move there and uh, you know, be safe. So I'll look at the map and it's like a one mile straight line distance on the map. I'm like, okay, it's an hour long movement, no big deal. It took four hours. And of those four hours, it was three hours of sliding down the side of the mountain, such that when I finally did get to the patrol base, um, I was exposed from like my right ankle all the way up to my right hip. B D U's were totally shredded. Um, yeah, it was awesome. It was awesome. But uh, but then yeah, on later tour, when I went back as a deputy chief

• 58:48Speaker 03

  of base, you know, not as exciting, uh, movement, much more restricted. Um, you know, and more, you know, management role. So you're not doing as

• 58:58Jack Murphy?

  I was, I was gonna ask Dell, what's it like supporting a, a conventional army infantry unit as a CIA officer? Like this is a far, a far cry from doing a brush passes and Bucharest or something like, I mean, this is a whole different sort of thing. And it's something that for, except for maybe some of the S A D guys that were active in Central America, it's kind of a new thing for the CIA, isn't it?

• 59:23Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And it's challenging because for a couple of reasons, like US conventional, conventional US military was in Afghanistan to essentially conduct counter insurgency against the Taliban, right?

• 59:37Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 59:38Speaker 03

  That's their job. We're there to be running cross border operations into Pakistan to find fix and facilitate the finish of uh, Al Qaeda senior leadership, right? So our job, our mandate, our authorities and what we've been told to do is run cross border operations, not conducting intelligence collection inside of Afghanistan. Now that being said.

• 1:00:06Speaker 03

  If we, if we run into it, great, we will share it immediately. And that, and that was the normal process. Like whenever I got any intel that, you know, could be of use to them, I shared with them immediately. Right? We didn't even, you know, get to the point of, well, it depended. Uh, if it was something that could wait a day for it to be pushed up the states and, and formally published and released, we wait. But if it was like shorters, you know, this is gonna happen in the next 12 hours, then I would like take my notes, go find Colonel Cavelli or, or, uh, God, I'm blanking on some of the other guys I worked with. But you would go straight to them, tell them, hey, this is what I got. This is who I got it from.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  This is what we assess the credibility of it to be. You know, so you constantly share that thing. But that was also by 2005, 2006, really when I was a deputy 2007. I will also say that we learned as an organization over time. Like, um, Sean Wisswetter, I know you interviewed him a couple of weeks ago. Sean's a good friend. Uh, he had served in a chief of base position earlier on in the war. And, um, he will also tell you that he was hesitant to share information until basically there was a meeting of a mind,

• 1:01:33Speaker 03

  meeting of the minds between him and the O D A, um, team leader in Warren to kind of like, they had a robust discussion. I'll leave it at that because it's his story, not mine. But at least for us, I could totally understand there was a hesitancy to share information. But also being a former army officer, I also know that these guys need this stuff. Right? Um, the challenge really became, and I, and I think most of military leadership understood. It's like, listen, I'm here for this mission. You're here for this mission. Right?

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  This is all in the greater good of national security. Um, but yeah, there were, there are, it's always going to be individuals. And a lot of times it comes down to personality that.

• 1:02:20Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:21Speaker 03

  Why don't you share this, you know, because this is secret stuff. Like, yeah, we're all on the same team, man. So.

• 1:02:30Jack Murphy?

  Uh, and in between these tours, you got to do some language training also.

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  I did, I did go through a, uh, uh, language, uh, program. Um, I will tell you that it was frigging intense. It was as, as intense as going through the farm because that is your day job, right?

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  Eight hours a day in language training, plus there's an expectation you're going to do five hours worth of study, you know, in addition to that. And the expectation is for the language I had, I had to learn it in nine months, right? And that's like from zero to at least level three for you to go out there.

• 1:03:16Jack Murphy?

  What, what was the language?

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  Oh, it was Spanish.

• 1:03:21Jack Murphy?

  Come on, they gave you an easy one.

• 1:03:24Speaker 03

  They did, they did. And, you know, um,

• 1:03:29Speaker 03

  yeah, I probably shouldn't have said that, but anyway, not, not that important. You know, what I feel bad for was like, you know, my friend Brian, uh, he had Greek, right? Cause he was going to Athens. And what I remember him telling me about Greek was there were 18 different forms of conjugation for verbs. Um, and I'm like, brother, how in the hell do you do that? But then like you, you have folks who go through, learn Russian, learn Chinese. It's like, that's usually like two years, something like that.

• 1:04:02Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, Chi- Chinese or Mandarin has something like nine different intonations or something like that.

• 1:04:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, but even even so, like, all right, I am not going to try and tell you that Spanish is as hard as, say, you know, Chinese. Obviously, it's not, right?

• 1:04:21Jack Murphy?

  But why the hell are they having you learn Spanish when they're deploying you to Afghanistan?

• 1:04:27Speaker 03

  Well, this was after my Afghan tours, right? So this was, I was going to a place where they spoke that.

• 1:04:33Jack Murphy?

  Okay, okay, gotcha.

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  But, you know, for other things like, like Urdu, Pashto, that sort of thing, did they send people through those training courses? Yeah, they did, but they didn't really push it as a priority because let's face it, where are you going to use Pashto?

• 1:04:51Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  You're gonna use it, you know, that's reality. And you end up picking up like a little bit of the language while you're there. So it would be the equivalent of like kitchen Pashto or kitchen Urdu where, you know, very, very basic stuff where you could like ask them, hey, how are you doing? How's your family? Isn't the weather nice today? You know, that sort of thing. Um, but not a, you know, high level, not a high level at all.

• 1:05:21Speaker 03

  But, you know, honestly, do you really want to spend the next 20 years of your career in Afghanistan? No.

• 1:05:28Jack Murphy?

  So the next, the next tour was somewhere a little bit more inhabitable?

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, and honestly, the nicest assignment of my entire professional career.

• 1:05:40Speaker 03

  Like, I had done a tour in South Korea when I was in the army in the mid 90s. And South Korea is nice, but back in the.

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

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• 1:06:46Speaker 03

  Mid 90s, the pollution was insane. Like every time you'd go out and go for a run, it was like smoking an entire pack of cigarettes. It was just, it was crazy. I hear it's much nicer now, but yeah, it was a European posting, very nice. And it was a good change for the family. Still working various, you know, challenging and interesting target sets. So that was a great experience. And then after that, went down to, went down to the farm to, to be an instructor. So that was, that was pretty cool.

• 1:07:27Jack Murphy?

  So they wanted you to get like a traditional case officer tour?

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and the beauty of it is, so, you know, first tour, you know, a line officer, just doing the job. Second tour, deputy pivot base in a war zone. Third tour, go back to being more of a, more of a line officer, but at the same time, you're, you know, a referant for this and you're a referant for that. But it's great because then it gives you the opportunity to do things like rush passes and signals and signal sites and stuff like that. So, you know, at the same time, you're working, you know, louder activities. You're also working with liaison. So it's a, it's, it's a, it's a good rounding experience, right?

• 1:08:14Speaker 03

  Cause you don't want individuals to be nothing but war zone type stuff. That's not good for them. It's not good for their career. And even paramilitary operations officers, at certain points in their career, they're going to be pulled out of the cycle of going and doing paramilitary stuff and be sent to a traditional tour so they can get that exposure. Um, you know, that's, that's one of those, and you know, I am not a paramilitary operations officer, however, um, many of them are very, very good. Not simply at the paramilitary stuff, but the operational, uh, the traditional operational stuff as well. So, um, but yeah, that's very normal. But then, of course,

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  you get promoted to a point where it's like, all right, now they're making you management. So then you're managing like a, you know, a, a global, uh, co-redaction program, uh, from HQ. I tried to approach it from the perspective of, yeah, I'm HQ, but I'm gonna go out and try and visit every platform, um, at least once if I can. Did I get to all of them? No, I didn't get to every one of them. Um, but we tried to go out and sometimes it would be just like a site survey, check on things. Sometimes it was to deliver, you

• 1:09:39Speaker 03

  know, some variant of training. So, and the beauty of that was, you're, you're, you, if you do and you're giving them a training course, you get to spend several days with them, one-on-one, you actually get to see who they are, how well they perform. Um, so did that for a couple of years.

• 1:09:56Jack Murphy?

  This is, this is like a lia- liaison type operations.

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, and here's what I would say, without going into details that I can get into, it's really the sort of thing that I think the American people would expect, right? So what do I mean by that? There's gonna be cer- certain targets, certain issues that we can't go after for a variety of reasons. Um, like-

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  You, me, all right, even if we spoke level five, near native, um, multiple dialects of Arabic, neither one of us looks Arabic, neither one of us looks Middle Eastern. And same thing if you're talking about the Balkans, or if you're talking about South America, if you're talking about wherever. Language is important, it's absolutely critical, but it's more than that, it's understanding the culture, it's understanding the nuances, it's understanding the fabric of that society at a level that an outsider is never gonna get, right? So depending on what the issue is, and we, we do this for counterterrorism, we do this

• 1:11:09Speaker 03

  for counter narcotics, we do this for a bunch of different things, and we've done it for decades. You partner with the local for, uh, the local liaison, because they have people who, i- it's more than just speaking the language, they know the culture, they know the history. Um, and we work with them, and basically we run them as proxies, as a proxy force to gather information that we can, and that's, that's a critical point. Co-reaction is a lot of things, and sometimes it does have a kinetic or lethal component, but ninety percent of the time, it's about gathering information for other things to happen, whether it's for, uh, a policymaker to make an informed decision, or maybe you're

• 1:11:52Speaker 03

  working closely with the liaison government, and they're gonna do, take action on something. Um, but yeah, m- most often, it's about, it's about gathering information. And I think, I honestly think that's what the American people would expect of us, to figure out a way to get the job done. Um, yeah, so there you go. I'm talking a lot.

• 1:12:15Jack Murphy?

  No, it's, no, it's great. Um, you also got involved in the counterintelligence side of things at one point.

• 1:12:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, a little bit, uh, I really can't get into detail, I know all about that, but, you know, think of it in terms of potentially recruiting, uh, intelligence officers of another service, so, but yeah, I really can't get into that stuff.

• 1:12:38Jack Murphy?

  That's like, uh, pretty high stakes, isn't it?

• 1:12:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. Um, for sure, definitely, because they're like very much um taking significant risk in terms of, you know, if they get caught, they're, they're, they're all kinds of screwed. Um, but I like there, there's, yeah, uh, I remember, this had nothing to do with me, but it's an example of where things can go horribly sid- sideways for uh, like foreign intelligence officers. There was, um, this occurred roughly when the time I was over in, in Europe. There was a um, a Russian uh, foreign intelligence officer who was basically working

• 1:13:24Speaker 03

  a series of penetrations of a given service, or not a service per se, but really a uh, uh, a government. So, he made a mistake, and this is, this is funny because it kind of harkens back to um, Sean's book, um, about kind of highlighting that, you know, the Russian intelligences, Russian intelligence services are plagued with corruption, and a lot of times they make horrendous mistakes. In this case, um, the Russian intelligence officer had been basically um, running penetrations that government, and what he would do is he would pick them up in his vehicle, and he'd go to a certain place,

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  and he'd park, and they'd have the meeting in the car, and then they'd drive away. Where the guy made mistake was, one, he parked his vehicle in the same place, literally every meeting with this, with this agent, right? Literally the same place. Problem number two was, what he didn't realize was where he was parking was immediately next to an apartment building where a senior member of the National Police Force lived. So this senior liaison officer would be coming home at night and he would see this diplomatic

• 1:14:49Speaker 03

  plated vehicle in the same location every three weeks and that only takes, you know, a couple of times to happen and he's like, ah, something is happening here. Without getting into details, basically they immediately put that individual under surveillance, um, both human and technical, um, basically watched him for an extended period, somewhere between six and 12 months. And then in the course of a weekend, basically wrapped, uh, the, every, every penetration he had of that government was wrapped up and arrested. Um, and then probably a day or two later, uh, he was identified as persona non grata and sent home.

• 1:15:33Jack Murphy?

  Wow.

• 1:15:36Jack Murphy?

  Are those the, is those the types of operations that like the CIA would engage in, like disrupting Russian intelligence abroad or, or here maybe?

• 1:15:47Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Uh, we're absolutely going to work with our foreign partners to disrupt, um, you know, Russian intelligence operations. Um, when it's, you know, a hu- a traditional human operation or if it's, you know, covert influence, um, whenever we can, wherever we can, we're going to work against them. So.

• 1:16:10Jack Murphy?

  Uh, and the, uh,

• 1:16:13Speaker 03

  It's a potting season.

• 1:16:16Jack Murphy?

  And when did the, uh, counter WMD stuff come in?

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  Um, probably around mid-career. Um, that's also something that I really don't want to get into, uh, detail with. What I will tell you is, you know, it kind of goes back to, uh, kind of speaks to how we'll approach things like that. In, in, or at least in one of those instances, um, I had recruited the individual, um, and, and to be clear, all right, I have a degree in humanities, right? I do not have a deep scientific background, right?

• 1:16:55Speaker 03

  But my job as an operations officer is literally to handle the operation, right? So I'm focused on things like training the individual, ensuring their communications are robust and secure, uh, the security of the overall operation, making sure that he remains committed to the cause, uh, committed to the relationship, relationship with CIA, all of that traditional operation stuff, right? But when it came to having substantive under, understanding of the, the science around what this individual had access to, that way over my head.

• 1:17:35Speaker 03

  So what we did in that case was we worked with elements back at HQ and we were able to meet in a third country location where we could bring in a no kidding PhD to be part of the debriefing. So, because at the end of the day, like, I just cannot, I, I just don't know, you know?

• 1:17:55Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I, I think, uh, Jim Waller talks about this, about, you know, training the intelligence officer to, you know, speak about nuclear fission and things like this.

• 1:18:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. And, and ironically, again, later on in my career, when I was running that community platform, one of the things we focused on was developing a course that was focused on emerging and, and disruptive technologies for that exact reason. Because, um, overwhelmingly, when you look at like, who becomes operations officers, they, there's a lot of finance individuals, a lot of, there's a lot of lawyers, accountants, the sort of things you'd find at the FBI. Having people with deep scientific background doesn't, I'm not saying that they're not there because I've actually known two operations officers who had degrees in physics.

• 1:18:50Jack Murphy?

  That's cool.

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  And advanced degrees. But most of us don't have that background. So what we'll do is we'll partner with the directorate of analysis back at HQ. And we'll bring, you know, a no kidding PhD to whatever country we need to bring them to. So they can sit in the room and have a robust discussion about something that's just going to go over my head. Now, I'm still, I'm still there. I'm still participating, but my part is the management of the, the meeting, management of security for communications. I'm making sure the room.

• 1:19:24Jack Murphy?

  You're facilitating, yeah.

• 1:19:26Speaker 03

  Remains secure. If I've had to bring in some kind of surveillance team to put a bubble around the, the safe house or the hotel or whatever, I'm managing that component as well. But then I'm going to literally use the, the, uh, the analyst from back at HQ to help debrief this guy and make sense of it. Because I'm not going to be able to. You know, Jim, Jim's a great guy. Um, I, I would love to call him a mentor, but we, we never got to work together in, in the agency. But he is, he's an amazing man and a true national treasure.

• 1:19:59Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Um, and going back and being a instructor at the farm, um, you kind of touched upon that a little bit, um, already. Um, but what were you, you were just, uh, one of the instructors that kind of like does the source meets and stuff with the students? Like, how, how did that work?

• 1:20:18Speaker 03

  So, you know, like any sort of thing like this, you can approach it where you're just going to do, you know, the bare minimum and kind of it becomes a, a low key break assignment because. The reality is, when you live in, when you work for the agency, there is really no such thing as work-life balance, right? That's why I, I kinda like my post-retirement career as a consultant is, I have work-life balance that I never had before, ever. So to answer your question directly, there are gonna be folks who will use it as a break from the grind of their career, and I totally understand that, truly do.

• 1:21:00Speaker 03

  And those individuals will, they'll be instructors, they'll maybe do some role-playing, but they're not gonna request to be a referant for anything, they're not gonna request to be, you know, chief of a, of a training element. And that's fine, you know, but then there's gonna be some of us who are gonna get more involved in different elements of it. So, you know, you're going to teach classes on, you know, everything from the asset recruitment cycle, or the agent recruitment cycle, depending on, you know, however you wanna phrase it, to maybe you wanna focus on counterintelligence methodologies, or defense against counterintelligence methodologies.

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  So, you know, it makes it sound a little bit like Hogwarts, but, you know, it's things like, teaching a student, what do you do when you are driving down a dark road, in the middle of the night, after an asset meeting, and you run into a roadblock? How do you deal with that? How do you deal with your, your meeting an agent's, you know, hotel room, and suddenly there's a knock on the door, and they say it's house call? And there's, there's general tips and procedures as to how we, we handle that sort of thing, and the reason is they work. And I wanna tell you that one of the, one of the most rewarding emails that I got from

• 1:22:26Speaker 03

  a student, years after he had been a student, he sent me an email one day, he goes, "Hey, you remember that thing you taught us to do in this circumstance? Well, it happened to me, and I did what you told me to do, and it worked." And I'm like...

• 1:22:45Speaker 03

  Yes, that is why I told you to do it. But um yeah, it's it's that's incredibly rewarding. So you may have you may have officers that specialize in commercial operations, right? Who are kind of lead the curriculum in that direction.

• 1:23:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's just so many different things. There's and there's definitely curriculum referats for things like surveillance detection routes. High threat meetings, uh basically covering the gamut. And then, of course, you know, maybe you become the chief of the operational training base, which is essentially being, you know, chief of the home room.

• 1:23:30Jack Murphy?

  I I think we also got to mention kind of blew past this Dell, but during this time while you're or maybe the first half of your career at the agency. You're still a reserve officer in the army.

• 1:23:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Um, for anyone who might be considering that, I would highly recommend it. Yes. Uh, especially during a period where the nation's at war. And the reason being is you're trying to battle both things that argumentably should be a full time career.

• 1:24:05Speaker 03

  So there's things like, you know, the the army wants you to do something called ILA, which is intermediate level education. Which is kind of the equivalent of getting a master's kind of sort of.

• 1:24:17Speaker 03

  And you're trying to do that while you're a full time CIA operations officer. Kind of hard to do. The worst for it for me was when I was doing Afghan tours.

• 1:24:34Speaker 03

  What I would do is I would come home on a on like a R and R for a couple of weeks. And I was like, all right, I'm gonna pick up a a week's worth of military duty while I'm on R and R.

• 1:24:47Speaker 03

  Doing military duty on R and R is just dumb, but that's what I did. And one time I got off the aircraft. The next day reported to support like a week long surveillance training exercise. And I made it through the week. And collapsed, ended up in the hospital. And basically, I collapsed and they just didn't know what the hell was wrong with me. And they're like, he's exhausted. You know, he's, he's getting, he's getting through the, he's getting through the, uh, the week, you know, uh, chewing stimulants and, uh, consuming coffee because he hasn't fricking slept.

• 1:25:30Speaker 03

  So after that experience, I basically would attempt to front load as much military duty before I deployed and then pick up the rest of it when I got back. Um, but yeah, you mentioned that it's like trying to do both of them at the same time. It's just, it's just nuts.

• 1:25:46Jack Murphy?

  The army did find a way to utilize your, uh, newfound civilian skills as an intelligence officer though, which is interesting.

• 1:25:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's, it's what, basically it's something that I think most of us would expect or want.

• 1:26:05Jack Murphy?

  You'd hope.

• 1:26:05Speaker 03

  The military or me to do. And that is, um, basically there's a memorandum agreement between two, the, you know, Department of Defense and the agency that essentially allows you to continue your military career as a reservist while you're working for the agency with the understanding and the agreement. If you should be mobilized, you are going to be used in a capacity that is commensurate with your, uh, your agency, uh, official specialty. So, you know, you could be, you know, maybe you're a logistician in the military and that's great. We need, we need logisticians, but then you're, you know, an analyst, uh, at the agency.

• 1:26:50Speaker 03

  If you get mobbed, they're going to use you as an analyst, not as a logistician and so on and so forth. Um, unless it's something, you know, cool like you're an aviator, right? Um, so, so yeah, uh, I was able to do that and basically was used as a, uh, operations officer with a, uh, JSOC element, um, for a year. A tremendous, tremendous opportunity, uh,

• 1:27:17Speaker 03

  Just really super impressed with everybody I got the opportunity to work with. That was fantastic. And then basically stayed attached to them. And I was a unit member for that mobilization tour. But was able to stay associated with them for the rest of my career. Basically facilitating your training operations and things of that nature.

• 1:27:40Jack Murphy?

  I'd love to ask, you know, because you have this like really unique insight. The difference between how JSOC and the CIA go about collecting intelligence. Is everything I hear, you correct me if I'm wrong, is that the CIA kind of is like long-term strategic intelligence? Where JSOC is more like short-term targeting intelligence?

• 1:28:02Speaker 03

  In general terms, yeah, that's accurate. However, it really depends on what element you're talking about. So CAG, for example, has its own internal collection capability. For something like that, for CAG, for DevGru, it's going to be very short-term, tactically focused.

• 1:28:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think if your readers are wondering, or not readers, if your viewers were wondering, well, what would that look like? If you remember in the movie Black Hawk Down, there's that scene early on in the movie where Eric is kind of like hanging out downtown in Mogadishu and he gets on his bicycle, rides away. That's what we're talking about. JSOC operators that are doing close reconnaissance for something. So it's very tactical in nature. It's very, it's high risk, to be sure. So yeah, a lot of JSOC is going to do that. Agency tends to be much more long-term. That being said, there's also certain organizations within JSOC that will be looking at what they refer to as the third original.

• 1:29:11Speaker 03

  So they're looking at things that might be an issue at some point in the next decade or two. And they're basically establishing, you know, a pattern of activity that will facilitate either commercial operations or something like that. Because sometimes they're commercially covered, sometimes they're doing some other thing.

• 1:29:33Speaker 03

  Most of it, yes, is going to be very short, fused, tactically focused, but you know, I assure you there are deeply experienced professionals there that do look at that third ridge line.

• 1:29:48Jack Murphy?

  My understanding also is that JSOC is sometimes the more aggressive of the two, where the CIA is a little more risk averse, where the military, being the military, is more like, there's a bit more of that move fast and break things mentality.

• 1:30:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that's true, but it is true, but I think it really just depends on the situation, and it depends on a bunch of things. It depends on like, what is the purpose of the organization, right? You know, the military's purpose is to, you know, conduct warfare, and that usually involves breaking shit, right? And if JSOC comes in, they're going to be there for a relatively short period of time, and they're probably not coming back, or maybe they will be. But it's also very short duration, and their specific focus is to execute whatever that mission is. You know, whereas the agency, and actually glad

• 1:30:42Speaker 03

  you brought this up, it does take a longer optic in terms of what is it trying to do? It's trying to go in a little bit softer, they've got to maintain the presence, there is, you know, there is concern about equities, right? Because ultimately, if you piss off the local service, right, if you do something to upset them, they can make your life a living hell. They can lock you down. They can surround your entire, you know, station, embassy, follow your people home, bumper lock you to the point where you cannot accomplish

• 1:31:21Speaker 03

  anything. So, we have to look at it from the perspective of being able to do the job, run the, and run the operations, and do the mission, not just in the next 72 hours, but, you know, for the next 24 months. Because, and the thing is, and Sean actually has a couple of good stories about times where liaison

• 1:31:47Speaker 03

  You know, got upset with us for something they perceived that we did. And, you know, they just made it very, very hard to operate for the duration of the time they used in that assignment. But again, that's his story, not mine. Um, but yeah, they can, they can absolutely make life very difficult. And I'm glad you bring it up because, you know, one of the, one of the things people don't get is how small the agency is, right? Um, I'm not going to confirm or deny numbers, but like, let's just say for argument's sake, that the whole of the agency is roughly somewhere between one and two infantry divisions, right? I've heard numbers out there and truthfully, I don't know if those numbers are accurate because

• 1:32:31Speaker 03

  I never knew and didn't care to know how big the agency was. But let's just pick a number of, say, twenty thousand. That twenty thousand includes everyone from the director to that brand new, uh, officer that just, you know, started duty yesterday, right? Everything in between. But that's also all five directorates. So Director of Operations, Director of Analysis, Director of Support, uh, Science and Technology and Digital Innovation. That's all five directorates. When you get down to operations, right? You're really looking at maybe less than a regiment, maybe two battalions. It's not a big number.

• 1:33:15Speaker 03

  And then you take that number and you break down all of the different, um, you know, occupational specialties within it. You've got, so operations officers, your case officers, you've got paramilitary operations officers. You have case management officers who are reports officers. Now, those three categories, they are trained and certified and authorized to conduct operations. Um, but then you've also got.

• 1:33:42Speaker 03

  Staff operations officers, you get targeters and more often than not, those got those individuals are not operationally certified and they don't conduct operations. They absolutely support, they're critical to our success. But my point here is you keep refining this number down into the number of individuals who can actually run operations is very, very small. We used to say things like there was more FBI agents assigned to Manhattan Island than there were agency officers covering the globe. I think that's a slight exaggeration.

• 1:34:19Jack Murphy?

  I think, I think I was reading Tim Weiner's book and he was saying how some politician was shocked to find out that the CIA's budget for covert action was under a billion dollars. Or DOD has like billions and billions and billions and it was just kind of shocking how little they actually had to play with.

• 1:34:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we can get more if we need it, but the, the, the point I'm driving at here is it's a very limited resource. You, you have a real limited resource, you have a limited number of officers to cover an entire country wherever you are overseas and we just cannot afford to not play the long game. We can't afford to break, break stuff and, and enrage the local service and potentially make our jobs impossible to execute.

• 1:35:12Jack Murphy?

  It's.

• 1:35:13Speaker 03

  Which was a really long-winded answer.

• 1:35:15Jack Murphy?

  No, no, no, it's, it's good. I mean, it, the, people need to hear some of these things because like I've had conversations with people here in Brooklyn, you know, normal, normal people and you know, they find out I'm a journalist, I cover this and that, blah, blah, blah. And they start telling me that, you know, the CIA installs all of the presidents in Central and South America. Did you know that? You know, like, and I'm, I'm trying, I try to explain to them like they couldn't do that if they had 10 times the resources that they actually have. And then the other uncomfortable part of the conversation is I, I hate to break it to you, but America doesn't really give a fuck about your country as much as you think it does. And that's kind of a difficult conversation to have with some people.

• 1:35:58Speaker 03

  No, it's, it's true because, you know, we have this thing called the NIFIF, National Intelligence Priorities Framework, right?

• 1:36:07Speaker 03

  And the reason why we have that is to articulate and make crystal clear to operators in the field, chiefs of station, this is what you need to focus on. And it breaks it out by country, category, but also like themes. So the top of the stack is something like counterterrorism. Then it's like probably weapons of mass destruction. Then it's like China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, right? There are, there are a long list of things after that. But you know what? Basically, what we're focused on more often than not is counterterrorism because you've got to do it. Weapons of mass destruction because it is a no kidding existential threat if they're used.

• 1:36:50Speaker 03

  And then the, you know, China, Russia, and North Korea, and Iran. And there's plenty of other horrible things that happen. There really are. You know, human trafficking is, is, you know, a stain on humanity. But we don't have the bandwidth to do, to address that. It's not a national security threat. We just can't. There, it's, it's just not fair. So, yeah, just kind of elaborating and unpacking what you're saying. You're right. We don't really care about your country. It's nothing personal.

• 1:37:30Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:31Speaker 03

  We have some worries.

• 1:37:33Jack Murphy?

  I, and then you finished out your career, was it community intelligence?

• 1:37:37Speaker 03

  Uh, so it basically was, it was a, uh, it falls underneath the director of operations or it's managed by the director of operations on behalf of director CIA, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's what they call community unit. And basically it was a training platform that was ironically mandated by the nine 11 commission, uh, report to basically enhance interoperability between, uh, various members of the IC. So sometimes that was really educating folks on who everybody else is and what they bring on the table.

• 1:38:20Speaker 03

  Which is a critical, an important thing, right? Because so much of our ability to work together and collaborate effectively is inhibited by not fully understanding what is important, or understanding the culture of other, of other groups, right? So, like, I'll give you an example. Operations officers, right? You're going to get promoted because there's a requirement for you to recruit an asset in every assignment, right? For the most part. That's something that if you don't do that, if you can't do that, your career's going to flatline and eventually you'll leave.

• 1:39:00Speaker 03

  And, and I've known officers who, good people, charming, can handle very well, they could not pull the trigger on recruitment to save their lives. They just couldn't. It was not in their character. And their careers flatlined and, and they eventually left. But that applies to lots of other organizations as well. So, I don't remember if it was DEA or it might have been the Marshals, but I think it was probably DEA, DEA where

• 1:39:31Speaker 03

  in order for a special agent to be promoted, they've got to have X number of cases with a wiretap. They've got to close X number of cases every calendar year. The point here is that every organization is going to have metrics and KPIs. And that's not just, you know, bureaucratic tomfoolery. That literally has an impact on individuals' personal lives. So, when you have a better understanding of that, of what is, you know, what's weighing on the individual across the table from you, it's more, you get more productive collaboration, right? And, and the ironic, the irony is, we will spend so much time training you to

• 1:40:16Speaker 03

  You know, to leverage empathy and to focus on understanding what motivates a source that you want to recruit to penetration. And yet, a lot of times, we struggle to

• 1:40:27Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down rather than giving teens the answer. Study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.comPARENTS to learn more.

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

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• 1:41:25Speaker 03

  Apply that same mindset to the people that we work with. So, there was a lot of that. We also did some specialty courses. We did one that was focused on emerging and disruptive technology, which was incredibly, you know, eye-opening. I remember when we initially did that course, we were talking about quantum computing. Quantum computing was theoretical that time, and then like a couple of years later, when I was taking my son to visit universities, and we were at RIT up in New York, and it's like, oh, here's our quantum computer. I'm like, what? You have a quantum computer? And they're not

• 1:42:10Speaker 03

  commonplace at this point, but there's a lot of. So, but yeah, that whole thing was to at least give an operations officer or other core collector a baseline understanding of a given technology such that they could at least begin the process of connecting with and assessing and evaluating somebody for potential recruitment.

• 1:42:36Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I can see it. I just recently finished this book written by a defector. I think he was the deputy head of the Russian bioweapons program. And Ken Alibek is his name and he

• 1:42:49Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:42:50Jack Murphy?

  Oh, you know that dude?

• 1:42:52Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I don't know him personally, but I like I've read like, I think all of his books.

• 1:42:57Jack Murphy?

  Okay, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it's interesting the way he like, I mean, the book, it's called Biohazard is really fascinating. But then also when he gets to the United States and he's being debriefed every day and he's like, you know, a lot of these people have no idea what I'm talking about. Like, they don't really understand the dangers of what we were working on.

• 1:43:18Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, for sure, for sure. Um, yeah, when earlier on in my career, when I was, when I was on the analytical side and I handled some things in a certain countries, a WMD portfolio, but yeah, Alibek was required reading. There was also like familiarization training and, you know, the irony of it was when the pandemic kicked off. I'm looking at it with all of that stuff in my head, right?

• 1:43:52Speaker 03

  You know, because people were convincing about like, you know, their movement being restricted and not having school and not being able to play sports. And I'm like, if this was like smallpox or weaponized tularemia, we would be stacking bodies in the street. It would fucking overwhelm our ability to deal with it. So, yeah. Alibek, his books are, I'm not going to say they're good reading because they're horrifying, but once that knowledge is in your head, you will see the world in a different, in a different light.

• 1:44:26Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah. And so you cycle out of the reserves in 2009 and then you retire five years ago. So I guess kind of on the tail end of the pandemic.

• 1:44:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:41Jack Murphy?

  And how's retirement been treating you?

• 1:44:43Speaker 03

  It was one of those things that, to be brutally honest with you and with your viewers, I would still be doing the job, um, because I loved it. I love the mission and I love the people. Um, you don't always love the agency. Uh, I mean, it's got a great, it's got a great cafeteria and amazing, you know, gift shop, but, uh, no, really, you do, you do it for the mission and the people, right? But my son was like, Dad, uh, I really want to finish school here. And at that point in time, basically I was being told by HQ, it's like, listen, it's either time for you to come back and take a management degree or a management position, you know, in headquarters

• 1:45:25Speaker 03

  or go back out overseas and take a field. And I was just like, I can't do that. So it was time to wrap it up. Um, and, and I don't regret it. I mean, I missed the job. I missed the mission and the people every day. Um, but, you know, my son, my son finished out high school with, uh, as captain of the football team, captain of the wrestling team, captain of his club rugby team. He's a plebe at West Point. He made the varsity squad, um, you know, first semester as a plebe.

• 1:46:04Speaker 03

  Um, he's doing fantastic. Um, my older son, uh, he's going to graduate from a really good school, uh, in Virginia, you know, at the end of the year. At the end of the day, it's like, at a certain point, you can't make this stuff work.

• 1:46:23Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:23Speaker 03

  As, yeah, and there it is.

• 1:46:27Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Uh, you want to set your kids up for success and it sounds like they're doing pretty well now.

• 1:46:32Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 1:46:34Jack Murphy?

  Um, and how has retirement been treating you, you know, personally and professionally? What have you been up to the last couple of years?

• 1:46:41Speaker 03

  So, so my day job is I work as a strategic implementation consultant. So that's a lot of project management, change management, process improvement. It's with a company called Green Castle. Green Castle, it's a good, it's a good outfit. What's interesting about it is it's 100% veteran owned and operated. So they literally will not look at your resume if you're not a veteran. So that, that's been a really interesting experience because, you know, like you spent your career in Rangers and SF, right? You, you have a optic of this is what the army is, this is what the military is. You know, and I had my career, so I look

• 1:47:24Speaker 03

  at it, this is what your, you know, life of service is. And then you start meeting every other member of, of the, of the military. And you're like, oh, wow. It's a much bigger universe than I thought. But separate from that, I've been writing, kind of writing military espionage type stuff, or really more espionage. If I were to describe it, I would describe it as if Jean Lecrae wrote Sicario. So looking for that, that gritty realism, but at the same time, want to be able to write something that if one of my former colleagues picked it up and looked at it, they would be like, you know, yeah,

• 1:48:08Speaker 03

  that's, that's good stuff, dog. You don't, you don't want them to say this is garbage. But also with a healthy dose of kind of Kurt Vonnegut-esque humor. You know, you and I were talking earlier today about, you know, there's that reality of when you're in the service, whether it's the military or the agency, there, there's a distinct tendency to have that, to mess with your, your teammates, to get under their skin, to screw with them. And I personally am like rather, rather wise into the conversation. It's like, you know, wait, the woman you refer to is your sweet boo boo? She let you leave the house wearing

• 1:48:50Speaker 03

  that? What the hell? Has she got vision problems? Yeah. You know, and, and gallows humor, you know, it's, it's part of it. But I think it also offsets, you know, the other elements, the darker elements of those types of stories, but. Yeah, it's uh, it's coming along. Uh, I've been working with a uh, a great agent. Uh, had the interest of a significant, uh, let me rewind that a second. Been working with a great editor. Um, had the attention of a uh, uh, really important agent and hopefully we will be getting something in front of a publisher later on this year. So.

• 1:49:33Jack Murphy?

  That's awesome.

• 1:49:34Speaker 03

  And I know that's vague, but you being a soon to be, well, no, you are, you are a published author, but you're about to be a published fiction author.

• 1:49:45Jack Murphy?

  Yes.

• 1:49:46Speaker 03

  You know that the whole thing about the industry is it's, it's, it's like they treat that stuff like it's top secret, special compartmentalized information. You cannot, you know, yeah, it's, it's just bad, but.

• 1:50:00Jack Murphy?

  Publishing is a harsh mistress. Uh, I, I, I could say they've never really asked me. I think, you know, if I can be honest, I think the whole reason why I was given a book deal was because they knew I would be a loud mouth and talk about it a lot on podcasts.

• 1:50:19Speaker 03

  Well, I, I'm excited about it for, for a couple of reasons. One, I read your first book. Um, and that was very cool because, you know, being assigned to Fort Bragg for five years, you know, I totally remember certain physical places at Fort Bragg that you kind of spoke about in, in your stories. Like when, one of those things you, you talked about in the first book was, uh, you know, Heho insertions with, uh, uh, uh, man portable tactical nukes. And I remember the place where those were supposedly stored.

• 1:50:56Jack Murphy?

  Oh yeah, on main post.

• 1:50:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And I remember being out for a, a, a run, uh, with a couple of my guys and, and they're like, hey, you know what they used to do over that building, right? And I'm like, no.

• 1:51:10Speaker 03

  And yeah, it's like, ah, that's where they kept the nukes. Like, oh, wow. It's kind of cool. But yeah, I'm, I'm excited because, you know, kind of what you kind of shared about, uh, you know, Most Dangerous Man, about how it kind of, it's going to focus on the character or protagonist that more representational of the Ranger Regiment.

• 1:51:28Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:29Speaker 03

  I think that's pretty cool.

• 1:51:31Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, thanks, man. Um, I'm looking forward to seeing your book when it gets out there. Sounds like, you know, we're a little ways out, but, uh, we'll, we'll have you back when it's closer.

• 1:51:40Speaker 03

  Oh, for sure, for sure, brother. And I will, I will definitely let you know when that's, you know, comes, is closer to being reality in a few seconds.

• 1:51:50Jack Murphy?

  Um, well, so a few things as we kind of wrap things up here, um, some recent controversies involving the CIA. I wanted to ask you about this cat that had, uh, you know, however many dozens of gold bars in his home that he liberated from the CIA's coffers.

• 1:52:10Speaker 03

  Well, so a little bit about that. What that is, is basically non-traditional remuneration, right? So obviously we pay assets and more often than not, you're going to pay them in cash, right? And you, either it's going to be the cash that's native to that country or maybe a regional currency. Sometimes maybe you pay them in euros, potentially in dollars, but you, there's problems with that, right? Because they can be traceable. Even if you go through the, the process of cleaning that money,

• 1:52:46Speaker 03

  you know, you're, you're still taking a degree of risk. In some cases, we may, depending on the amount of, um, you know, remuneration, facilitate it through other means. So in this case, they're talking about diamonds and gold and luxury watches. But I would say that more often that non-traditional remuneration is going to be things like, um, getting them access to healthcare that they need, that they can't get in their country. Um, maybe it's for them, maybe it's for their, their mother or spouse or what have you. And it could be, you know, you know, facilitating some kind of scholarship, if you will, so their children can go to the school that they want them to go to.

• 1:53:30Speaker 03

  The thing I would say about this situation is it's interesting because you know the first thing people ask it's like what is the agency have like a warehouse of diamonds and gold? I literally don't know and never cared because if I needed something like that I would just say I would send in a requisition report saying I need you to get me this and they'd figure it out. Here's the thing though, if it if it was acquired from the agency, it's not a good thing, but it could be worse. And what I mean by that is my understanding and what what's been in the news is that this was a result of a counter intelligence investigation, right?

• 1:54:14Speaker 03

  So if this had been discovered in his house and it couldn't be traced back to the agency, then I would be terrified because that is a lot of remuneration and I'd want to know was he working for the Russians, the Chinese, or who and what did he sell? So this is that's actually a good thing that it's not that. But I think the the bigger issue becomes apparently this was acquired in like a period of like a year to a year and a half. So I've got to wonder if he's the only person involved. And when I say that, it would be one thing if you you have a situation with an asset

• 1:54:55Speaker 03

  or some kind of entity where you know you're you're paying them, you know, three bars of gold a month, right? That's a ridiculous amount of money, but whatever. And you're gonna actually give him only two and you're gonna hold on to one.

• 1:55:09Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:55:10Speaker 03

  And with that, that would take a really long time to pilfer the amount that you know supposedly is in the news. So it kind of leads me to believe that one, you know, all of this is alleged, it's eventually gonna come out in the in the wash. But it just strikes me that it just doesn't seem realistic that he did this on his own.

• 1:55:35Jack Murphy?

  I mean, it's a, it's a lot of cheddar to walk out the door with, um, for sure. But I mean, are you, what you're alluding to is that there are some checks and balances in even covert, you know, accounting or finance, so to speak, that you as a CIA officer can't just like walk in and take the gold bars out, but without signing for them or whatever the accountability mechanisms are.

• 1:55:57Speaker 03

  There, there's a requisition process, uh, you know, that you have to go through. There's regular accounting, like every month you have to account for what you spent on your revolving fund. Right. So you get a revolving fund. It's, you know, X amount of money, depending on where you are. Do you take contacts out for dinner and cocktails or whatever, you know, if you're going to pay an asset, that may be a separate account, but you have to record all of it. And like literally, when you pay an asset, they're going to sign a piece of paperwork. They're going to, you know, it's going to say Mickey Mouse or, you know, Mickey Rooney or it's not going to be their name, but like literally I am required to provide receipts.

• 1:56:42Jack Murphy?

  Wow, so I have to put a next.

• 1:56:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's real and that's what you'd expect. So how on the devil he walked out with all of that money and diamonds and watches is mind boggling. So either the system utterly failed or other people could potentially be involved. But again, I don't know, but it is deeply concerning. So.

• 1:57:06Jack Murphy?

  What a heist.

• 1:57:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, no kidding.

• 1:57:10Jack Murphy?

  Uh, well, Dell, uh, anything else you want to, uh, hit up before we get going tonight? Uh, really appreciate it. I think this is a great interview.

• 1:57:20Speaker 03

  Hey, I, I loved it. Uh, great. I think, you know, one of the, one of the reasons why I love doing these things is, um,

• 1:57:30Speaker 03

  You know, the agency is, is a secret intelligence organization operating in an open society, right?

• 1:57:38Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:57:38Speaker 03

  And unfortunately, we don't, we can't really do, um, we can't really do press conferences, right? We, we've done a couple, right? But those are outliers. One of the things I worked, I learned from working with the Bureau periodically was, what is the Bureau's center of gravity, right? It's the faith and confidence of the American people. That's why they do, um, press conferences, right? It's not, you know, for the glory of all that. They, they need to be transparent as best they can, and they've got to maintain, um, the commitment of the United States people so that the people of the United States have

• 1:58:22Speaker 03

  full faith and confidence in them. Because if they ever lose that, they're dead in the water. We at the agency, on the other hand, really can't do that. Because the moment you step in front of a camera, your cover is burned, and it's not, it's like losing, I'm not going to say that, but it's just gone. It's just gone. It's over. And so, all the time, all the effort, all the resources that went into building that cover, you know, as a rule, we just don't do it. Well, so an opportunity like this to kind of get out there and talk about the agency, um, I think is important. It's an honor. And bluntly, the one thing I'd let, let people, what I'd like people to leave with is the

• 1:59:07Speaker 03

  understanding that this. The people that join the agency are the same people that serve in uniform. They're the same people that joined the FBI and the Marshal Service and our local police and firefighters and first responders. They're all the same people. They're people that have chosen to serve something greater than themselves. Do we sometimes make mistakes? Do we sometimes, like, cause more problems? Yeah. But for the most part, we're people that just want to serve something greater than themselves, and I think we're blessed and incredibly fortunate to have folks like that.

• 1:59:49Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:59:52Jack Murphy?

  Well, Del, thank you for doing this, man. I really appreciate it. And thank you, everyone who joined us tonight. And we will see you next week. Take care.

• 2:00:03Speaker 03

  You're welcome.

• 2:00:06Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

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• 2:01:05Jack Murphy?

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

• 2:01:50Jack Murphy?

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

• 2:02:05Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

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

• 2:10:29Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down, rather than giving teens the answer. Study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:10:56Speaker 01

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

• 2:11:35Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down, rather than giving teens the answer. Study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:12:03Speaker 01

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

• 2:12:39Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:13:07Speaker 01

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

• 2:13:37Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:14:05Speaker 05

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

• 2:14:36Speaker 06

  Can I get a number two?

• 2:14:38Speaker 05

  Anything else?

• 2:14:39Speaker 06

  Same shift. Different day. I need a smoke. What can I get you? Can I get a number four, number seven, number eight?

• 2:14:46Speaker 03

  Same shift. I need a smoke. Different day.

• 2:14:50Speaker 01

  Using nicotine to relieve stress might just make you feel... worse. Break the cycle and quit nicotine with free daily texts, expert tips, and community support from X Program. By Truth Initiative. Visit Xprogram.com to start your quit journey today.