Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Behind Enemy Lines - From Waco to the War on Terror with Chris Whitcomb

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

Chris Whitcomb is one of only 200 agents who've had the honor of serving in the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team. A veteran of multiple theaters of operation, from Ruby Ridge, Waco to Afghanistan and beyond, Whitcomb's unique and hard-earned insights into the world of elite law enforcement and intelligence services is unparalleled. Having seen the crucible of conflict up close in highly volatile environments such as Kosovo, Israel, Somalia, Zambia, and Timor-Leste, Whitcomb is no stranger to the trials and tribulations of the field. Featured in the Netflix docuseries, "Waco: American Apocalypse", and a bestselling author, he's now using his platform to shed light on the realities of frontline conflict, the war on terror, and the intricacies of domestic and foreign intelligence work. In addition to his hands-on experiences, Whitcomb's post-FBI career as a Global Security Advisor for NBC News, co-host of Checkpoint CNBC, and a prolific commentator and public speaker, lends a unique and broad-spectrum perspective. Prepare yourself for a journey as we uncover the hidden world of the elite forces shaping our world, discuss Whitcomb's role in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and the heart-pounding moments of live operations to the intense preparation and training required for such critical assignments. Sign up for the new G14 newsletter here: https://www.clearedhotpodcast.com/exclusive Check out the newest Cleared Hot Gear here: https://shop.clearedhotpodcast.com/  

Oh, hey everybody. Today's episode is brought to you by black rifle.com. Actually, it's brought to you by Black Rifle. Their website is Black Rifle Coffee.com. But if you listen to the podcast, you know this already. The main thing I'm going to point you at right now is they are still doing their boot campaign. And it's on that rotating banner if you go to Black Rifle Coffee.com.

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So if you're into that, go get some of that. I don't know what the hell it is, though. What I'm into is coffee. And when you scroll down, you can get as much coffee as you want delivered as often as you want. They got new apparel. They got new types of mugs. They have all sorts of stuff on their website. So go to blackwiflecoffee.com and go wild if you're a coffee fan. And if you're not a coffee fan, then I don't know what to tell you. My guest today is Chris Whitcomb. You want to talk about a man who has had an interesting career? Yeah, he's one of them. So Chris spent 15 years with the FBI and worked on some high profile cases that I think most people would recognize. Ruby Ridge was a little bit longer ago, but how about David Koresh and the Waco siege? Yeah, I think most people remember that.

And then his final assignment with the FBI consisted of working with the critical incident response group. Now, having said that what he was doing in the FBI, he's done a bunch of stuff since then. He's worked in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Israel, Somalia, Zambia. He's done some wild shit. And we get into it. Episode 291 with Chris Whitcomb, enjoy. Where do we begin the tale? Man, I've got no idea.

I've had a very, very odd life. Well, you're the one who's getting ready or are in the process of writing your memoir. Right. Where did you begin the story? Well, it's a long story, and I'm not really sure how to get into this story. But the bottom line, I guess, is I was born a writer when that was such a thing. My earliest memory, guys want to be a fry cook or a truck driver. Do they, though? Brain surgeons.

There you go. Anything. Where I came from plenty of fry cooks and truck drivers. I mean, somebody has to do the job. Somebody's got to do the job. And I don't know really how that happened. but I grew up in a small town in New Hampshire, northern New Hampshire, ski area called Franconi, New Hampshire,

had a little tiny college, really a hippie refuge, and not much else. But a very, very odd town in that we had two retired Supreme Court justices. We had three FBI agents, and we had a guy named Harold Janine, who I referred to as Uncle Harold, who was a fascinating guy. He was at the time the highest paid executive in the world. He built ITT, which was the world first multinational corporation, and he paid the CIA a million dollars to assassinate Salvadori, India, in Chile. So I grew up with this guy, Uncle Harold, at an estate in New Hampshire because the Chilean government was trying to kill him. So this tiny, tiny town, then a guy that worked for my dad, shot and killed the number two guy from the FBI, a guy named William Sullivan.

An agent? He shot and killed an agent? Number two agent in the entire FBI. He was number two behind Jay Edgar Hoover. And not only that, but he was the head of the domestic intelligence program. So he ran all those dossiers on Martin Luther King. He ran the Kennedy assassination investigation. And two weeks before this guy that worked for my dad shot and killed him, he was scheduled to testify before the Church Commission that Lee R. V. Oswald did not kill Kennedy.

We just had a Secret Service agent on not too long ago. and Michael, I would be interested to your input on this. I feel like I made him moderately uncomfortable with the questions I had about the Kennedy assassination. He was like, I don't speak for the Secret Service. We don't talk about it that much. What do you think, Michael?

Yeah, he was very hesitant. Yeah, that's what I call it the Secret Service, right? You were an HRT sniper for a long time. What do you think the odds are? And I didn't realize how close the actual shot was when I went down to Texas. And you're like, holy shit. Great angle.

But they look at the grass in all, like, that'd be a sweet L. Ambush. I don't know how good of a marksman Oswald was, but your thoughts as a sniper on that bolt action piece of shit rifle, what do you think? Manlicker's a bolt action piece of shit rifle. Yeah. 100%. I could have shot him with a model 60, five-shot snub-nosed Smith and Western revolver, and so could you. It was not a tough shot. It was a quick shot.

Was he capable of it, you think? I don't know. The thing about Leah Harvey Oswald, that I know, and I've not seen any special. files as an FBI agent, right? Yeah. But I've been there. I've looked it over in great detail, and I've watched a lot of the documentaries. I've talked to Oliver Stone about it, too, you know, his whole conspiracy investigation. He wouldn't call it a conspiracy, but that investigation.

And I don't think the shot was tough. I think it was not tough for an average shooter. Yeah. But his past is so murky. And there are so many weird things about that story, about the doctored photos of him holding the rifle. How about the ballistics of the round that supposedly went through a, couple people and was like perfect.

You're a sniper as well. Yeah. I've never seen that happen. Here's what I initially I said the same thing. Here's where I changed my mind. When you look at that round itself, and I would say that those many of your viewers are shooters, the difference between a 2-23 package in a 300 blackout package that you've got a very, and ballistics are nothing but physics, right? forces mass times acceleration.

So you get a slow-moving big bullet or a fast-moving small bullet. Six millimeters real popular, but the old 308 was what I grew up with. Yeah, 7-62. So you look at the mechanics of that rifle, and you have a very large projectile. I mean, that's a massive bullet. It's full metal jacket. And at a relatively slow velocity around that big might not distort the way a lot of other rounds have. And when I've seen reconstructions, when I was on the team, we had a bullet.

We had a ballistic lab. We would manufacture gels with pig gel and bones. So we'd manufacture cadavers and shoot them with everything, right? So you've seen all the same things, what bullets do in real life and in a manufactured situation. So I've looked at the round. I've looked at the angles. I've looked at laser reconstructions of the shots, the trajectories, and everything else. And I think it's entirely possible, in my opinion, it is a plausible shot that I think worked the way we now believe it worked.

but I think it's entirely possible the Secret Service tried to manufacture that bullet that they found on the gurney in the hospital. You know that story. So I think it's entirely possible they were trying to make sense of it, manufactured evidence because they couldn't find it. And as it turns out later on, it was real. So looking at the conspiracy aspect, I would say the fact that a guy that worked from my dad shot the man who was in charge of that investigation two weeks before the Senate testimony, that stinks. but it's real. I knew the guy. I grew up with the guy. So I think in my life, it's easy to find experiences that could be explained as conspiracies that we're not.

Have you ever seen a bullet take the path that that one lone bullet was supposed to take, though? That's another one, the combination of the two. Oh, shit. What did you find, Michael? Okay, here we go. All right. This is the path that's supposedly. Here's what's wrong with that photograph. This was very early. Good job, Michael. It's fucking wrong.

No, no, no, no. It's great. Michael, it's great. But the thing is, this was very early on. In fact, this might have been from the initial report, and it shows what you see here is impossible. I wouldn't say it's impossible. You've seen rounds hit people and do squirrely things. Never something like this.

Never something like that. There's just too many sharp angles in this particular diagram. I agree 100%. What you don't see in this diagram is a true reconstruction of the angle in the way Kennedy was sitting. It is a straight line through Kennedy. Okay. And it goes into Connolly and makes sense.

So what might not make sense to a lot of people is the distortion of the projectile itself. So this is a two-dimensional image where a three-dimensional image would give you a lot more clarity as the actual line of sight. If you were looking down the barrel as opposed to looking at this from like 90 degrees off. Right. And if you took, if you ran out a laser reconstruction of the shot, you'd see from this angle, from a side angle, you would see a straight shot. I mean, you know, with a small bullet drop that you would expect. But it was a very flat shot. It was a close shot.

And this is no longer accurate. I know this was very widely talked about in conspiracy theories, but this is not the way the shot was reconstructed with modern reconstruction methods. Let's just go on record right now and say the CIA killed him. Okay, so we can do that because my path through the FBI ended up. more, I think, with the CIA than it did with the FBI. And I think one thing I've not seen a lot of people talk about, that you and I can talk about obelically, is how many organizations there are, how closely we work together, and how

bizarre some of those combinations turn out to be. Many people would recognize the name FBI and CIA. Yes. And they would assume that that is the overall intelligence infrastructure. Like, oh, agency does external FBI does CONIS. there are at least a half a dozen other alphabet soup organizations that exist to fill the gaps in between those and they work. Yeah, the intelligence infrastructure is fucking massive. It's massive.

You want to talk about that for a second? Sure. It lays a groundwork. So my path through the FBI, my first office was Springfield, Missouri. If you join the FBI, first of all, I never applied to the FBI. My wife applied for me. I kind of got in as an accident. I never wanted to be an FBI agent.

How'd that first interview go? You're like, hey, I actually don't want to be here, and I'm not interested in what you do. That's a great question. So here's the mechanism. I wanted to be a writer. After college, I went to California to be a rock star. It didn't go very well, but I got a job working. An actual rock star?

Well, I was a musician. College bands. I think I could write some songs. Went to L.A. to make it. Didn't make it. What was the name of your band? Well, I didn't have a band. My college band?

Yeah. It was a college band, okay? Yeah. Dr. Neptune and the rare orchids. Fuck you. It's a college band. Yeah. A long time ago.

When I got to L.A., I was nobody. I remained in nobody. And I actually, when I showed up, I didn't even have a guitar. I was driving from Hanover, New Hampshire, to Los Angeles via New Orleans, driving across Texas in a 1968 Volkswagen bus. It burned up on the side of the road outside Dripping Springs, Texas. And I showed up in California with a Dartmouth T-shirt and a pair of khaki pants and shower flip-flops. And that's all, oh, I had like 37 bucks. And, but anyway, so I stayed in L.A. for three years working, bartending, writing, and surfing. And then I got a job teaching at a boarding school, which brought me to a newspaper, which brought me to D.C. I was in D.C. writing speeches from a member of Congress. I was boxing. I was fighting out of a boxing gym, 10th and H. Northeast D.C.

How old were you at this point? 26, maybe. 25, 26, something like that. Never been in a military. Never been a cop. Never been. thought about joining the FBI, but I had CIA in my head because I had grown up as part of the CIA because Harold Janine was intimately tied to it. He had bodyguards all the time. His number two guy was a guy named Jack McCone, John McCone, who was a former director of the CIA, who was at the farm all the time. He was Harold Janine's, one of his top executives of ITT. So I grew up with the director of the CIA. Harold Janine, who was the private finance year, four operations for the CIA.

And this is all fairly broadly written about New York Times and other things. So I really didn't think about that. I went to the gym. I sparred with this guy named Big Bob Moore. He knocked me the fuck out. I mean cold. And not the first time I've been knocked out, but he knocked me out. So I got back to the house.

My wife was reading a book and it was an envelope. I said, hey, what's going on? It was an envelope from the FBI. I'd been knocked out. I had tried to live a reasonably good. life up to that point. And I go, what does the FBI want with me? It's a odd thing. I opened it. It was an application that she had sent in, cut to the chase. I got into the FBI. 13 months later, I got into the FBI. I go to Kansas City, the Academy, then I go to the Kansas City Division.

You never know where they're going to send you. Yeah. First day on the job, it's a shootout. Very first day on the job. I was taking a leak with a cup of coffee, 10 o'clock in the morning. I was on a bank robbery squad, and they had a guy, a bank robbery suspect in a house. They tried a ruse. He came out with a gun, and it was on. And I will say, though I have enormous respect for FBI agents in general, very few of them getting shootouts at all. It's not actually their job. It's not their job.

Even for law enforcement. Their job is to enforce the law as not be gun fighters. Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's mostly white collar. It's mostly sophisticated crimes that don't require an interaction. at the time there was some possibility. I don't want to gloss over the fact. I believe that your wife committed a federal crime by filling out paperwork and probably signing your name without your knowledge.

I shouldn't say this on here, but I've never filled out of a tax form in my entire life, not one. Yeah, we're not editing in that. Yeah, yeah. I've got to say, this conversation is going sideways quick, but I get edited, I got audited by the IRS, for, I think it was five years. I think it was a five-year audit. So I don't know if I should mention that, but I will say this to the IRS. The IRS couldn't have been cooler. I mean, they were all the nightmares. I had worked with the IRS CID as an FBI agent, and they were ruthless. They'd go after a dime. They'd go after anything they could get. So it was a long story how I got there, but they

couldn't have been, they couldn't have been cooler, better. I mean, they were really, they were very fair, thorough, fair. It worked out great, but that was a five-year thing. So shootout first day, and we were laying the foundation for basically the intelligence infrastructure for the U.S. Yeah, exactly. We're getting back. Sorry. No worries. My story's a wild sometimes. I like it. Okay, so four years in the Springfield, Missouri resident agency, small town office from Kansas City division, working bank robberies and fugitives. Run and gun, fantastic, no paperwork, a couple trials. It was wild and it was fantastic. How often are banks getting robbed there? Two or three times? Well, I can't say two or three times a week. I don't want to exaggerate,

but some weeks there were two and some weeks there were three, some maybe one a month. A lot of bankrupties. Like a lot. Highly organized or kind of morons. Fucking idiots. Fucking idiots. I had these two guys and their name were Larry and Billy Hankins. They were tree service guys. They would climb trees and chopped down trees. And they give bad names to tree service guys because some of those guys are super cool. But their memo was to go up to the front door of a bank and blow it with a shotgun,

then go in through the open hole and demand robbery. So it's not like you walk in with a note and say, hey, it's a bad day. They would start by doing that. And they hit... I mean, it's a hell of an intro. It's a hell of an intro. And these guys, I mean, if you're a young FBI agent

and you're getting your first big case, it was incredible. So they had a sister named Goat who lived in a trailer house. And if you're an FBI agent and you're investigating violent bank robbers and I knew everything about them, you developed sources. One of my sources was their wife and I don't think she's still alive so I can say that. And so I get to know all their kids, right? So I go, it was really rough. It was bad.

It lived in middle of nowhere, Missouri. And it was Christmas. And they had no presents. They had no nothing. So if you're an FBI agent, You can pay sources. You do pay sources, sometimes a lot of money, but you can't give their kids Christmas presents. There are all these rules. You don't want to get too close to them. But there's these little kids crying because they don't have any Christmas presents. So, you know, government forms Christmas presents. I brought them Christmas presents. And they came out and they said, they called me Chris.

I said, how was, you know, how was Christmas? This was the next day. And they said, you know, Grammy Hankins just had to go and ruin Christmas. And I said, what do you mean? said, well, they were at Goats trailer, the sister. And she, the grandmother, got mad. Ma Hankins, they called her. Ma Hankins came out with a 12-gauge 870 and started poking holes in the floor of the trailer house with slugs on Christmas morning.

Fuck yeah. With the kids in the room. I'm not going to judge how people like to party. People are into shit that I'm not into. I love that about you, man. I love that about you. But I'll say, you know, in the great scheme of things, If you're just starting out and you're working that type of thing.

Yeah, you're like dumping it in fifth gear right out of the gates. Right out of the gate. So it was fantastic. I was running in surveillance out in the woods. I mean, it was just, it was a great case. There were a lot of other cases, but that was a great one. And it's interesting later on another story, but I ended up writing the training curriculum for the FBI Academy.

If you go to the FBI Academy, you go in day one, and you act out of play for 16 or 18 weeks, whatever it is now. There's a scenario. They have characters. they have actors, they have sets and locations, and you learn the skills and competencies in a living out of play. And I wrote the play. They were the central characters in the play. So hundreds, maybe thousands of FBI agents have gone through the academy trying to arrest Billy and Larry Hankins. So any FBI agent listening to this that went through the academy

and remembers Billy and Larry Hankins, goat, Ma Hankins, Christmas morning with a 12-gate shotgun, that's them. How did you eventually roll them up? It was fascinating. I got Larry, like the classic takedown. The car was full of 12-gauge rounds and guns. I mean, it was a full-on felony takedown. It was great. No shooting, maybe unfortunately.

But, oh, I should back up. They killed a lot of guys. Really? In the execution of their robberies? In the execution of the rob, not in the execution of the robberies, but in trying to get away from me. So one of those guys was a friend of the family somehow who was living in a shed behind one of these hovels in which they lived in. And they killed him and they put him in a car and they burned the car up so that we would think it was one of them.

They committed suicide by neighbor. Okay. And anyway, they were just, they were idiots and they were so bad. Dude, there was so bad. I mean, you couldn't make up a better FBI career just than those two guys. And it was wild. So anyway, we got Larry in a good old-fashioned takedown. He climbed over the wall of the Green County Jail, which must have been, again, I don't want to exaggerate, but it had to be 15, maybe 20 feet high, with razor wire on top.

He's a tree guy, right? Oh, yeah. Somehow he climbed over the wall, jumped, landed on a car, tib-fib, break. I mean, wrecked his leg, and he hopped on one leg probably a mile and a half or two miles, crawled into somebody's garage, and a kid found him. Damn. So we got him back. Billy escaped, went on the run, did a bunch of other stuff, and then I was at the, I was at

HRT tryouts, and I got a call, and they said that some guy found him passed out at a bar, faced down at a bar, lifted him up by his hair, said, yeah, that's Billy and took him in. Okay. Yeah. So that was Billy and Larry Hankins. my first big case. That was fun in the Ozarks around Springfield, Missouri. And where to go from there for you? Every FBI agent eventually gets transferred. Most FBI agents get transferred based on the needs of the Bureau, as they say. So I did my four years in the Ozarks, and I got a call from

Kansas City that said my name was on the rotation. I was getting transferred out. So I had two kids, married, had the white picket fence, golden retriever, the whole thing. And it was great. fat, dumb, and happy. And I said, where am I going? They said, New York or L.A. You get paid the same in New York or L.A. as you do in the Ozarks. And it was not the same cost of living. So I said, what am I going to do now? And I'd heard about this group when I was at the academy that would fly around in helicopters and, you know, where all the gear, the hostage rescue team, which was not very widely known, even within the bureau. People knew they existed, but didn't know anything about them. What's their actual charter? Okay, great. So here's the thing about H.R.T. and about being the old guy telling this story.

In the 70s, as a result of the Olympics in Munich, there's a great movie called Munich, where terrorists took and killed some Israeli athletes. The United States had Olympics, hosted Olympics in Los Angeles in what would have been 1990, maybe? I feel like 86. It was 86. That's right. It was 86. So at that time, the U.S. government had two counterterrorism components, Delta and six. Yep. We called them Delta then.

You call them other things now, but CAG, I think. Cag, okay. So we call them. Sorry, all you army guys, I don't know if that's a secret term. It's on the fucking Internet. Take it easy. Take a breath. The good thing about me, I don't give a shit about all that stuff.

We'll get into secrets. But at the time... Well, you know what's wild is at that time, in the fucking 80s, I'm going to say in comparison to the modern day, both those else. elements sucked. Both what elements sucked? Cag and development group. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Oh, my God. There are early videos you can get on YouTube showing H.R.T. doing CQB. It's humiliating. But here's the thing, and here's what a lot of people don't know. In those days, everything was primitive. I mean, when H.R.T started, when Delta started, they were running Model 10, 357 revolvers. Inside of airplane tubes. I mean, that was their charter was actual a hostage rescue inside of an airplane.

development group was a hostage rescue on a cruise ship because of the Achille-Lauru incident. Yeah. So the government tried to put something together for the Olympics. There is a law called the posse comitatis, which says you at 6 can't work on a mass hostage-taking in Los Angeles. So the government fearing a Munich-style event in Los Angeles said we've got to come up with another component. So the attorney general at the time went to Bragg to watch a demonstration. So they ran a CQB demonstration. At the end, he walked up to a couple of the operators and said, that was great.

But the only thing I don't see is handcuffs. Where are your handcuffs? He's the attorney general, right? Law enforcement guy. And they said, we don't use handcuffs. We give them all too right here. Yeah, it's military, buddy. We don't announce our presence on the way in the door.

There's no announcement. The problem was, what do you do with the survivors? And I've got to use this caveat right now. Until 9-11, until 2001, terrorism was considered. law enforcement. It was the Justice Department. We can come back to it. But every rendition, the first rendition, up

until 2001, to the best of my knowledge, all the renditions were done by HRT. The first one was a guy named Fawaz Yunus, 1986. It was an operation with the CIA. They got this guy. He was a hijacker. I think he killed a seal. And he was lured onto

a yacht in the I think it was in the Indian Ocean it was off the coast of Lebanon excuse my geography here off the coast of Lebanon HART came in off a naval

platform dregored up to a yacht snatched him took him to an aircraft carrier and flew him back to the United States and what at the time was the longest nonstop flight in military history so HART did all those

gigs while I was on the team up until 9-11 where it went from criminal to military. And we'll come back to Title 50 and Title 18 is a big deal. So going back to your initial question, the United States government decided that we had two brilliant teams, one in the Army, one in the Navy, six in Delta, to take care of special operations. But they needed another one on the civilian side

because of the policy comitat us. So they came up with an idea to form a team and they had to put it someplace. They put it in the FBI. That's how it happened. But here's the thing that's interesting about those early days. When Delta started, they were pioneering CQB. They didn't even have, did your generation have those Adida boots, those, the best, right?

Well, unless you're walking on a service. Yeah, with water. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you're immediately going to break your fucking head over it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't want to fucking fast rope onto a deck with those things. Well, you want to talk about CQB and the initial where it came from. My understanding in the SEAL community is that we actually drew a lot of the initial tactics from LAP.

Because they were daily cracking doors. That's where this is going. And I've said this a couple of places. Historians can do what they will with this, but this is the way it happened. Initial Delta guys went undercover through the FBI Academy, became FBI agents, and went to the LAPD. And they went to the SWAT community. SWAT developed what we did as a way of life. And then they took it out of the places.

I feel like there's such an easier path to that. Here's your fucking J-Soc liaison. He's going to come. But J-Socke. wasn't J-Soc back then. Well, here's you, whatever the fuck you are, liaison. And instead of going through that complicated pathway, like, hey, this dude's here to take notes because we want to use this shit in the military.

Yeah, yeah. It didn't exist, man. I know, I mean, you and I don't know each other well, but we had, Delta guys came to H.R.T. Yeah. Some of the plank holders at six came to H. Do you know those stories? I do, yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So a couple of those. Don't get me wrong. I like the Jason Borden shit. In hindsight, it's like, hey, man, you could have just told him who the fuck you are. and they probably would have shared their tactics. You know how that goes, man.

In those days, everything was classified, and there was no internet, right? When I, some of the clearance, like Q, right? I can talk about that now. But in those days, I could say I had, so everybody's got TSSCI, right? Yeah. But if you get read into a permission, if it's some special access program, or something as simple as a Q, everybody talks about that now, which is just basically nuclear shit. But if you get read into that, I could say Q and I could say clearance.

If I said Q clearance in the same sentence, that was supposedly a felony. So those days, things were secret. When I joined H.R.T., fastroping was classified. Can you imagine that? I mean, postal inspectors fastrope now. You can do it like a... I wish it had remained classified. And I'd never wasted any of my time or ankle fucking support doing it.

We've had... H.R.T. has... God bless them. Lost three guys. Three guys dead in fastroping. It's just a horrible way to get to work. I think it was... It might have been...

less than a year ago. It was an officer on an East Coast team died on a fast-roping evolution. I know of, fuck, I know of three seal fatalities from fast-roping training evolutions. Yes, needless death. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of ways to get there. That's not my favorite, but yeah. So all of those things were secret. In, when, when Marchenko started six, Charlie Beckwith coming through Delta, they built it up. So the point in this long convoluted story is that when the United States government writ large decided to put a hostage rescue component on the civilian side because we had welcomed Delta in, they welcomed us back. So the first operators at H.R.T in 1982, leading up to starting the team in 83, went to Bragg,

and they created H.R.T more or less as a carbon copy of Delta. So Delta and 6 are dramatically different organizations. They used to be. They're very similar. modern era. It's, you know, it used to be like, I would say Army was green, Navy was blue. Like we did cross-training, cross-training deployments. There's a lot of, there was, what I would say is the information flow is fantastic in the modern era. Early on, it wasn't because they were fighting for relevancy and budget. In my experience, like at an operator level, they're fucking awesome. Right. And I agree with that 100%. What I was trying to say is the model,

when I came up, the model was different in the sense, just looking at selection. Yeah. You guys, Very different. Nominated out of the teams. You have a very different workup coming to six than Delta does. I mean, you could be a cook at Fort Benning and you could try out. Well, that's why they have to have a different selection. You know, the SEAL community has an origin point for every single person, whereas maybe people don't know, but Delta is open to...

Anybody. Well, anybody with a... I mean, with a recommendation. Do you think they've opened it to the Space Force? I think that they have it. I think they've opened it to cooks at Fort Benning, though. 100%. I know a guy was a Navy diver one year and became a Kag operator a year later.

Right. So that was my point about six in Delta is that the point of origin, as you say, is different. So the mission became the same. But when I started working with Delta, they didn't have or with you guys. There was no black squadron in those days. Yeah. And in those days, I mean in the 90s, there were three kill houses, really three kill houses in the entire United States. Yours at Little Creek?

Bragg had a great complex. Well, I don't know what you have now, but it was the old one on the beach. You could assault it from the water. Yeah, they still have a variety of shoot houses. Right. They don't suck. No, no. Well, that was the first one.

So it was a leapfrog. So Delta had the initial one. And they had a really fantastic moat facility as well. so you could take sniper shops into movie screens. So you could build scenarios. In those days, I mean, now I know everything is different, but in those days it was pretty cool. And they had a budget we didn't have,

so we could shoot 747 windshields testing different rifles at $250,000 a pop in 1992, right? So, but anyway, you had the beach house at Little Creek. They had a couple of facilities, and H.R.T had, I, a tire house, which became a pretty good step up. So it was Delta. Then you guys stepped up with that beach house, which was a multi-floor and would take door breaches.

It's everything. Moveable walls, like, full control. And then so HRT built that. They have the catwalks up above an entire aircraft fuselage indoors, walls, aircraft ascents. Anyways, there's a leapfrog. But there are only three. And then CIA built one at the farm. So we would go every quarter and we would go all the three of us.

Yeah, Army Navy and H.R.T. would rotate. And then we had three fuselages at Davis-Mont and Air Force Base in Arizona. You had one, they had one, and we had one, and we'd do those once a quarter. Oh, out in that aircraft graveyard? Yeah, yeah. Right. So we had three 727 fuselages that we could assault, and we would do internal CQB on those three fuselages. What was the, once HRT was stood up, what was the litmus test for them being called out and used? Like what level did it have to rise to? Because it's not like, it's like, hey, we got a hostage situation in Michigan. It's like, okay, like the SWAT team's going to have to handle that. When would they engage the HRT? This is the tough part to talk about. Okay.

Because the short answer is. Just tell me all the secret parts. I'll tell you all the secrets. That's why I'm here, brother. That's why I'm here. We haven't got to the real shit yet. We're not even getting started in a real shit. No, we're just laying foundation.

Yeah. We're going from Billy Hankins to me going on about fast-dropping, which nobody likes. Yeah. The answer is this, that when they started, they had some great gigs. Fawaz Yunus. I mean, that's Jason Bourne's shit. The whole thing was put together. They went in, you know, all the fake passports and changing money and all the stuff that you guys did in your generation going into denied areas.

and I've worked with you guys in Yemen, in Somalia, and all of those countries. Those things were different, and way back in the day. It was easier because you didn't have all the discovery methods. You didn't have video, you didn't have DNA, you didn't have all the shit that's really a problem now. Biometrics. All the stuff that is so incredibly difficult now didn't exist then. But there were other problems, right? Dregor sucked, number one.

Still do. Still. Dregor still sucks. Yeah. But I don't think the piece of equipment sucks. Using it fucking blows. Using it blows. Yeah.

So anyway, and putting those things together because I don't even know, I'm not sure the history of J-Soc, but it was primitive in those days. Eagle Claw was the-Ecloth was the disaster. At Operation Eagle Claw was the impetus to create J-Soc. I met that guy one time, by the way. I don't know if you've ever met him. I'm not going to say his name. The one guy that got left behind? No.

Left behind. Yeah. I mean, sometimes you just need to get on the helo. Cool guy. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not blaming anybody. I've been left behind. It's like, hey, if you hide behind a rock, if you hide behind a rock and I don't see you,

and you see a helicopter coming and you don't get on it, like, that's kind of your fault. Yeah. But, you know, you're the higher evolution of what I started at. Like, when I started, we would go, it sucks. You do it now, and it's like, it's just Tuesday, right? It's a different thing. Yeah. You know, I'm still talking about the permative day.

So in those days, we would all work together because they were very small. H.R.T. was 50 shooters. I think, I don't think Delta was much more than 100. I mean, it would. They both started. pretty small. Very small. They were very small in those days. And there was no career path. I mean, if you went into that community, there was no place to go. There was no up because the community hated the fact that somebody was special, right, in your world. So your question is, how did

start? The FBI works federal crime. Murder is not a federal crime, except in specific instances. You've got federal crime, excuse me, a local crime, jaywalking, dog issues. You've got state crime, which would be murder, which would be sexual assault, things of that nature. And then you've got federal crimes, which bank robbery is only because the money is insured by the FDIC. So it's federal. Or crimes crossing state lines like kidnapping. When you get something big that locals can call you in, and it would be a hostage situation, and there were some of those. So HIT had some good work, but they were primarily at that time, and even me saying this now has different connotations. At that time, in the 80s and 90s, the white separatist movement was a real thing in

the United States. They were fighting what they called the Zionist occupational government, and it was Timothy McVeigh, the Hunter Diaries. Many of your listeners will know what I'm talking about. I'm not making a judgment call. I'm saying that was the crime of the day. Terrorism was incredibly widespread. I mean, you'd read about international terrorism in the paper every day, but America was focused on, primarily focused on groups within the United States, and many of them were seen as, one group specifically was called the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord. And they were very much like Ruby Ridge or like Waco, which is where, unfortunately, this is going. And H.R.T would get called in for hardened targets, multiple shooters, potential hostages, things that the locals couldn't step up.

You would go local, step up to the SWAT team. SWAT would step it up to the state, state would step it up and it would go from there. So where this is going, unfortunately, is Ruby Ridge, which is one of the first high-profile situations where HRT was called in and things went badly. Can you unpack that whole situation a little bit just so people have a better understanding?

I'll premise this by saying that I was one of the seven snipers at Ruby Ridge, and we could talk about it for hours if you want to. You know, all the endless investigations, I testified before Senate hearings, civil suits on and on. But I'll talk as much as you want about it. Just a broad brush of what led to H.R.T. even showing up on site. Because, again, my knowledge of this one is a little bit hazy. Just because, like the David Koresh thing, I understand a little bit more.

Actually, randomly, before you reached out to me, was watching that fucking documentary. Yeah, that fucking documentary would be about right. Although I love the guy who did it. Taylor Russell was a brilliant, brilliant. guy. But you know, Ruby Ridge, was it, did a family member get killed? Was it on there, something along the lines? Here's my impression of Ruby Ridge. At that time, HRT became HRT and every other organization in the federal government, and there are 10,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States, 10,000. There are 18 primary intelligence agencies in the United States. All of them want money, their budgets,

they want to grow, their duchies, that's what human beings do, are expansionistic. So at that time, the Marshal Service, which at the time, primarily moved federal prisoners, wanted, in my opinion, a higher profile. They had a very small office. I think it was the Cordillane office. I may be wrong about that, but it was in that it was a Cordillane Spokane area. And they got wind of a guy living on a mountaintop who was selling illegal weapons, sought off shotguns.

As it turns out, it's very likely that they got him, Randy Weaver, to sod those shotguns off. So would we care about that? Oh, really? Hell no. Hell no. I couldn't care less about it. At the time, I think it's very, I think it's widely plausible that they manufactured that case against Randy Weaver. And they went up to serve a warrant on him and to defend the Marshal Service. And Bill Deegan killed tragically, it's a terrible thing.

It's a terrible day for the Marshal Service. So in defense of them, I'll say this, that, If it were a manufactured case, and if they had gone before a judge, they would have gotten off and it would have gone away. It would have been nothing. So their argument is if you have a federal warrant for someone's arrest in the United States of America and you serve it on someone, the idea is the system will work. That's the idea. I'm not saying it's right. In that case, somebody decided it was a better idea to go up and do a surveillance.

They did a route recon on a mountaintop in Idaho, and I spent a lot of time there, and it was hard to get up there. while they were up there Randy Weaver who was living as Americans are entitled on a mountain top alone nobody's got any business what you do in your home on your property but they went up and to take a look

the dog heard them as dogs do dogs came after them somebody shot first and Randy Weaver's son was shot and killed Sammy and he and a shootout and sued Bill Degan

Deputy Marshall was killed and Kevin Harris was wounded and they all went back to the cabin and they ran in and hit out most people have seen the cabin on news and this is where the Red Star Cluster went up to HRT at this level. That's exactly right.

So somebody goes back, the Marshal unit went back, called headquarters and said, told them what had happened from their impression and there's video of it and the U.S. government had to send somebody in

to get someone who had just killed a federal marshal. the only people they could send because of the posse comitatis was hrt so you've got to have a mountain capability you've got to have a long range option capability you've got to have all those components that you guys have and that delta had they couldn't send you because of title 18 authority it's a criminal investigation the murder of a federal agent they send HRT so that's how it stepped up to that level HRT like i said with delta model we had MD 530s we had black ox at the time we didn't but HART has its own Blackhawks.

They have Bell 412s. They have full Hilo assets, even though most of the stuff we did was with 160. Yeah. So we had an air hop, fixed-wing air hop anywhere in the world through another entity, but 160 handled most of our Hilo stuff until we geared up and we got Blackhawks. At the time, we flew out an MD 530. I think we flew a Huey to Spokane, drove out. and all I knew, it was a Friday afternoon

we were having a pizza party for some guy that was going away and it would all, you know, missions for us at least would always start with a whisper like get ready, something's coming up and we go back to, we had team rooms like you do, then we have cages and we'd go get our gear and we'd have to pick a desert pack or a beach pack or whatever the gear was.

So it came out, we were going. We went out, we got on a plane out of Andrews, at the time Andrews Air Force Base, now joint base. We flew to Spokane, offloaded the helicopters, offloaded the gear, put it in box trucks, and we drove to a potato field in Bonner's Ferry, Idaho, and waited all night. The next morning, got worried. No one had established a perimeter. We didn't know where they were, but we had to go get them. The idea was that we were going to go get them. Get them as in the people who were in the cabin who had retreated. People in the cabin, and I didn't know anything about them. I know the names now. At the time,

I didn't know shit about him. I didn't know anything. Except that someone had found that Randy Weaver was a former SF guy that had some training and there had been a fairly significant gunfight and one U.S. Marshal had been killed. So we did what we did. We'd put on a gilly suit and we got our gear together and eventually we got orders to go up to the cabin. I think it was about a three hour hike. It was up on top of a not a mountain, but a pretty significant hill. And we didn't know going up, if we were under observation, we didn't know anything. We had zero intel, which is bad in any mission, right? So we get up onto this mountain ridge looking across the valley at the house. And I forget now, it was just over 200 yards. It was not very far at all. And we would go in two-man teams up the hill.

And I was in a three-man team at the very top of the hill. So I was on a rocky knoll looking down at the cabin. Very, very simple shot. The problem was it was maybe 37 or 38 degrees. It was pouring rain, and we'd just been up all night, and we'd just hike three hours to get up there. None of that matters, except the visibility was horrible, and we had no idea what was going on. No intel whatsoever. So I got up to the top of the hill, and I could only tell you what I saw.

And I laid down behind my rifle. I was trying to clear the scope. Simple, just tissue paper, you know, lens paper, trying to clear the scope, trying to find a hide, trying to build a hide. and no idea where these people were, but I could see the cabin. And I just barely set up my rifle. And I'm talking not seconds, but very few minutes. And all of a sudden, I see these guys coming running out of the cabin. One had a mini-14, one had a scoped rifle.

There were three of them. And as it turned out, it was Kevin Harris, Randy Weaver, and their daughter, sir. What are your rules of engagement with that? Okay, so here's the catch with that, and here's what many of your listeners are probably going to have strong things to say about this. And I've testified before the Senate. I went to a grand jury that tried to put me in jail for murder. Not the only one, but anyways, and you expect those. I mean, if somebody's shot in a situation like that, in the military, you have your rules.

In civilian law enforcement, if something like that, hell yeah, you've got to have investigations. Hell yes, you have to look at those things. and if somebody is culpable, go to jail, right? There is no room for error if you're a law enforcement sniper. It's it is what it is. So here's the thing. When we were standing in the potato field on the way up to the cabin, FBI rules of deadly force across the board. When you graduate from the academy, they hand you a badge and a gun.

They say, deadly force shall not be used except in defense. of you or another person of death or grievous bodily harm. It's not rules that you can shoot. It's rules that you cannot shoot unless these death or grievous bodily harm. Pretty straightforward. We went up there and someone at headquarters and everybody denies it. Somebody changed those rules of engagement. And they said, I have them written down if I'd know you were going to talk about it.

I was just curious. I've got the handwritten, a copy of the handwritten notes. And it says, deadly force could be used if they came out under certain circumstances with a gun. So that's been interpreted to be a shoot-to-kill order. But I can say this, having been through a lot of these situations in my lifetime, that if you shoot somebody, you sure as fuck better know what you're doing because it's expensive, right? You go to jail, civil suits, lose your job, maligned, you get shot yourself.

If you don't shoot, you're going to die, your kids are orphans. I mean, it's a choice between a bad decision and a bad decision. That's exactly. Yeah, it's not as clean as people want to believe it. It's tough. I mean, it's very different than a war zone. It's very different than an armed conflict. It's even different than a hostage rescue. A sniper shot in civilian law enforcement is a tough call, and nobody's going to help you with it. So I'm on to this ridge. They come out. I hear a gunshot. I hear a second gunshot. I'm watching these guys run from tree to Boulder to outhouse to shed to pile wood. And I've got, you know, my rifle trigger broke. We ran a, uh, we ran a, uh, Model 700 with the old 700. Yeah, but you know they're all custom-made. Oh, I fucking love them.

The Remington 700 is one of my favorite platforms. It's such a great right now. And so we can have any trigger package we want. We'd shoot probably two or three barrels a year out of, you know, a bull barrel. But it was a 308, 168 grain, boattail hollow point. We had these scopes called Unerdle. They were made by a guy named John Unerdle. And the only people in the world who had them were snipers.

I went through the Marine Corps Scout Sniper School. I should back that up and say, I've been through a lot of military schools, but I've never been in the military. So I went over to your shop for a coffee and they say, are you a veteran? And I say no. But I've been. Military veteran first responder. I'll just fire whoever didn't ask the question. No, no, no, because I have such respect for what you've done.

I would never say that I was a veteran if I did not serve in one of the branches. Well, it's also for law enforcement discount at the shop too. Yeah. Question for you guys. My point was I was a Marine Corps scout sniper. I graduated at school. I went through the school and I graduated to school. We ran the Unerl scope, which only those snipers had, and it was a great scope.

It had a bullet drop compensated to 1,000 yards. My point was that shot was incredibly easy, except, you know, when you're shooting movers, and the movers running, and they're only available within a glimpse. Fortunately, you had the ladies rifle, though. I mean, men shoot 300 win-mac. Oh, we had win-n-mags. You just told me you had a 308. No, I had 17 platforms.

That was one of them. Was yours pink? Did you have tassels on that shit? I have got with your 308. That's so cute. I don't have an inner, I don't have an inner feminine, but I'll accept it. I'm joking. No, I'll accept it.

308's a great round. 300 wind mag is better, in my personal opinion. I do too, but we would use windmags only for windshields, 747 windshields or hardened targets. Look, I had a 50. I had a suppressed 308. 300 win mag is like a multi-tool. It'll take care of the windmags. windshield and the fucker behind it.

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. One round. See, but that's it, man. That's where we're going to this thing. That was your job as a sniper. If you're an FBI, if you're an HRT sniper, you can't shoot the twin brother standing beside him and you can't hit the person.

I got to tell you a sniper shot story. Okay. And after this. So there are seven of us. We're all trying to take the shot. The reason I brought up my rifle, my trigger broke about two and a quarter, two pounds. And I had one and three quarters pulling. I was yanking on it.

a trigger. Not really. I was pulling on a trigger. That's fucking light, too. That's like a sneeze. Yeah, it's a sneeze trigger. Yeah. But, you know, that worked for me. Yeah. And so I was trying and trying and trying and try and try and take the shot, and the next thing I know they're back in the cabin. So what happened is another sniper, another sniper whose name was widely printed on the internet, but I'm not going to say his name. He saw the shot, had a different angle, had the shot, took the shot. And the shot, as you could see in various of the YouTube and online representations is this. For people who were not a sniper like you, you shoot a moving target, and it's very much like it's trajectory. It is a projectile

moving through the air at a moving target like a football or a baseball that you're trying to time the two of those things moving through time and space. So I would use the, I would place my crosshairs where I knew a moving target was going to go. I would calculate it with mill dots. I would time the shot. I'd pull the shot and I'd try to run the target into the shot, make the shot, which he did. The problem was the line was on the porch of the cabin. And when he pulled the shot, it would have been perfect, except she stepped in between the shot and Randy behind the door. So at the Senate hearings, they brought the door to the United States Senate. Really? The door, the curtain, you've got the door taken off the cabin in Idaho. taken to Washington, D.C. set up in room 214 at the heart office building with a hole in it. So you could see very clearly what happened. There's a curtain. So he, the HRT sniper, could not see what was behind the door.

He couldn't see anything except what we all thought is happening is that we were being assaulted, a frontal assault by guys carrying shoulder weapons at ready arms. You can look at that any way you want. You can talk about Ruby Ridge in terms of the initial encounter with a marshaled. You can look at it in terms of why they were there, how they were there. You could look at whether or not H.R.T. should ever have gone. You could look at the perimeter. We went up there to provide intelligence, not to get an issue out with anybody.

And you can look at the viability of the shot and how it should have been pulled off. You can look at all of those things, and I'm not taking a position. I've watched Sarah on television, and it's kind of gut-wrenching. I mean, I remember her mom screaming when she took that round, and it was. wasn't, you know. Yeah, what was the end result of the shot? Some people go down easy. That was awful.

That was not good. What was the end result of the shot? The end result, it killed her. Yeah. It killed the mother. Randy's, Randy Weaver's wife, Vicky. And they, and it hit, I can't remember exactly how the wounds went, but it hit Kevin Harris. And it hit him, it hit him hard.

And they, anyway, they ended up in the cabin. We did not know because the door, all, all seven snipers were on the same. line. So we only had we had one point of view on the cabin. There was nobody from else. So we nobody knew what the round did. When the door opened and the door closed, we didn't know what was inside the cabin. Nobody knew. But they all went in the cabin. They fell in the cabin and then the negotiation started until the last day. But that, when you talk about Ruby Ridge, it's not what happened after that first day because they all gave up and came out. It was previously resolved. It's Ruby Ridge is basically the Marshall's initial investigation, the shootout with the marshals in which Bill Deegan was killed, and Sammy was killed, and the resolution when we went up the next day with HRT and that shot.

So Ruby Ridge to this day is incredibly controversial and rightfully so. I have strong opinions. They're only my opinions. I was there. Other people who were there certainly have their own opinions. But it was a. It was a very, very early exercise of the United States government trying to send a violent resolution mechanism, meaning H.R.T, to a civilian situation. And obviously, it went badly. How did H.R.T. internally change from that incident? Dramatically. So I've got to say, when you get involved in a shooting as an FBI agent, they do what's called a shooting review board. And they come in pretty quickly with a supervisory component They interview you. They may take your gun.

Anything could happen. In that case, because we, those seven snipers, had the perimeter and we were the only guys up there, they couldn't do that. So we didn't have a shooting review board interview until quite some time after that. And you do in the FBI, any investigations written on what's called an FD 302, which is a report of investigation. So if you interview someone for a bank robbery, you write out what you, what you discovered. My FD302 from Ruby Ridge says something like, I don't have in front of me, it says something like, I went up on a mountain, I saw somebody out of a cabin, I heard a shot. I mean, it was nothing. It might have been four sentences. It might have been three sentences. So then the

shooting review board came up. They interviewed us literally on a log in the woods after a shift. That was another series of FD302s. Then it became a very big deal after it was resolved because it was outrage, outrage throughout the United States. And I'll say this. And I've always found this odd. I'm not saying that people in our line of work are Republican or Democrat. They're Americans. Yeah. And they have their own opinions. And I'm entitled. One of the guys on my sniper team was the head of security for Bill Clinton's security detail in Arkansas. And we had right-wing Republicans as well. We had everybody. My point is this, that Ruby Ridge over the years has become an issue of Second Amendment rights, where someone chooses to live their life on a

mountaintop and do what they want with weapons. I'll tell you right now, I celebrate that. That's my life. I mean, I grew up with guns in the country. I don't want the government telling me what to do. I could easily have been Randy Weaver. And H.R.T. was not some hit squad for the FBI. It was not. It has become that over 30 years. But I'll say this. When I was a speechwriter on Capitol Hill, I decided I wanted to write speeches for the NRA, which had their headquarters in Washington, D.C. And I was about to apply when my wife Rose applied to the FBI for me. When after Ruby Ridge, my dad called me and he said, have you got the, what is American Rifleman, the magazine for the National Rifle Association? He said, have you read the new issue?

And I said, no, I haven't seen it. And he said, you better read it. And I think they might have actually used the word pussy. Really? Yeah, they said Chris Whitcomb, they might have said Chris Whitcomb is a pussy, but they called me that by name. And they sent two copies to me at H.R.T. FBI. Chris Whitcomb, I got a manila envelope that said special agent Christopher Whitcomb, hostage rescue team, Quantico, Virginia, inside with two copies of that magazine where they called me. It's a bold move, cotton. I like it. So anyways, you know, then the civil suits.

Then the grand jury, then all the search warrants. I mean, they literally, they being other government agencies, came, showed up at Little Creek, and they take you outside, they close off, and they search everything. They searched everything we had. So it was a long process. I'm not saying it was bad. I'm saying it was unpleasant. And it went on for, what, 31 years? 31.

first big deployment, I guess. And then right after that, very shortly after that was Waco. How did that unfold? I was on a, you know, you have, in our line of work, you have to do everything. And high angle targets is a big one. So we had a climbing team, right? We'd climb elevators and skyscrapers in New York or whatever else. We were on a rock climbing trip in Tucson, Arizona, maybe seven of us, I think. And we had gone, we were taking on lunch break. So we were climbing, went into town, went to a place called Dirty Charlie's restaurant. And in those days, we didn't have cell phones. In those days, we had beepers.

And you'd get this code, I think it was 8-88. And that meant shit's going down, call somebody. So this guy on the team, it was an inter-team climbing. They were Salter snipers. It was a bunch of different guys climbing. So he said, hey, we got a gig in Waco, Texas. And everybody goes, where the hell's Waco, Texas? And one of the guys on the climbing team had gone to Baylor, had lived,

close to Waco. So we went to the airport. We grabbed our shit. We went to the airport. I had a browning high power on my hip. That's all I had for gear. My gear was at Quantigo. So we went up to the, I think it was a Southwest ticket counter and we were trying to get a flight right then to Waco. And Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell were trying to change their tickets at the Southwest. So we're going, dude, people are dying here. And we got to go save the day. And we're all sitting there while Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell were trying to change their tickets. So eventually we got, I think we went Delta. We flew into Waco. They took, they being the, the local office took us to a warehouse. We walk in, same thing you would do. He go, okay, what do we

got? And he goes, watch this. And they press a button, and it was news footage of that initial shootout. And now we take it. How did that incident begin as well? Like I said, I watched a documentary recently. How did, because they were on that compound for a while. What precipitated the initial exchange of lead? Great question. Debatable, but the reality is, I think, what we saw at Ruby Ridge, in my opinion, different agency. Marshals at Ruby Ridge, this was ATF.

Small office. That's right. It was guns again. It was guns again, right? Which just made it worse, because at the end of Waco, I'm not kidding you. H.R.T. had black helicopters, because if you're running an op, you don't want to look like, you know, you're not going to paint it some bright colors. Yeah.

The FBI made us paint the helicopters because they were so concerned that we were coming across as a military organization, which, of course, we were. I mean, my God, that was why you had the team to begin with. So going back to Waco, in that case, it was ATF. Same thing. Why didn't you arrest, why didn't you not arrest Vernon Howell, who became David Koresh? Why did you not arrest him walking down the streets of Waco? and that's an obvious question.

It didn't happen that way. ATF put together a team, as you see in the documentary, Tiller Russell's documentary, brilliant guy, and I think he did a very fair job, but it's tough to tell 51-day story in three hours. ATF went out in a, I think it was a 250 F-250 pickup truck with a cattle hauler. Cattle hauler was full of guys with machine guns. They roll up to the front door, somebody starts shooting, and the rest is history. Yeah, it was pretty good little gunfight they had there. Good gunfight. And it was two pretty good gunfights. They took a lunch break in between, you know, and it was...

You got to eat. You got to eat, man. Yeah. Hydrate a little bit. Gets some salt in you. You know how that goes. You know how that goes. Yeah. So not to make like of a terrible situation, it was. It was an awful situation. Again, more federal agents dead civilians dead inside. It was absolute cluster. It was awful, right? But you guys as HRT, get that Red Star cluster post that initial engagement. Exactly. Once again, the United States government has a situation where things have gone back. You need somebody to come in and clean it up. There's one entity, and that entity was us. Again, because of the posse comitatus, they could not send you guys, they could not send Delta, they sent us.

And that's why H.R.T. was formed. So, I was there with a Browning High Power, and there were seven of us. And the rest of the guys got on the plane and flew in from Quantico. They got there sometime in the middle of the night. Hostage rescue means you take every advantage, speed, surprise, violence of action. You have a specific objective. bad guys, save the good guys. We ran the same thing. You guys did. We didn't talk to anybody. We didn't have dogs in those days. The first three years I was on HRT. The first three years,

we had no immediate action drill for when we got shot. If you get shot going through a door, you'll lay there. There's nobody coming to get you until the mission's over. It was just a different mindset in those days. And it was the same. The Army and the Navy were the same thing. There was no immediate action drill for casualties, good guy casualties. So anyways, We, the team comes in, I bring that up because I thought arriving there, we'd probably go in the next morning because they're down, right? They're wounded. They're on their heels. There's already been a shootout. That's perfect for us. We go in at five o'clock. We got nods. We got everything. We're ready to go. And, you know, save the good guys and, you know, didn't happen. Yeah. So the politicians come in. maybe some would argue clearer minds came in and you end up in this situation.

In civilian law enforcement at that time, there was an evolution from, we're here with the FBI surrender, right? That was like the old J. Edgar Hoover mentality. Yeah, just comply. Just comply, right? Now we look at that as ridiculous. YouTube videos, First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, all of the constitutional auditors, you can see endlessly online,

we've evolved to a higher place. At that time, we had not. The mission was complicated. The weapons were simplistic. The tactics were rudimentary, but that's all we had and that's all we knew. So at that time, you're a bad guy, I'm a good guy, do what I say, right? Thank God we've evolved, but that's what it was. So we got there, once again, we've got a compound, we've got dead bodies everywhere, a halacious firefight which played out on the news so the entire country was watching it. And we had no perimeter and we had nobody to resolve it. So they sent, I went with two guys on my sniper team, and there was a house about half a mile away. And we drove up, climbed up on the roof, and I had a 50, and we had some optics, and that's all we had. And then the rest of the team came in, and eventually, as they said in a documentary, we set up a perimeter around the place.

And 51 days later, it went bad. I mean, Tilla could not tell that story. the whole thing in the documentary, but that last day, they shot thousands of rounds at us. I mean, we just got hosed for a better part of six hours. Koresh was wounded in the initial exchange, right? Took like a flyer, it seemed like almost in like the kidney area.

Yeah, it was flesh, didn't get the kidney. He came out of it fine. I think he took a, got grazed in the hand, but the one, apparently the one that got him, got level was through and through, and I'm sure it didn't feel good, but it wasn't, it wasn't a life-threatening. No, no, it wasn't a bad deal. Why on that 51st day did they initiate that barrage?

Like, what changed that day versus the other ones? Well, I'm assuming you were there probably on Overwatch that whole time, too. Yeah, the entire time. I was literally one of the first guys in, and I was literally the last guy out. You know, it's a, and 51 days, if you just count to 51. Can I say that it's mind-numbingly. It's mind-numbingly long for a team that is built to deploy, resolve, go home. It's like a fire department that gets called to a house fire and they're there for 51 days.

A first responder that shows up at a domestic dispute and they stay there for 51 days. It's the same thing. Can you imagine all the missions that you've done? You're doing high value target and Fallujah or something like that and you set up on post for 51 days for somebody to decide whether or not you could get them. That's exactly what it was. It's not even a metaphor. Was the vast majority of that time in that 51 days just... Stultifyingly boring.

Yeah, I was going to say probably nobody moving. in or out. It's just like, hey, I'm looking through a building through optics. Awesome. And we did shifts. At first, it was 12 on, 12 off, then we took 24 on, 24 off. And, you know, we lived at the holiday inn in Waco, and you'd go out. And here's how bad it was, right? You know, I started out saying I wanted to be a rock star coming out of college. I went to Ray Dave, not Ray Davies, what's his name? Heart of Texas music in Waco, Texas. And I bought a brand new Fender Stratocaster, because I was bored shitless. I'd read a book a day.

I mean, it's literally, you'd be two hours on a scope and then off for six or eight, and then two hours on, and the rest of the time, he'd just hanging around. And it evolved over time. I mean, you know, the first three or four days, there was some stuff going on. A guy got shot, you know, trying to come in behind us, took a couple in the head out of stovepipe. It didn't make it. Value of keeping your gun clean, I guess. So the first few days was that.

And then I remember it was funny because we'd come in in our own vehicles. Well, like you guys, right, you stand off and you've got support teams and support units, which are fabulous in our own way, but you're your own thing. And we were our own thing. So we'd come in in these vans, and we would go up to this crossroads, and we'd get in these Bradley's, and then the Bradley's would take us into Sierra 1 and Sierra 2, or two front and back positions. So I come in one day, and everybody knew who we were, but didn't really know what we were. And I get out of this thing, and I've got a fender strap.

Cadacaster case. It's a big rectangular case. Kind of looks like a rifle case. And everybody goes, wow, what's that? They all thought it was some secret weapon. Like this HRT sniper's got this secret boredom weapon. Secret. Yeah, I got a secret boredom weapon. Yeah. So then my technique or tactic was saying, listen, he's a guitar player. I'm a guitar player. Hook me up a Marshall Halfstack. Let me play at that guy. It'll drive him crazy. He had a T-shirt. One time I said, saw him come to a window. I had him in. Talking about Koresh. Koresh. I had him in crosshairs. And he was wearing a t-shirt with a guy playing a

pointy guitar, Ibanez or something, leaning back with his head like this, and it said, God rocks. He had a t-shirt made of himself playing guitar that said God rocks. And I said, let me play this guy. You know, all those speakers that you see of, we were playing rabbits being killed and Nancy Sinatra songs and all this other stuff. I said, just plug me in. Just let me play at this guy. He'll play back. We'll have it out mono-a-mono with Stratocat. investors, right? And people would say this is ridiculous. And I would say, yes, that's how ridiculous it was. It was madness. What would have happened if you would have cracked a shot off when you had them in your scope? I'm assuming you would have ended up in prison, but it would have probably

avoided the totality of the life loss there. The short answer is that it's tough for me to convey because everybody was asleep. The particular thing I talked about, I did that Waco documentary, I was in that documentary, and they talk about that shot, and the reality was, it was another night, it was boring. A guy

called me up after the documentary, he said, Wittcomb, you asshole, everybody had them in their crosshairs. And I go, yeah, I know, but that was mine, right? Yeah. But it's boring. It's three in the morning. It's my two-hour shift. Everybody's asleep. We had a perimeter detail, but everybody's asleep. And I like music, so I had this little

transistor radio. You don't even know what that is anymore. I do. A battery power thing. Michael doesn't, but I do. He's looking it up right now, actually. Yeah, exactly. I am. It's like a small listening device before they had buds, earbuds. And I was listening to Miles Davis, bitches brew, right? And he's got these, anybody who listens to Miles Davis, it's got some kind of crazy music. There was this low hanging fog, and that lights were on. It was just, it was surreal. But you're bored, shitless, right? So you're, run so you go black alpha one black alpha two white you know you just run down your list of all you're looking for uh frequency analysis on movements and stuff like that trying to give you just giving surveillance

that's all and so i go window window window and i go on the window and it's him so i say okay now it was 297 yards from the i had the 700 again sorry man yeah 300 it would have been a different story yeah yeah so i've got the uh 300 gets it done Sometimes 7-62 does not. Thank you. There you go. Yeah, there you go. So, you know, I'm sitting there, three in a morning, whatever it was, just me and Miles Davis, low-hanging fog, the lights. It was kind of surreal. And I'm looking, and Koresh knows where we are, and he knows what I'm doing. And he had the same thing. He had guys in hides. They were really professional. I've got to say that about those guys. They were very good. His mighty men, I think he called him. but we just had this quiet little moment and you know as a sniper it's an intimate game right

when you've got a guy in your crosshairs and this moment he's alive and this moment he's dead there's this special little space that's hard for other people really to understand deer hunters people that shoot big game you get the same sort of thing a mammal's a mammal in some context especially after a certain amount of training but it was my it was our moment it was like my little time

with Vernon Howell David Koresh and he's got the t-shirt on and he's looking at me I'm looking at him and, you know, I had to cross ears on his nose because the brain stem, it's not between the eyes. And it was that moment. And the moment is that, just as I said in the film. It is a, the moral dilemma in saying, I can kill one man in this moment knowing that when you cut the head off the, whatever the metaphor, that they're all going to come out.

He was the leader. That was it. Or, even though we didn't know they were going to start a fire, I felt very firmly that it was going to end in violence. I thought they were going to come out. Rest up, gear up, fight it out. I mean, it started with violence, so logical assumptions that it would probably end with that. And he kept telling negotiators, day after day after day, he would say, we're going to fight it out. And that didn't make the documentary because you can't put it all in the documentary. But the negotiators would hear day after day after day, let me finish the seven

seals. If I don't, I'm going to fight it out. I'm willing to die. This is a way it's going to end. So I thought that was a very plausible outcome for a very bad situation. So you're in that private moment and here's your question. There's nobody else on. There's nobody else watching. There's nobody else involved. If I, as an individual, shoot him in that situation, there is nobody that's going to say he wasn't pointing a gun at me or that he didn't. it would have it's not just a he said she said it is very much an interpretation did i feel

my life was threatened remember the fbi rules of deadly force are you shall not shoot unless your life or the life of another person is threatened with death of grievous bodily harm did i feel at that time that my life was threatened with death of grievous body harm fuck yeah if i could shoot somebody at 2997 he sure is how they had grenades they had you know 1.6 They really? They threw grenades at the ATF. Where did they get those things? They built them.

They bought the husks, and then they bought the primers, and they bought the powder, and they made fully explosive World War II era pineapple-style grenades, and they used them. Wow. Yeah. And they had two-fifties. Plus, they had, I don't know what belt feds they had, but they had fully automatic weapons. And like I say, 1.6. Do I care, would I want 1.6 million rounds of ammo?

Yeah, I would. Yeah. I mean, why not, right? So an American can have 1.6 million rounds of uranium ocean. You don't want them to have it if they're shooting at you. And they did. They shot, they being the mighty men, David Koresh's people, shot so many rounds during the initial shootout and the last day on April 19th that the forensic team that went in weighed them with a front end loader. I swear to God, Google it. Google it. They fired so many rounds. Just brass everywhere. Yeah, we're just going to gross, round it out. Holy fuck. So I think that gets lost in translation. These guys, whether you believe in the good or bad or evil or the Bible or theologians, everybody has a perspective, and I honor those perspectives.

Fine. I was there. He almost killed me. You know, we'll get to that in a second. But in that moment, three o'clock in the morning, just me and David Koresh, I had that think. And that think was tough. That think was really tough, man, because I think.

thought to myself, my job, my role in life at that time in my life was to save what I perceived to be innocent human beings. And they had men and women. I saw all the kids. I saw all the women. When they first started, Andy, they would come to the windows and there was this little kid. By the way, I've got photographs of everything I say to you, I have photographs to prove it. And I gave him to Till we just couldn't use them all. But I've got a picture of this little kid in a red down puffy jacket because it was cold, right? It's March in Texas. And when, I was a little kid. And when they would come to the window, they would hold this little kid up as a human shield and peer around him, so thinking we'd shoot him in a window or something like that. Probably good tactically,

but it's pretty tough when you're watching a guy that claims he's the word of God and he's got a three-year-old in front of him as a human shield. And that was a daily thing. So we got to know the kids. We got to know the women. We got to know the guys. We got to know the faces. They would, you know, we'd see them every single day. So it's not like this thing played out after 51 days with evil henchmen with machine guns trying to burn down a bunch of people exercising religious freedom. That's not the way I perceived it. These were people that we wanted to save. There are people that I decided to join the FBI and a hostage rescue team and to be there to save human beings. That was the whole point in the mission. So it was complex in that moment because I believed very strongly that it could go either way.

And again, you know, my optic was a model 700308 with a 10 power unneral scope. I didn't shoot him. If you could go back and you knew what the outcome was going to be, what would you've done? Yeah. So obviously an impossible question because you can't go back in time. But let's say Chris is now behind that scope again and you know that X number of days later it's going to be a fucking inferno and a firefight. Here's a problem with a podcast with you. because you motherfucker know exactly what I want to say.

Yeah, you shoot him in a face. Shoot him in a face. No question about it. Could I kill one guy to save 86, including 25 or 26 children in a heartbeat? But I just said it. And I guess this is probably people are going to see that and they're going to think what they want to think. But I'll say this to every person watching this. But I'm also asking you a hypothetical question.

And the question is not now, hey, you're the younger Chris watching. with an unknown situation. You're now going back in time, which is a fucking impossible. Knowing what happened to everybody and the very high likelihood, if you would kill one person, it would save the others. It's an impossible, not real question. I'm just curious. Okay. Great question, great qualification. I'll say this, that at this point in my life, I have no social media. I have no wait for people to get a hold of me. I mean, people could find out where I hang out most of the time, maybe, because I don't hang out anywhere very often. I don't have any consequence, except that I believe in the truth. And everything that I say to

you, I'll say is the truth, but I know fully well that I might have to back it up. So anything that we discuss, I've got photographs, passport entries, contracts, whatever else, right? But I'll say this, that I took all the courses in philosophy. I read Hume and Descartes and hard and rule utilitarian and individual utilitarian. I read all the St. Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, all of the rules of thought on moral behavior among humans. Free choice, free will, all of those things. So I can't say that what I'm saying to you right now is in a vacuum. I had the benefit of that education. I had the benefit of that thought process. Then I had the training as an FBI agent, which at least in my mind was a fundamental aspect of good. I believed

that I was good. Then I went to HRT and I had the training of that benefit where I personally slid a little bit because, you know, there's the Nietzsche, since we're on philosophy, the Nietzsche expression, men who fight monsters have to be careful. They don't become monsters themselves, right? Yeah. We've been there. And there are those moments in a gunfight where you make decisions, but it's tactical order. It's life or death. Things happen fast and, you know, they happen a certain way. As a sniper, you know fully well what I'm saying,

that you make the decision in the confines of a world that that's that big around, that it's going to go that way. So knowing that people will react in different ways, I'll say it. It's not a hypothetical decision. If I could go back and save 86 human beings and kill one, yes, I would do that. I would shoot that motherfucker right in the pelvis girdle. Yeah.

Well, you know what? You guys developed that. I wish we'd thought about that, Andy. You know, nobody did. You guys developed so many things that we even know. Sometimes you're going to drive them to the ground. When people are moving, it's hard to take a headshot. The old pelvis fucking puts them around the ground.

How many people have you shot that didn't go down? And you don't even know if you hit them, right? I mean, I'm a big caliber guy. I hit every shot I ever took. Right. 100% accuracy. It's the only time it's ever happened in the history of the military. Oh, really?

No. I'm just, fuck, I don't know. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. I know, but I know you're so good that that's plausible to me. Trust me, I'm not that good. No, but if you don't hit bone, and this is hard for a lot of people who are not in that world to understand is that there's that dilemma when you hit somebody or even big game hunters, people who've shot a large mammal where you hit them and you know you hit them, but nothing happened. Yeah. And like on a deer, there's a pocket.

There's a pocket. Just above the lungs where you can actually just pass right through. Right. And they'll still haunch up and they take off and there's not very much blood. Yeah. And they're around the next season with a scar. Yeah. It's, I've had, yeah, I've had experiences where the lights go off and others where distinctly.

I remember very distinctly, I showed a man in a hallway about seven times and he walked down the hallway to another room. Yeah, I rest my case. That's what I was trying to say. If you don't get that initial feedback. He didn't make it out of that room. I'm guessing he didn't. I guess he didn't. But if I had known then that I could shoot him with a, with a.

300 blackout in the pelvic girdle. Yeah. I would go with that tactic. That came... It makes great sense. I don't know who came up with that. I don't actually remember when I first heard it, but especially on a fast-moving target,

it's one of the fastest ways to drive people to the ground. Well, it's all bone. It's all bone, and there's a lot of artery and vein in there as well. Right. And it gives you the opportunity to at least demobilize a threat that you can then deal with in an easier fashion. Yeah. It's a great tactic.

You guys learned all that stuff. You pioneered all that stuff. We gave my job. generation gave you guys boots and automatic weapons. You gave us, I'm kidding. 20 years of sustained warfare. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Burden that comes along with that. Anything I say, anything I say talking to you, I'm fully aware that I'm amateur hour. I completely understand that. You are not. At the time, you're going to look at what it was at the time, you know. Yeah. It was, we were developed that. So anyways, that was the origins of HRT who have gone on to be

remarkable in evolved ways. And I don't know if did you run with those guys on task forces in Iraq and Afghanistan? Yes. I would I mean it was interesting. We would work with agency guys. We would work with I swear there was D.A. It was honestly, we ended up working with

again the alphabet soup. And some of this stuff, they were looking for particular things or particular we would basically do our job and they would do whatever the fuck they want to do. They would roll right with us and they were looking for different things but well that's where this conversation's going to go because well before it goes there yeah how so how long after that moment that you shared with caresh did it turn into the fireball that it became

oh that was early on that was probably day no more than day 10 or 12 first quarter first third something like that we were there a long time after how'd that last day play itself out okay again there's something about the intimacy of this room like i can pretend that nobody's going to hear this conversation. Michael's going to hear it. But yeah, it's Michael's going to hear it. It's honest. I think after 30 years, it's very cathartic and healing for me to be truthful about it.

And I'll say this, unequivocally, I am not speaking for the FBI. I'm not speaking for the hostage rescue team or any of the guys I worked with. Every human being has their own experiences. These are my experiences, period. Just my experiences. But the time out there, boredom among people who are, are designed not to be in that situation became, it would migrate to other things. And because an element of the command element, the negotiators, there's a guy named Gary

Nesner, who is now a very good friend of mine. I have enormous respect for him. At the time, I didn't. He is a negotiator. He was a negotiator at Waco. He's talked very widely about it. He and I were both FBI agents. We had very different attitudes on what should happen, right? their objective is to talk them out. Our objective is to do something if talking ends. And there's the difference between talking to a guy at 5 o'clock in the afternoon and going into a burn-in building at 4 in the morning with a bunch of screaming people. And, you know, it's a different mindset, right?

So one's not better than the other. You need both. You need a toolbox with a lot of different implements. So here's where I'm going with this. We being Sierra 2, sniper position 2 at the back of the building of my element within the hostage rescue team. We got no information about anything. You'd get up and go to work and everybody would joke around and say, what's happened and it goes, nobody knew anything. I mean nothing. We would know what day it was. We knew they were going to be there 24 hours, nothing. We didn't get any

word from the communications from negotiators, nothing. We just sat there. So you've manufactured things to do. So we had helicopters and we had knives and we had rattlesnakes. So we'd make a lot of hat bands out of rattlesnakes. Classic pairings really. We'd get the 530s out and we'd play tag with rabbits in the field and play chicken flying the helicopters toward the building and pulling out at the last moment. I know I'm not supposed to say that, but I think it probably on videotaped someplace. Again, 30 years ago. But it was the same thing. Yes, but was it legally yes. Was it ethically plausible? I don't know. That's what people are still talking about. It could be viewed as antagonistic, but I get, I understand where you're coming from. It could be viewed as antagonistic,

in my opinion. It was antagonistic by design. We played Nancy Sinatra singing, these boots are made for walking at 130 decibels, kept the lights on 24 hours a day to antagonize them. I didn't make that decision. Somebody else did. But among those things was having tanks get closer or armored vehicles, getting closer and closer to the building. There are a lot of things stepping up the aggression because we believed they were just finally just say, okay, all right, we're out. Because Koresh kept saying over and over and over again, just let me finish this page I'm coming out on a Monday, Wednesday, day after day after day. So we were over it, man.

We were just completely over it. So we did what we were supposed to do professionally, which was nothing. We sat there. We got bored. I read books. I played a Stratocaster. I complained about it 30 years later. In reality, the negotiators talked, the decision makers all the way up to Bill Clinton

and the White House, Janet Reno. They did what they did. H.R.T. did what we were told to do, which was deliver stuff and watch the place. And that was it, 51 days. And then that final day, obviously the whole fucking thing burned down, but they just started going outgoing with lead, it sounds like? Yeah, so I was off the night before.

So it was April 19th, I can't remember, but maybe a Thursday. I can't remember what day it was. But my team was off. We would rotate 24 on, right? We were off, and we got the call. We're probably drinking beer in a dive bar or something. And we got the call to come back to work. So we said, finally something's happening.

It hadn't happened in 51 days. They called the entire team in. we jumped into Bradley's, we went back out to Sierra 1 and Sierra 2, the entire team. At the time, we had about 50 shooters. Jesus. And they came in, they didn't even tell us until the following morning. So they being the HRT command element, came to Sierra 2 at about 4 in the morning and got everybody up and said, this is, you know, it was a five-paragraph order, the warning order.

This is how it's going to go. This is what we're going to do. And it was that we're going to issue the ultimatum to start. surrender at 6 a.m. If they didn't come out, we were going to approach the building with the C-EVs, the construction engineering vehicles that look like tanks and essentially tanks, with booms and those booms would inject CS, right, which is not typically used in civilian law enforcement, into the building. Reason being, I think, that it was such a large space they wanted a more, whatever. We also had M-79 projectable gas rounds, ferret rounds, that we were shooting

at the building and through the windows. So it was on. So we had sniper units, sniper elements in Sierra 1, sniper elements in Sierra 2 covered in the beginning. We had a couple peripheral units, but that was primarily it. And then the assault teams approached the building and started injecting tear gas. The moment we rolled up on the building with the armored vehicles, they just started opening fire, front back.

And it went like that for, I think it went like that for four hours, about 10 or 11 o'clock, they called a ceasefire and we pulled everything back, had another negotiation, fell through. We went back in with the armored vehicles, injected more, started pulling off the walls. You can justify it any way you want. I think we justified it saying we wanted to have avenues for people to run out. And I remember he had a, Coresh, Sierra 2 was a garage. He had maybe 10 Harleys in there with custom-painted Harleys. Oh, it was his garage.

It was a very large property, but he had a garage out back. And if you became a branch Davidian, you had to give up all your worldly possessions. So there were all these trailers parked behind us, and they had prom dresses and wedding albums and babies' shoes made out of brass. I mean, everybody in a compound just put their stuff in storage and became whatever. But he had a shitload of Harleys. Actually, I got a big cut above my head. I'd like to make up a story about how I get it.

I crashed one of his motorcycles. I should probably not say it. I got a... You were just testing it as a mobility platform in case. I was testing a mobility platform. In case you needed a hasty egress or ingress. Hasty egress or ingress. Yeah.

It's not your fault. In lieu of death of laud. Yeah. It's not your fault. The keys were probably in it. Oh, yeah. Well, so anyways, that was my big... The keys were not in it.

Yeah. I'm saying he had like a 68 Camaro. He had Harleys. He had dirt bikes. He had go. carts. He had tons of great stuff. Tons of really cool stuff. But he also had a four by eight sheet of plywood on which someone had painted a mural of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. So you got the gray horse and the black horse, whatever the horses. Palomino maybe, I don't know. And so we had,

the front of Sierra two sandbags, because they had 50s. They had two 50s. And so we're doing our best there. And so I ended up with the four horsemen of the apocalypse at my snows. And my snows. sniper position. So I cut a hole in the gray horse's head, and that was my firing position. So I'm staring at the four horsemen of the apocalypse, but we didn't shoot back because I was behind sandbags. Nothing was going to hurt me. If they'd fired up the 50, I think it would have been different. It would have been a different story. What was the first indication that you saw that it was on fire? I was, so I'm looking at it at that time through a 10 power scope at 297 yards. It's not that clear. It's a great sniper shot, but it's not the detail you want, you need a 40 power

spotting scope or something like that. And I saw smoke first. Then I saw flames. There was about a 40 mile an hour, 40, 50 mile an hour wind that you could see on the video. Everybody's seen the video just whipping. Yeah, going left to right. And there's a huge branch dividian flag. So calling the wind was simple. It would have been a hard shot. It was easy to call the wind because there were all these different indicators. So I saw the first, I saw the smoke, and then I saw the flames. Then I saw flames at the other end of the building in the opposite direction of the wind. So the wind was not, it was obvious to me very quickly that a fire had started in two locations

and it wasn't blowing one toward the other. Then the guys in the CEVs, they're literally in the building. I mean, you can see it on video. They're literally piercing the skin of that building. And they can see them. You know, they have those little prisms, you know, the sighting prisms. Yeah, the sighting ports. And they can literally see the guys lighting the fire.

So they're calling it in over the radio. And then everybody starts doing the math and saying, basically, holy shit, they're lighting a place on fire. And it passed down the line very, very quickly through our comms. We had our own tactical comm section. And I thought, well, they got to come out now. And they didn't. And then the fire went fast, man. I mean, it places a Tinderbox.

And here's what didn't make the documentary, but I want to talk about. We knew, because we had mics inside the building, right? We had really strong surveillance. So we had, I mean, that makes sense. We would have gotten mics inside the building, right? Yeah. So we can hear everything they're doing. We can hear everything they're saying, we being the FBI, not me individually.

But we knew that there were 25 or 30 children in the building. And whatever you say about men, women, combat, whatever else. You and I have both seen women do bad things with guns, right? Kids are different. Every single human being I knew at Waco could say, I don't give a shit what happens. Overall, we'll figure it out. It's the kids.

It's all about the kids. I had two kids. I had five and six-year-old kids myself. Everybody in a team did. They're all family guys. They're good human beings. They're patriots or whatever you want to say about them. They're human beings.

They're children in a burning building. All of a sudden, everything in our psyche and our soul, and our reason for being is trying to find and save those kids. And a guy whose name I won't say, but there's video of it. I have photographs of it, and he's a remarkable guy, and he ran out from cover from Humvee while under fire, into the burning building and actually went into the burning building and grabbed this woman and tried to drag her out.

and he's screaming at her. I have a photograph. He's completely surrounded in flames. She is too. In the building and he's grabbing her and screaming at her. Where are the kids? Where are the kids?

Where are the kids? And she just stared him in the eye, pulled away from him and went back in the building and burned to death. So the building's on fire. They're not coming out. Kids are dying.

That sucked. Yeah. That sucked. And then it burns down. And as it turns out, he had a bunker buried off to the side with a school bus in it that we found out about during the course of this thing. So the only way you could get to that school bus was through this, or I don't know if it was the only way that the only way I knew of to get to this school bus was through this basically a sewer where they threw all the bodies of the people who died in the initial shootout. So these bodies and these bodies, which are now body parts, they've been in a sewer for 51 days. That's not somewhere you want to go skinny dipping.

We had to. I didn't personally, but guys on the team had to wade through that in the dark to get to the school bus to try and save the kids. There were elements of the story of Waco, and I'm sure there are for the Branch Divideons. I'm here telling you my side of the story, I'm sure they have their own. But I can tell you there are things that didn't make the documentary that sucked that people need to understand. And hostage rescue team operators, when everything was over in a mad dash to try to find and save 25 children who looked just like their own kids were in a school bus buried underground and they had to walk through a sewer of body parts that had been festering for 51 days to try to get to them. And, I mean, Waco sucked. Waco sucked. What was the total tally on loss of life there?

I think all in it was 86 maybe. Did they burn alive or did they, you know, like, you know, the Jones Town, like, you know, the Kool-Aid? Or did they all just eat it? They just fucking ate those flames. A lot of them ate the flames. But so this didn't make the documentary either, but, you know, I think people need to know this. I think at least my perspective. Mount Carmel burned very quickly.

Very quickly, meaning, I mean, from the time I saw the flames until the time it was embers, I'm going to guess, don't hold me to it. I'm going to guess it was 45 minutes. Just to give you some idea, right? When it was fully involved in flames, I said this in documentary. So I'm inside. You couldn't, I was completely safe behind sandbags and inside. There's no heroes there at all, zero.

But when the building was fully involved in flames, I walked outside, because I figured the job was over, right? I walked outside, I walked around the edge of the building, and I was standing there with a guy, who you might know, We'll talk about it afterwards, but another guy on my team, and we were standing shoulder to shoulder. And we make a living with rounds, right? Like, we used to shoot 200, 250,000 rounds a year. And in CQB, they're going by your face all the time. And a rifle round, you know, that snap, you get the supersonic snap. The rifle went right between our heads.

So it missed me by eight inches. And I thought, and I was looking at the building that was completely involved in flames. What you see on TV, the massive conflagration, and somebody was sitting at a snubing. sniper hide in that building probably on fire and his last act on earth was to try to shoot me in the head and i thought to myself holy shit you say whatever you want to say about david caress and his followers i mean that guy was had to be on fire when he when he cooked that round off power of belief is an amazing thing i'm telling me andy that's it man the power of belief is an amazing thing you say what you want about the branch divinians they were earnest they were they were they were serious

Did they ever positively ID Koresh's body? All right, so here's another thing that I don't know if I can talk about, but... I feel like you absolutely should. Yeah, I'm sure you feel about this. All right, so, you know, on H.R.T., probably the same with you. Everybody has a side project, right? So you're... Everybody's an assaulter, but you become a sniper or a...

Ancillary tertiary... Yes, exactly right. So, you know, you go to breach of school, you get stepped up in terms of medical training. Everybody's got these peripheral things. for a time we had a surveillance photograph component and that was me. So I was in charge. Like if anybody took pictures for surveillance, I was in charge of doing all that shit.

And at that time, they were still physical photographs. So I have photographs of most everything that was taken at Waco. And I've kept them someplace in a box. I haven't looked at them in 30 years. But I, you know, I mean, I've looked at them recently. The reason I bring it up is this. that I've got pictures of skulls with entry wounds and with exit wounds.

And I can say with a high degree of certainty that a large number of people were shot in the head. Either they did it themselves. I don't know many people that shoot themselves like this. Yeah, chin or, you know, easy, right? So there were absolutely, and the FBI, I say this primarily because this has all come out during investigations. and the FBI said it themselves, that branched of idioms, including who I won't say this, but who I firmly believe to be David Koresh, I saw it with my own eyes. So I saw the fire.

I saw and have photographs of the skulls and the body parts and hundreds and hundreds of guns and piles and piles of ammo, 1.6 million rounds of ammo. And it's cooking off, you know, and you know, when bullets cook off, they're not dainting. But it's just boom, boom, boom. Doesn't sound safe. Yeah. For those who have never thrown a bullet into a campfire, it makes a big bang, but it's not going to hurt you.

I mean, I wouldn't stand there, like try to warm your hands around it, but yeah, it needs the compression of the chamber and it needs pressure to go down. Exactly, right. So what I'm saying is it was the place was a smoldering ruin and huge. Everybody's seen how big the place was. It was huge, massive. And it was guns, bullets, and body parts.

86 bodies in a confined space and various states of being burned. I mean bones sticking out and skulls with bullet holes in them. And to add this to that apocalyptic image, which goes along with what he was preaching, to add this, as I said in a documentary, somehow when that explosion that everybody saw on TV, that massive explosion. I don't know if it was that. Maybe not. Maybe it was just the heat. Thermals rising off the heat. I don't know what it was, but I can tell you this. When I got up there, it was raining pieces of Bibles. It's raining paper. And I look up and I think, you know, it's kind of for people, even guys like us who've done that most of our lives. I've been on a lot of

those before and after. And even then, to stand there with, with what had happened in that time and think about 86 human beings lying at your feet, burned, children, bullet holes and skulls, embers, you know, it's hot. You know, it's like 150 degrees just standing in it. Bullets cooking off, armored vehicles, everything that you see on TV, and all of a sudden it's raining Bible pages. I'll never forget it as long as I live. I reach down, I go, what is that?

I reach down and I start picking up chapters of revelation and, John 316 and all these things that you grew up, you know. It was a very, I don't know looking back through my life, even now how to make sense of it. It's just, it was wild from day one until it was over. It's wild 30 years later. It's just an amazing, an amazing event in American history. Tragic, tragic event. I don't think you can make sense some of that stuff.

No. It's too hard to describe the variables or the scene that you're talking about. I don't know if the human brain is designed to make sense of all of that compressed and a 51-day stretch. No, I just, for whatever reason, I think people are born to different things. I'm a writer, a poet, a musician. You know, I think I'm a good dad. I love my kids. And my wife is a PhD in psychology, if anybody could figure it out, right?

but for some reason I remember the first fist fight I got in with Bucky Corliss in third grade by the swing set and the third and the fifth and the seventh and fight my way through high school and boxing and just an entire life of violence not that define me

I'm not a bad guy I don't go out starting fights I've just been in a million of them and then Kosovo I mean we could talk about Kosovo that was a bad war that was a bad war that was a bad war

not that there's a good war but I mean I went to this one place in Kosovo and this it looks like the it looks like the sound of music it's the Alps right beautiful chalais I mean it's one of the most beautiful places in the world and during that war I remember we went up to this place and there was a well and and the what we consider the bad guys had gone in and killed eight people in a family and put them down a well so they pollute the water when the when the people came home and they had to get them out of the well. And we went over there and we had to identify those bodies. So we had to zoom all the bodies and take the skulls apart to get the bullets out of the skulls to prove that they'd been

murdered. And you're doing autopsies. I mean, I was an English major. I didn't, I didn't have any medical training. Yeah. And I mean, but then it's, then it's Yemen. And then it's all the other places that we haven't gotten to probably won't even get a chance to. But anyway, Waco, 30 years later, stands out in my mind. as a tragedy of historic consequence for 86 people, branched dividians and federal agents. And I guess that's why we're still talking about it 30 years from now. But like you said, it can't make sense of it.

Where'd your career take you after that? So cut to the chase. How many years had you been in the FBI at Waco? Five years. Okay. Damn. Early on. Four years as an agent, one year on the hostage rescue team.

Okay. So what's, fuck. That was front end. of your career. It's front end, yeah. Yeah. And then it got kind of weird after that because, like I said, and I won't talk much about this, but H.R.T. did the renditions, did a lot of black stuff, did a lot of stuff overseas, did a lot of, because terrorism was considered civilian, right? Yeah. So any good, high-speed, low-drag thing that was going on in the day, it was likely that we were part of it.

Where does the government authorization for rendition come in? Okay, great question. So I should back up by saying, for, for people listening, and I'll say it again. Right now I'm writing a book, which is actually my second memoir. The first one I wrote in 2001, it was called Cold Zero. It was about that. I wrote about Waco. I wrote about Ruby Ridge. I wrote about H.R.T. I wrote about my life up until 9-11. And it was a, that was the reason I left the FBI. It was a big book, and it changed my life. But this is the second one. The problem is this. After Waco, it got weird. And it got weirder and weirder and ends up now.

And I just wrote this book. So I sold it to Random House. And so it's done. Or you're in process. Yeah. You know, in nonfiction, typically you sell a novel. I've sold five books. I've written seven books, but I've sold five books.

This is the fifth one. So typically, if you sell fiction, you sell from a completed manuscript or nearly completed manuscript. It's tougher. Nonfiction, if you get a good story, you sell off a proposal. then you write the book. So I'm writing the book. I've got, I don't know, like four chapters left. It's almost done. But it's a crazy story. And the book is called Anonymous Mail because it happened after the FBI. And we'll get to that for a second. So I was on HRT for six years, almost to the day almost. And then I had a moment in my own life where I decided I had to,

I had to leave. And I'll tell you about it, but I don't think I'm going to talk about it now. but we were working with some fifth group guys in, uh, uh, they were at Quantico, we were shooting at the Marine Corps range, a thousand meter range. And I had this little thing with these fifth group guys and I said, I got to go. So I went into my boss and I said, I got to go. And he said, you can't go. Great guy. Incredible guy. Our, our, the second HRT boss was world-class human being. And, uh, uh, so anyways, I did. I went over to the FBI Academy, literally across the street because the HRT compound is on the Quantico government reservation. And I taught interrogation for two years, interview interrogation, and got a master's degree,

and I wrote the curriculum. And so I had two, it was basically two years on a rubber gun squad, and a little time off. And then I went back. I got promoted, and I went back to the parent organization. So I did a lot of the things in those years, but that's a different story. What happened next is in my life story is crazy because I always wanted to work as a writer. I ended up in the FBI.

Somehow I ended up on HRT. And I enjoyed those times. They were life-shaping. But that's not where my life was where I wanted to go. So right after Ruby Ridge, I wrote a novel. It was called Rules of Engagement. And at that time, if you're going to sell a book, you've got to have an agent.

The agent works the process. I couldn't get an agent. I couldn't get arrested writing anything. thing. And this went on for a long time. About that time, a guy on the team had gone to law school with this guy named Joe, let's call him Joe, who worked in Hollywood. And he was, can I say this? He was living with Cheryl Crow, who's one of the sweethearts of the world. I don't know if I should say her name, but she's one of the coolest human beings. She probably doesn't care. I hope she doesn't care. We'll pretend like you didn't. Sorry, Cheryl. She is one of, she is such a cool

talented, incredible person. But anyways, the reason I bring her up is because he lived in Hollywood and he knew everyone. And so the music world and this other guy, who's a big movie director who I think you know, who worked...

You know Pete? Yeah. Yeah, okay. So Joe introduced me to Pete. 1992. So I've been friends with him for 30-something years. And he didn't, he was nobody at the time. He was auditioning for a television show. He'd done a couple B movies. And we just became best buddies.

So they were best buddies with pretty much every household name you could imagine in music and in acting. And they, Pete and Joe had a buddy who carried a gun and who did all this crazy shit, right? So I would go to Yemen and then I would go to L.A. and hang out at some A-List Celebrities Christmas Party or go to New York. and I mean, it was unbelievable. I had two parallel lives and a Porsche 9-11. And I would go back and forth from Quantico to New York or fly to L.A. Living two completely utterly separate lives.

And I bring it up for this reason. 99, 1999. I'm back. I was running, I created this little intelligence cell with an counterterrorism component of the FBI. And I go up to, at the time, the Mercer, there's always a place, a clubhouse, right? So here and, you know, you have the clubhouse here. We had clubhouses back in the day. The clubhouse in New York was, it was the Mercer Hotel in Soho and across the street of bar called Finnelli, right?

And the Mercer had just opened. And Soho in those days was nothing. I mean, it was all, I don't, it was, it was rough. It was really rough when the Guggenheim was still there. So that was our clubhouse. I mean, that was the bar. But part of our crew was all these celebrities and the head of the, the New York Nightlife Association.

So there's no place we couldn't go. So I would go up there and we'd have dinners, 10 people who just made the number one movie in the country. And then we'd go, it was crazy. It was fantastic. It was absolutely fantastic. And I was the weird guy, the FBI guy with a gun. Friday night, drive up to New York, go to the Mercer Hotel, getting ready to go out

for dinner, sitting down there. I say, Pete, what are we doing tonight? He goes, we're playing cards. He said, what do you mean we're playing cards? I didn't come up here to play cards. Are you crazy? And he goes, we're playing cards. So we go up, get a room, a bunch of patron, which was the thing at the time, a bunch of beer.

Guys start knocking on the door. Knock it's this guy, knock it's that guy, knock it's this guy knock. It's Brad Pitt. So I go, hey, Brad, he's from Springfield, Missouri. That's no secret. And I said, my first office was Springfield, Missouri. He goes, go chiefs. You know, he went to kick up high school in Springfield, Missouri.

Yeah. And it's just a guy. I mean, he's just the greatest fucking guy you'd ever want to hang out with. So there's these guys around a card table. We're playing cards. And it goes around, and this was before five card, before Texas Hold'em. So it goes around and we start playing this game, just like this table, Andy. So there's eight of us.

And just having a blast. This guy's playing cards. And so it goes around. Long story short, we're playing this game in between you. But you get two cards. You bet the third car is going to fall in between. Okay? You get a king and a two.

you're going to bet the pot because it's probably statistically, statistical probability is you're going to win the pot, right? The problem is... You only got four cards that eat your lunch. Right. But if you get a king or a two, you double the pot. So there's still three kings and there's still three twos in the deal. It goes around.

So the pot ended up being... It's grown over time, right? It's probably $35. But over time, I think it was about $4,000. Just pile of cash on a table. I was an FBI agent with a mortgage, two kids, and I didn't have $8,000 in my pocket, which would have, that's what it would have cost me

if I drew a king or a two. I'm sorry, I did. Brad Pitt was dealing, and he throws the cards down, I look at the king and a two, and anybody goes, oh, Whitcomb, you asshole, you know, you lucky bastard.

You know, it's a card game, right? Yeah. And I look down and I start doing the math in my head. I love math. I love math and physics. I'm nuts for it. So I start doing the math and the probability. I start running the probability

so what are my chances are, try to weigh whether or not I should bet. And I'm thinking, this isn't good, man, because it's consequence, right? So maybe I'm going to win, maybe I'm going to lose, but I don't have $8,000, and these guys are going to want $8,000. And it's just shame. I mean, I got a gun, right? So it's just shame. So anyways, long story short, he stands up, he pulls out this giant wad, $100 bills,

side bets, everybody's calling me pussy, everybody's yelling. It was chaos. Brad Pitt's calling me a pussy. And there's some other famous actors. in there too. Pete's in there. So it's just, it's just chaos and guys yelling and money's flying. And finally, okay, I'll bet the pot. I bought the pot. I won $4,000 plus maybe two from him. Now I got this giant pile of cash. And so I did, you know, what you're not supposed to do? I grab all the money and tuck it in a bag, pillowcase or whatever. And I head out. Next morning,

I think I probably didn't go to sleep at all. Next morning Pete calls me and he goes, got a meeting downstairs in the cafe. I went down to guys that go, who is this asshole? Me. Pete goes all now, he's this guy. Two weeks later, I had one of the top agents. This woman ran the literary division of William Morris, which is one of the top agencies in the world. And then two weeks after that, she sold my first book and for a lot of money and I decided to leave the FBI. So after an entire life trying to be a writer, all those years in the FBI, I saw my first book in a card game with Brad Pitt and resigned from the FBI. Guess what my first, guess the day I resigned from the FBI?

September 10th. You were so fucking smart. September 11th. So here's where it goes from here. September 11th or September 10th, the book came out in London before it came out in the United States. So I did a two-week book junket in London, which is the story by itself. And you had already put your papers in?

Yeah, yeah. I had to, you have to resign. You can't write books and be in the EPA. What's that process like, actually? It's at the time, well, first of all, people say, this big thing, people say, they said this, they did that, they did this. There is no they. The FBI is me. Seal Team 6 was you.

They're individuals that make decisions, right? And the FBI at the time was you have to run a book through pre-publication review and here are the rules. But I knew them all. I was friends with all those guys because I worked other stories that I haven't told. So they said, all right, nope. whatever. And so I wrote the manuscript. I sold the proposal. I wrote the manuscript. I sent the manuscript to FBI headquarters. And they said, look, you can write about anything non-classified. You can't write about the classified stuff. And I said, all right. So I wrote about Ruby Ridge and

Waco and being on H.R.T. in early days, things we've talked about. Yeah. Cold Zero. I made up the term. And it was a cold-bore shot with hitting your zero. He put those and it became Cold Zero. That I made up the title of the book. Now it's a, now it's a, now it's a, now. it's a whiskey and a video game. There's a whiskey called Cole Zero, which I thought was kind of cool. But, so I sent a manuscript in. They came back and they said, I had said that we took off from runway 28 right from Andrews Air Force Base, and they said, you got to change the name.

And I said, I made it up. There's no 28, right? I just made it up. So they changed almost nothing. And it came out. So the book opened in London. I flew back from London, September 10th, the night of September 10th. They flew me first class sitting upper deck behind the, or maybe it's business, but I was right behind the cabin, the cockpit.

Flight deck. Flight deck. Door's open. And in those days, you could go up and just go and tour the flight deck, right? I remember that vividly. And you could sit in the jump seat. Yeah. So I'm sitting there right behind, actually the back of the captain's head.

And there's somebody in there, they're arguing over who gets to sit in the jump seat for landing. And I've got a serrated steak knife with a wooden handle in my right hand. and I'm thinking to myself, this isn't cool. People don't realize what it was like before 9-11. So we land, I go into the office the next morning, and I say, guys, this is crazy, man, because we all shared the aircraft responsibility, those planes at Davis-Mont, and I said, this is crazy. Somebody's going to hijack a goddamn plane, and, you know, it's going to be bad.

And at that very moment, somebody in my office, I had three TVs in my office, somebody goes, holy shit, look at that, which is what every American said. 100%. And I looked over. Everybody was like, oh, that fucking 182 pilot, that Setsna pilot, how could you possibly hit that building? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Shit changed right quick, though, with that second one. Yeah, so that because, you know, I had already resigned from the FBI, I couldn't go back.

And because the publisher was Little Brown, Little Brown had already put together the press tour. And my first gig on the press tour was a show on TV show called Larry King Live, which was a big show in those days. Yeah, very much so. Now you're it. Larry King was before you. I'm not going to put myself at the Larry King level, but I know what that was. was for sure so here's where this goes so I go up and and I'm feeling like shit man I mean I want to go I want to go to war and I got to go do Larry King so I'm standing there in this little studio he shot in

LA and I was in I think I was in DC maybe it was in New York and so I look over in the green room it was an office and it was a clear wall and I look over and sitting on the couch is Tom Clancy Tom Clancy back in the day was he was the best-selling writer of the entire 1980s he was huge he wrote he still might be one of the best-selling authors he is even though he's dead

yeah he's huge by volume by all shit is still selling so so like yesterday I was in the FBI now I'm doing Larry King I'm about to do Larry King and I'm sitting there looking at Tom Clancy on the couch here's the weird part there's a little Asian woman between his knees kneeling on the

floor massaging his feet and he's got his head back he's lying on the couch and she's and they're talking baby talk I thought you're going to go a different direction with that but well that's just because you're in the Navy I was like yeah where's this story going well I was thinking the same thing but I you know I see what's going on in the baby talk it was surreal it was absolutely surreal so they put makeup on you and they put me in a closet literally a utility closet and I'm sitting in this utility closet and I'm going on Larry King and I go I have no fucking clue what's going on on here. I don't know what you do. I mean, it's not in the studio. I don't know what you do. And this woman puts me in this closet, closes the door. And there's a camera like that one right

there. Maybe, I don't know if it's a 5D, but it was similar. And there's a paper, a piece of paper, eight by ten sheet of Xerox paper. Somebody took a magic marker and it says, look here with an arrow. That's it. And then I, sometimes low tech works. She puts one of those cheap, you know, like ear pieces, 99 cent earpiece in. And I hear like a prel commercial. Like if you want golden lustrous hair or whatever else, in an echo chamber, right? And I'm in a closet with a piece of paper that says, look here with a magic marker. And all of a sudden I hear Larry King's voice go, and next up, we've got a special agent from the FBI, Chris Wickham.

And he starts talking. And I'm thinking to myself, do you have a monitor where you can see him? I can't see anything. God, that's horrible. And nobody said talk now. I mean, nobody said anything. So I don't know if I'm supposed to talk. know. So, I mean, I finally, I just said, hey, Larry, how you doing? And that was it. It was, it was

bizarre. And, and then somebody needed a person to talk about terrorism, so I became the guy. So NBC hired me. So I worked in TV for five years. So here's where we go next. If you sell a book, in those days, if you sold a book, you wanted a magazine to exert the book, because you get a broader audience, right? I mean, in my day, I'm kind of doing, attempting to what, you what you and you guys do, right? I mean, you try to, you try to make a life of what's next. So I'm working for NBC. I'm on the Today Show all the time.

Buddies with Matt Lauer and I got great Katie Kirk stories. And I was on Meet the Press, you know, on Sundays. I was in Meet the Press. All those shows, nightly news. And I would work on MSNBC on all the things. And then they gave me a show on CNBC. I had a daily television show on CNBC. But the point is this, that GQM.

magazine of all things decided to excerpt my book. That sounds like a big deal. It was a big deal. In those days it was big because you had Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire, and Playboy. That was about it for that type of stuff. And if they did that, it meant that you were the biggest book in the country for that month. And they didn't have an excerpt every month. So the guy that ran GQ magazine was named Art Cooper, who is, Andy, you would friggin' dig this guy. He was an old school maniac. He had balls like hand grenades, and he was just a remarkable guy.

He knew everybody, right? Because he ran GQ Magazine. And he had a table at four seasons. So if he sold a book, you wanted a major publisher, which I had, you want a major agent, which I had, and they were fantastic. My agent and the editor, I won't say their names, but they were really remarkable to me, and I'm very grateful. But then you want to get excerpts, and I had Esquire. I mean, I had GQ, which was cool. So then R. Cooper, because it was 9-11, right?

So our Cooper says, hey, you want to go find bin Laden? And I said, okay. So he goes, all right, well, you know, make a flight and go find bin Laden. So I got my car and I drove out to Langley because I needed a way back in. I couldn't go back into the FBI, but I worked a lot on that side. I'll say this very specifically. I was a speechwriter on Capitol Hill, and I was an FBI agent for 15 years, almost 16 years. I never worked officially for any intelligence agency foreign or domestic.

I'll say that unequivocally, okay? That said. Key word in there was officially. Yeah. Well, I don't want to sound like an asshole because the next 20 years, that's all I did. But not. Unofficially. But yeah, but not.

Look, I know you guys and your friends and the people that you talk to, you can be a case officer. or an analyst to support employee. You can be a contractor. GRS, there's all sorts of shit. There's a billion things. You could be a security guard. You could be a lot of things and work for an intelligence agency.

And again, there are 18 of them. But in this particular case, I went out to Langley and I sat down and I said they have these three executive dining rooms or at the time they did. I think ADR, maybe administrative dining rooms or something like that. But anyways, I've got like the bone china

and a linen tablecloth and looking out into those trees on the backside of CIA, you know, and the whole story's crazy. I had a 9-11, and I've got Art Cooper in one ear and my sniper partner in the other, and I'm going to Afghanistan with GQ magazine and all my buddies are calling me names, and I go up and have these things. I present my proposal because I got a legitimate cover, and I say, you know, I needed certain elements to – it was hard to get in. I mean, we're talking November 1st, so like five to six weeks after 9-11.

So this guy looks at me, and in very polite terms, basically said, thanks Whitcomb, but we've got the United States military and 18 intelligence agencies and a whole bunch of really dedicated people. We don't need you, right? And I said, okay. and then I presented my proposal again. And I said, I get it. You know, that's cool. But here's what I think I can do, and here's how I can do it.

And he thought about it, and he said, I'll tell you what, go see this guy. And he gave me a room number at the Pentagon. And so I drove over to the Pentagon. And this guy put the whole thing together, a guy with no MOS, you know, a warrant officer with no MOS. And then a week later, I fly into Islamabad. and a week after that, in the Northwest Frontier Province, crossing over through deer.

And people who know deer at that time frame know what I'm talking about. Yeah. It was fucking nuts. Still probably is. Yeah. But, you know, the biggest thing about that was what a moron I was thinking I could do it by myself.

I mean, everybody wants to be Jason Bourne. You just gave it a shot. Well, it turned, it worked out. It worked out later. But that was my first, that was my dry run. But, I mean, so heavy. So heavy. Because there's nobody.

I mean, there's no bloodshits. You don't have any phone number in West Virginia to call for Exville. There's nobody, man. I mean, you know, my last meeting was in the embassy. You know what I mean? And the guy looks at me and he goes, dude, it was funny because when I got there, they had a copy of my book on the, I'm going to say, well, the embassy has different agencies. you know, one of the desks, we'll say.

And he goes, you're going to need a little help, and I go, okay. And he said, Pakistan's a dry country. You're going to need a little bargaining power. So he goes to the bar. One of those agencies has a bar. And he went and got me two bottles of Johnny Walker Black. And he gave them to me and said, you know, for bargaining, whatever. And I was on my way out with two bottles of Johnny Walker Black.

And he said, listen, I don't know what you think. you doing but nobody's coming for you you know you know you're on your own and and that's when he said no bloodsheds no no nothing so um there is that moment that was my first moment where i said i'm going to try this on my own and that's a whole different gig i mean it's so so i went i went north and then i went through spin ball dock i went down to quetta i got dysentery then i went through spinball dock on the south so i went i was in the north and then i flew down and i was and i went in from the south because the fighting went to Kandahar. So I went down through the Kojak Pass

up to Spinball Dock through the West Chaman Crossing. And so I came back and then we're probably running out of time. But I went from there to a short time after that, I kind of fucked up my writing career through whatever. And I said, I was starting to deteriorate a little bit in terms of what I really wanted to do in life, which is war. And what about war did you want to do? I just, I just, I loved, as fucked up as it sounds.

I was never adrenaline junkie, because I didn't have any adrenaline. I never, I could never muster anything, but, you know, before you run into a door on a HVT or, you know, before you're about to kick something, right? And it's just that calm malaise and you're just hanging out and you've just done it so many times that you just can't get that feeling. And so I decided to manufacture it for myself. So I would create these situations where I would always say

knowing I was going to die and not dying was the best feeling I ever could have in the world. But the problem is the first time you do it might be like jaywalking in New York, like I'm going to die, right? That's absurd. You're not going to, but you've been in countless situations where you could legitimately say, I knew I was going to die, but you didn't. And there's that nut sack. I don't know. It's irreplaceable. So I would manufacture it. If I was in New York at a party, I'd go up on the roof

and stand with my toes over the edge of the parapet. I wasn't trying to kill myself overtly, but I was manufacturing that. So I got way too much of that. And I needed way. way too much more because the more you get the more you want. Sounds like you were working. I try to speak broadly about it. Sounds like you were weaving your way through the post-able of the intelligence network. Contracting. My role in the intelligence community is very difficult to explain for this reason.

I have enormous respect for case officers. I have enormous respect for staff sergeants in the Air Force who were running skiffs for NSA. I have enormous respect for Warren offices and DIA with no MOS. I have enormous respect for all the people that we've worked with over the years. And I was not any of those things, but I had a skill set and I had an experience base that allowed me to contribute. So for people that are listening to this, especially people that work in certain agencies, there's a huge dividing line between passive collection and tasking. Certain agencies can say, hey, what did you do last Tuesday?

And you could say, I was in such and such a place. And this is what I saw and this is who I met, right? Legit, no problem. Might get paid. Who cares? But the moment an agency or a bureau or any organization tells you to do something, that's a whole different thing. So FBI authority is Title 18.

You get a badge and a gun. You've got rules of behavior, things you have to inform. for us. Title 50, which is your world, is a different world. And if you understand Title 50 and you understand those parameters, there is a vast landscape of possibilities, right? Yeah. I found those possibilities. So where I'm going to is February 28th, well, let me back up a couple days, 2006. So I'm fast-forwarding through five years of television and odd jobs, Afghanistan, in Indonesia, Yemen, things like that.

And so I had an apartment in New York City, and the family lived in New Hampshire. So I would go up on the weekends. And how am I going to tell the story? I go to New Hampshire. And I'm sitting on the couch in New Hampshire with my two sons, my son Jake and my son Mick. I have four kids, boy, boy, girl boy.

Jake and Mick are the oldest two. And we're watching Black Hawk Down. and I knew a lot of those guys. I know a lot of the original guys. I didn't know the heroes, you know, Randy and Gary. I know a lot of those guys.

And so we're watching the movie, Black Hawk Down, First Battle of Mogadishu. And there's a scene in the movie where this actor, his name is Scott, maybe George Scott, Gary Scott, something. He's playing a guy named Osmond Aliato. And there's a scene who's anybody's seen the movie. You're in the Bacara Arms Market,

and there's this guy and he's wearing a Monteik walking suit with short sleeves, right? Smoking a big cigar, gets in an SUV, Delta comes in on a black hawk. They tap the engine block a couple times with a M-14 or something like that. And they go in and they take him. And he goes into an interview with Sam Shepard, who is playing General, whatever the General's name was. Sorry, General. And he goes, you're a bunch of Arkansas white boys. This is not your war, this is our war.

Right? And Sam Shepard just kicks his ass with something like, you know, it's genocide. But there's that great scene, right, with Osman Aliatu's a real guy. So Jake and Mick and I are watching the movie and Rosie's baking a pie. And the kids come in wearing, you know, pajamas, onesies with a feet in them, and I hug it out and whatever. Three days later, four days later, I'm in a warehouse and buy dough a Somalia, standing next to Osman Aliato

shaking his hand four days New Hampshire watching Black Hawk down four days later I'm in Bidoa I'm leaving a few steps out but that's how weird it was and so

I stayed there for about two weeks when they stood up the first government it was called the transitional federal government this guy named what hell is his name Yusuf and I had a, my primary guy, you get a kick out of this.

This guy's name will call him Farah. Farrar is a Somali. And I'll say this again. I'll show you, I've got all these photographs, I've got passport entries, I've got everything that I tell you, because I have to back it up for random house. And so,

so this guy, Farah, there's a place in Nairobi called Westlands. And Westlands is like a little mall area where a lot of the expats live around there. And my guy that I went over there for is this guy named Farrah. Farah was a Somali intelligence officer with the Somali army who worked under General IDD. I think IDED was a colonel at the time.

In the 1980s, he went to Libya and received his intelligence training from Gaddafi's guys, a Mahavarot. I don't ever run into those guys, but there's some fucking hoodlums, you know. And so Farah's a real deal. I mean, he's a character, but he's my guy. He speaks fluent Swedish. He speaks fluent English. He speaks Swahili.

He speaks native Somali. He's a linguist. Smart guy. Really connected guy. And I hear somebody yelling my name. Whitcomb, Whitcomb. And I go, who the hell is yelling my name in Nairobi? I thought I was going in there a little undercover.

And I look up and there's this guy from H.R.T. And his name's Ricky in case he's listening to this thing. Great guy. Sniper. and he had left the FBI. He left HRT, then left the FBI, and he went to work for one of the private companies. He was in Afghanistan, I think,

and his family was living there. And he came up with these two other guys. I'll never forget this one guy. He was wearing, they were both wearing, like, bud shorts in Nairobi. UD.T shorts? UD.T shorts. Unacceptable. In Westlands.

In Nairobi with a fanny pack. One of them you can see the Packmire grip standing out the back of his Packmire grip. He's wearing a big Johnson T-shirt. and a ping golf visor. Not the full hat. A ping golf visor. And I look up and I go,

what the fuck is up with this guy? Right? And then the other guy with him, I can't remember their names. I don't think I ever knew the name. The other guy's got this porn mustache, big jacked up guy doing like, you know, like four hits of sustan on a week.

I mean, jacked wearing his little sister's t-shirt, and he's wearing the same sort of thing, and he's got a porn mustache and a lisp. So I'm sitting there with this guy. that I knew, who was a real deal guy, and these two guys that he's working with in this company, and I'm thinking to myself, I just start laughing, and I'm sitting with this guy Farah, who is, he's dangerous, man.

I mean, this guy's fucking dangerous. And then it just, it went from there. So anyways, I rented a, I chartered, there was no way into Moog at the time. I mean, nobody had been there since Blackhawk down, right? Yeah. So I charted a Cessna 402B that, it already had crashed a couple times. I found the tail number.

I looked it up. I found it. It was still flying until like five or six years ago. And so I flew in, and I flew into Bidoa in this plane, and this plane flew away. And the long point in the story is I got stuck. And I got stuck, bad, man. And they found out I was there, and they were coming for me because the plan was, I won't go into the whole plan. But there was a plan.

And the plan involved piracy and trying to stand up the transitional federal government and the fishing grounds off the Horn of Africa. It's the largest fishing grounds. But the ship, the government needs GDP, right? Yeah. And you can't get GDP if the pirates is jacking your ship so the Chinese wouldn't buy the fission rights. So the deal was get the naval task force to come down out of Djibouti, tamped down piracy, sell the coastline. Then the bad guys couldn't go down through the Saudi Peninsula because you can get across the straits of Yemen's only like 22 miles at one point. Yeah, it's pretty narrow.

So the intelligence community was losing a lot of bad guys going into Somalia or Somalia land through there. So there was a plan. The problem is plans go wrong. I couldn't get out. I got stuck there. And there's nothing there. There's no government. There's no fuel.

There's no, there's nothing. There's no money. So I went in there and I had, I don't know, maybe like 10 grand in my sock or something like that. And that goes fast. I had a technical. I had a full technical. We had a doucheca, 12.7 millimeter doucheca. We had, I think I had two chain gunners.

One had an M60, which kind of sat poorly with me because everything is Russian, but I had an M60 in my crew, which I don't, you know. Certainly not Russian. No, but I was wondering where they got the M60, right? Yeah, probably from Blackhawk. That's what I'm thinking. So that sucked. But I needed it. So I had a couple P-Cams and the rest of the guys had AKs.

And, you know, I'd say I've got pictures of my crew, but I'm guessing the oldest guy was maybe 17. And the guy, just side story. So when I was traveling, I would carry a med kit, right? Because I was on my own. I mean, I went there by myself. I mean, fucking by myself. So I always found that if you carry a bunch of gauze and you carry stuff that looks overtly, like they didn't have clotting powder in those days, didn't have that stuff.

So I would carry tampons, right? I'd carry like Playtec sport because they're small and duct tape. So I figured, you know, you pack them in and you duct tape them down. and that's your best chance to get in some place because there's no medevac. And if I got tossed at customs or something, they wouldn't see a bunch of shit that looked prepared, you know. So I've got a bunch of, I had iodine,

I had tampons and duct tape. And one of my guys on my crew had cut his hand and had gone septic. It was a really nasty wound. So I was trying to get like the best I could do. Like I debride it and hit it with some iodine with a tampon and try to get him to keep it clean. This other guy in the crew was laughing at him.

and finally I go, you know, what's so funny? I mean, he can lose his arm for sure. Lose his hand for sure. And he pulls up the pant leg. He pulls up his pants, and he has nothing but bone from his boot. He had a boot that was unlaced about halfway up to his knee, just the tibia and the fibia. And like what looked like an old worn-out rubber band where the skin had healed about halfway

up his leg, he's walking around on a fucking, in tibia fibbia, fibia, and no flesh, just his boot. Hard pass. So he was laughing at his buddy because his buddy's complaining

and he's going to lose his hand. And this guy is in my crew. He was on the M60. I called him M60. He was running the M60 and he's walking around on a peg leg that's his own bones. So those guys,

they were great guys. I taught him a bunch of obscenities and I paid him well. I love those guys. They were great. But anyway, so I ran out of money. money and they told me I had to leave and I couldn't get out. So the bottom line is I had to fight my way to Mogadishu. So Osmond Aliyado owned all the

checkpoints from Bidoa to Moog. It's a big way. So I think at the time, I think there were 28 roadblocks between Bidoa and Moog. And every time you come over hill and there's like a tree in the road with a 12-year-old with an AK and they shake you down. But we were trying to get, I had heard there was a point. that I might be able to get on at the Mogadishu Airport. I didn't know that. I didn't even know how far it was to Mogadishu. It was my only chance. I was dead otherwise.

And I was living between a wall and a mosque in this little hideout thing. They had put a little mat down, and I had a bottle of water, and I was sleeping in there, which sucks because, you know, 4 o'clock in the morning, they have the early call to prayer,

so you're hearing a lock boss screaming all the time. And so anyways, I get in a car. I'm into Toyota Corolla. I got the crew behind me. We were racing a Mogadishu. Come over a hill. There's a figuring 1.15 how it's a hole in the middle of the road. And it was bad.

And so I finally got there. Long story short, shot the back window out of the car so they could see in because before they couldn't really see me in those things. So by the time we got to Mogue, it was so fucked. It was so fucked. And get to Mugadishu Airport, which was closed. There was nothing going out because it was still hot. So there's another airport in Mogadishu called K-50, just down just south. And so we get down to K-50, which is basically just a strip.

At that time, I don't know what it's now. At the time, it was just, it was an old Soviet military strip, and everything was bombed flat. You know, there's nothing in Moog, just piles of rubble. I mean, in all of Somalia. And so anyways, long story shirt. I'm sorry, it's a long story long. But I get, I get, it's a pivotal moment in my life, K-50. So I get out.

My technical couldn't keep up. They're long gone. And I've got $600 in cash. That's all the money I have left to my name. And I'm standing at K50, which is a big gravel lot with people selling bottles of Nestle water, you know. And I could see this plane.

It was the old D.B. Cooper plane with a tail that comes down the back. So sweet. That he jumped out. Yeah. Like this antique plane. DC-9, I think. Yeah.

Okay. DC-9. And I'm thinking, man, I get on that fucking plane. It's my only chance. I'm in Moke. And all the... the guys, all the players are there, and they're all looking at me going, who the fuck? What is this guy doing here? Right? And they're all, they're all strapped, and they did have cell phones.

And so I'm thinking, man, this sucks. This really sucks. It's hot, you know. And so this guy comes up, and I had this semi-fixer, who could at least speak language. And he goes, how much money do you have? And I said, 600 bucks. And he said, they're going to search you. I said, I got 600 bucks. That's all I got. So I gave him the $600. About 40 minutes later, the guy comes back and searches me. Pockets, backpack. I had $600. I got no money. Comes back a few minutes later, he goes, give me your passport. And I'm thinking, it's been a while since there's been many people in Mogadishu. I'm at the second best airport. I got nothing. I give him a passport. So I'm standing there by myself, I mean completely by myself. And I've got no passport. I got no passport. I got

no money. I got no technical. I got no gun. And I'm thinking, man, what a shitty day. And that's what I wanted. That's what I was after. Because I knew it was going to be bad. And that's, that was the day. Why'd you decide to hang it up? Because I went back, our clubhouse in L.A. was a place called Equator Books. There was a bookstore on Abbott Kinney in Venice, California, back before Rabbit Kinney was an idiot place. Really cool place. You dig this place. Just a spectacular place. And this guy, this guy I know,

Philip Farkas, he's a novelist, really great writer. And he looks at me and he goes, Whitcomb, you've got to stop acting like such a pussy. And I thought, his term has been following you around your whole life. Well, yeah. Brad Pitt, now it's this novelist to equate Brooks. Yeah, yeah. But at that point, I was thinking, And this was a long time since 2001 at a Mercer Hotel,

and I'm thinking to myself, I'm not really used to guys calling me a pussy. And he goes, you've got to stop trying to create. I think he said, you've got to stop trying to, he's a novelist, okay, so I've got to frame it in that. But he said, you've got to stop trying to create homoerotic situations with 14-year-olds because you don't have the balls to commit suicide by yourself.

I think that's almost exactly what he said. And he said, if you want to do it, just go, kill yourself, you know. Stop trying to get some 14-year-old to do it in Africa. And I thought, wow. So I said, all right. So I said, I need a war I can manage. So I knew about a war in a country called East Timor, Timor Lestay, and they had a full-on war. And so long story short, I packed a suitcase. I bought a one-way ticket, and I went to East Timor. And then it got wild. So, yeah, H.R.T. and Waco and all those things, those were important stories in American history, important in a lot of ways, but they were not big events in my life, really.

How did you justify what you were putting your family through? That's a great question. You should have Rose on here because she's so fucking cool. She's got a PhD. She's a psychologist, PhD and psychologist. What I haven't talked about here is that my oldest son, Jake, spent his junior in high school at the Karen Foundation rehab facility with Aerosmith and Liza Minnelli in, you know, whatever it was, 2003 or four, major drug and alcohol problems when he's 14 years old. What was his drug of choice? Pretty much anything he could put in his body.

But his big thing was he would drink. And just to give you an idea, I sent him to Nicaragua to build houses for, house habitat for humanity. Yes. With his brother Mick when I think he was four, they were 14 and 13, I think. Jake, at 14 years of age, with a great life, very close family, you know, loving parents. He was a scratch golfer. He was a member of a country club.

He was playing golf every day. He decides to take a turn and go gangster at the age of 14. Send him in Nicaragua to buy houses. He decides it's a good idea to go into Managua on his own by two ounces of below, tape it to his nut sack and walk it back through customs. He's 14 years old. How'd that work out for him? just fine. It's so weird.

I don't know why he would have this adventurous spirit. I don't know who he would have gotten it from. All right. I got to take one more thing after that because it gets, it gets. So how did it go work with the family? Yeah. They were used to it. You know, I mean, the time I was on HR team.

Did they actually know what you were up to them? No, no. Yeah. Because, you know, there's, there are always support groups and families are the ones that suffer. And when we would go away, a lot of times, we wouldn't know where we're going. And, you know, you go to Manassas Airport and you get on a, a G4, which you could fly. And because at the time, there was no $5.50 at the time, I think we had maybe a G2 or something.

Because we'd stop in Gander, Newfoundland for gas, and then Shannon Ireland for gas. We didn't have a big range. It's not uncommon going west east, yeah. You might have been on like a G300. It might have been, but we didn't have a lot of gas and they were all range and they were all charters. But anyway, where we were going with Jake? A lot of times we didn't know where we were going and we would just come back and then you get to make up a story. and they just didn't ask. And Rose never asked about anything.

Never asked about anything. But there's an erosion because when you go, you get names and passports and how you step things up. And I mean, even if it's training, I mean, you know, I'd go to Ramstein and we do a mock-up out in the woods and be gone for a month or something.

Yemen, Kosovo, and Israel, Jordan, all over the, Middle East. I mean, it was all, it was on all the time for six years. So it was an erosion over time. And, but it was, you know, I don't want to overstate that they were, they are, they're remarkable people. And it was a very, very close family. Still is. My daughter called you, Chelsea, who's, who's very cool just because. And, but anyways, the point in the story is that, that Jake somewhere took a flyer for, for whatever reasons. He's doing, he's, tribute to humanity now he's doing really well but um so i decided it was a good idea after i'd been

in timor for about two or three months to fly the boys down for summer break in university right so jake missed his first year because he got caught selling drugs at school and um so he and mick were a freshman together so the year after the summer after their freshman year i thought it would be a good idea to fly him down to a war zone so i flew into Bali we had a weekend and i flew him in So the first day, day one. So Timor had a war with Indonesia. They broke away. And Indonesia killed by most accounts about 200,000 men, women and children, massacred, 200,000

people out of 800,000 population. It was a big hit. And after the thing settled down, they had a civil war, and the civil war is what I went into. And they had about 150,000 internally displaced people, IDP camps, so internal refugee camps, one of which was at the airport. So I fly the guys in, and it was bad, man. I mean, it wasn't Somalia, but it was pretty bad.

And so the only way you could live there was to live behind a 12-foot wall. Everything was walled off, the stores, the houses. So I had a 12-foot wall compound with a moat. I mean, literally had a moat with a bridge and everything. Do you have any? No alligators. They had alligators. I didn't have any.

That'd be dope if you did. Piranhas? So last story I'll tell here. I know I'm wearing now, but this is a funny one. So the first night they get in, they didn't have shit for food, so you could get like some freeze, dried, expired stuff from China. Everything came from China. And so the guys come in, they brought a couple ball gloves.

We're sitting out in the yard. We're throwing a ball back around. And it got dark at 6.30 every night because it's equatorial. So I goes, okay, let's get something to eat because they'll be coming pretty soon. And we had something to eat. We go back in the yard. and I had a bunch of Indonesian beers called Bintang, and you can get the big ones, like the 40s in the United States.

And these big green bottles, and I had a five-gallon can of gas, and we're pouring the gas into the Bintang bottles. And they were pouring too much gas in there, and I said, got to put some laundry detergent in there. And Jake goes, why are we pouring laundry detergent in a bottle full of gasoline? and I said, Napalm, motherfucker. Thank you, baby.

Exactly, man, I knew you would miss that. So we're making napalm. So we put in the fuses and I throw one against the wall to show them and whatever. And we placed them around the perimeter. And we had, I think it's number 10 rebar, like the big heavy rebar, long, like 10 foot sections of that sharpened at the end. And, man, like 7 o'clock, it went. It went.

And I don't think they really knew what was coming. And it was on until about 4 in the morning. And it was the only place I've ever had that had white phosphorus flares, illumination flares on parachutes, whatever, coming on our house. They were coming inside our compound. Were they fighting each other or were they trying to get to you guys? They were fighting each other. They were trying to get to us guys.

And they were fighting the Australian Army. The Australian Army, SAS was in there. Yeah. The several mechanized units. I think they had 32 APCs, they had Blackhawks. The Australian Army and the New Zealand Army were in there, and then all the black side, everybody was there. But it was full on.

But anyway, so the tanks were outside and the rain of diesel turbines. And you hear a thunk, M79 going off. And then the flares floating down, and they were floating down on top of the house, and Mick and Jake was 17 or 18. You're throwing Molotov cocktails over the walls, and it was like crazy movie outside. And then Mick was scared it was going to catch the house on fire,

so he tries to get the hose, but the power was out so there's no power. I mean, it was on, right? From like seven until three or four in the morning or something like that. And then just went to bed and, you know, it went on. It was like that for a long time. So the point telling you the story, is a week ago, two weeks ago, because I'm writing all of this in this book that I'm working

on, Anonymous Mail. So I go back to Jake. I'm trying to track down all the people to ask them their perspectives, like the people I stabbed and the people I fucking, it was madness. And so I said, Jake, remember that first time he came down and we had this, you know, whatever, and he goes, I remember. And because Jake's a tough guy, real tough guy, Mick is a tough guy too. And he said, man, when you started, when you told us to put the dishwashing detergent, when you told us to put the laundry detergions, Downey Snow, in the Bentang bottles, he goes, I pissed my pants. And I said, Jake, what do you mean you're pissed your pants?

I thought you were in on it, man. I thought, you know, I thought you were good to go. I mean, they fought like they were good to go. But I didn't find that out until like 20 years later that he pissed his pants. Why would you want to expose your sons to that? I didn't see anything wrong with it, really. I mean, they were, I didn't think about it in those terms. What is something that happened to one of them?

Well, things have happened to them, not just because of me. I mean, in that situation, you bring your sons to an active war zone. It's all fun in games when you're telling the story, like, hey, it's like you're looking in the rearview mirror, but you're a few inches from catastrophe there. I think I was fucking nuts, man. I was nuts. I mean, I'm not a doctor. That's what I would prescribe it as. or describe it as.

I don't know. My experience in war is that I want to keep my kids as far away from that shit as seemingly possible. No, listen, I think, I understand what you're saying. And the short answer, I fucking don't know. I have no answer. I don't have any answer. And your wife was cool with that?

Well, she didn't know. Oh, yes. I mean, she knew they were going. They asked for forgiveness instead of permission to approach. All I guess, I mean, Rose will probably watch this, and she'll have her own things to say about it. But, all I can say is she's one of the coolest human beings I ever met my life.

Yeah. And she's up with a lot worse than this. What did you want your sons to get out of that experience? Adventure, man. Adventure, man. Adventure. Adventure at potentially the cost of their own life? Well, I didn't think about it in terms of their own life. It was like, you know, now that we're talking about it, I could see that maybe it's kind of weird. It's not kind of weird. It's like super fucking weird.

It didn't seem weird at the time, man. It didn't. Have you sought professional help for the things that go on between your ears? Here's one thing. Because if you don't recognize that situation is weird, we have deeper problems. Listen, I'm a very happy guy. I'm a well-adjusted guy. I've got a fabulous life.

Jeffrey Dahmer said the same thing. You fucking living a great life. I'm not saying you're Jeffrey Dahmer. Well, I just have never heard anybody to describe willingly bringing their sons to East Timor. And I say that with no judgment whatsoever. I'm trying to understand. I think they had worse experiences than that, you know. You did?

They did, I'm sure. With you? Yeah. I mean, that was the first day. Yeah. Yeah. But why? I never even thought about it in terms of why.

I mean, it was just, it was an adventure. I mean... What if that adventure damaged them for the rest of their life? Well, it didn't. But it's a great question, but I don't have that introspection, to be honest with you. I don't know. I really don't know. Okay.

Fair. It's not that I've... That I'm trying to hide the answer from you. Yeah. I don't even think I've ever thought about an answer. How much have you talked with them about those experiences? A lot. Yeah.

What did they get out of it? I think they had a blast. I think. Yeah, I mean, throwing napalm is fun until somebody throws it back at you. Well, I don't think they considered that fun. That was survival. Yeah. I mean, we'd have guns.

And, you know, they talk about the smell, you know, and they talk about, you know, I don't know. answer to that. I'm not sure of the answer to that. I can say we have a very close family. Yeah. They're both very happy and successful and they are and they tell the stories like I tell the stories. They tell the stories like remember the time we did this and remember the time we did that. It's just a very different set of stories. Yeah. So I don't know, man. I mean, like I say, Rose is a psychologist, you know. Yeah. And I don't think she's ever given any answers. I'll tell two stories about being nuts. H.R.T. had no immediate action drill for getting shot, right? Which happens?

Is that because there had never been an HRT member that had been shot? Oh, no, no. I saw a guy, we had a guy get shot under the, shot in the lat, and we had our own surgeons. We had our own full medical suite. Yeah, full medical suite. We traveled everywhere we went. We had surgeons. We had the whole thing. And anyways, it doesn't matter. I won't tell those stories. So what I was going to say is that there was not. There was no. no such thing as resilience in those days, or I'd never heard of it. There was no PTSD. There was no CTE. There was no, you'd get beat up every day, over pressure. You endure breaches and, you know, I mean, all the stuff that is your life. We had no, there was no, what do you call it, mental health counseling. There was no mental health capability to speak of, I could tell you once.

I won't tell this story, but I'll say this. The component was at the FBI Academy, and somebody at the FBI Academy realized there were all these guys walking around in green Nomex flight suits acting what they perceived to be weird. So headquarters sent down like a SWAT team of psychiatrists, and they got everybody together, and nobody wanted to know what we did, right? So we didn't have a lot of oversight. Headquarters sent down six psychologists, got the guys together, 50 shooters together, and tried to have this. kumbaya session, and it didn't go very well. So at the end, that component brought all the HRT guys together in a classroom at the academy, one of those tiered classrooms. 50 guys, we wore white polo shirts with the logo, and he came up and said, I have, I think it's only fair to

tell you, I'm going to go back to headquarters and I have certain protections, hip I think they call it or something like that. Probably patient protections, yes, hip-a-protections, yeah. But he said, I'm I'm going to tell you the basics of what I'm going to tell. Headquarters and that my assessment is that you have a significant problem with rage. At which point one guy in the back of the room stood up and said, rage, I'll show you, rage, you motherfucker. And then they ran away and that was the last we ever saw him. So my entire time on HRT, my entire time in the FBI, nobody ever asked again how anybody was doing or why people were doing what they did. and my only other

I was going to say that was the first I was a professional told me I was nuts but when I came back from Asia Rose said that if I in a very well-mannered way said that if I want

Can I tell you this to her? She said I had to go see a psychologist so I said all right whatever it's all good so I went to see this guy and he said I didn't really know what it was going to be like and I said hey this is my name

and I talked to him for an hour and I left. I went back five weeks later because he, you know, that was his next available thing. And he walked in and he says, I got to tell you something. I said, all right. He said, it's a good thing I googled you because last time

I talked to you, I thought you were fucking nuts. That's what he said. And as it turned out, he didn't think I was. I mean, it's the only time I ever saw him. So, I don't know, Andy, you bring up good questions that I had not thought about. I've lived a very, very complex life and I've touched on a very small part of it

talking to you. Have you sat down and talked with other mental health professionals? No. Look, I have, when I went to Timor, I went there with a suitcase and a one-way ticket. I built a company of 4,000 people during a coup d'etat. They shot the president, rebel shot the president, who was a Nobel Peace Prize, they shot them seven times in AK-47, tried to take over the government. It was a hard time down there, but I built a company of 4,000 people.

I've done written books, I've spoken to parliament, I've done a lot of things in my life. I don't have mental health issues. I might have made decisions that were bad decisions in retrospect, but I've never perceived them to be mental health problems. I'm not claiming that you do by any stretch. What I would say is the things that you have done carry a weight with them. Yeah. And people are only so strong.

Right, which is one thing, the only thing that I came here thinking that I was going to tell you, I didn't think I was going to tell you any of this, because if anything, I've probably just pissed off about 10,000 people who say, who's this lunatic, make it up. a bunch of stuff, but I'll say again, I have receipts for everything, or I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have mentioned any of these things to have receipts. And there's a lot more than this. The only thing I wanted to say is this, that I am a generation ahead of you, a little bit more. You're probably the same age as my oldest son. How old is he? 35. 45. You're 45? Yeah.

Tusha. I'm a generation ahead of you. I've lived a lot of life, and I went through some tough times along the way. And I found the other side healthy. I don't think in retrospect I had a PTSD sort of issue. I think I certainly had CTE. I mean, I've had all those symptoms. But the only thing I thought in meeting you, to be honestly, I'm a huge fan of your life, of your success, of your service, of your patriotism, of the things you are as a human being. But I would rather have just gotten together for a cup of coffee and had this conversation. It's not about a podcast. Well, you need to blame your daughter for that.

Yeah, yeah. But what I'm saying is. She reached out. But I said, Chelsea, what are we going to talk about? You know, you don't know anything about me. And I thought to myself, the only thing I wanted to talk to you on a podcast about was this, that there were thousands of men and women who have gone through the two longest wars in American history, who've suffered greatly.

And many of them have not fared as well over time. And I think I fared well over time. because I talk about it and I wrote about it. I'm writing my second memoir, 900 pages, 900 pages, 450 page books. It's a long-form introspection. You sit and you look at all these things and go through it. My path is different than a lot of people, but there are an awful lot of people that I would help, if I could,

just saying it gets better. Some people need tools. You know, human beings are so fucking wildly different. I can say I have three kids. Same genetics throughout all three. If I had a recipe to make them different, it would be fucking impossible. They're so wildly different. They have different strengths, different weaknesses, different sensitivity points, anything that may go along those lines.

Some people can handle and work through naturally, in my opinion, as a not professional, substantial levels of trauma and come out the other side, unblenished. Other people fold under like the weight of a blade of glass. Blade of grass. So there are people who can figure it out on their own, and there are people who need a massive amount of help and tools and everything in between. Yep. I agree.

I think, I don't know if I grew that capability over time or if I was born to it. I don't know the answer. Yeah. But I do know that I found a happy, reasonably well-adjusted life after a, so it would have been 91, so more than 30 years of it, you know. Have you finally hung it up? I finally hung it up just prior to coronavirus. I was in Ukraine, and I was in Ukraine.

How am I going to say this? I was in Ukraine. I'll show you a picture after this. And with a group who's probably mostly all dead now, but I don't know the answer. But then I went to Turkey. I had a routine. I spent a lot of time over there, and I made a lot of time. And I went to Turkey, and I was dealing with Erdogan's guys.

And I don't want to get a piss and match with Erdogan because he's heavy, right? Erdogan has, they call it the organization, like his guys. And you get these wake-up calls every once in a while. Well, you think it's all fun in games. And it ain't all fun in games. So even though it was very different than Yemen or Somalia or, Kosovo. They're all different. They'll have their own flavor. But when you think it's all buddy-buddy and everything is business and suddenly it's not, that's a whole different

type of thing. So yeah, I'm done, more or less. Are you happy being done? Or do you wake up every morning missing it? I don't, I've gotten healthier about why I would miss it. I don't have that feeling, you know, that consequence thing anymore. I don't have that. I spent the last seven months in isolation on a plantation north of Charleston, South Carolina, writing this book. And I literally, I really didn't do anything for seven months. And I'm very happy alone. And I'm also very happy going out to a party or going to a, you know, my granddaughters graduated from kindergarten the other day.

And I had a blast at that. You know, I think I'm a great granddad, a great-grandfather. I think I'm a good, you know, a loving, grandfather. I think I have found what I was. I think it's full circle to be honestly. I think I'm that little kid in New Hampshire happy and I've got experiences that I get to write about. And I got to meet you, man. Yeah. I mean, I'm usually at the coffee shop. You can swing by anytime. Yeah, probably should have. And all the experiences you went through in your life, if you could pass on a lesson to somebody listening that didn't have to go through those experiences and deal with the ups and downs.

Yeah. What would you tell somebody? What would you tell your younger self if you could go back in time or somebody at your younger self's age when you made that choice to go down the path that you did? I don't think I'm that guy. I'm not an advice giver. I'm not a, my path is different. I could not give advice to somebody because I don't know anybody that's done things away I have.

I don't know anybody that's done the things you have. I mean, you've done everything and more than I have, trust me. you are the highest accomplishment of a human being in a lobby of voice. You should ask Michael about that off here. He'll tell you a completely different story. I'm not blowing smoke up your ass. I'm saying, I have enormous respect for you, dude. I make him wear a Batman mask when no one's around.

It's fine. I don't know what it means about me, but... Yeah, I wouldn't... If I could go back in time and I would say two things, one, I wouldn't change anything in two, I would know it was coming. I knew when I was a little kid it was coming. I say in this book,

I say I was born whole into a life fully formed. I'll tell you this on the way up. Here's my answer to that. Part of my path, you know how people talk now about micro-dosing mushrooms and stuff like that. Or adversity. Pick your flavor, whatever. Everybody's got a flavor, right?

That's all it is as a flavor. Don't forget to cold plunging sauna and post about it or it didn't happen. I moved to Bali for two and a half years and surfed for two and a half years and ate mushrooms twice a week. Not micro-dosing. I went deep.

Macro-dosing. I mean, you go to the, you go to the, you go to the galaxy. Bar, because they're illegal, right? So you go to a Galaxy Bar and you get a two-bag shake and a six-pack of Bentang and you just, you know. Commune with nature? Yeah, yeah. So listen, my path is different. But I'll say this, that I had one particular experience in an animist burial ground in Timor in a place called Manitudo District. And I mean totems, like water buffalo horns on poles with a guy naked.

They called me Emma Hollow. Emma Hollow means, Emma Hollow means make people forget. And I asked a guy one time, I said, make them forget what? One of the locals. And he goes, make them forget to live, you, Emma Hollow.

And so I went with this guy to get a better definition of what Emma Hollow was, because I knew it was magic. I didn't know why. I had no idea why. But anyways, I had this one experience, this one induced experience. and in that experience

I got two things out of it and I'm not trying to be metaphysical about it but the two experiences are three experiences the two that I will talk about one is that I was born whole into a life fully formed so you go was that fade or what about free will and all the things we were talking about with David Corresh and the crosshairs all of those things

I don't have an answer I think my life as I have lived it was mapped out I don't think I have I don't know how I got to meet you and sit at this table and talk to you I have no clue how these things happened They just do. How I got in the FBI, any of that stuff.

The other is this, that it is my first time around, and I got all the tools and no clue on how to use them. Yeah? I mean, we haven't talked about the music and the places I've played, the working in movies and all that. We haven't talked about any of that stuff. But the third thing is the most profound, and I'll save that. But I can't give advice because I wouldn't want somebody to follow my advice.

It worked for me. It doesn't mean it's going to work for somebody else. But I'll tell you one thing. I'm 64 years old now. I don't know if I've got another five minutes or if I've got another five years. I have no clue. But when I check out, dude, I left nothing on the table.

Your cup is definitely overflowing. Well, it's full. The cup was full. Yeah. But I didn't have anything to do with any of it, Andy. I really truly believe that. I'm not a magic carpet guy and all this other stuff. I just, I think you have to believe in things in life.

I believe in goodness. I believe in kindness. I believe in love. and all the stuff that I did was selfish. It was selfish. It was self-indulgent. It was exploitive. It was a lot of those things.

I wrapped it up in patriotism. I wrapped it up in law enforcement and justice and saving the world from democracy. You can wrap it up in anything you want. But I think at the end of the day, I come at life from a spiritual perspective. And I feel very much at ease with my my makeup, my spiritual self.

But would I have advice on anybody? Fuck, no. I mean, with what I've just told you, it worked for me. I don't think it would work for anybody else. Yeah. Well, we've been out of it for almost three hours. Oh, Jesus, guy.

I'm sorry, dude. Sorry for what? Taking so long, man. No, I feel like we need to do round two sometime in the future. What I want to be able to do is point people towards your book when it does come out?

What would be the best platform? And do you have an estimated timeline? I'll deliver it at the end of this month probably. I don't know what. Delivered to the publisher. It still takes time, though. I would talk like six months-ish? I don't know because I've never, my previous publisher was Little Brown.

They were quick and efficient. They moved very closely, very, very quickly. This is a random house, and they're obviously a huge, incredible publisher. Powerhouse, yeah. Powerhouse, right? And my editor is a powerhouse. My editor is the shit. He's a real good guy.

But I just don't know what their mechanism is. So I would say first of the year. But it'll eventually be for sale in traditional mediums. Amazon. Oh, yeah. It'll be all those things. It's called anonymous mail because that's the metaphor of the book. I became anonymous to myself by being anonymous in the community.

Six-pack names, you know. That's the idea. But yeah, I didn't come on. The book will be something way down the line. I just basically want to be able to point people out of that, though. Yeah. You know, here's a weird thing about my life right now. I have no social media, no LinkedIn, can't find me, nothing.

I'm not pitching anything. I get enough money. I got people I love. I'm a happy guy. I just want to have a chat with you, man. Well, here we are. Yeah, that's it. Until next time.

Awesome, man. Thank you.