Danny Jones Podcast - #172 - The CIA has Activated Sleeper Cells to Conduct Sabotage Inside Russia | Jack Murphy

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

Jack Murphy is an author, journalist, & co-host of the @TheTeamHousePodcast Jack is also an eight-year Army Special Operations veteran who served as a sniper and team leader in 3rd Ranger Battalion and as a senior weapons sergeant on a military free fall team in 5th Special Forces Group. EPISODE LINKS  http://youtube.com/@TheTeamHousePodcast  https://twitter.com/JackMurphyRgr JOIN OUR KULT: https://bit.ly/koncretepatreon  DANNY  https://www.instagram.com/jonesdanny  https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE  0:00 - Introduction  3:24 - ranger indoctrination program (RIP)  7:35 - Meaning of death  10:19 - Human suffering in Afghanistan  22:57 - Becoming a war reporter  31:23 - Reporting in Syria  43:13 - CIA Cold War sleeper cells  45:23 - CIA sabotage in Russia right now  1:12:37 - America & Russia’s complicated history  1:16:06 - Foreign sleeper cells in America  1:26:43 - The CIA’s secret experimental dive unit  1:36:52 - Dealing with critics  1:44:35 - Human trafficking at Fort Bragg  1:53:18 - Psychological effects of combat  2:04:25 - Africa Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome, Jack. Hey, thanks for having me. You have an incredible podcast, man. The Team House podcast. How did you tell people that are listening a brief history of yourself, your life in the military, and then how you started this incredible podcast? Yeah, I'll try to sum it up. The short version. You know, joined the military at age 19.

Grew up in, you know, suburbs of New York. Served in the Ranger Regiment and Special Forces. Eight years in the Army, deployed three. times. I got out in 2010, went to Columbia, majored in political science, found my way into journalism around that point, and I've been working as, you know, essentially national security journalist for about 10 years now. The podcast was sort of a separate business endeavor, I guess you could say, but it, you know, kind of leveraged some of those connections and networking that I did within, you know, that national security sphere. And so we interview a lot of special

ops guys, a lot of spies, a lot of people kind of in that milieu, I guess you could say. I discovered a mad dog, Jim Lawler from your podcast and got him in here. Jim's awesome. And so I'm sure that parlayed right into your writing career, your book. I just finished reading your book, Murphy's Law, which is fascinating. Yeah, thank you. Hold that thing up so people can see it. I appreciate that, you know.

A little bit higher like toward your face. There you go. Read by tens of people, Danny. I got cheated out of Pulitzer for this one. No, I'm just kidding. The book was, it was a fun. experience to write it, but I never really promoted or talk about it. So there it is, if you want to hear the whole life story. What convinced you to actually write a book about your

personal experience? A few different things, but I mean, one of the big ones was a conversation with a friend named Jim West, who's a retired Special Forces warrant officer. And we were talking about this. Pull it in a little bit closer. We were talking about this topic. There was a a publisher who was interested in having me write a book. I was hesitant about it. And I realized at a certain point, like as a writer, as a journalist, I call up people. I meet with people and I ask them to, you know, spill their guts and, you know, tell me in some cases these, like, very intimate and traumatic experiences they've been through, you know. And, but at the same time, I wanted, I wanted to tell everyone's story except my own. And my friend Jim was like, well, yeah, that's,

that's the PTSD speaking right there. Like, you know, you're, you're afraid of talking about your own past. And at that point, it's kind of like, fuck, you're not wrong. You know, and at that point, it becomes like this thing, like I kind of have to confront that and go through that and actually tell, you know, my piece of it. What was that like confronting that and going through yourself? Was it, was it helpful? Yeah, yeah, it was. It was a good experience to go back and write about all that and kind of, it's like sort of formatting your own life and your own experiences and kind of figuring out where to place all of that and what it means. And in a lot of cases, also going back and talking to old teammates and friends and I don't

want to say rehashing, you know, but to go back and say, hey, do you remember that thing that happened? Like, how do you remember it? What was that like? And kind of getting these other perspectives and kind of, it was an interesting, you know, kind of revisiting of the past. So when you first joined the military, can you speak? what that was like and like what you had my audio sounds weird is it does it look okay on there

maybe it's just my headphones um when you first joined the military like what branch of the military did you first join and like how did that evolve like where did you go because you explained that initially i think you wanted to be a sniper is that right uh well actually initially i looked at the marine corps and like a lot of people the marine corps recruits um try to play hardball and you know people end up going and looking elsewhere and i was one of those people went down the hall to the army. And I enlisted on a, it was called an Option 40. It's a Ranger contract, which, you know, it guarantees you the opportunity to try out for the Ranger Regiment.

So go to basic training, airborne school. And then what was known at that time, Rip the Ranger indoctrination program. And if you graduate, then you get assigned to one of the three Ranger battalions. Rangers are like, that's one of the most hardcore things you can get into as being a Ranger. Yeah, yeah. It's a airborne light infantry unit. It was an interesting period when I got there. It was 2003 when I got to Ranger Battalion that summer.

It was right after the guys were just coming back from Iraq, the invasion. And the unit was going through this interesting sort of cultural shift from being a sort of white infantry unit with its sort of origins, still very much, I think, rooted in the Vietnam conflict with this idea of patrolling in the woods and doing patrol-based activities. and doing raids and things like this, there was transitioning to becoming more of like a counterterrorism unit that could do these strike operations and hunting high value targets. And so there's like this interesting cultural transition that was taking place. Like when I first got there, we had the LCE and, you know, your load carrying equipment,

which is pretty much the same stuff the guys were in Vietnam. And there are these meticulous tie-down standards that you have to tie every pouch down and burn the ends of the 550 cord and make it all, look like, you know, dress right dress. But then that thing gets hung up in the wall locker and never used. It's like vestigial of the past. And we have this new kit that's coming in for the war on terror that we're actually using. So it was an interesting, I think, transitional period for, for the Ranger Regiment. How old were you the first time you got deployed overseas, over to the Middle East? First time I was deployed, I think I was 21, as I recall. Okay.

Afghanistan. Okay. And what was, like, what were the type of things that you were doing over there? Like, what was, were you, at what point did you become a sniper? I was a sniper on that deployment of my first deployment overseas. That was, again, it was sort of an interesting period in Afghanistan. The invasion had taken place, but the insurgency had not really kicked into high gear. So it was this sort of like in-between period. So this was after they kicked out the bath party? This is Afghanistan. Afghanistan. Okay, I'm sorry. It was after, you know, the Taliban had been defeated as far as a governmental entity and no longer existed. Right. Ben Laden and a lot of the Al-Qaeda guys fled across the border to Pakistan.

Okay. There were Taliban holdouts. There were people who had gone into hiding. But there wasn't really a organized resistance to the American occupation at that time. But we still stayed busy. I mean, we did, you know, I think a few dozen raids. while we were in country. But it wasn't, you know, probably like what guys experienced later on, you know, the Marines and the

Rangers and everyone else who was over there when that insurgency really got hot. How, yeah, what happened after that? What happened? And can you explain like what sort of transpired and how the insurgency really like started to develop out there? Well, yeah. I mean, I wasn't there. That was my one trip to Afghanistan.

But I mean, the Taliban was able to reorganize and constitute a armed, resistance to the United States. And, you know, clearly the people of that country chose the Taliban over, you know, whatever America was offering. Reading your book, one of the most eye-opening things about your book to me was when you explained like life, you said death seemed meaningless to you. Like, death didn't mean anything and life, you said there was nothing special or spiritual about it. You think that it was just like life and death was just a thing. Like once you're dead, then that's it. You're forgotten about it. Just block its curtains. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think as a soldier, like, you go about doing your job. And a lot of people don't understand that, that it is a job. It's

an occupation. And you get on with it, right? You see it as a job that you check into work. You do, you know, your tasks. And, you know, you can rest when when the mission's over. You know, I think the part of the book you're referencing is when we killed a terrorist. He was a squirting off an objective, meaning he was trying to escape. He wasn't surrendering. He was trying to run away. And our rules of engagement authorized us to kill people who are just terrorists who are trying to run away. And we did, and we brought his body back to the base. And I just remember looking at him. I had actually watched this guy die. Is this the guy that was running away? Yeah. And the entire task force opened fire on him. Yeah. And so this guy's corpse, I mean, I watched the guy be shot and killed. And then his corpse,

you know, is there outside our, you know, operation center. And, you know, just riddled with bullets and, you know, flies crawling across his face. And looking at him, it's just that experience hits you. Like, this guy was a human being. He was a bad person, but he was a living human being. And then we made him a dead human being. And that sort of thread between life and death, you could sort of, I guess sort of the sanctity that we tend to apply to human life here in America or, you know, the Western world or I mean even then it's too much I mean there there's people in other cultures

who apply a sanctity of life I should say in a war zone that sanctity I think disappears rather quickly evaporates into thin air yeah that's it's so interesting to see that perspective I was just listening to uh joby warwick talk on a podcast my friend Julian did and he was explaining a situation where he saw a house get raided and a guy got put like the father of of somebody He got put on the ground. They put his hands behind his head and they tied him up. And the guy's son, the guy's like 11-year-old son came out and didn't know what was going on. And he just came down with no one talking to him or anything, came outside and just laid down next to his father with his hands behind his back.

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than ours. That yeah, it feels like we're like almost different species on different kind of tracks, right? One of the moments that's kind of burned into my memory that I bring up in the book was driving down the road. I think, I believe it was it was around the outskirts of Missoule and there is this pothole in the road. And when I say a pothole, I mean, it was like the size of a semi truck. It was this huge hole in the ground, just filled with like putrid black water. And there were two little kids in the water like five years old splashing each other. And it's like, we're not, we ain't in Kansas anymore.

You know, another, another Iraq incident was when I set my rifle down against the vehicle to take my body armor off or take my, I think maybe to take some cold weather gear off. And this little kid made a beeline for my. rifle and I was like, oh, that's not good. And I kind of reached over and I scooped them up before he could get to it. And I used to babysit kids when I was a teenager when I was in high school. And so I know how much like a five, six year old kid is supposed to weigh. I picked this kid up and he's like a feather in my arms. He doesn't weigh anything. They're severely malnourished out in this remote village in in Western Iraq. So yeah, I mean, it's the way of life is so different. It's in Afghanistan, also going into some of these remote valleys, it really does feel like you're on another planet.

I was almost like, I was almost brought to tears reading the part two where you said you were in a house that you had rated and there was a disabled kid in the closet locked in the closet and somebody fed him an apple or something. One of our teammates gave him an apple and he ate the whole thing like stem and all. Yeah, there is a kid that they had, I mean, he was a mentally disabled child and they had him locked in a closet. If you are suffering any kind of disability in a country like Iraq or Afghanistan, like you are beyond fucked. Like it's impossible to even comprehend. You know, people like we tend to call them now little people in the United States. Midgets. Midgets in Iraq.

You know, it's funny. I've met, side note, I've met so many of them, especially the ones that have the, I think, I don't know, it must be a Florida thing, but there's like a bunch of midget wrestling. like groups here. Like there's a midget wrestling league and we talked to them. And I'm like, do you guys like being called little people? Like, no, we like being called midgets.

It calls what we are. Well, these folks are like, they're like used as like tea boys in Iraq. And the people there say, you know, these midgets are quote unquote crazy. They're crazy people.

And so they're treated as like subhuman. And I've seen like people just like going up to slapping them around and beating the shit out of them. Are there lots of them over there? And not a lot, but they're around. Yeah. You know, stories in Afghanistan, people who are crippled and, you know, they'll just get left on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere to panhandle.

God. Yeah, it's, it's the stuff that happens to adults over there, especially to children, is just so, it's just really terrible. And I have to also caveat some of this. I have a jaundiced perspective from being there as a soldier and being there during a war. If you talk to somebody who is Afghan or Iraqi and grew up there in that culture, they can explain some of the other aspects of the culture and some of the beauty and things of that. That I have no doubt exist.

So I'm very much coming from a soldier's perspective and an outsider's perspective. Yeah, when you came back and you sort of like left the military, what was your perspective, like, hindsight looking on like our pretext for going into Iraq and all of, you know, similar to like the work you're doing now, the work you're doing now, the journalism you're doing now is kind of like calling out the bullshit that's going on. When you first kind of discovered some of that stuff that the United States was doing, going in there and what, what. was your perspective on that and how did you take that? Yeah, you know, I was telling you earlier, you know, no one really lives a life of empiricism. It's too painful to live like that. No one lives in a totally fact-based world all the time. We all have little stories that we tell ourselves to a certain extent. Soldiers tell themselves little stories to make sense of them being in what is a profoundly insane environment. I mean, being in war is it's not normal per se. You're seeing insane

things every day. You have to have some sort of a way to rationalize that and explain it. I remember my teammates and I having conversations and talking about, you know, maybe the way we got into this conflict was wrong, but we're trying to make the best of it and try to build this country up into something, you know, and try to help these people now. And I think that was the story we sort of told ourselves. For me personally, by the time, you know, 2009, 2010, I was very disenchanted with how the war was being prosecuted. I didn't believe that we were taking it seriously. And I made the decision to get out of the military.

You know, as a friend of mine says, you know, we got out during the halftime show. We punched out and left halfway through the war. And yeah, as time goes on, like a lot of veterans, and I can't speak for other veterans, but I think a lot of us come out of the military for various reasons being pretty angry about what we experienced and what we experienced. we went through. Yeah. And then as an individual on your own, you're sort of left to figure out what that experience means. What was that? When you look back on it, on these things, it seems like a fever dream. When you look back and you think about, you know, a firefight that under night vision goggles, you think about, you know, a valley you drove through and you see a woman in

Afghanistan washing plates in the river or the kids splashing each other in the, in the putrid black water. It seems sort of like a dream. Like, did that really happen? You know, and some of those things that almost killed you as well. It's going to be gut-wrenching to see kids in those situations, especially when you have kids. I didn't have children at the time,

but it still was. It was still tough. I mean, it's the stuff with the kids is always with the things that fuck people up the worst. And, you know, the collateral damage leads to, you know, the post-traumatic stress that guys have. It's not from killing the enemy and

combat. I don't think that really bothers, you know, infantrymen so much, you know, killing armed enemy is one thing. But, you know, when you see civilians caught up, it's different. So, yeah, when guys leave the military, they're sort of left to their own devices to try to figure out what that experience meant. And I think that, you know, as a group, we're all still struggling with it. We're all trying to figure it out, especially what happened in Afghanistan with a botched withdrawal. a lot of guys are trying to piece together what that means. I want to go deep into that stuff and like what it's like dealing with life after the military and finding meaning and stuff.

But real quick, I want to just make sure I cover one thing, another thing that stuck out to me about your book. I feel like perspective on people over there is so important, especially when it comes to like, so the way you laid it out in your book was like you said, imagine if China can. came to the United States and put boots on the ground to come help us out in some conflict and started just raiding houses and dragging people's families out and executing them. If somebody did that to your house and killed your mom and dad or your kids, it's highly likely that you would be waiting at a bridge with an IED to blow up a fucking Chinese tank too. It doesn't even have to be like Waffen SS type war atrocities, right? What if a foreign army came here and they were doing the same sort of things we do that we're trying to target a terrorist network? Right. But sometimes we fuck it up, right? We blow down the wrong door. We kill the wrong person. And, you know, your uncle gets beaten up and dragged to prison for five days. You know, your cousin gets killed because, you know, this army occupying army hit the wrong house. Hit the wrong, like the mistakes. Right. Mistakes, yeah. Things, you know, shit happens, collateral damage. And then how do you, how is that going to affect you? Are you more or less likely to join an insurgency at that point? And, you know, I think what, what I'm trying to get at there is,

with these wars, these counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, there's a lot of reasons we're looking at, that our government is looking at, there's a whole commission on Afghanistan congressional committee that's starting up to look at like, how did we fuck this up? What did we do wrong? And there's a lot of reasons and a lot of finger pointing. But there's very little talk about the local populations fundamentally rejecting our proposition. And, that they fundamentally rejected any sort of foreign imposition, that they did not want foreign personnel, foreign military, foreign soldiers walking around their streets and, you know, essentially telling them what to do. They rejected that premise and it was just unacceptable to them.

And so we can look at these wars and say, oh, man, if we had just like tactically done this instead of that, if our strategy had been, you know, we had better interoperability, like you can turn it into this intellectual thought problem that if only we had moved the chest pieces around. differently. We could have won the war. Other people will try to blame the media. If it wasn't for the, for the liberal media, we would have won the war. But when we talk about all of these things, we fundamentally miss the fact that the local populations in these countries just did not want us there and would not accept us there. A lot of people just think that that culture and people of Islam are just evil and that the Quran just teaches them to kill Christians. And, And I just had this guy on this podcast a couple days ago, this guy, Beck Lover, who's from, he's from Kosovo or Albania.

Yeah. And he was talking, he was educating me a lot on that religion. And basically, it's the most closest religion to Christianity from what he was saying and the way, like the way that they teach it. And just because there's a couple guys in a cave that are doing some evil shit does not. not mean you can classify however many billions of people. I think the biggest, the number two religion in the world is Islam. I think there's a billion Muslims in the world worldwide. It's a huge population and, you know, the vast majority of them are not engaged in terrorist activities. Right. And so, yeah, we don't want to demonize those, you know, ordinary people going about their lives.

There is a, and has been for the last, you know, 20, 30 years, a growing, we could call it Islam, Islamic nationalist movement, a movement for political Islam in some countries. But what mostly concerns us is not sort of like, you know, the sort of politics we see in Egypt or even necessarily Afghanistan, you could argue. But it's more of the jihadi Salafist brand of Islam that tends to be, you know, violent and interested in particularly doing terrorist operations. And that's, you know, what our chief concern is. So when you got back to the United States, what was it like? When you got back and you kind of, how long did it take you to retire from the military? Did you stay enlisted for a while? What were you doing when you came back? You mean like in between deployments or after I left the military? Like after you, like when you, how many deployments did you do in the first place?

Three. You did three deployments. So like when you were done with your deployments, did you stay here in the U.S. before you retired or like how did you transition into civilian life and journalism? Yeah. So I came back from a deployment to Iraq in 2009 and got out of the military in 2010. Didn't have a whole lot of a plan, which is a bad idea. You know, anybody who's transitioning out of the military, have a plan when you get out.

I got out and went to, I went back home. I spent that mandatory like two or three months in my mom's basement playing video games. I got signed up for college. I did my first year school at a school called Mercy in Dobbs Ferry and then applied to Columbia and transferred over there did the last three years of my undergrad and got my BA. So while I was in college, I mean, the post-9-11 GI Bill is a great thing and it provides the sort of buffer to transition as well in a civilian role. What is that bill? It's a the post-9-11 GI Bill is a bill that will pay for a veteran to go to college. and it'll also pay a housing allowance.

So it's sort of like all of your expenses are paid. There's even a book allowance to buy college textbooks. So, I mean, it's a very soft cushion for a guy or a woman coming out of the military after four years or longer to make use of that GI bill. And you have the sort of four years to transition into civilian life, get yourself a degree and find a new job. And while I was in school, I was a part of a startup company, a startup news, military news website. And, you know, when I did that, I suddenly found myself in this position where, okay, now I have to write news. So I kind of fell into it. And what the final one thought to that was, well, I can't just sit around and tell war stories about, yeah, this is what Iraq was like in 2005.

Who cares? So I started making trips overseas to do reporting from Iraq, Syria. I even made trips to the Philippines, Switzerland, South Korea. Some interesting stuff. What was that like, man? It was fun. From being over there in these countries actually like fighting a war to being over there working on your own projects, your own journalistic endeavors. It was so much fun.

It was such a great time. no one was telling me what to do. I did exactly what I wanted to do, the way I felt it should be done. The tradeoff to that, I mean, some of these experiences were very safe. I mean, South Korea, Switzerland, like, it doesn't really get more safe than that, right? But some of the stuff going to Iraq and Syria, the tradeoff to doing this stuff as an independent journalist is that there's no air strikes on call. There's no helicopters coming to pick you up. there's no if you get shot there's no you know highly trained ranger medic coming to you know plug the

wounds and get you into a sketco like a stretcher and evacuate you you don't have any of that so you're really out there i was really out there flapping in some instances and that's sort of the trade-off you know you're living your life the way that you choose and living by your wits and it's very exciting um but as we were talking about over lunch i did get to a point with it where i was like yeah If I keep doing this, it's going to kill me. Yeah. Did you, I talked to, I've talked to another guy on here, Ryan Tate. He was explained to me that he, when he got out of the Marines, he was just experiencing

this like, this like hyper alertness, this hyper vigilance everywhere he went. Threats everywhere. Looking over his shoulder, just like hyper alert of everything. Was you, were you experiencing something like that at all? Is that kind of, is that sort of what helped you decide or made you decide? to go back over there and experience that kind of like you're still even though you're doing journalism you're still gambling with life or death situations absolutely addicted to the adrenaline high of war um i think i the term i used in the book was that war is intoxicating and it it absolutely is um

i never experienced sort of like that um like hyper vigilance or like flashbacks you know people they're like sort of symptoms you hear about PTSD when i look back on it what I realized with exactly this with what I was doing with these trips overseas was that I was so addicted to the adrenaline and working in this high-stress environment. What I was doing was artificially creating this same high-stress environment or an even more stressful environment in my civilian life. So I was doing these reporting trips. I was working full-time writing news stories. I was writing novels. I was a full-time student at an Ivy League University. I was a new father. Holy shit. I mean, I was basically, I was traveling all over the city. I was having every

minute I was having phone calls. I was doing new spots going going downtown to do news shows, traveling around the country to do other things. I mean, I was, subconsciously, I was doing this. I was working myself to death because I was just riding that chronic, like adrenaline spike every day. And it caught up with me, you know, it definitely caught up with me. I literally hit the pavement. I was like so stressed out. Like I actually passed out on the way to school one morning. Yeah, on 112th Street. And that was the first wake up call that like something's got to give.

But to be perfectly honest, I mean, I was in the Army for eight years. I would say it took about eight years for me to fully like detox out of that, out of that mindset. Yeah. And you'll find some hobbies, some things that I can do just for me. They have nothing to do with, you know, all this, all this insane war stuff. you know, be a dad in a different sort of way, be present in a different sort of way. And that took a long time for me, honestly. Yeah, man.

Like, finding meaning seems to be the one common denominator for people like veterans when you get out of those highly, highly stressful situations overseas. Like coming back and like finding something that actually something to do that like is bigger than yourself. Like leave something behind, leave a legacy, like create something bigger than yourself. And in war, as a soldier or a Marine in the military, I mean, when you're at war, everything you do is so important. Exactly. It's so important. Like if you don't do it the right way, someone could get killed. It could be you.

It could be your friend. The mission could fail. Everything has this immediacy to it, right? And then when you get in the civilian world, you know, it's obviously totally different. And it's much more laid back. And that creates a sort of like cultural shizum. between the veteran in their own culture. And it takes some time to reconcile that.

You said you went to Syria, right, for a while. You went to Syria at one point. A couple times, yeah. A couple of times reporting on. What exactly were you reporting on in Syria? And then did you have to find somebody to like go with you everywhere to translate and what they call it a fixer or something? Yeah, I have used fixers in the past for limited things like translation. Yeah. So there's a whole insane story there. But I mean, the first time I went, I was smuggled into northeastern Syria.

Did a border crossing that may not have been strictly legal and was hanging out with the Kurdish YPG and YPJ militia in Syria. That was just an absolutely fascinating experience. And then the second time, I was invited to Damascus. And so I was actually hanging out with the Syrian regime. So where for somebody who I don't know anything about the geography of that area, where is Damascus? Damascus is like central, south central Syria, I guess you could say. It's a capital city of Syria. Okay, okay.

So and then what were you doing there? Like what kind of situations did you find yourself in and who, what kind of people were you talking to? Yeah, it was an interesting moment. in history where the Assad government was attempting to institute this policy of new openness. We want to, we, you know, we're the good guys. You know, we're going to let in all these Western journalists. They bust us in. I got invited to this thing, this event.

And they literally, it was like a couple busloads of journalists. And we were bust in for this conference in Damascus. And while we were in Damascus, we had opportunities, you know, to. go walk around the streets of Damascus. We had opportunities to put in media requests to go and interview people. And that didn't go very well. But, you know, I interviewed, you know, I was there in an interview in the room with President Assad at one point. Oh, wow.

It was a fascinating experience. It was, I was actually thinking about this the other day about the conference itself, where it is the government, the regime is put. people in front of you that they want you to hear their perspectives, right? That they're speaking at this conference. And when I look back on it, what strikes me is that we were hearing from an elite class of people in Damascus who are profoundly out of touch with their own country. Yeah. When I think back to it, there's things that just make me chuckle. Like, I remember the question of like the oppression of the Kurdish population. in Syria came up at one point. And there was a Syrian woman who was a speaker there. And she said, my last name sounds Kurdish. It sounds very Kurdish. This has never been a problem. I've never been discriminated against. It was just completely out of touch with the people, the Kurdish people in Syria who could not own a passport, could not speak their language, could not lawfully have a job. I mean,

just insane, just total insanity. Wow. Can you give like some brief context to like what the geographical situation was in Syria at that point in time and what like what year was that and like what was going on where what was ISIS doing at that point oh my god uh so what year was was this 2015 or 2016 I'd have to go back and look myself um the I mean the situation was extremely complicated uh there were ISIS was definitely in full force um the battle for Aleppo was taking place around this time frame or had just concluded.

You know, the, the, the Kurds in the YPG and YPJ and what eventually became SDF was active in the northeastern part of the country. You had a small American garrison in Al-Tanf down in southern

Syria. But I mean, there was still like FSA, like notional, you know, free Syrian army. El Nistra was still all over the place. I mean, it is total chaos. I mean, there was still areas outside Damascus that were controlled by militias. What was happening at that time frame was that the regime was kind of like cutting deals with these different militias that controlled different sectors, like come back into the fold and you'll get some sort of amnesty. So it was like, crazy civil war.

Yeah, it was like the city is controlled by the government, but not really. Like as I came to find out, like as you go into these different sectors, actually a militia. a commander has more say over what happens than say the Ministry of Defense. How confident were you like I can imagine myself being in that situation I would first of all I wouldn't fucking go. Second of all if I was

there I would be fucking terrified after watching videos of ISIS fucking saw heads off people and journalists and just like innocent people like how confident were you like from your army being in the being in the military and being deployed and like in combat like you were armed

obviously like I was not armed on this trip. You were not armed. No, as a journalist, I was never armed. No. So how scared were you or were you not scared of like encountering ISIS? On this trip, I was not scared of that at all because I mean, we were in a city that, you know, especially the central part of Damascus is controlled by the government. We were there at the government's invitation. Okay. On a U.S. passport. So it was all very legit and above board in that sense. We, yeah, yeah, no, I didn't have any. real safety concerns. I mean, there were still like motors landing in the city sometimes, but nothing too serious. The other, the first trip I made to Syria was actually like pretty sketchy, especially getting in and out. That's the one where you like cross the river or whatever and you had to like, you were in the car. You explained you were in the car. Some guy was driving and he was, what was he saying? He was saying, no Syria, no Syria or something. That was on the way back. On the way back. Don't say you went to Syria. We couldn't get across the border the way we came, taking a little

inflatable raft across the river. So instead, the plan that was concocted was that we would have to cross the border on foot. And there are these huge dirt berms that are the demarcation line between Syria and Iraq that must have been pressed up there with bulldozers because they're like 30 feet high. And in the night scrambling over this dirt berm coming down on the other side and walking through the mud for a few miles into a village. and there's a driver that meets on the other side, flashes his headlights of his car. And now this poor guy who's been tasked to do this has to drive us through all these checkpoints.

And yeah, he's the one looking at us, no Syria, no Syria. I think that was the only English he spoke. Now, when you're doing this stuff, do you have cameras and are you taking photos or are taking video? Or are you just simply just like taking notes? I think during the actual border crossing, I did take a few pictures and I did have a camera. Yeah, but I was more focused on trying to not die at that particular moment. Right. Then, yeah, chronicling it.

I've heard descriptions from journalists that have been in like the middle. I think it was a vice journalist. I forget, I hope. Maybe it was a BBC journalist, but it was explaining like being in the middle of a firefight over there and being like behind a berm with a video camera. And he's saying like he's so lost in just getting. the shot, getting that clip. I can see that, yeah. He just forgets about bullets flying over his head.

Like, forgets that he's like, if he stands up, he's dead. Because he's so focused on getting this incredible fucking shot of these guys in a firefight. Well, remember what we were saying about soldiers, that it's a job, it's an occupation, right? Being a videographer or video journalist, he has a job. He's doing his job. And he's not really thinking about

all these other things that he probably should be thinking about. Right, right. Right. It's just crazy to hear that. Yeah, there was a group of journalists. They may have been BBC actually who got, they got trapped behind enemy lines in Missoule. Like they got encircled by ISIS at one point. Yeah. That's some sketchy shit. What happened to them? They were able to break through and get out. They may have done some, I can't remember the whole story. I'm going to tell it wrong. I had nothing to do with it, of course. They may have done some air strikes to help them get out. But they were able to escape. So when you started, you got back and you started doing this stuff and you started reporting on some of the things that were happening. What was like, was there a big break for you? Like a big breakthrough you had in journalism where you like, you know, no. No, no big break. I mean, it was just sort of consistent work, writing daily. Sometimes, you know, writing about things that are, you know, maybe rather mundane. You know, these are changes to the military. This is what's happening. Some of them are quite explosive stories. I've written about. I know all this covert op stuff, but I mean, I've also written about, you know, all this other stuff that affects soldiers.

Sexual assault, domestic violence, suicides, murders, missing persons. I mean, I've covered all this stuff at varying times. And they're tough stories, but yeah, no big break. You know, at the time, so this news website I was a part of, I left there years ago, but we, it was a special operations focused websites. site. And in 2012, nothing like that existed. It was a different, it was a different era. Now, all these special ops guys are on Instagram posting deployment pictures. They all have podcasts. Yeah, I mean, I do. Who am I to speak, right? That's fascinating, man. I'm glad they all have podcast. I agree with you. But the only point I'm trying to make is that in 2012,

things were different. No one was doing this yet. And so this was like very controversial for the special ops community and for for the military in general to a certain extent like you're talking publicly about all these things like you can't do that and now here we are fast forward 10 years we're just in a different world and you know a different generation um so it was definitely interesting i mean i would say for a time it was groundbreaking and it was a fun job until it wasn't and um i I've since moved on to other endeavors where I write for different outlets. Isn't it interesting how kind of like guys like you and a lot of guys and I don't know how I'm 35. How old are you?

I'm 39. 39. So like guys in our age bracket or even a little older, they're coming out now. They're going on podcasts. They're talking about their stories. They're writing books. They're much more open. But then you'll see a lot of older guys like Jim Lawler's age.

He's an exception. But a lot of like agency guys or military guys that they just don't want to. talk about things. Yes. The military guys, the special forces guys, and like on one hand, I really respect them. I respect their professionalism because when they were in decades ago, like this stuff was super secret. It was classified. And so they're maintaining, you know, like the sort of informal motto of special forces is, you know, the quiet professionals. So I know, and I have the utmost respect for that. However, a lot of this stuff is no longer secret. It's been declassified. It's not sensitive anymore. There's a lot of things, even when something is classified, there's still

ways you can talk about certain things without getting too deep into the weeds, right? So it is frustrating sometimes. I'll give you an example. I went down to a Detachment A reunion, Special Forces Detachment A. What does that mean Detachment A? They were a specialized unit stationed in Berlin during the Cold War. And these guys were, they did amazing. stuff. They wore civilian clothes. They spoke German. They lived off the local economy. They built up their own cover identities. And their job was if the Soviet Union invaded, they would go to ground, hide out in their safe houses. And when the Soviet lines passed over them, they would activate, and they would begin conducting acts of sabotage and espionage. This is what you call sleeper cells,

right? Right. And this is the good stuff. And so Detachment A existed from, geez, from the fifth, late 50s, I think, and I have to check my own research until 1984. And then it became another unit called Pishy or PSSE. That existed until, I think, like 93 or something like this. And I apologize if my dates aren't quite up to snuff. But the point I'm making is I went to this reunion to interview these guys. Now a lot of this stuff is declassified. A lot of this stuff is declassified now.

So I went to this reunion. I was invited to come and interview these guys. And some of them, I got them on camera. and they were telling their whole story and it was amazing. There were some guys who were telling their story and they're like, it feels so strange to talk about this

because for like 35 years, I didn't tell my wife and kids about this. And here they are saying it on camera. And then there were some guys, I put them on camera and they gave me the unit's cover story and nothing else. They still were not willing to talk about it. And, you know, that's another thing as a journalist.

I mean, nobody owes me anything. Nobody owes me an interview. nobody has to talk to me. I asked nicely. And, you know, I hope that people trust me to, you know, tell the real story. And you build that trust. And, you know, you have to kind of build that up. And so, I mean, I guess what I'm getting at is, yeah, I mean, people just do that because they're nice and they're, they're trying to do you a solid. And you definitely have to understand that some people don't want to talk. So that's a perfect lead in to this recent CIA story. I feel like we could spend a whole hour talking about this recent story that you just released just like a week ago, maybe two weeks ago,

about the CIA espionage that's going on in Russia and Ukraine right now. How did this story, how did this story come across your desk and how did you get interested in this and what made you want to report this? No, that's a great question. So it first came up on my radar, honestly, was just me watching the news and what was happening, things that were in social media. And right as the invasion kicked off, the Russian invasion of Ukraine kicked off what in February,

almost immediately, there's this whole rash of like mysterious fires. There were things blowing up in Russia. There was like an aerospace defense building that burned to the ground. There was fuel depots going up in flames. There was like ammunition depots, you saw all of these things that were what I was looking at and what I immediately recognized in my mind is there is a target selection criteria that is being worked down. It's like straight out of like a special forces unconventional warfare manual.

It's a classic sabotage campaign. And you saw reports of these things happening. Yeah. It's openly. Openly. And social media because people are like, oh, something's burning in Russia again. Look at this. You know, here goes, you know, train track.

got blown up today, fuel depot got blown up today, warehouse housing, you know, Russian propaganda caught on fire today. And that happened so quickly. It was very clear to me that this was done by people who had pre-planned these targets. They had done a reconnaissance targeting reconnaissance ahead of time, that there were teams on the ground doing this, and that this was an intelligence. There was a intelligence behind this organization pulling the puppet. strings. And I don't know who is doing that. I truly did not. But I could see that there is something there, right? And I don't think it takes any genius to put two and two together. And I certainly was not the only person that realized that. I think a lot of people, they didn't know specifically,

but a lot of people are like wink, wink, nod, and as time went on, even the Ukrainian government would give the wink, wink, nod, like, man, they really got to work on their, you know, be careful flicking out cigarettes in these military warehouses and things like that, you know. So who was reporting on these fires or these explosions or these train tracks blowing up? I think there was like a munitions warehouse that caught on fire. Like where was very little, I mean, it was mostly social media stuff, but there was one story in the Washington Post, not about Russia, but in Belarus. Again, just as the invasion was popping off rail line sabotage and the group that was behind that. And so that little arm of it was exposed.

But I could see all these things happening in Russia as well. And so I started asking questions. And I started going to sources. And I really believed if we had anything to do with this, if America had anything to do with this, this is one of those things that's like deeply classified. I'm not going to hear about it for 20 years. But before long, I started having some conversations that really shocked me that I was surprised by. that we would that I started finding some answers. And when you find, when you're dealing in the world of covert operations and when you

finally find the, the, the right people who know what you're asking about, and this thing that in your mind is this huge story, but you talk to them. And again, it goes back to it's a job, it's an occupation, right? And when you lay this on them, they shrugged their shoulders and say, yeah, we did that. Fuck of it. Like they don't really think too much of. I mean, it's a big deal, but they don't see it in the same context that an outsider sees it because they're doing their job, right? They're read into it.

It's not surprising to them. When you see reports like this, though, like reports of these things happening over there in the U.S. media and social media. Do you, are you like one of those people who goes to like Russian media and looks at what the Russians are reporting? Yes, a little bit. Because I needed to understand what the Russian interpretation was of it and what they were. putting out in the Russian media. And they were, they were writing these things off pretty much as all accidental fires, you know.

And what is? Like, where do you go to find out like what the, what the Russian narrative is? I am not a Russian speaker or, or reader. So I, um, I actually, um, spoke to a woman named Olga Lopman, uh, who is. And she, she has a pretty deep knowledge. Oh, yeah, you link to her in this article. Yes. Yeah.

She's quoted in the article. So yeah, um, I need to talk to. actual experts in some areas to kind of plug these knowledge gaps. Yeah. Okay. So, right. So you see you're following up on these reports of these things that you think, that you see and you say instantly, yeah, this is textbook sabotage.

Yeah. And where do you go from there? Who do you start talking to? How do you develop sources that actually have knowledge of these things going on? Yeah. I mean, I can't really discuss anonymous sources, of course. I'll just say that this story was difficult to report on. It was challenging.

I worked on this from, you know, about April to, you know, pretty much like when I published it and I published it on Christmas Eve. So it took quite a long time. There's a whole journey. There's a whole backstory that this article took with numerous publications. It was definitely an uphill battle. And this was probably the most, I don't know. No, it's not the most difficult story I've reported on, but it was high up there. So when you started reporting on it, at what point did you think like this is not something I'm going to publish myself?

This is something that's bigger. This is something that needs to be a part of a major publication. And like, how does that, how does that communication start? Do you reach out to one of these big, one of these big publications and say, hey, I'm working on this story and explain to me how that process works? Yeah, when you, from my point of view, I mean, when you start getting multiple sources confirming different aspects of the story and you're kind of double and triple sourcing facts, it's like, or more, you know, I think there were six anonymous sources in this story. That's when it's like, okay, we got something to work with here. Right. And I reached out to one outlet, you know, editors there. This story was actually too big a lift for them. They had gone through some editorial changes. I think there were, I think there were, I think they were being truthful. This was just too much for them to handle at the moment. So they passed me off to another outlet. Really? Yes. Yeah, a bigger outlet, actually. And I had, I ran into some issues with them. They, you know, I had this conversation with the editor there, and he said, you know, could you get me like some proof? I'm like, what do you mean proof?

What constitutes proof in your world? And he says, well, can you have like one of your sorts of like take a picture of a PowerPoint slide with his cell phone or like get some documents like classified documents or something and bring them out yeah and I was like okay let me get this straight you want me to task my sources to break federal law yeah so that's illegal for them to do and I'm pretty sure it's illegal for me to do as a journalist as well if it's certainly unethical and he was like yes I was like okay here's what I need you to do I want you to put that in writing I want to that in a contract where you tell me to break federal law. And you should have seen how fast they backpedaled at that point. That was hilarious. And like, yeah, you know, anything about breaking the law, I probably don't want to put that on paper. Like, yeah, yeah, man. But the thing, the problem is, if they had told a younger, less experienced journalist to do that, they may have done it. And then you would very quickly end up in this sort of like a reality winner situation, you know, where they figured out who she was in two seconds and, you know, she did prison time.

I'm not playing that game. So I then went, it seems like a messy game to play. But do they, there's reports like this, not exactly like this, but I mean, there's similar, like intelligence reports that come out of these big publications all the time. How do they deal with sources in those in these typical situations? Are they always getting proof? No, absolutely not. Absolutely not.

in this day and age, it's very rare that somebody is going to leak a top secret, you know, a top secret, you know, TSSCI document to you. There are key stroke loggers on the classified terminals. I mean, there's all sorts of reasons why it's completely idiotic to do that. And quite frankly, I don't, I don't want those documents, guys. Don't send, don't send anything that says top secret on it. I honestly am not interested in that. And I don't need that to do my job. No, like at any like mainstream publication, like, no, they're not getting documents to back up their stories on this sort of stuff. No. And without giving up your sources, how do you, how do you maintain relationships with these high level sources that have to remain anonymous for good reasons? How do you sort of like manage relationships with people like that?

Like, what are their, like, especially if they're intelligence folks. Like, how do you sort of navigate their intentions and how do you know that they're not trying to get one over on you and trying to manipulate you? Yeah, that's very important. I think one of the things I have going for me, I'll, maybe I'll spill a little bit of tea here. In my work in general, I tend to speak more to middle management. I don't normally speak to political, you know, mucky mucks in Washington, D.C. That's not really my venue or my interest. I would much, much more trust a sergeant in the Army or a, you know, like, retired CIA case officer, just a normal dude.

When they tell you something, they're telling you because, like, they're either like they're proud of, like, an op they pulled off or they're pissed off about an op that went wrong. Like, they're telling you that kind of for more genuine reasons. But when you get up to that, like, DC level, there's always some sort of political agenda. There's some sort of reason why they're leaking this information to reporters. So I'll say that's one aspect of it. But another aspect is that's why you need to use multiple sources and confirm things. And there were some sources that were on the record, though, correct? There were a few sources who were on the record offering context to the story. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Let's go back to the, you're dealing with this major. your publication and they're asking you for this source. You ask them for for they're asking you to ask you. Yeah. Asking them and give it, put it to me in writing. So, uh, you ask me to break the law in writing. And how far does it evolve past that? Does the conversation stop there? Where does it go? It kind of stopped there. And I went to a yet another publication, uh, a pretty large, uh, well-known publication. And, um, I had a, it was, it was a ride there. I, I, you know, this article, my story went through a vigorous fact-checking process at that publication.

It passed through that fact-checking process. We were good to go. We had a publication plan. We were going to contact the CIA for comment, give them 48 hours to respond, and then 48 hours after that we were going to publish. Okay. So we had a plan. Like this is like 11th hour type shit, right? So this is not standard.

This is not typically how it works? No, this is this is not atypical. but now we're like in the red zone here, right? We're like, we're close to hitting that publish button. So we go to the CIA for comment. They're on the record comment, which should be said, you know, here on the record, is they deny all of this. They say the United States.

Yeah, the CIA has nothing to do with these sabotage operations. It's a flat denial, which they are entitled. and actually committed to denying Title 50 covert operations. That's completely lawful for them to lie to anyone about a covert operation. It's not illegal or unethical for them to do that. Okay, got it. But now the deputy director of the CIA wants to have a conversation with us, with me and the editor-in-chief of the publication. Who is the deputy director of the CIA?

David Cohen. David Cohen. Okay. And I told them, I said, look, I can talk any time today except at like whatever it was 2 o'clock or 250. I have to pick up my kid at school. When did that call take place? Exactly when I was picking up my daughter at school. Wow.

Now, now David Cohen had an off-the-record agreement with the editor of the publication, but he had no off-the-record agreement with me. I never spoke with him. So I will go ahead right out and tell you, David Cohen blamed the Ukrainians. He said, these are rogue Ukrainian operations, that the Ukrainians have gone rogue and we can't control them. That's what he said to the editor and off the record comments that he made to that editor. So now the editor's coming to me and saying that we need to square the circle, meaning we need to make the CIA's off the record comments jive with this story. Wow. And then he's going into my article and he basically scrubbed.

He scrubbed every aspect of the CIA out of this story. He wanted to make it about Ukrainian ops, which the story is not about Ukrainian ops. That's not what it is. Couldn't he just have taken what the CIA guy said and just added it as context to the article? We could have added additional context, but the deputy director's comments were off the record. They were off the record. As far as talking to that editor, like I said, I don't have an off the record agreement with anybody at the agency. this uh so we we got now now we're into this like sort of revisionism that we're trying to make

this story match the deputy director's narrative and and i mean the reason why i mean i don't want to speculate um yeah i'm not going to speculate i'm just going to say that's what happened okay and you can you can draw your own conclusions from that um now and now we're also dragging our feet our publication plan is kind of broken, where we're trying to square the circle, right? Five days go by, five or six days, and a story miraculously appears in New York Times, blaming all the sabotage operations on rogue Ukrainian elements,

quoting anonymous intelligence officials. Gee, I wonder who that was. Who could that have been? Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And interestingly about that New York Times story is there was a lot in there about the Dugina assassination, Alexander Dugan's daughter, who is assassinated in a car bomb.

Oh, yeah. And a lot of trying to pad around that. It's not us. It's not America. It's not CIA. It's these other, these rogue elements. And that was interesting because my article has nothing about Dugina. And my line of questioning that I submitted to the CIA has nothing about Dugina. They just felt necessary to get ahead of that story and put it out there up front that we have nothing to do with it. Like, again, I'm not going to speculate. You can just draw your own conclusions by what may have been happening there. I mean, isn't it so, I mean, isn't there telltale signs when you see all these former Pentagon officials and CIA officials getting like salaries at these big TV channels like MSNBC and CNN? They're like paid correspondence now to come in and comment on whatever's happening.

You know, it's one thing for a former government official. I mean, I understand what you're saying. It can be a revolving door, but I think it's one thing for a former government official to find a job in the media offering like commentary, you know, political commentary, contextual commentary on national security issues. But it's another thing for a serving, high-ranking intelligence official to give him the ability to edit a fact. checked piece of journalism with off the record comments. It's like, hey, hold on a second. If you want, if that's the story you're going with, then I'm going to need that on the record. And we'll put that in the story. We'll put such and such said this about rogue ops. Right. And that's their side of it. But to make off the record comments, it's just, I mean, look, and I want to also be clear something about the ethics of espionage. I am not saying that the deputy director is a bad man. I've been told he's actually a good person that he's very charming. I'm not saying he's

unethical. I'm not saying it wouldn't even be fair to call him a liar. I think that's the wrong, that would be the wrong thing to say. He is upholding his professional and lawful obligation to keep covert ops off the front page of the paper. And I totally understand that. The game is the game. And he played it well and was effective at it. But the problem I do have is with journalists who are able to fulfill the premise of their job, that they're more worried about the politics, that they just want to publish authorized leaks, right, that come from those official sources, the official leaks, right? Rather than this type of journalism, that's more, you know, it's kind of out there hanging

gangster journalism that's, you know, comes from a totally different source. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it just goes to show you how much sway that these agents, these, the government has over the biggest publications that exist in America. If this guy, if this editor was literally trying to change the whole story, according to this guy's off-the-record comments. I agree.

Yeah. I mean, it's becoming more and more clear to us that things like this are happening. These relationships have always existed. And there are a series of norms, I think, that exist between, you know, journalism and the intelligence community. and, you know, I get it to a large extent. And there are things like as a journalist that I would not do. Like I said, I don't want to publish classified documents.

I don't want to out covered personnel, you know, people who live under an alias. Right. I don't want to, you know, run the names of CIA assets, like that very sensitive stuff. I do care about national security. But again, there are ways to report stories like in this story. I talk about the United States and the CIA, but we are working by with and through a liaison partner to do these sabotage operations. That's one of the interesting things about this. I did not name that partner because I think it's just too sensitive right now.

So there are a system of norms, but sometimes these journalists and these editors, they want to publish stories. They do want to break news, all right? It's difficult to explain this to people because they, I think the public tends to pull into one or two extremes of, you know, the media is totally compromised or the media's rogue off the rails. It's actually a much more, I think it's a more complicated dynamic. And I think there are editors, they want to break news, but within a certain, a narrow scope of left and right limits. They don't want to challenge the prevailing narrative too much. They don't want to be too disruptive, right? They want to stay within those left and right limits, those norms.

And when you start talking about unauthorized leaks and things that are going to piss off some of their contacts in the intelligence community, they fear that that spigot could get turned off. And they're not going to get the controlled leaks anymore. And, you know, I might piss people off saying this. But one of the things I'm most proud of is that I've never been a press corps person. I've never been a Pentagon press corps guy. I've never been a White House press corps guy. I've always been off on my own doing my own thing.

I live in Brooklyn, New York. I'm not in Washington, D.C. I don't give a shit about getting invited to dinner parties in D.C. I was never being invited to them to begin with. So I literally don't care of people in that town like me or not. Which is way cooler and which is why your work is so much more fascinating, some of the mainstream stuff that we see. It's so much more. It's so unique.

Like I told you in the car on the way here Reading this article, it was like watching a fucking movie. You're talking about people that are sleeper cells that are living here that like that have been there for up to what over a decade maybe that were possibly. Possibly up to a decade or more. And then they have buried caches of munitions that they can go find and pick up to to carry out these operations. That is some shit that's out of a movie, man. It's fucking crazy. It's a tightly wound and effective operation.

And I think it demonstrates a few things. Perhaps it demonstrates a renewed central intelligence agency, one that is dealing with a threat that it knows how to counter and has prepared for for 75 years. It also reveals, in my opinion, the strength of our alliances and our overseas alliances and how important they are. with this particular partner, a very tight, it really is a very tight partnership that we have with them, but also other European allies. And we've seen that in this conflict in Ukraine, that it's sort of like we're all fighting in the same direction for the first time in a long time. What was your first reaction to when this war in Ukraine between Ukraine and Russia broke out? Like what was your initial, I mean, I know what the mainstream narrative was, but what was your like initial reaction? My initial reaction. My initial reaction was surprised. I didn't think Putin was stupid enough to do this. I lost a bet with a good friend of mine. Really?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we're betting on whether, I mean, that sounds a little crass to bet a bottle of whiskey over a conflict. But it's over the political action of it. And I was like, come on, dude, Putin's not dumb enough to do that. He wouldn't do that. I was wrong. I was totally wrong.

You know, we've seen what's happened since then. And then why was he dumb to do that? Because he thrust himself into a quagmire that he was not prepared for. And now it is turned into a full-blown disaster for Russia that I don't know if they'll ever be able to emerge. I mean, they're being knocked decades back, backwards in time right now. Their economy is not going to recover from this. Before the invasion happened, obviously there was all this reporting of all of the American arms and weapons that was being deployed under the Ukrainian. border the billions of dollars of things and it was almost like it was almost like we were we'd been

arming and equipping them since uh 2014 i mean there's a pretty substantial effort going on right but i'm saying like this specific the specific time where they were gearing up to invade how like we were also like ramping up on the ukrainian side as well and and on top of that we were reporting on it like crazy almost as if like hey russia we fucking dare you Yeah, I mean, what was happening is that there was an astounding series of, you know, again, and not, I shouldn't say leaks. I mean, there were like official statements being made by government officials like the invasions coming in two days. You know, the invasions coming in. And what they were doing was they were trying to sabotage Putin that we clearly had very strong intelligence about his intentions and what he was up to. And I think how we knew that it's going to be a fascinating story in the future. But, I mean, one of the criticisms I've heard from some people within the intelligence communities, we have this huge intelligence apparatus, but we don't do anything with the intelligence. We just kind of sit on it and watch. And that's what an intelligence service does. Not everything needs to lead to paramilitary action, right? But some people get frustrated with that. But this was a really interesting situation where we declassified intelligence and we used it politically and diplomatically to warn our allies and to scare our adversaries. and to kind of as one person described it to be kind of like taking those arrows out of Putin's quiver before he was able to fire them so he was not able to launch any sort of surprise attack everyone knew

it was coming by the time it happened right right these these sabotage attacks are still happening and so my question was going back to the sabotage why why is it that the US is doing it like through another country plausible deniability plausible deniability yeah yeah they were just they're just basically like staying on they're staying out of it but they're sort of like giving them the map and giving them like the orders and tactically strategically telling them what to do and helping them accomplish their mission right we're working through a liaison partner so agency resources tactical planning intelligence going to that partner the partner who is training these civilian groups who are then going in and working as

sabotage cells inside Russia. So we're working through a partner. And it maintains plausible deniability. And to clarify, in the article, you say it's a NATO ally. Correct. Does that mean it's a NATO country? A NATO country, yes. Got it.

And, you know, the other thing you have to consider is, let's say the CIA was to do this directly. The CIA has difficulty operating in Russia. We consider Russia to be denied territory. Our spies who work out of the embassy in Moscow are under like cons. I mean, everyone in the embassy is really under surveillance, right? Like pretty harassing surveillance, pretty heavy surveillance. We have a difficult time working in Russia. So, you know, that territory is denied to the United States, but is it denied to all of our partners who may have an easier time working there?

So this is another reason why we would work through a partner force. Why is the U.S. and Russia, why don't they try to like maintain some sort of civility and work together in the world? Profound difference in national interests. History, culture, geography. What do you mean exactly when you say that? Well, they see, you know, they're near abroad being, you know, post-Soviet space, the stands, the Baltics, you know, these former Warsaw path countries, they see that as being in their sphere of influence and they'd like to develop that as a buffer between them and NATO.

But they've lost that. They see, you know, NATO, I don't know, not incursion, but NATO encirclement. Right, right, right, right. Even talk about Georgia, you know, the country of Georgia joining NATO. There's been conversations about that. And so this, you know, Russia, because of its history, you know, World War II, you know, standing out in our minds. They have a history and a fear of invasions coming from, you know, their, their western flank and, you know, are driven by a sort of paranoia in a lot of

ways. Isn't that justified that we're encircling them with NATO and they're basically surrounded? Because we have all those missile, all those launch pads from NATO all around them. From their perspective, certainly it's a, it's a real military concern that's, they have. And even though the notion of a NATO invasion sounds completely ridiculous, an invasion of Russia, sounds completely ridiculous to me or to, I think, anyone, any, any, you know, national security professional, that's not even a possibility. We're not going to invade a nuclear power, right? But if you're a Russian general, you have to take the possibility seriously and playing for that contingency. Yeah, and I am not a Russian, you know, expert by any means.

But I mean, I think we're just, we're coming from two different places. Our history, our culture, our geography is very different. Our concerns are very different. I had one person tell me that, you know, even if you ordered the CIA and the FSB to cooperate with one another, that these guys have spent too much time mean mugging each other in cafes and Rome and New Delhi for decades, that they won't work together. That's just a cultural clash in between these intelligence services. And we tried to work with them after 9-11 on counterterrorism endeavors. And it didn't really go anywhere.

They weren't sharing information with us. I mean, I'm sure there's more to the story than just that. But that cooperation didn't really work out. Yeah, it's like, what would we do, though, if they put missiles in Mexico and in Canada? You know, like, oh, of course. Russia goes, of course we'll never invade. Yeah, we would freak out and bomb the hell. out of them. So yeah, I mean, I certainly understand, uh, understand Russia's consternation,

but I'm, let's also consider Russia's own belligerence, uh, and their invasion of Georgia in 2008, their invasion of Ukraine, uh, in 2014. They're engaging this sort of aggressive, uh, territory expansion, uh, you know, eastward into, into Ukraine and into Europe. Um, and Europe has played this game before, right? They've been there. before. And one of the things we learned from the past is you can't appease a dictator. Yeah. Do you think, like speaking about these sleeper cells that are in Russia, whether they're from the U.S. or from whatever NATO country, do you think how many of these sleeper cells are currently in the U.S. that are from Russia or from them? That's a good question. People have asked me that

before. And I think that this comes up in a number of regards. For a long time, there were fears about Hezbollah sleeper cells in America and how we can't do anything too provocative against Iran because these sleeper cells will activate and conduct acts of terrorism in America. Well, you know, we assassinated Qasem Soleimani, leader of Kuds Force in Baghdad a few years ago. Where were these Hezbollah sleeper cells? Now, here we are.

We're fighting this proxy war with Russia. And the Russians know that they're being hit. They know that there is an intelligence agency hitting them, you know, on their home turf. If there are Russian sleeper cells here, my question is, what are they waiting for? Right. So I think that we can sometimes overestimate our enemy's capabilities and project all sorts of things into them. At this point, I really think we have to call on the question, you know, the last 70 years of Russia analysis that we've done. that we have built up Russia into a boogeyman that maybe they never were they were to begin with.

You know, I did an interview with Milbierden who ran the agency's covert program in Afghanistan the first time in the 80s, the Stinger program. And he said the most pushback he ever got from cable traffic he sent back to Langley was when he was writing about how the Russian military was underperforming in Afghanistan in the 80s. He said the vehement anger that came from some of the analysts that he misread the situation didn't understand the Russian army because they were so committed to this idea of the Russian bear. And it was inconceivable that their military was not performing. And now we've seen this in Ukraine where this military, we built up in our own minds these ideas of, you know, artillery barrages and human wave attacks and, you know, like, you know, the sort of like wholesale destruction, I guess, that we saw in Grosny in Chechnya, we've sort of built that up, built up an enemy of our own imagination. Although, I mean, I don't mean to minimize it either.

There is a real national security threat. There's a real national security threat from China as well. But again, I think we have to couch some of our assumptions about how the Chinese military would perform, let's say if they were to invade Taiwan. I mean, the Chinese military, and when was the last time they did a large-scale amphibious landing operation? When was the last time they did an air assault operation? Like, their military has basically no combat experience.

Like, when was the last time they did any of that? So these capabilities don't come out of nowhere. The American military's capabilities came out of a lot of failures, honestly. Like, we screwed up a lot. and, you know, we had to fix ourselves afterwards. Right. So I do think we should take these sorts of threats seriously, but at the same time, there is an institutional and a, even a career incentive to exaggerate the threat. And the American public really doesn't respond to anything unless it's an emergency.

Like, we're so desensitized. It really has to be in Americans' faces. Yeah. Like 9-11, you know, or like the way. we talk about climate change like climate apocalypse right now something's not done right now we're all going to die like everything is this has this immediacy this this this emergency and it's like nothing less than that gets the attention of american citizens right right yeah we live in a society like that man everything is like that you know and it goes to again like comparing russia to the united

states just like while we're on this topic we were talking briefly i was mentioning to you briefly about like the Oliver Stone Putin interviews where he's he's having that discussion with Putin. It's a I think he spent like over 36 hours with him talking and it was edited down into a four hour documentary four episodes, one hour each. And again, he's covering all these topics with Putin. You can say whatever you want about Oliver Stone, like he's anti-American, he's pro dictator. But he does have a very open conversation discussion with Putin and he challenges him on a lot of things. and Oliver claims that Putin did not even get to see the edit before it was published. I don't know if that's true or not, but that's what he said.

And again, he challenges him on all these topics. And Putin is able to have a free-flowing, deep conversation about these things. You can tell he's thought about this stuff. And he's making judgments that he thinks is best, that he thinks is best for his country. And he's, he, it seems like, I mean, obviously, you know, he's a bad guy. He's on lots of bad things. I'm not saying that Putin's a good guy. I'm just saying that it's very valuable to be able to have those kind of conversations and see where that guy's mind's at.

Some people will say that it's all bullshit. It's just like everything he said was a lie. He fabricated all that to make him look good, to make Russia look good. But it was very fucking convincing. Yeah. I haven't heard an American president say something that was that convincing in a long time. Yeah, I mean, look, Putin would not be in that position as long as he has been if he was stupid, right? I can absolutely believe that he's a very smart man, you know, made a strategic era in Ukraine. The Russian military revealed itself to be rather incompetent. Yeah, I think it would be wrong to underestimate Putin. I mean, he's basically installed himself as president for life. He's an entrenched bureaucrat. He's created a political system around him that keeps him in power. Yeah, a stupid person. doesn't have that sort of resiliency.

And compared to America, the look at our presidents, that they spend usually four years and how much of that time is spent just on the election cycle, just trying to win the next election? Two out of four years? It's like, how do you get anything done? Should the American, I've been thinking about? Like, shouldn't the American presidency be 10 years? Would that be better?

I don't know the answer to that. Yeah, this democracy thing. Or if you're like, like the term limits, like, why not? If the people want to vote these people in and keep this guy, keep this person president, like, how would that be a bad thing? I don't know. It's just got me thinking, listening to all this stuff. Yeah, I mean, I know I get it. I mean, our system has a lot of drawbacks and it's kind of a shit show. But I do think it's better than having president for life. And, you know, a lot of these other systems have led to so many excesses and abuses. And I would, I prefer the messy American style to some of the other systems.

that I've seen out there. What do you think a full-scale war would look like between the U.S. and Russia? It's hard to imagine that without a nuclear exchange. And then the question is, will it be a limited nuclear exchange or full-blown, you know, ICBM, strategic nuclear weapons exchange, the end of the world type stuff? Yeah, I mean, two nuclear powers going to war. We have very little data on that. Pakistan and India have done it on a few occasions. Asians, 1999, cargo conflict. They fought a conventional war on the Kashmir line without any sort of nuclear exchange. Now we're seeing some new norms maybe being established or tested in Ukraine, where the Ukrainians as a proxy for NATO, as some people see them, are fighting back against Russia, retaking territory. And it hasn't escalated to WMD.

right the Russians have not pulled that that um because they know how dire the repercussions would be uh and no i don't think anyone wants to go there that's what that you know in that film i was telling you about with oliver stone he he asked him what that would look at him the same question he said Putin said nobody would win he said it would be the end of the world yeah and i don't think the russians want that i don't think Vladimir Putin wants that and neither does any single nato nation decided that either so So it's interesting how, you know, there's always this, as I talked to an analyst named Michael Kaufman for this article. And he speaks to how there's this fear that nations will stumble into war, that it'll happen accidentally, that one side makes a move that's misinterpreted, or one side crosses a red line without knowing it, or an accident happens. And it triggers, you know, World War III, that there's a fear of that.

But he points out that this isn't really the way nation states think that they look at an incident as it happens and decide how they want to respond to it. And if the ROI, it works out for them or not. They may choose to ignore certain operations and pretend they're just accidental fires because they don't want that particular subject to go any further. And it's more convenient, politically expedient to just ignore it for now. you don't think that this has anything to do with that Nord Stream explosion? I, well, obviously, it's all speculation, but. I mean, these things may be interconnected. I, the true answer to be transparent, I don't know.

I don't know what happened in the Nord Stream pipeline. I have heard theories from sources speculating, you know, speculating that the Russians did this either with saturation divers or with unmanned vehicles. I have talked to explain them what a saturation diver is? Oh, just divers coming off a submarine breathing off of mixed gas like deep sea diving. And I've talked to other people who say no, that we would not hit a target like this at this time

because of how sensitive it is. It's partly owned by Germany, another NATO ally. So they're saying, no, we would not hit this target. But did the Russians blow it up? I don't know the answer to that. I think more to follow on that. I want to go into this saturation diving again. Yeah, yeah.

We were talking briefly about this. You said there's a guy here who was a saturation diver somewhere in Florida. How do we get this topic got brought up before we started the podcast? Oh, well, I mean, geez, down in Panama City, Florida is the Navy's experimental dive unit where they do all sorts of cool things and develop new gear and testing things. Oh, really? That's in Panama City. I had no idea. Yeah, Panama City is kind of a center for some of that stuff.

Some spooky goings on down there, you might say, with some other things happening down there. There was... Tell me more. Tell me more. Yeah. Well, I did this story years ago. It was about a CIA operation that went wrong in the not quite the South China Sea. It's north of Luzon in the Philippines. And it was an operation where some CIA paramilitary guys, they're called, it's called Maritime Branch.

There's, you know, the three components are air branch, ground branch, and maritime branch. So these guys have, you know, these are the three different paramilitary components. And there's also like the covert influence group that guys who do like propaganda. So Mar Branch has four guys on a small boat and they're to go out there. They're under like a civilian cover. And they're going to go on one of these like atolls out there that, you know, where it's like some rocks that are visible at low tide. They're going to send some,

a couple divers out with this pod. It's disguised to look like a rock, but it's packed with like sensitive electronics, like classified electronics. And they're going to put the pod in the rocky, you know, Atoll, and it's going to monitor Chinese military traffic in the area coming through the area. What happens is as they're heading out to complete their mission, a hurricane starts sweeping through the Pacific. They have to make a decision. Do we continue with the mission? Because the hurricane was supposed to like veer north and miss their area of operations.

So they decide, yeah, we're going to go ahead with the operation. well, the hurricane did not veer. It barreled straight towards them. And by that point, there was nothing they could do to avoid it. They could go north, southeast, west. It didn't matter. They'd get hit full bore with the hurricane. I guess they were wedged between the hurricane and what, like mainland China?

They were out in the middle of nowhere, really. Oh, okay. Yeah. On like a 30-foot boat. And there was a beacon on that. that boat that the agency was monitoring and it flashed out in the middle of the hurricane no trace of those four maritime branch guys or the boat itself were ever found not not a floating life preserver nothing absolutely nothing was ever found uh you know those four guys who died um

you know there was a younger guy named michael perrick uh who was a graduate of the merchant Marine Academy. There was a retired EOD Navy diver named Stephen Stannock. There was another, you know, a Navy guy, part of like a Marine Union, Daniel Meeks. And then there's a mechanic on board also. And geez, I'm sorry, his name escapes me right now. It's definitely in the article I wrote. But those four guys perished, you know, and they got stars on the wall at CIA headquarters. Now, typically operations like this where things go wrong and people don't come back, those things typically aren't reported on, right? Because people don't even know that they're doing what they're doing. And it was one of the eeriest stories I ever reported on because for a long time, I'm looking at this.

It was so eerie because as time went on, I was able to, it was really difficult, but I dug up all four of the names. And I got death certificates. and I could tell these were human beings. They actually lived and they died. But beyond these death certificates, it's like they just vanished off the face of the earth and nobody said anything about it. And I think that's part of the reality of, you know,

or, you know, I think I called them in the article, secret sailors. These are our covert operators, if you will. And that even in death, their life and death remains, secret. Oh my God. Yeah, it's coming back to me now. I think that is this the story where these guys had, their identities traced back to like a building or a fake business. Yes. That was placed in the panhandle. Yes. That makes sense now. So yeah, so what else is going on in the panhandle with these diving teams and these, is this maritime branch still a thing? Maritime branch definitely exists. Yeah,

they, they have, you know, civilian charter, civilian vessels that they, they operate and they can do different things to get people in and out of certain places in certain situations or do different types of missions. And yeah, I mean, yeah, down there on the panhandle, there's a big presence of spooky stuff, you know, both intelligence community and Navy. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's spooky about it?

Just a covert op stuff. Ivory Bells was the program to tap into undersea cables. There's components of that program run out of there. Yeah, it's interesting stuff. What kind are they utilizing any sort of like unknown or classified like technology to you were mentioning that these guys are diving like thousand, a thousand feet underwater? Well, those are like experiments that are conducted, right? To see the Navy does these like kind of like NASA type experiments except underwater with divers. See like how deep can they go?

How much bottom time can we get them once they're down? there and experimenting with different types of mixed gas. And yeah, that one guy who was telling me he was under like a thousand feet of water. And because the oxygen in that tank gets compressed more and more, the deeper you go, he said that when he was down there at the bottom, it was like he was trying to suck maple syrup through his regulator breathing in that oxygen gas. So, yeah, these guys, I mean, they can be deployed off of submarines or they can be deployed off boats and there's all sorts of different ways you can get these guys there um but you know

we're talking about they can be deployed off of a submarine yeah yeah they can lock out of a submarine wow i didn't know that yeah the seals do that too for a different mission uh different type of mission the seal delivery vehicle and they can go ashore and conduct reconnaissance and things like that yeah yeah um but then the navy divers um can they conduct you know under sea espionage that's a thing And one of those things is tapping fiber optic under sea cables. And I mean, everyone taps fiber. America, Russia, France, Israel, UK. I mean, we're all tapping fiber.

We're all tapping each other and we all know it. Yeah. Well, there's even a term for some of that. If you've ever heard of fourth party collection, no. A fourth party collection is when you go into, you know, you're exploring around trying to find a place to exploit the adversary's communications. So let's let's say, let's stick with this example.

We send some divers under water to go tap and undersea fiber optic cable. So they go down there with all their equipment, they're ready to tap into it. And they get there and it's like, oh shit, there's already a tap on it. But it's not ours. It's, let's say, for this example, it's Russian. Let's say it's the Russians tapping a French-owned fiber optic cable. Now, what we can do is fourth-party. collection would be we tap into the tap. And so we now we're we're collecting everything that's going

through the fiber optic cable, but we also know all of the information that the Russians are getting because we're tapped into their tap. Right. So it's sort of like a this like omnipresent sort of intelligence collection method that you get to know what everybody, the information that everybody's getting. And yeah, that's a thing. That's scary, man. That's that's wild. In the old days, It was done with induction cables. And I did an interview with Jim Olson, who's CIA officer. And this guy went down a manhole cover in Moscow and tapped into fiber optic communication cables with like calipers, like induction cables. Yeah.

Really? Yeah, it's interesting stuff. You've talked to so many different CIA people. Like you've talked to, you've talked to, what, it's been dozens of CIA, DIA, spy. people that were sleeper cells like what what what is it about these people that is so fascinating to us you know i people find different things in them um like we make movies about these people they they're they're they're the most viewed stories on the internet on youtube everywhere you go it's just there's something about it that that makes us just so infatuated with these stories. I mean, I, I just have a

enduring fascination with special operations and covert operations. And I just find that stuff fascinating. I want to know, I want to know everything about it. I want to know, you know, every time someone brings up secret operations, you say, clicking my pen. Like, well, I get, I get excited. I love that stuff, you know, and, you know, I, uh, I would do my job for free if I could. I have to pay rent and I have to buy food like a normal person. But I mean, I love it. I love, I love reporting on it. I love talking to these people.

I love interviewing them. I love writing these stories. Do you get any shit from people for talking about this kind of stuff? Hell yeah. Absolutely. What kind of pushback or what kind of bullshit do you get from people who get pissed off about you reporting on this? Different varieties of shit. There are people within the special ops community who hate my guts.

I mean, we're down here in Tampa, you know, special operations command and McDill. I mean, I think they have my picture on a dartboard down there. I'm not, yeah, I'm not loved and respected by the entire special operations community because I tell them, you know, truths that they don't want to hear a lot of times and sometimes expose, you know, some dirty things that are happening in their units that they would rather not have out there publicly, you know, for career reasons. You know, the intelligence community handles journalists a lot smarter than, you know, know at special ops, I feel like those guys are running around with their hair on fire, scared to death of negative press, like every day. Like they just, they've never learned how to handle it, right? They're like, their skin is so paper thin that the smallest thing just sends them off into a tirade. Not everybody, but I just noticed that with some of the leadership, that there's very, very sensitive and they don't know how to engage with the media. The intelligence community, they're more like slick. They're more like GQ. They have like professional comms people that work.

for them and handle, you know, people like me stick in their nose places. So, yeah, I would say that, yeah, they handle things a lot better. But, yeah, I mean, I catch all sorts of varieties of shit from people within, also people without. At a certain point, I just kind of ignore it. You know, one day, people are saying I'm a paid CIA shill. The next day, people are saying I'm a paid FSB shill. I mean, it's like they can't, these weirdos can't even keep their story.

straight. So I end up just ignoring all of it. I mean, I trust in my sourcing, in my reporting. If my stories have integrity, if they're telling the truth, then I'm just going to go with that. And what I, the metaphor I use is like when when people hear an uncomfortable truth that they don't necessarily want to hear, they go through a phases of denial that it's really like the stages of grief when a loved one dies. They go through these five stages. And the first phase is denial. No, this isn't happening. They go through like the bargaining phase where they're like, well, part of Jack's story is right, but some of it isn't. You know, take it with a grain of salt guys. And then eventually they get to acceptance. And it takes some time to get there. I mean, this story here that we've been talking about, this story is going to take some time for people to digest and to process. And it's not going to happen overnight. What kind of pushback have you had on this story? So you published it, are people, I assume people would say, you know, you're compromising national security.

You're compromising CIA operations that are going to... From the intelligence community, the response has been a deafening silence. Just nothing, nothing at all. From the public, a tremendous public interest in this story, a lot of people reading it and enjoyed reading it and thought it was informative and helpful. Some people, I notice ideological people, they see the world through that. ideological lens and they tend to get upset with some of my reporting because it doesn't match their you know worldview uh whether it comes whatever whatever that worldview is um you know i've had you know the the the alt-right people mad at me sometimes i've had the far fringe left mad at me

other times again i just ignore that stuff because it's like they need to go talk to a therapist about that stuff it's not my drama right um but i mean the response has been good um the only like i haven't really had any pushback. I mean, what about from like people like your colleagues in the military? You ever have people like people that you have a relationship with come out and be like, Jack, what the fuck? Yes.

Yeah, absolutely. That has to be difficult. I've had fallings out with friends for sure. I've had people come to me. Sometimes they'll even try to like be manipulative. Like, you know, we serve together back in the day, Jack, you should change that headline. That shouldn't say that. It's just kind of gross.

And it makes you feel like, were we ever really friends? If you see it as like something transactional like this, you feel you can hit me up 10 years later and try to get me to change my story. Like, what is this? Things like that. But yeah, no, there are definitely, there are teammates, former teammates of mine who don't agree with everything I do. And we're still friends. And that's fine. I mean, they're their own person and they make their own decisions.

And I respect their decisions and, you know, their views. And I'm open to hearing what they think. I'm sure you can empathize with people like yourself that have come out of the military that haven't found meaning or purpose when you have, right? You've found something. You've built something. You're working towards something. But I'm sure there's a lot of friends that you've dealt with that are going through hell. That just, you know, I know there's a huge amount of veterans that kill themselves every day.

And my stories and my words sometimes impact those guys and they hit them. They feel like it's a punch below the belt, right? As they're trying to figure out their way in the civilian life. And here comes Jack Murphy saying this really bad thing happened, you know, in special forces or whatever the story may be, right? And they take it personally, which I understand. I've tried to be, yeah, a little bit more empathetic about how I talk about veterans and understanding that they're going through. the same process I went through at one point. I was there, right?

I was that angry guy who got out of the military and didn't know. I had no idea how to live life. You know what I mean? Because I'd never really lived in real life. I'd been in this coistered military environment the entire time. Since you were a teenager, right? Exactly. Now, think about if you spend 20, 25, 30 years in the military.

You've basically been put into a time capsule. Yeah. And now you're in the civilian world. And you're having all these realizations. One of those realizations is they're realizing that the America, they thought they were fighting for, you know, this image they had of America of, you know, guy putting his flag out on the porch on Memorial Day, you know, the sort of leave it the beaver America. Like that doesn't exist. It never existed. But, and they're realizing this for the first time when they retire.

And suddenly they're in the civilian world and they're seeing all these people walk around and like, the example I've given is, let's say you're like a legit badass guy. like you were the command sergeant major of Delta Force. Like you went, you went up to the top, you did everything, you're a badass dude. You come into the civilian world and you tell people, I was a command sergeant major in Delta Force. Their first question is going to be, what is command sergeant major? What is Delta Force? Well, I was, it's not that they're anti-military. It's just because we have an all-volunteer force.

There's not a shared culture or a common understanding like there, was with like World War II veterans like if you were sitting in a boardroom in 1950 no I mean I can't imagine someone there being like you know I was in the battle of the bulge and you know you guys are a bunch of pussies because everyone else in that boardroom will look at them and like yes so I fought in our dens you know I was at I was at Omaha beach like everyone there was a veteran right you know some dude some guy was a marine fighting in the Pacific yeah it was a different shared culture that existed in that moment I want to go to you are I went out of I don't know when you published it, but the story that you were working on that involved human trafficking at...

I published that like a week ago. Fort Bragg. That was only a week ago. How long had you been working on that story? It came together very quickly. Yeah, I mean, some of these stories like this one, like worked on that, like, what, eight months, that CIA Maritime Branch story. I worked on that for like two years. Wow.

Yeah. And then, but then that special forces story that you're talking about, I worked on that. I was up till 2 in the morning working on that, woke up the next day and wrote it. And yeah, you want to talk about the genesis behind that story. It's interesting. A lot of the – I shouldn't say a lot. But a few of these stories, like the sort of like drama insider baseball happening in these units, the way I found out about this one was because all these guys on Instagram were posting memes about it. Like, oh, third group's getting drug tested.

and you know here's all this crazy stuff that's happening. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. So I send a message to one of these accounts. I know who runs it. And I was like, spill the tea. Tell me everything now. And so he tells me, he tells me all the insider baseball that's going on. And I'm like, holy shit.

And so I reach out to like probably 20 people that night and start getting little bits and pieces of it. And I'm able to document little pieces of it. So what happened was back in December, there was a special forces soldier based on Fort Bragg, moonlighted as a bouncer at O'Donnell's pub, which is like a frequently, it's a pub in Southern Pines. I've been there before. It's a nice place. And it's frequented by the Special Forces dudes to hang out there. And this guy was allegedly pimping underage girls.

and he got picked up by an undercover agent. And I've seen his charge sheet. So he's charged with kidnapping, statutory rape, human trafficking of a minor, and something else like, I can't remember the exact charge. But there's another one thrown in there also. So they picked this guy up. And I'm not clear if I don't know if he's talking to law enforcement or they just ripped his phone. I think they got on his cell phone. And that led to them basically to CID, the criminal investigation division, questioning something like 15 people over the weekend.

And like two weeks ago now. And they, on drug-related charges. And they did recalls of special forces, third group battalions, first battalion got called in on Sunday. and they pissed tested all of them. I don't know exactly how many came up hot, but this is unfolding into like a pretty big deal. There's a lot of people involved. And there's only one soldier being charged with human trafficking,

just to be clear at this time. There are others who, it looks like they're going to be charged with felony use of cocaine. And I don't know how many others have pissed hot on the urinalysis tests. That remains to be seen. But this story is unfolding. I can say I've continued working on this. There is a lot, a lot going on here that I'm just not prepared to speak about this time because I have to do my, my diligence on the story before I speak about it publicly. But I would feel comfortable in saying there's much more to follow on this.

How does something like this go so off the rails at a base like this at Fort Bragg? Like how does this, how does this? obviously this started somewhere and went fucking way off the rails and got into territory where it's like out of control. I can answer that question. You know, it's a question of culture and a question of subcultures and the infiltration of organized crime into the military plays a role in it. And then you have the issue of leadership, lack of leadership. you have leaders who are compromised themselves. And when leaders turn a blind eye to some illegal activities,

it's a signal to the rest of the force that they can also get away with it. And the problem gets worse and worse and worse. And you end up with a subculture that resembles the mafia in the sense that everyone has dirt on everyone else. And everyone's scared that somebody in their network is going to defect, right? and, you know, sing like a canary to try to save themselves. And that may be what's happening right now. So the short answer is, yeah, it's a question of a toxic subculture, an insular subculture that is largely immune from peer review and accountability and visibility.

Special operations has come forward in the last couple of years and acknowledge that they have an ethical problem. in the ranks. They've done publications about this, talking about it, trying to get the conversation going. They understand there's a perception because of all the news stories that have come out over the last 10 years, especially. But I don't think that message is being heard. The military, you have to understand it's a large institution and it's not particularly creative. It operates along standard operating procedures. And so when they have problems, like this, whether it's the Navy SEALs going through their stuff or special forces, the default method of bringing discipline back into the force is, okay, we're going to have more formations, we're going to have haircut and uniform inspections, we're going to inspect your barracks, you're going to do organized PT, it's all this sort of like army stuff. But the problem with a lot of that is I don't think that is necessarily, I mean, maybe that's a tool you can use, but I'm not totally convinced that that's going to stamp out drug use or horrible things like human trafficking.

That has to be bottom up. That has to do with like the NCO culture. And it's not there's no like action. The colonel can't make you sit inside a briefing. Hey, because they already do make them sit in briefings like, hey, don't do drugs. Don't traffic humans. There's literally an anti-human trafficking like training module soldiers have to do like quarterly. Really?

Yeah. Yeah. So those sorts of like corporate, corporatized leadership mechanisms, they don't really work in my view. That really has to come from the bottom up. How, what is the motivation for human trafficking in places like this? Well, I mean, soldiers, we have human trafficking. Fayetteville, North Carolina, where Fort Bragg is, is like a human trafficking hub in the United States. That's like publicly known.

and talked about by law enforcement. Oh, wow. Yeah. So they're becoming a part of these rings and profiting off them and aren't like making money from this? In at least one case, this was happening. Okay. And then soldiers also go to, or these soldiers are deployed to parts of the world where there is frequent human trafficking. So that's another reason why, you know, you should be cautious.

I bet dealing with sources on stories like this can be pretty brutal. Yes. Pretty explosive. I mean, you're dealing with people. The sources, I'm sure, are very close to some of the stuff that's going on here. I'm not, I don't know if they're still at these bases or not, but that's got to be a very, very delicate situation. There's a lot of trauma and there's a lot of fear. There have been a lot of narcotics related deaths in the Fort Bragg area. Seth Harp is a reporter who's done much more reporting on this than I have, talking about the third. fentanyl and killings around a Fort Bragg area. But there's a lot of fear and there's a lot of trauma from 20 years of war and the fallout that has on the soldiers and on their family members. It's a mess, honestly. It's a train wreck.

I mean, at some point, we just have to call it what it is. We have to come out in the open and say, we have a huge fucking problem on our hands. Like, the denials just don't cut it anymore. The PR doesn't cut it anymore. Or like we have to admit that we have this problem and then we can start working to solve it. I wanted to also talk briefly about like it's interesting to me the differences between people across different branches of the military and how they are after like they retire from the military. Like for example, yesterday I was talking to a Navy fighter pilot and it's interesting to me the dichotomy between the psychology of a Navy fighter pilot going to war. compared to the psychology of boots on the ground ranger on the you know in a firefight in

Afghanistan and and how disconnected the fighter pilots are from the killing compared to the people on the ground and how that affects them in the trajectory of their lives afterward um this guy I talked to Ryan the fighter pilot you know he seemed to he was very matter of fact the way he was talking and and you know I know there's drone pilots that do the same thing that's a little bit different because you're not actually like you're not actually flying a plane you're sitting like at a computer like you're playing a video game killing people and I know there's people that I have dealt with severe severe PTSD from that but it's interesting to me hearing those stories compared to like your story right especially when you talk about like you know you witnessed a guy

You were there when a guy was squirting out of a building and you guys took him down. And it was essentially nothing to you, right? But it's so wild how that can be your experience. But a guy in Las Vegas operating a drone can be so fucked up from something like this. It's so situational, you know, and there could be other guys who witnessed that same event and have post-traumatic stress from it because they experienced it in a different way. Right. Right. Right. And I don't mean that as a judgment against anyone. There were guys in that deployment who, you know, saved their buddy's lives, injured guys, you know, limbs getting blown apart. I mean, there's terrible stuff. And there's a lot of different ways that guys can get PTSD. But I think what you touch on there is really interesting, the way that different positions, people in different occupations in the military, get different PTSD.

So like one thing, I would have laughed at this at one point in my life. But through talking to people, I think I have a better understanding of it. Analysts get PTSD. And the reason why they're obviously not seeing a lot of blood and gore necessarily. They're working in an operation center working behind a computer. But they are so firmly engrossed in their work. And they feel all this pressure on them that, I have to get it right or soldiers are going to die.

And so they're like their burnout rate is pretty high. I mean, they're trying to bring in all this information and distill it and analyze it and put together intelligence products. And if a bomb goes off somewhere and kills somebody, sometimes their thought is that's my fault. I should, why did I miss that? Which is bullshit. It's the fault of the guy who planted the bomb. But that's the kind of pressure that a lot of analysts put on themselves and why they come away with PTSD. Steve from the job.

Um, the drone pilots, like you mentioned, um, yeah, they are sitting behind like, it's called like a remote control station or something like this. Yeah, um, but yeah, playing quote unquote video game, but the sensors on those drones, the video cameras have advanced significantly. And you can zoom right in and see all the gory details. And, um, I did an article for connecting vets about drone strikes in Afghanistan towards the tail end of the war. Um,

and what some of the drone pilots were going through. And I mean, they're seeing death every day. And the pilots I had talked to started to have severe moral issues with the types of killings we were doing. We were just dropping on anybody who used a radio, touched a radio. You thought you saw a tack vest under their shirt. You thought maybe you saw the barrel of a Kalashnikov under their vest. Like we were just like killing all kinds of people in Helmand province during that. time frame and they started to have serious moral injury over this and one of the guys i talked to

he has stories like they dropped on uh on this man unarmed male walking in a field bloom him up his wife comes running out of the house and grabs his body and is crying and she looks up into the sky and is shaking her fist what yeah and they watch this they also get the grim duty of watching the bodies pulling surveillance on the bodies after they kill them them and watching the people come and pick them up. Where do they take the body? They're supposed to watch this. Yeah.

Yeah. Gather more intelligence. The kid I talked to on this podcast that was doing that, he said that when he was doing it, he was brought in at a very, very young age. I think he wasn't even, I think he was like maybe just 18. What platform did he fly? I don't remember off the top of my head. Some of the Army RPA pilots are quite young.

Yeah. I could probably pull it up and find out exactly what the, what the drone that he was flying was, but I remember he was, I want to say he wasn't even 18 when he got recruited. I don't know if that's possible or illegal, but I couldn't be wrong. You can enlist at 17.

Okay. And yeah, I think you can start basic training at 17, but then I'm not exactly sure what the law is offhand, but like I don't think you can go to combat until 18. I think that's the rule. Okay. Yeah, no,

and, you know, he was explaining the culture too, of those people in there. Like if they have anything to say or they're not allowed to give any opinions on what they're doing, they're told what they're going to do. And if they show any sort of like vulnerability in this job, they're immediately outcast or called a pussy or called, you know, this guy in particular, he was saying that that was very much the culture like that. Like if you showed any sort of emotion doing these kind of like, like, like, carrying out these kinds of acts that you are basically punished for it seems real tough in the

moment right but how many of those guys now have severe PTSD themselves yeah and are cracking up and are you know having a really rough go at it you know let's look you know unpack those units look at their suicide rates and then you asked yourself the question was this really the right way to handle personnel you know to ostracize people call people pussies like instead of you know trying to process what they were going through in a healthy way. Have you ever talked to any like fighter pilots? I have. Again, this aviation is not like my area of expertise, but sure. Right. Right. Obviously.

What do you think, from you, what did you deduce from talking to fighter pilots who have been deployed overseas and like what is there, how does their experience or their view of everything differ from yours being down there or like the culture or their day-to-day life? I think it's a little bit different. They're a little bit removed from it. Even the helicopter pilots, it's a, it's a different perspective. It's not a bad perspective, but yeah, they do come from a different place. Well, they're stationed on carriers, right?

And like what, like where, how far away are the aircraft carriers from like when they go to like carry out strikes over Afghanistan or Iraq? Like how? I don't think we were flying off carriers, except. during the invasion, which was a huge, that was a very long movement for them. And how this might be a dumb question, but how connected are you guys? Or is there any communication between the Navy jets? Oh, certainly. Yeah. I mean, this is the thing that Americans do very well is we do joint operations very well. So yeah, there's like, there will be like liaisons, there will be meetings. There's, there's all kinds of coordinations. And with special

Lops teams on the ground. Usually you have a Air Force J-TAC. So an Air Force guy joint terminal attack controller. So it's an Air Force guy who's trained specifically to talk to aircraft in the air and tell them where to drop their bombs. So that's like a very like tight relationship. Okay. And then so going back to the journalism side of thing. So after you got back and you started doing some of your journalism stuff, were you contracted to? do any sort of like any sort of I mentioned briefly that you did some sort of work in africa yeah i mean that wasn't a contract job that was actually something that i was asked to do and my dumb ass did it for free um it was really it was business development essentially i was working

with a small group of people and we were testing out some um open source intelligence methodologies um i did it it was briefed at a fairly high level uh they did didn't really know what to do with it though they didn't know what authorities they could even use that under um but it's very interesting about like a year a year and a half ago i saw the special forces commander in an interview talking about one of the things i worked on and i was like oh shit some of it got through who are you working for it it wasn't really working for anybody i mean it was just a kind of an informal group of people okay um there was like maybe a couple small like they own their own little LLCs but i mean it was essentially like a

a proof of concept that you could arrive in country and set up an open source intelligence platform with things that are off the shelf that you can get there. And, you know, there's this one concept, the one that I heard the Special Forces Commander used that we were testing out was called the Naked Man. The Naked Man was a concept that these people came up with that when you go into denied areas, Russia, Iran, China, whatever it is, that you may not be able to go in with any sort of like spy equipment or any sort of like shady dual use equipment, right? That you need to come in you may, and because of biometrics and everything else, you may not be able to fool that

stuff. So you come in as a regular Joe on your passport and then once you're in country, you start developing the tools and the techniques and the assets that you need to accomplish the intelligence collection with what you can find on the local economy. And so we were testing some of these things out. And yeah, apparently some of it made it up to, you know, SF command. Oh, really? Years later. Yeah, because that guy was saying in an interview talking, he specifically mentioned the naked man concept. That's fascinating.

Like using just the resources they have available to you to sort of. Unconventional warfare. Unconventional warfare. Yeah. Wow. That's interesting. Have you ever heard about there's a guy who's been on here before Ryan Tate? He is a former Marine.

He went over there and started basically protecting the endangered animals over there, like especially the elephants and the rhinos that are being poached by the poachers out there. And they're carrying out like crazy missions to, to sort of like capture these poachers. Really? And save the elephants. Yeah. And they got a bunch of veterans that are over there. are working. I mean, I know there are a lot of like different like vet groups that have gone

over there doing like counter poaching training and stuff like that. I mean, I would be interested if there were like American veterans actually going over there and shooting poachers. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, here it is. That's called vet paw. I don't know. I don't think they've gotten into any like serious fire fights. They're more more likely they're training and working, you know, again, with local partners to enable the game. wardens to do their job is probably what's happening right right but it it uh it's wild too because there's the the terrorist groups out in africa oh yeah well uh what's the name of that terrorist group again in northern africa well there's a there's a there's a there's uh the name of it is this

boca haram in nigeria yeah like the boca haram that like took all those kids hostage in the schools yep out there and there's a lot of fucking crazy shit going on out there and absolutely i mean if you're a if you're a veteran dealing with some of the stuff that we talked about earlier, going out and doing some shit like this is, it's pretty close to like combat type situations when you're dealing with terrorists and fucking lions and tigers and poachers. West Africa is a fascinating, fascinating place. You know, and we've, you know, the United States, you know, special ops community has been over there for a long time. There's a lot of at-risk populations that could, you know, fall prey to Islamic. extremism and we don't want that area to become, you know, the next Afghanistan, another place, ungoverned area. But there's a tremendous opportunity for West Africa as well. I mean,

their population is going to swell over the next couple decades. There's a real hope that they're going to develop into what we would call like First World Nations, that they're going to really, yes, that they're going to, that West Africa will become the new, you know, West Europe for lack of a better term, that they'll follow their own, their own trajectory, right? But that they were going to go through a rapid development process in West Africa. Like what countries in particular? I mean, Nigeria, Gabon, Ghana, Senegal, Benin, like all of these countries in the West African coast. Oh, wow.

Going through this sort of like population explosion, but also economic explosion over the next couple of decades. I mean, it's probably going to become the most densely populated place on earth, some people think. Well, China has dumped a shitload of money into Africa. as far as like railways and roads and like they're dumping so much money into africa they are kind of bizarre they are it'll it'll be interesting to see if it pays dividends for them you know as china is starting to learn what we have learned that you know there is a cost of trying to run a i want to use the word empire but let's just say maintaining global influence is expensive and it's costly in many different ways um and we'll see how they do there it's interesting

you know, trying to figure out what their, with their global chess game is with that, dumping all that money to there. I think there was, they even paid for an embassy or some sort of government building there that they found like spy equipment in. Could be. I mean,

they, for them, it's, they're looking forward and they want to secure up, um, arable land, uh, natural resources.

Yeah. They want to, they want to position themselves for, you know, this century and the next century. And they're the ones that are responsible for the poaching, too, because they're the ones that are they're buying up all the ivory that is being and these people these poor fucking people in africa that they they can either be poachers and fucking feed their family right or they can be park rangers and barely be able to afford anything yeah it's that's a hard fucking thing to deal with yeah it's a sad situation and these guys Ryan and he's he explained to me how they they've gone through operations where they've like tracked down poachers and fucking pulled them out of their bedrooms at night whether they're sleeping really yeah well our wives are sleeping next to them don't even wake up well yeah i mean i

wish these countries luck in in those endeavors because i mean i'm afraid that you know in my lifetime we won't have elephants or rhinoceroses anymore i did did you hear about there's a country of like northwest africa that is like one of the biggest cocaine importers in the world like these guy the actual government one of the heads of government like the main i forget yeah so he was like the general or something you're probably talking about morocco and algeria but um zoom in zoom in to the top left of africa oh you can't zoom in and right around there molly is very interesting too because of the uh in the sahel that like packed um desert earth uh lends itself to like kind of landing an airplane wherever the fuck you want.

So you can fly those cocaine airplanes from Columbia, from South America, and just like landed a desert, improvised desert air strip and offload drugs and then, and then they continue on to Europe. Yeah, this guy, the guy, I believe I'm referring to, he was like the head of the fucking Navy of that country. And like he was, he was asked about this and he completely denied it. And they later found out that he was the one in charge of all the imports. Yeah, that was the one protecting.

protecting all the import. Yeah, of course. Because the country, I mean, it comes back to the countries that are the most impoverished that are going through the suffering the hardest. They're the ones that are the most susceptible to corruption. There was probably the most prolific pirate in Somalia in modern history was this dude named Afwene, which means big mouth. And he, his racket, you've got to respect the game.

He was the biggest pirate in in in in in in in in in in in In Somalia but he was also taking money from the UN to run counter piracy operations Guinea Bissau that's the company that's the company that's the fucking country Oh okay that's uh that's West Africa yeah anyway sorry interrupt the pirate yeah so yeah this guy was he was basically playing firefighter an orsonist he was a he was a pirate running all these piracy operations but also taking money from the UN to run counter piracy operations corner the market man yeah Uh, he, they caught,

like my lawyer. They caught him. I think it was the Belgians arrested him. What they did, they did a sting where they ward him into Belgium. They said they want to make a, um, a documentary about him. And when he showed up in the airport, the authorities arrested him. Really? Yeah.

What's on the radar for you like in the coming year? Like what plans do you have as far as like you're reporting in the future and like, do you have any like big stories, big podcasts? Like, yeah, man. I definitely. I mean, I think 20, 23 is going to be a good year. I'm excited. I've started a National Security News website. I got back into that with another journalist named Sean Naylor, National Security journalist, wrote a book about the history of J-Soc. It's called The High Side. So we're on there now. We're working on stories for it. I don't want to tease too much and get people disappointed. But I mean, there's some pretty big like operation, past operations. You know, we're working on some stories. about that.

I texted Dimitri when I was trying to buy your, when I was trying to get your book, and I searched your name on Apple Books, and there was like 50 fucking books that you wrote. No, no. I wrote four novels years ago. There's some other Jack Murphys, maybe? There is. So there's a quote-unquote masculinity expert who uses my name. Oh, really?

Yeah. His real name is John Goldman. He uses the name Jack Murphy. And, yeah, he, he. He's a curious cat. He's a masculinity. A masculinity expert. Yes.

And he had a whole, he had a whole, um, a whole scandal like a year ago. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. I want to see what this guy looks like, Austin. Yeah. So, yeah, Jack Murphy, um, blew up on this girl on a podcast and was like telling her to go fuck herself. And so then like all this stuff started leaking out about him, you know, the gay porn and. Oh, really?

Putting, putting things up his coal shoot. Uh, yeah. So how did this stuff come out? Listen, I wasn't a part of all of that. I just got, I just got the nasty grams. This is him? Yeah, I just got, I got emails from people who are looking for him. And they were sending me emails.

And they were like, I'm going to fuck your whore wife, Jack Murphy, you cuck. I'm like, you got the wrong Jack Murphy. Sorry, sorry, buddy. This guy's name isn't really Jack Murphy. Why the fuck did he steal your name? What a dick. Yeah, well, I mean, his real name is John Goldman. I'll leave people to speculate why he wouldn't want his audience to know that his last name is Goldman.

You can roll that one around on your room. So he's kind of like an old school. He's kind of like in the same realm as Andrew Tate. Bro, I don't know. I don't get it. I heard what do you think about the Andrew Tate thing, him getting busted in a, what was the country he got busted? Romania.

Romania. I heard from one of my buddies that one of my friends who thinks everything's a sigh up. He thinks that that was an intelligence. operation. Why? Because this was this was his reasoning. I'm going to try to regurgitate this as accurately as I possibly can. But he thinks that China wanted him to be arrested. So China somehow did it deal with Romania to get him arrested, to either arrest him or kill him to put him away. So he could not keep growing his cult following and spreading this message of masculinity because China doesn't want the message of masculinity in America.

China wants American children to be stupid and weak and scrolling on TikTok all day, not trying to be men like Andrew Tate. Wow. That was his theory. Wow. Okay. I mean, yes, that reminds me of like John McAfee. Yeah.

Yeah, like going off the rails. Like the CIA is trying to steal my penis when I sleep, you know, that kind of. That's what he said? No, he didn't say that. But I mean, he was, he was like thought like, they're coming to get me and all this crazy stuff. He did say, like, not long before he died that if I die, I didn't kill myself. Yeah, I think a lot of these people have like delusions of grandeur. That's a, that John McAfee story is an interesting story.

Yeah, it is. And, well, Jack Murphy. That's not your Instagram account, though. The fake Jack Murphy. This Jack Murphy, John Goldman, he should have to shave his beard. and send it to me in a small box. Yeah, that beard's a little. He should be denied my name.

Denied. That's awesome, man. We'll tell the people that are listening and or watching where they can find your books, where they can find the podcast. Oh, there's your Twitter. Yeah, that's where you can find all my shit posting on Twitter. At Jack Murphy, RGR. You know, the book, Murphy's Law.

That's on Amazon. My novels are on Amazon. I write for a website connecting vets. I produce podcasts for Stars and Stripes called Military Matters. Again, the high side is a news site. I'm in the process of standing up with Sean. And then the podcast is the Team House. The Team House is on YouTube.

It's on wherever you go to find podcasts, and we're live every Friday night, 8 p.m. And what is the name? What does the name come from, Team House? It's just where a Special Forces team operates out of. It would be called the Team House. Oh, okay. And that's sort of the vibe.

we go for in the in the show is that the the feeling is that you know like you're at a bar with like some old you know veteran you know knocking back a few scotches and he's telling you some stories about his career and who is the guy that you do the show with david park david park yeah dave uh dave has a very eclectic background uh he was in the marines who's a navy diver he was a army ranger um he's done all kinds of cool stuff in life actually that's amazing fantastic podcast highly recommended. I'll link it below. Awesome. Thanks again, man. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me on the show.

Absolutely, man. We've got to do it again for sure. Yeah, let me know. All right. Goodbye, world.