Julian Dorey Podcast - #311 - Delta Force Spy on Hunting Bin Laden, Warlords & Double Agents | Gary Harrington

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

SPONSORS: 1) Evil Goods: Click HERE to get 30% OFF EVIL GOODS! Whipped Tallow Honey Balm - https://evilgoods.com/julian PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Gary Harrington is a former Delta Force Operator, Green Beret & CIA Officer. GARY's LINKS: IG: https://www.instagram.com/therealgaryh/ GARY'S COURSE: https://powerofprudence.com/ WEBSITE: https://www.garyharrington.net/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 – North Carolina Childhood, Military Calling, Skipping Classes 11:35 – Risk Taker, Dale Comstock Fight, Delta Force Selection 18:29 – Marines Enlistment, Supernatural Experience, Anxiety, College Pitch 30:01 – Marine Recruitment, Platoon Commander, 2nd Lieutenant 37:29 – Beirut Evacuation, Sabra/Shatila Massacre, Refused Bombing Order 46:02 – Ambassador Clash, Intel Ignored, Gary Gets Pissed 58:01 – Kabul Vehicle Trap, Rotating 10 Board, CIA Mistake 01:11:02 – Beirut Rule-Breaking, Taliban Flip, 2000–2001 Warlords 01:26:03 – IED Locals, Bribery, Flipped 29 Taliban, Kabul–Pakistan Drive 01:41:32 – 2002 Kabul Chief, Bin Laden Safehouse, Tora Bora 01:51:41 – CIA Base Setup, Nate Chapman Death, Warlord Deal 02:06:19 – CIA Double Agent Bombing, Agency Marriage, Revenge Plot 02:24:59 – Pacha Khan Situation, Intense Exchange, Wild West Reflection 02:34:10 – Weapons Raid, Afghan Bonding CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 311 - Gary Harrington Part 1 Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A couple times in my career I've had the job where you are tasked with getting rid of somebody. His name was Pasha Khan. Once asked the CIA guy to have a meeting in the middle of the valley surrounded by mountains on every side. And we're waiting for this guy to show. And he's not showing. Then I start noticing that the civilians are disappearing. So I went to the guy in charge and I go, hey, this ain't right. There's something going on. We're being set up.

And the interesting thing was, signals intelligence had picked up al-Qaeda radio communications, they had an ambush in place, trying to surround us and attack on us. Now I'm like, yeah, I just need to kill you. How can I do this? We're in this guy's thing, surrounded by his people, and there's just a handful of Americans.

And I couldn't figure it out, till one day it dawned on me, my role for use of deadly force, if I feel threatened, I can use deadly force and We were at this mountain pass Pachacan is sitting to my left and I start yelling at and he wore a pistol You know shoulder host I'm gonna kill him right here. Well, what happened was Hey guys, if you're not subscribed Please smash that subscribe button and hit that like button on the video

And if you don't have time to watch this episode right now, no problem. But I'd really appreciate it if you would save it to your watch later playlist. Finally, if you'd like to follow me on Instagram and X those links are in my description below. Thank you. I was just down in your neck of the woods last week in Carolina. In Boone? Yeah, yeah, I was, I was up at, I was like, I guess about 45 minutes up the mountain outside Boone where there was no cell service whatsoever and just no people.

Yeah. In that whole area, cell service sucks. And it's, did you go by like Grandfather's Mountain up there? I just saw mountains. Or the swing race? I mean, it was, it was very pretty. I don't know what they were called, but there were a lot of cliffs. And if you drove into them too fast,

you felt like you were gonna go over like one of those goats you see on the videos, like all along the edge, but. Oh, you know, they filmed that, the final scene of the last of the Mohicans up there. Really? Yeah, that thing where they're running up the hill for that final battle in last of the Mohicans

that was filmed up there in blue. No kidding. Yeah. It's a good thing I didn't know that. We were up there shooting, I would have been yelling out last Mohican calls the entire time. It's a good, very, very beautiful area of the country, though.

Like, I never realized that North Carolina was that. I mean, I guess I just had my head stuck up my ass with this, but I didn't realize North Carolina had mountains like that. Very cool. It is, though. People that grew up there, like my parents on the side of those red clay mountains, have a little bit different view. How so? Well, because they grew up, you know, on the side of the red clay mountains have a little bit different view. How so? Well, because they grew up on the side of the red clay in a log cabin where dirty, muddy roads

you couldn't get in and out of. So getting out of the mountains was a goal for them, right? As they were growing up to see something else. But I still love it. You go back there, like when I see the Blue Ridge and you start getting back towards there, it just feels good. You start feeling peaceful. It takes you back a little bit.

Yeah. Did you grow up like shooting out there? No, it's really odd. So I grew up, both my parents were born in log cabins, the whole outhouse thing, and I grew up with some relatives that still had that. My dad used to borrow my grandfather's mule to plow the garden at our house. But my dad was not a farmer. He was the generation, he was the first of his family to graduate high school and get a job. So he had a job, irregular, you know,

nine or eight to five job as a installer for a Western electric. But then we on weekends would go back home or he, we lived on a farm for a while and he would still travel during the day and in farm at night and on weekends, just small stuff, you know, a garden kill a hog, kill a cow. So you have the food, but they, or the generation that wanted to leave the farm and try to make a better life. I take it that was your dream growing up too.

And no, you know, cause first of all, I think I was lucky. I met my father, uh, just to go back to what you were talking about shooting. So my father was busy working and he grew up shooting squirrels, eating squirrel, eating rabbit. We had rabbit traps. So sometimes we would eat a rabbit. Fortunately, I only had to eat squirrel like once or twice. We didn't have to. Um, you know, everybody says everything tastes like chicken, but I gotta be honest.

I don't care for any of us and as many weird things about as I've eaten in other countries, if it looks, if it looks like a skin to cat, it's not fun to eat. When I'm starving for survival exercise or something, yeah, okay, I'll eat it, but is it fun? Hell no. I'm not going to try it. I just, you know.

Maybe after a few drinks. But so we didn't grow up hunting and, you know, we had, again, we had a garden and a cow and a hog and once in a while a rabbit. But so I didn't grow up. I didn't grow up with anything about military or shooting or any of that stuff Then what made you want to do it? What made you want to do it? Well, I grew up watching John Wayne, Audie Murphy, The Lone Ranger, all those were your heroes And me, you know, I grew up I was a little Toe-headed, scrawny, skinny kid starting at age five, wore thick

glasses and all. I had those heroes. That's who I wanted to be. But I was really a hyper, fast, skinny, scrawny kid. I grew up catching a lot of crap from, uh, bigger folks, other folks. I was, I guess I did well in school, so I was kind of always ahead of where I should have been for grades and stuff. So I was always smaller and, um,

way I grew up was there wasn't a lot of self-worth and stuff. So, you know, I went through life. At some point in high school, I guess I started getting, now I know it as anxiety attacks, where I'd start to go into a certain class and then suddenly my heart would start pounding, breaths start coming quickly and I didn't know what was happening. I just knew that as the closer I would get to that door of that class, the more overwhelming fear was trying to grab me.

Then one day I just turned and walked away from the door and skipped the class and it was like, Oh, that was good. So that became my habit and I started skipping. And so yeah, I skipped a lot of class and I went from being like one of the top students rated people in my class to the bottom, failed 11th grade and stuff like that. Whoa, you went all the way. Yeah, but you flipped the story here. Yeah, you skipped, but I was cool. And I think that's when maybe I should have known

at that time that I had what it takes to become later in life a spy. Because while that scared me, certain things about certain classes had caused me anxiety. When you get called to the principal's office the next day to explain where you were during that class. Somehow I always was able to create some story that they would not be able to refute and get away with it. What was an example of a story you would have?

Sometimes I used to go out and I help like the maintenance guys work on the football field or on the track or something. And then sometimes I jump in my car. My first car, by the way, purchased for $600 in 1974 was a 69 Chevelle super sport convertible. That's a good one with the ladies. Oh, no, no, no ladies wanted in my car. I grew up, you know, Junior Johnson, NASCAR, that whole thing, moonshiners, my family did some moonshine. And, um, we, uh,

so driving fast was my, I told you, I was extremely shy. I didn't have much self-worth. So my car was my deal and there is no burning body in their right mind that wanted to get in my car with me. Cause it only into you one thing and that was fast. And until I lost my license and all. You lost your license? Yeah.

If you're under 18, it used to be in North Carolina, if you're under 18 and get your second ticket, it's an automatic suspension of your license and all that stuff. I ran from cops successfully once in my life. And it scared me enough that I decided not to do it again but Anyway, we were taught we were so we're talking about Spy skills when you're a kid. So yeah, I could make up stories and get away with it Well, then the problem started occurring in 11th grade that it because I was skipping school that I started making bad grades

Well, my family never really cared because I had always been a straight-A student no matter what So I knew the A's and B's were at least expected so so I wouldn't get caught at home For my skipping I walked into the principal's office one day and started talking, chatting with the secretary. I noticed she had blank report cards on her desk. So I'm talking to her and just like, oh I've got these questions and I had some papers in my hand. So I dropped my papers on top of the blank report cards and talked to her a while. And then I thank her for helping me. And I pick up my papers in a few blank report cards and walk out. So, uh,

A, A, A, A, A. Yeah. So when it's time to take your report card home, I had, you know, report cards that I could take home and, uh, and have signed. And, um, then I would copy their signature onto the real report card and turn that back in. And that worked until, uh, I didn't account for the fact that at the end of the year, when school ends, they don't send the report card home with you. They mail it home.

Oh, you didn't learn how to intercept the mail. I didn't think about that. That's by 101, Gary, come on. Well, I know it's just the whole after, you got to get the whole thing, right? The whole back end. Pay off the whole the whole thing, right the whole Mail guy that's what we do in Jersey so Yeah, they got that eventual report card that had all the whole year's correct grades on it So let's just say it was a little bit of a surprise to my parents

But the academics are going wrong because you're skipping essentially not because you didn't excel in it Like you said you you were always getting straight A's so obviously like you were a smart guy But like you're talking about spy skills though, which came later. Yeah, but it's I always like taking risk like I was always that guy that if somebody dares you, I'm going to do it. If somebody threatens you, I'm going to respond. Whether it's been in military schools or whatever. Del Comstock saying you got to box them. That's just because if people bother you long enough, you get... We're guys, right?

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you can get 30% off your Evil Goods order when you subscribe by hitting the link at the top of my description and that link is gonna be EvilGoods.com Julian. Once again, you're gonna get 30% off when you subscribe by hitting the first link below. So check out Evil Goods and check out Jake's channels while you're at it. Did you kick his ass? I need to know.

No, I would never claim to kick Dale's ass. But I did get lucky on the one time that I sparred with him. I admit I expected him to clean my clock and he was much faster and quicker and experienced and we started but I got the lucky left jab in right to his nose and it stopped there. And I got to be honest.

It's a humble way of saying I kicked his ass. He's gonna be so pissed I brought this up. No, he might have a different version of it, but here's the truth of that. I walked away like kind of shaking my head like that's not how it's supposed to happen. Cuz I fully was planning on getting my butt kicked. Because I'd had a Golden Gloves boxer on my team that I used to spar with once in a while. And he used to clean my clock all the time.

Was this when you were in Delta? Yeah, in Delta in A Squadron. The other guy was Charles Jerrickson. He was a Golden Gloves? He'd been a golden gloves boxer That's a badass people in that we're gonna get to it Yeah, a lot of badass people obviously like we were talking before we had Dale in here before and then we've had other guys who weren't Delta but you know army Rangers green berets all these different special forces guys And you know everyone's got their own style and there's different clicks in each unit,

but they're all pretty hard motherfuckers, if you don't mind me saying. Yeah, and they're different guys. It's funny because later in my life, when people hear you've been in Special Forces or Delta, they look at you and they go, you're not that big. It's kind of like the Roadhouse thing with Swayze. The truth is, yes, sure, there's those guys, but most people aren't. I think a lot of people misunderstand what it takes to get through or what they're looking for. You've probably had other people talk about that. These years uh, you know, I, it,

these years there are actually camps that people go to to prep for seal team, to, to go out for seal team or special forces. And I know people that pay and go to these camps or hire a trainer to do all that. And you know, my day, that was just unheard of. You're fit, you work hard, and you show up, take the test, and see. Yeah, I've had so many different personality types across those guys in here.

You will have everything from a Taylor Kavanaugh slash Dale Comstock, who's like hardcore in your face, the whole bit, to someone like Dan Corbett who is just Right here, which you're very similar to as well like unassuming doesn't walk in like he's gonna bench 450 pounds But when you get him talking you realize okay That's a guy you want on the battlefield when you go out there like there's something about you guys Very quickly like when I'll talk with you for three four or five minutes, and it's like okay I see there's like they're just built a little different.

But I do always ask, you know, whether it be the SEALs or some of the special forces guys like always ask what trait you think it is that's most important to be able to get you through to make it. And I always get a different answer from everyone. So I'd be curious to know what you'd have to say about, let's say, Delta Force and getting into that. Well, it's kind of the same for all of them.

And I think a lot of people have a misunderstanding. They think it's a tough guy or somebody that's got physical, is real strong and fast and all that stuff. I was a distance runner when I went in. But really what it is is who is tough. And by tough, it's really funny. I will talk about that later on a dating app. One of the things that hooked me up with some girl at a Nashville one time was this thing about being tough. But I think tough is not how much you can deal out, it's how much you can take. So in a lot of these schools, it's how much physical and mental stress can you take, lack of sleep can you take, ridicule can you take,

you know, being humiliated and still stay focused and never quit. It's that no, I will not quit. I will keep going to the end. I think that Delta Selection is designed to bring that out in people. I don't know the criteria for the cut because that was always the secret that only one or two people knew. I've worked at Delta Selection a couple times, you know, helping administer it and and put the students through, but I was never involved in who makes it and, and put the students through, but we, I was never involved in who makes it and, and who doesn't. You weren't. No, but yeah, but I,

it took me twice to make it through. That's the only thing I ever had to try twice. Um, but yeah, I ultimately think, you know, it's not who's the fastest times and all that. It's they want to see who will dig down and just keep, keep giving. Not to be stereotypical, but it's essentially like the Rocky Balboa model. Like it's not about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get and keep moving forward. Yeah, that's, you know, yeah, I think that's probably mostly it.

Yeah, I've had some interesting answers on that, but there's a couple that come back to, as they'll all be different, but they'll come back to an idea of grit, and I think that's part of what you're getting at. What can you take and how can we break you down? To build you up to be a super soldier and that's what ends up happening So anyway, we were we were talking about though

How got on this tangent talking about how you first got interested in the military dogs before you were Delta? You were obviously like a Marine and all that. So how did that come up? Well, you know this goes so I I told you about how I did in high school. So the picture that might have at this point is here is a person that maybe outwardly is vocal and tries to hide the fact that inside they're full of anxiety and self doubt, um, low self worth. anxiety and self-doubt, low self-worth. And I have to go a whole lot into this, but during that summer after I had failed 11th grade, I was at a Fellowship of Christian Athletes camp.

And during that time is when my parents got my report card, found out I failed. This was the days before cell phones. So while I was at that camp, a call came to the camp that said, please have Gary Harrington get to a phone at some time and call home. And so I did. So I realized there was some music to face when I got home from that camp.

And they couldn't make me come home right away because I'm the one that drove the school bus up there. So they let you drive a school bus in North Carolina during my day. If you were 16 and licensed, you could drive the school bus and drive the other kids. I know I think about that. I go, like, man, there's no way now. Yeah, I don't want you driving a school bus up those mountains. That's all. It's hard enough driving a car.

Yeah, but I did. During that time, I had a, what do you call, religious experience, one of those things where, I know it sounds crazy, but I saw something and heard something. Not like I was asleep and dreamed something or I thought something. I actually had an experience where I saw something and heard something and you know the message it was a time obviously I was quite distraught about what had happened where things were at that time I didn't know about anxiety or anything I didn't't know why I was skipping school. But the message I heard from this thing that appeared was, you know, don't be afraid. I

have a great purpose for you. What was the thing that appeared? Well, it's funny because I was in, it was nighttime and we're up on a mountain and during a break from the lecture hall, I walked outside to be, um, I wanted to be alone in the, in the woods and yeah, you know, I was distraught. I was, uh, I was probably, probably at that time considering whether my life was worthwhile, whether I shouldn't, you know, uh, if it was worth living or not.

So I just wanted to be alone out there in the woods and then I'm out there and I'm, you know, it's nighttime and I, And then I'm out there and I'm, you know, it's nighttime. And I, I see like up in a distance here, like it's like, Oh, this little kind of like glowing light thing, little thing is appearing. Well, that's odd. Look at that. And then I'm thinking, and then as I do, you know, it's like, it's like, it starts moving a little bit. So I mean, I'm, I'm a rational person.

I think through things. I'm like, Oh, maybe this is a swamp gas. Maybe there's this or that. But as I'm doing that, this thing is starting to get a little bit bigger and it's moving. And a sense of peace came over me and I couldn't understand that, right? But I'm now I'm curious and I'm saying, well I'm on the side of a mountain so it's not a swamp gas and it's the way it's doing it's not some reflection and about that time you know this thing starts coming

down closer to the ground and it's getting bigger and bigger and brighter and brighter to the point that you know out just a little bit from me, like five, 10 yards away, but it's so bright that now I'm not curious and peaceful. I'm scared to death. This is something that's, you know, it didn't seem like it was of this world. And to be honest, you know, I was frightened. I felt I dropped down to my knees and, you know, and then that's when I heard this voice coming out of, you know, the light.

It seemed like there was, you know, something along the lines of a person somewhere inside, you know, emanating from that person. Yeah. Well, I, I couldn't really tell. I was afraid to really look much, you know, it was right there. And, um, and then I heard that, you know, the first thing was, don't be afraid. And then it was, I have a great purpose for you. And then it got kind of, you know, gone.

And I'm like, wait a second. Wait a second. Come back. Yeah. What? What? What was that? And the first thing, because I grew up hearing about these rural Church of God guys that said, I heard a voice from heaven and that called me to the ministry.

And I was looking at that and I was, I claimed to be a Christian, but I was certainly not one that lived that at that time. Or if you listen to my talk around the locker room with other guys, you would certainly not think that. Locker room talk. But after the... But after it left, I was like, crap, does that mean I have to go be a preacher? Because I don't wanna do that. You don't wanna do that.

It doesn't involve killing people. I'm not doing that. Well, and at the time, that wasn't part of my schema. But what it did was change me, and it gave me a different lease on life in that I felt, okay, there's something I'm supposed to do. I have no idea in hell what that is, but there's something I'm supposed to do. So I go through life and I kind of overcompensated for whatever anxieties I had. I was became became really outgoing and sought dares and risky things to do because it made me feel like I was brave. Did that terrify you at all though? Because you're putting on a front, like you said, but you're still going and doing the

literal opposite of what your mind is telling you to do because you're usually trying to run from things because of anxiety. So is it like, holy shit, like, I'm doing this right now? Well, it's odd because I've realized that it's some ridicule, some other stuff about, you know, women probably kidding. I got as a kid from my parents and stuff that, that the anxiety I had was about people and what people thought about me. There was never anything like when I would skip school and lie to the principals or take a dare or do anything like that. Those things never scared me. Oh go up to anybody, say anything,

do anything, and it didn't scare me. But thinking about what people might think of me caused me those problems. To be honest, I probably never really got over that. But what happens, I go on through college, and while I'm in college. Where'd you go? I went to Campbell College. Now it's a university, but when I went, it was Campbell College.

They had to make it sound more official now? I guess, maybe it reached a certain threshold. We used to say, people ask, because nobody heard of it, right? Where did you go to school? And I used to say, people ask, because nobody heard of it, right? Where did you go to school? And I used to say UCLA. And what's that? It's the University of Campbell. It's between Lillington and Angier. It's just podunk towns. It's a small Southern Baptist University, like 35 miles away from Fort Bragg. I didn't even know, I'll tell you my high

school career, I wound up there because of running and their coach came up to me after a cross-country meet and said, hey you're not the best runner in the state but you're pretty good. My college isn't the best. But I... What a pitch. Campbell, mediocre. Yeah. But he goes, but I can get you in. And I'm like, with my grades, you can get me in? And so without him, I go, sure, I'm there. Well, I guess when you average out like ninth and 10th grade with the Fs, it kind of brings it up to Cs. So I showed up at that college and I actually did not know it was a Baptist college. And I remember I was 17

when I showed up. Back then, drinking age was 18. And I remember some upperclassmen making fun of me. They said when they realized I was new, hey go up to the lady, it was old lady in the in the student union running the cafe. They said, order some, order us some beers. So I go up as my 17 year old deep voice, excuse me I'd like four beers. And that older lady she must have been her 60s or so. Ch chuckles and looks at me she goes, son you're new here aren't you? She said this here is a Southern Baptist school,

you get kicked out if you drink. And I didn't even know that I was going to a Southern Baptist school. But I learned the hard way. Well I was in school and Southern Baptist school, but, uh, I learned the hard way. Well, I was in school and running. I got approached one time by a Marine Corps officer selection officer. There are the guys that go around to universities trying to recruit for the Marine Corps officer program. And you know, this was a guy, he was a big, big blonde headed guy, V shape, you know, striking guy.

He goes, Hi, you're Gary, I've heard about you and sports. He goes, I don't think you're tough enough to do what I got in the Marine Corps. It's too tough for you. And he said, Matter of fact, I challenge you to a decathlon and you can pick eight of the events. And I'm looking at this big guy, I'll run your ass off, you know, and I started thinking when all these guys, but it was kind of like, uh, I see now his opening to say he would challenge, but you know, he had me when he said, I don't think you can make it.

I don't think you're tough enough. That's a dare. Yeah. So I said, I don't think you can make it. I don't think you're tough enough. That's a dare. Yeah, so I said, oh, yeah, where's the paper? I'll sign that paper. And that summer, I went to what's called platoon leaders class, which is like a six week introduction to the Marine Corps, where it's mostly yelling at you and drills, some initial combat stuff, and I loved it. And then for me,

what had changed my trajectory was it dawned on me like, hey, wait a second. This is it. This is what that thing on the side of the mountain, that event meant, that here I can go into the military. And that event meant that here I can go into the military. I can be like my childhood heroes. And they're telling me that odds are you'll get killed as a platoon commander, whatever, if we go into combat. So, yeah, maybe I'll get killed. But this is my thing. This is that purpose that I'm supposed to have.

You weren't afraid of the death factor, then? No, that's the easy thing. I think to be successful in combat in the military, once you decide, you make that conscious decision that you're willing to pay your life, then everything becomes a lot easier. So I think a lot of us fool ourselves, because you think about dying,

but now with all the traumatic injuries that we've had from the GWOT, and you see the people with missing arms and legs and are all messed up, and none of us thought about that. And I mean, look, I know a lot of SF guys that, hey man, if I get like that, just put that bullet in me because I don't want to come home like that. I like to think I wasn't that way, but it's just,

you never figured that part, but dying, hey, I'm going to go down hard, but I'm willing to die. So for that moment on, I thought this is what I'm supposed to die. So for that moment on, I thought, this is what I'm supposed to do. Now, I'll be honest. I could say this was my God-given purpose. And I think now when I look back on that time, I think, oh, no, that was my easy way out.

Easy way out. Yeah, because if you don't want to face your issues or whatever about anxiety, you can play the hero. And if you walk the walk and talk the talk and do the deed, that's what you are. Maybe inside you're the deed, that's what you are. Maybe inside you're different, but that's what you are to the world. And it made me able, you know, hold my head high and seek those risks. And, you know, to be honest, I kind of think, well, maybe it wasn't really God's purpose, but it suited

mine pretty good. Had you like, because you had that experience when you were 17, right? So had you, was it the kind of thing where it just got compartmentalized and when that guy walked up to you, you're like, oh yeah, this is it. I connected it where you hadn't really thought about it. Or was it something that you were kind of thinking about every day as almost if you're looking for the sign when it's going to show itself. Well, during that first summer, I think they told you that the old fashioned Marine Corps landing from a ship to shore, it's a 52% chance that

you're going to die. And if you're the leader, you're the first off the boat, so 52% chance. So I think it was hearing that, I was like, oh yeah, this is it. I'm supposed to, I get to be a hero and serve my country, serve my fellow man, I get to be a hero and serve my country, serve my fellow man. I get to lead men and try to take care of them

and save their lives. If it costs mine, okay, so it does, but that's a good deal. You know, I mean, when you're focused on what does your life mean? And unfortunately, you know, I went through a good chunk of my life where that's what you, how you weighed what your life was worth. And I wouldn't say that's the most healthy thing to most people to have a rounded life. You went through most of your life saying your life meant this because you were doing something where you could die at any moment for

Yeah, most for a good deal of it, right? Okay. Yeah now when you When you go in First of all, did you do the decathlon with the guy? Did you know we didn't because I think once he got my name on the block, he did his thing. So it was a trick. So yeah, I think he told me how he would have gamed me during that. And then I think we came to an agreement that on all the strength things he would have won,

but on the two distance runs that I would have made, I would have won, but on the two distance runs that I would have made, um, I would have won, but, uh, but he was showing that he wasn't afraid to challenge me on my turf, right? So that made me more ready to accept his challenge on his turf. So did you leave college to go? No. So you do that, the program I did, the summer of my, maybe it was my sophomore year, I did six weeks. And then the following summer I did six weeks and then that qualified me. So in December of 1979, when I graduated college, I got commissioned at graduation as a second lieutenant in the

Marine Corps. Whoa. So did you go, do you report to a base? Yeah, you go to Quantico. Oh, you go to Quantico? What did they have you do at Quantico? Well, Quantico is where the officer's basic course is. So all Marine officers get their initial training at Quantico.

And then after that finished, I went to the Marine Infantry Officers course, which is also there at Quantico. And then after that, I went to Camp Lejeune and became a platoon commander there. Now, did you see combat pretty quickly or? Nah, I did not in the Marine Corps. So I showed up on active down at Camp Lejeune in 1980. And nothing much was going on in the military at that time. Yeah, post-Vietnam. Yeah, and everybody was anti-military at that time.

I did go. I spent a year in the infantry. And then after that, got asked if I wanted to go to recon. And so I did that and took another platoon, recon platoon. And in 1982, we went out on a ship on a six-month float, and we became the first people to go into Beirut in 1982. Oh, during the bombings and all that? Yeah, during the Israeli offensive.

So we were that first people. The first time I went into Beirut, we evacuated non-combatants. Some American, a lot of French and Cyprus. Can you type in US Navy Base, Cyprus? We'll get the name. Bless you's on it. Cyprus, Evangelikos, Floracus Naval Base?

No. Type in US Navy Base. Yeah. US Navy base. Yeah. US Navy base, Italy. Naples. It's Naples. Oh, in Italy? Yeah.

Okay, so not Cyprus. Oh, yeah, I said Cyprus. So I'll go back so you can cut that part out. No, no, it's all good. It's all good. So we evacuated those noncombatants, mostly British and French, the first time. And I think we did take them and drop them off at Cyprus. Hey guys, if you haven't already subscribed, please hit that subscribe button. It's a huge,

huge help. Thank you. Then we got called back into Beirut to evacuate the PLO. And really? to evacuate the PLO. Really? Yeah. So we set up a perimeter and we were controlling stuff. There were some French foreign legion there. The Israelis were there. How did they feel about you evacuating PLO? Well, the PLO, that was a whole different thing because I'm a young guy, right? because I'm a young guy.

I remember I saw the car with Yasser Arafat in it. And all his people were afraid that the Israelis or somebody were going to try to kill him while they were, say, would come to a checkpoint. And then we would impross our greed them and then they would go to the ship where they were evacuated from and I remember when his car came up that all of his men laid on top of the car so it was just a sea of bodies on top of the car and then and they drove there I remember thinking as I stood there beside the car went beside me that wonder how much of the car and then they drove there. I remember thinking as I stood there beside the car,

went beside me that I wonder how much of the world's problems I could end if I would just... I think we've learned there's always someone to come up right behind them. There's always someone to come up behind them. What did you make of that? Seeing that though for for the first time because you're going into a place for people You're giving some context here But obviously there was as you said an enormous offensive going on a lot of people had died I guess right prior to you getting there like you're going into a war-torn area for the first time What was that like? Well, it was nothing like the training we got in the Marine Corps

It was all combat and here here we are, peacekeepers. And that was my first time ever interacting with a local populace and civilians. And I'd go out on a Jeep, and you'd run into an Israeli checkpoint. You'd have to negotiate with them, maybe run into French, negotiate with them. So it was kind of my first kind of free flow, wide open environment. And after we evacuated PLO, we pulled out and went to Naples, Italy.

And we were supposed to get some leave and vacation, be able to tour Italy. But after we were there several days was when the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps happened. We had to suddenly load back up on ship and head out. Can you tell people what that was who aren't familiar? Yeah, so there were a couple refugee camps in there and so Israel was still occupying most of Beirut at the time. When we got there, I mean, Beirut was just in shambles, right? It then really bombed out. out a lot of death and destruction. And in these refugee camps, someone came in and massacred people. I think some blamed the... I can't remember if it was the Druze that were in

the camps or blame the Druze for coming in and killing the people in the refugee camps. Yeah, you're saying Druze's to be clear, not Jews. Yeah. Yeah. The D R U Z E Drew's sect. So I wasn't sure who, who did that, but that, that put us there. And then, you know, we stayed there, um, till like November of 82. And then we're replaced by other Marines. So the barracks that ended up being bombed in 1983 became the headquarters building. And the funny story about that is they started moving everybody into that building.

And I was, okay, I kind of got known in the military as a non-compliance person and a rule breaker. And I was like, that's wrong. I'm not moving my guys in there. So I didn't. And my mission that I'd been given was because I had a reconnaissance platoon. So what are you going to do in peacekeeping and reconnaissance? We were supposed to protect the span of beach where the Navy ships would unload

supplies to send to the Marines on shore. So there was a stretch of sand. Well, the thing is that, you know, the beach was down on a low level and then the road above it was elevated. So we were in a real extremely vulnerable place. So I built a giant sandbag machine gun positions. Um, I have some of those on my computer that I could share with you later, but, uh, I have some of those on my computer that I could share with you later, but that were parallel to the road so I could put a hardened machine gun placements to defend us from any attack.

I know that at one point I used to go to the nightly meetings there in the building in the barracks that got bombed and the Colonel one night said, you know, had everybody say, okay, you're all moved in. And he, they came around to me and said, are you moved in? I said, no, sir. And then he looked at his, uh, chief of his, uh, operations officer and said, I thought you told me everybody was moved in here. And he goes, I told him to get his moved in here. And he goes, I told him to get his ass in here and, uh, Mr. Non-compliance over there. And then, and then, and then the,

but by now, by this time that, that Carlin charging you me a little bit, and he looked at me and he goes, is that true? And he hadn't directly ordered me to move in there. So I just said, I was told that my job was to cover this sector by observation. I cannot observe it from inside there and I have to be able to rotate people on and off position. So that's best done by me occupying that spot. And I didn't move in. And the people that replaced me did. And most of them died. Oh my God.

But while I was in Beirut, I think I had my first time where I ran into politicians. And I think I had my first time where I ran into politicians and it was the first time that I saw where politicians can outrule or overrule what makes military sense to keep people safe. How'd you come across that? So I told you that the road was up high so So I built these, um, sandbagged positions and you put machine, you put one at each end and then you put machine guns in each position. That gives you ability to put on flating fire to repel attacks. Well, um, in order to build up and make those safer,

I got these big shipping, wooden shipping containers that stuff from the ship came in. And we built a small cubicle in the sandbags with that. Then that enabled me to stack sandbags on the outside. And then we lifted the lid up higher with two by fours and I was able to put a roof on it and then put a couple layers of sandbags on that roof. So why don't you do that? You do that because that prevents them being vulnerable to overhead fire, somebody throwing in a grenade, shooting an RPG in. I mean, it's a critical thing to help keep those Marines safe. I remember, I'm there in charge and one day a limo drives up and stops and some guy in a suit gets out

and he walks over and he's talking to the you know, the Marines. And then I see him point to me down there, you know, and I'm in my UDT shorts and probably no shirt. And they motioned me to come up there. So I walk up there and this guy strutting back and forth and he's saying, is that wood? Is that wood inside this? And I said, yeah, that's wood. The suit guy said this. Yeah, the suit guy said that. And I go, yeah, it's wood. He goes, that makes it look like

you're planning on being here forever. And I go, no, that makes it look like that's what keeps people from getting shot. And he goes, no, I don't like that the wood thing. You need to take that down. And I looked at him. I go, you know, who are you? He goes, I'm the U S ambassador. Oh no. Yeah. I go, yeah. Well, you're not wearing a uniform. I mean, come on. I was 20, 25. I'm just picturing you in shorts, shirtless, and probably dipping the whole day behind this bunker. I didn't dip back then.

I didn't dip. Matter of fact, I never really dipped. I actually too caught before I dipped. No shit, old school. Yeah, yeah, when in Yemen, right? So. That's it, I'm gonna use that. No shit. Old school. Yeah. Yeah. It went in Yemen, right? So, uh, that's it. I'm going to use that. But the, uh, yeah, I didn't, I didn't understand cause I thought, you know, the person that can order me around is a Marine higher ranked than me.

So he's like, boy, and he get that really somehow my remark really set him off. And, uh, And somehow my remark really set him off. And I said, I said, I'll take that down as soon as I am ordered to by someone in my military chain of command. So he jumped in his car and left. Oddly enough, about 20 minutes later, a call comes on the radio, and this unhappy Colonel, radio and this unhappy Colonel Harrington. And yeah, so I got ordered to take that down. And you know, the thing that stuck in my head was so here now we're saying that the Marines in this position have to be vulnerable because we think it makes it look too permanent. And that was my-

Isn't that funny how they do that? They care about how things look from some office with a suit and the guys out there who know their shit like you, apparently they know better than you. And you know, I understand, you know, now I've served in a lot of countries and I understand that we have bigger objectives.

And my purview and scope is military operations and my mission. So I understand that. But I've been involved or seen a lot of tragedies like Benghazi, Beirut, some other attacks that. Like the USS Cole, some others where it's like those kind of actions and that kind of mindset are what leads to those. I understand that sometimes political needs out, I mean, we're military, you'll risk your life to do the mission, but those decisions should be made fully weighing the cost that it might cost in lives.

And to me, that reaches a point where you say if the probability is that much increase that somebody could die, then the answer is that has to take priority over that political messaging. I feel like if we're going to play that game of how things look, it also matters how the thing you think it looks, how it looks. What I mean is if someone's what if someone like you is walking down the street of Beirut, I don't know what something crazy using a fucking flamethrower because you're like, well, this is gonna keep people off me. Yes I would probably be with the ambassador if they said let's not do that because that's what's called propaganda right there But if you're doing something very subtle and simple I would think like using wood to create a shield so that motherfuckers don't get shot. Yeah That's what you're taught to do

The government sets up programs so that the military can teach you guys how to create a fortified position, what safety precautions must be taken so that you don't lose extra lives, right? Beyond the lives that are already going to get lost just because of statistics. It's like when I hear stuff like that, that's where how it looks is so granularly over thought, you know? And it seems like, you know, you and I were talking off camera a couple weeks ago, it seems like you ran into stuff like that quite a bit, unfortunately,

throughout your career. You do, I think it's just a reality, particularly since we haven't been in a war like Korea, World War II, maybe to some extent Vietnam in a long time, that we have the luxury of these. It's not an out-and-out combat zone. It's low-intensity conflict in a lot of places, so it's mixed. There's civilians in the mix. There's State Department, military agency, aid organizations, all that kind of, everybody's thrown in there.

So the lanes and the road get kind of confused. And actually to the defense of some of the people who will sometimes be stuck in the suit saying these things that I'm also kind of ripping right now, they are dealing with these now too. And everyone's got one of the—I'm holding up a phone for people listening, not watching. And you can make a video look way worse than it is or way better than it is depending on what that is. So obviously you weren't dealing with that when we're talking about 1982 Beirut, but today I will admit, you know, I still think something like that would be stupid,

but what would happen with you would be stupid, but there are other things where it's like, damn, this could really, this could get spun the wrong way, and it creates a tough decision because, you know, maybe you're gonna lose lives if you don't do a basic thing, whatever that thing is, but you know, you're gonna lose hearts and minds if you do that thing Well, then if I go back to the end of my career or later in my career that I've been the guy in the suit

You know on the other end of that and every once in a while have to make a call and I have other guys Now that are in the same boat that I was in all those years before. And now I have to make a decision because I'm responsible for their lives too. But you've been there and you get it. There's got to be some level like, because I'm sure you can speak their language and work with them on stuff, whereas some other people who have never done the thing, they can't do that, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's different. When I became in the CIA and was a case officer going out, you know, you have in war zones, you have the bodyguards that are mostly SEAL and SF and Ranger guys, a lot of them who I worked with before in my career.

And now they're the bodyguards. And, you know, the staff officer supposedly runs the thing, and they were in the meeting and they're kind of in charge. But really, you know, the guys taking you out, they're responsible to keep you safe. They're the ones that are going to take action to eliminate a threat, avoid a threat, escape the threat, get off the X if, uh, if something happens. But it was funny because I knew a lot and we,

we had a really good relationship, which is funny cause you get the wannabe case officer that is the new guy wearing his orvus clothes and he shows up in a war zone and he's got all this, you know, now he's got a gun and he's got or she has a gun and and they get to put on magazines and stuff and they think they're gonna go out and save the world. And I remember once a guy in Afghanistan, he knew my background, and he said, well, I've got 12 magazines for my rifle in case something happens. And he goes, how many do you carry, Gary?

I go, I don't know, four or five. Both. That's, you know, the people in combat, that's not a combat load. I go, I know, I'm CIA. We're CIA. Our job is not to fight. But what happens if you're in a plane and it goes down and you have to hold off hordes? I go, I'll figure it out. And every once in a while, every once in a while you get mortared or rockets come to the base. So they sound the alarm and you go to a bunker. And I remember the first time, this is the early days, like 2005, five or six and in Afghanistan and you know guys I remember a guy that were in the office and the alarm goes I gotta grab my my gun and get to the place I said I'm just going to the bunker and he goes aren't you gonna

go to your hooch and get your rifle? I go, no. I go, trust me, the last thing these professionals up here want is you behind their back with your one week of training. With a desk pop. With a loaded weapon, itching to pull that trigger. Excuse me, it's in the pull that trigger. And that's and that's how I treated it, you know, and the guys we go out is funny. I once had a vehicle get stuck in the mud in Kabul. But the guys I had a good enough working relationship that the guy driving the vehicle go he'd go, hey, Gary, we're going to have to go find something to dig this out.

Can you pull security? So I took over their job and pulled security while they went and got somebody and started digging the vehicle out. And one of my goals, they would let me in their hooch where the security guys had their little ops center inside the big place where the agency guys stayed. And I'm maybe the only, or at least in my time, regular person that they let in there. But you hadn't been. That's why.

Yeah, because I didn't ask to be. I didn't, you know, it's like, but it's mutual. You'd done what they did, effectively. Right. Yeah. And some of them knew me. And my past stuff, like, as a military guy, I did some stuff with the agency in Iraq

and some other places. stuff like as a military guy, I did some stuff with the agency in Iraq and some other places. So they, uh, like, you know, people knew, knew me. And my big deal was to try to stay off their board of the big 10 because they had a white board in there and it would be, it was a rotating thing and it would be the 10 most stupid things that a case officer has done. And there were some doozies. What was an example of a doozy? Well, some of it would be people that, you know, the want to be a gunslinger and do that. One, you know, because the case officer would

go out and they would carry, didn't have to carry a rifle in the armored car, they could have a pistol and the pistol would either need to be in the backpack or in a holster. And they were driving once, these two guys, and they hear something hit the floor, boom, like that, hit the floor. And then they hear a, shit. And what was that? I dropped my pistol on the floor and Your pistol why you got your pistol out and he's like I

Didn't even want to put it. Why is it not in your hole? Why is it not in your holster? I'm not wearing a holster Why are you not wearing a holster? And here's the answer. My boots are brown and the holster is black. Oh no. Oh my god. So uh... That's not a real answer. I swear to god. Oh my god.

I swear to God. Oh my God. And, you know, I mean, look, that's no, you know, it's just a difference when, you know, the agency runs, case officers run the ops, unless you're in the paramilitary side of the things and they just have a different experience. You know, a lot of people graduated Ivy League or a nice university and they come in and they have a whole different set of skills. Suddenly you drop them into a war zone where everything is vastly different. And I think a lot of them don't really understand what all is going on. But yeah, I just...

And look, everybody makes mistakes. I've made some and but I but I make it made me make sure that I did not want to wind up as being one of the people on that on that list. Yeah that's the kind of thing going on the list I feel like you were pretty safe. Well I was. My boots match in my holster. I did yeah I made my share like one time I'd been in another country and I can't remember if as maybe I flew to the UAE out of Afghanistan but I came back and landed at the civilian airport where and Kabul so it's a you know it's a dangerous trek to get from the airport to the Ariana Hotel where we were. And you submit your schedule and they schedule you and then an armored car with two of these

bodyguards is supposed to show up to get you. And I got to the airport, got out, I saw the little tiny old Afghan guy that was the guy that would pick up luggage and stuff. And I saw him and he was going to take my case. And I waited and remember if I could call by cell phone in, because I didn't have a radio with me. But I realized that my pickup had been dropped and not scheduled.

So this is where being too familiar with some of the guys that do the security stuff might hurt. So I'm like, man, you know, now I realize they're busy as hell. They're all running ops. There's a schedule. They're busy. You have to have a quick reaction force stood up in case.

So there's, you know, they're busy. So now if I contact there, somebody's gonna have to scramble something, cancel something, and come out here and get me. Here's this little Afghan, and he had one of those little micro buses, they had little micro vans. A micro van. Yeah, little tiny, you know, you've seen them in Italy,

those little tiny micro vans. Not well fortified. No, not fortified and not with bodyguards. And I didn't have body armor, a lot of things. But I thought, I'll just hop in here with the luggage and the gear and ride in the back of this guy's van. What could possibly go wrong? Not a thing. So I ride back and they pull up to the

security place and this was a well fortified compound. So you got the outer security which are good guys. Maybe not all of them had as much SF or SEAL experience as the guys that went out with you and did the bodyguard stuff. But some of them were new and they let the Afghan drive through and then they make him stop and they open the van to check. Now they slide back the door of the van and here sitting on top of the luggage is me and some guy who I didn't recognize of is somebody I didn't know opens. He goes, what are you doing in here? And I go, I'm coming back from the airport and he's like, huh? And like,

I don't worry about it like that. So I go on back. Well, and I start, you know, get back. I'm doing my job. That night, some guys from the bodyguard came and knocked on my door. They go, hey man, they're looking for you. I go, what? I go, they don't know who,

but somebody on the outer security reported that some guy with a Brown goatee, they here came in without body armor, without a weapon and not an armored car. And all that. I'm going on the white board. So, well, not from the security guys, but this. So now the bosses there, they're in the chief of security are looking for who it was. They go, when they described it, we go, that has to be you. Because I, come on, it's the war zone.

Everybody had a brown goatee, right? Just walk in the bathroom and shave it off. Problem solved. Yeah. and shave it off. Problem solved. Yeah, so I marched myself down to the head of security and said, Hey, I hear you're looking for... I go, Yeah, that was me. You know, so I took the but you and then and then they said, Well, we can't let this go because technically you being caught without wearing a body armor

alone could get you sent home. So they decided to write one of those letters and we're going to keep it in the file. And if you do something again, then we're going to do it. But yeah, they let me slide somewhat on that. Yeah, that's just living on the edge, it feels like. Yeah, bad. That's just you looking for that excitement. Yeah, because I know one time I got caught out.

I was at a meeting not too far from that hotel compound, and I'm supposed to get picked up at a certain time by the bodyguards. Well, suddenly the official who I was visiting got an unexpected visit from the French ambassador. And now I can't be caught in here meeting with this guy. So I panicked because his outer, he had a walled compound around his house and they're coming in through the front. So I'm like, shit, what am I gonna do? So I just said, ah, screw it. I ran and I hid outside and waited till the ambassador

and his people came in and then I just hoofed it. You hid outside? Yeah, I just hid. Like in the bush? Yeah, in the bushes. And then when... Man, she looks at you and goes, she looked to it.

That's terrible for you, sorry. So then I left the compound and it wasn't fired. To be honest, it was really close to the compound where we lived. So I just started hanging in the shadows and walking. I had my radio on me. But now my problem is, oh, how am I going to get in? Because there's a certain procedure you use to call in and get the outer security to recognize

the vehicle and then come up and get double checked and the vehicle through. So I'm calling on the thing and I start using the lingo. I, I use my call sign, um, which was banjo. Banjo. Yeah. I wanted different, you got all the gone Dorfs and the all the killer stuff and all that banjo cause when I grew up there was a famous race car builder named banjo Matthews. And I thought that's not like the big, you know, killer guy name is different. So I'll choose that.

All right. Fair enough. And, um, so I, I called in, I go, Hey, this is Banjo ready to enter a compound. Banjo, what vehicle are you in? I'm on my two leather sole modes of transportation. And there's this guy in the guard tower, tower and he's like, uh, it could you say that again? I don't understand. I go, uh, I'm on foot.

He goes, what do you mean you're on foot? And so, uh, you know, uh, had to get in at times. So then I had to, you know, explain myself as why I opted to risk my life and break all the rules to, to do that. And I said, well, the other thing was get caught. And, you know, this is supposed to be secret what I'm doing. So, yeah, that was funny. That's probably what, you know, one of the things that added to my reputation as a rule breaker, but an honest one. Yeah, an honest rule breaker. Yeah.

Because you're honest about breaking the rules. Yeah, if you call me on it most of the time, there's a few I never got caught on. But Watch you never get caught on. Now's the time to tell us. No one's listening. Yeah, we got, uh, yeah, I've had to, you know, sometimes, okay, let's go back to the Beirut story. 82. So later in my life, there were a time or two where I was given instructions that were sort of like that about running

ops in an agency, like one op in particular. Had I followed what I was told, I was given a couple of criteria. I'm happy we'll go into detail. But, so, I made a decision to not follow those rules, cause I'm the guy on the ground somewhere away from them, and I can make it now, I realize that's a career decision, could be. Career limiting decision. Or career ending decision. Both. But it made those calls. And then it causes you to become, I became a creative writer because when you have to write your ops

summary about everything you did, sometimes you have to carefully choose how you write something up so that you don't lie, but you're intentionally vague on some aspects of it. We let the air out of these individuals. Yeah, I never had that, right? So in the one we're talking about in particular, one of the ones was I did this op where I got a bunch of Taliban to turn to a hoi, if you go back to the Vietnam terminology, and basically surrender, and I processed them and ended up keeping a few of them and set up my own Taliban cell. Wait, so you turned them into spies?

Yeah. So what do you do? Do you go knock on the door to the Taliban, say, hey, guys, I'd like you to work for the USN day. Like, how does this go down? No, it's... Yeah, this was one of the weird things. And I think a lot of people were surprised that anybody would approve this

because it and the fact that we were able to do it without getting anybody killed was probably good. I had some contacts that had worked against the Soviets with some of the guys that were now Taliban. Mujahideen. Yeah, Mujahideen. Every good guy was a Mujahideen. Yeah, Mujahideen. Every good guy was a Mujahideen. Right. And so I had contacts in the Afghan government that were on the

military side. And so through that with the refugee camps in Pakistan, there were some Afghan refugee camps around Peshawar. Were big places that Taliban came out of. So basically through one of these people who used to fight for Jalaluddin Haqqani back during the Mujt days, made contact with some Taliban. And I basically said, OK, look, you know, we're talking like 2006 is time frame. So at that time, we were being pretty successful. We're up in the number of US and Afghanistan.

We're taking out people. The military is taking out people. So I basically said, hey, look, I'm willing to talk to you guys without arresting you. And it's a free chance. Let's have a talk. And now I'll let you go. If this doesn't work out, I'm free pass.

You can go back into Pakistan. And we actually got 29 to agree. How do you do that? Like you're talking about people who, the United States, obviously what had happened on 9-11 led them to be there, but the United States is in their country. Obviously what had happened on 9-11 led them to be there, but the United States is in their country. It's war torn at this point. These guys have had one experience in their life where they're a part of this group that is so different from everything we understand in our world and a guy like you comes from. How do you just walk in there and flip them?

You make it sound so simple, but psychologically, there has to be a lot going on there, obviously. Maybe some of it is personality driven. I had, in 2001 and 2002, when I worked with warlords and stuff there, because I was a combat guy and had some experience. Sometimes I had better success. I could go to a warlord and I'd help them. But if I had to pull them off to the side and say, Hey, if you do this, I'm going to have to come and see you in the middle of night.

Not for man Man Love Thursday. Oh my God, Afghanistan gets a lot of low blows on that man. No pun intended. But, but, and then, but you need to have the other guy like the guy I described wearing the Orvis clothes and all, you go to one of these seasoned guys that fought against the Soviets and try to say something like that, they'll kick you out. And so I don't know, I had some, maybe some credibility and I always believed, you know, to show I was unafraid. So when it came to get these 29 people, there was an illegal border crossing in Pakistan called the Torkham Gate.

And you can pull that up on the internet. If we can and Torquem gate. Torquem gate. How do you spell it? T-O-R-K-A-M or with a H. I wonder if that Alessi, I don't know if you would remember. Yep, that's it. I wonder if this is one of the things Safi was talking about where they would cross back over. Right? So there's a place if I don't know if the audience can see what you have up there. So that's the main gate and then off. Stay with the mic. And then if you look off to the, well if you can imagine off to the left of that picture, about a thousand meters away is a wadi and there's where the illegal crossing point is.

And there's, and there was just a line. I mean, it's almost like a highway where people don't want to pay the custom fees and stuff would do that. I'm sure Pakistanis were taking bribes on the other side and letting them do that. So, uh, these, it was agreed that these Taliban were going to cross at that point. Now I'm, I'm a little concerned cause it's unusual for a regular case officer,

which I was at the time, to work with ground branch or to work with the paramilitary guys. What? Work with who? Well, there's different parts of the paramilitary. I didn't hear anything. I didn't hear anything. So, but a regular case officer isn't supposed to.

They're supposed to stay with the bodyguards, which are kind of like adult supervision for case officers. But I was allowed to do this op with the paramilitary guys because the leadership in Afghanistan all knew me from wars before where I was the, the shooter. Right. Um, so, but there were only five or six of us. Now I'm going to bring 29 guys across. Do I know if they're armed and going to wait till they're with us and do one of

these, uh, you know, green on green, you know, suicide vest or shoot. And, um, so, but yeah, but you know, you weigh things and I decided that, okay, I'm going to bring them across and I asked them to come across one at a time and some space in between. And me and an Afghan, the guy I knew in the military would be the people because he spoke the language I didn't. And we were going to do the initial greeting of the people after they came across the border and walked a few hundred

meters up. And then I would send them from me to a smaller group of paramilitary guys that would search them and then take them somewhere to stage them until we could get everybody across. And then we were going to move them until we could get everybody across and then we were going to move them. I always had a belief, okay, this was a little bit of a chancey op. There's a lot of margin for guys that we think are bad guys to do something. It's my op. I didn't want I It's my op I didn't want anybody killed if anybody was gonna die I'd rather it be me a cuz then I don't have to answer the questions after You can't you can't I mean come on you can't second guess me or or

If you read your eulogy, they're like and luckily Answer to the fucking reporting you people in the front row right there. So, uh, and the way I would do that, cause you know, it was they would come and part of it was I wanted to show no fear and the tribal culture from Afghanistan and some of these other tribal cultures I've seen that, you know, if you're the head guy, you don't need the gun. You're not the shooter. You're the head guy. Now you have to have the experience and aware with all, but you know,

for me to be all kitted out like that would be, uh, I think detract from, from what, uh, how they would, would view me or respect me. So they'd come across, and the Afghan guy beside me would greet them. And we'd come up, and then I would do the traditional man hug and brush cheeks. But then while I'm hugging him, I'm doing this.

Hug, reach, patting him down. And you do the on this. Patting them down. Patting them down. And you do the, on this side and then that side. Well, mostly I'm feeling for a vest, right? I can see if somebody's going to go for a weapon because in those days, we all wore, locals wore blankets on the outside. But so I'll pat them down. Now I thought, yeah, so if they're going're gonna blow themselves up they'll have to blow themselves up with me and Not you know, not where the bigger group of guys is

And I that was how I did things anytime I brought an Asset or somebody I was working so I did during my years As a case officer in Afghanistan, that's five, six, seven, and eight. I worked some bad guys and I would always, before I'd bring them onto a compound to a room where I could interview them, I would always, generally the bodyguards search them. A lot of times for me I would search them first and the bodyguards trusted me enough that I could do that. But you would always search somebody because it's my responsibility. If I bring somebody on a compound, I'm responsible

for what happens after. As we see with Coast, that didn't happen. I have pretty strong feelings about that. Did you know Jessica Masters? Yeah. Well, let's come back around to that later because I'm not sure what I feel like talking about about that. But we'll talk around it or some aspects of it. Yeah, my friend, Joby wrote the book. I read that book after watching your podcast on there. And there's the thing I actually have something to add to that that's not in the book because the book tells part of the story. Um, you can look up, uh, Hussain al Yemeni cause I didn't see that mentioned in the book. That name sounds familiar. Hussain al Yemeni.

I've been on his Wikipedia before. Why? No, no, no, no, no. Al Yemeni like, like Yemen, but with an eye on the end. Yeah. Yeah. Why was I on this guy's page? Yeah, that guy got dead. He got what? He got dead. He got dead. Yeah. He was part of launching that attack. Yeah, there it is. On December 32nd, he was part of launching that attack. Yeah, there it is. On December 30, 2009, Coast Province, there was an explosion that killed seven CIA employees

and contractors. And it mentions at the top that he was a part of that attack. Yeah. So- We can come back to that. Yeah, we can come back to that. Yeah, we can come back. But that's, um, that part is my involvement, uh, with that. So, um, yeah, so several times throughout my, my career, I worked with bad guys like that.

Like once I ran a guy that, uh, would bring in triggering devices from Quetta, Pakistan, for IEDs, mostly vehicle-borne IEDs. You'd bring them in? Yeah. So they were built in Quetta, Pakistan, and his job was to bring them in. He was a low-level mullah, and his job was to bring them in and deliver them to the people that would get them to people that were making bombs. Maybe it's not the cool combat story. I was

a CIA guy. What are you going to do? I'm a white guy in Afghanistan. How am I going to affect this war? I just thought out of the box with all my years in the military and all, right, and I thought, well, I seemed to do well with locals and people trusted me. So when I got an introduction of this guy, people trusted me that if I say, okay, look, I'll meet you and I'll give you one free pass. I'm not gonna arrest you. I'm not gonna try and kill you

unless you do something wrong. And then we'll see if we can work something out. And I spent time learning Pashtun Wali, which is the tribal code of the Pashtuns and how villagers do and how... So basically I learned if you want to get a guy to take a bribe, here's how you have to offer it. Mm-hmm. Cultural customs.

Yeah, cultural. I didn't insult them. I could fit in. And that enabled me to be able to walk in and make proposals to people. And they were more received maybe than some other people's would have been But I figured you could say it's a like if I'm giving money for a triggering device Is that really helping the war but how I looked at it was any triggering device if I give a hundred two hundred bucks for? That's not going into a bomb equals lives saved. Yeah, it's taking pieces off the chessboard. Yeah. And me trying to get him arrested and turn on somebody bigger, I didn't look at that,

at least not during the time I ran this guy for about six months. He knew who you were. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it was a pretty good deal. Now you do have precautions to take because you're going out to meet a guy carrying, you

hope not explosives, but detonators, small charge for the detonator and all that. So I did that kind of stuff. Real quick, if you don't mind, I do want to go back to the 29 guys, Taliban guys you turned. I was just getting to the story of bringing them across the pass and all that. But back to when you first go in there, is there anyone in there who you're speaking a common language with that is in English? That's the first question

No, okay. So are you working through a translator the whole time? Well, we had translators that we worked with on this op I Had my own Contact within the Afghan military that that was doing that for me. Okay. So from, just like take me there. When you walk into the room, I don't know if it's all 29 at the same time, but when you walk in the room with-

It was 27, so it go back to that. 27 came across. I'm like, where are the other two? And the guy kind of in charge of those guys said, well, they're in fighting positions hiding here in Afghanistan. So we actually drove to a couple of places in Afghanistan. Don't let that one in the report. Yeah, that one didn't go in the report. going. You know, so we, we, uh, we actually, you know,

drive and then I send somebody out and then he come back with this guy. Now look in the end, was it possible that these were just poor villagers that said, Hey, let's play Taliban. Maybe we'll get some money out of this. And that's always, you know, that's a chance that you have to take. Um, later, you know, That's a chance that you have to take. Later we were able to do some follow on ops through some intel that we developed with these guys that proved that they had at least some level of contact.

But the funny part was, so we start gathering these people and the paramilitary guys are searching them And now we're gonna put them on a bus and we need to transport them from you know north of Jalalabad if we can pull up a map of Afghanistan and See the from Torquem gate from Torquem gate to Torquem gate to Kabul So I'm gonna have I'm gonna have to transport 29 bad guys

to the capital of the country Yep, yeah, not do directions to Kabul Like we're gonna drive You and I'll do it later or less. Four hours and 44 minutes. You want to talk about a trip? Well, you're driving, so it's three hours and 44 minutes, right? No, because that, not that. But so- Seems safe. So the government doesn't know that this is happening. Nobody else knows. So I have the danger of what happens if there's only a handful of Americans?

So what happens if these guys turn on us or start killing civilians? Then I had the flip side. Well, what happens if, cause my, I had a few Afghan army guys too that were going to help me with driving and stuff. And, um, or what happens if somebody starts shooting at the, at these other guys? Cause now I've got, you know, people that we, nobody knows the status of that people at under my control are killing. So it was kind of a, I needed to protect them from outside forces, but I needed to protect everybody else from them. And you know, I think when it started, nobody in headquarters really believed this was going

to work, but they were like, Hey, Gary seems to be successful at all this other weird stuff that we let him do. So let's get, let's let him try. Um, but the night before we left to do that op, you know, I had gone down to Jalalabad and stayed at the base there And I was launching out of Jalalabad with the paramilitary guides to go do this. Um, and, uh, the night before we left, they call me into the little headquarters room and say, uh, they're on the line and want to talk to you. The chief in Kabul does. So he goes, Hey, uh, or actually it was his deputy. He goes,

um, a couple of things. You can't have the, the agency trained local Afghans. I've seen, I'm sure you've had other guys talk about the forces that they trained and did ops with. And, um, so they trained and did ops with. And so there were going to be some of those guys as well in some key roles driving along with a handful five or six paramilitary guys. So the boss told me, yeah, Washington DC got involved now and everybody's really concerned about what you're doing.

And so there's two things that you have to do. One is you can't have the guy that works, that was trained by us driving that bus because I was going to put all these people on a bus. And I was like, I have to have a guy that is under my control driving the bus because he has to have a radio. He has to know who he has and he has to

be able to follow our directions and I've got to have communications with the other vehicles. And they go, I don't care. That came from Washington. You can't do it. So, you know, I'm not happy about that. And then the other one was my plan was to put a truck that had two paramilitary guys in the front and a few of the force that they trained in the back with a machine gun on it. One behind the bus, one in front of the bus. So that's my protection and if I need to

kill the guys on the bus then that's we can use that too. So you know and that's because we're now we're gonna move this long arduous trip and there is some truly bad mountain passes and cliff things that have, you have to go up. How's the infrastructure in Afghanistan? You know, it's great. It's like, uh, yeah, it's about like it is in LA right now. Gotcha. So, but-

Mad Max Fury Road. But, well, so, so I'm, you know, and there, these are people telling me, I gotta have, how can I react? And so then the guy starts saying, no, you have to be back. And I said, well, I'm not taking it from you. I want to hear it from the boss. And the boss said, yeah, you got to do it. I told him to tell you.

So I was pissed. So I said, okay, so then how far away from that bus do you want me? Is it 200 meters? No, that's probably not far enough. Is it a quarter mile? Is it a half mile? Is it 200 meters? No, that's probably not far enough. Is it a quarter mile? Is it a half mile? Is it a kilometer? What? What do you want? He goes, well, you'll figure it out, but it has to be far enough that there's deniability and that we can't do that. So that was one of those times where I'm like, yeah, okay, sure. So I go and talk to, um,

the paramilitary guys and tell them and they're like, well, shit, we can't, you know, and I'm like, I know, can't do that. But now I put myself back in the shoes of that young second lieutenant talking to the ambassador. And I go, but now I'm in a position where I can, I'm sort of like where the Colonel was to me, I can impact this. Yes. So I talked to the paramilitary guys and what we decided was the guy that was going to drive the bus, they called him in and they fired him from the force

that he belonged to, that they had trained. They said, okay, you're fired. We kick you out. And then five minutes later, we hired him as an independent contractor He belonged to that they had trained they said okay, you're fired. We kick you out and Then five minutes later. We hired him as an independent contractor to drive the bus and But but they call that a back door, but but right I Thought okay that one I out Foxed him on that. We got that one. But then the thing about the gun trucks and all, that was one I just said, man, no, no. I'll get chewed out later. Yeah.

The gun trucks can be up on the bus. He's like, Brad Pitt, I've been chewed out before. Probably gonna get chewed out. Yeah. But, so yeah, so with all that happened, we end up, you know, taking off with that. And what the odd thing was, you know, it starts moving at night and then we get to the point where you climb this really arduous pass with cliffs and all, and we get to the top. Now it's pretty late at night. And I'm in some in this Afghan officer's personal car, not armored car, you know that stuff.

I think I had permission that time to be in a non-armored vehicle. that time to be in an armored vehicle and You know, I've got the gun trucks and we get to the top of the mountain out of this pass and Then they call a halt and the Peru military guys come to me to go. Hey, you know, we're out of our territory now We have to go back to Jalalabad and I'm like Well, that's me and this military guy in like four Afghans in 29 Taliban. Right. And they go, and I was like, yeah, okay.

I guess we just drive. And so they went back and off we went and, into Kabul and eventually get him into this basement safe house that I had acquired in downtown Kabul. I remember calling on the phone and to the chief there, I said, hey, this is Gary. I'm back here in town with all these guests. We're here in town. And he's like, you're here? And like, well, how do you get from there to here?

And there's no drivers. There's no plane. There's no other. Yeah, I'm here. Don't worry about it. Yeah. I think by that point, I think they were kind of like, yeah, maybe sometimes it's best not to ask the question you don't really want to answer to. But yeah, so we did that and had those guys there.

But that was the case where you had to weigh that cost of, cause I mean, and really those were career decisions. And if anything had gone wrong, um, you know, that probably would have been a career ender. You think a lot of it though, like, cause this is the second half of your career, you would, you had been an operator for so long and had been so accepting of the complete life and death situation that you could be put in at any moment. Do you think that, I don't want to say you get numb to it, you don't get numb to it, but do you think there's an aspect of it that it's like you just get used to the fact that

this is the game, that's what it is. These are the stakes. Oh, well. Yeah. Well, you get that inshallah attitude where if God wills it, here you go. I think you have to be that way. But you do need... I always planned my option. I took high risk, but I tried to always have my backups and think through thoroughly and pay attention and make timely decisions. There's times I've walked out of Al-Qaeda ambushes because just paying attention to say, this ain't right, we got to leave. Do you have a story for one of those you're able to tell? Yeah, sure.

There's the guy that happened to be the chief in Kabul at the time, the story we just told. In early 2002, I was a military guy in Afghanistan. And so I wound up being loaned by the head of Task Force Dagger to he had, let's see, he didn't have complete faith in the operational ability of all the agency folks in Afghanistan. When they were running the paramilitary ops. When they were running the jawbreaker stuff, paramilitary ops. Right after 9-11. And we, you know, the stuff with Mike Spann, some of the other things were not great. So what he started doing was putting me on agency teams and then

use me as to kind of vet that team before he would agree to send special forces to be with them. That started in Toro, for Toro Bora was my first one of those. He wasn't going to give them a team for, he was reluctant for several reasons. And then somebody on that team said, you seem to have a lot of faith in this Gary guy. If we take him, will you give us that team?" He goes, yeah. So on a handshake, I was transferred over to that team. And we went to Jalalabad and hooked up with the agency to go up to Toro Bora. And was that your first time really working with the agency at all? Let me think how I can answer that. No, I did, so I started doing like, as a soldier. And so I coordinated with everybody in the embassy in my role there. Which includes agencies. I don't know, I have no idea

whether or not there are any agency people in me then. So they knew who I was. But when you're put in Tora Bora, when you're put with this team, is it safe to say that's your first time being all immersed and constantly around the clock working with them? Yeah. around the clock working with them? Yeah and I was with an ODA at that time and we were supporting ops there. So like in Toro Bora our task was and we were in OPs. I was on an OP. We were calling in the bombs. We had two OPs where we were trying to get the lucky bomb that took out Ben Laden and all that stuff and suppressive fires, just trying to take out people.

My first thing with them was I ran a like you get trained in your special forces training. I ran an aerial resupply or that or some C-130s came in really low at night and dropped all these cases of ammunition and winter uniforms and stuff for us to outfit the locals to go up to Tora Bora to be able to withstand the weather and take the fight up there to Tora Bora. That was my first time dealing with the locals up close like that in Afghanistan. And I did the whole Toribora thing for the OP there, came down out of there and was staying in a safe house in Jalalabad. And it was a place where Bin Laden had been before. I actually found in that safe house, still have it, it looks like they took a military operations manual and made it over into Arabic. It was a how-to tactics manual in Arabic.

Oh, so they like those ideas from the infidels, huh? I guess we weren't all bad. Right. Well, come on the the Mujahideen, right? We're the ones that really enabled them to be successful against the soviets, you know, that was their biggest claim of victory up to that point. How'd that work out? Yeah The way it does is pretty kind of the way it does everywhere we go meddling. Interesting you say that. I think you and I are on the same page about that. But it all comes around, right?

So yeah, we, so I was on that team. But then while we're in the safe house, there's a radio call that comes in and says, tell Gary to show back up in Uzbekistan at the headquarters and report to the Colonel. All right. So I talked to the CIA. I hitched a ride on one of their planes. It wasn't American Airlines flying out of there? No. It wasn't American Airlines flying out there. No, it and it's funny because

It seems so mundane, but I'm not allowed to identify that the plane I'll tell you this it was colored white. It was a white Air Canada for this. No, it wasn't Yeah, it was a it was on mark,, and then I had to hide on the plane cause I didn't have a passport and ID or anything on me. That doesn't matter with the CIA. So yeah, I had on the, I had on the plane till they did their cursory walk through and then they put me on a helicopter, an agency helicopter. And I got back to the military base and went to see the Colonel.

It was almost like one of those movies where by now I've left and we were staying in bombed out bunkers and Soviet hangars. Now I come back and there's a big giant plywood two know, buildings and stuff like that built. And I walk in and all these people at their plywood desk and I go, Hey, where's the Colonel? And they go, come back there. So I go into his room and you know, he shakes my hand, shuts the door. And he goes, need to talk to you. And he had some questions about some things that had happened in Toro Bora. Some internal questions about some things that had happened in Toro Bora, um, some internal, uh,

things he was trying to work through and what did my opinion about some things. So we talked about that and he goes, well, now there's a new agency team and you're on it. And I, okay, where's it going? It's going go open a place called Coast. So, I go, well, how do I get on this team? Oh, they're in Kabul now. You're supposed to get yourself back into Afghanistan and go join them. Are we still in 02 right now? No, I'm in 01.

You're still in 01. Yeah. So, you did all that in Tora Bora. Yeah. It's still like, yeah. In December, in December. And now, I mean, literally, like, you know, if you talk, if you looked at most of these agency teams, the jawbreaker teams or the SF teams, they went in for one week, two weeks and out. Like if you look at the movie 13 strong, they were in there about what? Two weeks total. Something like that.

Well, yeah. So I was in Afghanistan before Toribora. Then I was there through Toribora and then I, you know, I spent a few hours in the Colonel's... I said, well, how soon do you need me to get back in Afghanistan? He goes, yeah, now. And I said, well, I need to repack my rucksack. And kind of refigured my rucksack and then hitched a ride on a helicopter by myself and got back into Kabul and then got dropped off at the Ariana Hotel and said here I am. Next thing you know I'm on this team to set up coast. That's going to go into coast. Right. Nate Chapman was on that team.

So there wasn't a base there at the time. No. And you guys were going to build that. Yeah. These initial teams were the ones that, that started the, those bases. That's actually a great question. I've never asked anyone but now feels like a good time first of all you find so The obvious point is you identify a spot where you're gonna want to base for some sort of strategic purpose So command identifies coasts for whatever reason or they identify a friendly warlord that will cooperate with them that Supposedly can produce a enough men to be a fighting force. Okay.

We'll add that to the mix too. Once that decision is made though, and you go to this, I don't know, open field, open area, whatever it is, and you're like, we're going to build a base here. You're talking about a CIA base in a foreign country that is going to have nothing but classified things happening there. I would imagine you don't just call the local contracting company in Afghanistan to come build that. Like, who literally, not to ask a stupid question, but who's laying down the sandbags?

Who's hitting the nails in the wood here? And at first, there's none of that. That's what, for me, I really like those early days because you go, there's nobody. It's you. There's nobody to your left. There's nobody to your right. Yeah, you're not going to have a lot of help come save you if you need saved. But, you know, But, you know, we stayed in mud huts. We stayed outside. Mud huts? Yeah, mud huts. We would go pay some local. You hand some local some cash. And, you know, I want to stay this. Once in a mountain pass, I wanted to build, to reinforce a fighting position and the trucks coming

through with a load of wood on it. I go, I want your wood here, here, take some money. And they were more than happy to let us have it. So you make do originally with nothing. And then as things build up, then you get that whole supply. You start getting logistics guys come in, you start getting security people come in. Who are the logistics guys? Well, the agency has all that stuff on there. And then later on, and things get bigger, there are companies that contract. But the agency has all that support thing. At one point in

2006 when I was in the agency now, in Afghanistan we had grown to over 700 officers across the country. And I flew back to headquarters one time and they knew that I'd been there in 2001 and two and five and six. So they, and somebody called me up a senior person and said, how the hell do we go from when it was 15, 30 people to this? And I said, well, everybody has a good idea. And you say, well, I want five more case officers to do this.

Then where am I going to bet them? Where am I going to house them? How am I going to feed them? Where's that train? And I said, it's just exponential, you know, that whole supply trail that comes in with it. That's how we wind up. I think it wound up with over a thousand officers in Afghanistan probably at one time.

That almost seems low to me too, but it's a lot. It's a lot, yeah. But I liked those initial days where you go in and you're there to make the decision. There's nobody looking over your shoulder. No reports to file. Yeah, So I did that in Coast and then in Coast we had a fight between two warlords and after Nate Chapman got killed the agency decided they wanted to go with who they felt was the stronger warlord. Who was Nate

Chapman? Nate Chapman was the first Military guy he had been loaned to the agency So he was the first military US military guy to die in Afghanistan What happened you got ambushed? The team coast a few of them went out to meet this warlord, a different warlord than the one we came into town with. And on their way back, they got ambushed. Somebody fired their AK on automatic into the vehicle and it wounded one paramilitary

guy. and it wounded one paramilitary guy, got a second chest wound. And Nate Chapman took some rounds in his thigh and it got his femoral artery. And he, you know, eight minutes later he was, he was gone. Um, but the, those two warlords were feuding. So they wanted, they wanted to kill each other more than they wanted to help us. It was turning into a big nightmare. So I had the bright idea, um,

that, okay, let me go talk to this guy. So I told the one warlord, you're originally from a place called Irgun. And it was further away up in the mountains, right across from the Waziristan in Pakistan. And I said, I tell you what, if you will go back to Urgun, I will go with you to Urgun. And I'll bring some guys, and I will bring special forces people in to work with

you and that's your power base anyway and let's let's do that." So he said yes. So next thing you know here I am an army guy long to the agency and I'm making this plan then the agency goes, hey we'll buy into that. Warlords, sign us up. Well, and then so they assigned some people to do this whole thing going to Urgun. That was with the warlord there was Zia Khan, as they would say. And he was a real seasoned, tall, thin guy

from fighting the Mujahideen. The other warlord he had been fighting with was a guy named Pasha Khan, who later became a parliamentarian. We actually think he's the one that ordered the ambush that killed Nate. And yet the agency ended up working with him and he was a horrible, horrible person. I spent a lot of time, I almost went to think I might have been close to spending time in

jail because I spent a lot of time planning on how to kill him. On your own? On my own. How were you going to do it? Well, that's a story for after Orgun. So we go to Orgun and that was a whole other thing because now I've got, you get trained in special forces about making infill and inserts and how you do that. Well, now we're in this country and Al-Qaeda have just left.

We've just left. They're on the run from Tora Bora. So they're everywhere. Now I'm going to go to some place where no Americans ever been. And I'm going to trust some of these guys who are probably more friendly with them than they are the Americans. And I am going to eventually get on a helicopter and fly a US helicopter to an unknown spot and land with who knows what.

Easy. And what a big victory for them just to be waiting with some machine guns and RPGs. How are you going to run that infill? That's not how you're trained in the military. Right? What do you mean it's not how you're trained? About how you're going to trust the locals and how are you going to do all this. You have to be creative.

For me, I trained a guy that spoke no English, what we needed for an LZ. You know, what kind of terrain was suitable for an LZ. And I'd go out with him and practice looking and have him, you know, I showed him some, then I would have him choose some. Then I had to teach him how to use an IR strobe light. And just to mark it, that's something from far away, you put the IR cover and then the pilots can see it wearing night vision, but you can't on the ground. And it's a distinct marker to help you find the LZ.

So I run him through all that and then I give him a Thoraya and we work out this thing. There's through an interpreter. A Thoraya? Thoraya. They're commercially available satellite phones. And yeah, early days, Afghanistan, Iraq, yeah, the ANC went through a lot. I can imagine a lot. Um, so I gave him a Thoria and I sent him up there and I'm thinking, okay, how can I just,

how can I give myself a little bit of insurance? So the plan I had was that, okay, you find a suitable LZ and then after I tell you through the radio, the Thriya, to mark the LZ, then I want you to go out that night, and between these hours, I want you to turn on that strobe light and wait for us. So I have him do that and we didn't go because I'm not gonna tell him what night I'm coming. I just tell him every night. Once I tell you then every night I want you to go do it. So part of it is if they had bring I wanted to leave a little uncertainty about when we would come. And then my next thing I thought of was, oh, I went to some relatives of his, some, it was a kind of a 20-ish year old guy. So I got some of his senior uncles and stuff and said, oh, by the way, I'm putting them on

a helicopter with me when I come. So, you know, deal with this. You know, if you want to shoot... I hope you had a good relationship with them. No, it's like if you shoot my helicopter down, you're going to shoot them down. And if you shoot me, you know, maybe something's going to happen to them. Yeah, but if they're going to leave all their money to him, they might shoot you. Yeah, they ain't no money then. We had the money. Yeah, but these were the days. It was cash-taught. Like when I have been back, that time I went back to the headquarters, I'd left. One of the things I had was a backpack with a whole bunch of money We're talking, you know more than a million dollars like air sealed kind of deal like yeah

Yeah money Comes in ten thousand dollar twenty-dollar bricks and we all have these images of just like, you know Planes landing on hangers in the back opening up and some dude not even in a suit Just like walking out with like bags of cash being like Yep, put that right there. You can imagine a lot of people have this image right now of Ukraine, but back then I mean before social media You get away with anything. Yeah. Well, I can tell you now that a million dollars in denominations like that is about

What's that 14 16 inches by? square and maybe that tall. It's about 20 pounds, give or take, I think. Yeah, I don't remember the weight. I had this guy, Tim McBride, who was like a legendary pot smuggler, and he had everything weighed down to what it was. Oh, yeah, sure, because I was explaining. He's like, dude, hiding cash, very heavy. I'm like, what do you. Yeah, he's like dude hiding cash very heavy

I'm like we mean and he's explaining like the weight that each of them is cuz you know I never carried more than like five six grand of cash at a time But you think about it and adds up with hundred dollar bills and whatever it gets it gets out. Yeah. Yeah I mean I've looked around just backpack stuff with little backpacks, stuffed with 500,000, 300,000. It'd be surprised that much as weight. Just lugging it through the streets of Kabul. Another country. You know, another country.

But anyway, so yeah, I didn't tell him. And then finally one night we show up in the helicopter land. I have everybody else stay on the helicopter and walk out because I figure well And I had told had one guy cover me. I said hey if you see me dive on the ground start shooting And I figured that out but then And that started the base in Coast. How many of your guys were there the first day when you're like, here's the base of Coast. Is it you and two other guys? So there would be, so there were probably initially six, seven of us that went and started.

Real quick, sorry to cut you off, Gary. I just want the visual here. We can't play it, but can you pull up the scene from Zero Dark Thirty where it depicts this and before the car blows up, I want the... Yeah, I think that's it. Before the car blows up, I just want you to pause it on the far shot, where you can see the full base, if you know what I mean. So go...let's see.

Should I show this? No, no, no. Don't show this. Let's find the spot. I can actually do it. Let me just grab this. Okay, don't show this. Let's find the spot while we're doing it. I can actually do it. Let's grab this. He's pulling up. Boom, boom, boom. That's what I want. Okay. All right, so we have a pause and you need to put this up.

So right now we're seeing, you know, this is a recreation obviously. It's not the exact bass, but we're seeing the car of what would be the bomber pull into this bass that's got all kinds of concrete set up and different ways to... Yeah, the serpentine, then there'll be some bars somewhere and a fence. This is a much, much later iteration of the base. I first went in the coast.

There was nothing. We stayed in an old school house, concrete school house. Then after we wanted more secure after Nate was killed. So I'm one of the people that scouted out the airfield, which is, I think, where the base wound up being. So when we first went to the airfield, there were some mud huts outside of village, beside the airfield. And we,

and I have photos of all that stuff. So we started out in those mud huts, and then I brought SF in and they come and then we needed more security. So like an infantry unit came, the first Marines came. And they would always bring something. And they bring in stuff and they bring tents and things start growing bigger. Next thing you know, showers are being made.

In 2001 and 2002, I spent five months pretty much constantly in the field in Afghanistan. In that time, I only got to a place where there was civilization a couple of times. But in those five months, I had five showers, but all five showers were in two days. Because I was so nasty. I got somewhere, I got showers. I took three one day and two the next. After we came down out of Toro Borja to the safe house, there were 11 of us sleeping in a little concrete room.

And maybe it's the fear and the physical exertion going up to Toro Bora and back. I don't know. You don't know how bad you smell until there's 11 of you in a cooped up place, but you'd be in there. So we're sleeping on the floor and sleeping back. Just cold as hell, snowing. And, uh, every once in a while you'd have to go outside to pee or I tried to every two weeks boil heat some water and I thought you're gonna say I tried to shit every two weeks yeah so the um um, but when you go out to pee, you know, you're in the fresh air and you'd walk back in that room. Oh yeah. And you'd start retching from

smelling us. Yeah. And you would literally physically, you would retch, but you know what? 30 minutes later, you're sitting there eating an MRE Movie where the plot takes place before like 1950 yeah, this is constantly a thought in my head like what the fuck do these people smell like oh You watch like a Revolutionary War movie or like oh bad in there I I know cuz it it was, I mean, I couldn't believe that. Then it dawned on me, yeah, then after you get used to it, you're in here eating.

And I've never smelled so bad that I was once down inside my sleeping bag with the front cover over trying to get warm. And I woke up in the middle of night because my own stench woke me up. And that's why I've thrown away sets of clothes in Afghanistan at five months. I rotted through my first set of clothes. My jeans literally rotted off of me. Yeah, I've got a couple- You smell great today. So yeah. Well, I got a couple of pictures where I'm wearing some local look like pirate pants picked up from some local village or something even that thing about like being on old ships probably a lot less fraternization but yeah like how are you

doing with your life? I'm doing it for the first time. I'm doing it for the first time. I'm doing it for the first time. I'm doing it for the first time. I Probably a lot less fraternization Like how are you even even like when you're talking about being attracted to a woman if you both smell like shit Like you know what I mean For me I like women smell good and when I smell good, too. Yeah, I'm sure it works that way. But we're talking about coasts. So yeah, first, it was the it was just the dirt. And that didn't grew into this much bigger iteration that Yeah, yeah, we have it on the screen, right, LSE, so people can see this right now. So this again, this is a recreation of movies. This isn't the exact right, but this is the right when the car was blown up. So they're doing

Catherine Bigelow is doing a far shot of the base and you just see, you know, housing and barracks and and it's it's like its own little town or whatever. So this is 09 when this is happening and you're there in 02 when it's nothing. It's like when the dudes walked out in Vegas for the first time. It's just a desert. It would have been mostly shipping containers because they the agency started sending in shipping containers and they were you know, I guess a contractor built them. They were housing units and they could stack them and they would have stairs going up to them.

I mean they were decent right? Some to them. I mean, they were decent, right? Some of them were kind of like bunk houses that people there for temporary duty would room in. If you were permanent, you got half of one. If you were staying somewhere, like you got a portion of that shipping container was yours. I actually spent my last year in Afghanistan there with an agency wife. Agency wife?

Yeah. I married somebody in the agency. Oh, you're another one, huh? Yeah. You guys do that a lot. Well, there's not many people you can talk to. Yeah, but we'd spent like so That the one that's the ring on your finger right now, or is that no no, that's yeah My friends

Some folks guys that have known me for a long time said Gary. Why Did you ever, after the first wife from the army that ended, they were like, and you got married again? And they go, Gary, why every 10 or 15 years, just take everything you own and every penny you have and give it to some random woman and it's the same effect. So 2008, we actually had our own shipping container that was our home. With showers.

It had a little tiny bathroom and shower in it. All right. So it smelled better. Yeah. I mean, so you're, I mean, look, the agency isn't going to be like those early days. And to be honest, most agency people and army people, it's one thing to go in the field for a week, two weeks, three weeks even. But month after month, it's, it, you know, you're not meant to take that. Right.

But you set up this base. You were one of the guys who was sent in to set up what became a, unfortunately, infamous base. Yeah, so I helped set up Jalalabad, then I helped set up Coast, and then I took off and went to Argun, and that became a big agency base. Right.

Now you said Argoon was where the story was that happened that then you were planning to kill a guy. Well because I split him. Nate Chapman got killed in Coast. Okay. So, the guy that most people believed were responsible for that, I mean, right after it happened, I wanted to kill him because I thought he's the guy. And I'm like, this is war. We don't have the burden of proof. Let's just kill him. And I wanted to do that with a missile, putting a Hellfire missile into his place.

But that's not what they wanted to do. So I split off and go to Argoon and I start a base in Argoon, build that up, and I'm doing a bunch of cool stuff in Argoon and then you know I get another radio call and it says the Colonel now says he wants you on a different CIA team and what year we in 2002 can prep for Operation Anaconda oh Oh, okay. So they go, now you're gonna go to such and such town and that warlord, and this happens to be the guy that I wanted to kill, is now gonna move from coast to close to Gardez, Afghanistan.

His name was Pasha Khan. You might be able to find a picture of him on the net. So, um, and you're, this team's job is to sit on him cause nobody knows what side he's really on and, uh, we don't want him screwing up operation Anaconda. Sit on him, meaning don't kill him, watch him. Yeah. Okay. And there's, of course, an agency guy that speaks the language, a case officer that's

going to be in charge of that op. But I'm thinking this is a guy that killed, that probably killed Nate Chapman. He did a lot of other bad things. With the money that the US had given him, he was raining artillery shells. The people of coast ultimately didn't want him in charge of them and he couldn't force them to let him be in charge of them and he couldn't force them to let him be in charge. So now he was coming to Gardez and he was trying to force them and he used the money the US had given him and was lobbying artillery shells at them to try to force them to say, yeah, let me be your governor. And, you know, the agency officer would meet with him from time to time. That

was his job, right? That's what he was assigned to do. And, you know, me, by this time, people in the military, people in the agency had told me, yes, somebody should kill that guy. In a way, I think I was like, well, that means me, I should kill that guy. And I used to plan like, okay, if he drives down this road, I could shoot him with an RPG. And then, or do I do it this way or do it that way? Then you start playing out. Well, then how do I explain it after?

And I'm going to get chewed out. Well, cause I'm a military guy, just kind of, and frankly it was illegally borrowed by the agency. There's a whole giant, yeah, there was a whole giant legal process you have to go to because you come under different laws and different authorities in the agency than you do. That's why the agency has certain activities like covert ops and stuff, our agency purview, because of law. Yeah. This is the CIA. They don't follow the law.

Yeah, but a lot of people think special ops does all that stuff but there's there's a limit because I Know you have to say that Yeah, well know that there so there's a difference but but sirs this whole legal process But on put to me it was a handshake of guys, the Colonel and some agency people. Yeah, okay. And you go. So I kept trying to figure out how can I do this?

And then I was thinking about repercussions. I figured, okay, prison for me, I can probably do that. But then it was what happens to the US because right now, now is the CIA going to get blamed for something? Is the US government going to get blamed for something? Is this a UN issue? So what's all the secondary and tertiary impact going to be? And I couldn't figure it out until one day it dawned on me. Hey, wait a minute. I

Haven't been legally given to the CIA. I'm a soldier soldiers have rules for using deadly force and My rule for use of deadly force as if I feel threatened I can use deadly force Now I was like, oh feel threatened, I can use deadly force. And I was like, oh, this is a thing. So now. Did you call a lawyer?

I don't know. I'm like, so how can I do this? And I thought, you know, I was like, you know, and I'm glad, yeah, so it came to this point that we were up in this really high mountain pass. Now, before I get to that, I have to say that this guy that I'm saying is bad once asked the CIA guy to have a meeting in the middle of the valley that was in a nowhere place. So this was a group of little huts in the middle of this open valley surrounded by mountains on every side. No one would ever know. And we, I'm the leader

of the tactical part, right? So like five of us shooters and this guy roll out to this desolate place. And we're waiting for this guy to show. And he's not showing. And there are very few civilians, and this is not a good place. If I was in the military, you know, this is not a highly defendable place. And then I start noticing that the civilians are disappearing. They're going somewhere. I'm like, this ain't right, man. I think we're being set up. And so I went to the guy in charge and I go, hey, this ain't right. There's something going

on. We're too vulnerable. We've been here too long. I'll give you five minutes and we're pulling out." And he agreed with me and we left. And the interesting thing was by the time we got back to our little base place, we were staying in some mud huts that we were in it took over. They heard from the, that signals intelligence had picked up Al Qaeda radio communications saying that they had an ambush in place and were trying to surround us and waiting for

the last people to arrive to close in. And then they were going to initiate an attack on us. So I was right, but we walked out. We, we drove back out and got out. And, uh, yeah, and that's one of the reasons why, you know, now we go to years later, this guy's chief and there's a lot of stuff that I shouldn't have been allowed to do that there it happened to be the same guy and he's but now he's much more senior so they kind of gave me leeway to be more creative and do stuff that normally they didn't let other people like me do.

Was it possible? I mean, I know the guy we're talking about was a warlord, so he's a powerful guy, he's got people around him. But you guys are all over the place and you have access. Did it ever cross your mind that there was gonna be an ability to, I don't know, walk into his house one day and just blow him away with a silencer? Well, then I got worried about the murder thing and all that. I mean, I mean, that

sounds like a bad way to say it. I mean, I don't mean... The way you said the murder thing, like, oh, I had an inconvenience. No, but... I know what you mean. Yeah, you're thinking... It's war. Well, I'm thinking, I thought the guy needed dead. I've always been the guy that if nobody else will do it, I'll step up and do it. All right.

But then I had this brilliant idea. This is after I felt he had us set up. So now I'm like, yeah, I just need to kill you. You want to top off? Yeah. I got you. And so I was like, we were at this, on this mountain pass, real tall place. And a lot of the people that worked for him were around us.

And I had my plan made up. And this was a guy he looked like Jabba the Hutt. He was a big giant fat guy with the big turban and big jowls and his body looked like Jabba the Hutt. And he was known to have a big temper temper and he wore a pistol in a shoulder holster. So I thought, okay. And I got the interpreter. Again, I'm military. I haven't told anybody, but I already figured my own mind that if I feel threatened, I'm authorized to use lethal force as long as I did it because I felt threatened. And then the other calculation was that, okay, we're in this guy's thing surrounded by his

people and there's just a handful of Americans. So what's going to happen if I kill him in front of all these people? But then I thought, yeah, we're badass enough that if I kill him, they ain't gonna mess with us. And I was prepared to, I guess I didn't tell anybody else about my plan, so I guess they just had to go along with it. So, I got the interpreter. Interpreters sometimes, if you want to play hard-ass,

they're hard to get to go along because, you know, like if I say, I want you to tell this guy in no uncertain terms this, a lot of times they play it down. They don't want to be as mean as you want them to be. So I told the guy, hey, look, I need this to be verbatim exactly like I want. So I sat cross-legged like this on the floor. I put my rifle across my lap, safety off, like here. The guy, Pasha Khan, is sitting over here to my left. So then I have the interpreter and I start yelling at him and I start calling him stuff and...

You yell? Yeah. You yell? Yeah. You do? I can. You seem like the guy who doesn't yell. You seem like you're right here all the time. Well, you can say things. We don't have to be, maybe the, I don't have to be screaming it,

but you can say it loudly and with mal-intent. And I seem to have a way of getting that across. I want to. I mean, I'm not like you guys have had guys that have been a lot of, you guys have guys on here that have been a lot of big bloody fights and all that. Hey, none of mine turned bloody. You know, I've blown people up with various ways that, you know, called them bombs or other things have blown people up. Um, but I've never done those. So I'm not that kind of

bad-ass guy, but, um, so my goal was to get him to start shaking when he would get mad or even yell. And as soon as he did I was just gonna pick my rifle up and kill him. Well why? Because you felt threatened? Because I felt threatened. But he didn't? Well what happened was, so now it starts getting loud and then the case officer

that was in charge speaks the language and he's somewhere else in the room and he hears something going on so he runs over he goes hey what are you doing I go I'm getting ready to kill him and he goes what I go yeah soon as he yells or reaches there I'm gonna kill him right here in front of everybody. Because you can't do that. I go, you, everybody has said he needs to die. My, you know, the, my rules that I'm under allow me to kill him if I feel threatened. He goes, no, that's no, we're not gonna do that. So we didn't. Now you know I'm glad in the end that didn't happen. I'm not sure I'm glad for that guy that it didn't happen, but I'm glad for myself, my own well-being, mental health and all that.

A couple of times in my career, I've had the job where you are tasked with getting rid of somebody. Now, in this case, I wasn't tasked to get rid of them. But I have eliminated some or planned and managed operations that have taken players off the battle, Al-Qaeda guys off the battlefield. And when you spend your weeks and months only thinking about hunting down somebody to get rid of them. I think it takes something out of you. You're living for that. Maybe everybody's not that way, but for me, I'm all in. If I go in on a mission, I'm all in.

I don't think that's good for you, but at least in those cases I was directed to and had the backing of the U.S. government to do that. Now on this guy, Pasha Khan, had I done that, you know, I'd have been justifying it to myself. It essentially would have been murder. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm glad I didn't have to come to grips with that after. Objectively, the guy is a bad guy. Objectively, it sounds like the evidence points to he literally killed the first guy in Afghanistan who was one of your guys. It is a war torn area. I'm kind of like, I guess, steel man in this case, as to what it was. You know, him not being around to be able to do those things probably would probably be a good thing. At the same time though, we talked earlier about how things looked

and how it can be stupid sometimes, like, oh, why do you have wood over your covering right there, just for safety precautions? In this case though, I know it's fucking crazy at that time in Afghanistan, there's a lot of stuff happening. But if somebody at ABC News or CBS News got a hold of some story where some Delta Force case officer, whatever you wanna call him, guy,

killed a dude at a sit down, you know, and even if it got spun the wrong way and they didn't actually have the exact story of how it went down, the effect that that could have, the third order effects that that could have compared to just taking this one guy off the battlefield actually are probably worse, no? Yeah, and that's funny how things can spin that way, right? And in the agency there's a saying that no matter how much secrecy that we use in something, you always have to figure that someday somebody's gonna leak it and it's gonna be on the story on the post. And you know, so you kind of have to be prepared for that. Yeah. So that was my fourth CIA

team. So in 2001 and 2002, as a soldier, I was on four different CIA teams. That's a lot to... I mean, it's very hard for me to put myself in those shoes because I wasn't a soldier and I wasn't in a war-torn area and I never worked with the CIA and how that all goes down. But I would imagine just from like a relationship building, trust building and high stakes life and death situation scenario, moving from team to team like that during such a red hot time in that country has got to be stressful, no? Yeah, but on one hand, I was a chance and I was in my 40s, right?

And I'm living out my childhood dreams, man. I'm in a place, there's no roles. It's me. And me and rules never got along great anyway. And it's Wild West. You're out there. I've had to negotiate my way through checkpoints that are manned by some Afghan guy out in the middle of nowhere. And it's either we're going to shoot or we're going to come to You know, it's like the Wild West where you walk into town and meet somebody on the street. And those, you know, it's to be honest, it was pretty thrilling. It has chances. I used, I'm a believer in servant leadership and I use that. So with the local Afghans that I worked with, I tried to share in their hardship,

take care of them. I would make sure that guys would have these really poor, poor guys, you know, that you had hot tea to drink in the middle of the night or take care of them. I would help them unload trucks. Like we would go do a raid on a weapons cache or something. I would try to help unload the vehicles and trucks. And other people didn't do that. And the Afghans started being protective towards me.

And to be honest, we kind of bonded there was one time when we were in an orgoon I started doing all these raids on hidden weapons caches buried under villages and stuff like that and they were they were really doing well I started collecting okay but but when you go and do these raids, there were stuff that was hidden in the 80s during the fight against the Soviets. So a lot of it was unstable. The protective casings were gone. Mines, explosives, RPGs, thousands and thousands of rounds, mortars, everything imaginable. And what would happen was we would load them in some local big truck you've seen in movies, stuff, the Jenga trucks

from Pakistan, those trucks. So we would load that full of these, you know, unstable explosives and take them back somewhere where they could be disposed of. So the way that would work would be the two lowest ranking Afghan villagers would get in the truck to drive it, and everybody else drives a few hundred meters away. And I got where I started doing these pretty often. And I always felt bad for you guys. And I remember one time, it's these two guys, you know, and

they're playing music, a cassette player, because now that with the Taliban gone, for the first time in a good number of years, Afghans can play music. So they were in there and they got in a truck and I said, screw it, you know, inshallah. And I wanted to show them that I was, would share their hardships with them. So I tapped on the side of the truck and I got, you know, I said, I'm coming in and I climbed in that, that truck with them and they didn't believe it cause not even the other Afghans would get in that truck. And, um, yeah, for sure. Not many American Americans would,

we had a truck like that disintegrate in Yemen. I mean the explosive kicked off and and the Yemenis driving that truck just disintegrated. They were gone. But it's kind of like, inshallah. But after you do stuff like that, with the Afghans the the word got around that, you know, Americans will look out for you. Americans can help you. Here's a guy that he'll share that risk with you. So I depended on that in those times that hopefully I had built enough of a bond that if an Al-Qaeda guy infiltrated and wanted to try to kill us, that somebody would care enough about me to at least give me a heads up, you know, so that it would

help. Plus, it's just the way I believe, you know, to be. And that worked. And I think that same thing was at play later when I turned Taliban people or worked with locals. You think you just kind of as much as you can or straight up with people and show them you're a human too. And you get people surprising what you can get people to go along with you and do that. Did it get harder though as time went along? And what I mean by that, to be a little more specific is... All right, guys, that is the end of part one of my two-part sit down with Gary. We're going to be dropping another episode within the next couple of weeks. So stay tuned for that. And if you're not already subscribed, please smash that subscribe button

and hit that like button on the video. And I will see you guys for the next episode. Thank you.