Julian Dorey Podcast - #326 - Delta Force Spy on 9/11, Benghazi & CIA's Tragic Mistake | Gary Harrington

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

SPONSORS: 1) HUEL: Get Huel today with this exclusive offer for New Customers of 15% OFF with code JULIAN at https://huel.com/julian (Minimum $75 purchase) 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 – Democratizing the Middle East Once We Were There, Dr@g Trade in the Region 12:09 – Argument with Taliban Leader (Operation Anaconda), Why Missions Succeeded 00:17:50 – Building the Khost Base & Full Double Agent Story, Attending CIA Farm 00:34:34 – Deployed to Afghanistan / CIA, 2002 Iraq Prep, Colin Powell’s “Nukes” Testimony 00:46:19 – Where Gary Was on 9/11 00:54:52 – Surviving Al Qaeda S@icide B0mbing, Turning Bombers into CIA Assets 01:07:44 – Death of Jennifer in Bombing, Gary’s Explosive Email to Commanding Officer 01:11:48 – Capturing the 10th Most Wanted Taliban 01:23:16 – Breaking Rules, Funny Story of Getting Stuck in a Ditch in Kuwait 01:36:09 – Two Times He Stole in the Military (Clipboard in Hand) 01:40:00 – Al Qaeda Op Before Double Agent Bombing, Family Struggles, Talking to Kids 02:02:41 – Raising a Family While Working Black Ops 02:09:08 – Gary’s Benghazi Connection, Gaddafi & Dictators: “Better Than the Alternative” CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 326 - Gary Harrington Part 2 Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For a few years, our job was al-Qaeda and Taliban. By this time, I'm standing on this traffic circle at a corner waiting for a guy, thinking somebody might shoot me. And I look to my left, and I see a black Toyota. Why does that bother me? Nobody's supposed to park there. Where's this guy at? And then the guy shows up.

And just as we come inside the gate of the embassy, there's a definite... Those guys were two suss bombers. Obviously, the goal is to kill Americans. Now, I know that I need to fight an unconventional war. On this stop, we're going to go to get a top 10 on the list. And we were on the border of Nangahar. This Taliban guy was going to cross the border. And we were to meet it.

45 minutes ago by, this number 10 guy isn't here. So I'm like, get the Americans out of here now. But suddenly I look behind us and I see a plume of dust. And it's some car. And it's really going fast. Okay, boys, it's on. Hey, guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review.

They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. Did it get harder, though, as time went along. And what I mean by that, to be a little more specific, is I always look at this, of the, at the global war on terror as like the front end and then the slow, long end. And what I mean by that is, you. have 9-11 happen and then we go into afghanistan where the taliban was makes sense and that first power military operation was pretty incredible didn't get bin laden but obviously a lot of major military successes and achievements of modern warfare there then this whole thing happens with

iraq where they're like he's got wmds we got to go in there even though not to say saddam was a good guy he was a horrible guy but it's like they'd nothing to do with 9-11 like this was almost like taking your eye off the ball, if you will. That starts a whole thing where we have to put in crazy resources because it's a full-blown war there, which means that resources also slowly get pulled from Afghanistan, which leads to Taliban very slowly rising from the ashes, not overnight, but a little more and a little more as the years go on, 06, or 7, 08, 09. You know, so at the beginning, you're a liberator in a lot of ways to many people.

Always. Always, we're always stark that way. And then eventually you start running into people who just because their country has been war-torn and the Taliban's back and so much shit's going on and you guys suddenly aren't liberating in their minds. Maybe they start to go back and forth people that previously wouldn't have. You know, did it get harder as the years went on to build those relationships because of that? For me, it got harder because I went from being the guy out with no protection. with the locals to being that guy that was back in the you know for one year i lived in the the new embassy in Kabul or in that ariana hotel so now i'm staying with americans and i'm just

venturing out from time to time so if you're not living with people and sharing the hardships i think it's hard to get that um the buy-in from them and then it turns in so americans so americans America just turned into, you know, we've got the cash, people want the cash, and they're going to do what they need to do to get the cash. And a lot of, you know, the, I felt bad because we first went in, most Afghans told me they wished that we didn't so quickly turn it over and try to build a democracy there. Yeah. They said, we want you to run this for a few years to get it through all these knuckleheads. corrupt people's heads that this is how things are supposed to work then let us take control they didn't want us quickly turning it over to other afghans well we also let's some of this is a

little bit of a generalization but the idea i think rings true on what i'm about to say handing it over to the people we did like a car's eye you were essentially hands handing the country over to the biggest drug kingpin in the world his family yeah i mean they they were exporting 93 percent of the world's poppy so i think people sitting at home now playing monday morning quarterback you know it's like what did we know that we had to know that so why's that type of decision made. I understand you want to put the country in better hands than the Taliban systematically. Forget the people for a second. But then if the U.S. government's in control here of selecting the people, why are we selecting people like that who might be worse?

Because the U.S., this is a generalization as well, but what I have seen is particularly at senior levels and when you cross over into the political side and senators, and congressmen and state department people get involved it becomes a matter of who do we have access to who can we meet and who is friendly to us that can get the job done and and then you get my opia right for me our job was al-Qaeda and Taliban so the drug stuff I didn't look at it you didn't look at if if if there's poppy fields there i don't care that's not my deal i don't care about that because this is what we're supposed to do other people you never stopped and ask that question though yourself just oh yes this is like a thinking guy like

okay that's not your purview and and i see exactly what you mean but like you pass a field that maybe has a few soldiers from our side protecting it and a bunch of people from afghanistan And, you know, harvesting a product that kills people around the world, does not, there's got to be a point there where you're like, what the fuck? Well, it's like I told the ambassador in Yemen one time, we were having a gentle disagreement. And she. Is this Bodine? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. She was fussing at me because I had taken some shortcuts to make some things happen, and they couldn't really nail me out right, but she was, you know, I was just overwhelmed with everything, so I took a few shortcuts. And so I just said, hey, look, I've got this happening and this happening, so I can't worry about these little. things like that because that's i go i got elephants charging at me so i can't take the time to deal with that little mutt over there that's that's jumping up trying to nip me in the calf uh or but hey guys to be clear this is part two of my sit down with gary who put out part one two months ago this was an evergreen episode so we held the second part until now so if you'd like to check out the previous one that link is going to be in the description below thank you

And then she looked at me and said, well, one day, Mr. Harrington, one of those things going to nip up is going to jump up. I said, bite me in the heels. She said, one of those days, one of those things is going to jump up and bite you in the ass. Yeah. And, but it was that way with the opium for me that, you know, Al-Qaeda, stopping attacks, hunting for bin Laden, all those things were what we were forced to do. Opium was a bad thing in you that some point that needed to be dealt with. But it was also so pervasive, there's no way you were going to do anything unless you had a stable country under control that you could affect that. And then to me, I knew we were never going to get to that point.

When we were in Torobora and those early days of 2001, when we were just victory after victory, just rolling over the Taliban and al-Qaeda on the run. Everybody was so happy. I remember standing in Toraboro on top of a mountain, and everybody just, yeah, you know, we're really kicking ass and what we're doing. I looked at the guys around me.

I said, hey, you realize that 10 years or more from now, we're still going to be here. You knew that then? I knew it then. I said, right now, It's like king of the hill. Taliban is king. We come in with all the planes, all the money, all the weapons,

and it's easy to knock the king off the hill. But now they're going to have time to regroup, rebuild, refigure things out, and we're going to be the king of the hill. And now we're going to be the ones that's easy to topple. And, you know, it's always easy to pull somebody off the top. of that hill a lot harder to hold that hill yeah i didn't know it turned into 20 years right but still though you saw a long-term yeah that it's just you know it's just a thing but but we had that i i once got an argument with a taliban commander he and i had been a lot of arguments uh with bad guys mostly

yeah you're such an agreeable guy i know i am i am i think that maybe should Tell it, if somebody's arguing with me, they're probably on the wrong side of stuff. But anyway, we had both been in Anaconda on opposite sides. And I was trying to get him to do some stuff for me. And then he started yelling at me one time. He's like, you know, we work together, the U.S. and the Mujahideen, and we beat the Soviets, and we were together. Then you guys left us. You abandoned us.

And now you hold us responsible for what al-Qaeda did. and he goes, if you had stayed with us, we would have, you know, things would have been different. I go, hey, look, that's the thing about U.S. policy. We go four to eight years in one direction, and then we go in a different direction. I go, I'm not making excuses for my country. That's the way we are. It is a strength and it is a weakness. We wanted to go after the Soviet.

Soviets and we were able to work together on that. After that, the U.S. people had no interest in what was going on here in Afghanistan. So the U.S. went away. Then you guys hosted al-Qaeda that did what they did to us. So now we're here. It's just, that's just the way it is. And it's, in a way it's ashamed when you go country to country and you're the U.S. guy. And how many countries have I been to where it's like we have a mixed reputation there? We've been in that country before. We've done good. We've done bad. You know, and why should I trust you now coming in my country? Why am I going to work with you? And, you know, I try to be honest with people that the U.S. is a fickle country because we don't, we're not like a dictator. a dictatorial regime that can have a 25 year plan a 50 year plan i said hell we can't even have a 10 year plan it's a gift and and like don't get me wrong that's i like that a lot better than a dictatorial regime this is where it gets weird though it's like the one thing those places

have an advantage on is that they can when they have total control there's little nooks and crannies where it's like fuck that'd be nice but it's just such a slippery slip you could never do it i i always cite it's a different context but you'll understand what i mean i always cite for example like the ccp you know they have total iron fist control over their people anyone who says something wrong disappears doesn't matter if you're a billionaire or a poor person it's horrible but like they can make sure that our kids here using democracy where people are free to make a choice they can make sure that our kids are sitting up watching titty videos all night yeah but over there they turn off tic tic tic tic

at 9 p.m. And before that, it's only science and math videos. So their kids are all smart. Right. And it's like you can, when you have an open system like democracy, which is the best system, totally agree. Unfortunately, what we have to be conscious of as a society is that from a government geopolitical level to decisions that are made outside the borders, all the way to things that culturally happen inside our borders, there are ways that other places who don't care and don't have a stake in that system being successful, can use it to take advantage of it. And, you know, it sounds like that's exactly what you're saying. Yeah, I agree with you because, and it is, I think, that the U.S., there are things we seed,

advantages those other type of regimes have over us. But it is precisely that change, that refocus, that independence, I think that makes us more. more adaptable, more resilient. I think the three of us, for example, if we were going to be on a mission together, team up to go do some op, if all three of us were identical Garys, we would not have the best chance of succeeding.

But the three of us, with our three diverse backgrounds and different experiences and different personalities coming together, now and especially if you're talking about the lot of things I did where you're dropped into chaos and you're told to figure it out and make a way we together because of that difference and all then we could be successful if you take a bunch of guys that are you know all one way yes that's uh it ain't gonna work you got to have the yin and the yang and the yeah wing and the Right, and they're not flexible they can to have.

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or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact. contact Connex, Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. I don't know if we ever answered questions about coasts where we were heading by that. We didn't. You took the words out of my mouth. I was going to see if you were okay coming back to that. Yeah. Yeah, we can talk about. Okay. So you, as you've already laid out, you're there initially building it. You know, certain things are building up. over time and then I guess like fast forward you've been in afghanistan obviously most this time

but we get to oh nine before what happens happens there's some people have seen zero dark 30 but jovie warks also been on the podcast a bunch like he wrote a book about this and everything but there was a spy in jordan el bellowy who they believed i guess matthews at the CIA believed was going to be coming and working for CIA, but he turned out to be a double agent. And at least the story of the part that we know is that he ended up blowing up the base. So where were you in all this?

So isn't it odd that earlier we've talked about times where I brought in bad guys, worried about that same thing, right? And here we have the case where that is what happened. So by this time, time, you know, I did my thing in the Army in Afghanistan on agency teams, 2001 and 2. When I left Afghanistan as the longest term person in Afghanistan up to that time, I was brought back to the States. And then by that time, the agency had asked for me by

name to be assigned to them to prep to do prep for the iraq war so you know people knew that we were ultimately going to be at war with iraq what did you think of that and two come on what there's another war i've i've just been in this one for five months doing i've been seeing action for five months now you need me to go in uh middle east and go do more sign me up I'm in. And so there were, let me pause just for a second to think through the classification of some of this. So the agency knew it had to prepare in case there was a war with Iraq. And, you know, there's all these things.

If you look at every conflict we have or what have had in the last 20-something years, there's this cycle where there's agency involvement that ultimately leads to special ops involvement, which ultimately leads to bigger military involvement we get in these things, right? So they were in that phase, and there had been a program where they had worked with local cops in a neighboring country and trying to do some stuff bringing people in and out of Iraq

talking 2001 to time frame when they were like these were untrained cops they were like carrying 38 revolvers in their dish dasha and uh they got set up and a couple of them got smoked so then they said okay we need somebody to understand tactics come out here and

run this part so by that time oh and then there had been another project i had done in that country for the army where i had the agency got to know me and so ultimately i was asked for by name to come out and uh run this um or handle the tactical portion of this uh getting people in and out of iraq and so I did that and then when the war started in so 2002 to 4 I was full-time as a soldier were working for the agency and I was in and out of Iraq and then 2004 went back retired from the Army joined the agency immediately yeah left Fort Campbell on a Friday reported at Langley on Monday.

Did you have to go to the farm? You know, when the agency was telling me I could join the agency, I had had other training in my military career that introduced me to agent handling stuff and some of that stuff. so when I was in the doing this loan to the agency they said have you had any this I said yeah I did my thing we do it a little bit different but I did that and we'll see how you can do go to this diplomatic function with me and let's see how that works so I went to a diplomatic function and they said ah okay and they uh started letting me do some you know lower level some some of their case work. I ultimately did recruit somebody during that time and ran somebody. But it's funny

because I thought, okay, I'm going to go now. I'm going to retire from the Army. I'm going to join the agency. Case officer, here we go. Hit the ground running. And then I got to the HR department. And I go, well, here's the grade they said I would start with. And a lady goes, No. No, not that. And I go, okay. And I go, well, I'm going to be an operations officer. And I go, no, you weren't recruited for that.

You're not qualified for that. But I did this and this and this. And he goes, too bad. It doesn't count. So I started out, and my career path was an operation. support officer, it was called a sue. And if you go on the CIA recruiting thing, I think that's one the career paths you can take, which is a desk person that handles the cable traffic and responds to people from overseas, writing back to headquarters for guidance and approvals and all those

kind of thing. Your favorite kind of job. My favorite. Exactly. And to be honest, I think I thought I have screwed up. And the, so I started that work, and I told my boss right off the bat. I said, hey, I heard there's a course you can go to once you're Sue. I was told that I could apply to get in this training to get to the farm. She goes, do you know that that's only for people that have been in this career field that have been in the agency like 10 years already? and are very experienced and there's a long waiting list for people on that and i was like uh you know i'm in my late 40s or in my 40s so uh that's no that's not going to work

and then carrie's reaching in his holster like oh let me see you so and and i got to be honest i thought i was going to die during this job sitting in front of a computer all day and uh and one i'd never learned to type so I'm like oh no like this and all these young kids around me like that and chatting and talking and I didn't and it wasn't until I had those two years I was long the agency I even knew that you could type without looking at your fingers I thought I was going to play a joke on a girl one time in the office so she was gone and I went and I moved the keys on her her laptop or on her computer i moved the keys around if you did that to me i'd be really screwed up right and i remember going back to my desk and i'm thinking i'm i'm pretty damn funny and then i remember

that woman sitting down and typing typing and turning talking and type in and there's no cursing nothing to happen and then it dawned on me if you don't need to look where your fingers go you know it doesn't matter yeah so the joke was really on me yeah um but anyway that so i wasn't sure if i was going to stay in the agency without getting through the farm training and then my boss happened to talk to her boss who happened to be one of those people that during wars i had helped out or taken care of or or saved, you know, at some point. And he said, oh, yeah, we're going to, we're going to put him at the top of the list to get the training. So after six months, I got able to go through the training.

So you're in your 40s. You've seen war for years and years and years. You've been in some of the craziest combat zones in modern history. I had, it was a mix. I went to this course that was actually held in northern Virginia, not where the farm is. And it's for experienced people. Now, to be honest, that woman had been right. I was not experienced enough to cause the admin part of what you have to do was a stretch for me.

But I go to the course, and a lot of it were a retire agency retirees. that are teaching the course, some regular staff officers, and other people. It was there. It was funny because I had the experience. And they think everybody's new in a headquarters person. And it's like two students in a room, and you have a mentor for those two students. And then there are some general classes you do together. but you go through all that training of learning how to do surveillance detection routes and all these things and there was a woman instructor and my the guy that ran my room and was teaching my roommate and i surveillance detection had left some dubious instructions with us for over the weekend

And it didn't sound like what I heard the other students saying they were supposed to do. So I walked into somebody else's room where, I think it was two women. And their female instructor was in there. And I asked one of them, hey, we're told this. What are you guys supposed to do? And then that instructor said, excuse me. you don't know this and i said well we're gonna we were told we need to do this and i here's what i'm gonna do because she said you don't know what surveillance detection is until you've been in

bagdad driving a hundred miles an hour down route irish to try to avoid the bombs you have no idea oh my god and i almost i wanted to kill myself because i like i looked at her and i'm like oh i've learned that um i knew i had to keep my my thoughts to myself but i was like i knew you i I was in Iraq way before you, way more than you, riding around and rusted out Toyotas that weren't even armored. And you, yeah, I saw you. Yeah, you should have hit her with it. Do you know who I am? Yeah, but, you know, I mean, I'm a new guy.

And now I'm a low guy on the totem pole in the agency. And but it was hard, you know, and there were a lot of cases like that. And, yeah, I mean, literally, I had times where I thought keeping my mouth shut was such a stress that, you know, I literally sometimes would bang my head against the lockers in our room because I was just like, I don't know if I can take these people that much longer. And, but, you know, eventually I made it through that training. And I had enough war zones. You know, I joined the agency. I didn't go in on the paramilitary side, which maybe would have been better for me.

It's where I would have been more at home. But I was like, hey, I'm already in my 40s. I don't want to be that really old guy trying to carry that rifle past his time. You know? If I go to this other side, I can go work in embassies, have a semi-normal life.

I've never had like a real normal life. and you know and still get to do fun stuff for my country and so I went to that side of the house and that's a whole different side of the house you've got had other guests from that side it's way more a it's way more liberal and it's way more Ivy League brown you know kind of university stuff um it's just a different way of thinking and those people then when i worked with other case officers in war zones kind of looked at me like wait a second you're the kind of guy that that they thought took their money when they were in high school and picked on them and you're this you know you did all this war stuff and everybody thinks you're this well now you're in my

court right and you want to do what i do and now i'm the expert so you need to sit over there and keep your mouth shut and um regular provincial kind of politics yeah so there was a lot of that which was kind of hard to take and every once in a while there'd be somebody that that saying as be who you are and and they would trust me but yeah I ran afoul of a few people you know I was lucky that when I became a case officer you know it's funny because I said I I I I thought I'd be an embassy. So I was like my first assignment after I went through the training to be an operations officer,

I was supposed to go to an embassy somewhere and be a regular guy. And then the day I graduated, I got an email from the HR guy from the division I worked for. I worked for the Near East Division. And they go, hey, congratulations. on graduation. At your earliest convenience, please stop by HR. So I went to HR, they go, yeah, I go, yeah, about your assignment, yeah, to this place. They go, yeah, that ain't going to happen.

I go, what do you have in mind? They go, Afghanistan. I go, I've done Afghanistan. 2001, 2002, did Iraq, 2002. I mean, yeah, two, three, and four. I go time for something else for me. And then no time for Afghanistan for you. There's a need and people have asked for you.

And you can't say where you wanted to go? I told where I'd like to go, but I kind of was still, I didn't realize the agency is different than the military. I thought in the end you had to salute and go. And that now I learn, hell of these days, a 23-year-old, 24-year-old, walking into agency, no, no, I ain't going there. And they'd be like, okay, no problem. But me, you know, I asked nicely, I asked nicely, I stepped my foot a little bit.

But in the end, I salute and say, okay, I'll go to Afghanistan. And I went there. What year? Like, oh, 5? It's 2005. it was still fairly sparse back to the area on a hotel that I had gone to to start before I went to coast in December 2001. Of course, now it's a lot bigger, a little bit different. And it turned out that the chief there in Afghanistan happened to be a guy I'd been in recon with in the Marines.

Corps all those years before. Whoa. And a guy that had been a very senior guy, he was a very senior guy in the paramilitary side of things. And grab a coffee and discover Vegas level excitement with BetMGM Casino, now introducing our hottest exclusive, friends, the one with multi-drop. Your favorite classic television show is being reimagined into your favorite casino game featuring iconic images from the show.

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So we drive to another base somewhere. And there's a guy with, you know, we all had beards and vocal clothes on. And there's a guy laying on the ground, taking a nap. And we walk over and he goes, hey, do this guy's name. And he wakes up and stands up. He goes, got this guy here. I want you to meet Gary Harrington. And Gary, or no, he goes, Gary, I want you to meet, and he said this guy's name.

And the guy goes, and he goes, hey, this is Gary. He goes, yeah, Gary Harrington, second recomb battalion, 1983. And I was like, and I didn't recognize him. So I thought, wow, you guys are, how do you know all this stuff? And then he goes, I guess you don't recognize me. And, of course, when I'd seen him before, he was like me, a scrawny guy. He had, I thought, reddish hair and freckles. And now here we were quite different looking.

So I ran into him. And then he and I did some Iraq stuff together. Some Iraq stuff. Yeah, in 2002, three, four. And then he, well, he was the chief in Afghanistan. Wait, wait, wait, wait. You were doing Iraq stuff? in 2002?

Yeah. Yeah. I told you that they borrowed me to prepare for the war. Uh-huh. What kind of preparation here? Well, you need information. If you're going to do something, right, shouldn't you get ground information? Absolutely.

Try to find out where missile sites were, where anti-aircraft batteries are, where scud missiles are. How were you doing this? Well, that was the agency's job is to get people that will provide information. So how you usually do that, you hand people money and they give you information for money. Well, you don't know if the information is going to be right. No, that's a whole thing. There's a whole thing between a regular recruitment, like if I'm going to try to recruit the Chinese code clerk from their embassy, right?

That's a whole giant, the whole. thing that the farm is set up to prepare you for this giant long iteration of vetting and testing and all that when we talk about wars it's there's a different thing there's a different criteria and you need a lot of low level support people like the people i dealt with in 2002 three like that they were like smugglers they were uneducated they were people that were navigating that UN no-go zone between Iraq and where I was

avoiding the Iraqis avoiding the locals avoiding the UN and smuggling well those people don't have a lot of high-level intel they can give you

but they can help you get things into other people they can help move people they can carry a theriah in or they can give you an information of where a scud missile launcher is if they come across it so that's the CIA's job because I wasn't one yet in 2002 and they so they would interview somebody get information and task them but somebody had to navigate and avoid bad people and not get shot to pick the person up and then eventually to get them back to get them back into iraq and that's

where i came in what did you think just on that topic while we're while we're still there what did you think when you heard colin powell's testimony in the beginning of 2003 at the u.n where you know it sounds like colin was put in a bad position by some people i don't know who but there's a lot of speculation could have been different people but he reads this report saying like Saddam Hussein has nukes like what based on the work you had done which I'm not necessarily saying was getting to that specific thing like did did you look at that like wait a minute some of this seems off or was it more oh maybe well to be honest at that time I was a believer and it's I still have mixed feelings about that when

Nukes, I don't know. Don't know about that. We know that or I think they're fairly certain that in when he took over Kuwait the first time in 2000 or in 1992 that he did move chemical weapons into Kuwait and the that they were kept sometimes in schoolhouses. They were moved around and stuff. So the things that I was involved with and all, we were getting reports about these vehicles that at night would move around trucks and stay at different places and they would always move around. So it kind of seemed like there was a shell game going on to move materials or launchers around. After we first invaded and went in, you know, I've seen Iraqi government documents that talk about engineers and scientists, missile technicians and stuff from Russia, from other places coming in and stuff. and kind of so I kind of believed in the after we first went in and weren't finding things I you know I kind of held Bush responsible for that and the decision to make it's really funny

because at the time you know we took eight months to decide for we're going to go into Iraq or not I was told that decision had already been made but they were taking that time to get our allies on board with it yeah well to me as a military guy now what i've done is told my enemy i'm coming you're coming and you know that when he comes he's coming you're going to get your ass kicked and they're going to come in big so you now i know that i need to fight an unconventional war i'm not going to win a conventional war So for me, I felt that a lot of stuff was moved to Syria or hidden or moved, whatever, just based off things that I heard or saw. There was no smoking gun, but there was enough other stuff.

When you say stuff, are you referring to biological weapons? Yeah, I think that there were, whether it's biological and chemical for sure, I felt. Yeah. And we knew he had had him before, so where are they on now? Those he did seem to have. We've had a couple different people in here. The first guy to ever mention that was Danny Hall at the beginning of episode 217. He talked about, I was like the second podcast of the two we did.

He talked about 100. He's like, oh, I saw myself, like 100%. And he's like, he's like, WMD didn't have that. But biological, chemical, he had that. And there was, who was in here recently? and also said that unrelated fuck who was that but yeah but but yeah but yeah was it johnny i was it johnny mother fucking glenn i think johnny glenn also said that yeah but yeah i mean i i certainly believe that biological and kim he had uh nuclear yeah i i was never sure i i

he had aspirations right but i don't sure right and to me that that didn't really matter yeah but it's just interesting that and we have testimony of this that that will confirm this it's interesting that like on the night of 9-11 you had the white house saying yeah when we invade iraq and people are like iraq i was me and uh chris miller later became sec deaf under Trump's last administration at the very end. He and I were sent from Fifth Special Forces Group to Tampa

to help get the side fifth groups' involvement in the invasion of Afghanistan. Is this like days after 9-11? Yeah, I was actually, on 9-11, I was supposed to, I was on my way to the airport in Nashville, to fly to Tampa to plan an exercise that involved J-Soc and uh in fifth group in a foreign country

in but not any not at war no just there but then and then on my way to the airport on my way to the airport not you know world trade center gets it so what'd you think when that happened yeah i was uh i lived on a farm outside fort campbell i'm heading to the airport for once in my life, I'm a little early. And I'm listening to radio, and I start hearing this thing about a plane had just hit the North Tower. I'm like, that's odd. You've got a co-pilot and a flight engineer. How could you, that kind of accident happen?

And at this time, not many people, because of my time in Delta, I knew who al-Qaeda was. I knew about terrorism. I knew about other attacks that had been made against the West. but it wasn't the way people thought back then so when uh when the i heard that i was like i just kept trying to play it through my mind and i was like it's not making sense and i go i got like 15 minutes to spare so there was a tiny cafe there on the road and i i pulled in that cafe asked them to turn on their tv and there's a little like 13 inch black and white TV black and white yeah in 01 yeah but this is just something with a

with the antenna sticking on it well that it was just some little rundown place and uh 40 years behind yeah well and i it's to my recollection it was black and white but it made me but it was just a little box thing and uh and then i saw the second plane while we were watching I was was watching now what's your thought and now well immediately i was like yeah that confirms it it's terrorism and that's funny because then i heard them saying airports are shut down but right where that cafe was if i turned left i would get on the highway to go to nashville if i turned right i would go to fifth special forces group headquarters i turned right and went and started working on getting us ready to go to Afghanistan.

Yeah, but I mean, you'd been in the military for so long at that point. It had been more than half your life probably. You know, I would imagine once you do have that realization, like, okay, this is what I think I'm seeing. And you get in that car to go drive over there, there's got to be some sort of quiet moment with yourself where you're like, holy shit. Yeah, you know, it was more, you know, I think I'd describe it when you've, talk about the impact of 9-11 on people and what happened that's because it was a shock to most people so to me what happened to me and i think to a lot of the uh guys that i worked with was we didn't have that big yeah there was a a holy shit moment but then it was like this is what we've trained

our whole lives to do now it's not shock mad awe whatever it's we know what to do now we know that the things that we have to start putting in place to get ready to get packed out to get ready to go for who knows how long to go fight so it was very everybody became super focused super serious highly motivated whatever it took you know there was no limit to the hours you would or could work and i would say it was that thing if you've ever been like around the pro sports teams or anything when you see pros and we would be you know maybe it's getting ready to go on stage for a big concert where we think how it must feel but they're pros they're focused right there and that's how it was for those of us

that were preparing to go over it's kind of like this it's almost a weird thing to think about but You want to live in a world without war, but that world doesn't exist. There are evil people in the world, and as long as I'm alive, that's still going to be the case, unfortunately. But even if you don't want to see it, the job you're in, you sign up to be able to go and play in the Super Bowl. And I don't mean to make it sound like not serious or something to be taken lightly. That's not what I mean at all. But, like, you know, if you're sitting there just training all day, you know, that's just a preseason game. And now you've got to go in and some horrible things are going to happen, including the people that you know and love and work with, just statistically speaking.

But that's where you want to be. Yeah. Well, you take that in the military all through the 80s, the late 70s, 80s, 90s, nothing much was going on. Yeah. Or there were a little bit of special ops involvement in a few places in Central America and different places. places around the world, but no big fights. And so people that, you know, you read, you get all this history and the stories, and you're thinking, I'm going to do a whole career and never see that.

And so, you know, most people, if you came into military and you're in combat arms, you know, you're itching to test yourself. You want to see if you have what it takes. And I wanted that. Everybody wants to get in a gunfight. I mean, that sounds stupid, but why would you do that? Why would you come in combat arms if you didn't want to test yourself? And I wanted that.

I tried that. I volunteered for the most, any, whatever the mission was, I volunteered. But, you know, it fell to me that I never had that. The only times I had opportunities where, let's say, I could have pulled the trigger. pulling the trigger was not the right thing yeah so i didn't um i've yeah i've grabbed guys and fought them hand-to-hand um that i could have shot maybe but then i wouldn't be able to interrogate them after so you know you make those choices but i never i never had that big battle you guys have interviewed a lot of guys that have been through the the real shit you know um

But it's that chance you take. You put yourself out there and maybe it happens, maybe it doesn't. But you know you're going into a zone where this shit is happening, regardless of how it's going to end up looking. If there's some crazy gunfight like Nick Irving hat or something like that, or if you're going door to door trying to make assets that are high pressure situations dealing with warlords and Taliban, you know what I mean? Like it's all a part of the same, they're all different. components of the same war game. Yeah, same thing. And it's still, you know, at least in my, most of my time, risk of life.

Absolutely. You know, I walked out of an al-Qaeda ambush that one time. I looked two suicide bombers in a car in the eye once. And they looked at me. Well, I didn't know. It was one of my rule-breaking times in Kabul. and there's a there's a show on Netflix called SpyOps and episode seven of that is about some stuff I did

and one of those is a story about this suicide bomber I was going to meet somebody on a street corner in Kabul that I wanted to interview to see if they might might have access to information I would want. So what year? This is 2006 or seven. Okay. So you're CIA case officer?

CIA case officer. So I get an interpreter, Afghan interpreter, and we walk outside the embassy compound, which I guess technically, you know, we weren't supposed to be out without a armored car. And I'm standing on this traffic circle at a corner waiting for a guy. So, of course, I'm on alert. I'm busy.

I'm scanning. I'm looking. I'm thinking somebody might try to run up and shoot me because clearly I'm a white Caucasian. And I'm watching. And your situational awareness goes off. But I, there was something, I mean, I looked and off to my left down, you know, this is a traffic circle. There was four ways and a circle in the middle. And I'm in this corner of that circle.

And I look to my left and I see a black Toyota Corolla sitting there. And I like, I don't know, why does that bother me? There are two dudes in it. And so I'm looking, scanning, looking, looking, waiting. Ah, where's this guy at? And look back at that. car again. I'm like, well, nobody's supposed to park there. And I can, yeah, but this is Afghanistan. And then, you know, I look around and I look back at the car and I go, well,

there's a cop standing like 10 yards away from it. Surely if he didn't want him parking there, he'd move him on. And that car kept bothering me. And it's really odd. And I looked at one point and they looked at me. And because they were only like 30 yards from me. Did you know? No. When, when, when, when, when, but when, when, when, but when, when, when, but when, When they looked at you, did you know, it's off? No, because I'm, you know, I'm busy. I got something to do. So these guys, and they looked at me, and then the guy shows up.

So the interpreter, I get him. We cross back through the security checkpoint, and we're walking back down through the concrete barriers. And just as we come inside the gate of the embassy, there's a deafening noise, ground shakes. the alarms go off you know they lock everybody down you're supposed to get on the floor and hide so you know we're hiding i got this afghan now i wait like 30 minutes and don't pin out a back door of the embassy you know tell him get on his way and i wait and there's all kind of chaos going on and helicopters coming in

and um you know we i realized you know a bomb had gone off So I waited, took things, kind of died down, and then I got out of my room at the embassy and walked into the embassy proper and found the head of one of the security guys, the regional security officers. And I said, hey, was that a car bomb? And he goes, yeah, he said, we brought all the wounded and dead here. The Americans had, you know, he killed. I think he had killed two Americans.

You can find this attack on the Internet, by the way. You can see the attack? You can know, you can see the burning aftermath in where I was standing. But the, and I, and he's, you know, he said, yeah, a bunch of Afghans were killed, and I think two Americans were killed and four wounded. And I said, was it a black Toyota Corolla? He goes, that's impossible. How could you know that?

I said, I was looking at that car about two minutes before it blew up. Oh, my God. And if you look for Massoud Circle car bombing, it would be, it might be two, 2006 um wow so yeah it's really that was that was kind of one of those moments where it was odd i was mad at myself because that car bothered me and i kept looking but i didn't leave i i kept staying because i was trying to accomplish the mission yeah and that was that lesson to me

that follow your instincts if they're telling you something's wrong it's cause something's wrong That's right. And I got lucky. I imagined myself always that, you know, here's these two, the suicide bombers are the dumbest guys. They pick, it just trust me. Yeah, 72 virgins. Go get them. Yeah, well, I've, I actually ended up turning to suicide bombers one time.

But I, but so I got to know. You get them a couple of hookers? Oh, that was a pause. No, actually, the Taliban gave him the hook. the hookers before a suicide bomber carries out their mission they're actually would in those days we're given some money and told okay now for this period until you martyr yourself it's okay for you do all those things the Quran says you can't do live it up because you're going to go to your heavenly reward so 72 virgins and four use cards and if you get drunk and have some opium

in the meantime that's okay too no problem that's right but uh yeah I would tell myself, so those guys were told to hit a military convoy, right? And because obviously the goal is to kill Americans. So I think about that moment when they looked at me and I looked at them, that maybe one of them turned to the other and said, hey, there's an American right there. Let's just do it now. All they would have had to do is touch the wires together, right? Yeah.

And then maybe the other guy goes, no, they told us a military convoy. and make well what if a military convoy doesn't come here's one right now and uh but whatever and then i like think well then i'm glad that whoever won that argument uh you know i mean that's imaginary but i thought i'd be real if that was me i'd have thought that and uh and i was just

lucky you know to walk away from that i can imagine there's just some moments that the hairs on the back of your neck even thinking about it today, it's just always going to stand up. Yeah, that one, I mean, that one was out of my hands. Most of the time I plan, and I think it's mostly in my hands, yeah, if you hug a Taliban guy and search him while you're hugging him, there's some chance there. Hit the wrong button. Yeah. That would be true. So, the, yeah, so, but, yeah.

I don't think that one doesn't bother me much anymore. I think the things that bother me more are like thinking about the USS Cole, thinking about Benghazi, thinking about the coast bombing, where, like, the coast bombing. Have you ever, if you talk to FBI guys or a lot of cops, have you ever heard the term lust for the bust? I don't think so. So that's like... I mean, I know what it means, but... Yeah, you can see what it means, right?

It's when you want to make that bust so much that you start cutting corners. Right. So obviously with Balawe, there were exceptions made and corners cut. By FBI. By CIA. Because what it looked like he could give us, like, you know, number of... two or three maybe oh wait i'm sorry i misunderstood you you're saying there were corners cut before it happened you're not before it happened no no no no that's why i said

fbi i yeah so no in in uh in the run up to that right it everybody just got so hungry for that chance to try to get some higher ups that they um you know cut corners and and in some decisions were made that I think, you know, of course in the hindsight, people say they wouldn't have made or shouldn't have been made, not searching him before he came in and a couple other things on, you know, maybe on vetting him. But, but, you know, I have to say Al Qaeda played the agency perfectly on that. You know, they released some videos that showed him sitting with you know very senior al-Qaeda people and so that if you go through the way that the agency would vet somebody you know what is their access well i think i could meet with number three well if he comes out on video sitting with number three now you've verified that that's right so that gives him credibility and um So that, you know, that happened and, you know, just a whole bunch of decisions, like the big crowd, you know, because everybody wants to be involved.

When you're going to get to somebody senior, I have actually right before the Coast bombing was involved in helping track down a very serious. you're al-Qaeda person and you know when you get somebody that high up on the list i mean you know everybody wants in on it yes you know everybody wants to be involved everybody wants um it's it helps careers yeah um it's uh does a lot but um you know so so i think that that that whole decision process and the way he was treated like a celebrity, you know, he kind of had celebrity status. And there are some stuff out of headquarters that I don't really want to go into, but there are personalities and people in senior key places that played a lot to do with that. and they manipulated who was in position to run some things and a lot was placed on loyalty and stuff and less,

I think that kind of circumvented operational sense and operational oversight, good operational oversight. My friend John Kyriaku actually was just on the podcast again, and he had a lot to say about this. That was, so we did two with him again, Alessi. So I guess this would have been the second one, right? 279, I think we got into it. But he was on Alex Station with Jennifer Matthews before. And so what he said is that, yes, technically she fucked up, but it was, she was put in a horrible position. She should not have been in the position to handle that takedown just be I forget what the details were and I don't want to mess it up, but he's like yeah, but there was a person senior person that him picked her for that that's job that bypassed the that's right chain of command. And I. Yeah, I. I. Yeah, I had some. Um, well, you, we already.

established that I sometimes have problems with people and if the more senior they are the more I seem to enjoy having problems with them and um so that I'd had an issue with that problem then everybody nobody everybody well is but I'm kind of like I'm I'm pretty far down on the totem pole what can you do just fire me so you know that's one thing so I made sure that I'm really surprised that didn't end my career but I I made sure that what I thought was captured officially in writing and and it's and I did I did the thing that you know like there's a whole thing between and before an official cable can be sent. There's a whole release

protocol that has to be followed. There's one way that's, I think, made for dire circumstances where anyone can release it. But if you do, that's a negative.

It's a, like, you're done. And I did one of those once because of it was for this. It was for another operation. and interference from Washington, D.C., and being put in a horrible place,

I was being put in that place that we're talking about and told, you know, listen to this person in D.C., don't listen to your bosses. And that's a fpped-up place to be. and you got lives at stake and stuff. So when was the last time you were at Coast before December 30th, 2009? No, for me, last time I would have been in Coast would have been 2002. Oh, so you're there at the beginning, you never go there again.

I never go there again. I was in 2005, six, seven, and eight, I operated out of Kabul. Now, it's true. I did one, the border op I talked about, 29 Taliban. I did that at a Jalalabad base. Later, I tried to do another op at a Jalalabad base to get a top 10. I thought that I had an agreement to get number 10 on the list to come over to my side. myself and some paramilitary guys did a pretty, pretty chancy op to try to get this guy, and he did not. Are you allowed to talk about that up? Yeah, we can talk about it. Okay. Hold on one second. I just have to go to the bathroom.

All right. We're back. So you were just about to explain the mission where you almost were able to turn the 10th ranked Al-Qaeda guy. Is that right? Well, I, no, 10th, this guy was Taliban. Taliban. But at the time, back in, we're probably talking in 2007, this guy was number 10 on the list. And those Taliban that we talked about earlier, the 20 something that I was able to deal with, in the end, I only wound up working with like five or six of them. the rest of them i sent back to pakistan and uh yeah yeah but with those five or six i ultimately got two suicide bombers um the what we're talking about again you have to remind me the 10th ranked hell yeah so um but since i'd been successful on that one and they were

supposedly down the chain from this other guy i thought that we had a chance you know you always wonder people will tell you anything and when you're passing out money people can get with other people and create creative conspiracies and the agency over these years in Gwad and the military have paid lots of money to lots of people that have been feeding us all a crockle you know what oh yeah and and you take that chance when it's a a war zone and low level people like this yeah the level of vetting and stuff is just a lot lower than it is for like again trying to recruit a code clerk but anyway so on this uh op we're

going to go and we were on the border of nangahar there was a real real remote pass in a super dangerous area where no U.S. had been, is it which province is just north of Nangahar province? I can't remember that now, but it was right at that border, and this place was super remote, and this Taliban guy allegedly was going to cross the border at that place, and we were to meet him. So now this place is way different. That Torquam Gate was by a major highway, you know, it was right at a major highway. So getting there is way different. And if you get in trouble, you have a lot more options somewhere like that.

And now what we're talking about is many, many, many miles down intermittent roads, wadis, no paved roads. right is it was on the border of Pakistan way up in the mountains and um so it'd be a lot more hairy when you do an agency op you don't have all the support all the overhead uh coverage and iSR support um by you know drones flying infrared um giving you eyes of the battlefield you kind of on your own, you know, wing it. And so to plan this op, I was using the same Afghan military officer that I'd used before. And one of the Taliban guys that we'd brought across from a refugee camp. And then there were about five paramilitary branch guys. and myself.

And we were going to go to this place to try to meet this guy. So how are you going to get in there? Because when you're moving in a place like that, I always have a rule that you only have a short time you can stick, that no matter what Americans think you can't sneak in anywhere. It's too remote. They're going to know you're there. The locals will.

so i always think that every time i go in somewhere bad i've lit the fuse on dynamite the only thing is i don't know how long that fuse is so you always got to figure when you go in somewhere i have this long and then people are going to be aware that i'm here and then it's going to take this long for the bad guys to find out and this long for them to either attack me or put in an IED for my on my route out or something to be able to attack us. So how can you minimize that? The plan that the paramilitary guys came up with

and I were that we would go in, we called them thin-skinned vehicles, and for listeners, thin-skinned vehicle in, you know, war zones or agency talk are non-armored vehicles. And the rules say you have to be an armored vehicle in a war zone. That's written really hard rule. There are times when that doesn't make sense operationally to accomplish the mission. So special permission has to be given and the bosses have to all sign off on it to say that for this mission on this time these specific people can be in these vehicles and this time I think we actually had permission to do that at least the paramilitary guys did and so we thought that we would our plan was to leave the dirt the pay roads and start on dirt roads and we would be in these nondescript thin skin

vehicles and we were going to move during the night and we were going to move with lights out and using night vision but then the plan was if we ever came across a little hamlet or a house we'd turn the lights on because you know if you're driving on in a road or a wadi at night without lights on you must be an American with NVGs on. So, and the goal was that if we can get to this remote place on the border without being detected, sure, once it gets daylight, it won't be long before we're known. But at least it allows us that time to get in and buys us more time on the ground.

But then what are we going to do with those vehicles? how are we going to protect ourselves what happens if we get hit and we mentioned before that the cia had a force of local afghans that it trained i don't know if any of your other guests have uh mentioned the name of that force um i'm i'm reluctant to mention it they might have it would have been it would have been probably joe tedai in 149 who would have said something but i I don't remember a name if he did. Yeah. Might have been something named after a kind of horse.

But, yeah, so then we thought to protect us then would be two Americans, and they had Toyota pickups. And in the back of the pickup, this force had, so. there was a machine gun mounted in the back of the pickup and then like four or six afghans in the bed of the truck facing outboard and there would be two americans uh in the cab one driving with nvg's not we had two of those trucks so a total of like maybe 12 afghans and uh two americans in each truck so that's four and then i think i had three three or four other paramilitary guys with me and the thin-skinned kind of like little SUV um regular vehicles and our plan now obviously

we can't disguise ourselves if those we called them gun trucks are up there with us so the plan was after we got so far that we would drop them off and they would like trail us by like 30 minutes and that way it allowed us the ability to get in kind of undiscovered but then if we got hit you know we would need to hold off whatever attack was for the 30-ish minutes that it would take them to get in and provide more firepower to help get us out so the advanced part would have been two thin-skinned vehicles and then I had the Afghan officer and his driver were in a little their own pickup truck a little pickup truck and so we go we go we rolled a long trip.

I think we probably set out from Jalalabad at midnight. So we're rolling into this village just before dawn. And I say village, it was just a few huts strewn out. You couldn't make cell phone coverage and our satellite phones. We were not being able to hit satellites consistently from there either. That's reassuring.

So, yeah, it was not a good place. and we're definitely way in way in bad guy territory but when again if you can conduct a successful infill into a place like that you're kind of free because nobody's expecting an attack so you have the luxury for a little bit uh being there so before dawn and i found a uh there was a mud hut that had a big enough yard around it that we could hide our vehicles so i had our two vehicles and the generals are the uh the officers vehicle so i had three vehicles to hide so we go off for this village or hey let us put our vehicles in here keep your mouth shut and here's some money and they're happy to accommodate now you know i didn't fool myself you're not going to stay hidden long

It's a village. When people start waking up and getting stuff ready and people are moving about, you're going to be found, but you have some time. So we're trying to make contact. I'm trying to use cell phone to reach into this guy in Afghanistan. Where are you, you know, that I haven't seen you. um and we're we are on on the border and the border's not really marked so yeah we're just somewhere people haven't been and nothing nothing nothing so we're waiting and we're waiting

well now again like i said about the other ambush we walked away from now i'm starting to get worried. But what's interesting is now I'm worried, but now I'm the one that's now the officer in charge. And I have other guys that are in my shoes that I'm responsible for. And so we start conferring, like, what are we going to do? How are we going to do this? And, you know, there comes a point where you've got to say it was bullshit. It's not going to happen. Let's make sure we don't get attacked and just get everybody out of here and call it and go. And we were thinking about that, but then the Afghan officer said, well, you know, I'm a local. Let me go forward from where we are to see if I can get a better signal or running. Maybe there's some problem

and I can help. So I'm like, okay, I don't really want to do that, but I think we get, I guess or time. I said, hey, look, it's getting, like by now, it's getting like 9 o'clock in the morning. We got a, you know, our time is running out. So I can give you 45 minutes, but, you know, then we got to get out of here. And so he leaves and he goes forward. Now, when I say forward, that means I've already said we are at the edge of Afghanistan. So when I say go forward, he's not in afghanistan anymore um and he leaves well now 45 minutes go by he's not back and this number 10 guy isn't here and now we've been there a while smell a rat and now i'm like i'm responsible i'm i'm i'm got responsible now there and i'm so i conferred with

the paramilitary guys i mean just outstanding great americans patriots i mean guys you want to be surrounded by and um i said okay what are we going to do you know how and and part of me it's that military ethos i'm like you know you know i know what headquarters is going to want they're going to want me to get the americans out of here now and save of American lives, but I, that Afghan, he's kind of part of our team, but is part of our team. And I know headquarters would look at it that, no, he is not, he's not, we don't have to explain his death. But part of that military ethos was like, we don't leave a man behind.

So I was talking to these guys and I was trying to find a way that we could figure something else out and one of them said, you know what? So the other way is we can call up those gun trucks and we can just say the hell with it and go look for him. And I was thinking, holy crap. So what we're saying is I'm going to be that I'm going to take an armed force of Americans and enter another country armed and we're going to go look for it. And I was like, nothing bad can come up that. Not one thing. nothing so uh yeah and so uh yeah we decided that's where i decided that's that's what we'll do

so you almost accidentally escalated international tensions yeah with a foreign nation well that's what i mean i'm thinking that yeah here i go that this is yeah but but you know what's but you know what it's funny because i think i felt those those paramilitary guys trusted me because when i said nope we're gone or going after him call him up called gun trucks up that i think they were like fuck yeah oh yeah we're gonna do it and uh so you wait you went over the border and you went after yeah it's funny we passed uh there was some tiny afghan checkpoint there you know two little guys and a little rock building uh with a jeep and they go you can't go past here just you just you know there's a and i was like here we're going and it's just i just shut up and we we left and and drive and they

tried to follow us and broke an axle or something and uh and uh so we're we go a couple kilometers down this uh dirty dirt half half uh road and suddenly i look behind us and i see a plume of dust coming up and it's some car and it's really going fast and it's coming coming towards us. So we're like, okay, boys, it's on. So we get out, turn, and then the car comes sliding to a stop, and the door opens and out jumps this Afghan officer. And it's funny, he's wearing body armor that I had given him my body armor when he went forward. And he jumped out and he ran up to me, and he was almost crying. He started hugging me and all that. And this story he tells is that he and his driver were driving that truck and just a little further ahead than

where we were they rolled up on a Pakistani checkpoint and he had him stop the vehicle and turn it off like the hill beside the checkpoint while they're trying to figure out what to do and now he's in a bad place because technically that would not have been good if a officer of the Afghan military and the military doesn't even know about it is a lot of problems a lot of problems so he told his when the people in the checkpoint were yelling at them to stop and and wanted to come and check them out and he told his driver turn the truck back on let's let's get out of here and the battery wouldn't start so wouldn't start so he told the driver just tell him I'm a guy that paid you to ride here and because that guy was a refugee had a refugee card and all that

and he jumped out of the car and started running or out of the truck and started running he said he heard two shots he don't know if they were shooting up in the air or shooting at him and he said for over an hour I ran in Wadis and hid and just kept running and running and got back and then he said I got back to that village and they told me you guys went this way

so I grabbed a car and gave a guy some money and here I am and so then we turned around and all of us now we're not secret anymore and you're still in international issues at the moment.

Yeah, yeah, somewhat. But, no, but that, but we got out. Now my biggest worry was we didn't have always, when you go in somewhere, you want to come out a different way. Unfortunately, in those vehicles and where we were, there was not another way. So I was worried a little bit that somebody could have put an IED in place. But they didn't.

We made it back. And, you know, with no, no, No incident, right? Nobody got hurt. It's crazy how a story like that with so many potential international implications if one thing goes wrong comes out like a comedic story, though.

Yeah, it's pretty fucking funny. It is funny. Well, yeah, because funny stories, I've got one on Kuwait, but there was a time that my hubris got me stuck in a hole, and I thought I was going to become a... In a hole?

Yes. in a ditch let me say that okay um i mentioned before in quaint i i would get people in and out of iraq this is oh too did i say quaint i i'm not sure where i was but there was a somewhere in and around there was a border and this border you know there was a u.n zone patrolled by by u.n that no U.S. were allowed in and in that was what was supposed to be the Iraq border there was a giant a big berm and then a giant tank trap which was a 15 foot deep 15 foot wide trench oh yeah and that was the difficult thing about getting these smugglers in and out was that they had to negotiate that trench now they're smugglers in that trench now they're smugglers and that trench and

in some places where the sand was loose, was kind of eroded down and get in and out. But some places it would have been really hard. And matter of fact, one time down in that ditch, we found a human skeleton. And I don't know if it was somebody had been murdered and thrown in there or somebody got in there and couldn't get out, who knows,

probably murdered and tossed. Do these things, like, the thing I'm picturing, I don't know if I'm like way off in picturing this is the hole in dark night rises that they put christian bail in you know what i'm talking about i didn't see that we pull that up dark night rises hole for people am i wrong alessie to be thinking of it that way yeah it's like it's like he's trying to get out of the hole oh yeah like that yeah climbing up the side get one with them oh yeah okay i'm yeah so am i right well okay so this is

15 feet by 15 feet. Yeah, this one was probably 30. And then the dirt that they took out of that, they used to make a berm, right, on the outside. So this one time, now I've got, I mentioned to you when we were not on camera that I had an agency guy who was not military background that was with me doing these ops. You know, I was pretty much the tactical expert, and he was. was the intelligence expert.

And yeah, I kind of figured I had enough skill to help him through what needed to be done tactically. And to be honest, the policemen that were working with us were just inept idiots. And I had to stay really close to everybody. And I would physically push, move people and whatever that I needed to do to keep people safe. But the Iraqi that we picked up that evening had been lost like three hours in that ditch

trying to get out. And now we're really, really running late and behind. And I had to get him to the secret facility where the agency people can debrief him. And then I got to get him back. And so when we're ready to take him back one of these local police that we were working with goes i know this ditch i know a place where it's easy uh it's not collapsed in but there's things you can hold on to and you can get out easy let's go there so we okay let's go so we go to this ditch and it was literally a 15 foot drop down in there so how am i going to get this guy in the air So we held him by his arms and draped him over the side and then dropped him. So it wasn't that far of a drop.

And that was fine. He lands. He goes. But now, you know, imagine this. Like you can see the picture sitting there. I'm sitting on the side of this ditch. I've got NVGs on. So I'm in night vision goggles.

So I'm watching what he's doing. And he's feeling the other side and he's moving. and he's feeling and he's like and then once in a while you see him lift the leg and try to and he's falling nothing nothing and he's moving and we're sitting there and he's like he's not getting out he's not going to get out

and now I'm sitting there and we're sitting here in any minute an Iraqi patrol might come by and the two things I've been told was don't get him I killed and don't start the war until the president does And so I'm thinking, okay, we're sitting here watching this guy and it's not going to happen. And that's where my hubris comes in.

You know, I've been in Delta. I've learned how to climb buildings and stuff on the outside, done all that stuff. And I'd been an avid rock climber before. So I'm like, I'm good. I'm going to climb it. Oh, my God. So I tell the guys. and okay these were clowns these policemen and then i have a non-t tactical guy i didn't know there was

such thing as iraqi policeman well they weren't ira did i say iraqi they weren't iraqi they were a neighboring country i didn't know there was such thing as kuwaiti policeman either but yeah who would think uh and um so so i have them hold me by the arms and drop me down in into this ditch and they walk away so i you know they're standing there so i walk over i i move to somewhere i get the guy up on my shoulders i get him up to a perch he gets out i'm like i'm good and i go back to this place where there actually was a place where there was a right angle in this ditch and i'm going to brace myself and climb out but i didn't and it turned into i couldn't And then there were nothing I could brace on that was steady enough, and I couldn't get out.

Did you have a calm on you? No. Oh, no. And then I'm in this, and I'm like, and then I'll start walking up and down and looking for a place, and I'm like, I can't get out. Then I start thinking an Iraqi patrol is going to come by. I go, I'm going to get captured because I'm stuck down in a hole. I'm a big badass former Delta CIA person. Well, at that time I won't CIA.

I'm a big badass, former Delta Special Forces guy, and I'm going to get captured because I'm stuck down in a hole. I didn't care about can I get killed or, well, I go being a prisoner of war. I thought, everybody's going to laugh at me when I get out. And you're going to be the guy that started the Iraq war? Well, I was worried everybody's going to laugh at me like with a dumb ass. I'd have been more worried about starting the word, but that's just me. But so I was down there and I was like, well, this is really sucks.

How am I going to explain this? And then I was thinking about it. But thank God, you know, and this really taught me a lesson about evaluating people on their turf. Because it was that agency technical guy, right? and he was a very technical minded person and he um had him or maybe it was even his idea but he took off his boot laces and tied them together and was able to make a loop in that and lower that enough to me that i could get one foot hold using that and then get up to where i was able to climb the rest of the way and um and got out so was he like laying over the edge with his whole body uh i can't remember how he how he was or braced but uh you

know i didn't need a whole lot of help but i needed some help and if it hadn't been for this guy who i tended to want to discount right with his abilities out there uh bad ass gary would of start the Iraq war or been one of those skeletons you find in there but yeah so I got out now immediately after that I went into town and bought a

collapsible aluminum ladder that I never went anywhere without how like do you carry that like a brick almost and it just no it was like just like you would buy at Home Depot or something it was uh but You know, we would just hoof it to the, to where that ditch was. And that way I could, we could climb down it and then just move it to the other side and climb up.

Okay, I see. For that issue. For that issue. Because, you know, we weren't hiking a great distance by foot. Yeah, I was picturing you guys just carrying a ladder around a rack for like the next two years. I'm like, no, we were in vehicles. Although, apparently if you carry a ladder somewhere, you get let. through security every time. I don't know if you ever seen this video.

No. Oh, yeah, we don't need to pull it up right now, but like guys will test out just like two dudes carrying a ladder together and they'll walk into stadiums just like right by security. Like, oh, yeah, yeah, we're just going this way. People are like, oh, they must be working on something. So it's low key actually like a really good access tool. But that happens like twice in my military career, I stole stuff by having a clipboard in my hand. And, you know, the first time, But the first time I was a Marine lieutenant and the company commander said, I want every platoon to put up, pull up official Marine Corps pull-up bars out here out in front of our barracks.

And he said, the first platoon that does it will get a four-day pass. You know, so, of course, you know, everybody starts planning on building and what the materials they need and all that stuff. And I'm like, what's a shortcut to that? And I was thinking, hey, you know, when I drive around on base in front of the brig, you know, the brig is the military jail. So there is a big set of pull-up bars that are welded metal there. And yes, they're chained to the ground, but it's a, that's pull-up bars.

If somebody were to go and take those pull-up bars, you could just come back here and set them up and you've done. But then how do you steal them in front of the brig? You take a clipboard and you write it down while you're doing it. You take a clipboard. So we do that and it's successful. You get a hard hat too? Nah, I probably want that. But I was thinking about that, you know.

And then years later, I was on an SF team, a Special Forces team in Kuwait, and we'd been there a few months, and we're getting ready to leave. And the whole months that we'd been there, people, the guys on my team were talking about the commanding officer, the two-star of Camp Doha at the time. And his little, in their trailer headquarters there, had this parking sign. It was the usual tire rim that has the metal pole welded to it and the signs on that. And it had two stars on it and parking only or his two stars. I can't remember what was on it. And everybody kept talking about we're going to steal that thing. We're going to steal that thing.

The thing is it was 24-7 headquarters and there was always people there and guarded. So how are you going to steal that? And I never said anything. I went through the whole time and listened to guys when you sit around at night. People would talk about their plans to steal that. And nobody ever did. So one day when we were getting close to packing up to leave, I went and got some clerk and had this big extended bed, forged truck.

I said, come with me, got the clipboard and just drove up there. and I told him, I parked down here and him follow my directions when I guide you. And I just walked up in front of the general's office and stood there and went, hey. And looked at him and start doing all that official, looking back here like that. You know, yeah, yeah, it's like a, and before I got it. So I got, when I walked over there, I had the clipboard in my hand. I looked at it and I looked at the sign. I looked at the clipboard.

And I go, yep. And then got him back. and he gets there and I just pick up the sign put it in the back of the truck and we drive away and then the rest and I put it in the middle of the bay where the team was and when the rest of the team came in and saw that I couldn't believe like how the hell did you get don't worry get that so that yeah so I got used to that kind of like you said sometimes the most obvious thing puts people's guard down, and you can, you know, get through that. Yeah. Now, this, this weave we started was all the way back at Coast. We ended up through, like, the failed mission to get the 10th and all that, but we were going through the buildup to Coast,

and you mentioned that there was something before that, and you and I talked off camera for one sec, but you can't give all the details here, but shortly before December 20th, December 30th, you were involved in something al-Qaeda related is that fair to say yeah there were yeah so um yeah there was uh an operation that i participated in that um you know took um an important uh salai al samali uh oh you can say off the I hope I can't okay I was trying to help you out there I told you I'd help you out yeah I think I've been told that that part we can we can talk about so my help

yeah with that and you think because of the success of that I don't I do not know what happened as a result of that that op happened a few weeks before the bombing and coast happened less than a month so possibly to speculate the success of that op and the confidence that they may have instilled at the agency could have led to some corners being cut and uh i won't say that because um the agency had been doing and planning operations against senior al-Qaeda for a lot of years right so the personalities involved and the method operandi you know they were kind of already in place and you know they had their favorite scripts that they like to follow and um the films and stuff that the evidence that

al-qaeda allowed to be presented that made balawe look like a very lucrative chance to take um those were well in place long before that yeah i have no idea if uh what happened with uh al-sali um hurried or sped up i have no because it might be that that meeting was planned long before that um but it to me it kind of reminds me of that whole thing of you know it's almost like when you talk about the gwatt this tit for tat that they're trying to get us we're trying to get them you take out one here one pops up there um you know it's kind of i think a in a way a statement about the state of the world good and evil war that the more things change the more they're the same yeah and it doesn't mean when i say that i don't mean that wars aren't worth fighting that people

aren't worth killing i think when any conflict or something like this happens there's people you got to kill and then there's a bunch of other people you got to convince and it's knowing when to stop one and start the other people you got to kill and a bunch of other people you got to convince yeah that's a loaded statement but it's kind of it does kind of encapsulate everything yes and you shouldn't kill who shouldn't be killed and there comes a time when killing you know i asked like we had we wound up with all these bases all over afghanistan and how much effort were the basis putting out to get information to protect the base so was the base if would would that justify the bait if the base was never there right surely I think until

we got bin Laden there was always this unending thing that we're just gonna whatever it takes and forever how long and how much money we're gonna put until we can claim that victory And then with him, of course, when you look back at that, you know, what did that mean? For me, it was like 15 years out of my life that I just chase after bad people. And that's 15 years away from home, 15 years of no life. And I'm happy. I'm really lucky to be able to spend my life the way I did.

but it's not the way that I want my kids to spend their lives and not the way that when I look around our country and see other folks, I don't want many people to have to live like that or do like that. Was it tough developing a close relationship with your kids because you're gone all the time? Yeah, my first set of kids. I had three kids and a stepdaughter from a marriage

when I was in the Army. And that ended in 97, which happened to be right after that happened when I got offered to start doing classified unusual things for special forces in the army and started traveling around the world and doing classified missions in places like I was working in Yemen and Kuwait. and you know the 9-11 hit and I never stopped after that and you married someone in the agency yeah so I had those three kids but those in those three I probably didn't deal with that well because that was one of those deals and I'm I'm not really trying to disparage any the mother of my kids or anything, but I went away on a trip for the military to do training in calling close air support. Our team went away for a week. I came back at the end of that week to find my house empty, my truck gone, and kids gone. And she had left with the kids. So I went through that.

and then later how do you deal with that like that i didn't deal with it well i i mean i admit my marriage wasn't the best and she'd been married before but i was one of those guys that you know divorces out of question so you you do the best you can and the the whole thing about kids kind of yeah i it kind of brought back some of that anxiety stuff that i'd had when i was younger that if I would be still and start thinking about them, I would just, like, images of their faces would just go through my head and, you know, it would get really hard.

I didn't know how to deal with it. And I never talked to anybody. You know, I never told anybody about feelings or anything like that. And about that time, I got offered to start doing these missions. And when I do a mission, I'm all in. And I don't think about home. I don't think about life. I don't think about that.

And then every time I stop or take a vacation, then all that stuff will come back. So the more you do it, better. So I'd only see my kids, I mean, they relocated 1,500 miles away. And then I was out of the country for most of the next 15 years. So I would see them once or twice a year for a short period of time and then be gone. When I was in Afghanistan in 2001 and two, I had the luxury of satellite phones all the time. So sometimes when I was pulling watch in the middle of the night, you know, I would call them up by satellite phone because we were authorized to make morale welfare calls using the Theriah. I probably talked more to them during those few months than I did somewhere else because it puts a different perspective when you're standing on top of a mud hut and there's like eight Americans there and you're surrounded by 300 people that you don't know.

You don't know how many of them are Al-Qaeda or that would just assume shoot you and you're getting ready maybe be in some battle. And, you know, that can cause you to, like, I have this time and make that phone call. For me, otherwise, I'm kind of not that guy. I'm all focused on the mission. You have the ability to massively compartmentalize? I thought I had the ability to massively compartmentalize, and I lived my life that way. But it turns out none of us are actually quite successful. compartmentalizing and I think it always it has its price and there's that can be paid later in life

or through your health or whatever so we full ourselves meaning when you're in the moment yeah exactly when you're in the moment you think you just have that subconscious ability to do that but it's really just building up some sort of and some manifestation ticking time bomb Yeah, or a time bomb or the time without or then how do you address your kids? Like my older kids now, it's funny because I spend a lot of time now trying to downplay things I did in the military. But yet I see particularly with my two sons who are in the early 30s and one late 20s that, you know, But that's all they knew about dad. Right.

Dad's gone, but dad's a hero. Dad, well, you know, he's doing this stuff. And it's hard because now I'm trying to sort of dispel them of some of that. Because there's a lot more to life than, you know, all these experiences that I've been lucky enough to have that we've been talking about. But my experiences are different than maybe most of the population. have but they're just experiences i i choose to not let that define who i am now and what i can contribute to the world now right it's um i'm great to have done what i did uh i feel blessed to be able to do that but that's not something i would tell everybody you need to do

or should do or aspire to do or nor is it what I want my kids to think that I did so I got married again inside the agency had two daughters from that marriage that are one is 16 today oh happy birthday Olivia and the other is 14 Reagan so I've got five kids And now you're around, though, too, which is great. Now I'm around, the girls live about 45 minutes for me. And I'm in the Northern Virginia area because every chance I get, I'm with them. And try to be part of the life. And I'm trying to be, you know, I think you're a better far out.

You know, they were born when I was in my 50s. So I think my experiences, I probably was a much better father in my 50s and 60s than I was in my 30s. And I still have time, right? My relationship is evolving with my older kids. And I'm able to have, you know, long talks about life with them. and with my daughters yeah it's good do you think the older ones now that they're you know not kids anymore and you and you know you're after your career and you can talk about some other things you did do you think that that that there's some understanding there just because of how i mean let's be honest like you were doing the highest level most serious jobs during you know the most dangerous time in modern history do you think there's they they get that even if it doesn't make up for time

lost and stuff like they understand that they do and uh and they're very i would have to say kind um i can't say i'm as close to them i just don't have much that much time on target as i would wish with them i wasn't there for the football games i wasn't there for the recitals uh i have a daughter and two sons from that marriage um i was absent for a lot of that time um but yeah i mean it's right they're they're appreciative and they're happy i've done a few documentaries the last couple years um a couple more coming out this year and yeah they're proud that their dad did this but um yeah i just try to point out to them that yeah your dad did that and I was gone but here's some weaknesses that your dad had

that in regards to you I know it's not that I'm apologizing for you know being a horrible father it's just that I made my choices based off who I was and my weaknesses and it's just part of what made me what I am so what's important is what are we doing now and what are we going to do in the future so fortunately none of mine chose military i've got an accountant uh and one in finance and uh one that works in the service industry cool that means bartenders so they went yeah they went they went they went their own way with things they went their own own way yeah and i i do it it sounds like you know your life is in a way less chaotic place than it was, which certainly helps.

I mean, I don't, whenever I talk with guys who, you know, did some of the highest level things, whether it be tier one operators or guys who were in CIA or both in your case, it's like, you know, you're constantly thrown into these life and death situations. You understand how the world really works and the things that we don't have to see here, you know, and the danger that we face. And yet, you know, you're still human beings. You may have this ability to really turn on to something like you talked about and turn on to a mission, but like you got family, you got friends.

And there's a loss there that naturally occurs because this isn't a nine to five job. And it's not an office down the street. You know, it's go to fucking Kabul. You might be there for three years. And by the way, you know, we're working at 2 a.m. because there's fucking drones going off you know what i mean like it's there's no there's no way for me or people out there listening to really even like understand that unless we lived it it's funny though that that for me what life has taught me is that you got to take the whole thing

that's uh my wife kim she's a great person that has a lot of good sayings one of hers is that you have to take the whole thing and with my life If there's a lot of guys that watch podcasts and stuff, I wish I had that life and those things. But there's part and some of that. We got in a little bit of it, but a lot of it were not going to. That you'd have to take that too. And it's the same with everybody's life. If you take that whole story, our stories are different.

But your story, if somebody wanted to do a podcast, I saw you had Sean Ryan. on and then uh you know each of us has that story and that arc that's its own unique thing that creates you for whatever is next um but there are tradeoffs so yeah there's tradeoffs right yeah i look at you i like to be your age look as good as you and uh have you know you've worked hard to uh build what you've built so far and i think like Oh, man, I would, I really like to be in those shoes and do that. But then I think, yeah, there's some other that probably comes with that, too. Yeah.

And I, you know, I always try to help anyone who, not even necessarily with just podcasting, but, you know, who's looking to get into content or stuff like that. Whenever they reach out and I see it, you know, and they want to start this, this or that, like I try to make myself available and help them out. But I never, I'm sure you can relate to this with people you talked with for your line. work who were interested and get into it like I never sugar-coded or tell them like oh it's all this it's just exactly what you see on camera you know there's there's a lot as a lessee will attest to there's a lot not life and death stuff like what you did but there's a lot of you know regular

old bullshit that that you got to you got to do and and I think you know if there's a silver lining in everything whether it be things like you did with the government something like what I'm doing or whatever if someone's out there doing something that they love to do whatever it might be you know you're going to have to take the good with the bed like you you don't it's not even if you love what you do there's going to be aspects of what you do that you're never going to love and you just got to do it because that's a part of life and putting the work in and it's like like you're saying like what are those tradeoffs and one of the things that I think I have a real luxury with that I'm grateful for is that

I figured out what I wanted to do in my 20s. And I also knew it was the kind of thing, you know, you put in five years, which I just crossed the five year mark like a few weeks ago. You put in five years and then you can start to kind of scale, which is slowly starting to happen now. But I could never do that, at least me personally, I could never do that if I already had a family or something like that. Yeah, probably not. Because I have, look at the way you're living. Yeah. Right?

I live right next door in the same place, you know? Yeah. And it's like, this is a seven day a week thing. You don't turn off. And like it eventually won't be that way. But for me, and this is just how I looked at it, to ask like a woman to come along for that ride. Yeah. You know, I've never felt like that was fair.

A fair ask. And eventually, like, you know, I'll be able to. kind of have both but right now it's still in that period where it's like we're thinking about this shit all day i'm making thumbnails into the late night and early morning of when an episode comes out yeah you know and you did that for fucking 25 years yeah i i spent total of 35 years chasing uh after that stuff right and and and that's the thing like you know we don't have time And by the way, I'm not leaving tonight. I'm actually leaving tomorrow morning.

Oh, you're staying now? Yeah. I already, before I came over here, I bumped my ticket. All right, fair enough. So I know we still need to call it at some point, but. Yeah, Alex O'Connor's coming in a little bit. I got another one right after you. Oh, my God.

There you go. You don't have a life. You have a life. It's just a thing. I was going to let that go. No, I mean, I don't want to say it. Well, you know, I hope that when I said it, you understood I'm not in one vein. Yeah, I know what you mean.

I'm messing with you. In one vein. Because, yeah, so, yeah, anyway, we've talked about that. Do we have anything else? I keep jumping us off. There is one thing I want to get to before we go. We got Coast. I think what we'll do is we'll bring you back at some point and there's a lot to go through, like, because we jumped the

around and there's a lot of Delta career I want to run through, but. Yeah, because I got kicked out of Delta, you know. I didn't even get to talk about that. But between coal and Benghazi, let's table the coal, which, because that's a really, you and I had a chance to talk about that like a month ago. There's a lot of build up there and things that happen. And I mentioned my friend Mike Ritlin was in here. He was one of the seals that was brought in right after to, you know, help guard.

From Lorraine, I think. Yeah, and all that. And that, the USS Cole ties directly into 9-11. That's a whole rabbit hole. But you mentioned, you mentioned Benghazi. Did, did you have look through? I don't know if you were just mentioned that because you had opinions on it, or did you have looked through to some of that? I have, so with that one, I was in the agency at that time.

And, you know, it's funny because one of the things we didn't say, agency and SF guys in 2001, 2002, I think we mentioned before, we're in for two weeks or three weeks and out. I was in there for five months. And then when I became a case officer in the CIA operations officer, those people go TDI or temporary or you do a year. So you year tour. Well, then how did I stay as long as I stayed? Because I went for the end of one year and they go, you're older.

You're good at this war stuff. we need you to stay again so i'm second year which is double what you know only a small percentage of people in the agency served in war zones and then even way smaller percentage sort serve multiple tours and it gets where you kind of get known as a war horse and particularly if you're a targeter or a paramilitary guy you're going to keep going to those places but for case officers, no. But for me, and it's kind of career suicide, but then they just kept me there. And during my time in the agencies, when I got married, so I got engaged before I went to Afghanistan. A year later, I went on leave, got married, and then she went to her country,

and I went back to Afghanistan for a second year. And so I'm married, but we're living apart. And And then my third year, they told me, I said, I don't want a war zone anymore. They go, well, you've done your share of war zone. But you're married now and she hasn't. She's going to do a war zone. Would you like to be with her or you want to be apart two more years? And so, and they said, your choice is to be with her in Iraq or be with her in Afghanistan. I go, well, shit, Ari, know this place pretty good.

so stayed in Afghanistan and I did that there what years was that so that was oh nine 10ish eight okay we were together eight so how I came involved with with Benghazi

is in my one of my periods at after all this right what year was the Benghazi thing. 2012, I believe.

Yeah, 2012. Yeah, 2012. Yeah. I had just returned to the States from my last overseas job. And I was working in Dunyere East Division. And actually, I was one of the first people that I was stood up what became the agency's effort in Syria. And while I was doing that job is, of course, when stuff started going down in Benghazi. And by that time, you know, I was known as the guy that understood war stuff and all this stuff.

So as things started going down, senior, well, the division chief who wanted me to ask me to take a look at some stuff that was coming in and give my opinion. And I had my boss, I started, but then they brought in some more senior people to handle serious stuff. And my boss, he and I were in super early one more, the morning that was all coming out. And he started complaining about that blanking video and like that. And I had already read a few of the reports. coming out initial raw reports coming out of benghazi and and he said you know he was blaming it on the

the movie and a spontaneous uh protest and i said you're smoking dope man that's not that's not that's not that's not that i go when they were coming back from the um chancellery they or wherever the ambassador had been they got hit with a linear ambush so that's not something that spontaneous rioters are going to be able to set up so that's a linear ambush and second those guys that got hit on the roof um if you look at the description of the mortar fire there was one round that was short then one round that was long and then they started a whole bunch of rounds that were right on target. I go, that means that somebody has a, it's not some guy holding a mortar tube and winging it. That it's a regular mortar set up on a tripod with people trained

to run it, that once you have a short round and a long round, now you know, adjust the dial in between and you're on target. So that's trained people. I said, so this is not a spontaneous reaction is this is a planned operation attack by trained people right and so that stuck out to me and some of the other stuff that happened with Benghazi and I have yeah I've got heartburn with that I got heartburn about the senior military and senior politicians that turn their back on a bad decision the whole deal with Libya in the first place that let's get rid of Gaddafi at that time. And then the way the U.S. went about, you know, sticking its toe in the water,

but then half-assin when it did kind of ruled out us having any credibility. What do you mean in half-assum when it did? You know, so the U.S. advisors there, they weren't, you know, the kind of people that are up on the front lines with the people that you're directing and taking the risk and fighting, you know, we're kind of back. Well, if you've been up there and do this, you know, maybe. And that, when Gaddafi did fall, then what that did was push the U.S. out.

If you remember, the U.S. tried then to have some influence there. They even rejected our first. We tried to send diplomats. They said, no, go the hell home. We're not going to talk to you. And that's because we didn't, you know, we kind of were on the outskirts just advising you know kind of like that voice on the outside we got the money we got this and they're like hey we're fighting a battle you know there's also i i mean this is just how i read it from the people i talk with you know there's this unfortunate reality in the world we kind of mentioned it with saddam briefly earlier where sometimes you do have people in charge of other countries who are evil people like objectively speaking they're not good the dictators they they do bad things to their own people

and i goddafi's a guy you would put on that list as well yet we unfortunately seem to live in a world where sometimes as annoying and against maybe even morality as it seems leaving them in charge yeah is actually better or or at least stabilizing yeah and and and yeah It may not be better for humanity and all that, but stabilizing is true. Like, but then, you know, the thing that, that one of the things that frustrated me was that the politicians and, yeah, I don't like to get political, but like Hillary Clinton and some other people in the Senate at that time that kind of got involved with all this. And in the Obama administration, they viewed Qaddafi falling as a big thing. Why? Because he was looking for a way to say, I'm a hard-ass-to.

I didn't have my 9-11 moment, but I'm a hard-ass too. And I said, Gaddafi must go and look, he's gone. And that emboldened them. And then you had people looking ahead, I think, to their, next political office that wanted to make some bones on this. So then it's like, let's do Syria. And then on the- Let's do Syria.

But on the, and let's say why, because who would be cheering for, let's do Syria? All the Sunni countries with Saudi, with the UAE, with Qatar, that saw and Kuwait, that here we go into. Iraq and we flipped it. So we had a minority Sunni government that was controlling majority Shia. Right. And we upended that. Well, now Iran's realignment, the Hezbollah, the whole thing with Iran and Shia, Sunni, they say, is out of balance. So all the Arab countries want to set the straight, well, okay, in Syria, we got the minority Shia. That'll ruling over majority Sunni so everybody's cheering for let's do this and um you know so i you know i you know i kind of thought that you know no um Syria is not the best country but like you said

that women still have some freedom there it's better than some other places and they're not really going after us so why are we going to mess around in Syria right yeah that seems to be the story though over and over again with so many countries and it's like you know at some point you would think we would learn the lesson that a were not too great at spreading democracy especially in places where they don't want it even if I think it'd be better for them to have it they don't want it you know and second Secondly, how many times you're going to watch this sucking sound of a vacuum happen where like, oh, well, now that was bad, but they're chopping people's heads off on live TV now. You know, like, it's, you know, in this trade, that's why I'd become convinced I would almost rather see the U.S. after seeing what happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, some of these other countries, see us go to more like an Israeli strategic military policy that was punitive.

you know the U.S. we go like we go to Afghanistan we want to topple the Taliban and get retribution well then what we want to do we want to fix you yeah and we're going to spend all this to fix you I would rather have it like now with the Taliban in charge I would rather say hey you know what we have every government facility and wherever you all live mapped out and we can precision target the hell out of it. We bomb you into the Stone Age. If you screw with us or an attack is facilitated from you again, we're not going to come in and fix your country and do that. We're going to come in. We're going to bomb the crap out of you. We're going to topple you and then we're gone. We're not going to come in.

We're not going to fix your country back up. We're not going to do anything. No black rock for you. Yeah. And, you know, now maybe that will have a lot of government contracting companies not making their profits but I think in in as Americans we don't like that we don't mind going in and throwing out a country or attacking it but we want to tell ourselves it's for the good of everybody in the long term so we'll invest a trillion dollars and a whole bunch of lives and a whole bunch of treasure and effort here to make a feel better and I think it'd be better that okay I'm mad at you you hit me I'm going to punch

in the nose and then I'm going to turn around and walk away see Gary you just open up an entire can of worms right now and normally I'd keep cooking with you but we got to stop we just did two of them and I got a guy here yeah to do another one but this this this was a lot of fun so thank you so much for doing this and I will literally leave it off right there because I kind of want to start the next conversation with you going through that philosophy because there's a lot there yeah we'll do that hey it's been fun thanks a lot thanks for coming up all right everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace thank you guys for watching the episode if you haven't already please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video they're both a huge help and if you

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