The Jordan Harbinger Show - 504: Lt. Col. Oliver North | Lessons from the Tragedies of War

Episode Date: May 6, 2021

Lt. Col. Oliver North (@OliverLNorth) is a political commentator, military historian, and retired United States Marine Corps lieutenant colonel. He is the author of many leather-bound books, and the host of Oliver North's America and Oliver North's Real American Heroes. What We Discuss with Oliver North: An Oliver North's-eye view of the Iran–Contra affair after 30+ years in the rearview mirror. Using SMEAC (Situation, Mission, Execution, Admin and Logistics, and Command and Signal) for making decisions in high-pressure situations. Why Oliver still recalls one day as a Marine machine-gunner during the Vietnam conflict as the worst in his life. What it's like to survive an assassination attempt (and outlive its bumbling perpetrators). Why Oliver considers "servant leaders" to be the best leaders. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/504 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. One of the lawyers for the hearings of the Senator House, forgotten which, said to me, the day you got fired at the White House had to be the worst day of your life. I said, no, sir. Worst days of my life were when Marines died in my arms. And that happened a bunch of times. The 28th of July is a repeat of that in my head every 28th July,

because I lost more Marines that one night than I did entire two tours than Westpac. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game. Astronauts and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional legendary Hollywood director, national security advisor, or rocket scientist.

And each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, we now have episode starter packs, and these are collections of your world. favorite episodes, organized by popular topics to help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash starts to get started or to help somebody else get started with us, and of course I always appreciate it when you do that. Today, I never saw this one coming when I started podcasting.

Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North served 22 years as a U.S. Marine. His awards for service in combat include the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and two Purple Hearts for Wounds in Action, which he calls enemy accuracy medals. He's also the former president of the NRA, a little controversial there. If you're Gen X like me, you remember him being on trial, on live TV, in front of the Senate and the entire country

back in the 80s. Before that craziness, he served as counterterrorism coordinator on the National Security Council staff. So he helped plan the rescue of U.S. students in Grenada, the liberation of American hostages, the capture of the Akeel Loro ship hijackers, and the raids on Gaddafi's terror bases.

After that, he made some friends. he was targeted for assassination by Abu Nidal's Islamic Jihad. So, spoiler alert, they missed him. That's why he's still here today. Today, we get into making decisions in high pressure situations. We've got some stories about covert missions. Obviously, can't pass up that opportunity. I also wanted to know what it's like being targeted for assassination without, you know,

actually trying it myself. I also wondered where he thinks the country is headed. He's a guy with a fairly unique perspective on things. This episode is more political than usual if you've been listening for a while. You know, I never get into politics here on the show. If you're not into that, there's several hundred other episodes you can dive into. But for now, let's talk to the sometimes polarizing Oliver North. And by the way, if you're wondering how I managed to book these folks on the show,

it's always about the network. And I'm teaching you how to build your network for free. My systems help me follow up with Oliver North for years to get him here on the show. I'm doing that with all the guests. I'm showing you the software, the skills, the systems, all for free at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. All right, here we go with Oliver North. The book that I read was Underfire, came out in, I think, 1991, right?

Yeah, 91. And you were on trial for the Iran-Contra affair, and we'll talk about that in a second. And I remember watching this as a, I guess I was probably seven or eight when it was live on TV. And my parents were trying to explain to me what happened. And, you know, eight-year-olds, it's kind of a heavy lift for an eight-year-old to understand the Iran-Contra affair. I think there's a lot of 40-year-olds that don't understand. I got eight-year-old grandkids who don't understand it. Yeah.

And there's pictures of mom and dad at the hearing. in the summer of 87, picture of mom and dad coming out of the courtroom. And it's now the grandparents, right? And so one of our grandkids, we spend college sophomore down to, I think, 13 months. Oh, wow. And the 18 grandkids. And so I look at one of them is in my office at home. I have an office up over my garage. And he's looking up at this picture of my wife and me on the cover of Life magazine in 1987. And he looks at it and he says, Nan, which is what they call their grandmother, because my wife called her grandmother, Nan.

So these are the kind of generational things that happen in life. He says, Nan was a beautiful woman. And I said to him, son, she will write you out of her will. And she owns everything here, right? She will write you out of her will if you use past tense describing your grandmother, right? College sophomore. Yeah. Smart and up kid.

Yeah, yeah, smart and up kid. If you want to see this boat again, if you want the fishing boat, you better wise. up. Exactly. Yeah, the trial captivated the whole country. And I know that you'd mention in the book, and this sounded sort of speaking of social media, sounded very modern. You said you found out that you had been fired by Reagan when you saw it on TV. And I thought, ah, if only Twitter were around, you would have found out that way instead. Now that you mentioned that story. So Tom Landry, coaching the Dallas Cowboys and Joe Gibbs are bitter enemies on the football field. But when Joe Gibbs was

starting Youth for Tomorrow, modeled on what Tom Landry and Roger Stobach had done in Dallas to help youngsters who were in trouble and to create a place where they could actually live with families. It's modeled right after the one in Dallas. The first fundraiser done for Joe Gibbs Youth for Tomorrow was done in Dallas, not in Washington. Now, we've done a lot since. Youth Tomorrow is a wonderful organization. Absolutely first grade. And the first guy to speak in behalf of it was a surprise speaker, me. And Landry introduced to the surprise speaker at this fundraiser for Joe Gibbs with the following ways. Our next speaker and I have a lot in common.

Three things, in fact. One, you never see either one of us outside without a hat. True. We both know our Lord and Savior. True. And we both learned we were fired on national television. It seems like such a drastic move. But can we talk around Conchon for a minute here because a lot of people are going,

I've heard of that or I've never heard of that. I'll do a quick chronology for it. So, 1979 is the Iranian Revolution. The Shah dies, the Ayatollah Khomeini, becomes the supreme ruler of Iran. And Iran, it goes to war against Iraq in an eight-year-long, brutal, bloody campaign. And so in 1981, I joined the NSC staff. My bio says 1983, and that's because the first two years was something so sensitive, I still can't talk about it, at least not knowingly unclassified.

And so from 1983 to 1986, I was the U.S. government's counterterrorism coordinator. We had American hostages grabbed in Beirut at the behest of the Iranians. It was, Hezbollah is a creation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the chief guy, just Soleimani, just happened to get out of the car at the wrong time a few months ago and got whacked. Those were the people who convinced the Hezbollah in Beirut to capture Americans. And so they held five of them at that point in time. And my mission was to get them back. And so we had at the same time, as you pointed out, a Nicaraguan resistance starting in 1980, growing all over the place.

They were cut off by the Congress of the United States in 1984 with what was called the Boland Amendment. The Boland Amendment said, and I'm trying to remember exactly, but it goes something like this. No funds made available by this Act, which was the National Defense Authorization Act. may be used for the purposes or which would have the effect of conducting military or paramilitary action against the government of Nicaragua. So the CIA was taken out of the business. They turned to me and said, find a way to support them. And so we created a 501c3 public charity. And we went to countries like Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, South Korea, Sultan of Brunei, and they donated millions of dollars. When I started the operation in 1984, it was March and

1984, there were 10,000 Nicaraguan freedom fighters. By the time I was fired in 1986, there were 20,000. And we didn't have $100 million a year. We had a lot less, but because of the efficiencies in it, we didn't have a big air force. We had a small air force. We didn't have a big Navy. You had a small Navy. We were able to do things for them that brought them to the brink of disaster for the San Anistas, even though they were getting help from the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Libya, Cuba, they were in deep trouble. And there was an election, and Violetta Chimorro won. Why? Because the Nicaraguan resistance became so good. Now, granted, there were all kinds of folks in the media that hated him. The Miami Herald does not have a positive thing to say about Alley North,

whose name did not show up in all of this until after November of 86. And so what I look back on it, I say to myself, could we have done things different? Probably. But selling, and it wasn't, because of my relationship with the Israelis, okay? The Israelis volunteered, they actually brought the idea to us, we'll sell our old-toe missiles to the Iranians for a profit. All you need to do is replace our missiles. And so in three different trips, I went to, the aircraft, actually rented an airplane from another country,

parked it in a hangar in Iceland, put that tail number and all the electronics of that airplane on a 707 that was Israeli, and they flew the missiles to Tehran and hostages got released. We did it three times. Three hostages came out. The last of us was David Jacobson, who just died just before Christmas, and one of the bravest men I've ever met. I brought him in to see the president after he came out.

And as we were coming back from the mission, a plane went down in Nicaragua. And there was one survivor who thought he was working for the CIA. He wasn't. He was working for Project Democracy, which was edited by U.S. Air Force retired major General Dick Seacord, one of the smartest, bravest guys. He came to me as a consequence of Bill Casey saying, this is the guy you want to run the Air Force, take care of the deliveries. And he did. He also made sure that the toes got picked up in the United States and delivered to Israel to replace the Israeli toes, tow missiles, which we're talking about, the toll missiles that the Israelis

had sent to the Iranians. Incidentally, none of those missiles worked as they should, the ones that were delivered to Tehran. And why is that? I was nailed on it. in one of my meetings with the Iranians. And it is true of the older missiles, but none of those were fielded. If you fired that missile, which was wire guided, that missile was trailing gold wire behind it. And if it went into water, it would short circuit. Now, none of those got shipped, but it just happens that the ones that they were using that got short-circuited were fired over water. So traded some arms that didn't really maybe work so well to the Iranians and you got humans out. And that was the idea, right?

And money. And money, yeah. And the byproduct is the money went to the anti-communist guerrillas in Nicaragua. So now, I don't feel so bad about not understanding this when I was eight and nine years old now, because it actually isn't super simple. My parents probably only had a sort of rudimentary grasp on it. So no wonder their explanation didn't make as much sense. You mentioned that you went to Iran. I got to wonder, what was it like visiting one of our enemies, especially at that time, our staunchest enemies, right, on this sort of secret mission. I imagine you were nervous, right? It was very secret. In fact, along on that trip was Bud McFarland, former National Security Advisor, my boss at the NSA, who left in 1984, but he stayed in touch. He went on it to verify

that the President of the United States did want to make a relationship with moderate Iranians, not with the crazies that are still running the place, but with others who, quite frankly, there's still a bunch of them there, maybe even more of them now than there were, who don't want the Aitola's running the place as a radical theocracy. And so Reagan's effort was genuine. If this works good. And so Bud McFarland went on that trip, which is, now that's real Cajonis, along the mix my metaphors in different languages.

Sure. And so was I worried. Yeah. Like, weren't you worried about joining the hostages that you were going to pick up, especially as a military officer? Like, you got stuff in your head they might want, right? Well, sure. And that's why Casey gave me seven pills.

Really? Yeah, and I carried them with me the whole time. What were they? I don't want you to get the wrong impression. I'm not afraid of anything on this earth. I fear God. I know where I'm going, and I know why I'm going there. There's nothing to do with how many medals I have or how many wars I was in.

And I'd been shot at and hit a few times before I got to the NSA. They've been hurt a bunch of times since. But Fox paid me a lot more to get shot at than the Marine Corps did. And so it's not foolhardy. It's just one, knowing what you're doing is helpful, having good situational awareness. The mission was a failure from our perspective in the fact, there's pictures of Rafz and Johnny going through the Bible that Ronald Reagan personally inscribed. And it was an embarrassment to the president when the plaintiff, Nicaragua, and the rest of this all came out. Could it have succeeded?

Yeah. I don't think any of us who were involved in it. And there were hundreds of people in our government who were very witting of it, who said, suddenly couldn't remember anything about it in the aftermath, but most people considered it to be worth the risk. Cap Weinberger disagreed with that, but he didn't stand up and shout it from the rooftops like you do nowadays. George Schultz was not in favor of it, although he had plenty of opportunity to sit down privately with the president and say, stop it. And was he was the Secretary of Defense at that time? Weinberger was Sacked F. Schultz was Secretary of State. Oh, right. Yeah.

And Casey was the director of Central Intelligence, which at the time, all those were very, very powerful position of the National Security Advisor, obviously John Poindexter succeeded Bud McFarland the job. These are wise men. In fact, I'm still in very close touch with both Bud McFarland and certainly Admiral Poindexter. You said they gave you seven pills. Why do you need seven? These are poisonous pills that you were going to take, right? That's what I was told.

I did give them back. I did give them back when we got home. Seems like they could fit it all into one. I don't know. There were seven people who... That makes more sense. That would have been a bad situation. I would imagine you had one or two sort of nightmares where you're sitting there handing out those pills, right?

And, you know, you wake up and you go, all right, this could go sideways. Not really. No. It's not that I'm not thoughtful. What you do is you focus on the mission. I get asked a lot, how do you decide what you're going to do? And it's something I learned probably from my dad, who was the first hero I ever met. I mean, my dad was a World War II hero from the European theater.

and a remarkable man and a very successful businessman, and eventually before he died, a teacher, taught business at Albany State, New York. And I like to look at a situation the way the Marine Corps taught us to. Situation, mission, execution, admin and logistics, command and signal. Those five paragraphs. Smeak is what we call it. And so good situational awareness is a good thing to have. Okay, what's your mission? Our mission is to get Americans back and to build a relationship with moderates, which didn't really exist at the time. The execution of it was, carrying out the plan that had been developed and worked on for several months before we went. And Command and Signal was, in fact, I think there was a picture in the book of the equipment

that we carried. It was satellite communications equipment, which was so secret at the time, I had to make special promises to Mr. Casey that I would not lose it on the trip. Oh, yeah. That would have been kind of a disaster. Yeah. That's pretty interesting. No, the tape doesn't have any photos. It has the photo, one of many photos of you looking kind of annoyed during your hearings, which we'll get to in a second. There's a lot of those photos, and I don't blame you. In your first book, you did talk about your father's death, and you mentioned that he died peacefully in his own bed, and years later, you were glad that he didn't have to go through the stress of the investigation like your

mother did. Can you paint a picture of what the investigation process was like? I mean, what was your life like at that point? And there is a picture of my dad's, the last picture of the whole family had it together. My dad had emphyseum very badly, he'd been a war hero. he smoked, as a lot of people did in that generation. And as a consequence of the emphysema, he ultimately died with early dementia and a pretty severe case of pneumonia, which is what took him out at the age of 67. So I'm 77. I've outlived all my male relatives and intend to.

Wow. Yeah. Well, so far so good, right? And so far so good. And I don't smoke, and that's part of the solution. And I eat well and I stay fit. When my dad was leaving us, he talked to all of us, both privately as well as in a group. The group setting is that last photograph of taking.

You can see he's got the oxygen, and he's kind of out of it. And so I was just very glad that he didn't have to go through that because he raised us. And people asked, you know, military recruiting is always a big issue. And our family, every one of us, the North Boys, all served in the military, all of us in combat in different branches of the service. And so I look at that experience and say, why did he never said you have to serve. And in the military, they call it a legacy volunteer. And so, of course, since 1973, there's been no draft. Everybody still has to sign up for the Selective Service.

But there's no draft. And it probably never will be again because we're not going to have the time that it takes to build a military once a war starts. The next war is going to be boom like that. It won't be a six-month build up like Desert Storm, like Desert Shield before Desert Storm. there's not going to be the kinds of things like we did in Afghanistan. 9-11-01 happens by the 7th of my birthday, by the way, the 7th of October, I'm with Mattis going into southern Afghanistan. And so the next war is probably going to be fought by an adversary,

probably communist China or one of its proxies like Iran or the North Koreans, who will use nuclear and chemical and probably even biological weapons like maybe COVID-19. So the draft will probably never happen like it once did. Do you think COVID-19 is a bioweapon? I sort of picked up that little aside there. I hadn't heard that from you before in your interviews. And I've never said it that it is, but it could be. The variations in that particular spore are rather dramatic.

You know, I read just about everything I can. I like to look at those kinds of things from a lot of different perspectives. I read what the CDC said initially, that you couldn't transmit it from one human to another. Oops, why you can. Yeah. And all of those kinds of things that have come out, and at the very least, that book right there, can you see that book?

Yeah, I do see that one. It looks like Xi Jinping, America's number one adversary. I'm not sure who else is on the cover. It's Donald Trump. Okay. Couldn't tell from here. But the book is about communist China, and they are our number one adversary. There is no doubt economically, militarily.

They have more ships in their Navy than we have in ours, and they're building more than we are. They have more submarines deployed at any one time than we do. They have more ballistic missiles than we do. And we're treating them like there's still a developing country, and their economy is soon going to overtake ours. And an awful lot of that debt is owned by the communist Chinese. Where do they get all the money to do all this stuff from us?

And so us giving them the Green New Deal to punish ourselves further is not a good idea. I look at the kinds of things that are happening, particularly with COVID-19. And I say to myself, well, if they're not building a bio-wif, weapon that we'll do that. Why didn't they stand up and say right at the get-go when the very first cases showed up in October of 2019? And they knew instantly what to do about it. They stopped all internal travel inside China, allowed anybody to go back and forth. And where was the number one overseas Chinese production manufacturing operation? It was in northern Italy. I mean, if you buy a Gucci bag or you buy a Lamborghini or a Maserati, it still says made in Italy, but it's made by

hundreds of thousands of communist Chinese laborers in that country. And they were allowed to go back and forth. So the first major outbreak of the disease in Europe is Italy, Northern Italy. And so I look at those kinds of things, Jordan, I say, why would they do it that way? Obviously, they've had far fewer cases than we have. They knew exactly what to do. They started administering all kinds of things like hydroxychloroquine and the like to their people and never told us that it was working. And of course, every time the previous president would say something like that, the press has come down and hammer my head, because you don't know what you're talking about. Why is that? I mean, why didn't the World Health Organization discover all this back in the early days of 2020? Instead, it's not until March

that we start lockdowns and things like that, and then we become draconian about it, and it wrecks our economy. I don't even think the World Health Organization was allowed to go investigate this until recently. I could be mistaken here, but... But they have members, Chinese members of the WHO working in the Wuhan Virology labs, right? What I'm saying is they didn't come out and start saying any. And some of the doctors who did start saying, wait a second, we have a moral responsibility here.

They've disappeared. And so the Uyghurs aren't the only ones who are in jeopardy inside communist China. I'm not claiming that they invented it in the lab. I'm just saying what they didn't do to stop it or to tell the rest of the world how they could stop, which tells you something about them, at least as a deceptive force,

and that's what that book is all about. Let's go back to Vietnam for a minute here. I know it's been a zillion years. There's an experience here that you talk about in the book about your friend Johnson passing away in your arms. And when this kind of thing happens, how does that change you, right? It's got to be so impactful.

You remembered it decades later. I'm sure you still remember it now. It's one of the worst days of my life. Here's a Marine, machine gunner, PFC, private first class, black, bright, tough, hard. We've been out in the field for over 50 days straight without going back to get a shower or hot chow. And we're night attack as a probe by a North Vietnamese Army rattle against what we call the Laotian salient. They picked our battalion up on the DMZ because we used to operating in mountains and flew us down into the first Marine Division's area of operations and sent us out into the wilderness. us. And our job was to go out. They'd drop a bunch of heavy B-52 loads on top of the mountains,

and we'd go out and clear the wreckage, defend the place a little bit, and then move on to the next one to put a fire base in. And we were just about to move out of that place the next day. It was pouring rain that night. And the probe gets picked up by the listening post, and the machine gun opens fire. And then you hear a lot of AK-47 fire. You could hear him get hit because he was right in front of me. He's probably 20 meters in front of me. And I was dug into my radio operator, Jim Leonard and I were dug into a little tiny foxhole for the two of us, dragged him back. Leonard calling, calling, calling on the radio for helicopter to come in. In our day, it was a golden hour. If you could get somebody back within an hour being badly wounded,

they would probably live. And the weather was so bad, the ceiling was literally below us. And then we'd rise up and they tried, it flew around for over an hour trying to get to land us. and we ended up having to carry him to the next LZ, the weather cleared. But just 24-hour difference would have changed everything. I look back, I tried in every one of those experiences to say, what could I have done differently to change the outcome? No one ever ought to look back and say, should or what or coulda. It's not a game anybody wins.

But if you can learn something about what could I have done to change the outcome, there's probably several different things. I could have put people further out, a tiny little perimeter. We were probably down to 35 or 40 guys and what should have been a 46-man rifle between reinforced by engineers. We should have had about 55 guys. We'd been out a long time in the field.

We'd had some wounded. We'd had some guys hurt. A guy's sick. Malaria was rampant. How does seeing real combat, real... You mentioned the decisions you made that maybe you would have done things differently or there are other things you could have tried differently.

How does that change the decisions that you make in other areas, such as trying to get hostages, out of Iran or helping Contra's fight off commies in Nicaragua. And I guess I just said commies. It's 1988 again. But how do those intense experiences where you see real consequences change the way that you make decisions later on in your career? Well, I'm not trying to inflict my perspective on anyone. I know where I'm going and I know why I'm going there, right? And I know that Romans 10, 9, Paul's letter to the church in Rome, if you confess to your lips that Jesus is Lord and you believe in your heart, God raised him from the dead. You will be saved. That's a key verse.

It's one of the last words I said to my dad, and I've said it to a bunch of other guys. So that confidence of knowing the outcome, I'm a chronic optimist. I am. I mean, it's all going to work out. Even in the midst of the fact, we have 20 some odd federal agents at a time living with us back when we lived in Great Falls, Virginia. Betsy and I got married 53 years ago in November. The kids joke about it. See, Mom, how did you make it this long with this guy. Look at all the things he's put us through. And her answer was, he's been gone half the time. Yeah. I mean, that's part of it. Number two. And I made the comment in the back of my most recent book in the acknowledgement section, the most recent novel, which is

the rifleman. And in the back, I acknowledge that Betsy is my mate, my muse, my most fervent critic, and the greatest inspiration I've ever had, and the most fun I've ever had. And the kids go, Goddad. I said, where do you guys think you came from? No, she is still the most fun I've ever had. And I look at the adventures I've had in my life. There's very few people that have had as much fun and as much of the adventures as I have in life. The only thing I've got that commends me as a husband and father is that I believe the words Semper Fidelis actually means something. Always faithful is a way of life. I sign all my correspondence that way. And so when you say, when you look back and you say, are there challenges? Yeah, I would rather my family,

had not been put through that. I would rather the guys who targeted me for assassination hadn't come to our house when we weren't there and killed our dog. That happened? I did not know that that happened. So who targeted you for assassination, right? It was like Islamic jihadis. Islamic jihad, which was an organization put together by a guy named Abu Nidal. Abunidal was a henchman for Muradhafi. In 1985, he blew up a discotheque in Berlin, killed old. bunch of people, a lot of Americans, and President Reagan said, I want retribution. And so we launched a very short planning, a series of air raids, both from the Mediterranean to ships at sea and the F111s out of Mildenhall, England. And that Mildonaw, we flew, at my point next time, actually flew to Paris

to ask Mitterrand for permission to overfly France. And he turned us down. Oh. And so they had to fly all the way around and come back in from the south against Libya. which meant that they had to refuel three times, and we lost one of the aircraft for the two U.S. Air Force officers aboard. Now, I look at something like that and say, I wish we could have done that differently. It would have taken a better relationship with Mitterrand

or at least less of a bullhead as the man was. Was that a mistake? No. But as a consequence of that, Abu Nidal was then told to target the people who planned the raid. Now, that was done at the direction of Muammar Gaddafi, but it was his Islamic jihad that had the terror cell called the People's Committee for Libyan students in McLean, Virginia, about 10 miles from where we lived in Great Falls. And they sent a message from Tripoli, Abu Nielder, to his terracel, the People's Committee for Libyan students, and told them to take out target number 11.

And I was target number 11. And so they reconnoitered the House. And thankfully, the FBI was on it. I was the director of counterterrorism for the NSC, right? And so, and we knew about this being a terrorist. We just didn't know that they'd sent the signal until it was decrypted, you know, days later. And they immediately pulled Betsy and the kids out of town, sent us down to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, arrested the six guys. And the U.S. attorney named Henry Hudson, brought him into court and laid out all the weapons, AK-47s, hand grenades, rocket-propelled grenades, RPD machine gun in Great Falls, Virginia.

Yeah. All taken out of a cell storage unit that belonged to those. guys. The FBI arrest him brings them in the middle of the night, and they're going to do the hit on the family when we were gone. There's a liberal judge appointed by Johnson. He said, Mr. Hudson, I see all the weapons. What charge am I going to hold these people? You say, no bail. He said, they can post bail for this. He said, yes, Your Honor, I know, but attempted assassination of a U.S. government officer is a specific crime for which there is no bond. He said, who? He said, well, it's a technical, Your Honor. I mean, that's the way that the verbiage goes. I've been around enough

courtrooms nowadays, these days since. That's the verbiage it's used for a technical, meaning wire tap or video tap. In this case, it was both. Long short of it, the judge said, and by the way, they already had their lawyers there from the Yugoslav embassy. Remember, Libya did not have any diplomatic facilities in D.C. since Ronald Reagan got. And so Yugoslav embassy provided their legal representation, very good lawyer from the prominent law firm, said, I'm not going to allow, Your Honor. It's wrong for you to allow a bench conference without me attending. And Hudson said, we can't do that because he didn't want him to know that we're still monitoring that place. And the judge says, well, what's the maximum bond? I can hold on all these

weapons. And Hudson says, $500,000 a piece. It's Mr. Hudson. Who's going to come up with $3 million between now and dawn? Gaddafi. Yes, they did. Then they booked. Really? Oh, my God. That's- So we ended up with federal agents living with this, a total of 37 and 20 of them at a time on some days all on duty. Terrific guys. Back before NCIS, it was Naval Intelligence Service in those days. And there was the guys that provided bodyguards for the chief of naval operations, all the foreign naval chiefs, the Secretary of the Navy. And they stayed with us until I was indicted. And then private security firms picked it up from there. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Oliver North. We'll be right back.

Now back to Oliver North on the Jordan Harbinger Show. What happened to those guys that tried to come after you? If the story's right, and again, all I have is the names of the original ones. So there are two guys of those names, didn't see the pictures, who were killed in a bank robbery in Canada. A third one was killed by a train. He was walking into the United States across, in Rome, New York, there's a bridge across the St. Lawrence. And he was hit by a train just before the bridge in the middle of the snowstorm. The snowstorm was blowing that way.

He was walking that way. The train came from behind and killed him. The fourth and fifth ones were killed in a raid by the Israelis into Lebanon in the 1980s. The sixth one is still at large someplace, which is why I live in undisclosed location. I was going to say, I don't know how true that part is. Yeah, he's probably not really on the hunt anymore at this point. He's probably like 65 or something. But who knows?

Well, he might be older than that, even, because one of these guys was a professor at University of Maryland. These are little people. They really are. There are cells like that. I mean, look what just happened here in Colorado. The individual who shot up that grocery store is not Irish. And so you've got to wonder, I mean, I'm sure we'll find out over the course of the next several days because he was wounded. He's in the hospital.

But if you look at that kind of track record for those kinds of folks who've been, I understand that the Secretary of Defense is now looking for extremists in the armed forces of the United States. Well, back at Fort Hood, what happened is a guy who'd already become extreme and was a medical officer in the United States. Army did the shooting. And you've got to wonder why we're looking inside our military for guys who might as a youngster belong to some right-wing organization just to throw them out of the military. And you've got guys like that walking around the streets of America who obviously had some motivation other than robbing a grocery store. Yeah, you've had some close calls. There's a mention in Underfire where you're going through an enemy officer's pack after an ambush when you, I guess, had taken out this officer.

And you found letters from his family. And I think maybe photos, but I can't remember. And you said he became real at that point. Did you ever think, wow, I'm glad he's not going through my pack? There were a couple of real close when they might have been going through my pack. And hopefully the guys around me saved me on one terrible adventure going on the 25th of May. Some days, maybe life you should never forget. My dear friend is the first platoon commander.

I was second platoon commander, and he was hit immediately in an ambush. And my platoon was ordered to move through. And about five hours later, we got to the top of that hill. And I had run out of ammo. I'd run out of hand grenades. My shotgun had taken a piece of fragment. In fact, the other piece of the fragment went through that finger. And I couldn't cock it anymore, so I threw it down on the ground and took out my 45.

And I had to take 45 ammunition for my radio operator because I'd run out of it a couple times. A couple pretty close calls like that. In fact, when the company commander finally got to the top of the hill about six hours into this gunfight, I'm sitting on a tree that was blown down by in the air, one of the many airstrikes I ran that afternoon. And he says, he's carrying my shotgun. And he says, in a military shotgun, you can fix a bayonet to it. And I have no recollection of ever saying it. But one of my Marines said, when I heard you say fixed bayonets, I knew we were in trouble. And I have no recollection saying everybody around had their bayonets on. and my bayonet was on the end of the shotgun because the Model 12 Winchester, it takes 10 rounds in it, and it fits a bayonet, and my bayonet was on it.

And so when the company commander, who was a very brave guy in his own right, gets to the top of the hill, he's carrying my shotgun. And we're doing what they call pursuit by fire back into the DMZ chasing the back. And he says, what's the idea of dropping this government property? I said, well, sir, if you notice, it won't cock because there's a fragment that went through it and into my hand. And that's why it won't cock. He says, son is still a perfectly good club with a ban on. And he wrote me up for a solar star. But there were many occasions when we always tried to get identity for the ambushes.

I've got a lot of medals. The ones that I actually deserve Purple Heart, that's an enemy accuracy medal, a Navy combination medal for running 72 successful ambushes. At least that's what it says in the citation. That means we killed enemy soldiers and lost no amount of our own every time. And we tried to go through in the middle of the night, most of them, go through their equipment, their packs, take their weapons, and identities so that Red Cross could be notified. In this case, it was an officer. He was a lieutenant.

He's got a picture of his lovely wife and kid in his pack. I've got that picture that I carried in my helmet. Every time I take off my helmet, I'd see Betsy and our baby. And so unless you're totally cold-hearted, you can see the connections there. Does that make me feel great about killing other people? know, but the option was they would have killed us in a heartbeat. That's one of the horrors of war. I don't think anybody ever ought to glory in it. One of my favorite Marines is a fellow by the name of Joe Dunford, and I was embedded with his unit for a whole attack from Kuwait all the way north to Tikrit on March of

2003. And the 5th Marine Regiment was the biggest Marine combat unit that we've had in a war short of the division, about 7,000 troops. And I would see him almost every day because I was living with a helicopter squadron, HMM 268, which no longer exists. It's all been replaced by V-22s. And I was with then-Colonel Dunford, my cameraman Griff Jenkins nicknamed him Fighting Joe Dunford. And we went to almost every briefing with him in the squadron commander that we were living with. And Dunford said at one point, the cameras weren't running. And trust me, I could sit there in the morning briefing. And every once in a while, they'd say something like, what'd you think of yesterday after it was all over or whatever? A lot of really good gunfight footage.

And I said, how are you feeling? Because this is like the 25th or 26th of March. And we've been at it nonstop for five or six days. I guess we started on the 18th. And it's exhausting. He looked up at me and he said, it is a good thing we do not do this often. For it is so exhilarating to see so many people moving in the same direction,

accomplishing the mission. And it breaks my heart every time one of them gets hurt. And that's Joe Dunford. And we rode Kazelvax helicopters, Griff and I more than I could count with footage that is equally dramatic. He's the kind of guy that you really want leading troops because his heart. The best leaders I ever knew were servant leaders, the battalion commander that led me in the Mediterranean, John Grunnels, who went on to become retired as a major general, went on to become the president of the Citadel and a very devout guy and never hesitated to go out and say, here's what I believe. don't have to believe it if you don't want, but here's why I believe it. And he did that with thousands of young people. Today, if you tried something like that, you wouldn't get court

marty and just get relieved. Things have changed that much. But I love being with Marines. Every once in a while, the Marine Corps or the institutions of our government less so, but I wouldn't trade you at a single second that I could spend with Marines. During the hearings, how old were you at that time? So, let's see, I was born in 60. I was married at 25. of 1968. The hearings are in the summer of 87, so I'm 35, 36 years old, yeah. Okay. That's a young age to be going through national spotlight, Nancy Reagan and Ronald Reagan saying, this guy's full of crap, more or less. I'm paraphrasing, Nancy Reagan didn't say full of crap, obviously. No, she may. She may have. Yeah, something along those lines.

One of the things I couldn't write about at the time, because the book is being written while were cases on appeal. That first night of the hearings, we had an unlisted phone number. We were living with at the time probably 20 federal agents, knew that our phones were being monitored. I mean, that's what I would have ordered if I'd been in charge, a special prosecutor in the congressional hearings. And the first night of the hearings, and I remember there's already a special prosecutor appointed. And the first night of the hearings got home probably, I don't know, nine o'clock, 10 o'clock at night. I've got to be back at the office, Brendan Sullivan's office at five in the morning. Betsy, did not come with me the first night.

And she pitched a fit. And so she was there the second day. At the time, we had four kids, one off in college, the two at home, the three at home. The youngest one in her Dr. Dentons. She was one of the ones

that got taken out in her Dr. Dentons to go down to Camp Lejeune in the middle of the night. What are Dr. Dentons? The little footies, you know, the footies of the, and the trap door in the back. Oh, that's what those are called?

The little button button, but pajamas? I've never heard that. I didn't know they had a special name. Dr. Denton's, yeah. And it probably doesn't exist. anymore. And so I get four phone calls to an unlisted phone number. One is Richard Nixon, who I had gotten to know very well while I was at the White House. And he said, I said,

Oliver, that was a magnificent show today. You just did everything exactly right. You said it all well, and it had the additional merit of being the truth. Only Richard Nixon, who put it that way. The second call was from the Command on the Marine Corps, General PX Kelly, who had ordered me the day I got fired, the 26th of November to report to his office. And I went right into operations and plans, which requires the top secret clearance. The third phone call was from Billy Graham, what got in to know. And he prayed with me. And I said, at the end of the conversation, I said, Dr. Graham, how did you get my phone number?

Well, I did what I always do. I called the White House switchboard. And the last call was from the president. And President Reagan said, I know your kids have gone to bed. But now it's 11 o'clock or 12 o'clock. I know your kids have all gone to bed. But I want them to know that I regard you to be an American hero. We said, talked for a few minutes.

I told him how sorry I was that this is hurting him. And at the back end of it, he said it again to Hugh Cydie and several other people. I've got a little note from him that he wrote to them. And I guess I'll tear it in four pieces when I, I don't know, give it to one of the kids. One of the greatest privileges of my life was to work for Ronald Reagan. I look back at that experience, some of it very, very exciting, some of it very dangerous. some of it very educational. I'm still close to a number of people to include my former boss,

I'm a point extra especially. I had some great friends I made in the Israelis, armed services and their intelligence service, and some of them are still alive. We've got to have some remarkable experiences. Betsy and I, up until COVID, were leading a group to Israel just about every other year and hoped to be able to do it again.

And meanwhile, one of those guys that I got to know so very, very well, who incredibly brave, who'd gone all the way into Tehran with us, with a passport that we gave him, died of COVID. And we're getting to the point now where I try hard to stay in touch with people. I mentioned Dick Seacord a while ago. He and I were on the phone earlier today,

not about moving arms and weapons and things like that, but just about old friends, and we've lost a bunch of them. I've got a flag here that I've got to get to the family of a Marine who I'd covered during the war, and hopefully they'll be able to find some of the footage. He didn't die of suicide and he didn't die of COVID, but he died of the complications of being badly wounded 10 years ago. Wow.

Yeah. What advice would you give your younger self going through those hearings, right? You were 35. If you're watching this unfold in real time right now, given the benefit of hindsight, what would you have told yourself at that point? That has to be one of the most stressful situations of your entire life, right? No. No?

I mean, stressful situation is leading, you know, 50 Marines up the hill into enemy gunfire. That makes more sense. Yeah. At one point during the hearings, one of the lawyers for the hearings of the Senator House forgotten which said to me, the day you got fired at the White House had to be the worst day of your life. I said, no, sir. The worst days of my life were Marines died in my arms. And that happened a bunch of times. And the 28th of July is a repeat of that in my head every 28th July because I lost more Marines that one night than I did entire two tours in the Westpac. And one of them was a company commander, a whole bunch of staff sergeants. just awful, terrible, terrible night. I was hurt pretty badly. My corpsman saved my life, tried to save the captain's life, and was badly wounded himself. And Jack Fowler and I are still very close from those days. What you don't want to do is to drag you down. So I try not to let it, I love to go out, just taking a long walk in the woods or going fishing in the Shenandoah or coming

down here, sitting looking at the Atlantic Ocean, and just take a long walk on the beach and just, Okay, that happened 50 plus years ago, and it was still a terrible time. But the Lord's blessed me in many other ways, so let's get on with life. You fought to support the Nicaraguan Contras, bring them weapons, bring them money. You didn't want to bring them empty promises in their fight against communism. This is back in 1987. It reminds me a little bit of the situation now with the Iraqi Kurds, and it seems like we left them a little bit in the lurch, right? I mean, we're pulling forces out, pulling our support.

What do you think? Not a little bit. a whole lot. We left the Iraqi Kurds. I actually came home from my last trip overseas in 2017. I got hurt. Somebody on the internet said I was wounded. I was running so I wouldn't get wounded. And it's the middle of the night. And there's a barrage of mortars coming in on this position. It's right outside of Mosul. The final fight for Mosul is just about to begin. And I'd been with the Peshmerga guys several times by then. And these are incredible guys. many of the ones I got to know as officers and enlisted guys were in college in the United States

when Kurdistan was invaded by ISIS. They promptly said, thank you very much. I'll finish the semester when I get back from the war, and they went to fight. And it was the Kurds who joined us to drive out ISIS out of Syria. It was a terrible mistake to abandon them. It was a terrible mistake that we didn't stand up at the end of it. It's the largest ethnic group in the world, Jordan, without a homeland. And the Uyghurs are close second. The Kurds have been promised by the Western powers ever since 1919 in the Treaty of Versailles.

They've been promised to homeland. Do they have one yet? No. And they should because they're remarkably close to us. They have an enormous sense of religious tolerance. Some of the biggest Christian churches in all of that part of the world today, and not going back 500 years,

but going back in modern times, some of the biggest Christian churches are in Erbil, the quote capital of Kurdistan. I had them hand me a map. I wish I'd know we were going to talk about this. I've got it here somewhere. Draw me a map. I'm talking to the president of Kurdistan.

And I draw me a map and show me what the borders of Kurdistan are. Borders of Kurdistan would have taken up a little bit of Iraq, a little bit of Turkey, a little bit of Syria, and a little bit of Iran, not much. And, of course, a fair amount of oil. And I just think it's a terrible tragedy that they are now beholden to the Baghdad government. The Baghdad regime is corrupt. They're sitting on great big pools of oil. And I suppose now the price of oil is back over 60 bucks a barrel, they're going to make some money on it. But very little of it's going to get to the kind of people who deserve to have it. That's a major problem in that part of the

world. Do you think we should have more to end the Syrian Civil War? I'm not sure we could have. I mean, if you look at the alignments, I mean, the Hafez al-Assad family, the family line goes all back, is the al-aite, which is primarily Shiite. And you've got the Russians involved in it. The Russians have got to keep their bases there. They have no fresh water. If the Russians don't keep their bases, air bases and their naval bases in Syria, they won't have any ice-free ports anywhere in the world, right? Because eventually St. Petersburg freezes over, and so does Archangel. And so the Soviets are in there. The Russians are in there. The Turks are in there. The Western powers are in there. The Israelis are in there. And everybody wants a different outcome.

And of course, ISIS was pretty well running the place up until a few months ago. I'm not entirely sure that there was much anybody could do short of American intervention. I think we've had enough of endless wars. I'm not trying to take any political party's perspective on it, but I think good, quick wars are the kind of thing. Until this thing came along, the longest war was Vietnam for my generation. And there were guys who did two or three, 13-month tours over there. And it wrecked their marriages. It wrecked their home lives.

that wrecked them. My foundation does a lot with the young guys and gals who come out of this war. We have over 500 youngsters who have lost a parent in the line of duty from this long war, 500 kids on college scholarships right this minute. I'm just hoping they all get to go back to school. And that's a free ride for those youngsters. And so what we do with Freedom Alliance is trying to help the families. As you and I are speaking right now, there's a track chair being given to a wounded vet in Houston, Texas. And this war's been going on. I mean, we've still got to American troops in arms way in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's time to bring them home.

Back in the 80s and earlier, we had the Cold War. There was no dispute that the Soviet Union was the enemy. They were antagonist to the USA. Now there seems to be a split, especially among conservatives, about whether Russia is our adversary or not. I'm wondering what you think. I'm thinking, thank you for the opportunity to promote the book. There you go.

It is the number one adversary. Russia ought to be, if hubris and ego are such big factors, in politics and power. If Putin was thinking things through and not just trying to make himself the richest guy in the world instead of Bill Gates or whoever it is this week, he would become an ally of the United States. They're broke. Their economy is broken. The corruption is rampant. And he's essentially president for life now because he managed to change the Constitution. The number one adversary, by the way, the Chinese are not going to have to go to war against the Russians. They're buying it in order to own property inside what is now

Russia, you have to be a Russian or married to a Russian. China has 51 million more men than women. What do you suppose they're going to get married? And so you've got Chinese men moving as fast as they can to buy up pieces of Siberia. They own land with lithium and rare earth metals and petroleum and coal underneath the ground. The Russians are going to lose it. They ought to be doing a deal with us. On firing line, which is a PBS show in 2018, you said something along the lines of any country that doesn't have a democracy is our adversary. Is that still an accurate representation of your thoughts? No, it's more likely to be an adversary, though. More likely. I may have even gotten this wrong. This is going off sort of, you know, notes from this. That's for sure.

No, I mean, our long history is opposing tyranny. And we, sometimes tyranny came here. I mean, the forces of the King's George came here three times in the space of the lifetime of Daniel Morgan, who I'm writing my next book about, the rifleman. And if you look at what, Tyranny did, we ended up losing almost a million Americans in World War I and World War II because of tyranny. If you look at the Korean War, it was because we had a treaty that was going to defend the South. And the Russians, with great prescians, walked out of the Security Council session that could have vetoed the war, right? Vietnam was because of a treaty obligation against tyranny. If you look at what's been transpiring, our effort to bring and force other people to be democracies just like us,

but have no experience with it whatsoever, it's been a failure. and it's cost the lives of thousands of Americans. How much longer do we want to do that? If we're going to do it anywhere, we ought to do it. Let's say, I'm all in favor of the next war being in a place that's not a hellhole. It's like Bermuda. Yeah, we'll do it in the Caribbean. Why not?

I'm only half-gesting, because if something really matters, it ought to be our own hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine was all about that. And right now, the Chinese-Chinese owns both ends of the Panama Canal. And pretty soon they're going to take over the maintenance up. And the same thing's happening in the Swiss Canal. Anybody worried about the communist Chinese? They ought to be. This book is, by three of my buddies,

is all about how to take the steps necessary, 70 of them, to save America. And that is a tyrannical regime. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Oliver North. We'll be right back. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers,

that's what keeps us going. If you want all the discount codes, all those URLs, everything's in one place, Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. You can check out the sponsors for yourself. do consider supporting those who support us. Don't forget, we've got worksheets for today's episode. If you want some of the drills, exercises, main takeaways during the show. They're all in one easy place. The link to the worksheets is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast.

Now for the conclusion of our episode with Oliver North. You're a combat veteran and you've written many books and done a ton of research about the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, other American wars and non-American wars, for that matter, when you see events on the news where people are breaking into the Capitol building and they have Confederate flags, which is a flag of an enemy of the United States, right? What do you, as a military historian as a veteran, what do you think about that? Well, they're Americans. I mean, let me take you back a few months earlier. I was appalled all summer long. You had courthouses. You had buildings, you had pharmacies, you had private businesses, you had homes torched all across this country. And nobody did the darn thing about it. And when

then President Trump would say, you know, you can call in the National Guard. Everybody said, no, no, that'd be a terrible thing to do. We, right today, we have something in the neighborhood of 3,000 plus National Guard troops still in Washington, D.C. We're on a great big fence. They won't finish the border fence, but by God, they've still got the fence in Washington, D.C., guarded by U.S. military personnel carrying firearms, real assault weapons, right? I look at that kind of thing, and I say, this is the kind of thing.

that makes Americans cynical about their government. This is the kind of thing, the hypocrisy, the corruption that makes people say, my vote doesn't count. Or let's go out and phoning up a bunch of voting records to make sure that we can stay in power. I'm not saying all that happens, but I'm saying it affects the attitudes of the people of this country. We spoke a few minutes ago, we spoke about the idea of legacy accessions into the military. Those guys that I interviewed for our last book. Veterans Lament. There's guys who I interviewed for that book who we've now gone back, David Gretchen I, and asked them, would you recommend your kids to go in the military? Now, I'm still willing to do that, right? But a good number of them are not. A good number of them are now saying,

I wouldn't want my kid to have to serve in a military where their loyalty is being questioned about, did you ever belong to the Boy Scouts? Have you ever been a Republican? I mean, it's not quite that bad yet, but that's where it's headed. You've got political questions on the security form. When I came to the United States Marine Court, December 29th, 1961, raised my right hand, took the oath for the first time. If I were a Marine recruiter, right, there was one question, it was a loyalty question.

And so a lot of two of you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party? And the answer was, of course, no. Now that section of that clearance form, form 86 or 84, is now 14 or 15 pages long. Are you a member of this extremist group? Are you a member of that extremist group? Meanwhile, you've got a guy who's clearly been motivated by something other than the Holy Bible

who just guns 10 people down in a grocery store in Colorado. What are we doing to ourselves? And I'm not Rodney King. Can't we all get along? We're never all going to get along. And so when I see somebody waving a Confederate flag, look, I got friends of mine who graduated from VMI. In fact, I just wrote to a congressman in Florida in his first term who was a VMI graduate and a war hero.

And we all recognize that it's a different climate than it was. when we were growing up, right? It ought not to be as different as it's become. And so when people start talking about reparations, if you don't think that's going to be polarizing, I'd like to just point out to the reparations people up in Chicago that just started a program they call reparations, that not one member of my family was in this country by 1900, much less 1860s. So my family, I don't know anything. And my kids aren't going to pay anything for reparations. The fact is they're trying to take money from people who didn't have slaves and give it to people who were never slaves. Now, that's a purely political decision being made by, quote, leaders here in our country.

That's not the kind of leadership we need. You don't need it. Your kids don't need it. And my grandkids don't need it. It's not going to be helpful. Now, whether the pendulum is going to swing back the other direction in two years, I don't know, but I hope so. I wonder what you think. I missed the VMI, the Virginia Military Institute.

What does that have to do with the Confederate flag? That one went over my head. Well, Stonewall Jackson was a professor there. And the Stonewall Brigade was cadets that fought right up the road, I mean, right up Route 11 from VMI, fought against armed forces of the United States. They were Confederate recruits come right out of Stonewall Jackson's classrooms. Where do you stand as a veteran on the Confederate flag? It just seems so strange to me to see that, like it's an enemy flag right inside the Capitol building.

And it's just, of course, it was held by somebody who probably didn't put all these associations together so directly. But as a veteran, I'd be like, what the heck is that guy doing here? You know, what's that flag doing in there? The flag that's going to cover my transfer case. By the way, it's not a casket. It's a transfer case. You'll know that the next time you watch a military funeral. That's what they call.

This is good name for it, transfer. Think about that. Transfer case is Old Glory, okay? Old Glory is flying right outside my window. All right? That's the flag. I had in my office for years a North Vietnamese communist flag hanging on the wall because I captured it. No one ever criticized me for it. I have no idea where it is today,

but I captured it in one of those ambushes in South Vietnam, and the soldier was carrying it, undoubtedly didn't think that there was a thing called South Vietnam, because they were indoctrinated to believe it was all one country, and they were just fighting these American invaders. So I brought that flag back home from me, and when I was teaching tactics down at Quantico, it hung over my desk right next to the American flag, which hung just a little bit higher. Sure. I mean, I understand that that was a trope. from a war. If you were in World War II and you killed a Nazi and you took a knife and it had a swastika on the hill, maybe you keep that in your office. This is a guy who bought it off of Amazon, right? He wasn't in the

Civil War. Look, the United States Marine Corps is now banned it being hung up in a barracks anywhere. I'm not sure how many lives that's going to save in the next war that we're in. But that's the rule. So you live with the rule. I'm fond of reminding my kids. The kids are all upset that the IRS is going to raise taxes on granddad and dad. I don't make the rules. I just live with them. I abide by them. to. Otherwise, I'd be in jail right now instead of walking around free from Iran country, because a lot of people wanted to put me in jail. There's still time. The fact is, I didn't break it. I didn't break any laws. Therefore, we're good.

I don't complain about it. I'm just saying the count on the Marine Corps ordered no more Confederate flags on any Marine Corps bases. I don't know what it's like in the other services. I'm sure probably the same. But the bottom line of it, it's the rule so bad. Bye-bye. Now, what about the kid who got at 17, got a tattoo on his arm that's got a Confederate flag on? Should we throw him out of the Marine Corps? I mean, I don't know about the... Wait, wait, no, we don't. Don't touch the question.

Oh, no, I honestly, I have no idea. I just wondered what veterans thought of the Confederate flag in the Capitol building. I don't, honestly, if you drive a truck and you have that thing on there, whatever. You know, the Duke's a hazard car when I was a little kid, that had it on there. I don't wear it, but if somebody else wants to wear it,

then fine. I'm not going to try and even just say that, I don't even want to make assumptions about all those people, because I would imagine it's pretty tough to say everybody who has that is racist. But if I were in the United States and I brought in a North Korea flag and I stormed the capital, people would probably go, what the heck is that guy thinking?

That's not the American flag. And if you say that, hey, I'm a patriot, but then you bring a Confederate States of America flag into the Capitol building, I have to wonder which sides you're on, you know? If the guy brought an American flag in, like the woman who wore one, I get that. I understand why they chose that flag. But when you choose the enemy flag from the Civil War, I don't know. is a couple of questions. But yeah, the guy with a tattoo, I mean, hey, that's, I don't make any policy, and I probably shouldn't, and I never served. That's why I'm asking you.

No, you got my answer. What I'm suggesting to you is that an awful lot of that is being overplayed at this point, because it's to the benefit of a particular political perspective, right? And they made good use of it. It was happening well before what happened on January 6th. It's going to happen again. There's going to be people who are going to object to tearing down statues and things like, a stunning. it the lack of history. They call it the 1619 movement. Well, in fact, there were lots of slaves and African slaves in America well before 1619. I don't know which history prof they used to call that and talk about that, but they're wrong. Okay. If you look at what transpires in terms of

slavery in America, right from the get-go, even people like Thomas Jefferson knew it was wrong. That's why he crafted the declaration the way he did. And he knew he was going to take grief for it in Virginia. And Virginia had not the most slaves, but pretty near it. And if you look at what transpires in the process of getting rid of slavery, the number one state with casualties is Virginia on both sides. And so I can understand the perspective of a family who lost loved ones, even though none of my family was even in this country yet, not on my Irish side or my angle side. I can understand how if you look at the history of those fights, and we live right in the midst of it. I mean, Winchester, Virginia is not only the place where Daniel Morgan launched his long walk to Boston for George Washington

and the American Revolution. It's also a city of chain stands five times in the Civil War. And so if you don't have a memorial at some point, who are these people fighting? Because there's no memorials to the bad guys. And all around us, within 25 miles, you've got battlefields that are enormous. You know, Gettysburg is a little bit further, but not much. And if you look at our distortion of why people fought, granted, the war began over the whole issue, they knew from the day that Lincoln was elected, they knew the outcome, right, which is why Virginia is one of the last states to succeed. And you have people collecting up arms and trying to manufacture arms in the south, Alabama and Mississippi, because they knew

that it was going to transform their society completely. I'm not justifying slavery. Don't get me wrong. I'm just saying that what we're being taught today is not necessarily the whole truth. And when you see, you see the commonwealth order, no Confederate flags on base. Got it. Carry out your orders. But I asked the question about that kid with a Confederate flag, who may have got it at 15 or 16 years of age. Sure.

Should we be throwing him out of the service? I mean, it doesn't seem like that's a good idea, right? It doesn't to me, but they are checking people from their tattoos now. The way I kind of look at that is, look, if it's not a friggin swastika or an SS symbol or something like that, it probably is just some dumb kid crap. Again, that's sort of above my pay grade. there's a reason I don't make military policy. I'm curious to know, with the benefit of 30 years plus hindsight, and after both Gulf Wars, 9-11, the war in Afghanistan, ISIS, do you think that

if America had engaged in more Iran-contra-type deals, would we have headed off the terrorist threat that's defined the last two decades? Or do you feel more like American imperialism might have contributed more to it? No, no, look at radical jihadism and radical Islamist, it's not simply a theocratic perspective. It's a social, judicial, military, and societal structure. It's not just, he's a Roman Catholic, and that's a Presbyterian, and that's an Anglican, and that's a Baptist. It's not that at all. This is our way or the highway. Okay. And so I have no idea what motivated this gunman out there in Colorado. I have absolutely no doubt of the benefit that they're going to take from it politically in terms of banning certain types of firearms and all the rest of it. But the

reality of it is there are people who hate us simply for being Americans, okay? I've seen a bunch of them, and I think there's a whole bunch more out there. There's want to take advantage of our weaknesses, and we do have weaknesses. One of the things that happened up in Anchorage was you have the communist Chinese equivalent of the Secretary of State pointing his finger at American representatives saying, you've got Black Lives Matters issues, don't tell us about human rights, okay? And so, look, it's never going to be a perfect world. It's not going to be a perfect world. It's not to be a kind of situation where weakness is going to prevail. It's not going to be the kind of situation where we're going to gain friends by being a kind or gentler kind of people.

Ronald Reagan's line was peace through strength, okay, and he was absolutely right. He prevented a major war. And the Soviet Union had to take a step back and look at it and say, we're not going to win this one. We're up against adversaries in places like Iran and perhaps in other Muslim countries who don't care about the outcome for their people. They are bound and determined to carry out their vision of a prophecy that calls for the eradication of Jews, Gentiles, infidels, and non-believers. And I've studied enough of it to realize some of those folks are never going to be our friends. One of the reasons I became such an advocate for getting the interpreters out, if we're going to pull out, bring our interpreters home with us. And unfortunately, we didn't do that.

And so many of those interpreters have now been killed or their families have been butchered, those kinds of things. I mean, I walked over the mass graves that ISIS had created in northern Syria and in western Kurdistan. It's absolutely horrendous. I saw nothing like that in the wars that I was in, in which I was a participant. And I just, I look at that Jordan and say, no one's going to stop doing those kinds of things because we're too weak. If you look back at Soleimani's demise, Soleimani was the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Kud's force, which was their terrorism arm. He built the Hezbollah movements in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq, and in what is going to ultimately happen down in the coast of Yemen. I look at those kinds of things and say to myself, was there anything we could do to be nice to this guy that made him like us?

No. He was totally committed. And of course, the president took insufferable grief from all kinds of people for killing him. And yet he was out killing Americans every time he had a chance. And so my experience in life has led me to believe that there are some things I can change and some things I can't. And what I can do for my 18 grandkids is I can be an example of how a Christian husband, father, grandfather, brother, son ought to behave. That's what I try to do. At the end of my days, I wanted to put on the back, I've got a little spot picked out at Arlington because I got enough medals to get there. And that's the criteria that they, I didn't make them. That's the rules. I don't want all the medals and all the battles on the back. I want from Paul's,

second letter to Timothy. He showed us how to fight the good fight, how to finish the race, and how to keep the faith. If I can do that, I'll have accomplished my mission. Well, this was fun. Thank you so much. I hope it was a bit more enjoyable than your congressional testimony. Unlike, unlike howl Heflin was, I don't know what was going through his head. But at one point he put up on a screen, a check that I had signed, made out, and I'm making up the name of something like Lily's lingerie. And, of course, our six-year-old daughter, right? And Betsy, thank God, was there that day.

Because if this had happened on the first day, I would not have known the answer to you. He said, I want to know, Colonel, big fat jowls. You're looking at that checkup there, made out to Lily's lingerie. Will you buy an undies for your girlfriend, Thorn Hall? And Betsy tasked me on the shoulder,

and she said, no senator, as my wife just reminded me, that was for our little six-year-old daughter's retards for dancing lessons. This is the prosecutor thinking, I've got him dead to rights in front of his wife. I assume he just sat back down after that and didn't say anything. He never came back into hearings. Remember, the hearings went on for what you saw was five days of daytime hearings.

They went on until nine or ten, eleven o'clock at night in the top secret quarters of the place, and over a total of nine days. There's a long hot summer. Jeez. I had no idea what was happening outside until we'd come out and see crowds of young people, you know, cheering and things like that. which they will never do that again. Congress will never, ever call hearings like that again.

And if that's the best outcome of what I went through, good, because they should never do that. They tried it with Kavanaugh, and you'd think they'd learn their lesson, but they didn't. Oliver North, thank you so much for doing the show. I really appreciate it. My pleasure, Georgia. Next time you're in this neck of the woods, and my neck of the woods goes from Georgia to Washington, D.C.

Come see me. I would love that. Thank you very much. Thank you for your service and for your time today. Great for our country, buddy. Thank you. I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that, here's a trailer from my interview with Academy Award winner Matthew McConaughey. Did you just kind of like walk down and get a coffee one day and everyone's like, oh, hey, guy I see here regularly? And then the next time it was like, that's the guy from a time to kill.

It wasn't coffee. It was a tuna sandwich. And it inverted. I mean, it went from 400 people in the promenade, 395, minding their own business, five of them looking at me to 3995. It's staring at me. The world became a mirror. Notice right there immediately, oh, I don't meet strangers anymore. Who am I when I'm being told I can kind of be whoever I want to be? And I was 23, 24. You know, you can engineer Green Lights for your future by the choices and responsibilities you take today. They can give you more freedom tomorrow. But you don't do the work.

You don't get the freedom. For more, including how Matthew McConaughey makes life-altering career decisions, check out episode 455 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. All right, well, there was a lot in here. I enjoyed this one, but it was challenging. Oliver North has a lifetime of media experience, and some of it was quite adversarial. So this conversation, while very cordial,

I think he's used to people maybe jumping down his throat, not really sure. He got a little resistant there, a little defensive. When he equated or seemed to equate the BLM protests with the capital riots, you know, I wish I'd asked him if he thought that both sides were wrong or if he thought that both sides were right. Can't really have it both ways, can we? got the old redirect there a few times, right? I was trying to ask, and then it was like,

let me dodge, let me go over here. Also, for the record, there's no evidence that COVID-19 is a bio-weapon. That is a Q&ON-esque type of theory. I'm not saying he got it from Q&ON or anything, but that's, they tend to echo that stuff. Hydroxychloroquine, not useful against COVID. That's also kind of a Q&N type thing. Again, I'm not saying he got it from Q&ON. I'm just saying those are the same beliefs. I hope that's just a coincidence, and he's not wrapped up in that. But look, on the whole, I'm glad I did this interview. There's something a little, a little disappointing about him dodging the Confederate flag question

and then accusing me of dodging some irrelevant question about military policy and tattoos. I don't know. Am I too sensitive about that? Did he think that would just go unnoticed? I don't know. Maybe a lot of interviewers just aren't paying attention. Super nice guy overall.

I'm really glad I got a chance to have this conversation with him. I think I'm a, I guess I'm a bit surprised by some of this. Perhaps I shouldn't be. Now you all know why I stay off politics on the show. It's a freaking minefield. But I will say this. He's been married 52 plus years. He's got 18 grandkids.

Good for him. That is impressive. And I thank him for his service and his time here today as well. Links to Oliver North's website and some of his books will be in the show notes. Please use our website links if you buy any books from any guest here on the show.

That helps support this show. Worksheets for the episode are in the show notes. Transcripts in the show notes. There's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube channel at jordanherbanger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or hit me on LinkedIn. I always love connecting with you there.

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they contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in great company. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, J. Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. I couldn't do this show without them.

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