The Team House - Army Counterintelligence Agent Adam White, Ep. 78

Episode Date: January 30, 2021

Adam served as a Counterintelligence Agent in Afghanistan and Iraq, participating in the hunt for high value targets.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five

with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit Child and Family Resource Network.org today. Special operations. Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hosts, Jack Murphy,

and David Park All right guys, we are live This is episode 78 of the team house I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park And this is our guest tonight Adam White Asalamu alaqum

Farmer army Army counterintelligence agent So this is going to be an interesting episode I mean Adam go back We went to Colombia together That's where I met this guy This Gibroni

I mean crushed on you Yeah, I court it in Jack Loki You want some scotch? I'll have whatever you guys are having All right, Dave Oh, you don't have to twist my arm So start off and telling us a little bit about Where the hell you came out of?

You're a kid from Boston, right? Yeah, I guess I'll segue to the I'll have whatever you're having, right? My dad is, his nickname is Big Jim, right? 6-2, like 250 pounds, like Irish Catholic bruiser from like Dorchester, which is like a real kind of hearty section of Boston. And my mom is like the sweetest, a nurse that's like the daughter of nurse, like super sweet, right? They, as it were, separated pretty early. My dad used to take me out to lunch, right?

And when I was a kid, right? And whatever I ordered, he would look up to the waiter and say, I'll have what he's having. Or I'll have the same, right? And we're going to talk about human and everything like tonight. It's oftentimes not what people say, but like how you feel like in their presence. And I just remember like just the spirit or the principle of him being like I'll have it whatever he's having. Right. Yeah.

So in that spirit, cheers y'all. Cheers. Cheers. Let's have some fun. You two bruises. You bruises. It's a little, I don't know if the audience can see, but it's a geometrically a bit of a distance there. Yeah, I met you.

I think it was probably. I think we started the same semester. I started in January of 2011, right? When did you start? Same? 2011, September would have been. Okay, okay. And then so both Jack and I studied political science at Columbia. I guess I'll kind of go back. Yeah, I'm a kid from Boston. My mother's very Catholic, Irish, my father's very Catholic, Irish. My dad's a city kid. My mom's from the suburbs, super sweet woman. They both come from big families. I grew up in a place called Winchester, which is adjacent to Lexington, like Al La Lexington in Concord, right? So a lot of rich

history in the area. I grew up in a place called Winchester, Norman Rockwell, like New England, picturesque Americana, like, and we'll get into all like my experiences, you know, I'm sleeping in caves in Kuhner or whatever, but like in Lai. of that, looking back, it was, like, silver platter, perfect. Like, I got into weird reggae because my friends' parents were cool. And, like, you know, it's just, like, it's just like a really, a very, very civilized place, which is maybe a strange word to use. But, you know, it's like, in Boston's a cool place to grow up because it's a, it's a paradox, right?

There's a lot of merit to the movies and stuff about, like, the Irish Catholic, like, fighting. like, you know, what was just the kind of fighting culture in Boston? It really is. But also it's the home of MIT and Harvard and some of the greatest medical institutions, you know, academic institutions. So there's a paradox of, you know, that why I oughta and like, we'll fight,

but also kind of intellectual, like cerebral or whatever, blah, blah, right? Were those two completely different crowds there? No, it's baked in. So it is me. It is me. It's not goodwill hunting. So kind of, I'm the poor man's like goodwill hunting. Like I'm like the third string.

Like put me in coach. Like come on, we're up by 40 points. Right. Like goodwill hunting, right? Right. But I joke, but like a lot of great comedians come from Boxing. Yeah. There's running with this paradox.

Like I'm sure I will swear a lot tonight. I'm going to drink. I got a couple blunts on me. Right. Like, you know, like we're going to, it's a Friday night in Brooklyn, right? It's all good. Me and Dave drink way more than we should when we do this show. You know, in Vino Veritas.

You met with the previous guest of ours yesterday. I made a point. I made a point to be with Alana. Hashtag Alana. You're G2 in the show to see what was going to happen. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But so you already know that, you know, there was. Well, at one point I asked, so we'll pivot for a second and talk about, like, Alana.

I was saying Jack before we started rolling, like, I was not in the regiment. I was not in, you know, SF or whatever. but you know when you talk to somebody in the regiment, you know if they were in the regiment. And if you talk to somebody that was an SF, you know, so when I saw the show and I was having fun, you know, in my home, you know, and I hope people are enjoying themselves as well. Like, you know, because I was saying that part of the environment is just kind of kick back. But when I was watching Alana's interview, I was like, that girl, I'll bet the eyes of my children, right, has been in CI He met. You know, and you got to understand, there's a million different directions that would go, whatever, but like, Alana and I, chronologically, a bit matched that we met yesterday, whatever, you know, we did, had different experiences of whatever, but we both had TSSCI clearances, right? So we're intel people, right? But who are we intel people for? Like, what's our gang sign? Our gang sign, we're intelligence agents for an organization who's responsible for ground warfare, right? Like, God love you, FBI.

I hope you arrest all those dudes that, like, invaded the Capitol or whatever. Right. Like, God love the FBI, right? But, like, they're Department of Justice. They're nerds. You know, like, theoretically, like, we're part of an organization that needs to go to the dark side of the dark side of the dark side of those mountains that nobody talks about.

Or up that river that, you know what I mean? Like, that's gang gang. You know, so it is a weird, again, paradox, you know? It's, you know, like, I've told people in the past, you know, When you meet a guy who claims that they're special forces, if they're telling a bunch of stories about how they were like slaying bodies in Afghanistan, probably full of shit. But they're telling stories about how they were like drinking scotch in Berlin, got drunk off their ass, pulled out of a car, and pulls out of being a shit. That guy's the real deal. Right. No, seriously, seriously.

Yeah, no. Yeah, no, I'm a super weirdo from Massachusetts. Like, I think to be successful in human intelligence, you have to at heart be a hippie. So back to Boston, how did you end up joining the military? Oh, you're going to love this. So maybe I'll stand up later or whatever, but I'm a pretty big guy. I'm about 6'4, 220 athletic. Shout out to Big Jam, my dad.

Pretty athletic. I went to, and it's just in terms of origin story, this is important to mention. The high school that I went to, right, I went to Boston College High School, okay? The high school that I went to, outside of the military academies, Benapolis, West Point, Air Force, no school in the country has produced more four-star admirals and four-star generals than Boston College High School in Boston. Yeah. So I'll circle back, like, it's a fucking warrior culture, dude. Yeah.

It's a fucking warrior culture, but it's also like a cerebral culture. Yeah. It's like I, like, you want to live in harmony. you're you're intellectual, you're enlightened and all that shit. It's like, God damn, this guy, I got to hit his fucking throat. I got to hit this motherfucker's throat, right? Right. It's like, there's a sense of duty.

I'm being a little kind of maybe general or whatever, but I usually have the kids that grew up in Boston. You fight. You're a good kid. You know how to fix a tire. You know how to cook a steak. There's a sense of duty. everybody has like a daddy

you know like you know you grow up in whatever part of L.A I imagine maybe your local gang is your daddy or whatever right

you go up in you know Koonar maybe it's Higg right but like for me growing up like America the concept of the United States

America not Massachusetts not you know good old West Virginia not south side of Chicago you know not the Boston Red Sox my daddy

was the United States America the concept and like again like I will give a little shout out to Columbia I had no idea how good of the school it was until I started going there.

I went into the Army in the first place because I'm a terrible fucking student. Right? Oh, so to your point, I was a good athlete. I played for Boston College High School, which recently had, shout out to Boston College High School. It was just voted the fourth best high school in the country for athletes to go to. What did you play? I played football and the cross. And actually this is maybe relevant.

in terms of like destructive innovation and thinking differently. All right? So I mentioned a group in Winchester, okay? I'm the youngest of five children, right? All of my siblings went to Winchester public schools and so did myself through my freshman year of high school where I played soccer. I was the goalie.

Goal keeper, right? Freshman year, Winchester High School. Wasn't doing what I was supposed to do, getting into trouble, like the cool thing was to kind of maybe skip class, smoke a little weed, drink. It wasn't until I get, you know, to volunteer at the hospital and you know but it just it which has to be what grade or whatever but it was

just I transferred as a rising sophomore and I started playing football and never had never played football before ultimately ended up being captain of my team our senior year of high school we won the state championship we were nationally ranked it was like really cool um it's a place where it's an all-boys school uh and it's a place where everybody kind of like maybe like a regiment or whatever. Like you kind of look to your left and your right and like, oh, Billy's doing fucking 15 pull-ups. Or look at Joey.

He's, right? You kind of iron sharpens iron, tip to do, right? So played football was successful, captain of my team, we won the States, whatever, blah, blah, got recruited to play sports in college, football and lacrosse. And I went to a place called Bentley College, which is in Waltham. I got to do a Mark Rubio here.

Marco Rubio? Yeah. What's the thing here? Is it Marco Rubio? So. No, you ended up fine. Right, the Marco Rubio, right? But he had, you know, went to Bentley for ultimately three semesters.

Played two seasons of football, one season of lacrosse, right? I'll make sense where I'm going here. When 9-11 happened, I was 18 years old. I'm born in 1982. My birthday's October 1st, right? So 9-11, 2001, as it were, I was 18 years old. I was a freshman in college at Bentley, now university. It was Bentley College at the time.

really good business school. It's a factory. It teaches you how to have a job and then when you graduate, you get a good job and you get a, you know, a good wife, good husband, good house, right? Columbia, honestly, I don't know if I would send my kids to Columbia. Because if they're half me and we have to talk about my experience there and how I graduated, I threatened this dude. Yeah, yeah, I had an Iranian professor that I like, yeah, it's a long story. We'll get to it in a second, but if my kids are half me, I won't send them to Columbia because it's, you know,

it teaches you how to like, you know, ponder upon the stars, like, you know, while you're hiking in the Himalayas or whatever, but it doesn't teach you to get a fucking job, right? Whereas my, shot up, like, you know, like, my friends family, hopefully some of them are watching right now, they're doing great, right? I mean, I

would send my kid there, but but they're half you. You're fucking, what's the word? I mean, you're very astute. The issue is An intelligence The issue is Hey kid

Have you heard of the GI Bill before? We're gonna talk about Maybe the Air Force Yeah So No I mean

So the Air Force I mean That's if you want to do Something tactical or whatever But like look I can You know Pharamones are a thing

The audience can't tell But like look at these I'm definitely I'm triangulated But two fucking Former Rangers Philly's like Pharomones

Right The Air Force is not for you Right Shut out Doug I hope Doug's watching. Doug Cachian, yeah. He's a good guy. He's a great guy, airman of the year.

Yeah, it wasn't really? Airman of the year. Jesus Christ. Yeah, it's impressive. Doug, uh, Doug was a parent. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents

and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting.

Visit child and family resource network.org today. Boreski dude who also went to Columbia with us. He was in graduate school. Yeah, he went to Brown undergrad and went into the Air Force, PJ. If you ever see me on this past episode, it's one of the T-shirt that says Resilient, that's him. No, he is honest. So Doug Kachijian, yeah, resilient. I mean, he's, if you're a Hollywood actor and you're training for some whatever action movie, Doug Kachia, he's the man.

Then he went to Teachers College, which is kind of like by name, it doesn't sound sexy, but it's a really, really, really good. school. I went there for kinesiology, I believe. Something like that. Yeah, he has a gym in Midtown. Yeah, no, he's amazing. He's amazing. Being here, I've lived in New York for 10 years now, I, the type of veteran that, like, does their thing and I was like, you were the type of veteran that stopped gesticulating around

the fucking studio. It's like the big shadow right in the middle of his face. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Ahim was a hen big. I'm sorry to cook. You took Arabic? In the army, I took Arabic. I bet it sucks.

It was horrible. And I was horrible. I bet your Arabic sucks. Yeah, man, that's pretty good, man. We'll talk about this. Dave was like fucking fluent. You were like a three three. Two plus two.

Two plus two. Yeah. No, I shed ki. Let's take it to him. Thartheim, but mehaqi. Did you have to speak Arabic, but 30% of speaking Iraqi. Yeah. Shue, shui, shui.

Shueh-ishua, inshallah. Yeah. I love... Al-Hahahah. But, so kind of, obviously we're going every direction. At some point, we'll kind of...

Let's bring it back home. Bring it back home. How did you end up in the fucking army? Okay, so I talked about B.C. High and Bentley playing football, whatever, blah, blah, blah. Right? So, long story short, I ended up getting into a fight.

I guess we... I don't know if we can call it a fight. I'd knock some kid up. Like, bad. Bad, bad. Like, he was in, like, the ICU and shit like that? Ish.

Yeah. He had facial. reconstructive surgery that night. What did you hit him with like a flunk of? My left. My left. No, no, no, no. He slept.

He wasn't, he wasn't, he wasn't, he, what do you, relief, what do you, what do you get relief from the Ranger Regiment? What do you call it? R.S. Yeah, he was RFS. Yeah, he was RFS, yeah. No, I mean, I don't want to make light of it, I get it, but it's like a country song.

I mean, I knocked some dude out, man, and I'm not going to name his name. I mean, this was a long, long time ago. You're asking me my impetus of, So I mention everything. I'll make sense here in a second. And I spent so much time with Arabs that I talk like an Arab. You're like, what's the name of the mosque? And you're like, you know what, 1983, the winter I remember being very, very windy.

It's like, what's the fucking name of the mosque? Yeah, they start right out. You know, telling your fucking origin story out, right? Yeah. So, but I'll make sense, right? Sorry, future employers. Sorry current employer. I knock some dude the fuck out, right?

I was a big dude It was Under an righteous auspice Or whatever, right? I guess I'll tell the story, right? So I played on the football team And most of my All my friends were, you know, on the football team, whatever

There was one suite where there was like eight guys living together And seven of the eight were on the football team So I hung out there, whatever, blah blah blah That night won the one of the eight that was in some frat and he was at some rival frats party he got beat up in the melee his girlfriend got hit and he came back all you know whatever and he's like my girlfriend got hit and I'm like let's rock and roll right so uh I ended up long to long story short we went up to these dudes and I was like hey are you in this frat and the kid's like yeah and I clapped this dude and he was like a tree right

um bad bad um it turns out unfortunately I mean, hopefully John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism, I saved lives because of this, right, in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this kid fell and ultimately kind of got kicked out of school for it. I had this thing and there was a Marine, you grew up in Boston, like the narrative, you want to be a tough guy, you go to the Marines. I have cousins that I really admired uncles, you know, that had done great stuff in the Marine Corps. So I went, basically got kicked out of school. I withdrew because I just rather than get like expelled, I mean I never clap this kid, right? So rather than get expelled, I went to like the, you know, like a country song, I went to the

Marine recruiter, right? Went through the entire process, took the ASFAB with the Marine Corps. I scored like a 96 and if anybody's ever, I think you did both, I think I listened to interview one time and you, you had been, you'd done the Marine Corps recruiting. The style is very different. Yeah. The style of recruiting is very different. So the way that I scored on the ASFAB, they're like, you're going to go into intelligence.

So I went on this track of trying to enlist, and this was February of 2003. Right? So it's after 9-11. Again, I was 18 when 9-11 happened. I'm a kid from Boston. I mentioned everything because I got kicked. I was a captain of my football team. I went to this great high school.

I had great expectations. And I got fucking kicked out of school because I got into a fight, right? context it was 2003 I'm an Irish kid from Boston right there's an avenue of redemption where I'm like I could go into the fucking army of the rain court and fight some brown people right and come back and like spit shiny shoes and my own you know me like right is kind of so 60 K bar up on the wall yeah so I mean so I mean really and I am today and again like anybody that's done you know human intelligence whatever I'm really fascinated in the area of anthropology sites

psychology, sociology. What do I mean by that? What makes somebody tick? What makes a girl go home with you? What makes a kid fucking blow himself up in a marketplace? Right. Like what makes me go to Soul Cycle versus CrossFit? You know, like, you know what makes me choose a tomato versus a tomato? Like that fucking space right there I'm fascinated with, right? So the Army recruiter heart sells you. No, no. So I went through the whole thing with the Marine Corps. I have a latex allergy, right? And then when I went to MEPs, they were like, I remember it was question for. 46, they tried to draw blood. I'm like, hey, wait, is not a latex glove? And the kid, he's like some Navy guy. He's like, I'm allergic, right?

And he looks at, and of course, if you answer yes or anything, it's your enlistment stops, you know that, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything is, no, no, no, I'm perfectly fine. So it didn't work out with the Marine Corps. I was going to do an 0-2-31, which is like an intelligent specialist, right? It didn't work out with the Marine Corps. A couple months later, I got like a call from the Army.

And I was like, hey, look, I imagine this is in regards to recruiting. I went through the whole process. I got to let you know this. And the guys are like, hang tight. We have a lower bar. Yeah. That should be the Army's bar. We have a lower bar.

Hang tight, hang tight. If you want to get who-a-who. Like, you can, you know, I promise you there's going to. That's the thing about the Army. Yeah. If you want to be fat and wear sneakers in your, like, BDUs and be from Newport News, like Virginia and like working like the supply shop, you can do that. Right?

If you want to be flying from the sky, like shooting bad guys in the face, you can do that too. The thing about the army is, we can juxtapose at the Marine Corps in a second. Like thank God it says the United States before Marine Corps, right? My best friend who's watching right now is the best man in his wedding. I mean, he is always faithful. He is semper fucking Fidelis, right? And then for me, like in terms of gang sign, I would, there's a part of me that would all, I just, don't you know, Rangerulus, SF, like, see I got, don't you kind of sneaky want to sing that, you know, Marine Corps anthem, like, right, there's something about it. The older I get, no. And the reason is, is because mission, mission, mission, mission, mission, mission. The Marine Corps is chockful of dudes that are like way more talented than the mission that they have, right? Like, the thing about the Army is you can be fat and fucking. stupid wearing sneakers like in your VDUs like from Newport News like supply like we all wink wink

know what I'm talking about right or you can be Joey fucking badass you can do that it's mission mission mission mission mission you know obviously the special operations community is like super great the intel community is super great I would submit to you guys and we can talk about this and expand later after I do another Marco Rubio about why like army intel is the best in the world It's better than CIA. It's better than, you know. So did you tell the Army recruiter that you wanted to go into? I mean, did you tell them that you had already successfully conducted a raid?

I mean, did you guys have an op order before you raided the frat house? Did you get up on the planning board? So the audience deserves the story. So as it were, the college that I went to, they didn't have like any Greek on campus. So they had off-campus houses. And in order to do so, you had to provide, to be recognized by the college, This is a Greek house or whatever. You had to provide sober transportation.

So to and from this off-campus party was like this van that was bringing these, like, frat guys and these party goes or whatever. So we just waited at the bus stop. The bus comes, van comes. Kid gets out. Fucking poor kid was a pledge. He wasn't even in the frat. I go, hey, are you an ex? He goes, yeah.

And I go, plop. So got kicked out of college. So you guys didn't even make it to the house to like? No, no, no. No, it wasn't that. It wasn't that. No. Oh, okay.

But. So I'm sorry. Army recruiter. Yeah, yeah. So the Army calls, and again, pardon to the audience, we'll bracket here in a second. So the Army calls, I'm like,

look, I imagine this is in regards to recruiting, XYZ, and they're like, hang tight. And I was like, if you can show me, you know, man from Missouri prove to me that, like, I can get a waiver, then I'll start this process again. Because quite frankly, sociologically, I was really excited about the Marine Corps.

And I was telling my friends and my family and, like, strangers at the bus stop. And just, again, sociologically, when you're like, oh yeah, about that, I have a fucking latex allergy and they didn't accept me. Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? Right, right.

You didn't have fucking absurd and beta male that sounds? Right? You know what I'm saying? So I was like kind of, what is it, Roar Indigo is actually the, not Rear Indigo, but Roaring is the proper expression,

but, um, so because of this Asfab score in the 021 intelligence specialist, I was like, you know what, I want to go into Intel. So I started doing, I was like 97 Bravo.

and I guess like a Quentin Tarantino movie I'll give a little action first like you read about it and you're like this sounds like some fucking James Bond shit right and then like once you start doing your training they make a point to be like whoa now relax right but honestly

and we can obviously expound upon this once you're kind of there and you realize that like I don't know about you guys but like in the stuff that I did I had no mentors like my higher up had never deployed before doing this emma you know I mean like nobody school or when you got to your unit? Both there was both okay both yeah there was so I went through the schoolhouse

ultimately so blah blah blah everything worked out with the army and I signed my contract for 90s and rub five years active duty TSSCI like 19 weeks MOS you know whatever AIT I went to in May of 2004 I went to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, you know, for my basic whatever. I literally didn't know until I got there that it was a co-ed. It was probably a better term for that. But like, you know, the movies that I watched, I was like, there's women. It's great ultimately because, you know, you figure out a way to work. But in terms of like the G.I. Joe that I'd be playing in Illinois, I was like, okay, this is interesting. Quick side note, the most diverse

institution I have ever been a part of is, of course, the Army. Maybe the Navy's more diverse? I don't know. honestly gun to your head I imagine the Navy it might even be more diverse well the Navy probably just because you also have like your Filipino population of people like that I don't know if the Navy still has

the deal with the Philippines but it used to be that Filipino mafia yeah that I don't know anything about what you're talking about it used to be maybe it still is I don't know but it used to be that if somebody from the Philippines joined the Navy

I think they served four years or something like that and then they could apply for U.S. citizenship or gain U.S. citizen. So there were a lot of, there were a lot of Filipinos, you know, a substantial portion in the naming. Dude, have you, have all the institutions that you've been associated with, the Army, but you've never been Big Army, right? You always went, Regiment? So you've never been Big Army, but brother, promise you. What institutions have I ever been a part of in the Army? The public school system? Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, the metropolitan museum lovers. You know, you know. on Facebook.

You know, I'm making that up. I mean, like, anything good, you know. I don't think you are. I think Jack is. Right, right. I think I am that. So the Army for sure, especially a big army, right? But blah, blah, blah, went to Fort Jackson, and then I went to my age.

Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents

and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. In Fort Wachuka, Fort Wachuka, Arizona, which Alana talked a little bit about, it's 18 miles north of the Mexican border. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, which is kind of cool. For me, as a kid from Boston, as I was flying there from South Carolina, I was like, this is already the United States.

And it was neat and like it was interesting to I was like this is cool like this is just as much as you know Vermont foliage it's like you know that West Texas like it was neat to kind of understand how vast and from sea to signet help me with this one see to shining sea nearly right yeah yeah it um it was neat so yeah the I guess the only thing I really learned from AIT is get your alcohol tolerance. up and this is like within the first three days like dead serious and that applies to kind of everything like we were talking before we went like if y'all are doing opium right fuck it man I guess I'm doing opium like you know if you guys are doing half as part of your job if you guys are you're not a fucking

narc dude right right for real yeah if you need to eat goat testicle guess what jack you're not a machine gunner like you get to do grow the beard and where this because you eat goat testes If everybody is eaten, go testicle. Right. If they were drinking the cobra blood, you're drinking the cobra blood. Exactly. I went to, I went, I mentioned Boston, you know, I keep mentioning Boston.

I had like a friend who has like a similar MOS, 97 Echo, right, a Humidor. Visited me in Boston. I took him to this place. Shout out Erie Pub, the Erie Pub in Adam Square at Dorchester, right? One side is firefighters, the other side is cops. right it's just it used to be until a couple years ago not a couple years ago until like the 80s gentlemen's only but it is the most quintessential right i mean seen from a movie and the guy goes in there and he doesn't order any he sits up the bar and doesn't order anything not a water not a

fucking i'm like you got to order something i'll drink it right but like you got to understand that you're a fucking narc you're a mark brother like you don't mean like this is i said boston firefighters and boston cops and you're a pretty boy at the fucking bar with nothing in front of you know right it's suspect bro you know I mean that seriously no seriously like that you know Vietnam you know like eat the local food you know like everything man right like you to the extent in which I could learn Pashto I learned Pashto I learned to the extent of which I could learn Arabic it learned pretty good Arabic you know and it and you read the Quran and you read the

Hadid's you know and if you don't understand that then you've missed the whole some of the worst CI people again we're bouncing everywhere but some of the worst CI people are reclass people, former infantry, former combat engineer or whatever. And like they see the trailer, you know, they see the ball cap and the beard and stuff, but they don't get it. Right. They sort of bring that conventional army attitude with them. Right.

And a lot of reclass people are just the worst, worse in the MOS. And they're like, this is still the army. Well, yeah, but fucking not at all. It's totally, totally different. Like, if you're a super, super, again, as it were, the years that I was in, 04 to 09, I'm doing counterterrorism. Okay? Not counter narcotics. Not counter like, hey, are you wearing your mask?

This is COVID time. I'm doing counterterrorism. Right. Okay. Terrorists, right? So I'm not looking for information. I'm looking for intelligence. Okay.

So the people that know that the best aren't the baker or the butcher or the candlestick maker or hey, I know a guy who knows a guy. I know a guy. It's fucking you. Who wakes up every single thing. day and you're part of that crew. Right. Right. And that's the other thing.

I mean, I'll pivot kind of hard for a second. There's no, you don't learn some dialect to fucking tie and go up the river and like, you know, blend in. That's not what happens. Due to the fact that the United States is the world's hegemon, like the world's superpower and like the product that we push is the best in the world, right? People kind of come to us and you don't have to. you don't have to, we're the best intelligence agency in the world, you know,

because at the end of the day, like, we're the United States, I know that sounds abstract and I'll expound, but like the best engineers in the world and the best basket revers and the best rappers and comedians and models, like you don't go to fucking Bosnia and Herzegovina, right? You don't go to Russia, shout out KGB or whatever. were called nowadays F-SB. Well, maybe for models. But they come here.

They go chippriani down in town if you're a fucking Russian model, right? Yeah. And if anybody lives in New York, then what's up with that? But at the end of the day, like, you can speak a million fucking languages, right? And know how to throw Chinese stars and do the Spetsnots or whatever. But if you're an Intel guy for fucking Russia, who wants to live in fucking Russia? Right, right. Who the fuck wants to live in Russia?

Right? Even massage. Shout out, Israel. What the fuck wants to live in Israel? Right. I want to visit Israel. I actually, Jewish is shit. And I want to visit Israel five months out of 12. But I don't want to live there. I'm going to live in the United States.

So you're saying that we have the product that everybody wants, which is America. So, again, we're going kind of everywhere, but like, I guess I'll just kind of jump into specifics. Like, my specific role was

again, my M.O.S., my military occupational specialty, was always counterintelligence agent, which at the time was in 97 Bravo, right? What is counterintelligence? Counterintelligence is thwarting the intelligence efforts of our adversarial intelligence, and safeguarding our own secrets. It's what counterintelligence is ascertaining, so again, for the audience, the layman, we call the good guys blue and the bad guy's red and we call civilians green okay counterintelligence is ascertaining what does red know about blue what do they know about our rank structure

what do they know about like the vulnerabilities of the underbelly of an MRAP what do they know about like our tTP a tactics techniques procedure so what do they know what do they know about our radio what our comsac or whatever robot right human intelligence is what does blue blue what does blue know about red. And that's the exciting stuff. Like, you know, countertell is cool. That was always my MOS. You have the top secret clearance. You're a federal law enforcement agent under executive order one, two, triple three. You get to do cool stuff or whatever. But it's kind of lame. And so far as anything really, really, really sexy in counter intel is passed off to other organizations. Okay. But the human is, is a lot.

It's like legit running spies in wars and we know we can you know kind of the crux of the whole kind of interviews I would submit to you that I think I listened to an earlier interview and you were talking about how the SF guys are looked at as like the successors of OSS or CIA's but I kind of think that like Army Intel kind of still maintains that okay there's dudes that again we're responsible for ground warfare and there's like long programs. There's it's a really kind of interesting character. There's a lot of kind of stuff that you do alone. It's neat. So yeah, I went to, I'm Ram and so I'll stop.

You're good. Yeah. No, so you finish AIT, all that jazz. Now you're a counterintelligence agent and America's at war. Yeah. So one of the reasons that I was glad, what was in? What was interesting. I once heard about the Marine Corps that, like a very, very small percentage of Marines actually had been, you know, kind of deploying. And what I liked about the Army, the concept was that you were guaranteed. Like, again, from a Shakespearean sense, like, if I'm going to cross this threshold and I'm going to be a Crip, I want to be a fucking Crip. You know, if I'm going to be a blood, I want to be a fucking blood, brother. You mean, like, let's, you know, if I'm going to try it, I want to be varsity. I want to be Judy Varsity, right? So I want to be where the

party's at and it was super neat so my first assignment was Big Army it was fourth infantry division I arrived there in January of 2005 and we had 10 months of training but it was a new concept of the the BCT the brigade combat team which is a model when did you get out of the Army though I left the Army around 2000 like total of like 2001, 2002. Okay, okay, okay. So you, I hate to say, but he kind of missed out

on a lot of funky stuff. No, I, I, no. Oh, you did contractor stuff? Yeah, I did. Yeah, yeah. So my first assignment was fourth infantry division, and they were building up

four BCT. I got some friends that are watching. The fourth brigade combat team modeled after the Marine Corps is, you know, brigade combat team, whatever they called it, like the self-sufficient,

You have your MI, military intelligence, you have your supply, you have your field artillery, your cavalry, whatever. Again, we were talking before we started rolling, like a 97 Bravo counterintelligence. It's very weird. I honestly don't know how to succinctly describe it because it's kind of what you make of it. And it depends on what's going on at the time and the MTO, the military table organization, the equipment. right so my first assignment at ford hood was in a reconnaissance platoon as a counterintelligence agent in a reconnaissance platoon of uh i think it was alpha troop 810 cavs 810 cavalry squadron right four bc t right i mentioned that because it was the only

intelligence basically one of the only intelligence person one of the few like in the entire squadron which is what the cavalry calls like a battalion, right? And I had had friends that were in the special troops battalion, which was where the military intelligence company was, right? I'm a PV2, E2, like a private second class, whatever it's called, right? I know nothing, right? And again, the zeitgeist or the spirit of the time was go get them boys, there was fucking bust loads of money flying from the sky in the depraperate of defense, right?

So I had heard some of my my micro friends, my military, you know, kids, guys, I guess kids at the time. They were going to the John E. Reed School of interviewing and interrogation. I was stationed at Fort Hood and it was in Houston, Texas. It was like a five-day advanced school. I went through that same course. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So I'm a PV2 in Big Army, nothing sexy, a mechanized infantry division, right, at Fort Hood, Texas. And I find, again, bus loads of money falling from the sky, you know, George W. Bush, Department of Defense, right? So I found out about this school, you know, one of the things that, for the civilians out there, whatever, like, one of the questions is, oh, what schools do you go to? Right, right. Dude, schools are fucking lame for the most part.

I don't know, I mean, maybe Halo is different, right, because you kind of need to know that. But our stuff, I don't need to jump out of a fucking airplane to whack bad guys. Right. Do you know what I mean? I don't need to scuba fucking dive, you know, to whack bad guys. So schools are, right?

Some of the stuff is really relevant insofar as it's someday and it's happened. Iraq and Afghanistan is going to go away. And you need to know how to operate in a permissible and semi-permissible environment. Like your, whatever, J-Sita and your socks or whatever, you know, whatever the different source operation courses are. Yeah. But so I went to the John Reed course in, um, March of 2005.

And I mentioned that because I'm a PV2 and I'm living in the barracks and I advocated for myself and I went to the S2 and I was like, hey, er-um, er-um, there's this course going on. There's these other guys in this other battalion that are taking this, like I think it would behoove, you know, the warriors of 810 Cav, like if they're, you know, counterintelligence guy, like went to this course. A couple weeks later, I'm in the round

Renaissance Hotel, something like five pillows, six pillows, you know, my own here, right? It's like I'm taking a course with Houston Homicide, Dallas Homicide, NSA, NASA, HR for NASA, some insurance companies. And this is a free course, G-EA, can you tell us, and you're a private and CI, you're going up to them like, you know I'm kind of a big deal. You want to see my badge? Well, yeah, actually, I wish, I guess. a parent can be really challenging.

Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit Child and Family Resource Network.org today. So Juana has her badge and credentials. I don't know if I can get mine. I know I have, I have one. And the badge and credentials for, again, I mentioned that CI, the cool thing about CI is

that you're an actual federal agent, right? Which is different than like a human tour or whatever. Now, I think humanters should get a TSCI because I think that humanters need to be able to in real time talk to SIGAN. And we could talk about this later or whatever, but like one of the problems, I was on a T-HD, a tactical human intelligence team in Baghdad. And I was, my boss was a 97th, a human intelligence collector, right? He didn't have a secret clearance. He didn't have a TSCI. So in real time, if we needed to do SIGAN shit, I had to go up to the SCIF, which was literally the top of the palace at,

prosperity. Do you know prosperity? Well, back to the read course. Let's finish up this. Yeah, let's finish up this bignette. The point of the read course is in the recourse is cool. We can talk about that. It talks about body posture. Body posture is really, really, really big. Body posture is fucking huge. Then, so in my opinion, this is with the readcourt, it goes body posture, power linguistics, which is The holistic manner in which we say things, not just our diction, but like the latency response time, the volume, the pitch, the intonations, you know, stuff like that. So like after you lie, one to three seconds after you lie, you'll, like, awkwardly laugh or like cough or like start to clean your glasses or like pick lint off your jacket that doesn't exist.

Right? You'll do something to release that tension. in for me in military intelligence army intelligence I'm dealing with people that don't there's a like the radio whatever there's a delay time they don't speak the fucking language right so there's so much stuff there's a whole world that's not applicable in terms of that like I don't get the real time like what did he mean but parallel wistically when he said that I don't fucking speak Arabic right I mean I pick up on it like you know over time because it's like you know nothing we can talk about this but it's like paint by numbers

You know, all day, every day I'm doing source meetings. Right. So I'm saying, hey, the fox jumped over the river, right? And then I hear, maka, lukha, Heidi, ho. Right? And you just kind of hear that over time, you just kind of get, you know, what things are. But the read course, it started in 1947 in Chicago, Illinois, and it's a super, super, super, amalgamation of stuff that we all kind of notice without a

giving you a name to if that makes sense. So I guess we'll talk about this. This is kind of really the real. You took the readcourse, but like an innocent person, I'm gonna be extreme so kind of you know buckle up here but like if I brought down to the precinct and I'm accused of, and again this is super extreme, if I'm accused of having you know a bit better pedophile, right, I am going to vehemently be like I don't fucking touch 13 year old kids Jack

right right right an innocent person will do that like how fucking dare you I wasn't in the fucking room and you will use I didn't but you but a guilty person will say I don't do that no that I don't touch

fucking little kids dude right is very different than like I don't do that now obviously it'd be an absurd but like the the the paralinguistics the wording of it, it's indicative of how I'm framing it in my brain. Once you see those evasive measures, the read technique then relies a lot of narrative building and relating to the person on their level. And after that, this story with the interrogator who goes in becomes, some of these little

girls are very attractive, you know, they dress up like Britney Spears. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Really, complain yourself. That's a really, one thing that is relevant. So I guess a couple things about the read course is, uh, physically and this is super important when it relates to like a source meeting ultimately we'll talk about like actually having you know a dude in a terrorist cell and like you cannot fumble that

football in real talk there's no i don't give a shit if you think you're a fucking intel guy or whatever in real life in war you don't recruit somebody at a fucking cocktail party in vienna what happens in real life is they come to you right and they they where this so one i'm gonna do a quick kind of side note, a phenomenon that takes place in human intelligence. And if you empathize for a second, you can understand why. We'll take Baghdad for example, right? So I was responsible, you know, my, it stands to reason wherever you are geographically, there's a concentric circle where you're responsible for, right? We could concede that, right? But what happens is a phenomenon in human intelligence is you become an expert of an area that you're not

responsible for why because the fucking people that live in your zip code don't go to the military checkpoint in that motherfucking zip code right dude right right like if I'm in sheep's head Brooklyn I'm going to the fucking west side of Harlan if you're going to read out on guys that will and honestly this is not shout out to the bloods in the Crips but we're talking about real real shit like your whole family gets their fucking heads cut off right right real shit right I mean if anybody real shit. It's not like a why I ought to beat you up and I'm gonna embarrass you right now I mean your whole family gets their heads cut off right so you don't

you become an expert on an area that you're not responsible for right and then I guess a byproduct of that is there's and again my I was 04 to 09 so it was post 9-11 oh fuck us Intel community we should have shared information there was a spirit of camaraderie within the Intel community right You had the fusion cells and things like that. Well, it was just like you want to be cool because it's some, you never know, something could come across your desk and you're like, look, my office is not fit for this. But like my buddy, Dave, this is exactly the shit that he does.

Right. And I want to like, again, so we got like, and we can talk about this or whatever, we got like courted by the CIA, which they called themselves the Office of Regional Affairs, the ORA. This was Baghdad 06. We got courted by the CIA because it behooved them to, for us to hold them in a positive esteem. Right? There was a little, not with us, but there was like a little, there was a thing called Skid,

which is the Strategic Counter Intelligence Directorate. You guys know about that or whatever? It was like a conglomerate of like, wannabe cool guy, CIA guys of the different DOD agencies. I guess it was kind of like a precursor of cool kid DIA stuff. Although DIA was doing some shit. Before February of 2006, before February 22nd of 2006, which is, of course, the Golden Mosque Bombing of Samara,

DIA was going fucking Foggish. Yeah. They were going full fucking hodge. They were doing, you know, hodge everything, bands. Oh, they were going out in thin skins. They were going full, I mean, everything, full fucking hodge. When other agencies, when other organizations,

wouldn't even go out and up armor. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, DIA was really good. DIA until February of two, and again, we're speaking a little esoterically, and this is kind of the most exciting stuff about my career. And really Baghdad, 06, is... Was that your first deployment in O-Sah?

Yeah, so I did... I was at Fort Hood for like 10 months in the BCT. Ultimately, I was... I left the Cavs Squadron, pretty quickly, and I went to like the MICO, the military intelligence company, Alpha Company, the human to platoon, military intelligence company,

Fourth Brigade, you know, combat team, whatever, blah, blah, right? Fourth ID, right? But I'll say this. After 9-11, due to like, I guess patriotism, the army, no, really, the army benefited, and you know what I'm about to say, the army got some motherfucking sandser.

studs that had no business joining the fucking army. You know what I'm saying? After 9-11, from like, we'll say 2001 to 2010, two real big things happened for the army that had an influx of talent in terms of human resources. One 9-11 and just the galvanization of patriotism. There's a guy that I hope is watching, one of my best friends of travel the ward with him, and he's done so. He went to Georgetown. Was a banker in New York City, Manhattan, making six figures.

Went to work on a Tuesday morning. Saw people jumping out of the fucking Twin Towers rather than burn alive. Join the army. Five years of active duty. Went to Duke Fukuwa afterwards. Did you use the GI Bill or whatever? but he was a fucking superstar, actual fucking hero superstar for five years. Like the army got, I'm not going to say his name, guys that they had no business. Well, I think the most notable example of people would know would be Patrick Tillman. Like, perfect, perfect example.

But he was a known. Perfect example. Yeah. There's a lot of, if you will, I mean, not NFL players, but exactly. Right. If you will, there was a lot of Patrick Tillman's that were like, you know, that kind of, this is Woodstock. Yeah, right. Dude, it would have been making millions of dollars.

Yeah. Right. This is, for me, I mentioned, and we could talk about my life here in New York, but I always, always, always want to be where the party's at. You know, not, like, I'm not going to run. Well, you found it. Yeah, no, for real. You found it.

This is legit, man. I'll say that I'm really, really, I'm joking around. We'll continue to have fun. But I'm really honored to be here. I've watched a lot of the other episodes, and there are super heroes. us. It's just really, really amazing guys.

You guys are doing an awesome thing. We've been really fortunate to get some of the cats that we have here. And we're grateful that you're here. Yeah, we'll make sense here in a second. I'm just still tuning the guitar. That's fine, man. But there's just so much,

I've never said this story before, and there's just so much to say. It's just like layers on layers. It's inception level four, right? It's not like, what do you mean? Inception level three, right? No, four, brother.

There's another level to it, right? And really, I'm joking, but there's just so much to say because it's so different. Blah, blah, blah. My function within Fourth ID was to do human. Right. And let me just for people who aren't all that familiar with the military, human is human intelligence. C.I. is counterintelligence.

What would you've said? When Adam says a TSSCI, he needs a top secret clearance. with special access, well, it's, you know, it's an addendum to... Secure compartmentalized. It's a computer compartmentalize. It gives you, like, read access to certain steps. It means you can be, like, read onto certain things, or be given access, like signals intelligence,

where somebody with a secret clearance doesn't have access to that type of intelligent things like that. Now, we're speaking a little... So the other thing is, um, In my five years in the army, I can, under 10 things that I deal with that were like top secret. Now, I don't say that to like cut myself down. In actuality, you don't, top secret shit sucks because there's so many, like you can't flow like real good juicy juice intel. The warfighter needs to know like fucking that, right?

So by design, most human is all secret no foreign. Right. Secret no foreign and no foreign. And then you get the caveats and stuff like that. But like you, if you can, unless you absolutely have to, don't fucking classify shit weird. Right. Because you want to like kick it, you want to flow it. I don't want to like, if there's an IED and philosophy in Sauter City.

Right. Right? whatever, the first of the 503, I'm making this up, is patrolling. You know, you want to know, like, yo, boy, but you don't want any, and then there are software you just kind of get around it. Boy, you just remove the header in it. There's, and that's the other, no, that's the other real talk. Sorry, I had to.

No, that's, we can talk about this forever, but, like, to this point, like, look, I'm going to pretend I didn't hear this. No, no, no, for real, like, the best, and anybody knows this, like, what is chest? see puller say, take me to the brink. I want to see what the real Marines are at. Right? Like, the best soldiers that I knew

hated the army but loved soldiers. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to

for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org We're like, I don't give a shit about my N-C-O-E-R or my O-E-R. Like, I'm just going to do shit that I have to do to keep people alive. Right. Dude. I know this last, like, two weeks, like, hearing all these people in the Army whining about, like, how women are allowed to wear their hair in the military.

And it's like, what military were you in? Like, if you can't, if one of our female attachments came to my team sergeant was like, can I wear a ponytail? We're like, what? What? Why wouldn't you wear a ponytail if that's what you want to do? Yeah. What? Again,

MI is different. It's totally. When I first got out in 2009, there was the conversation of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and we were at Columbia, and it was a big, I don't know if you remember,

but it was like, a big thing at Columbia, an important conversation. People would ask me, and they're like, what do you think about the Don't Ask Don't Tell? I'm like, honestly, I was like,

I'm from Boston. I'm a Red Sox fan. You're a Yankee. I'm pointing, I don't know what that people can see at no one, but you're a Yankees fan. that doesn't fucking matter.

In the very definition of you being in the military, you relinquish individualism. So I'm sorry, earmuffs, earmuffs, earmuffs. But if I like to suck dick and you like it, if I like dudes and you, as long as you can pop, pop, pop with the machine gun and close with and destroy the enemy, I don't give a fuck what you do in your bedroom, bro.

I don't give a shit if you're a Yankees fan. You know what I don't get, if you like Pink Floyd versus like, you know, whatever, naughty by nature. Take us back 2,000 and steps in a right. Get the point to back then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the mission?

Okay, so I was thinking about, obviously, I was going to answer this. In real life, again, I was mentioning, you don't go to like a Vienna cocktail party and like, you know, super spook, like recruit someone, right? What happens in real life is the football, like, flies in the air and you're like, oh, shit. And you're an offensive lineman. You have no business holding the football, but you're like, oh, okay. And you just go like this and you don't.

buck it up, right? You just, so if you have a good source, you keep running with it, right? Our job was to, again, there's no, because there's no movies about this, there's no books, there's really not a succinct way, but our job for the army in Baghdad, was to do human intelligence, the discipline of human intelligence versus signal intelligence, which is, you know, I can say this in 2021, listening to cell phones and computers, shit imagery intelligence that's up self-explanatory human intelligence is literally where's the best place to go to chicken palm that's it right hey man like I'm into house music my my cousin's visiting from Berlin all she

wants is a fucking Ruben-on-Rye and house music where's the best place to go right you don't Google that shit right you don't yelp that shit right like human intelligence is like what's really going on And that's why you have to be super, super curious, super curious. I had a boss that, like, as a habit in the office, like on the clock, would just hit random article on Wikipedia. Random article, random article, random article. Because you've got to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

Like you never know when. So again, Baghdad out of the 6th, my job for fourth infantry division was, I was in fourth ID. My T.HT. Tactical Human Intelligence Team was assigned to 112 infantry battalion of 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division. They had a concentric circle, geographic area of operational responsibility, right?

That was what I was responsible for, right? Big picture, at that time, we were trying to do hearts and minds, and we were ultimately, we started the process of transitioning to the Iraqi forces, the Iraqi army, the Iraqi police, we're trying to stand up there, parliament, whatever. We're trying to get home and not have kids from Nebraska killed. Right. So, like, I mentioned that the infantry battalion that we were general support to

was the, under this greater mission, was the first battalion to relinquish their area of operational responsibility to the Iraqi army. As we were in Baghdad, and the more time that we spent there, the more sources that we got, we started to learn more about the city and everything like that. We had, ostensibly the unit that we were assigned to support had relinquished their area wire. So we basically became freelance, which sounds absurd. But when I was a kid, I read that, like, Rekondo.

And it was like, how on earth could they have a fucking school within a country? Right? Doesn't it, when you were a kid, does that sound absurd to you? We talked to Ken Miller once in our kind of school. Yeah, no, I think I watched the opposite. But when you read it, you're like, how is that even pop? I'm telling you, for all you folks at home or whatever, in theater, there's so much weird shit going on and like, this guy's cool. Yo, my guy Dave, he's good people, don't worry.

Seriously, especially in Intel, because I'm not, especially if you're free-ins. What were you doing there? So we're running, so this is important. important. I was on FAB Prosperity, okay, which is at the western end of the green zone. And it was like the nice, it was one of, like an old Saddam Palace or whatever that we had taken over. It was like the nicest fob. Now, anybody that does kind of cool kid stuff, that we had some Navy SEALs on prosperity, they had a compound within the compound. We call that the Fishbowl. EOD had a compound within a compound. And then us as the

human intelligence dudes, we had a compound within a compound, right, which was at the very edge, right? I mentioned concentric circles, right? The reason that the CIA built rapport with us and wanted to ensure that we had like a fluid conduit with them is that they recognize that like inhuman, again, this football that you hold, right, there's no cocktail party in Vienna, right? What really happens at a war zone is it's one. walk in. It's walk in, walk in, walk in, walk in, walk in, walk in, walking, walking, walk in. Like, you don't go to, you know, Soter, the Sector 5 Sauter City and, you know, buy a couple oranges, you know, it does not fucking happen when there's a hundred militia checkpoints in Sauter City alone. This is the sectarian war, right? So everything is walk in sources. So it's people, it's people coming in with, to you, to somebody. Yeah. Because they come to the green zone and they don't know who

they're going to mean right they just want to report on something yeah and in there's a wide spectrum of motivation uh i would say i mean i'm making this up one out of 15 now that's maybe too low one out of 10 is of merit you know there's a lot of people that are just bullshit there's a lot of people that are looking for a handout looking for money there's some counter-intelligence people there's some people that you're like why the fuck are you asking me that question right you know right I mean it's there's a little spy versus spy but it's not like absurd like the movies like you don't know for sure but you kind of you're like it's strange that you and that you can talk about the john reed course and eye movement

and body posture here's the deal man in real life your lighthouse right is what's reasonable right what fucking makes sense and what doesn't right and then you get into the eye movement and Dave's body posture was he coughed a second after right but it's like what are you even talking about right in real life it's reasonable so you have a lot of walk-in sources I imagine some people are piped into like the kind of chronology but like everything was kind of I got in there I got into Baghdad in December of 2005 and everything was kind of normal and then the Samara mosque bombing happened in a you in Samara on February 22nd of 2006 and the sectarian war started right the Samara

Mosque is like a super poignant salient it was like what the third most holy site yeah yeah right and that so that got everybody kind of riled up and tensions in Baghdad but I was in Baghdad and that was Samara right what really really really kicked off the sectarian war was I believe I need some backtuckers out there April 9th 2006 the albaweitha mosque in Haria which is a Shia section it's a kind of central central northwest Baghdad 94 people killed 197 wounded and that was when it's like okay it's on motherfucker and when I say it's on motherfucker like as Jay Z says like men lie women lie numbers don't like Baghdad in

In July of 2006, there was 3,900 homicides. That's, again, good guys are blue, bad guys are red, civilians are green. We're talking green on green. 39, that's over 100 dead bodies on the streets on a Monday. Oh, shit, man, 100 dead. Clean those up. On a Tuesday, 100 more. That's real shit, dude.

And it was on. Everything, so it was from a human intelligence standpoint, There was so much going on. There was so much Game of Thrones that business was popping. Right. Popping. Right? Like, the demographics of neighborhoods were changing.

There were certain neighborhoods that were fucking mortaring other neighborhoods. It's been a long time now, but there was like maybe a couple clicks north of the green zone is Kadamia. And then west of that is Atomia. One of them is Shia, one of them is Sunni. A butt, what's that fancy word? A butt? They were fucking mortaring each other. Right?

In the middle of the day. In a city that geographically is not that big, right, that has like 8 million people. Right? So the collateral damage, I never saw countering indirect fire in my entire year in Baghdad, right? So business was super, super, super good. And we had tons and tons of sources. And we always got, again, it was maybe one out of ten. But it's your job.

You go and some, there's a drunk suit or an East guy. It's a fucking drunk Egyptian guy. There's somebody that just like, you know, I don't speak Arabic, but their vibe is like, you have mental illness. Right. It's just, you know, and then sometimes your turp is like, we got to go. This person's full of shit. Right? I mean, your turp, it does it, right?

But sometimes there's really Jews, right? And I guess for me, you're an investigative reporter, right? Or journalist? What do you call it? On occasion. So, an entire. Intelligence agent and an investigative journalist is the exact same job in that you have two functions. You collect and then you disseminate.

On the collection side, right, you are only as good as your sources, right? And therein you have to protect them, right? And there's weird, like you take, you know, surveillance detection routes and you've got to make sure that you use Coke games, you protect them, right? And then you disseminate. You write the reports and you know how to use a semicolon and m-dash and all that jazz, right? The only difference between an investigative journalist and an intelligence agent, the collection aspect is the exact same. Again, the function is dual. Collection, dissemination.

The collection is the same, right? All that, you know, acuity and tenderness and all that jazz, right? The only difference is the dissemination aspect. Theoretically, a journalist, will want to disseminate as widely and as much. prolifically as possible right in detail and again m dash and semicolon we're the same deal we just do it in a narrow channel but again like alon i was saying like if there's one hour of field shit you know where you're you know eating bread and you know whatever with the in the dude you know drinking tea of this three hours of report writing right and it's all good and a lot of it um you kind

of but sometimes you're super tired and it's hot and you're like well am I doing this and they're but a big picture it is important what was the type of like what were your targets so to speak what kind of intelligence were you hunting at that time okay so this is Baghdad 2006 so we're looking at IED facilities we're looking at Katusha rocket cells we're looking at mortar cells we're looking at EFPs explosive form penetrators you know the technology that was like Shia stuff coming from Iran. So I guess

I'll segue maybe a little more, what do you say, LaFrog to why I'm really here. I'm invited here. Again, I'm very, very lucky, but... Dave? Yes, please. I had a walk-in, as it were,

on the 22nd of February, a walk-in source. And I mentioned Fourth ID and all this, you know, brigade combat team. We had 10 months at Fort Hood where we did a lot of. of field training exercises, right? And you're a staff sergeant in the infantry battalion,

and you're a staff sergeant in the cavalry squadron, and like, I've spent three days with you and some mount sight and fucking boardhood, and likewise, and you know that I'm legit, my boss is cool and he's funny and we're cool people, right? That's really relevant. It's super relevant. So ultimately, like when the fourth, the fourth brigade combat team goes to this footprint in Baghdad, and 8-10 cab is responsible for Northeast Baghdad, I'm making this up, and 112-in-whatever is responsible for this. And then we get the phone call. It's like, oh, shit, Dave, I remember you? And then there's like that where I'm not some weird out from Langley.

Right. You know, you know that I stunk after three days, like in the Texas heat. Right. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. There's a real there there in that I'm organic and you're organic and I'm a shooter and you're a shooter and you're a shooter too. And yeah, I have a different MOS, but like we vibe. right on and maybe you're a texas tech fan so was i and bonded over that like all that shit is

relevant because we've done it together right so i mentioned that um concentric circle like footprints uh the real juice of intel in real life as we've talked about is walk-ins you're not hiding you know you don't take over some house and with some binoculars look across the street and recruit some dog walkins of the terrorist that never it's walking sources right right so you have to be lucky and just not fumble right so one out of ten on February 22nd I got a walk in and I went to it and the guy was like look at 10 p.m. tonight your base in Rastamaya which is East Baghdad is gonna be hit with four Ketusha rockets

and I was like okay the way that we're trained is you do a spot report. Right? Do you guys, I don't know if that's an acronym or whatever, but if something, we call it EWIOH, early warning imminence of hostility.

So most of the time, it's like, there's a neighbor next to me, he's Algerian, he's shady, shit like that. You don't often get at fucking 10 p.m. tonight.

Bob Rustamaya, or your basin Rustamaya, is going to get hit by four Katusha rockets. Right? So I stopped, as my train. training goes, I stopped the interview right there and I just spot report. I don't know what the fucking acronym is. It's a salute report. It's like, hey, shit, there's

EWI-O-H, early warnings, imminence of hostility. You stop the interview right there, I excuse myself, I called it up, went back. This guy, I'll call him 3416, which was what his source code identifier is, right? I can talk for hours about all this shit, but like, I do know his name, but like, we went by a nickname and then I had a name. source code identifier like so i'll call him 3416 because that's what his number was he then proceeds to say to me he's like look this was february 22nd 2006 right he goes in november you guys and i wasn't in iraqaqa he goes you guys arrested my brother thinking that he's a terrorist he's in buca right now, right?

Buka, right? It's in Basra. Buka is a prison in Basra that has a fucking bad reputation. Seriously, right? There's a terrorist university. Yeah, yeah. So Buka, I think that's where, what's his face, right? Baghdadi? Rotten peace? Debatable, but I mean, they all went through there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but Buka was known as like a hard time. Yeah, yeah. Using weird American slang. But like, so this kid, it was his brother, he had three brothers, he's one of three, he comes to me, This is February 22nd, walk-in source. Again, at 10 o'clock tonight, four Katusha rockets,

which are 107 millimeter from Russia through Iran. It's all Shia shit. The Sunnis weren't doing Ketushas, right? But they were super accurate. It was a great... So he comes to me, 10 p.m. tonight, blah, blah, blah. And by the way, my brother is arrested in November. He's super innocent.

Trust me. And I was like, I remember, like, kind of fake... I have a German Shepherd who's like a beautiful trained dog, right? when she was like the first six months she used to do something wrong and I'd say to my friends be like I'm really not that mad but I would like scold her right I would like posture her so what I said to this guy really wasn't that mad I but I was like we're not gonna talk about that we'll talk about your brother if this you know I was reading the script right sure um but I did take all of his brother's information um I don't know if I'm saying too much FBI relax but like

you have, any source you have. We could be on a dismounted patrol, like on the streets. It's 128 degrees in South Baghdad, right? And somebody comes up to you and they're like, there's a ID around the corner. Any source you have, right? Now you can react to that tactically. But in order for you to report that into our portal, you have to have the big four. Okay? The big four is their full name, which is first name, father's name, grandfather's name, tribe. their date of birth, their occupation, and their Mahala street house number. You spent time in Baghdad, right? Okay, so did you ever, did you guys use that in my own, Mosul?

I was up north. I mean, a lot of the places didn't fucking have house numbers. So that's another thing. So you, so, but this is where that gray area of actually doing intelligence. So you have some major who went to VMI and he's, right, who's the S2, and he wants to know. Yeah, there's, their apartment number. That's what I'm saying. So I sit down to this guy and your name is Abu Abu, right?

And I'm like, what's your Mahala street house number? And he's like, brother, if you fucking come to Haria and you ask for Abu Fahed, they'll fucking tell you that I live right there. Right. And it's like, and I'm like, what's your... So honestly, my real moneymaker where I earned my money was like training Afghans how to use a fucking GPS. Training Iraqis had to read Imit, like how to read, like, bullseye.

Getting them to understand overhead. No, no, they don't understand. So here's the deal. I want to be very clear. Iraqis are not stupid people, especially Baghdadans. But just, they don't know maps, brother. They've never seen overhead.

They don't know fucking maps, right? And not just maps, but imagery in general. That's what I'm saying, brother. It's interesting because their brains, because they're not used to it

or look at it. What do I look at? The fuck am I looking at us. When I was in SF, we had a source we were working with, and the leadership of my team it was a woman in her daughter and they're like oh we're going to put them up in a helicopter

flying over their hometown they're going to point us where the bad guys live yeah i was like hey bro like they're not gonna know what the hell they're looking at right they don't they don't have that and they didn't believe me they put them up in a helicopter flying around for like an hour and a hewy over their own hometown they get to point in the house and i was like i told you they've never seen their hometown from that angle before right and to be super clear these are people that their IQ is super high. They're not super high. It's like, what am I looking at?

I don't even know what the fucking look at. It's a sundial. It's Greek. What am I looking at? Yeah. So, like, again, not per se the regiment, but like, S.F, you do a lot of source stuff yourself. So there's a lot of, like, all right, I'm going to give you this GPS. I'm going to, you don't understand that.

Like, there have been times where I have the Uncle Sam, I have earned every red cent. Every red cent. Paint by number has been like. Okay, because you can't give, and also there's an aspect of counterintelligence where you don't know if this guy's playing stupid. If you give him a garment and he's going to go click, click, click, and now he knows like the exact coordinate of where you're at. But so I go back into the room after doing the spot report. This is this guy, oh, Katusha Rockets at 10 p.m., right? He's like, hey, my brother's arrested in Buga.

I got his whole, the big four, as I mentioned, right? So his full name, occupation, Mahala Street house number, and his date of birth, right? And now I got his brother's information, right? One of the importance, importances of documenting, you know, that one hour of collection and three hours of dissemination is the report. So I went back to our base or whatever later that day. I don't know if I was in my pajamas, but I was certainly comfortable, right? And I just, I, another really kind of nuanced thing that I got to say is, um, Arabic is a different alphabet. No, no, this is, this is relevant from an intelligence standpoint, right?

But there is only one way in Arabic to spell Maham. Right. Only one way. Right. Romanized. There's 15 in terms of its permutations. Right. So we had and thank God, and this is something that we learned, like, I wasn't there,

but we learned the intelligence community in 03,04, we had a standardization. You could not use O, you could not use the letter E. So like Al-Qaeda, like in the New York Times, they spell it, whatever, AL-QA-E-D-A. Right? In the intelligence community, we spate, Q, whatever the fuck, the Kaeda, Q-U, you know, blah, blah, You couldn't use an E, you couldn't use an O, you couldn't use a P. That's why I call them Al Queda. There's a QU there, I'm going to pronounce it.

Yeah, no, so I kind of, you know how, like, when you're listening to the radio and the person speaks perfect English, and then they're like, I'm Maria Br-R-R-R-Ur-Svian. I kind of sound like an asshole when I speak Arabic. Like, I'm trying to sound too cool, but you have... Oh, like when you go in a Taco Bell and you order up on. Yeah, but you can't say Unafijita. You can't say Unavita, but what? Like, you kind of...

Especially in Arabic, you can't fit in Asian languages. You can't fake the funk. You've got to dive in there. Well, it's also because there are 10 cases in Arabic where different vowels go in different places, which completely changes the meaning of the word. Oh, the, not conjugations, but there's the Hamza and the Shada, the different abbreviations above the letters.

Will that change how they're pronounced? Well, no, it's not just that. It is, it's, it's, it's like I mean I don't even remember all this but there are 10 cases so so

a certain letter will be inserted or two a letter will be inserted after the first word like every every every Arabic word has a root of three letters right

I think there are some that are four but they're but anyway so three letters and so if you say Taliban, right, that's Telaba and then Talab and then

Taliban Yeah, so And Talabani would be multiple one name, right? No, Taliban is plural. Two, but it means, it only means two. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, I thought the Talib is

singular and then I thought Taliban was plural. Well, it's, It's not an Arabic word. So I don't know what, because it's, you know, it's Pashtun, right, Taliban or whatever. So if it were plural, it would either be, in Arabic, it would either be Taliban or Taliban or Taliban. Talabana. Right.

And then Taliban would be too in Arabic, Taliban or whatever, but it's not an Arabic. So I don't know what the... Like, the letters are the same, or most letters are the same, and you can read it, and there are a lot of words that are just saying, but it's not the same. Sorry. And then Iraqi dialect is like a whole other camera. Well, and that's... So that's the thing... It's a way...

Particularly, so Arabic versus Pashto for a second, right? Here's the deal. DLI, let me give you a fucking probative. Do not ever send anybody to learn Pashto. And I'll tell you why. Were you ever in Afghanistan? Yes. So mountain top to mountain top, it's a fucking different dialogue.

Right. I remember when I did, we could talk about this later, but like, we'll do chronologically. I'll talk about February 22nd here. But like when I first got, I worked with the in Kunar with the second five or third, the scout element, right? And the scout leader, right, he goes, you see that mountain top? He goes, how long do you think it takes to get there? And I said five hours, he goes, two days. It takes two days to get there.

Right. So mountain top, the dialects are different. So you can study your balls off. give me Mr. Suu Kuladi in Monterey, right? Go fucking head. Go to Kunar and speak questions. Matthew here's point now. Taliban, it is an Arabic word, I mean, because it means student.

Religious student. Yeah. But he's saying the parole meaning many is Taliban. Oh, Taliban. Yeah. Right. Talabat. Specifically, too, Taliban would be a group large, you know, more than two.

So it would be in the feminine, in the, in the, in the, in the mouth. I mean Calaboon. Oh man. Now we're going down a whole other... I was going to say, so we went out this rabbit hole of etymology spawned by the importance, the important lesson in the intelligence community of like, yo, there was literally like one terrorist guy, I'm spelling Jack Murphy, 15 different ways. Right, right.

Right. So like we learned this in 03... Uhamma and Mohamed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We learned this, we learned this in 03 and 04, and by the time I was around. I was around. So blah, blah, blah. I knew the right way to type this guy, his brother's name in. Right. His brother who's in Buka and arrested. So I'm there, you know, I'm metaphorically eating my fruit loops in my pajamas, just kicking back in the office. And I'm like, Googling,

Googling. You know, in our system, intranet, I guess would be the best word. We have a thing called a sir, an S-I-R, a summary of interrogation report. So thank God, again, to the rabbit hole. we had this etymology, the nomenclature. So this type this guy's, his brother's name incorrectly, and shout out to the dissemination and the importance of report writing. I'm in Baghdad, eating my fruit loops in my pajamas, metaphorically. And this poor guy's brother is in fucking Basra, Buka right now. And I read the summary of interrogation report,

and the interrogator was like, I believe this guy, I don't think that he, I think we got him wrapped up. summarizing. I think we wrapped him up erroneously. I believe him when he says Wollumma Adiff, which I'm sure you heard a million times. You know, I swear I god I don't know. Right. I believe this guy blah blah blah. Something along the lines of I recommend he gets released. So I read this February 22nd and maybe within a half an hour after I had met with this dude who said hey at 10 p.m. tonight and again I'll make sense and this would be kind of cool.

And I was like, okay, I know the system that this guy, he's going to get released. You know, the interrogator is like, look. Right. You know, and to a degree, one of the things that you learn the longer you're in intelligence is on all our reports, at some point there's an agent comments. And at first you kind of gloss over it. And then it's my last assignment, I did Iraq, Afghanistan, and then Kuwait. And then my last assignment, I would fire off. I would be like, this is what I really fucking think.

Right. In terms of the age in commons, right? Because it's like you're asking me what I think is somebody who met with this dude. Right? So blah, blah, blah, blah. I knew the guy was going to get released, right? So whatever, I got the guy's information and blah, blah, blah, blah. 10 p.m. later that night.

Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Right. Right. Those guys on Rusty Meyer were like, oh shit, my fucking dick gets hard as a human terror.

Why does my dick get hard as a human terror? I'm like, holy shit. I was like, I got a big fucking, this is a tuna. This guy said to me earlier today this is going to be fucking, oh, your basin, Rustamaya is going to get hit at 10 p.m. with four fucking katushes.

And I could hear it where I was at on prosperity. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Dick gets hard. Right? Because again, I'm not, I love terrorists. Right? You understand the concept? I'm like,

holy shit, I can work with this guy. This guy, I'm going to release this guy's brother. Right? Right. So in my head, I was like a little tedious. I was like, I know the system. This fucking dude's brother is going to get released. This guy, I was so stoked that an American base got attacked with Russian, right?

Right. And you understand my perspective. Sure. Holy shit, baby doll. Right. Because it means you have a source that actually has. Golden goose, dude, this guy. And the other thing is you've got to play cool, right?

And as you guys know from shooting, slow is smooth and smooth as fast. Right. So when you're an actual field agent, a quick little side note. Again, we call the good guy's blue and the bad guy's red. You lie to blue all the time. And you almost never lie to red. there is some honor amongst thieves

like honestly real talk if we're gonna the inner hippie and me where I'm doing this for the military where I'm trying to not get fucking innocent civilians murked where I live in Baghdad and like 15 people

live to a fucking house right you know what I'm saying so like if 810 cab does the wrong thing like that's not cool brother I'm a hippie from Massachusetts right I'm not a tobacco spitting dumb dumb simpleton who just wants to kill brown people

not at all right So he was so excited that I had this guy that had, I was like, what's going on here? Right? So I ran with this dude. We met kind of week to week. And at some point, I was like, how do you know, maybe the fourth meeting between this guy and I? I was like, he's like, you know, I heard so-and-so say this. And so-and-so, the guy's name was, as it were, he was part of the Al-Fartusi network.

The Al-Fartuisi network, this is 2006. operated out of sector 5 of Saver City. Now, you know back then, right? A little bit, yeah. Okay, so for all you folks at home, remember I was mentioning that, like, so when you're in Intel, you have a responsibility, like your AOR, but you don't know shit about your AOR because only idiots would be like, hey, I want to get recognized by my neighbors, ratting on them.

Right. So, as it were, I became an expert on Sauter City. Right. Because people from Sauter City, an expert, that's a handsome description of myself, right? But I kind of sort of of fucking knew what I was talking about over the time, right? A lot of these dudes.

Now, so the Fartusi Network, Sauter City is all Shia. Baghdad has about 8 million people. Sauter City is a diamond-shaped neighborhood in the northeast of Baghdad that was effectively founded in 1979 as like a giant, giant, giant

housing project. There is a bazillion different neighborhood in Sarder City, they're all designed the same. Each one has one market, one soccer field, one mosque, a primary school, and a secondary school. And it's all on a grid.

And 2 million to 2.5 million Shia live there, right? Sauter City is in northeast Baghdad. Kind of sort of in the southeastern corner of Soder City is sector 5, which is where the Fartusi tribe operated. They were big, dudes that were getting Kutusha rockets, right? The leader was this guy, Hodge, Hadi, Shullish, Alfortusi. You can imagine this. They all live together. Everybody's a cousin,

you know, we're all cousins, we're all uncles, we all live in the kind of same neighborhood, right? So ultimately what happened, it was twofold. It was that this guy was an actual, trust me, I never used the word terrorist, but I'm aware that there's like civilians and laymen's and stuff you don't use the word terrorists but this guy was a terrorist right and I'll understand I'll explain why I don't use that word because look man I was on the other side of the fucking world with guns and tanks and shit if you if the Chinese army or the Martian army is like in the upper west side like I'm gonna be throwing Molotov cocktails and all types of weird shit right but you know I'm

saying like you can't blame these guys if it's just business yeah after I mean it's interesting that like probably like 80% of the country supported us overthrowing Saddam. But then... Then you become a Saddam fan. But then after that... Then become a Saddam fan. After that, it's kind of like, why are you guys still here?

Yeah, yeah. What are you doing? Well, it wasn't just... It was the El Paul Bremer. The economy, yeah. 570,000 men. So, for the audience of home, what was it, December of 2004? El Paul Brummer made the decision to disband the Iraqi police and the Iraqi military.

What does that mean economically? Right. 570,000 military-aged military, military, trained men go home and oh yeah by the way you get to keep your AK right I said you get to keep your AK 570,000 military trained men that are no longer employed right you feel me talk about juxtapose that the Marshall Plan yeah so that was you know that's why the insurgency started no 5 whatever blah blah so this guy turned out to be super legit he was a member of the Fartucci Network and he was there was maybe 10 of them that

would they had like pickup trucks or whatever and they would go and then pop pop pop and they would do their thing they were very good at what they did um and he was my guy i think his impetus for being a source was one his brother he felt kind of guilty that he was actually like the terrorist right and his brother is in fucking buca right he was like you know mr prude right i'm kind of embellishing a little But that was a deal. I guess his brother was like a straight-ledged guy. And so he was, and the other thing is he was insulted. And again, this is from a human intelligence perspective,

I love when I'm making this up, you're an employee and your boss insults you. Right. I fucking love that. Right. Especially like in the Arab and the Afghan world where it's like, what do you say to me? Right.

Because shout out to Arabs, especially shout out to Arabs. Especially shout out to Arabs. Afghans. If an Afghan says, holy shit, I got to fucking kill this guy, guess what? That guy gets killed. Right. For real. For real. Right. I mean, they mean what they say. Shout out to you Afghans, especially you questions. Kuhnard. I have people from Koonar watching this, by the way. Yeah. Seriously. And we'll talk about Koonar in a second, but blah blah, blah this guy is the real deal, right? So everything is reported and documented and we have different, you know, areas, and I was like, direct access to blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, right? So in our greater portal, there's nomenclatures and stuff like that, and there's insums, like, intelligent summaries or whatever. So, so-and-so was reading, it's like, oh, fuck, direct access, right? And then you look at the nomenclature, and you're like, oh, it looks like this guy is here. And it looked, okay, then you're just, whatever, a yellow book. Oh, it looks like, I'll get in touch. So you would get phone calls from, And from this guy, this source who was active duty, his brother was in prison, when I say active duty, he was in like, you know, in the Fartucci network doing his fang. His brother's in prison and his boss pissed him off. He was like an active source for us, right?

I guess his wife spoke pretty good English. So we, we, I, we, I got his wife like an interview for some interpreter job with, one of these like you know myriad of you know agency whatever that were in back at the time I got him a security security job which gave him money was given this and that we kept meeting each week through this guy I started doing some pretty cool stuff again as an investigator you are only as as your source right so this football now starting to kind of make sense I was very very lucky that I found this guy that's like actually legit again boom boom boom boom boom boom at 10 p.m., right?

Right. So we started running with him. And I knew that his brother was going to get released, so I was like, okay. The other thing that I'm going to say is we look for six things in a source, right? Placement, access, motivation, suitability, susceptibility, and accessibility. Have you ever heard this? Okay, so the most important thing is placement and access, right? So a janitor at MIT has the placement to national, you know,

defense secrets or whatever but not the access person well they doesn't access mean they can get there that would be the janitor the janitor has a placement he's mopping the floors he's in the building every night but he doesn't have the key code to type into the computer I thought it was the other way around like doesn't placement mean like they're supposed to be there access means they can get there if they need to I'm gonna say I'm gonna say yes but yes maybe I'm not getting it backwards I don't know yeah I The placement for me, I might be, all these years have been getting wrong, but it's the same kind of deal.

Yeah, I mean, the way I understand his placement is, is they're in place. So, like, a bad guy's, say, doorman, he's in the right place. Right. But he doesn't have access to the information. Right. That's how I would work. Perfect. You didn't better because he's able to know.

the janitor, right? And the other thing is that when you ultimately task a source, you want to task them in as narrow a deviation of what they normally do as possible. So if you're a Latin king, I don't want to be like, oh shit, you're a gangbanger. I need to infiltrate the bloods. Right. What the fuck are you talking about? I'm going to get you whacked. Right. So like I want you like I don't want you to, is you very, very, very narrowly. Right. Right?

Because you want to sustain. The other thing I got to say is all the movies in the books and stuff, it's like, oh, Intel, you backstab and just daggers and who told you that? Right. That's bad business. I want to create a y'all, y'all come back now. How do you create-you-all-you-re-friends-out-us? Exactly.

Right. How do you create a y'all come back now? Service, food, you know, ambions, et cetera, et cetera. Like I don't know where it came from, but like one of the reasons that I'm kind of doing this is like There's no dagger or backseptive it's at equilibrium like if I can have an elbow pipe for 49,000 years Right and just slowly you know I mean that's what I want to do it's like I've had so many people Like CIA case officers say like like like everyone thinks the CIA like black nails people like that's how they get assets It's not really how it works because then you have a hot

hostile asset. Yeah. You've got to wonder what they're going to do to you. Yeah. Now, the other thing I was thinking about, again, this has been 10 years since I've done this, but like in a tactical environment, P&A, right, you want to completely exhaust, you want to exhaust the P&A of your source in a tactical environment. What do I mean by that, right?

So I'll give you a real life example, I'm going to keep running with this, right? So this guy was in the Catushia, he was in the Fortucci Network, right, 3416, right? Ultimately, I don't know what happened to him, right? I don't know what happened to him because we exhausted his P&A because we fucking just, we fucked that thing up. He was in a Katusha rocket squad. He was in, yeah, there was about 10 of them. And the Baghdad number two at the time, Baghdad's number two most wanted guy, was the leader of that cell. His name was Hajj Hadi, Shalash, Alphaltusi.

The second in command was Josham Tahrush. He was Baghdad's fifth most wanted. Baghdad's seventh most wanted was Talibrahim, Al-Fartusi, right? So ultimately, and I'll tell you how we did this or whatever, but the real talk is, the reason that I really take the time to mention Sadr City is you can't hit a guy in Sadr City. You can't go, it's going to be motherfucking Mogadishu, Times Mogadishu. I've never been there, but I've told me. Rather, it's a motherfucking intimidating.

There's like one way in and out. Yeah, it's a motherfucker. So here's the deal. And it's not necessarily because of us, the Americans, but because of the sectarian war. Sartre City is the mecca of, like, Shiaism, not necessarily in terms of shrines or stuff, but, like, in terms of...

Population. It is the Harlem, McFucking Harlem, like, of the Shia, like, in Baghdad, right? Saddam Hussein, only went to Sada City one time at the tip of Sada City, which is a diamond in northeast Baghdad. There's a Marl Barberle factory, Marlborel, and he went to the top of it, and he basically announced the cutting of the ribbon, if you can envision this, not literal, but the cutting of a ribbon of this giant infrastructure, like, you know, a public housing

kind of whatever. He stood on the roof, gave a speech in 1979, and that was it, and he never went back to Sutter City ever. It's a shithole. It's a slum. So what did you do with this source? How do you bust up the squad? So what we did was again, and the way that we did it is this is not 03, this is not 04, and I had the stress for all you like, arm pitted, you know, kind of people out there. I'm being abstract, but like I'm not going after the baker, the butcher, the candlestick maker. I'm not going after guys that deal with dine bags. Like if your fucking name comes across my desk over and over again

and like I develop a target packet on you and I do this not this I do this right if I develop a target packet on you and we fucking hit you like you're really good at what you do shout out to you shout out to you you know what I'm saying like

in 2006 like if we're especially if you're a Shia target and that's a whole other conversation because in 2006 we were basically doing ethnic cleansing do you guys what was going on in 2006. I ended up working with the task force, and I'll talk about that in a second, but like,

we weren't hitting, because we were trying to do hearts and minds and build up, we weren't hitting any Shia targets, because the Shia targets were Jaysha Mahadi, and Jaysha Mahadi, which is like the Maktada al-Satars, like Shia militia, they had the four really

key ministries. They had the ministry of interior, the ministry of health, which is all hospitals. They had the ministry of transportation. It was interpreted as an ethnic cleansing by the population. Brother, I felt this on the fucking ground, and I even said this

internally. I know I sound hyperbolic, but we weren't hitting. I had a guy that was telling me when Kutusha Rockets were going to get hit. I had fucking a Garfield sandwich this big. Like,

I had everything when it was going to happen. You're Iraqi. How else would you possibly interpret that? And the frustrating thing I started to kind of interject, but like, I was like, guys, the Shia, the Sunni population is feeling this. The Sunnis are like, wait a second, these guys are fucking doing EFPs and launching, and you're whacking us and what the fuck is going on? From a human perspective, that doesn't inspire a whole reservoir of potential Sunni sources that were like, hey, my uncle's a dickhead. And he's also a boss and fucking Tachbid Wahal Jihad.

You know, oh, really? What's his, can you talk about the blueprints to his house? You know, we don't get to tap into that reservoir because we were only whacking Sunni, right? So I was like, honestly, from a 10,000 foot perspective, I was like, can we fucking hit a Shia target, please? Right. Just to like...

It got really weird because... It was super fucking weird. We were doing ethic cleansing in 2016. It came... It came... I don't know if it came from... I don't know where it came from, around that time it was also...

It was Maliki, the Maliki government. It was also, there are no Iranians in Baghdad. Brother, there's a buddy watching right now, right? Who changed his name to Adam based on our friendship. Shout out to him and his two Psalms that are watching right now, right? His name is Ahmed, right? He's from Kadasia. We became super cool.

When he naturalized, he changed his name to Adam out of respect to our friendship. Shout out human, right? He is a Sunni, right? He got pulled over by the Iraqi police. He told me that he fucking met an Iraqi policeman that didn't speak Arabic. Yeah. Well, did you just heard what I said? Yeah, when I say there are no Iranians in Iraq, that was like the word that had come down by it was like, cease all operations against Iranians because there are no Iranians in Iraq. no Iranians in Iraq. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. There are, there are, there are, there's

there's where the, there are no Iranians in Iraq. That's where strategic shit gets so frustrating because it's so lame because you understand that like the ship is very big. So to turn the ship you have to, right? But from a very ground level, you're like, what the fuck are you dumb-dums in Washington? Right. Right. And it infuriated. Yeah. And, and with that no Iranians in Iraq, it's also like it's hands off the Shia because they were, you know, It was Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Defense, not Ministry of Defense.

That was mostly Sony. We'll talk about that later here. But Sony was I ran with this guy, I met him once a week. At the time, it was fifth group. Fifth Group was in town. And fifth group, they had a 180-Alpha, excuse me, a 180 Fox,

which is a warrant officer version of an Intel officer. I didn't even know he had those. So, so anyways, this dude, his name is Sean. He was, he was the 18 Fox, but he was a warrant. I mean, maybe he was a warrant that was also filling in, you know, Duel had it as an 18 Fox because of a shortage on his team. But it is possible.

So, I don't know, I genuinely don't know how I met, how we linked up. But he had a guy that was also in the Fartucci Network. And the reason that I mentioned, we don't go out. dime bag guys is we you have you have to have dual source this is not 2003 right just fucking murk people right you know what I'm saying that happened no this is not and by the way I'm sorry but lots of murder murder happened in 2003 2005 and henceforth but we started to clean it up a little bit like

because of them congratulations you broke our record we hit 200 live well that was the challenge what did I say what did I say cheers cheers cheers so all my all my people right i honestly think our highest previously was uh tracy walder oh actual live yours wait so who's tracy the cia lady yeah cia fbi yeah no so oh no i don't know so the unexpected spired books over there that that was hers i gotta tell you erin and sarah were the two uh agency females we had on tracy tracy well well tracy dude agency anna yeah all right so i got to like make sure that i don't talk shade but what partially inspired me was There was a CIA lady who was like royalty.

Like her parents had been in it and she grew up. And then she did some shit in Mosul. It's like a three-hour interview. Oh, Aaron. Okay, so check it out. I don't know that her parents were royal. Well, whatever. If they were in the CIA, so she kind of grew up.

If you watched Aaron, I'm not talking shit, but you inspired me to come here, there's a three-hour episode. Physiologically, her whole story, she gets the most excited. about what rolling out of the wire yeah going just on which which I'm sitting there smoking a fucking joint in my studio apartment in Manhattan and I'm like I'm like you're talking about no it's that intelligence baby you're talking about so in for your viewers at home or whatever it just sounds crazy at a bar but like CIA case officers all those movies you see in the homeland what we're really talking about

We called it at the time case officers, now they're called operations officers. Yeah, yeah. So they will tell you, they've told me, and I will convey this, that they're jealous of us as military intelligence. Because when you work a target, it becomes your baby. Becomes your fucking baby. I mean literally your day and night and you're, when I was in Baghdad, for whatever reason, we had one imagery system on one computer and one on another.

So I literally slide back and forth. So it's not right for the army. No, it was slide back and forth. And it becomes your baby, right? The Army, no other computers will be. And then once you get that Garfield sandwich, that's the target packet, they don't have an organic action arm. So they have to pass it off.

And then you're like, well, just take care of my baby. You know, I'm being absurd, right? But not really. I'm military intelligence. Now, I'm not fucking Jack Murphy or David, I don't know how to fast roll, but I can fucking shoot. Right. I can fight.

Right. You know what I mean? So when y'all do the door kicking, and I'm like, all right, once you guys are zip tied, I come right in there. Because I know the whole system, I've been studying this stuff, you know. And so they're kind of, they're jealous of us, right? So the rocket squad. Yeah, so there's two real things that I kind of want to get across. We'll talk about Afghanistan later, but Iraq really boils down to me for two sources. 3416 and 3421

3416 is this rocket guy right I got he was organic his wife was pregnant now quick side now anybody who really knows Baghdad I hate to say this but there's like the Tigris

in Baghdad and then Karata looks like the penis right we've all if anybody's been in Baghdad like you know about the penis I never saw it go ahead the Tigers the Karata and then there's like the University of Baghdad which is like the tip of the western tip of Karada

and then to the east of it is Huidda. Karata was affluent, a Sunni, a lot of people in the bath party like who's who kind of lived there, right? So my guy he lived in Saar City. Effectively he was a Shia hood rat, right? He somehow

met this chick from Karata who was like the Sunni son of whoever, daughter of whoever, right? Married that. Married her, right? Romeo and Juliet without permission. Right. So this hood rat, so the father in Karada of the daughter was like,

I would love to invite you guys over for lunch. Right. They come over, what happened? They kidnapped the daughter. Right. Kidnapped, reclaimed. They were bloated. No, no, no.

They were already married. This hood rat, this hood rat from Sauna City married this, like, nice girl from Surida. Right? So they're like, again, they didn't ask permission. So they invited them over for lunch This is my source, the hood rat, the kid that's in, you know, the terrorist The rocket cell.

It was the Montague's and the... Capulets. Capulets, yeah. Goes for lunch, right? And then they're like, we're going to take the daughter back, go fuck yourself, right? So I almost said my buddy.

Fuck it. You never fall in love with your source, but my buddy. I did bond with this guy, right? You do. You bond, you bond with these are real people, brother. And I'm not risking that much.

I can call fire planes if I have to. Seriously. You're risking, you have to understand that, right? So, invited for launch, they, like, kidnapped the wife of my buddy. He's like, fuck, I better beat it. Goes back to Sauter City. I don't know, maybe gives a William Wallace speech or whatever, right? But he comes back with his boys.

They, like, re-kidnap, I don't know the better word, reacquire the girl, right? And then on Market Street in Karata, they was, he describes this. And the cool thing about like Baghdadians, when we talk about gangster shit, like under the implicit bias of watching gangster movies and stuff, you see it in a certain tone. But when you hear this stuff,

they're like, yeah, we just put this guy out back and we shot him in the head. Right. And it's like, what? No, so the way that almost monotone, like laissez-faire, like the way that, so he gets his, buddies, his cousins, all these, you know, dudes.

And then I grabbed a cook for your son, right? That's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah. So gets his wife back and puts her in the car, and they start going down Market Street, which is almost like a perfect west east to go back to Satter City, like in Baghdad. Somebody can Google, you know, look at it. He describes, then the wife's family, they, cousins, brothers, whatever, they get guns, and it was like a shootout along Market Street where, like, everybody's like,

And then they go back to Sadr City, but because of the sectarian, once they get into Sauter City, it was like safe. Right. Right. So this is the type of people you're doing, right? So we kept working this guy. And this dude who was in fifth group, I want to think it was, I want to say it was like 0343 or in like there's two ODAs, like 034 or whatever, but maybe I'm going to say too

much. But ultimately, somehow, maybe through our portal, we linked up with each other. and I would meet him cut out the middleman. I just met this dude once a week in the green zone like either at the embassy we would like you know have the pininis anybody who's been to the embassy you've been to the embassy of course right you know the pinini the hub there the embassy's nice right so we would meet there and low talk and then we would do our dual source we would get our dual source humid because he had a guy who was also in that cell and then we did dual source and then we obviously got sig-end so he had a dude that was in the name

He had a guy that was also in the cell. Yeah, he had a guy who's also in the cell. So you're talking, yeah. So you're about 20% of that cell was dissatisfied with their job. No, and that's what the... Not happy with their leadership. No, so, and it's like a 50-cent lyric where he's like, I can't say the word that he uses, but he goes,

the dudes that are with you and even with you. Right. That is the essence of human. The dudes that are with you, they ain't even with you. Like, honestly, I'm not... I speak. little bit of you know, 30%

by the minute, right? I'm not going to, I'm 6'4, I look very American. Right. I'm not like going to go into Sarder City.

Like what you do is you just somehow, some way. And the other thing that I'm going to say big picture is in a war zone. It's so easy to run source ops.

Why? Because in a war zone, the level of desperation is four degrees, 360. Right? There's no sewage, water, electricity,

trash. you've lived on Haifa Street your whole fucking life and all of a sudden some jihadis from Algeria who the fuck are you? I can't go to the corner so I get a loaf of bread seriously right so it's so easy to do it's doing dirt it's so easy to do human especially

we'll juxtaposed it to Afghanistan later where there was no there was the reason that Baghdad was great place to cut your teeth and the work was nonstop is because of the sectarian war Right. The enemy wasn't unified, as it were. It was where there was two enemies.

The thing with Afghanistan, we'll talk about that later, is that it was all Pashtun, it was all Hague, it was all, there's us and then there's you fucking dumb asses who don't belong here. And that was a whole, talk about the six things of a source. Accessibility was the hardest thing in Afghanistan because there's no cell phone towers. So, okay, so back to the cell. Ultimately, with the SF dudes, it was fifth group guys. I met this guy on the 22nd of February, right? And shortly thereafter, I linked up with an intel dude that was in the fifth group that was like floating around or whatever, blah, blah.

We met about once a week, and literally it was like, hey, man, I'm going to meet my guy in a couple hours. Is there any questions that you want me to ask? Because basically, we're trying to fucking hit these dudes. So like if we understand that we need dual source. So like I'm trying to beef him up. He's trying to beef me up. Not in a disingenuous or inaccurate way, but I'm like, okay, what do you need? What are you looking for?

And then what am I looking for? Right. So we ultimately got the dual source. Sauter City, Sauter City. We talked about it. You can't, it's going to be motherfucking Mogadishu when you go in there. And at one point, the way that you do it is, and again, it is so much. talk about but at the end of every source meeting you say look are you willing to do a positive

identification someday some all this stuff that we talked about someday i might need you again we talk about imit dude oh let's be real real we're talking about either bagdad or Afghanistan imit hits a motherfucking brick wall pretty fucking fast you feel me like maybe not in 2021 but i promise you in 2006 like you're going to get sloppy if you think to you you know you know what the fuck you're talking about by him you know what I'm saying like in sod like in Baghdad like that right so uh we we we worked uh together and ultimately you can't hit him in in soda city so long story short uh I met with this guy once a week and this is kind of really important if you want to get into the weeds uh how we like hit this target

uh any military people out there anybody military out there you guys know what an alpha roster is right So like every company, I don't know, maybe bigger, maybe you guys didn't have it, but there's an alpha roster, which is your company commander, his name, and his number, and then the first sergeant, and then it's like a tree of this platoon sergeant and everybody. Like the alert roster. Yes, the alert roster. We called it an alpha roster. I did. The alert roster.

What was it called the Ranger Battalion? It was like RF1. But it's every person in your company. From my experience, we had an alpha roster, which was a company. which is about 120 people, four platoons or whatever. Company commander, which is a captain, first sergeant, the whole tree of their number and everything down, right? At the end of the day, you need SIGNT, right?

So these guys were pretty savvy, they were good, right? Baghdad had a lot of killings, as I mentioned, in 2006, but they had a lot of kidnappings as well. A lot of these cells were doing kidnappings for ransom, like, hey, we'll cut fucking Mahmoud's head off if you don't give us $8,000, I'm making that up, right? So they would do it for both

financial purposes, but also to take your cell phone, to stay ahead of the curve via SIGAN. Because they were hip enough that they knew that we were like, you know, tracking their cell phones and shit like that, right? So, kind of taking a step back,

there's an expression, and every MOS except at the best MOS, right? But in human, we say, operations revolve around targeting. targeting and revolves around human. So obviously you need that signal in, but targeting revolves around human, right? So getting into the weeds with this, right? So this guy was in the cell.

I was meeting with an SF dude who was, I thought, I think he was a warrant officer. So you would know better, but I might be making this up. No, but he was 18 Fox, 180 Fox or whatever, right? I know I met with him once a week. We got the dual source. And then when I would meet with my guy, I would get. the blueprints to Hajhadi's house.

And I want to talk this is where the hippie comes in, right? I'm not looking for information brother. I'm looking for intelligence. I'm trying to... This is Baghdad. I'm looking to remove that with which is malignant and that with which is malignant

only. Like if you have a little cancer, I would explicitly say this to Iraqis, Baghdadians. If... Ibn Sina. Do you guys know who Ibn Sina is? He's like a polymath. The first hospital in the world was in Baghdad. I think in the West he's called Abarist or something like that.

But Ibn Sina is like a polymath, like 12th century. All Baghdadians know about Ibn Sina, right? He's like a hero, right? And I'd be like, so I would use the medical analogy, right? And so to talk about collateral damage and being surgical. And I'd say, look, one of the things that I would do to, again, I'm not looking for information. I'm looking for intelligence. What is the difference, right?

Information is, hey man, I hate to break it to you, but there's drug dealers in the South Bronx. Thanks, right? Intelligence is at apartment, 3C, 1, 2, 3 Main Street, Soundview, Bronx. This is the diagram. There should be eight kilos of fucking heroin in this closet, right? Just in that, right?

That's intelligence, right? So every week I would, again, the hippie, Massachusetts in me, right? I'm trying to get as surgical as possible because violence brings violence, right? So one of the things that I would do to kind of sneaky pressure a potential source or a source is basically be like, yo, there's a brigade of tobacco-spitten fucking idiot Marines from West Virginia that want to murk you. And I would physically do this. I would, there's a lot of dust in Iraq. I would reach to the ground, I would grab dust and I'd go, They want to turn your fucking neighborhood.

And I would like, one thing I want to say about Intel is it's theater, but it's not acting. What's the difference? So I mean what I say. I'm dead, dead. There's no dagger, backstab or I can't wait to fuck you over. That's not, those are the stupid movies. In real life, again, forever and ever and ever, I want to, like, you know, FaceTime you. How you doing, go?

Forever, right? So there's no backstabbing. What do you want to distinguish? The theater? Theater. So you have to, it's not acting. I mean what I say. Right.

So again, to stay on target, I'm like, look, I know that you know, that I know, that you know what's going on. Right. Kind of John Reed, right? You want to offer them the most noble and honorable avenue, the most noble and honorable avenue to be like, okay, if we're just speculating, John Jones, who lives, he's the guy. Right. I don't know, but I'm speculated. Right. You want to give them.

I know you don't know who it is, but if you did know, who might it be. Yeah. Yeah. Who would I want to talk to about that? Right. Right. So, so much stuff's going on with Grand Rums. Yeah, so fifth group, man. You're linked up with fifth group. You guys are plotting to go do these guys in. Yeah. So one of the things is that, and this is kind of cool, post-9-11, there was like a camaraderie within the intelligence community.

And it's really, really important that your source is your source. It's not some inanimate object that I can, like, okay so this is how you use this equipment right so your your source might be like i don't give a shit if you're o r a or cia dave is my fucking god do you feel you understand what i'm saying so the intelligence community understands that uh nuance right so this bartusi network they were hitting the uh kurdish embassy i don't know if the embassy is the best word but some whatever the best the consul or whatever fucking kurdistan had something in the green zone that was getting hit by the Kutja Rockets.

The British Embassy also was getting hit by the Kutja Rockets, right? So I was getting hit up, again, ethnic cleansing, and we weren't hitting Shia targets. People were fucking hitting me up left and right, and they're like, I was getting invited to dinner at the Kurdish embassy. I'm dead serious. I went to dinner, that's the first time I ever heard of Peshmerga

and all that jazz, and there was so much more professional than the Iraqis. Well, the Iraqis, but they're Iraqis, but you know what I mean? Like the Kurdish, the Pershmirga in Baghdad, for me, was distinctively different than the Iraqi army. There were also Baghdad Kurds, which are distinctively different than... They were educated. It was a whole different vibe.

But they, like, courted me because their consulate embassy, whatever the best word is. I mean, their marquee spot was getting hit. And then again, we had this whole system where they were able to look at our... And it was, it all came back to me. whatever my nomenclature was, it was like there's a guy on prosperity that has a source with direct access. So I got, the British embassy got hit by the Fartucci Network. And then we got invited. I got invited.

The SAS was like, all right, they were pissed so that we wanted to do a mission. And I almost did a mission with them and that never happened. There was one point I think in May, again, I met this guy in February. But come May, this S. dude and I we had built up enough that we were going to go there was two ODAs and my source was going to do a positive identification of that's you know Hodge Hadi we were going to hit two targets Hodge Hottie and then Talbrahim right in the same name they lived you know almost right across the street from one another you

know whole everybody's family right this was May everything is Shia Shia it was the Al Maliki government because we were going to Sartar City the mission got all the way brought up to the prime minister, which was Al-Maliki. I had my source, again, at the end of every meeting, this is kind of really, we're getting into the weeds now, at the end of every meeting, you tell this guy, look, at some point, the day may come where you have to do a positive identification. For Arabs that are like real kind of honor, they're like, no problem, I got it. You know, like, I can't think of one instance in which an Arab was like, I don't know.

know I don't feel comfortable with that. They're all like, you know, I got it, right? Eventually that day did come. And there was two things in which, one we had, we were going to go and hit Haj Haddi. Now ultimately all these guys got hit, but they got hit when they left Sauter City and then Little Bird came down and like, you know, they wrapped them up. But you can't hit them inside the city. Just in terms of like the nuances of humand, this guy was a full-blown terrorists or whatever, right? He did come, we were talking about a big-ass cache northeast of Saver City outside of Baghdad and this place called Ma'amu, right? Which is like super, it was this big ass fucking cachet and we had been talking about it for a long time,

right? Again, at the end of every meeting you say, hey, you're still willing to do a PND, right? And they always say yes, right? So it was a Friday. I knew that this was going to happen, but you can never tell your sources because he's a fucking terrorist. Right, right. So this guy shows up and I was like, hey, bro, I was like, today's the day. Yeah. You can't go home. Here's your mask. Uh, you, you can't go home. So I don't know, this is 2006. I had an iPod or whatever the fucking turn thing was. Anyways, we got a bunch of onion rings. Uh, we got some porn. Uh, we, I had this iPod. He was fascinated. I played 50 cent and then the next song,

was Aretha Franklin and he was like what the fuck is going on he was like so fascinated um this is kind of like an interesting kind of nuance or whatever right um so many kidnappings took place in baghdad right so this is what they didn't never tell you in training right um and this is where a field agent makes this decision um i told this guy like hey knock knock who's there today's the fucking day you can't go home at five in the morning we're going to hit this you know, weapons cache and ma'amil, and you're going to be a motherfucking PID. And you're going to be wearing DCUs and you're going to be wearing fucking body armor. And that's what's going to happen because you've been saying, naham,

for four months now, right? It was a Friday and the guy's wife was pregnant, okay? There was so many kidnappings at the time that I just knew the calculus. I was like, okay, so this is a Friday. We're going to hit this at like five in the morning. If 3416 is gone, it's going to look pretty fucking suspect. Right, right. So I was like, I was like, I have to let this guy call his wife.

Again, this is not training. This is just on the job, you know. I was like, I got to let this guy call his wife. I have a German Shepherd, as I mentioned before, right, who gets really alert. Now shout out, I hope Jamal, my interpreter, who I had three square meals a day with, and shout out to interpreters. You do nothing. Everything you do is with an interpreter, right?

I've never seen anyone, whether it be a fucking canine or anyone, more focused than when this guy, my source, was calling his wife and saying that he wasn't going to be home that night. He said something like, oh, I'm going to stay with my brother. Don't ask any questions. But he had, potentially he could have said some weird code that I have no idea, but Jamal, that's why Jamal was like, he was like German Shepherd and Mick German Shepherd, right? But we had, I made the command decision as a, I was a specialist at the time, right, E4. You got to let him make this phone call.

And so he called his wife and he's like, you know, blah, blah, blah, I'm not going to come home. Around was, hit time was supposed to be at about 5 a.m. About 1 a.m., we got a phone call, mission off, mission off, mission off, SIGINT is popping. They're ready for you. So because it went all the way up to Nuri al-Maliki and everything is, like, it was leaked. And the way that Sada City works is when I say it's a fortress, I mean, they had machine gun nests.

They had a 24-7, like effectively a private in Jashamati, that their job was to just sit there. and to man and IED. So it was wide, whatever I was wired, it was around the corner, you know, the main avenue, whatever, where we would just sit there and I don't know if it was a four hour shift and then I replaced you and it's another four hour shift. But 24-7 they had fucking IEDs. It was like click, click, click, click, clack.

They were ready for us. So thank God I talk shit on SIGANT, but like SIGINET saved my life. Because I was going to go into Sada City, Sector 5, with only two ODAs now look superheroes but when the whole beehives comes on you motherfuckers American men are gonna fuck all that dude I ain't that tough right so shout out this again it got leaked we didn't hit it then maybe a month or so later I got my buddy the SF dude he like invited us over and he invited us over just to brag that the the main guy had they

he left, I think it's Obedee. Obedee is the neighborhood that's east of Sara City. He went to a gas station in Obedee and they fucking little birded down and they got him. Now the way, one of the things that I always used to say to my sources is I was like, look, do you know boxing?

And I was like, you know how like when one boxer hits another boxer and he can just see that he's seeing stars or whatever, he just fucking lays it on? I was like, that's what we're going to do. Once we hit the top guy, we're gonna fuck everybody up. You know, you understand that.

I would explicitly say this to my sources. Right. We're gonna start hitting fucking everything. And what happens is, is, you know, the alpha is the alpha because the alpha is the alpha. The number one is the number one, right? Now you take him out, by definition, the guy that replaces him is a little less as good. Right? And then you fucking hit him.

And then they start getting really sloppy with SIG-in, you know what I mean? And then you start fucking hitting everybody. Right, so the third command. So we hit ultimately this guy, 3416, and I'll wrap up this 3416 here in a second. We hit Hajj Hadi, Shalas R. Fautusi, fifth group got him in July of 2006. Two weeks later, they got Tallah Abrahim,

which was five out of the fifth most wanna guy in Baghdad, who was the second command of Fortisi. And then they got Josh Mtares, which was the seven. So kind of getting back to fourth ID, my battalion commander found out that like I was the dude I somebody briefed somebody and it was like there's you know I don't know how the fuck it went down but at some point I got credit and you know fourth special troops battalion Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Gendera got credit for hitting number two number five and number seven most wanted and I remember

been in the dining facility and my battalion commander came up to me and he must have He was like fucking hitting me on the shoulder, like all fired up. Like I must have made him look real good. Right. And at that point, we could do no wrong. Right. We could do no wrong. And again, I mentioned that we had a compound within a compound.

I should kind of make sense here for a second. My platoon sergeant was, he's now a prosecutor in like one of the highest crime areas of Michigan. Right. Before he joined the army, he was a professional kickboxer. Okay. this motherfucker had us on lock haircuts a DNC

show up 10 minutes early right he did it because he knows Garrison you have to do that because you need to butter up your blue force you need to butter up your command because in order for you to actually save lives you need to be off fucking leash

right you understand what I'm saying for me to do my fucking thing it's one of those things like if you if you follow the little rules yeah you can break the big that's what I'm saying people notice that's what I'm saying so shout out the

the easiest job in the world were the actual officers in my military intelligence company because my platoon sergeant this was is the last samurai yeah the last he is we have a signal group

there's six of us I know my fucking role I jump when he says jump and I haven't seen his face in fucking 10 years yeah you know what I'm saying so he had us so locked in garrison that we were fly on freebird fly on free bird when we were down range and that ultimately utilitarianism saved lives we were able to be freaky deaky you know do whatever the fuck we want um so we hit via with with fifth group we hit the second most wanted

fifth most wanted and seventh most wanted guy right um I'll pivot to my other big source because this is where I started to work with the task force okay uh I have jumped out on an airplane one time. It was skydiving. I don't, I'm not, fuck it. I'm a leg, right? You have to say, you have to dirty assing. I don't know, I don't need to, like, to whack motherfuckers.

I don't need to jump out of an airplane. Tell them what you are, Adam. Right. So, I mentioned February 22nd, Samara, Golden Mosque, right? But what really fucking kicked off the sectarian war was April 9th

Albaweith the mosque and Harria 94 killed 197 wounded right we is Intel guys we got a phone call

later that afternoon that was like hey the Iraqi police the Ministry of Interior have suspects for the Haria

bombing they're in site 4 which is east of the river and Rasa we're worried that they're getting fucking tortured

so we linked up with How well do you know Baghdad? There was Union 1 and Union 3 So we linked up with like a I think the guy's name was Colonel Steele, some Special Forces fucking legend Steel was a Ranger legend

Yeah, no, no, no, he was That guy was a Raca Sons, he was at Loyalty, he was the Third Brigade A hundred and first, I went on a fucking raid with those dudes, we'll talk about that later. Black Clockdown fame right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was a former Georgia football player. That's not that guy, it's a different guy. This guy was

an 06, a dead like I was too as well, but this is special for, blah blah blah. We went with, everything was bilateral at the time, right? So I think it was April 9th, some, this is when shit was really started to fucking cook in Baghdad. My partner and I, we got called to link up with some SF colonel who was doing some bilateral shit with Iraqis to go east of the river, to go visit the interrogation facility, Site 4, Rasafa, Ministry of Interior, where these suspects were, right?

They were going there to make sure that nobody was getting tortured. Look, ethically, morally, I don't really care that much about torture. Professionally, it's not a good tactic. I imagine at some point, some dude somewhere needs to get fucking tortured, right? But, like, professionally

in terms of cleaning intelligence, so ethically morally, I'm not, like, totally against it, right? Yeah. But like professionally it's just not a good tactic. So we went there, and this is where my shit really becomes interest in, in my opinion. We went there to Site 4, Rasaafa, east of the river, Minister of Interior. And we met up with, so again, this is the Iraqi police, which is basically 100% J. Shalmani.

I think it's like 83% J. Shamani, right? And my partner and I, as Intel dudes, we met with our counterparts, which are double our age and 10 times our experience, right? And to that point, you don't, you leverage that. Right? You box a wrestler, you wrestle a boxer. When you say you're counterpart, do you mean in the Iraqi system? Yeah, yeah.

And so to that point, so sorry, we're going to hit on the same thing. The American system is super unique. I think we're almost, every other military, enlisted people do not do this shit. It's only officers. Do you guys understand what I'm saying? Yeah. unique that a fucking 23 year old specialist is going to be having this agency endowed and entrusted with this right so you have to be honest with yourself

right these guys are twice my age ten times my experience so one of the things that you do as a source handler is student teacher teacher student right and then each week when I see you I've learned a little bit more about the Quran right I've learned maybe two expressions in Arabic and all that I I'm citing something from the Hadith, right? Al-Handallilah, right? I'm leveraging, so the way that I'm maintaining rapport with you is not, well, I'm so fucking smart.

Right, I'm American. You know, I'm fucking, absolutely not. And real talk, any real intel guy that's done the shit that I did that did counterterrorism, you're one step away from the shahara. So what happens is you're so curious about Islam. Oh my God Islam I'm from Boston

Everyone's Christian Where I'm from I never fucking hurt I'm oh my God And you're one step away From the shahada So what you do is You don't

Present yourself as You know Fifi Fofom Here comes this fucking 23 year old Baby Fest Know nothing What you do is

You're like I'm the T-boy I'm a ball of clay Right Educate me I'm a ball of clay Real talk I'm a baby fucking face, right?

So I did that with these, you have to recognize, what are you, stupid? I'm cool, I ain't that fucking cool, right? These guys are twice my age, 10 times my experience, right? So we went, April 9th, we met these dudes that were interrogators, a colonel and a major general in the Iraqi police, part of the Ministry of Interior, which equals 100% Shia, 100% Jashamedi.

Right, do you guys understand what I'm saying? viewers at home, Google it, right? It's a quick side-now, right? When you're doing a PM, which is a personal meeting, right, and you're doing this, you might talk about, oh, I like tea and you like tea, right? But at some point you're going to talk about blueprints, you're going to talk about, okay, what's the rank structure, you're going to really talk, real talk, right? You have to take a break.

Some of these meetings, when you're especially doing the blueprints, again, when you're teaching the garment, you're doing imagery, it takes two to three hours, right? So you take a break. When we would take a break, we would walk outside and I would, and kinetically, that's when you ask your real questions. Like, I don't know if the viewers at home see this, but there's probably four and a half feet separating you and I, and four and a half feet separate you and I in terms of furniture. It's a completely different experience. If we were at the end of the interview, when you start walking, if you would start asking, oh, so how many, Girlfriends have you had.

How many daughters do you have? You can't ask a fucking Iraqi or especially in Afghan. That question, how many daughters do you have? Right. Unless you can't in general. But you have to do that when the meeting's over and you're walking under the car. And you're physically kinetic. That's one of...

They're off the guard, yeah. Yeah, yeah, but just... It also changes, like, if you... Sure. Geography and the... Everything, when you... You and I want to go on a date with you. My best date with you is walking in Central Park

Versus the fanciest five-star French fucking whatever You're sitting here and we're a can of sardines And people are listening to, so where are you from? How many siblings do you have? That's not how you fucking get to know somebody. Right. It's hard to establish a state, like a solid state

With you're moving. Physical kinetic, no, it is. It's, everything's fluid and there's fresh air And you can ask that taboo question. Yeah. I can't ask the taboo question here. I can ask it. Oh, the inner cut.

Now we start walking. That's when you get your... Obviously, I've lost my track here for a second. The second source. Yeah, the second source. So this is 3421. Right. So you went to...

So this is 3421. Do you have refil over that? Yeah, brother. So this guy, we'll call him Colonel Ali. Okay. He was an actual colonel in the Iraqi military before they were disbanded. No, he was a colonel in the Iraqi police.

And it's super important that I distinguish it too, because the Iraqi police, the Minister of Interior, was very Shia heavy. The Iraqi army was very Sunni heavy. Do you guys know that? It was very Sunni heavy. And there was particular dudes, and we'll get to this, I was in Iraq for a year. As far as I understood it, and I'm kind of fast forward in here, like, what's my job? My job was to hit fucking terrorists, right? So I can do that via sending a company of American men who have girlfriends and pregnant wives and mothers and daughters and shit like that.

Or I can find out that there's some battalion commander, some William fucking Wallace battalion commander in Amaria, West Baghdad, who fucking hates Shia. So ultimately, fast forward, we started hitting targets that. I'm dead serious. What would have taken us, Shia targets would have taken us four, five, six months to hit, what you do is you find out like the ETT, the embedded training teams, right?

And like an American, like Jack Murphy is a captain, and he's embedded with one, two, three battalion, you know, Iraqi army, right? certain guys are fucking gun hull, right? And what you do is you just literally call them on the cell phone and you're like, hey, there's an IED facility in this Shia neighborhood of, you know, whatever, West, whatever, I'm making this up. And it would take us forever and ever and ever to send 120 American lives to do it.

But what you do is when I say minutes, eventually I got savvy. In fucking minutes, you can get an Iraqi army battalion that, be like, fuck it, let's go hit it. Right. So for me, from, again, freelance, after the course of a year, I'm like, look, man, I don't kind of feel like putting Charlie Jones, 21-year-old, you know what I mean?

He was from West Virginia with a pregnant wife, like kicking down that door. I'd probably just send a bunch of Iraqis to do it, man. Why not? Because they seem pretty fucking motivated to do it, right? 3421. This is where, like, Intel gets weird, right? shout out to Rangers and SF, but y'all roll around with like 10 guys, like 12 guys.

You know, a lot of times we do shit alone, you know, kind of off the reservation, right? So I met with this guy and I just vived with him. He was a colonel in the Iraqi police, Minister of Interior, Shia. He, I read reports on him. He was a bad, bad dude. he used to make earmuffs, earmuffs he used to make his prisoners

fellate him there's like a power move he purportedly personally cut people's heads off and drove down an avenue in Sauter City and was throwing out the fucking heads decapitated heads inside of city this guy that I, my source right?

Oh, or rack. Yeah no for real right so the reason that this is like the weird soupy like where an intel dude is an intel dude is I'm the nexus right I'm not that cool, but as a word, based on our composition, I'm the guy. So I met with this dude, and they had, just based on their tactics, based on what they did, they're Iraqi, they just, they had a, the Pacific Ocean of human intelligence that I didn't have. Guess what the fuck I had?

I had task force one four, five. I had, you know what I mean? I had tasked, turned Task Force 77, turned Task Force 24. That's what the fuck I had. All you rappers are like, I'll make one phone call. No, bitch, seriously, I'll make one phone call, right? So they knew that. I don't, I need to tell somebody from Delaware and Iowa

about the might of the American military. Let me tell you something. I don't need to convince an Iraqi the might of the American military. Right. You feel me? Right. They know what's up, right? So they know what we can, the buttons that we can push, right?

So I developed a relationship with this guy and we started meeting with this guy. He met with us and I met with him because of this reservoir of human intelligence that he had. He was a Shia in Jashamati during the sectarian war that had beef with all things Sunni. Right? And I was the portal to the hegemon that sent people to the fucking moon in the 60s. Right? I don't know if I finished that, but when we would go outside, I would take a break and say, Hey, you see that rock in the sky?

See that fucking rock up there? I represent a fucking country that sent people that rock in the sky 50 years ago. So... Set the tall fake. But if you're hearing that, you know what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is, if you give me juice, I'm going to give you some motherfucking juice. You got a space program? No. Shut the fuck up. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. But you know what the response to that in Afghanistan, though, is Oh, Afghanistan is a whole different thing, man. They go, that, that, that, no, that's far too small.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, Afghanistan is a whole different thing. A man can't fit on that. That's a true story. Yeah, yeah, not from my own ears. Oh, yeah, oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. So this guy, the colonel and the minister of interior, right,

he had this whole wealth. And again, I really want to stress that, there was a power struggle, particularly in Baghdad, between the Sunnis and the Shia, right? So the number one target in Iraq at the time was Abu Masab al-Zar Kali. My Shia source, Colonel Ali, had prisoners, as it were, that were Sunni dudes, right? That gave really good human intelligence, right? At some point, we kept kind of meeting with this dude. At some point, I got a phone call from my turp that got a phone call.

call from Colonel Ali that was like, yo, shit's fucking real. I can tell by this guy's tone, like, we need to go meet him. So, throw out all the middleman, like, any real Intel dude knows that you have to leave yourself very, very vulnerable. Like, sometimes, like, you cannot ask your parents' permission to go to the after party. Like, you, you know what saying like you you just if you want to save lives you have to fucking before I deploy or anything I learned from like a guy that he said you're going to do things that will never leave your THA your tactical human intelligence. You will also do things that you'll never tell your THD okay now that is not to say that I'm selling secrets to the North Koreans but there's just

shit that I just I'm a field agent you fucking made me one. I am my assessment is I need to fucking do this to save American to rain to save fucking range your lives real talk right you do that that's where shit gets weird as an Intel dude right so we got a phone call and I should kind of side note and this is actually kind of sexy we replaced third ID fourth ID replaced third ID the THT that we replaced there was one dude there that was like super slick snake oil salesman super savvy he stole everything he had great relationships with everybody just slick oil you

know right so he we fell into a really really good relationship with the ORA the Office of Regional Affairs CIA right both for macro reasons of hey communication you know we're working together and also just this specific relationship so we had a great relationship with the CIA My partner, my boss, my best friend, who I've lived with girlfriends more than my mommy, more than my daddy, my boss in Baghdad, he knows me better than anybody, right? He's from Southeast Texas. As it were, the little tiny fucking Southeast Texas high school that he went to, right, and we had a good relationship for the ORA, he went to, he went to fucking high school with one of these ORA girls. They knew each other.

Really? Yeah, they knew each other. So we had a super, everything, and he's mind. say he's charismatic and he's competent and he's cool I mean I mean he's dope dude right yeah so everybody was cool and human terms are generally cool right yeah so everybody was cool and we had a great relationship with CIA right they gave us MCI phones do you guys know MCI phones so I had an Arachna phone which I kept in touch with my sources with or whatever but I had an MCI phone do you guys know what an MCI phone it had either a New York

area code or a Virginia area code and And I don't know who paid for it. No, I'm dead serious. Someone in New York or Virginia. No, I have no idea. But all of us on our T-H-T, we were given by ORA, M-C-I phones. Anybody who was cool in Baghdad had an MCI phone. Were they like flip phones or a little Nokia-type?

Yeah, it was not, whatever it was at the time. It was a cell phone. It was a kind of a regular cell phone. It was a flip-phone in 06. I mean, it wasn't a razor. The razor was popular. No, they were just... It was a regular phone.

I don't think it was... The phone was... The phone was... Iraq were just like the Nokia and they were fliptops but this is kind of you know the MWR 10s and all that shit my family my friends at any point day and night they could call this New York area code or Virginia area code and they could reach me and I would talk with my family and my friends until the battery ran out right so we had MCI phones internally for cool kids SF dudes task force dudes

Hugh Minters, anybody cool in Baghdad had an MCI phone, right? So we had an MCI phone, right? We had a really, really good relationship, and I'll make sense that we were a bone with this in a second. Really good relationship with the ORA, right? This is Baghdad, brother. You know how like business guys, all their deals are made on the golf course and shit like that? So for us, there was an underground, and I don't mean subterranean, but I mean like, there was an underground ORA, CIA bar. in Baghdad that was just south of LZ Washington like you would be literally at the bar

and when the Hilo would come do so you hear it and dust and shit that was mark Palmyropolis and he said he built that bar what he's with the dev group guys so check this up no I think he I've been there a lot of times oh is in bio yeah he built the bar I've never been to the one in bio but there was one somebody out there has been to I know for a fact that I've been to this bar, and it was so funny because I was a specialist, and the base was guarded by, like, army guys, and it was, like, a PFC or, like, a specter. And I showed my Massachusetts license at the time to get in. I'm a fucking special, but, you know, I mean, I'm in the same rank.

But I went in with the CIA people. We got picked up in an up-armored Mercedes. I'm about to get real, real with some stories here in a second. Let's do it. Yeah. So future girlfriends, you're going to hate me, future employers. But I can't tell the story without getting real, right? It's very relevant that the Bob prosperity was super beautiful.

It was super nice. We had a beautiful, and then we had a compound within a compound, right? We had a beautiful meeting room. So there's a kind of colloquial, what's the word were you, congenial, where everybody gets along? Is that the word? Congenial? So the Intel community, so it's like the 10th Mountain guys, the human terms in 10th Mountain that were like in bio.

If they had to meet with their source and they needed to use our room, we would let them use it, right? We were friends with the Siyap guys and we had like a bunch of cool t-shirts and shit like that, right? And I'll make sense of why I'm saying all this, right? But it was like a cool place to hang out. It was a good, and I, Jared's my boss, we were like kind of cool dudes, right? It was a good kind of Camp David type of day. So we had a great relationship with the R.A. And we, because of the relationship that we fell in on,

and then it was kind of double whammyed with like, oh, I know you. We're from small, so. Right. So we started going on Thursday nights, right? On Thursday nights, we started going to hang out with, it was like a who's who

task force guys SF dudes CT people ops officers or case we called him case officers everybody was

it was cool kid humeters at this bar it was run by a British couple I don't maybe I'm on a

LSD or something but I'm telling you it was a man and a woman a British couple it was $2 anything you want It was a beer, $2, anything you want. And then what happens is, is for the first, it's who's who. And for the first, like, three or four drinks, it's, oh, I played baseball too.

Oh, you played third base? You look like a third basement. And then it's like, after the fourth drink, it's like, okay, what the fuck you got inside of the city? What do you got on Maria? Do you know what I'm saying? Like, after a couple drinks, it was really good business. Now, big army would be like, Adam, Specialist White, what are you doing? General Order number one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, what are you doing? But it was good business. Right. Was there a dance for? I think that's what I already wants to know. There was a bar, and that got a little deck. But I ended up meeting, I think it was through there, I ended up meeting these task force guys. Okay. And then so this Colonel Ali dude, who was in the Ministry of Interior, he had juicy, juicy, juicy juice in terms of human. At the end of the day, it was beneficial for me, the human that he had, how he got it. I would not say it's ethical.

No, I'm being real. I mean, it was fucking super torture, right? And I'll kind of speak to that in a second. I started to become friends with this guy, right? He invited myself and my interpreter over to his apartment, which was on the eighth floor of apartment complex in Baghdad, right? This is not in sector, it's in the green zone. But it's still myself and my interpreter on the eighth floor of a guy

who makes his prisoners fillate him and his cut heads off. Right. Okay, it's just myself. And I, you don't walk in. there with a platoon of fucking Navy SEALs. You don't do that on a meeting. This is the Iraq I know I love. That's what I'm saying.

You don't walk in there with a long barrel. Right. Because that shows that you don't trust them and you're not cool. Right. So your PTSD as an intel guy is that for you to really pick that fruit, you need to be naked, fucking McNakid, dude. So it was just myself and my interpreter,

I'm a leftie, so I had a leg holster nine-mill. on my arachna I had texted my friends where I was like my ad hoc fucking QRF quick reaction force right and myself and my interpreter we went to go meet this guy uh colonel ali 8th 4 and this is the sectarian war at the time right i keep mentioning this um that means there's militia checkpoints everywhere so he was like an hour late for the meeting because he got caught up in a militia checkpoint right um i knew that i was safe the guy has five kids when we knocked on the door or whatever the person that greeted us was his youngest son whose name was Hamoudi which is a nickname for Muhammad

like it's like Johnny and then eventually you become John right so he was I knew just again I'm really fascinated and like my spidey skills again shout out to Rangers shout out to SF but y'all roll around with other meat eaters I'm fucking rolling around with myself and a dude from Nebraska who doesn't have a gun right right so like my spidey senses need to be like super ADHD right um I knew that I was safe and that shit was kosher shout out to my time in New York uh because it was it was halal it was it was it was because Hamuri his youngest son who was five years old at the time he greeted us and he goes asahama alaikum and he like

us a double kiss. Right, right. Guess what, man. I mean, I don't know how old Alice is, Alice is like nine or ten. If you fucking hated me, I would know, not from you, from Alice. Alice would be like, oh, you're that fucking loser. You're in like Flynn. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I just knew, you just, this is where the Spidey sense, brother. I have a fucking nine-knock. I have a M-92 Fox Barretta, what is this fucking thing? M-9. Army nomenclature. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a 92-F in a civilian world. Yeah, I have a fucking M-9.

what's not going to do me? Right? Not much and they decided Wanging my nothing, nothing. So this is kind of where my whole, honestly, this is the story I'm telling now

is kind of where my whole kind of life change. I'm being a little dramatic but trust me. So this guy, there was a militia, checkpoint, he got caught up. I'm on the eighth floor. It's a traditional Iraqi family.

So like his wife's in the kitchen. I can't talk to his wife. She can't serve us, tea and lemon tarts. You know what I mean? I don't fucking talk to his wife, right? So the wife's in the kitchen. Hamoudi like kind of greets us, brings us to this little living room type deal

and then they shut the, you know, and we're just kind of waiting there. We're kind of twiddling on our fucking thumbs, right? It's a war zone, right? So sewage, water, electricity, trash, everything's on a power generator. I'm on the eighth floor in an apartment complex with just a fucking pistol. This guy

makes his prisoners blow him and cuts heads off and through it. And the fucking power goes out. Myself and my interpreter on the eighth floor, my command does not know where I am, right? And the power goes out. And I'm like, okay. I mean, pitch black,

eighth floor. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to have to get gully if shit gets weird. I'm going to have to be shooting everybody in the face and just doing parkour down the fucking stairs, because there ain't no elevator, right? I mean, I was envisioning just shooting innocent people in the face

and just doing parkour like a Peter While yelling parkour. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so that's where human is human. Do you know what I'm saying? Right. When you're on the eighth floor, this guy cuts people's heads off, throws him out the window, you're there with your interpreter,

the guy's an hour or late, and for eight minutes, the power is cut off, right? Power goes on, guy shows up, everything's crazy. Report, rapport, rapport, rapport, and he goes, hey, my boss wants to meet you. So we leave that building. Picture kind of like Bronx projects, maybe 12 stories high, 15 stories high. There's maybe four or five of them, right? So we go to like another complex. It's just the three of us.

Colonel Ali, and by the way, his father was like a judge. So wait, this guy proposes a venue change to you and you followed him. Yes. It's a first date. No, no. So you're feeling my vibe. So your spot, he says, that's where my kind of PTSD is an intel dude. my stories aren't like

oh my god my machine done was so heavy and there was a dust storm in Fallujah and it was 120 degrees I'm sorry that's a played out lame story right for real like my story is fuck I can't say no right so we went

from his apartment to his boss's apartment colonel to a major general right and how far away is his boss's 200 yards so picture complexes Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we went to, and it was like the eighth floor of this guy's Major General, and there's like six officers.

It was the first time I ever saw French fries in rice. If you guys have ever read. So we went there, and it was myself and my interpreter, and this is where, like, we really, like a first date, we really started to date the shit out of each other. Yeah. Because we think we're so cool as Intel guys, and I'm assessing you. you, bitch, I'm not assessing you. You're assessing me. Because if I'm a fucking dumb dumb, your whole family's getting killed. Right. Not slapped in the face or some, you know,

somebody's going to write something bad about you online. Like this is Baghdad 06, brother. Right. Is this general Shawnee or me? No, I don't know who that is. Okay. Yeah. Uh, so we, we, we, we went with this guy that was like maybe, it was myself, my interpreter. And, uh, maybe six kind of Ministry of Interior, interrogators, Iraqi police, high-ranking, but they're all kind of J.H. Imani's well, right? We had dinner, and then to show off, this was one of the most awkward things that's ever happened in my life. To show off, they showed us, like, interrogation porn. Right? They showed us, us.

My interpreter and I, they showed us interrogation videos. confession videos of Sunnis that were admitting their transgressions before they were about to be executed. Right. Creepy fucking shit. Totally legit shit right there. No, but the other thing is, so I know enough Arabic and you guys know enough of Arabic, that the Sunnis were doing these confession videos and they were saying like, I'm a terrorist.

Bitch you would never use that word. And you could just tell they were under such fucking duress. Their eyes are moving from like... No, dude, it was fucking... It was... Faces of death. It was... It was interrogation, porn.

It was so awkward. But again, I'm an intel guy. It'd be cool. Everything is cool. Everything is cool. But henceforth, and then everything was fine. And I remember when I say my life kind of changed. I remember kind of looking around and being like... This is Baghdad 2006.

These guys know that I'm not supposed to be which is kind of my merit. Like, you know, I mean, there's a weird... I was this white dude in the room watching his BHS tapes. Yeah, no, but they knew that, like, I'm a little off the reservation, which simultaneously is beneficial to me, but it also kind of puts me in trouble. Right. You know what I'm saying?

Right. So I knew, again, I'm not exactly... This is Brooklyn 2021. I do not think that that door is going to get kicked down on guys with... I... Zero percent of my being suspects that that that's going to have. happen. Right. In fucking Baghdad 20606, I

thought legitimately that that might happen. And I was walking I'm not a tough guy. I am not a tough guy. But I was like, I'm gonna fucking, if I, if that door get, I'm gonna fucking shoot everybody in the face. Oh, you're pregnant. Fucking, you're a little kid. You know, I'm being absurd, but I was like,

I'm gonna start parkour, getting the fuck out of here, and then we're gonna figure everything else later. Right. For real. when you talk about the experience of these guys I think it's important for people to realize that both in Iraq and Afghanistan that the intelligence apparatus the Ministry of Intelligence of Interior and then like in Afghanistan the NDP the National Defense Police and people like that like they some of them were very very savvy like in the Ministry of Interior in Iraq a lot of those people had come from the Sadat from the Hussein Saddam regime and in order to just stay alive under Saddam they had to be, even though they were part of his intelligence

they had to be very savvy and then with the NDP a lot of them were Russian trained, they were trained by the KGB and then doing human intelligence I'm cool, I'm not that cool. Like my, I became cooler and I was successful in recognizing that I'm like, I'm looking at George Clooney and I'm fucking kid brother. Well, you didn't underestimate them which I think a lot of Americans did.

So I used to tell my soldiers and this is kind of really important. I used to, it was a rhetorical question. I was like, hey man, what application process did you have to go through to become an American? Exactly. You know, you are no better. You could have been, first off,

I mean, just in terms of pure mathematics, your sperm maybe, you know, you could have not one. Right. You could have been a fucking limbless kid in Nepal, dude. Right. You were born in, right? You know how fucking, you were a lot of dumbass? Yeah.

You know, Lucky, you're not special. How fucking dare you. And in terms of, like, I used to sell my soldiers, it's really important. I was like, when you put your grandkid on your knee, I was like, I want you to say when I lived in Iraq, when I lived in Afghanistan. Not when I was deployed. Because that's indicative of the blend through which you view it. I want you to be freaky-deaky fucking hippie McGee. Right?

Oh, I was breaking bread with the, oh, fucking, fucking whoever's. Right? If you word it that way, then reverse engineering, it means that the lens to which you view it is that you're actually trying to figure stuff out, right? So everything was cool with the interrogation videos, right? Go ahead. No, I was just going to say remind everyone, thanks for joining us tonight, watching the show. And remember to subscribe to the channel and hit that bell icon and hit the, I think it's all notifications tab on there. So you get notified every time we go live.

otherwise they kind of screw you. So please remember to do that. So Adam, you're in this apartment and you're watching interrogation videos with these Iraqi police officers, which is kind of like, holy fuck. Yeah, and so... Like snuff videos.

It was honestly, genuinely sketchy and awkward. Because these dudes, again, man, this is not... The guys that I was watching confessing were about to be murked, right? And you could just tell that they were saying what they were saying, knowing that they were going to die to save their families. Do you know what I'm saying? I don't know if you guys

at home know that, but this is not, oh my God, south side of Chicago is so bad. Yeah, yeah, but Baghdad was really, really bad this time, right? So it was sketchy. Long story short, at some point they had a prisoner that they turned who was in the inner circle, a bodyguard, personal security detail of Abu Masab al-Arzakali. Okay, and this is where it gets interesting, right? So my first source was the Pertucci Network, Shia, we got them down. For me, if you were to put a tombstone on my military kind of career, it would be what I'm about to tell you. Oh, and by the way, if you have questions for Adam, make sure you hit us up.

Go ahead. And any of my friends out there, you better fucking donate a dollar or so. I'll pay you back over a Venmo, but don't be cheap-ass-bass. Seriously, don't be cheap-ass. Go ahead. Continue, please. So, I got a phone call, and you can just tell. Like, everything is toned. You can just tell.

I got a phone call one night. It must have been in April. It was in April of 2006. Shortly after I met Colonel Ali and did the snuff video, you know, fries and rice, lamb dinner. It was, hey, this is something. We got to spin up. We've got to meet this guy.

So I went back to his apartment on the eighth floor or whatever, blah, blah, blah. At this point, we had, I honestly, I genuinely don't know how we linked up with the task force guys. I genuinely don't know. Yeah. But I knew there was two dudes

specifically that I worked. with. I guess I'll say their names. One dude, his name was Brent, the other guy his name was Will. I guess they were both 18 deltas. Okay. And that was their MOS. But these guys

were not on an ODA. Do you feel me? Yeah. And I worked with CIA. I worked with CIA a lot. I worked with CIA on Joe Carroll. So anything Joe Carroll, we would do meetings with CIA. And I was 23, 24.

at the time my CIA counterparts were like 2930 they were smart one dude was like a Harvard law grad that had after 9-11 applied to the FBI but he had smoked pot within a year so the FBI is like later and the CIA is like wait you're a Harvard law grad yeah come on they were smart super competent but like again I'm super biased but like they've not in terms of granular there's just questions that you would ask as a dude who's done DAs that like you wouldn't ask if you got an anthropology you read from Georgetown. DAs are correct actions.

Do you understand what I'm saying? Yeah. Oh, there's a wall. Cool. How thick is it? What's it made out of? Oh, there's crops. There's a river.

How deep is it? How wide is it? Do I have to go two hours to like cross it or can I just with my fucking scouts just wade through it? Do you know what I'm saying? This is just granular question. There's a million reasons why I think. think Army Intel is better than CIA. Well, for what we do in terms of tactical stuff. Right, in terms of tactical. Sure. So we got the phone call and again, this was the second

time I've never seen, this was awesome. I went to this dude's apartment, Colonel Ali. They had turned, they themselves, my source had a source. So my Shia source that was Colonel Ali had a Sunni source that was in the PSD personal security detail of Abba Masaqa. The Sunnis were kind of losing the sectarian war in Baghdad. So basically like a rah-rah, Azarqawi was kind of hiding out in Anbar, but he would come to Baghdad periodically to give like a rah-rah speech. We got a call that Zarqawi was going to South, South and East

east of Baghdad, this area called Salmon Poc, right? Which southeast of Baghdad, it's farmlands, it's all Sunni. It's kind of east of Yusufia, Alataphia, Yusufia, the kind of triangle of death, it's east of that, Salmon Pock, right? This is April, and if you Google Task Force 145, the only thing that you really see is this mission that I'm talking about, right?

Which spun from what I'm talking about. So I went there with my interpreter, and we met with Colonel Ali, And he had on speaker there was like a little coffee table. And he had on speaker phone his guy. And I don't, again, I speak a little Arabic, but like over a cell phone, Iraqi speaker. Sure.

I don't fucking speak Arabic. Right. But you could tell that this guy was shifting his fucking pants, that it was not cool for him to talk loud. And I just knew that something was going on. So my interpreter, Jamal, I hope to shout out Jamal, I hope you're watching. I've never, he was just lays the fuck on. And I knew that it was, like, I knew that it was on, right?

So again, Colonel Ali, he called me, hey, this is not a drill. Myself and Jamal came to meet. We heard what his source, Colonel Lee source, the guy, and I called my dudes in the task force. And 10 minutes later, we're all kind of in the same neighborhood. The guy joins, right? And we ascertained that it was legit. And that it was worth a, that it was worth spin it up for, I just drop something, that it was worth

spin out for, right? And so later that night, I went to one of these CIA parties, right? The next morning, I got a phone call. I was in the office, the espoit, you know, the, right? The espo. Yeah. I got a phone call and it was so-and-so who's the chief at the task force. May I speak to adamant prosperity?

This is him speaking. I want you to know for your source reliability column, we actioned that target last night and did a lot of killing. End quote. Basically, end of conversation. So I don't know how much I can say about this, but we have a source reliability column. There's essentially a matrix.

I'll call it 1A versus 3 Charlie, right, where you could be a drunk-ass idiot that's never reported nothing, and you start off as a three Charlie, right? But if you, for 28 years, 90 fucking 9% accurate, you're a one alpha, right? So we have a source reliability column that's ultimately very relevant in our apparatus to how seriously these reports are taken, right?

Right. So it was important for him to let me know, hey, your boy fucking hooked that shit up. Like, we whack dudes, right? They killed, again, a lot has happened to my brain in 10 years, But I remember that apparently an entire brigade of Iraqi special forces hit the target. Because it was like 200, 250, 300 dudes that were the guardian al-Masalb al-Azakawi. An entire fucking Iraqi brigade of special forces hit the target.

They killed like 250 guys. As it were, AMZ absconded. But they killed a lot of his fucking juicy dudes. Like a lot of his good dudes. And again, like a boxer, the alpha's the alpha. you know, once you knock off the guy, the first in charge is because he's, and the second in charge is, because he's not as good. Right.

So that happened in April and then we did something similar in May, again, hit his other, and then ultimately June 7th, 2006, I think it was kind of close to Samara or Taji. I think it was Taji. June 7th, 2006, we dropped that JDM and then the Rangers, they tried to resuscitate him. We whacked that motherfucker. It was a Delta guys. But whatever it was is that on June 7th, 2006, that particular operation I had nothing to do with. I do sneaky take a little credit because in April we whacked the fuck out of his...

Right. You set up a chain of events. Your immune system, right? Yeah. We fucked up a lot of his dudes in April and then in May. And then, again, shit gets sloppy. And then so as I understand it, this is 2021. I could probably say this. They were smart enough.

EMZ was smart enough to shut his shit off. But his spiritual advisor who visited him did not have, that's how they got the same thing. A big controversy was, did the Delta bros smoke him out? The story is that they recovered him alive after they dropped that airstrike. But how alive? Like half alive? Like you guys know, Princess Bride?

Half a lot. half a lot. To the point that he was still somewhat combative. Good for him. Yeah. And so the story, it's, I've heard two stories. One was that he was trying to fight the guys on the stretchers. They carried him off.

Good for him. And they snuffed them out right there. Yeah. The other stories, they got him into the ambulance and they fucking strangled his ass there. I mean, I don't know. I mean, honestly, at the end of the day, I know it seems like, it seems super personal. But what's the difference between that? and a J-dam.

I mean, if a dude is an enemy and you're going to kill him, you're going to kill him. Yeah, I guess I'm talking more than the entire. I'm not losing any sleepover to Rakawee, but at the same time,

there's a world of difference between, like, dropping an airstrike and, like, killing a dude and cold blood is pretty different. Yeah. So, dropping a J-Dam

when he's driving down the street just killing him a cold blood too, right? Not really, no. He's an armed combatant on the battlefield. Oh. I mean, I would say, we'll talk about Afghanistan later, but like, I definitely, in terms of just, I respected my enemy in Afghanistan a lot more. Go ahead, brother.

We're three hours in at this point. We should answer some question. Yeah, yeah. Gold Star for Dave for pointing out the difference between Pashtun versus Arabic difference from Ian. What are you, a fucking dumb dumb? Their entire, completely different ethnicities. scrolling through I don't know if a gold stuff

I give you silver silver stuff Alex says Man those interrogation videos sounds like a scene from a Michael Man movie What's your favorite meal that you had with a source? Easy In Iraq they have bread called

Samoon which is like a diamond shaped bread You get like a shopping bag of it It's like a dollar Yeah you cut it in half And they call it Gus Gus is like

lamb that's marinated in vinegar and then you have cucumbers and tomatoes like it's like in a sandwich yeah I would say Gus B. Piazzi says crazy I never knew MI people had such stories Oh I have a bazillion dude

Ginti sorry to rant Ginti for BCI Ginti thank you bro Lithuanian PCI Dorsester DM says love the whole stream How did Adam go from CI to human I think some people don't understand

Yeah so My MOS was always counterintelligence for five years. There was a window where, because of Iraq and Afghanistan, and because these are ground kind of warfare or wars, there was a necessity for an influx of human intelligence, right? So if CI people started wearing the human tat where they normally didn't. That's what I... There also, though, I want to say when...

Like, if that, I mean, to my understanding, back in the day, 97 echoes, so 97 robots were CI, 97 echoes were interrogators, and all human were either warrant or officers, but there weren't actual, like, there were, and I could be wrong, but I don't think there was an actual, like, human, uh, collector, uh, um, um, MOS back of the day, either a CI or interrogator, so a lot of the human fell on on CI. Is that?

Yeah, I know that, um, it was, we started doing, I honestly don't even know, like, traditionally CI is kind of lame to my mind. Um, not really, but just not sexy to me. Like, uh, in terms of Iraq and Afghanistan, they were putting CI guys on these THGs. which was like a blend of a normal THT was like three green suitors, a mix of counterintel and Humint, which was 97 Bravo, counterintel, and then 97 Echo, Human Intelligence Collector,

which used to be interrogator, but after Abagreb, the attorney... Okay, so they did change after after... And then you had two interpreters that were catoos, catoos with the secret clearance. Yeah, man, so... It was neat. Ultimately, we were able to, I guess my best sources are ticking down the Fartucie Network

and then really putting a lot of pressure on AMZ. Right. And I ended up working with the task force quite a bit. Just gunned in my head, there's a whole different vibe, man. The people that do the badass shit for the DOD, they're deeper, bigger, faster, tougher, stronger than the people that I worked with in the CIA. In my opinion. Yeah. Like the spookiest, the spooky spooky fucking dudes out there are ultimately Army.

U.S. Army. In my opinion. Yeah. Other task force, you know. There's a lot of stuff that, like, you guys get into to, without going too much in a specific. So, like, there's the detachments and all these little projects. Everything, everything is so compartmentalized. I was my I was recruited for an SMU by my first sergeant at Fort Gordon in an SMU is a special mission unit yeah because

I was like physically fit but specifically I was recruited for an SMU in the middle of the day because earlier that morning when I drove into the parking lot I was blasting eda james I'd rather go blind okay so my first sergeant as it were was like raised by his grand-grand-a-law mother and fucking love that shit and like literally like that was the straw that broke the cable he invited me into his office and he's like do you want to be a part of an SM you and it was earlier that morning because I was blasting I'd rather go blind but Ed of James there's a lot of I promise you he did not ask my first line supervisor or you know there's just a lot of weird stuff in Intel and I don't

mean to sound super cool but like there's a whole I'll give you an example right like pretty much kind of sort of everybody in spec ops kind of sneaky knows what other people in spec ops are doing Absolutely not the case in Intel I mentioned this dude who went to Georgetown witnessed 9-11 I fought with him in southern Baghdad in the surge I traveled all throughout Thailand all throughout eastern Europe with him like on day 16 of a 19 day trip in Eastern Europe No cell phones were lock up with like Couture Montenegro walking along and I asked him about this program that he had like applied to right years of friendship no we're on live camera right hold nothing yeah he didn't say fucking nothing right and I had been in firefights with him right so they'd say the whole different uh you

this I was actually worried that I was gonna say this and how ridiculous it might sound but you may be doing stuff that you're not even totally aware of like my My last assignment, so this SMU, my last assignment was Kuwait. It was called Field Office Southwest Asia. How mundane is that? And the more badass you guys sound in specops, the more badass you are, the more like general maintenance facility. Like that's an intel unit is splitting throats. Right, right.

Right, right. Our vibe. So I did, my last assignment was Kuwait. it was part of INSCOM. So we were doing, you know, I'm a green suitor, Army, but I'm doing operational stuff for NSA. Why am I doing that? Because, well, I'm a super geek within the Army.

Why would the NSA, like, basically train some guy to be a field agent when they can just tap into us? You know, I'm super bedded at that point. You don't get invited into those programs unless you're bettered it, unless you're blasted and I'd rather go blind. Right. Yeah, I mean, it's to some extent. it's the same in J-Soc in that there are like these little planning cells that are doing like

some sort of contingency or like if this happens what are we going to do and so they're brought in these little committees that are planning things that the rest of the unit's not privy to but then there's also intelligence programs within J-Soc where like you have a guy who has been vetted very carefully and now because they like who he is and what he's doing it really boils down to that like I got into this. How can I say this? I have my feet in a couple different worlds. Like, I have a regular job.

I work in civil engineering. But, like, I essentially get offers and texts and phone calls to this day because I drink whiskey. I smoke fucking weed. I'm an honest, authentic person who is done bang, bang, beat them up shit on the record. Right. I'm vetted. Right. Right.

It's a small circle. Yeah, it is. Yeah, I've even known guys in ODAs who were brought on to shit, like you said, they didn't really know what they were doing. Yeah. Like, they thought they were setting up non-assisted recovery routes in a foreign country somewhere. They didn't really understand the full-blown scope. And I've had conversations with that guy who are, not without getting specific, like, hey, yeah, I understand you were brought on to that, but, like, you know that was part of something much bigger, right? And they're like, what are you talking about?

Yeah, we knew, so the way that we do it in intelligence, I guess, we do tactical, tactical, and then strategic. You're not invited to a fucking strategic, because your margin of error in a tactical environment is much, much wider than a strategic environment. Why? Because in a war zone, they need you. The whole city is burning down. They need you, right? So you can fuck up. Right. You would think that you can't, but you can fuck. You cannot fuck. You cannot fuck. up in Kuwait when the guy you're talking to drives a white family and lives in a $4.1 million house. He doesn't need you. Right. So you can't fuck up.

Your margin of error is a lot less. And you're also, like you said, with the Walkins and with the tactical human and things like that, it might be one in ten. The people always want us to be more like Joe Rogan. I was going to say, can I do an Elon Musk? Here you go. You can do whatever you want. I'm in

fucking Brooklyn. You can do whatever you want. You can do whatever you want. But like you say, like In tactical intelligence, it's like separating the wheat from chaffes. Like one in ten, it's these people come in. But that's your job. So sometimes people apologize to you. They're like, oh, sorry for wasting your time.

I'm like, dude, this is my fucking job. I twiddle my thumbs and I suntaned to look good. Right. And there's a whole hundred million stuff that we could talk about. But like, we didn't even talk about the onion rings or whatever. But like, hashtag end rings. No, but like, honestly, like, human intelligence, you have to understand. I know this sounds, you're not supposed to use the word.

the definition but it's fucking people dude um but i mentioned boston and comedy right a really good stand-up comic self-deprecates uh by self-deprecating he humanizes and all of a sudden he creates an environment where it's okay for you to laugh oh my god i thought it was the only person that did that in a shower i thought it was the only person that couldn't get hard when i or wet my bed or gets nervous you know i mean like you say stuff like you say stuff like that the joke is not on you if you're an intel if I say something like that to you all of a sudden eight minutes later you share something with me that you wouldn't share to that FBI guy with the perfect fucking hair and the white teeth I'm dead

serious right like it is the joke is not on me like if I'm like oh x Y Z and I express like a really human imperfection right there's a chest move there because you're like oh I've now I got I'm totally being absurd my uncle molested me too. My cousin actually, he's pretty high up in an IED facility. You know, like, you know, like my stepbrother were really good friends, but he's a huge fucking crack dealer. You share these things because, not that I'm, you know, Ken the Ken doll with the per, you, by design, strategically you want to be flawed. Right. You know. So did you tell the story about the onion rings? So when I first met Jack and I met special operations guys, I was like,

Like, for me, it was so apparent and so clear how different Intel is. I was like, look, you guys are jumping out of the sky and the middle of the fucking face. I'm watching porn looking through Maxim magazines with jihadis. Why am I doing that? Because based on their doctrine, they would get 100 lashings that they were found in the fucking Maxim, right? Right.

So you have to find someone's Turkish delight. Right. And one of the reasons that I'm smoking and drinking and ha ha ha. and I'm talking about sex drugs and rock and roll is guess what keep things fun I don't give a shit if you work in politics or engineering or banking or human intelligence at the end of the day when you want to fucking create an environment where it's like that wasn't bad hanging out with that guy what do you mean find somebody's Turkish to like you just so so here's the deal man every billion okay it's so and this is kind of segue into New York I love New York I love the nightlife I know where speakiesies are I'm good uptown downtown whatever right you're to go high low you do need to know, you need to be able to party on the top deck of the Titanic and the middle deck of the Titanic and you need to know the password to get to the fucking bottom deck of the Titanic, right? And you need to provide people. So the Irish, sure. You need to provide people, so a jihadi, so getting back to what

we're kind of alluding to, I would, I had one guy that, his, he went cuckoo for cocoa puffs over fucking onion rings. He'd never had onion rings before, right? And he went absolutely bananas. So we were just like kind of watch porn, eat onion rings. I would like sit next to him and rub his thigh. You guys are shooting people in the fucking face in the middle of the night. And I'm eating onion rings watching porn and be like, oh, tell me more. You know, you create the environment and then you go back to the meeting room and then you talk about, you know, the blueprints. Right? That's what we do. It's a whole different environment. You told us before we started filming about Turkish delight.

What do you mean by that? Where does that come from? So I was born in 82 and I remember the cartoon version of the Lion, the Witch, of the wardrobe. And you have to find someone's Turkish delight. The Turkish delight is something, for me it's a metaphor, something that they cannot get elsewhere. How does it relate to the lion, the witch, in the wardrobe? It's a specific example.

You read the book but didn't see the cartoon. Right. I'm learning disability, so I'm not a big fucking book guy, as it were. But the brother, Edmund, goes through the wardrobe. He's cold in this winter wonderland of Narnia, and he's hungry. And the witch shows up, she gives him a hot drink, she gives him Turkish stuff, he's never had it before. You have to give somebody something that they can't get elsewhere. whether you're selling insurance or

you know there's you know I have an ice cream stand here and you have an ice cream stand there I have to give you something that you can't get elsewhere now as that's why kind of go in full circle that's why it's easy as an American to be good in intel because we have so much to offer

I don't work for Belize shout out to Belize I don't work for Estonia or even you fucking Russia who the fuck wants to live in Russia I'll visit there sometime maybe But honestly, if I want to live, if I want to be Russian, I'll go to Brighton Beach. Seriously, and like all day, every day be Russian, but also living in America. You know, and be able to jump on, I got recruited by some one of these freaky dark matter, right?

It was like, I had a conversation with a recruiter who was trying to recruit me to do a job in the Middle East, basically doing CI shit for one of these freaky-diki. And I said to him, I said, you know what brother? I said, what's relevant is I'm having this conversation on a half block from Central Park and I can jump up and down on this table and say, fuck Donald Trump. So that's a little abstract. What I'm saying is that, like,

it's, I don't give a shit about malls and salary. Like, I need to be able to, like, rock out and, like, do whatever I need to do and live a life of permissibility here in the United States. Which is why we're the best, with the best services because at the end of the end of the rainbow

is just better than what other people offer. Brian Fitzgibbon's, thank you. Chris, also for Dave, but Jack, after Rangers and SF, did you ever consider going to the unit? I mean, I thought about it, but I decided to get out of the Army instead. How many years did you serve?

Eight. So you re-enlisted once? Why? To go to SF, do my... whole other second half of my So what was your original contract? Four years? Brad,

biggest difference between what you were doing in Iraq and a CIA case officer and also did you exchange money for information? I guess it's 2021. I know the answer to that question,

I guess I'll say. The short answer is yes. At times we did. I can tell you that we can offer things better than money. I mean, literally, I know people living in the United States right now that were sources for us.

So that's what I say. Like, if your shit's that good, one of the things that's like a source handler is you're basically, if your guy's a star, you fucking advocate for him. And you're like, no, we need to pay this guy more. You know, or we need to give this guy. So you can give them guns.

You can give them tarps a week before the monsoon season in Afghanistan, which is like super, valuable to put on like their mud huts like before that right sure uh you can whack their enemies you can give them visas you can give them jobs like again like that i'm walmart i'm uh coca cola yeah i got double stuff oreos that's that's what i'm saying really that that that's that's why it's easy because if you're if you i will match you i'll match your energy if you're saving a hundred million fucking lives,

then brother, you just might be living in, like, you know, I'll set you up in the penthouse. Right. You know, I mean, there's people watching that I'm friends with that I met overseas that are living in the United States because they've done a damn good job. Right. That are more American than any of us.

Right. You understand what I'm saying? No, absolutely. I'll say it again. There are people that are living in the United States right now that I met in Iraq and that are more American than all three of us come back. Because they value us. They're more American than all three.

And black lives do matter, by the way, still. Alan asks any opportunities to do similar things as an officer of the Army Reserver National Guard. So here's the deal. There's only a few branches of the Army where officers actually participate or are practitioners of the MOS. Mostly in military intelligence, officers oversee the operations, but they don't conduct the operations. One of the only areas in the Army where officers do the MOS is infantry, from my perspective. The next time we talk, if we ever talk again, I will talk more about Afghanistan. My second assignment was Afghanistan, and I went to Kunar.

I went to Kunar Afghanistan, and if there's some, Koonar is a whole institution. There's a tug-of-the-earlob. The thing about Baghdad is, okay, what year were you there? right but there's no what year were you there when you're in Koonar if you're in fucking Koonar you're in fucking Koonar I'm talking about Koonar guys man You ever been to Koonar

It's all mountains And those boys don't play Dude like those You walk out of When I say you're in the valleys And when I say valley I mean the fucking letter V You could throw grenades on the fog But yeah

This Koonar And that was very difficult to run source operations because of the accessibility. Because you had to be so creative to get in touch with your source. In Iraq, it's, oh, ring, ring, on a cell phone. You know what I mean? In Afghanistan, it's, okay,

I need to get super fucking creative. We're going to have to have you on again to talk about that sometime about Afghanistan. You want to tell us about getting out of the military and going to school and where we met? Yeah, yeah. So I got, I was in the Army from 21 to 26, and I'd been all around the world and back again and worked with the task force and been super cool kid stuff.

And within those five years, I had squeezed so much juice. I had squeezed so much juice out of the whole experience, right? So I was like geographically where do I want to live. I was like, okay, I want to either live in Chicago or Austin or San Francisco or New York. You didn't want to go back to Boston? I had lived in Boston. I've been there 21 years. I've been there 21 years.

And I love Boston and maybe someday the Winds will be back there. and I'll raise a family, a great place to, but I'm not done with New York yet. But, so I moved to New York City because I was dating a girl that applied to Columbia School of Social Work. We had lived together long enough. She got it, we moved up here together. For a semester, I went to Manhattan College. Great engineering school, okay?

But I was, I'm so fucking sorry, at no point ever was I not the smartest, person in the room ever a TA professional ever and that just like I felt like Will Farrell an elf you know physically and fucking the thing I liked about Columbia is that it's Columbia University so in it wasn't just college with Manhattan in that neighborhood there was old older people that were doing law school journalism school whatever I didn't feel like Will Farrow from Alf right um Columbia was hard for me I I was tell you this on the record, I don't think anyone has a, I probably graduated the lowest

GPA of anybody ever. You need a GPA, you need a 2.0 to graduate. I got a 2.0167 GPA. This should be a Patreon only fans. It should be Patreon only. My last dude, so, but if you know me, if you needed a 3.0 to graduate, I would have a 3.0167. But you had to have a 2.0 to graduate, excuse me, 2.0 to graduate. I have a 2.0.5. I have a 2.0.5. I have a 2.5. 0167, right? How did I get that? I got a B minus on my last paper. How did I get that?

My last semester, you took a seminar. A seminar is like four points versus like three points, and it's like nine people, eight people. You know, the girl from Hong Kong who dead fucking owns the whole place and the kid from Georgia, I don't mean the state, whose dad's the Minister of Defense. Yeah, yeah, the girl from Mexico, whose dad is in the PRI.

I'm saying that it's me, right? Yeah, yeah. And I had a professor that was an Iranian professor. Okay, fuck it, I'll tell this story, right? So how the fuck did I graduate from Columbia University, right? I threatened my Iranian professor with detention in Egypt, in Muhammad Morrissey's Egypt, right? What do I mean by that? So the semester technically ends on the 21st of December, right?

But our last class was the 4th of December, and that was when our big paper was due, right? This big 15, 20 page, a seminar, Columbia University, paper on theories of revolution, right? You know, it's got to be something, right? It was due at the beginning of the class on the 4th of December, right? The reason that it was due then was because at the end of the week, the guy was going to go take six months in Cairo, Egypt. I'll say again, he was a Iranian dude who was going to, in 2013, December, 2013 takes six months in

fucking Cairo Egypt with chronologically it was the Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad Morsi I think we were giving them $10 billion a month in terms of military aid. Right? So long and story short, this guy like my paper wasn't done at the beginning of the class and he wouldn't accept it which mathematically

related to I just I could not graduate which means that I had toiled for fucking three and a half years for nothing. The GI Bill was exhausted and then just the F that I would have gone I can't be accepted

to other institutions, even Uncle Frank's community college, right? So like he was making, and the guy was making my life problematic, right? So I said to my academic advisor who was like, basically my psychiatrist for fucking

three years, right? I was like, look, my last assignment was some freaky-diki, like, I've been vetted, I did Baghdad, I Kuhner, this guy's like, trust me, this guy's legit, my last assignment. So my last assignment was the only time that I had a real mentor. My boss and my partner was my mentor.

This guy was big dick energy, big a man crush on him every day, right? So after that assignment, he went on to Germany and he became the head of all of intelligence for all of Europe. Okay, while I'm twiddling my thumbs meeting Jack at Columbia, right? So long story short, this Iranian professor is about to take fucking six months in the Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad Morrissey, Cairo, threatens to completely sink me, right? Submarine me, or torpedo me, right? So I was like actually feeling it, like not reading the script, like not Daniel DeLewis acting, like actually fucking feeling it. I told it, I was like, here's the deal.

This fucking Iranians going to Cairo for six months. The United States military spends $10 billion a month, right? I was like, like a rapper, I would go, I will make one phone call to a guy whose secrets I fucking hold in my back pocket, right, who, like, loves me and I love him. And he'll make a fucking phone. And he will, I was just say, hey man, I don't, I don't want to alarm anybody, but there's a fishy fucking Iranian floating around fucking Muslim Brotherhood, Cairo. Maybe you should wrap him up. So like I indirectly, this is really, I indirect, I told my academic advisor that I was going to have my professor detained in a fucking dungeon in Cairo. Right.

Right. You told them, in those words, you told them that. Not what I just said, dungeon in Cairo, but what I said, no, I read about it. No, I literally said I will fucking make a fucking phone call to my best friend and partner who's the boss of Siot who will make a call and shit will get weird for an interrupt. Iranian and fucking Cairo. Yeah. Shit will get weird for a fucking Iranian and Cairo. Right?

You know what I mean? So my academic advisor knew that I was enough of like, Jesus Christ, that she kind of sort of scrambled, ultimately, rest in peace, Dean On who passed away, who was the president, the dean of our college. He was the dean of our college. They figured out a way where this guy, he refused to accept my paper, accept my paper, which effectively would have meant that I did not graduate. But the course wasn't technically over yet, right?

Yeah, but it was just, so that's why I was so mad. I was like, and honestly, kind of like what I was saying earlier, if I hunt you down, you do not, you're not doing dime bags. Yeah. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, I'm such a fucking hippie. Yeah. Like, if I'm, if I'm coming after you, if I'm, like, doing a DA on you,

you are such a cocks sucker. Do you know what I'm saying? Right? So this guy was going to fuck my whole life up, right? So I said to my academic advisor, and she's like, kind of sort of behind the scene and scrambled, I had done the math that I was like, I need a B minus. I got my paper back. It was a B minus, corrected, judged by Dean on.

That's how I graduated with a 2.01-67 you did it. You know, because I threatened my Iranian professor with detention with a very awkward three-de-old. four weeks in the fucking dungeon in Cairo yeah well it might have been more than three or four weeks that's it for an Iranian in retrospect I'm like wait he's an Iranian American yeah he's like so it was like so probably went but I was so furious sure that my academic the the message that was emanated was like we have a problem sure we have like we this kid needs a B minus there was um Matthew real says ask Adam about the icky sticky bugbook.

Oh, yeah. So, you know, I like the last story, then we've got to wrap it up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shout out to everybody. Matt Svremont. He was in Fourth ID with me. He's 97. I go from California.

You know, this was George W. Bush's army, right? So, like, when you go to Austin, which is south of Fort Hood, like, maybe if you want to go home with the girl or make out with a girl, you don't say that you're in fourth infantry division. You know what I'm saying? So like a challenge, I used to be like, oh, I'm, it's funny you ask. I would either say, this is funny. If you know what I'm a super jokester, right? People would be like, what do you do?

And I'd be like, actually nothing. My father invented Oregon Trail. So I kind of, yeah. Which is like just nuanced enough. There's probably a younger crowd. But the other thing that I would say is I'd be like, I'm an author Children's book author

I have a book out there Anthony and the Ant an Ick and Sticky Bug Book You know We would just kind of play You know You don't have fun Because you don't want to say

Hey I'm a stupid You know Mouth breathing George W. Bush Green Machine You know When you're like You know

In Austin Texas Right That's funny I mean Did you Because we did Like we We just didn't

Want to tell girls That we were Rangers Like up in Seattle stuff. You guys were both second? No, you were third, right? Yeah, yeah. And we would tell girls that, man, we'd tell them that we were professional ping pong players. We would tell them that we shined the bumps on the... Did you guys grow your hair a little bit? No, no. This was the first guys, the first back guys this was this was black beret, this was pre-9-11. This was like, this was like,

high and tight spit, spitzhine boots. This is before all of that. Yeah. But, yeah, but we would do the same. We would, Sanboni drivers. We used to tell the girls that we were,

that's fucking excellent. We used to tell the girls that we were retarded dolphin trainers. Okay. Yeah, they love that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The PC culture, you know, I'm super hippie,

I'm falling out of the chair, I'm so left. But I want, retarded is a word that I hate that you can't say anymore. No, you can't. No, I hate it's just, I mean it.

You know, Sam, I'm not trying to throw any shit, but I just... I can't say it, man. The R-word. Yeah. No, we'll talk about Afghanistan later. I'm a weirdo, guys. Any human terms of weirdo. Sorry for Rambling so much.

I do hope it was interesting to us. Yeah. Guys, and next week we're going to have my friend Casper on. It's going to be really a very unique show. Casper, so in Denmark, there are three special operations units, the Frogman Corps, the Jagger Corps, and Sirius Patrol. So you can probably guess the Frogman Corps is naval special operations. Yager Corps is Army Special Operations.

Serious Patrol is very unique. These guys patrol Greenland. And for like, it's more than a year. They go, they're deployed overseas. And primarily how they're getting around is on dog sled. With the huskies? I don't know if it's huskies. I don't know what the breed is.

We're going to have to ask Casper about that. So that would be next week. Yeah, like sometimes they'll see it. The cold breaks you off. I would have thought Sirius Patrol was part of Space Force, but not yet. Not yet. We choose to go to the bone. So, yeah, I'm going to be very interested to hear what you have to say.

And then also, please make sure you subscribe to the channel. Like us, comments, let us know how you think we're doing it or if we think we stuck. Yeah, Adam, do you have any... Any merch support? Yeah, any merch, any website, anything? No, no, honestly, I'm mad famous for being unknown. Like, I'm very, my friends that are watching, I'm super... The way that I am right now, I'm very in private,

but I've never done anything like this before, man. It's never, like, gone on the record. It's called the Hoffone effect. I feel as though I should be sitting next to you, eating coot watching porn and rubbing your rubbing your... I don't know it, brother. Hey man, to save lives,

so... Made love Thursday. No, but seriously, like, uh, if you don't understand, like, that's what you do? Like,

you miss the whole fucking... Then you know what? Be a combat engineer, brother. Well, I think, though, I think that... You miss the whole...

For anybody, for anybody who may have, like, stutter-stepped when you said that, they don't understand. The first off... If you're not doing poppers at four,

38 in the morning at a gay club with the Lower East Side, then you've missed the whole point about what it is to be a humeter. Well, I was just going to talk about Iraq, Afghanistan, but sure, we can do that too. Alphonse from Trinidad. But if you can't go left,

because at some point, ring, ring, ring, hey, I need to know where the fuck X, Y, okay, shit, it's funny you ask. Right. I do know where to get the best chopped cheese. Right. I do know where to get the best fucking veal. I do know, you have to fucking know that.

Right. You have, or you're a fucking loser, and you should do something else. And for our Patreon supporters, you get to hear where to find the best. I'm just kidding. No, but seriously, like, people don't understand that the biggest halls, like when you, if you were doing, like, target exploitation or, you know, exploitation of what you found on target, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was always porn. that, you know, that, because it was so forbidden in those cultures, that, you know.

That's the Turkish to light. It's something that you can't get. Right. And that, that, that their. Elon Musk over here. By the way, Elon Musk. Their concept of closeness. Right.

Their concept of closeness, like they would walk around and hold hands. Like, their concept of closures was different. Yeah. And if you're walking with somebody important and they grab your hand, it's in soul. to pull it away. Right. You... Whatever you guys are having, I'm having.

Right. What the fuck we're doing on here? I totally forgot about the damn bonus segment. I'm gonna make you tell some more worse. Oh, dude, so for the people that aren't fucking cheapskates, I'll tell some real shit. All right. Yeah, here a second, because I'm about to get comfortable. Hey, if I'm, if I, if you're like on LinkedIn, if you're like on LinkedIn, fucking go home.

Yeah. Seriously. Seriously, seriously, go the fuck home. So in our bonus segment, I think you're going to hear about something that Adam could only speak about, what? We're talking about it. Are we going to talk about a statute of limitations? Is that what we're going to talk about? I can, I can, yeah, yeah, I'm a crime.

Yeah, yeah, I'm a bad boy. The thing is it's, we're going to talk. No, no, no, I'm going to answer this way. We're going to talk about neurology. Okay. Because when you do this stuff, shout out to Sebastian Younger, who spent some time in fucking Kunaar, right? It's a combination of adrenaline and the chemicals neurologically there. And then the concept anthropologically of, I'm with some motherfucking gang bangers.

And just knowing that comfort, right? That's why combat is so addictive. And then how that translates to a post-military life in New York. So what I'm seeing is everything is boring. Right. Brothers and sisters, I cannot, as of yet, live in the tumbling tumbleweeds of wherever, right? I can't go to the mountains of wherever and be like, don't you love how quiet it is? No, bitch, I don't.

I need some, I need jambalaya in my fucking head. For real, I love the subway. I love the pit de bat. You know, I love everything of New York, man. I need to, when you go from 35,000 fucking feet neurologically, like running spies, like dudes who are like, that guy that you want, yeah, I know he's going to be tomorrow night, and then you whack his fucking ass with dudes like you.

You better be a hot fucking girl, man, if I'm gonna get excited. All right, all right. We'll see you guys on the bonus segment. Sorry, all. Sorry, Mom. Next time. Sorry, Mom.

I got a lot of friends and family that are watching. It's cool, man. No, that's awesome, man. But you have to be authentic, dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dude, you were awesome. It was great. I am forever.

I never fucking loved you.