The Team House - Chatting with a Counterintelligence agent, Ep. 95

Episode Date: May 22, 2021

On this episode we interview former counterintelligence agent about his time in the Army chasing a spy who worked for the Chinese government, deploying to Afghanistan, the guys who run double agents, and protecting critical military facilities from spies. Get access to bonus segments with our guests: https://www.patreon.com/m/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Podcast version of this show can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/user-796052562/eagle-down-the-last-special-forces-fighting-the-forever-war-with-jessica-donati-ep-94 Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links): https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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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

Hey folks, this is Episode 95 of the Team House. We're live tonight on Friday evening. I'm Jack Murphy here with co-host Dave Park. And our guest tonight is Guy Hardman. He's a former counterintelligence agent with the United States

Army. So we're here to talk about spy stuff, spook stuff. Guy, man. When you stop, just give me 15 minutes, man. I'm trying to talk to my friends. kidding the diapers, man. I don't know what's going. Rum. Go get your mother.

Rum is the answer. They're well out of diapers by now. How are you? How are you? Good, good. Thanks for joining us tonight. Yeah, absolutely. So, listen, man, if you've ever seen the show before, you know what our first question is, right?

I do. Okay. And I've got to be honest with you, I think that should be everybody's first. question to everybody. In the specialized community, in normal society, you go to a new place and nobody asks, hey, what's your name? Can you do your job? You get into your people and depending on where they're coming from, if it's first,

second or third bat or whichever group it is, they've all got a reputation. So you already know. The butt sniffing. Yeah. Yeah. So you got cash bat, angry bat. You get the seventh group with the hookers in cocaine. With our people, when you find out.

somebody is, you know, coming to your place, people start working those keyboards already. Yeah. So there's no origin store by the time you get there. They know all the dirt on you already. I've got one friend who's the best at that. I'll be start talking about somebody and by the time the name gets out of my mouth, he's already on the keyboard and got a 10-digit grid and social security numbers, it'll sample, everything. So anyway, you want my origin story? Yes, please.

All right. Well, to tell mine, I have to tell you a little bit of the prologue because I wouldn't be here if we couldn't go back to just before 1950. So on my mother's side, they're not a huge military family. My maternal grandfather was a balturic gunner and a B-17 in World War II.

I used to love to listen to his stories. I mean, he had a lot of good ones. It was hellish what he told, but it would be that would punctuate days and hours and weeks of playing poker in Scotland while they were waiting for a new mission get out. So it's the best of both worlds.

On my father's side, it's nothing but military. We have very few that are not. All of them except me wore funny hats of one color or another. All NCOs, because I think that's the only way to be. We only got one officer in the family, and we don't even talk to him or family reunions. But what kind of brought me,

I mean, I was never pushed toward military service, but I never really thought about anything else. Again, it was a highly respected profession in our family. And it was just kind of something that everybody knew everybody was going to do it. So I think it was 1948. These three dudes meet up down at Fort Benning. They're going to go to infantry school and then airborne. And at that time, if you went to airborne school,

you went to the Rigger and Glider School as well. So Bill Conrad comes down from Ohio. Jr., my grandfather from Hull, Georgia on a red clay road down there. And this guy named Douglas D. Horse. He's a full-blooded South Dakota suit. Big giant boy. He was only 16 years old. He ran away from the reservation because the nuns treated him so bad,

and he hated his life there. So he ran away, join the Army. He was big enough to pull it off. Well, if you watch dances with wolves, by the way, most of the people in the credits, they are related to him in some way. It's cousins and uncles and aunts and all kind of people. I forget which band of the Sioux it was, but much of them were in there. So his name was shortened to D. Horse. It was Devil Horse.

That was their family name, because they were known just to be Hellraiser's, but it wouldn't fit on the name tag. So they shortened it to D. Horse, and there you go. So these guys became fast friends real quick. and D-horse and junior, my grandfather, a little more than the others. Anyway, they went through all the train together, had a good old time, they get assigned to the 187th,

and they end up in Korea the following year. So, I think it was Hotel 1, 187th. Anyway, the 20th of October, 1950, the first airborne operation into Korea, they were all there and jumped. And that mission was, as I recall, a Chinese prisoner war train was headed north. Their job was to intercept it,

you know, free the prisoners and lay waste of the Chinese. As usual, intelligence was just a bit off and the Chinese had already been through there with their super train, but they were kind enough to leave about a brigade of their friends back for a surprise. It's called the Battle of the Apple Orchery. So there were Americans, Ozzy's,

Brits and Koreans, I believe. Anyway, my grandfather was a machine gunner. There were at this bridgehead fighting across the bridge. A guy on the other side needed more ammo. My grandpa raises up to throw him a belt

and they killed him. So DeHorse and Conrad, they finished out their tours, but Conrad really like Kimchi. So he stayed there for the duration. He kept extended. He stayed there for the whole war. He loved Asia for a lot of reasons. Divorce, you know, like I said, they had become really good friends, so he had already promised

him and knew that my grandmother was pregnant with my father. By the way, my father was born four days after his father was killed, so he never got to know him, you know. Anyway, he promised him to him, he said, if anything ever happens to you, I'll make sure everything gets taken care of, you know, with the survivor assistance and all that. And they knew they were already going back to Fort Braggs. My grandmother moved down there. He went back over the course of the next three years. You know, I hate to call it a Stockholm syndrome,

but it kind of was, you know, a lot of close interaction. And they ended up falling in love and were married 58 years after that until they both died in 2011. He spent a lot of time in the 82nd, in Alaska and some other places. and he had, I think, two mustard stains on his. Uncle Bill had three, and he was the last or the next to last guy on active duty when he retired with the glider patch still. Bill Conrad, when they started up Special Forces, he raised up his hand and said, here my lord send me. So the bulk of buildup, or pre-Vietnam, not really build-up, right?

And then almost the whole time, he was in theater in some capacity. either with an A-team or later he got roped into Phoenix. And he was with that program, which those stories, man, it still makes my head hurt. And I haven't heard one in 25 years probably. I would go to his house when I was assigned at Fort Bragg. He lived there and I'd go to his house every day after work, you know, just to sit at his foot and have him regale me with these tales.

And a picture fell out of a book one time. It was him and the Prince of Laos. He's handing him over. some cocaine for information. It's just, you know, beautiful things. Anyway, so my father was born. He grew up in a military family. One of his step siblings was also, he went the SF route.

So it comes time for me to do something. I graduated high school and I didn't want to go to college. I was done learning for a little while, or so I thought. I mean, I wanted to learn things, but I just didn't want to go get a piece of paper to do it. I wanted to follow it. in the family tradition of getting a funny hat. And my father took me aside and said,

I don't want you to do that. He felt bad always because of all the holidays and birthdays and special occasions that he missed while he was gone. And he was gone a lot. I didn't feel bad about that. Not that I didn't miss him, but I knew as long as he and his buddies were out there, they were doing their best to keep a red star off of my forehead.

So I'm growing up in the 80s and red dawn, that was the real. this movie to me. That's the movie that scared me. It wasn't psycho or the shiny or anything else. Red Dawn scared me. I was waiting to look out and see Russians and Cubans jumping into the backyard. Still am, by the way. It's it going to happen. Anyway,

so he took me, at that time we were at Fort Lewis and he said, just go and talk. He had a buddy over in the MI Brigade there, and he said, just go talk to this guy. He was an analyst and see what he has to say. I said, all right. So I went to talk to him, and he told me what he did, and I was exceptionally uninterested in that. I want to sit all day reading documents and trying to figure out what somebody else means by what they wrote. It just doesn't interest me. So we started looking through that old MOS book, and we got down, you know, we went through the 96s, they were out, got down on the 97s, 97 Bravo, counterintelligence agents. So I started reading that thing. Well, I think I could do this. I've got a little bit of experience.

I've always kind of been good at manipulation is a dirty word, but motivating people to come around to my way of thinking. I'm sometimes fairly good at that. Even from a young age, I remember. So I said, maybe I'll try that out. And there weren't any in that particular unit. I don't know if there were not any at all, and I didn't even available to talk to, but I didn't.

Anyway, I went to maps and I told them that's what I want. and they were it was at that time it's not like it is now where you can't just walk in off the street at that time you could as an initial entry soldier to get the MOS

but they were real tight about it you know I had all the scores I had no problem with that but they didn't want to give us I got it so I'm going to walk out of course you know then they changed their tune and here we are

so I got that 97 Broadway with airborne in my contract because you're not allowed to be a Hardman if you don't have a flying ice cream cone on your chest. I went to Fort Leonard Wood for basic training in May of 1994. So Dave, you were at second bat, right? Yeah, but in 94 I was still in the Navy. Yeah, but you were up there. So you know what May is like in Tacoma, Washington?

Oh, yeah. It's very, very different in St. Louis, Missouri. So I got off of that airplane, man. I was like Frosty the Snowman, Melt. Yeah. Anyway, we got down there to basic training, and, you know, I'm going to tell a little story that will make somebody on your laugh. So on the bus, we're parked outside the back of the airport, and they kept saying, we're waiting for one more, waiting for one more. Man, I said, I'm melting.

I just want to go. So finally, this dude comes lumbering on the bus. and as he's going down, there was the few empty seats that there were. People were moving to the center so he wouldn't sit there. He got back to me, can I sit here? Because we all had the little security clearance folder. You know, they told you guard with your life from MEPs. They saw I had one.

Sit down. I want to get something moving. I want to get some air. So we sat down. Get on down to Fort Huachuca. I'm sorry, Fort Leonardwood. And to be honest, the only difference between basic training and being at home was that the inspections of basic training were easier

and I was in a different zip coat. The older Sergeant Hartman was not a hard ass, but there were standards that had to be maintained. So when I got there, you know, you do your first dump out of the dupel bag. My underwear and socks were already rolled. And it's not because I intentionally did it to show off. That's what I pulled them out of my drawer. So I didn't have some of those failure to adapt problems that a lot of people

who've never had any military exposure had. For all intents of purposes, I kind of had 20 years of reserve time already. I called. I knew how the Army worked. I knew the rank structure. I knew a lot of things. I could have probably written you a good counseling statement in Article 15 if I had to. Anyway, basic train was a lot of fun for me.

So we got done with that. Went out to Fort Huachuca for AIT for the Basic Agent course. I really love it out there if you never had the chance. Southwest Arizona is beautiful to me. So by a month after we were out there, we weren't even in class yet. We were still on casual status doing different details, pots and pans at the mess hall and this kind of thing. I looked out with the best detail ever for almost two months.

I was the driver for the protocol office at Fort Huachuca. I got that because the guy who had it went into class and he bequeathed it to me. So all I did all day was sit around engraving coins and taking invitations for the general's parties and his wife's teas out to all the secretaries around the command. That's all I did all day while everybody else was sweating out there. kicking rocks and doing pots and pants. Anyway, about a month after we're out there, we go to the theater at Fort White Yucca. July-ish, whatever it was,

and this little movie called Forrest Gump came on. I didn't have any idea what it was. I had any interest in it, but there was a crowd going that way, so I went. Sitting in this old 1960s-era theater, people with PT clothes, all dressed up, and the bus scene on Forrest Gump comes on.

And I started laughing my ass off because the dude that sat with me on the backside of St. Louis airport is from Bayulibatry. His daddy ran shrimp boats. He is my bubba, which I guess makes me forest. I don't know how I feel about that. But anyway, we've been brothers ever since. We went around the world in different directions together and we work together now. So after Fort Huachuca, I went to airborne school for the first time. I liked it so much.

I had an engineer a situation in which I would get to come back. So on the zero day, we got out there. There was four or five of us. That Friday night, you know, we signed in. We went down to the outback. I think it was on 185 up there, exit five or six. Went into the outback. The sun was high in the sky.

We came out. The sun was nowhere to be found, nor was many whiskeys and other drinks. And Private Hardman wanted some ice cream. I don't know why. I'm not a big ice cream fiend, but at this point, I wanted ice cream. I'm looking around, nothing was open but Hardee's. And this was like a split-level shopping center. Hardee's was open.

So I start walking down, and there's a little retaining wall about 10 or 12 feet. I saw, man, I can make it. That was not true. I had not learned yet how to execute a dynamic PLF, jump up and sound awful, loud and thunderous airborne. So I kind of fractured my left tibia. I didn't know it at the time.

There was no pain whatsoever. But we hobbled around. I got my ice cream by guy. So the rest of that weekend, I was barring motrin and other forms of Ranger candy to get me through. I made it through the ground week. Somehow, I don't know. But, you know, down there in the sod.

pit, I'd have my right, or my left foot raised imperceptibly higher than the right one. I'd be hopping along on that one. The runs, man, they sucked. I made it through the next weekend, again, barring those things for nice people. I made it one, two, three days during Tower Week. So usually on Friday, you know, the company commander, the BC will come out and run with you, at least back in those days. for some reason the BC decided

he was going to come on Wednesday and the company commander got wind up the first sergeant and sarah major and everybody's out there so we go around one two three and I said man all I got to do is just do this I do it

tomorrow and Friday jump next week I'm good but we didn't stop and do that little turn around we kept going we got about halfway around I started to fall back a little bit

black hat running up and down the middle get back in the formation. I'm trying, I'm trying. I got back up there. We get three quarters of the way around. Get up or get out. I had to get out.

So he was actually cool. He took me to TMC and waited. We found out what happened. The doc comes in, put the x-ray out. Son, what's the matter with you? So my leg hurts a little bit. He's, no shit.

You got a fracture. You got to go home. So, of course, you know, just like any school, now they start with the, oh, worldwide assignment. You're up for whatever. Right. And everybody was going to Korea then because that was kind of still the flashpoint. You know, we're just a little bit post-golf.

We haven't got anything into anything new. And Kim Jong-il was over there or Kim Il-was-over-there, kind of lighten it up every now and again. So I said, hey, man, can I borrow your phone real quick after I was over at the medical hole company. And my dad was up at the Puzzle Palace up. He used to sock proper by then. And I called him and he called somebody else about 15 minutes later. The fax came through. Yeah, dumb private will proceed as ordered to seventh group.

Who are you? So, man, I'm a guy that's going to the seventh group and not going to free of it. So I got up there February-ish of 95. First day in the door, the commander said, hey, do you speak Spanish? I said, no. He said, well, you're no good to me then. You start on Monday. They had one of the SWIP language classes starting up.

I had French in school from the 8th through the 12th grade, and I did good. I mean, I hardly ever cracked a book, and I got straight A's. My brain just seems to be wired like that. So I didn't figure the Spanish would be much trouble, and it wasn't. I mean, you've probably been jacked through one of those courses, and they don't teach it at the highest, highest level. I mean, it's survival language and mostly military oriented. We had a series of good teachers that kind of got us the street talk part of it, not just the academic part, but I did learn that too.

A little later, they were going to start letting us go, Seventh group go back into Brazil, and so they sent some of us to a Spanish-to-Portuguese Brazilian or Spanish-to-Portuguese conversion course. I did that all right in the Continental, but the Brazilian, it's like they're speaking with rocks in their mouth. I can't understand them, and they make up words. It's ridiculous. There are any Brazilians out there in the audience. I'm sorry, but I can't do your language.

All we did in that class, though, it's probably not my fault. It's probably the teacher's fault, even though it was a lot of fun. For the first 45 minutes every day, we watch Scola, you know, the news, and then the rest of it, it was basically Brazilian Skinimax. Because he was chart, his mission was get him so they can survive on the street. And so we were watching this stuff you'd be, you know, seeing it on Friday night here. Sonia Braga and some of the other ones that have crossed over. And that's probably why I didn't learn anything. We were watching more than we were listening.

In any case. I was at 7th group for 24 months. And 19 or 20 out of those 24 months, I was gone somewhere. Which I like. Because I didn't have any, you know, nobody waiting at home for me. I was getting to do a lot of good things, training with other units, some of the other units on Fort Bragg, and then live missions down south. Anywhere south of Miami rapidly became my favorite place in the world. As a CIA agent attached to a special forces group, what was your primary mission?

How did you, I mean, did you work with the ODAs at all, or were you guys? kind of more separate doing support activities, but activities that surrounded that? Well, both. We would deploy with the ODAs, and sometimes, you know, you go do a good job for one of them and kind of get adopted,

and then they ask you to come back. Often it would be a counterintelligence agent and an interrogator to go along with them, because they've got the Fox, but their mission set is a little bit different than what ours is. And most of those missions down south at that time, if not all of them were counter-narcotics kind of stuff.

There wasn't a lot of counter-intelligence stuff going on. But a narcotics organization, a gang, a terrorist organization, the MO, a lot of them are identical to what an intelligence apparatus would use. It's just what is the end goal? How is the information used? But the collection of the information is almost the same in any case. You know, guys, we've had a couple of counterintelligence people on before, but just for the people who haven't had an opportunity to maybe catch those episodes yet, can you give us sort of the one over 30,000? What is a counterintelligence agent?

Like, what's your mission? So it's countering the hostile intelligence threat, right? And it's primarily an offensive discipline. You can remember it by a counter. There's an O in it. O offense, right? Though there are some defensive pieces to it, right? So we counter hostile intelligence attempts to compromise friendly personnel, information, equipment, supply lines, whatever it is.

But we're working actively against those intelligence organizations, Ford intelligence services. And we do that through basically four methods. detect, deter, neutralize, and exploit. So the detect and deter, that's kind of on the defensive side. One of the things that most agents hate to do because they hate getting up in front of people is your counterintelligence awareness briefings, right?

I'm here to tell you that that is the cornerstone of any good counterintelligence program because you have to inform the audience, those who will be targeted, what the rules are. You don't know the rules. you can't play and more importantly win the game. When you do that, every person that actually pays attention and takes it into their heart and brain,

you gain a lot of additional sensors, right? Every person that knows what's going on, every person that knows how to recognize an attempt by a foreign intelligence service to do this, can report it to you. Because if they don't know to recognize it, if they don't know who to report it to, they're useless.

They're just dead weight. I personally, I love doing that. I didn't used to. First time I ever did it, it was a disaster. And I knew right then that was something that I, I mean, I had 200 aviators running out of the back of the theater in Korea because they didn't want to hear one more second of anything I had to say. And justifiably so. But you have to be good at that part of the craft, because not only does it help you get those additional sensors and get good awareness out there.

But it's a huge lead development tool. So every time after I do a briefing, I get several people come up to me and say, you know what, now that you mention that, I never thought of it that way before, but this happened to me. Or I heard this happen. I got this email.

So that's how cases start, you know. Adam before, he talked about walk-ins being the bread and butter of a counterintelligence agent. And they're a huge part. We'll talk about some of the other parts. later, but that, you know, I consider that a walk-in because it's something coming to you. And it's, you have to be able to do that. And that has to be part of the cornerstone of any good counterintelligence program.

So. The other aspects of being a counterintelligence agent. No, that was kind of it, just sort of the broad scheme of what the counterintelligence mission is, what a counterintelligence agent is. But, I mean, you're also trying to catch spies that are spying. So that's the, yeah, that's the neutralize and exploit type, right? So if a foreign intelligence service has put an agent against one of our people, right, we're looking out to defend against that and to do the investigation to find out who it is,

what they're doing, what they're after, what methods they're using, and that kind of falls under the exploitation because we want to know what they're doing, how they're doing it to us. In different arenas, we might just neutralize that, take away the person that they're targeting or the system that they're targeting and neutralize their access, or we might throw it back at them through some of the things we were talking about before, like offensive counterintelligence operations, and that's where you get into the double agency,

where you put somebody back that they believe is under their control, but in fact they're under friendly control, and we're feeding them information. So that gives us then an inside view into how they task, how they meet, what their security is, what their goals are, and it also helps us tie that one agent up for as long as we can engage them. And as long as they're tied up with our guy, they might not be tied up with the next guy.

So mutualization is cool, but sometimes exploitation pays more benefits in the long run. Interesting. All right, so now you're down doing ops down in South America with seventh group. Yeah, so a lot of embassy trips, the tats and the J-sets and those kind of things. And there's a lot of, you know, a lot of what we do,

we try to have as many of the answers before we get on the ground as we can't. So there's a lot of build-up working with the analytical cells, not just internal to the unit, but big Army, the Army Counterintelligence Center. They have a whole unit up at Fort Meade that does counterintelligence and analysis and they specialize in different regions, technologies, and so forth. And they produce a lot of documents that are disseminated out to the field. The Defense Intelligence Agency and then some of the other services, too, where there's overlap. So like in Central and South America, the Air Force has got folks down there, DEA, a lot of different agencies have equities down there.

And you really do, no matter what part of the intelligence community you're in or in what role you serve, we're getting better about it, you know, sharing information across agencies and across disciplines. There was a time where we weren't, you know, we've all heard about how the intelligence community failures is what, you know, didn't allow us to see the attacks on September 11th coming. I would say having lived through before that, through that, and until today, I see a lot better information sharing across the intelligence community as a whole. But every once in a while somebody gets something cool and you don't want anybody else to know about it, so you keep it. All right. That's just human nature. We don't want people to take our toys away.

So the bulk of the support to the teams was that it was threat information about what they might encounter when they got down there, whether it's going to be the FARC, the ELN, the general criminal threat, foreign intelligence services, working in and around the areas where the teams are going to take. deploy to because you might not know it, but we're not only targeted here at home. We Americans are targeted everywhere by all the same countries that target us here because they know that when you, you know, aside from being deployed to a combat zone, but a deployment to Columbia, your radar might not be as fine-tuned as it is when you're back at Fort Bragg or when you're in Baghdad or in Kandahar. And the Russians

and through their proxy, the Cubans were very active down in Central and South America through a couple of ostensibly humanitarian groups, but they use them as collection platforms against

U.S. and other friendly countries. Was this when Snowcap was still going on down there? I don't... I was there 95 to 97. This big multinational encompassing counter-narcotics operation we had going on from like Peru.

I know some other operation names. I don't know if it got renamed or if that was before me, but it probably was because, you know, we did work with other agencies as well as some of the other, you know, the local host nation as well. So, but I loved it. I love being down south. And then one day I came home from a trip and opened my mailbox and among the bills was that little green and white purse gram.

It's a guess what? You're going to Korea. So I dodged it once. I wasn't going to dodge it this time. February 97, I ended up over in Seoul, Korea, part of the 501st military intelligence brigade at the Seoul Resident Office. So I didn't even get to go away from the flagpole. There, our primary mission was the personnel security investigations, you know, source, subject, reference, interviews for security clearances.

We did other investigations as well, the standard espionage stuff, but I think it was due to a lack of reporting, not due to a lack of it actually occurring. How do you make a radio ad for an 8K TV that conveys the feeling of 33 million pixels with over a billion shades of color hitting your eyeballs? This is the best we can do. Samsung Neo-Q-L-L-E-L-D-8K, unreasonably good. Being a parent can be really challenging. 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. But the PSIs were just as interesting. I'll tell you, anybody wants to read top secret documents about fancy intel stuff and shooter stuff? No way. Do a PSI about somebody who grew up in the 60s and used to be a druggy. I asked a guy at one time, have ever done drugs? Illegal drugs, yeah.

All right. How many times? When? And it gives me a 10-year span. I said, no, no, no. Like once in that 10? No, he said, I was high for 10 years. You know, those that you get to laugh at,

and when they're laughing with you too, you know, I don't feel bad. After a few months, I went to, I went to PLDC over in Korea. which was also a blast, Camp Jackson. They got the land nap courses in the mountains, and there's still a little fighting positions there from the war. So from a historical standpoint, you know,

I like that kind of stuff, and it was really neat to be able to see that. Plus, they had a giant hamburger as big as your head, the Jackson burger, and it puts you to sleep. And the whole class would be standing up after lunch. We went alongside. catusis. And you don't know what they are. The Korean augmentees to the United States Army. So Korea has compulsory military service.

At some time, I think it's between 18 and 24, you have to do two years. And regular kids go to Rock Army, rich kids get to go be Catus. So they wear our military uniform. They work in personnel, finance, whatever doesn't require them to have a clearance. And we went with them and it was funny, man the SGL's found out real quick all they had to do was threatening to go see Sar Major Park at Rock Army that they were messing up, you know, they'd get a little

out of line, boy, they'd straighten up real quick. They're very, the sleepiest individuals I've ever known on the planet. I came back from PLDC and I got onto the surveillance team in the special operations section for the 501st.

They had a series of of cases going kind of one after the other. One had just closed, new one just opened up. I was fortunate enough to be pulled on to that by a friend of mine that I'd known for a few years at the time who had come to Korea from the Army surveillance team that sits at Fort Me.

This was called Cable at Rope. It was the operation name. Army E7 walked himself into the Chinese embassy and offered his services. He was a supply guy. He worked for CCOM, the Communications and Electronics Command at their depot in Korea. So his job was basically to check in all the new combo equipment coming in and then fielded out to the line units. Yeah. That's actually a really vulnerable. I mean, you think, oh, what, a supply guy, but if he's got his hands on the electronics

and he's able to compromise the radio systems. Yeah, I mean, that's, almost a worst case scenario. Yeah. So that's what I tell people all the time. You know, it doesn't matter if you're the secretary sitting at the door watching people come in and out all day and checking badges and making a paperclip chain for eight hours a day, you're still a target. You've got access to something because you've probably got email, which direct contact

information is a real live, you know, intelligence requirement that they want so they can go directly to the person they want to talk to instead of having to go through three or four people. There's no piece of information that anybody who touches anything really has access to that's not valuable to someone somewhere. So yeah, this guy didn't have a clearance. He just had access to stuff. So he lived, if you're familiar with the geography. He lived in Seoul.

His administrative office was in Incheon, and then the depot was actually up at at Ouijambu, at Camp Falling Water. So he did a lot of traveling. he was the poster child for all the indicators in our regs. You know, we talk about what people to report, you know. So he had money problems. He had gambling problems.

He had drinking problems. He had infidelity problems with multiple women and one young man from the second ID, who was definitely not his wife. I mean, he went right down the line. So the only way we found out about it was when he was, when he walked into the Chinese embassy, another agency had a source in there and saw him.

By the way, he wasn't the brightest ball because he walked into the Chinese embassy in broad daylight in BDUs. That's a bold play. That's a bold move. Yeah. So he walked in there and he had, it was basically some trash.

He had an old busted singars, one of those old big brown pluggers and a couple of cables and stuff and it was I mean really it was didn't have a lot of value it wouldn't but another agency had a source

there and they cut a copy of the security tape gave it to their people and even though it was clearly legible US Army on the uniform they gave it to the Air Force first and a few months later they gave it to us anyway

so the investigation was started So he had all these problems And he was He alternated being interesting and really boring to follow And and Yangsan The main concern is really small So you get to know the people It's hard to do surveillance in a small place like that

Just because you're a known entity there right You see the same people all the time doing the same things And so we had to really work hard to rotate personnel out So we didn't you know burn ourselves burn the vehicles and whatnot. This went on for about six months. Sometime during that, he went to two other embassies as well. He was of Yemeni descent, but from Trinidad.

So it goes on for about six months, and we finally arrested him in July of 97. It would have been July 7th, but you had to have original signature on the arrest paperwork. So they sent it all the way back to. to NSCOM and the general was out that day, I guess. So the little captain doing the four,

he got a little happy with it because he didn't know any better and sent it all back. So we had to wait another week until they could arrest him. They arrested him on July 14th. The deal was that if he cooperated rather completely with the debrief, they were going to give him 20 years, but then

they would reduce it to 10. But during the sting, just prior to arrest, you know, we had some ethnic Chinese role players, but CI guys from another unit come in, a colonel or warrant officer, and knocked on his door

one morning, hey, we're from the home office, sorry, we couldn't deal with you before, but, you know, we want to help you out now. So they got him, put him in a limo, took him to a nice hotel, and, you know, we had it already wired up. And here's the thing, right? So

when they were talking back and forth, he was explaining what the items were, and he admitted that the singars was broken. But he told him, he said, this is the radio that our soldiers on the ground used to talk to vehicles and to aircraft. So if you can figure out how it works, you can figure out how to defeat it. This guy was arrested when he was on his way into Yangsan for his final out appointment. He would have been three days later retired. Sucking off Uncle Sam's teeth for the rest of his natural.

life. And I can't for the life of me still 20 some years later figure out why. What acts did he have to grind? I mean, he had, especially for that last year, he had no problems. He spent maybe, maybe 10, 15% of his time working and in a work area. The rest of the time, he was sitting at the Dragon Hill Lodge or the NCO club gambling, drinking, chasing girls. And again, a young soldier from the second ID at one point. So I don't know. We started digging into him and everybody puckered

a lot when they found out that his son was in the Air Force and he was a comment guy. So, you know, they're thinking, oh, oh, we got the next Walker on our hands. Little did we know, he was just a dummy and he wanted free money. So they paid him $2,500 for his trouble. The role players did. He sent a thousand of it home to his wife,

which they let her keep is a departure gift, a parting gift. He spent almost $500 in PX Hawaiian shirts. All right. Now, I love, and if there's any Bougaloo boys out there, we wore these things first, all right? And then it just came later. But I love me a good Hawaiian shirt.

I've probably got 30 or 40 of them right now. But the PX ones, no, you're never going to find one. that's worth and all that money on. That's what he did. And the rest of it, he gambled and drank away in the few days between the arrest and the stink.

So he wasn't even asking for that much money or like, we're not talking about somebody who was bringing in $50, $200,000, $200,000. Fun guy to party with, though. I mean, the line shirts, booze, girls. Sounds like a good time. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I guess. One of our guys, I think, He did have a drink with him at one point because there was nobody else in the NCO club. And this is the thing he hated to drink alone. And he would get mad at people if he would try to buy you a drink and you wouldn't let him get mad. And we had seen this happen a couple of other times, you know, various of our surveillance had. And one time this guy ends up at the only other person in the pool hall part of the of the NCO club with him. And he went, he just nothing would do, but he had to buy him a drink.

this guy got to drink a drink with a suspected spy or an attempted spy anyway after that I ended up up in Chunchon for the duration of my tour so that was about four or five months

and that's real close up there to the DMZ it's right next to the Soyang Dam at that time we understood the plan was that if North Koreans were coming they had one of two plans they were going to use they were going to blow that dam and surf all the way down to

Pusan or they were going to fight as far as they could and if they got beat back to the dam they were going to blow it. So either way I was swimming and I wasn't very interested in that but I did love it up there up in the northern part. February 98 they had the trial for the spy guy and I was clearing at the time so I got to had some free time and me and another friend of mine who was clearing as well,

we actually got to go to the trial. So we're sitting there in the back in uniform for the first time and, you know, I can't remember when. They marched this dude in, in handcuffs. Used to be at E7. Now he's a slick sleeve, nothing. And he's just kind of looking around a little bit and he looked back and he saw us. That was the most fun right there.

I love that feeling. Oh, man, I know. So in March, March of 98, I PCS to Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. It's in Huntsville, North Alabama, about 20 miles. Hold on, hold on, guy. I got to hear, like, what happened to this dude

after you guys hemmed up and he goes to trial? Oh, well, he was convicted. I know the person who did the bulk of the debrief, and remember I told you, they said that if he cooperated fully, they would, yeah. if I was the one making the determination, he did not cooperate fully, but he got the 10 years anyway. So they initially had him at Leavenworth, and then they moved him up to the regional correctional facility up in Fort Lewis, as a matter of fact.

And I heard, though I'm not sure, that he did get anniversary and Christmas cards on a couple of occasions, the anniversary of his arrest and his conviction. But I don't know anything about that. When you guys were investigating this and you know, you kind of got pulled into this. Is this something that is a common occurrence or relatively common occurrence in the military? Is this like a big deal for you guys? How do you mean? The investigating an American who. Yeah, bawling up an American soldier who's spying for a foreign country like that.

Well, look, I mean, no matter what. your job in the military is or in any part of the federal government, right? Our ultimate goal is to keep that flag waving. Right. So I took an oath to the Constitution to support and defend. And with that, you know, it sucks because counterintelligence often has, you know, we've got the blue falcon moniker emblazoned on our chest, right? And when we come around, everybody says, shush here they come, you know, they don't want, they don't want to talk to us, they don't want to deal with us,

they don't realize we're, we're necessary evil, right? And then they say, who watches the watchers, right? Who's watching us? Well, we have jackasses in our ranks too, just like every discipline does. And we have people that do dumb things that should know better. But, you know, it goes back to what I was saying before is awareness being a part of,

the cornerstone of a good counterintelligence program, everybody in the Army is getting this every year. They know you're not supposed to do A, B, and C. So I never feel bad about having to investigate a friendly, you know, a fellow service member, so I think, because I didn't put him in that situation. Right, right. And so with the kind of, with tactical counterintelligence,

I know a couple of the ones you've had on before, the former army of people, they did the more tactical side, right? And we're looking at the strategic level. We're not just looking at the next 72 hours. We're looking at the next 7 to 10 years. Right. Because some of the things, just think

if he would have actually given that Singar's radio. And I don't know where in the life cycle it was then, how close we were to have in the next generation. But just think if he would have actually turned that over to a hostel, and they did reverse engineer it. Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention before. The plugger was actually filled. It hadn't been zeroed out. Some dumb grunt turned it in without doing that and it didn't get checked along the

way. So real quick, for people who aren't familiar with these terms, a plugger is the old GPS. I mean, these, they were big. This is before like everybody had a GPS on their phone. And a fill is the cryptologic code or the, a fill is basically our crypto, which if that can be, reverse, you know, captured and reverse engineered. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not just second order effects. It's third, fourth, fifth.

And, you know, we're technically still at war at the 38th parallel. So they need, they, he should have been more cognizant of that, you know, than anywhere else in the world, even though everybody should. Right. Hey, can I answer a question from the live chat that I just saw? Yeah, absolutely. Where are you at? Kilo-19.

they must have kept that kind of quiet. They did. So here's the other thing about counterintelligence, right? Everybody loves it when we come in and do our job and do something right. But then they rarely want to tell because us getting involved in doing something right means that there was a series of failures to the left of boom. And the man with the shiny stuff on his hat doesn't want that on his record. Right, right.

So Commander 8th U.S. Army, we, I think it was the 501st in my brigade, actually did up a press release, as we would have. And Commander 8th U.S. Army said, you will not release this. If somebody calls and asks specific questions, P.A.O. can answer them, but you will not release it. And I really do believe that was the reason why. It happens often with us, you know. a counterintelligence success means failures to the left of boom on multiple levels. And nobody wants that. I say, I think it should be just the opposite.

If there's a counterintelligence success, at some point the system worked because either through reporting or through other means, we got the information. That means the system works. You want to publicize that so you let the adversary know that you're a hard target. And you're letting the soldiers in the ranks know also, like, if you do this, you will go to jail. Yeah. I mean, you have to punish somebody publicly every once in a while, so the rest of the masses know that it's a real thing. Yeah. And there are actually, you know, there's a hammer and an anvil.

There's teeth to the Army and the rest of the services as well, regulations regarding espionage. Right. Some places, some organizations, there's not. some agencies. It's really hard to get a conviction to come out of there because it's a different mentality. It's a different set of rules even though ultimately espionage

falls under the U.S. code, right? But yeah, we should. We should public shaming in the square. It works. It really does. So you find yourself next at what, Redstone Arsenal, you said? Yeah, Redstone

arsenal. So for those you who are not familiar, it's it came to prominence, I guess, in the early 40s. It's the home of Army rocketry. After World War II, Operation Paperclip, where he snacked up, the good Dr. Von Braun has exalted

rocketness and the rest of his folks snatched them all up, brought him down here, and so this is the home of missiles and rockets now. They even call it the Rocket City. So Redstone is unique in that everything a sailor, soldier, airman, marine, coastier astronaut touches in his or her daily life. Every piece of equipment, everything you ride in or on, everything you wear has got some nexus here at Redstone Arsenal,

a programmatic or on a technical and, you know, RD level. So it's kind of like Costco for technology. I mean, it really is one-stop shopping. And truly, all eyes, all foreign eyes are on Huntsville. The surrounding area, there's nearly 500 cleared defense contractors. And the unclear number is about two and a half times again, Matt. And those cleared contractors, they range all the way from your multi-billion dollar multinational corporations down to little mom and pop shops that this criminal engineer have opened up out of their mother's basements. And everything in between.

So if it flies, shoots, or rides, you know, it touches Huntsville in some way. People are always worried that Huntsville is going to be a big, you know, like a terrorism target. This is not an official opinion. This is my personal opinion. I don't think they would ever attack us here. Them or a nation state. Because if they do, they know that all the technology they steal from us and our friends, they're not going to have access to it anymore because it's all going to be gone.

So I think we're probably pretty safe from, you know, a nuke in this place. Anyway, my primary job here, I was assigned to the 902nd Military Intelligence Group, which falls under INSCOM. 902nd headquarters is up at Fort Meade, but with duty down here at Redstone. And at that time, there were two separate offices here. There was one that kind of provided the general support to the commands here. Your, to go old school, Saida briefing, subversion and espionage, directed against the Army. Now they call it TARP, threat awareness reporting program, but

counterintelligence awareness. They would provide those and other general kind of advice and assistance roles to the respective commands. The office that I was assigned to was the regional field office and we dealt

strictly in the CAT 1 and CAT2 investigations and counter espionage operations. As I tell you, before, Huntsville is a high-priority target for a lot of countries, and most of them, you may or may not be surprised to find out, are actually our friends. It's not just the traditional bad guys that target us here, though they do.

And through, you know, a variety of counterintelligence, human intelligence, cyber, a lot of different targeting vectors. But a lot of times it's our friends that target us even more, right? think about it. The NATO and the Five Eyes countries, we invite them over, we show them all our neat toys, and then we say, okay, go home

you can't have one. Right. Right? That's not fair. I did this in Christmas of 1985. New kid on the block came over. I showed him my new raft of G.I. Joe toys, and when he left, barbecue was gone. I'm going to find

him one day, and I'm getting barbecue back. It's the same principle, right? You show somebody you need stuff. They don't have one. They want one. It's human nature. We are exceptionally curious and we are exceptionally jealous when somebody has something that we don't and we want one. And to be honest, it's the fear of tomorrow. It's the fear of the unknown that actually

drives intelligence collection, right? Yet, this country is my friend today, but they just got a missile that can go a million miles an hour and knock another one out of the sky. We might not be friends tomorrow. I'm going to have to give me one of those too. I'm just imagining the head of the French intelligence. I want a nuclear missile too. Give me one. Yeah.

I mean, that's what it is. So it's a little different here because we, it's not a secret that we, the United States, sell a lot of our stuff to foreign countries, foreign military sales, right? So we sell Apaches and Blackhawks and Patriots and Thad to, all of our friends, and we don't sell them the tip-top version. We kind of sell them a dumb-down version in a lot of cases. We'll give them the erector set, but we don't give them what's inside the black box.

For a couple of reasons. First of all, what's inside the black box could really harm us if they knew it. But second, Uncle Sam realized that we can charge them a long and expensive maintenance contract on that black box if we don't give it to them. So we can recoup some of that money back that we lose in the sale because we, we often don't sell the same item to each country at the same price. It depends on, you know, what are you going to do for me? So it's huge.

And then not only do here at Redstone, we have 45 or 50 liaison officers from, you know, NATO and allied countries. And it's not only that they try to get stuff from us and collect on what we won't give them, because there's an agreement before they send somebody here. we're going to give you ABC X, Y, Z, and nothing else. So they want to fill in, you know, D through whatever. But they don't only collect against us. They'll collect on each other as well.

And it's funny to see that happen to see, you know, kind of like a little thundernome. You know, who's better? Who's going to get the most information? But when they start working together, it gets dangerous. And we've seen that happen on a couple of occasions, too. you know, they'll kind of attack the same person for the same information from different angles. And unfortunately, that works a lot. From the friendly standpoint of foreign military sales, when those people do that,

it's not that they're intentionally trying to compromise information, but their mission set is keep country happy. So country comes back and buys mod two, three, four, and five, right? So again, every little piece of information that gets out, once it's gone, you can get it back. And you never know often until it's too late if that little piece of information is going to be the one that really hurts us. It's almost, I mean, in a way, it's probably also just part of the personality and the drive that goes into making somebody who is, you know, an intelligence officer. Like, collector's going to collect, right? don't eat the collector hate the game or whatever.

That's, they're collecting, their collectors by nature and they're always going to kind of push it. Yeah, of course. And so the people, in the case of the liaison officers, the ones that they send here,

they are, because here it's aviation and missile heavy. And so they are by trade, aviation and missile officers, career officers. But I'm here to tell you that they get a little extra training before they come over in things like elicitation and some of the other little disciplines. So in the late 90s, early 2000s, that was the cases against those guys was our bread and butter.

And right here at Redstone, we had the number one and two in that Southeast Regional field office, the number one and two cases for the Army. And that was for several years before I came and probably until 2000, 2001. And they were against a friendly country who was robbing us blind. So it's hard because in some cases, I look at the motivation of an offender is important, right? Right. Whether it's a criminal case or an intel thing. So there's different motivations of people that steal from us.

we are on the top of the heat technologically with every other country probably below us right every country that is anybody that has any kind of a fighting military in some form wants some of our stuff period it's the best we are the best there is at making things that go bump in the night

you know bing boom bang further in the space further deeper into the ocean faster kill better, kill harder. We are, period. So why do people want to steal that from them? Some of them is for their own self-preservation. They're surrounded by their enemies. They just want to protect themselves.

And I understand that. But my job is to protect, you know, United States' equities, not your country if it relates to you stealing my stuff. Because other countries, when they steal from us, they don't afford us. We take it from other countries. We stamp it double secret probation

and throw it underneath the Pentagon until Dooms Day. These other countries don't afford us that same luxury. They share it with their friends who are not always ours. Right. So then there's the countries that they want to be the biggest kid on their block. And that may not cause us a problem today, but it could cause us a problem tomorrow, depending on who their neighbors are,

if we're involved with their neighbors and so on. And then there's, of course, we all know who they are, the countries that want to be at that top of that heat. Right. So militarily, it's Iran. Iran and Russia. They're heavy collectors against us because they want to beat us militarily. China, we hear them in the news every day. And I don't know if we will ever engage with them militarily, but they want to kick us out off the top of the heat.

financially, right? And technologically. They are stealing us dry of technology. You know, the Chinese for a long time, well, it probably still does. Their industrial base has always out pay stars, and it probably always will. But their technological base is catching up.

So I used to put together models, and maybe you guys did too when I was kidding. Chinese are really good at making those. plastic cutouts that, you know, exactly indicated what the plane looks like on the outside. The problem is now they didn't know what it looks like on the inside too.

And the difference between the Russians and the Chinese is how they use information that they compromise from us. The Russians aren't going to give it to anybody else. They do the same as us. They hide it under a bushel and they'll use it if they can. They don't care if we know if they use it.

But they're not going to share it with anybody. the Chinese, they will use it to defeat us militarily, the Russians. The Chinese will go and pump out a thousand of their version of the F-35, and if you've got the money, they've got the time. Yeah, I saw it on Alibaba. Yeah, exactly. So that's the real danger. Not that it changes how we go after the organizations or individuals

who target us, but it's important to know what those motivations are because that might help us develop the proper course of action to, again, either exploit or neutralize those collection efforts. Guy, you know, I think that when a lot of us think of counterintelligence, we think of targets like Iran and China. How complicated does it get when it is a friendly country, when you catch somebody who is right. And absolutely outlawed. Like New Zealand or something. Yeah, I mean, because diplomatically, that has to, we're not going to cut off ties from the country. We're not going to sanction the country. Probably not going to put them in jail, I would think.

Yeah, what happens with that? Yeah, I haven't run into a lot of friendly country, things like that, except for one. And there's only been in, I think, the history of our country, only one person that has been convicted of spying for this country and I think that was a fluke. We won't do it again. And I'm talking about Pollard in this case. He spied for Israel, right? You know, there are our only, if closest friend in that area,

probably always be able to land a plane there, but it's really difficult. It gets very, very tricky when you start dealing with those kind of things. Stuff starts happening in the back channels and the red phones and yeah. Yeah. Problems go away quietly, but I don't get another notch on my belt. Right. I have a question, Guy, and I'm really curious from a counterintelligence perspective.

We always hear about the Chinese and other countries hacking into our systems. They're stealing the blueprints for the F-35 and all these sorts of things. But then we've also been discussing here mostly the human intelligence aspect of it, that they're sending collectors here to spy on us. I was wondering if at all you could talk about the interplay of these two things and how they work in tandem, if they do work in tandem with one another. Oh, sure they do. So the Chinese cyber apparatus, man, I'm here to tell you, they're the best in the world at it,

not just because they're good, but because of the sheer numbers. I mean, they have got brigades upon brigades probably of straight up cyber guys who sit in dark rooms all day. And then you get the computer kitties at internet cafes who do the hacking just to get a name, right? Chinese government would say, well, we don't sponsor that. Whatever they do is on them. Well, it ends up back at the home office somehow, and you might not directly sponsor it and say, do it, but every week or so, truck comes by,

kicks out a new pal or brand new computers for the internet cafe. So one way or another, they're sponsoring it. So it is a kind of layered approach, right? The easiest way to collect information and the safest way for a foreign intelligence service is certainly cyber. because you can have bad cyber guys sitting in country X. He never has to take off his pink bunny slippers. He can send out a thousand fishing emails a day.

He can target a thousand websites. And he is in no danger. The worst thing that can happen is that defense on the other end works and he doesn't get in. The real danger is when you put an actual human agent on foreign soil because then, you know, you put in jeopardy politically. diplomatically and so forth, that agent, both country's reputations and so on and so forth, right? But there's just some information that you can't get on a computer. Sometimes you really need to put a human in front of another human and find out what makes them tick, get them to share more information with you than is readily accessible.

Because, you know, we've got a lot of stuff hanging on the regular internet. network, right? And we've got Sipper, the classified network and the even higher classified network. But even within those, there's a lot of little hidey holes and nodes that if you don't know, it's kind of like the dark web. If you don't know exactly where you're going, you can't get there. Right. It's not just, you know, somebody click, clacket on a keyboard in a dark room and the screen turns green and says access granted. It's not how it works. So sometimes you do have to put a human agent, you know, to target another one. But they're even better than that.

The Chinese have a program that they've been engaged in for several years, and you've heard about it probably on the news or some of the websites you might look at, called the Thousand Talents Program. Nothing secret about it at all. You can look it up. And so they send researchers over here. And they get embedded in research programs often that are either just adjacent to other classified stuff they're interested in or at a low enough level that it won't attract too much

suspicion. What do we do? We welcome everybody from everywhere, right? And they want to come and get a good education in the hard sciences. And that's okay because that doesn't mean that every Chinese person or every foreign national that's here studying is a spy, right? What these programs do is that let you get in. You get embedded.

You get trusted. You start doing some good work. You get more access. and then somebody comes knocking and they say, hey, check this out. You got to help us out a little bit. When you need to target this person and this information, you could say no, but then maybe grandma doesn't get all the fire what she needs this winter or whatever. The Chinese are really good about laying on those ethnic ties to motivate,

they call them overseas Chinese, to bend to the home office will. there's a principle in the Chinese culture that says that no matter where you go in the universe how long you're there what route you put down family change your name change your job whatever change your citizenship you always belong to the Chinese government and if you don't respond as they want you to when they come knocking then you bring shame on your family everybody all the way back to the great wall and that's a lot to bear for for some people right So the Chinese specifically are really good about late on those ethnic ties. And I'm going to tell you, they're very effective.

Greg Chung was a case that was wrapped up. I don't know, probably about 12 or 13 years ago. This dude had 200,000 pages of documents, a lot of space shuttle stuff, but also some fighter stuff at his house. And he had been retired for a while when the Chinese came back to him and said, man, you got to help us out. So they're good at it. And unlike us, you know, we look at a one-year fiscal budget. We look at a five-year plan.

Uh-uh. They're looking at a 500-year plan. Right. Because they're planning on being here long after we are gone or after they have conquered us in some form or another, which will probably be economic, right? The other side of the cyber piece, Jack, is that, you know, shooting wars are not a thing of the past. But the next war that we're engaged in, I'm going to guess will probably be preceded by communications, power, and several other blackouts because everything's connected, right?

There's nothing that you can do without being connected in some form. Analog hardly even exist anymore. Look what happened just last week with the colonial pipeline. People filling up Walmart bags with gas, you know. They know that with a few clicks of a button that they, they can blind us and cripple us. And even if they don't jump, maybe somebody else will. Well, yeah, it's one of those things where that's what they would do, right,

as they're invading Taiwan, like when they're going to make a play. They're going to, you know, cripple us, not kill us, but cripple us, slow us down for 48 hours, you know, so that our military commanders, they can't get access to their computers, their cat card isn't working right, all that kind of shit, just to slow things down and hamper us long enough. Does the cack ever work right? Yeah, right. Good question.

Let's take some questions real quick, because I don't want these to go too far. Let's see here. Thank you, Gordon. We appreciate it. Gordon says, so now that Sharky's is closed on Bragg Boulevard, less of a risk and also not as much training time. Oh, man. You know, I never went in that place once. Don't lie.

Don't come on this podcast and lie. either. You liar. Not once. I'll tell you where I did go in and spent way too much time, but I never went in Sharkies once. I went in the bottoms up one time. We were looking for somebody. Right, right, yeah.

Did you find her? No, no, no. We're looking for a soldier. And the best, have you guys ever been in that place? No. The best thing is, not once. So you walk right in. It's very small.

You walk in and you're at the bar. It goes, you know, probably about. 20 feet to your right and hooks around in an L and there's a bathroom and a video game. And that was it. The onstage dancer was the bartender. And she took my ID card and never missed the beat and kept dancing. So you want to be, it wasn't what would you like. It was you want a beer because it was the champagne of beers Miller High Life.

I've never been to Sharks. I spent an inordinate amount of time at the Q&A although. That place was probably going. on by the time you guys were there. That doesn't ring a bell for me. Yeah. And down at Fort, near Krispy Kreme on Bragg Boulevard. Sharkies was a social club.

Oh, I know it. Many, oh, I'm telling our audience who doesn't. Oh, okay. We know you know it. Despite your denials. Spent their paychecks at. Special Forces missions, thank you very much. Dave, hope you're

head is doing well these days. Thank you very much. Yeah, it's doing good. I mean, it's still there. It's still, yeah. I mean, what's one more TBI, right? And also, he had a question. Yeah. Let's see here. Sorry, I missed the second part of that. And Jack, appreciate you, man. My goal is to shoot for intelligence in the future, but I'm a Christian. Do you find it difficult morally to do the job in any way? Because ultimately, you're serving your country. I mean, Whether you're doing this for the military or for a civilian organization, you are in the tactical arena. You're protecting people in the strategic arena.

You're protecting more people, but technologies and the systems that then go to protect those on the battlefield. So I think that is the ultimate service. And I don't think that you can, if you're concerned about you might at some point have, to do something that does not agree with your morals, there is always a way to, you can always find a different way to do the same thing, right? That's one of the kind of tenets of my philosophy, my counterintelligence philosophy, if you will. A lot of the activities that we do over and over

again do the same thing, just different situations. Well, you have to tweak them. So you can either renovate or innovate, right? You can use what you know works based on that particular situation. You tweak it a little bit, so it works perfectly for you and that situation because everyone is going to be different. Or innovate something new. But your faith shouldn't get in the way of doing this kind of work.

I mean, use the Lord's work. There are a lot of Christians, even in like the National Condesstine Services and things. So don't be, I don't want to discourage that guy. And if there's something about it that really makes you uncomfortable, there's lots of jobs in the intelligence community. You could be doing imagery analysis, signals intelligence. You could be doing analysis.

So, yeah, there's all sorts of things out there for you, man, even if you're not quite comfortable with like the case officer, you know, sort of the actual getting your hands dirty in air quotes. And it sounds to me as though counterintelligence. in terms of mission set and sort of those great areas, tends to be a little bit more cut and dry. Like it's a clearly defined, this is who we're after,

than maybe an intelligence, you know, like a case officer in another organization or something like that. Well, yeah, I guess you could say that. Again, our primary job is countering the hostile intelligence threat. Right. Right. So it is a little more defined than some others, you. Johnny B. Good. Thank you very much.

I just had a good. We'll have a good friend named Johnny B. Good. Johnny Good. Andrew Dunbar, thank you. Does he think that Snowden had a shopping list of things to steal before he bolted? Ooh, controversial question there. Man, I hate that, dude. Can I just tell you? So let me ask, and we'll ask the audience, and we'll ask the two of you, raise your hand if you were affected by what Edward Snowden did.

In a sense, or no, I'm sorry, I wasn't. I was affected by the OPM hack, just like everyone else who served in the military, basically, or had a security clearance of any kind. Let's talk about that in a minute, too. But, yes, you were affected by Edward Snowden. every single person in this country was affected by what Edward Snowden did and we will not recover from it in my children's lifetimes. It was a lot more expansive than what you get to see in the news, but espionage whenever it happens, let's just call it what it is.

It's selfish, right? No matter what your other supposed motivations are, you know, whether it's revenge or ideology or money, whatever it is. Ultimately, it is a selfish decision because one individual is making the decision to make every other individual in this country less safe. And that's what Edward Snowden did. He compromised such specific information that we now have big black holes where we were getting good information out before to, excuse me, to keep.

us and our friends safe. So do I think he had a shopping list? I don't know. I don't want to even try to think like him. I think he was selfish, and he'll tell you that he was motivated by my ideology. The government is doing wrong, and they're listening to you and this and that. I just want anybody with half a brain to think of how absurd that sounds, right? So think about you as an individual.

How much data you generate on a daily basis. Right. Times 365 times 330 million. All right. The NSA does not have the ability. The ability doesn't exist to capture and store and analyze that much data for this country. Okay. It just doesn't.

It's not possible. Can they do it? Could you be illegally and unwarrantedly targeted? Absolutely, because any system is only as good as the people to follow the rules that are set forth before them, right? Is that happening? No, it's not. They don't have the personnel that have the time. They don't have a bazillion hard drives to do it with.

The bandwidth doesn't exist. Now, they do capture header information, and that's due to the Digital Communications Act of 2011, right? Everybody clacked when that was passed because nobody bothered to read it. we pass it before we read things in this country, right? But the Digital Communications Act, the reason now why you can't have just a coax coming out of your wall into the back of your TV, you've got to have that converter.

That's what they applauded because TV is a right and you have to have digital communications to be a real person. But what was written down in there that said that every digital communication that originates, terminates, or traverses U.S. pipes is by default the property of the FCC and must be handled as such and as they say. Well, the FCC says We can do what we want to with all digital communication.

So it's a little spiral fuck. Spiral vortex, they aren't going on there. You can say whatever you want on the... We're not a kid's show. And, well, it might be one day if my children find this. But so, Snowden's whole reason for saying he did what he did, I don't believe it.

Yeah. I believe it was a little bit of revenge. He was a failed SF candidate, right? and he wanted to also be a super spook and he didn't believe now I have to agree that he was probably pretty smart he had to be to do what he did and he was probably pretty good at the

at the aspects at the technical aspects of his job and I think that there was a little bit of revenge in there that he was treated bad felt like he was passed over not not given enough paths on the back or whatever but it was a selfish act he made every one of us

in multiple ways less set. Guy, I would just like to add or use the army expression caveat off of that. Just one point. I mean, a lot of people have this impression of Ed Snowden that he revealed domestic spying operations, that our government was illegally spying on us. And there's this one program, I believe it was Prism, right? The metadata that was being collected, which is questionable. And, okay, I can get that to some point.

We need to have a national conversation about metadata and what's the appropriate use for our government to collect it. But Snowden didn't just steal that. He didn't just make off with that. He took fucking everything. He took everything he could get his hands on. The vast, vast majority of it was lawful overseas espionage directed overseas, not at Americans. Now, explain to me why he stole all of that if he was just trying to blow the whistle on illegal domestic spying. Like you said, Guy, what he says doesn't make sense.

No, it doesn't. It doesn't. It's just a precocious little boy. He got his feelings hurt. He stamped his feet. And, you know, back in the old days, spies actually had motivations. You know, we talk. There's a couple of different acronyms that we use.

Ideologies. Mice and crime, right? Money, ideology, compromise, coercion, ego. or if you use crime, you had revenge in there. I like crime a little better. So we could go back to the World War II, the Rosenbergs. They believed in the ideology of communism. They believed that we were the great Satan, right?

They did not take one red cent, unintended, for selling out our budding nuclear program to the Russians. Not one. and they died for what they believed in. I don't like what they did because what they did in just a few short years brought the Russians decades closer on parity

militarily with us. And in a lot of ways, we can blame, you know, lay squarely at the Rosenberg's feet, all the proxy wars that we fought with the Soviet Union for the latter half of the 20th century. But they believed in what they were doing and they were willing to die for it and they did.

All right. You can't call, I don't like calling Edward Snowden a spy. He's a leaker. He's a little punk, but he wasn't a spy because he really didn't have any strong motivations and convictions other than

this is bad and I'm going to tell everybody about it. Right, right. And there's a whistleblowing system in every government agency and the intelligence community that exists. And he didn't go through that. All right. He made the choice to, make 300 million people less safe.

There's somebody out there right now that says, well, it didn't affect me. I'm here to tell you that it affected every person. When that story broke, I was at Fort Bragg. Working something up there. I was in the Burger King of Fort Bragg, and there was two construction bubbas in front of me, right? At TV on, the story came across,

and it had been on for a couple days by now. And these two Bubba started arguing because they had differing opinions about where he should Edward Snowden land in history, you know, traitor, hero of the revolution, whatever. These two Bubba's. Now, I'm not trying to stereotype, but I'm a North Carolina boy too,

so I can say this. I can almost guarantee they ain't ever seen a secret either one of them a day in their life. But they almost came to blows in the line at the Fort Bragg Burger King because they had different opinions about Edward Snow. So it affected everybody in this country in one way or another,

whether you realize it or not, you know. And that's the thing when when anything happens, but especially when something like espionage happens, it's not in the news every day, right? We see shootings in the news every day. But if it's not happening to somebody that you know, you don't take it the same way. Espionage is the same way. Until you know that something affects you, you tend to kind of dismiss it. Yeah. We need to tell people, we need, as we were talking about before, publicizing these cases.

We need to do that every time and line out for the public. What are the effects, what would the effects have been had this happened? What were the effects of this that did happen? So, you know, everybody takes a little personal pride in that flag flying, and we all do our part at whatever level to thwart these efforts when they happen. Everybody's not going to have access to somebody like that. But if you do, you have to be out there on defense all the time. And when I give my awareness briefings, that's the thing that I beat into them, you know, six or seven times during the hour.

You are the first line of defense in this war that we fight against foreign intelligence services because bad guys aren't going to come to me for smart stuff with a sixth grade education. It's not going to happen. They're going to come to Joe the engineer with all these zeros and ones floating around in his head that can make sense for them, right? we just don't we don't make it clear we try to hide these things and we humans in general but especially Americans are really bad you know we've got long memories about good stuff you can remember all the good times but the the bad times they slip away pretty quick unless they directly impacted you think about September 12th through October 31st 2001 there was flags on every on every car on every house and you know the heck with terrorists and it didn't take long for us to start complaining

about having to take off shoes and belts at the airport we got a short memory about bad things we need to we need to we need to change that if we're going to be effective in fighting those bad things in the future yeah uh Ian asks if you have any thoughts on the ethics of nation states giving IP aid to commercial interests how this works in various culture groups what do we mean IPAid intellectual property That's what I was thinking I think so I think intellectual property Ian do you want to clarify that

And we'll get back to that John, thank you Casey, thank you Casey asks What was the story about the magical chair So One of the things I do is I collect souvenirs This is again this is what is all the contraband That's out here

Who's Casey that knows about this chair? Anyway, Casey Loveless. Well, it's got to be a fake name. So we were in, in Gosny, Afghanistan. We didn't even get to Afghanistan yet. So in 2011, I went to Afghanistan, by the way, to run a civilian counterintelligence team. I was in Gosney. I was supposed to stay up at the C.J. Soto, Poppe, Boggroom.

I got there, and there was no room at the end, at the end, rather. and that was probably the best thing that could ever happen to me because going down there with the poles down in Gosney had a lot better job and I didn't have some majors walking up and down Disney, you know, looking for iPro and reflective belts and whatnot. So anyway, we'd go on walkabouts. The place that we were at,

there was part of a little camp on there, the hard sites that had been an old Russian prison, I think. And I'd go, they wouldn't go in some of the rooms because the locals would tell them they were haunted and because of the, you know, the ghost of whoever was in there, the rushes have been torturing or whatever. So I go poking around these rooms all the time and I always told my guys, we had our little compound within the

fob. I said, don't ever leave this camp, our little compound and come back without bringing something for, you know, the betterment, little area of unification, right? And proving your foxhole. That was the rule. I'll come back empty-handed no matter what you're doing. You're going to the bathroom. You better bring me back a roll of toilet paper, something.

So we got on one of these prison buildings, and there were some old, there's nothing special, just old plain wooden chairs. Like you might see the teacher sitting in at an old one-room schoolhouse. And there were two of them. So I threw them in the back of the truck and took them back. One of them, I just put in a little storage area. And on the other one, I had my interpreter right on the back of it, Chalkit has your lot, the chair of shame.

And on the bottom, it said, on the seat, it says, leave all your troubles here. So often the guys we would get in the box, you know, they couldn't read. Every now and again, we'd get one that could, and they'd read that chair of shame, and they'd, you know, already start hanging their head. So as soon as you come in the door, I'm starting to twist the screws. I can't remember what the exact issue was, but within the confines of the FAB, we had the Afghan National Police Training Facility for Gosney Province. So they would run the new kids, the traffic cops in there.

They'd run a class of a couple hundred of those. And then they would run like an NCO class through there. It was a problem with one of them over there. I just can't remember what the issue was. But anyway, he was in trouble. And so the commander over there brings him and four or five of the other guys for whatever he had done. It was some egregious offense that they wanted some special love about. I think they'd accused him

of talking to bad guys or something anyway so we took him in the box and I told the interoper I'm like hey man go get the chair so he went and get the chair and he could read so I said can you read that? He said yeah I can read it

I don't know what it means but I can read it so you know what shame means doesn't yeah so well this is my magic chair I know sometimes when I talk to people they don't want to trust me and tell me the truth. And I know that when you do something bad, you really do want to tell the truth so you can get it off your chest. So I'm going to help you out.

When you sit in my chair, it has special magical qualities that it will help you do that. And you won't be breaking the faith with bad guys you talk to because you won't be able to help it. It's not your fault. And he was all, he's like, really? I said, yeah, watch. So I had the interpreter sit down in there and I just ask him some silly question.

And he answered it. he said, was that the truth? And Abdul said, yeah. I said, all right, now your turn. You ready to go? I don't know. So he sat down on the other one for a little while and we talked and talked, he wasn't giving up.

I said, don't you want to give it a try, man? We could just, we can get this over with, you can go home, everything. He said, okay. So he sat down and he completely changed his story. He told me the truth. I'm like, all right. Well, they were waiting for the big commander, like the, I don't know if it was a general or a colonel or whatever, but Gosney province police commander.

to come in and he finally did. They were all sitting out on the bench in the front. And he come in and I talked to him for a few minutes, told him what was going on. And he goes over and just hauls off a wax of dude. Starts lighten into him. And the interpreter is listening to him or my ear. He's telling him what he's going to do to him when he gets out of our site

and all this other stuff. Like, well, all right, good for him. So then the kid starts, jawing back at him and what he was saying was it wasn't my fault. They made me sit in a magic chair and the things I said

weren't true. It made me say things that weren't true. I mean, I don't know. I don't know I know what you're talking about. The interpreter says what do you mean magic chair? What are you talking about? I said, okay. Go get the chair. And he went to

go get the other one, the clean one. And he brought it out. and he said, is this a chair? And all the other five guys were with him, yep, yep, that's a chair. That's the one I saw him go to city. So there you go. I enjoyed Afghanistan for that aspect because so many of them that I came in contact with,

I mean, these were Hill gentlemen that had never been touched by the white man. So I could make stuff. I had one of them sit on foam from a Pelican case one time. And I told them that it was a special pad. We were doing the... They had a polygraph variant over there called PCAS. You might be familiar with the preliminary credibility assessment screening system. I think it was a piece of junk.

But anyway, they were halfway requiring that we use it. And the guy that I was doing it on, we kept getting, I was watching him. And he was, somebody had told him somewhere along the way. He'd had some counter-poly traded because he kept squeezing his butt. And so I said, said, you know, I'll be right back. I'm going to help you out. You look uncomfortable. So I went and got a piece of foam out of the pelican case made stand up and sit on it. What is this? I said, well, you know, I know that these chairs are kind of hard, but also I know what you're doing.

You know what you're doing too. And this, no matter how imperceptibly you clinch that brown eye, it's going to tell me. It's going to read right here. And I pulled up the little diagnostic thing on the screen. I had nothing to do with this. I said, watch. Do it. And it, it will. It just a little bit because the plethymograph was still on his figure and he believed it and he stopped doing it and again you know who wins me but I really

enjoyed being able to sprinkle a little pixie dust you know from time to time with things like that you couldn't do that anywhere else in the world I don't think it's a very very hard like you couldn't have done that you couldn't have done that in Iraq because they were you know more educated more westernized over there no you know actually

it's been upheld in the Supreme Court like police officers in the United States can use some deceptions like that. Like to say, you know, I have this, I have this squeeze bottle. I'm going to take some air samples around you and it's going to tell me if you were in the house where that person was murdered. That's actually been held up by a Supreme Court.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. What I mean by you can't get away with it. I mean that it just wouldn't work. Yeah. Oh, right. You're talking, you're talking more about the superstition and things like that.

Gotcha. And I've told Jack this story, but I may or may not have been involved in an interview session where a red Kemlight represented the blood of Satan. Oh yeah, yeah. Can I tell you another one that you're really laughing? I don't want to tell this one in the after party.

So there was another one. We got this dumb kid in there. He was caught after an IED, I think. Anyway, unit brings him in and we got him in the box.

And it was a good long time, man. I was hot, sweaty. I've been up for couple days at this point. And every time I would ask the guy, I really just needed him to answer. I knew the answers. You know, usually before we do an interview, I like to know as many of the answers as I can because I only get surprised in there. I just need you to say it so that we can send you on to the next phase of your existence, whatever that may be. And we were going to help this gentleman get a nice room up at Bogram. Anyway, every time I would ask you this particular question. He would answer a different question that somebody somewhere else was asking. I don't

I don't know where he was getting his information from, but you know, what color are your socks, pink tuna, you know, what day is it green. And we went around and around and around and around on this. And I was getting ill. It was wing day at the mess hall. I was very hungry. I had a deal worked out with the ladies that worked there. I didn't just get five. I got five of each kind. So, you know, I wanted to move on. that's all right dude i'm kind of getting tired of this i don't want to fool with you anymore so here's how this is going to go down i'm going to ask you this question one more time and you either answer it or that's it what do you mean that's it well everything's going to go

black you're not going to feel anything you're not going to see anything nothing you're done you looked over at the interpreter can you do that interpreter said well i've known me for a while now, I've seen him do some strange things. He says he can do it. He could probably do it. He said, okay, I'm ready. I said, okay, sure. Remember, we're going to ask the question. If you don't answer it, then that's it. Okay,

I'm ready. I said, okay. What's two plus two? Dog. I said, all right, I told you. That's it. Here we go. One, two, three. I slammed my hand down on the table as hard as I could, and just then the lights went out. Now what I knew that he didn't know I've been there a while, we were on a generator

and we went through a generator probably every three, four months, you know, the fuel's bad and all the dust up there in the high desert. So it would go out regularly. And I'd been there long enough that I could kind of, we were in a little pod out back of the main tent, a hard pod kind of like a connex, and with lines running to it.

And I could, I've been there long enough that I could hear when, And the thing I knew it was getting ready to overload and cut out and would start pulsing through the lines. So I didn't plan this with the interpreter, but he picked it up, oh, beautifully. Everything goes black. About 15 seconds go by, 30 seconds. And the kid says, he starts whispering, hello? Hello?

Can anybody hear me? I can't feel anything. I can't feel my legs. The interpreter, mad, he was quick. He was good. he said, I can hear you, son, but I'm your only, I'm the only life line to the real world. He said, what happened? Where am I?

He said, I don't know where you're at, but that he told you what he was going to do. He said, can he bring me back? He said, well, if he can make you go away, he can bring you back. All you have to do is just answer that question. He started singing like Tweber. The other thing I knew that neither one of them did was that it took the, we lived and worked in the MPs. We had their sign out front, but, you know, it didn't say, Spooks RS and S.

So that was kind of our light cover. I knew that they were good about getting that thing restarted. It took them about 90 seconds. So I only had a minute. He was singing and singing and here comes the lights back on. And I was sitting back. And he looked at me. He's like, you know what?

You got me. So little things like that worked over there. Like I said earlier, if you can't renovate, innovate. And that's what I had to do a lot. And it worked. Aaron says, I think you kind of answered this one. Do you think that ego and desire for fame can be a motivator for intelligence breaches thinking Snowden and Robert Hanson? Absolutely. Yes.

I mean, it's built into both of the acronyms. Ego. It's rarely going to be a primary. So like with Snowden, I'm going to call his. I haven't spoken with him. And you better help it. I never do. But I'm going to call his primary motivation revenge.

It was revenge for his failures, by the way. He's the one to fail. And against the government for what he believed was inappropriate action. But it really was ego. He thought he was smarter than everybody else. He thought that he was doing the right thing. He thought that he was important enough to make that decision with everybody. As regards to Hansen, oh, you better believe it.

Ego was huge, but it was also revenge with him, too. There was no ideology involved. There was, there was no, there was, he did get paid some money, but it wasn't, it wasn't a lot. And he didn't spend a lot of it either. In fact, that's how he got caught the first time. You know, he had two different periods of, of espionage. The first one was when he was working up in New York as a brand new agent. And he engaged with the rest of, you know, he had two different periods of espionage.

And he engaged with the rest of, you know, he had two different periods of espionage. questions. And the reason why he got caught that first time is his wife found the money that he was being paid. I don't know where he had it, but obviously he didn't have a good hidey hole. She found it and went and reported it to the priest. They were members of Opus Day, one of the stricter orders. And so the priest calls him on the carpet and said, hey, man, what's going on? Oh, shit. And he said, well, looks to me like you got two choices. You can either donate this money to the church or we can handle it like gangsters. And he donated it.

And then he stopped for a while and then he got back re-involved several years later. But huge ego. I know a couple of people who worked directly with him before and during the time that he was active, that second period. And he always thought by their reports and by everything we know now that he was the smartest guy in the room. He thought that he would never get caught which is why he was so bold in the way that he initially walked himself into the Russians

and introduced himself and his services. Jim says, did you work with other CIA agents from other organizations? If so, which ones were the worst and which ones impressed you? Yeah, so in, you know, I was an army

guy, but I spent probably more war time while I was on active duty and then later as a as a civilian in different capacities as well with other services and organizations I spent a lot of time joint stuff with Air Force Navy and Marines I'm not going to say which one I like the worst right I dislike the worst but I will say the one that I honestly aside from the Army like the most was the Marines yeah they push they push approvals for stuff down to a much lower level than we did in the Army me. So I had a in Bosnia in 2000, I

was with a unit called the Amid, the Allied in my battalion. And it was kind of the Hogan's heroes there of NATO counterintelligence support. So they had people all over Bosnia and Croatia doing ostensibly

counterintelligence collection, but it really wasn't. They had in my section alone, I was in a place called Mostar. We had a Greek sergeant major who said he was a commo guy, but he had some dirty words, and I think he was something else. Still to this day, we had a Norwegian female MP who thought guns were icky.

And so my jarhead partner and I were happy to wear out her MP5 and three cases of ammo that she brought with her for a four months ride. We had a Spanish helicopter pilot and made her clean it too, by the way. We never cleaned it once. a Spanish helicopter pilot and then a couple of folks from DIA we had a guy from who was an analyst he thought he was Jack Ryan in fact that's what he's called to this day

he was a reserve Navy lieutenant but a civilian analyst at DIA and then another civilian analyst so that was probably my first big exposure to the Marines the other Marine CIA guy was there and if we want to do something from the Army side, you know, Army guys love to kill trees. And so I'd have to ask all these different people to do stuff.

And the Marines, my partner, he'd just call one captain. That captain would send us bumping down the road in about 15 minutes. Yeah. So I love that. Half the paperwork, twice the bullets, you know. I just want to say that Hogan's Heroes is a very nice pull. Oh, yeah. It really was, too. It's a great reference. Yeah. Ian says, yeah, he's clarifying that past question. He says intellectual property, spy agencies, stealing corporate secrets and giving them out as their own domestic interests. Sorry for the confusion. Yes, so that happens all the time. In, you know, in this country, for as many reasons as people think it's a horrible, horrible place because the government's bad and always trying to hurt you. You have no idea. At least if you open up a private business in this country, your intellectual property is yours. The government just doesn't come in and snatch it away from it. but in other countries the government

and intelligence and military and private business there's really no delineation between them especially in some of the communist or former communist countries that haven't worked themselves out of that yet if you do it

it belongs to the government no matter what it is no matter how much of your time, money, blood, sweat and tears you've put into it. So if if corporate intelligence is happening against the United States from some of those countries, you might as well call it government-sponsored intelligence, because it will get back to the government in some fashion or another. Andrew says, I'm asking this on behalf of D.C. Nolan,

what does he think the price of a giraffe is in the following situations? One, on the black market, two, on the black market, three, when the giraffe is an albino. How old is a giraffe? I'm going to say it's an adult, and it's an adult giraffe. But not too old. We're not talking a geriatric giraffe on its last. Right. Like one you would be happy to have at a zoo or the circus or something.

Or in your backyard. Yeah. Do I have to pay for it? Can I barter for it? Because I'm fairly good at that too. I have a little Peter. I have a little Peterson in me. What would you be willing to pay or barter?

Uh, yeah, I mean, because we could figure out, like, we do the prices, right, like a value system for whatever you would barter. I don't know. I'm trying, I'm going through my, the Hardman Travel Museum right now and seeing what I would, I brought back in infield, inlaid with camel bone. It was very operational, uh, just a little recently before it came into my possession. I would trade that for a giraffe. I would also trade you a 75 pound paperweight in the form of a basset hound named Fred. They got the same colors. So a basset hound, Andrew.

Andrew also says the CI service you like the least. It was the OSI, wasn't it? No way. I love traveling with those guys and play with them too because quality of life is number one prior to tie. Right. The Air Force never gets that wrong. no no no no no no no no no no no oh oh i'm thinking i'll think i'll say i'll go ahead and say i don't dislike him but i had some bad experiences working with navy over the years and that was probably you know

that's individuals that's not that's not the service as a whole because i know mark harmon he runs a tight ship i was one thing i mean i's where i think we're probably going to start wrapping up here a little bit but i'd like to ask you you know as far as what you're able to talk about as far as the spooky side of CIA, these guys who run double agents who do some of this more covert kind of stuff, clandestine, I should say. Yeah, so we're talking about Offco, offensive counterintelligence. I have never been personally assigned to one of those units to do that. I've been trained. I attended in 1998 the advanced foreign counterintelligence training course up at Fort Meade. And later I went back to teach there and I taught in the

in the ops and in the surveillance portions. I have been on the periphery supporting a couple of those things, and that's usually on surveillance missions, which is probably my favorite, favorite part of this job. It's long, hard hours, you know, living in hotels and eating crap food, but I really do, I like it. You know, if you get a good partner that you work with a lot, which I have, my very Mexican friend, Mr. Vato, he's probably watching right now.

We've been all over this country together sitting in a car together. So you learn to love and sometimes hate these people. And he wanted me to tell you that all the years he's known me, he actually made me scream once because I thought we're going to die. But it's only happened once. I have many tens of thousands of miles. So there you go. I told him.

But I like that part. You know, the off-co stuff is cool. And, you know, basically, like I said before, it's a source operation where we control an asset, friendly controls an asset, but opposition thinks that they're being controlled by then. So you pass information. For us, it's, again, the main thing is keeping that other service

occupied with this person. and so they're not going on to the next person, getting some insight into how they work, what they're after. And eventually, in some cases, it could learn or lead to, rather, a recruitment of that opposite number. That's not an everyday occurrence, but it does occur. And at that level, that's going to happen more with the CIA clan case officers are going to do that, you know, going service to service.

when you are or when somebody in military or the army counterintosh is running like this double agent type of scenario what at what level are the decisions made and the information the false information at what level are those created do they leave it up to the individual agent or those coming from like a boardroom full of of analyst or or uh for the passage material yeah yeah so that's all controlled. There's a process that things go through to get approved. So it's not just the person on the, the asset going in and saying, oh, I'm going to give them this because they asked for this. No, that doesn't how, that's not how it works. It's a very controlled process at every step along the way. Very interesting. Casey says he would like to see Henry,

please. Who's Henry? Is Henry your dog, your Basset hound? Oh, no, that's Fred. Fred, Fred. Oh, Fred. Then, yeah, maybe he wants to see Fred? I don't know. Well, Fred is, Fred is down for the night. Yeah, but Casey donated to see Henry. So I think that you basically have to produce a Henry.

It's Henry like the pet name you have for your penis. Like, come on, tell us, tell us the truth. What's going on here? I honestly don't know what this Henry is. Yeah, like, you're going to show us your Henry? I don't know. I mean, I could. But don't, don't.

We don't want to get kicked off YouTube. Guys, thank you everyone for joining us tonight. I just want to remind everyone to like, share, and subscribe to the channel. Leave us some comments if you like, and there's a link down in the description to our Patreon page, where you can support the channel financially if you'd like and get access to our bonus segments. There's also a link down there to our merch if you want to get coffee mugs, and I have them around here somewhere. There you go.

coffee mugs, t-shirts, everything's for sale. Also check out our Instagram page at the dot team. I'm working on getting a Dave Park body pillow made. It's like a full body, you know, photorealistic pillow of Dave Park that you can have, you can own. It'll be the Dave Park Cuddle Buddy. Well, there's some debate. Dave wants the cartoon character.

He wants to be like, you know, cartoonized by an artist and he doesn't want an actual photograph. We're still having that negotiation back and forth on that, but we'll get it going. Oh, yeah. Casey says, sorry, I meant Fred. Oh, yeah, man. There's no way I'm lifting that fat sucker up. All right, man. So, yeah, so you, was your trip to Afghanistan, like, that was sort of working on the tactical level, was that kind of a big transition for you? you from going to that to, you know, from sort of the

strat stuff that you were doing to more of this tactical? I mean, back at 7th group, you could call that tactical too. Okay. Yeah. Because I wasn't on investigative status and doing suit and tie stuff, which I hate suit and tie stuff. So what I was doing in Afghanistan was I ran a civilian CI team that was mainly responsible for screening local nationals for

terrorists and intelligence affiliations right but I ended up doing as as we often always do a lot of other things too I had to cover down on the active duty teams that rolled through they sent a couple back to back I was there for almost two years straight they sent a couple teams back to back that were I mean literally still had sand from Wachupa in their boots so I kind of was the shadow NCIC of those teams.

And then I had the opportunity to assist some of the Polish units that were there as well. Again, it wasn't my main mission set, but it was in my best interest to help, you know, protect my skin that surrounds my body to help them. And I made a lot of good friends out of it. I got to work with the Grom guys and a couple of their other task force. And man, that was. they were really good people and they were there. Grown was there for, they were open for business.

I can't say that of all the other line units, but these guys were out getting it done. What can you tell us, what can you tell us about, you know, since then, where you're at now? What do you got going on today? So when I came back from Afghanistan, I went back into a training,

a CI training job for a little while and then again another traveling job so I've just been on the road for two years and now I'm traveling again that lasts three or four months while I was looking for something more permanent back down here in Huntsville. So I came back to missile defense agency

counterintelligence and worked there for a little while and now I do some general CI consulting here and there for some of the various agencies in and around the area. I pretty much, well, my stuff has been here since 1998. I haven't been here since 1998, but I know everybody there is to know in this town

that has anything to do with intelligence or defense, you know, so I've got the longevity and I don't want to leave here. We really like it here. I imagine that some of the difference between being the military side versus the civilian side is when you had the creds and sort of the official backing with the military, but you probably have a little bit more freedom as a civilian. How do those two jobs compare? Well, you'll have badge of credentials as a civilian agent as well.

Okay. Yeah. And it really just depends on the organization that you're working for and what your left and right sector stakes are, you know? Sure. So some can only look at a very narrow scope of violations. Others are kind of broader. And ultimately, you know, the FBI has purview over counterintelligence in the United States.

So if you get an actual, by God, spy case, they're going to be the lead. You may be working it, but it's, you know, it's on their books. So it honestly, it just, it really depends. on where you are and what that mission set is, what the authorities are, and then whether or not you're an actual government employee agent, or in some cases they have contractor counterintelligence officers. And so then there's an elination there because there's some things that are inherently government functions that only government people can do and the contractors can't do.

So there's no one answer. It just really depends. That's interesting. because I didn't know that like outside of the military that there was sort of a I don't know if it's a state or a federal or whatever credentialing process for sort of counterintelligence. Yeah, so pretty much every federal agency has their own internal counterintelligence program. Okay.

And again, you'll work off their regulations and off of the federal regulations. And in the end, the federal regulation is what's going to trump, you know, your internal stuff. Yeah. All right. So Go ahead. No, I was just saying that's very interesting. We have one more question that Andrew wanted us to ask for Lola. The CI field has gotten more diverse. What does Guy think about the impact of diversity?

Is one gender better than the other? Is it hard as a white American male to gain trust when working overseas? Diversity. I don't know that male or female or, are better at this job. I'm really to think it has to do with the individual. So I had the luxury of growing up in a variety of different places, and especially growing up as a military kid,

you've got people from everywhere. You know, it was rare that I had two actual U.S.-born friends at the same time. I know, Smolans and Filipinos and, you know, everything. So at a very young age, I was able to, learn about the different cultures and I actually developed an affinity for learning about the little nuances and the food and that kind of stuff. I think that's what made me a good agent. I don't think it was because of the color of my skin or my chromosomes, right?

Women are sneakier than men most of the time, so I guess the argument could be made that generally they might be better at it. As far as being trusted in different countries, You know, there's clowns in every field, and especially in CI, right? So you get the people who think that just because it's a special agent in front of their name, they're actually special, and you're not. Just like every other government functionary or military member, you are a tool. And you can be sharpened and used, or you can be dull and be replaced. You're not special. By the same token, those people who go into a foreign country with that belief that they are special and best,

than the other people are the people who will fail. And I saw it, especially in Afghanistan, I saw it a lot. So I try to start out, no matter how much of a bad guy is sitting on the other side of the table for me, start out with what we have in common, right? We're both carbon-based beings and we inhale oxygen and exude carbon dioxide. And I start from there. The color of the skin, the intelligence level, the motivations, all that comes later. But if you start at that basic level, you can get there.

And you can get people to trust you. find some commonality. And when you do that, you've got to be genuine with it. For example, I would go once a week, the labor camp on the Fob at Gosni. They'd have a big potluck down there. So there was 30 or 40 of them. And then there was this 167-year-old man who had a no work. He would just come and sit all day and look at people working, but that was his job.

And I'd go down and play what's in the pot with it, you know, and just sit and talk. and eat and wouldn't ask them for a thing. And they would walk past the active duty team, who they should have been reporting things to when they happened, and come and report it to me because I did that. So it's the simple, it's the simple connections that you make like. You know, humans are like radios, I believe.

Remember we used to have the, you know, the hard intent is on the radios. You have to move it around to get the right reception. Humans are like that too, you know. And we're different each day. We're all operating at different frequencies each day. So you've got to move those antennas around and get on receive and transmit, get them synced up. And it doesn't matter about the color your skin or what's between your legs.

You can deal with anybody, you know, from the ditch digger to the prints. So don't ever let anything like that. If Lola is thinking about, you know, getting out there into counterintelligence, don't let any of your descriptors stop you because you're worried about that. And that goes for anybody else as well. This has been really cool guy

and I really appreciate you sharing all these insights with us tonight. Yeah, I was happy to do it. I was to talk about my second favorite topic. Is there anything else that like we failed to cover or failed to ask that you really think people should know? Man, I could go through hours more. I know we can't, though.

But if you're out there and you're looking to get into this field or if you are in the field and kind of struggling, there's a couple of things that, again, my little countertells philosophy, training. You're never going to learn, you're never going to know everything, all right? You will always learn something new. Two days ago, my partner and I who have been in this business for nearly 30 years, experienced something that we have never had happened before. And I don't know how it did, right? So you'll never know everything.

You'll never be the best. You're always got to be better tomorrow than you were today. Have fun. There's a lot of different, you've seen the pictures that I put up there. You know, I didn't put all my cool guy pictures with all the kit and everything because that ain't who I am. I've done it, but I like to have fun, right? And there's a lot of different ways to have fun.

in this job while still getting the job done and being good at it. I think probably the most important thing, though, is how you read regulations, right? So we've got all of our regulations that govern counterintelligence, what we can do and what we can't do. And there's two different ways to read regulations. You can read a regulation. And if it doesn't specifically say that you can do something, then you won't do it. Or you can read a regulation that if it doesn't specifically say that you can do something, then you won't do it. say that you can't do something,

then you can do everything else. And I read it the second way. And you will always be more effective like that. Now, I'll say that generally leadership in counterintelligence as a whole, but specifically in Army counterintelligence, is very risk-averse. So they don't like people who read regulations like that. But you got to find a way to do that. You'll be more effective

when you can, as I said before, you know, renovate or innovate. and last, if you're in this business, just don't be too spooky, all right? Be as spooky as a situation demands, but there's all kinds of people out there that hide behind their poles and take their own black ovals around with them

so they can sit with them at the stoplight. Don't do that, because you make the rest of us look bad, all right? Just be normal, please. What's your first favorite topic to talk about? Well, my wife of nearly 20 years would say it's me. Yeah, I don't know. Well, we've covered both.

We've covered both of this one episode. I guess, yeah. Not so bad. Well, please thank your wife for us for your time. And spend some time with us on Friday night. Appreciate it. And guys, next episode, if you tune in, we're going to have Mike Edwards back for a second episode. He served in Third Ranger Battalion with me.

and then he served in the regimental reconnaissance company. So he'll be back and we'll have a second episode with him. I just happen to see this at the very bottom of the comments. Ron Smith says guys hetero life. Guys hetero life mate approves of his performance on this podcast. Good job, brother. That is my hetero life mate. That's that's Bubba.

Oh. Yeah, I was telling you. Bubba gum shrimp. Oh, that's him. Okay. Cool, man. Thanks, dude. Thanks for stopping by.

And that's it.