The Team House - CIA Chief of Operations for Afghanistan/Pakistan | Ed Bogan | Ep. 292

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseEd is a retired CIA Operations Officer with 24 years of experience in national security and intelligence operations in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. He is a two time Chief of Station (COS) and three time Chief of Base (COB). Bogan served five of his seven PCS assignments in three designated war/combat zones, as well as Acting positions in countries in armed conflict.Find Ed here:https://www.linkedin.com/in/ed-b-840678213/—————————————————————-Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️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/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#cia #espionageBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House. channel and podcast if you'd like to and we really appreciate that so go it and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house special operations covert ops espionage the team house with your hopes jack murphy and david park hey folks welcome to episode two hundred and ninety two of the team house I'm Jack, here with Dave, and our guest on tonight's show is Ed Bogan, career CIA officer, spent significant amounts of time in Central Asia and South Asia and Ukraine as well. So we're really excited to talk to him about his extensive career here in a moment. I just want to take a moment before we get started to remind you that you can find a link to our Patreon down the description and subscribe for $5 a month and you get access to all these episodes. ad-free, as well as access to our sister podcast, Eyes On. Please go and check it out. We really

appreciate all of you guys who support the channel, and that really helps keep the lights on around here. And the second thing I want to tell you about is I have a book coming out in December. We Defy the Lost Chapters of Special Forces History. This book covers the things that aren't covered in the other books. So America's First Counterterrorism Unit, Blue Light is in here. Detachment A, the guys who were undercover in Berlin, green berets who were undercover in Berlin with a sabotage mission, Greenlight, the dudes that jumped in or trained to jump in backpack nuclear weapons behind enemy lines during the Cold War. I mean, a lot of these very interesting things, and I probably did close to 100 interviews for this thing, talking to the people who are directly involved.

So I'm really excited. I get excited talking about this stuff. I can go on and on. but it's available for pre-order on Amazon right now, and the paperback, as well as the e-book, will be out on December 9th. So thank you guys for checking it out. So, Ed, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here. It's a great honor. So, you know, you've seen the show before, so you know the deal. I'm going to ask you about your kind of your origin story. Tell us about kind of like what your upbringing was

and how that took you towards central intelligence. Absolutely. You know, I grew up in New Jersey at the Jersey Shore, actually, in a fishing community. My family was into fishing mostly party boats, if you know what they are. Where in Jersey Shore? Point Pleasant Beach. Okay. I was dragged to Long Beach Island every summer as a kid.

Yeah, just a little bit north of Long Beach Island, you know. Yeah, because you had, you were just north of our south of seaside. Yeah. Yeah, so that's where after, you know, I came of age to go to bars, you know, Seaside was the place to go. And I was there in the 90s, early 90s, and it definitely didn't change when the 2000s came. And the Jersey Shore TV show was on. It's pretty much the same. But anyway, yeah, so I grew up in a fishing community in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey family.

It was multiple generations of fishermen. I obviously didn't do that. I worked on the boats, got mildly seasick. I couldn't shake it, tried my best, but such as life. But after sort of finishing high school, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. I was trying to actually become a professional skateboarder for a few years. I had some sponsorships and I was traveling around mostly just the East Coast competing. And, you know, I wasn't as good as I probably.

thought I was at the time, but, but competed for a while and I had a couple of major injuries, which led me to say, okay, time to buckle down and get a degree. But at the same time, I really wasn't sure what I wanted to do. So I started out with a community college in Ocean County, New Jersey, taking courses there that were, you know, basically intro to this, intro to that, or, you know, psychology two, you know, after intro to psych, things like that. And I kind of started with interest in law enforcement and criminal justice courses, and I started looking at the sort of psychological underpinnings behind a lot of the theory. So I said, all right, let me start studying psychology. And then as I was studying the psychology courses, I was like,

well, what's behind that? And I said, this philosophy stuff seems pretty interesting. And I started studying more philosophy courses. So that kind of set the hook in me. And I said, all right, I want to continue studying philosophy. So I started looking for, you know, basically a four-year university to transfer those credits to. And I moved to Philadelphia. And in 1992, yeah, 1992 and enrolled at LaSalle University because I went to a, while it's a Christian university, there's a lot of philosophy programs around the Philadelphia area and I thought theirs was the most diverse and and kind of vast. I mean, they had a rather large department. So I selected them because I wasn't going because of the religious background.

It was more just to get the breadth of study. So I studied there for two years to get my bachelor's degree. And because I had done so many intro to this, intro to that classes, it was almost all philosophy courses the entire time. So it was kind of getting really focused in on that. And there's really nothing you can do with a bachelor's degree. in philosophy. So I kind of wish I could go back and dual major and maybe pick like accounting to go with it or something. But being a philosophy major, doesn't it help you out like later on in your life that it helps you with your decision making process? Definitely. But I think it might make you

probably your writing is probably not employable. Yeah, still not employable. Your writing is still a little too verbose and a little annoyingly arrogant too. So after I finish that, I finished, that, I actually enrolled at Villanova in their graduate program, philosophy program. They had a specialty in what's called Contemporary Continental Philosophy, which is European thinkers of the last 150 years. Think like Friedrich Nietzsche forward. And it's super interesting, probably my favorite area of thought to sort of dig into.

And I actually applied to the program, didn't get in, and then I I went back and I was like, why, you know, why? Like, can't I just take courses here and pay for it? And so I didn't get in their formal program, but they allowed me to take courses there. So I only did that one semester. And it was just too much to juggle with what I was doing. I was working. I started working within the mayor's office in Philadelphia, not the political office, but the broader mayor's office of community services where I was doing a range of classes. I was teaching, whether it was a leadership program for gifted inner city kids or there was a literacy program in GED prep course for illiterate adults, a lot of substance abusers who are,

you know, trying to get a second chance. And so I was doing that for a couple of years. And I, you know, the commute out to Villanova from Center City really wasn't working for me. So I only lasted a semester. and I wanted to just sort of reset a path forward. So I worked for those two years. And one thing I saw throughout the mayor's office was people with law degrees and not necessarily lawyers, like a load of people doing a load of different things, but they had a law degree that, I guess, opened the door for them. So I said, okay, I think that might be the right path for me.

So I applied to several law schools in the Philadelphia area and got into Temple. Temple Law School I was very excited about because they had a robust international law program and I have a longstanding interest in traveling abroad and seeing the world. So I was really excited when I got accepted there. So I started with Temple and my first summer, so you have three years of law school. My first summer, I went to a study abroad program at, the University of Athens School of Law that was affiliated with Temple and just a whole range of international law courses across, you know, war crimes and, you know, constitutions in general, you know, IP, you name it. And it was a great summer. It was real like broadening experience

for me in so many ways. There was like a four-day break in the middle of this summer program. And I went with several classmates. We flew over to Cairo and saw all the ancient sites. And, you know, for me, when I was little, I was always intrigued by ancient Egypt and ancient Greece and their culture and the gods and all that, whatnot. So just to be in those two places was really like, I would say had a huge impact on me and saying, like, I definitely want to have some kind of ability to spend my life traveling in some manner. When the program ended, I still had several weeks before the new semester started. So I ended up backpacking across Europe for about two weeks.

And then linked up with my father at the time in Wexford, Ireland. And we kind of did a cruise around Ireland for a week and a half or so. So I ended up basically making my way from Athens to Belfast in about three weeks. and just zigged and zags, and I had somewhat of a plan, but I changed it a lot along the way. Often you'd meet somebody interesting, and they say, hey, we're going to this town, we're going to Amsterdam, we're going to Paris, you know, tag along with them and just why not. So again, a really interesting experience for me, like unstructured, super fun, but at the same time, you know, advancing my education and getting an international experience all the same time. So while I was in my second year of law school, I applied for an internship with the State Department and was selected. And it's like a 10-week program in the summer.

So it would have been for my second summer in law school. And they said, you know, you were in Athens last year. We could send you to Athens and you can work in the embassy there for 10 weeks. I was like, this is incredible because I had made a bunch of friends. friends, you know, a ton of Greek friends. So I was like, all right, now I get a chance to go back. And I had such a wonderful experience. Like you're sort of, you think you're going to sort of relive all those moments. So I said yes, and I went, went to work there. Fantastic experience. I was in the economic section. And, you know, there was maybe four of us there. So I actually

had some accounts that I was responsible for, you know, just sort of reporting things. And just a great experience. And, you know, the embassy there is pretty large. So it's a robust sort of interagency, government agency community there. So I was able to see quite a bit and meet a lot of different people from different government agencies and put more context onto sort of like what the different agencies are and do. I had a sense on who the station people were. And I had a few conversations. And of course, you know, they didn't share anything, you know, secret with me, but they inspire or intrigued, let's say they intrigued me. And I said, okay, this looks really interesting. I wonder who this person is, you know, what they're really up to.

So while I was there, a lot of the state traffic, you know, the cable traffic and state channels, for whatever reason we had, we were, Athens was on a lot of the traffic about bin Laden. So there was a whole bunch of dialogue going on about bin Laden. state levels. It was sort of about like, you know, discussions with the Saudis. What are we going to do? That kind of stuff. And this was summer of 1998. So if you know in early August,

MI6 guy gets assassinated. Say again? There's an MI6 guy got assassinated in what, 1999. Yep, yep. And well, this was, so this summer 98, we have the embassy bombings in Africa. So I'm working. I'm in this internship and we're in the same time zone. And so there's, you know, frantic cables moving around. There's tons of people I'm working with who know people who are posted in these locations right now. So there's just a lot of energy and anxiety and whatnot. And it just sort of, it kind of had a huge impact to me. And I said, no, who is this bin Laden? Who is this person who declared war on the United States? States in 1997 and and how can I do something about it. So that really had an impact on me as far as where I wanted to go. Because, you know, working in state, it was, it was interesting, but it was

not, you know, it was fine, but that's not something I wanted. I had no passion towards it and anything I wanted to do like that. So it was a wonderful experience for me, great exposure. But I think the better part of that summer was really seeing other agencies and getting a sense of, hey, I want to work for the agents. I want to work for the CIA. So I came back for my third year of law school. And, you know, the tyranny of the day takes over. You're doing classes. You're doing all your things. And you're starting to think about, you know, applying for jobs. And this is 1999. So you're, you know, typing up your resume and you're mailing it out and handwritten letters and all the things. And then I don't remember exactly when it was during,

my third year. It was somewhere in the second half, but I saw an advertisement for the agency in like the economist. And so I said, all right, time to do this. So I started the process. The process, as you know, takes a long time. You know, it can take a year, it can take a year and a half, can take two years in some instances. I think mine was probably like a year in several months. But while it was going on, I finished law school. I think I had sent a out several hundred resumes and I got all of two offers and one of which was an offer that I think every law student got so it wasn't to me it wasn't really an offer it was some sort of sales job with American Express but the job I did get offered was a clerkship in the Mercer County, New Jersey

courthouse great job clerkships are fantastic you know you're just piled on with work and the sort of survey you get of, you know, so sort of all things legal is pretty, pretty dramatic. In my instance, it was a civil court judge. So it was any number of things from car accidents to, you know, someone suing someone else in a business sense because someone slipped in their, you know, some, some ice that wasn't removed from their parking lot of their business to toxic torts. Now, toxic torts is like this dump. from the 70s that caused all kinds of cancer is now. A lot of those in New Jersey. Right.

And my judge was the state's expert in this issue. So we had all these cases. This is 99. We had cases that went back to the 70s. And there's just insurance companies suing insurance companies, suing companies that insure the insurers. I mean, everybody was trying to take a piece out of each other for these massive, massive.

claims. And again, I would get every other Thursday was the basically motion day. And so you've got all the intervening two weeks, you have all these motions filed by either side in a dispute. And they just come with reams and reams and material. And I have to prepare, boil it all down to its, you know, bear arguments, pull the relevant case law and present it to the judge with a recommendation. And just incredible work, you know, 80-hour weeks easily. So, but in the meantime, in addition to that, I actually stayed for a fourth year at Temple Law and got an LLM in tax law, taxation. I was interested in tax law a little bit when I was working on the JD. It was, you know, pretty interesting classes, particularly like the international aspects of it.

And I thought maybe that could be a niche for me to get, you know, a job overseas as being an international tax law specialist. And anyway, because I chose Temple, some of the credits that went to my JD were able to attach to the LLM. So I was able to do basically two classes per semester at night while I was working. And by the end of that year, I had an LLM, which was great. So I'm really happy I did that. Never used it, of course. But again, like education is more than just using a degree for jobs and things. And what do you mind if I ask you like, what does a clerk do for a judge?

I mean, do you do all like a lot of the research and give them briefings or how does that work? Yeah. So all judges have when you'll hear like, hey, this person clerked for, you know, Justice Rehnquist in the Supreme Court. And now they're the senator from whatever, whatever. Yeah, that's a certain thing. like when you're clerking at that level, that's really prestigious and whatnot. But there's courts everywhere. And there's all different types of courts. So for example, on the Mercer County courthouse, you have civil courts, you have criminal courts, and you have family courts.

And all the judges have clerks. And the clerk is really an assistant. It's an apprentice lawyer who is going to get crammed with unbelievable amounts of work to advance their understanding and support the judge. You know, this is like some people will say like, well, doing a clerkship is like three years at a law firm. You know, you really, it accelerates your learning considerably because of the breadth and depth of what you're probably covering. So it's a, it's like a, it's like an apprenticeship, but it's an informed apprenticeship because you're, you've had the degree, you don't have the experience. Yeah. Yeah, fantastic thing. And, you know, I didn't go to law school to be a lawyer. I wasn't dead set against it. But that

wasn't my preference. But while I was in the clerkship and going through the background investigation at the same time, you know, I can't assume I'm going to get the job at the agency. So I continued to look for other positions. And to be quite frank, the clerkship opened doors. It opened doors to big New Jersey law firms. And there was some opportunities there. And interestingly, I get a phone call. So there's a couple things all came together at once. One, my judge was retiring, so she actually didn't finish her whole year. So like theoretically, I would have gone through till end of August to do a one year clerkship. This was probably like May she was planning on retiring, something like that. Second, I get a phone call and get the offer from the agency.

This is also like May timeframe. And I was ecstatic. And it just, that, that alone like worked perfectly. So I was so happy that I could just, because I would start in June. in CIA. And then I get a phone call the next day from the state Supreme Court of New Jersey offering me a clerkship on the state Supreme Court, which would have been a real nice, so like a second year as a clerkship, which isn't atypical, typical. It's just an opportunity. But it's a hell of an opportunity to be on the state Supreme Court. So the things you would see that there would be pretty remarkable and would have been a great leg up into if I wanted to have a legal career. Anyway, said yes to the agency and in June of 2000, I moved to Washington, D.C. So that's

kind of how I got there and why. A lot of different things. You know, you look at my chapters. You know, it starts with kind of skateboarding, a little bit of a counterculture mindset, you know, and in the agency, you know, there's a little perception of it and it's a little outside the box in certain ways. So like I saw sort of a corollary in that, but all also with my, you know, sort of philosophy and legal background. So a lot of sort of big thought and strategy and writing. And I was just sort of thinking like all this stuff's going to come together and be kind of useful for me in terms of beginning my career and having at least a little bit of a tool set

before I even find out what the hell I'm actually going to do. And so you go to, you begin your training at CIA at the farm 2000, graduate in 2001, like right around the right it's 9-11 is about to happen right correct i finished training in june of 2001 and i was uh selected by our then africa division um and i was prepared so they basically said you're going to go to the congo and um super interesting place a lot of history there a lot of CIA history there uh so pretty exciting and uh I basically, they said, you know, once the fall comes around, you'll start French, do a year of French before you go. So in the summertime, I, you know, worked on one of the desks as a desk officer supporting, you know,

supporting field requests for all kinds of things, traces, whatever. And, you know, started to learn the work, you know, at least just sort of the cadence of the work, the format of the work, the processes related to the work, all the support aspects of it. and then I began French. And lo and behold, my second day of French was 9-11. So that changed everything, as you can imagine. I remember being in class, remember being in French class, and the instructor's doing her thing.

And another instructor comes in and says, this is in the middle of the class. You need to see what's happening right now. And the first instructor in the room is like, well, we're going to take a break in about 10 minutes. And she's like, no, no, you need to stop right now come out. So it was like a very abrupt, strange thing. And as we came out, TVs were on in, you know, in sort of the hallway. And then I think it wasn't long after that that the first tower

fell. So you're just watching this like just completely dumbfounded. We get word that, and all the classes, all the language classes are pouring into the hallway now. And a lot of my classmates, people I went through training are there because they're in various languages. And, We hear that the Pentagon was hit. And one of my friends lives, like, at the time, lives in an apartment building as close to the Pentagon as possible as far as apartment buildings go. And he's like, I got to help.

And I just, like, went out with him. He jumped in his car. I jumped in mine. And we just raced that direction. But, of course, we got to some point, I don't know, a couple, like two miles out. And you're not getting any closer. Everything is chaotic. All the traffic is what it is.

And we both end up making our, way to another classmate's home that was kind of in the neighborhood and then just watching the day unfold on the television and just soaking it all in. The next day, we didn't go in the, we didn't go in the office because the language school wasn't open the next day. But the following day, which was a Thursday, yeah. Thursday. Thursday. it was a Thursday. I went in and I wrote an email to the

chief of Africa division point to point. You know, young guys got it all figured out. Right. And I said, it was basically like four sentences and I said, you know, the world's just changed dramatically. I joined because of

Al Qaeda's attacks in Africa. Africa division almost certainly is going to get asked to give up resources. If it is, I'd like to be on that list. That didn't go over well. Didn't go over well at all. And the response I got was pretty brutal.

Sit down and shut up. Yeah, it was even worse. You know, just sort of questioning my loyalty and a lot of things. Now, you know, I've had a little bit of life experience coming in. I mean, I'm 31 at this point, maybe. even 32 at this point. So, you know, I've got colleagues that are 23, 24. This would have destroyed their mind probably for quite a while.

And, of course, I get called in to talk to, you know, the deputy group chief on Friday. So Friday I go into language on Friday, and they're like, there's a note for me that says, you need to report to headquarters right now and see the chief of the division. It's like, oh, geez, okay, this is interesting. So I drive over to headquarters and I go into where our group sits and I first meet with the deputy group chief. And he's like, what did you do? Why did you do that? And I'm like, well, because something awful just happened and I want to pitch in.

And he's like, this is why I joke. He's like, oh, that makes sense. And then I talk to the group chief, same conversation. I talked to the cops of the division, the number three, same conversation. Talk to the number two, the deputy chief of the division. Same conversation. And then I get to the chief, of course, I guess that's all funneled to him. He won't meet with me now.

So I was like, okay, fine. Such is life. Three weeks later, about a third of the division was surged. And, of course, I was on the list, right? To CTC, to our counterterrorism setting. So that's fine. It's, you know, I don't obviously wish 9-11 happened, but whatever. This all worked out for a reason.

So I joined the counterterrorism center probably like October 1st, 2001. Wow. Yeah. So when I arrived, you know, I don't know, hundreds of people were pouring it. Hundreds were being redirected from all over the building or from the field. What was the atmosphere like in CTC at that time? Because, I mean, as a young guy, brand new guy, you got to feel like you're getting loaded into the breach here, right? Like, it's on.

Totally. And it's exactly. No, that's exactly how it felt. And it's like, all right, where am I going to land? What are they going to ask me to do? You know, like this is the dog barking and chasing the taxi. Now I caught it, right? Yeah. I'm in terrorism center.

And so the weirdest thing happened, but it's not weird in retrospect. But, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people are being searched the center. So they're just putting them in slots, you know, that they had. And then they're getting more slots. You know, it's a bureaucratic thing and putting people in these slots. So because I had some time in Greece, I was put in this task force, you know, focused on Marxist, Leninist, a certain urban guerrilla group and was on this team for like two months just sort of sitting there and just reading, reading all about the history, reading all these, you know, collections of cables that are like your read-in material when you join this team. but I didn't think I was going to be sticking around this team, just given that the priority was clearly not Marxist, Leninist terrorist groups.

So within a couple of, I would say within two months, I finished up there, and the Counterterrorism Center set up a thing called the current action staff, which was there 24-7, specifically Counterterrorism Center, watch center. And it's one of those things where, like, I have the shift at three in the morning, and some immediate comes in from Riyadh that says some senior guy was captured or whatever.

I'm calling the director of CTC, waking the director up and saying, this just happened. This was an incredible job. I had it for six months. I like to refer to it as my like master's degree in al-Qaeda, in sort of global core al-Qaeda. Because I saw everything. and I had to see everything and I was studying it so I understood it.

Separately, there was a famous sort of like five o'clock meeting that Director Tenet had every day to just sort of go over where we are on everything. People from our team were the note takers for that or the Counterterrorism Center. So there's always notes that could be sort of researched back in time when we need to.

So the things I was able to get exposed to during those meetings as well, to see exactly everything we're doing, how we do it, what we can and can't do, what partners can do, I mean, it was invaluable for me to see sort of behind the curtain on all things, counterterrorism, which is what I wanted. So it was a fantastic experience. At a curiosity, I mean, from your perspective where you sat at that time, what was your take on Al-Qaeda? Like how prevalent they were.

I mean, I remember as I was, I was like, geez, 19, I think, 18 or 19 when 9-11 happened. And just watching the news, it's like this octopus that has his tentacles and everything. And, you know, we tend to sometimes build these things up like it's, you know, cobra commander or something like that. But, I mean, I am curious since you were there sort of like almost a boots on the ground perspective, what your take was on al-Qaeda and the threat emanating from that group. well again i'm not super experienced at this point and i'm seeing tons and tons of potential threat reporting from all around the globe and you're also seeing an ungodly amount of leads from all around the globe because everyone's erring on the side of documenting and sharing so many partners

so you're you're a wash in data and it's it's pretty overwhelming um yeah i mean there was a graphic I recall from the fall of 2001 that was on like in everyone's office. It was like the eight and a half by 14 al-Qaeda org chart. And it had probably somewhere between 16 and 21 people on it. There's probably only photos for like two-thirds of them. And I'll just take a second to say, and you roll forward to like 2004, 2005. We have an understanding of 2001 Al-Qaeda that's, you know, 400 people deep at a full order of battle.

Who was doing what? Right. Who reported to who? Who was trusted who? Like, it's remarkable what we did in that interim sort of three-year period to sort of understand the enemy we were facing. And you were starting to put some red X's through some of those pictures? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, do you think prior to 9-11 that the reason that it started out 6 to 21 is because the United States intelligence apparatus just didn't have that much interest in AQ, or do you think that conducting ops against them gave us a deeper insight? So absolutely the latter. I think, you know, pre-9-11, we have a lot of over-the-horizon. Not a lot. we have a handful, you know, sort of of over-the-horizon collection capabilities that are sort of in the mix, whether it's, you know, human, singing, whatever, and trying to sort of map it all out and understand it. What we gained over three years is a crazy amount of in the weeds understanding of every single individual, you know, down to their like, you know, over time, you're building out bios of their whole family,

their family connections, and that starts to illuminate relationships that now that connects something you read, somewhere else. Like, okay, now that totally makes sense why that person's working with that person because their daughter is married to his son, you know, that kind of a thing. So I would say that our understanding was, you know, we weren't, you know, yes, I was going to say we weren't in Afghanistan. Of course, we were, you know, sort of in the pancheer, but that's different. You know, we're not sort of there among them. Right. Kind of in the mix. And on a war footing. So from a collection standpoint, there's a very big difference from just sort of general collection. And then being on a war footing, even with your collection posture.

So the chart that I described, I think, really reflects kind of a pre-9-11 understanding of the entity. Now, I'm sure our knowledge was deeper than that, but what I'm saying is this was a, at least was a leadership org chart. Right, right. It was really, if you look at a leadership org chart and there's 21 people on, you're like, check your watch. This isn't going to take that long if we're going to really take this seriously.

go after them, but obviously it's not 21 people. So, but we had to really build out that understanding through our collection posture. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. I'd like to ask you one question. I'd like to rewind back to you going into the CIA. Because, you know, you're a professional. You are a lawyer.

And obviously, you know, the agency has the Office of General Counsel. They have, so for somebody, and this might be for a question that people out who are already professionals have out there. for somebody who is like a lawyer or a doctor and doesn't want to go to OMS or an engineer and doesn't want to go into DST and T, but they want to be a case officer. Do you have to, is that a battle you have to fight if you have a profession and you don't want to be filtered into that professional track like OGC or OMS or DS&T? Great question. I don't think so, and here's why. you know for the DO a lot of certainly for a lot of operations officers they want you to have some kind of a graduate degree and they don't care what it is or to have like a real special forces pedigree um you know my training class was small but 20 percent were lawyers wow so i'd say 20 percent were lawyers and 20 percent were special forces backgrounds right so so So you start looking at it. There was a couple of archaeologists.

Interesting. You know, you have a lot of different types of things. Now, it's quite possible that at some point along the way, someone could have pulled me aside and said, you know what? You don't have the right psychological profile for the job you applied for, but would you consider this? I bet that happens to some people. I don't know that experience, but I wouldn't be surprised because why, if someone can, you know, pass the Polly and get in and have the clearance and all the things, find the right place for them and certainly don't leave them in a place they shouldn't be, right?

Right. That's just we're all not going to get the best out of them and they're not going to get the best out of themselves. You know, so yeah, that's a great question. So after that period of time, you get put into another section in CTC that's kind of focused on, like, it sounds like personality driven,

looking at OBL, Zawahiri, KSM. Tell us about that. Yeah, so there's a lot of change happening in the Counterterrorism Center. There's a lot of, with all these new resources, there's reorganizations. There's, you know, more field positions, you know, PCS postings established. So basically you're trying to just rebuild, not rebuild, you're trying to build, the center you need. So both from a headquarters and a field standpoint.

So new offices appeared to include ones that were very focused in on seeing your most HVTs. So I was, I got on a team and was very focused on al-Qaeda leadership figures. Our office, you know, there's always going to be some sort of like, you know, when there's change, there's a lot of people that are uncomfortable with change. So with the sort of advent of, of our office, I think it may have ruffled some feathers on some other offices who previously were going after the same targets or individuals associated with those targets. In other words,

leads to those targets. And so we had a lot of fits and starts about how to actually like get people in the field to dialogue with us about our specific mission, despite the fact that it was about, you know, several leadership figures at the top levels of al-Qaeda. The one thing we did, that I think was a way of addressing that rapidly for our offices. We had a lot of ops officers on the team, and there was gaps in the field. So we surged people forward and started filling all those gaps. So we had multiple officers and various bases on either side of the Duran line, including as like a base chief here and there, depending on the grade of the individual.

So suddenly we were sort of the value add in the field. for some gaps and even in oh two those gaps are forming because there's a giant sucking sound coming from iraq already and there's people that were like in the sort of pack afghan theater who are now moving over and positioning themselves for what's to come in the middle east so there was a lot of gaps which means there was a lot of opportunities so people from our team started filling them and i was one of them and i went out and i started out um bouncing around different, different, different bases and basically serving as a line officer working with our liaison partners who were working jointly with us to pursue Al Qaeda targets and leads

and try to exploit individuals when, when they were apprehended, look at their pocket litter, you know, talk to them, whatever, and then find leads to the next person, you know, next rung up the, up the ladder. That went on, you know, for quite a few months. And that was, you know, I got incredible experiences there to include even being in, basically an acting base chief for two months at the beginning of 2003, which was my first sort of field leadership experience. And you can say like, that's way too soon in terms of my experience, you know, my counter would be like, well, I do have, I have quite a bit of depth at this point on the target set. And I also have some life experience before I got here. And one thing that

was really wonderful with the station leadership team at the time, they were, they actually had, and in like a huge number of, it was like less than 10, but it was all these retired officers, old, you know, cold warriors who were awesome. rotating through and doing long-term TDIs and just rolling up their sleeves and doing work. And I couldn't have been in a better environment sort of just being shoulder to shoulder with these guys. And when I was sent to one of the bases to be the chief for two months, the chiefest station sent two of those guys with me. So I had, you know, guys that were like, you know, cis threes when they retired, you know, three-star general types. and had in, you know, four decades of experience and we're still in it for the right reasons.

And so I felt, you know, you feel unstoppable. You're like, okay, cool. I'm going to do what I do, which is, you know, we all get paid for our judgment. So I'm going to use my good judgment. I'm going to use my subject matter expertise on this target set. I'm going to, you know, leverage these two amazing guys who have given their entire lives to mission and learn from them. and I'm going to lean into, you know, liaison operations and try to maximize a really challenging relationship, a really challenging liaison relationship.

And in fact, I had an interlocutor for a period who, a liaison interlocutor who was, he was not, he was not on Team America. Let's say that. He was, I think his, he was fairly, he was fairly problematic, probably the most problematic. over my tenure in South Asia of dealing with partners. And it was my first one. So pretty interesting. Yeah, he just, yeah, he was a card. And so you went on from this assignment to dealing specifically with that region of the world going on TDIIs over there, as you alluded to, that this became sort of like a regional focus for you.

Correct. Yeah. So very much South Asia, South Asia focus, very much core. Al-Qaeda focus, nothing else. And I stayed on that. So it was a tremendous, yeah, a lot of months of TDIY in second half of 2002, first half of 2003. I traveled to the other side of the border in the middle of 2003. And I was there for, let's say, TDY for about six months. That was supposed to be a three-week TDI turned into six months, like as all good TDIs do. And then I quickly came home at the end of it just to PCS back.

So I came back to do all my paperwork so that I could PCS back to Kabul at December of 2003. So I was there, December 2003, December 2004. So all told, 18 months of, of Kabul happens, you know, basically from the middle of 03 to the end of 04. That was, again, tremendous and different. You know, it's a different operating environment. There's a different set of resources, a different set of priorities with partners. You know, I was able to go out with special activity center officers for a mission in Gardez or something.

remember exactly where I was, but somewhere in, you know, down, down in the southeast of Afghanistan for a week, really great exposure for me because I don't have a military background, so I'm, you know, starting to really open my eyes to a whole range of different types of units and what they're capable of. And again, that's invaluable for me as I move up the change, just really, truly understand what's, what's happening and where it's taken place and what can and can't be done. yeah that year and a half was was tremendous we that was a period as I said before where I think we we radically advanced our knowledge of the enemy set and and you know right before then I would say like an O2 I would say second half of well that's second half but after 9-11 and all of O2 we're just

getting shoveled data at us from everything, every service on Earth. We are collecting everything we possibly can. And like the challenges, if you're looking at, okay, somebody says, where's bin Laden? You could almost make an argument that he's anywhere because there's so many data points have been pushed our way. It's almost incoherent, such that someone could, you know, say, okay, there was a sighting. Like literally they'll say, like, we think there was a sighting in Hirachinar, Pakistan, or something like that. Well, Then we start doing scrubs of that and you suddenly find that you can come up with an argument for why he could be there. So now we have to think about, all right, what kind of resources are we going to put there?

How are we going to do it? You know, you talk to the Pakistanis. You say, how do we do that? It was a very imperfect period of time where you're frenetically running at a lot, a lot of data and, you know, a lot of false. I don't even call them false positive. It's just sort of like false avenues. And like I said, is I get to second half of 2003 and then into 04, I really feel like we start to refine our actual, accurate picture of what we're facing in that period. How was it for you?

Because I know you came in prior to 9-11, but you were very much part of like the 9-11 crew. But were there, in your experience, were there kind of two different agencies at this point in time, the side that said, hey, like our job is strategic intelligence, you know, it is not this on the ground tactical level stuff. Was there, was that, was that, can you please tell us your experience around that? Yeah. And I think, I think, I think the answer is there was yes and no, right? Like it's, you know, it depends as the constant case officer answer. But, you know, because I was in the counterterrorism center and in places that were, you know, I was constantly interacting with near East division officers, right?

They certainly were everywhere doing the hard things. They might not be as focused on, as myopically on the Al-Qaeda target at certain times. They've got other priorities that they're pushed on. So you have cadres of officers in other locations who did hard work in hard places. And I don't want to oversimplify and say like, then there's the people who like, were Europe division and in a nice place and didn't really, weren't really battle tested because that's not fair to say about them. But there's, you know, you see, you see reverbs of this now when you, you know, sometimes you'll have these conversations. You'll hear somebody say like,

you know, we spent too much time. We're overfocused on CT. We need to get back to the core mission and get back to our roots and, you know, we're behind the ball on great power competition and we got But there's truth in those statements and there's also sort of overdone aspects to those statements. And so you go back to that period and you can make the claim and say, okay, well, the 90s was the peace dividend end. And, you know, it was in time of downsizing and maybe it didn't have the same, you know, focus you need. And then you're going to have other people say, yeah, but we had the Balkans and a ton of people went through there and it was gritty. So it's unfortunately it's an it depends answer because I think it's about who you work with. And, you know, there's certainly the people who stay in the fight.

And you know who they are. You work with them. And then there's the people who just show up and do their, you know, quote, unquote, war zone tour. And there's nothing wrong with that. Right. But, you know, there's going to be a limit on what you can do because you don't have the context. You know, it's like drop me in Beijing in 2012 and tell me to figure out how to do ops. I'm not going to do them well.

You know, this is going to be a liability. Right. I can do my, you know, denied area. We can make the same sort of descriptors and doesn't make sense. Right. So you sort of have to think about how you grow into your requirements. Right. And you need, you know, you need expertise.

I'm a huge, huge proponent of expertise. And we struggle with that in the DO because it's, it kind of comes and goes in waves, whether we like want to have experts or whether we just want to have generalists who can be put anywhere. And there's strengths and weaknesses to both. So, and then, yeah, I'm answering your question without.

No, I appreciate it because I also, if you don't mind, you know, comparing this to sort of Iraq, because you said that, you know, there's the whispers of that,

you know, building up and, you know, and then through that process, we know that it was, you know, one of the largest stations outside of headquarters.

And where in, you know, Afghanistan, and other places in South Asia, you had this AQ threat, but then you have this massive presence in Iraq that I think was kind of aimless at times, initially focused on the Iranians and then kind of magic wanded that away. Did you see a big difference in the assets, the resources, and the attitude towards both those theaters? Yeah, I think, you know, as I said, sort of late 2002 and into O2,

and into 03, really beginning of 03, you start, I'm watching people who are in the theater I'm working in and there are people I'm looking up to them, like, you know, partly I'm working, I'm working my tail off at the same time I'm looking up going like, that's someone I want to, I want to be like, that's probably a role model. I want to get to know that person and figure out how to do this stuff. And then they're gone. And they're, again, they're getting set up for some infiltration into a rock from one of the sides. And there was a lot of that. And yes, it created opportunities, you know, but this is a war and it's, you know, we just got smashed in the mouth a couple of years back. Like, you don't want to see that. You want to see all the resources

put in right to finish. And, you know, obviously in retrospect, you know, you look at it and go like, I always talk about bin Laden and I say, you know, the rate itself, the op, the, the targeting that went into it, it's fantastic. But it was nine and a half years after 9-11, right? You have, If you're on September 12, 2001, you're just a citizen in America. You're not like, God, I hope they get him in the next nine and a half years. Like, that's not even a thing, right? And even bin Laden himself was probably like, I'm probably dead in 60 days. Right.

What do I need to do to sort of make sure this thing keeps going, you know? So, you know, what's the phrase? You know, the main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing. you know, after a 9-11, you know, do you just go all in and make sure that can't happen again? Because that, you know, things get diluted. I mean, I can tell you, you know, having spent time in Afghanistan, you know, 0304 is one thing. Sitting there in 8 and 9, you know, it looks like eight different missions. Right.

10 times the people, you know, 10 times the contractors and just to jump ball for prioritization. Yeah. Yeah. Ed, I'd like to ask at this point, I mean, we're talking 2004, 2005. You accepted a couple of different assignments in South Asia. I'd really like to hear your perspective from the, this is the early years of the on terror still that we're talking about here. I'd really like to hear about the liaison relationship that you had with the host nation intelligence service and like what that was at the time and how that developed or degraded, I mean, whatever the case may be. To some extent, you know, it's it's in part defined, and this is not a cop-out to protect their integrity, but in part it's defined by where the enemy is.

when the enemy is in urban areas, they're getable. And working with our partner, we had incredible success going after them in, you know, what is effectively called the settled areas, but it's the cities where they have infrastructure and they're on their phones and they're on computers and they're leaving a whole lot of different, you know, breadcrum trails to themselves and we're able to exploit that. in the fall of 03, after a lot of success against them, they move into the tribal areas, the federally administered tribal areas of Pakistan, which really shouldn't be called federally administered at all.

Right. It's an ungoverned place, which Al-Qaeda always in its life cycle took advantage of, is ungoverned, you know, poorly governed regions. And this particular region also happens to be a place where they have, relationships. Some of their elders have relationships with other elders going back to the Soviet jihad days. So you have, you know, kind of the makings of a complex safe haven that there are no easy ways to reach out and touch, let alone collect on. So we have to develop a whole new way of doing business. And all of it is very hard for our partner. All of it. It's, you know, they have

bases in some of these places that they don't leave the wire at all because they can't. I mean, it's going to be a problem for that really quickly. You know, that might allow for, you know, signals collection or something else. Who knows, whatever else they're doing. But it's a problem. And working with them, you know, we're constantly asking and pushing them, you know, past their comfort zone understandably because, you know, these opportunities are always fleeting and you really can't self-limit when you're not have an opportunity to to to solve a problem

take someone take someone down otherwise you're gonna you're gonna miss the opportunity so we're constantly pushing them to do things and we're pushing them not just to do hard things we're doing high volume of hard things i mean i've been in plenty of you know liaison meetings where the you know the agenda itself is 18 items and they're all like i got Washington breathing down my neck on them all understandably just given what they are. Some of them are about threats in various countries that are emanating from these guys in the Fata.

It's no shortage of that. And over time, yeah, the relationship degrades because, you know, we come to conclusions from a policy standpoint, and this is well documented, where we have to start taking more unilateral actions that are pretty severe. That puts them in a difficult position.

Yeah. And again, I'm not trying to defend them and say like they were forced into a situation where they had a bad relationship with them. But I'm just saying what sort of what the facts were on the ground along the way is we then, you know, started to ramp up what we were doing. And of course, it takes, it even takes policy changes on our side, lots of, you know, intelligence collection, lots of failures. And then we go and we talk, you know, people higher up in the chain. We'll talk with the NSC and say, hey, we need to change the parameters for how we're, you know, prosecuting this war. And I should probably point out, I don't know if you want to say this or not, Ed, but the largest covert operation, I believe, in American history, is taking place in this country at this time with the Predator Program. Which, again, I mean, it has political repercussions at high levels.

Yeah, and that story, I'm sure, will be written in detail in time. and, you know, and that's sort of, I think, what I'm getting at with, like, there's, there's, methodologies that work right up until they stop working. So maybe at some point, you know, you have a cordial sort of collaborative targeting discussion that gets you to a yes, and then it gets you to a, I'm not sure, and then it's no, and then you have several nos in a row, then you have missed opportunities, and through other means, you know those missed opportunities were pretty serious. And suddenly, you know, what happens is those things are, you know, those facts are dutifully sent back to Washington.

Our analysts dutifully write up what is taking place. And leadership figures will ask the very simple question, well, what can be done? And that generally changes, that drives change, change in policies that allow for more authority. you know, from a unilateral standpoint to do things, which you have to know it's going to rapidly degrade a relationship and you start taking very aggressive actions on your own, despite what they want you to do. Another thing I'd like to ask you about is in 2006, there's a cross-border operation that we did. Could you illuminate us a bit on how that came about?

yeah i think uh there's a book uh the way of the knife have you read that one yeah yeah that tell i always joke i this is so mean i know i've not met the uh the author but it's like the bottom 10% of a really good story uh i shouldn't say that out loud i'm sorry don't worry it's live nobody will remember this yeah um yeah um yeah this is about it this is during the time when, you know, I think we were as a government, some of our own internal dysfunctionalities included, you know, a lot of discussion of whether Title 10 or 50 on a particular situation. Obviously, when you're in a place like Afghanistan and there's, you know, the warfighting machine is there. It's very easy to delineate Title 10. But when you start working in sovereign countries

that were not in war with, there's a reason why Title 50 ops. are preferred. And at the same time, you, again, we have capabilities. And what have I referred to? You know, you have an enemy that is now in a safe haven and a hard to reach place that the host government cannot really reach out and touch. So what are we going to do? Just sit and watch it when we have a capability. But of course, it's a very big muscle movement. It's a political hot potato in a lot of ways. But we, again, what are we here for? Like, are we waiting to get attacked again or not? like this is this is what drives these decisions um and you know like said you can you can read that

that book and see you know there was a cross-border you know you know raid into into northern moziristan um under title 10 authorities and it was uh you know there was a lot of discussion i can say you know there was a lot of discussion in advance of that saying okay what are we doing why are we doing it what's the gain um but it was it was a good discussion it was the right discussion and ultimately, you know, the raid went down and it demonstrated, well, first of all, it had gains. And second of all, it demonstrated that this can be done. And that serves a lot of purposes. You know, it serves purposes to our host partner who, you know, drags their feet. And it kind of serves as a sort of like a bit of courage for our own policymakers to say, see,

we can do these things. It's like, this is, we're capable. And, you know, I can say from my perspective. At the time I was leading an interagency targeting team, some of what we look at, when we're looking at these guys in the network is what external ops they're plotting, meaning what ops they're plotting that are against the U.S. and our partners globally. And you have masterminds of various flavors in the tribal areas. And yes, theoretically, someone could hit them with a hellfire missile, but we're not going to understand the plotting that's going on from that. So we need to have a capability to potentially, you know, have boots on the ground and go get a guy. And we can get the material, get the,

you know, the computers, whatever, whatever it takes. And, you know, even talk to them about what they're plotting, who their contacts are, who their operatives are, how it's facilitated, all those things. So that raid was, you know, an example of, you know, a paradigm shift in a lot of ways or a paradigm shift capability, let's call it that. And it was, what was that, January of 2006? So still pretty early on, right? Yeah. I got to believe it's a little frustrating.

I mean, I've heard from other people that, yes, the raid, this operation was successful. It demonstrated the capability. But the political fallout was such that it sort of precluded any further operations of that nature. Yeah, but that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, our own policy deliberation, right? So that's, to me, I think the answer is yes, but I think that's a self-limiting on our part that we're politically driven by us. Now, that's easy to say. This still is a sovereign country. You do that too many times. I don't know what the ramifications are, but again, like with the bin Laden raid, and that's an extreme and easy example, when you have a

target like that and you know it needs to get dealt with, we have the capability. And those moments, 2006 and some subsequent operations that happened or were proposed and didn't happen along the way is what got us very comfortable when the bin Laden compound was identified as a suspect bin Laden compound that our range of options included ultimately what took place. So after that period of time, you got an assignment. at the working WMDs? Yeah. So, yeah, so with the Carrier Terrorism Center,

looking at weapons of mass destruction, again, looking at South Asia, I didn't leave the theater. I mean, I left the theater, went back to Washington, but in terms of my substantive attention, maintained a focus on South Asia, just a narrow look at a target set

within Kor al-Qaeda that we were concerned, definitely historically, and potentially currently at the moment was looking for, you know, opportunities for dirty bombs, looking at, you know, biological weapons, anything. And so I did that for a year. Small team, really, really, really capable team.

We got quite a bit done in that time. I was very, very proud of the team and what we were able to accomplish. Yeah. And then you're back to Afghanistan. stand. Chief of base assignment 2008, 2009. Yep, Chief of Base assignment.

That was, it's hard to, it's hard to, I have a hard time saying like when somebody asked me, hey, what was your favorite tour? So I've got a bunch. And this was definitely one of them because of, because of the scope of work we had to do, the caliber of the officers we had on the team. the capabilities we had. And for my own, for my own,

you know, sort of, um, development, like this was my fifth year in theater on the ground. And I feel like now I'm like sort of at the end, getting towards the end of my PhD at this point in,

in Al Qaeda in South Asia. So it was, um, we did, I think we did masterful work there. It's, it's, you know,

our location was, very proximate to the tribal areas which allowed us incredible range of access so that really informed all of our human operations we yeah it was it was a wonderful tour

I mean when you say it was a wonderful tour I mean I have to imagine in my mind's eye do you mean it was very gratifying to see like the intelligence operations actually leading to something with the paramilitary operations like you sort of like saw in real time the results of the collection efforts that you guys were making. Absolutely. 100%. That's exactly it. I wish I could get into detail about the things that we did

during that time. And also other sister bases around the way and the collaboration we were able to do with some locations, you know, the synchronicity cross-border. Because again, we're getting better at this thing. You know, there's, you know, there's all these battles that go on over the the course of the first 10 years, these internal battles, right? So you have, you know, Title 10 versus Title 50 conceptually. You've got, you know, agency versus FBI, but that quickly resolved itself. You've got agency DOD. You've got all of us in Pakistan against all of us in Afghanistan. And everyone's saying, like, why are you this? Why are you that? Blood is on your hands. How can you work with them kind of things? You have all these sort of intersection points constantly happening.

and I think during my time between 2008 and 2009, I feel like we had not resolved them all, but I think we have moved them into an incredibly manageable place and we were working collaboratively with the people we needed to work collaboratively. And the results that we came from it is what we should have been getting all along. How were you seeing the target set evolve? Obviously, like when we went into Afghanistan, it was to remove al-Qaeda, which we did fairly quickly.

And then we have Taliban, we have Haqqani Network, you know, guys like, oh, it'll come to me, Sangin, and people like this. Like we have these players. Was the target list, in your opinion, was it expanding? Was it expanding appropriately? Were we sort of losing the, like losing the plot? Yeah. Oh, that's a great question. So because I think the units that I was part of, we maintained focus on Al Qaeda, but there were other units. So again, we would start to expand our target set, but we always staffed it with personnel. So for example, on the interagency targeting team that I led, you know, we went from, you know, single digits. of people, which were largely just agency targeters, you know, when we first stood it up, like,

literally like day one to, you know, like five times that size and incredible interagency footprint. Some agencies had five different people from their, you know, their subject matter experts on the team at any given time. And some of them were experts in al-Qaeda, some of them were experts in Taliban. Some of them were experts in al-Qaeda's external operations specifically, so kind of looking globally. So it was really getting down in that weeds and building out the teams. I think, yes, our mission expanded,

but I don't think this was mission creep. I think as we further understood the enemy we're facing, we're building out the teams underneath it to specialize in it. I would say without dilution, like certainly from this targeting team standpoint, we weren't diluting the team at all.

We just were working more hours and trying to just get all the messages out. I had this, I was thinking about all these different anecdotes before this call and one, you guys triggered for me and I'm thinking of it now. I remember when I was sitting on this targeting team, we would just have unbelievable amounts of cables coming at us with requests to do all kinds of things, pass liaison information, ask them to do things, you name it. And I had a phone call one morning from a chief station, which, which is odd that a chief would call me.

That's probably bad form. They probably should have called our chief, but called me. And they were from a fairly decent-sized European station. And they're like, hey, we sent you an immediate yesterday, and we haven't received any response yet. And I was like, I know. I'm looking at my list right now,

and I've got 25 immediates from yesterday. And all due respect, the thing you ask for is the least important of them all. And we're going to get to it. But it's just we have to do this like this. That's the kind of environment you have. So yeah, I mean, maybe there is a little bit of what the mission creep starts to pull up the resource. But you get to a point where you're sort of like inundated like that.

And then it, you don't like if the workload tripled, you wouldn't know it. You know what I mean? Because it still feels the same. Because you're at that sort of tipping point. So we're already there. So let's, I'd like to jump forward to August. of 2011 when you took another chief of base position in Benghazi, Libya. And so this is a little bit before the infamous attack that everybody knows about at this point.

But since you were there beforehand, I'd really like to hear your perspective. That became very controversial in the aftermath. So like any sort of primary source material, you know, is really important to help flesh that out. So there was one big takeaway from my time there that there's, you know, I don't know what the solution is to this. We were talking with a lot of people. You know, you're meeting people out on in, in that part of the country, it's really the rebellious part. Like these are the people that are always anti-Kaddafi. So, you know, people are very willing to meet with us.

You know, civil society, you know, aspiring. Politicos or want to like get their big seat at the table once the dust settles. But when you're moving around, you start seeing the militias. So the militias control neighborhoods, big neighborhoods, small neighborhoods. And it's like just gangs, right? All over the place, young people. And you start talking to them, you get to know them. And there was this undercurrent, this interesting undercurrent.

And it goes like this. there was discussion sort of at the political government to government in the press space level of where is the line in society, sorry, where is the line through Gaddafi's system where everyone above the line has to be prosecuted and certainly can't keep their job. But below the line, people can keep their job because we need to make sure the water's running, the T-com's working, you name it. And when you talk to these young people, they were very well aware of that conversation. And all of them were like, there's no line.

We're going to kill all of them. And that was remarkable. And probably my biggest takeaway from that time period is like, and look at what's sort of come. And we already knew that from Iraq, though. We already knew that like the debathification. ruined any chance of maintaining the societal norms that they already had or the infrastructure. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, how do you think that situation played into the run-up to the attack on the temporary mission facility in Benghazi the next year?

I think, you know, it's, there was no. If there was order, it was that chaotic order of neighborhood by neighborhood. So, like, there really wasn't order. This is, you know, it looks like a city, but it's not a coherent thing. So, you know, in retrospect, you know, more defendable locations, more defensible locations. I because you how do you start to disarm

people right in an environment like that I have no idea I mean these are people that have been abused too for decades you know their their families

you know there are generations before them abused I don't know I don't know do you do you know why we we kind of flipped on Goddafi because we sort of didn't the U.S. basically tell Gaddafi,

hey, you need you X, Y, and Z to get off our shit list. And he did X, Y, and Z and thought, I thought he was good. And then we just kind of like, I don't want to say it was overnight, but we did have a real shift in our behavior towards him. Yeah, I don't know specifically what happened behind the scenes with, with his relationship with, you know, everyone who had cut those deals with him. but you also you know you remember this is happening amid the Arab Spring so it's I mean I don't know that we go to his I don't think there's any scenario where people just go to his defense because the

people are rising I just can't see the right I get it you know we I mean we unfriended him on Facebook at a certain point yeah he unfriended him indeed yeah and then he was alive uh So, oh, so right also around this time period was the bin Laden raid. I'd love to like probe your experiences for like kind of where you were when that happened and what the aftermath was having so much experience in the region. Yeah, so when the rate itself happened, I mean, I was the chief of operations for our department in the counterterrorism center that's covering South Asia. So this, this theater. So I was very much involved in this for, the entire time, all the planning. So, you know, when it went down, I was in our office spaces. We had

all these like operation centers set up in numerous locations for different purposes down at the White House, up on the seventh floor, in a couple of different field locations, all communicating with each other at the same time all the raid was sort of underway. And so I was in charge in our main vault with the large, large gaggle of people that were there contributing in various ways. Any interesting anecdotes or insights you want to bring up from that period of time? You know, well, I mentioned to you before I'm a friend with Aaron Brown, and I did watch his interview with you guys. He does a really good job of talking through, you know, his role was sort of as an executive assistant to the department chief,

which was really great, you know, because I, I, you know, the department chief is, it was a tremendous guy, great, great friend and mentor. I would say he came into my office at one point. I don't remember exactly when this was, maybe, let's say, a month, two months before the raid, maybe even three months for the raid. And he said,

so I need you to do something. I need you to basically run the department. And I'm going to just focus on the bin Laden stuff, basically. And I'm very much like, to me, the answer is always yes. When you're asked by someone senior to do stuff. And if it's, you know, if your plate's full, you're going to be working harder. You're going to figure it out.

And he said, I need you to run the department and I'm going to focus on the bin Laden when I said, absolutely not. I said, I've been on this issue for the entire time and I can do both. And he took it. But I was like, it's like, this is what I'm like. I felt weird about it, but I'm like, absolutely not. Right.

So the next thing coming at you is the Syria or. Iraq Department at CTC. And so now we're getting into that like 2012, 2013. I mean, again, you're hitting it just at that time as everything is coming undone in this part of the world. Truly. And so you have, you know, ISIS is becoming a really global problem during this tenure.

They are, you know, how do I characterize this is, we are having incredible engagement with partner services everywhere. Why? Their citizens are doing one of three things. They're making it to Syria and fighting. They're getting almost all the way there, let's say Turkey, and getting turned around,

or they're at home in whatever country agitating online, in public, and talking about and basically self-radicalizing. So everyone is recognizing you have this global cancer growing rapidly that's metastasized in Syria. And the challenge is from a policy standpoint, you know, through much of this period, it was a collection target. There wasn't a lot of operations done,

like I'm saying, like kinetic, anything to sort of address it from a Title 50 standpoint, because there were other ongoing equities. You know, there's lots of discussions about, you know, what are we doing with Assad? What's Assad doing? You know, who's fighting him? Do they need help? All that, all of that. You know, that's, you know, you think we can do multiple things, complex things at once, and we can, but sometimes things take a sort of backseat. And I, you know, I would say that, you know, during those two years, it was hard. It was certainly hard for my team, too.

You're sort of, you're telling the story, right? Collecting and telling the story of this cancer that's growing rapidly. It was frustrating. It was tough. I mean, you know, we did fantastic work at a collection standpoint, but, and we certainly explored, you know, there was, And particularly in the second year, there was a lot more discussion about, okay, there's going to come a time that we need to actually start taking action. What does that look like? And there was a lot of good collaborative discussion in the interagency on that, certainly in my second year, looking at what resources we can bring to bear on things. Because what you had was, you know, it's funny. You know, Coral Qaeda stayed with me, you know, the PAC Afghan guys. You know, they had some nodes in Libya. Now they had a node in Syria. By node, I mean like they had guys who traveled from that theater.

You know, and in the case of Syria, sort of now plotting from Syria. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression at the time was that there was to some extent conflicting missions, that DOD's mission was the counter ISIS, but CIA's mission was Assad's got to go. Yeah, but, you know, I mean, I didn't have that account, but I was certainly, you know, attended many, many meetings as a backbencher on that topic. And it's,

the question is how, right? Like, you know, we have this, but you, you, you,

how do you even describe this? It's like, there's not nice ways to do it. Right. And it's a really hard thing to do. So like, if you're going to do it, you got to do it.

Yeah. And if you're trying to sort of come up with an elegant way to do it, you're not going to come up with an elegant way to do it. You're just going to come up with an elegant way to do it. You're just going to do it. they'd talk about it. And time's going to go by. And then, you know, the Russians jump in or whatever.

You know, others jump in and just stir it up in a way that you're like, okay, now we lost a window of time. That's the question that Aaron may have mentioned it. David McCloskey certainly mentioned it when we had him on the show that there's maybe a certain window when we could have acted, but it closed. So I have this thing. I mean, I don't have this thing. This is a thing that's collective

with a bunch of others I've worked with, including in the PAC-Afghan space, is like, you know, you have these sort of, like, principles that you filter your thoughts through, particularly in a crisis. You know, you have a crisis situation or an urgent situation.

So, like, whither Assad is an urgent conversation, right? So the principles are like, you know, know that time matters, matters. Don't self-limit. And, you know, the cost of an action are always bigger than you can possibly calculate. You know, these sort of thoughts, they're very simple. And you guys have applied them in other settings, I'm sure, many times. But they're kind of easy guidelines. You're like, all right, you want to do something about Assad. Then we're going to tell you how to do it. And it's, it's not pretty.

It's not pretty. Let's not put limits on this. Like if he's a problem and we're going to do this, like let's do this. It doesn't make sense. And then if you're like, well, let's keep thinking and we can come up with a better idea. And then all that time is going by.

And like then the conditions and the fact pattern changes. And so this is like a feature. And it relates to me to our Ukraine policy is, you know, I kind of characterize it sometimes as like multiple days late and multiple dollars short. the whole time. The targets are no longer valid because too much time has passed.

Right. You know, we're just late, we're late to these, these hard decisions because we want them, we want them our way somehow. Like some, like somehow we, we have this control. You know, what a Churchill, was it Churchill said? It's like, you can always count on the United States to do the right thing after they've tried everything else. Really amazing phrase, right?

like that to me like when I look at Ukraine it's like we're doing the right thing we're just doing it six months later than we should in each instance out of curiosity because obviously i mean Tito died of natural cause but we saw what happened to Yugoslavia when Tito died or not that you know Tito died like we didn't take him out but we saw what happened to Yugoslavia then we take out Saddam who is another I would say horrible horrible human being but also secular and not religious, you know, only religious to the point that it gets him clout. And we see what happens in Iraq. Like when we look at a leader like Assad and we say we want to take him out,

what is the discussion about, okay, what happens the day after we take him out? And who, like every idea, like every time we've taken a leader out, it hasn't gone well after that. Is there a point when we say maybe regime change is not the best, maybe we suck at it? Yeah. I mean, I think that's a, look, that that's a fair position to come to and that might be why we deliberate so long. There may be a reason why we're deliberating so long on these is because they aren't simple. Yeah. And because those plans, those day after plans are not easy to make. Right. And certainly not easy to dictate. Right. Right. So, you know, there's, there's a track record that have as a country that probably is informing this, this, this, you know, this mindset,

that's this kind of pausing mindset. Right. It's a good point. It's a really good point. Yeah, it's just curious. And then so when, you know, like Jack had mentioned, you know, you have this DOD mission against ISIS and you have this sort of agency mission against Assad. And obviously a lot of the people who are registering up to fight Assad.

we don't know who they are. Like how does how does that look from sort of an intelligence perspective when, yeah, when you're not quite sure who these guys that are rogering up are? This is a fantastic question and it's very, very uncomfortable, right? Your first thought is, okay, well, there's groups fighting the Syrians. Who are they? let's see who we can meet and make assessments. And that's a process and that's difficult and it takes time.

And while you're doing it, we're then looking at the data and you're looking at these people and you're looking for their networks and you're analyzing it. And over time, you're discovering derogatory aspects of concern. And this stuff is not happening. That whole cycle doesn't happen over a course of a week. That whole cycle might come over four months, five months, six months. Right. And you're like, all right, the leaders.

of this group is, you know, linked up with this other group and this other group is just declared their allegiance to al-Qaeda and Syria. And I don't know what we should do with that, but we have a problem because that first group is assessed right now to be our best option. Right. Now way. Now what. And that's the kind of stuff that happens. And you're like, this is hard even inside the building, inside the agency when you're like going and talking to your colleagues because everyone's busy everyone's working their ass off on an incredibly complex problem and everyone's stressed and you're going to come and be like hey your baby's not just ugly like it's really really ugly and yeah it's a hard way to know your relationships that you have

when you walk into those conversations matter how much you've been collaborating with that office before you get there matters and also taking it to them before you sort of shoot it up the flagpole because there's certainly there's no shortage of people somewhere that are like, oh, I'm going to use that to like, you know, go after that one person who kind of screwed me over this is going to make them look bad, you know, whatever, whatever. Like try to like do the things, you know, do it as professional, do it the right way. But at the still, when you do it right, it's still incredibly bad news because these guys, you know, if you're working on the Syria task force that's not, you know, not where I was, Syria Rock

department, like you're not the CT part, but this other part. Yeah, I mean, it's an incredibly difficult problem. Yeah. Particularly with all the bits that are placed on you. And then, you know, now we're coming at you saying, okay, that one thing you finally figured out is actually a terrible idea. Yeah. And it's tough because, you know, like talking to Jack Devine and some of the other guys

who were involved in covert actions when it was against communism, you know, sometimes we sided with guys that may, that we didn't want to be neighbors with because they were the anti-communist forces in the area. I think that's reflected in the stutter stepping that the Obama administration made, you know, that you can see, like the guys that I talked to who are kind of like more on the ground in Jordan and Turkey and Iraq, it was very much like these operations, advisory missions, training, et cetera, it was getting turned on and off, almost on a daily basis. And I have to believe that was because of some trepidation that was happening up at the national security council level. Yeah, I watched, actually I watched that bit with Jack Devine

too. And there were some really interesting points he raised in there about like sort of where, you know, sometimes where the decision making lies, you know, and when you have decisions being, when those kinds of decisions are being managed at the National Security Council level, it's really hard to do, it's really hard to do the work. It's unique when you have, you know, the stars line up and you have someone like Leon Panetta, who, who has enough respect and clout across the administration and even with like the Congress, that a lot would, you know, during his tenure was delegated to him in terms of authority to do things that in other iterations would be sort of held at the National Security Council level.

And, you know, what happens when someone like Panetta, you know, and I would say like during the course of my career, you know, Tenet, Hayden, Panetta, and even Burns had this kind of kind of juice, then they could internally delegate, you know, authority to, you know, director CTC for something as long, you know, there's like always informing, you know, like Panetta will always know what's going on and it's getting briefed along the way, but, you know, those kind of scenarios are much, much better. But when you're in what you just described and that sort of like, that fits and start era of like, I call it the Wither Assad era, you know, of the later Obama years, there's a lot of kind of policy this, you know, sort of

let's keep. Right. And what happens is the scenarios and the situations don't get better. Indeed, they get worse. They get more complicated. And so what happens is, you know, we might have a situation and say, okay, well, someone should write a paper that sort of characterizes this one issue so we understand it. Right.

And then the paper gets written. It may take six days. may take eight days. Another policy meeting happens. It's briefed. But in those eight days, something on the ground has changed. And now someone's like, yeah, but what about that thing that just happened Tuesday? All right, well, let's, you know, I'm being facetious, but it's like, let's task another paper and like, see, well, you know, what are the implications of this? And you see this stuff rolling. What happens is decisions don't get made. And then the problem gets worse. And, you know, we've seen that on a range.

of really, you know, difficult topics. It's not just Syria. It's, you know, it's Afghanistan. It's Ukraine. It's, it was Libya. Like, these are, I'm not saying these things are easy, but, you know. Yeah. Your job in those positions is to make very hard decisions with incomplete information.

And not just risk, not just risk mitigate into infinity. Correct. Yeah. I could pick your brains about Syria all day. I'm going to, I'm going to try to hold my. myself back a little bit because I want to jump in. I want to make sure we have some time to talk about Ukraine because your next assignment was to Kiev, where you ended up working as the active chief station even for a little bit. In the, geez, what are we talking about now?

2013, 2014? 14, 15. Uh-huh. Okay. So you're there when the Russians start making these encroachments, the little green men and all of that starts happening. When that stuff happened, I wasn't there. I got there a little after that in the fall when I first arrived. Yeah, so looking at it through an American prism, which is never the right thing to do. But it was kind of, to me, it was like their 9-11 moment. In meeting with our partners, you know, what you see is people who are working incredible hours

and trying to turn over every single rock that they could to try to figure out how to, you know, understand the threat, disrupt, you know, Russians operating on Ukrainian soil to include, you know, in the capital in other cities, assassination teams, you name it, build out partnerships, bolster partnerships, and just get support. And it was incredibly, you know, incredibly,

I would say inspiring for me because it reminded me of us sort of after 9-11 to sort of people rolling up their sleeves and just going where the work was needed and getting it done. The Ukrainians have an incredible fighting spirit. And to me, like they're almost like a like a Nouveau Mossad in some respect. I really think that whenever this thing ends, so for example, when this thing ends, those who've been identified as having committed various atrocities like the Ukrainians are going to hunt them all down

like that's that's coming and it may take 20 years or whatever but that's going to be a feature of the future without question from my experience. They are incredibly capable and but that didn't come out of nowhere

I mean 2024 Ukraine is not 2014 Ukraine no it's not no it's not But over time, they've been battle tested. I mean, they've got, and they were, you know, it's small units, you know, in that time period, 14, 15, 16. I mean, there's lots of militia units at the time. You know, you have these, you know, oligarchs who might be from like Nipro Petrosk or something. And that's like their territory or whatever. And they've got militia groups and they're a little worried.

They're not like on team Poroshenko at the time. but they're definitely not on Team Putin because Team Putin wants all their stuff. And whether it's mines or some car factory or all the farmland or whatever. So they send their militia groups to fight. So you have, you know, spets notts units that are small, but very capable in different services. You've got militia groups and you've got people just like fighting as hard as hard. hard as they can. And yeah, very different from what it is in 2022 when the, when the full invasion starts. But they built it up over time. And, you know, thankfully, you know,

thankfully it wasn't, you know, sooner that the full invasion came. Excuse me. Could you tell us a little bit more about like that buildup? Like I want to just to cut to the point and ask you the question straight up. I'm very interesting. I'm very interesting. to ask about like that CIA Ukraine relationship and how that developed you know 2013 2014 and how that sort of expanded as time went on

yeah it's a fantastic article by Adam Entus in the New York Times from about February hey Ed I'd like to interject here there's a fantastic article written by Jack Murphy in December of

23. It's a controversial. It's a big controversial, but it talks all about the CIA and the J-Soc involvement in the Ukraine sabotage. Check that one out. Oh, okay, okay.

Yeah, I'll definitely look that up. Thank you. Thank you, Dee. Yeah, I mean, what I can say is you know, this this relationship has been growing, you know,

since the beginning. beginning. We on our side invested a lot of resources into understanding all the capabilities and opportunities that the Ukrainians presented. Not surprisingly, you know, others like Defense Adashe and others are like, hey, there's other opportunities here. We need to be pushing on that too. But I would say that we sort of kicked open the door on the Ukrainians kicked open the door and said let's let's let's figure this out on how to partner with them and it's been you know i would say just a steady increase in in creating a really special you know relationship and um like i said we needed that time i think we needed that time before 2022 so that we were in the best possible

position for that because if if 2022 happened in 2016 we would have been i don't think the same scenario plays out at all there there there was and is like this sort of like like gradualism taking place. Like, for instance, the jatholin missiles, which were much harped upon during the invasion, my understanding was that those got approved at the tail end of the Obama administration to be shipped to Ukraine and arrived during the early Trump administration. Like, like, this stuff happened kind of slowly, didn't it? Well, so look, now we have a full-on war happening in there,

and you have all this incrementalism that's happening just since February of 2020 in terms of our support, which is much faster than the sort of incrementalism that took place between 15 and 22, but it's wholly inadequate still. You know, we're not exploiting Putin's vulnerabilities. You know, he's not, I mean, he can't handle the pressure.

Like, we need to be putting extreme pressure on him. I mean, you know, happened in Kurson, what happened in Harkiv, what's happening now in Kursk. I mean, these are blows to his whole narrative. These are blows to all the narrative that's been preceded for the last decade. You know, this is almost an emperor has no close moment with Kersk. I mean, let's see what it's a little too early to, I think, to make a real assessment of what it means and what its value is, but I think it's exposing a couple of things. It's exposing, you know, the myth of Putin's military. Paper tiger. It's, it's undermining his political cohesion. It's, it's challenging our

own policy assumptions without question. And that's important because, again, this incrementalism on our side isn't serving, isn't serving the end game that is needed here. I mean, I think, I think we really need to be ramping up our support. And there's a wide array of things we can be doing better and faster. I'm going to come back to that for sure, Ed. I want to go back to 2014 real quick, if you don't mind. You know, like, obviously the CIA is not operating without the president's authority. So the administration did care, but we didn't see any real action on the part of the administration or at least any outspoken support.

But the administration was still, do you know sort of what that balance was for them at the time? Yeah, I think so I think what you have is people on the ground. So Ambassador Paiet was the ambassador at the time. And he was an incredible and still is an incredible champion for the Ukrainians. And I'm talking 14 and 15. He was, you know, like, you know, the battle Mariupil ends. And he's like, I want to go there tomorrow. You know, he's making the RSO.

apoplectic. He's like, we need to be there tomorrow because I want to tweet from there. You know, like this guy was like incredible advocate. He was sort of meeting with every single official that he could and pushing out, you know, so many messages a day saying like, keeping Washington apprised on what's going on. And what happens in these scenarios is he's he's probably like the most informed policymaker so to speak in the whole architecture at that point and everyone else has to catch up and of course you know they're busy with a range of other things and including like you know incrementally thinking about a range of other problems and sort of jammed up in those policy processes so there's only so much bandwidth um that gets into

this space and think about the time and all the other issues that are going on because you've got Syria. You've got Libya. You've still got questions in Afghanistan. Are we drawing down? Are we not? There's all this stuff. So now you've got this other thing thrown on the top. And the policy

decisions move at a pace that kind of look like all the other issues. And they're moving at the same slow pace. It's frustrating. But you know, you're always when you're on the ground in a place, you're seeing it closer than anybody and you're probably going to have the loudest voice

and you're going to be the most frustrated about what's needed. You have to temper that too. You have to temper that, you know, because you want to be heard. I definitely want to return to this sort of a larger conversation about Ukraine, but just following somewhat in chronological order, I want to talk about your chief of station position

that you took in southern Africa. Another kind of change of pace for you, it sounds like. Yeah, I mean, as I said, you know, I was selected by Africa Division when I finished training, so now I finally get to the terrain, the turf that is under their domain 15 years later. And what an interesting experience. You know, there are so many countries in Southern Africa that, you know, were on the other side during the Cold War, and they were battlegrounds. And you still feel it.

I was almost just going to say you like you feel the remnants of it, but it's more than remnants. It's still there. It's still visceral in a lot of ways because you have leadership figures in the government and the state-owned enterprises who, you know, were fighting, you know, from outside their country back into their country, you know, and trained by the Cubans and the Russians. And so these are like individuals who lost brothers and arms. And now they're like running these countries and they're running like not just, I'm not just talking about a president, like a, you know, president of country. I'm saying the entire architecture is full of people who, you know, in many ways they're going to look at us. They're like, you know, we really don't have a relationship with you. Like you're not, you're not our friends and you're not going to be our friend.

And it's hard. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's hard. Because the history, like I said, the history is history for us, but it's not history for them. And at the same time, you know, you see these countries that are, have all this opportunity. And, you know, you wish we could have a good relationship with them. You know, I, you know, I saw this a couple of times where it's sort of the policy swirl would be, you know, if we could just, from a policy standpoint, build a bridge and make a better, you know, get a better relationship going with some of these countries, you know, coalitions could be built to address, you know, African problems with African solutions. And, you know, that's the right mindset, but the relationships, I think, are going to be fractured until people die off in some cases.

What do you think that that disconnect is? Is that some sort of discontent about the post-colonial moment in Southern Africa or, like, where does that come from? It's, you know, the colonial aspect is a piece of it, but I think the Cold War stuff is pretty, acute you know you look at um you look at a apartheid in south africa you know we once the wall fell i think you start seeing our government get suddenly vocal about apartheid being bad it looks very opportunistic you know to those who are there they say okay apartheid was fine when it served the cold war purpose but now the cold war is over and apartheid's bad and you want credit for saving the day, not just changing this status quo,

but it's like, you know, you almost want, you know, that's the thing. I get you. So there's a, there's a credibility challenge that we face. You know, I, you know, I've had interactions with individuals, limited interactions, because again, like I said, they don't necessarily want to have a relationship with us. You know, with finger wags in your face while you're meeting with them and they're bringing up stuff from the 70s and 80s, some flap. And it's very important.

But again, it's like, you're going like, I don't even know what you're talking about. Or you do. And you're like, that was literally 30 years ago. And, you know, I'm sitting here with, you know, just to come back to a counterterrorism context, I'm like, I've got a packet of information that's really good about ISIS nodes in your country. We want to work with you on this. We're really good at this.

like they'll take the information but then you know it's crickets you know you don't hear anything do do you feel that any of that is performative in the sense of i don't know we see the chinese kind of moving in there now with money and infrastructure and i think china is going to learn their lessons that you can't fund countries forever but but but they're moving in there that some of that as performative because they want a bigger payday for whoever's running the country at that point in time. Like taking bribes or what do you mean?

Yeah, it doesn't have to be bribed because in a lot of countries, yeah, in a lot of countries like that, anything you give the government is a bribe because we can't really try where the money goes. So it doesn't have to be a bribe in the way we see it. Right, it could be a structural thing. Yeah, I mean, you know, the Chinese obviously, you know, have that whole predatory style with their loans and infrastructure.

And I agree with you. Like that that can't endure. Right. Like there's there's going to be wins they get out of it, but that can't endure as a strategy. It just doesn't make sense to me. But, you know, you sort of have this this kind of mantra of like it's my time. turn to eat. So you have people on the top of the pyramid. And then, you know, the Chinese come in and then these things start

happen like you just said. I mean, it's it's still going to happen because of that, just because of that, because someone's going to get their turn. Yeah. And that's a huge challenge. I mean, like we, you know, we can and we do, we can and we do sort of brief these partners on like, look, this is what's coming. We can help you understand it. We recommend you try. to understand it yourselves, like, again, looking at the small print and all those things. But, you know, we have to be willing, this is the hard part, we have to be willing to come in with something a deliverable. So when we go into a country and say, you know, a small country

and say, look, you're loading up your infrastructure with Huawei racks for your T-com. and you really need to not like you need to understand the the mistake you're making and you know i've been in a conversation like this with a with a leader of a country who looks back and you know i was she was talking with the ambassador and said look you know semen racks are expensive um and you're not helping you're like okay that actually makes a lot of sense you know like if we really have a problem with you know china sort of of expanding and all the things that are going to come with, you know, not just the predatory loans, but like them putting in their surveillance state, you know, everywhere, kind of got

to put our money where our mouth is too. And it's not easy, but you got to, again, you got to prioritize these things. Like, that to me is, you know, we need to listen when partners say something like that because that's not going to win you their friendship, but it's going to win you credibility. You know, you say, okay, cool, here's what we're going to do. Give us the rack. we're going to help you get this one. So the next step after southern Africa is Cyprus for you. Two years during when this is around the time frame that Russia is straight up invading Ukraine. Yeah.

Yeah, what an interesting thing to watch Europe coalesce. And, you know, again, somewhat late, someone late decisions that probably would have been much better made a lot sooner. But you see countries, you know, coming together on sanctions regimes. And this is crucial. And, you know, in a place like Cyprus, you have an incredible amount of banking. Cyprus is like one of those gateways into the EU. and certainly for money. And if you look at the island, there's an enormous Russian presence.

So, I mean, tens and tens of thousands of Russians. I forget it was how many tens before the invasion, and then it like tripled. And, you know, just an abundance of, you know, for us, you say like, you know, targets, but like it's an abundance of concerns. You know, it's potentially an operating platform. not just financially, but for personnel, because there was that whole citizenship by investment program for a period of years.

And you won't be surprised to know the types of people who buy citizenship that's very expensive. It's going to be, tend to be people that are our adversaries, and in bulk. So Cyprus becomes a really important hub for ensuring stuff that Russia relies on typically isn't there for them to rely on. So it's not just a place to keep their money.

It's shell companies. It's, again, it's entree into Europe itself. So suddenly that starts to close up. And, you know, I give incredible credit to them for making these decisions on their own doing the right thing. They are a complex. It's a small country that's incredibly complex. has a complex history. I mean, it's, it's, it's occupied. It's, it's, it's almost always has been. I mean, it was a British colony up until 1960. If you look at it, you know, 2,000 years ago, it's in

dispute. In 3,000 years ago, it's in dispute. I mean, this is a, it's in dispute today. Yeah, it's, it's, it's an interesting place with some, you know, very passionate, very intelligent, very proud people. Um, and also capable. And, um, yeah, I'm, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's an interesting, I'm very, very thankful. I didn't expect to end up there. And that was a real blessing. I really enjoyed my time there in the relationships that we had and that I've kept. You know, there's some, I've got some good friends there. But again, you know, looking at it from the optic of Russia's invasion, full invasion of Ukraine, you know, a lot played out there.

Because there's also a Ukrainian diaspora there that's sizable. So there was a lot of tension on the island. There's a lot going on there. There's already a lot of tension, as you know, from even going back to the Syria days, Cyprus is right across the Met. Like, it's very close. It's a first stop for a lot of Syrians. And a lot of Syrians end up staying.

So there's like a really taxed infrastructure on island as is. And then there was this huge influx of Russians and Ukrainians. And it's a wild place. In 2022, you're. back in Kiev. Very different scenario than the first time you showed up there. Let's talk a little bit about

how things had changed from your first tour over there to this time. You know, their government is pretty vast, you know, in terms of, you know, like their Ministry of Interior, you know, is 100, more than 100,000 people

and various, and lots of different subunits. border guards you name it um i would say that you know we we have an incredibly broad set of relationships um that's just things i didn't even know existed when i was there before like you know what i'm saying um like programs and so programs and unit you know there's intelligence units there's collection units there's you know cyber teams you name it like there's so so so much and what that shows me is it's just how much the relationship continued to grow over the years including when i wasn't there um and and just how important a partnership this is and people you know i think people still don't totally understand like this is a special relationship um and uh and we really need to we need to

to make it survive this thing. And I mean, I have to ask not to put you on the spot too much, but just today, I believe it was the economist quoted President Zelensky saying that we kept the West in the dark about our invasion of Kursk. They're in the dark. They knew nothing. So there's something here that doesn't quite jive for me on a level that, We have this hand-in-glove relationship.

But you're also kept in the dark about busting across an international border and invading a nuclear power. Yeah. So this one's not too shocking to me. So I'll tell you what I think. And you've seen numerous instances over the course of this invasion

where Ukrainians are constantly, contemplating something and you'll see an article that says all the the white house or national security council asked them not to do it to hold them to stand down and even in some instances like you're going to undermine our ability to keep subpromp applying you if you do X. There's been numerous instances of that and that's problematic and you got to imagine how this works you know when they share with us an idea that they have. You know, it doesn't, it doesn't just sit. I mean, it's going to be discussed. It's going to be written up. It's going to go back. People back home are going to talk about it. And then that's when the, that's when the, this happens. We do here. So now imagine what we're talking about here.

Can you imagine any scenario where that's communicated back and the answer is, cool. No, the answer is going to be someone get into the office of the president right now and tell him absolutely not. And Zelensky knows this. And he respects us, but he also understands that this is the reality. And again, you know, this incursion happens. And of course, like, it had to leave a mark in advance of it. So somebody had to see that there was some kind of buildup. And maybe there was something being discussed.

that was picked up in signals, who knows. But you also see, and this is very much like, you know, par for the course between both the Russians and the Ukrainians, you know, bluffs, feints, make things look like they're actually going to happen. You know, so I don't know, but I can envision people looking at this and saying, okay, look, there's a small buildup. I don't know if they're just trying to draw, make it look like they're going to go across and try to draw troops from Donetsk to reinforce over here.

I could see someone making that mistake and thinking that this was a faint of some sort. I don't know. I mean, this is a tough one. If you're the CIA Chief of Station and you learn about this invasion into Russia from CNN, isn't that like profoundly shameful and embarrassing? In the moment, yes, but you should get over it. I think because if you've been there, look, I'm not there anymore, so I can say it. Like, it's also frustrating when, you know, the machine comes in and says, tell them to knock X off.

You're like, they should be doing X and more of X. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But it's also, I'm sure Zelensky also feels betrayed by the fact that not only does the administration say no, but that it's in the New York Times the next day. Like the right way to wage an information war or information war against Russia right now is to tell the government that they're going to do something because it'll get out to the press immediately. Well, let's.

Yeah, this is the problem, right? Go ahead. No, no, finish your thought, please. I said, I think this is a, you know, this is a real problem. And it's like it's developed over time, you know, and it's, uh, what happens is there's acrimony, you know, um, you know, basically what will happen is like, false valuations will get put on something, you know, if something doesn't go right. You know, this is a recipe, this is a recipe for acrimony in unhelpful ways. And we are here because the Ukrainians have been very aggressive and have proposed a wide

array of very aggressive things fully understandably because they're literally fighting an existential fight. You know, we always, you know, made the mistake post-night like, oh, this is an existential fight. You're like, it never was an existential fight, but like we talked that way early on. Didn't know, you know, what we meant. This is an existential fight for Ukraine. It's very clear. So they're proposing a wide array of extremely aggressive things. And because of that history with us, eight years preceding the full invasion, they're going to come to us and be like, hey, we want to do X in another country. And then they're like, you know, we get these, you know, you get an instruction and says, tell them absolutely not.

It's not much you can do about that, you know. Again, this has all been, you know, written. But you would think, I mean, when the Battle of Marlwee was happening in the Philippines, and we withdrew weapons shipments to the Philippines over the extrajudicial killings that the Duterte regime was doing at the time. Like, there are actual legal obligations that they're. the Central Intelligence Agency has about commanding control. You can't just train people and give them bombs and be like, oh, okay, well, you know, we didn't, we didn't know.

So it's very interesting to see this dichotomy between how we treat certain countries, but Ukraine gets, so they blow us off. They blow off all the things we're telling them, and it's okay, and we just let them get away with it. We don't withdraw our ambassador. we don't we don't stop weapons shipments it's all like like is that a de facto permission slip you're giving them a hall pass i think it is in this instance i think it is um that's a really good question i think it is because you know now it's even more so because you saw people coming out

even including like the white house saying you know there's spokespeople saying no this is this is fine this is fine you know they're yeah yeah you don't even you don't you don't see Congress like the Armed Services Committee or Hipsy and Sissy like speaking out against it? Well, because you'll see guys like in Hipsy are like, we're not doing enough. I mean, you see that more on the hills that we're not doing enough. And, you know, to focus on that point, and we've talked about this on the show before, you know, earlier we mentioned the incrementalism that we saw, you know, from 2014, 2015 and on. and now with the full invasion happening in 22, you know, people who have been, people have been saying, hey, why don't they have Hi Mars?

Why aren't we like, why don't they have F-16s? And then we see the Biden administration shoot down like a potential NATO leader because he says he wants to train them in F-16s. And then it makes, it causes certain people to say, look, there are Americans, not this administration necessarily, but people who have been. power for a long time who see this as a way to bleed the Russians and we don't want to give the Ukrainians really the tools they need to really fight this and the way they need to fight it as long as as long as the Russians are bleeding. I mean, do you feel like there's anything to that or do you think that it's just a difference in priorities? I think it's a difference in risk assessment. I think I think it's a third thing. It's it's it's a misassessment of the risk.

And I think that the misassessment is informed by a decade of pre-greasing the narratives that Putin has done so well. Okay. Well, isn't it, it's also like the entire Cold War intelligence assessments and these concepts of escalatory theory that we've had that have all been kind of smashed in the last couple years. Correct. I agree. Great. Yeah. We take a quick break. Yeah, that be okay? Yeah, go for it.

yeah do your thing we'll we'll uh hey everybody so please join our patreon um just a few dollars a month can help keep us in the scots pay our rent uh link is down in the description yeah and uh next uh or i'm sorry this friday we'll have uh mike west well we have a show on wednesday right no no that's that's not for us oh okay okay uh mike west uh he served in the rhodesian special ops in south africans special operations he'll be on Friday and guys I appreciate it if you go and check out we defy

it's available for pre-sale on Amazon right now I had a hell of a lot of fun writing this book it's exhausting but it was a lot of fun so you've been a fan of this history and a student of this kind of history for a long time were there one or two things that you learned

that just blew your socks off when you're researching this or did you already know everything kind of no no I definitely did not know everything. Like, things that blew my socks off. I mean, I learned things about, like, the targets, the things that they were targeting with the Greenlight program, like parachute guys in with a backpack nuclear weapon. And so, like, the common thought, or I shouldn't say common because it's only published

in, like, some obscure books, but the thought out there was that it was about parachuting behind Soviet lines in Western Europe if they invaded and blowing up troop formations or ports or bridges or mountain passes. But there's actually, like, that program was much bigger. And there were targets in Central America. There were targets in Asia. Oh, interesting. And, oh, yeah, like choke points.

Yeah. It was very much about, like, turning off a large part of the world, if that ever happened. So it would have been, like, a Red Dawn scenario. Oh, kind of, kind of. It would definitely, I mean, if not, a Dr. Strangelove's scenario. Yeah. Ed, thank you, you know, for sharing these insights with us. I guess just to like wrap up that part of the conversation, you want to talk it all about kind of like, we've talked about the drips and the drabs and like very slowly warming up. I mean, I know the tap has been

kind of open on a lot of DOD and also Title 50 programs, but it still seems like we're taking like half steps in a lot of ways. In Ukraine? Towards Ukraine. Okay. Yeah. And I just wanted to like kind of probe your thoughts about like kind of where we're at today and where we need to be.

Right. Yeah. I mean, we're again, leaps and bounds ahead of where we were in 2015, 2016. But it's insufficient, you know, for the current fact matter. We should be giving. the Ukrainians, everything they possibly need and giving them the authority to fight, wherever they need to fight. Obviously, in third countries, that gets dicey and problematic, and that's a separate complexity, but certainly inside Russia. They've demonstrated repeatedly

that they're about nothing except the targets, you know, military targets. There may be one or two exceptions with sort of mouthpieces, propaganda mouthpieces. But everything they have struck has absolutely been, you know, done in a manner that tried to ensure, you know, no innocence were killed along the way. There's nothing like that happening with the Russians. I mean, in fact, almost all of their targets, particularly when they just launched the missiles and the shaheads every couple of nights or every night, they seem to be just sort of meant for terror. Like, let's, let's target civilian infrastructure. Obviously, the energy space, that's, you know, one can discuss whether that's a legitimate

target or not. It is in war to take out people's energy capability, sure. But a lot of what they do with the shaheads is aimed at just causing terror among the populations. So to me, you know, again, we, we are sort of self-limiting because of our risk assessment that, you know, whatever we determine is an escalation is, an escalation is bad and an escalation, whatever that is, equals nuclear response potentiality. There's a lot of leaps in that. And I think we're, you know, we've demonstrated that over the two years, the two plus years of this war that, I'm not clear that Putin has an escalation definition other than his rule is at risk, directly at risk.

The Ukrainians aren't doing anything to topple him. They are doing everything they can inside Russia to dismantle Russia's ability to strike Ukraine. So we need to be giving them everything they can to do that. And, you know, again, we've given them a lot of capabilities, but we've now said you can't use it for these projects. From your perspective, I mean, what additional capabilities should we give them? Should we give them ballistic missiles to strike deep inside Russia? Should we clear them to conduct assassinations with on Russian soil? I mean, like, where do you see that line existing?

That's a great question. I think that's ripe for, you know, a discussion. I think if, you know, if you're the president and you say, okay, what makes Putin pull out of the whole country? Like, what, how do we defeat him here? Not have Ukraine lose, you know, this sort of like passive statement. Yeah, let's skip to the end game. Right. there is going to be

in this instance there will be a covert action portion of this that needs to be an element if we decide this is the end game we want there's going to need to be a covert action portion of this for some of those things that you just discussed because they're going to be dicey

when they have to be managed in very certain ways right but we can do this we can do this we have the partner to do it. And the question's going to be, you know, what, you know, which stuff falls within the covert action space, which stuff is, you know, things that we say publicly, what things we're saying publicly, you know,

do they need to be completely accurate, you know, at this point? I mean, certain things, like you can't get away with like, hey, we're not going to give a certain weapon system and then that certain weapon system is used. I recognize that. But we seem to be telegraping every, in this, you know, the first two years of this world, we're telegraphing every single contribution down to the like penny.

Yeah. With descriptions. And it's like almost like getting credit for helping. You know, it's like you want to get public credit for this thing. So we're just going to keep on showing it. But it doesn't serve our needs. That doesn't serve Ukraine's needs. That certainly allows Putin to know exactly what's coming.

Right. So I think, you know, I think, Jack, your question is, your question is we need, we probably need a clear covert action program with the end state being Russia's defeat in Ukraine, complete defeat in Ukraine. And then we have to go work backwards from that and say, okay, what does that take and which parts need to stay within the covert action and which other parts are whole of government? Because we already have an ongoing set of whole of government activities. And then you need this sort of like addendum inside it doing certain things. and that can happen.

That can happen. It could happen in a new administration. Does that require the defeat of Putin's regime? I mean, does that have to be part of the program? I don't think so. I don't think so. Even if, you know, if, what do you think about this? I mean, if, if some, let's say, you know, the administration, you know,

the Biden administration finishes up and, and it's a Harris, administration and it's largely the same people in the policymaker decisions and it's sort of a continuation of what we're doing. Now, I don't see an easy scenario where at some point Russia backs out of occupied territories, but what's going to be diminished on them in terms of their personnel and material and what kind of effects is that going to have on their economy if we were like another two or three years into this, that would be a place of pretty significant devastation for Russia. Is there a way we can accelerate that?

What were the elements that get us to that point so we're not waiting three years? Right? And start working back from that. Do you see that as being primarily covert actions, sabotage, espionage, information operations? Yeah. I mean, it's a lot of covert action. I think we need to go after.

I think we really, really need to go after their information operations architecture far, far more aggressively. I think we are, they are punching, you know, that phrase, they are punching way above their weight in this space. And they dominate narrative so much. I mean, on so many issues in our country, you know that. And on the global stage, you know, they take full advantage of our freedoms and just jam it, jam us with it. Even though they're looking like huge assholes right now. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So just following along with your career here in all this, I mean, I know we're jumping around, but you spent some time with special activities?

I'll tell you. So yeah, special activities center, many of my tours, I've had the pleasure of working with special activities officers. in my experience in the DO, the Director of Operations, they are very consistently among the best of us, the best officers I've worked with, the most capable officers I've worked with. They are the closest thing we have to an OSS in the current ranks. And I'm lucky to have served with them everywhere.

I have. Yeah, I'm always blown away what their capability is. You know, I, when I was in one of my tours, when I was the base chief in Afghanistan, Director Panetta came through and he was on his first trip ever as director. And he came through the base and one of my officers asked him, you know, like, what, what has surprised you so far about the organization? like what did you not expect and the director said that we can do anything globally in house and a lot of that's like SAC you know it's like sort of the ability to do you know land air maritime

tech you name it medical like it's just all there and we can be somewhere we can get in somewhere we can operate somewhere we can communicate from that somewhere like that's this is they I guess I'll just say they're they're among the very best of us without question. So now we're getting to about 20, 23, you spent some time in headquarters. Do you want to wind us down towards like the tail end of your career and or I should say the tail end of your CIA career. Yeah.

So so I finished up in Ukraine in late December of 2022. So I'm in headquarters and I'm trying to. figure out when I'm going to retire. And I wasn't, you know, I didn't really have a specific plan on when it would be ideal. A lot of people do it towards the end of the year. And I'm like, oh, it's January, February. Now I'm like, maybe do I want to do it at the end of the year or what? So I kind of was dragging my feet and thinking about it and, you know, talking with people and just trying to gather information. And while I was doing so, another longtime friend and colleague came up to me and like, hey, I got a position I need to fill and I really would love to have you in it.

And I was like, oh, like I said before, like the answer is always yes. You know, like it's very rare that you say no to somebody. Like I just, to me, it's like this is what service is about. I was like, man, I don't know that I can do. I certainly can't do a two. I told them, I'm like, I'm planning on retiring. I just don't know when. I can't do a two year assignment.

And he's like, well, just do one year. And I really didn't feel like I can. could do even do that. So I said I said yes to six months, right, which is not convenient for the way we do business because a lot, you know, a minimum if you're on like one year cycles, it makes things easier for how we advertise positions internally and fill them. I said, I'll do six months. Because I was kind of like trying to be clear with myself, I am going to retire and I picked a set date and it was six months out. And I stuck with it, which was great. So it, you know, it was a great experience this other position. It was in our counter-narcotic center, you know, learning some

issues and a part of the world that I don't have experience in. But at the same time, you know, you're still looking at networks. You're targeting networks. And that's something that I've done, you know, my whole career. By chance, was that part of the world central and South America? Yes, so the Western Hemisphere, as it were. Shock. Yeah. So really interesting set of experiences for me. I did a little bit of travel to places I'd never been before, which was super exciting. One was for like a conference, so very obscure location that was awesome. And then, you know, south of the border, Mexico, you know. But yeah, really interesting.

And I'll get an up-close look at the fentanyl problem, which is really just an ungodly tragedy when you look at, you know, 300 overdose deaths a day nationwide, you have under 8,000 a year, something like that. So it's these ridiculous, my math might be wrong, but it was like just crazy numbers. And just, you know, cheap, easy to do stuff that can be done inside a kitchen in your home. Like, like, really hard to find when you're looking at sort of network attack. Like, all right, how do we find this stuff? You know, whack them all at the border.

supply chain issues on the front end, whack-a-mole on the back end. And in the middle, like I said, it could be somebody's kitchen. So it's like really, really hard work to try to track this stuff down. And like fentanyl doesn't like emanate anything that would help you,

you know, to say, oh, let's look for, track it. Signatures. But really just an awful, awful issue.

And, you know, just it touches so many people in such a bad way. So you retire from the agency. tell us a little bit about your post-governmental service life. I mean, what has it been like? I know you've been back to Ukraine. You're involved in some other projects and even nonprofit research.

Tell us about where you're at now. Great. Yeah, so after I left, working with a group of friends that include former agency officers, but not just, who are doing a lot of stuff in the business. intelligence space, you name the due diligence, you know, research, whatnot. But they have some contracts back with government that they're doing. So I'm helping them with a, with a project with Socom that is pretty fun. It's effectively a targeting project. You know, it has it has implications against all of our sort of great power peers.

because it's a, you know, it's a, effectively it's a supply chain challenge. And it touches, it touches all the bad countries. And so really looking at ways to, to characterize and propose ways to better intervene, interdict. You know, the action arms are elsewhere. But this is all just sort of an open source scrub of a certain problem set. And that's been really rewarding. And I like to say that it's, it's an easy transition because,

one, it, like completely rhymes with things I've done before. And two, you know, I'm working with great people on something that's still mission-oriented where I have an opportunity to still learn a lot every day.

So that's been fun. And then separately, I'm starting a nonprofit. In the process, I've filed with the IRS for 501C3 status. This is, is going to be an academic and research institute that is sort of bringing back my philosophical interest,

my law background, and even my experience sort of working the globe to look at, it's a very niche issue. It's looking at how executive emergency powers are basically weaponized by wannabe autocrats to extend their power. And there's a lot of really interesting scholarship already written on this issue. The legalism is called state of exception.

So it's really about states of exception. And in fact, what I'm calling it is the Institute for the Study of States of Exception. And it'll be a central repository for scholarship on this issue. And like I said, there's a lot of good scholarship already. There's scholars in Turkey who write about some things that Erdogan has done. Orroman or there's people writing on Orban or Ortega. Nicaragua, you name it. There's plenty of examples globally of how emergency powers can be used and abused.

And I want to sort of centralize it in one place and talk about it. And you've also been back to Ukraine a few times. I've been back once, almost twice. I had to bail the second time. But the first time I went back for a conference with the Cipher Brief, and that was really well done. tremendous conference saw some old friends there was a few of us former's on the trip several of them were on some of the panels which was great for me it was you know kind of looking

at some of the people who are even doing like like business there like some of the drone companies and there's a lot of as you know I mean it's very well documented an enormous amount of innovation taking place by necessity there so meeting some of the the companies that do that and thinking about, you know, is there ways, is there other ways to contribute? And I also spent a little bit of time in, so that was in Kiev. I spent a little bit of time in Lviv. And, you know, randomly ran into a friend who I worked with in Afghanistan in 2003. It was just so crazy to run into him there. But he has another nonprofit. And he's like going out to the front line and helping people with learning how to, you know,

do tourniquets in a in a in a in a in a in a foxhole so to speak and like pull people out and all this stuff it's really um just god's work and um it was really amazing they're running into them randomly after not seeing him for 20 years so ed what's what's the next step for you i mean you you've talked about some of these projects that you have going on um and i appreciate you sharing i mean your life experience with us i know it's it's really about 10% of your career but I appreciate you sharing those insights with us nonetheless. What do you see? Where are you going from here?

Well, I'm excited about the nonprofit, and I think that's going to take a lot of my time if I do it right. So I want to make sure I'm not taking on too many other things. So I've got a couple of advisory gigs going on right now that I'm really excited about. But I also don't want to bite off more than I can choose, so I don't serve them. I want to make sure I serve them well and serve my other, other interests well. So, you know, long term I want to write. I've got a lot to, a lot to

sort of unpack and stories to tell. I think there's some really interesting things. Yeah, like, I feel like this, this, I mean, any one of the topics we discussed, we could probably dig deep in for like an hour, hour and a half, I think. And there's at least 10 that came up today. And I love that. And I sort of sort of want to like do that, you know, and like really start writing it down and thinking about it. Obviously, you have to get it all cleared. But that to me is kind of what my future holds. I like, you know, I'm going to continue traveling. I enjoy it.

You know, we talked before. You know, I like to snowboard. So I use that as a hook for a lot of travel. And, you know, the work I'm doing right now, all the things that I'm doing can be done while I'm traveling. And I've already been doing them while I've been traveling since I retired. So that's been a nice discovery for me is. that I should continue to spend my time on things that I can be mobile for.

And where can people find you if they're interested in retaining your services or just following along with these adventures? That's a great question. So I'm on LinkedIn and in true name, obviously. So I would say, hit me up on LinkedIn because I don't have a website yet. So I'll have to get that set up and I'll link it to the LinkedIn site. but Ed Bogan, B-O-G-A-N, hit me up on LinkedIn. Awesome. Anything else, guys? We have a couple user questions. Fantastic.

Okay, user questions. Carlton Percy, thank you very much for the donation. M. Corbyn, thank you very much. T-shirt time. I guess he likes your T-shirt check. J.P. Ortega, thank you very much. Curious to see what CIA folks think about soft vet pods and pro-Russia American Politico's

disparaging and vilifying the CIA and all their hard work. You know, it's, yeah, it's a free country. It's abrasive to me, but it's like I changed the channel. I just, I don't want to, what I, you know, so here, right, this is a really good question. I am very, look, the work that I've done, and I'm no different from all my colleagues.

Like it's an incredible amount of stress we've put ourselves under for a very long time. And we've normalized a lot of it. I'm very focused on removing that stress going forward. I'm very focused on, you know, like, I'm on Twitter and it's, it's, it's a terrible place. But what I do, you know, on the side, you know, on the side that's the, the group that I cultivated, you know, if I see something that makes me really, really angry or something that makes me really, really happy and it's like Schadenfreude, I tend to delete the account I'm following because I just, I don't want that in my life. And oddly enough, since I retired, I don't think I've been really stressed or really angry at

all. And I'm really happy about that. So the question, the answer to the question is, I don't like that that stuff's happening, but I also like, there's, there's no shortage of it. So I try to just ignore it. and effectively change the channel. Yeah. KX, thank you very much. How much training did the KGB give to Dr. Emina Oza-Jahiri prior to 9-11? Ooh, that I don't know.

That's a great question, and I probably knew it in 2002, 2003, to what extent that there was anything there? I don't recall. I'm sorry, I really don't recall. Bjorne, thank you very much. How often do you see case officers become PMO's? In theory, could a case officer with a prior SWAT or federal tactical experience transfer into SAC?

You know, transferring in, I didn't see that a whole lot. You know, people would start in. Yeah, I can't think of an instance that I'm aware of where someone transferred in from, like saying, being just sort of a case officer. Now, to be fair, there are other departments, you know, now inside SAC. Well, there always were other departments, but like there's other departments that aren't just people with special forces pedigree,

whether it's like, you know, covert influence type backgrounds and things like that. So Bjorn, let's asking another question. what was your impression of ground ranch and if you don't have any idea of what that is then i'll just say what's your impression of what of sac yeah i mean the ground branch you know and sac i mean this is as i said it's some of the the very best of us that i've ever worked with i mean i've in almost for say again say again go no i'm sorry go yeah go ahead yeah go ahead yeah so i mean it's It's almost every tour, you know, I've worked, worked with Special Activity Center, and they literally are always at the poigniest end of whatever we're doing, right?

Like, that is the poignant end of the spear. That's, and it's, and again, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, being able to communicate, being able to build relationships quickly, you know, being able, basically to solve very strange problems that come up, really super, super complex problems on the fly just by whatever is around. I mean, the innovation and creativity that is sort of a norm within SAC is exemplary. And that's why they get thrown into everything that's the hardest things we do and probably over deployed just because, you know, the world is always a mess. It just is.

Dee, that's it for the Patreon question. Do you have some? Yeah, so Daniel H. Thanks, guys, big fan of the show. Please ask Ed what his favorite 90s rap lyric is and why. You know, it's the beginning of trying. triumph and it's by the Wutan clan and it starts with iBomb atomically and then it just goes and it's pretty wild anyway i i will not try to wrap that here do not try this at home

next time you have to rehearse it uh we have a couple more um corbin what was your worst injury from skateboarding and how do you feel about the changes in the west's ability to use it's legal lexicon since the collapse of the USSR? Oh my God. Worst injuries, I would say, on my skateboard, I broke my arm twice, six months apart. And what it did was I had a full up to my shoulder cast both times. So basically, I had it on for like five, six months.

I'd get it off. And then within several weeks, I break the damn thing again in the same spot. And so effectively for about a year, I was off my board. And this was a year when so many of the guys I rode with on the East Coast started turning professional. And as I said earlier, I was not as good as any of them or as good as I thought I might be. So there was no scenario where I was going to turn pro. But that was sort of like an exclamation point that ensured I had the wake-up call to say,

okay, time to pivot to other things in life. And what was the second half of that question again about the USSR? It was like legal terms and like what have we lost? Yeah, what have we lost with the legal lexicon with the fall of the USSR? Yeah, how do you feel about the changes in the West's ability to use its legal lexicon since the collapse of the USSR? Wow. Yeah, I mean, it's different, right?

Because it's, you know, that was a sort of an all-in global fight. And that allowed us to have a seed at probably every single take. even ones that we made up over a period of decades. And that's not the case anymore. But at some point, you know, you got to finish those things. But yeah, I mean, it's problematic. The world is, look, our adversaries right now are so well aligned in their behaviors, you know, the great power countries, all of them, right?

They're so well aligned right now. And we need to, we need to change our language and figure out, I mean, we need to change our behaviors, first of all, but we also need to change our language so that we can get the enduring buy-in we need from the citizens. I mean, that is a challenge because, as I've said, repeatedly,

like the Russians have out-maneuvered us for over a decade, just in the narrative space. And, I mean, we're paying in so many places for that. And we're not just us. So it's a huge issue. It's a good question. I'm out of curiosity,

oh, was there another one, D? I'm curious because you mentioned, like how they out maneuver us and are near peers and how they've taken advantage of our system. And was this anything that, obviously with the background of philosophy is something you probably think about and as a trained lawyer. But in your view, how does the United States, without infringing on our own freedom of speech on the First Amendment here in the United States, how do we combat like information warfare against these people that are using our laws against us? Yeah, and I think this gets into a covert action space and like how do we disincentivize our adversaries from maybe, maybe not the adversaries, but from people from like wanting to be part of, you know, bot farms and things like that. I mean, I think there's a couple of.

layers to it, right? There's a technical layer where we don't impinge on freedoms, but if there's a way we can figure out which handles are not real or, you know, I don't know. I mean, does it impinge on our freedom speech to require handles to be attached to a real person? I don't know. That's an open question, right? The answer might be yes, it does. Like, I can't be like an alias on Twitter and have five different handsets and five different accounts. And I'm not doing anything bad. Right. I just decide I want to do that.

So, like, maybe that's not because what I'm suggesting is, you know, maybe you can figure out that like. So, for example, in the last, I would say over the last 25 days, almost every single day an account has started following me. that is always a female, cute looking, a name with a bunch of numbers in it. It was created in the spring of 2023, and there are zero posts. I think I'm in love with that girl. I think we have something very special. She's really into you. I think we have something very special.

So like these are clearly not real people, right? Like they're clearly, clearly not real people. But like, is there a way to determine that technically? And, you know, the companies themselves, the companies themselves can do whatever they want. The First Amendment is about the government. The government can't do stuff, right? Right. You know, if the companies decided that they wanted to not have this happen, I mean, they'd have to come up with algorithms and means for determining, like, the reality behind the account.

But like I'm saying, I think this is more taking the fight overseas. I think, you know, bot farms or whatever. I'm going to have to figure out how to disincentivize this people from doing this. Yeah, I know that, you know, not in this space, necessarily in the information warfare space, but in the cybersecurity space. You know, you have people like Andrew Thompson imposed cost who, you know, is like, look, like, we have to look at this as not just like a criminal action sometimes, but as as as as more of of a national threat and how would and how should we respond how do we impose

costs on these on these bad actors that's just you know well if we can reach out through proxy governments and have them arrest them and you know and go through this whole rigamaral I mean I'm I'm all about you know putting a javelin inside a inside a ransomware gang you know I am too aim to you know um but no it's interesting it's it's it's it's a challenge for towards our freedoms i think in terms of how do we ensure that you know the first amendment and and everything in this country you know and if somebody wants to go on to some like twitter x and say what they want to say without without worrying about losing their job because it's not politically in at that moment and use an alias they should be able to um right but then

you know but then all these young ladies that are signing up for you and you lure me into you know sending them all my money like how do we avoid that yeah we got to figure that out because it's um because that space is so you mean that there's a lot of great literature on like what it's doing to young minds you know they're developing um and just and how you know to lonely people and how about it's increasing loneliness and what's coming from that. I mean, the effects are pretty, pretty vast. You know, like to loop it back to fentanyl, too. It's like, you know, when you look at, you know, a problem like that and the size of it,

you realize, okay, what's not ignore all of this cat content going on? Yeah, we've got some great cat content going on right there. Absolutely. I got a couple, couple boys. There's some jokes in there that some of your people will know on that. Oh, that's for another time. But yeah, I mean with the Fentanyl thing too, like, you know, the agency, if it's doing anything, it's obviously not domestic, right? It's going to be outside the country.

So it's clearly dealing with the supply side of the problem. There's a huge demand side problem in the U.S., right? And that's related to this, you know, all the loneliness and like what gets people to, you know, or like the despair factor. Like what does that lead to? Like, what does that, that shit gets exacerbated on the, on the Twitters of the world without question. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And by our adversaries. Yeah.

That's the challenge. Look, we just went through the whole thing with TikTok. Like, what is the government's rule? What is the right? You know, are they overextending? Can they say that this app that like forms your entire phone for information is, you know, that no foreign government can't own it? There are big questions that are just going to become more and more prevalent.

No, it's exactly right. So again, it's going to be yet another issue where we're going to, like, react and address it when we're at some ungodly crisis where we have, you know, keen suicides at some crazy rate or whatever, you know. Right. Right. Ed, thank you so much for this interview, man, and spending this time with us. Any final thoughts before we get going tonight? Anything I failed to cover? You know, I've got a lot of principles and things like that, but those would take some time to talk. through. So I mean... We can have you on again. There's plenty more to talk about. I would love that. I would love that. Yeah, absolutely, man. So we'll be back

on Friday with Mike West. Anything, Dave, Dee? Check out the newest I-Zahn episode. It's great. We have Mark Polymopoulos on. Friend of the show. I know. That's it. Okay. All right, guys. Thanks so much. That's it. We really appreciate it. We'll see you guys on Friday.

Take care out there. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Ed. That was awesome.