The Team House - CIA Ops Officer H.K. Roy, running intel assets from war torn Bosnia, Ep. 28

Episode Date: February 7, 2020

H.K. Roy served in the CIA for 13 years, running human intelligence networks from Latin America to the Balkans. Later, he established a private intelligence group in Iraq. Highlights include surviving an Iranian assassination attempt in Bosnia, developing a Soviet officer as a potential source, running a strategic asset in Sarajevo, and reporting on Serbian war crimes. His book is called American Spy and can be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/American-Spy-Wry-Reflections-Life/dp/1633885887 Support the stream on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MurphysLawstreamBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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

with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Okay, gents, we are alive. Don't even ask me which episode this is. I can remember it. 28. It's 28?

According to what you put on YouTube. Okay, well, hopefully I'm not a liar. That was actually accurate. But it really doesn't matter what number episode this is. That's not the important thing. The important thing is that today we are on with our special guest, H.K. Roy. He is the author of American Spy. I have the book right here.

It was a hell of a good read. Tore through it over the last week or two. Took a lot of notes, underlining passages in it. H.K. is a retired CIA operations officer. He has extensive experience serving in the Balkans. And then on the private sector side, he has a company in Iraq. So as you say in the book, I'm all Iraqed out. He spent a lot of time over there as well on the private sector side.

But primarily tonight I wanted to talk to HK about the Balkans because, I mean, he's had some terrific stories in there of, I mean, all sorts of different stuff, hunting down war criminals. But also that like good spy-vers-spy, like crusty case officer stories, meeting with assets in the graveyard, literally. There's just some really great stuff in there that I wanted to get into. And also some really surprising things I learned about, well, Iran being active in the Balkans, quite frankly, and HK coming into contact with those guys. But anyway, thank you, HK. Welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for joining us tonight. Thank you guys for having me on. I appreciate it. Absolutely. And by the way, I'm Jack Murphy. this is my co-host, Dave Park. This is the Team House episode 29, if I'm not. 28, if I'm not lying.

But HK, jumping right into it, and you know, you really jump right into it from the very beginning of your book. Can you introduce us to the Balkans? You were active there during the 1990s when things were really bad. The former Yugoslavia had broken up at the end of the Cold War. introduce us to this topic because it's an incredibly complicated part of the world with an incredibly complicated history. It is very complicated and I'll try and summarize it in a pretty simple way if possible. I first was assigned there PCS in fall of 1989 which as you may recall was when the Berlin Wall came down. Now at that point Yugoslavia had been not a member of the

the Soviet block, but like its own, it had its own unique socialist system. So for us, it was still a denying area, more or less a communist country, but not quite as hardcore as Russia or the Soviet Union or Bulgaria, for example. Tito had held this country together by force for many years. Yugoslavia was made up of six or so different republics with different ethnic groups, different religions. There were Serbs who were Orthodox, Christian, Croats and Slovenes, Roman Catholic. They were under the Ottoman Empire, excuse me, under the Austro-Hungarian Empire,

whereas the Serbs and the Bosnians were under the Ottoman Empire. Bosnians, a lot of them are Muslim because they were converted when they, 500 years ago, under the Turks. And you have Albanians in Kosovo. But Tito managed to hold all of this together pretty well, and he outlawed, essentially outlawed tribalism and ethnic hatred and that type of thing. But he died, and then when I was there, I first got there in the late 89, Slobodan Milosevic was in charge, and he is sort of seen as the leader who helped break up Yugoslavi in the sense that he started stirring up ethnic passion. starting with Albanians in Kosovo.

And at any rate, we knew from our sources, and just it was pretty easy to see that Yugoslavia was not going to stick together. There was too much desire on the part of the Croats and the Slovenes and others to go their own way, have their own independent republics. But official U.S. policy initially was we only recognized, a single unified Yugoslavia, which was a nice idea if it would work, but unfortunately, they were past that. And we reported this to the administration at the time. It was the first George Bush administration. I'll try and make the long story short.

After we, James Baker came to Belgrade and officially said we only recognize a singly unified Yugoslavia. This was in summer of 91, I believe. That, for all practical purposes, gave the green light to the Yugoslavs and the Serbs to start civil war in Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia, which we knew would happen. So the civil wars kicked off. We imposed an arms embargo, which only really hurt those who couldn't defend themselves as easily like the Croats and the Bosnians. And then we flip-flopped our policy and said, all right, Serbs now you're the bad guys. Now we only recognize the independent republics. And so, as I say in the book, we aren't responsible for, the U.S. government is not responsible for the civil war in Yugoslavia.

but our ever-changing policies certainly made things worse than they needed to be. And so when I was there, it was still Cold War rules. I was handling a sensitive asset. It was typical spy versus spy. If you think of the old, you know, Smiley's People type movies or the spy who came in from the cold, denied area tradecraft. And then we were there and we transitioned from Cold War into a Civil War. So in that sense, it was a great place to be if you were doing my job because,

you know, it was a pretty unique situation to go from Cold War to Civil War in Europe. It was the first armed conflict in the heart of Europe since World War II. And I was lucky enough really to be right in the right place at the right time. And there weren't many of us there. And so that's why they continued to send me back after my two-year PCS tour. from late 89 to late 91, I went right from Belgrade to Croatia because the war was just starting there. And then I PCS back to the U.S., but continued to TUI back to Croatia and Bosnia, primarily to establish our first official service-to-service relationships between the CIA and the security service of Croatia initially. And then in that was in 92.

and then in 95 with the Bosnian service, they sent me to do that. And I'd get into some of those stories in the book as well. So I've got quite a bit of experience working in Central America prior to the Balkans. I mean, were you ever the Serbo-Croat guy at the agency? Or was it something you really just got thrown into the deep end? So I was in Latin America. It was actually in South America. for three years, worked a lot on Nicaragua from there, but was based in South America.

And no, I spoke Spanish at the time and Italian, but I decided I wanted to, after my Latin America tour, that I wanted to work in the Soviet East European Division. And, you know, I wanted to go toe to toe with the Ruski's, as they say, in that old movie, what is it called? At any rate, and so I was accepted in the Soviet East European Division and was slow. slotted for Belgrade. I put down B.E. thinking at Gideast Berlin, but they gave me Belgrade instead. And then I went to a much more intensive surveillance training, which they give you. It was called the SCIO course, Soviet-East European Internal Ops course, where you are tested and trained much

more than you are in the normal spy school at the farm, which is very good in and of itself. But they have to be 100% certain before they send you out to a denied area that you can detect surveillance before you meet with your asset. Because if you can't, you will lead surveillance to your meeting and they will wrap him up and likely kill him. And not everybody passes the course. It doesn't hurt your career if you don't. It just means you can't see surveillance. But that training was intensive and it was fantastic. And by the time I went to Belgrade, I knew with 100% certainty that I could detect surveillance if it was there.

Now, just having curiosity, was that all surveillance detection or was it learning more also how to incorporate counter surveillance and things like that? How to work more with? We also, the primary function was to be able to know for sure if you were under surveillance. before committing an operational act, but you also learn how to mark a signal or operate in a window, let's say, if you only have, you know, 10 seconds to do something as you ran the corner or something. And it's also equal, so you learn how to operate while under surveillance, but the more important thing is to know whether you're under surveillance or not. and it's important as well to know if you're not under surveillance. A lot of people will see a ghost and they think they're under surveillance and they abort a meeting. And what if your meeting is so important that you're about to collect information on an imminent terrorist attack,

which occasionally happens, and you abort the meeting because you thought you had surveillance, but you didn't. So it's equally important to know in both directions, whether you have it or not. HK, on that note, could you tell us the story in your book you call your asset Hitch, a very high-level, very important strategic asset for the United States? And you had this great story where you thought you had a ghost on your tail, so to speak. And you had to make this last-minute determination like, am I being surveilled? Am I not?

Because it's so critical that you meet with this asset that there's people back in D.C. who are waiting for this information. Could you tell us a little bit about that, that whole experience? Yes, and that was a typical experience. That was just one out of many cases like that. So Hitch, we would assign a kryptonym to our assets. His wasn't really Hitch. I chose that.

It's an inside joke. But he was a high-level officer in the SDB, which was the Yugoslav KGB. And he was our asset and had been for years. and my job, my only job while I was in Yugoslavia was to securely handle him and collect and report high-level, top-secret intelligence as Yugoslavia slid out of the Cold War and into Civil War. His reporting was critical to our understanding of what was going on in Yugoslavia and to be able to predict what would happen in the future in Croatia and Bosnia. But my job was just to handle him securely. And initially, I would meet him maybe once every two or three months. And in the interim, I would prepare for that one meeting.

And the meeting would last five to ten minutes. We called them brief encounters. It was after doing a minimum three-hour SDR surveillance detection route, which was also planned out, coordinated with headquarters in advance. And not always a good thing when headquarters gets involved in the nitty-gritty, but generally speaking, an SE division, it was a good thing. And so, you know, the idea is you prepare for this meeting, and then when the night comes, you take off on your SDR.

Typically in Belgrade in those days, there wasn't a lot of surveillance. It wasn't like Moscow where they can blanket you with, you know, two dozen cars and it's tough to see, or even during our SCEIO course training, which was much better than what I saw in Belgrade. you know there was a couple of if you had surveillance it would be a couple of Lottas or Ugo's with a couple of burly guys in them with leather jackets and

chain smoking smoke smoke porn out of the windows and they stood out because most Yugoslavs in those days were pretty aggressive drivers they had side swipe you pass you cut you off, clip you off and all that these guys were hanging back a couple of courteous car lengths

you know so it wasn't that hard to pick them out But at any rate, so you do a two-hour planned SDR, and there's a whole science of how you do the SDR and progressively more provocative. And you don't, unlike in the movies, you don't want to be obvious about looking for surveillance. You're not trying to lose anybody.

You just want to know if it's there, but you don't want them to know that you're looking because you don't want them to know that you're an intelligence officer. And so after a couple of hours, of driving your you know I'd be confident that I wasn't under surveillance and then I would ditch my car which in those days had dip tags on them and so I would ditch it in a typically in a parking lot they had these big so big block style apartment complexes which is thousands of cars on the road into Belgrade those

huge yeah yeah yes and so if I ditch my car there and then take off for the next hour so the idea is if the SDB comes across my car in the parking lot They're going to assume I'm in one of those buildings and they can spend hours looking for me. And meanwhile, I'm across town. And so after I do all that, well, in the story in the book, I had done all that. And I was confident that I was not under surveillance. The problem in Yugoslavia was that even if you weren't under surveillance, since they had limited resources, they would have SDB cars staked out in different parts of town.

And then if you happen to drive past, they glom onto you. And so that was the risk. You may be black, which means you have no surveillance. And then two and a half hours into your SDR, but then boom, they pick you up. So as I was making my final approach to my meeting site, and a meeting site is something that, you know, we cased and we photograph. We didn't have, this was pre-internet, pre-Google and all that. So we were our own Google Maps, our own Google Earth. We did extensive casing reports.

You know, we drew our own maps, photograph the site. the agent knew had the casing report on the site he knew exactly what time to be there you know you have like a one-minute window and if he's not there if you're not there you continue on your way so to this day I'm very timely but anyways I was making my final approach to the meeting site which happened to be in a cemetery like on a side path down the cemetery in new in zemun which is across the river from Rassasava River from Belgrade, not all meeting sites from cemeteries. This one just happened to be in a cemetery. And it was late November, I believe, and late at night.

And so, you know, when you're walking down the street and it's completely deserted, if somebody's behind you, you can hear them walking back there behind you. So as I was making my final approach, somebody was behind me. It sounded like a big guy based on the, you know, the sound of his footfalls. and so I had to determine, you know, my instinct told me this is just a ghost because I know I'm black, but you never know. Did I happen to walk past somebody who just pick me up? And so as I was approaching the meeting site, I had like 30 seconds left to decide whether to abort or not.

And I just relied on my training and experience there. I knew it had to be a ghost. And so I peeled off towards the meeting site. And fortunately, it was a ghost. He continued on his way down the main path to the cemetery. And we had our little Bren, our little meeting. And, I mean, if you've got it wrong, you're going to get beat up and sent home. But the asset is done.

I mean, he's a dead man. Exactly. So you don't want to get it wrong. Yeah. You know, because exactly, he'd be arrested. And, you know, at the very least, in prison for the rest of his life, maybe executed. this is a guy who'd been on you know been around for many years and you know he puts his life in our hands and that's why this sciio course training is so essential if you can't see surveillance

you're not going we owe it to our agents to protect them so what can you tell us then about this meeting in the graveyard i mean it sounds like something right out of a movie that you this asset was your sole responsibility i mean it was one case officer one ops officer for this one asset, which I think tells you how critical it was to national security. What's it like when you finally, after months of training, have a face-in-face brief encounter with this asset? Yeah, that's what it's all about. It's exciting.

You know, I've got just a couple of minutes because you don't want to be seen on the, you know, two guys on the street in Belgrade late at night. People were suspicious. Now, sometimes he brought his wife along, and that sort of lowered the profile. But we would, I would, the first thing I would do is ask him, this was all in Serbian, by the way, I would ask him for any sort of breaking news updates that may not be in the, he, I should back up. He would hand me a, like a gym bag full of a stack of top secret documents from the SDB, KGB essentially, from the past couple of months. Not all agents would do that because it was too risky. We told him, you know, photograph them, but he liked to take chances. And he got away with it. But you know, you can't control it. You like to think you can control them, but you really can't. So he would hand me a gym bag full of top secret documents, all in Cyrillic and in Servian.

On top, he would type out or handwrite out sort of his list of, first of all, any late breaking news that aren't covered by the documents. And then he'd sort of prioritized for me what he thought would be the most important things to report. in what order. And then I would talk to him for just five minutes or so, for any late breaking news, and commit that to memory. And then we would shake hands and go our separate ways, both of us continuing to look for surveillance

until we got back to where we were going. And so in my case, I'd have to get back to my car, first of all. And now, you know, I'm breathing a preliminary sigh of relief because I've met the agent. I didn't drag surveillance to the meeting. did my job, but now I've got this sports bag full of top secret documents. If I'm in a car accident, I'm not so worried about being pulled over and searched. I'm worried about being involved in a car accident where I'm unconscious,

and the police come along, and they find this bag of documents, and then that'll lead back to him as well. At any rate, I work my way back to my house across the river, and quickly go upstairs. By now I'm reeking at Belgrade, which in those days was polluted. They burned a lot of soft coal, so you got this yellow mist in the air, and then they would toss their burning coal embers into these giant garbage dumpsters all around town. So you had sort of the smell of burnt garbage together with the coal smell.

And your clothes are just all gray after about a month there. and you just smell like Belgrade. So I get home and try not to wake my wife up, stash the bag under the bed, and then the next morning, stick it in a cardboard box to carry it into the case, you know, I'm under surveillance end. All they see me is carrying a grocery box into the office. And then it's kind of like Christmas Day. We open up the box, go through the documents, and every time we're blown away by one,

what he's sharing with us and it's just it's important stuff and um in those days things were very low tech we we we thought that the russians or the or the ugo slabs might have some way to electronically eavesdrop on us so we couldn't use laptops or in those days they weren't laptops they were you know but some sort of a computer word processor so everything was handwritten pencil and paper uh in a tiny crappy little office with music blaring long translating from Serbian into English and then we would hand it to our communicator who did have a secure little booth and he'd have to retype the whole thing and then and then send it out by by satellite securely correct me if I'm

wrong your asset is a member of the what was it the SBD basically the KGB in Yugoslavia so this has the added benefit that you get to learn all the intelligence that this surveillance that this intelligence service is collecting. You get all that information. But you also on top of that, you get to know what the thinking is inside that intelligence agency and that government. So it's kind of like a two for one deal, isn't it? Exactly. So there's foreign intelligence, which is we want to know sort of what the Yugoslav government has planned for Croatia. And just that's what we call FI foreign intelligence. but there's also counterintelligence, CI.

These are the guys who were surveilling me and going after people in the American community there. And so it's a good check on me. Like if I were ever to miss surveillance, he would be able to tell me that. And one time I did because before we were getting ready to leave Belgrade, I asked, my wife had gone through the SEI O course as well. They were sort of required to in those days,

whether they like it or not. And so I said, you drive. I want to drive around Belgrade and get a videotape of our daily route to work just to have some souvenirs 20 years down the road, what Belgrade looked like. And I said, you know, watch for surveillance because I'm going to have a video camera. Okay. So we did that. And she was supposed to be watching for surveillance.

And it turns out she didn't see it because at my next meeting he said, oh, by the way, we were surveilling you while your wife was driving. and they assumed you were videotaping military installations and that kind of thing. It doesn't do any good to say, but I wasn't. I was just being a tourist that day. Yeah. You know, they believe what they're going to believe. Oh, sorry.

We have our first super chat, our first question. It actually relates back to something that we generally ask our guests anyway. We would have asked you eventually. But thank you, Alex. And Alex asks, what is HK's origin? So we always want to know what somebody's origin story is. Who were you before the CIA? you get there? What drew you in? And also, he wants to know if you met Greg, Greg Walker while

you were in, he was in Central America, but you were out of South America, right? I was in South America. Yeah. Greg Walker, I don't recognize the name. But, you know, it's been many years. Yeah. So, your origin story. Yeah. Well, I didn't grow up planning on joining the CIA. In fact, I probably didn't even know what it was. I grew up in the American Southwest, you know, in late 60s and 70s, assumed I would have to go to Vietnam because that's what all the older kids in the neighborhood did. You grow up and go to Vietnam. You go to join the Army, go to Vietnam. So I was, you know, worried about that. I had allergies. I envisioned my future 18-year-old self on patrol in the jungle, you know, sneezing and having to blow my nose on a banana leaf and betraying my

squad's position to the Viet Cong who would then kill us all. And so, you know, when I heard that the draft had ended, I was still, you know, young teen, I was happy about that. I figured life would be pretty much smooth sailing from that point on. But I went to college in the Southwest, but then went to law school in D.C. And while I was in law school, I worked for all three branches of government and got a feel for the U.S. government and sort of decided in those three years that I didn't really want to work as a lawyer and a law firm. I'd like to go overseas. I had already spoken a couple of languages and grew up going to Mexico and sort of love foreign cultures, foreign languages, travel. And so I heard about the CIA and the Foreign Service, and I read up

as much as I could in those days because, again, there was no internet and you couldn't just apply online, but I heard about it and read about it and said, you know, it sounds like a good career for me. And so I somehow made contact with them. And I don't remember exactly how I did because it wasn't online. So I must have found their number in the phone book or something. But got the process started and went through the process took almost, I don't know, less than a year, but close to a year, I guess. And that's sort of how it came about. Was there something that drew you to the CIA as opposed to the State Department or like, you know, the Foreign Service, you know? Yeah, it just sounded so much more fun and so much more interesting.

And that proved to be the case 100%. So it was definitely the right choice. So without having worked for the State Department. So without like the assets or the resources of the Internet, which now everybody, you know, anybody who has an interest in, and probably the movies too, Anybody who has an interest in the CIA can read all about the farm and the type of training they get and things like that. You obviously didn't have access to stuff like that. What did you think when you got to the farm? What was your experience there?

Well, interestingly enough, there was one book that I read by a guy named Philip Agee. It was called CIA Diary. This was the guy who was a CIA officer in Latin America and then he defected to Q. He wrote this book, had no approval to do so. And the first 75 pages, he told everything you could possibly tell about training at the farm. So I felt like I already knew a lot about it. Oh, wow. And that was the only book of his kind at the time.

But it paid off. Guys, again, we are here with H.K. Roy. He is the author of American Spy. I just read it. I highly recommend it. HK. was a CIA ops officer. If you're just joining us, he has pretty extensive experience. working in the Balkans, also in Iraq, in the private sector, as he was mentioning, also in

South America. So we're kind of talking to him tonight about the contents of the book. And thank you everyone who's joining us live tonight. And everyone who listens to this later is a podcast or yeah, what have you. So HK, the next thing I got to get out of you, I need to hear this just insane story that you kick your book off with about the Iranians attempting to assassinate you in Sarajevo. So, I mean, maybe if you could, you could begin because you were the first station chief of Sarajevo. They, like, sent you in there in the middle of a war zone with a couple army dudes to spearhead

that whole effort. Yeah. So, again, I was based in the U.S. at that time. This was after my Belgrade tour. This was after I had established the relationship with the Croatian intelligence service or security service. And so this was in July of 95. And again, there were no U.S. troops in Bosnia at the time.

But things were, the Bosnian war had been raging for three years at this point. You know, you may remember from the news that there were concentration camps set up across Bosnia, rape camps. People were starving, you know, literally starving in Sarajevo because there was no food. The Serbs had them surrounded. Honest to God atrocities happening. in Europe in the 1990s. I'm going to ask you about that next.

Yeah. And so Clinton was president, and it was clear that they were thinking about engaging NATO militarily to stop the serve rampage. And so we decided after three years that we needed to establish an official service-to-service relationship with the Bosnians. And so I was selected to go to lead that,

supposed to be a team, me and a communicator and some paramilitary guys, but for whatever reason, it was just me and the communicator. And so I went to D.C. and said, all right, because I was in the U.S. then, but, you know, so I wasn't really keeping up with everything in the Balkans.

So what's the plan? How am I going to get to Sarajevo? Because it was, there was no air traffic. There was no safe way to get in and out. and they said, we don't know. That's why we called on you. You can figure it out.

So I did, you know, I went to split Croatia with my communicator. And from there, yeah, this is where I had a colleague in Zagreb and he could tell that, you know, this was a mess that I was getting into. And so he had a couple of, Being a parent can be really challenging.

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

Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. army guys in Zagreb with him who he sent over to split in the defense attach's brand new armored Jeep Cherokee, which we destroyed. And so they came over to split. And we met up that night in the hotel split, had a few Peevos, few beers, and talked about our plans for how we were going to get from Split to Sarajevo. at the time there were occasional UN relief convoes that would go into Sarajevo.

They would get shot up. The Serbs would actually shoot them with anti-aircraft guns. And so our armored Jeep was nice, but if they shoot us with an anti-aircraft gun, you know, tough luck. So that was the plan. We would just insert our vehicle into the vehicle that they brought over from Zybriv into this UN convoy and make our way into Sarajevo. And so that's what we did. We started off early the next morning from Split and drove as far as a place called Tartacin,

which is a little village on the Bosnian-controlled side of Mount Igman. Mount Igman was this mountain. It may have been the one where they had the Olympics many years ago. I'm not sure if it's the same mountain or not, but I think it is. At any rate, the Serbs were attacking Sarajevo from their positions on Mount Igman, but there were also Bosnian troops and there was a French battalion there. And so it was just kind of a dangerous place. And so you kind of had to take your chances in terms of slipping through.

So the convoy waited until after dark. And that's when we entered. We took this really treacherous track over Mount Igman lights out. Everybody had nods, you know, night vision goggles, except us because our guys unfortunately. I don't know, they probably didn't know we were going to have to rely on them to get in. You wrote the book that the agency policy was that you couldn't carry a gun at the time. Right. Because I guess the agency, and I was the only guy there, but I guess because the agency

lawyers didn't want to have to deal with any kind of a mess. And as I pointed out in the book, a year later, after there were thousands of U.S. troops and dozens of agency officers serving side by side with the troops, everybody was free to carry a weapon then but it was probably a lot less necessary that didn't stop me but you know that's that was the way the

the lawyers looked at things and anyway we made it into Sarajevo and my mission there I know your question was about the Iranian so no that's okay I want to to hook up with this Bosnian the head of the Bosnian security service

and also so I could just start collecting intelligence on what's happening and identifying targets for NATO to shoot at essentially in the coming month and they were happy to help with that. I also knew that there were a lot of Mujahideen there who had been in Afghanistan who were now coming down to fight in Bosnia because, you know, from their perspective and from Osama bin Laden's perspective, the West turns its back on the Bosnian Muslims. And you could say that there was some truth to that.

But there was also, we'd heard, you know, an Iranian presence, although we didn't know much about it. And I would meet with the head of the Bosnian Security Service every day at the Interior Ministry and, you know, driving at high speed to and from the meeting because of sniper fire. And there was not too many people on the street in those days. And he was happy to share with me intelligence on service. positions, you know, where their communications were anti-aircraft sites, ammo dump, whatever, he was 100% cooperative because he knew we could come in and, you know, blow the shit out of

them, basically, and they could not. But when I asked him about, you know, the Iranian presence there, all he would say is Iran is welcome here. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. Well, one day I go show up for my daily meeting with him, and the receptionist tells me to meet him, instead of going upstairs like I normally did, she said, meet Marco over there in that little office. Okay, so I go in, Marco's in there, and he was dressed camouflage. They always were dressed in camouflage fatigues. And then there was this big, you know, I thought he was an Arab. A big Middle Eastern looking guy with the beard, also in Camouflage.

camouflage fatigues, standing there in this little room. And I said, you know, good day, Marco. And he goes, oh, sorry, it was a mistake. I'll meet you upstairs in five minutes. So I thought, okay. And I did and went about my business. But it struck me as odd, you know, like it seemed like it was an intentional mistake, you know, and I didn't know who this guy was.

well later that day or night I found out from as I told you offline an incredibly reliable source 100% reliable that he was that the Middle Eastern looking guy was indeed the head of the Iranian

intelligence service in Sarajevo and he had tasked his agent my colleague the head of the Bosnian Security Service to bring me into this meeting so that he could see me. He showcased me essentially because his plan was to pick me up, kidnap me, and do all kinds of other nasty things to me, as they had done to my colleague William Buckley

in Beirut 10 years earlier. And the reason they did this is not because I was anybody special, but I was the guy who showed up and declared myself in true name as a CIA officer, in Iranian territory essentially. At that time, it was their backyard. That's how they looked at it. They were established there, and it would be like walking into Tehran, essentially, and saying, hey, I'm from the CIA, I'm here to help.

So to them, it was a target of an opportunity, and he had a very, I got to read his, it was a translation from Farsi, but I got to read his plan for me. He described me physically, and he had all the details, there and as you probably know from the Buckley case, if the Iranians get you, you are never going to leave because they're not going to trade you. They don't want to ever show their hand.

They're not going to spike the football like we did with Swaymani. You know, you're going to be tortured to death eventually. And so I found that out and decided, okay, now what? Then came the rest of the story. Yeah, I mean, it had to send the hackles up when you walked into that room and there's this big bearded dude just standing there eyeballing you. I had to know immediately like something super wrong here. Yeah, something didn't seem right. But again, that wasn't my focus.

I wasn't in Iraq, you know. I mean, I was in Bosnia. Right. And my concern was just not getting killed by a random sniper or mortar. Not that anybody was targeting me, but it was just a dangerous place to be. So your whole focus is in how you're going to stay alive and do your job in this war zone. And so it was weird, but it wasn't my focus. You're not expecting this from an ally, from somebody who stands to benefit.

You are the enemy of his enemy. You are his friend in this situation, and you can bring the firepower. So you have no reason to suspect that he would have any sort of, you know, Yeah. Yeah. Any sort of designs on you. Yeah, it just didn't really, I knew it just seemed weird, but it didn't, you know, it occurred to me that that might be what was happening until I found out what was

happening. How soon after that, did you find, how soon after that was it when you found out what was happening? I think it was within 24 hours. And so, so then I had to, you know, kind of switch my focus from being, how do I survive in this crazy war zone to not getting. picked up off the street by somebody who's targeting me personally. So I couldn't leave our compound from that point forward because they knew me.

They knew my vehicle. And so, and, you know, I figured out the Bosnians were collaborating with the Iranians. That was the first evidence we had that they were under their control. And as I found out a couple of years later, at that point, even the Bosnian Interior Minister, Ali Spahitch, was an Iranian asset, as was Marco, the head of the service, who was meeting with. So yeah, they were cooperative in terms of telling me everything about Srebrenica or about where the served targets were for us to blow up. But they were still under Iranian control. And kind of like with ISIS, even though we and Iran were on the same side,

in a sense, this was too big of a prize for the Iranians to pass up. If they take you out and the American government doesn't know that they facilitated the Iranian involvement, they're just going to send somebody else out with no, you know, with no idea of what the source of their information was. Exactly. So it's good for a lot of people that I found out when I did. And you said that you actually got to read the plan they had for you. I mean, what was their plan to kidnap you? It's been a long time, but essentially picked me up off the street somewhere because I was out of the street every day.

and so pick me up and it was my recollection is it was approved by their headquarters and again this all happened sort of fast and so and I read it one time

I believe it was the MOIS you know looking back it seems like it might have been Coots Force because these are the guys who are overseas doing this kind of thing right and again I didn't

I didn't spend a lot of time reading it or anything else. I mean, I just had to sort of, I read it and had to decide what to do. But it was Iranian intelligence, at the very least, M-O-I-S, and probably Kudis Force, but I can't say for sure. So now you're in this position where you have to figure out how to get out of this, you know, beleaguered city that's just in a constant state of warfare before these guys get their chance to kidnap or assassinate you.

So, I mean, what was the plan that you came up with to get yourself out of there? Right. Well, first I spoke with, you know, headquarters. Believe it or not, headquarters wasn't, didn't alert me to this. It was my colleague in Zagreb who alerted me to it. I can't get into too much detail, but he was more diligent than anybody at headquarters was. So thanks to him, I'm still here. So they came up with a few ideas, none of which were very good.

We were talking to U-COM and General Hayden, Michael Hayden, was in Stuttgart at the time, I believe. And so they talked about maybe sending in a helicopter to get me. But that would have taken several days of preparation. And there was no helicopters flying over Sarajevo in those days. Everybody would have taken a shot at it. And so I didn't really like any of the ideas they came up with. So there was a diplomatic security guy in my, in our. office there and also an undercover J-Soc guy there ostensibly diplomatic security and I talked to them

and we came up with a plan we'll just sort of every now and then they would go out in the middle of the night to make a run to split for example and so they would just make an unannounced run to split the next night leave the compound at two in the morning and make a run for it over over Mount Igmon again. And again, typically, they're just concerned about also not getting shot by the Serbs, by the anti-aircraft guns, by a sniper. But now we had to worry about the Iranians and their Bosnian collaborators, who we thought were our friends looking for me.

And so it was pretty nerve-wracking. And that was the plan we came up. It was basically a two-vehicle convoy. And so we took off at 2 a.m. and I was obviously alert to any signs of surveillance and there was none. And at this point, as far as I know, the Bosnians didn't know, obviously, that I was planning on getting out of town. In fact, when I missed one meeting with him, I called in sick essentially. And then so that he wouldn't, you know, but I can only do that for so long.

If I'm calling him sick for five days in a row, he's going to know that I know. and so I had to I could use that excuse for a little bit but then I had to get out so we left the compound around 2 or 2.30 and got as far as you know we crossed Sarajevo airport

and there were a lot of UN checkpoints in Bosnian military and police checkpoints in those days we made it to the base of Mount Igman but we got held up there because there was incoming Bosnian army traffic that had to clear the checkpoints before we could go up we wanted to go up and over the mountain before

the sun came up. And we were there delayed for a couple of hours, and the sun was starting to come up. And so we thought about heading back to the compound and trying to get in the next night, because it's too dangerous if it's too light out. But there was kind of like a light haze or over the city that day,

so the visibility wasn't good. And we knew the Serbs were typically drunk around 4.30 in the morning, or at least hung over. not very attentive, so we decided to make a run for it, all the while alert to any signs that Bosnians or the Iranians were going to come after us. And keep in mind these guys that my J-Soc and diplomatic security friends were heavily armed and highly competent.

And so my buddy and I were armed too, but I knew I was in good hands. And I think we had somebody else in another vehicle. But we were in good hands, and we made it. And again, made it without getting shot by the Serbs as well, which was just as much, we passed by some smoldering hulks of UN vehicles that had just been shot that night, you know. And so made it out to split, and the rest is history. We have another super chat from Andrew, and this is, Andrew also. So it was just you and Hillary Clinton dodging snipers, right? That's right.

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Well, and speaking of Hillary, I was, before I was sent to Sarajevo, my division chief said, Hillary Clinton decided that we need to open a station in Sarajevo. And again, at the time she was not Secretary of State, she was first lady. And you can argue whether it was right or wrong, but that was what I was told is that she made the call to open a station. And Andrew just wants to clarify, to be clear that it was just, he was just making fun of Hillary Clinton. That's it. Oh, I got that.

There's an interesting little epilogue to this story in your book. You talk about how this entire story, your close call with the Iranians, got leaked to what was at the Washington Post for political reasons. And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that, because that's a little bit of a, it's of interest for what we read in the newspaper and why it shows up. there. Right. So it was the LA Times. It was James Reisen, who at the time was working with the LA Times, and he has excellent sources within the intelligence community and is, you know, fantastic journalist, I think. And so this was about two years, maybe a little bit less than two years after it happened. Front page of the LA Times, there's this story that says Bosnia betrayed U.S. spy to Iran or something.

along those lines and it told my story didn't identify me by by name but it told my story this was supposedly a classified story and so I was kind of blown away and eventually figured out that they had they had leaked this somebody and I don't I still don't know who leaked it I assume it was somebody in the CIA but that it was essentially approved they had the Dayton Accords where they're trying to bring peace to Bosnia and one of the conditions for peace was that the Bosnians had to get rid of all the Iranians and others of their ilk in Bosnia. And so by leaking this story, it made it more understandable and believable that, yeah, there are Iranians and Bosnia doing these bad things.

They're a threat to America. We need to get them out. What they didn't say was something that I had stumbled across several years earlier in Croatia. I learned, at the time, the war was raging in Bosnia, there was an arms embargo on Bosnia and Croatia. And so it was illegal for us to, for anybody, to provide weapons to the Bosnians, even though they desperately needed them. And my contact in the Croatian security service,

let's just say he was extremely close to the president of Croatia. He said one night we were having this meeting and he said, HK, there's something I need to talk to you about. And also to set the stage of the scene, a couple of years earlier, we had worked together to intercept an Iranian relief flight in Zagreb. Relief flight, meaning was mainly weapons, and even a couple of mercenaries and a couple of samovars. And we intercepted it and sent it back. So we were trying to, our policy was we want to stop all weapons, especially Iranian weapons, obviously. It's a counter the Iranian influence in that region. Yeah, just, you know, it's not a good thing.

And so my Croatian government contact says, your ambassador, Peter Galbraith, asked the Croatian president, Tujman, to allow Iranian weapons to transatl, transit Croatia en route to Bosnia. Wow. And I said, yeah, and I said, no, I said, you know, I think he must have, there must be some misunderstanding because, number one, it's illegal. You know, the U.S. government, we intercept those things. And number two, it's just idiotic.

Why wouldn't the U.S. government enable Iranian weapons to go to Bosnia? I'm not opposed to covert arms, you know, you want to send in some Saudi weapons or whatever and help the Bosnians, sure, we can, you know, you might want to look at something like that. But at that moment in time, we weren't doing that. And we certainly wouldn't want Iranian weapons to go in. And he said, no, that's what he said, believe it or not. And it turned out that it was a secret policy. It was, and also to backtrack, I'm not political.

I'm not, you know, I don't, I criticize. every president because I look at it through CIAIs. If they screw up intelligence or ignore it or politicize it, they suck. And I say that in my book about both presidents Bush, about Obama and about Clinton. So I'm a very apolitical, bipartisan critic of our politicians. But anyway, this secret policy was known only to Clinton, National Security Advisor, Anthony and Ambassador Galbraith and the Croatian president and my contact and me. So now I'm thinking, and I was just there TDIWI for it.

And you always found out by mistake. You weren't supposed to know. I wasn't supposed to know, but, you know, the president knew something, the Croatian president knew this didn't sound right. And we often, the CIA often had more influence and better contacts in a country than the ambassador did. They would often come to us first. I've had ambassadors come to me to help arrange meetings, believe it or not, which sounds crazy. So essentially, the president wanted to check with us to see if this was true,

because he knew that we'd work together to intercept previous Iranian shipment. And I said, I'm going to have to get back to you on that. You know, I didn't know what in the hell to do at that point. And so I did not immediately report it in cable traffic. I waited for my colleague to get back. I was just essentially there to cover for him for a few weeks. So he came back in the next few days or the next week. And I told him about what had happened,

and it fell to him to deal with it in official channels. So essentially, CIA was a whistleblower, not using the whistleblower statute and all that, but we blew the whistle on this illegal, ostensibly illegal and idiotic activity. It came to a halt. And the ambassador was not happy with CIA, and it soured relations between us for a long time. And in fact, I cite in the book, a congressional investigation into the ambassador's improper behavior towards the CIA after we reported his idiotic behavior.

Yeah, I mean, without knowing that the president was behind that and stuff, I would have just thought that Iran had gotten to the ambassador somehow. you know, and that he was playing proxy for them. Like, that's very unusual for the president to, you know. But that it's the president, a national security advisor, and the ambassador where, I mean, HK, you know better than I do, that this is not how covert action programs are supposed to work, right? We went through this with all over the north. Oh, exactly. Yeah, you don't use the ambassador for covert. And I don't know whose idea it was to do this.

I don't know if it was the ambassador's idea, and he pushed it up the chain of command or if it was Anthony Lakes. And again, you could say their motives were good. They want to help the Bosdians. Okay, great. Let's figure out a way to help. There's another way to do that. Right. You don't invite the Iranians into the heart of Europe, you know, unbelievable.

Do you think part of the reason why maybe they did this, why they pursued it in this manner, was because there were congressional limitations on what we could do in Bosnia at the time, so they had to get quote unquote creative? You know, like, I mean, like Oliver North, like, let's use Iran to do things since we can't. Yeah, absolutely. Because, again, we had this arms embargo. And again, I was not there to support. I was just there to represent the U.S. government and to collect intelligence.

And I'm sure my book will piss off serves as going to piss off Croats, Bosnians, Albanians. It means I'm doing my job. You know, I'm not biased in favor of one or the other. I say good and bad about each. I sort of call it as I see it. But you could argue that our arms embargo really did hurt the Bosnian Muslims. It hurt the Croats.

You know, it only helped the Serbs who we eventually decided were the bad guys. So why do we have this arms embargo? So that absolutely could have been one of the motivations to some way get around this arms embargo. But still, that's not how you go about it. Right, right. It has shades of Syria and the mess we

made over there. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of times that's because, like, the policymakers get such, they don't understand, they don't research stuff, you know, they have a staffer who has a bare under, the barest understanding and their own motivations or whatever, who briefs them on it. Yeah, this is a side we should be on or this is what we should do and, and that's what they do. They don't know. I mean, probably most of the politicians involved had no idea where, where, you know, Bosnia-Hertsia was, where, you know, they had no idea what's going. They're like, okay, yeah, just stop weapons to everybody. They can't fight if they don't have weapons.

Right, and that was a good sentiment. But these were pretty sophisticated people. This is Peter Galbraith, a very sharp guy, respected ambassador. Anthony Lake, he got in trouble for this, and I heard that he was up to be CIA director after this, but one of the reasons he was not put into that position was because of this Iran arms fiasco. So, you know, these were pretty sharp people involved. So I still don't understand whose idea was and why they thought it was a good idea.

Guys, we're one hour in. I just wanted to take another opportunity to plug HK's book. This is what we're talking about today. American spy. If you're just joining us, HK's a retired CIA operations officer, had a lot of experience in the Balkans and other parts of the world, which is what we're talking about here today. You wrote a lot of these stories.

I mean, it's also, we're talking today. about a lot of kind of dark things, but this is actually a really funny book. There's a lot of funny anecdotes in here about HK's adventures around the world. You know, your wife and your kids are part of the story. They're along for the ride. So it's a lot of fun. And I also want to take a second to remind everyone who's watching, you know, please subscribe to the stream if you haven't already.

Yeah, subscribe to the stream. I hit the button for notifications. join our subreddit, which is the Reddit backslash. The link is in the description. Yeah, the team house. And please buy HK.'s book and check it out. A phenomenal read. And also, our rent just went up.

So anyway, so we're turning to you guys. If you enjoy our content, if you enjoy us having guests like HK. on please join us on Patreon the link is is below and even a dollar a month we have almost 2,000 subscribers now 2000 $1 a day from or $1 a day one dollar a month from each subscriber would have us in the green um did did uh what happened to you in Bosnia how did that obviously they didn't they didn't send out another case officer did they I mean how did that affect our relations with with Bosnia that time with our policy and support of them?

Yeah, that's an excellent question. And I don't really know the answer to that because once I was out, you know, I no longer have a need to know what's going on there. And so I was sort of shut out of what was happening there. So they obviously knew what was going on. So they dealt with it, you know, however they dealt with it. And I'm not saying there's a connection, but both the Iranian, who, targeted me and my Bosnian counterpart who showcased me to him died under bloody and

mysterious circumstances inside Bosnia. And I honestly don't know how that happened. How far from this event? Did they die? I'm guessing within, my recollection is like within a year or so. And I don't think it had anything to do with, I'd like to think that it did, but this was pre-9-11, so we, you know, we didn't fully take the gloves off until 9-11. And so I doubt it had anything to do with us.

Now, what happened shortly after I got out, because I got out in July, I think in August is when NATO started bombing Serb targets, including those that I identified when I was, you know, from Sarajevo. And so that was the first thing that happened. You know, whether we had a new chief there or not, I just don't know. You know, I wouldn't have been told. But I know that's when NATO finally got involved and, you know, And that eventually led to the peace accord.

And the other thing I wanted to ask you about that really blew my mind reading this book is that you recreated, because you couldn't publish actual cable traffic, it's still classified, locked up at a vault somewhere. So you just kind of recreated cable traffic in a semi-fictional manner, I guess, and put it into the book so people could get an idea of how it works. But you, I mean, it's true that you sent up the, the initial cable traffic back to DC on the Sabrenica massacre? Yeah, so I was there when Srebrenica fell, just coincidentally.

You know, I didn't know it was going to happen, but I just happened to be there. Srebrenica and then another so-called safe haven called Jepa. They both fell while I was there. And so I didn't go to Srebrenica. I was in Sarajevo, and I was getting most of my intelligence from the Bosnian security. service which had its own sources in Srebrenica. And so they provided me with the intelligence. And yeah, I remember Madeline Albright was, I think she was the U.S. ambassador to the

United Nations at the time. And she was, you know, I was there and I was getting requirements directly from her, from the White House. It was pretty cool. This is kind of what you live for. If you're a CIA officers to have your reporting actually paid attention to by somebody in Washington and not just by an analyst and then, you know, disappear somewhere. So I love that aspect of it, knowing that everything I reported, it was being sent raw to the White House, to the Pentagon to the NSC.

And so she wanted to know how many people were killed in Srebrenica. And I said, based on my sources there, between 6 and 8,000 in the first couple of days were killed. And nobody really believed it initially. It was just too much to imagine. How could they do this? You know, this is Europe after all. We had safe havens, but they did. And it turned out that that number was spot on, if not low.

Can you lay out what your sources told you, what you learned about the SEPRADITA? Sorry, if I'm mispronouncing it, this massacre. Because, I mean, I think it's really important for people to understand that this was a genocide that was taking place in Europe in the 1990s. I mean, there were death camps in Europe in the 1990s. Like, that's insane to really think about. Yeah. And at the time, I mean, we knew that there were atrocities. Even when I was in Croatia, we'd set up this refugee debriefing center to debrief refugees coming out of Croatia and Bosnia for use, you know, as evidence in war crimes, future war crimes tribunals. At the time, though, I wasn't really focused on the nitty gritty of the atrocities, you know. It was more big picture stuff like the Serbs are opening up this corridor to make their way.

Serievo, they slaughtered between six and eight thousand here. You know, they do have the rape camps and the concentration camps. But it wasn't in the fictitious cable in my book, I get into a lot of the nitty-gritty. And those are all true stories as far as I know. But a lot of those weren't reported until long after, or at least long after I was there. And so I pulled those together from a lot of open sources and put them into. the cable just to number one to share the truth about what happened in Srebrenica because a lot of people don't remember or know or care but also that's the type of thing

that would go into a cable typically but my reporting was more big picture stuff even though we knew about what was happening you know it was more big picture reporting and is it true what you wrote in there then that the response you got back from your employer was you know what the fuck are you in disguising yourself as a journalist and invoicing us for gasoline, like what the hell was wrong with you? That kind of thing happened over the course of my career. You know, that's why it's almost surreal. You're reporting on war crimes, trying to stay alive, and they're telling you, you're going to, you know, if you are caught with a weapon,

you're going to have a reprimand in your personnel file and you may lose your job. or we can't reimburse you for the black market gasoline you bought because you don't have a receipt. All this stuff just kind of going on at the same time. And that's all sort of to be expected. But what's frustrating is if they don't believe your intelligence or if they downplay it or don't disseminate it because they're relying instead on Serb radio out of Pala or open source State Department reporting. You know, come on, this is what the CIA does. This is why you pay us to go there and collect.

the secret stuff, you know, the stuff that's not openly available. And there's not much that's not openly available anymore. But, you know, that's the really frustrating part is that they ignore or politicize your intelligence. So what, so when you say that Chauvinisa was, was a safe haven, what does that mean exactly? Were there, were there allied NATO or, were there forces there that were meant to protect it? If you could, for the sake of the audience explain, you know, what that event was and how that went down. Right. So the United Nations peacekeepers were there in Bosnia at the time. In fact, it was their convoy who we drove in with to Sarajevo. Remember, they were bringing relief supplies in,

multiple nationalities, you know, people from Denmark and, I mean, all over the world, typical UN contingent. They were arms, but they didn't really have either the, permission or the ability to fight off the Serbs. So, yes, the UN was in Srebrenica, they were in Jepa, they declared it safe haven, and then Ratko Mladic, who was the Bosnian Serb general, one of the top two war criminals, along with Radovan Karajic, who was the political leader. He basically told the UN peacekeepers to stand aside. he was going to take over Srebrenica.

And I think NATO bombed one Serb tank or something. And after that, Bloddage took a bunch of UN peacekeepers hostage. French general negotiated with them and said, we'll pull out, just let our hostages go. French General Morione, I think is who it was. And then the Dutch peacekeepers also got a lot of flack for abandoning Srebrenica to the Serb slaughter. But the fact is, you know, like,

I said, they didn't really have the ability or the authority to do much about it. If the Serbs wanted to take over Srebrenica, they were going to do it whether the UN was there or not. So the idea of a safe haven was more in theory than in practice. Yeah, when they're under as peacekeepers, their rules of engagement are strict. I mean, very, very tight. And even so, they don't, they don't have a huge supply, you know, logistics trained to support any kind of extended conflict. They probably got the magazines they're carrying and that's it. Yeah, exactly.

They just weren't equipped and the rules of engagement wouldn't have allowed it. I don't believe. You know, I think of it like Baghdad today where if, you know, if the Shiite militias decided to overrun our massive embassy compound, they probably could, you know, if they've decided to activate enough enough people. It was kind of like that in Srebrenica. So we were counting on the goodwill of the Bosnian Serbs, and there was basically none at the time. They were going to do what they were going to do.

Right. And it is. So the UN I tailed it out of there. There's another interesting thing you point out in your book about working in this part of the world. And I just wanted to briefly tell you a story of my own story being in Belgrade a couple years ago that I think kind of leads right into it. because I understood exactly what you were talking about, that I was there, what, in 2017, to do a television show for the Discovery Channel. And one of the people I was meeting with was a college professor, and he was also the leader or a leader in the Serbian Socialist Party. So my thoughts are, this is a serious guy.

I got to have my game face on, got to have it together, right? We meet him at the castle in Belgrade that's right along the river. I was told that it's changed hands like 40-something times throughout history. We meet this guy there and start having this very basic conversation about Serbian history. And then whenever the Discovery Channel people turn the cameras off and we're kind of talking off the cuff, this guy immediately launches into this story and starts telling us he's like, you know, you know, the, the gypsy girls, when they turn 16, they get naked and they have a party and they touch each other. And like he's smoking a cigarette. He's like, I think they kiss. And I'm like,

were you saying like an orgy? You're like, I don't know. I don't know if they have sex, but they kiss each other. The gypsy girls, they get naked. It's a ritual they do. And then he goes right into talking about like pornography and like, you know, today with the blue pill, you don't know who the real stallion is anymore, like getting all fired up about this. And this is like, I thought this was a serious guy as a college professor and a politician in Serbia. I'm like, this is a fucking clown show. Like, who said this guy here? Right. What the hell is going on? So you wrote in your book, HK, that it's like impossible to get to the truth because, in this part of the world, because there's just conspiracy theories within conspiracy theories and these people, they're just like raised

from the day they come out of the womb to believe in these like, big. Byzantine conspiracy theories floating around. And I mean, largely, I guess it's because of the history of the region. And like I said, the Belgrade had changed hands like 40 years and all the ethnic tension. But anyway, that's just my own little anecdote with that. I was just wondering if you can share some of those experiences with us. Yeah, you definitely got a good taste with the Balkans with that experience. But yeah, you know, everybody I dealt with was very nice to me, you know, whether they're Bosnians or Serbs or Croas.

I was an outsider and they were, for the most part, very nice, and also very intelligent and highly educated, for the most part, the people who I dealt with. But they were all brought up. It's like tribalism on steroids. And so, you know, you can be talking with the most educated. And again, I haven't been there in a long time, so maybe things have changed a bit, although I kind of doubt it. Just to use an example, the most educated, open-minded serve on Earth. But you get to a certain point, and they say, but Albanians are dogs, they should all be killed.

Right. Okay. Because they've all been brainwashed in their tribes' culture and the stories from the time they're born, and they're sort of taught all these things. And some of the things they're taught are probably true. But other things, you know, like certainly, they would tear up when talking about the Battle of Kosovo of 1389, which they lost. 1389 and use that as justification for what they're doing in Kosovo at that time, you know, today, let's say. And so you can't, you just can't really reason with them about certain things.

Right. Especially, you know, I would find out very quickly. I mean, in this case, it was a younger kid. He was probably 18 years old. Finds out I'm an American. Like, could I just throw up. Let me explain to you why today's borders around Serbia are inappropriate. Okay, sit down.

We're going to talk about Greater Serbia now and have a little classroom time on this. And I mean, yeah, like you said, it's just, it's in their DNA. Yeah, it is. And all of them are, and the Bosnians are like that, the Croats are like that. And they all have their conspiracy theories. And it just, I mean, and they would have state-controlled TV. And it was, you know, Serbs are kind of like Russians cousins, you know, it's the same alphabet. And they sort of think the same way.

And I see stuff that Putin does and says and the things that Russian's... I have a Putin coffee mug that I bought in Belgrade. What's that? I have a, it's a coffee bug with Putin's face on it that I bought it like a stall in Belgrade in the park. There's a lot of similarities between the Russians and the Serbs and they're historically allies and the Russians always tend to favor of the Serbs. But I have one story just to give you an idea of the conspiracy theories that people will

believe. When I was in Croatia early on in the war, the Yugoslav Air Force flew over Zagreb, bombed the presidential palace, didn't kill anybody, I don't think. flew off. The Serbs said, or the Yugoslavs at the time, said, no, we didn't, yes, we were flying by innocently overhead. What happened was the Croats knew we were going to fly over, and so they planted a bomb inside the presidential palace, and they waited for us to fly over and activated it as we did, so it looked like we did it, and people bought it. And that's just every day of the week, there was something like that coming out, and people believe it. What is

that mean for your job as an intelligence officer working in that part of the world where you're very much in the business of discerning what the truth is and getting objective information back to our policymakers in America? Right. That made it really tough. And that's why it's so important to have good quality people as your sources, your assets, because 90% of it's bullshit. And you hear the same things over and over. They all want to educate. you on how things really are, whether in Kosovo or Serbia or Croatia. And even in language school in D.C., beforehand, those of us going to Belgrade were taught Serbian, those going to Zagreb were taught Croatian.

They're very similar languages, but slightly different. And we were taught by native Croats, native Serbs, and half of language training was them trying to brainwash their students into the Serbian way of life or the Croatian way of life. So we learned early on to, you know, sort of block out most of what they said. But it was a challenge. And that's why having documents delivered were good, because that was the real deal. This was a professional intelligence service. And they don't get messed up and or mixed up in, the conspiracy theories. This is their own internal documentation. So that was good. Plus, my asset was sort of a true Yugoslav. He was really able to separate tribalism from

Fact and analysis. He was a true pro and we were really lucky to have access to him and his his insights Can you say where that gentleman is today? I mean is he okay? I don't know Again once I left I had no need to know what happened other than I wanted to make sure my My successor took care of him as you know as well as I did But after that I I don't know It's interesting because it seems that the more tribalistic a community or a country or a question, you know, whatever you want to call them, is the more prone to conspiracy and superstition they tend to be. Because like if you compare Iraq to Afghanistan

two places where I spend a lot of time, Iraq does have some of the conspiracy and superstition and things like that going on, but nowhere near as much as compared to particularly the tribal areas, you know, in the south and the east of Afghanistan, where a conspiracy and, you know, where a conspiracy and superstition were just, I mean, very, very common, you know. Interesting. Yeah. And, you know, and getting through, like you say, getting through the truth beyond the conspiracy, because they're not, they're not hypothesizing conspiracy. They, they know it to their core. Like, you know, they, it's not a, well, you know,

maybe it's like, no, this, this is the truth. This is, you know, it had to have been. been them or this is how it is. So did it take you a while to learn, like to wade through that when you first went out there? Because it's something that's very foreign to a Western mind. It is. Luckily, I had nine months or so of language school, which was a good orientation, not only into the language, but into the culture and how they think. And so, you know, I kind of, I kind of knew what I was getting into. Yeah. And I can't really get into what I was. was doing in my day job, but I spent a lot of time with the people speaking the language every single day and a lot of contact with people. And so I really got to know everything about,

I could sort of blend in, I could, you know, tell the jokes and curse and everything else with, like, with the best of them. And so I really got to understand the place really well. And so that made it a lot, a lot better as well. And I think to be a good CIA officer, you have to really enjoy getting into a culture and a language. If you don't love doing that, you know, you're not going to be very effective, I think. I was wondering if you'd be willing to talk to us a little bit then about after you left the CIA, you went into the private sector and returning back to the Balkans and getting involved in the hunt for some of these war criminals.

You had some pretty interesting stories in the book about that as well. Yeah, so I left actually, so I didn't retire. I resigned from the CIA sort of mid-career for a variety of reasons. And I started my own company. I continued to operate like a station. I continued to run sources overseas, collect intelligence. But my customers or clients were no longer the U.S. government, for the most part, it was corporate client.

So, for example, I would have a big bank or a tobacco company who wanted an investigation done in Kosovo. or somewhere in Central Europe. And so I continued to do the same job, but for private clients. I also continued to work as needed for the CIA, and I get into some of those stories in the book as well. But the war criminal thing came about because just before 9-11,

I had started work on a novel. I wanted to try my hand in fiction, and it was essentially based on chapter one, the Siri Able Story, the Iranian terrorism threat and Bosnia war criminals. And in the novel, which I didn't finish, it was just a synopsis, the former CIA guy decides to go back to try and track down one of the war criminals for the reward money for a variety of personal motives,

which are in the novel, not necessarily in real life. And so there really was a $5 million reward at the time for Karjjic, also for Lottish. Those are the top two guys. And so I was like nine chapters in and then 9-11 happened. So I said, well, screw the novel. Who cares about Bosnian war criminals

when we got the likes of Al-Qaeda 9-11? The world has changed. So I set aside the novel. But I started thinking about it. Well, why not do what the protagonist of the novel was going to do? Why not go

after the $5 million in reward money? what you had to do to collect it was provide intelligence that led to the capture or killing of one of these war criminals. I figured, well, hell, I could do that. What could go wrong? And so I had sort of a principal agent who I had recruited after I left the CIA. He had nothing to do with CIA in the former Yugoslavia. He had incredible sources, police, but also organized crime sources throughout the former Yugoslavia. Kosovo, Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, you name it, great sources.

He had his own stable of assets, essentially, and I was able to tap into that. So I discussed it with him. I said, what do you think about going after one of these war criminals for the reward money? And these guys, the war criminals were basically the same guys who were organized crime figures. There was a guy named Arkan, who was a notorious war criminal. but also involved in organized crime. And so the Serbs have an expression, Isto stranyi drugopakovani,

which means same shit, different packaging. That sort of applied to the Serb war criminals slash organized crime figures. The Croats had their own expression, which was Easti Dreg, Druga frisura, same shit, different hairdo. But that's how you would describe these guys. So my principal agent in the Balkans

and said, yeah, you know, I can do this. So we came up with a plan. And his half of the plan was to gain access to, we decided on Kadajij, because he was able to get access to him and not to Mladic. Karajic was the political leader behind the whole Bosnian war. And so there were like three guys in the chain between him and the source, insomero, inside Karajjjjic's inner circle. And at the time Karajic was moving around almost every day to a new location.

He knew he was hunted. And our intelligence was like a day old as well. And so his job was to provide that intelligence. My job was to coordinate with the U.S. was much harder. We had to coordinate the U.S. government and with NATO forces in Bosnia to convince them that we could come up with the intelligence that they needed because they were actively looking for these guys. And so their first reaction was understandable. They said, we need to know who your sources are. And I was on the outside at this point. So if I had been on the inside, I could have

better influenced the bureaucracy and maybe gotten things done more my way. My way was, you got to trust me to do this my way, and we will give you the green light when he's down for a couple of days. We heard that he was going to have some sort of leg surgery. He'd have to be down for two or three days. And we wanted, I was going to remain in constant contact with my government sources who were in their contacts who were in touch with the military. And they said, no, we have to know or we won't, we won't proceed. And the reason they did that was because they had been on the receiving end of some bad intelligence in the past. So I don't blame them for taking that approach. But I knew that if I went that route, it wouldn't, it probably wouldn't work. But I had no choice. So we said,

all right, we identified the sources. They believed us. They knew it was the real deal. But I again said, please, just hold off. Don't jump the gun. Number one, don't go to my sources. Number two, don't jump the gun. Because, you know, they tended to move loudly and slowly. Yeah. So I said, wait until we give you the green light and then you can move in. So we had everything teed up. I was in 24-7 communication with my contact. contact and the government. He was in 24-7 contact with his sources. And then we got word. There was a, I think it was, what were they called, not K-4. It was like, whatever the Bosnian force was at the time. They held a news conference to announce that they had tried to capture Karajic and they missed him.

They caught a couple of other guys. And it was based on intelligence they had. And they mentioned the leg bit that I had provided. All that was only known. to people in his inner circle. So they jumped the gun, they blew it, and they revealed some of the intelligence. Right. I heard Karajic immediately went on a mole hunt within his circle. Luckily, he never figured out who Argye was. He had a big enough circle, and plus, our guy didn't know that I even existed.

He was dealing with his primary contact, and there were two more between him and me. So even if he'd been under suspicion and tortured, he had no idea that this was for, you know, the US government. But at any rate, they blew it and then I heard after that they actually went to a couple of our sources to try and recruit them unilaterally. And these guys went to my guy who handled them and said, you know, we will never work for you again because you botched it. And we didn't, we were each going to get a million bucks. You know, there were five of us in the chain. And so it was just a complete, you know, foobar situation. You knew that the government would try to recruit your sources directly once you turned them out.

I mean, once you gave them the names like that. So I either had to pull the plug and just say, forget it, or just hope for the best, even though I knew that it probably wouldn't work out. So we came close. Yeah. And luckily he was captured many years later in Belgrade posing as a spiritual healer. I have a photo of him in the book. That's funny. You mentioned in the book also that a lot of this sounds suspiciously like a few films that have been made.

I mean, there is one where the journalists are sitting around the bar drinking and they're like, hey, the UN's not doing anything to catch these work criminals. Let's go try it ourselves. Yeah. So I never finished the book, but I finished the synopsis. And the synopsis tells the entire story. And I was living in Los Angeles at the time and had shared the synopsis with some. agents, but also with a couple of people in the entertainment industry. Anyway, like I said, 9-11 happened.

I forgot about it. I figured who cares. And a couple of years ago was watching this movie on Netflix. I don't even remember the name of it. It's in the book. It's a Richard Gear movie. And I swear to God, and in the book I list, like, in a footnote, like a dozen side-by-side comparisons of my synopsis to the movie.

And the movie was based on an Esquare, magazine article, which I remember reading a long time ago, fantastic article. But the movie bore more resemblance to my novel synopsis than it did to the Esquire magazine article. It may be a coincidence. I don't, you know, who knows? But the coincidences are pretty remarkable when you take a look at them in the book. Yeah, I wrote a novel years ago, and it was about, there's a conspiracy in the background. It's down in Mexico, and the idea is that the CIA is going to Unite all the cartels in Mexico within the Sinaloa cartel. So they will become the predominant one and it will cut down on the violence You'll just have one mega corporate cartel, right? And then I saw the movie Sicario come out where it's like the exact same basic potline that they're trying to unite them into into one and you know

Maybe it is just a coincidence like you say HK, but it's like if you squint hard enough at the movie screen, you're like, what the fuck? Yeah, yeah, it's Hollywood's a den of thieves apparently and so Once you share an idea, it's gone. Yeah. Yeah. It's up for grabs. We got a couple more super chats. Alex.

Thanks, Alex. So he wants to know, other than the surveillance detection, what was your favorite skill that you learned at the CIA? I talk a lot about this in the book. I was never in the military, and a lot of us who joined were not. Some had military backgrounds, but a lot of us did not. And so we went through what was called SOTC, special operations training course. It was essentially a couple of months, three months of paramilitary training at the farm. And a lot of it was sort of, you know, I call it it's like ISIS training, but without the decapitation in Facebook.

You know, it was a lot of counterinsurgency from the point of view of the insurgent. And so we got to learn all kinds of, we got to play with all kinds of weapons. We went to demolitions training for two weeks, learned how to make IEDs and blow things up. And it wasn't so that we would become special operation soldiers. We weren't. This was more for familiarization with the weapons and with the tactics and with all these concepts so that when we are overseas, we sort of know what we're reporting on. But then we also got to go to jump school for two weeks, which was taught.

And all of this was taught primarily by former agency or army agency guys who had served in Vietnam. This was because this training was in the 80s. So a lot of them came out of Vietnam. And they had worked for the CIA and or the army in Vietnam. And so the training from jump school, we went through Seer training, which was not fun, but it was fantastic, led by the late great Colonel Nick Rowe, if you know who he else, he worked five years of freedom. and he came up with the SEAR program. Yeah.

But, but, so that was the most fun was this paramilitary, you know, as a kid, I liked to blow shit up and buy explosives. And so this was like, you know, it was, it was great fun after being in law school for three years. Now, is that something that in the 80s, all case officers were going to, or only if you were going to, like, a high threat area, would you go through that? When I joined, everybody went through it. Now, keep in mind, Reagan was president. William Casey was the CIA director. There was renewed enthusiasm and morale. It was high.

And it was a good time to join the CIA. And so, you know, I don't know what happened after I went through training. But it was really fantastic at the time. And so we went to this paramilitary training first. It was also good for obviously team building and confidence building and all that. And then we got to know each other really well. before we went to the ops course, the spy school, also at the farm, a couple of months later. So you actually had the opportunity to meet Nick Rowe before he, before who's killed?

Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah, I went and visited the traffic circle in Manila where he was taken out by a sparrow team. Yeah, did you, I don't know if you read this or remember in the book. I didn't get into it in too much detail, but I have a friend who, um, was in the embassy with Nick Rowe when it happened. And he went to the traffic circle, and they checked out the vehicle.

And he and others in the U.S. military are convinced it was not the Philippine, what are the new people, I mean, whatever they're called. It was actually judging, by the way, that the shot pattern in the vehicle, the professionalism of it all, the way they cased him, followed him, the tight patterns. They're 100% convinced it was the Philippine military behind it. Somebody who apparently Nick Rowe was investigating corruption involved. There was a lot of U.S. military assistance to the Philippines, and there was a lot of corruption.

Philippines military was involved, and he was, this is the theory in the story anyway. I can't say that it's true. But that Nick Rowe was on to that, and he was going to report what these corrupt Philippines military leaders were doing, and that is why he was assassinated. And that is who did it, judging by the professionalism of the job. For any of you who haven't read, it's a great book. It's called Five Years to Freedom by Nick Rowe, who was a P.O.W. in Vietnam for five. for five years and it talks about his experiences and it's it's a phenomenal and when he came

back as SHK points out he was the one who really pushed to create a Sears school so that American soldiers POWs were prepared for that experience so I mean generations of us including me have benefited from yeah yeah he's kind of he's the father yeah the father so you're uh Andrew uh he said uh he said I believe it was a general Darmay Bernard Janvier, Hanvier, Johnvier, who was the lead out there during the massacre that we're talking about, the name? Yeah, that sounds right. I forget who Morial. Maybe Morial was in a different place.

But yeah, that name sounds right. And again, the Dutch took a lot of the blame as well. Yeah. And so, and Andrew also wants to know, he says, hold up. Jack suggesting he knows who the real stallion is? No, I don't. That's a mystery. You'll have to go talk to that Serb professor.

And tell you the truth about the Roma teenage girls and whatever the fuck that's all about. And Alex wants to know, what's everyone's thoughts on the Iowa cluster? HK. Do you have any thoughts on that? HK? Iowa? Yeah. I don't know if you follow the news, but on their whole caucus and the whole debacle up there about have to read.

recount like they're doing the whole the involvement in the app. Are you following any of that? Do you care? A little bit and I don't care that much. I just sort of despise all politicians and I probably better should better keep my mouth shut when it comes to politics because it'll only piss off half of your viewers. Yeah. Jack, do you have any thoughts on it?

I mean, I always have thoughts. I mean, I always say the alternative name. this live stream is two white dudes have thoughts. Yeah. Who old white dudes have thoughts. Oh, by the way, I turned 50 this week. Congratulations. Yeah. Mr. Dave. I saw that. Yeah. So I'm, I didn't realize it, but AARP managed to get like their membership info to me right on the day of my birthday. I didn't know it's 50. I thought it would be like 55 or 60, but social security right around that corner. Man, I can't wait. All those fat, sweet social security benefits.

I mean, I posted some of my thoughts on Twitter about it and came under attack by the anonymous, woke, mill veteran world. It was pretty entertaining. About me 2050? No, about my insufficiently woke comments about the Iowa situation. Oh, about the Iowa situation? Well, no, I'm sorry, it wasn't about Iowa. It was about impeachment. Oh.

And I was just saying, this is like, this is a stage show. This is a soap opera. It's a theater, and, you know, the Democrats blew it. Yeah. And now we're going to have to deal with eight years of this idiot. And, yeah, I got an earful about that. That wasn't the right thing to say. What did they disagree with?

That he was an idiot, that we'd have to do eight years with him? Did the Democrats blew it? No, they were mad at me for saying it was a scandal because you're not supposed to say it's a scandal because it was real criminal activity, Jack, and gosh, darn it. You know, there are constitutional issues. issues here at play and you know you're a boomer having these you know Pat Roberts takes on things then you should just go away delete your Twitter account but hey man that's the world we live in

that's uh that's just how it is so like as you say HK I mean you're going to alienate one half of the audience or the other so it is what it is yeah it is what it is yeah the only thing I will say in that regard without getting political is that I have witnessed the effects of tribalism And the results are not good. It leads to the destruction of a country. Yeah. And so for what it's worth. We in this country are getting more and more tribalistic, like, every day.

And the thing is, is it, I mean, maybe we just know more about what everybody thinks because of things like Twitter or stuff. Maybe, like, previous generations have been just as divided and divisive. I don't know. But it doesn't feel like we've always been this way. And it's almost as if now people are like forcing you to pick one side. Yeah, yeah. You have to pick a team. You have to pick a team.

Like you can't just go, well, I don't really know. Like it's complicated. There are a lot of things. That must be especially challenging, I would think, for our professionals in the intelligence community who, you know, and I've talked to people in the FBI as well. where they're like, we have to be objective. You know, we cannot be political partisans. I mean, do you hear anything in that regard, H.K.,

from your friends at the agency, that it's getting more and more difficult to be a nonpartisan service member, for lack of a better term? Yeah, I think it is. And again, that's a good point that you made. You know, CIA people, FBI, military, they are traditionally very apolitical.

I mean, everybody has their own personal beliefs, but I swear we never talked about politics when I was in the CIA. I couldn't tell you if my friends were Democrat or Republican. We really didn't talk about it. It didn't come up. And now I just, you know, I read that Gina Haskell, the CIA director, was not only at the state of the union, which was first because I think she's a member of the cabinet and they weren't before, but that she was applauding. You know, that is not said a good example. I don't care if it's a Democrat or Republican. We have to remain apolitical to do the job right.

Now, if the politicians want to politicize the intelligence and screw things up, that's their prerogative, you know. But the professional, you know, the working people have to stay out of politics. And I think it is getting harder and harder to do that. There is so much pressure, as you say, to pick a side. And that's how it was in Yugoslavia. You pick a side and it leads to the destruction of the country. Yeah. Yeah. And the thing is, once you pick a side just because of confirmation bias and everything else, you lose all objectivity.

You, your brain can, I mean, your brain just cannot remain objective at that point because... You're rooting for a sports team. Yeah. You know, and it's not like, oh, I'm going to choose to believe this or choose not to believe this. Like, your brain has pathways that are being formed that are going to jump logical. processes and you're going to reach you're going to form a you know a conclusion based on whatever you know whatever your beliefs are and then your bill will your brain will build the logical system to support that and then you're lost you know yeah you're lost yeah yeah hk could we uh talk a little

bit then about your second business endeavor in the private sector where i mean you basically, I mean, you did. You drove into Iraq right after the invasion. I kind of just trying to spearhead this entrepreneurial endeavor in Iraq. And I mean, you sent me that picture of you in the middle of the sandstorm that you, I mean, it just sounded like completely insane to me that you were doing this without U.S. government auspices just going off on your own, hoping to start something. And, you know, maybe the government would nibble on it, you know, later on if it was successful. Yeah, well, first of all, the photo was actually of my colleague who was an American who was with me when we went in during the sandstorm. And, you know, you've probably been in some of these sandstorms where it turns day into night, literally.

Yeah. And it's an eerie, scary feeling because you don't know who's going to run NGO or what's going to happen. But yeah, so when I, I'll briefly tell you how I got into Iraq. You know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I had, after I left the CIA, I had a private client who wanted to do some good during the Kosovo war. And, you know, he was watching the refugees on TV every night. There was, you know, ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. And so I went to Kosovo a couple of times.

I talked him into doing a humanitarian project there to finance it. And he did. And so I went there and sat a. up and got it going, and it was handed off to the International Rescue Committee. And anyway, this humanitarian project evolved into a very successful, profitable business. It didn't belong to me, but it was sort of my idea. And it was in a post-war zone where they needed the goods and services that this guy could provide.

So I said, you know what, that's a good business model. So when I knew that Iraq was going to happen, I decided to do the same thing in Iraq that we had done in Kosovo, but this time it would be my business, so I borrowed some money, got a couple of guys who had absolutely nothing else to do with their time and convinced them to go to Baghdad with me. I had an Iraqi partner, tribal leader from Ramadi, because you, you know, one thing I learned in the CIA is you can't get anything done anywhere without good... local partner asset, whatever you want to call them.

And so as soon as we saw that mission accomplished sign up on the ship, we said, all right, piece is broken out. We're going to go in. And we did. We thought we'd have maybe a two or three month jumps head start on the competition. But it ended up being many years because, you know, obviously the insurgency quickly sprang up. And all these stories are covered in the book as well. But that's how I got into it.

It was based on something I had done in Kosovo before. And it was purely private. It had nothing to do with the U.S. government. However, as I mentioned in the book, the U.S. government, which initially told me I couldn't do it, shouldn't do it. And I forget what else they said. They said the same thing when I went to Kosovo, and they ended up becoming our customer there. Right. So I ignored them.

And they heard, first of all, because they thought, how can a former CIA guy get away with this in Iraq? And I said, it ain't going to be easy, but you know, you do the best you can. And you keep it quiet, and we're an Iraqi company and, you know, people, and we have all Iraqi employees. And we cover all regions of Iraq and little white Iraqi cars. There's no private convoy for us. Couldn't afford it anyway. And so we were operating anywhere and everywhere from day one. And the U.S. government got wind of it and said, hey, you could help us with our counterterrorism mission because you can do things and go play.

that we can't do and again I can't get into the detail but it was a highly successful program for many years countrywide and they pulled the plug on it when troops left Iraq at the end of 2011 even though it was supposed to be a stay-behind program and it was unbelievably successful and it had been kept secret and a lot of us inside and outside of the government said, don't pull the plug on it. This is now is when we need it.

The bad guys have not gone away. They're not going to go away. Right. But they did. And so my business continued to operate. And then a couple of years later, when ISIS took over Mosul, and our business was operating in Mosul,

as always, with ISIS permission eventually. Again, they didn't know it was an American-run company. And I reminded my friends in the government that we're operational in Mosul, and according to the news, you guys don't know anything about what's happening in Mosul. You were caught off guard by ISIS. You probably wouldn't have been if you had not pulled the plug on the program, but would you like to reactivate the program now since, you know, this is ISIS occupation? And the bottom line answer was, no thanks. It was a sort of a friend of mine at a Soxcent at that time when we were withdrawn, and he was telling me about

that how we like literally shut down all of our intelligence networks in Iraq and they were shocked they were like we've never done anything like this before yeah just like pulling the plug on something this large yeah I feel like the uh I mean this is habitual for the United States government though in the sense it we're blind to what's going on in the world unless like we have some knee-jerk reaction or some interest in it whether it's political interest economical interest whatever else and then we go in and we have we start from zero almost every time we go into someplace they have to reactivate you know like when we went into afghanistan then to reactivate guys who have been working with the moose against the russians because we had we had nothing there we

kept nothing there we kept no assets no resources nothing we remain blind in areas until it's like oh no something's happening you know let's spin something up well why do you think that is hk why why do we have such a you and you mentioned it in the balkans also that that we had this like schizophrenic foreign policy. Why do you think we behave like that from a policy standpoint? You know, I pin a lot of it on the politicians, you know, the first George Bush and the Balkans and James Baker, Secretary of State, they had good intentions.

They wanted to hold Yugoslavia together the way Tito had because we knew that civil war was the alternative. The way they wanted to hold Iraq together. Right, but it was the same thing. Exactly. I compare Saddam to Tito quite often because he's almost a necessary evil in that part of the world. Exactly. Exactly. In fact, when we first went into Iraq, I immediately set up an office in Basra, Baghdad, and Kurdistan. Because I looked at it through the Yugoslav lens, I thought, this place is going to fall apart eventually.

Now, they haven't quite yet, but that was my thought. And then, you know, when it was the Obama administration that pulled the plug on our program, and I don't know who made the decision. I don't know if it was made at the agency level or the white, who knows. But, you know, in that case, he had promised to get us out of Iraq. And so maybe it was based on that. You know, it's hard to figure out why they do things, because in the scheme of things, it didn't cost much to run our program, you know, probably cost a lot less than a single missile.

and so why not keep the damn thing going, you know. And it very well could have helped predict the rise of ISIS, you know, because we were everywhere, Rabadi and Mosul, Fallujah, you name it, we were there. And anyway, they pulled the plug and never reactivated it. So it never made any sense to me. I got one more question, unless the audience has anything, or you have anything, Dave. No, Andrew, thanks, Andrew again.

He just made a comment. He said that Will Durant said, no civilization is conquered from without before it has destroyed itself from within. And I mean, there's a lot of truth to that. And, you know, I think he's commenting on our discussion about our divisive politics right now, you know, and the tribalism we're starting to see in America.

Right. Well, wasn't it Lenin? I think it was Len, or some old Soviet leader who said that they will take America without firing a shot. Right. And there's that fascinating interview with the old KGB agent on YouTube where he says that their policy basically succeeded. They introduced Marxism into the colleges, into the educational system, and now it's just a matter of watching as it takes its course, you know, whether it's based on class warfare or, identity warfare or whatever, but some way to stop Americans from seeing themselves as Americans, but as some sort of class to do battle with the other classes.

Right. I mean, it's nothing new that the Russians are doing this. The Soviets did the same thing. What's new is I think that we have sort of given them the tools like Facebook and other things to use against us almost free. You know, we've given them more than they can possibly use against. us. HK, I'm going to ask you to stay for a private or a separate segment for our supporters. There's a couple other stories that I want to ask you about potentially recruiting a KGB officer

or something you were involved in, which is really interesting. And we'll see if we have time for anything else because I know we've already kept you for like two hours. But before we end the stream tonight, I just wanted to ask you, war in the Balkans in the 2020s, what do you place your odds at. In the Balkans? In the Balkans, yeah. What do you mean? Do you think war is coming back to that region? Is it going to happen again? You know, I honestly don't follow it that closely anymore. I still have friends there that I speak with, although we don't talk about politics that much. I hope, you know, I hope not, and I know there's still tension in places like Bosnia, but I really don't keep up with it that much.

So I hope they wouldn't go back to that path again because it's just no good comes from it, as you know. Absolutely. Guys, the book is American Spy, written by our guest H.K. Roy. I mean, we've talked about it for two hours at this point. You have a pretty good idea about what his experience is and what he's done. But there's a lot more in this book. I mean, we barely covered his experience.

in Iraq, which is like the whole second half of the book. So I definitely recommend going and picking this up. Yeah, please, please read the book. First off, thank you everybody for the birthday wishes. I really appreciate it. Another question, Alex asked, what advice would H.K. give to someone trying to join the CIA? And what was your favorite meal in the Balkans? That's an excellent, both are excellent questions. And I, I wrote a lot of the book with young people in mind, people who might be thinking about joining the CIA. The good news is you can do so much more research on it now than you could when I joined. And so get online.

The CIA has a fantastic website where you can learn about all the different jobs. They have internships for kids in college so you can be exposed to it that way. So I would start off with the CIA website as well as just sort of researching what you can online. but, you know, there's no, I think you need a college degree, and there are a lot of different jobs at the CIA. You don't have to be an operations officer like I was. They're all different, I mean, any job you can think of, it's almost like the military. There's a place for you there. A lot of them are based in D.C., obviously.

If you want to go overseas, then you should become a case officer and operations officer, which to me is the best, most important job at the CIA anyway. Why join to do anything else? But that's just my own bias. but yeah, get online, go to their website, and look into all the different types of job descriptions, and it's a good, fair process. You know, they will, you, it's not based on who you know

like it may have been in the old days. It's, you know, based on your qualifications, and they look for people from all different backgrounds, all different parts of the world, all different kinds of languages, obviously. It's not a requirement to have a foreign language to join, but it obviously helps if you've got one. especially one that they're interested in.

As for my favorite meal in the Balkans, I was in Serbia, so there was a lot of it was kind of like Russian food. There's not a lot of vegetables, and to this day I can't get enough salad after having lived there. But there's something called the Shopska Salata, which is kind of like a Greek salad.

And so a lot of the Turkish influence, although the Serbs complain about it, the best food had the Turkish influence. The Shopska Salata, Chevacchi, are basically like little kofta kebabs, you know, minced meat on the grill. That was my favorite stuff, was all the Turkish-based food. Did you have a hard time with PRB getting your book published? Not too bad.

I had been through the process once before with Chapter 1, which I published as an article, although chapter one is twice as long as the article was, so it's a lot more in depth. I knew more or less what I could and couldn't say. I go to D.C. every year for a fundraiser called Spookstock, which I mentioned at the back of the book. It's a fundraiser for the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation and for Special Ops Warrior Foundation, something like that. I can give you the websites later. But while I was there, I went in to meet with PRB because it's always better to. meet face to face if you can.

And so we sort of went over the outline of the book and they gave me guidance on what I couldn't, couldn't say. And, you know, at first it seemed like impossible hurdles to overcome, but then I figured out ways, and they were helpful, ways to work around some of the things that they had issues with. And so, you know, for the most part, it wasn't too bad of a process. And I wasn't able to tell with as much detail, like the story that I was just talking about in Iraq where we had this fantastic

successful counterterrorism program which they pulled the plug on but there are reasons why I can't tell the whole story and it makes perfect sense and who knows maybe someday we'll reactivate it but for the most part it was fair

but I've heard other people who say it was it was a pretty bad experience so I guess it just sort of depends on you know your experience yeah would you mention the name that charity again? You know, I want to read it to you, correct.

I'm going to get out of the back of my book here. There's two, the, the fundraiser is called Spookstock. There's not a lot on it online. It's sort of like a secret fundraiser, which they have every year. It's a battle of the bands, and they have, it's like a private concert. Like this past year, we had Lenny Kravitz. We've had ZZ Top, Steve Miller Band, John Fogarty, and we have celebrity judges sometimes.

who will judge this amateur battle of the ban. Robert De Niro's been there. Harvey Keitel, who was a Marine in Vietnam. I didn't know that. He was a celebrity judge. Admiral McCraven was a celebrity judge once. But it's a fundraiser for the children of fallen CIA and Special Operations Military.

And I'm just looking really quickly to see if I can find. Here we go. The websites are CIA memorial foundation. org and specialops.org. If anybody is inclined to make a donation to a very worthy cause, there are usually a dozen or two dozen new kids every year. They pay for the college education for the kids, but also they provide just a lot of guidance that the missing parent

would have been providing had they survived. Yeah. There's also, I believe, third option.org is another one. There's a, yeah, they actually added, I think, DIA to Spookstock, and I don't have their website, but there's a DIA fundraiser as well connected to it. But, yeah, lots of good causes, that's for sure, and not enough money to go around. Right. Yeah. And then, do CIA doctors ever go on operations?

I don't know. I mean, I would think so. You know, I didn't have that much contact with other. than at headquarters. Since 9-11, you know, things have changed a lot since I was in. And so I can't really say for sure. I just don't know. You know, there are polygraph operators and there are other psychologists who get involved

with agent debriefings and agent assessments and that kind of thing. But I never personally worked with the CIA doctor overseas. One could speculate, especially if they listen to this live stream podcast show, that there are contractors that work for the Central Intelligence Agency who may be special forces qualified medics or even doctors who are out in operational environments. That's very possible. It's a possibility. Yeah, especially since 9-11. Yeah.

Since there's been a militarization of the CIA, as you guys know, and a lot of blurring of the lines between spies and soldiers since 9-11 as well. do you do you have an opinion on the the militarization of the CIA as you see it I mean do you feel it that it's an area that that they should be in shouldn't be in do you have a sort of a personal take on it you know I kind of go back and forth on that and I I've been out since 9-11 and so I can't say with any great authority you know that it's a good thing or a bad thing I mean I understand how things evolve that way. But part of me thinks that, you know, the CIA should focus on traditional espionage. That's their job. Is there the foreign clandestine service of the United States? And the Pentagon should handle anything military. Obviously, there's some overlap. You know, look at the drone program and things like that. And I'm not an expert on what's been happening there since 9-11, but just by gut tells me that CIA should focus more on their core mission, which is foreign

clandestine intelligence. So when you say that, you mean more sort of at the strategic level and you feel, do you, I mean, do you feel that militarizing it makes it too, makes the information or makes, makes the activity too tactical, too small

scale and doesn't focus on what their main mission is? Yeah. And again, I understand why they went down that path because a lot of CIA to Afghanistan and Iraq and so there were war zones

and so it kind of made sense but there's a whole you know if you take out Afghanistan and Iraq and you look at the rest of the world you don't need the military training to work as a CIA officer for the most part you know

right so I understand how they got into that into that business but you know it wasn't from what I've heard about how they handled assets in Iraq, you know, you go out with a team of guys and you bring them back to the embassy

or wherever and debrief them. And, you know, it's a lot different from how we did things in the Cold War where, sure, you're one guy, you know, one guy, you do it, you know, you make it or break it. But, and then there's that story, which I know you know about, it was in zero dark 30 where the CIA brought in the somebody they thought was going to be an al-Qaeda volunteer. Oh, that's a Bob Chapman. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And so the way that was handled was not good. You know, in the old days, even in a situation like that, you'd probably send a case officer out on his own to meet with a guy and, you know, and hope for the best. And maybe bring somebody with you, but you wouldn't bring him into a place like that. And I don't mean to second guess what they were doing because I wasn't there, and I don't know.

But I know there, I don't know the person in charge was even a case officer. And to bring somebody in like that without basic, you know, patting him down and, right, what the hell? It's just from what I heard about it, I couldn't believe that they did it that way. You know, it was a horrible tragedy, too. And some of those children are beneficiaries of spookstock as well. But I don't know what the answer is. And like I said, I understand why they went down that path. But it seems like there's a lot of overlap and confusion as a result.

Yeah. And one last question. One last question. And thank you again. Did H.K. ever work with CIA Maritime or Air Branch? No, I did not. We received both maritime and air branch training during SOTC, which was a hell of a lot of fun. But no, I had nothing.

I was not a paramilitary officer, and so I had, I did not work with those guys. Great. Well, guys, thank you very much. Thank you, H.K. We really, really appreciate your time. Thanks for joining us tonight. Please make sure to subscribe if you have already. Share this video.

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