The Team House - CIA Paramilitary Team Leader, Counter Terrorism Deputy Chief of Ops | JR Seeger | Ep. 153

Episode Date: July 9, 2022

JR Seeger served as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne and as a CIA officer for a total of 27 years federal service. Since his retirement, JR has written articles and book reviews in the CIA professional journal "Studies in Intelligence" and the TE Lawrence Society newsletter. MIKE4 was his first novel and the first in a six part series about a family who have served in the special operations and intelligence community from World War II to the present. In 2020, JR has started a new series focusing on the early twentieth century competition among the great European powers. Part fantasy, part thriller, the first book, “A school for the Great Game,” looks at the first decade of the last century through the eyes of a teenager. JR splits his time between WNY and New Mexico. Check out JR's books here: https://www.amazon.com/J.-R.-Seeger/e/B07FDKNXTF%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share JR's website: https://www.jrseeger.com/ For all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests -Ad Free audio feed Subscribe to our Patreon! 👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links): https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: 👇 [e-mail] #ciaparamilitary #counterterrorism #groundbranchBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House with your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, guys, welcome to the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with co-host David Park. Our guest tonight is J.R. Seeger. J.R. served as a Army infantry officer and then went on to have a extensive career in the Central Intelligence Agency, which included leading paramilitary teams, one of the first teams into Afghanistan, amongst many other postings around the world as Chief of Station, Chief of Base, all sorts of interesting things that J.R. will be able to get to in varying levels of detail as he's allowed.

He is also an author. He's an author of the Mike 4 series, and he is the author of a steampunk series. This is a school for the great game. And I, well, J.R., I've wanted to interview you. I've wanted to have you on the show for a long time. I really appreciate you doing this. Well, it's my pleasure, guys. I mean, it was the reason I didn't have any idea.

You interviewed a teammate of mine, and you looked right in the camera and said, hey, JR, if you're watching, I want to talk to you. So that's actually why I'm talking to you today. You're talking about we had Justin on? That's right, absolutely. Yeah, Justin Sapp, we had on a little while back. He was great. We had him in studio.

So for folks who are watching, Justin was assigned to special forces, but was detached to one of the CIA paramilitary teams in Afghanistan, Alpha team. The alpha team leader was this guy right here, JR. So that's why I wanted to have him on the show. J.R., let's kick it off. I'd like to hear a little bit about your origin story. We ask our guests to tell us a little bit about their upbringing and sort of that path that took them into governmental service,

in your case, into the airborne infantry, then the Central Intelligence Agency. Okay, well, it's not terribly exciting. I mean, basically, I grew up in a blue-collar family. My dad was a railroad engineer. Grandfather was a railroad engineer. You know, it was just a blue-collar family. I grew up in a little tiny rural town.

Today, it's not quite as rural as it used to be, but it was a rural town outside of Buffalo. And then my folks made it very clear. I was going to college. I mean, it was just like there was no, I mean, I was either going to go to college or they were going to knife me in my sleep sometime. You know, I mean, it was really that straightforward. And I was fine with that.

I mean, I was not a terribly interesting kid. I mean, I had school and I had sports. I played soccer and I was a wrestler. That was it. So, honestly, if it hadn't been for the New York State Region scholarship, I'm not sure. could have afforded to go to college right after high school, but I did. And I was able to go to a small school college called Eisenhower College. Now, for those of you who might look it up, you won't find it because Eisenhower College folded in the late 90s or mid-90s, actually. And, you know,

It was a school that was designed at the request of President Eisenhower to create a cadre of people who were experienced in world events and worlds. It was called World Studies. And one of the reasons it wasn't terribly popular is because you didn't get, you didn't get any electives until you were in your second semester of your junior year. But, I mean, to give you a feeling for how the school started, class one in the big lecture hall was on the creation of the Chinese empire. And then class two was on Confucianism. And then class three was on Chinese literature. And then class four was on, you know, was, and it went across the world. So we learned about not just European history, but Asian history, African history, and African culture, African art, Asian art, Asian culture.

So it makes me an actually a pretty good cocktail party guy. I can talk for about a minute about just about anything. And more than once in my career, I have looked a guy in the INC, at Mahjong. Yeah, I know what mahjong is. I've always wanted to play mahjong. And then, of course, I go home and open up my books and figure out what the hell Mahjong is. Is it a, what is it? Is it a sport? Is it a game? Is it a board game? What is it? But anyhow, I mentioned and spent a little bit of time focusing on that school, because the only reason I ended up in the CIA is because of Eisenhower College and not the way you think.

Anyhow, I went out of college. I then went to graduate school where I came to the realization that I was a pretty good student. I was a terrible scholar. I learned that lesson when the head of the department pulled me aside and said, you know, Chair, your grades are really good. You're never getting a degree here.

So, I mean, you know, you don't have to throw a brick through my window to make me realize, I need to go away. So after my master's, he got the chairman of the department got me a job as an archaeologist, and I was an archaeologist for a year in Wyoming. This is 1979,

1980. Two things happened, of course, during that time period, the hostage crisis in Iran and the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. And I had always been interested in thinking about how I was going to do service. In fact, while I was in grad school, I sent a note to an application to the CIA. In the old day, she had to mail it in. And I got a letter back that said, no, thank you. So I was like, okay, I guess that, you know, so far my career progression

is really working well for me, right? Everything's doing fine. I keep asking for stuff and people keep saying no. So then I joined the Army and that was a shock to my my wife. She was my girlfriend at the time. She was like, you did what? Yeah, I enlisted in the Army as a private and went to Fort Knox, Kentucky in basic training as a 26 year old. And then went to OCS and went on to, you know, airborne school, Ranger School, all that stuff. and then did four plus years with the 82nd as an airborne infantry officer and then progressively a couple of other staff jobs before I was getting ready to go on to the advanced course. And I guess most of your folks would know that unless you're really, really good and you're an OCS officer,

you're at the bottom of the pile. And I used to think that was just, you know, prejudice. But I understand now, having done a long career in the federal government, that they're just amoritizing their investment, right? It costs a lot of money to put an officer through West Point. And a lot of money to put them through ROTC. I got commissioned after four and a half months as an E4, a specialist. So it didn't cost them very much to put me into that commission source.

So I am trying to figure out what's going to happen to me when I'm working in my office at, I was the S3 Air in my battalion, which is in an airborne battalion, there's got to be an NCO and an officer who design all the jumps and get the airplanes and get the parachutes, all that stuff. And I get a phone call, says, hey, Captain Seeger, we understand that you're thinking about, you know, what's going to happen next in, we'd really like to talk to you about opportunities in CIA. Cold call. And I'm thinking, really? Like, really, this is how you do this? Right.

So I turned to my partner in crime at the time at an E7, I've done a lot of other kinds of stuff with him. And I said, Chip, here's the deal. They want me to meet this guy at a hotel. If I end up face down in the Cape Fear River tomorrow, I want somebody to know what the hell was going on. So anyhow, that was just that that's sort of what happened. I wasn't, it was a real deal. And I was puzzled for years as to how I was approached. Well, it turns out some many years later that classmates of my.

mine at Eisenhower College were already in the CIA because their parents were in CIA. Oh, interesting. And in those days, that's, you know, not the only way that things could be done. But it was one of the ways that things were done. Today, of course, for anybody who is interested, you go online and like every other part of the federal government, you apply online. And the process then goes into a, you know, a protected environment. But you can't refer anybody.

What happens is they, you know, the applicants go online, which is a good thing because, quite honestly, if you have these referrals, everybody ends up looking like the next guy, right? I mean, you know, and we need all kinds of different people in the CIA today. day. And so, anyhow, that was my entrance into the CIA. I worked into a training program, which the selection process, I don't know what it is now, but the selection process when I was going through, I started in April of 85, and I was certified as a case officer in June of 86. So it's approximately a year plus of different steps along the way. And then by that time, I was married and I had convinced the agency.

Actually, I walked into a personnel office and said, this is my wife's resume. You can see that she's really the smart one of the two of us. And they looked at the resume and they said, you're absolutely right. We're interested in her because she is much smarter than you are. So they hired her. And then as to onward assignments, basically there were two different outfits that were two different parts, geographic divisions. They don't have those things anymore. But in the old days, there were geographic divisions and the director of operations.

There were two geographic divisions who were asking me if I was interested. And I basically told him, whoever hires my wife is the one that's going to be, you know, on the list. So it turned out that it was near East Division, which was actually okay by me, because I'd already served when I was in the Army. I served in the multinational forces of service in Egypt. So I thought, that's cool.

I mean, I get it. I mean, Arabic's tough language, but I can do that. So I get off my one week leave after this months of training. And I go in and they said, good news. You've got an onward assignment. Bad news. You're late for language school. And I'm like, okay.

Oh, and by the way, it's going to be Dari. And I'm like, okay, not having a clue what Dari is, not a clue. So I said, okay. And they said, well, you know, you're late. Get down to the state department because that's where the Dari language. school is. Check. And so what I found out was, of course, it's Afghan Persian. And all my peers who were onward going onward assignments and they were going to study Chinese and Arabic and Russian, they were like, oh, J.R, you're so screwed. I mean, no one is going to care. You know, you're going to

finish off a tour someplace. And then you're never going to be able to use your language again. you're going to have to study another one. I was like, well, you know, orders are orders. I mean, I just came out of the army. I know, my hair hadn't even grown out yet. You know, I get it. Orders are orders. And so, of course, you know, in the long run,

Afghan Persian turned out to be a pretty good language to have. Yeah. So what was that first assignment then? You said you were in the Near East Division. What did that look like for you? And what year was it by that time that you, after you finished, you graduated your training? Well, okay. So I went to my first assignment in 87 because it was a year-long language program.

And as I told you earlier, I have to just sort of be generic. Sure. It was in South Asia. You can do the math. And I was assigned instead of a standard sort of convention. tour, I was assigned, because I had the Afghan Persian, and for those of you, for, you know, your listeners who don't remember this time period, the Soviets had occupied Afghanistan, and they were fighting the Afghans across the entire country. So I was sent in, along with a couple

other people, to meet with Afghans, Afghan resistance guys. Now, this was not a, in any way, shape, or form associated with the paramilitary weapons program that we had at the time. And that's, you know, it was super secret then, but, you know, let's face it, once you start to deliver Stinger missiles into Afghanistan, it's kind of a clue who's in charge. We've had Baz Basil on the show before, who may have mentioned a little bit about that. Yeah, exactly. Well, Baz was one of the guys. Actually, Baz and, uh, There was my very first job in the agency before I was in the pipeline was down in the sub-basement in the building with guys like, in fact, with BAS and a number of other guys. We refer to ourselves as the methane breeders because, of course, I know it's a heavy gas and it goes down into the basement.

Anyhow, so I spent three years meeting Afghans night after night. after night, who had just come out from a war zone and were willing to talk about what they were doing. And so that's what I did. I debriefed soldiers, basically. It was a very unconventional sort of environment for me. And that was my first tour. You know, if you, no matter how bad your language might be. If you meet guys like six nights a week for three to four hours in a night, pretty quick, you get, you know, unless you're really a dim, you get the, you know, you get pretty good at the language. So that's, that's sort of where it was. And I was, finished my tour. I had a, I got into a TIF with any division. It was my fault, really, quite honestly, because I told

and I had been working with SAD guys, and I wanted to go work in SAD. And they said, you don't seem to understand, young case officer. We, you're an N.E. guy. You're going to be an N.E. guy. Okay. Well, anyhow, for all of the things that we can say bad about Saddam Hussein, the fact that he invaded Kuwait actually made my life. much easier in one respect, which was they had a job for me, which was a crummy, what I, you know, they thought was a crummy job. It was a great job for me. I was in Desert Shield, Desert Storm in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. There was no other agency officer there that could work

with the Saudis and work with the military. So that's what I did for a better part of a year. I was the, you know, this is a classic sort of story. People say, how can this possibly be? But it's a classic, it's kind of like the story. There's an old story about Texas Rangers, and there's a story about in the 20s, there was a, you know, there was a, a riot in Waco, Texas. One riot, one ranger. One riot, one ranger, exactly. You know.

And so the idea. is that I was the agency L&O for 18th Airborne Corps, first Marine Expeditionary Force, and the first attack fighter wing. So I kept pretty busy during that time period. It's mostly because of my background, it was mostly associated with what at the time was called force protection, but really was counterterrorism. and counterintelligence stuff. And did that for, until I returned.

And then they, by that time, all was forgiven. And Near East Division said, we've got another job for you and your wife, because we're a tandem couple, which makes life kind of complicated. I had told them they could send me anywhere in the world so long as there were two jobs. 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. It arrived the new Doblo, guided by ingenue, Corrie in concessionaria and and profita

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Info Info suhufational point eight. So they said, we got a job for you and it was a, it was actually a very, very cool job. It was in a specialized, it would have been called, it was a specialized station. This is a long time before these kinds of things happened before where it was a station going after near-east rogue state, proliferators, terrorists, and counterintelligence officers. So I did that for four years, working my way up from being a line case officer

through to managing a team hunting one of these rogue state, well, all the rogue state intelligence services basically that we were working after. So both their military and their civilian services, which was great. it meant being on the road about 20 days a month. So if you can do the math, it means, you know, I was home on weekends and leaving every Monday. And being in it, and this was a tandem, a tandem tour. So it was a tandem. So my wife, if you're going to ask, my wife is what's called a reports and requirements officer.

Now they're called a CMOs, I guess, right? And, you know, the only reason to go out and do stuff, of course, is to produce reports. By this time in my career, I'd come to the realization that although every case officer has to be a, both a hunter and a handler, I come, every case officer by their second tour ought to know which they're better at. And I'm a better handler, quite honestly. And you can, I can basically squeeze intelligence out of just about anybody. And can you tell us sort of, you know, in like case office or vernacular or whatever, what the difference between a hunter and a handler is?

Okay. So, so in, you know, in the spy world, there are two things that have to be done, right? One is produce intelligence, and that's done by people who are handlers. You debrief people, you keep them on board, you make sure that they are productive, that they're safe, that they understand what they're supposed to do for us, right? But you're always, you always need new business because, you know, guys decide somewhere along the way, they don't want to do it anymore. or they want to retire or they want to or they get caught. So you always have to have new business as well. So the hunters end up finding and recruiting the new spies.

Now, most hunters prefer to just once they've recruited a spy, I prefer to go and recruit another spy because it's what they like to do. And, man, that's not to say that you can't, in the CIA as a case officer, you must be able to do both, right? But, you know, pretty quick, like I say, early on you figure out what you're better at. And I'm, I was, I'm not doing it at all anymore, but I was better at producing intelligence, taking the requirements, designing them so that the debriefing makes sense, doing it in language, and keeping the asset safe, because that's our primary director, right? I mean, more than anything else, the CIA is a place where you are expected more than anything else to keep your asset alive and safe. teach them how to be safe because they don't know.

It's not their profession. Right. So it's our trade craft skills that we use to do that. And then afterwards you had a more conventional tour in a South Asian country? Yeah. I was a, you know, I was a base chief running, you know, regular espionage operations. And, I mean, it was, it was a good tour. I mean, it was an okay tour.

I did two years there. And I mean, I can't really talk very much about the cases. But, I mean, basically it was classic spot assess, develop, recruit, and handle, and then manage young case officers who are spotting, assessing, developing, and recruiting. And as was pretty typical at the time, you have to remember that we're talking about now. Now we are talking about the post-exam. Cold War world. So there's lots of different kinds of people who five years earlier would have been great

targets and are now our allies, or at least our neutrals. But there's always going to be targets out there. And of course, if you, and also you're always going to be looking at local targets if you can. It depends on the, it all depends on the security environment. And I was in a pretty, pretty rigorous security environment. So we didn't do a lot of that stuff. We did an awful lot of third country national stuff.

But during all of that time, actually just before the conventional tour, during the other tour, I got grabbed up and opened up a provisional station in the former Soviet Union. Wow. So that was another one of those classic sort of stories of, hey, who are we going to send to this? Oh, we'll just send this guy. Why?

Well, because he's reliable, but he's also disposable. You know, I mean, it's just a, it is when I was sent to, there was a bunch of teams all going out, right? This 1992, the USSR collapsed. All of these places are opening up. And I'm getting my in-brief, and I'm looking around with all the other guys that are there. There's nobody who was from Russia House. Like, it's all of my pals who are in, like, have been in Southeast Asia or Africa or any or someplace like that.

And, you know, okay. You know, it turns out, of course, Afghan Persian is actually pretty well translated. across to other side of the border. Not, I mean, if I had spoken Russian, it would have been great, but I didn't. But I could speak Afghan Persian. And so, you know, Afghan Persian works pretty well for Tajik's. It will, you can get along with Uzbeks. You can get along with Turkmen, all those southern, central Asian countries.

Did they also send you JR on a job? that because they figure, oh, this is an army guy. Like, he can sleep in the dirt and, like, use a rock as a pillow. Like, you know, it's, it's not that big a deal. Well, it's that, I mean, that's true. But it's also because most of these places right after the collapse of the Soviet Union were at civil wars. Right. I mean, so.

Or close to it. Yeah. A lot of the kinds of things I did there. And it wasn't for very long until the station was formalized. But, you know, it was a provisional station. And it was really 19th century sort of intelligence work. It was like, go spy the land. Go out and see every day, you're like, walk out on the street, see who's shooting at somebody else, you know, get in a car, figure out where the shooting stops, give us a better feeling for what's going on.

It really wasn't an espionage tour. And, you know, fair enough. I mean, my, my successors, you know, or the people who opened up the station afterwards, they, you know, they were able to conduct conventional espionage. That just wasn't what they asked me to do. And that was a good thing because is what I do anyhow. Out of curiosity, when you say that like in all these former USSR Soviet Union countries that nobody was from Russia house or the people weren't from Russia house, is that because they were all drunk wondering, what had happened to their career and their life with the cause of the Soviet Union? No, actually, it was because they were in Moscow.

Okay. Right? I mean, they were doing stuff in Moscow or in St. Petersburg or in places where the KGB was running away to, you know? I mean, there were lots of, there were lots of, it was, the collapse of the USSR was a, you know, it was a catastrophe. if you were a KGB agent, right? I mean, because even if you were only in the first chief directorate, which was the Foreign Intelligence Service, you couldn't say to your, like, your neighbors,

oh, I was with the KGB, because they're going to think about the other side of the KGB, which was the totalitarian terrorizing people stuff. So there was a lot of work to be done in those places. It just wasn't going to be. in the FSU, which is fine, because it turns out, of course, the FSU turns out to have been a fascinating place for the agency and for State Department, for that matter, and for the military. I mean, you know, one of the things that if you read like Toby Hardin's book or if you read Doug Stanton's book about the operations in Afghanistan, in the one of the ODAs, ODA 595, had just come back from working with the Uzbeks. So, I mean, you know, it turned out to be a really important, it turned out to be a really important thing to build a network of allies during that time period.

I take no credit for that, my, because they were just the guys who were eventually were in, charge, we're still shooting at each other when I left. But eventually, I mean, you got to start with a footprint someplace, and that's what we did. You know, a lot of times it's the, it's just a footprint. That's all you do. And you got to be ready for the fact that it's not always, you know, great intelligence operations or great paramilitary operations. Sometimes it's just spade work. Right. And then after that, you had a couple stateside tours. Yeah. Yeah, we did. Well, I mean, the stateside tours, I mean, so two things. By that time, I was relatively senior, so I was managing the teams, not necessarily a station, but flyaway teams. And we were just using the U.S. as a start point to go after all kinds of different sorts of targets all over the world. My team wasn't the only one that did that. But that's, that was the states that in the meantime, while since I was, you know, not doing a lot of that flying away, some, but not as much, because I had to be home managing and talking to guys making sure that they followed all the TDI rules, make sure they don't get caught, all that.

So what I did was I was responsible for working with the FBI on counterterrorism stuff. At the time, counterterrorism was a, this is the late 90s going into just before, well, I was in, I was in stateside for through 9-11. But the FBI had, you know, a challenge because before 9-11, the idea was that the counterterrorism was something that was really hard to. prove and it was really hard to build networks the way the FBI is really good at building networks on other kind of criminal enterprises. I mean, the FBI don't ever think that if the FBI is after you, you won't get caught. I mean, I'm just here to tell you. Their work is exceptional.

But it was a challenge. And here I was, a guy who had spent basically from 1987 until I arrived in, in, in, in, California in in 1997, I'd been a guy who had, you know, worked with on terrorist targets. That's what I did. And I was building a network of flyaway guys who were doing counterterrorism missions. So I could go over the FBI and sit down with the FBI senior managers and say, okay, here's how we would do it. I don't have any idea how you can do it.

but at the very least I can tell you what the bad guys are doing out there in their efforts to come here. So that was, you know, that was part of my work that I did just before 9-11. And then- And then take, I mean, this is a little bit of a segue, but maybe worthwhile. We want to take maybe just a moment to explain to people because I think the public has this perception, largely because of the the movies that the CIA has a very robust and intrusive presence domestically in the United States. Could you explain how that

works in real life? I mean, the realities of like the limitations that you have as you know, in these sort of state side assignments. Well, sure. I mean, first of all, there is I mean, like as I said, the team that I was managing they were, I mean, the only reason they were state side is because we had great airports. Right. I mean, that's, that's what we did. We flew out from

state side to someplace else. And that's great. I mean, let's face it, as the counterintelligence environment has become progressively more difficult, it's really hard to do some of the, in fact, it's impossible to do some of the things that I did in Europe back in the early 90s. Can't do it because of what's called ubiquitous technical surveillance. Right, right. That had just started in the end of the 90s, but it was already, we knew that our work was going to be limited unless we did something like start and finish from the USA.

Now, in the meantime, our work with the FBI was exclusively, and I can't speak for what it's like now. But our work for the FBI was exclusively to help them understand the target set. We weren't allowed to talk to Americans at all. I mean, at all, unless the only time I ever talked to an American was when I was with an FBI agent and we would talk to an American, he'd show his creds, and I'd show my creds. and there was no sneaking around. And that was really rare because, quite honestly, the FBI, if they're building a case, they really don't want any complications.

They want two special agents who are trained to do the right thing. And we're not. I mean, CIA guys aren't trained to do. I mean, we're trained to, you know, to steal things and break things. I mean, basically, right? That's our job abroad. And so, no, there is not a. robust CIA presence in Conis, Continental United States. And what it is is maintained in a structure

that is through our FBI partners. The FBI by the mid-90s had what they call the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which would have been in each of their field offices. So there would have been sheriff's deputies and police departments and, you know, members of NC. CIS and members of OSI, the Air Force intelligence, well, counterintelligence arm. And we were just there to provide context if they wanted to talk about something that was going on someplace else. We could use our electronic capability to pull down that data. And the data are important when you're building the case, no question. but a lot of times at least in you know post 9-11 or pre-9-11 i didn't even know what the cases were

it was completely out of my you know they wouldn't talk about it and rightly so because you know if you want to put a guy in if you want to if you want to try a guy for some kind of crime the last thing you want to do is have in the discovery process some data that says oh yeah and there was this schmoe from the CIA who was there. Right, right. I mean, that's not going to work. And you're, living under a cover and an alias and so on. So it's not like you can take the stand under oath under your real name and offer testimony. Right. And worse, worse still, of course, is that that as you said in the, you know, the movie presentation of what agency officers, what, what we're like is a, you know, is terrible. I mean, no, it's just absolutely terrible. And I,

in a criminal, you know, in a criminal court. So we just didn't. The FBI, you know, was, was more than happy to be to work with us, but work with us in a way that was consistent with what they needed to accomplish. Now, I won't, you know, I don't want to leave this subject without saying, and the FBI would help us if they had a case that went overseas. if they didn't have an overseas footprint and they thought that they could help us

while we were working abroad, then absolutely our partners in the FBI did that too. So it was a mutually beneficial partnership, but it wasn't something that the guys who were working for me were going to spend their time doing because they were busy hustling new cases, producing intelligence, doing all that stuff. Right.

Now, in terms of like working with the FBI when it came to overseas counterterrorism, because obviously the CIA doesn't have any arrest authority and the FBI did if, you know, they can show it. Like, was it acceptable for, you know, the titles, the CIA worked under for, for you guys to run your intelligence operation and then bring in the CIA, or I mean the FBI, like how was that evidence, how was that like custody of evidence and how, how when you built your case were you sharing it with them were they allowed to use your information by u.s legal standards no the answer the short answer is no that actually let me just say to both of you

you know it's important for you to know i'm going to reveal a secret to you right uh so CIA case officer class one hour one the answer to all questions is it depends so it's just So you know. Right. And of course, that's because we're always working with humans, and humans change over time. Right. But in the case of the FBI, basically what you would be looking at in a case of overseas, the intelligence network that you build then becomes something that might be shared,

both with the FBI and with a local law enforcement entity. that would be partnered with the FBI. So what's going on abroad is not about, I mean, and I was never involved in counter-narcotics or any of that kind of stuff, where we, you know, where bad guys get grabbed and brought to the United States. I was involved in counter-terrorism stuff,

and what would happen would be the case would be built, we'd be producing great intelligence, and then anything that we could share with the FBI that the FBI could share with the service, or we could share with the service, for that matter, if the FBI didn't have a footprint in the country that we were in, then we would because at the end of the day, you know, I mean, there's the motto of the Counterterrorism Center, right? Preempt, disrupt, defeat. So if you can disrupt a terrorist network in a third country long before they are any threat to the United States, absolutely, you do that, right? And if that means bringing in a liaison service, if it means partnering between a liaison service and the FBI and a CIA entity, good, great, actually.

So I hope that sort of answers. I mean, it's complicated, right? I mean, it is complicated. And every case is different. That's why it depends. But the vast majority of the stuff that we were doing on counterterrorism cases was producing the intelligence that then could be passed to a liaison service either directly with, you know, because I was, to give you a feeling for this, I was declared to like, I think my last count was 22 different liaison services. So, you know, if you could pass the intelligence, you would. If it made more sense to pass the intelligence through the FBI and the FBI was there, you would.

I mean, it's all, you know, it's one team, one fight in that sense. There's no real downside to that. Yeah. Let's get into the run up into 9-11, J.R, because you're already working counterterrorism, making these trips overseas. kind of like where were you at around that period of 9-11? Where was your head at? What were the cases you were working? Was Bengladen and Al-Qaeda on your mind at that time?

What was kind of your world at that point? Yeah, well, okay. So just prior to 9-11, I had made a couple of trips out to Uzbekistan for something, I mean, it was associated with, but not focused on Osama bin Laden, right? Osama bin Laden, however, had become for counterterrorism center, Osama bin Laden had been, you know, like target one. Everybody knew that.

It was absolutely part of our mission set. Now, a lot of what I was doing wasn't necessarily, it was associated. We used to call it, right, it was Islamic extremism. And, you know, and we, you know, we knew it was al-Qaeda. But a lot of the al-Qaeda network wasn't, in fact, calling itself Al-Qaeda at the time. I mean, Ben Laden had this headquarters in Kandahar. They had training camps and other parts of Afghanistan.

We were certainly doing what we could to understand that and work against him. A lot of the kinds of things that I was doing in Tashkent was associated with rebuilding networks against Afghans or with Afghans. So the Afghan resistance. And people don't, I mean, people often ask me, like, how in the world could you put, you know, 9-11 happens, you know, two weeks later, we've got a team inside the punch here. and then, you know, another week later, you're flying out to Tashkan, and then two weeks after that, the team, Alpha team goes in. How can that possibly be? And the answer is, because we were running cases all the way through the 90s,

it wasn't that we expected 9-11. It was what the CIA does is you build a case, you run a case, You keep a case running. You get those folks used to seeing you with the understanding that sometimes the intelligence is good, sometimes it's bad, but generally speaking, it's that sustained relationship over the years. I mean, small joke. I gave this presentation to a bunch. I've done this with a bunch of special four.

forces groups. And I was given the presentation about this. And I finished and I'm walking out to get a cup of coffee and the guys are walking out to get away from me. And I hear one of the younger special forces guys go, like, who is that guy anyhow? And one of the older guys goes, man, you don't know that cat? Man, JR is the forest gump of Afghanistan. Now, I'm hoping, I'm really hoping in the largest scheme of things that was because I had been to a lot of different kinds of stuff, right? I met with Massoud in the 90s. I had worked with a bunch of different guys in the resistance in the 80s. And so the idea was that, you know, I just, maybe it was because I was stubborn. Maybe it was because I like working with Afghans. Maybe it's because I had the language.

But I kept doing it, and I wasn't the only one. I mean, by no means was I the only guy doing this same thing who were just stubborn and kept work on the Afghans, whether the United States government cared or not. And now the CIA cared. And our intelligence that we were producing at the time in the 90s, you know, it wasn't going to end up in the presidential daily brief. It just wasn't. What it was doing is it was building that. that understanding of the complex web inside Afghanistan. So, yeah, we've been, we focused on it for a long time.

Did you, during that time, especially after like the Russians left Afghanistan, when there was a period where, was there at a time when you had to sell Afghanistan to management and say we still need a presence there? We still need to know what's going on? well what you do you don't I mean the answer is sort of kind of right I mean what you do is you sort out if the if the seniors aren't interested in it used to be a joke in state department actually one of the jokes this is in the in the 70s and the joke was if you wanted to joke about somebody doing something that was absolutely of no interest to anybody the argument that the line was, so what's the political situation in Afghanistan? I mean, that was literally what state department officers said when they were, when they were trying to tell one of their junior officers, what you're talking about, nobody cares about. Right. But the good news about Afghanistan,

well, it was a terrible news, but from a standpoint of the United States government, there was a very quick transition from, you know, the problems associated with a civil war, right? Because that's what happened when the Soviets left. It was a civil war. But pretty quickly after that, people were interested in Afghanistan because it was the center of narco-trafficking. Okay. And then shortly after it being the center of narco-trafficking, which it's, throughout the entire Taliban era, it also became one of the centers of counterterrorism.

So as a case officer and a manager of case officers, we always wanted to make sure that we weren't just doing something because it was something we wanted to do. You don't commit espionage because it's a cool thing to do. It's just not because you're putting a person at risk. Whoever that is that's producing that intelligence, regardless of where they are, they are being put at risk. So you better have a reason behind it. You know, the truth is that Afghanistan had sufficient reasons for all those years that you could always say, okay, yeah, I know it's a country that has no economy. and I know that it really doesn't, nobody really cares about it, but it's the primary producer of black tar opium. Oh, well, yeah, that's disruptive.

So, yeah, we want to do something about that. Oh, by the way, it's where Ben Laden's headquarters is now, and he's training people. Long before we thought he was training people to attack America. Right. He was training people to attack people all over the world, basically the entire West. So it was not a real problem. So when 9-11 happens, was all these images of Massad and the Northern Alliance, bin Laden, was this what immediately came to mind?

And if you could, I think we talked about this with Rick Prado a little bit. But if you could talk to us a little bit about what it was like inside CTC and SAD that day. I can't tell you because I was on TDI. Oh, okay. In California. I was in California. I was driving, I was actually driving with my wife going to the FBI. And I got a phone call on the mobile phone saying from the regional boss saying,

turn on the radio. And we're like, okay, you know, we're in the middle of nowhere. We're probably, she said, it doesn't matter. Turn on any radio station. So that was, you know, as soon as 9-11 happened, I mean, we all, I mean, basically all of us who had been doing the counterterrorism gig knew it was Al-Qaeda and it was designed and perpetrated by Ben Laden. Now, just because, I mean, it's what I thought, right? I mean, in the CIA, you've got to make a very significant distinction between what you think and what you know. what you know is based on intelligence that you have either collected or somebody else is collected.

It might be human, it might be SIGN, it might be something else. That's what you know. But all of us who have been working these targets for five years knew, or at least we thought we, we certainly thought that it was Ben Laden. So it took me, I mean, as we're driving, my wife turns to me and goes, you realize, you know, you're going to get on an airplane as soon as you can't. They're going to call you back. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I know that.

It wasn't like it was the first TDII I disappeared on. But, you know, for a few days, I was able to close up some cases that had been, because you couldn't travel unless you drove someplace. And so I traveled to a bunch of different FBI units that were working cases. and try to help them work through what they were doing because their world changed completely, of course. And then as soon as you could fly, I was called back to Washington.

And that's when I, by that time, CTC Special Operations, CTCSO had already been established. and I had a little sad face because I thought that I was going to go out with the team that went to the ponchere. I mean, I'd helped set up the team that went to the punch here. I'd met Masu. I'd done all that stuff. And I get back and they're already gone. That's the jawbreaker team?

What's that? That's jawbreaker? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It was actually, you know, officially titled the Northern Afghanistan liaison team. and Jawbreaker was Nalt 3. So I'd been on Nalt 1. I'd had some of my guys, my flyaway guys, on Nalt 2. So I felt a little bit of ownership.

Well, that was, you know, slapped out of my head pretty quickly. And I was terrified that I was going to end up. You know, I was back in the basement because that's where the empty space was. And I thought for sure, I'm going to be, you know, doing all the kinds of stuff that headquarters all the important stuff right logistics the management

but still not the cool guy stuff and let's face it you know we all given an opportunity want to be cool guys so even at 46 which is how old I was at that point in time so but as soon as they started the as soon as you know I got my in brief they were like Oh, no, no, no, don't you worry.

We're putting together another, the first team that's going to go behind the lines. That's you. And SAD has already got the team assembled. Alex was my deputy and he was already assembling a team. Justin was there. By the way, just a small sidebar to show how small the world is. Justin Sapp's dad was my instructor at the farm. So, you know, it was, it is a small world.

Anyhow, the point is that I start figuring out, okay, we're going to go, how are we going to get in? And we can fast forward to that process. The only thing that's really fun or an interesting, really, the rest of it is just sort of administrative stories. But an interesting story is the day before I left. So I went out a day about actually a week early to Tashkent. Alex was assembling the team, assembling the weapons, assembling the commo, assembly all of that, which obviously wasn't going to go out commercial. So he was assembling the equipment and the team that was going to go out on an agency bird.

I went out commercial to Tashkent, but the day before I went out, it's a Sunday. There's, you know, I mean, the team down in the basement that's managing C2CSO is working diligently, but it's basically an empty building. and in i'm sitting in at in front of a picnic bench because you know it's a folding classic like plastic picnic bench because that's all there was in the basement and i'm working through my notes and trying to figure out what we're going to do next when in comes uh director tenant cofer black and uh Hank Crumpton uh and i i've known i'd known Hank a little bit I'd known cofer for oh I don't know at that point 50 15 years or so. I mean, it's a small world. So Director Tenet comes in. He's a big burly guy. You've probably seen pictures of him at the very least. And he walks over to, you know, the map that's at the table. And he goes, come here, Cher. I want to tell you what I want you to do. I'm like, yes, sir. I think I know. She's, well, I want to be clear. I want you to be clear about this. Yes, sir. So he takes, because he's a big burly guy, he takes a very

large hand and puts it over all of northern Afghanistan. And he says, okay, J.R., listen, here's the deal. These are the five provinces of Afghanistan that you're responsible for. I want you to destroy the Taliban and capture or kill any al-Qaeda you can find. Yes, sir. Okay, just wanted to be clear. He got up and left. That was it.

That was my, I mean, you know, in the army, we talk about commanders intent. Right. Right. I mean, you can't ask for better commanders intent. Right. Than that. In my opinion. Hey, J.R., can you fix Afghanistan for us? If you could have that done by the end of the week, that'd be great. Thanks, man. Good luck. Well, I mean, it wasn't only, not to all of Afghanistan, just five provinces. I mean, I have eight guys. Right. Right. Right. So, you know, by the way, I mean, of course, at that point, I didn't know how it was going to get in. I didn't know what I was going to do when I got in. But he didn't care about that part because,

he was certain that I was going to make it work. Yeah. And, you know, I guess if any of your listeners have read either Doug Stanton's book or Toby Hardin's book, we were able to do that. Now, sadly, we lost one of our guys while doing it. But we were able to accomplish that in probably much shorter time. I mean, when Alex and I talked about this, you know, we just said, you know, we're going to be in for a year. I hope you're prepared for a year. And I've told this to lots of people over time.

This was a, you know, the success in the fall of 2001 is a function of three things, right? It's a function of a CIA network. It's a function of ODA capabilities. And it's a function of U.S. air power. Now, you might say, well, what about the locals? Absolutely, the locals are a centerpiece to this, but the locals had been fighting the Taliban for the better part of three years and having almost no success along the way.

So it was the addition of those three resources, working together in collaboration, but not necessarily trying to, to do the same thing. Everybody was doing something different is how we were able to accomplish what got accomplished. And we inserted on the 16th of October. ODA 595, I think, came in on the 1819, so two days later, two and a half days later. ODA 534 came in about two weeks later. the ODC came in about another week after that and in the space of so and we and we rolled into Mazar Sharif on the 10th of November yeah could you tell us about your team about Alpha team kind of

your planning process and insertion and kind of how that played out well yeah I mean like most agency stuff it's just sort of informal So I had, I was in, in Tashkent for like a week, 10 days, well, about a week before, before Alex was able to come in. So I spent that time period doing a couple of different things. The first thing was to work with the, both the station there and with the Uzbek service to get in contact with, with Abdul Rashid Dostok. Because he was the one guy that we had up in the north that we, that was working behind the lines that we knew. I mean, there were other guys working behind the lines,

but he was the one that we knew. So I started getting into a conversation with him on satellite phone. And he's a character and a half. I mean, if you've read anything about him, you know that. And, you know, early on, he, so I decided because I knew that they had no encrypted comms, I wasn't going to give him my true name. So I decided my nom de gar was going to be Baba John, which just means grandfather. So we're talking back and forth and he says, you know, Baba John, I'm ready.

I mean, we're ready for you. But we want to want you to know it's a little different here in Afghanistan. And I was like, yes, Commander, I kind of know that. And he's like, well, no, let me just explain to you. So what we call an armored personnel carrier, you call a horse. and, you know, I was like, got it, right, check. But so I know I got a guy at the other end. Now I got to get in.

So we have some resource, some agency resources there, but nothing that will get us in deep enough to where we want to go. And I've got a couple of guys from the agency, from SAD, Air Branch. And I find that, at the at the at the at the at the at the Tashkent airport actually the military side of of the Tashkent airport is a a old Soviet aircraft kind of looks it's a it's a it's a a buyplane sort of it's a it's uses in in the old Soviet days it's used as a crop duster and moving people around and so it's it's an antonoff too it's been around for a very long time but I thought it was kind of cool because it looked like a lysander. Now, for those of you who don't know what a lysander is, it is the aircraft that virtually all of the SOE and the OSS guys who didn't go in by parachute into France went in by Lysander. It's a high wing stole aircraft. And I thought,

how cool would this be, right? I mean, this is like right out, I mean, we're already CTCSO, right? So, I mean, which is what OSSSO is where they took the name from. So, okay, I go to the, our air branch guys. I go, what do you think? And they say, I don't know. We'll go check it out. They come back that afternoon. They said, we'll fly anything, but we cannot fly that.

That airplane does not, that's not safe. And that said a lot to me because I'd flown a bunch of different air branch aircraft in a bunch of different aircraft, air branch pilots who will fly anywhere and do just about anything. And I thought, ooh, I guess that didn't work out. So we're still puzzling over this. And Alex gets in and we're doing all the other sort of team and isolation stuff that an SF team or a MArsoc team would be doing. Right? We're doing, you know, everybody's doing checking weapons, checking comms.

everybody's cross-checking. What are you going to be able to do? We're getting our, our medic, Mark, is giving us sort of basic. This is your medic kit. This is my medic kit. This is what's going on. And I'm just puzzling with Alex. I'm like, we got to get in, but we can't walk in. I mean, there's this river and we can't drive in because we can't cross the bridge because the Taliban owned the bridge. And he was like, well, let me get down to Karshi Kahnabat. You know, I've still got some contacts down there. I'll see what I can do.

Remember, now, Alex was a retired senior sergeant major. I mean, he'd been a sergeant major in like multiple units in the military, okay? Multiple special forces units, multiple soft units. So he had a couple of contacts. So I said, excellent. You know, I got, you know, the agency pilots will fly you down there. That's not a problem. So he goes down like the next day, he's magically said, hey, we're good to go.

I've talked to John Mulholland, and we're, you know, we're good to go. We got, we're going to fly in on the nightstalkers are going to take us in. I'm like, sweet. So we get down to, then we all fly down to KKUZ and go into isolation. And I go over to the nightstalkers and fold up my map. And I say, I take my little fat finger, like right out of Ranger School, point to the place. That's where our LZ is going to be. and they're like, okay.

And they're like, how do you want to get there? I'm like, guys, you're the pilots. I have no idea. I'm not going to, I'm certainly not going to try to tell guys from Task Force 160 how to fly helicopters and where to go. All I want to do, I pointed once again at the LZ, that's where I want to go. And they're like, okay, any other thing, anything else? I said, well, I don't know if we're going to have a reception committee.

But you're not taking us back, right? This bird, your birds are going to be empty when you go home. We'll get off. And if there's no reception committee, we'll figure out what we're going to do at that point. And they looked at me, clearly, they looked at me and they're like, oh, boy, sure, this guy's nuts. But you know what? It's a mission. It's a really good mission.

We're doing it. So there was some weather issues like there always is in Afghanistan. So we were actually supposed to go in first the night of 13th and then the night of the 14th. And eventually the weather cleared up and we ended up in the night of the 16th. And so that's how we got. I have a whole story about getting in. But that maybe just answers at least the front end of your question. Is there something else you wanted to talk about?

as far as KKUC first. Before we move forward, I just want to ask you because you were, like, you were working Afghanistan in hindsight, like in retrospect, when people go through the records, and I'm not talking about the, you know, the hijackers here in the United States, but was there ever any indication or ever any intelligence that, like, looking backwards that people could have predicted, This was there any way to tie like Massoud's death on the nine to what was going to happen? Or was it just a completely a closed loop at that time? I mean, I wasn't involved in the headquarters analysis of that.

So, I mean, the short answer is, I don't know. Okay. I can say that certainly Ben Laden made no secret about the fact that he was going to attack Americans. Right. Not necessarily America, but he had named us in 1998 as the main enemy. And of course, he had attacked the embassies, right? So we've got the Nairobi and the Darbomings. And then he attacks the USS Cole.

Right. Very clearly, he was going to live up to his statement that he was going to attack Americans. Now, the 9-11. side of the house? I don't know. I mean, I really don't know. I certainly don't have any. I mean, the stuff I was working with the FBI was more focused on possible other kinds of infiltration. Remember, the 9-11 hijackers are Arabs, and they were on legitimate visas. Right. And really not associated in any way, shape, or form that we could, I mean, maybe in hindsight, somebody's looked it up and figured it out. Right. But certainly not, not from my perspective. Right. And I, like,

and that's why I say, like, in hindsight, it's, it's always easier to PC, like, it seems obvious or whatever, but, you know, I don't think the people understand sort of the, the massive intelligence requirements that are placed on, you know, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and you just can't collect on every single individual in the world. I was just wondering if it had ever, if like, if, especially in Afghanistan at time, like if we had access to those camps, if we had sources, or if they were just so insular and isolated that there was no way to sort of predict that. I have no idea.

Yeah. I mean, I really don't. The camps were, Ben Laden, and. and his crew. I remember Ben Laden was the figurehead, but he had a very sophisticated crew of guys who understood counterintelligence. Why do they understand counterintelligence? Because they had been on the run. They'd had like half a dozen services trying to kill them for almost a dozen years. Right. Right. And so how they protected their intelligence, how they, how they protected their operations is, I just wasn't involved in it. So,

I'm not even going to try and answer that question. Well, the Afghans, like, even, you know, during the war, like, they, they had fairly sophisticated counterintelligence because of their dealings with the Russians, whether they were trained by Russians or working against the Russians. Like, they were not, you know, you think of Afghanistan as a non, you know, not a very advanced country or not very technological, but they've been doing this for ages. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is part of the great game, right?

And I'll give you, I'll just give you one little tiny vignette that teaches you this kind of stuff. This goes back to the 80s. So I was, I had a case that was, that I had turned from being a case about combat operations into a penetration of the Afghan Ministry of Defense, the DRA ministry defense. And it was a complicated thing because we had to do, I mean, the communications network was unsophisticated. We were getting intelligence. I was able to get a document copy camera into Kabul.

I was getting document film out of Kabul. And the very first time that I got one of those things, I was sitting there with a guy who was managing, I mean the Afghan who was managing this network. And we're sitting drinking tea. And of course, we're eating, you know, the classic sort of pistachios and almonds and raisins and all that stuff. Toot, exactly. Mulberries. And he said, so how do you like the mix?

And I was like, okay, it's great. He said, is it salty or sweet? And, you know, of course, I'm thinking maybe this is a rapport thing, right? So I'm saying, well, I find it kind of salty. And he said, exactly. And that's our signal that the material that was shipped out and smuggled out through three different smugglers was untouched. because every one of the guys in the network had to include something, and each of them knew what it was going to be.

The last one was a mix of toot, raisins, and salty nuts. And I was like, dang, you know, this is like right out of Rudyard Kipling. Yeah. You know, it was really right. So, yeah, they understood, they still understand how to do this properly. But in the case of the Al-Qaeda guys, you know, Afghans weren't allowed into the Al-Qaeda basis, right? I mean, they, at all. So that would have meant that we would have had to have recruited years before an Arab who was being vetted for a mission that nobody knew about.

you know yeah that's that's asking a lot yeah so uh just real quick for the viewers out there just wanted to plug our patreon i know they they threw it up on the screen if you guys are interested in getting episodes of the team house without advertisements in it uh the link is right down below and it's in the description if you guys want to check it out and we really appreciate you supporting the stream so jr tell us the story about the about the infiltration then uh behind enemy lines with 160th? The insertion was, I mean, it was, I mean, first of all, by now, we're like an hour in, you realize I am basically not a cool guy, okay?

Now, Alex was a cool guy, and most of my team was filled with cool guys. I mean, real guys who, you know, who had done this, we had one who had, you know, a ranger who had been in Mogadishu, you know, I mean, we're talking. about people who had seen the elephant is the way it's presented. Now, I'd had people shoot at me, but it's a different thing. I mean, it was an espionage thing as opposed to a cool guy thing. So we load onto, you know, it's a classic sort of story of where walk out, it's the middle of the night, and we load onto our two helicopters.

We have, so there's eight of us, so there's four and four, and a couple of Pelican cases and our rucksacks. And so the door closes. John Mulholland was there. I think Justin said, I knew that John pulled him aside. I didn't know what he said. Of course, Justin told you, right, don't die is what is what John said. So we close the doors and, you know, the birds take off and head into the darkness. And I'm, I've got a headset just like this, uh,

sort of except nicer. Uh, and so I'm doing, you know, I'm talking to the pilot and command, uh, and the crew. I don't have the comms out.

I can hear the comms out, but I actually can't. No, they're not going to let, you know, guy like me talk out. So the first thing that happens is we're flying into the night. And all of a sudden I'm listening to the guys are,

you know, they're cool guys and they're and and they've done a bazillion different kinds of ops so they're they're not in the least bit bothered and all of a sudden i realized they ain't talking much and then i look out my i'm on i'm looking out the left door and i realize we're about like i don't know it seemed like uh within touching distance of course it wasn't it was probably 40 feet from the tail of a C of an MC 130 because we were refueling to get into Afghanistan. And so, you know, the guys are kind of nervous about this because it's in the dark. They're doing it with nods on.

And so and we're right on the Afghan border. So success, right? Both birds refuel the MC 130 pulls away. and some detached voice from on high says, congratulations, gentlemen, you've just conducted the first combat in-air refueling for the regiment. Good luck. And I thought, this is like right out of a movie. Later, I found out that we had like aircraft stacked up to the sky for this operation.

It was the only operation taking place that night, right? So we had a J-Stars. We had the inner refueling. We had three different C-130s. We had fast movers. We had a lot of aircraft with us. So anyhow, as soon as that happens, the guys just dropped down onto the deck,

and we cross over the Amudaria and head into Afghanistan in the pitch dark. And, you know, it's up and down because there's a lot of mountains there. So I'm looking at the watch, and I'm listening to the guys talk, the co-pilot is telling the pilot in command and the crew sort of the countdown as far as how long it's going to be before we hit the LC. And what I'm thinking about is one thing, right? Just one thing, which is there are two door handles on a Black Hawk.

one is the door handle that opens the door. The other one is the door handle that releases the door in an accident. Now, I know, I hadn't worked with 160, but I worked with a lot of pilots of all sorts. I realize none of them want to leave parts of their airplane behind when we pull away. So I'm, you know, I'm staring right at that, making sure I grab the right handle. And it's pitch black. I can't see it. I don't have my nods on.

It's really black. And the guys are counting it down. And they're like, okay, J.R. We're one minute out. So I said to the guys, well, okay, I key the mic. And I say, okay, guys, like, thanks for the ride. We'll see you on the other side. And I was just getting ready to take the headset off

because that's the other thing you don't want to do. It tells people right up. front that you're not a cool guy when you like get off the helicopter and you still have the headset on your head right right uh that's that's not going to work so okay fine uh just as i'm about to take the headset off i hear the the pilot in command say hey jr i think we're here and i look out over his shoulder and out there uh is what looks to be like a about two tennis courts lit by about 50, 60 watt light bulbs. Because I had tried to talk ghostom into, you know, doing some sort of American.

I mean, I had my Ranger handbook. I know how to set up an L-S. And I've been telling him how to, you know, do all the stuff. And he was like, no, no, don't worry. It'll be set up. And I'm like, okay, I guess I'm just going to have to take your word for it. And in fact, it was absolutely set up. So our bird lands, the second bird, of course, hovers over.

So it's got the mini guns looking at any kind of, because we still don't know. Good guys, bad guys. Could be anybody. Might be a mistake. We're in the right place, for sure. I'm not worried about that. So I opened up the door. I grabbed the right handle.

I got the headset off. Now, the agreement was I was going to get out of the helicopter. everybody else was going to stay in the helicopter until we confirmed that we had a real reception committee and not Taliban because I mean I was confident that since right over my shoulder was a mini gun I was confident that it was that if there was problems I wasn't going to have to worry about like shooting it out but I didn't want everybody out of the helicopter while a shootout was taking place right so I look out and what do I see? in the dust, the helicopter course, blazer still turning, is like about 50 people who look like

the sand people from Star Wars, right? They're dressed in these long, it's called Chapans, that just, it's the long jacket, they've got the, you know, the cumberbun, they got knives, and they got guns, and they got turbines, and I could just barely see their eyes, and they start walking towards the helicopter. Now, you guys know, and most of your audience probably knows, when a Black Hawk is on the ground hovering, the front, the blade is only about six feet, you know, forward. And it is really a bad thing to start an insertion by, you know, a bunch of guys that are supposed to be helping you, getting killed. So I go running out. there outside the blades and I lean over and I put up you know the classic sort of all everybody in

the world knows stop right hands out stop and I say stop uh of course nobody can hear me because the helicopter and all of a sudden I realize you know everybody in front of me is sort of bent over holding their hands out. They're assuming that it's some sort of, you know, take me to your leader's sort of greeting, because after all, we are aliens. And while they're not shooting at me, so I turn around and I give Alex a thumbs up and he starts to unload the bird. And as soon as he starts to unload the bird, the guys start walking forward again. And I bend over and I put my hands out and yell stop. And they bend over and put their hands out and stop. We could have done this all night, But I decided that it was probably better for me to walk to the very front, grab the guy who looked like the leader.

I grabbed him by the collar of his chippon. I took a knee. I pulled him down to take a knee. Everybody took a knee. And so the helicopters, you know, we offload both birds. And for, you know, anybody who's been an assertion, whether it's day or night, when the helicopters are gone, because you're hearing has, you know, been affected by this very loud noise of turbines, it seems like there's absolute silence. Yeah.

There's just absolute, it's like you've got earplugs in or something. And I look over at the guy that I've grabbed and he pulls down his, he's got his turban wrapped around his face. And I've got my goggles and I pull my goggles up. And he says, Baba John, welcome to Afghanistan. We must have tea. So that was the beginning of the adventure. And in fact, we did have tea.

Interestingly enough, and this just people say, you know, these guys are, you know, sophisticated and unsophisticated. There's big arguments about this. Dostom had decided he could have brought us in to an LZ. on his turf. But instead, what he did is he brought us in on an LZ on his Shia allies turf to allow the Shia to feel like they were to get the bragging rights for the fact that they brought the Americans in. I thought that was just pretty clever. So we ended up having tea at the Adam Adrosse run by the Shia leader.

at Moha Keck. And then we loaded up into trucks and we went to Dostom's headquarters, which was deeper into or closer to the front lines, let's say. And then eventually, of course, when we brought 595 in, we used an LZ that was Dostom's LZ right in front of where we were based out of, which we call the Alamo, which was, you know, it was very, like a little nativity scene. It was a, you know, we had a manger. was a little stables that had been abandoned. And so there was room of the end for the Americans.

And so that's where we spent our next, the first few days. And at this point, I assume you're getting the lay of the land starting to assess. Everybody alive. Are you still there? What? Yeah. I missed you. I was just asking, I mean, at this point, I assumed that you were kind of getting the way of the land and assessing the state of the Northern Alliance, the state of the Taliban, and how you're going to live up to director of tenants directive to, you know, take care of this broad Taliban problem here in northern Afghanistan. Well, you know, the great thing about Dostam is, is that, you know, he was trained. He's a military guy, right?

He founded amusing that he knew how he knew, I don't know, but he knew. He says, you know, Baba John, I know in the 80s you were trying to kill me. I think that's pretty amusing. Here we are now together. So, you know, he already had a. plant. His bait, he rolled out the first night, right? Now, Dostom, as near as I could tell, never slept a whole night. If he ever slept more than an hour, the whole time we were rolling, I never saw it. But so the first night, he rolls out this map that's the size of a, you know,

a six, five by ten carpet hand drawn of Afghanistan. And he says, look it, here's the deal. if we take Mazar Shereef, Kabul will fall. It's just that simple. Now, I'm not going to argue with the guy, right? I'm thinking, well, you know, historically, that's true. When when Mazarishu fell to Masoud's guys, it was after, you know, this was after the Soviets left.

The DRA was done. And in fact, they were then able to roll in from Jabal Saraj right into Kabul. So, yeah, I get it. But he had a, you know, he said, so here's who we're working with. And here's where they are and here's where we are. And we need, you know, it's the classic sort of Warren Zivant, right? Without the lawyers, we need guns and money. And so I'm like, well, I've brought money.

And he said, that's a good start, you know. And shortly afterwards, we start delivering guns and bullets as well. 9-5 comes in, and as soon as 9-5 comes in, they're bringing in tea lamps. So they're bringing in lasers, which is, you know, really good because trying to do air strikes, well, the United States military at the time, now it changed over 20 years of war. But the United States military at the time were like, no, if you can't get, give me absolutely the grid coordinate down to, you know, a 10 meter square, we're just not going to drop any bombs. And we're like, well, you know, that's going to be kind of hard because

we're sitting up in the mountains looking at these guys with binoculars. But once 9-5 and 3-4 came in with soft lamps, it was all over for the Taliban. But what was most interesting about this was that the Taliban in the north, I mean, there were serious Taliban bad guys. I mean, they're back in power in Kabul. But the vast majority of their foot soldiers were just that. They were foot soldiers. They were what the British would call levees.

They were either, you know, kidnapped and told that they were going to fight or die, or they were given a small amount of money. And, you know, 16-year-old kid, you give him a Kalashnikov. you give him a Toyota Highlox and you say you can terrorize anybody in the neighborhood so long as you call yourself a Taliban. Generally speaking, he's going to say, that's cool. Right. But the thing about it is, hardly anybody, you know, truthfully, hardly everybody is, everybody's more than willing to kill for jihad. But hardly anybody I ever met in Afghanistan wanted to die for jihad.

some did but not very many so what we were able to do with dostom dostom was the one who had the best connections uh was he'd call the guys up on radios and say hey you know you're on the wrong side of the history here and i will in fact i and i can pay you to be on the right side and the first time he tried that, the guys would say, you know, something rude. I was listening to him. I was sitting right next to you post them on the radio. And they're saying something rude to him. And then he would turn to Mark Neuch or whoever with 9-5 was there that day.

And he'd say, see that? That's right over there. That's where I am. That's the guy I'm talking to. And so they'd put the soft lamb laser designator on that and squish. You know, the guy would go, would be done. And then he'd call the guy next to him to the right or the left of that line and say, Hey, Mohammed, you know, I was just talking to Abdul.

And I offered him a deal. And he basically wasn't much interested. But, you know, I'm hoping that you have seen what happened to Abdul, and you'll come to our side. And pretty quick, that's exactly what happened. A lot of the Taliban levies. where like, I'm not dying for these guys from Kandahar. I'm from around here.

Right. And if I can be financially successful, as well as be on the right side of history, I'm in. So that's basically what happened. And it was, you know, one after another after another, slowly but surely, that, as I said, that mix. our work was to keep the resistance guys from fighting each other. Now, the Shia and Dostom were close. They'd always been close. But the Shia and Dostom weren't very close to the Tajik's, Muhammad Atta.

So we had to constantly work on that. Meanwhile, we needed to send a team to Bamian so that, another SF team could come into Bombion. So that was, we split the team and sent Justin and Mike Span and Mark in a Jeep into bombing. At the bombion. That's, you know, so they went out, they went out and disappeared for weeks because it was a long drive. And they were doing exactly what we were doing. And then we realized that we were never going to get real success with Atta until he had,

his own agency team and his own ODA. So we split the team again, and that became then Bravo team. And that was three guys. And then when ODA 534 came in, two more ground branch guys and a medic came in and helped set up that team. So in the space of,

At the end of the first two weeks, we were split all over the country, right? We were in all kinds of different directions, three, no less than three at a time, but a lot of times two or three guys going to do something. As I said, we, you know, rolled into Mazar Shri fell on the 10th of November, and we rolled into Mazar. And it was like, you know, it was one of those things. that, I mean, no pictures were taken, but it was kind of like the films you've seen

of the Liberation of Paris without the champagne. So, you know, men and women throw in rose medals at us, women, you know, throwing their burkas underneath the jeeps so that they would be driven forever destroyed. Cheering crowds. I mean, it was all liberation of Paris, except it was the liberation of his archery. It's incredible to thank all.

I mean, and from there, what was the next step was on to Kabul? Well, for us, the next step, we still had a couple of provinces to take care of, right? So the first province, the first set of provinces that we had to take care of were really not liberations, but just announcements. So Justin and I jumped in a Jeep with Dostom, and we went to the three provinces to the west. The first one, of course, was his old province, Jousjan. Saripul was there, and then Maimonah as well. So we did basically a grand tour saying, by the way, the reason the Taliban are gone is because they ain't coming back. They're done.

And Dostom was, of course, the big winner there. And it was his turf, so I wasn't surprised at that part. classic sort of, you know, story, again, a small bit of humor. So we're driving along, we were blasting along on this highway that goes from the Tsarraf to Shebran. And, you know, I'm still kind of nervous. I mean, there's still Taliban out there. And Justin's to my, you know, so I'm a lefty, so I'm on the right seat looking out the window.

Justin's on the left seat looking out the window behind those dom and his driver. And all of a sudden, and we've got, you know, a truckloaded guys in front of us and a truckload of guys behind us. And all of a sudden, the trucks absolutely screeched to a halt and go into a herringbone, classic sort of military herringbone. All the guys in the pickup trucks jump out and disappear. And I'm like asking those stuff. I'm like, what's going on? He's like, Baba John, don't worry. I'm like, yeah, okay.

but, you know, I'm kind of worried. He's like, no, don't worry. And all of a sudden, like in a very short amount of time, all these guys come running back into their trucks. They come to our truck, and they start handing us melons. And those some goes, we always stop here. This is the best of the whole region. And I was like, okay, you know, I guess, you know, what the hell?

But the last, of course, the last big problem was, well, there's two problems. There was Saman Gan, which still had the Taliban in it, and Kunduz. So Alex took a team to Saman Gan and started working on the distribution of resources, money, guns, bullets, and bringing in an ODA. there. And Kunduz was supposed to be, well, you know, the problem was that Dostam and Atta had been convinced by Mullah Fasal, the head Taliban guy, that the Taliban wanted to surrender. But if they didn't accept, if Dostam and Atta didn't accept the surrender, then they were going to have to fight house to house. And he said, neither one of you guys wants to be the butcher of Kunduz. well okay so uh none of us not none of us americans were all that excited about any of this but

you know it's it's exactly what lawrence said right it's better for the locals to do what they do you know it's it's it's it's it's for you to do it for them exactly so we're like you know what are we can't uh we can't we don't have an invasion force right We've got ODA 595. We've got ODA 534. And the commanders that they're working with, they want to, you know, go with a surrender. Well, you know, both Doug Stanton and Toby's books talk in detail about the fact that it was a completely false surrender. And it was, I mean, from the standpoint,

I mean, it was horrible. I lost a man. Afghans lost some of our closest allies. Dave almost was killed. We were almost killed out in Kunduz because it was an ambush there too, though we had AC130s on our side. So it didn't work, you know, it didn't work out so well for the Taliban. But the point is that whether you like it or not, it was an exceptionally sophisticated deception operation. because they had convinced the two major Afghan allies

to drive right into a trap that was going to kill him and would have killed them if it hadn't been for AC130s and the fact that we had, you know, we had the, at that point, it was Max Bowers, who was the battalion commander for these guys and Sergeant Major Vee Hill, Mario Veehill, and their comms network with the authority to call in air power, like right away. Otherwise, you wouldn't be talking to me today. We still would have won the battle, but I'd be dead.

No question in my mind about that. And so that's what happened. I mean, you know, again, I would point your, your, your listeners to reading either one of those books because they go into significant detail about that. And it's a tough story to read and it's not a great story to talk about. Yeah. Yeah. When we talk to both Toby and Justin, I think that really came through about like Span's death and just what a horrible day that was. Yeah. And you know, I mean, I, so Scotty, I made it back for day two of that operation. And Alex drove up from Samangana. So Alex and I went,

were in the fort when Mark Mitchell, the night that Mark Mitchell won his Distinguished Service Cross with the, with the team. It was a pretty spooky thing. The Taliban, or it wasn't Taliban, it was the Al-Qaeda guys, were using all of the resources that were available. I had never really thought that you could direct fire, direct lay a 122 rocket. But I guarantee you it was either that or they were using explosives to send telephone poles over my head. I'm not sure which it was. Either way, it was pretty scary. But, you know, again, AC130s won out the day and the Air Force saved our lives. could you tell us a little bit more about like how that came about well okay so so i i get back to

uh scotty and i came back from kundus uh the guys who had been in the fort that day to include the sbs team had were all coming back rolling in they they well they looked exactly like what they were they had been buried alive because the j dam had hit the fort and buried him alive they dug their way out and they were coming back trying to figure out what they were going to do and the part of the fortress that overlooked that truly overlooked where the where the the the uh the al-Qaeda guys were was not where they had been and they didn't know quite how they were going to get in there and uh so Alex and I got in a Jeep and drove over there.

And we, you know, shouted from the ramparts, hey, we want to come up. And they said, come on up. So we climbed up the ramparts, went through a drainage hole, and came up to where our Afghan allies were. And I mean, these are the same allies we've been with now for six weeks. So they were all like, hey, Baba John, good to see you, you know.

Bullets flying everywhere. And I'm like, okay, here's the deal. You know, if you can hold these guys in place tonight, we're going to bring in air power. And they were like, absolutely, we can hold these guys inside these walls. And they'd already seen what air power did. So, you know, they were like, come on back. So then we, you know, climb over the walls, down through the drain pipe, up, you know, again, jump in the Jeep, go back to, where everybody was set up and Mark and a combat controller and one other guy,

then about 9 o'clock that night, we loaded in the Jeep, back through, you know, same story, right? Up the walls, through the drain pipe, up where the walls, and in, and tell the commander, okay, we're going to start bringing in air power. And he was like, that's good because they found mortars. And just about the time he got mortars out of his mouth, rounds started landing on the parapet around us. And we were like, well, that ain't good. I've seen good before. And that ain't it.

And I turned to Alex and said, you know, Alex, I don't have my Ranger tab to hide under. I mean, if I did, I wouldn't be worried, but I don't have it with me. So he was like, yeah, I don't have my SF tab with me either. So we'll just, we'll just stick here. And, you know, it's really up the mark at this point and the combat controller to do the job. I mean, there's no sense in me, we couldn't see the bad guys. They could see us. Well, I mean, we could have gotten stood up on a pair of it and shot our AKs, but like, why?

So Mark called in the AC-130s. They made two runs. This is about the same time that the guys are shooting mortars at us and the 122s and just about anything they could find. They were doing direct lay on us. And finally, I remember Mark talking to the aircraft and saying, guys, I know you have to rotate back through, right? You're doing your rotation because all the guns are on the left side of the aircraft. But you just need to know. you need to finish this this time because the last couple of rounds, mortar rounds,

only landed about like 50 meters from us. They've got, they're walking the mortars in on us. Now, I didn't hear what Mark, I mean, I heard what Mark said. I don't know what the Air Force guys said, but absolutely, they came roaring in. And for those of you who remember it, if you've ever seen the final scene from Apocalypse now when the arc light comes in. And the entire sky turns orange. Well, to this day, I don't know what they hit.

I think they hit the cheese charges, and then that kicked off all the other kind of mortar rounds and everything else. The entire end of the fortress where the bad guys were just exploded into fire. So I turned to the Afghan commander and said, you know, I think our work here is. done. We're going to come back tomorrow and I need to find Mike. We still, I mean, until, I mean, I wasn't willing to say that Mike was KIA until we knew he was KIA because Mike had been such a power in so many different ways and so good at what he did. I thought even if he was wounded and he could have easily crawled into a space and hidden, and then the guys would never have found it.

So until we actually found Mike's remains, I mean, I was really committed to hoping. Of course, now we know from Dave's debrief and everything else that didn't work out that way. But anyhow, we left. The next day, the whole team now is crawling in because we think we're just going to enter, go into the, fortress and, you know, do our post-blast analysis.

I would climb into the fortress doing the same thing again. And the commander goes, I say, like, so why aren't you down in the area? He says, well, it turns out that, and then just as he said, you know, that, you know, two mortar rounds hit on the parapet again. He says, yep, they're still firing mortars at us. I'm like, oh, great. well it's daylight and he said yeah we're going to bring in we've got a

we've got a T62 we're going to bring in a tank and we've got troops all along the parapet we're just going to start opening up on these guys and and you know it takes it took all that day

and they still ended up you know the guys the al-Qaeda guys were treated into what's called the pink house which it was it was pink And then what was really clever, I would never have thought of this, but the Afghans thought of it. They brought in a fire truck and started to flood the Pink House. And remember, this is November, late November.

It's cold at night. And by the next day, the guys were hypothermic. They were no longer combatants. And they were pulled out of the Pink House. and grabbed and then by that time, a good chunk of Dostom's team were there. Dostom was still in Kunduz dealing with the Afghans there. But they put him into trucks and they took him to Shepaghan.

And that's basically the last of the story except when the medic in 9-5 identified John Walker Lynn. then they brought him back to actually to the Turkish school where we were headquartered. I made sure that my guys didn't talk to or do anything with Mike Spann or with John Walker Lynn. For two reasons. One, I was afraid they would do him harm. Right. But more importantly, having worked with the FBI, I knew that if any of us were in involved in this at all.

The defense team would immediately say that, you know, we were somehow perfidious. And so we didn't do anything. Admiral Callan understood it as well because he'd been, you know, Sealed Team 6th commander. So he had a lot of work in this weird world of counterterrorism and criminal enterprises and all that. And so he just put guards on the room that, that, uh, John. Walker Lynn was there until they could fly in from, at that point, they flew them in from Tashkent, some Army CID guys. And then the Army CID guys matched up.

They also had some NCIS guys there and they put them on a bird and took them out of there. And that was the last I saw of him. JR, you know, the John Walker, Lynn, the so-called American Taliban, amazingly, he's out of prison now. And writing. Yeah, he's taken up some writing, a little bit of writing. And has accused the CIA and the army of committing war crimes out there. And I'm just curious what you think of John Walker's account of how that went down out there, those few days. You know, I honestly, I haven't followed any of that.

I mean, I'm sorry. I can't, I can't stomach the guy. Yeah. You know, and, you know, the only thing that I know about that guy is after the fact, I talked to some of the FBI guys who did the initial interview with him. And they showed me some pictures and they said, they showed me the pictures of when he was first, you know, first brought out and interviewed.

And he, I think you've seen some of those pictures because they've become part of the story. But anyhow, like half of his face looks really dirty. And the other half looks sort of dirty. and the FBI guys I talked to said, well, that's because that's what happens when you, you know, have a good stock weld on an AK-47 and all that carbon from those rounds comes out because AK-47s for everybody who's ever fired one, you know, they're sort of, I mean, they're designed to be loose so they can be, so that they can be shot in any environment. That's why they are so popular all over the world. But it was, you know, carbon from the... So I have not followed John Walker-Litt. I mean, I'm sorry.

I can't blame myself to do it. I'm an old guy. I'm a geyser. He is a traitor. The end. I mean, I'm not going to judge anything else about him. What he wants to talk about now is between him and he's a... He's a mom, so it's between him and his God, you know?

Really. Fair enough, JR. But on a sadder note, how did you guys get a resolution on Mike's ban and evacuate his remains? Well, we went in. I mean, after the guys had been pushed into the pitch. bank house, but before they were pulled out, we walked at the, the Afghans, of course, you know, see, a good chunk of the, of the folks who were, who were actually the fighters, our fighters, on the ramparts were Shia, right? They were, because it was the Shia that had been, had, had,

well, Mizarri Shreif was a Shia town before the Taliban took over. So they were always the guys, and they knew Mike very, very well. Mike had been. And Mike and Justin and Mark had been our focal points with the Shia resistance. And then with the Shia, when we started to rebuild Mazarish Rief. So they went in, on their own, found him, and brought him out in a stretcher. And so we didn't have to go searching for him. they had already brought him right out to the entrance of where the big gunfight had taken place. And then we recovered Mike.

We had a classic American bag to put him in. Brought his remains to the Turkish school. put him in a space where we could do a quiet time with him. And then that night, half the team loaded up with Mike's remains, loaded up into a CH-47 and flew back to KKUZ. Alex was on that. You know, why half the team? Well, you know, we had not been, we had, you know,

we hadn't been relieved. We were still doing stuff across the board. So it was half the team needed to go because Mike was buried, Barry, before I even got back to Conis. But we needed to half the team needed to stay to continue to work the stuff that we were doing, which was building something resembling a legitimate, not government exactly, but at least a legitimate order and also hunting down the last of the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda guys who were now on the run in Samangang. Jared, when you talk about like building, not the legitimate government, maybe a legitimate coalition or whatever, how tough was that because even though these warlords like Dostom and Otto that they were fighting the Taliban, they were.

they were all there wasn't like a national identity for them they were also fighting for themselves and would just as easily turn on each other if they thought they could get away with it how was that for you trying to orchestrate that or manage manage those relationships it was something that of course you know this goes back to my experience in the 80s right i learned a long time ago that there comes a point in time where you can't you can you need to be polite but you need to draw a line in the sand. And I made it pretty clear to the guys early on, actually, well, before we had entered Mazzari Shreif, let's just say, that if they didn't cooperate, we were all going home. There'd be no more money, no more guns, no more ODAs, no more anything. And then,

so, you know, and if that was what they were, they were committed to do, We weren't going to get in the way of it, but we certainly weren't going to help them. And so they took it to heart. I mean, they didn't have to. I mean, I don't know if I was blunt or if I was, you know, just looked sincere or what. But it was like one-on-one with these guys. I've had guys in the past when I was doing this. I mean, say, you know, really?

with just like you're surrounded by bad guys and you're saying it's our job it's what we do right it's the leverage you have too yeah well it is and it's not like they're going to kill me because that would also you know end and the relationship so they could grumble about it but they had seen what what was what was successful now you know is and what we said right up front was look at once we're once the Taliban, we're only here to get these guys out of here. It's really up to you to figure out what you're going to do next. And, you know, my own, I mean, I've only done Afghanistan, Afghan since 1986. So I'm not going to pretend that I am like a real, you know, cultural expert, like, you know, from Harvard or Yale.

Because I'm just a kid who, you know, blue collar kid who just live with these guys for years. but there is no such thing as an Afghan. Right, right. There's absolutely no such thing as an Afghan. The only Afghan I ever met was Amrullah Saleh, who was, you know, the last vice president of Kabul. But before that, he was the head of the National Directorate of Security. And before that, he was one of Masood's guys.

I mean, he was actually a very close to Massoud and was one of the guys that traveled with the Massoud when Massoud was going back and forth between the Ponchir and Dushanbe to meet folks. He's the only Afghan I ever met who was an Afghan. All the rest of them, all of the rest of them are Tajik's Uzbeks, Hazara, Push Toons. And there's two different, I mean, and the, you know, people say push tunes. But, you know, the truth is that the push tunes of, let's say, Jalalabad can barely understand what the push tunes in Kandahar say. And neither one of them can understand what the push tunes from Numerus say. I mean, it's not a country.

National Geographic has done the maps, you know, they had a flag. And so by definition, Americans think that they're a country. But, you know, they are neither a nation. Oh, they were a state, certainly, but they were not a nation state. Right. And the folks in the north, I mean, remember, when the winter comes, you can't drive from Kabul to Missouri Sharif. Right. The roads are closed.

There's no way to get through the Hindu Kush. Even today, you have to fly. So what we had to do was convince all these guys that regardless of what they thought of each other, and they didn't like each other, that's for sure. Right. that they needed to collaborate, cooperate, if they wanted their country back. And they did. I mean, just because they grumbled

doesn't mean that they didn't do their job. They did their job in ways that were, you know, exactly what you could have asked for. Right. What was the next phase for Alpha Team after that whole incident after Mike's band's death and resolving the situation at the prison? I mean, as you said, you were continuing to do things.

The mission wasn't over. So what was the next step? Well, the next step was to, you know, to build a, to work with all three of our Afghan allies to make sure that there weren't Taliban, you know, I guess the only term I could think of is a term from, you know, from World War II. We wanted to make sure there were no war wolves out there, right? Everybody was worried in 45 that there were Nazi warwolves. out there hiding out just waiting to come up. So we did that. We were involved with the ODA that was down in Samaan,

working with the Ismailis, totally different culture as well. And then, you know, for me, my job towards the end was to be sort of the intelligence diplomat. I worked a lot with Admiral Calland, as we built airfields and we worked with the commanders trying or the you know the three leaders to try and make sure that they continue to collaborate and cooperate dividing up the city how you do police work you know i mean i don't mean like a police force but you know making sure that there aren't checkpoints that are hostile to each other across the town all that stuff um and then you know our allies started to roll in and uh So, I mean, we had lots of allies already.

I mean, the Brits were our shoulder to shoulder with us. But, I mean, the other allies, the Jordanians, special forces came in. The French aviation folks started to come in. Eventually, of course, Mazarishreif was run by a German unit. So at the very end, the job was just there were five of us left. and the five of us carved up every day, a little piece here, a little piece there, trying to do all of those things,

until we were relieved in place in mid-December and did the handshakes with our new team and introduced them to all the other, you know, the guys that we've been working with all this time. And then we boarded a, an agency twin otter and left Kahlb or left Mazar Shreif and headed back to KKUZ

And you had a few more years left at the CIA before retiring in 2007 I believe you finished as the deputy of operations of CTC No, well I mean I did I mean first of all You know that wasn't my last trip to Kabul right I mean or Afghanistan

I made like five different trips, TYs, for lots of different kinds of projects over time as we worked with the station. Now, by that time, the station is set up. It's a big station. But there were certain things, cooperation, collaboration, some other stuff. There's some training that I was involved with. After, in 2004, I was pulled back to headquarters after 17 years, kicking and screaming. but orders are orders. And I went back into the basement.

Of course. It only goes, you know, I was given, I was given an office in the basement to do some other stuff that was nothing to do with Afghanistan. And then I ended up as a, the chief of ops for a geographic division for about six months. And then I got promoted, shocked everybody, myself included, and got grabbed up to go to CTC. CGC is a big place, right? I mean, there were, at that point in time, there's over not quite 4,000 people in the CTC mix. Now, that doesn't mean that there were 4,000 people working in headquarters.

There are 4,000 people doing the CTC mission. Are you still there? Yeah, that's, you know, no. Okay. Yeah. Okay, so anyhow, the operations office, so I was a deputy, I was the one of the two deputy chiefs of operations. And then we had a chief of operations and he had a deputy. So I was partnered with Doug Wise.

So Doug and I split, and you've had Doug on the podcast. He's coming back in a few weeks. We got him scheduled for the 22nd. Excellent. Well, anyhow, he and I divided up the day-to-day management of CTC and half. So I ended up with a bunch of different parts. of CTC and then the the

the CTC director wanted to have a a a sciops program a robust siops program going after countering violent extremism so I wanted to call it the

political warfare department no that wasn't going to work that that sounded too political so we ended up calling it the strategic communications department. And I was listed just so I could go over to state and not be laughed out of the building. They listed me as a deputy director of CTC for strategic communications.

So I spent the tail end of the last 18 months of my career managing teams that were all over the world. is again kind of, you know, the same sort of story over and over again, that we're working on what is what would have been called in the old OSS days, black propaganda. And, you know, and black propaganda is designed to undermine the morale of the bad guys as opposed to Psiops or strategic communications that the military and the State Department were doing, which was to bring guys onto our side, right, to convince people on our side. And also that the bad guys don't know where the information is coming from,

as opposed to, like, say, the Broadcasting Board of Governors where it's very clearly coming from the United States. What you guys are doing is concealed. And what we're doing, I mean, what basically what we're doing is telling them, in a sense, a modified truth, which is your leaders are making themselves rich. while you guys are being asked to be martyrs, you know, which is all true. Yeah, that's not really a modified truth. That's kind of the truth. That is the truth, but it has to come from some place that doesn't say United States of America.

That doesn't have CIA all over it. Right. That's right. So we did a variety of different, very creative things. I take, I mean, no credit for this other than getting money to make it happen. I mean, I had a team of exceptionally smart folks. And then because I knew I was going to leave soon, I grabbed Alex to take over for me. So we ended up at the end of, I ended up at the end of my career with Alex as my deputy again, which was great. And then he took over my job when I left.

That's pretty cool. So retired in 2007. And tell us a little bit about what your life has been like post-retirement. I'm sure your wife is happy to have you at home a little more often. And getting into writing, you're a pretty prolific writer. Yeah. Well, let's start with, you know, I, this, this trade, this blend of intelligence and special operations, it's very addictive. And it's very hard to just go cold turkey.

So for years, I worked very hard with the Army and the Special Operations Community to try and do some training for them. Cultural training. I'm an anthropologist by training. So cultural training on how to work with the locals. I mean, obviously, Robin Sage, they teach how to work with the locals. But I'm like down in the tactical, this is how I worked with the locals, as well as how to work with the CIA. because working with the CIA is a challenge because it's another culture entirely. And, you know, it might seem easy when you're in a forward operating base and you've got a base chief and maybe one.

It's another thing entirely when you're going to fly into a station, an established station, and you're going to be talking to people who are interested in conventional intelligence operations because that's their job. So I spent a lot of time working on that and still do a little bit of that. And then about five years ago, I started writing. And it seems more prolific than it is because Mike Four had to go through two years with the censors. Oh, really? And then it's the sequel, friend or foe, was 28 months with the sensors. And then eventually what happens is I guess I just warmed down or they just figured out I'm not going to quit.

And I also got the code, right? I got the code. I understand how to write to make sure that the sensors legitimately. I mean, I signed a document in 1985. So they could watch everything I wrote forever. So it isn't like I don't understand that it's the rules. I get it. But it seems like if you look at like nine books since 2019, well, no.

Actually, I started writing Mike 4 in 2014. Okay. finished it, finished it in 15, and then had to find, get through the sensors. Right. And then after the sensors had to go through and find a publisher. So meanwhile, while I'm doing all that, I'm still writing. So it looks like I'm creating these things. Now, those people who have read it will say it's sort of slap dash anyhow.

But, I mean, the point is that it is the, it is the, the publication date doesn't reflect what happens. That makes sense. So I was just going to say for our audience who doesn't know, because we've had people on who have written autobiographies and whatnot, and we've talked about the pre-publication review board at the CIA that has to review their stuff and make sure it's not classified. But you might not know in the audience that even if you write fiction,

they have to go through it and check it to make sure that you haven't spilled any secrets in your fiction, correct? Correct. And, you know, and fair enough. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, there's an entire, you know, there's an entire part of the CIA that does open source intelligence. And, you know, for years and years and years, the KGB was doing open source intelligence on all of their officers who were in North America. that's what they were doing. So yeah, the pre-publication is a fair requirement. I think what happened to me was that I hit it at a time, just about the time, that a bunch of very senior people legitimately wanted to write essays and articles and books about their careers. Whereas, so what would happen would be, I mean, I don't.

know this for sure, but my guess is my fiction kept getting back down to the bottom of the pile. Because, let's face it, if a former director wants to write an editorial that's going to the New York Times, that's a whole lot more important than me writing about a fictional character who is a special operator, right? I mean, it's just totally different. So, Jared, please, I'm going to talk about your other series, and I'll ask you questions about it. But please tell us, we haven't had a chance to read this one. So please tell us about Mike Ford. There are six books in the series?

Seven now. And it's about a- And it's about a family whose history and special operations intelligence goes back to World War II, correct? Correct. So the basic story is Mike 4 is the call sign for a female special operator who is on a surveillance detachment. Okay. We'll leave it at that for folks who know what we're talking about. They know.

But that's what the policy review board wanted it to be called. So fair. Fair enough. So she's in a surveillance detachment, very successful. and but very aggressive. Now, you might say, why a female character? Well, partly because I met a ton of female operators and a ton of agency females. And, you know, you'd look around in the fiction, try and find some in fiction, right?

Anyhow, she's a, she is this daughter of a tandem couple, and she's the granddaughter of an OSS commander. So who also then becomes a CIA officer very senior and ends his career CIA officer. She doesn't want to be in the family business. So she goes through selection and ends up in this surveillance attachment. In Jalalabad, she ends up walking into an ambush and it becomes a what is known in the wounded warrior world as BTK, below the knee amputee. and just like many BTKs from Iraq or Afghanistan, the army after she is healed, as much as a BTK can be healed, says to her, okay, here's the deal.

You can either get 100% disability and start a new life. You know, go back to college, go do something else. Or you can stay in the fight as an intelligence officer. and we're going to send you to the farm and you're going to learn CIA tradecraft and you're going to be one of our that is the special operations community

intelligence officers well you know Mike Forrest spent her whole life trying to dodge the family business but given a choice between staying in the fight or not staying in the fight she chooses to stay in the fight and she ends up

working in a team that is a special operations intelligence, human intelligence, counterterrorism collection team. Now, people say, why a BTK? One of the training programs I was in after I retired was down at Fort Huachuca, and I was doing, you know, my cultural stuff, but we were doing it out. this is back in the day when Iraq and Afghanistan, the guys who were doing intelligence had to be able to get out into the, literally out of the field, right? So I was working students one after another and evaluating them after the fact. It's a five-day, six-day program.

And, you know, because I was an outsider, at the end of that program, I would give them a one-on-one. hey, this worked well for you. This didn't work so well. And like, you know, I learned through all the leadership training I've ever given and ever taken that, you know, it's really good to unkey the mic and listen for a while. Now, those of you who have been listening to me for now two hours are wondering about that. But nevertheless, so I went to one of these guys and I said, so you have anything you want to? to say because he had done very well and I didn't expect him to say anything more than thank you and go he's like man this is tough this was really hard and I was like dude it's supposed to be hard

that's the whole point and that's when he rolled up his pants leg and showed me that he was a btk I had I had walked this guy all over southern New Mexico and he had never said anything and had done his job on his own, all alone, face to face with me, giving him a hard time. And it was at that point, I realized that is one, you know, this, in the 80 second, when you say that, that guy is as hard as woodpecker lips. Yeah. You know, I mean, he was one hard character. Well, years later, when I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to move this character,

character from this side of the house to that side of the house, it only seemed fair to make sure that there was a person there who was a BTK who said right up front, I'm not a victim. I am a person who is still in the fight and I will remain in the fight until I retire. And, you know, the special operations community, the Army as a whole, is filled with people right now who are gravely, who were gravely injured in Iraq or Afghanistan and are still in the fight. And God bless them for that because most folks don't even know that they're, that they are wounded warriors because they don't tell anybody. They don't ask for any, any pity. They just want to do their job. So that's, that's Mike Four.

Goes through a bunch of different stuff. there's seven in the series, six of them are about Mike 4, and one of them is entirely focused on a prequel about her grandfather, because through the series, you find out that there's a vendetta between a Russian family of spies and an American family of spies. And book 4 reveals, actually book 3 reveals that the origin. of that vendetta. So, guys, so check out if you, I mean, check out the Mike Forest series. I'm going to talk about a school for the great

game, which to me is a mix of Kipling, Hopkirk, the great game. It's got, it's steampunk, like, it says it's a steampunk-Raj novel,

but it's also like a Philip K. Dick, like alternative history or alternate history, it's a fascinating book that draws on real history of the world. It's basically the great game, but more in a steampunk environment. It's a little bit of Ian Fleming, where mysticism and mentalism actually exist. I mean, it's a fascinating book. Where did this come from? Because there's two of these. There's actually, I'm working on the third one. We're in world, I, I, on a regular basis, you know, my wife's an artist and all of the illustrations in that book are her. Oh, cool.

So, so, uh, but, you know, I'll regularly say to her recently, I'm saying like, I'm going back to my office and back to 1915, because, uh, book three is set in World War I. So what I'd like to tell people about this series is if you can imagine Rudyard Kipling's Kim, meeting Stan Lee's Dr. Strange. Yeah. Yeah. That's the story. But there's Ian Fleming. There's Her Majesty's Secret Service. Well, yeah.

Well, here's the deal. I mean, in the 80s, when I was in, you know, doing the Afghan stuff, one of the things that I really believe in is if you're going to do this trade, you have to understand history. whatever culture you're working against, you have to understand history. So the good news is when the Brits left the subcontinent, they left behind the print plates for all of their old books. And so you could buy in books, you still can buy in bookstores, memoirs of, you know, 20 years on the Khyber, this and that and the other thing. Well, a lot of those books include these statements that, you know, that.

The guy dyes his skin with walnut oil and puts on the local garb and disappears in the crowd. Well, listen. Bullshit. Trust me. Yeah. I mean, exactly. I mean, I speak the language pretty darn good. I grew a beard that looked like Zizi top.

But let me just tell you, I didn't fool any locals. Right. Right. Except maybe at a distance where if they were looking to shoot somebody, they might not shoot me first. They'd shoot me eventually, but they were going to shoot me first. So, okay, fine. But I thought to myself, okay, well, I know it's not true. But what if it was true?

Right. Well, if it was true, somebody would have to teach these guys to do this stuff. So I created the school, right, where they were being taught how to disappear into the crowd, how to run their operations against the Russians. Now, by the second book, the Russians and the Brits are allies, and they're running their operations against the Germans, as they are in this new book, too. But it's a fun book.

It takes a lot longer to write because I put real people into the story, and those real people kind of have to be where I say they are, right? Because most folks are going to wonder about who are these people. And in today's world of Google and Wikipedia, people are going to really quick know if I was completely off base. Right. So I do a fair bit of research. But of course, as I said, I bought a whole bunch of books from that time period and brought them back to the States. My office has got probably 500 books of background stuff that I can use.

It just means I have to be a student again. That's all. Well, what's so fascinating about it is it like in a lot of, like in some ways, if you took out the fictional elements, the characters, the, you know, that, you know, the steampunk, you know, the magic or whatever, it's a history book. Like there's so much rich history in it about. about Afghanistan, about India, like, there are so many things. And I'm like, oh, my gosh.

Like, you know, you're talking about the posh. Oh, yeah. I mean, when I'm talking about the waziris and the massoods, I mean, it's absolutely, the waziris and the masus were regularly causing trouble. Right. Up on the, and the fata. Well, you know, and the thing about the mysticism is interesting. I got that from there was a, uh, an adventurer, a Belgian adventurer that went up into Tibet in the 30s.

Oh, yeah. And he came back and wrote this book about all those things that I'm talking about, right? All that the, you know, the, being able to jump long distances and being able to. And telepathy and all that stuff. Now, another, you know, short, you know, reality story. I have a friend who I worked with for years and years of years, special forces guy, was also an Olympic kayaker. And years later, he was hired by National Geographic to be a scout for them. They were going to sponsor a team that was going to try and whitewater raft.

So rafting on the headwaters of the Ganges all the way from Nepal down to Calcutta. Well, you know, my friend Wick, he and he's a writer as well. He's now, of course, we're all geysers, so we can't be adventurers anymore. We have to write. But he was doing this, and he was, you know, of course, he doesn't speak Nepali and he doesn't speak Hindi. So what he did was on his first leg of the Whitewater, he hired a young man who was from the University of Kathmandu, spoke good English, and was a comparative religion guy, which in University of Kathmandu meant he was compared. wearing red hat, white hat, Buddhism. But anyhow, Wicks, you know, spending his time with this guy.

And at one point, he says after some weeks, and he's made friends with the guy, look at it, he says, I don't want to insult you. But I've been reading for years about the fact that, you know, Tibetan monks could, you know, astral project from one monastery to another monastery. and, you know, all that stuff. I've read this book about this guy who says he's seen all this stuff, like, really? And the young man said, you know, absolutely. You've got to separate facts and fiction fiction, right?

I mean, it's our religion is our religion, and we believe these things and some of these things. He says personally, and then he, you know, raises his hand. He says, I've never seen a monk levitate any more than up the height of my shoulder. and and WIC goes, all right then. That answers a question, you know. So, so I just put that stuff in because it's fun. Yeah. It's, you know, and it gives me an opportunity to get some of the characters out of jams.

Sure. That would, they would otherwise, you know, and, and partly it's true that if you are able to, I mean, disappearing in the crowd is one thing. But there's plenty of stories of modern stories about snipers disappearing into ground that nobody would expect they could disappear to. And that's because. What? Well, I mean, it's because they understand how the adversary's mind works. So if you look like something that the adversary expects. to see, then you are, you're not invisible in the sense of Dr. Strange invisible, but you are

invisible to your adversary because they don't see you. Right. But it's also like it's just a fun element to the story. Let's jump into the user questions here. Let's try to get through these for JR. Okay. Jerry, thank you very much. Do you have knowledge about Operation Samoam back in 1990 in Iraq. No. I mean, I'm not a, I'm a Central Asian guy. So I'm sorry. I can't, I can't speak on Iraq at all.

I made two trips to Iraq and neither one of them were in that time period. I mean, I made two trips to Iraq because I had some of my black propaganda team there. So I was in Baghdad and Ramadi a couple of times. But no, sorry. I'm not trying to dodge it. I just don't know anything about it. And Ava, you were trying to judge it. It's totally cool.

We get it. John, but we know you're not. John Pierre, thank you very much. Keeping people safe. Last year, it was reported that the agents made a call out on the loss of too many informants. Is the cause the tougher environments or the lack of talented handlers? And I'm going to add on to this order. Is there, do you think?

that there are other issues? Well, first of all, right, the whole idea of what's called UTS, right, ubiquitous technical surveillance makes it exceptionally hard to do the old kind of tradecraft I did, right? Then you add to that, how are you going to communicate with these folks if you can't see them face to face? Well, then you enter another piece of, now you're into another. world where cyber operations and cybersecurity and everything else. So I think that what happens is we go through, it is, and I don't want to make light of it

because it's people's deaths, but it is a competition, just like it's a competition between stealth aircraft and air defense. You're constantly competing with your adversary who's trying to get better to defend. defeat you. And then as they start to defeat you, you have to figure out new mechanisms, new means to get through it. So I think probably the answer is the technology is moving so quickly now that it's really hard to do the job that I, I mean, you couldn't do the job that I did. I mean, really, honestly, the sort of tradecraft I used might as well be, you might as well be talking about the 19th century. Right. Yeah. Routy's incoherent rambling. Thank you very much for

your donation. Very good podcast. Thank you. I spent a good bit of last night actually doing some more research on early 2001 operations. Interesting listening to someone who is on the ground watching it all unfold. And thank you very much, J.R. for being here and for sharing like your experiences with us and with our audience. Like, Well, it's my, you know, I won't say pleasure because it reminds me of a death of a teammate, but it is nice to be able to now 20 years later be able to talk about something and tell people how, explain to people how complicated it is. It's not, it's not, it's not easy to do this stuff.

And it requires time on target. Yeah. You know, 2001 didn't happen. of 2001. It happened because of what we were doing in the 1980s. Right. Right. And you could say the same thing about what happened in Iraq. You could say the same thing today on probably, I mean, I don't know anything about Ukraine, except what I read in newspaper. But my guess is some of those successes are probably associated with a partnership between the Ukrainians and some part of the United States

government. Right. Just saying. Right. The foundation has been there. Staff Sergeant Oman, thank you very much for the donation. Thanks, Team House. Your content never disappoints. Thank you. The withdrawal broke my heart. In your opinion, does this... So this is your opinion.

It doesn't have to be based on anything you do or don't know. Does CIA have plans in supporting the resistance? He's talking about Afghanistan. Yeah, would you think about... Would you think that the agency would have plans to supporting the resistance there? do you think that would probably just pull out? I mean, again, it's been years and years since I've been, I haven't been in the building and only then as a guest,

and that was five years ago. Sure. I mean, I, so that's, uh, again, let's go back to what I said before. In 1989, theoretically, we stopped being in contact with Afghans. Did we stop? Were we, and we like, stopped the whole program. did we stop working with Afghans? Well, no.

Now, it's complicated by the way that everything has happened in Afghanistan. But, you know, in 1991 and 92, we were still contacting Afghans in the middle of a civil war. In 1998, I was still contacting Afghans when the Taliban were in charge. So I can't imagine that there aren't people in the agency working this problem set. However, I want to reinforce to the folks who write and to you guys, I don't know. Right. I'm a geyser. I am long out of practice.

I mean, it was amazing. When I tell people, when I tell people I was riding on horses at, 46, they roll their eyes at that. You can imagine, you can imagine at 67 how useless I would be in that game. So nobody is much interested in what I have to think or say. Yeah. Stuart O, thank you very much for the donation. We really appreciate it. J.R., thanks for telling the stories of the accomplishments of you and your team, makes me proud. Well, thank you very much for saying that. that time period was something that was really something and it wasn't just remember remember we were alpha bravo but it was i mean if you haven't read the books i mean fox trot and kandahar is about

uh echo and fox fox trot teams uh there's there's a you know there were a bunch of a bunch of i mean fox trout was probably the last of the teams that was behind lines uh but there were teams i mean we were we were just two of all those others and i would have to have to actually get my fingers and count on my toes to try and figure out how many, because I'm not real good about the alphabet and all that. But I'm just saying there were a lot of guys out there who committed to this and did very much the same sort of stuff. We all fought in this battle along with the ODAs, along with the Rangers who went into

Condahar early on, along with the special boat service guys that were with. me for weeks. So, you know, it's a good thing. Scott G., thank you very much for the donation. How does black propaganda work when the enemy knows who it's coming from? I want to have more effective trash talk in video games. Well, the enemy can't know where it's coming from. That's the whole point, right? So what you do in black propaganda is, let's, I'll just give you a generic example. So if I, well, I mean, you don't have to do a generic example. We could do what the Russians, to talk about what the Russians did in 16. So they created fictional Americans to reside on the web to say whatever they wanted to,

because they were fictional. They could say whatever. And the idea was to create controversy, to create hostility on the web. So sometimes those fictional Americans were pro-Hillary, sometimes they were pro-Donald Trump. Sometimes they were neither, and they were doing wedge issue stuff, whether it was gun control or abortion or Christian. or whatever, that in today's world, it's really, it's not easy, but it is much easier to create fictional characters than it's ever been before that are, that are, that appear real, right? I mean, with, with AI especially, you can look like, or that fictional character can absolutely

look like he's writing to you right now. And the timestamp is going to be right. And the IP address is going to be right. All of that stuff. So I would say to the writer, it's about making sure that you are not who you say you are. So Scott, you need some sock puppet accounts.

Exactly. You need a when you're trash talking in gaming, you need to create some sock puppet accounts to create controversial topics. I got one last question from Isaac. It's a little bit of a long one, but he says, Dear Mr. Seeger, I'm 29 years old in my second year of university, getting my bachelor's and computer information systems. After that, I want to get my master's in cybersecurity. When I'm done, I want to apply for the agency. I would be happy doing clandestine services, being a case officer or cyber ops officer, but I want to do the work like you did and go into

ground branch, but I'm afraid of hitting the same roadblocks as when I tried to enlist. I could not list in the Army because I didn't qualify for medical waivers, even though I'm not medically restricted at all. The recruiter described to me that a MEPs doctor did not want to take the chance on me. Also, I had a record for misdemeanor, which has been resolved for a long time. What can I do to make the agency see me and increase my chances of getting in? Do they care if people were never on a role students because I'm not? Does he even asking questions on a live format like this hurt my chances? What do you think, J.R.?

Okay, first things first. Nobody in either the CIA or the FBI is going to look at anybody who's still an undergraduate. What we want to see is a person, and again, I've worked with FBI recruiters just as much as I've worked with CIA recruiters. What we want to see is a person who has finished school and then gone to do something else. because let's face it, when you're in college, you probably don't meet nasty people. You may think they're nasty professors, but you don't meet challenging nasty people. And if you're going to be in the CIA or the FBI, you've got to understand that perspective. So start with that.

So basically what they want to see is for your degree, follow. followed by some work. Actually, they'll be fine with a two-year degree, followed by some work. Doesn't have to be military work. It doesn't have to be. It could be anything. I mean, it just needs to be work. Then the other part of this, which is important to realize,

it's totally different from my world. Everybody applies online. Everybody's, and so tell the truth. when you apply, show them what you have done, and then hope for the best because it's a rigorous selection process. And it is, you know, the vetting process starts with checking to see

if what you put online is true. Anybody who might try to make their resume better than it really is, probably is immediately going to get rejected. So just tell the truth. Do your job. Go to school. Go to graduate school.

While you're in graduate school, get a job that would be associated with your career. And then apply. What's the worst that can happen? Right. You know, I mean, really, but it's not a secret. You just go online to cia.com or F. B.I.gov, it's right there. The application's right there. Do it. And in your case, you did apply. You got rejected. And then later on, when you weren't even looking, they called you.

So it's sort of, it's one of those things where just because you get told no the first time, like keep living your life, keep gaining the experience, keep doing things. Absolutely. And I can understand now, looking back on it, why they weren't interested in me in 1978, because I'd gone undergraduate school and I had just started working, period, right? I was in Wyoming working, but I hadn't really proven that I could actually hold a job all that well. I mean, I'd proven that I could go to school. Well, that's great. Lots of people go to school. And you're right. It wasn't until after I had been in the Army. And of course, it was just literally dumb luck. But that, you know, sometimes, you know, Louis Pasteur,

said something that I like to use this quote a lot, which is fortune favors the prepared mind. Okay? So if you're prepared, then when luck does strike, you know, I mean, you're more likely to succeed than if the guy who hasn't thought it through. Yeah.

J.R., I really appreciate you taking the time. I know I've kept you like way long, almost like three hours here tonight. Again, really appreciate your time and telling the story. I hope people check out the Mike 4 series. Oh, and a school for the great game. Guys, this is a really enjoyable read if like, yeah, I am enjoying the hell of this. The link to the books is down in the description of this video, so you can find it right there.

Next week, we're going to have a 160th guy on. He flew MH-47s for 160th. excited to talk to him on Friday next Friday. We're also a bit at the end of an era here. We're moving studios. So by the end of this month, you're going to see episodes in our new studio. This place is going to be shut down. Jack and I were just looking at emails earlier from-

We've been in here for like four years altogether. Yeah. Yeah. So, and Jackson Smith, thank you very much for the donation. We deeply appreciate it. J.R., I would love, I know you split your time between two different local The next time you come through the greater New York metropolitan area, like sometime this fall or this winter, I'd love to have you in our new studio because you're also a bit of a historian. And I would love to have you just sit down and discuss the history of CIA paramilitary operations or just CIA in general because you have so much information about that.

And you've studied it so closely. You're so passionate about it. I'd love to continue this conversation later on in this year. Well, I'll be happy to. Justin's already invited me to come to New York and talk to him as well. So, you know, I think we'll make it work. I'm not sure when. You know, that's the great thing about being a mere wretched federal pensioner.

I don't actually have a schedule. Maybe we can have both you and Justin come in at the same time. That would be amazing. Yeah. Okay, guys. Well, it's been my pleasure. And good luck as you move studios. That's pretty cool.

Yeah, thank you. We're really excited about it and all the things that to come. It's going to be awesome. JR, thank you again. And everybody else out there. We'll see you next Friday. Have a good weekend. Okay, out here. Take care, J.R. Thank you, J.R.