The Team House - Ep. 25 w/ CIA Paramilitary Operations Officer Ron Moeller

Episode Date: January 18, 2020

Huge episode tonight with Ron Moeller who was a CIA Paramilitary Operations Officer serving in Air Branch and Maritime Branch. Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuban spy, Bergdahl, and more. 3hrs, +30min exclusive for our supporters about CT ops in the Philippines. Support the stream on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MurphysLawstreamBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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You are live episode 25. I am Jack Murphy here with my lovely co-host, Dave Park, and our special guest today, Ron Mueller. Ron served in the Central Intelligence Agency as a paramilitary operations officer, also in the military, and has a really extensive resume that I don't think we're even going to be able to get into everything on this one episode. We're already kind of war game in a little bit. We might have to do a part two. But that said, no time like the president to get started. We're really excited to have Ron with us today.

And Ron, welcome. Thank you for joining us tonight. Thank you. It's great to be here. I guess just to give people a little bit of a feeling for who you are as a person before we jump into all this other stuff. I mean, who is, Ron? Where did you come from? Where did you grow up?

What's your origin story, Ron? Oh gosh. What Steve Martin used to say? I was born a poor black child in the South or something like that. No, I'm kidding. I'm the only son of German immigrants who immigrated after the war. Originally, they met, married, and had me in Chicago, Illinois. after the second grade moved to Oregon and grew up there in a small town just west of Portland,

which is not a small town anymore. And graduated high school from there. And one step ahead of Johnny Law joined the Air Force. Just kidding. I really was okay. And then spent 11 years, three months, and two days in the Air Force, not that I counted. and had a week of unemployment and became a U.S. Army Micep, which I'll explain later on in the broadcast if you'd like. And after a week of in-processing, went to the farm for six months of intensive training and graduated and was certified, which is always an important distinction, and was assigned to a Kona Space Unit in support of U.S. Army Central.

and U.S. Central Command. They sent me to Arabic language school, which still gives me headaches. The Arabic, pardon up the school. And then, of course, the Defense Human Service became a fact of life. And so the Army Intelligence Program died. We all became DIA employees. And that was an abortion in itself, and in some ways still is. There's a lot of good people there, but the, anyway, that's a whole other story too. Since I felt I was condemned to Devil's Island, known as the Diak and DIA in Clarendon, Virginia, I looked around for better jobs within DIA, landed in the exercise branch, and was able to travel all around the world to all the different services,

combatant commands, unified and specified commands in the time, and exercise their con plans and O plans and neos and all sorts of things in between. That led to an assignment through the Intel Community Assignment Program, which is basically a program from one Intel organization to another. the inscrutored for their nascent exercise program, which I helped to revitalize and did the same thing for a few years. And the head of OMA at the time when I was getting ready to rotate back to DIA, took me by the short and curleys, if you will, my stack and swivel, my neck, and took me to an office and introduced me to a gentleman known as John. and I was hired and I became a paramilitary operations officer and air branch. That's the up to that. Just back up for a second, Ron, and somebody's already asking, MySep, what is that? How did you get involved in all that?

MySep stands for, you've got to live with the military. They have all sorts of acronyms. Military Intelligence, Civilian Accepted Career Program. So it's quite a mouthful. And back in the day, this was, this was 1987 when I applied. It was both for counterintelligence, Miceps, civilians, as well as foreign intelligence collectors, FI or AI, depending on what generation you're from. It was basically an ad in the back of one of the Military Times magazines,

and it went something like, do you speak a foreign language? Do you enjoy traveling? Do you enjoy challenges? meeting new people. And I, well, yeah. And since the Air Force had sort of offered me a commission and I could either be a missile launch officer or an air traffic control officer, and neither one which really appealed to me. So I sent them in a crappy resume. And a couple weeks later, I get interviewed and I get a follow-on interview and then I get actually a third interview. And I got hired. So it was basically the MISEP program from the F-I part is the it was at the time was the Army's equivalent of the of the DO and the agency

building you know hiring and training and making and detailing case officers out to to collect against different collection targets and sets. And the Arco Bus program, The Air Force had the next largest one, which was a very distant second place. And then, of course, the Navy had a very small one. The Marines had a very good one, too, because they, but they didn't have civilians. They were all warrant officers. They all warrants. Then became limited duty officers.

But they were, I think besides the Army guys, I would take a Marine with me on an op any day of the week. Yeah, they had great interrogators, too, great interrogators and CIA guys. I'm sorry? I was also reading, Ron, you mentioned that you were part of the tunnel neutralization teams in South Korea, TNT, which I wish I had to know that when I was writing about South Korea a few years back. It's an interesting thing. This was, gosh, one was, I was in Korea in 81, 82, so it was still, they still had the half of my PCS there was under martial law. So it was combat conditions, wartime conditions in Seoul, curfews, things like that. I worked in the Indications and Warning Center, and we got an opportunity of some of us that raised... Wanted to go up north to the DMZ to hang out with the tunnel neutralization team guys, the TNT, the coolest acronym there is.

And what they would basically be doing is using seismic devices and little test holes, drill holes, where they thought they would hit North Korean tunnels, and then they would take whatever action was deemed appropriate. It was a fairly new thing at the time because they had just discovered, I think, one tunnel by accident. So this whole thing, this whole TNT was still being formed and figuring it out. And they were really, you know, they were going to a petroleum engineers and people that were searching for oil because it's a lot of the same techniques. Small test explosions, the sound waves reverberating through the rock formations and, you know, a lot of science and sonar and Doppler and things like that. But it was an exciting and very valuable thing.

During my tour there, they discovered three more tunnels. So it was, it made the threat real. And again, this is back in the bad old days. And I got to go in one of those tunnels, and I mean, so can anyone now that one or two of them are open. It's like tourist attractions, and you can go down there and check them out. And, you know, I showed her to think that had they not been discovered and the North Koreans ever decided to do anything, I mean, they are, there's one tunnel that's big enough to drive a Jeep down, if not a tank. But the one I was in, I mean, you could move columns of soldiers freely through that tunnel. you know, quite easily.

Exactly. I mean, imagine you're, you know, in the old DMZ outposts like Golett and Collier and the other ones there. And all of a sudden a couple of battalions of North Korean infantry that are hungry and mean show up behind you and you're cut off and you're dead. So it's, like I said, the threat was very real. And we were doing everything we could to neutralize it at the time. And I believe some form of this is probably still going on, because I don't think North Koreans have given up digging tunnels. I believe you're right. I don't think it's called TNT anymore. I think there's a different organization or different unit that does that now.

Probably TNT sounds too aggressive. You're right, then it is a great acronym. Well, it's also been sold by the wrestling community, I think. That was really bad. So, did you know when you initially applied to the, or when you responded, did you know it was an intelligence position? Were you just looking for a job? Like, what were you thinking at the time? Well, let's see, for my, I mean, my step of, you know, military intelligence.

So I knew it was an intelligence program. I had no idea if it was an analyst program. You know, the Air Force didn't have a lot of human collectors. And, I mean, I knew that human existence. existed, but the Air Force never had used it a lot, at least in the assignments that I was in. So, I mean, the first interview, the guy pretty much pulled back the fig leaf and said, this is what you're going to do. And he described both the FI version and the CI version.

And so he said, well, which one would you refer? And, of course, being the hungry job applicant, I said, whichever one the Army needs me in. I'm sorry, I totally spoke over you there. For the viewers who don't, aren't familiar with this area, what is FI, what is C.I. What's the difference? Okay, well, CI is counterintelligence, and you basically hunt, capture, and then turn over for prosecution, spies against the United States and the United States Army in this particular case. FI or field or foreign intelligence, or some people call it A.S. AI, area intelligence, is basically you're collecting against the enemy.

You're going out there recruiting spies, assets, whatever phrase you want to use, practicing trade craft, managing those assets, directing them on collection operations, writing those intel reports, and just, you know, continuing the cycle of, you know, recruitment and, you know, collection. So one you're looking, you're trying to catch spies, the other you're trying to create them. Exactly. So my wife is a retired Army counterintelligence officer. So the joke is that she caught me. I was her best catch. She'll disagree, of course, but that's all right. So going through this, I mean, this is really interesting.

I think a lot of people aren't aware of that, you know, you had these military personnel going through the farm with agency personnel. Right, right. When I went through, it was, I mean, it was basically, I don't want to say on life support, but it was a small class. The agency's class was approximately 30 people. And then our military operations training course, or MOTSE, was also 30 people. So there were 60 people total going through the course simultaneously. The agency's course was, I think, one week ahead of us. And that was only because of some of the instructors that were. were teaching the agency guys on one week, had to turn around and teach the same course the next week, and the classrooms weren't big enough to accommodate all of us. And there was also that thing, you know, like, I'm an agency guy. I don't want to dirty myself with you military people and things like that. So it was a unique introduction to that culture of the agency. the instructors were top-notch. They were all either former service collectors, very, very experienced,

and a lot of agency folks as well. And a lot of the lessons they taught us, I mean, life lessons, if you will, ethical lessons have stayed with me today. I mean, they were impeccable instructors. Ethical lessons? and associate with the CIA, surely you jest. Well, the one instructor, the one senior instructor came out, a couple little small short war stories.

He told a story when he was working against the Ho Chi Minh Trail and also as well as the tributaries of that trail that went into Thailand and elsewhere, and into Burma, I might add too. So, you know, both drug, drug mules, and I do mean mules, real four-leggers going. He'd recruited an asset that was going to take a caravan of mules up a trail that was something that they needed to interdict and stop. So he told the guy, and I'm going to sort of talk around some of the stuff here, he told the guy that I'm going to beacon one of your, saddle horns or all of your saddle horns in case the convoy gets separated and stuff like that. So we can track where all these things go.

And the asset goes, oh, okay, got it, no problem. Well, he didn't put beacons in this. He put explosives in this. And so when the thing was, when that caravan was somewhere down the trail a few days later, an aircraft overhead initiated the radio signal and mule sticks for everybody. holy shit yeah so he told us that

of course we all had the same reaction that you all did and it's like oh my god you know this this stuff's real and he goes so if any of you have a problem with that you know ethical morally otherwise

I mean there's the door and nobody will think the less of you which is a total lie because we're all not you know I'm not going to be a pussy and walk out everybody will laugh at me, you know. So, but it was like, okay, so this is, this is, this is, this is real, no, no shit stuff. So we go, okay, I got it.

Some of us took the lessons more to heart than others, I believe. Some people still thought it was a game. And, you know, it was like, let's play dress up. Let's play spy. Let's play, you know, cool guy intelligence collector. Miami Vice was big on the TV back then. So everybody wanted to be crockett and tubs and that sort of thing. It was ridiculous.

The other short story is another senior instructor who I met later on when I was at the agency, and he remembered me, which was always impressive. I always thought I was one of his problem children in school, but I guess not. But he was happy to see me. But one of the lessons that he taught was about, you know, you have a, you're going to, you have a strong, hopefully, he said, hopefully you have a strong set. of personal ethics and morality inside you. And we're never going to ask you to do anything that's going to conflict with that, we hope.

If we do, you need to let who's ever tasking you know that. And we'll discuss that. So he brought up some examples that I really can't get into. But, you know, it was an important lesson that, okay, so, you know, I'm going to be asked to do some things that, you know, maybe to the average, you know, John Q public in America or elsewhere may seem, you know, how could you do that? You know, like the lady in Blazing Settles, isn't anybody going to help that poor man? How could you do that?

So we go, okay, I got it. So you structure the recruitment pitch in such a way that you appeal to their inner angels, their better side, their patriotism. You know, you always try to recruit for the role. right reasons, you know, money reasons are always, you know, the worst because they're always going to, you know, like, well, the Israelis will pay me a whole lot more for this information, which is always never a good thing. Well, they'll always take your money, whether they give you anything a return is another question, right?

Right. So I'm joking. I know nothing about the Israelis, honest. So for our younger viewers, Ron has already referenced the jerk and blazing saddles. So you were in for a night of vintage trivia. to phenomenal movies if you're not so much. I don't get out much, okay? Come on now.

These are those great deployment videos that we see over and over again. Right, I'm with you. I could do super troopers, but I can't remember any of the lines. You know all the meow lines, though. You've got Steve Martin VHS tapes. So when you went into the MOTC course,

the military operations training course, Is that correct? Right. Right. The very generic name. Was there anything that you found that veterans were actually, or a lot of veterans were actually ill-suited for that line of work, maybe because they were used to working in a team environment or more collaborative environment where this is a very individual thing, I assume.

It is. Did you see that because of some people's... like military mindset and conditioning, that they had a really difficult time kind of transitioning into this kind of line of work or this field? Some did, but we all tried to help each other out. The best people that went through the course, the ones that literally breezed through the course and had no problem, were the ones that were already certified counterintelligence agents, special agents in the military that had badge and credentials.

because some of their training aspects, the recruitment, the interview part, that sort of thing is very similar to what we were taught. And they literally... Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging.

It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're... doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Reased through this, some people like myself who came, even though I came from an

Intel background, I had no concept of all this stuff. And I was actually a very shy in person back then. So it really, one of the instructors had to tell me, he kicked me in the ass and, you know, told me to get out of my comfort zone and start, you know, getting out there and meeting people. So, and I haven't stopped since, much to my wife chagrined, because I'll go into a bar and start talking to people. And it's just a terrible thing. But it was, It was challenging for some people. I mean, some aspects of the course were more challenging than the others. I mean, I think one of the coolest things we got to do was clandestine photography,

the old briefcase or the gym bag with the pinhole for the camera and things like. And not only did we get to practice doing that on each other, which was really sort of silly, but we had to learn how to develop the film. Right. And we had to learn all the dark room stuff and everything like that. So it's a skill that my digital photos won't allow me to use anymore, but it was, I still have photos, you know, that I took. Because we all got to go one long weekend. We all got to fly home, and my family was still in the greater St. Louis area, and where I got out of the service out of Scott Air Force Base.

So I asked, hey, can I take this with me, at least the camera, not the, the Klan, container cases and things like that, but the camera and a lens and things like that. And they said, sure, you just have to develop the film when you get back. So I have pictures of my son and daughter when they were little. And, you know, it's not Richard Aveden, but it's, I like it. That's pretty cool. Yeah. There's a different world back then, different world of SB.

Yeah, technical surveillance is like night and day. I mean, you meant aspect, you know, things kind of remain constant. imagine but the technical aspect is just what they can do now is incredible oh it is I mean this and and the the biometrics is it's making it much more difficult you you almost have to hide in plain sight yeah and your tradecraft has to be impeccable yeah and I noticed you know we talked about this a little bit earlier around this time was when you had this brush with a Cuban spy. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how that all came about. Yeah, that was later on when I was actually in DIA and I was in the exercise branch there.

And we were scheduled to support an exercise down in the old Joint Forces Command. In Suffolk, Virginia, they have this great little simulations facility. very, very nice, very well appointed with computers and laptops. So it's almost like watching a war game with all the symbology moving in whatever time the contractors, the controllers wanted to move in. But there's a lot of inputs and things like that. So we're still exercising staffs and people. So we would go down there as part of the red cell as well as the support cell to the main exercise part.

to, and in this case it was, whatever the meth is out of Lejeune, I can't, is it too mef I can ever remember? Anyways, their staff, their senior staff and some of their senior battalion and brigade staff folks that would deploy were there participating. But the exercise, the scenario was that the Castro brothers had died. I can't remember. as they died, but somebody got very creative. And so the United States felt compelled to land troops, in this case the Marines, onto Cuba,

to restore order, feed the population, you know, pick up all the old ramblers for the museum, that sort of thing. So it was interesting. So what I had to do was I had to go out and get some people that were experts on Cuba. So I reached over to the Diak, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Center over on Bowling Air Force Base, the Latin America Division Branch section, whatever it is, and asked for a Cuban person who knew Cuba could do well. And that's how I got to meet Anna Montez.

And so I gave Anna all the details. You know, here's your hotel, here's what time to report, here's where to send your clearance to, blah, blah, blah. and I gave her all the as much as I had details on the scenario and everything like that. So we all show up down there the day ahead. We kind of meet each other. And Anna's, she's very hoity-toity stuck up, unapproachable, until the Marines showed up, the exercise audience. And she was ever so interested in all their, their planning and where they were going to land

and how they were going to do stuff and how they were going to maneuver on the island of Cuba, all sorts of things that, you know, a spy would want to know. So, but none of us thought anything other. We just thought she was being a very thorough analyst and trying to learn more about this. We're just really into Marines? I'm sorry?

We're just really into Marines. Well, they were Marines. Come on. They were good people. But the, so anyway, so fast forward. a couple more years when I'm in the Office of Military Affairs now still working exercises, getting ready to transition into the Special Operations Group. This agency-wide blast notice comes out on everybody's computer saying, hey, the FBI has just arrested

a DAA analyst Anna Montez. And of course, my heart just drops. And I'm going, oh, shit. if anybody knows or has worked with her or anything or had any interaction with her you know here's a you know contact this number and here's the email address and well i did all that got interviewed by the office of the general counsel and some security folks told him in much more ad nauseum detail than i've told you all here because it was a lot i could remember a lot more back you know because it was a lot closer

when it actually all happened. So a couple days later, I met some of these folks from the security and Office of General Council. We were driven to a nondescript building in downtown D.C. between a restaurant and a clothing store, somewhere off of Pennsylvania Avenue, but not the FBI, went in through one of those doors that lead into offices. And there was another door inside that. small lobby with a cipher lock.

One of the other agency folks activated the cipher lock. We went in. And there's the federal police guys that you see when you normally go into courthouses and things like that. The metal detectors, the whole bit. So I'm in a real official location. So we take the elevator, after we go through all that, we take the elevator up, go to a conference room.

and I meet a representative from the U.S. attorney and the lead FBI agent on the Adamontas case. And I get grilled for two or three hours about everything. I've already told everybody numerous times, both orally and written. So, I mean, I'm not guilty of anything, but I think they wanted to really make, find out any more details they had about what she had collected against and were about so they could, you know, up the charge sheet on. her. After we were all done and everybody's like, we're all friends now, I'm no longer the, you know, under the spotlight of interrogation. I pull the FBI guy aside and I say, hey, you know, is this for real? I mean, I mean, what did she do? And he starts detailing her glend, her clandestine radio, her frequency of contacts, and that she was an ideological recruitment.

She fervently believed in the Castro's and the Cuban Revolution. And I mean, those are the hardest people to, I mean, they're inconsolable. They feel no remorse. They feel like they are, you know, they're total zealots. I mean, they're not, she didn't use ego as a motivation. She didn't use money as a motivation or anything untoward. I mean, what she believed in was a very strong. motivator. So it was, I mean, I'm glad they caught her and everything, but it was a little tense

because one of the general counsel people told me, you know, this might delay or totally cancel your agency employment. I go, I didn't do anything wrong. I mean, I would have done something wrong if I hadn't responded, but it was, it just kind of pissed me off a little bit. How many years ago was this roughly? this was back in um this this was before 9-11 but it was in it was in 2001 so so after 19 years can we finally get the truth you set her up because she blew you off from Marines right you set her up are you kidding i am married to the most beautiful lady in in the world i if you if you google adamantez you know, you're going to have to like, oh, you know, it's, I mean, so never mind.

Did now, don't want to pick the federal, I don't want to do prisoner shaming here, okay? Yeah. Did that delay? Did that have any impact at all in your transfer over to? It did not. It did not. I mean, I was fully completely honest and above board. I mean, I hadn't done anything wrong.

And being married to a counterintelligence. officer, I learned a long time ago, I hate spies unless they work for me. And then you probably hate them still, right? I'm not a fan, yeah. No, I don't even, I don't think about it. I mean, it's a cool story because how many people actually come in contact with a real-life enemy spy outside of the counterintelligence people that go against them and catch them. So it's kind of cool.

And she like legit had like clandestine comms in her apartment and everything. Yep. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, you, I don't know what you. I mean, you can Google her stuff. And I'm not sure what links there are, but on the FBI affidavit and things like that. But I mean, it was a, it was a, she had a pretty, pretty extensive setup.

And she'd been trained offshore somewhere. I can't recall where by the DGSE. That's, that's the Cuban intelligence service. So she was a full-fledged deep in the heart of DIA spy. Yeah. Real quick, we have a couple of questions. First off, thank you, DJ. Thank you, Andrew.

Thank you, Alex. Thanks, guys, for the donations. We really appreciate it. DJ asked a question about MISA. I guess that's the first time he's heard of that. He's impressed. Andrew says, the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea has recently

come out under intense criticism for his mustache. Critics claim his mustache evokes memory of Tohu and Hirohito. As a result, mustachio gentleman, is this discrimination? Everybody's picking on my stash. You know how hard at work. I had to work to get this thing. I just briefly read snippets on it. I think he's a naval reservist, the U.S. person. He might be an ambassador or some foreign service guy. You know, it's his deployment mustache, you know, is like, you know, I'm, I don't, I don't think anything of it. I just like, it's, it's much to do about nothing.

I mean, good Lord, I had a mustache when I was assigned in Korea and a lot of us did. So. Yeah. Well, it's funny because when you were talking about in, in the, at the former, you know, during the MOTC, however you want to be. Crockett and Tubbs. I thought, and you already had him beat with MagnumPI. I wish.

I just didn't have the cool Rolex or the Detroit Tigers ball caps, so I'm way behind. I'm still a fan of the original Magnum, not this new guy. Sorry, he just doesn't look like a Navy SEAL. Oh, did they reboot that? Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, yeah. Rebooted everything, Dave. In fact, it's on right now.

It's not a secret. Alex says... I don't watch it. I just know because... I'm sorry. Go ahead. Alex asked, what made you pick Air Branch over the other branchers? Did you ever work with James Powell?

And what is your favorite skill thing you learned at the farm? So first question is, Oh, gosh. Did you pick Air Branch? Why did you pick Air Branch? I didn't pick Air Branch. Air Branch was picked for me. They had a shortage of air operations officers,

which is what they called us with, you know, They called the paramilitary operations officer within air branch. I didn't pick it. They had a shortage, and because I had Air Force in my background, therefore they think I could talk airplanes and I could talk with my hands and I could shoot my watchdown four out of five times, that sort of thing. So it was picked for me. And no, I never got to work with James,

but I really enjoyed and I listened to his Ural's podcast or webcast. with him several times and I wish I had worked with him. He would have been a great partner out there in the field somewhere. So wherever, wherever I would have gone on. And I have talked to him several times since via Twitter and email and that sort of thing. And hey, James, if you're listening, thanks, man. You inspired me to reach out to Jack and Dave to do this thing. So it's all your fault if I screw up. The, what the middle question was, what's, what skill or? Yeah, when you went to the farm, was there any particular phase of training or any skill that you picked up that you really enjoyed or did you have a favorite that you can talk about? Oh, gosh, yeah.

I mean, the favorite is evasive driving. I mean, come on now. I mean, that's, geez, you know, and then you get to go later on. When I was in Air Branch, you get to go to a more intensive advanced one week thing instead of just a three, four day or I think it was two and a half, three days of introduction tovasive driving, which, was done very safely. I felt like I was back in high school and driver's ed and how to do a J-turn and how to do this. But I mean it sort of wet your whistle.

So not a, didn't happen during MOTC, but the defensive or whatever we called it, an evasive driving course. My dog's bothering me scary. It was really, really great. I mean, we got to do some high-speed, low-drive, stuff and it was phenomenal. In fact, when we finish the course and everybody finishes the course,

some people finish it better than others. But the instructors don't warn us now. Now when you leave here, be careful, drive the speed limit, don't go over because the Virginia State Troopers know that this course has been going on and they know that this is the end of the course day and they're all out there waiting for you guys to screw up. So, you know, no high-speed driving, no evasive driving, don't do anything stupid or silly. And you put the fear of God into you because the last thing you want to do is, you know, get a ticket on your way back to D.C. So, but it was, I mean, it was some great, great stuff. The, the quick reaction drills in a vehicle, you're driving towards a barrack, it's all done with cones, so it's not a solid barricade, but there's like door number one,

door number two, and door number three. And there's traffic lights above it. They're all red. And you have to reach a certain speed. And I think we had to get up to 80 miles an hour. And, I mean, you're stomping on these cars. These cars, the engines are getting road hard and put away wet type thing. We're driving hard.

and you're literally like, you know, I don't know if I'm going to be able to, you know, decide, you know, if I'm getting so close. And all of a sudden, and you're scanning the lights and you're scanning the environment, you're using all the skills they've taught you up to then. And all of a sudden, it's green over there. And of course, you have to keep it under control and do it smooth. And they've taught you how to don't look short, look long, look where you want to be and things like it. And it's actually helped me a few times out in the world, driving. both overseas and here in the States is, you know, there's traffic accidents, the beltway, freeway driving, you know, go to the empty space, look where you want to be. Don't target fixate

on the whatever's the bad thing that's happening in front of you. Get around it, get away from it, get off the X, and all those sorts of things. So, Ron, tell us a little bit more about your recruitment into the agency because you were telling me that it was an old salt, a former blue light guy who was pretty instrumental in bringing you into the fold. Oh, I owe Tim so, so much. Well, I was ready in the agency. You know, I had a blue badge. I had the access to the computer. I was, but I was a, for all intents of proofs I was a detailee, but I was, I didn't have the brown badge like detailese what normally had because I was part of this ICA, this Intel community assignment program in the Office of Military Affairs. So I was really there. So I made the

decision the first day I got there that I was never going back to DIA because this is where I always wanted to be and this is where I needed to be. So I started shopping myself around after about a year, kind of getting the lay of the land, figuring out what was up. Now, again, this is the late 90s. So the Balkans is going on. And so I, you know, you know, you know, put on my Sunday best, and I go down to the, the Balkans Division office group, whatever they're called that week, and present myself and talk to some people, and I kind of get, yeah, you know, you sound qualified, but we didn't grow you from an infant. You know, we really don't want to bring you in, you know, halfway through.

You know, sort of like, you know, coming in, you know, I've heard tales, people going into the Ranger Regiment. You know, you have to go in as a young PV. They don't like imports. Yeah. Two or one, because if you come in any later, you know, you've learned all those bad habits out in the real infantry. And import is somebody who comes in a leadership position. Not somebody could be there somewhere else. So it was a little disheartening because, you know, okay.

So, you know, because the Balkans was hot and heavy, and they were always sending out internal notices for volunteers and people to transfer in to. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting.

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You know, implement their efforts. And so I was pretty disheartened when they when they didn't they turned me down cold. I went to a couple other offices and, you know, I got the, well, you know, don't call us. We'll call you. Thank you. Thank you. I hadn't even thought of SOG. I mean, I can't be one of those guys.

Gosh, they're just too cool for school. They're like the football team. They were the cool Royal Robbins 5-11s. But what is, what is SOC? There are some of the people who are listening. Like, when you see these guys, there's like a, a bull. wall of pure white white behind their heads. So you're like in a lot of.

Well, they'd like to think so. But that's only because the airbranch carried the light fixtures out there for them. So that's not a big deal. But so towards, I think it was the last, I was coming up in the last year of my three-year detailed assignment. And it was early 01. And Tim calls me. to his office and says, hey, you know, you're not going back. I go, thank you. I don't want to go

back. He says, so what are you doing about it? And I tell him my tail of woe. And he goes, oh, all right, give me a few days. A few days pass. He comes out to my little cubicle and says, come with me. And if you've ever, and if you ever meet Tim or if you, if you ever talk to any of the guys that used to be worked with him in blue light when he was an SF guy, I mean, Tim is the the quintessential surfer dude, calm, cool, cool. I mean, you never think he was a high-speed, low-drag action guy. I mean, this guy is like, I mean, it's amazing. And he's also one heck of a halo jumper, parachutist, free fall guy, whatever phrase he wants to call himself.

So, will you leave me, my dog's bothering the heck out of me here. So anyway, so Tim takes me from the fifth floor down to the third floor. of the tower we're in there at the agency headquarters. And he brings me into the office and introduces me to John. And John's the head of special operations group. And he says, John, this is the guy I was telling you about. You need to hire him. John gives me the one up, one down look.

And he's got, I guess, part of my file or whatever, my resume, my record. And he says, great. All right, your details up on this date. you can, you know, we'll, we'll hire you that, you know, the next, you'll come work for us the next Monday. So that was my, my very difficult recruitment into the agency. But I still had, I still got, as James described, I still got the thick envelope at home to fill out all the same paper. I just filled out before for the, for my detail. So I was kind of, it was a little upsetting because don't you guys talk to each other?

for people listening to this who think this is all like black magic. What is special operations group and air branch, the department you were specifically recruited into? Okay, well, special operations group is the paramilitary arm of the agency. And the agency has certain authorities. Sometimes I want to say privileges because I know J-Soc continually tries to peel some of off of them and assume those for themselves. It's working for him here. But under, and, well, I'm like, that's all politics. I'm like, yeah.

The, but the, and the main, the main thing is, is, is, the agency's charged with covert action in support of presidential findings and foreign policy objectives. So, and the SAG guys, and also there's, there's a couple other groups that, that do non, in-your-face sort of stuff, the, I guess, media sort of things. But I can't really talk about that. But SOG does the, they go out and do the covert actions. And when I say covert actions,

I'm not talking about, you know, kayaking up to, you know, the docks in Dieppe or something like that and doing the blowing up German freighters or something silly like that or doing Rambo and throwing, you know, C-4 charges into the engine. of Soviet fighters.

I'm talking about there's a resistance group out, you know, some third world country that's fighting against a, at the time, a Soviet bloc or Soviet-sponsored

government or insurgency. And the agency guys go out there because they have the deniability and they have a little bit more free reign. They're not constrained by Title X, the UCMJ, which is, again,

not to say that we break the law, but we have a, our rules and regulations are just a little, give us a little wider latitude. So we're out there, we're out there doing that. And, you know, and there's, it's no, it shouldn't come to any surprise to anybody that it was the agency guys that sent the very first team into Afghanistan after 9-11. And it, so because of, again, our authorities and also our agility to to act very quickly. The agency operates on a very, very light footprint. We try not to bring the, we don't have to operate the entire U.S. Army and material command to deploy one soldier forward. We can make a decision and deploy a team forward and make it happen and without a lot of must or fuss.

Ron, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's also a pretty short chain of command in the sense. again, and correct me if I'm wrong here, after 9-11, it would have gone from the president to the head of the Directorate of Operations or NCS, then to the paramilitary guys who are actually setting the personnel. The president to director-tenant, to the, I think it was, oh gosh, to James Pavett, who was the director of operations at the time. and then of course it went to then from there Coffert or Pavit parceled it out to either Coffert Black who was the head of CTC

or and I can't remember who is the head of the special activities division which is now a center as James went over and then SOG works for special activities that's the umbrella overarching for that covers those media guys as well so and then

so then SOG you know it came down to us and then In this case, it went, well, I mean, Gary Shron's book, First End, covers it real well how Gary was basically, he was getting ready to retire out, and the director pulled him in, said, you need to lead this team, because Gary had led an earlier liaison team to talk to Massoud, who had been killed two days before 9-11. And so, and then Gary basically could hand-picked the litter through the agency for his team. And then once he went in and started establishing things, then the other teams, Alpha through, I don't know, somewhere in the middle of the alphabet, teams were deployed out there and into Afghanistan to liaise and work with the various different warlords and entities there out.

It's also that book about. A lot of these teams, though, were augmented by special forces personnel to assist because we were running out of Jeep beers. We hadn't hired any contractors then, but so it was interesting. Busy times. What is Air Branch then specifically? I mean, as I would understand it, they deal with covered aircraft that are not necessarily marked. or don't necessarily have a huge American flag on it to enable the agency to go and do things covertly. I mean, is that the gist of it?

Well, I mean, the short version is it's the updated version of Air America, but that really is, that doesn't give it any, that's kind of a misnomer because that's the lineage, but not the entity. And we do have our aircraft armourkech, they do have serial numbers on the side. I mean, you can't land at an airport without a serial number. They do have, for the lack of a better word, a VIN number on the aircraft. The engine things are similar to what we have in cars. So these, they're all legitimate aircraft.

They work for legitimate companies. They file legitimate flight plans. It's just the crews that pilot them and maintain them are all cleared by the agency. They're red end to the agency. so they're for all intensive purposes, they're agency employees. And they know how to keep their mouth shut and they do the job.

And we always have a pretty good cover story for them. And they perform miracles. I mean, these pilots and these maintainers are the best. I never felt worried about flying some of these aircraft going, one airplane we had and I believe we still have in the inventory had actually flown into Desert One prior to Charlie Beckwith and those guys flying. Major Cardi's aircraft. It was, I mean, it was, that was, I mean, we're flying in a piece of national history and heirloom and, and it's a great aircraft. But so it was, there's a, there's, but we were able to do, I mean, we fly in.

I mean, we fly in and do the things and we get in there and do it and then leave. It's funny, like in Iraq when we would fly in. And God bless the Air Force in their air tasking orders. They didn't know how to categorize our aircraft. So all our aircraft became C-130s. Now, I'm here to tell you that a lot of aircraft don't even look anything close to a C-130. So we land at El-Assad, oh, by the way. and the, we're landing there, and I'm sitting in the co-pilot seat just because the back was all filled with cargo.

And the tower calls down and says, that's the funniest looking C-130 I've ever seen. And so, you know, I said, well, you know, no problem. I says, hey, I got to come by the tower and talk to you guys anyways. So we unload the cargo and, hey, guys, drop me off, wait a few minutes and you can take me back to the aircraft. I go up there. I do that, you know, Obi-Wan, Kenobi, Jetta, Mines, we are not the C-130 you're looking for. So, yeah, and they joked and laughed and they said,

oh, you guys are, you guys are the OGA guys, aren't you? I go, I'm not saying we are. I'm not saying we're not, but yeah, okay, just let it go. Don't worry about it. And do you need anything? Because, you know, I can get you stuff. And so I think the next trip we brought a, like I mentioned to you, in our earlier conversation, I brought the ODA that we were supporting a,

a case of Crown Royal that we had liberated from the duty-free shop at the closed Baghdad International Airport and a couple sleeves of Copenhagen for the guys and even though the one guy go, well I don't do it, I go, well dude, it's good trade bait.

I mean, just, you know, give horse in the mouth. What? You know, so he had to work with these Air Force guys. They were a little slow on the uptake. And even though you brought those guys Crown Royal, I'm sure they didn't drink it because General Order general order number one. Oh gosh, no.

Well, no, but when we had to work with them again, I, we were, we were extraordinarily popular. The, yeah, it was I learned really early in, you know, you talk and the earlier question the gentleman asked

about the skills you use, you know, small favors but get big favors. And it's, it's really important to, to do these things and to keep people, you know, you can lose your temper and you can get mad at people, but be judicious in that.

And I'm guilty of not always doing that, but it was an important lesson and an important skill. We got a lot more accomplished that way with honey than we did with vinegar. Right. So general order number one is the... No fun, no sex, no drinking. Yeah, no drinking. No drinking.

And no sex. No sex. Oh, it's funny, I showed up at an army unit to give them the... gouge on the local area during one of my tours in Afghanistan. And I interrupted the commander's general order number one thing. And he talked about sex and having no sex. And I'm going, I can't believe I'm hearing this. Here's a lieutenant colonel talking to his troops, treating him like their children, infants,

and talking about, I'm going, there's men and there's women here. And there's, you know, good Lord, they're going to find a way. a year you figure it out yeah but i just found it he was very um fire and brimstone like it was i just stood there and took up put on the poker face and didn't didn't say anything but my eye roll i think said a lot well it's funny is i think every one of those officers had a had a bottle in their desk in their office so and you know we're probably like having sex with some lower unlisted guy's wife. Yeah. Yeah. But there's no sex in the champagne room, folks. There's champagne. No. But that's not what you want. That's right. So 9-11 happens. And I mean,

by this time, you are fairly new to the agency, right? You have been brought into the fold. I mean, what was that experience like? I was finishing up my, I was actually in my last month of working in an office of military affairs. I was going to start one November. So I was actually, I was part of an exercise team that was, we were exercising the federal governments, state department's incident response team. And I'm probably getting the name incorrect.

I'm sure the state department has a much cooler, more innocuous name for it. But the agency part was the IRT, the incident response team. And that better be good, single malt there. So somebody asked whatever he was drinking. We are drinking as usual. What are you drinking tonight, Ron? As parents, there's enough to worry about and plenty to figure out alone. So isn't it nice to find answers? To worry less with people who get it. Saving for college

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Is it nice? It's a 10th Mountain whiskey. That should be in New York. It's made in, it's distilled in Vail, Colorado. We're just across the mountain from where 10th Mountain was was formed and established in Camp Hale. Okay. I didn't know what it was established in Colorado.

So the federal government IRT consists of three components. There was the State Department who was the lead, the agency folks, and there was a military component in this case from J-Soc. So, and we all showed up at Andrews and loaded our stuff up on a C-135, not a K-C, but a C-1-3. The Air Force has like half a dozen of these tankers, or they never became tankers. They're a transport aircraft. Very, very uncomfortable aircraft to fly in. Podgepodge of airplane seats.

I mean, I guess United was selling one row of seats, and Americans sold a different row and so on and so forth. And they still had all the old logos on them, and it was hilarious. So we fly to Budapest to do this counterterrorism. exercise with the Hungarians, their counter and terrorist service and some of their intel folks. It's a NATO confidence building exercise and things like that. And Budapest is a great place, wonderful. And we get there on a, we leave on a Sunday, we get there Monday, we liaise with the station and the country team, the country team being the ambassador and the regional affairs officer,

or not affairs, because I know that's another word for OGA, but the regional security officer, things like that, the different entities we need to make sure everything is smooth sailing as Americans working with the Hungarians. And so that's Monday, the 10th. So it's Tuesday the 11th, and it's normal day for us. And a lot of us go out of the embassy for lunch elsewhere in Budapest, because it's Budapest.

Come on. I mean, it's a cool place to be. So we beep up on back to the embassy after not a very long lunch, but a healthy lunch, maybe an hour and a half. And there's a whole lot more security around the embassy now,

Hungarians, security forces. And of course, we always carry our diplomatic passports with us. So we get in and come back in and CNN is blaring on all. all the TVs showing the one tower in the World Trade Center, and we get there just in time to see the second tower hit and things like that. It was, we're all, what do you say, right?

It was, so I kind of just misspoke. The ambassador actually had not showed up yet. The ambassador was a new ambassador who had just been confirmed by the Senate. she was the sister of the lady that Susan Coleman Breast Foundation, the running thing, breast awareness, cancer awareness stuff. She hadn't arrived. He was stuck either in D.C. or JFK or someplace like that. So the Sharj was there, and the Sharjay was melting down. Oh, I don't know what to do.

The chief of station, oh, I don't know what to do. everybody else in the embassy, I don't know what to do. And most of the people on the IRT, I don't know what to do. So Scotty Miller, Lieutenant Colonel at the time, now four-star general in charge of Afghanistan, comes up to me and we'd work together a couple times in the past in exercises when he was down at Special Operations Command, Central Command, down at McDill, Air Force Base, Tampa. He says, Ron, you're going to need to give the brief. He says, what brief?

he says you're going to need to tell everybody what's going on and how this happened and and what all and I says well who to who he says to everybody not just us but the embassy staff as well I go you got me shit in me dude how do I know any what I know I know any more than what's going on in the TV he goes oh I got confidence in you I go great I can see why I can see why you made four stars so but so anyway so we so we so On the team, in addition to us and the State Department, there was also a couple FBI guys as well. And they were on the phone back to their headquarters. Some of the agency guys were in the back to our headquarters, state department guys back to their head.

And, of course, they're relaying every single rooment that was coming through rumor that was coming through. You know, there's bombs on the mall. The White House has been attacked. And of course, the conversations got ended quickly because all these people were getting evacuated because I can only imagine what it was like in D.C., you know, panic and mayhem and everything else. So we got as much as we could. We knew about all the final endpoints of all four aircraft. I took an old TPC, a tactical pilot's chart because I needed something to write on.

and talk to. So I flipped it on the back and it's all white. So it was my tactically expedient briefing slide in lieu of making up a fancy ambassador approved PowerPoint. And I just magic markered some basic bullet points on there about what we knew, what we didn't know, who we suspected did it, and everything like that. So hardest briefing I've ever had to give in 38 years in the intelligence career and never hoped to give one like that ever again. So, RC-135, which had dropped us off in Budapest, had flown back up to Ramstein and was just hanging out in Ramstein. Well, they were ready to fly us back, but the airspace, of course, was closed, so we couldn't do anything. So we ended up spending several days in Budapest just hanging out, you know, show up in the morning at the embassy saying,

hi, I'm still alive. I haven't been enrolled yet by the Roma hookers or the panhandlers. or anything like that. What? It's true. They're everywhere. They were nice people. Actually, we got a lot of free drinks and a lot of free meals because a lot of a lot of Hungarians felt sorry for us.

But we didn't take advantage of it, of course. But it was still very nice of the Hungarian people to do that. When we left, the C-135 came, picked us all up, except for the J-Soc guys. They'd all redeployed down to Tazar. which is a large Hungarian military installation in south central Hungary. And because they were thinking they were going to forward deploy. So they sort of missed the bus, and I guess they got picked up by a military aircraft later on. But we were flying back.

And the air routing, if you've ever flown transatlantic, you know, you go up the Great Storkover kind of route. You go up around Iceland and then down the coast of Greenland and Newfoundland, along the New England coast. Well, being an official aircraft, we got permission to fly the innermost airway that was the closest to the American coastline. So we got to fly right along, you know, right along basically we, you know, Long Island was on one side and Manhattan was on the other side. So as we were approaching Manhattan, and we were getting buzzed by the F-15s and the 16s

that were flying around. We all got called up to the cockpit, which was the only place that had windows, which was another reason that the aircraft really sucked because nobody had windows in the back, to take a look at the remnants of the World Trade Center. And it was, I mean, I've never been there. I really have no desire to go.

Seen enough of the video of the ground view, but from the air, it was, it was, was devastating and we all stood there and everybody wanted to stop and stare but we all felt guilty because we were basically all lined up and you had 15 seconds to to take a look it was made quite an impression so we all get back to our seats we land back at Andrews we unload the aircraft and and you know people take the stuff back to the secure warehouse and and you know we all go back to Langley to get our our our our our personal vehicles to drive home.

And, oh, I'm sorry, no, we didn't. We actually had our personal vehicles there at Andrews. So we got in those and just trying to get off Andrews. I mean, it's hard to get on a military installation even back then or even before back then, but just getting off the installation was difficult. And I immediately got the sense as soon as I got off the air base that the country I had left a week before had irrevocably changed to something I still I still can't really define, but it was it was definitely different.

You just felt it. Everybody was very tense, focused, whatever. Small personal aside on this whole long, winded tail. So I get home and my wife wasn't home when I arrived. she was out shopping. And my kids were home. At the time I had a daughter who had graduated high school and she was trying to find herself working odd jobs here and there,

working at the mall, Aeropostale, folding clothes, selling clothes, and my son who was in high school. And they were extraordinarily happy to see me. Come to find out because they didn't know if I was dead or alive. Because the Pentagon, where the Pentagon got struck, was where my cover office was for, and I never had told them that I had moved from OMA to, where I was moving from OMA to Air Branch and things like that. In fact, they didn't even know that I had moved to Langley. They still thought I worked in the Pentagon for the, for the DIA exercise people, which was under the J2 rubric. So they thought I'd been killed in the Pentagon.

and yeah so that was um i i got a lot of a lot of hate thrown at me a lot of happy happy hate sure um so i had to sit them down and tell them who their daddy was yeah where their daddy worked where he was going to work and how important it was for them this wasn't one of those little high school girlfriend boyfriend boyfriend secrets this was this was this was no shit real life, there's people out there that want to hurt you, and people that won't understand. So this is a secret you need to take to your grave. And the only person that you can reveal the secret to is somebody that you tell me and then I'll reveal it to them if I feel it. It's my secret to be revealed, not yours. And they've adhered to that ever since. So it was, it was really,

it was a it was it's important i mean you know they always talk about in the in the farm and elsewhere you know you know reading in your family and and you know your immediate family and and stuff like that it was um it's a value judgment that everybody has to make that's one of those other life lessons that i learned in the first week nazi is how do you i mean my wife always knew because heck she helped me fill out the paperwork so because I don't remember where she was born. Shoot. But anyway, so the, yeah, that was pretty important.

The one thing is, is that while we were stuck in Budapest, the State Department guy finally got a telephone line, a commercial telephone line to his family back in Prince William County down there south of D.C. And we'd all given them our home phone numbers. So he said, hi, I'm good. here write down all these phone numbers and call these people and let them know that they're you know whoever you know husband wife father mother is is okay so my kid's told me later it says so yeah so we get

this phone call from some strange lady who says hi you don't know me but your dad's working with my husband they're overseas and he's fine and they thought it was a prank so they had no idea so they were like we're like you know shut up bitch you don't know my dad clam it was um now yeah yeah how to win friends and you know but it was um it was yeah it was uh it's been it's been hard i mean that was hard that was a hard thing i hadn't i hadn't even thought of that i i was just happy to be home i hadn't thought about the impact it had on my family well you said that uh you know they talk about reading your family in or you know basically reading them in i assume it's like letting them know what you're doing or what you do.

I thought that, like in the movies, if you tell somebody that you're in the agency, they kill you, right? That's not how that works? Yeah. Well, I don't tell them everything. You know, you tell them, hey, I work in the agency. I didn't even tell them about Air Branch.

I just said, hey, I'm working in special operations and let it go with that. And that way my son, who was reading up all on, you know, S.F and Navy Seals and that sort of thing. So he kind of made assumptions to where dad was. So suddenly I wasn't just the dad. I was the cool dad. Right. Right. So we got a couple more questions real quick.

Andrew asked our ideological recruits, the Cuban targets of preference. Actually, ideological recruits are anybody's targets of preference? It's like they're the best because, again, they're not, you know, you don't have to, you know, you're not, you're not, you're not, you're not, you're not, you're not, you're not, you don't have to worry about, I mean, in double agents, you don't have to worry about, you know, being for money or whatever. Would you, I mean, would you agree with that or am I kind of going off the rails here? I, I, I, well, to be honest, I didn't hear the entire thing. I didn't hear the first part you cut out. So I heard the last part. ideological recruits, he said, aren't ideological recruits the Cubans target of preference? And really ideological recruits would be anybody's target. I think any intel services, that's their recruitment of preference because that's a true believer. Right. If you're recruiting for ego, that's a lot of work. You're always having to stroke their ego and make them feel good and self-actualize them. if you're recruiting them for money, you know, it's never a great motivator.

So, and so ideological, it was always the best. And one of the things I've been told is, you know, unlike in the movies and things, the CIA doesn't so often use blackmail, like these ideas that, like you catch a guy with a hooker or something like that, make a videotape of it, because then you have to deal with the other side of the source, that they might turn around and shoot you in the back or they're going to narc you out or who knows what. Well, we try not to do that because, you know, we want people to be, we want people to volunteer to work for us. We don't want to coerce people because coerced assets are also the worst because the first

chance they get, they're going to run to their host counterintelligence service and turn you over. What are going to be turned back to you as a double agent and you're going to get fed a lot of crap. So I mean, there's, there's history of that of, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, the East Germans and the Soviets doing that during the height of the Cold War. And so we were getting all sorts of great recruitments, low-level recruitments, but recruitments nevertheless.

And those officers were getting fed a lot of crap. And there's a lot of bogus intelligence that was getting published out there. It was hard to wheat, chaff type of thing, separate all that. Right. So you get back home. now you're doing your job. I mean, when was it that they actually sent you overseas? Well, so I showed up, and my one November date for Air Branch suddenly showed up to be that Monday

because everybody was all hands on deck. So, you know, Gary Shrone was picking his people, and they were out within a week after that. and the other teams the letter were getting organized and things like so there's a lot of carrying tough boxes to and fro the hallway of the agency which really freaked a lot of people out that

like but that's not the way we operated in Paris so it was kind of scary I mean I met Michael Spann in the elevator he's him and another ground branch officer are escorting a bunch of tough boxes up to their old facility in the in the headquarters building and he's just smiling going I go wow he said I helped him carry him in

and that was you know nice guy I mean I never I never got to meet him again or work with him again obviously but because he deployed but he uh every everything they always said about him is absolutely the truth as far as his smile humility and just good attitude and he was the first american killed in the global war on terror he was the correct he was the first American kill And so, and we're working air branch, we're working 12 on, 12 off, pretty much six and a half days a week type of thing because there's all sorts of moving parts. And I mean, going from a, from a lethargic peacetime environment where the agency was doing a little bit in the Balkans and maybe a dabbing here or there in Africa and some stuff in the counter narcotics war down in Latin America. all of a sudden this is, I mean, we're going from zero to 60 in a heartbeat, in a blink of an eye. So it was a lot of confusion, a lot of, a lot of egos, a lot of yelling in the hallways.

It was, you know, when you're surrounded by elephants, be the smallest blade of grass. It was, it was, there was a lot of, you know, who's in charge and, you know, there was, Yeah, it was, I mean, we made it all work, and that's the thing. But there was, it was a little hard sometimes to not get us off the dime, but get us out the door, if you will. When Mike Spann was unfortunately killed during the prison uprising, and we were notified and the agency was notified, his body eventually made it in a couple days or a day up to Karshi Khanabad, the Uzbekia airbase, known as K2, because it was easier to pronounce, that the Uzbekis had graciously allowed us to use for, I'm sure, untold millions of dollars in rental fees. So the military, bless their hearts, were ill-equipped to evacuate casualties, let alone, let alone. an American killed in action. So there was a lot of Sturman Drung, if you will,

to use an agency aircraft to transport the bodyback. Now, he was already in the silver casket, and we were, of course, going to transport him to Dover, because we weren't certainly going to drop him off at the local D.C. mortuary or anything like that. But all our aircraft were passenger doors, you know, not a car door. door. So there's no way to, you know, load a coffin into, through a passenger door. So we eventually got a military aircraft to take him and everything like that because I think Director Tennant called the

commandant of the Marine Corps who called the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And somehow, some of that air force resistance just melted away. Surprise, surprise. How great is that that it's so early on in the war that a CIA officer gets killed in it and it becomes a debate about how do we repatriated his remains back to the United States. It was a, I mean, it was a real low-level debate, but it was just, it was like, you've got to be kidding me. I mean, this was, I always like to say there's, there was a lot of September 10th people in a September 12th world, and it took, it took a lot of time for some of those people to either be moved out, at least the first few years, and eventually they all came back.

back and forth. So they seem to be back in the ascendancy these days. So you did get over there, though. And I mean, I got over there in early January, flew into after flew into Tashkent via lovely Uzbekiair, which was, they actually flew Boeing's, but it was still a white knuckle experience. And the, I mean, you know, airplane food is never good food anyways, commercial airplane food. In this case, it was local Uzbekia delicacy food. Oh yeah. So thank God for power bars. It was because it's a long flight. But anyway, so we get to Tashkent. We sit around for two, three days, you know, trying to get all our stuff packed in the right kind of ways and get deployed.

Cobble's trying to figure out where they're going to put everybody, the agency offices there, the station. We get into Kabul and, you know, it was interesting. I mean, I remember in the Air Force looking at overhead photography of Kabul during the Soviet invasion and then the subsequent war. But here I am now, instead of looking at it from, you know, eye in the sky, I'm looking at it at the ground view. And as we're driving from the airfield to, from the airport to the station,

it was like I felt like I was driving through Stalingrad, the utter destruction everywhere. But still tons of Afghans running around. I'm trying to figure out which way is up. A couple little things, you know, get etched in your mind. the mandatory Kabul traffic cop, you know, with his little, you know, waving the traffic, because there's a couple traffic circles between the airport and where the station is. And he's directing traffic and trying to, I don't know, I guess he had nothing else to do. So not that he, nobody was paying any attention to him.

But his traffic baton, you would think it would be something orange or bright that you could see. I guess he misplaced that. So he just picked up his RPG rocket and was using that to direct traffic. That was, yeah, I was like, wow, that's great. You know, at least he's not doing it with the launcher. And then as we're driving along further, we pass a little one-axil cart pulled by an emaciated horse or mule or I'm not sure. but, and two things stood out from that. The animal, I mean, this old Wieson guy who probably was 30 years old because Afghans always aged extraordinarily quickly because it's such a harsh environment.

Yeah. But he's just beating the high end quarters of this animal, you know, like to move fast, move fast. And the animal has this real hang dog look in that one eye, you know, from the side of the animal. I think he's looking at him. He says, dude, shoot me, please. get me kill me now put me out of my misery i'm like yeah no but the other interesting thing was the wood the firewood for heating and cooking he was carrying was really it wasn't firewood like you and i would see you know cut into nice you know cords of 18 inches long or you know chopped wood

it was this real gnarly curved wood it was the roots from the trees because all the trees had been cut down years before they were having to dig up the roots to, because the Soviets had defoliate a lot. Yeah, and the Soviets defoliated that whole area. So, yeah, so like all the vegetation is dead. Oh, yeah, around coast. I mean, you look at some of the old paintings from when the British fought the Afghans

back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, I mean, the British troops are gallantly charging up the wooded hillside, a thickly wooded hillside, and there the Afghans are hiding behind the trees and the shrubbery, you know, shooting with their rifles. And all that stuff is now bare. I mean, it looks like... It used to be lush.

When I was there, they called the Kausk bowl. And I mean, it looks like the fucking surface of the moon. Yeah, that's the Soviets. Real. Yeah. It's like Agent R. Exactly. Yeah.

I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. Yeah. And it's amazing how many, even when I was back there, my final tour in 2012, as we're flying into Salerno when it wasn't flooded after a rainstorm, I'm sitting with the J2 and of course he's Mr.

Really actually he's a good guy. It's General Nakasone who's now the head of NSA. We're sitting there chatting about this and that but he's He's like well you know this that and he's looking wow that really is as you said jack The surface of the moon. I go you realize of course and I give him the quick two second headphone tutorial history on it And he just kind of looks at him. He goes, you're kidding.

I got, when we got back to Kabul that evening, we looked it up. And he goes, damn. He says, oh, yeah. This country's been through hell and back twice. Yeah, I'm not keeping up with Jack here. But anyway, so we got to station, and we, and building was, you know, pick a spot in the hallway. So it's like being in the bus depot, you know, working away around the Daryl.

Felix, things like that. The MREs were the food of the day because every time we tried the local Afghan cuisine, especially the bread, which looked really appetizing, but the way they made it, there was all sorts of little rocks inside of it. So we were always chipping teeth and breaking fillings and that sort of thing. So I lived on a diet of jalapino cheese, crackers, and skittles. good stuff. Oh, and instant coffee. But we had a limited comp pipeline back to headquarters and back to a couple of the more important regional entities that we needed to talk to,

like Tashkan Station, which was our, if you will, our support station for our effort. Everything flew into Tashkent and then down south. and then the Kayok, the combined air operations center at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, which has been moved to LUDD Air Base in gutter, I guess. I don't know, someplace. So that was, you know, to help coordinate air operations and things like that. So we had that, and we had one in Marsat phone, which you had to stand on the toilet in this one little room off to the side from the pit. where all the computer terminals, all 12 of them were, that we all had to use and share,

and try to make a phone call home. And, of course, MRsats were extraordinarily expensive. What is it MRSAT for people who don't know? So you're in Afghanistan. International Maritime satellite. It's a communication satellite. It's, you know, I mean, now they're the cool phones with the fancy donkey dick antenna. Can I say that on, I guess?

Well, I just did. So anyways, there you go. That's the bourbon talking. So anyways, we'd have to make those phone calls. You know, we were limited to like three minutes. And there was always some log person saying, you know, you just cost the U.S. taxpayers $200. I'm like, well, okay. Thank you.

But it was, even though it was. Even though it was the conditions were less than ideal, you know, looking back on it now, it was the best time. I mean, you were, you were, you were, you were, you were, you were working with like-minded people. Everybody was focused. It was, it was great. It's, it's a feeling, it's hard to recreate or describe because on subsequent assignments to Kabul, it got more and more established and, and strategize.

gentrified chain of command and you know you can't see the chief of station because you have to go through the executive officer to the deputy to the chief and we were all in the same basic area of the building and I mean the chief had a little separate office because well he's the chief and but he shared that with the deputy and and an executive officer so it was it was it was everybody felt family tight and it was um I mean, we had to pull multiple duties. So not only was I the Air Operations Officer in charge of the sole airframe that we had at the time of the MI17 helicopter, the transport helicopter, which is now in static display outside CIA headquarters, but I also had to coordinate with the fixed wing aircraft that we had based out in Tash Kent that would bring in passengers and critical cargo and things like that. So we had that. We also had to pull guard duty outside at night for our, two hours. I can't remember. But it was long because we had a small perimeter.

When you go there now, the perimeter is quite more expanded and robust because we've actually had professional defensive people show up and show us how to do things. So I'm out there one night pulling guard duty. and we have Afghans from the Northern Alliance that are there with us. And I got to see true man love, yay. That was exciting. I immediately walked the other way and, hey, they weren't sleeping, so I couldn't say anything. But we knew about there was a couple packs of wild dogs running around Kabul.

And of course, here we have, you know, we're cooking in the smell, these exotic smells of cooking are filling in the air. Well, I'm staying there one night, and of course there's no street lights and maybe one or two street lights that are still working from some of the other foreign compounds in the area, but, you know, it's dark.

It's pitch black. And, I mean, we got our lights, we got our flood lamps pointed outward. And all of a sudden, you hear the dogs growling and snarling. And it's like something out of that that wolf movie where the wolves are stalking the one airplane

survivor passenger and you hear them and they're they're charging us i'm sorry was that wolfen i can't remember it was it was it was it was Liam nisen he was he was in some movie yeah whatever it was up in the arctic or something anyways so these these dogs are are charging us i'm going shit you know i love dogs but they're these are not friendly dogs these aren't and and afghans aren't aren't particularly fond of dogs as a lot of Muslims aren't for, especially in that area of the world. So it's me or them. So I open up and so do the guards. And it was it was ugly and depressing.

Thank you. Of course I woke everybody up in the compound and everybody thought we were under attack. And so that was an exciting report to give orally to the chief, who thanked me for my for you know shooting getting rid of the pest but you know I'm going

well it's not like we had an alarm system or a PA system that I can alert people to I you know so and then I had to write the report and of course you know I get all these inquiries back from headquarters about well couldn't you have you know done this you know not not had to take lethal force on the

I'm going geez you know I mean these people act like I'm at the dog park in Fairfax County outside of D.C. and some dog, you know, gets too friendly with me. He wants to hump my leg. I'm like, these guys, they wanted to rip us apart. And so, you know, a lot of those, a lot of those inquiries went unanswered. You mentioned the, you mentioned an MI17. What, what is that? What's special about it? What, what's, like, for the people who don't know, what's the deal? And why is it on display? What's the big deal about it? Well, the MI-17 is, I think it was a 1950s, 1960s generation Soviet helicopter built, designed to transport troops.

Some models of it have, they put little rocket pods on the sides and things like that. Ours did, and ours was a straight troop transport. We, I think we got it for two reasons. One, our model was the MI-18 or MI17 MTV. It was, which is Russian, is initials for a long Russian word, which basically means high-altitude engines. Because a lot of the locations we were flying to in Afghanistan were up in the foothills of the Hindu Kush and, you know, further south. But so there was, we need to be able to get up to altitude and carrying a decent load of cargo. personnel and cargo.

And it was a person, it was basically a cargo aircraft, very bare bones, could carry. I think the most of we ever carried was 12 people in light gear, you know, rucksacks and weapons. And it was a rear loader. We took off the clamshell doors off, which, so made it for very cold in the winter, flying up into the Hindu Kush. I've been cold, but I've never been that cold. Even wrapped in Sneville Gear and Kevlar and Gortex and everything else.

It was, I mean, that wind found all sorts of places to chill you. But anyway, so it was a very capable aircraft. And the other reason we picked it was it was an aircraft that the Afghan Air Force and the Soviets used to fly. So it was, it was the Afghans. It's just, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it didn't look like, it didn't, it didn't, it wasn't, it wasn't a, it wasn't a, it wasn't a Chinook or a Black Hawk or, or the Germans when they brought in their CH53s or anything like that. And they were used to the sound, the Doppler effect, because we, we only flew at night, a lot. So, um, and we always flew obviously under, under goggles. So it was, um, it was a great aircraft. It, it, it, it, it, it was a great aircraft. It, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it did amazing, wonderful things. And with good planning and some awesome pilots at the controls, we were able to do some amazing things.

Ron, can you talk a bit if you're able about the pilots? I mean, were these like former 160th guys? I mean, flying non-standard aircraft. Who were these dudes? The best pilots our country's ever produced. But, yeah, they're former military pilots from all the different services who have thousands of hours in either rotary, fixed-wing, or both.

Their judgment's impeccable. Their skills are beyond, beyond, you know, they're awesome. Yeah, it's, I mean, during Anaconda, we were flying in support of the, not just agency folks, But my charge from, because I deployed up to Bagram to work with the 10th Mountain guys in the effort, and the chief of station said, and he said, the helicopter's here with you at Bagram, and you're here to support the effort, support the war. You're not going to just do agency only and be all spooky and behind the green door and not be a team player. Because there wasn't a lot of stuff there at Bagram.

I mean, the Army had a few Chinooks and some Apaches, and that was about it. No Blackhawks. The Air Force had declined to bring any of their aircraft down from Karshi Khanabad. And, of course, then we had some marine aircraft down in Kandahar. So here's all these NATO-ISAF Alliance soft guys. We had Australian soft. We had Danish soft, British, et cetera, et cetera. Well, so, and there was an Air Force Brigadier General Trubon.

This guy had the perfect hair. I mean, you look him up in Sean Naylor's book, Not a Good Day to Die. There's a picture of, I always called him the Hair General because he was perfect. He was the typical political general that, you know, every hair in play, even in the middle of the freaking war zone. But anyways, he comes up to me one day and starts to try. chewing my ass. Well, I am nowhere in his chain of command and I don't have to put up with crap from him, but I listen to him. He says, I will immediately stop supporting the military missions, and I will only do CIA missions because that's not my purview. And I go, yeah, okay, well, you know, the guys come up to me, for example, this soft team comes up to me this afternoon and says, hey, can you fly us tonight to this location?

So I said, well, I don't know. Let's go see. I get together with my pilot in charge and a couple of, actually the whole air crew, the other pilot and the mechanic, the flight mechanic. And we sit down, we go, yeah, we can do it. We can fly this route. This is the weather. This is the loom. This is the altitude.

We'll be flying at. This is how much we can carry. And the guys go, oh, great. And that evening, we take off and fly a mission. So after the general comes by and does this, I have. go up to one of the military guys. I said, hey, so what's the deal with this? I mean, I'm trying to, I thought we were all Americans fighting the common enemy down in, you know, down on the whale there and doing this. He goes, well, they have a form they have to fill up when they want to fly with

Army aviation. And it takes a couple days to approve it. I go, oh, so it's really time responsive. Got it. No problem. I'm all over it. So I didn't change the thing. And, um, uh, General Gary Harrell, who was an old SF guy who'd been detailed to the agency, and then he showed up to provide a little adult leadership to do the overall army effort. I think he took Trebonne aside and told him to sit down, shut up in color. So it was much to do about nothing. I think that you were probably making them look bad because the Air Force leadership throughout most of Afghanistan was very risk-adverse. They were not going to lose. A lot of that came out in the Anaconda, even both of the brain.

They would rather lose troops on the ground than risk a bird of any type, helicopter or airplane. They didn't even want to. So I'm talking with some of the medical evacuation guys before Anaconda kicks off. And I said, hey, guys, you know, this is who I am. These are the resources I got a couple of fixed wings. and I got this rotary thing. What do you need? The surgeon guys, they're very, very concerned about aeromedical evacuation.

They're going to do the first level care right there at Bogrom, and then they've got to transfer them up to K2 where they have the more expansive medical facilities and then onwards to launch dual. The Air Force will not, will not send a C-130, base of C-130 here, configured for aeromedical evacuation because they don't want to keep it here overnight because you know they're afraid there's going to be viet Cong sappers coming through the wire it was I said not a problem I get on the horn I'm simplifying a little bit here but I get on

the horn call up my uh my guys up my fixed wing guys up in Tashkent say hey follow a flight plan get your ass down to Bogum and I got building for you be prepared for Field conditions, which was a misnower. It was rougher than field conditions, but it was still fun. And you're going to park here, and this is what you're going to do. So they took out a bunch of the passenger seats, and they configured it so they could carry litters and things like that. And, yeah, so we were there in support of that to do that, and we did. So it was like we were trying to pull the gaps.

It was like you were trying to fill the gaps. Well, fill the gas, but do the right thing. It's like, to me, it was, I mean, we're all Americans, and I never understood the problems with that. I mean, I knew what the threats were outside the wire, and they were minimal. They were manageable. They were, you know, I took them into account.

And I didn't, of course, make this decision all on my own. I mean, I'm not that stupid. I coordinate this with the chief of station. I said, hey, here's the deal. And he says, well, yeah, do it. That's the right decision. Make it so number one. So I did.

And yeah, I upset a few people that, as you say, the risk-adverse crowd. But I got a few cool unit coins out of it, so it was nice. Was the conventional Army aviation, I'm trying to remember, were they, with the helicopters, were they as risk adverse as the Air Force was with their planes? They kind of were, right? No, that's a really good question. Well, I mean, you know, we lost a couple of the 47s, the Makos, as we were carrying in the seals and the other guys.

And then, of course, we've had the Apaches there, too. So I'm out on what they called Steel Beach, because the ramp out of Boggham where the helicopters were at the time, now it's all paved, was the old pierced steel planking, the old Vietnam-era-type pierce steel planking, was still a lot of,

where it had peeled back from, during the Afghan Civil War, artillery shelling of the thing. So it was always interesting, driving my little gator around, trying to navigate all that stuff, especially at night under NVGs, you know, type of thing.

It's, you know, I'm always bringing an extra. extra chem lights to mark these things because I really don't want to dump the gator and get yelled at. But I'm out there during the daytime talking to one of these Apache drivers who's getting ready to go out on a mission. And I stopped at his in particular because so the helicopter driver who sits up and behind in the Apache, he's a CW4, old experienced thousands, billions of hours in attack aircraft. and in the front the gunner is some fresh-face lieutenant first lieutenant who i i think shaves you know had shaved once in flight school and hasn't since type of thing but the thing was

if you remember back in the day they had those suction cup uh garfield cat dolls that you can stick in the side of vehicles well he had this lieutenant had stuck one in the side of his cockpit window the one that didn't open the uh the left side and um so obviously i i I stopped and I had to comment on it. And the chief foreign officer gives me that the old lurch, oh, you know, this is the guy I got to fly with. But, you know, after he was joking, they were actually a good team. But he said, so how is it out there, you know, flying, you know, in support of the troops?

He says, man, you, these guys, the enemy, they're tough. So we're shooting with our 30-millimeter chain gun and maybe firing a couple of at some of these cave entrances and these trench lines and what all. And this guy gets out of the cave and he's holding an RPG and he's, he's, you know, he's going to shoot. He's aiming. He's aiming. And I'm stitching him from crotch to head. And he's standing there and he shoots.

I mean, at the last minute we, you know, we, you know, veer left, right, whatever and avoid. But these are some tough mofos and they're brave as crap and they're going to fight to the death. It was an eye-opening little air crew report that I don't think ever made it into Sean's book or any of the other books, but it was something that always stuck with me. Well, the pilots were all fierce. I think it was the commands that were very reluctant to let them, and they were very frustrated. It was. It was. I mean, we could spend two hours just talking about my observations of Task Force Mountain and General Hagenbach and the idiocy that I observed.

as an outsider looking in, but having done a few NTC rotations back in the day and other things, I was dismayed at the lackadaisical planning and execution and the way they had organized their talk. We actually had one predator that time. And when the predator came online and the screen started showing, everything in the talk stopped. I mean, people that had no business being in the talk showed up in the talk. I started watching Pred TV. It was just, it was poorly executed, poorly disciplined, and we were only able to overcome by the bravery of the on-ground commanders, you know, like Paul the camera and Steve Townsend and those kind of folks that are still in the Army today, they're general officers. But, you know, their bravery and their troops bravery and the junior officers.

I think Nate Self, you know, did a lot of great things and suffered for it. A lot of great soldiers out there doing stuff going, you know, of course, the big question I always had was, why are we fighting uphill? You know, it's sort of like that one chapter in your book, Jack, you know, no matter which way you're going, you're always marching uphill. And Tom Greer wrote about that in his book, Kill bin Laden. He was like, you know, our original plan was to come from the Pakistani side, get on O-2 bottles because we're at high altitude and then come downhill and instead they changed it up on him

and made them assault uphill. Oh, it was, it was, it was, yeah, it was, it was bad. The, I mean, the guys had to fight uphill and, you know, the enemy had great fields of fire and, you know, they had little rain stakes out. I mean, it was something right out of an old British Zulu movie. They put range stakes out, and so the, the, the, the, the, the, and the, the, and the P.K.N. could, you know, figure out where you were and take appropriate action against you. It was, it was terrible.

But it was, yeah, it was a disorganized mess. I'll give you an example. So we fly up to Boggham from Kabul. The chief brings me along because he's going to set me there. He's already decided that he's going to do all the things I described with the helicopter. And then later on, of course, the fixed-wing aircraft. So it brings me up and we're going to go to the, the, the, final pre-execution briefing on exercise anaconda.

Yeah, that was the name of the, on the title slide. Exercise Anaconda. And now I'm sitting back in the peanut gallery of this teeny briefing room in the talk. And, you know, I'm working on like two hours sleep and an overdose of skittles and sugar and halapino cheese and maybe a little bit of hate and things like that. So I jump up and I go, exercise. What the F are you? I mean, this is not NTC. This is an operation.

This is real world. And the chief turns around, because he's sitting next to General Hagenbach, and Hagenbach just looks like, you know, like he wants me to go out and do burpees until the end of time. And the chief of staff was pissed because that was his slide. But the chief turns around and looks at me and says, inside voice, Ron, inside voice. So I sit down and, yeah, I sit down and kind of go,

oh. But some of the people sitting next me goes, yeah, we've been trying to get them to think like that or to change. I mean, what it indicated to me and what I saw throughout the entire briefing of the phase lines and the execution and the avenues approach. This was all like they were, it was, we're going to go against the opt for it. Oh, gee, that didn't work. Okay, guys, time out, reset. You know, everybody, everybody, you know, let's recharge the miles gear. Let's move out.

I mean, it was, it was atrocious. And so anyways, yeah, I mean, it was, it was just bad. It was bad. So it was, I mean, I saw troops as I'm driving back and forth to the ramp to brief the air crews because sometimes we'd fly daytime, nighttime missions and try to keep them going. I mean, within, I mean, they never said, oh, we got crew rest. They weren't Air Force guys. But I saw like companies of soldiers, you know,

marching out with their rucks and their weapons and everything like that. And then they basically all do the paratrooper squat. You know, they all sit back in rows and files and, you know, sit back on their rucks and wait. And they're still there a couple hours later waiting. Now, remember, this is wintertime in Afghanistan. It's not a balmy 70 degrees outside. It's butt-ass cold and they're sitting on the ground. And then a couple hours later, okay, let's grab your stuff.

let's all go back and they all go back to their building. Their GP medium tents, the group tents that they had. And it was like, nobody knew what was going on. And one of the units on the ground calls for fires, for supporting fires. And we didn't have any tube artillery, any indirect fire capability, mortars or anything like that. It was aircraft. And I think we had some hellfires on the one predator. that the Air Force had graciously provided.

And there's a method, there's a tried and true method to do deconfliction of fires so you don't have a friendly fire incident with indirect fires and things like that. So it was basically yell around the talk to get clearance to fires. It was like everything's thought, hey, we're going to fire at this grid. Anybody got anybody there? And all around the talk, all these different task force dagger and task force buoy reps would all jump in and say, oh, no, we don't. Oh, we got a guy's 100 meters from there. And it was just, oh, wow.

Extraordinarily frustrating to see, you know, so many missed opportunities. I mean, you know, Gary Bernstein talked about the missed opportunity in Torabora when he asked for a Ranger bat or two to come up and assist. and basically plug the squirt lines going into Pakistan. And, you know, again, there was another missed opportunity here as well in Anacondon. So, but we were fighting some pretty serious dudes out there. I mean, there was Chechens and all sorts of bad guys. I mean, that the book that, you know, under the name Dalton Fury that he wrote, I mean, he doesn't come out and say it.

I mean, the late Tom Greer, he passed away. But, I mean, the frustration is very much there in his book that there were strange decisions being made. And I don't know, you can tell he was not happy with how that went down. No, it was for something that well, supposedly that well planned and well thought out, it was it was haphazard and ham-fisted. It was just, I mean, and then, you know, so I'm asked, I asked the question, again, not being in, not wearing a uniform, not being a cool guy in desert camo uniform, asking the question, saying, so how can we don't have any, you know, pack howitzers or 105s or something? I mean, you know, artillery is the, you know, what is it, the queen of the battlefield or something. And so, you know, we could, we could do a lot more damage with that than, you know, flying Apaches in there and getting them all shot up because some of those Apaches came. back and they were, I mean, thank God they were built robust and to survive a Soviet European battlefield type environment, but they were coming back pretty, pretty shaking. Some of them didn't even make it back to Boggham. They would only get as far as the FARP, the Ford area refueling

point, which the Army had set up to you so they could do a quick turnaround for the for the helicopters to give them extra gas and reload them. I mean, they were, they were broke hard. So the, And it turns out that I guess General Franks, the commander of Central Command, had decreed that there would be no artillery. And I think there was a seal unit that showed up. And they said, well, hell with that, although they used much more saltier language because they're seals. And they brought a pair of 120 millimeter mortars with them, which were used to some effect. But there was only two of them. Not a, you know, and they, not everybody knew that they were there until they started firing.

Then everybody's trying to figure out how to, how to get. Hey, how can I get on that net all for fires? But I mean, you're partly, I mean, you were primarily running logistics and running people back and forth. Well, yeah. I mean, you know, it doesn't sound sexy. I mean, I'm not storing the trench line or the beaches of Normandy. But I thought it was pretty critical. We, you know, we were, like I said, we were, we were extraordinary response.

to the military guys that needed to get where they're going because we were trying to insert these guys, and we succeeded for the most part on the different rat lines that the military analysts had identified, suspected or known rat lines going back into Pakistan, and there weren't enough soft teams to cover down on all the rat lines. So some of the locations were trying to, you know, where the rat lines were getting close. you would try to get to a topographical feature where you could cover both ratline areas, but didn't always work out that way. I mean, and of course some of the soft units were very ill-equipped to participate in anaconda. I mentioned earlier that the Dave Nogne's soft team, great guys. I mean, they would always run around the airfield prior to Anaconda, you know, getting in shape. But, I mean, you know, those really high mountains in Denmark have really prepared them well

for the altitude and elevation of Afghanistan. So we infill them on one day. We had X-film the next day because they were suffering from high altitude sickness. And there was nobody to replace them. There was nobody to cover down on their location. So it was a comedy of errors, tragic errors, in some cases. But it was an eye-opening for a lot of folks.

And you mentioned you did, what, like almost a dozen deployments to Afghanistan all told? I'm saying again about a dozen, that's all I heard. Yeah, about a dozen deployments to Afghanistan? Well, not about exactly a dozen. And then I did one to Pakistan. So my lucky 13. But then you also got deployed to Iraq. And I, and three deployments to Iraq, my first one right after we took over Baghdad.

And then two ones follow. up in pretty rapid succession. And of course, two to the P.I and a couple to the Gulf for other things. And then one to the Balkans to hunt Pithwicks, another great acronym. So what was that like going on a couple of pumps to Iraq, bouncing right from one theater into the next? Well, luckily, I actually had a, you know, I mean, the first deployment to Afghanistan, And, you know, deployed early January, I got home just in time to file my income taxes on the 15th of April.

And then a couple weeks later, oh, yeah, it was, that's all right. My wife had power of attorney. I wasn't worried, although I did admire the new stainless steel kitchen appliances that she got when I was gone. With all that extra money I was making. She was making? Yeah, so then I think from the, so I get back and I'm going back to Afghanistan. said, no, you're going to Pakistan. No, you're going here.

No, you're, oh, I ended up going to the Philippines for that, and then for the hostage rescue. And then came back from that, and then went back to Iraq, back to Afghanistan. And for the second time, and it already had changed a whole lot. And then just, and then eventually when Iraq kicked off, you know, did a few of three tours there. and then a few more to Afghanistan as well. But it was interesting because the theaters were obviously extraordinarily different, both threat-wise from an air branch point of view,

the flying conditions-wise, the coordination-wise. So the initial days of Afghanistan, for some strange reason, we were only allowed to fly one mission a day from Tashkent into Kabul, and we had to land at a certain window, and then we had to sit around for eight hours before we could take off again. And maybe not, maybe it was six hours, but it was quite a stretch of time. I can unload an aircraft a lot faster than that, and I'm not that slow and that bad out of shape.

So I asked the agency liaison at the Khock that combined, Air Operations Center in Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Hey, WTF, what gives? Well, that's the military's rules. I go, well, that's this, you know, who's in charge of this? Let me talk to him. So I talked to some Air Force colonel who, you know, hop, hub, hub, hub, hub, hub, and it gives me a lot of crap.

He thinks I'm some sort of missionary aircraft or, you know, Catholic relief or whatever. And I got to wonder what the hell my agency complying. are telling them there in the Kayak and we're not telling them. And I said, well, you know, I'm here and I'm I'm working for the State Department. That was always our catch-all. That's how we paid for the fuel too. You know, send them the bill to the embassy. And so I'm sure there's some resource management officer at the embassy still trying to get collection.

And that part will delete out of the video. So he, so I eventually, I talked to this Colonel several times. And I say, why don't you just come out to Kabul and see what I'm dealing with here and talk to me? So he finally has to come out anyways for some big air coordination meeting. I mean, the Air Force is always really big on having meetings. And so he flew out in his brand new starch press DCUs, the desert camouflage uniform, very clean. And it was impressive. And he meets me.

And, of course, I'm like, it's been a week before, since I've had a. even a rudimentary field shower. And, you know, like I say, I'm still on that diet of jalapino cheese, crackers, and skittles. And he starts, and he sees, I got the helicopter there, and it's in one of those little Afghan mud brick revetment things that's eroding before my very eyes. And my fixed-wing aircraft parked, parked a little further down the ramp. And he says, wow, wow, this is, this is, I didn't realize it was all this. I go, all right, well, here, here's a, here's a non-disclosure agreement.

And he read it. I didn't have him signed. It was just for dramatic effect because I wanted to make him part of the team. I wanted to recruit him, if you will. And so I, I said, here's who I really am. Here's what we're really doing. And I, you know, so, you know, let my people go. Let my airplanes go, please.

And he says, oh, geez, why didn't the, you know, whatever the people's name was back in the chaos? Why don't they just tell me this? I don't know. They'd probably like to have everything over spookified and hide it behind triple green doors. So, you know, the next day when we had missions, easy, squeezy. It was like, oh, thank you. So it was, we were much more responsive to our guys out in the forward deployed areas like, like Organi and Schen and up to Abad.

and out where Chapman and, you know, Coast and down in Gardez and things like that. So it was, suddenly everybody was going like, wow, you know, somebody turned the faucet and I go, yeah, yeah, don't thank me just, you know, you know, send me cards and letters. But it was, it was all good. So everybody, it worked out, but it was, it was like two, three weeks of pulling hen's teeth. It was agony. We need to get some of the questions real quick. But I'm sorry, but in Iraq, so Iraq, so Iraq,

So we were based out of Kuwait City. So I said, well, let's bring the stuff up to Baghdad because, you know, we're wasting like two hours of flight time just getting to Baghdad. Well, you know, we can't do that because we can't fly past this, you know, longitudinal, this geographic line, this longitudinal line here. And I go, why? And they go, well, that's what the Army or the Air Force says. We can't fly past that. I go, so I finally tracked down some Air Force dude. I says, what's up with that?

He says, oh, that was during the initial phases of the war when we were trying to, you know, so we could de-conflict aircraft because we, you know, the AWACs and the J-Stars and yada, yada, we, but that's all OBE. I mean, we own the airspace now. So I explained this back to my counterpart down in Kuwait City. I'm not letting my aircraft go. They can't get dirty. We live in five-star hotels here in Kuwait City.

No, no, no, you can't go to Baghdad. And the air crews wanted to come because they wanted to go where the mission was. They wanted to fly. So finally the headquarters had to send the aircraft to Baghdad. So he was, you know, my counterpart in Kuwait City wasn't happy, but that's okay. He was leaving Air Branch anyways. The other thing I want to ask you, and I mean, the question, keeps coming up, and I think you wanted to weigh in on it, too, was that you had some visibility

on the search and the hunt for Bo Birddoll. Oh, yeah. That was, God, that was in the, what, 2010, nine, I can't remember, but it was one of my, I was, I was actually on a deployment to Afghanistan supporting the, the task force on a mission, a special program. And the, the chief of base at Bagram, went home on one of their R&Rs. And since I was the senior officer present on Boggham, I got dual-hatted. And I'm going, okay, I've done Bogram before. I mean, it's grown up quadruple, you know, quintuple size

from when I first was there. But I can do that. And so the 101st had just left with General Schlosser and General Millie and General McConville. there's a couple names that people might know, had just left. And the 82nd Airborne showed up with General Scaparotti in command and General Mayville and one other general who I cannot remember his name. But anyway, so they've been there maybe a week.

So they're still trying to figure out how to spell Afghanistan and where the John is and how to unlock their hooch and things like that. their their their their their their their their their drinking hooch their Dave um so the so bird doll also in one day I get a

knock on the on the door at the OGA base uh which is just around the corner from the the uh the talk or the headquarters building headquarters hangar for the for the JTF JTF 82 and

Hey, you need to come. There's a big meeting in the conference room. So we, you know, go, I get over there. And we discover that Bergdahl, at that time we didn't know his name, just that a soldier had disappeared from this fob. It was nighttime, so not a lot of details yet, just that he was nowhere to be found on the fob. I mean, they'd turned the fob inside out, done in all hands,

search. and, you know, done the missing sensitive item walk up and down the fob type of thing to, but he was nowhere to be found. So we kind of war-gamed a little bit, trying to figure out what's up. Skaparati sends the CID team. There was a CI, a criminal investigation detachment there at Bogum, and it rotated between the three services. the Army CID criminal investigation guys, the Air Force Office of Special Investigation.

But this time, it happened to be the Naval Criminal Investigative Service guys. And no, Jethro Gibbs wasn't there, and neither was Ziva. Otherwise, we all would have never let her go. But anyway, so they send them down the first thing screaming the next morning, and they come back a day or two later with their report, and they brief us on it. And by now they've asked retained a lot. And the Bergdahl's platoon mates have spoken. And I know they've spoken a lot in the media, especially after Bergdahl was repatriated.

I guess that's the least offensive term. So they explained to us that Bergdahl had been very friendly with a lot of the local Afghans, which by itself was nothing untoward. thing abnormal about that because you're supposed to win hearts and minds and meet the people, that sort of thing. But Bergdahl had him and his bunk made, or his, the guy that had the rack next to him, the bed next to him, they liked playing that video game assassin or something like that. It's like the movie, Assassin 42 or what, it's the Russian organized crime thing.

And Bergdahl had declared, had told his, his bunkmate, that he wanted to make his way to Russia to hire himself out as a contract killer for Russian organized crime. Now, I know there's a lot of people, maybe some people listening to this, the author of American Seifer, they don't believe any of that. I believe the report. These NCIS officers, agents were professional. They didn't have an axe to grind. And they reported what the guys said, the platoon mates, and that sort of thing. In the meantime, now that we've discovered that Bergdahl's missing, we, you know, it's all hands on deck throughout that whole region of the country to find the missing American soldier.

But what upset the apple cart this whole time was this was right prior to the Afghan elections. So all the U.S. forces, along with the Afghan forces, had already been positioned to support securing the polling places and provide election security. So now we have to repurpose all these guys and move them from where they were at to where they needed to be. And it seemed like we were always a day late and a dollar short and one step behind Bergdahl. And I mean, we would get little snippets of indications that he was making his way to Pakistan, but that his way was being made to Pakistan. He was being escorted by the tour group, the Haqani tour group, to Pakistan. So there was, and I don't have any details about the units that engaged with the enemy

and lost soldiers hunting for him. And, you know, I feel terrible about that. But, I mean, this is from my optic where I was sitting up there and these people were trying to manage this whole effort, as well as still trying to provide security for the election because it was, I mean, the soldier was important, but the stability of Afghanistan seemed to be was also a major point. Now, complicating all this, and there's always, as you say in your book, the truth is complicated. And reality is complicated. There's lots of layers to this. Stanmer Crystal had just showed up literally a few days before all this began, or maybe right as it was happening,

as a new four-star in charge of ISAF. Or I'm not ISAF, by the Afghan military effort. Right. Right, yeah, he was, so he was down in Kabul. And so we had numerous video teleconferences with, with the station who was trying to retask assets out there in that area to collect information to find Bergdahl, with Stan McChrystal and his headquarters, the U.S. Embassy that was working, liaising with the Afghan government and the MOD and that sort of thing.

I mean, and a few other players like Central Command. So these video teleconcesses took place at a lot of weird hours because we had to accommodate all sorts of different time zones. But I remember one, when it was like a day or two before, it was confirmed that Bergdahl was definitely in Pakistan and definitely in Miram Shah in the warm embrace of the Haqqani network. We suspected that's where they were going, but we couldn't figure. out where to block their movement because they knew these guys know the area a whole lot better than we did. So and McChrystal was, he was extraordinarily agitated and standing behind him was General Rodriguez, who, the former, who was just retired as the four-star in charge of Africa command a few years back. But he was, he was there as well. And McChrystal was, I mean, he was like,

And the other, before I get to what he said and got everybody all upset, the other two more important players on this video were Ambassador Ann Patterson from Pakistan in Islamabad and her country team right there. And then, of course, General Petraeus at Central Command. So, I mean, it was rarefied air. And there's Scaparotti, a brand new two-star. And he doesn't know half these players. I mean, he knows Petraeus and McChrystal, obviously, but he doesn't know the Pakistan country team.

So he has me sit right over his left shoulder just out of that VTC camera angle so nobody can see me. And I'm whispering in his ear when he has the mute button pushed because my voice does carry occasionally, that who all the players are. So he knows. And I give him a quick three-second, three-sentence, you know, biography synopsis, you know, good, person, bad person, you know, snake in the grass, you know, watch your six, be careful. You know, because I'm the chief of base, the acting chief of base, they're a bogerman. He's the guy I'm supporting as the chief of base, and, you know, I'm trying to do right by him

because I don't want him to get screwed up. So anyway, so McChrystal erupts when we're talking about that we think Bergdahl's about to, you know, go across the border into Pakistan. He says, he's an American soldier. I'm getting ready to send, you know, companies of soldiers into Pakistan to retrieve our soldier. And Patterson, the ambassador, she, I mean, she was already pretty pale on the video, but I think she turned another shade paler. And she said, absolutely not.

You will not invade Pakistan. You know, you give us the coordinates and we'll let the Pakistani army handle it. And that goes into a whole other story about the how our, the, you know, U.S. Embassy and the station in Islamabad, like, you know, somehow we're, you know, addicted to Pakistan and they mainline Pakistani crap all the time. Sorry, that's my op-ed for on Pakistan. How long was this after Bergdahl was captured, that they, you know, this meeting took place, McChrystal hits the roof because it looks like Bergdahl's about to disappear into Pakistan. it was about from from the time we from the time he disappeared to the time he was

a week five days um i'm trying to remember you know obviously most of my notes were still locked in a safe somewhere but uh the and the whole time this is going on there's petraeus sitting on the video eating this large chef's salad with this uh cheshire cat grin going on his face. He's going, there, there, stand, calm down. It's okay, madame investor. We won't do any of that stuff. I'm going, oh, my, you know, it was, it was remarkable to see the interplay at that level of government. I'm going, God, give me a couple of gunny sergeants and a couple sergeants major, and I think we could solve this in a heartbeat, but never mind. I just work here, bro. Yeah. Yeah, I did too. But, yeah, yes.

I mean, Scap always appreciated that. And when he was getting ready to go back to Afghanistan as a three-star, and I was the director's representative at the PAC Afghan coordination cell for the chairman there at the Pentagon, he came by for an orientation and all that general officer, the reach-around stuff that staffs do to make general officers feel good and what all. And I'm weighing back in the room. and he he sort of, and Scap-Roddy, if you've ever, he's not a tall gentleman, and he's a paratrooper short kind of guy, but he, he leans way around the conference room table

so he can look at the Pia's, hey, Ron, there you are. Why are you sitting all the way back there? Get up here. Hey, everybody, I trust this guy. This guy knows what he's talking about. I'm going, oh, God, I've got to work with all these people. Scapp, don't do that to me. But it was, it was good.

It was a good deal. I mean, the hunt for bird doll just went on and on. We had rangers and seals and everyone else combing Afghanistan looking for him. But now the question is, in retrospect, of course, why when we knew he was in Pakistan? Well, I think we weren't quite sure. And a lot of the stuff when we were combing the countryside form, we were discovering a lot of, I think, one element, a cave network that was interesting. And so it was like we were using the reason of hunting for Bergdahl or trying to retrieve him.

And we were finding other things. There were branches and sequels to this thing. So we were discovering other things. But at the same time, remember, again, there was also the election security. So a lot of the stuff all folded into one another. It almost became indistinguishable. Are we hunting Bergdell? Are we providing election security?

Are we hunting bad guy Taliban or al-Qaeda dudes or what? So it was always kind of Johnny Ketch-all. I mean, I asked these questions, you know, because I've talked to, you know, J-Soc personnel and so forth, who have told me that they were putting on the con-op that they were going after Boe Bergdoll, knowing full well that the operation had nothing to do with Bergdoll is just a way to get the Conop approved so they could go and do missions. And, okay, you're going to go do ops, you're going to go hunt down some bad guys, I got it.

But this becomes a problem when you have these dudes who were either killed or injured on these operations. And in their mind, they think that they were on a mission to recover Bo Bergdoll when really that had nothing to do with why they were out there. Yeah, again, even though I, even though I, was assigned to the task force for that special project. I was spending most of my time with the 82nd guys by this time, and my deputy was doing that stuff with the task force.

And they didn't coordinate any of that stuff with us. That was in their own little stovepipe element. They were doing that themselves. So as well as the guys on the conventional military guys doing their own thing, you know, the 425 based out of Salerno, they were doing their own thing as well. So. Did you have any involvement in, you know, later on in trying to locate him and find him and eventually when, you know, we did get him back? Well, I mean, once we determined he was in the Haqanis, we figured he was somewhere in the greater Miram Shai area.

I mean, you know, they pretty much own that area. So we, but we never, we never figured out what building or anything like that. And yeah, it was, it was as much as we would have loved to. have gone in and I think we could have. I mean, this is Ron's personal opinion. We, you know, you know, maybe a battalion of, you know, very hungry infantrymen augmented by, you know, a whole bunch of, you know, rangers and maybe a few seals just so we can pretend we're inter-service correct. Um, and going and, you know, we could just, we could have level Miram Shah. And unfortunately, the, uh, because I, I've been to Miriam Shah. And the, I, I've been to

Miram Shah and the Hakani compounds and the Pack Mill compound are pretty much I mean the only thing the airfield sort of divides them to and and they sort of touch each other in all sorts of spots in and around Miram Shah so it was yeah Miram Shah was that was an interesting time on the ground there it was my if you had to give me some Kingsford briquettes I would have made all sorts of great diamonds it was the Pucker factor was extraordinary because I'm looking at the people that aren't wearing pack mill uniforms looking at us from you know 100 meters away and I don't know that they're Haqani it's not like they're wearing you know HKN jerseys or something like that but I mean they sure weren't looking friendly like

hey it's it's a great American he's he's got chocolate to give me they they look like they they want to if daggers were coming out so it was uh yeah the pucker factor was hard because I'm in Pakistan and I'm at the mercy of Pakistan military for my security. I don't even so much as have a handgun and so it was

yeah so I think we could have done some but again then the risk adverse nature of a lot of the military planners comes in you know determine the actual building that Bergdahl's in instead of just going in and you know cordoning off the entire

entire, you know, large compounded area and just start, you know, going building to building, you know, it would have involved along the horses in the pack mill would have screamed bloody murder, but they probably would have just stayed in Lager for the most part after we shwacked a couple dozen of them. I mean, you're a weird jack of them. Could have done that? I'm sorry, I talked to over me. Did you have actionable intel that you were pretty certain where Birddall was that you think

they could have executed a rescue mission? Not really. We're trying to get actionable intel on anything inside and about the Haqqani network was pretty near impossible. The only time we got anything actionable on them was when they crossed the border and they had to reach out to local assets that we were able to infiltrate or listen in on or detect. So it was, but inside Miram Shah, they were golden.

We need to get some of you super chats. They've been waiting for a while, so real quick. We're going to roll it back a little bit to what you're talking about earlier about the DIA. Andrew asked, I have heard criticism of the DIA claiming that the organization is dysfunctional. In your opinion, is that a fair criticism? And can you comment us to why? Who thinks DIA? is dysfunctional?

One of our viewers doesn't think he's just heard that the D.I. Okay. Well, the joke that what D.I. really stands for is do it again and again and again and again. A lot of great Americans work there. Don't get me wrong. But if you look at the history of D.I., it was created by Robert Macdon. McNamara back in the 60s to streamline and, you know, make military intelligence from all the services more joint and reduced costs and all the usual McNamara type of things.

Obviously, the services never gave up their own organic intelligence things. So, DI has always been a little bit of an organization in search of a greater mission. I can only speak really to the human collection part. When General Clapper, when he was the director of DIA, he's the one that briefed Congress and got approval to create the Defense Human Service, DHS at the time. Now, of course, that's a totally different acronym. And his pitch to the congressional committees was he showed them some very,

very convoluted, complicated line and block charts about how Army or Air Force or the other services, human intelligence organizations operated and how they reported up to and the supporting chains and things like that. And it looked like a bad plate of spaghetti, just intermingled and intertwined. And I'm sure it made the congressmen, made their heads hurt because they actually had to look at it. And then he drew a very simplified three box line and block chart with one single line going between the, to connect all the boxes. So at the bottom were the collectors. Then there's DHS and then there's DIA and, you know, the customers.

And everybody goes, oh, that's so simple. So we'll do that. So, and the first few years of DHS were, there was a lot of fighting back and forth between the services, trying to, you know, DHS wanted to have it all. The Army has now gone back and recreated a lot of their human collection, but they justified it as a tactical collections. Right. instead of like when I was when I was with them it was at the strategic level as well as tactical but we also had the strategic mission so DHS was you know and of course it was a ginormous bureaucracy because that's just the nature of DIA so you know when General Flynn was there for ever so brief a time and he was trying to reorganize I I can understand it I've seen it from at least just my little slur of the world, that it was, I don't want to say dysfunctional, but it wasn't responsive enough, I believe.

I mean, there's individual little programs like document exploitation program that my time exposed to it in both Afghanistan and Iraq coordinating with them because they were the national, they had the national charter to do that. they seem to be very responsive and capable and they had good resources, good funding, good people working for them. But the analytical part, I always kind of wonder, what do you add that, I mean, why are you writing a report on Russian naval buildup that O&I can't do better? In fact, you probably plagiarized the ONI report. In fact, I will tell you this, that a lot of the hard. copy DIA products that I saw before everything became electronic was they would slap on a DIA cover sheet.

I mean, that's all they did. They put on a DIA cover sheet and, you know, you flip it open and there's the O&I or the or the Air Force or whatever. And it was, you know, of course, now it's the Maritime Intelligence Center and it's it's the ground intelligence center and, you know, down in Charlottesville and things like that. So, you know, they've, the services have reorganized a little bit to be more, I guess, in line with greater DIA, but they're still supporting the services as well. But, but, yeah, I, so your viewer who asked the question, yeah, it's, it's, it wouldn't be my first choice. If I wanted to go work for one of the 17 intel organizations out there, yeah, it wouldn't be my first or my first 16 choices. So, I'll just put it like that. Just so the viewers know, when Ron is talking, when he says DHS, he doesn't mean Department of Homeland Security.

The D.H., which is Defense Human, now, used to be called the Defense. Right, right. It used to be the Defense Human Service, DHS. Right. And when DHS was formed, the Department of Homeland Security, DHS had to change their name to D.A. They had to create a new acronym. So they didn't, yeah, they had to pick a new acronym so they didn't get confused. Which was much more in keeping with, right, which is much more in keeping with.

all the other DIA office symbols, which were only two letters. So we had to give up, yes, so whatever. So what, uh, somebody, Alex asks, what do the different color badges mean, i.e. blue, green, et cetera. Ron, can you please explain what maritime branch does? And he wants to know what your favorite meme of the week is. Yeah. No, I, that's a great question because, uh, I mean, we've kept you for like two and a half hours, Ron. I think we're going to have to do a second episode, but we'll try to get through everyone's questions. But I'll try to get through everyone's questions, but I did want to ask you for sure. I still got half a bottle of bourbon going here.

We got more than half here. But I for sure wanted to ask you, yeah, the same question, because you went over to Maritime Branch, you worked there as well. What's the deal with that as supposed to, you know, Arab Branch or Ground Branch? Well, Maritime Branch is one of the four branches within Special Operations Group. I mean, everybody knows about Ground Branch. knows about ground branch because they're the cool kids on the block, air branch, which we've

talked about, Maritime Branch, which is they do stuff on the water, which is much more difficult because boats move a lot slower than airplanes and things like that. And then there's a fourth branch, a personnel recovery, which I used to be the chief of, which deals with recovering personnel. But Maritime Branch, I spent a very short amount of time there. It was, I'd come back from that special project in Afghanistan that I talked to you about. And they didn't quite know where to put me. And I didn't really want to go back to Air Branch because I've been there, done that. And I didn't want to go to Ground Ranch because it would have been an extra 15-minute commute for me.

So I'm like, I really don't want to drive anymore. So they said, why don't you go to Maritime Branch? I go, cool, beaches, exotic ports, you know, clam chowder, I'm all over it. So it's a, you know, it was the next to smallest, I mean, personal recovery being the smallest branch, but maritime, very small branch, also a global mission. Again, very experienced mariners with all sorts of ship captain licenses that I was only beginning to understand all the different ratings.

and things like that. Deployed around the world in civilian craft, you know, what it was the phrase of the day, non-traditional craft, but these are your standard cabin cruisers or whatever. And they're really passive collectors, if you will. They're always ready to host an infill, I'm guessing, but we never practiced that or anything like that.

I think that's always something we would tell people that we can do, but the vessels we had where they were at, those weren't the capable vessels to do that. It would have, you know, it takes a long time to chug across the Pacific or the Atlantic or wherever we needed to be to do that stuff. Most of what the guys did, and the guys were mostly former team guys from the SEALs, and not necessarily dev group, but the regular CES, seals, as well as SWIC guys, the Special Warfare Combatant Craftsman, the guys who drive

the really cool boats that are armed, you know, like porcupines with all sorts of weapons and stuff like that. My son-in-law, by the way, is one of those guys. So we would go out and train with other nations' maritime forces because the seals were still trying to get into the whole foreign internal defense training thing that the special forces do so well, but the agency's maritime branch would do a lot of training with host nation maritime defense forces, small craft things, underwater infills, scuba training, that sort of thing. Nothing really substantial, I mean, high tech. And as well as they would augment ground branch on deployments overseas because, you know, The ground branch guys, even with the augmentation of contractors, they were getting pretty exhausted.

And we would have to wrote, and throughout all the branches, you know, officers would rotate to more traditional agency billets in the traditional area divisions, or now I guess they're all centers, to make their bones as a generic normal case officer in, you know, pick a location. of course everybody wanted to go to paris or berlin or london but a lot of a lot of officers actually did a went to africa and we're able to do a lot of good work down there so good stuff but yeah so that's that's meritor the different color badges um well blue badges you're you're a you're a bona fide agency dude um now i should say you're a bona fide intel community dude because um you're um you're a bona fide community dude because um The other community entities like DIA, NSA, etc., they would also have blue badges for their folks. The only way you could tell who was who was everybody had their own little logo. We would have a more generic, not the CIA logo, but something like the Great Seal of the United States. And DIA, unfortunately, since we got ahead of them, they had to do the DIA logo and so on and so forth. Green Badgers were contractors. They had passed all the same clearances, security checks, polygraph that the agency employees had passed, and they had access to agency computers and terminals and things like that.

But they were contractors. They weren't employees. They weren't allowed to make decisions. They could offer advice, and a lot of them were retired agency officers who came back to you know, help, you know, bridge generational gaps and keep that experience alive. Brown Badgers were liaison officers from other organizations like J-Soc and things like that. These guys would have brown badges. They would have limited access to the computers and things like that.

I think there was yellow badges too, and that was the cleaning crew and things like that. They didn't have any clearances, but they didn't. Ron, what we have been told, tell me if you agree or disagree, is that the green badgers make more money, but the blue badgers have all the clap and that this creates some friction. Yeah, a butt ton of friction. Example. So, I mean, a young case officer literally, he graduated the school and did all his pre-term. deployment training. He shows up at Baghdad and he, I guess he does whatever he does and he goes back and whatever the minimum amount of time it was for him to stay with, you know, that he, before he had to

whatever, I don't know, repay the government. I don't know how you'd repay a clandestine training thing, but he resigned from the agency and went right over to a contractor. So I saw him again a couple a year later as a green badger. Again, this guy has one tour under his belt. Still can't even spell case officer, can't even spell CO. And he's making almost twice as much as me. I know D.C. is expensive, but yeah, it caused a lot of friction. So I think it was Director Hayden that passed a rule or proglomated or sent out a rule

saying that, hey, unless you are retiring, you know, if you just resign from the agency, you have to wait, I think it was one or two years before you could come back as a Green Badger here at the agency. So that sort of dimmed a lot of people's, you know, buying the mini-Mac mansions up in McLean or something like that. They, you know, people suddenly realize that you've made a commitment here to us. You've got to stick. around for a little bit. Another question, did Ron get to fly any more antique aircraft, PBI's question mark? PBY's?

Oh, Catalina, no, I never got to fly one of those. I use the word antique aircraft as a very respectful homage to a very special type airplane with a special history that's been flown by, within the Air Branch, Air America family flown by some very special people that are giants among us or among them and so it was

no I mean most of the aircraft are you know you can go out to any civilian airport and you know you can look at any Cessna or Piper or beachcraft type aircraft and go yeah those are the kind of aircraft you know that would be flown by us and you know they

they don't look any different on the outside side than any other aircraft. And even on the inside, you know, because we would have foreign customs inspectors get in the aircraft and look. And there was, I mean, that was nothing, nothing untoward, nothing secrets. It's just a freaking airplane, people. Cipher. It's the people that use it as transport that make it special.

Cipher, thank you very much for the donation. Really appreciate it. I'm glad you're enjoying the show. Awareness with Chris. CIA favorite sidearm, primary weapon, unconventional, i.e. explosives, special grenade and gears, thanks. Like, are there, like, if you can talk about it, are there like CIA specifics that,

that are favorites amongst them? Like if you're playing the video game and it's like the CIA loadout kit, does that exist? Yeah, that's funny. Yeah, as many people that were Kevlar and load out kits, you know, there's that many versions of it. I mean, the agency issues Glock's. When I was, we transitioned from the browning high power when I was there. And I'm not one of my favorite weapons, but the Glock, you know, simple, easy.

It's easy to clean, easy to use. You guys carried B.HPs. Even a chimp can operate it. I'm sorry? You carried BHPs early on? The Browning High cars. The HBHPs? Yeah.

We used to, yeah. I mean, yeah. And I think in some cases, but, and then, of course, we were issued M4s, you know, generic M4s. Only the ground branches got them all tricked out. Although funny, because there was a, there was a guy in CTC who, tried to recreate using our friends down in Blackwater in their training environment to turn some of the CTC officers into a ground branch light, as we called them. And so there was a big tussle because Ground Branch is the weapons custodian for the agency. They're the ones who,

you know, so, you know, we're going to get the M-Force. Bang. And only only these officers. and with these skill sets like PMO's, paramilitary operations officers, primarily ground branch, will get them with the lasers and the flashlights and the, you know, the, all the, all the, all the, all the, um, all the aim point scopes and what all. Well, so this guy shows up and he's got a bunch of his, you know, I want to like, like the little minions, you know, they all show up off the airplane and cobble and they're all, you know, they're all looking like they're, they're, their ground branch light. It's sort of like, you know,

you're over-cleared militia guys with way too much gear, and they're still trying to figure out how to arrange their kit all around them. Like, guys, you really might want to put that on the front where you can get to it more because around the back, it's going to be hard to get to your first aid kit when you need it type of thing. It was hilarious. That was, yeah, that was funny to watch a few ground branch guys

get pretty upset about that. But that came and went very quickly. That was one of those little mini power struggles between CTC and SOG. The other funny thing was we had officers in the early days up in Kurdistan. And there was, I think there were seals there, and they had a couple of Barrett's 50-calibur sniper rifles. And so, of course, there's nothing much going on. So, hey, guys, you want to come on and shoot with us?

Sure, great. So bang, bang, bang, they shoot the Barrett's. And after a couple days after their shoulders healed, they sent a message down to Baghdad saying, hey, you know, we've qualified on the Barrett's, you know, put that on our weapons card. And everybody's going, weapons card, it's, I was sort of reminded of like, you know, like, guys, it's just, you know,

there's a standard weapons call, you know, it's like a handgun, the Glock, and the M4. There's really nothing in between unless you're in ground branch, and then that's internal to ground branch. But that went on and on back and forth for a couple of weeks until, I think finally somebody just told him to sit down, shut up, and color, you know, and stop. You're not, you're glad you had the experience with the parent, but you're not, it's not like we're going to start issuing them or training with them

because we'd have to rent out like a triple long range somewhere to, So you can at least minimum, you know, use the Barrett to its minimum range. It's in your file. It's the classified version of your file that you can't see. But it's in your file. Don't worry about it. Trust us. Yeah, trust us.

Before we go on, we just throw a little the YouTube call-to-action spiel out there. Thank you, everyone who joined us tonight. And there's like 50 people watching this live, which is really cool. And, you know, thanks for showing up. Thanks for asking your questions. Thanks for spending some time with Ron. and Dave and I. If you haven't subscribed to the channel, please hit the subscribe button below and also hit the bell icon and make sure you get notified whenever we

go live in the future. Down in the description you're also going to see a link for our Patreon site. If you like what we're doing and you want to support us financially to keep this whole thing going, please take a look at that and consider making a monthly donation even if it's just a dollar a month. It helps us out a lot. So thank you. What else Dave? Oh our right There is a subreddit for this stream. It's, you know, Reddit slash, what is it, R or S? S slash, it's slash R the team house.

Yeah. And one last question, one last super chat. If you had to do it all again, would you do it differently? Or what would you do differently? Well, I wouldn't, I mean, it was the greatest job ever. I mean, a lot of times we would have to pinch ourselves, you know, out in the field somewhere. I can't believe we're actually getting to do this. This is too cool for school.

It was really good. What would I do differently? You know, there's all sorts of little things that you can say, gee, if I had to just keep my mouth shut, you know, maybe I would have gotten promoted a year sooner. Gosh, you know. But, you know, I had a great career. I had a wonderful experience. I worked with some super outstanding people. I mean, there's some people there that, I mean, I tell the story that if I was 1% as good as one individual, one officer that I think we all know, but I can't, his name is like Lord Baltimore.

I can't say it. So I'd be 100% better as an officer and as a human being. So there's some really tremendous people out there doing some really great work for this country and for their fellow. fellow CIA officers because that's what it really boils down to a lot of time. You know, there's all sorts of policy stuff. I mean, you know, oh, I don't support the war in Iraq or I don't do this or I don't want to do that. I go, I don't care. I'm out there to support my battle buddy, my partner, my fellow employee, my colleague. And I, you know, when I get to be the senior Pachaderm at the White House, at the NSC or wherever, then I'll input my decision. Right now, I'll just keep it to myself and do the best job I know how to do what I need to do and to, you know,

bring everybody back safely and to bring myself back safely. Ron, you know, this has been amazing. I've kept you for three hours, and I'm, if you're willing, I'm going to twist your arm a little bit and try to ask you to record another video for us for our supporters on Patreon, talking to some stories about the Philippines. But we have kept you a long time here. Thank you again. And if you're willing, I'd love to invite you on to do a second episode because there's just a lot more of that we haven't even gotten to cover. I would love to.

And, you know, it would be my honor and privilege. Oh, it's ours, really. I mean, it's so great to be able to hear you tell some of these stories and share some of this history with us. We really appreciate you. We appreciate you guys. appreciate our viewers. Yeah, this is crazy. It's great. All right, folks. So we'll thank you. Yeah, we'll stick around for the extra video. Yeah, and we'll record the exclusive video for our supporters after this, and we'll talk a little bit about the Philippines.

I know you got some pretty interesting stories there as well. Okay, sounds good. Thanks, guys. Remember to subscribe if you haven't already hit that like. Please share this if you thought it was good. Thanks guys. Thanks for joining us. It was a long night. We appreciate it. Thank you.