The Team House - FBI Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) Sniper | Chris Whitcomb | Ep. 231

Episode Date: September 4, 2023

Whitcomb spent 15 years with the FBI as a special agent from 1987 to 2002 and worked on many high-profile cases. Whitcomb joined FBI Hostage Rescue Team after completing a rigorous two week specialized selection process and six month training course known as New Operator Training School" or "NOTS". Whitcomb was a participant at the Waco Siege, LA Riots, and Ruby Ridge. His final assignment with the FBI consisted of working with the Critical Incident Response Group. Whitcomb has worked extensively with foreign and domestic intelligence agencies in highly challenging environments, including Afghanistan, Kosovo, Israel, Somalia, Zambia and Timor-Leste. He has been awarded numerous citations and awards including the FBI's Medal of Bravery. He's also an author and analyst for multiple news media companies. Grab his books here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/stores/Christopher-Whitcomb/author/B001IXUBVQ?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Today's sponsors: Augusta Precious Metals⬇️ https://www.augustapreciousmetals.com/ Learn why thousands of Americans are getting gold IRAs as part of their retirement portfolios. You need to contact Augusta Precious Metals and get their free guide!  Text "TEAM" to 68592 or go to https://www.augustapreciousmetals.com/ PIA VPN⬇️ If you want to enjoy all the benefits of Private Internet Access, now's the time to subscribe. Head to https://PIAVPN.com/TEAMHOUSE and get an 83% discount! Seriously… 83%! That's just $2.03 a month, and you also get 4 extra months completely for free! But you MUST go to https://PIAVPN.com/TEAMHOUSE --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Or make a one time donation at: https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #fbihrt #sniperBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Special operations. Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey guys, welcome to episode 231 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy, here with David Park. And we're really happy tonight to have in studio with us.

Christopher Whitcomb. Chris served in the FBI as a special agent as a member of the Hostage Rescue. team HRT, involved in all sorts of national level operations, and then went on to have a very interesting career outside of the FBI as well. He actually retired on 9-11 on September 11th. So it's a very interesting period of time that you kind of cross paths. And as I was telling you before the show, your book came out like right after 9-11, Cold Zero, your memoir. And I read it as a senior in high school. And I loved it. I thought it was so awesome. awesome. And so you've been on my radar for a very long time and I'm glad we could like make

this happen all these years later. There's still parts of your book that kind of like resonate in the back of my mind from now 20 years ago. Yeah, it's hard. I mean, it's so long ago. I always say I forget the lead character's name and which is true. But I think history is important in the world that you guys document on this show. And I got to start out by saying I'm huge fans. I was I was really, believe it when you called me up and invited me on the show. I'm a huge fan. I think it's remarkable what you do to document all the heroes and the remarkable human beings that are out on the line doing what they do for this country. And anyway, I really, really appreciate you bringing me in. I got to give a quick shout out to sponsor of tonight's show, Augustus Precious Metals. Go check them out

at Augusta Preciousmetals.com. Appreciate it, guys. So, Chris, I mean, yeah, man, I mean, this is like right in our wheelhouse. I'm really glad to have. have you here today. Let's start off talking a little bit about, you know, your background, your origin story, as it were, how you grew up, your upbringing and like how that sort of led you towards, you know, eventually federal law enforcement. I guess I'll warn you right off the bat. We talked a little bit about this, but my story's very odd, and for a period of time, it made sense. Small town kid joins the FBI, ends up making the hostage rescue team, and during that time was involved in a lot of really high profile

and some notorious cases or actions over a course of time. And then when I left the FBI, and I resigned on 9-11, coincidentally, by the way, it was horrible. Nobody ever wants to leave the war on terror on 9-11. That was horrible. We'll come back to that later. But then the story after that is really kind of wild, and I guess we'll get there.

start out. You want me to talk about sorting out? Yeah. And we're going to you know, we want to spend sort of the majority of the show talking about your post FBI career because it's fascinating and it's, it's an angle of like the intel world that it doesn't get talked about often, if

at all. So that'll be great. But we do want to talk about, you know, your time in the FBI. What year did you go into the FBI? I joined in 1987. I was 27 years old. I went in when I was 27. Getting to the FBI, I think, is a crazy part of the story.

I grew up in a small town in northern New Hampshire at a ski area. Small town meaning 250, 300 people. Home of, I was born in Bethlehem and then in a town called Franconi, the ski area, Cannon Mountain ski area in Frankkone, New Hampshire. Home of Bodie Miller, who's the most successful ski racer in American history. also home of four FBI agents. I was the fourth FBI agent to come from this tiny little town, which sounds very odd. And I always say that I was born on a Thursday to 17-year-old

sweetheart's exactly nine months after the junior prom. So my, so not only did I start out in a small town, but austere beginnings, I suppose. My dad was a, my dad and mom dropped out of high school. My dad was a ski patrolman at Cannon Mountain and worked summers mowing ski slopes with a sling blade a scythe a hand saw right for like a dollar 18 an hour so it was a it was an incredible youth it was a great place to grow up because everything was outdoor you know in those days we had one television channel and all we did was hike rock climb ski race and spend our time outdoors so you know I spent my youth outdoors with no parental controls whatsoever, you know, for better or worse.

So grew up in New Hampshire and then went away to college and really never came back after that. And so you joined the FBI at age 27. What, I mean, I take you had to go to college first. I mean, there's different ways to get into the FBI. You could go become an accountant, a lawyer, or have some sort of law enforcement background. I mean, what was the path you took? Yeah, I think people probably find it interesting. I think many shows I watch, I think a lot of people would say, ask this question or ask that question, because a lot of people don't really know.

There are a lot of myths flying around the FBI or the CIA or the military. But the FBI has very basic rules. I never applied to the FBI. I was living in Washington, D.C., writing speeches. I was a speechwriter for a member of Congress named Sylvia O'Conty. He was a chairman of the Appropriations Committee. and I was fighting boxing out of a gym called Finley's Boxing, whatever, in Northeast Washington. It was a rough place, really rough place.

And I went sparred one night and this guy named Big Bob Moore, knock me the fuck out. I mean, cold. And so I was a little dizzy. I go home, sit down, I was married. My wife was reading a book. And she said, hey, you got mail. and I said, okay, whatever. I checked the envelope and it was from the FBI.

So I just got knocked out. It was 27 years old. I think what most people would. Why the hell is the FBI after me? So I opened it up and it was an application. So she had seen, you talk about recruiting, how do you get recruited to this and how do you get recruited to that? In my case, she watched a television commercial on local TV in D.C.

They were recruiting Spanish speakers. And I said, I don't speak Spanish. And she said, well, when does that ever stop to you? You know, give it a try. So I ended up in the FBI kind of by accident. And then the process, you apply, you take a test. You pass the test. You go on to a background investigation.

Then they get an interview. And in this case, it was interesting because going back to my youth, at the time, the Washington metropolitan field office in Washington, D.C. was at a place called Buzzard Point. And it was a hellhole. I mean, you didn't want to be. to get down there unless you already had a gun. It was a pretty rough spot. Go in, go up to the whatever seventh floor, sit down at a table in a conference room with, you know, the president and the

attorney general pictures on the wall and the big FBI seal and I'm wearing a suit. And, you know, I'm thinking, how do you get in the FBI? It just seemed kind of odd. And there were three people that did the interview and we go through the whole interview and tell all the stories in the background investigation and we got to the end and this one agent the lead agent in the interview said I had told him that that I the story about the CIA I guess should back up at some point tell about that but I was really should have gone into the CIA I should have applied to the CIA and I told him that he asked me why I wanted to be an FBI agent and I said well I don't know you know I think I might want to go in the CIA as well and he said well why didn't you

He said, I know I didn't apply to go to the CIA. And I said, you do? And he said, yeah, because the CIA doesn't take people who have used illegal drugs. And I thought, shit. When I was in college, like most people in college, and I didn't want to go into the FBI, I never thought about it. I was in this band called Dr. Neptune and the rare organs.

The college band, we did Frank Zappa covers. That's awesome. And, you know, I might have dropped a bowl or two, you know, every once in a while. But you didn't inhale. I never inhaled. Right. I inhaled the shit out of it. But anyway, so he was a great guy and he said, look, the FBI has changed his policy and they allow experimental use of marijuana, but not within the last three years. And he said, so I'm going to say that again. The FBI allows experimental use of marijuana, but not in the last three years. So let me ask you, Mr. Whitcomb. Have you ever tried illegal drugs? And I thought, I, I

I've tried it. Experimental use of marijuana, but not within the last year. So he goes, fantastic. It's all great. And he said, because if you make it, you know, if you get hired, you'll be the fourth FBI agent from Franconi, New Hampshire. And I thought, well, that sounds almost impossible to believe because it was such a small town. But then it goes back to this story. When I was growing up in this tiny town, the FBI agent that I knew was living in town, his name was William Sullivan. William Sullivan had been the number two assistant director behind Jay Edgar Hoover in the FBI during the co-intel years. He was in charge of domestic intelligence gathering. Martin Luther King, he was in charge of the Kennedy assassination investigation.

And he was heir apparent to Jay Edgar Hoover. He got some kind of a piss and match with Jay Edgar Hoover and Jay Edgar Hoover looked over him, handpicking his successor. So William Sullivan said, it. He retired. He wrote a book and he retired in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire. He was scheduled two weeks before the Senate hearings on the Kennedy assassination to go and testify before the United States Senate that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill JFK by himself. It was a conspiracy. And two weeks before he was scheduled to testify, a guy that worked for my dad shot him and killed him in a hunting accident. and that was big news in Francoane's handship.

I didn't notice you didn't do the accident. You didn't do the quotes. No, because I know the kid. He's a really, really nice guy, and the guy's dad was a state trooper. He's a remarkable guy, great guy. It was a tragic accident. But when people talk in my life, and I've been involved in a lot of things in life, but people talk about conspiracies.

I always look back on that and think to myself, you cannot tell that story and say, you've got to have the, right, Dave? I mean, that's the way that goes. But to grow up in a town that small, and where you know everybody, I knew the chief of police, this guy, Barney Young. As it turns out, there was another FBI agent named Tim Casey who was at the chief of police's house, the night that William Sullivan was shot and killed the next morning, it was hunting season. And you put all of it together, and it's just, it's one of those stories that has not been widely written about,

but it is a compelling conspiracy. And it's not a conspiracy. It's just a tragic accident. Yeah. But that's, you know, that's kind of way that world works. So Tim Casey, William Sullivan, the FBI agents, the gentleman that was interviewing me at the, when I got in and I was the fourth. I don't know about anybody since then. So that was that small town, but what was really remarkable about it, remarkable, I think, is that an adjacent town land to Hampshire, even smaller, the man that I grew up calling Uncle Harold's name, was Harold Janine. Harold Janine doesn't mean much now, but at the time he was kind of Bill Gates and Elon Musk and several others all put together. He started a company called ITT. ITT, now is community colleges or something. At the time, it was the world's first multinational corporation. They had Sheridan Hotels. They had Avis Renicar. They had Continental Bakery. They made Wonderbread

and Twinkies. They made coney shock absorbers. They made the communication cables that go one to the North Atlantic. They were the biggest multinational corporation in the world. He was the chairman of the board and the CEO. And he had a farm, which they called the farm, which comes in later, on this hilltop in Hanna, excuse me, in Landaff, New Hampshire. And that's where I grew up. Harold Janine paid the CIA in 1970, Harold Janine paid the CIA $1 million in cash to overthrow the government of Chile. And this is widely written about New York Times, books. And the CIA, I think, did not take the million dollars in cash because they got onto it.

Somebody discovered it ahead of time, but it was widely written about at the time. But the government was overthrothed. Salvador Allende, the president of Chile, was killed. And hit squads came after Uncle Harold. they blew up the ITT office building Madison Avenue Manhattan and they came to kill him

he and his bodyguards went to the farm in New Hampshire so I grew up with those guys I grew up with Jerry Sabatino who we called Bullet who had because odd job was already taken he looked just like odd job and so I grew up

with all of these guys coming and going at all hours a day and night briefcases and limousines private jets. He had a grum and goose, an amphibious plane that would land in the water in the Connecticut River and take off. It was pretty incredible. And everything that goes with it. Like we, there's a pool room, right? I mean, this was a mansion. It was a really remarkable place. And we were playing one day, and we found this secret door in a closet in the pool room full of all these eavesdropping devices, you know, the pelican cases full of all these weird-looking

guns and stuff. It was pretty incredible. And to hear the stories that he would tell, about the way the world really worked. I was 13, 12, 13 years old at the time, but I remember it very well. And he hired a guy named John McCone, who called Jack. Jack McCone was the most recent director of the CIA. So Harold Janine was intimately involved and historically documented as the private arm of the CIA

at a time when that's what was going on. Like David Rockefeller or Ross Perrault? in later years. Exactly right. Exactly right. So, I mean, he had started out at Bevan Howell and he had worked classified projects all the way back to World War II. So to grow up in a tiny town with those stories about the guy that worked for my dad

shooting, the number two guy in the FBI, and Uncle Harold, who was literally like living in a spy novel for a 12-year-old kid during the height of the Cold War. I mean, we had ducking cover in school, and I'd go home and we'd check it out his fucking secret stashes of guns and closets and all his bodyguards. would teach us how to shoot. It was a, it was really remarkable way to grow up. So then I went

away to school and that's how I found my way back in that office at Buzzards Point. So one of the things that stands out in my mind again, you know, after I read your book in like 2001, was you're going through your FBI training and your instructors are trying to drill into you like, hey man, this isn't like the movies. You're not a G-man with a Tommy gun shooting up gangsters. It doesn't work like that. And then you get to your first station. And then you get to your first station. your first day as an actual FBI agent. Somewhere out in the Midwest, as I recall. Yeah.

Can you tell us a little bit about that day? Yeah, so for those who have ever thought about joining the FBI, you give up your entire life and you go to the Academy at Quantico. The CIA basically has two academies, right? The Farm and Harvey Point and other places, Sears schools and stuff like that. But the FBI has one. The Academy is on the Quantico Marine Corps Reservation.

You show up with a suitcase. You check in on a Sunday night and you stay there for now, I think it might be 18 weeks. When I went through, it was 16 weeks. So you lived there for four months. And you never see, I didn't see my wife. I didn't see my, I had a brand new baby. I didn't see them at all. And you live there.

And, you know, it's very different. You really consumed by that world. Then one day they give you orders. In this case, it was Kansas City. I didn't even know what Kansas City was. I mean, I show up in Kansas City, checked into the Adams Mark Hotel or something, and I'm looking out over the sea. I remember very clearly. We've driven from Quantico to Kansas City and a Jeep C.J. 7 with a lift kit and a canvas top.

A miserable drive. With a baby who was like eight months old and my wife was pregnant with the next one, right? No air conditioning in July. And we roll up there. She's tough as nails. and but that's where he started. So check in, you look out over the city and say, yeah, life of fighting crime, you know, and at the time it was kind of cool.

So the next day, you go into the office, you sit around, you read the newspaper, have a cup of coffee like you think of a, you know, sitting around an FBI agent. And so it was like 10 o'clock in the morning or something like that. I was in the bathroom standing in a urinal. This guy, Roger, came in, said, hey, kid, let's go. We got a situation. and I was on a bank robbery squad. Now, when you go in the FBI, you can work a lot of different classifications.

You could work violent crime. You could work white-collar crime. You could work applicants. You could work a million different things. I just got lucky and ended up on a bank robbery squad for what I wanted to do. So we jump in the car. And now, remember, before going in the FBI, I'd been all over the world. I mean, I'd probably been to 20 countries at that point.

I'd lived in L.A. And I had a lot of experiences before I went in. and I had been a speechwriter for a senior member of Congress. Every Thursday we'd go to the Oval Office to the White House. My boss had a 1968 GTO judge with factory flames on the side, a red GTO with a white convertible top, and I'd get in the car with them when we drive down Pennsylvania Avenue, turn left into the White House Park in front of the Oval Office.

It was cool. I mean, it was remarkable. So I get in a car with the supervisor and with a squad supervisor and with the ASAC. The ASAC is the assistant special agent in charge, like the number two and one of the number three guys in the office, and I'm in the back seat, right? So I'm thinking, cool, I'm riding with the big boys. First day on the job, and just complete moron. I was an idiot, complete idiot. We roll up on this thing, and the bank robbery squad had found a guy in a house, and they thought he had kids in the house with him and didn't want to have a hostage situation. So they put together a ruse where they dressed two guys up.

They dressed two guys down and they went to the front door with like a TV or something. They were selling raffle tickets for a little giveaway or something. They knock on the door. The guy comes out. Oh, I'm sorry. We were all stationed around like there's a big hit's going to go down. We're taking down this armed bank rob or armed and dangerous. And there were streets shut down and people hiding behind trees like you see.

And I'm thinking, cool. the door opens up and this guy comes out with this big chrome you know 357 44 magnum and whatever and it was on man it was the guys dive off and everybody's piling out of their cars with their shotguns and it's going down 10 o'clock in the morning the mean streets of kansas city and i and i remember clearing the back seat of the car coming around and they teach you to kneel down behind the tire because bullets go through sheet metal, obviously. And I'm behind there, and I've got my gun, and I'm trying to draw a beat on the guy.

And all of a sudden I hear somebody yelling, wake him! Wake him! And I'm thinking, am I supposed to charge the house? I'm like, I'm the one who's going to save the day. And it was the boss. It was the ASAC. And he goes, you put that fucking gun back in your holster,

and you hide behind that tire, and I don't want to see you again. And I mean, I was destroyed. I was ruined. So I go, what am I going to do? So I sat down behind the tire, and then everybody else who's there who's fully involved in this thing, and it was a pretty big deal. And they all see me, and they start screaming at me, what the hell is wrong with you?

Get your gun out, get in the fight. So the boss is yelling at me to hide, and the rest of the crew is calling me names for not joining the fight. So that was quite a first day on the job. I love the idea of, like, your first day on the job, everybody, has this image in the cells and it sounds like you're getting called up to the show like they see like they see how cool i am like i'm like i'm like they recognize talent exactly right like just think about it i'm getting called by name up to the show it doesn't matter what you go into any branch of the military any law enforcement whatever else you think when you join you're

special you're special yeah yeah i mean they give you a badge and a gun yeah and you've got 30 statutes that you can enforce you know you're the guy who's supposed to Save democracy. Yeah. The hero in the Western world. And it happens. Yeah. It's not like I got to wait two years before I get involved in something.

It's day one, 10 o'clock in a morning. Yeah. It's not your first cup of coffee. Yeah. The next thing you know you're in this. But it's just the reality. It's like it reminds you of Star Wars where everybody feels like, you know, they're Luke Skywalker and they're usually like Red 2 or whoever gets blown up.

Oh, you're like the red shirts in Star Trek. Yeah. Yeah. No, but the idea that I'm getting called up and then from put your gun away, it's like, oh. shit. Yeah. But, yeah. Well, in my case, I was an idiot, a complete moron.

But I didn't know what to do. But, you know, it worked out. And they sent me, the FBI has offices, field offices around the country, and they have satellite offices. They called resident agencies. And it was a resident agency about two hours south, two or three hours south in Springfield. And they sent me down there. And then it was four years of just incredible work.

It was just, it was a dream come true. Let me read these ad reads real quick for our sponsors. Our first one is for Augustus, Augusta precious metals. And, you know, these guys sell obviously physical gold. That's their whole deal. You know, you can buy gold for your IRA and your 401K. Gold can't be tracked like digital currency. No one has to know you're buying it, and there's no way for the government to print more.

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So protect yourself and also, you know, stream smarter. PIA VPN. So if you want to enjoy all the benefits of private internet access, now's the time to subscribe, head to Piavpn.com. That's P as and Papa, IAvpn.com slash teamhouse and get an 83% discount. Seriously, 83%. That's just $2.3.3 a month. And you also get four extra months completely for free. But you must go to PIAvPN.com slash the team house for a truly private digital life. So, Chris, when did HRT first come up on your radar, like, that even becomes something you hear about? In those days, a very different world back then.

In those days, nobody really knew a lot about anything. I mean, now we live in a magic age of information. You guys, in this podcast, bring the average person face to face with remarkable human beings who've done incredible things, right? None of that existed back then, even within the FBI. So all I knew about the hostage rescue team at the time, and we're talking now 1991, 1990. All I really knew was there was a group at the FBI Academy who had a compound off in the woods, off to the side, and they had helicopters and they wore Nomex flight suits, and you'd see them in the gym or in the cafeteria. People talk kind of in hush tones about them.

You didn't really know much about them. So the way the FBI works, in particular at that time, they would, they, the FBI would move new agents, or excuse me, would move agents based on the needs of the Bureau. So if you had been a certain amount of time in one office, they could arbitrarily move you without much notice at all. So after four years, I got a call from Kansas City and they said, look, your time's up. You're going to rotate out and you're going to go either to New York or to L.A. I had two sons at the time, Mick and Jake, and it was great. I mean, working in the FBI at that time in Springfield, Missouri was kind of the white picket fence. I had a nice house.

You worked essentially from eight to six or something like that. It was really a straightforward job. And you're kind of a small business person, a contractor, really, in the sense that you go find your own cases. You don't just go in. In a bigger city, it's different. New York field offices. It's very, very different. A resident agency, you would have a caseload.

In my case, maybe 20, 25 cases, something like that. And I could go out and work a bank robbery suspect in the middle of the Ozark someplace by myself and not see anybody else. So it was a great gig. My gig was up. I didn't want to go to New York and I didn't want to go to L.A., talk to Rose, my wife, and said, what are we going to do? And I had heard about, knew something about this hostage rescue team, and they had a selection once a year. And the selection came in March. So I said, I'm going to try out.

I applied. I got a tryout. I went back to Quantico. I made it through the tryout and I somehow got picked for the team. That's how it happened. And what year was that? 91. So, yeah, and this was also, I mean, you didn't know it at the time, but coming up on like a pivotal time of American history, you know, we've had Danny Colson on the show who, you know, was created HRT. We've had Gary Nostner. Yeah. who was one of the negotiators. So do you want to start talking a little bit about, you know, what was going on domestically at that time and sort of like what HRT's portfolio looked like at that moment?

Yeah, two things. One, the United States government at that time looked at terrorism as a domestic law enforcement function, and it was the domain of the FBI. It was a federal offense, terrorism writ large. So at that time, just for example, on 9-11, And I'm skipping ahead. Let me come back and just say that at that time I joined H.R.T. 1991, there were about 70,

7-0 designated terrorist organizations throughout the world, one of which was Al-Qaeda, just one. I mean, they might have been number 30 down the list. There were red brigades. There were endless numbers of them. And they were prolific. In the 1980s, hijacking was a regular occurrence. And they, I mean, anybody that goes back and does a research, terrorism was a completely different world than it is today.

Something would happen all the time. There would be a bombing, a hijacking, a murder, something really extraordinary. And the United States government looked at it as a criminal enterprise that would be investigated by the FBI and prosecuted by United States attorneys. That's the way the system worked, okay? So anywhere we found terrorists, we would go and get them. Like the weathermen? The weathermen.

I mean, there were so many. I mean, but we would... The BLA back then, right? Irish Republican Army, Black September, Red Brigades, I think Amish Rhin Rico was a little bit later, but there was so many of them. My point being that prior to 9-11, it was not the purview of the military,

it was almost exclusively the FBI. So we, the FBI, would work with the CIA in terms of putting together different actions, especially outside the United States. And one myth, many people think the FBI works inside the United States and the CIA works outside. Couldn't be further from the truth. The FBI has legal attachés or field offices throughout the world, and we can chase, investigate, and help prosecute crimes wherever they occur in a world involving Americans.

So that's one aspect of what H.R.T did at the time in the early 1990s. And then also we would work anything that was a high-profile crime that would escalate to that. point. People think various things about HRT because it's very, very poorly understood. The hostage rescue team is not a SWAT team. They are not a negotiation element. They are a tactical hostage rescue component that is, and people talk about tier one and I don't even know what that means. There are certain entities that are designed. Most people who say that term don't know what it means. Yeah, I don't even know where that came from. In the 1990s, there were three tactical elements the United States relied upon for in extremist violence. Delta Force or whatever

the unit or combat application group in the day it was still called Delta Force. Seal Team 6 with Dev Group and because of a law called the Posse Comitatis, the United States government could not send military in a law enforcement crisis in the United States. So if you had a hostage situation. Well, I'll use the Olympics, the Olympics in Los Angeles. Coming out of the Olympics in Munich, where all of those athletes were killed in the terrorist action, the United States government didn't want that to happen. So the Attorney General at the time went to Fort Bragg to see a demonstration by Delta to show how they would resolve a hostage situation for the Los Angeles Olympics, which was 1984, I think, was it? I think that's 84, yeah. Eighty-six. So he went down. It was a

very famous story and he went up, I mean, it was dealt, right? I'm sure it was a remarkable demonstration. He went up and said, fabulous, the only thing I don't see is handcuffs, wear the handcuffs. And the guy, one of the operators looks at him and goes, I don't know what you're talking about. We give them all two right here. Right? We don't need any handcuffs. And he thought to himself as attorney general, you know, the number one law enforcement agent, agent or official in the United States and he said, okay, we can't have that. So, and I've said this before, when Delta started as a hostage rescue component, not even a special warfare component, but a specific entity, they had to invent all that shit.

They invented CQB. They invented fast roping. They invented tactical wrapping. They invented all of those different things. And a lot of that came out of the SWAT community. So when Delta started, they, pioneered those tactics based on what had come from the Los Angeles SWAT team, the Los Angeles Police Department SWAT team,

and received a lot of help from the FBI. And I've said this before, and I hope I'm right, but I've been told by numerous sources that most of the original Delta guys came through the FBI Academy undercover in order to work in that world, right? Which will come back because I truly believe you never know who the fuck anybody is anyways. But so anyways, when HRT, excuse me, when the U.S. government decided to get ready for the Los Angeles Olympics, they decided to put together a civilian component. That became HRT, and they had to put it someplace,

so they put it in the FBI. So they created a civilian version of Delta, same weapons, tactics, same command structure, even a very, very similar selection process. And they built that, put it in the FBI, and that started, Danny Colson started that in 1983. I always found interesting what fascinates me about HR. is they have that counterterrorism capability that you describe, but they're also cops. They can investigate crimes, collect evidence, make arrests. Well, the short answer is yes. So you have people who ask me, what are the legal justifications?

And it is Title 18, U.S. Code Title 18 provides for certain capabilities and authorizations for federal law enforcement. And you could have a special agent in different agencies, but the special agent, people always say, what's so special about you, right? You're not going to trailer park at 2 in the morning, and that's the first thing I always say, what's so special about you? That's the authorization. And the specific designation is 1811. That is a specific designation that you can carry a gun and you have arrest authority and all of that. The FBI has certain criminal violations that they investigate. one of which is not murder.

Murder is not even a federal crime except in certain applications. Like political violence? Political violence, certain judges. Yes, exactly right. So you have local state and federal organizations. Each has their own jurisdictions. The FBI has a specific one. It has a set of specific violations.

Do they also get involved in full to it's across state lines? Yes. That's how it originally started. That if you have a crime in Iowa, you can't chase across state lines to another. And Jayad Gah Hoover, what started as the Bureau of Investigation, before the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was designed to allow an entity to chase crime across borders.

And then it went from there, financial crimes, financial instruments, things like that. So at the time, terrorism was considered a federal crime. The hostage rescue team was a highly evolved tactical component that could chase anywhere in the world, any crime involving an American, specifically terrorism, with the idea that if someone were taken hostage, you would need somebody to go in and resolve it, and that's what they did. So when I joined H.R.T., that was their primary operation, coming back to this, the second point, which is some of those crimes escalate to unusual circumstances, which is where this conversation

always goes, which is Ruby Ridge and Waco, right? I was at both. Some people may have seen the Netflix documentary on Waco, and I will say two things. One, that I'm sick of talking about it, but I understand that it is a pivotal thing in America and history, and I fully understand that it is a hot-button issue that I hate to talk about just because I have to go over it over and over and over again.

But it's a tragedy. I mean, 85 or 87 people or something like they died at Waco, And on both sides, law enforcement and the civilians inside, and the same with Ruby Ridge. So they are events that I remember in a lifetime of events, but they are events that stand out as pivotal moments in American history. And I respect that. I try to do my best to explain my perspectives, fully aware that there are many different perspectives. So if you have any questions about that. Did you watch the documentary?

Yeah. What did you think of it? Do you think it for people who are curious about it or want to know more that it's a good source of information for them? The director's name is Tiller Russell. He's a brilliant guy. He did an impossible job. And I think it was, if I could leave any lasting testament to Waco, that would be it. I think he did a brilliant job in a theatrical setting, meaning he had to present it in three hours. And you can't tell something that lasted that long. You could do three hours just on the last morning. So there are lots of things that I would have talked to. about in the documentary, but there's lots of things that Branch Davidians would have as well. So I thought Taylor did a remarkable job, and I think it was a very fair and very balanced way of saying everybody dicked up. I mean, it was a mess. It was awful, had tragic consequences for federal law enforcement officers and for women and children and men that died in that thing. It was awful. And the same with the word be rich.

Go ahead. Well, in the, it's the documentary is called American Apocalypse. Yes. Yeah. If people want to go and check it out on Netflix. I've watched it. It's definitely worth, worth your time. Well, I guess, well, one of the, one of the big things that, you know, I think is kind of, kind of shocking or interesting to hear, you know, your part in it.

I mean, you were an HRT sniper on both events. And you talk at one point about having David Koresh himself in your sights and how that's kind of like something that haunts you, even today. Yeah, I wouldn't say haunt. I think maybe the show made it sound like that. Yeah. Yeah, that's not the case. What's your perspective?

My perspective is this, that we had a specific mission, and you guys know this mission, right? The objective is to go in and you kill the bad guys and you save the good guys and you go home. Right. That's it. You're a strike, a fast action asset. We were not designed to go in and say drop the gun. We were not designed to go in with smoke and mirrors and, you know, you're not designed to go in with smoke and mirrors and it was a last resort.

So typically, at that time, Delta or 6 or H.R.T would be held in reserve until every other thing, every other option had failed. There were no more options. Right. At that time, negotiation was just becoming a big deal. Gary probably talked about this. He did. It was a new construct. It was a new concept that you could talk somebody out of a situation.

Because, let's face it, the Texas Rangers and law enforcement through the Wild West, up through the prohibition errors with Al Capone and the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, law enforcement up to a certain point in American history was, we're the good guys, you're the bad guys, do what we say, we're going to kill you. Right, right. When we got to that point, 1992, 93, Waco, First Ruby Ridge and Wickewip Ridge right together, when we got to that point, we, the United States government had, new assets, specifically the hostage rescue team, and did not as a government, as a country,

really have a strong sense of what we would do with them. And I'll say this very specifically. At that time, in the early 1990s, the most prevalent conversation about what was wrong in America at the time was what was called white nationalist, white supremacist organizations, like the covenant, the sword and the arm of the Lord of Mission, the Dan Eat was involved in. And there were a lot of those organizations that came out of what was called the Turner Diaries. There was a book called The Turner Diaries, and it was the end of Zionist-occupied government. And it was a big deal.

And people don't know those things now, so they don't put it in that frame of reference. Domestic terrorists based on white supremacist, white nationalist identity politics movement, was the singular focus of federal law enforcement at that level at that time. So when we went to Ruby Ridge and we went to Waco, they were wrapped within a national sentiment that you've got these crazies living out in the woods or living out in the field and they're dangerous. I'm not saying that's the reality of it. I'm saying that was the perception. Right. That they had these training camps that they're basically preparing to conduct violent acts from.

That's exactly right. So we now know Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris and the Harris family. that's not it at all. But we didn't have the information at the time. We, the hostage rescue team, had information that we got from other entities. And, I mean, we didn't even have, we had no Google. We had no online-based, computerized system of gathering information. It was primitive.

You were reliant on the agency, the organization. The local law enforcement that you walked in on. Right. And the ATF, right? Well, one was the Marshals and one was the ATF. Okay. Well, the ATF at Waco, Marshals and ATF, it was an ATF investigation that became a Marshall's response because they were supposed to go into the arrest. Okay. But they were both non-FBI cases.

But because you escalate the latter, remember that the United States government had one counterterrorism, excuse me, had one tactical asset. That was the hostage rescue team. And it could go anywhere. It could go to a county in Tennessee. It could go to a federal, to an airport in Tajikistan. It could be absolutely anything. So it was a time in American history where a set of circumstances met with a set of demands that led to a set of failures that were still talking about 30 years later. Did that lead to, I don't know about the overall FBI, but specifically for the hostage rescue team?

Did that lead you guys to distrust of other agencies, you know, whether it was the ATF or the marshal or even local law enforcement, the idea of you guys landing on the ground and not having like... I recall from reading your book from Cold Zero. I mean, if I recall correctly, I mean, you expressed even like outright anger with the negotiators that you guys did not have good cons with each other. Well, it's very tough. And I'll say this a couple things. One, I was a member of the FBI hostage rescue team. a long time ago and it is a very different entity it is a remarkable organization that you should have somebody newer on to talk about what they do and how they do it and the endless series of successes that they've had right there were a remarkable group of people that I'm no longer part of right I was a member of that team at a time in history that people still choose to talk about right but

you should really have an HRT guy talking about HR we'd love to yeah well I mean there's some truly some remarkable human beings. I mean, these guys, we can tell stories about who they are and where they come from, but they're just, anyway, I'll go back and say, at that time, my personal perspective, and everybody has a different perspective on something like that. For example, at Ruby Ridge, I heard more gunshots and testified before the Senate that I heard things that nobody else did because the way sound moves in mountains. Everything is a little bit different. My perspective at the time in Waco was that we were going in to, kill the bad guys and save the good guys that night. I was on a climbing trip, as I said in a documentary. We had a climbing team and I grew up rock climbing. We had a climbing trip in Phoenix, Arizona, and Tucson, I guess. And we went back up to, or we flew to Waco and the rest of the team hadn't come in, but they came in later that night. There were seven of us that arrived first at Waco. and I thought we would do what we were supposed to do.

At the time, negotiations was becoming a much bigger play, and negotiation is, in my opinion, always the best way to go. Loss of life in a military action is part of the process. Loss of life in a law enforcement action in the United States of America is bad. It is costly. it is irrevocably it lasts in ways that surprise me now. We're talking about this 30 years later. It causes lasting harm to everyone.

Yeah. To everyone. So my lasting harm was saying I thought we were going to go in, we were going to do what we did and resolve it and go home. It didn't work that way. We stayed. And then you have, I don't want to use an Nimbabry. proper metaphor. But if you have the shot tip of a spear or whatever the metaphor you want to use, and you just lay it there, eventually it's going to rust or eventually it's going to get lost

or it's going to get knocked around, whatever metaphor you want to use. And it just became a two-month-long babysitting enterprise, and everything broke down. It broke down within the FBI. It broke down within the federal government, Janet Reno and the Attorney General, Bill Clinton, the president. It became political. It became everything that it was not. And so I have from my perspectives. I don't think anybody should really care what my perspectives are. I did my best. Yeah.

I did my job. And then the last day, a shitstorm went down of heroic proportions. It was awful. And that part was not really talked about in the show. But when we started the operation, the last day. So we go in, secure the compound. The United States government, through the FBI, hostage and negotiators, tried to talk this thing out. Everybody came down.

The director of the FBI wanted to come down. the sheriff was involved. Everybody was trying to get involved in this thing. We just sat and watched. We would do whatever anybody wanted. So we had armored vehicles. Everybody seen the videotape. The last day, six o'clock in the morning,

we are told that we're supposed to insert gas into the building to force the people out of the building. And that's where you see the tanks going up to the building. Construction, the CEVs, construction engineering vehicles instead of turret mounted guns, they had turret mounted gas projectors, poked holes, put in gas. The moment they pierced the skin,

the branch Davidians opened up on us and hosed us thousands of rounds for hours at a time. And we wrote it out. I mean, I was sitting behind a plate. Plates of steel and sandbags. It was no threat. Nobody shot back. Took a ceasefire, about 10 in the morning,

ceasefire from them. And then after negotiators just brought, down again, we started inserting gas again, and then the fire started and the place burned down. So it was that last morning, it started about six in the morning, it ended about noon. And I remember you talking about, you know, watching the compound burned to the ground, and you came down out of your sniper hide with your partner, your sniper partner, and standing there like, what are you thinking as you're like watching this catastrophe? What I say would not come across well. So I'm not going to. I'm not going to.

going to say anything about it. I mean, when you sit there and you count 51 days and all the shit that you go through, not knowing what's going on, and what you think about the world, and what you think about right and wrong, and what you think about those children that you'd see every day. I mean, I have photographs of everything. I have a complete archive of every photograph taken during Waco, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of photographs. And I have, and I, you know, I showed some of them to tell, and not all of them, but a few of them. But I have a series of photographs of this little kid probably four years old, a little blonde-headed kid, and he's wearing a red puffy jacket. It was cold, right?

It was March, February, March. And the mighty men, David Koresh's soldiers, his Branch-Dividian followers, I shouldn't call him soldiers. He called him Mighty Men. I will call them Branch Davidians. Would come to the window and hold this little kid up as a human shield and taunt us or they have their guns and they'd have their guns. set up their sniper hides and they were very militaristic in their own right we knew they had grenades we knew they had 250 cows because we saw them they were very very very heavily armed but to see these kids and to see them in the windows every single day we all had kids we all had families and then

that last day realized that they're all dying there's no way a human being in my opinion can go through something like that and not stumble, fall down a little bit. I mean, it's, that's sort of what I was, what I was trying to ask, like, as a cop, you know, you have this, as an HRT agent, you have this vision in your mind of like, we're the good guys, we're here to save people. Yes. I mean, did, stand in there watching that, I mean, did it, did it change your view, either of yourself or of your country or of the, of the Bureau? No, it didn't, it didn't change any sense of myself or the, or the people that I worked with, because I believed in them, I believed in myself, I still do.

I still, I believe in the heroism of all who serve, first responders. And I mean, across the board, I come from a family of firemen and military, law enforcement, anybody that puts their ass on the line in the cause of good in my book as a hero. Yeah. And I will always believe very, very strongly that those guys rank among the very best. Because not only could they have done anything else in life, just getting in the FBI is kind of hard, right? I mean, you got to have a master's degree and you've got to live a good life and stuff. Getting to HRT is harder.

I mean, getting on HRT is hard. Right. It was 13,000 FBI agents and there's 50 guys, 50 shooters on HRT. In my opinion, there's some of the most remarkable human beings I've ever met in my life. The smartest, the fastest, the most dedicated. They're devoted at the risk of their own life. And I say it, a significant number of HRT operators have died in training. Yeah.

It's a very, very dangerous job. And you have to commit in ways that most people don't even think about. And you have to do that for a reason, and the reason is good. And when you do something you think is in the name of good that turns out to be something different. It really makes you think what went wrong and how to make it better. Well, and that's one of the things. You know, the HRT has, they have an incredibly difficult job because a lot of times they can face the exact same threat profile of somebody in a military special operations unit. But without the lethal recourse, right?

You can't, if you start taking fire from an objective, you can't step back and then bomb the objective. You know, there's. Well, and we don't, I mean, we didn't have superiors. impressive fire. Right. I mean, let's just take it. Waco. Let's say they shot 10,000 rounds. Nobody fired a shot back. Not one. Now, people would argue while we were in tanks and we were behind sandbags and I would say, you're absolutely right. That's why we didn't shoot back. But, you know, I walked out at the end, I talked about it in the documentary. I walked out when the building was fully involved and I walked out of our position of cover just to watch the fire.

I mean, I was dumbfounded. Nobody could believe the place was burning. And you saw it on television. It was a horrendous fire. Yeah. And I walked outside and I was standing there next to a guy that you used to work with and we were standing there shoulder to shoulder and a guy cranked off around and it went right between our head. And anybody's ever been in any kind of live fire situation, you know, you feel the vapor trail going past your head and that snap, that hypersonic snap. And it's not that he almost killed us. I mean, you know, it's not the first time I was almost been killed, but it was that the building was fully involved in flames, and I said this in a documentary,

the guy that tried to kill me that almost did kill me had to have been fully involved in flames when he pulled the trigger. His legs were on fire, his arms were on fire, his clothes were on fire, and the last act he took as a human being on the planet Earth was to try to kill me. So, you know, I always say in terms of commitment, you can look at Waco any way you want,

but law enforcement is a very, very difficult function in a lot of different ways. and we did have military situations outside Waco and didn't have the same things. We had flashbang grenades instead of frag grenades. We could not use suppressive fire. We had helicopters and saws and 60s and 50s and everything else, but very, very carefully prescribed rules of engagement

on how we could use them. So it's a very tough thing. As a sniper, a lot of people you've had on were snipers. You talk about it, and I've talked to various people. in a military application, you can have two guys stand by side by side into combat situation and you shoot somebody with a 50 at a thousand meters

and if you hit the wrong guy, it's still win. Right, right. If you shoot somebody in a law enforcement action and it's two twin brothers and you shoot the wrong twin, even if a good shot you get the wrong guy, if you fuck up for any reason whatsoever, you're probably going to jail, you're definitely going to get

civil action, you're probably going to lose your job and it's going to ruin your life. So you say, I'm going to take this job. And I'm going to give up my family. I'm going to do all these things and make these sacrifices. And the margin of error is so small, it's hard even to explain. Yeah. And so I'm not saying that's a bad thing.

We all take that risk, understanding that is the liability. But I think people outside of Waco and Ruby Ridge, I'm just saying there are human beings working today and tonight in the military and law enforcement, first responders of every kind, who put their lives on the line. who take extraordinary chances, make extraordinary sacrifices, and occasionally they get it wrong. Yeah. Because it's what humans do. Yeah. So final thoughts on Waco and Ruby Ridge, you know, from your perspective. I mean, big takeaways, lessons learned, things that changed within the organization in the aftermath?

Everything changed. Everything changed. The world changed. The first thing, the first and most obvious change was the creation of the critical incident response group. There's a mechanism within the FBI where the federal government said we are going to pull all of the component parts together and we're going to create a super unit that can look at all eventualities so that we never fuck up again in those ways. Right. So what do you need in a crisis situation you need to resolve, you need to deal with the criminal, with the, what are we going to

call it? Like the psychology, the threat, the psychology of the threat. But the human mind, the human construct of decision-making in a situation. The first thing you want to do is figure out who they are, so we have the behavioral scientists or what we call profilers. The profiles, the national, what most people call profile is that unit is part of critical incident response group. The negotiators who take that information and time-proven methods of influencing behavior to try and resolve the thing peacefully, those guys are part of that organization. If that fails, you need a tactical component to save those lives, and that's the hostage rescue team. And then there's a logistical component. There are other components all brought together, are palatized, air mobile at a moment's

notice. They can get on the ground and address a situation in a coordinated manner to try and prevent that from happening. And they've been remarkably successful. And if you look at what's happened within the FBI, within federal law enforcement writ large since 1993, and in 30 years, it is a remarkable history of extraordinary successes. Yeah. We don't talk about Waco's because there haven't been any Waco's in 30 years. And wasn't the bunker boy? Wasn't that that HRT? That was H.R.T.

Like, what an incredibly heroic rescue. When you actually look at what happened, I got goosebumps on the back of my neck. That's why I say you should talk to real HRT guys. You should talk to current HRT guys. I mean, you know, I'm old school. The new guys have tactics. They have techniques. They have process that didn't even exist in those days.

And that's why they're so successful. But when you look at what's been printed about what happened with that bunker and how they went down, excuse me, and saved that child, it was remarkable. I mean, these guys jumped into a phone booth in a live fire gun fight. I mean, you talk about having a knife fight in a phone booth. These guys had fully automatic weapons, and it was wired to blow up. And they jumped in there. And, I mean, they're literally gunfighting, I mean, holding each other and feeling body parts to know where to shoot. So the successes, I come on these shows, and I feel really badly about it because I go on and I talk about something that's a failure 30 years ago.

And I say, talk to the heroes, talk to the remarkable guys in an ostrich rescue team that do this today. and they will. I mean, you'll get them on. Yeah. We'd love to. I want to hand it off to the guys that really do the shit. Yeah. No, and here's the other thing.

And this is true about the military. It's true about the intelligence community. And it's true about the law enforcement community. Is that you're always going to hear about the failures and everybody is going to judge those organizations based on their failures. You know, whether it's a single cop in an abusive situation, whether it's Waco, whether it's, you know, like My Lie or. or, you know, or, you know, even in the 90s, the,

the, it's the, it's that Danny Colson talked about where they defused the situation successfully and there's no loss of life on the other side. Like, those just, I hadn't heard of that. It's not newsworthy. That's exactly it. One, the successful operations generally wouldn't even get acknowledged

because they were successful and they just happened. And two, it's just not newsworthy. Nobody wants to really, unless it's something like the Bunker where it's, you know, this insane situation, and these men acted with these outrageous courage. But generally, like most situations, if you resolve a situation safely,

that's not sex. Nobody's going to print that. That's not sexy. First of all, HRT has been involved in more than 800, 800 tactical resolutions in the last 30 years since Waco. 800. And how many have you heard about? Zero?

Well, you heard about the boy in the bunker. Yeah. You don't hear about them because they're successful. Right. And that kind of a track record, 800 and zero is, I don't even how you put that in terms. My sense, correct me if I'm wrong, Chris. My sense is that they often try to blend in with the local law enforcement guys and you just never really know that. Okay, so here's a perfect example, right? And this is where we're going to go somewhere down the line. So in my crazy life that we haven't got to yet, I ended up in Patriot Day, the movie about the Boston Marathon bombing. right buddy mine's a movie director and uh i ended up right and part of it and i ended up being playing a guy they call the the virginian his name is derrick i'm not going to say his last name but he was

the head of a hostage rescue team component that went into boston to get the sarnia brothers once they'd been identified they found one of the kids in the boat in the backyard and maybe you've seen the movie if you've seen the movie there's a there's a Netflix documentary on on the Boston bombing too that i i found very interesting okay well these These guys came in and it was funny because you think you're going to fast rope in and, you know, save the day for Boston. They came in in a minivan. They got to Boston. All the rent of cars were taken.

And so they showed up at the gunfight in a minivan and went out. And instead of coming in and saying, like, you see in the movies, we're the FBI. We got it boss, you know, and whatever, getting a piss and match. They went in, talked behind the scenes with the Boston police entities, not just the Boston. police department and you talk to any of them and I have I've talked to them all and drank beer with them and you know the time I was up there for the movie which is two months or whatever and to a person they'll all say the same thing that who were those guys they were remarkable that the way they came in out of nowhere they contributed they helped to resolve it in a professional tactical and

silent manner and disappeared without a press release and I think to this day you would talk to anybody involved in that situation and they'll still say the same thing. Who were those guys? And that's what you want. An entity that is so good, even to this, and I'll say this, once HRT got the guys out of the boat, or they talked to him a negotiator, who happened to this remarkable guy, he was an HRT operator, became a negotiator, left the team, became a negotiator, and he talked him out of the boat, and HRT affected the capture. But rather than hook the guy up and take him away, the best-known terrorist in America at the time, once it was resolved in the backyard, away from the cameras and away

from everybody else, they turned it to a component of all the different law enforcement organizations who went in, handcuffed him, and took him out themselves, and brought him to justice, meaning they went in, resolved it, and disappeared. And what the quiet professionalism you would most want in an entity like that. There were absolutely remarkable group of guys that have been very badly misunderstood, mischaracterized. Yeah. And I hope that changes. Another moment, you know, kind of wrapping up the HRT stuff, another moment that stands out

all these years later from your book is you talk about being down, you know, behind your long gun out at the range one day shooting. You'd go on to the Marine Corps scout sniper course, as I recall. Yeah, I graduated at Marine Courscout sniper school. So you're out there on the range shooting and you said you got up and you just realized that day you were done. You had proved everything you felt you had to prove to yourself behind a rifle. Could you talk a little bit about what that moment was? I mean, you said also quitting HRT was like one of the hardest decisions of your life.

Well, I wrote a book about it, you know. But the book came out 23 years ago. Yeah. 23 years ago. A lot happened after that. that. Well, you can see it had like an outsized impact on a teenage Jack Murphy, you know, that these things stand out in my mind. No, and listen, what I wrote about it at that time was accurate. It was honest and I stand by what I wrote. There was a day when it was over. It was more

complex than that. And here's why. Yeah, weigh it out, man. When you're an FBI agent and you want, if you're an FBI agent, you can't have an outside job, right? You can't work on the side to make more money. You've got to get anything has to be approved. If you write a book, you're stepping in shit. You just can't write a book if you're an FBI agent. But what we haven't discussed yet is I didn't want to become an FBI agent. I wanted to write books. I grew up. I thought I was going to be a theater writer. I was a speech writer. I went to California to be a rock star, right out of college, right? I went to California to be a rock star. I didn't work out very well. So I surfed and I was a bartender. And I wrote, I got my first gig writing for Orange Coast

Magazine. Big deal. I wrote about alternative energy in the 80s, right? Then I got hired from there to teach English at a boarding school. So I went to the Berkshire School in Western Massachusetts, and I taught English and ran the theater program. That's what I thought I was going to do with my life. I had no interest in all this other stuff. Then I went from there to a newspaper. We're going to get to the rest of the story.

I went to the North Adams transcript in North Adams, Massachusetts, and I became the City Hall Reporter. So magazine writer, failed rock star, magazine reporter, English teacher at a boarding school, newspaper reporter. I left the newspaper reporting job for a couple different reasons. And the guy that took my job was Danny Pearl. Oh shit. Daniel Pearl. Yeah. He took the City Hall reporting job, the North Adams transcript. And he was even the same fraternity I was in. I was Alpha Delta Phi fraternity in college. and so was he, these bizarre parallels that kind of follow through my life.

But I left the newspaper and I got called by this congressman who said, he had read an article that I had written about him and said, hey, you want to come to work for me. But I said, all right, I got on a bus, or excuse me, I got on a train and I went to D.C. And I wrote speeches. So it had all been writing, it had all been chasing art. It had all been something that had nothing to do with law enforcement, but always with the CIA in the back of my mind because of, Uncle Harold. I mean, I literally grew up at the farm with surrounded by guys with weird guns

and recording devices and people coming from Chile to try to kill them. And I mean, you can read about all this in the New York Times and various books. I'm not exaggerating any of it. It was wild. So anyway, so I got into the FBI and it went from there, but that's not where it was originally intended to go. So while I was in the FBI, I continued to write. After Ruby, I wrote a novel called Rules of Engagement and it was basically about a white supremacist group and a guy goes in undercover and had a lot of overtones of Ruby Ridge. I kind of played it out in a novel. Couldn't sell it.

Couldn't get arrested. In those days you would send out a self-draft stamp envelope. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And a query letter. And they would stacks of them, you know, it's just the stories were ridiculous. Couldn't do anything. and then one day well I'll back up one second

so I wrote one of these I wrote this novel one of the guys on the team had gone to law school with a guy named it's called Joe he's gone to law school with a guy named Joe Joe had moved to Hollywood and he was trying to make it as a screenwriter

my buddy said I'll introduce you guys maybe you can turn a novel into a screenplay he did we tried he introduced me to another guy who we'll call him Pete. His name's Pete. He's a big movie director. At the time he wasn't, at the time he was an unemployed actor.

And then they introduced me to this person and that person. And it was this, who is who of household names, who were just getting started, Talyoni and Jason Patrick, Christy Turlington, this guy, Terry Quinn, this New York City firefighter.

Terry Quinn's one of the most remarkable guys you ever met in your life. He would have Cindy Crawford, would come up to the firehouse and cook dinner. And he had one of the hottest This club's in New York. He's a prince of the city and everybody. Eric Roberts and Vince Fawn.

Anybody that was big in those days all came through that circle. And they all started out with this guy in the FBI who had a 45 and was flying around the world doing all this weird shit. So somehow it all came together where I was on the hostage rescue team. I had written a book that took me to Hollywood. And all of a sudden, I'm hanging out with people at the time who were just trying to make it and now they're all huge stars including one who I met at the Mercer Hotel so I mean everybody has a clubhouse right we had a clubhouse in LA and a clubhouse in New York the clubhouse in New York at that time was the Mercer Hotel when it opened for those who don't

know soho in the late 90s was kind of a hellhole right the Guggenheim was there you had lucky strike and finale Bob the bartender in Finnellys right and but for those who don't know the Mercer Hotel was Andre Bellage opened this really swank hotel and you had to be somebody to stay there. And I got to stay there because all my friends were somebody, right? I was just a mutt. I was an idiot. And so one day I'd go up.

I'd just come back from Yemen. I'd just done a gig in Yemen, which I'd like to talk about. And so I'd go up and I think we would go out and have these fascinating dinners. I was at one dinner at one night. It was Lou Reed and Henry Kissinger at this Turkish restaurant. I mean, you never knew who was going to show up. It was wild. And it was, you know, it was three years or something.

I mean, it was a long thing. So anyway, I go to the Merce Hotel, just got back from Yemen. It's almost Christmas. I go, what do we doing tonight? Big dinner party. He says, no, we're playing cards. And I said, whatever, we go up and we're having a card game. All the boys coming in.

One guy, you know, meeting all these guys, one of the guys is Brad Pitt. One of the greatest guys in the world. All the shit that you see, you know, the pikey look. you know the tongue in his teeth and stuff like that he's just a guy he's just a fucking incredible actor but just a guy if you're sitting here now he'd be like whatever um anyway in that card game i ended up winning $8,000 in cash i didn't even have i had a two kids a government job a mortgage i don't even think i had the money for the buy-in i went $8,000 and the next morning i sell my first book and

And I get an agent. The whole thing came together just like that. So I couldn't get arrested, sell in the novel, that I meet all these guys in Hollywood, had this insane three or four or five years, and then I saw my first book at a card game with Brad Pitt. And then everything changed. And that's what led your decision to retire.

Yeah, so I did not retire from the FBI. You have to be quite yet. 50 and 20, and I think I was, I think I had 18 years in government service because I was... So amidst all this Hollywood partying and shindigs, I mean, what was the Yemen job that you went on in between? This one particular job was the coal bombing. And I'll say this just because, you know, we talk about Ruby Ridge and Waco. What I was going to say, the reason I started talking about this book is the FBI said, you can write this book.

And I've got to go back in time and say, people have said, well, why would you write a book about HRT? Why would you write a book about the FBI? and the reality is that I've not talked about much in public, but the reality is that the FBI was us, right? You say they did this and that's bullshit. The FBI at the time was the three of us. Literally, I mean, it's guys, I knew everybody, right? And these guys, this group of friends,

these group of people that I knew, decided it would be a good idea to support a book that wrote in realistic terms and honest ways about the good parts of the FBI. coming out of Waco and coming out of Ruby Ridge and looking at something that was a positive way where a small town kid from New Hampshire grows up, joins the FBI

and has all these experiences. So when Cold Zero came out, it was fully 100% sponsored and backed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, meaning specific individuals at headquarters who supported this, to the point where they even brought Brian Lerner, Williams and NBC News and all these other entities down to go through the shooting house. They rolled out the red carpet to try to support the book when it came out.

So I've not talked about that in great length. But I didn't do the book just for those reasons. It was a fully supported public relations support from the FBI. So the book came out and the book was scheduled to be released on September 12, 2001. like I say, you can't write a book and stay in the FBI, so I had to resign. So I said, okay, the book's coming out on September 12th. So I put in my resignation, and I was in London the two weeks before 9-11. I flew back to the United States on September 10th. I got back at midnight, September 10th, 2001, on a 747 sitting right behind the upper deck right behind the cockpit,

and the door was open. In those days, in 2001, September 10th, 10th, 2001, you could go and sit, a first class passenger could sit in a jump seat on the flight deck behind the captain of a 747 landing at Dulles Airport. And I was sitting in my seat holding a wood handle, serrated edge steak knife, looking at the back of the captain's head thinking, this is unsat. This ain't right. And terrorism, I mean, hijacking was already a thing. So I go home, got a few hours sleep. I went into my office at the critical incident response group on September 11th. To sign your papers, basically.

Basically, say goodbye to everybody. And I was supposed to go to New York that afternoon to do Larry King live because that was part of the press junket. And September 12th, the next morning, was my first book signing at the borders at the South Tower Mall at the South Tower of the World Trade Center the next morning. So then I have the exact same experience you and everybody else had. Sit in my desk. I had three televisions in my office.

talking to the guys about how we got to do something about state knives and 747s. Somebody goes, holy shit, look at that. And we all had the exact same experience at the same time. So now I've got to leave the FBI on September 11th, which feels kind of like what you would expect. You know, maybe we want to throw up. Yeah. It was a horrible moment. And then going to New York, I did go to New York, and then you see the smoke coming up from the towers.

And so I guess we can move on to something else, but questions before we get to the next stage? The Yemen? Oh, the Yemen. I'm sorry. So Yemen, that particular Yemen trip was the USS coal bombing. And because the FBI investigates terrorist acts, remember what I was saying, that terrorism was a criminal enterprise, on American citizens. Someone in the federal government decided that it was the purview of the FBI and not. NCIS or other organizations. And I want to bring it up for this reason because we talked now after the two longest wars in American history and all the things that we

should have learned since 2001 in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I just got to point this picture. We, the FBI, flew a component on a, it was probably a C5, I guess, whatever. I think I went over on a, I might have gone over on a different hop, but went into landstool Germany, Ramstein, and interviewed some of the sailors that had been blown up. I wrote about it in the book and about what it was like to watch that skiff run out toward the USS Cole with a guy in the bow waving and smiling and then detonating the bomb and blowing everybody up. And I'm talking this guy and his face is half blown off and he's all fucked up. And he was courageous, he was composed and all he wanted to do was give us information so we could

But on another plane flew into Aden Yemen. When we flew into Aiden Yemen, the Yemeni military locked on us with surface-to-era missile radar. We did a combat spiral, you know, you'd been on those things. They're unpleasant landings, right? And slammed down on the runway and promptly sit there for four hours on the plane. Because the Yemeni military came out and circled the plane with belt-fed machine guns and wouldn't let us off the plane. Eventually, somebody prevailed. We got off and they took us to the Aden Hotel.

And then they surrounded the hotel with guys, with machine guns. Did the embassy not tell them that you were coming? They did tell them we were coming. But, okay, we're getting there. And there's a point in this whole story. The point in the story, well, so now we get in the hotel. We being, I don't know what it was, maybe 200 FBI agents or something like that. But we can't leave.

But this, I bring this up because this is, how so many operations I've worked on in my life went before we got it all figured out. I mean, we did things in those two wars that got things straightened out. In those days, it was not. And here's where we're going. So in Yemen, they chew the shit called the cot, right? They call it Mira there, but it's caught. It's the same thing.

And, you know, it turns your mouth all arms and you get all fucked up. And these guys had, they had, I don't know, I think they had, mostly they had PKMs, and I think they had some douchekas too, some DSHK heavies. And most of their stuff was Russian, including the anti-aircraft stuff, was Russian. So we get in, we go in the hotel, and you go in, there's a little bit of a lobby. There was a bar. Now, it's a dry country, but they had a bar, and then a cafeteria. And the Yemenis had decided to let the bad guys in.

So, but they wouldn't let us out. So we're in there, and we've all got M-4s and 45s, and they've all got AK-4s. and they've all got AK-47s and beards. And we're having breakfast together. So there's a table of us and a table of them, and you're ready to go, and they're ready to go. And it was like that day after day. And they could come and go all they want.

And it was the same people. You could look out and you could see the coal. You could see the ship with the hole in it. So this is where the story's going. So I won't tell the whole story, but one of the weirdest gigs I ever played, they had a bar in there. and the head of the hotel had gone to the Cornell School of Hotel Operations, I mean, American.

I went in there one night, and there was a band playing. Granted, there's nobody there, but there's a nine-piece band playing, and I see a guitar leaning up on an amplifier, and I like to play guitar, and I said, hey, I think they'd let me sit in? So I go up on stage, and my buddy's amortified, right? What the fuck are you talking about? You're not going to go up and play guitar in a band, but I did. And so we play Proud Mary keeps on,

or we played some like Yemeni music, and then they played Proud Mary. Yeah. And then this guy looks at me, he didn't speak a word of English, and he goes, Hotel California. And I go, I know that one. Yeah.

Didn't speak any English whatsoever. We start the intro, and he starts singing, On the dog desert highway, cool ringing my hair. We're playing and ripping it up. And here come two Russian belly dancers who were doing a little hooking on the side in the hotel.

And I'm standing on stage, look out and here's a bunch of my, it's like four or five guys at a table over here with M-4s, and here's a bunch of guy with beards in AK-47s, and I'm playing Hotel of California with two Russian hooker belly dancers and a bunch of guys who don't speak English. And I'm thinking, man, this is great. You can't make this up. You can't make this up. Yeah.

Yeah. Jack Murphy, and I'm going to tell him this story. You can't make it up, but I'm thinking, this is awesome. So I go back. everybody takes off I go back and oh I had the M4 slung around my back and walked down off stage go to the elevator

and we had the sixth floor the entire entity had the sixth floor so we'd get we were a hot sheet in bed so you'd get eight hours in a bunk and then you'd sleep yeah unpleasant way to get your rest but so I walk up take the elevator to the sixth floor

and it opens up in the hallways kind of a Y two hallways like Y wings and there is a Marine Corps fast team there with a 60 behind sandbags pointed at the elevated door. So it's like for me, you know, it's 20 feet away. And you get an 18-year-old kid staring at you at 1 o'clock in the morning after you've been drinking two Borg and playing with a house band. We're going to Saigon. We're going to Saigon, right?

And I just smile and say, hey, guys, can I get your coffee or whatever? So the bunks were all down this wing. The other wing was all the different entities. So their hotel rooms. So it's FBI, CIA, DIA, N-C-I-S. It was just alphabet soup, all the different offices. And then at the end, they had moved the embassy from Sanaah down to the hotel. The ambassador's name was Barbara Bodine.

And she had come down. So she was running all in-country operations from that hallway in that hotel. And I get off, and I still have this. I was looking at it the other day. I get off the elevator and I'm walking down the hall just to see what's going on. you know like you hang it out in the command center and it hands me a piece of paper and it says i can't remember the exact words but it says something like uh we have received information that uh the element that blew up the coal is coming this way with a van full of explosion they're gonna blow us up

right and i go oh and it says um you know destroy this or something like you're not supposed to say because it's all your mouth and start chewing yeah yeah exactly because the whole fucking thing was was wired right they told us everything was video and audio and audio It was a fuck show. The whole thing was ridiculous. So the FBI program was run by a guy named John O'Neill. John O'Neill, contrary to what Richard Clark or any of these other guys say, nothing against Richard Clark. I like the guy.

But what these guys say, John O'Neill was the guy that knew terrorism. He ran what at the time was called the UBL Task Force, Osama Bin Laden Task Force, the New York Field Office. And he was the guy, right? We would go in support of him. But he was the guy. So he was running the investigation. Barbara Bodeen despised him and anybody knows John O'Neill

a lot of people despised him or a lot of people loved him too but they were big personalities and they hated each other and he would call her it was ugly so once the word got out that they were coming to blow us up

the US government didn't want to have 200 more FBI agents getting blown up at a hotel to go with a coal bomb ears it looks bad on TV right looks bad if you're me you know it's whatever so so here's the way it goes from here and this is so many operations i've been involved with go the exact same way so john o'neill says fuck this you're not going to kill any FBI agents on my watch he calls the national security council the national security council calls the pentagon the pentagon says yeah we'll go get those

guys but they locked on our c5 with a surface to air missile radar when they come in, tell them to turn that shit off. Barbara Bodine says, I'm not telling them to turn what to do with their missile radar. And in a hallway, at the Aden Hotel, under the circumstances that I described, you've got the Department of Justice at war with the Department of Defense, at war with the Department of State, with Barbara Bodine, the ambassador, who is the queen of the country, that's her country. And John O'Neill, who was the king of all that he surveyed,

was a big personality, screaming you mother, screaming all these insults. And I was the intermediary. And I was the guy. Two New Yorkers fighting over a parking spot. Exactly. That's exactly right. And I'm standing there and I'm trying. So I would talk to her, then I would talk to him. And then the CIA would come up and say, you got to do this. And the DIA and the NCIS is pissed off because it's, you know, there were sailors that were killed in the thing. And it was absolutely insane. Mayhem. It was mayhem. So eventually they ended up, they being somebody, I don't even know who it was, eventually ended up putting in a little bit of a convoy, we drove out to the port in the dark,

we got on a couple of amphibious landing vehicles, and we go out over the horizon, pitch black, and I'll never forget it, you guys do this all the time. A lot of your viewers go, yeah, what's so big about that? But I had never seen the nose of a naval ship open up. It was the, I think it was a Duluth, the USS Duluth. It was a helicopter carrier. And I remember, I don't even know where we're going, right? I got an M-4 and I'm in a boat.

And I'm with a bunch of people, I don't even know where. We could have been going to Africa for all I knew. I didn't know where we're going. And I look, somebody goes, holy shit. And I look up and it was just like a James Bond movie where the nose of the ship opened up. And we drive these amphibious vehicles up in the ship. And then the nose comes down. And then the red lights come on.

And then white lights and stuff like that. and we hung around there for, I don't know, we floated around for a couple weeks maybe. But I saw them when they came up with this ship that sunk down underneath the coal, lifted it up and floated it back to the States. So that particularly Yemen mission was interesting in a lot of ways. It was tragic in obvious ways, but it was interesting in other ways, primarily because everybody who thinks that what we do for a living is all one lockstep, smooth operation,

it's it's never that it's just in my experience yeah it was a cluster fuck every time why was did you expect going in that the Yemen military the Yemeni military the government was going to be so hostile towards you and what was the U.S.'s responses to that response to that given it you guys were there to do an investigation and you couldn't do it right I think my personal perspective was I did so many of them and so many places, I just didn't give a shit. I just assumed whenever I showed up someplace, we can talk about classifications and we can talk about whatever. But my world was so bizarre that, you know, I would show up for dinner with Madonna. And then I would show up in Yemen watching a fistfight

between the ambassador and the head of the FBI. Yeah. Everything was so bizarre. I didn't ever, I never wanted to know anything. I just wanted to do what I could do. I just wanted to do my little part. Yeah. And then go on to whatever the next, whatever it next was. So I wonder if you have cross paths with Gary Harrington. He had some interesting Yemen stories about that time. I'm sure I did. I still have a pass to the embassy and Sana'a.

So I probably at some point did. But that's the other thing. Excuse me. I'm already taking too much shot. No, no, no, you're fine. But we haven't got to classifications or names yet. Which is, I mean, we've talked about everything I didn't want to talk

about so far. But the really crazy shit, you keep asking me these questions. And I want to tell you the answer, but I'm going to make sense them somehow. The thing about HRT at that time was we were involved in everything, right? It didn't matter what you were. So people, can we just go to classifications? Yeah, absolutely. So classifications, as you guys well know, you get into these gigs and you get a TSSCI, right? That's basic. There's only three real classifications, right? And but when you get in that, if you get in various programs, you get read into different permissions. And some of them could be very broad, like Q, right? Q is D-O-E,

Because Department of Energy needed help moving, locating, dealing with nukes in various ways. That was our gig. Right? So you got to get Q. And I bring up Q for this reason. When I got Q, you could say Q and you could say clearance. If you said Q clearance in the same, in that combination, it was a felony. Right.

So I go, well, why do I want that? Right. I don't want to, I don't want to, why do I give a shit? I don't want a cue clearance. You get into this weird position where you can't say what your job is, your own colleagues. You can't talk to anybody, which is going back to Germany in a second. So it's okay with Q because that's one thing. But then you get read in on a specific, like all these Saps and stuff.

Yeah, a special access program that is one thing. Here's one example. I don't know what I can say about this. But I was involved in this one thing that you could research it and Google it and you could find little bits and pieces. is about that involve, I'll just say that it involves Osama bin Laden in Sudan. When he came out of Sudan in 96 when he went to Afghanistan, there was an aspect and I won't say anything about it. But it was, it had a special access handle, right?

And I was watching some, Billy Waz's book, he talks about it. Oh, he does? Well, the hunt for bin Laden and Sudan. Does he name that program? I don't, I don't probably not, but hunting the jackal is his book. He talks about being. there. So let's just say hypothetically I was somehow involved

in that. I was watching back in the day when I was doing a lot of TV. I see this guy come on and I've never seen him before and he's doing MSNBC or Fox. He's doing one of those things and he's getting up there his first time on TV and he goes yeah blah blah blah and he spits out that fucking name, that specific thing

and I almost choked on my Bratworth or whatever the hell I was doing it to time. And I thought, I can't believe he just said that on national television. And then I realized at that time how impossible it is to keep track of secrets because there are so many of them. I mean, when I think about how many programs I've been involved, like DARPA projects, or specific missions, or specific programs that are, like some of those things only last for

a day or a week or a month, and some of them last longer. But anyway, classifications while I was on HRT, and then afterwards, after I, after I was, left that became a huge pain in the ass because every time you get one it's more it's more ways to fuck up yeah right yeah and here's where so I end up on another gig and I was doing something in Germany and we were on the economy so I think we were working in Ramstein but we were living in one of those little towns one of those little villages around there and I was in it was the end of the day it was probably 11 o'clock at night and we were in one of those little rath skellers drinking beer and we had these two NSA guys who, in my experience, were most often staff sergeants in the,

in the Air Force, right? They're cover. Because the NSA's official cover, yeah, they're administered by the Air Force. Yeah. Oh, or were the actual Air Force? A lot of times, they're actually, yeah, a lot of times you might actually be. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I got a, one class, one other thing to go back to in a minute, but, so anyways, so it's 11 o'clock at night on a Thursday night, having a couple beers with the boys, because you're not on 24 hours a day forever. And so these guys came up. I knew who they were. I knew they were somehow involved with us, but they were in a different side of things. But I basically knew what they were. It wasn't a skiff, but it was a secure comms thing that they were doing. So they go up and they go, sir, we need to talk

to somebody who has this. And they said it out loud in a bar. And my first reaction is, where's the camera? Yeah. My first reaction is. that they were setting me up. Right. Because even when you're in something, they'll still run ops on you just to fuck with you to make sure that you're credible.

So I'm sitting in this bar and I just had this weird moment where I thought to myself, what do I do? I mean, do I dime these poor kids out because they're just trying to, they're trying to find somebody that they can pass the comms,

traffic, you know, for whatever else. But you just, you end up in those things all the time where you never, I personally, in my experience, running across all of those different things, I wouldn't know if you were part of the gig or if you were on the gig just to test me because you wanted to get me off the gig.

And it just became insanely confusing. I've heard that so many times in those little like that world of saps that it becomes kind of like cutthroat because as far as like being read onto all these programs some people perceive that as power. And there's only someone who wants to fuck you off of the program so that they can have it.

it. Plus, there's guys, and all they do, their entire job is just to go in and try to find guys to wash them out. Yeah. That's all they do. It's like the... It's like internal affairs. It's like internal affairs. That's exactly right. But not just investigating, not just investigating, but actually offering bribes to see what dudes do. That's exactly right. Their entire job is a control officer, is to find vulnerabilities in the program. So now I'm in Ramstein, Germany, getting ready for a real gig, sitting there talking to my buddies and these two staff sergeants come up and they either stepped on their dick in a really bad way or they're stepping on my dick in a really bad way and I had no clue as to what it was.

So those become a big, big problem, became a problem with me, names and programs because just two quick examples. Maybe we're going off track here. No, no. Okay. It's your track. So there is a true. I know we're doing this thing, but, you know, we go whiskey and cigars and this guy's talking, right but so anyways the first what i used to work i used to go to the farm a lot not the farm in the hampshire but camp perry and uh because they you know at the time in the early days of hr t there was a kill house at uh fort brag there was one at uh little creek there's one at hrt and they had one a very very crude one i think it was made out a canvas at camp perry but they had that track and you can shoot and and use any kind of expulsions you want on the track and we were

would use that so we would just circle around everybody would oh and we had the air the aircraft fuselages at davis monthe for practice and cqb on planes so one of the first times i go down to camp perry and we're running uh we're doing these we used to wrap axles with uh deck cord or flex linear and blow the wheels so that you could stop somebody if you're like doing some kind of an interdiction right and uh so we're out it's hot july or August in Virginia, we're covered in spalling and, you know, a mess. But you got to eat lunch. So we go up to the cafeteria and you go into the cafeteria like any other cafeteria at the farm.

And we're standing in line. And we were all wearing a Nomex flight suits tied around our waist. And you would never tell anybody who you were, right? They told us not to say anything to anybody. And so we're standing in line and there's these two chicks in front of us. And they're looking and they're talking and they're looking and they're talking. And this buddy of mine, Charlie, was a real good-looking guy. And so I just figured they were hitting on them or something.

So finally they turned to him and they go, who are you guys anyway? And, you know, they're wearing their Royal Robbins Cargo pants and a polo shirt. And Charlie doesn't know what to say. So he looks at him and he goes, we're with the Justice Department. She goes, good cover. And, you know, it goes through. And I realized sometime around that time that time that, nobody is anybody.

I mean, I would tell somebody on this and somebody would tell that. We did a thing one time. I'm sure somebody, maybe somebody who were watching this, they were part of it. But we got ready to do a hit one time in a Caribbean island through a DEA referral. So DEA had found some violent gang

that was doing some drug thing. It might have been St. Thomas, St. Croix. I mean, you guys were down in Puerto Rico a lot too back in the area. Yeah, yeah, we were everywhere. I mean, just traveled. I think some of those years we were on the road 300, 320 days a year. Wow. It was constantly gone.

So anyways, but it was a Delta app. It was a Delta, like some kind of a training thing. It wasn't a real thing. But we almost went down on a DEA referral to shoot it out with Delta on St. Thomas or St. Croix. Because we just didn't have the comms in those days.

Someone didn't de-conflict it. Yeah. I don't even think knew a deep they didn't even have that term right right it was just you just didn't have there were no comms there was just it was a very very very different world in those days so talk to us about you know getting into all this this murky world tell us about you know september 12th and you know driving down the street okay up at langley in the penton so as you retire yeah so for whatever reason oh and by the way do you do you want a drink do you want i think it's time yeah do you uh do you like

rocks uh i don't care whatever you go no we have just pour some Something in that one right there would be fabulous. For anybody who doesn't know what's going on, I purposely did not want anything to drink for a certain amount of time. With you, Hulgans, I just said there's no point in adding alcohol to one of these conversations. Which is what we're known for by the... I've watched it a million times. Yeah.

I watch all your shows. Thank you, man. And I'm a huge fan. I think you guys do a remarkable thing for America to give people an idea. You bring people in, in their own. words they tell what they've gone through. My experience is probably only my experience. Everybody I've ever worked will go, you know, that's not the way I remember it, but that's, you know, the beauty is you bring in everybody. But the thing is, we wouldn't be here without people like you

coming in and willing to share your stories. I think, you know, we are humble paupers in the presence of people like you. I mean, honestly, okay, let me just back up a second and suggest something. If people really know what you guys did and do and are, I'm the humble popper and I'm an interloper. I shouldn't even be here. No, I mean, every guy we have on here, no matter like how heroic they were. And girl. It always always plays like, oh man, you have some like real heroes on this show. I don't think I should be on there. And I'm like, and yeah, like Dave said, I'm like, I was like a ranger and a green beret for like a short period of time and a little microscopic slice of history. And I mean, I'm just flattered to that the, that the, you know,

people give me the time of day. And I like Dennis Dragon, so everybody's cooler than me. I've just seen so many guys come on this show. There's no point going through the names, but that are just absolute, they're remarkable human beings, extraordinary patriots, and I want to know what they did and how they did it in a respectful way. I mean, nobody's in here telling secrets and blowing various things. Nobody's getting anybody in trouble or anybody hurt.

But if you don't record history, then you're going to, You're doomed to repeat it. How can you turn around and say, hey, the American public doesn't understand what we do as Rangers or FBI agents or seals or whatever the hell it is if you don't talk about it at all. If you just maintain that wall of secrecy, then, yeah, of course, the public has a total misunderstanding of, you know,

what these groups do. And also, like you say, it's not just PR, but it's history. It's, I mean, you know, I think Jack was fortunate enough to get a lot of interviews with, you know, some of the last living OSS guys, a while ago. OSS guys, not, no. I thought you had a few interviews.

I mean, I've interviewed some people from way back in the day. Yeah. Mostly starting with the Vietnam era. Okay. But I've been, yeah, I've been very fortunate to interview, like, a lot of the OGs who, like, stood up blue light and Delta, like, those original guys. But imagine if we could, you know, get, you know, like, the OSS on interviews, or if we had guys from War I, if, you know, so much of what we learned from history is written by

historians and not the actual people. who So tell us. But anyway, you retire and drive a line down the street with your big idea. Thank you.

Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Dave. Yeah. Anybody who listen to this thing, every detail, they'll say, that's not right. Right.

No, you resign. I want to make sure that I say that I resigned after 16 years. Yeah. But I did, right? Card game with Brad Pitt. September 12th,

I wake up at the Mercer Hotel and I go, fuck, what do I do now? Right. We're going to war. Like the world's on fire and you just

left the job that would have put you there. 100% right. And not only that, but John O'Neill, who had been with in Yemen, came back to the United States, got in a piss and match with the bureau and retired. He took a job, and you may know the story, but John O'Neill was the head of the UBL Task Force, who was the number one guy, in my opinion, in my opinion,

in the United States government, when it came to al-Qaeda, big personality, whatever you want to say about John. He left the FBI, and he took a new job as director of security, at the World Trade Centers and September 11th with his first day on the job and he died in the attacks. So any sack of shit that tells me some conspiracy theory about 9-11 and we knew this and we don't, it makes my blood boil. I mean, September 12th, I've got to figure out a way back into the war. And it just so happened that I had spent a good deal of my time in other government agencies

because we collaborate. Right. So you could be in the FBI and you could work with other agencies, one of which was the CIA. So I said, okay, I got an idea. So when I sold my first book,

in those days, if you sold a book, you got to, you know, publishing a book is one thing, selling this another thing altogether. You get to get on all the shows. Like this show, right? Back in the day, it was the Today show, Oprah or whatever,

whatever the case was. So back then, if you published a book and a magazine, excerpted you a book that was a huge deal. At the time there was Esquire, Vanity Fair, Playboy, Max, there weren't many. Time.

Yeah. People still read time. Yeah, they still read time. Do that book episode? I don't know, but I mean, to have your book reviewed or feature in a magazine. Well, yeah. I mean, if they review it, that's good. I mean, if they review it favorably, that's good.

But the excerpts were like-y-chapter. They actually took chapters and they published them in the magazine, which was a big deal at the time. Yeah. Q magazine, as absurd as that sounds, and as much shit as that caused me with everybody that I knew, you know, you don't want to be, it was awful. But at the same time, it was good. It really helped.

And the Bureau supported that. As an author is perfect. Yes. As a former action guy, you got a ton of shit. It was horrible. And I showed you, right? They put me on the inside cover. I showed you the picture.

And I was like in a jungle and I had this shirt on and too much shit in my hair. It was just. It was a glam shot. I mean, you were a sex bomb in that photo, man. I'm going to hang that up on the wall here. It was horrifying. Horrifying. But it happened.

The good news was the guy that ran GQ magazine is the guy named Art Cooper. And Art Cooper had a kung fu grip. I mean, he was among guys who were camouflaged, tidy whiteys, he's Mark Wahlberg models and stuff like that. Among magazine publishers, he was a stud. A remarkable guy. I loved him. And so anyways, he,

invited me over to his office. I'm sitting in his office. Had this incredible bar, chain smoking cigarettes. And he goes, hey, you want to go to Afghanistan and find bin Laden? And I thought to myself, now this was like a month after. So this is maybe the first week in October after 9-11. And I thought to myself, yes, I do. So I go, I know just what to do.

So I went down, I went home, that was in New York. I went back to, I was living still in Virginia. And I got my car and I drove out to Langley. And I told you this story before, but this is what a moron I am. So let's say that I had a pass. I had a hall pass at Langley, right? And then there's one primary entrance. What is it?

123, right 123, I think. That like, it's right into it. Yeah, yeah. Chamber and gate. Yeah. And the main gate, there's two lanes going in. There's a guard shack on the right. And then if you're a visitor, you just go around back.

You park your car and you go in and you sign in and you go in, right? So at the time I had a Porsche 9-11 And so I'm hauling ass up there And I've got my sniper partner on a cell phone One of those Nokia's like it had the black and white screens, you know Yeah, yeah And I've got the top deck And I've got I was listening to Ludicrous

I'll never forget it I've got Don't ask me why But I had ludicrous pumping I had this big subwoofer in there And my sniper partner Is giving me incredible amounts of shit You know About the GQ

thing saying everybody hates me and you know can't show my face there anymore but we have a tea time we're playing golf that Saturday yeah he's just fucking with you though right he was because he's a great guy yeah I'm sure there was a lot of consternation yeah yeah and uh and then I've got art Cooper you know back in those days you'd have a little car phone right like a little it's like a landline but it was in your car yeah right so I've got one on each ear and they're yelling at me and I'm feeling happy because I got a war back I got to find a way to back into the war on terrorism right I got a press pass to after Afghanistan.

Right. GQ is sending you there as a journalist. Correct. Condé Nast is going to pay my first class airfare and reasonable expenses to go find bin Laden. Check. So I roll up 110 miles an hour, pull off the exit. I go through the gate the way I've always gone through the gate. I get to the gate and I realize I don't have a pass anymore.

I'm out. I go, fuck. Hit the break. Or I hit the clutch and they're very close. together on that car and I locked up the tires shifting to reverse back up go around back parked to go in and go in like a visitor and I look in the rearview mirror and here comes a SWAT team MP5s leveled at my head they surround the car you know doing a felony car stop on me at the main gate to CIA headquarters and because you know I wasn't thinking but anyway I knew

the guys and it all worked out just fine. I go in and this woman I know this this friend of mine, a hero. This woman, she should be on your show. She's absolutely crazy. She's a, she was a colonel in the army who had two high speed parachute failures, one of which put a steel plate in her head, titanium plate in her head. And she would get vertigo real bad in certain situations. And you guys probably know there are certain configurations at Langley that I've never seen them printed anywhere so I'm not going to say what they were but there's you know what I'm talking about Dave the there's places you walk in Langley that are really weird geographically geometrically like they look similar uh anyway the point in the story was she the only way she could get through these places

in the building was to walk with their hands closed with her eyes closed on the walls so she We'd have to walk down the hallways so that she wouldn't pass out and throw up because of the steel plate in her head. She was incredible. Anyway, the point in the story is she'd set up on lunch. So we go into, they have three, I think there's three administrative dining rooms there. It's like ADR 1, 2, and 3 or something like that. But anyways, so we go not to the cafeteria at Langley, but go to one of the big wig dining rooms with a linen tablecloth, looking out into the, you know, over the Potomac through the woods.

And I'm thinking, man, I've arrived. this is the life. I'm not eating cheese burgers at the cafeteria. No Brad Pitt or Madonna, but still. I haven't got to the Madonna story. Yeah, that's a fucking hysterical story. But see, I shouldn't have done this even yet. So anyways, we go in and I go, so these two guys, she's with me, and these two guys,

I do not know, but I know who they are. And so we're eating broccoli and sirloin tips or whatever else. And I say, here's my plan. And I remember very clearly, the guy looks at me and he's nod in his head, and he goes, maybe you have forgotten a couple or haven't thought about a couple things one the United States government has 16 intelligence agency and B-52 bombers five five branches of the military and B-52 bombers he said the CIA gathers intelligence for clients that include the White House the FBI chases thieves and I go well I guess he put me in my place

but you know how we are right which is not what I was really thinking and I said well yeah I get that interesting but maybe you haven't thought about this and I went over the plan again and his buddy goes wow okay that makes great sense so he pulled out a card he wrote down a number and he said go see this guy right now I'll tell him you're calling so I got in my car I drove to the Pentagon and I went into the Pentagon and there's some guy I have no idea what he was but I only remember this he had this heavy heavy Boston accent and I grew up in the Hampshire, right? So I know Boston accents. So he's, I walk in there and he's got on a, like, this shitty looking knit tie, like with a square knit tie. And he's got on his shirt, his shirt

sleeve is rolled up, and he's got three watches on his arm. And I go, hey, how you doing? I said, you're from Boston? And he said, no. He goes talking, anyways, he was, I still have no idea who he was. I assume he was some aspect of DIA, but, you know, I still don't know who he was. But he put the whole thing together. And so I flew to London. I flew to, at the time, you could go through his, you could come through Uzbekistan, or you could come down to Jikistan, which is a very, very long overland drive, and it was dangerous. But each had pluses or minus, but Uzbekistan, at the time, Victoria Tenzing had put together the embed program. So they were putting guys like Haraldo Rivera. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what's her name?

Who was that chick with the blonde hair? I'm sorry, that was unkind. She was incredibly famous and very Ashley Bamfield. Oh, yeah. She was huge at the time. Anyway, these guys were getting all the great slots. So I decided to go into Islamabad and then go north through the Khyber Pass. But when I got there, they were killing everybody that was coming through the Khyber Pass, so I couldn't get there.

So what do you do? The first thing you do is you go to the embassy, right? So check into the hotel and everybody was there. All the Western news outlets were there at the hotel. So I go to the embassy. I've got a meeting at the embassy, and we all know who's at the embassy. And put the whole thing together, and I'll remember I walked in there. Can I tell the story?

Yeah. I try not to swear in this thing, but I got to tell this. Oh, you can swear. Like, this is, we're on an adult channel. So nobody under, nobody under, or, The age of 18 or 16 or whatever. So my partner, I don't know how to describe this guy, but this guy was, before he joined the FBI,

he was a controller for a company in San Diego. He was a very, very, very smart fucking guy. And he had a solid gold Rolex. I don't know what model was, like a date just or something, but solid gold, which he wore on HRT. Most of the guys on HRT, some of the guys on HRT had Rolexes, but they weren't solid gold. Right.

They were like a sub or GMC, right? Right. And so, but he was an incredible guy and he was unbelievable with a rifle. I mean, he was just incredible. So, great guy. So my partner. So the point in the story is this. So his, somebody he had worked with was now working in the league at in Islamabad and he'd set up a meeting.

So I go in to see him and this, your guys. And so I go into this office and he's got all the GIs. I said, hey, what's going on? He goes, how do you know? Or I said, how do you know Buck? And he said, well, they were agents together in San Diego, and they played together on a softball team. And the softball team was called,

My Dick is so hard I don't have enough skin left to close my eyes. And I said, I look at him and going to go, what? Who would even think of something like that? And why would you say it to me in the league at in Islamabad? You know, it was just such weird things happened. And I look over, and on his desk, he had that book, the first book, and he had a copy of GQ Magazine opened to the thing. And it said, that part of it said, has a license to kill, no, has the ability to kill and the license to do so.

And he had highlighted it with a yellow magic marker. That's hilarious. And I go, oh my God, I am the world's biggest moron. Absolute fool. So anyways, the point in the whole story is that the agency guy says, you know, this country is a dry country, you're going to need some leverage. I'll be right back. So he goes and he gives me two bottles of Johnny Walker Black, which in Islamabad, I'm sure you know, was Nicole. Yeah.

Because I had to get a multiple entry visa or whatever. So I get my two bottles of Johnny Walker and I go back to the hotel and there was. were two bars in Islamabad. One was at that hotel, one was at the other hotel, the other Western hotel. So here's the point in the story. So I've just, I've got this buddy of mine who is a, he has a very, very famous girlfriend. I told you who his girlfriend was, right? And he's got a, he's a very, I don't know how to describe this guy. He's, he's there because he's my buddy, and he's taking photographs for GQ Magazine because he's a really great photographer, but he's also a bad, bad dude. I mean, he's fearless and he's good anywhere you want to go. So we go back

to the hotel and he's an extremely worldly guy. So we go down to the basement. He gets in about three fights fights trying to find a drink. We go in the basement. There's a bar and you've got to sign in a testing that you're not Muslim in order to own a drink to buy a drink. Right. So he says, fuck these guys. So he signs in as our buddy, the movie director, he would always call himself El Belagio, like his undercover name when he's going to a UFC fight and he checks into the four seasons, right? So he signs in as El Belagio and I signed in as Team Rope header. We'll get to that story. That's like one of my cover identities as I was a cowboy, you know. And so we sign into this book and we go into the bar with the only two guys in the bar and they have

this stuff. It's called, I think it was called Murray, M-U-R-R-E-E, gin, vodka, whiskey, beer, all the same manufacturer and it's manufactured by Pakistanis even though it's a dry country. Oh interesting. So you can't buy any booze in Pakistan except the booze they make which I still have not figured out. So we're sitting at the bar and Joe says

you got any women around here? And I said Joe come on man relax we've got a job to do he goes shut up with let me work. So he ends up it's Ramadan. He ends up up negotiating one of the bottles of Johnny Walker Black for like the bartender's sister in like four of her best friends. And Joe, cut this shit out, you know, it's ridiculous.

But now 11 o'clock or 12 o'clock at night, we've had six or seven beers. A guy comes walking in. This is all the same day. Arrive, check in, go to the embassy, get the booze. Joe's trying to trade it from a couple of hookers during Ramadan. And it's now almost midnight. And I haven't slept for three days. And a guy comes in. me on the shoulder and he goes, Mr. Christopher or something like that, and hands me a piece of paper and walks away. And just like a bad movie, it says, meet at this address. I go, what the fuck is this? So we go upstairs, walk outside, get directions, walk four blocks, and we're standing at midnight in Islamabad on a street corner and a car pulls up, a sedan, like a Toyota

the carola and the guy basically says get in the car and I'm thinking to myself we're not getting in the car yeah and then I think to myself well how do they know who we are and what are we doing here maybe we maybe we should get in a car but my point in this isn't from the embassy bar right this is no no no no no this is in a hotel bar oh hotel bar okay I'm with no other Westerners okay zero other people so the point of the story is I'm going from being part of an organization that through my clearances and through my covers and through all this insane shit I did around the world, all this stuff was great. As long as you trust your backstop, you know

who gave you the cover. Right. And you know who's the blockbuster video card and somebody else's kid in your wallet. There's a credit card aged. Yeah. Yeah. You know it's all backstop and it's all right. And you know the people you're interacting with have that code like Kevin Ramstein. And if they say something. Yeah. You know, it all makes sense. There's a transition where that's, I realized, I'm not in that world anymore. Right. Now I'm just the moron who's decided he's trying to do this by himself. Right. Oh, I forgot to tell you. There's nobody coming for you. Okay. Yeah. I forgot to tell you. When he gave me the two bottles of Johnny Walker Black, he said, listen, dude, he said, I don't, he said, I don't know what they told you, but there's no, we're not giving you a bloodshit,

and we're not giving you a phone number to call in West Virginia for excellence. You're on your own. There's no QRF. Nobody's coming to get you. You can go on your own. We're not going to stop you. But you need to know nobody's coming to get you. And I go, okay, that was that. So then I end up in this car. We drove outside, like on the other side of the mountains outside of Islamabad, and we end up, by this time it's probably 1 o'clock in the morning. And we end up pulling into a polo club. It looks like a country club in, you know, in Omaha. Playing cricket, yeah? Yeah. So 1 o'clock in the morning, we pull into this country club, and there's three prodos parked in a dirt lot. So we walk in this building,

and a guy points to Joe and says, you sit over there, and I walk in, and I walk in, and there's this guy, and he's wearing, I forget what the hat is called, but, you know,

different tribes were different types of hats, and he's wearing a specific hat that meant something. I just don't remember what it was. And he points down, I sit down at the table. The guy brings tea, thinking, okay,

this is going pretty, well and he goes is he goes did they call people team rope headers in northern Virginia and I and I look down and he's got a copy of my passport on the table

and he knows that I just signed in to the bar as team rope header and he's telling me he knows where I'm from it was IASI guys right so we had Stern talking to and then they were incredible in how they

set up and interact fixers and everything else. And so Joe's sitting there like, so the girls are like... Now, when he said in Northern Virginia, though, was... Because you were there under very real journalistic cover, right? You were there as a journalist. Yes.

With the proper backstops because that was the real thing. Correct. Did they know... Why did he say Northern Virginia then? Because the CIA is in Northern Virginia. Right, but did they know, like, were you able to talk your way out of that and say, I'm just here as a journalist? No, there was no talking.

I don't know that I said anything. Yeah. You know, I think I had my tea and I nodded. And he just basically said, you know, we're on. He said something like, I think he said, Musharraf, you should recall that Musharraf came to power through force. I think he said we're a very old country. Oh, he said, we're a very new country in a very old part of the world. world. That's exactly what he said. We're a very new country and a very old part of the world.

And then he said something about Masharraf. But he was just basically telling me, don't fuck around. Yeah, don't fuck around. We're on it, right? Yeah. As it turns out, and I found this after the fact, that anybody that was involved in that from the CIA side or from the FBI side or from the military side or for anything else, at that time, no matter what your gig was, and I know this now after the fact, no matter what your gig was at that time, there was shit going on that you did not know about. Unequivocally, I don't care who you are or what you say. I know you've had those guys on the show. I'm huge fans. I'm enormous respect, but there was, no matter who you were, there's shit going on, you didn't know that you weren't read on. My thing was small, yeah,

and my thing was very specific. So to be, because there's a lot of other stories, the bottom line was, I was supposed to go first to Peshawar, and then, because the, the, uh, the, uh, Khyber Pass was closed down. And my job, was to go to deer in a northwest frontier province and I met a cleric who took us to an overland route to her rot to the north a real fucking off-grid place and there's a very there's a there's a story that you guys may know about um what was the name of that fucking town outside of deer. I can't even remember now, but there was another town that something happened at that time

with a military operation that crossed over with some people, which there were references to it. I don't know what it was, but I know they were there. Yeah, I mean, there were a couple of different things. I mean, it could have been a raider. There's like some stuff where like drones went down and stuff had to be recovered. No, no, this was a transport of people across. But I don't want to get into that because I don't know. what it was I don't want to say anything and I know something happened and I was there.

Are you talking about when they brought the al-Qaeda guys from Afghanistan to Pakistan? Yes. Yeah, Miller talks about that when we interviewed him. Okay, okay. Okay. So anyways, it was at that time, at that place. And so, but it was a specific, it was a specific Mullah who was taking people from Pakistan over. And he went in like the legend, not the legend, but the rumor at the time was he took 13,000 people over when he came back with five. It was one of those stories. Who knows what the numbers were, but he was a problem. So hypothetically speaking, my intention was not to try to stop him, but to try to get an idea of who these people were and where they were coming from. So anyways, the point of story is spent time there and then went very, very unpleasant time there,

then went back to Islamabad where I got really bad dysentery, including. to Quetta in the south, drove from Quetta to spin Baldock crossing over at the West Chaman crossing going up to Kandahar when the fighting moves out. And that's the last story there. And here it is. We got there sick as a dog. I'd been in a safe house, huddled around a hole in the floor, a hole in the floor, delirious for three days with fever. And I get in the back of yet another Toyota Corolla. And we make our work. way over and get to the border crossing and anybody that's been to that board across and there's nothing there it's like talcum powder you know it's like the whole south of afghanistan the moon dust yeah

the moon dust right everybody knows the moon dust so but there were the the refugees were coming across and a lot of the guys that were getting in the fighting were coming across the border too to try to get help in in uh in quetta right was just like three hours away so anyways the point i mean quetta is the port uh town in uh port city in pakistan right it's not a port it's inland it's inland but it's a it's a huge transport facility and I don't even remember landing there but so but I'll just end the story here about how how how the thing worked out so then at that point had been there quite a long time we killed two different guys with cars I mean we hit two different guys with cars and there's a lot I'm not telling you about a lot that I'm not telling you about but we

get in this like I was telling you before we pull into this thing and it's now seven 7 o'clock at night, it's dark. It's Ramadan so you can't eat. I'm sick. The driver stops at this cinder block building. You can see the border. And we're supposed to meet a guy named Rzeek, a warlord named Rizek that, I don't want to say warlord. He was a, you know what I mean, right? You're interlockinger into that world. He was a local leader. Yes, he was a local leader. He was an influencer. He was an influencer. He was not a fixer. He was the fix. This is a real fucking deal, right? But we're three days late.

So we pull into this cinder block building. I'll stop the story here. So Joe and I get out of the car and we walk in. And the driver is kind of our translator fix or whatever else. And walk inside and there are like three, four tables off to the right hand side. Everybody has an AK and a beard and Shawak comedies. But we're dressed local too, right? But I look like a diamond and a goat's ass.

I mean, I looked like a complete utter idiot. and Joe looks very plausible because he's got a beard, he's swarthy, he's like Slavic guy, and he's got a camera. So he looks plausible as a journalist. So we go over to the side to order some tea, and there's nobody there, but on the wall was a framed, not a frame, a big poster like you'd have behind, like I had behind my bed when I was a little kid. And it was Clint Eastwood from the Dirty Harry movies with a 44 magnum pointing it, like most people have seen that poster.

Yeah, yeah. And I look at Joe and I go, what the fuck? What's he doing on the border crossing into Afghanistan? And right next to him was an 8 by 10 glossy of Osama bin Laden with an AK Carbean pointing it at Clint East's head. And I go, you can't make this shit up. It was just absurd. So we walk over and sit down in the corner, sweats dripping off my face.

I look over, they're all staring at us. And all of a sudden one of these guys stands up, and Joe, Joe had a casting company. He was a casting director in Hollywood. But he said it looked like Kat Stevens on crack. And it did. He was mangy. It looked like he had rabies.

And the guy picks up his AK in his hand and a chair. And so I'd say it's a big room. So probably 20 feet, 25 feet from that pot of tables to where we were sitting. He brings a chair in the middle of the room. There's nothing there. It's just open space in the middle of the room. Put his chair down and goes like this. like he's eavesdropping, like he's listening to us.

And I go, look at what's going on to this guy. What an idiot. And then he picks up his chair and he walks the rest of the way to the table, puts his chair down with his knee touching Joe and says, who are you guys? Kind of like that. I mean, not much of an accent. And Joe thinks about it for a minute and he goes,

Je suis journalist. Joe doesn't speak French. I always say that he has occasional dinners at Tour d'Argent. and he has Reeve-Gos hair, right? He's wearing a Prada jacket. Right, right. And I go, oh, fuck. And I say, you know, I don't know.

You're like, mm, may we? Yeah, he goes, you're French. And I said, maybe Joe said we, but I couldn't tell because all the blood shunted into my nut sack. Couldn't hear anything. And so, so I go, we are, we're dead now for sure. Yeah. Because he doesn't speak French.

This guy, I'm sorry, this guy spoke. French. He spoke English and he spoke French and he was one of them. So I go, who would have thought that? Yeah. So I go, okay, well, we're going to die. I know we're going to die. And the only thing I've got is a fighting chance in this thing is if I can get in those guys and get one of those AKs, they're shooting at each other and maybe I'll get some of them. But it came to that. You know, every time you get in a fish fight and there's that moment just before the first punch lands and you know it's on it just nobody's bleeding yet right we're there right so i go okay i just say anything to joe i stood up cat stevens on crack is still sitting there get up

walk across the room as i'm walking straight at them and they're all staring at me and i've delirious sweats pouring off me you're just trying to close the distance because they've got the weapons exactly right because i don't you know the danny pearl thing i don't want my head chopped right i said i'll I don't want to die getting my head cut. Right. That's a shit way to go. Right. So I go by the door and I forget to say this door was literally, shit you not had a swimming.

Swinging doors with a couple of movers broke out. So I look out and I see in the parking lot, there was one bulb over a gas pump and the car's gone. The drive is gone. So the parking lot's empty. So it's now just me and Joe in this room with these guys. And I go, all right. And then, you know, you put together a five-paragraph order, and I'm thinking, you know, it's three hours back.

And it's, it's, I'm doing math, and the math sucks. You're out there flapping. Right. I'm flapping. Right. I'm flapping. And I know I'm flapping, but I'm too sick to care. Because I think I've really got one shot at this thing and fucking, I mean, if I'm going to die,

it's not going to get my hit chopped off. Right. I'm not getting on my knees. Right. Not getting on my knees. Right. So anyways, I walk up to the table. And these guys are looking at me, and I don't know what they're thinking, but they get these looks on your face.

Like, who is this fucking retard. and one of the AKs was on the table and it was had the the bolt up you know the flip switch is down yeah so I'm thinking I don't have to do anything I just got to grab it and pull a trigger and so the guy looks up at me who I kind of thought was the leader and he puts his hand on his like his finger on the pistol grip and he looks at me and he goes and then two guys stand up and they go and watch and walk over to the door and I go, well, I mean, what am I going to do now? Right.

So I walk back to the table, and I get back to the table, and Kat Stevens is standing there and picks up his chair and he walks back. And Joe looks up at me and he goes, he's gone, isn't he? The driver. I go, yep. He goes, wit, I got to tell you, this spy shit's getting pretty fucking old. It's the only thing he said, the month we were there or whatever, five weeks were there, the only thing he said in all the shit that we'd been through.

and I always said the first rule of not letting people know you're in the intelligence community is not making obvious lies about not being in the intelligence community. So anyways, obviously I survived. But that was... This is one of those like programs that some weirdo in some sub-office somewhere authorized in those fearful days after 9-11 that never, ever, ever would have gotten approved otherwise. If the Pentagon hadn't just had a hole blown in it, there's no way somebody would have signed off on this. I don't think anybody did sign off on it.

That's even worse. I think somebody said, the guys I had lunch with said, okay, I get it, but I don't want anything to do with it. Go see this guy. And I went to see that guy, and I think he thought I came from there. Right, right. I didn't know how. Yeah, hooked this guy up. We got him.

Yeah. We got him. We got him. And he didn't have to hook up shit. Right. Because I got myself there. Right. All he had to do was put together the pieces. It's like I'm hiking the Appalachian Trail. Right. People are staging food as I go along. Right.

So the fixers and the places to stay and guns, I mean, that's another thing. When you do things like that, if you've got a gun, you're only two things in a situation like that. You're either media or you're not. Right. And if you've got a gun, you're not. You're not media. Right. Right.

And there's times when a gun would help you fight. in a situation maybe like that, probably not, but two or three guys at a roadblock or something, like when I went to Somalia? Right. Oh, we haven't got there. But in that situation, the point I think in this whole story is that was the first time I realized that I could build a world

around what I knew of your world. I knew what you guys, agency, special forces, Delta, Seal Team 6, All the agencies, all the teams, all the countries. And at this point, I'd probably been to, I'd say at least 45 or 50 countries doing different things. Yeah. And I knew what I could get away with, and I knew how to work around those different things. Right. And then it goes back to Uncle Harold paying the CIA a million dollars, building his own private enterprise.

And that's really what it became. Yeah. A month after I got out of the theater. So Joe, because we haven't really talked about it. You know, you mentioned Joe was with you. and that he was the photographer had he had an Intel background or was he just

you just kind of brought him on and like just brought him on Joe had no background in anything but he had spent a great deal of time at HRT so had El Belagio so my director friend those guys were there and they knew that world oh sorry well probably want to turn it off anyways but no no no he was I mean he's a remarkable guy

he can tell his own story. He can write his own five books. He can, I mean, his life is so fucking wild. It makes me look like an amateur hour. But he was that guy that could survive in any situation. And there are a lot of others. I mean, there's some other stories that I won't go into. So through this like misadventure,

you sort of realized that you could create like an intelligence platform. That's it. And here's where it goes. I figured a way to make money off it. I figured out a way not to just, Because you can, what people don't realize about the intelligence community, in my opinion, in my experience, based on my 20-something, 30-something years in that world, overtly and obliquely, is that it all comes down to tasking. There is benign intelligence, human intelligence gathering that gives nobody heartburn, right? Like national resources, right?

Yeah. Like NR, if you work in an NR thing, you can, an intelligence agency can gather information from somebody who is not otherwise involved in the game in any way. They don't have any training. They don't have anything. They just fly on a regular basis to India and when they come back. You have a meeting and you feel like a patriot and you get some information, right?

There's that aspect. The moment you turn to tasking, bells go off. It's espionage. It's espionage. Yeah. Right. As soon as they tell you to do something. Right.

And it could be any they. now there's 18 intelligence agencies. As soon as you do something, it all comes down to tasking. What I realized early in the game, and I'm talking October 2001, was that there is a line in between. If you know it well enough,

if you know the system and you know the players and know how everybody works, what they want, you can be a patriot, you can have a hell of a time, and you can make a little money. And does that come from knowing what the

taskings would be knowing the requirements. So you don't need to be tasked. You can say, hey, I'm either you say it or you just do it, but I'm going to get this information, but nobody's ever tasked you on it. That's correct. But I knew the task. Right. So when I'm, when I, when I, when I presented a plan, it did not need to be signed off on by anyone. Right. It was plausible. Right. And it provided benefit to someone without any downside whatsoever. I mean, if I died, if I had got my head cut off instead of Danny Pearl. Right. In Lahore. And I'd been there many, plenty of times. Yeah. And it could have happened when I went out to the polo club. Yeah. That could have happened. Yeah. I'm just a lucky fuck. That's all I'm saying. But if you know, and listen, there are probably

people watching this right now who are CIA case officers, operations officers, FBI agents, Delta Force operated, seal team six guys. They've all got stories on the side. They've got, everybody's got a story where they were a little bit off to the side. And you know that, right? And there are all things that don't make sense. What I found a way to do and did it for very long time was to work in between those things. It's very smart because it's very because again it's like hey especially when you're getting the journalistic top cover when you're like hey I'm going to be doing this thing. I'm going here. I'm going to talk to these people. I don't want any task but I'm curious I'm curious like what what types of things you guys are interested in this area that I'm going to be.

It was kind of it was not even that. It was that idea. Yeah. When I first introduced my plan, I'm not going to talk about what I actually did. Right. Or how I actually did it. But I think it was clever. Yeah.

And I think it benefited in significant ways. Because if you're in the intelligence community, like you had a very minimum need a waiver to use journalistic cover. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those big no-n-no. It's like using, it's like using Red Cross as a cover. Like, there are things that are just... Red Cross, members of the clergy.

Journalists, it's just not something that's allowed. Yeah. Well, I got bad news for you, gentlemen. That's where this goes. Well, so the curious thing, though, is I don't remember seeing any articles written by Chris Whitcomb about... Oh, yeah. Were they out there? Oh, fuck yeah.

Yeah? I wrote, I wrote for the New York. Times. I had an op-ed contract with the New York Times. I wrote about all aspects of this stuff from the New York Times. I wrote about, I wrote for, like the Sunday Magazine section, I wrote for various things, but I wrote, I think I wrote six different articles for GQ. But that whole thing was, it was a horrible article because it was, I got back, like editors and writers, I'm a writer who does all these things, but writing is important to me. And I got back and Art Cooper assigned this editor. And I'm not going to make statements about men, females,

you know, whatever else. All I can say is this editor was trying to make sense of my article, the subtext of what you and I are talking about right now. And she left, after I get in a piss and match with her, she left and went to Red Book Magazine and started editing cookbook recipes, right? So you take a cookbook recipe editor from Red Book Magazine trying to make sense of me and all the shit that I did.

Yeah, the article's written it. I mean, it's got pictures of me wearing all the local garb. Like that picture that I sent you with the whatever the fucked up head, the head gear. That was one of those things up there. And there's like there's this one place where I was sleeping in a in a goat shed and, you know, there was just, anyway, just to wrap the story up, this guy Rizek came in after the whole thing happened when I almost tried to get in a gunfight in the corner. He came in and those were his guys. And what I had manufactured to be great drama in life, in reality

was his guys watching overs. Oh wow. I just didn't realize that. Yeah. You know? And then I was okay from that point on. I mean, I wasn't okay because there were other elements, but it wasn't those guys were not the threat that I thought. Even though it was a legitimate concern. So, yeah, that's a pretty wild ride. Well, it hasn't even started yet, man.

I mean, that was just, that was the dry run. That was like the fucking, Okay. So that was you dipping your... That was proof of concept. Right. That was, yeah. Proof your concept. Dipping your toe in the pool.

When you came back to the debrief you, like how did that work? What can I say about that? I came back to the States and I had to present, I had to write an article for GQ Magazine. I know that sounds absurd, but I did. And the first thing we did was go to L.A. I mean, literally flew from, okay, I probably shouldn't tell all these things. But so the thing about Joe is Joe was the first guy I ever knew that had an American Express black card. Remember, when those first came out, they were invitation only.

Yeah. Right. You couldn't get one. If you wanted one, you didn't have a chance. They would call you up and invite you. Joe was one of the first guys I ever knew that had a black card. And he had a cell phone with overseas coverage. The black card meant you had a concierge, right?

So you'd call a number and he'd go, Mr. Joe. And he'd say, I need a vegetarian restaurant. and her rot in, you know, in some like, some acacia tea or something like, right? And because, you know, I told you, he had just come from Madonna's wedding and his girlfriend was like this household name, right? So anyways, we get on a plane, uh, fuck. We're going to have to cut this thing off pretty quick because I'm going to have another scotch and it's going to go south. So anyways, just to close up the Afghanistan story, we go back to, um, he found a, he calls his concierge, and he gets us two tickets on a 747 100, 100 out of Islamabad airport.

And we take off. Now, I haven't taken a shower in a month. I'm not exaggerating. I mean, I looked like, I mean, it was, this whole thing was much worse than I'm letting on. It was much worse. I'm just, I don't want to make the whole thing about one story. But, so anyways, he would always say it clerages. And for those who don't spend a lot of time in London,

London. Clerges is one of the great hotels on earth. I mean, it's the bar, and Joe knew the bartender. He knew everybody, you know, Mr. So-and-so. And so we go there and let's see, I'm not going to tell you all those stories. But so we go back from London after a stay at Claridge's, take a shower, get regrouped, fly to L.A. And he sets up a dinner with all these actresses in this place called the Buffalo Club, which was, In Santa Monica, California, it was kind of a secret restaurant in those days, put together by Tony Yerkovich, who created Miami Vice. And he was one of the biggest television producers of the 90s. Huge guy, and he started this little restaurant. No sign.

In Buffalo, New York. No, no. He was from Buffalo, New York. Oh, okay. He called it the Buffalo Club. Okay. But it was on Olympic Boulevard in Santa Monica, California. Okay.

Back when that was still a shithole. So there was this little hidden sea. secret restaurant in Santa Monica that you could only get into if you knew where it was. Yeah. If you knew somebody. Yeah. It was one of those secret places that regular people can't go. So, but we had our own table, right?

I mean, like, permanently. So we go in there, I'm just trying to wrap up the story. So we go in, we're eventually going back to Langley, eventually going back to the CIA. So we fly to clerages and we have this big time in London. Then we fly to L.A. and he puts all these actresses together because he's a casting director. And I mean, some really household names. So we have a nice dinner and we're telling stories.

And he was a ladies man, as I may have mentioned. And one of the ladies was a bartender at the Buffalo Club, who we had a liaison with in the gentleman's restroom the previous night. Good conversation, I assume. Good conversation, intellectual. Yeah. And so he had gone to a private event in a garden out behind the place while we're having a conversation. So we're having this meeting.

We're having a dinner in a booth at the Buffalo Club with all these actresses. And I'm trying to tell this story to them. And they keep saying, wit, cut to the chase. How the fuck did you escape? And, you know, whatever. So anyways, the point in the story is Joe goes back and he gets a piss and match with the bouncer, who was a large man. A pretty boy, like a Hollywood bouncer. they're like one minute they're in a runway show in the next minute they're doing a UFC fight.

And so we're holding court and it's fairly late. We've had a couple cocktails. And I'll never forget it. I see Joe coming around the corner and he's walking straight at me. And Joe would always start the fights and then point to me. And we all like to fight, right? Some of us like to fight a lot. So he comes walking straight at me.

He goes, wit, we got a problem. And I go, I'm sure we do. So we walk to the front. Now, the Buffalo Club is an elegant little hole-in-the-wall restaurant. And there's a little tiny bar in the front, maybe four seats, and you would walk in off the street and you'd get a table, right? So we walk up at this, by the time we get up there, the bouncer has come around the corner from the garden party out back,

who wouldn't let him see the woman that he had an interesting liaison with. And I look at this fucking guy, and he's so big. I mean, I'm not a shrimp, right? I'm a fairly good-sized guy. And this guy was huge. And he was so big, Joe's maybe like 5, 10. He was so big that Joe had to jump up in the air like he was trying to dunk a basketball just to punch him in the mouth. And he clocked him.

I still remember you know that sound. And he clocks this guy. And a guy just looks at him like, what are you an idiot? And then he looks at me. And I don't want anything to do with any of it, right? But it's on. Right. So it goes to the floor and it's on and it's, you know, it's two on one and we're losing.

And it's not pretty. So all of a sudden we hear somebody start yelling, yelling, yelling, and I look up and it's Tony Yercovic, who is the biggest producer in Hollywood, Miami Vice and, I mean, like analyst shows. And he goes, Joe, you're out of here. Nobody fights in the Buffalo Club. You're banned. ban for life. And Joe goes, you can't ban me. I built this place. He goes, you didn't build fucking anything. You're out of here. So then we're out in the sidewalk, sitting on the sidewalk,

you know, trying to get a ride home and all the way, the famous actresses are all gone because I think we're a bunch of morons. So then I get on a plane and I fly back to Langley with all the film of all the things we haven't, you know, I mean, there's things you gather. Yeah, visually. Yeah. And so I took, you know, a couple of things for GQ, for the photographs, for the magazine article and they kept all the other film they kept all the film and he was furious about he's furious to this day he's furious that they kept all this film but then the only thing that was interesting there is that sometime after that i did a like a group debriefing a lecture i did a lecture at this you know a lecture hall and i was i was shocked to this day i'm shocked at how many

people came oh really i was really really very very surprised at to this day i don't know why that many people came to the lecture because it seems like they would have known that stuff. So anyways, that was the, that was the, my transition from the FBI into the world in October and November 2001. So that's your first trip. And then, you know, things continue to pop off. Of course, 2003 happens. The invasion of Iraq.

Yeah. How does this thing progress? Okay. As you build this, as you build this capability slash business, I mean, because it is a business now at this point. it is a business but I didn't think of it as a business I thought of it there there's a disconnect in my mind this is like old school like French Jedbergs that like go into the private sector after World War II

I mean this is it's a little bit of like it's a little bit of like Dewey Clarege like setting up his now yeah yeah you know I'll tell you what it was it was a moron who didn't know any better I just thought I can do anything I want in the world hold my beer and I did I did

so I moved to New York I didn't move to New York I built a I got a place in New York on the upper west side and I went to work for NBC so I worked for MSNBC NBC

so I did the Today Show I don't know how endless times I did the Today Show Matt Lowren K, I've got the best Katie Kirk story in the history of the world but I don't if we'll get to that So get us there Walk us in

Maybe we'll maybe we'll say that for a bonus segment for our patron. Oh my God. We got a lot for the bonus segment. Yeah, yeah. We just wasted two hours talking about Waco and Ruby Riz. And we apologize for that. No, no, no, nobody knows these stories. Yeah. I mean, so. Yeah. Anyways. Okay. So I come back and here's where we go from there. The last thing that I built in the FBI before I left was called the Strategic Information Management Office. Critical Incident Response Group, Negotiators, Profilers, hostage rescue team, logistics, all the different agencies. Whenever we went to a crisis, the biggest problem was controlling information, which is the media, and what do we know about

the situation, how do we want to control the information, which is the lifeblood of any crisis? Information is... And it can become, like, I don't know precisely what you're talking about, of course, but, like, it can become an issue, like, if the press is recording, the operator's staging to go in and... Well, here's a perfect example. Puerto Rico, spent a whole, lot of time in Puerto Rico. There's an island called Vieques. Vyacaz is a bomb site for the Navy. Yeah, yeah. And the people of Vykes didn't like that, right? You're blowing up all these, like, endangered birds and some non-gelatinous foreign

manifirons. And it's like all this, all this shit that you get, right? It's crazy. So we fly in, what's the helicopter with the Chinook? The Chinook? Yeah. So I remember we fly in. We do this big assault into the island, and we're on the Chinook, and I get off and off the back, and it was the island had all the soil. was kind of flinty. So maybe you guys have seen that. You see it in Iraq, in Afghanistan or in Iraq. It's a dust up, yeah. No, it lights the light. The light. It lights the end of the blades on fire. Yeah, yeah. It's beautiful. Yeah. It's beautiful. So get the whole thing. We couldn't land because it was dust. The point of the story is there was this one op, just as an example, in Vykes Island. We fly into Vykesh.

And they had these, I think there were two S congressmen. They had some protesters. And the protestors. And the protesters were on the beach and they said, we want you to come and arrest us on national television. So they called NBC, ABC, CBS. Everybody came down there with a camera cruise and they were saying, we are going to watch the next Waco. We're going to watch these guys come in. And they had slingshots and spark plugs. Right. I mean, I get an M4 and a bag of grenades.

Right. And they've got slingshots with spark plugs. Right. And two United States congressmen. So all it's going to happen is they shoot us with a slingshot and somebody does something stupid. Right. And the FBI is back 20 years. Right.

So I said, wait a minute. Let's relax here a little bit. We know what they want. We know how they plan to do it. All we've got to do is walk down there, get all the media together and say, come with me. We want you to record everything that we're going to do. So we went up to them and said the SWAT guys were pissed. All the San Juan SWAT guys were pissed.

Fuck these guys. We're going to make an example of them. And I said, maybe that's not the way it's going to go down. Death squads in police forces you generally don't. No. Foster. No. No.

But listen, you know, I didn't have anything to prove. I'd already been through Waco. I did not want another debacle for me or for the FBI. I love the FBI. I believe in the FBI, at least in those days. I didn't want that to happen. So I said, look, let's do this. Let's just think about this.

Let's walk down. We'll bring the media with. this I'll go up to whoever it was at the time you know all the famous people and I said we go up so we walked up to him and I said to the to the two congressmen and the people with the slingshots and the in the spark plugs I said these are flex cuffs we're going to put them on you and we're going to walk you out of here and they said no you're not whatever else so I put the flex cuffs all they wanted to do was be on national news yeah so we put the flex cuffs on them but didn't tighten them up so if they dropped their hands they would fall down on the ground so

So we put the flex cuss because that's what they wanted. But then they realized they looked like complete morons because they, I mean, it looked like a blacksmith, like a wizard's apron, you know, hanging off their wrists. And it diffused the situation. There was no fight. Nobody got hurt. Nobody caused any problems whatsoever. All the media had no story to write at all. Then I found a deuce and a half someplace.

It was like a bomb target and got it running. drove it up, put all their shit in the back, and drove it back to the airport and away they went, and it was no story whatsoever. So, realizing that nothing really matters unless it appears on the news.

Right. Or in those days, right? Now it's social media or whatever else, right? Or your show. But back in those days. And that changed the thinking.

Mostly our show. So this lightning bolt goes back to the seventh floor of FBI headquarters saying, wait a minute, you did what? You know, but it was a different way of thinking. And all of a sudden, these are awesome.

Thank you. They're good, aren't they? Fantastic. They're really tasty. So that was a paradigm shift in the way we looked at things. Yeah. But it came through the strategic information management office, and here's where it gets a little weird. Perhaps during my time, I may have come across the fourth psychological operations element. And perhaps they are the craziest motherfuckers I've ever met my entire life.

And I'll say this. When you join the FBI, you go through 16 weeks of academy. It might be 18 weeks now. You go through the farm, you go through, you know, it's different because the CIA training, case officer training is a little bit different. It's a little fragmented, right? But you go through operator training school. You go through any program that you guys have been through, and they have a timeline.

It's usually not that long. Sciop's basic school is 43 weeks. Yeah. 43 weeks away from your family, away from any. There are some true believers in that outfit, and there's some wild outfits. In my personal opinion, in my personal experience, I think I've worked with everybody around the world. We haven't got to it yet, but I've worked with everybody, the Israelis, the Turks, the South Africans, the anybody. I don't give a shit who you're talking about.

I've worked with all of those intelligence organizations up until about a year and a half ago. In my opinion, those SciOps guys are some squirrels. I mean, there's some wild dudes. The Syops guys, the Army Cyops guys are like widely misunderstood. Even derided, you have the loiter for Chris? Oh, it's right here. And even derided in the special operations community. And a lot of people, I think, don't really understand what they do.

A lot of them, there are a lot of CIA details that they work. A lot of people don't get that. And if, you know, those guys through what they're, you know, most people think of it just as pamphlet drops, but there's a lot of other stuff going on. And they are so controlled, like sciops in the military in particular. are so controlled because it would be like, it would be like shooting around from a sniper rifle and then an atomic blast going off as a result of that.

Yeah, there are like left and right limits. And another thing they do is that a lot of people don't realize is even produce films, anti-extremist films around the world that show up in places like Indonesia, Kurdistan, elsewhere. Well, that's one of their critical languages. When you join, they have a certain number of critical languages. Indonesian is one of those languages. Yeah. And I'll say this, the, um, based on my experience, and I don't know shit compared to,

I know what I don't know. Um, they have white, gray and black categories of operations, right? White is the pamphlet drops. Gray is the movies. The black shit is when you don't know where it's coming from. In my opinion, that's some of the wildest shit that I've done in my, in my life, that aspect of it. And some of it is weird. So anyways, the point in the story is that I put this all together and I said, look, what we really want as a government is to protect Americans. We're patriots. We believe in what we do and we believe that is good and we believe that good is going to make America a whole so that our kids can go to sleep at night. That's why we all serve and die if that's what it takes, right? I found a

way I felt that I could contribute in terms of information management. It's not new. I mean, we've been doing that. Propaganda's been around forever. Not always well, but... Not always well, but look, and it's not even government. It's public relations. Advertising. It's advertising. It's advertising. It is trying to manipulate human beings to do what you want them to do. Right. Right. And it's not, it's not even done best by government. It's done best by corporations because they make money. I mean, look at Bud Light the debacle they went through. That was a simple mistake that cost billions of dollars. And everybody knows that example.

But even going back in history, any government, kingdom, any populace who thought that their ruler was ordained by God or part of some historic lineage, they were sold, right? They were sold a bill of a bill. They were sold a bill of sale. You know, it's good marketing. It's good marketing. But I think everything in life comes down to objective. and you've got to believe, I believe a certain subset of things about human beings.

And when it comes right down to it, they are as old as human beings, and it's never changed. Human beings do what's in their own best interest. It might be Mother Teresa helping people in the ghettos of Calcutta. It might be a politician running for office. Human beings do what's in their best interest. There is an underlying sense of truth. That truth is objective, and it is different to people. that right now in America, you're right or left. You believe Joe Biden is the truth. You believe

Donald Trump is the truth. And it's about split down the middle. And you believe in the truth and it is your obligation, your duty to try and sway opinions on that. Right. So whether you're trying to sell a used car or whether you're trying to make, you know, a political debacle seem good. So I look at all those things and said, okay, let's put those together. And let's say that We understand certain things through math. I love math, right? So we all know the algorithm. Google came up with the algorithm that's changed the world,

and it can tell you what you want to listen to on Spotify. Right. It can tell you... The team house mostly. The team house mostly. Exactly. It can tell you what ads you want to see. All of those things.

But it's not about the math. It is not about the underlying reality. It is about understanding human beings. Right. Humans are so fucking simple. I used to do party tricks. I got to a dinner party, and I would leave the room

or you would leave the room and we would all get together and you would tell me what you want me to get him to do when he comes back and you'd come back and sit at the table and I would get you to do what the table told me to get you to do or detection of deception. It's very, very simple. But we've gotten to a point in American culture where we can do that very, very well. It's not just about math anymore. It's not just algorithms. It's more complicated than that. But I first learned that from fourth. I used that and built that. And then I took that private when I went,

which is where we go from here. So what was that intersection? The intersection is media. The intersection, and here's how it goes wrong. I was one of many, many people. People go back and they'll say, what's he talking about? And I'll say, what I'm talking about is Victoria Tenzing. That was her name right.

the woman, the flack of the Pentagon, who came up with the embed program, which was an enormously effective way of mixing reporters with the people who were keeping them alive while they were getting a story. Right. It's a brilliant idea. She's a brilliant woman. You get the reporters to start relating to the soldiers because they're so close. Stockholm syndrome by proxy.

It's a very, very simple human construct. It's a brilliant idea. I have enormous respect for that woman and what she's done. Whether you believe in what she did or not, it was a very effective model, right? that works in a private sector or not. Then you go to, you look at what happened after 9-11 with Fox News. Rupert Murdoch was brilliant in the sense that he said,

I am going to ride nationalist patriotic pride to a billion dollar payday. You can hate Robert Rupert Murdoch, but what he did was brilliant. And here's what I'll bring up. Shortly after 9-11, I'm going to say 2003, maybe. I had worked for NBC so I was doing daily I was on MSNBC every day

all day I was on the Today show Meet the press nightly news all of those shows and CNBC of all people CNBC came to me and said

hey at the time that the talent coordinator at NBC was a woman named Elaine I'm not going to say her last name but she was a brilliant woman I thought the world of her she hired all the everybody from Matt Lauer to whoever

And she said, okay, we're going to do a show on CNBC. I don't know why. It's called Checkpoint CNBC. It's every day at 6 o'clock. And I was going to co-host it with Martha McCallum, who is now at Fox News, right? She didn't know I was a co-host. I think she thought I was just in some goofball sitting next to her every day, which I probably was. So I had a daily news show on CNBC where we would interview, basically this, but on cable news.

So I did that. So again, I, I, I, I can't say how I did this because I don't want to get anybody in trouble. But let's say again that I understood the mechanism of the FBI. I understood the mechanism of the FBI. I understood the mechanism of the CIA. And I knew people at all of those organizations. And I knew what they did, how they did it, and what they wanted to achieve.

Does that make sense? Yeah. It's a fair. So I called him up and I said, I now not only am on TV every day on all these other shows, but now I have a daily format that I can help shape opinion of what's going on in the world of terror. The global war on terror, but the world of military operations. And it was a big problem because George Bush declared mission accomplished, remember, on the battleship. It started to slide very badly.

Is this related to the military analyst program? There was no program. This was me. This was no program. I mean, it's very simple from a world. that we all know very well, which is regimented. Like nothing happens without a piece of paper. Right. This is me saying, I'm going to do this.

It's not about tasking. Remember, we always come back to tasking. You do not have to task me. I'm telling you what I want to do, and I will do this if you give me X. And X is a phone call. So I remember very clearly numerous conversations over the course. This went on for two or three years, right?

when something happens, you need to wait. Like, here's a perfect example. This is not an affairist. There was a story that came out where the Secret Service had a bunch of guys in South America, I think it was. Columbia. Columbia, right? And they got a little jam. Yeah.

Right? So when I went on, and this, I didn't call the Secret Service. I didn't call anybody, but I said, I know a lot of Secret Service agents. I love those motherfuckers. And I love what they do and how they do it. Such a hard job. It's a thankless, brutal, endlessly difficult job. Yeah.

And there's some really, really great patriots. And so I went on and I said, what you don't know is X, Y, and Z. And I said it as loudly as I could, as often as I could. And it went away. I'm not saying it went away just because of me, but I did my part. They didn't have a program where they were trying to manipulate the media. I was in the media, and I knew how to manipulate opinion, and I did it. So that was an example.

But there are a lot of agencies, and I know a lot of people at those agencies. But I mean, I know this is like a murky world that we're describing here, but I mean, are you just going on television and giving your opinion, your expert opinion as a former law enforcement official? Or are they giving you talking points and telling you what to say? Because those are two very different things. Yeah. So I started doing all these shows. And one day, I got a call. And I know I didn't answer your question.

I'm fully aware that I didn't answer your question. And I got a call from this guy. And he says, hey, I got to, you know, you've been fantastic. And I got a little story for you. Story is the USG just rolled up. Some of bin Laden's son. You may remember that story. You may have been part of that up.

I don't know. And I said, okay, you want me to go out with this? And they said, we're not saying that, but I'm telling you what just happened. And it's going to be this, this, and this. And the president's going to make an announcement. And I said, okay. So the way a TV show works is this. The way TV shows work that I worked in, work this way.

You go in, I would get on a bus or car service at first. I'd get in a car from my apartment in Upper West Side, New York. I would go to CNBCA, CNBC World Headquarters, and I would sit at my desk. I had a desk right next to Joe Kernan, and, I mean, literally, we're adjoining. And all the people that you see there, you just, I mean, you work with them every day. Their personalities, but they're just really. great people. Yeah. And very smart. Very smart. So I go on and oh, so you go into this office for my show, see at Checkpoint CNBC, and you sit in the producer's office with 10 people and they go, what are we

going to do today? And somebody would go, well, what's the New York Times doing? And you check the New York Times. What's the post doing? And check the post. Then ultimately they would say, what's Fox doing? Because that's all that mattered because they had all the ratings. You want to generate ratings so you can sell advertising so that you make money so that you do what's in your own best interest, which is build your career. Right. All people need to understand about the media is that it's all about money. The product is news. The product or the result is money.

I mean, that's the only reason they're doing it to keep you informed. They're doing it for bigger bank. Listen, I remember Columbia Business School. I mean, Columbia Journalism School used to be the arbiter. I didn't go to Columbia Journalism School, by the way. But you know. I'm just saying. No, Columbia guy.

Yeah. I'm just saying that there was a day when the fourth estate would find stories about Watergate that would splash presidents. I was 13 years old when Nixon resigned. I remember that very, very well. Those days are gone. Yeah. The Pulitzer, if you do a list of Pulitzer's that have been received in journalism in the last five years, it is a debacle. It is a disgrace, right?

And a lot of them were, like, are for stuff that has since been debunked or... All of them. Yeah. I mean, now... Excuse me, I'm sorry, not all of them. Many of them have become shameful. But they're not taking them back. My point is this, that we'd have a meeting in the morning,

we'd put together a story based on what other people were doing and it would feed itself. Because ultimately you're trying to make a show that people watch so that you record the ratings for advertisers who pay, who make money for all the people involved. That's the whole point. And that's the way a show would happen every day. So we'd go in and we put together a show.

ultimately I'd end up in front of a camera reading a teleprompter and doing some kind of a story about that. And I did a lot of them. Like I flew in the back of a, what has a backseat? An F-15? Oh, 14. F-14s do. And I think F-16s do. I think it was a 16.

I can't remember. We need to ask Alex. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I did a million. These weren't stories that I sat at a desk and with a teleprompter. I was going out. Like I went to Guantanamo Bay, right? I went to Gitmo.

Now, I knew everybody, I knew, I knew people at Gitmo that were doing the investigations. I didn't say anything, but I spent two years at the FBI Academy after H.R.T. Where I taught interrogation at the FBI Academy. I was pretty good at it. And I taught interrogation to various other agencies, including the CIA, which called it elicitation. Prior to enhanced interrogation, the CIA used to call interrogation elicitation, and they had some funky ways of eliciting. You say what you want about interrogation.

The FBI interrogates people and puts them in jail for life. It's hard to get somebody to say, yes, I committed this crime, knowing that if I say it, I'm going to jail for life. That's difficult. They're very, very good at what they do. It's a difficult art form and they're very good at it. The CIA didn't have that consequence prior to 9-11, you know, a very, very different thing entirely. But anyway, the point of the story is that going into media

and having a platform where I was on television every day in different media and what I said mattered to a certain extent where I could do this, I would go on TV and I would specifically and intentionally say X because I would sit back and wait for you to go on TV and say X. and then you would go on TV and say X because human beings are extremely predictable and they will follow what benefits somebody else and I'll say this. If you look at society today,

you look at misinformation and disinformation. Those terms did not exist six months ago, a year ago. Didn't exist. Somebody made those terms up to exemplify something they didn't believe in. Once you come up with a word that people can get behind, where you can look in any aspect of society. Like right now, one of the big phrases,

is unpack, let's unpack this, right? That'll be a big thing for a while. It used to be cool beans or sort of. Or burnt your cookie, right? Your cookie. Yeah, burnt your cookie. There's always something, and you can follow that path through culture, right? Like this song, the song the guy just came out with Richmond, North of Richmond.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That lit fire, everybody in the world had to be part of that, because that's the way it is. Masks for coronavirus. There are predictable behaviors. You can call it whatever you want, a collective subgroup. conscious you can call whatever you want human behavior is incredibly simple to predict and if you can predict it you can shape it and if you can shape it you can benefit whatever program you want right but to what end i mean what what is it that you're trying to shape that's what you believe about the

right and the problem what we believe about the world is that i don't hold a single belief that i think is wrong otherwise i wouldn't believe it right so so i can make you believe anything i want but But what I'm saying, though, is, right. But what I'm saying, though, is that whatever I believe, I believe fervently, otherwise, you know, I, because I don't think I'm dumb. No human being, no human being thinks they're dumb and that the ideas they hold are wrong. So once we make an emotional decision or get behind an idea, we hold on to that idea with tenacity. Yes. But what a lot of people don't realize is how simple the mechanism.

Yeah, people are dumb. I mean, well, I don't think people are impressionable. Yeah, I don't think people are dumb. I think people are pretty dumb. I just, people are impressionable. I think that it's been shown that people make emotional decisions and then build the logical structures to support that decision. But we're all saying the same thing just using different words. But, but, but I don't think people.

All I'm saying is I know how to shape it. Yeah. And. But again, what, what is it we're trying to shape? Whatever your objective is. And for who. But you had a specific objective. Yes, I did.

Because my objective was what I perceived to be patriotic obligation to make the world a better place for people that I loved and cared about. I wanted your children, my children, people that I love to be safe in a world that for a long time was pretty fucking scary. That was my personal opinion. I'm not saying it was right or wrong. I'm just saying that's what I believe to be the case. Right. And I think a lot of people joined the military, joined the law enforcement, joined, the cause because they believe for a long time from 2001,

maybe 10 years, believe that we were vulnerable, believe that the United States needed. People were scared. People were scared. But people, people join Antifa and the, you know,

and they, the, you know, the problem, like they believe, like they have, they are every, uh,

every bit as certain. in their beliefs that they're making a better world, right? Again, whether it's Antifa or Proud Boys or whomever, they believe that they are making the world a better place based on, I don't even want to say facts, I want to say based on their filters and perception of what is wrong in the world.

True, but that perception, excuse me, the mechanism, in my opinion, that mechanism is exactly the same for every human being. Right. There's just, there's a part of your mind, And my wife's a PhD in psychology. I'm not. But she knows what that place in your brain is called. There is a place in your brain, just like the mammalian reflex, fight or flight.

Some people fight, some people fight. There's a part in your brain where you say, I am right, and I want the world to be right. So you could be a missionary and a religion. It could be Russia as a monolithic, monolithic threat to the United States. It could be what we feel about China. It could be all those things. It doesn't matter. The mechanism is exactly the same.

in the human mind. It just takes a different direction. I like wrestling. When I was a kid, I loved wrestling. Me too. So you see Hulk Hogan stand up against Randy Macho Man Savage over Miss Elizabeth.

Remember that big, that terrible, terrible time in American history. Yeah, right? It doesn't matter if you were behind Hulk Hogan or if you were behind Randy Macho Man Savage. And I know this is absurd. But a metaphor is a metaphor, right?

It doesn't matter. It's bud, light, taste great, less filling. My point is this. that human beings have the same exact mechanism. You're a Yankees fan, you're a Red Sox fan. Human beings need a monolithic threat to align themselves against. And always have since the beginning of time

and always will. When you understand that and you understand that you want to shape how that picks aside, that can be incredibly powerful. It's that idea that we all want to belong to something. And in order to belong, we have to other. So it doesn't matter if it's the chess and checkers,

club, oh, I'm in the chess club, look those fuckers and the checkers club. Or if it's America versus China, and again, I'm not breaking, I believe that America is a beacon of light and has been. Yes. But there are probably people in China think that too, but we don't have Uyghurs in torture camps, so fuck them. But the thing is, is that

and, you know, like, I know one of the parts of the brain is like the reticular activating system or particular activation activating system which is it allows us to see we see in the world like if i have a jeep all of a sudden i see everybody driving a jeep because that's sort of oh look even though there aren't any more jeeps on the road now but if i'm for trump or if i'm for biden i'm only going to see the shit that supports yes like it just my brain filters it i see the stuff that supports my views but both sides are doing the exact same thing. They just draw different conclusions.

Right. When you understand that, you can be more effective at it. And we're coming up on that now. We're coming up on a presidential election. And say what you want. People talk obliquely about a culture war. I think war is not an understatement. I think it is a very significant time in American history, at least in my life.

I live through the 60s. I live through the Nixon resignation. I've lived through some tumultuous times in the United States, in the history of the United States. I think right now is a very difficult one. Yeah. But we all believe the same way, we all believe the same way about different things, in my opinion. Now, having been in the media and understanding how to form these opinions, do you see this as a political divide or that the politicians are utilizing this divide? Because they already have sort of the party.

Right. If we were, like the Republicans and the Democrats, the GOP and the DNCL site, aren't that different in the sense that they eat at the same places. They send their kids the same schools. Is this, do you feel as though this is a mechanism they use? I don't, I strongly believe there is no they. Okay. I really believe there's no they. I talk to people all the time and they'll say, I believe this. And I'll say, well, why do you think that? And I said, because they say this, they say that. I go, who is they? nobody can ever define they. Right. Yeah, because it's more uncomfortable to say it's us. It's us. Right. There's just, there is no, I could never get four FBI agents to decide where they were

going to go for lunch. So putting together a conspiracy where everybody has this secret cabal and they're putting together these nefarious beliefs is really hard to put together. Now, I did that myself, but that was one human being moving a message because I understood things and and granted I mean I've been talking for a long time it's it's more complex than than what I've said thus far but but I believe this very very strongly that human beings believe that they're doing good and I don't mean I think even Ted Bundy in his own fucked up way thought it's good that I'm going to eat this guy right I mean that's what we do

it no I really do yeah I mean I think human beings I did this this thing for HBO called Police and Thieves where I went to the idea was I was going to take you as a viewer and I was going to go around the world to places where I've done bad things like Indonesia detachment 88 and uh this group the hongla in Colombia right yeah the crazy 88s yeah crazy 80s but so I went to Columbia and uh back to Bogota right from the old days in the old world and got two guys together two guys named el diablo right one el diablo was in this I don't even know how to describe these guys they were An entity, they were a U.S. government-backed guerrilla entity.

They lived in this villa up on a hill overlooking Bogota. And they had a wait room, a bunch of chickens, some pit bulls, and a really great bar. And all they did was fly out and kill people, right? And I worked with them. So I went back and I found a guy named El Diablo, and we started talking about killing people and death and what it's like. then I went into the favelas which nobody fucking goes into the favelas and I found

a guy that was supposed to be the bad guy and his name was El Diablo right? So I've got an El Diablo who was supposed to be the worst of humanity and I've got an El Diablo who is supposed to be the beacon of hope for society

and it was like talking to the same guys they were both great guys and to a certain part of humanity were both scary as fuck Right. You know? So I guess what I'm trying to say for people trying to make sense of my point is this, that human beings since the beginning of time have been very predictable.

I mean, let's just say hypothetically that you believe in Adam and Eve, right? Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel. There was a murderer, a victim, a woman who might not have banged a snake, and a guy who got reminded these naked, right? and it's got to wear a fig leaf, right? I'm saying that if you take the first four people, hypothetically, you know, a foundation of two primary religions in the world,

and you look at the first four people, they had some issues. Yeah. Right? I don't think we've ever made that much of a recovery. So we do the best we can to raise our kids with right and wrong, to love each other, to be kind to other human beings. And you know what? If we think they'd take a step across the line,

we're going to shoot them in the head with a two, two, three. You know, it's, are we right, or the Chinese right, or the Russians right, or the Colombians right, or the, we haven't got to Somalia all the time I've spent. I've seen, I was in Kosovo during the war in Kosovo, and I walk across a bridge and there's this old man, I'm an old man, but he was like older than me. And he's crying and through the interpreter, go up to him and say, what's the problem? And he pulls his pants down and the bad guy said, cut off his pecker. He's an old man just walking down the street and they pulled his pants down and they cut off his pecker.

I go up in the mountains and I found, it looks like the sound of music. It's Tiroli and some of the most beautiful places you've ever seen in your life, chalets and the sound of music, Julie Andrews singing. It's fucking beautiful, right? These guys came in. They killed eight members of a family and they stuffed them down a well to ruin the water. So when the family came back, they couldn't drink the water. I go to Somalia and I've had all the experiences that people have in Somalia, which are unpleasant. I go to Indonesia.

I lived in East Timor. I had a company in East Timor. I lived there for seven years. I got two guards outside my office, like my primary guys, my close quarter guys, the guys who protected me, one of them chops off the other guy's head with a machete. Like from me to that wall. It doesn't matter if you're black, white, yellow, red, whatever, it doesn't matter. Human beings do a lot of really bad stuff to each other. Yeah.

But we're also capable of love. Yeah. So how do you find the line between the two and how do you end up in our world trying to make sense of it so that we can protect other people? So how does all of this evolve? I mean, you're a media personality that you're saying you're not receiving taskings, but guidance perhaps. and that evolves in you're building this intelligence platform you said you're all over the world with I mean how does how does this sort of evolve over the years as the war on terror progresses I wouldn't say it was that I built an intelligence platform I think there's a

there's a you know there's a selfish aspect of it you know back up one second you know I did I've done a couple podcasts by accident Mike Glover who I met whatever I did his talk to him. And when I talked to him, it was an entirely different thing. I didn't talk about any of these things. We just talked about, it was like a historic thing, right? He's a remarkable guy, an incredible patriot, an entrepreneur, remarkable in a million ways. And then my daughter somehow called up Andy Stump and said, whatever, and he said, hey, come on out. So I flew out to Missoula and I talked to him, and I didn't go very well because I had taken my sons to a war zone in East Timor. It was another thing altogether. But I guess what I was, I guess,

what I'm trying to say is I've talked to a couple people about these, about various things, but I've never gotten to, I mean, I've way, way over outstayed my welcome here. No, look, you have not? Well, we don't want to keep you? Nobody's going to want, no, it's not me, guys. I'll sit in and drink scotch with you all night, but we haven't even got to the heavy shit at all. But what I'm going to say is this, that I spent, in the evolution of my process, went from 2001

to about 2006. somewhere in that line I went from saying I'm a patriot going to go to Afghanistan and try to contribute to the global war on terror in a way that is maybe maybe it's creative certainly productive and that people think is good people in organizations think is helpful right but then I end up more and more with dinner with Madonna and card games with Brad Pitt and and dinners with with all of these other house old names who are remarkable in their own way. I mean, they're incredible, but the world is exactly the same. The difference between getting a cue clearance and getting dinner with Madonna is, there is no difference. Right. You've got to learn certain behaviors. You've got to keep your mouth shut in certain situations, obviously not this one. And you've got to think on your feet in creative ways because they live in a world that is completely closed off from the reality that we see.

It's not their fault. You just can't be one of those people and think you're going to have a normal life because you walk out and you go to Soho for dinner at Indochine and you know you get, well not Indochine, but you know what I mean? Nobody or whatever. Yeah, yeah.

It used to be Rayos. Now you could buy it fucking. Now where I'd be invited to. Yeah. You know, it's so fucking funny. In the day it was Rayos, right? There was six tables. Right, right.

An eight-month wait list. Right. You know, in those days, when I was in that world, I would never wait in a line for anywhere. If I couldn't get in somehow, I want nothing to do with it. But Rayos was kind of the spot. That was kind of the last place. And now you can buy Rayo's sauce at fucking price chopper. Yeah.

You know, the world's changed. So time, the war is dragging on here. I mean, walk us into the heavy shit since you brought it up. Okay. The heavy shit is that in 2005, I had written three books. And my ultimate world was to make it as a writer, have a decent life as a writer. I hated TV. I hated TV from the day I started.

I hated the makeup. I hated the falseness. The lights come on. You talk. You go back. I hated everything about it. I think it's a scuzzy, vapid, inhuman. I'm not a fan of television.

in the old school, right? Network TV into cable news. The only thing that saved us as a species is podcasts like this where you can talk long form and actually give people something to talk about. They might hate me, they might find it's fascinating, but at least they have a legitimate position based on a long conversation. So anyways, 2005, I wrote my third book. Everything was great.

I wrote a fourth book. And it ate shit. And basically my publisher dropped me. And here's why. I don't know here's why, but here's what went wrong, I think. When I was in the FBI, I could write about things that were non-classified, cold zero. I wrote, I could write fictional accounts of things that were classified. Most of the stuff I did was classified.

So I said, okay, I'm going to tell those stories. So I wrote a novel called Black, which is Black Operations. And I wrote the sequel, which was called White, was like clever thing on words. White, I said, I'm going to talk about things that I've done. On the classified side, I'm going to fictionalize them. As long as they're in the public domain, it's okay. So I wrote about like a sonic cannon that I developed with DARPA, a project, which is now used in SWAT teams, right?

You can riot control with sound, right? Or maybe even the Havana syndrome, the agency guys that had brain stuff. So I wrote a novel about that. One thing I stepped over the line is the most bizarre things that I've ever been associated with, even more than SciOps, is FEMA. The continuity government plan. People talk about all these classifications. They talk about all this. FEMA has got some fucked up shit going on.

No, I'm dead. I mean, you guys probably know what I'm talking about. I actually don't outside of like all. the conspiracy stuff. Oh my God. Let's, let's unpack that a little bit. Let's unpack that. The, the community. It's cool beans. I unpacked it one time and it ruined my life. I'm not going to unpack it again, but I'll tell you the basics of what happened. So let's say hypothetically speaking that you'd Googled Mount Weather, right? Mount Weather used to be a really secret place. It's not, it's not that secret anymore. I mean, you can Google it, right? I only talk about shit that you can,

that's in the public domain only. So I got this wild hair, and I was writing a book in the New York Public Library, the Rose Reading Room in the New York Public Library, one of my favorite indoor spaces. And I said, you know what? Mount Weather's a crazy place, and I can't write about it, but if I go out there and I look at it, and I see it, whatever I can write about it, right? So I go, okay, cool. So I take the train to D.C., I get in a car, and I drive out to Mount Weather.

For people who don't know, you can Google it, right? Mount Weather is where Cheney went on 9-11, after 9-11. It's a government evacuation plan. It is a secure location, but that's really not what it's about. I mean, that's really not why Mount Weather exists. And there are all these names for it, like cite this and Aspect R, and they've got all these fucking... It's a bunker where the government can continue to function. It's a hollowed out mountain.

Like Norat or whatever? Yeah. Yeah, it's like NORAD, right? But it's, you can get some stuff on Google. So I said, okay, listen, I've been there a bunch of times, usually in a helicopter, but I know how to get there. I'm going to jump in my car and I'm going to drive out there. So this is hysterical, but it's true in all these real things.

So I drive up there and you drive up this dirt road. I mean, you literally drive up dirt like a gravel road and you get to the top of this mountain. And when you get close, there's all this chain link fence. and on one side is chain link fence and a certain type of the insulation on the other side is a whole different fucking game like doors and weird access points right so i drive up to where i know the entrance i've never joined there but i've flown in there so i get up there and there's a guardhouse i mean it's literally now this is 2000 i think 2004 so it's only three years after 9-11 we got two wars going on we've invaded iraq it was a hot time right so if you are one of the most of the

most secretive installations in the United States, you would think it would be kind of locked down. It's kind of heavy. That's what I was thinking. So I drive up and I shouldn't be laughing. Maybe I should be laughing. This is what happened. So I drive up in this rent a car and there's the guard check or the chain link fence ends and there is a turnoff and there's a guardhouse. But the guardhouse looks like a guard house at like the neighborhood pool, right?

I mean, it's just like an eight-by-eight-by-eight little guardhouse. And there's a woman there who's wearing a two-tone polyester uniform, light brown and brown, like you would see in a sheriff's department anywhere else, right? Only worse. And she's got a couple badges and whatever. So I pull up and I'm looking over there and I know what's over there because I've been there. But I can't write about it because it's secret. Right.

Right. Like I can say this because, I said this in the book, but I can say this because I think it's online. There's a house, and it's not really a house. It's a house to cover a ventilation shaft from satellites. So if you look down from Sputnik or whatever the fucking restaurants are flying these days, it looks like a house. But it's, you know, it's a, the whole thing is fake.

Right. It reminds me of the house in Resident Evil, right? Yeah, yeah. Right? The house is covered to the, yeah. So I drive in and I go up to the gate, excuse me, I go up to the guard house. and I go, hey, how are you doing? And this woman looks at me and she said,

Sugar, did you forget your ID again? And if I had said yes, baby, it's good to see you. I forgot my ID. I could have driven in and just wandered around. Right. And I knew where to go. Right. And I said, well, no, not really.

I said, I'm a novelist and I'm writing a book. And I know that if I come out and if I can see this, then it's legal for me to write about it. And she looked like I pulled a gun. A big gun. She shit herself. Maybe she'll watch this and goes, I remember that asshole. And so she stepped back, kind of staggered back.

I think she pressed a butt. She did something. I forget something. And literally, it was like a bad movie. It was that fast. There's two suburbans, blacked out suburbans, pulled in behind me out of nowhere. And they get out of the car, they walk up, and they motion. I don't think anybody ever said anything.

to me. I don't think they said a word. And they took me to a, like a trailer house, you know, go to a construction site. They get a temporary building. Yeah, yeah. It's got that fucked up looking siding, the white pebble, siding, whatever. You know, and I go in there, and they asked me for my idea. I gave them my ID. I knew the game, so I was being professional. And nobody ever said a word to me. And when I asked a couple questions, they handed me a business card of a number to call. And I said, okay, thank you very much. And I left. So, The story's not about that. The story is that I was a complete nutter fucking moron

and I wrote about it in a novel in that book right there, white, right? And in my experience, how about yours? In my experience, there is a line and when you step over that line, somebody who doesn't look like anybody is going to tap you on the shoulder

and say, no. And somebody tapped me on the shoulder real fucking hard. And that was the end of me. That was the end of it. So that was the end of your writing career? Writing career? Or I would think your intelligence business was over, but.

No, because, no, it wasn't because my, my intelligence business was, okay. But they didn't want you to write novels no more. I'll tell you where it goes. That was the end of my, that was the end of my writing career because all of a sudden I was writing about something that I stepped over the line. I didn't know that I stepped over the line. I did not do it in intelligence. Well, yeah, that's the thing with a lot of people in the intelligence communities. You don't know precisely where that line is.

Like, I don't know what mechanism, like what their publication review board is like. But we've talked to people on here, like, with the CIA. And with the CIA, apparently, even if you write a book, if, you know, one of our prior CIA guests had written a book on, fiction, a fantasy novel that had nothing to do with the CIA and no details whatsoever. Technically, they're still supposed to send that in and get it. Yeah, yeah. Like, you're not allowed to write a single thing apparently. So to like unpack that a little bit, the continuity of government program, like, for people

who are watching this have no idea what we're talking about. The continuity of government protocol is that if we as a country suffered a 9-11 and if somebody had gone into the Capitol building and incapacitated the elected government of the United States, we as a country need a way to move forward under the provisions of the Constitution in order to remain a country. It was designed for nuclear war. It was designed for... Has other... Yes, but nuclear war, that's another thing I want to talk about real quick. It was designed for nuclear war because nuclear war used to be the end all. Yeah. Right? It used to be. When is the last time you have heard anyone in a public forum talking in real terms about nuclear war.

I mean, like elected officials, like in the house. When's the last time anybody talked about North Korea being a threat or about Russia being a threat or about China being a threat? Nobody's been talking about it, but I will say that about what? Ukraine people talk about it a lot. Like New York came out with their first. One day. Yeah. One day.

And you know what? that was a way, way, way low appointed official making a colossal fucking mistake. The world has changed. I mean, I'm not going to qualify this or come up with any of the provisions, but I am going to say unequivocally that what we look at as a government, as a threat, has changed in terms of what we tell the public. And this is not me talking. This is me saying, if you're watching this thing. look at it, look at it in open terms. When is the last time you heard anybody talking about blowing up the North Stream pipeline?

Right. When is the last time you've heard anybody talking about North Korea launching missiles with nuclear weapons? The conversation has changed in fundamental ways in the last eight to 12 months. I'm not saying what it is. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that we as a country look in different terms at threats. And it seems like people would ask why. So as a country, as a populace, you're not saying the politicians or the administration or anybody else.

You're saying that the populace responds to the threats. I'll ask you. Are you saying that the populace responds to the threats that the media tells them? are threats. I'm saying that the conversation has changed. And I can't tell you why, but I can tell you what I used to do. Right. And I can tell you that people are better at it now than I was then.

Right. Well, I mean, in the media, I mean, Tucker Carlson was in the media this week talking about, we're going to have a nuclear war with Russia. But he's not in the media anymore. He got fired. He's in the media. Yeah. Absolutely in the media.

Well, I mean, yeah, he's, you could argue that he's bigger than he was. I mean, Tucker Carlson. Yeah. Whatever you feel about Tucker Carlson. I think there's a lot of talk about nuclear war. But again, you're talking about Tucker Carlson, somebody who is not in mainstream. He is not on a corporate-owned network news. I mean, to your point, right after the war in Ukraine started or a few months after,

New York came out with the first sort of like public service announcement for nuclear war if there's nuclear threat. And then it disappeared like a media. It was an accident. Somebody very low on a totem pole made a colossal mistake and it evaporated very quickly. Well, and someone in the media decided to pick up on it. And if they had it. Maybe that was it. It would have slipped right under the radar.

Listen, you know, I'll just use as an example. And I don't know the answer. I don't really have a position. But I remember very clearly the way the system worked. When I was on television every day for five years, almost six years, I knew all the people involved. I knew Jim Mikkelshefsky. I knew Pete Williams. I knew Jim Stewart.

I knew all of those guys. I didn't know them all well, but I knew some of them well. And I knew how they worked. So if you're the Pentagon correspondent, you have an office at the Pentagon, and you go in and you want to feed a story every day because that's your job, right? You get paid a certain amount of money.

So you go up and you talk to whoever the flack is at the Pentagon. You say, I need a story today, and they would come up with something. They turn the spigget on. They turn a spigget on. And they turn to spig it off. That's exactly the way it works. At every agency. And if you're a reporter, you know, on day one, you're looking for a Pulitzer Prize. Three days later, you're just trying to feed your kids. You're trying to put your, you know, food on the table. It's just a job. It's just a job. And if you do it properly, you can keep your job and you can work and you can get promoted or whatever else. If you do it improperly, you're fucked. And that's the way the system works. I was a reporter and I got my information that way. I controlled the information to reporters. And I knew that. the information that way. And when you say properly or improperly, do you mean if they're a great investigative journalist or do you mean if they follow their marching orders appropriately?

Seymour Hirsch is a great investigative reporter. And half the people, if you said Seymour Hirsch's name to half the people, to 100 people, 50 of them would probably say complete crackpot, 50 of them would probably say genius hero of the American information system, right? I don't think there is a way for an investigative journalist to do their job today in an effective way. And I will say, look at, this is not a political thing. I'm not saying if I'm a Trump guy or Biden guy, whatever else, it doesn't matter. But if you look at the hatchet job that was the Russia investigation and where that came from and the people that won Pulitzer prizes from that, complete utter fraud. Not intentional. I'm not saying these reporters woke up and said I'm going to

commit fraud. I'm not saying that at all. But I'm saying those stories are proven through investigation not to be accurate and falsified. Do you think that's a problem with people in government who are providing guidance? Everybody in government is trying to get, I'll go back to what I said before. Human beings act in own best interest. If you are a patriot, the Biden administration, and journalists are following what is in their best career interests. Yes. Human beings do what's in their own best interest. It's not bad. I'm not saying it's bad, but I'm saying if you wake up in your, what's the name, Corrine Jean-Pierre? Yeah. If you wake up in the morning, what is your job? It is to say Bidenomics work and, you know, Joe Biden is not this and he is this and it's, you know, whatever. That's her job and that's their thing.

If you are on the Trump side and you wake up every morning, you're trying to do the exact same thing. And I'll go back to what I said before. The human mind is the same. How you decide to exercise that process is different. So in my opinion, based on my experiences, I did my best to influence opinion based on what I thought was right, as what I perceive myself to be a patriot and a good father. you know, in a loving human being and a good person, right? I mean, I'll shoot you in the head. But if I'm going to try and do something for humanity,

right. And I ain't going to do it. Right. So my point is that I went real deep in that process. Right. And I think now, looking at what's going on right now, I think people really figured it out. Like maybe I came up with some ideas,

but now it's a whole different thing. You think that they've just really mastered. They've perfected it. Like even 2008. In my opinion, it will never happen again. I have friends, very, very wealthy friends, billionaires, and I'll ask them about it. I don't want to get into this,

but I know people who were in the left seat with a hand on the stick in 2008. Shearson, the splash of the economy, right? And I know where they are now. And they did not suffer. Right. I mean, I know of them personally. Like hanging out and have dinner tomorrow.

Right. And I'll look at it and say, 2008 helped the financial world perfect what they fucked up in 2008. And politicians have now perfected things that they fucked up in the past. Yeah. So I just think right now, maybe this conversation is getting a little sideways. But what it came to in my life experience was that I found a way to work as an individual doing what I thought was best in a world I understood, which you guys. guys understand very well, which is the mechanism of organization. I understood, in my own mind,

I understood the CIA and the DIA and the NSA and the FBI and the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. In my own way, I understood those things, and I knew how, I learned how to work between them in effective ways. And we haven't even got to, I mean, right now we're at 2001, right? But I mean, isn't part of the problem, though, that these journalists are being fed stories and these stories are being placed by the intelligence community in major papers? I know it's the way it works. 100%. But isn't that a problem? And it's a problem in the sense that these journalists publish these stories, these editors publish these stories.

But they don't understand the backroom politics that are going on inside these offices at Langley, at DoD, that those stories are being given them for reasons they do not comprehend. end in any sense. I don't think that people do. Here's the thing. Let's say the three of us are the cabal, right? And we're going to, like the Wizard of Oz, wheels and levers, and we're shaping all this opinion, right? We're going to do this for a certain amount of time,

and we're going to move on to the next job. We're going to do a great job for two years. Right. And we're going to get promoted. We're going to get a new special access program moniker, and we're going to get read into a new permission. We're going to get promoted. We're going to go on to the next thing.

there's nothing behind that it's the problem my experience in life is that there is other than a continuity of government plan which is genius in my opinion is brilliant there is no fucking way to run the world with politicians politicians come and go right now we have Mitch McConnell in the senate who freezes up right and not form a sentence he is the majority leader minority leader in the Senate, the United States Senate. He came out form a sentence. The doctor just yesterday declared him fine. It's all good.

Never mind. Go home. Don't care about it. On the other side, you've got Diane Feinstein. It might be a little bit worse off. You've got Federman. I was flying out here, right? I'm so fucking excited you guys brought me out here. I appreciate it that I flew out here.

Big thing in the airport showing this Federman on the cover of Time magazine as a testament to man's ability to overcome depression. And I'm thinking to myself, maybe, you know, thank God, I wish the guy the best, it's all great. But should Diane Feinstein and Federman be members of the United States Senate with their various issues, and should Mitch McConnell, and what's this guy, Santos, who is out of control on the Republican side? It doesn't matter.

You've got the same issues on the Republican and Democrats. He's the one that lied about his military service. He lied about almost many. Everything. Yeah. Everything. Yeah. I'm not judging either.

I'm saying it doesn't matter. Yeah, the American people deserve better. Yeah. I think this is the, the challenge that the American populace faced with social media because, like, we've had political parties in the past. We've had this political divide and whatnot. But I think that in days gone by, and I could be fantasizing because, you know, I wasn't alive in the 50s. But I believe that there was always a healthy distrust of the government where, yeah, We want our guy to be this or we want our, you know, guy to be that.

But now it's almost as if we don't, we will allow our side, whoever our side is, to get away with anything as long as it's our side. And it's justifies the means. Yeah. 100% true. Meanwhile, meanwhile, all the politicians are voting to remove, you know, insider trading restrictions on themselves. Meanwhile, they're extending the Patriot Act every year. Every year. And it's like, I don't think, I don't think it all seems like a tool.

I don't know that they're so all so nefarious as to, you know, be conducting this big op against the human. But people want power. Like you said, people do what's in their best interest. And if politicians can make $11 million from, you know, buying Nvidia after they pass a bill, then they're going to do that. Yeah. Listen, same what I said before. People do what's in our investor trips. It's not a bad thing.

It's just if you understand that, you can keep your behavior. Yeah. I mean, you can sell them a refrigerator, sell them a car. Yeah. Get on a podcast. You can fucking run for president. I mean, you can, you can sell them, you know, a congressional bill that restricts their fears. So anything else you want to get into?

Any more heavy shit? Well, I want to ask. Oh, I haven't started a heavy shit. Come on. I want to ask you. No, I want to finish the, because you talk to be. Because you talked about the tap on the shoulder and how that ended your career as a mother. Can you talk about that a little bit more?

I don't know how to say it because I'm not sure I truly understand it to this day. But I can say that I had a moment after Mount Weather where I was advised that I wasn't as smart as I thought I was. That I was not as clever as I thought I was. and that but my the problem was when I when I had that moment I felt really badly

because I really truly wanted to do the right thing right and I really truly thought that I was doing the right thing and I was told by this entity I was I was the information was conveyed by the entity

that that was not accurate that I didn't really know what the fuck was going on and I had stepped over the line and that was it that was over did you feel as though you had barely avoided jail time?

No. I don't think... But how did they... I don't think I've ever been... It's never been a jail issue as far as I'm concerned. It was never an overt issue. It was never something they could jail me for.

How did they kill your career as a novelist, though? If you write books, great. If you can publish books, better. But if you publish books, you get to sell books, right? I mean, I got a certain amount of money for that book, and I got a certain amount of money for that book, and I get a certain amount of money for that book. I would not have gotten that amount of money for another book.

Because they put the word out that you were persona non grata. I don't think it's a word. I don't know. The answer is I don't know, but I can tell you what happened. I don't know the mechanism, but I know how that mechanism, but I don't know how it happened in my particular interest. I know one person who writes novels and he had to clear his books both through DoD and CIA. Yeah.

And the mechanism they used was, you know, DoD has the first purview or is a CIA has a second. And they say no CIA has to have it. And so they basically found a way to fuck him because both entities were saying we have to have the first look. Yes. And that's the way they essentially shut him down and stopped him. Listen, the mechanism is way stronger than I think I'm clever. Like, I'm a moron in certain ways. I mean, I get a couple things up my sleeve.

but it all comes down to objective. In 2006, if I had wanted to write another book and publish another book, I would have had a zero chance. And I had everything. My agent at the time was one of the, I would argue that in, and I don't want to exaggerate because I would argue that she was probably one of the top three agents in the world. Because of her position at the time. my publisher at the time, my first agent, excuse me, my first editor is now the, or until recently, the publisher of all of Time Warner books. I mean, these people, you didn't get any better. It's the Illuminati.

I got the, I got the Illuminati. Listen, I'm not saying how I sold a book after winning $8,000 in a card game with Brad Pitt, but I got fucking everything. I got the lunch at four seasons. I got the GQ excerpts. I got the agent and the bookbook. These guys Robin Webbstone, two of the great fucking guys in my life. I'm incredibly grateful to them. How they helped me out.

I got everything, the whole fucking enchilada. And somehow I blew it. And how I'm not entirely sure the mech. I mean, I'm not entirely sure what, who did what, how? Yeah, Dad said no. And I can tell you what happened. So anyways, I went to Somalia and I did this fucking insane gig in Somalia. And I got stuck at K-50, you know, the second best airport in Mogadishu, with no passport and no money and no technical.

How the fuck do you not have a passport? They took it. I mean, I mean, listen, a lot of, I've heard guys on here talk about Somalia. Yeah, yeah. I might argue, I would always argue that, that, that, that I'm the only person, I'm the only American that ever fought his way. into Mogadishu. I think that's accurate. Like, I know,

we haven't got there yet. In 2006, I came, I just, I said, I'm fucking done. I was, my life was over.

My New York life was over. TV was over. Books were over. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was over. I was a Speaker's Bureau. It was over. I was literally,

I was a dead man to the world in 2006. And I said, all right, I got an idea. I'm going to go to Somalia. The U.S. government has stood up the transitional federal government from put it together in nairobi the biggest problem in 2006 was bad guys were going from iraq and afghanistan into the saudi peninsula down through

saudi into yemen and it's i think it's like 22 miles from uh in a skiff from samalia from from uh yeah yeah it's a short it's a sure i mean you can do it in a fucking rowboat right and once you get in somalia you're fucking you're free right after night after black hawk down There was nobody there. I mean, there was nobody there. So the U.S. government put together a transitional federal government. They sent them into Nairobi. They built them. There was a lot of guys from Minnesota. The diaspora, right? The Somalis, well-educated, successful businessmen

who had been fucked out of by warlords out of all their money. So the U.S. government sponsored it. The United Nations backed it. They all got together in Bidoa, Somalia, like February 26 of 2006. and I said, you know what? Here's the last story, because you guys are going to get rid of me. It's fun, way too fucking long. And we got questions for you, too.

All right, so, I mean, we haven't even got to the fucking... We're bringing you back on just, you know, very... No. I mean, no, I'd love to. Yeah. But I'm just saying people, there's no fucking way anybody's going to listen to me anymore. But we haven't even got to the great shit yet. But anyway, so the point in the story is, I came over this idea, and I said, I got to figure out,

I knew all these guys, right? A lot of guys that we haven't got to yet. Five Eyes guys, like Australians and Brits, and we haven't even got to them yet. But so I came up with this idea. You got to hear this idea. So I go, all right, I'm fucked in New York, right? I'm fucked in D.C. I'm fucked in America.

What am I going to do now? Because the people who really matter have decided they put the fucking fit print, you know, thumb. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have the scarlet letter now, right? I got the scarlet letter. Yeah. So I go, okay. So I knew that the USG was going to stand up the transitional federal government in Bidoa, Somalia, because Mo was too hot.

It's like this 15th transitional government, yeah? Yeah, 15th, exactly right. So the idea is that the bad guys were coming across Saudi Peninsula, they were going across the Straits of Yemen, into Somaliland, then into Somalia, once you were in, you were off grid. Because after 9-11, we had very, very, very meager resources in Somalia, right? I know you've had guys on here that have talked about it, but nobody's going to come on here and say we knew what was going on in Somalia. Nobody. So I said, okay. So I got my shots up to date, and I flew into Nairobi, right? I love Nairobi. I'm a big fan of Nairobi. So I always stay at the 680 hotel, because that's where all the spooks in Nairobi, they, in East Africa, they all stay at that shithole. It's on Kenyada Boulevard. and it's a fucking hysterical place.

You've got to go to some time. So there's only two clubs I ever really wanted to join in my life. One was Hell's Angels and two was the East Africa Flyers Club at Wilson Airport, which is the civilian side of Nairobi Airport, right? So Bluebird Air flies all the cot flights. They've got a bunch of King Air 500s and they fly all the cot. And you know, Cot's got a shelf flight for like eight hours. Oh, I didn't know that now.

Yeah, it's like eight hours. So you fly it up, they would cut it. My dealer never tells me how long. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, exactly. Well, your dealers should tell you, you're talking. So I go, look, I'm a huge Hemingway nut, right? All my life, I'm a Hemingway night.

So I go, okay, Hemingway had this big thing in Kenya. So I fly, anyways, I fly in. I get to tell you this one quick story. So I fly in, and I've got this guy, and his name is Farrah. Farah backup. At the time, in 2006, I bought a house in New Hampshire, right? I had a couple issues. Move the family into New Hampshire and this great place.

So I'm watching Black Hawk Downs got this great scene where Farah, no, what's his name? Not Farah, he did. Osmond Aliatto. Osmond Aliatto is in the Bakara Arms Market reading USA Today, right? Go back to Black Hawk Down. And all of a sudden he goes, he walks. walks over to a Prado, he gets in his Prado, and he's driving out of town. He's riding a red dirt road through Somalia, right?

He was actually in Morocco, but Ridley Scott shot it in Morocco. So he's driving down the road, and a fucking Black Hawk comes down, and a couple Delta guys tag him with, like, I think it was like an M-14 sawed off or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they tag the engine thing, and there's oil on the thing. And I'm in New Hampshire, and I'm watching this with my sons, Mick and Jake. Bad motherfuckers, these two guys. And so they, so Mick goes, dad, will a 308 break an engine block?

And I said, no. No, sir. No sir, but it's a movie, right? So the Black Hawk lands, the Prado comes to a stop. They kidnap Osmond Alayato and they take him to Sam Shepard, right? And Sam Shepard goes to him and he goes, you bunch of Arkansas white boys, you come in here, thinks this is your war. This is not your war. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a great scene, right? And Osmond Aliatto is a great actor. I forget his name, but the whole thing. So anyways, we'll watch this movie. Let's say it's a Wednesday night. 48 hours later, I'm in the Westlands in Nairobi. Right? And I'm meeting with this guy Farah, and I've got a plan.

One of my plans, one of my famous plans, right? So I'm talking to this guy, Farah. Farah was a lieutenant under, what was the guy's name? Who was the guy? Farah. No, I mean, Adid. Adid, under Adid, okay? So he was in the Somali army, a lieutenant under Adid and knew him very well.

And he went to Syria and received intelligence training from the Mouharahara. in Syria, right? He's my guy. So I hire him. And this guy, Faraz the shit, he was a linguist. So he spoke English. He spoke Somali.

He spoke all those clicking languages. Like, I don't want. Swahili. Yeah, Swahili. But I mean, this guy was the shit. This guy was such a bad dude. So we're sitting in the Westlands and we're putting this plan together.

So I'm getting ready to go into Somalia and I and I hear somebody yelling Whitcomb the Westlands is like a shopping mall with a bunch of outdoor cafes and stuff so having a cup of coffee and I hear somebody yelling Whitcomb Whitcomb Whitcomb and I look up and here comes a guy from HRT. This guy I'll say his name is Ricky right he's a man of color and Ricky everybody loved Ricky he was an incredible guy big big jacked up guys like 260 doing like 250 milligrams of sustenon every three days wearing his little sister's medium-sized t-shirt and i mean he's jacked his shit and he comes up and i go ricky what the fuck are you doing here right and he goes oh you know whatever

he had left the bureau and he'd gone to work for triple canopy or whatever else so he was working in country but he's got a place in nairobi he moved his family to nairobi so he can go back and forth so he comes up and then this guy comes up and he goes uh this guy comes up and he's got oh he's wearing a he's wearing a big johnson t-shirt big johnson remember that big johnson the root the what no that's stupid yeah

it was a goofy t-shirt company and a bing golf advisor with no no fucking top on it just a visor and he's wearing uh bud shorts like ud t-shirts you know they got the buckle in the front

the nut crackers yeah and they got they got fucking fanny packs on with you know with the pack mire grips showing out of the fanny packs whatever and there's other guys with him and he's got this just handlebar like village people mustache and he's got a list he's got a fucking list

so these guys come up and I go Ricky what the fuck's going on man and so he looks and he goes what are you doing here and I said I you know business and he looks at Farah and I go this is John you know he works for Google or you know whatever else so we have that moment and then

a guy with a lisp as a thalam alakum alakou motherfucker you know and whatever it was one of those moments so I went to the store and I a bunch of tampons and duct tape because I wouldn't carry, they didn't have, like that gel. The quick clot. The quick clot, right?

So tampons are easy, right? Right. So I'd carry duct tape and tampons. Yeah. We're talking about wound management. Woon management, right? Because if I'm going in, I get shot, there's no hospitals, this all you. Right.

So then I ran at 172B, a Cessna, and I fly in. And long story short, next time we talk, I get stuck there. I get stuck. The idea is this. Somalia has a transitional federal government. A government needs GDP. GDP, Somalia has the longest coastline in Africa, meaning they have the longest legitimate fishing grounds in the Indian Ocean, which is rich. The Chinese want it. So if I can sell the coastline of Africa in grids to China, that's money for the transitional federal government to stand up and run with GDP in Somalia, right? The idea, the The idea is the US government wants a government that can tamp down the warlords, find the bad guys, and get a toehold in Africa. We're dream casting here. Yeah.

No, no, this is real shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, well, yeah, you're right. It's true cast. But I thought it was real shit, because I'm delusional. We all hope it's real shit. 15 times, 17 times, you know. 17th time is the show.

Not saying, not saying that your plan is dreamcasting. I think the government's dream of like, why. out warlords in dream casting. That's what's dream casting. That's exactly right. Yeah. The face ringing and whatever. Yeah. You know, I was said, fuck it. I'm going to give it a trial. Yeah. So I fly, so I, it was like $7,000 or something like that to hire this plane.

To fly from Nairobi, from Wilson, you know, like the Wilson Flyers Club, where Hemingway used to drink, right? For me, it was all about Hemingway, but I just wanted to be Hemingway. so so listen seriously it gets better so I go

fuck it so I fly into Bidoa for those who have not been to Bidoa it's a shit stain on the world there's nothing there it's been

fucking blown to the ground and everybody so the first thing I did was hire a technical right so I've got like I got like two

I think I had two PKMs I had an M60 what's that go for a day to hire a technical 500 bucks that's fucking outstanding

That's new team house floor right there. $500. $500. If you want to know how much to get a technical floor. Well, no, that was 2006. I don't know what it is now. 2006, the technical was $500 a day. I think I had two PKMs.

I think I had, I know I had one M60 because it caused me a lot of grief. Because I'm thinking, where does an M60 come from, right? Right. That really bothered me. Right, right, right. So I had the M60, and I had the main guy up on a ZUSC. Is there like a technical mark that you, is it like Avis Technicals or something? Like, how do you hire a technical when you...

I'll tell you what. If a tall, skinny white boy goes to Bidoa Somalia with a shitload of money in their sock, yeah. Technicles appear out of nowhere. Right, they just magically appear out of nowhere. Yeah. They were standing when I get there. Somalia really might be one of my favorite places on Earth.

Just because it's like a last frontier type of thing. Like, they've got different classes of people, and I know we're getting to the end. People have got to go home. but different classes of people. And they had this one class of people that were kind of like gypsies, fortune tellers, and they would cast spells, right? So I could go to them and say, I'm going to pay you a certain amount of money,

and you can cast a spell on such and such a person. But the same people would have the genital mutilation. So they have like a 14-year-old girl selling Chinese watches and amulets to cast a spell when the village senior was cutting off her with a broken piece of glass from a bottle. I mean, it's fucking bizarre, Somalia. Yeah. It's primal.

So anyways, the idea was to... The issue was pirates, right? The pirates, the only reason the Chinese wouldn't buy the fishing rights is because of the pirates, but you had the naval task force in Djibouti, so if I could put together the whole package, then the... an aspect of the intelligence community, I'm not going to say which, would work with the Naval Task Force to tamp down, to patrol the coastline closer, to shut down piracy, to sell the fishing rights to the Chinese, to produce GDP, to stand up a federal government and give the USG a decent go at fighting terrorism. Yeah. That was the idea.

It didn't go well. It didn't go well. No? No. So I read a 172 and I fly in and I land and buy Doha and I've got a certain amount of money and they ain't no ATMs. There's no credit cards. There's nothing, right? You've got a certain amount of money.

Right. Today you've got $500. Tomorrow you're dead. Right. Dead. Right. I got to that point. So I didn't like where I was in my own right because it was untenable.

But the government didn't like it because all of a sudden the government. this me gets kidnapped by El Shabab and tortured to death, it does not look good for the transitional federal government. So all of a sudden it went within a very short period of time, meaning like an hour. They realized that I was, they being El Shabab, realized I was there and they were coming up to get me because I had great value to them. The, an intelligence component of the United States government was trying to put together very, very, very, very good. interests to work a stabilization program for the transitional federal government. And I was a big fucking problem.

So I ended up in a space between the wall of a mosque. I mean, and that's saying something because a mosque in Bidoia is not really much, right? It's like a loudspeaker and a fucking remains of a broken wall that's been chopped up with RPGs. Right. And I'm hiding in this thing. there was this little piece of corrugated tin, and they'd give me two bottles of Nestle water, because you find Nestle water anywhere you go, right?

Anywhere in the world. Thank God for the Swiss. Nestle and Nest Cafe, right? This guy, I've got pictures of all this. I'll show you these pictures after we're done here, but this guy that was, there was a guy that had started a, like a bed and breakfast for the government, except a bed and breakfast was a pile of rubble with, like, some blue paint, right?

And he had survived various wars, but he took a fucking hard frag to the face. So he had, I mean, he was gnarly to look at. He had a real problem with his face. And so anyways, I got stuck between, under this piece of corrugated tin, and then finally I was running out of money, and I said, I got to make a run for it. I mean, it's a long walk back to Nairobi.

So my only choice was to go to Moog, because it was the only, oh, I'm sorry, I forget to say. Every day the King Air, the plan was that an intelligence community, an intelligence component would fly Bluebird Air would fly King Air 500s caught flights in the morning. That was eight hours. Then an intelligence capability would hire them for the second and third shifts and they would just fly the planes around moving guns and warlords and trying to put the whole

thing together. Right? They decided they didn't have room for me. So I would get up every morning with my technical and I would go to the Bidoa Airport, which is nothing but a dirt strip with a pile of rubble. There was, there was like one tree. And we'd go out there, and all the technicals would line up to go out and get the cot, because that was the only money. The plane would land. They'd throw off the bales of cot. The guys would run up, grab their shit, and go sell it. I'd go up to the plane. The pilot would come out and say, fuck you, white man go away, and the plane would fly away. And that's a shit feeling. Now I've got $500 less, $500 less, $500. $500.

is less. My socks getting empty, right? So finally, I had no place to go. I got one day left. So I said, I'm going to make a run for it to Mogadishu. I didn't know how far it was to Mogadishu. I didn't know what it was there when I got there. Go to the Mogadishu airport, which was closed due to fighting. You go to checkpoints, you know, you get hung up at checkpoints with like a 12-year-old with an AK-47. Yeah. And my technical, so I'm in a Toyota Corolla. The technical would try to catch up. They would scream at each other. They'd yell at it. Like the 12-year-old doesn't care if I go through or not, but

oh, I forget to tell you. Osmond Aliato, the guy from Blackhawk down, I met him. So I'd go from New Hampshire to Nairobi and then into Bidoa and I'm in this warehouse. I got a fucking picture of him with me. And he's standing there, not in a fucking Montagg

walking suit with short sleeves and epaulettes. He's got on a fucking suit from Herod's and he's wearing aramis cologne right and i'm in this warehouse with him it's 104 degrees and i'm going what the fuck and i'm shaking his hand osmond aliato the guy from black hawk down i'm going what the fuck is going on here but anyway the point in the story is that i eventually ended up in mogue they shot out the they shot out the window of the Toyota corolla which is a problem because then they could see me right ahead right had reflective windows and uh so i get to the airport and i see that there was a

whatever that plane from D.B. Cooper, the one with the stairs that come down. Oh, is that like a DC-10 or something? Yeah, like a DC-10? Yeah. And I can see it. So, have you guys been to swell? No. Okay.

So, Moog, you know, got Mogu, Airport, right? Main Airport. And then about, I have, like, 25 miles south is this place called K-50. And K-50 is an old Russian air strip. And it's literally a red dirt strip and a bunch of shrub brush. And then a couple tents and piles of rubble. and 50 guys with machine guns who all want to know

what this fucking retard me this guy whatever this guy you're referring to yourself he goes and so they're all looking at me and I'm going and the only reason and I know I'm looking at them and they're looking at me and I'm thinking the only reason I'm alive is because

the agency is making deals with all these guys trying to put together what turned out to be the second battle of Mogadishu and they're all looking going can we take him can you take them nobody knew who I was there with and that's what saved my life. So anyways, the guy came out. Oh, they didn't want to cut off the money tap. Well, they didn't know who I was there with. Right, right. So it's like your crew didn't want to take a chance. You steal me. Right. But I had, but the agency was paying you

and then the agency is going to pay you to kill you. Right. So I think it was confusion. Yeah. So anyways, the point of story is that, so I said, you know, I got to get on that plane. It was a charter plane. It was not a scheduled flight there were no planes in mogadish that day zero but there was this one plane and and i still have the ticket but it's not a ticket but i still have the handwritten thing but anyways the part in the stories that came out and they said how much money do you have and i had 600 bucks left my technical's gone the car's gone um i'm all by myself so they took um i gave him 600 bucks they came out and they searched me they went through all my shit they stole the duct tape like they left the tampons but oh well that that's another story but i had some guys

with some real health issues. So they searched your stuff just to make sure that you had nothing else of value? No money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I was wearing a nice watch but they didn't know what that was. Do we have questions for Chris? We do. We should probably roll into those. Chris, we are, like we... Guys, I know.

This is way the fuck over there. It happens sometimes. Everybody who watches this show knows I'm a talker. Like, I'll go all night. Like, Jackson's one who's good about keeping up, like, on the rails. but the other thing is

is we just like we want you back and want to hear yeah we can do it again sometimes well the crazy shit we haven't got to you know it just that's why I've been trying to get to crazy shit for like four hours

well this is the start of the crazy shit but it's all been good though it's all amazing the crazy shit we haven't got to yet is I moved to Asia after Somalia because I needed a war that I could survive and that was

fucking madness just shut up Chris black magic I'll have you back next time and we'll talk about the, we'll talk about South East Asia. East Timor was madness. I was called Kita Boulang. Kita Boulang is number one ghost because I was, uh... The number one ghost, man.

Casper, but not so friendly, right? I was not friendly. Jackson, thank you so much. How much a black and white was based on your overseas HRPiars? Do you prefer domestic ops or renditions? Why? Also, we need another Waller novel. That's a really nice guy.

I don't know who he is, but I mean, anybody that even knows. First of all, Waller is a real guy. He was an NSA guy. Great guy, great friend, and that's why I used his name. But they were 100%, I shouldn't say 100%. They were very literally based on my life. Harold Janine, Uncle Harold that I grew up with, was the industrialist, the kind of the protagonist guy.

That was based on his life. and black was stories that I couldn't tell in Cold Zero. Why do you think, why do you think, like, you didn't get the tap on black and white, but you did on your fourth book? No, I got it on white. Oh, you got on white. Yeah, I didn't get a tap on black because it was, you know, there's not a big problem. I stepped on some dicks of white.

Jackson, thanks again. What was the hardest part of selection and an OTS? NOTS is a new operated training school. I don't think there was anything hard about them. It was, I've never been really good at anything athletic except violence. I mean, I was like a C lacrosse player and a C football player and a C. I was never really good anything. I just had endurance.

You know, you guys know, cue course or the long walk, it doesn't matter what you go through. It's endurance. If you just can shut off pain. Yeah. That's it. Jackson, thanks again. We have some party yourself outside. It sounds like.

As an early plank owner of the team, what has impressed you most about the team today and the direction they have taken since you've left? I could not make HRT today. They would hand me my fucking bus ticket in a banana sandwich and say, you know, leave me alone. They've evolved in ways that are remarkable

on so many levels. I almost feel embarrassed. that I get to meet you guys because I was on HRT but I'm just you know there's so much better but I think that's true of of I think anybody that was part of any force prior to the GWAC you know and looking back because the training technology has changed

you know just technology has changed knowledge has changed I mean all these units are doing things yeah I mean Jack's Ranger battalion experience and who the Rangers were then was way different and way better than what it was. Not the Rangers weren't great when I was there, but they didn't have that GWOT experience.

So I think that's true. Different than it is today. I think that's true of anywhere you look. I have enormous respect for these guys, and I just hate to, you know, I don't want to step on there, you know, whatever. Marco, thank you very much. Have you ever worked with Army CID, and if so, what was your honest opinion of the agents?

I love CID, and I'll tell you, Randy Mullins and Willie Rowell, I worked at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, with those two guys. They were both warren officers. Willie Ravel ran the entire operation. And I, they had shitty suits. They were polyester suits. Like $99 suits.

$99 suits. And Randy Mullins, I love the guy. Randy Mullins had a car like his main personally owned vehicle. And he had a bumper sticker that said, this is not an abandoned car. Please don't tow. It was in 47 coats of Bondo. They made no money. and they were true patriots.

I love those guys. So I loved my experience with CID is some of the greatest people that I've ever worked with. Dedicated, capable, and great guys. Louis Asquez, thank you very much. What lessons do you learn in H.R.T. That the general public could benefit from knowing.

Oh, my God. Great question. The short answer is, I don't know. I don't know that I have a huge, that I have a great opinion of the general public, to be honestly. I mean, I'm not really a humanist and I've lived a really fucking weird life. And HRT, Delta, Marcom, seal teams, Rangers, special operations, the marshals, the Bortak. I mean, I could talk for hours and hours about all the great people I've met working for different organizations that have devoted themselves.

to a greater good. I don't see that in general, you know, in general population. I think you try hard. You do the best you can to be a good human being and you hope it works, in my opinion. Cat Chaser, thank you very much for the cat sticker. R.S., thank you very much.

Thank you for mentioning John O'Neill, thought-provoking conversation. John O'Neill is an American hero, gave his life to his life to the fight on Al Qaeda and it's just bizarrely ironic that they killed him. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. He fought his

entire life against Al Qaeda and he died in the World Trade Center bombings. It's crazy. K Jam, thank you so much. Echoing the rest in peace for John O'Neill. Shout out. Thank you for the unique candor, Chris. And there's

an asterisk on unique. I don't know if there's something around. I got to say to anybody that still hanging on here. I apologize for the rambling. I mean, I've got, sorry. The problem with my life is, it's so widely, unwieldy, and it's hard picking a couple things to talk about. Chris, again,

just you and me here, I'm a rambler too, so I'm right there with you. You don't have to apologize for a thing. There's so many fucking stories that I don't know how to get there. We'll do it again next time, and we'll hit up all the other sidebars. K-jam, thank you so much. It can be another

a three and a half hour show. Like, I'm down. Come back to discuss the topic of propaganda pre-whiskeed. In the meantime, about to send Jack and Dave minimum 50 questions I have for you on the topic. Slaant. Like the, that's the Irish cheer, right?

Slante. Salante. Yeah. Thanks. Mohamed Sabani. Just for the record, whoever wrote that half Irish got the shamrock on my sleeve. Mohamed Sabani, thank you very much. Thank you for the sticker.

I think we got a couple more after that. What's that mean? Thank you for the sticker. So one of the things people can do instead of making a comment is they just put a sticker, which is like a little like, I'll show you right here. It's just that. It's just somebody like donating without really having a comment, but just like being very generous for us, helping us like buy booze and pay the rent. I want to get this right. Duke da fuck down. Anyway, thank you very much.

Team House can link as usual. Thanks, fellas. Dogpoint, thank you. What do you think made you attract to a life adventure? Were you looking for inspiration for writing at first, or was it something more personal? Great, great, great, great friggin' question. It was personal looking for a life adventure. It was two things.

One, I wanted to be Hemingway. Bya Kurtz going up the heart of darkness. Right. Joseph Conrad. Conrad, yeah. So, you know, as a writer, those things are important to me. And I just happen to be born into a place where there's nothing else to do. I mean, from the time I was a little tiny kid, I mean, like five years old,

I would go away in the morning and I would come back if I was hungry. So I lived my entire life in the mountains. I mean, survival. When you were doing that, were you there as an outdoorsman, sort of a naturalist, enjoying what you were or were there fantasies around what you were doing? Both. Great question. Both. I had, uh, my mind tends, I'm a romanticist to a certain extent. I wanted to be, uh, I literally wanted to be understanding. I mean, I, I, lived a life of extraordinary adventure. Yeah. Other than smoking a shotgun in Cordillane, Idaho.

Right. July 3rd, 1962. Other than that, I kind of dug his whole thing. I had shitty taste in women you know but like when i was my my junior in high school i drove from from hanover to hampshire to key west florida to drink in a titty bar across the street from where he wrote the snows of kiliman charro right i mean i mean who does that when you're fucking 17 years old you know i was into it i was way into it i wanted the life of adventure i wanted to go out and break and heal at the broken places. Yeah. I wanted to go home and write it all that. It's fantastic. It's it's interesting too because there was a whole generation, not even a generation because obviously him like I don't want to say necessarily carouac but Hunter Thompson but but Jack for Jack London. Yeah like like there I guess it's

more the Melville. Yeah. Conrad like they they saw the world. They saw the world. You can it's it's hard to see the world that way anymore. Yeah. People will people forget now you know I've told a lot of stories about things. They were before the internet. They were before cell phones the way we we see them now. When I first went to Morocco in 1980, it was dangerous. Right. And that was just Morocco. I mean, now you go there and you have dates and take a photo tour of the Rolling Stones and go surfing, right? I did go surfing here, but in those days, it was a very different world. There There were no Snapchat, shuffle dance videos, you know, overlooking Mogadishu airport with a bunch of gluten-free chefs who were,

you know what I'm saying? We live in a different world now. Right. In those days, adventure meant something. Right. Because if you fucked up, you were dead. Right. Like, what I was going to say, go back to Somali real quick.

Two guys in my crew, one guy had this really fucked up cut on his hand that I was trying to bride with a little bit of iodine. The other guy, maybe 16 years old, 17 years old, and he was laughing at the guy with a cut on his hand. And I go, what are you laughing at? I mean, you know, through a translator. He pulls up his leg. He had BDU pants on. Pulls up his leg. And he had what looked like a rubber band around his leg and bones, like his fucking Tibbib bones to his boot. There was no flesh. He got, hit with a grenade and the flesh died and atrophied. And they were going to cut off his leg and he said,

no, I'm leaving this life with this leg one way or another. So somehow, because the world is weird, somehow his leg had healed around the bone. And he was walking around on two fucking bones, like a peg leg. So anyway,

the point in the story is, you know, during a lot of the stuff that I did in my life, there was no, there was no backstop. It was simple. It was analog. It was not a digital world. Do you think that like, I mean, obviously we still have space. We still have the ocean. But do you feel like, especially with the internet and with like Wikipedia, like, you know, if you've never been to the Nile or to the Amazon or whatever, like you can just kind of look at all up, you know, see travel videos on YouTube or whatever? Do you feel like it's removed some of the mystery and some of the challenge in life? 100%. Look, you know, I, we haven't got to this point yet, but I've been to. I don't know what the number is, but I'm guessing it's like 80 countries. Every continent except Antarctica.

And I've been a lot of places. But you go to the Istanbul airport. There's two. Not one. There's two fucking crispy cream donut shops in the Istanbul airport. Right. I mean, Istanbul is the, like the center of the Silk Road. It's like the center of commerce for the world.

And there's two, I mean, maybe it's right that there's two crispy cream donuts. I'm just saying that the world's gone. Right. It's gone. Right. The world of discovery and exploration. It's hard, man. You've got to go deep in the ocean or far into outer space.

Yeah. Mohammed Sophani, thank you very much. Someone's coming to take that ghost title one day, you patriot. Drinks on me when I see you, gentlemen. Cheers. As a young businessman, how should I best fund and shape new politicians and crush the socialist left? Jesus. My daughter, Chelsea, who I love dearly, said,

Dad, no matter what, don't mention these fucking things, right? One of them was politics. I'm not going to say it. And that's fair. And we generally, like, we try to avoid that on our show. But let's say it's not the socialist left or the capitalist right. Let's say, as a young business person, how would somebody go about buying? buying politicians.

Well, you buy them. You know. It's just a campaign contribution. That's pretty simple. That's exactly right, yeah. I mean, you know, I've got a great buddy in Hartford, Connecticut. And I love this guy. And he paid a little here and he paid a little there and found out he shouldn't have.

You know, he did it honestly. He did it righteously. It's hard, man. It's really friggin' hard getting all the rules right. So, great question. I love the entrepreneurial spirit. real spirit i don't know i don't know how you buy them our our audience outside they love you do you hear nobody loves me man i've kept you here is so freaking late

nobody loves me i think it's we got to wrap it up for you poor guys i think it's just uh way of oh wait one last question here uh hey do you have you checked patron he's asleep yeah he's been he took a nap an hour ago uh one last question here uh jean collie thank you very much will the current focus on white nationalism lead to results similar to those in the 1990s? Greg, another, I mean, some really brilliant questions, and it's really cool to know that your audience is listening. We have the smartest audience out there. Incredibly smart people, right? My position is this, that I think that the white nationalist, you know, I didn't make up that phrase, but that phrase in what it commonly means, in the 1990s had a basis in the Turner Diaries,

and it had a basis in the Zionist occupational government. It had a certain legitimacy, and somebody has come up with a way to remanufacture that. I don't think because you vote for Trump, and this is not politics, that you are automatically a white anything. Right. I mean, I watch YouTube, and I watch black people and brown people

and red people and yellow people and various colors, whatever else, that like Biden and like Trump, that the world is changing, and it's not just because you're a person of a, a particular color, you have a particular affiliation. It's not that way anymore. Right. So saying, okay, I'll lend on this. My mother is a piece of work, all right?

My mother is a piece of work. My mother called me up one day, and she said, she was in a rant about something. She is way left. She's on a rant something, and she said, all those racist, gun-carrying military people. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. mom what the fuck are you talking about what about a military person would be anything I mean I know military people the left right and in between it's not a political issue you join the military because you're a hero because you believe in the greater good of humanity in my opinion

and I said what are you talking about she said well you know it's all the same thing these right wingers if they like guns they hate this right and I and I thought to myself oh my God I've known this woman all my life there's some really sideways thinking out there. So anyway, I don't think white nationalism these days is anything. I think it is a, they're usurping a

term that meant something 30 years ago. Yeah. Well, there's something to distinguish between nationalism and white nationalism. Yeah, exactly. What is a nationalist? Because you love your country? Right, right. Because you believe in what makes this a great place to live? Right. I've been a lot of places.

I've been to some good places and some shitty places. I don't know of a place that I wish I lived other than the United States of America. Right. Right. We have a remarkable constitution that guarantees freedoms that we should be proud of and enjoy, in my opinion, and protect. Right. And a lot of people die to protect those rights. Right. No, I'm right there with you. I mean, obviously, we're not perfect because the country is just humans and humans are never perfect.

But the Constitution ensures that we're as close to that as we can be. I wish I'd said that. I agree. Did you check patron? If you knew John O'Neill, Ali Sufant, but you pretty much. Oh, I've got to say. Thank you for asking that question. When I go down a list of people I've known in my life that benefited America who were heroes and who did extraordinary thing,

Ali Sifant would be at the top of the list. Ali Sifant, I met in Yemen, who was a junior FBI agent, who was working his way up, and he is one incredible guy. If you could get Ali Safant on this show, it would be remarkable for... Are you still in touch with him?

Maybe he helped us. I'm not, because he left the FBI, he went to the New York. He worked for some aspect of NYPD, and he built the terrorism, aspect within in New York. But I mean, Ali Saffon is, is, he's a hero. It's easy to ban to that round. Like anybody serves in the military as a hero, maybe. Ali Saffon's a hero. I mean, he almost, you know, he lived or died to protect Americans. And he came from, you know, a different route

than a lot of people would. So anyway, Ali Svant was an FBI agent who worked counterterrorism and he worked UBL and he was uh worked with john o'neill um and that is it and all right man it's jack's had enough we killed it man we killed something we will we'll we'll do it again man we can do a quick vote right now if if you know jack can go home and and uh chris and i'll sit here d uh i got to take a piss for i sit in your drink and fucking talk we we get drunk all night no no I mean, we should do a second episode at some point, but I mean, this was a good time, man. I'm glad that we had this wide-ranging conversations. I will say the really great stuff we haven't got to yet.

Seven years in Asia, in Indonesia, and where it goes after that. We'll do it next time. We do it next time. Yeah, yeah. All right, guys. Also, look, we have cold zero. No, no, no. Those are ancient.

It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. No. I get zero. Zero out of those books. You don't make any money? No, nothing. I just, you know, in the publishing industry, they say,

if you out-earn your advance, you didn't get a big enough advance, right? Yeah, I read these, too. I read both of these. I brought those books for you guys to put on your shelves for your literary guys, and because it tortures me that I have to look at no heroes. You've got to put that next to No Heroes. We'll put it right next to No Heroes. But anyway, if you guys want to know more about Chris,

if you, you know, want to... to see a book that, yeah, I mean, a Chris of his time. But there's another one coming. No, the new one is crazy. The book that's coming out now, I just finished it, I submitted it to Random House. It's called Anonymous Mail and it is very specific details about the stories, some of the stories I've told and the stories that I have not told yet. It's about what happens to a person in our world that falls too deeply into it, the anonymous male aspect of it, and how you come back out of it because you know i went through what everybody does the suicide and you know all of those things i i i feel like uh i have some perspectives on that but the new

the new book is about that probably six months all right we'll talk about that yeah yeah absolutely um but honestly uh if you want to read a book uh that gets somebody canceled by the u s government by the U.S. government. That got me canceled by the U.S. government. Read white. And if you want to understand white better, read black. And if you want to know what type of person writes a book like books like these, read cold zero. And they're all antiques like me.

All right, guys. The Bhagavad Gita is an antique and it's still great. Thank you, thank you everyone for joining us, man. We'll do this again with Chris. And we'll see all of you guys again next Friday. So thank you for joining us, man. Hopefully for something shorter. Maybe.