The Team House - FBI Hostage Rescue Team Operator | Greg Shaffer | Ep. 171

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

Greg is the author of the best-selling book, “Stay Safe – Security Secrets for Today‘s Dangerous World”, and is the host of Investigation Discovery Channel’s police drama, “Body Cam – Behind the Badge”. Greg served in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for twenty years before founding Shaffer Security Group. He has served as an Operator on their elite “Hostage Rescue Team” conducting tactical operations across the globe; as well as the Legal Attaché in Budapest, Hungary where he led the FBI’s international mission to defeat national security and criminal threats. He is internationally recognized as one of the leading experts and authorities on the phenomenon of “active shooter” events and domestic terrorism prevention. His responsibilities have included the security of all major Special Events such as NFL Super Bowl; NBA Finals; NBA All Star Game; MLB World Series and many other high profile events which were considered targets of terrorism. Check out Greg here: https://shaffersecuritygroup.com/our-founder/ Today's Sponsor: SAP Gear (Stately Asset Protection)  https://SAPGEAR.com Veteran-owned company, Stately Asset Protection’s retail store specializes in handmade and unique survivability products. Use the code “TEAM” for 15% off your order! https://SAPGEAR.com To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month  -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests -Ad Free audio feed Subscribe to our Patreon! 👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch:  https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media:  The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: 👇 [e-mail] #fbi #hrt #hostagerescueteamBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your hosts, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hey guys, welcome to episode 171 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park. And our guest on tonight's show is Greg Schaefer. Greg spent time in the Coast Guard and then the FBI and then the FBI hostage rescue team.

And today he runs a security company, writes about active shooters. And we're going to talk to him all about his career. We're really excited to have him on the show. I think you're the first HRT guy we've had on the show. since Danny Colson. So we really appreciate it, Greg. Well, thank you for having me. And Danny's a very good friend of mine, and he's a legend in the HRT. Yeah, he's the man. We had him on twice, a lot of fun. After people watch this, they should go check out Danny's episodes. So Greg, I mean, just starting off from the top, if you could tell

us a little bit about, you know, where you grew up and sort of what your pathway was towards your service in the Coast Guard. Sure. You know, I have three brothers or four boys in the family. My mom and dad were married for over 50 years. I grew up in really a leave-it-to-beaver type household. My dad was an IBMer. And I just, my dad was an IBMer. And about every two or three years, we would move someplace different. So I went to three different high schools. But as a result of moving around so much, I think it did help my brothers and I to develop a closer relationship. So, you know, we lived all over the country. And I remember at one point in time, we were traveling somewhere, and we were in an airport. And I saw these West Point cadets in their dress gray uniform and their capes. And I had no idea who they were of what they represented. I asked my dad, and he identified them as West Point cadets.

And he said, I was probably about 12, 13 at the time. And he sent me over there to talk to him. And that's really how I got interested in the academies. And ended up going to most of my high school years in Paris, France, returned to New Jersey. That was quite a culture shock, a Paris, France, and New Jersey. I ended up to spend my senior year in New Jersey where I played football. And the athletic director had a brother who went to the Coast Guard Academy.

And he knew I was looking at West Point and looking at Annapolis and Air Force Academy. And I have to remember this is 1979. So being in the military, it wasn't all that cool. You know, we had Jimmy Carter as president. The military was not that place you wanted to be, you know, to have chicks and be cool. Fortunately, that fortunately has turned around now and being in the military is a cool thing. So I ended up having an appointment to Annapolis and also had an appointment to the Coast Guard Academy. The Coast Guard Academy is the only academy that is a national competition.

No congressional appointments are required. So I got accepted to both. and it came down to the Coast Guard's peacetime mission. I love their search and rescue. I love the drug interdiction. So I went to the Coast Guard Academy, did four years there, got a Bachelor of Science degree, played football there, had a great time, made lifelong friends of which I stay in contact with today,

and did seven years in the Coast Guard. And the highlight of my Coast Guard career was being selected to command a Coast Guard cutter, 82 foot patrol boat out of Fort Myers Beach, Florida. This is in the mid, the late 80s when the drug trade was at its height. And we were out there doing search aggression cases and looking for drug smugglers. And last I heard, I still have the record for the largest marijuana seizure in the Gulf of Mexico, which was 45 tons. Wow. Yeah, that's a lot of marijuana.

So I had a great time, had a great crew. you know, the crew makes the team. I just had a fantastic crew. The name of the ship was a Coast Guard cutter point steel. It was 82 feet long. We had a crew of 10. And I'm a 24-year-old Lieutenant J.G. And I'm the commanding officer of the ship.

So, you know, it's incredible the amount of responsibility that the Coast Guard gives us young officers and senior listed people. So anyway, the seven years in the Coast Guard, loved it. I ended up getting married, having a kid, knowing that my time in the Coast Guard, would make me spend more time at sea. So about this time, my younger brother joined the Secret Service and got in the federal law enforcement. At the same time, I'm being recruited heavily by the DEA because I work very closely with them in the Coast Guard

doing drug interdiction, and they are trying to recruit me heavily to get into the DEA. So in 1994, I pretty much applied to every law enforcement agency there is no in demand, all the three-letter agencies. the FBI called, so they were interested. And so I went to the FBI, and that's how the FBI career started. Great. If you don't mind, can we talk a little bit about the Coast Guard? Because this is something we've never really talked about.

And people don't necessarily understand their mission. Yeah. And I mean, people don't understand that prior to 9-11, like the Coast Guard was probably killing more people than any, you know, than anybody. And I mean that in the Drug Interdiction Mission that the Coast Guard has always been active worldwide. Can you tell us about the Coast Guard about a cutter? because why is it called the cutter? I think there are some interesting things there. And sort of like, what's the range on a cutter? Like how far would you guys go?

How long would you be out? Well, the U.S. Coast Guard itself cannot fall under the Department of Defense because the Coast Guard has a law enforcement authority. Again, the Posse Comitonis Act, I don't want to get in the weeds about that. But the military cannot enforce laws in the United States. So Department of Defense entities cannot arrest. somebody. So the Coast Guard has arrest powers and therefore can never fall under the Department Defense. So prior to 9-11, the Coast Guard fell under the Department of Transportation. After 9-11,

they went to Homeland Security. So a law, a Coast Guard officer can, you know, he carries a gun, carry the badge when he does his long, forfeit boardings on the high seas, and he can place people under arrest and maintain that chain of custody for the seizures or what the violation is that he arrested individual court. Correct me if I'm wrong, Greg, but can't the Coast Guard also be federalized during wartime? It is. During wartime, the Coast Guard does fall on the Department of the Navy. As we say in the Coast Guard,

the Coast Guard is that hard nucleus about which the Navy forms in times of war. So anyway, getting back to your question, you know, the internal, let's see, what was of the,

the Cutter Service back in their, you know, late 1700s is where the word cutter came from. the U.S. Coast Guard actually older than the U.S. Navy. And the amount of time that goes cutters stay at sea, you know, depends on the size of the vessel and the size of the fuel tanks. So an 82-foot patrol boat out of Fort Myers Beach, Florida, which I commanded, we'd be underway for about four to seven days at a time.

Okay. At about day four or five or six, we may need some more fuel. So we would hook up with another larger Coast Guard vessel out to Gulf of Mexico and refuel. Oftentimes a large cross-year. Coast Guard Cutter would have four or five patrol boats, 82 patrol boats assigned to it to do a blockade of an area where they knew some drug smugglers are coming in. But, you know, I made multiple drug seizures, you know, on my patrol boat and they were all DEA intelligence driven. You know, we were very close with the DEA and their informants.

And, you know, it's just a lot of fun being out in the Gulf of Mexico on your own ship where you're, you know, called the skipper. and you are ultimately responsible. You guys, for military guys, the commanding officers, he's responsible for everything that happens. You know, everything good, everything bad falls on the commanding officer's shoulders. And fortunately,

I just had an incredible crew of people. And we had a lot of fun. We made a lot of drug seizures. We saved a lot of lives. And hands down, the best two years of my life in the Coast Guard. So on a ship of 10 people, I imagine, you know,

you have to have your mechanics and you have to have, you know, everybody who can do everything for the ship, but they also all have to be cross-trained into seizures and law enforcement and that type of thing. Exactly. With a crew that small, everybody had gone to law enforcement boarding officer school. So, yeah, we had, you know, my executive officer was a senior E8. And then we had a chief mechanic who was an E7. And then I was in 2002, the 10th junior grade. And then you had a couple of petty officers. a couple of non-rates on both the shipboard side and the engineering side.

So, you know, half the people were engineers, either half were, you know, deck hands. And, you know, we work 24-7, you know, and, you know, three shifts a day, eight-hour shifts. So, again, we had a lot of fun, you know, being that part of the country, South Florida, dry tortunes was nearby, Fort Jefferson. We go on the Key West for port calls. You know, we worked hard and we play hard. That's awesome. And so you took the offer from the FBI, went to the FBI Academy. In what year was this? It was 1995. Okay. And what was that experience like going through training to become an FBI agent?

You know, they kind of spoon feed you the things you need to know. I mean, academically, you know, it's hard, but it's not that hard. You know, but they don't want anybody to fail. So if you pay attention and you go to review classes before the exams, you know, you have to be a total moron to pass the failed the exams. So, you know, academically, if you just paid attention, it wasn't that difficult. Physically, you know, for me, of course, it wasn't that hard because I always stayed in shape. But for a lot of people, the physical fitness requirements of the FBI Academy was very difficult. It was, I think, 21 weeks long, if I remember correctly. For the first half of that, you're living with a roommate, you know, so you're 31-year-old man. I got it once 31.

So you're 31 years old, you know, by living in the college dormant and sharing a bathroom with two other people. So one bathroom for four people. So that's the hardest part. It's just getting accustomed to win that. Yeah, I can't believe they would make an officer on the Coast Guard living those conditions. Sounds like living in New York. And then the second half of the year. Academy Academy, you get your own room and treat them more like a human. But, you know, to me,

the FBI Academy was just a lot of fun. I mean, you're driving cars fast, you're shooting a lot of weapons, you're going to rest. You know, you're working in Hogan's Alley, which is very famous, you know, the most raw Bank of America is the Bank of Hogan's Alley, which is a fake town on the FBI base in Quantico. And the training was just a lot of fun. I enjoyed actually every minute of them. And then upon graduation, my first office of assignment was in San Francisco. And you were assigned to gangs and drugs. I was on the gang and drug task force in San Francisco. Exactly.

Interesting part about that as well in 1995, that was the height of the Unabomber, the Unabomber Task Force. So half of my graduating class in the FBI Academy was assigned to the San Francisco Division because that's where they knew the Unabomber was from. And they took literally half of the senior agents in the entire division and put them on a Unabomber task force. They wanted to find a new bomber that was their, that was the FBI's major goal at that time. So they had a backfill all those agents not working regular crimes like drugs, gangs, white-collar crime, all that stuff. So they had to backfill that.

So three graduating classes in a row from Guantico, half of the agents was in San Francisco. So I was kind of caught up in that wave. and spent three years in San Francisco, or I'm sorry, four years in San Francisco, and was assigned to a drug task force. We did gangs as well, and had a lot of fun. Worked with local cops on the task force,

and they taught me a lot of skills, a lot of street smarts. I gleaned from them, you know, kicking in doors, arresting people. I guess some great stories. I got as many stores in San Francisco than you from HRT. It's some great arrest stories.

Hit us with one of the better ones. All right, here's one. The guy was, the, what was the nickname? The bicycle bandit. He had robbed 12 banks in San Francisco, and he'd rob him on a bicycle. And we had Gilstor famous videos of this guy, and he had a unibrow. I mean, like, he liked like two caterpillars of his eyebrow. And, you know, the bank cameras back in those days, they weren't HD, they're really poor quality. But the one thing that stood out on this guy was these huge eyebrows. So anyway, he robbed his 12th bank, the San Francisco Division

the FBI put out one of the posters and they had commercials on television. They put his picture up on billboards in the San Francisco area. No crates. And sure sure is nothing. About a week after all that happened, after it was 12th bank robbery, we got a tip, a phone call. I think the bank robbery looking for is this guy, here's where he's staying. And he was standing up at a hotel, a flea-back hotel up in Santa Rosa, California. So I'm the case officer on this. of the case agent. So me and my partner, we go up there and we talked to the manager of the hotel

and we showed a picture, a greeny picture of this guy and say, it's this guy staying here and the manager of the hotel says, yeah, it looks like the guy staying on the second floor. And this is one of those garden-style hotels where you get a parking lot and the railings and the doors are behind the railings. You can sit in the parking lot of the hotel

and see all the rooms. So we parked across the street, take a pair of binoculars out, look at the room that he's supposed to be in, and where they were for literally five minutes. And this guy walks out the door, walks across the sidewalk there, puts his hands on railing, and does one of these

stretches and everything else, and we're looking dead on the binoculars, and it's like, this has got to be the guy. This is definitely him, right? So, you know, never have ever known for Venice, though that was not quick. So he literally comes down the stairs, gets in a car,

and drives away. So we follow. Now, I'm just one vehicle, so we call him some reinforcement thinking this is definitely the guy and looks just like photographs. So we're following him, about three or four FBI cars finally catch up. We follow him. He stops and pulls him inside of the road about 20 miles north of San Francisco, walks into the woods and comes out with a bicycle. Now, this guy's nicknamed the bicycle band, right? He rods back with bicycles. So there's a lot. The probable cause is kind of building up here. A little bit. So he throws the bike in the trunk of a car,

goes to pick up a friend. It's not there's two in the car. And they're driving in downtown San Francisco. They drive her on a block about three or four times. And once in the middle of the block, a bank. So I call my supervisor and I say, this has got to be the guy. You know, he's got a bike in the trunk.

He's got his partner there. And there's like six other agents now on his whole surveillance. So my supervisor says, standby. He calls me two minutes later, says let him rob the bank. Now, that's unheard of because if somebody gets hurt or injured, that's on the FBI. Right, right. He says, let him rob the bank. I'm like, can I get that in writing? Yeah, yeah. Ends up, my supervisor comes out and the guy still hasn't gotten to the bank yet,

and we're watching them, and my supervisor shows up, and he's like, okay, Greg, when he goes to the bank, you and I will stand outside the bank. And when he comes out the bank, I'll ask him what time it is, and you grab him from behind. Like, okay, great plan here. So we put people around, sure enough, he walks into the bank, he comes out. My boss asks him what time of there is, and he doesn't want to give my boss the time of day. I run up behind him, I bear hugging, my body slamming him into the pavement.

He gets a little injured. I, you know, I handcuff him. I unzip his jacket, and literally bank bills are now flying in the wind and cross-samexed school in the sign. It was like in the movies. I mean, literally, $20, $1,000 bill are flying in the wind, and this is right in the middle of downtown San Francisco. So we arrest him. We send him our team to the car where his partner is.

They arrest him. So that's the story to bicycle man. I was wondering, how much money can he carry out of the bank if he's riding a bicycle? Well, you know what the average take is for a bank job? No. Like, $3,200. Wow. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah, because they usually rob just one drawer, and the drawers have between $25 to $3,500. hundred dollars of the city. Oh, yeah. I've seen the movies. They've passed in the note. And I mean, that's like the FBI's bread and butter, right? It's like bank robbery.

Like, that's a good bust. Yeah, that's the history of the FBI kind of is from bank robberies back in the 1930s. Absolutely. So a bicyclist with a unibrow. Sounds like the love child of Frida Kalo and Lance Armstrong, right? But, wow. So, like, San Francisco. I mean, San Francisco is kind of rough now, too.

But San Francisco was pretty rough at that period of time, right? Like, yeah, the tenderloin was like, so did you guys get involved with the local law enforcement a lot? Or were you mostly working? I don't want to say white collar because obviously a bank robber isn't white collar. But were you mostly working the higher profile cases? Well, the FBI has, you know, multiple squads. And the squads do different work. You know, a white-collar crime squad.

You have a bank robbered squad. You have a gang squad. I have a drug squad. You have mortgage fraud squad. So, you know, I never worked the white-collar crime. I always worked violent crime. Okay. So, but working with the locals is the only way you get things done.

How? They have a context in the street. They know the street smarts. They know the individuals. They know the good guys and the bad guys at sight. So you work very closely with the locals. Every FBI office does. So with the drugs and the gangs and things like that,

what would elevate something from like a local issue to you guys? And were there jurisdictional fights over that stuff? Not really because the FBI got involved when the weight got heavier when they wanted to sell or buy more drugs because we have the deep pockets. And that's why the local agencies look to the FBI. We have the money behind us. We get the federal government behind us to do the buys, do the buy walks. You know, back in that time, a kilo cocaine was going for about $22,000. Well, you know, that's the entire yearly budget for buys for a small.

police department where we're letting $22,000, we'll give it to the drug dealer and then take it away, let it walk. So they look to us when they know they got big fish and everybody tried to move the food chain in the drug war. So when they get higher on the food chain, they bring the FBI and DEA and because of the deep pockets that we have. That makes sense. So now we're looking around a time frame like 1998 or so. When did the hostage rescue team kind of come up on your radar and this was something you started to think about like, I want to go and assess for this organization. That's a good question. Really when I was in Quantico, the HRT compound is co-located on the grounds of the FBI Academy.

And, you know, these HRT operators, you know, people, you know, even the agents that worked at the FBI Academy, all the instructors, you know, they would almost talk about the operators and whispers and with, you know, with reverence and respect. and at nighttime while you're trying to sleep, the H-R-T helicopter will be flying around because they're doing nighttime off, nighttime fast-troping training, you know, nighttime snipers shootings from an unstable platform. So then all this nighttime training is usually when they operate.

So you hear them flying around, you see them walking around, you see them in the gym, it's like, wow, who are those guys? And they're all buffed, and they all have a little bit of an attitude. And I saw them, and my, my, my, my, physical fitness instructor while, you know, every class at the FBI County had the physical fitness instructor signed to them. Well, my instructor was Brett Mosier, and he was a former HRT sniper. So he did a good job of identifying those in our class that he thought might have the capabilities to make it through selection. So he pulled me aside and asked me if I might consider trying for HRT, you know, in the future stuff like that. I talked to him offline about it. And, you know, it's just you see these guys walking around. you hear him train, you hear stories about them, you see the reverence that they're given. It's like, you know,

and for the FBI, it's the best of the best of the FBI. I'm like, I want to be a part of that. So it really just start there. Now, when I was in San Francisco, I was a member of the FBI, San Francisco SWAT team. And they were one of the seven, what they called enhanced SWAT teams at the time. And an enhanced SWAT team just means that they had

upwards of 40 people in the SWAT team, and they got better equipment and better training than the rest of the SWAT teams in the country. And that training came from the HRT. So we went to Bridgewater, California at the Mountain Warfare Training Center of the Marine Corps and did some mountain warfare training up there. And the HRT, Codray came out and helped us train there. So I got to meet them firsthand, got to know them a little bit. And that's really what I said to myself. I really want to be a part of that organization. So walk us through a little bit of what that's like to apply to HRT? Like what are kind of the prerequisites and then going to selection,

what that was like? Well, you have to be invited. So you put an application in and then they do, you know, their due diligence and talking to your supervisor, your SAC, looking at your arrest record, looking at your report that you're right, stuff like that. And they invite you to, to selection. I went through selection twice. I actually finished post selections. That's important to know because just because you finish selection doesn't mean you get picked up. And I finished the first selection in 1997, and I did not get picked up. And that's a huge, you know, that's a kicking, kicking the nuts.

I mean, it's hard to swallow. You finish the selection process, but they did not see something in you that they liked. And so I didn't get picked up. Did they give you feedback, you know, it's like what they wanted to see the next time or if you did it again? Nope. They don't give you very little feedback.

They tell you where you did well, but they don't tell you where you did bad. And you're only allowed to go to two selections. If you make it through two selections and don't get picked up, you can't try out again. So again, my first selection was in 1997. I didn't get picked up. I tried out again in 1999. I did get picked up. And each class, when I tried out, I had about 50 guys try out.

my first selection there were 12 guys left standing and they chose six of the 12 and I was not one to the six and my second selection I think we had about 50 guys try out I think there's 14 that made through selection and they picked I think 10 of us and what is what is selection entail I mean we've talked on the show about I mean every other selection there is I think about Rasp and SFAS and buds we've been through it all but what is HRT selection like Well, the good news is it's only two weeks long. So that's the good news. But it is modeled after Hell Week from the Navy SEALs.

I mean, it's, you know, they push it to your limits physically. There's very little sleep. A lot of mind games are played at you, you know, played against you. A lot of phobia testing. If you're, you know, if you're afraid of snakes, spiders, dark spaces, or heights, they're going to find out about it. And they're going to, you know, keep poking that until you quit. You know, just, you know, simple.

I mean, again, you guys are both push and force guys, so you know how Alice played. But, you know, let's say there's 20 guys left on, you know, day 10. They'll throw out a case of MRIs for lunch. Now, there's only 12 MREs in the case, and there's 20 guys. You know, they look for the guy who goes there and grabs the bag, runs to the corner, starts cracking it open, and starts eating and not thinking about his teammates. Right. You know.

So just small things like that. just to test what kind of teammates you'll be. So again, very physically demanding. You know, you are operating on very little sleep. They push you through a lot of shooting and arrest scenarios. So they'll send you into a room in Hogan's alley

where there's a bunch of HRT operators watching you, observing you, and they'll have a scenario where you have to arrest somebody and they just see how you react when things don't go your way. You know, some are shooting situations, some are non-shooting situations, but it's a lot of scenario-based training when you're just tired, miserable, cold, wet and hungry. That's a really interesting, like, a job-specific stressor to put you under, whereas, like, you know, the seals, they obviously put you in the water, special forces, they make you wear a rucksack and land nav around the woods at night. FBI, they make you make arrests while you're tired and cold and hungry. Yeah.

I mean, and I can see how that's really challenging or testing the temperament of somebody and how they respond in those very stressful situations. Yeah, and then, you know, they get Hayho and HAL qualified. Half the operators go through phase two of buds, you know, down in Coronado and get certified in the reggae system. You know, you have specialties to include communications, medical breaching. So you're an assaultor, you're a sniper, you're a sniper, one or the other, and then you're also one of those three specialties, communications, medical, or breaching.

Which were yours? I was medical. So they sent me to paramedic school, and then, you know, pig labs and goat labs and that sort of thing. Same thing you guys went through. And I was an assaulter as well. How long is the training pipeline after selection? That's about six months long. Okay.

Yeah, it's about six months before you, it's called Knotts, NOTS, new operator training school. And from the time that you make, from the time you arrive in Quantico to go to the knots, about six months later you're assigned to a team. Now, you can fail knots. And we had three guys of my generation who failed and were recycled from the next Nott's class. So just because you go through Nautism and you pass that either. Is there anything in HV, in HART training that you would identify as being sort of like different than being an operator in the military as far as like specifically they train you guys

on a skill sets that they want you to have? I guess judgment is really stressed. You know, when you clear a room a lot of times in the military, you clear a fragonade. In law enforcement, you can't do that. You have to be very judicious in who you shoot and who you don't shoot. So that was one of the biggest factors where they really want to see what your judgment is, again, when you're tired and hungry and not feeling your best. Before we get on to the next thing, I just want to tell our listeners out there a little bit about the sponsor for this show. It's Sap Gear.

And Sap Gear makes a number of products. And this one that was showing off today is called the Poor Man's Tablet. And these are just little tablets that you can write on with a marker. Different types of markers. I mean, you can write underwater if you're a diver. You can use a glow-in-the-dark pencil right on these if you want to pass these around the aircraft. And for the super paranoid out there, unlike an electronic device that has a tendency to leak data in various ways, this won't leak data. And you can erase it off of here.

It's a hard backing, and there's nothing left. again for the paranoid amongst you um amongst us people people who go through like CIA case officer training you don't write on a pad of paper because it leaves an impression on the sheet under it if you talk to some old school spies they only write on three by five cards and they make sure it's on like a marble countertops and it's not a sap gear has a lot of really fun stuff right and if if there's somebody in your life who just likes gadgets and things and cool stuff like check check out sap gear they've got amazing amazing uh products So this is the poor man's tablet. It's sapgear.com.

And what's the promo D? The promo code is team and you get 15% off your first order. So team and get 15% off your first order at sapgear.com and use the promo code team for 15% off your order. So back to you, Greg. And just FYI so you know I have lost video with you guys. Okay. I'm sorry about that. We got you fine, though.

So graduate from HART training. Where's the first place you land on a team? At that time, there's three teams, a red, golden, blue team, and I went to Red Team. And, you know, they divide the teams up with specific specialties. The Gold team was a maritime team. I was surprised. Actually, I didn't get assigned to Gold Team because of the prior Coast Guard experience.

But I was signed a Red Team. The Red Section or Red Team specialized. in buildings and hard points. The gold section specializes in maritime, and then the blue section specializes in tubular, so buses, trains, planes, and that sort of thing. So I landed on a red team, which are strongholds in buildings. So I went to elevator school. I did a lot of rappelling and climbing. I went to several schools for that as well, and, you know, really focused on the CQB skills for building assaults. I imagine the breaching skills must have been really important. too. Yeah, I mean, the HRT is kind of like the tier one units out there in the U S military.

We always look for hospitals and schools and stadiums that are closing down and getting ready to be demolished. And the HRT is very, you know, they use our, the HRT uses their connections with all 56 field offices. So when they know the school that's closing down and be demolished, so they have the HRT come out and we'll practice that at that site before the demolish it. And a good example of that is here in Dallas when the jury. Joe built his new stadium, Jerry's World, the old stadium here in Irving before it was demolished. The HRT came out here. And I think Dev Group and CAD came out as well to practice some, you know, high angle sniper

shootings from the top of the stadium down to the field. So, you know, we look for places to train like that quite often. Yeah, ruts, right? Realistic urban training. Yep. So it's like Hollywood. You guys have your own location scouts. Exactly.

they uh yeah so like for our listeners out there when you see like um like 160th black hawks flying around manhattan and stuff like that that's what it is realistic urban training that they do um i've heard some pretty funny stories of like delta officers getting called to the carpet by like some small town mayor like you made this big ruckus in town and like the people in the town start complaining like noise complaints about breaches so so something like lieutenant colonel like squadron commander has to show up in his class a is like oh i'm sorry sir you know, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Well, yeah. A lot of conspiracy theorists. That too. That too. Black, well, this is the 1990s, man, black helicopters. Yeah, that was the thing.

You guys were like the U.N. coming to take over, weren't you? Well, our black hawks are actually colored navy blue so that we don't look black. I mean, it was intentional to be navy blue so that they didn't have that military look to them. So, one of your first deployments, you got deployed to Yemen in 2000. for USS Cole. You want to tell us about what that experience was like? Yeah, that was the first time in a very long time that the HRT, full force, the entire team was deployed overseas. You know, we have historically in the past worked with those special mission units, you know, CAG and Dev Group on a smaller scale,

where the, you know, two or three or four operators assigned to them to go hunt down an individual, you know, in Somalia or wherever the case was, or Yemen or Kenya, but this was the first full team deployment overseas for the HRT in a very, very long time. So the USS Cole gets bombed and they send a big FBI team, bomb investigators, to go do the investigation. So we kind of had two missions that we were responsible for. First, we are doing force protection for the bomb investigators, the FBI bomb tax and the investigators that were sent there to, you know, collect the evidence, interview the witnesses and that sort of thing because it was an FBI investigation. So we will provide force protection from them while they're in the hotel and then in transit from the hotel to the dock where they would get a small vote and take the small vote out to where the U.S.S. coal was anchored. So that was the first mission was force protection.

Then we worked closer with the agency who was, you know, working out of the embassy there and helping to identify who is responsible using their contacts and their sources. And we actually did some operations where we did capture some individuals in the country that were responsible for the planning operation of that event. Now, when you say that you capture them, you mentioned earlier before the show that you guys always have to work with a partner force because you don't have jurisdiction outside the United States. That is true. On most cases, for the FBI to be in-country, we need host government permission, which goes through the agency and the State Department. So we were there, you know, with our

weapons at the behest of the Yemenese government. Now, I can't tell you how much pressure the U.S. government put it on the Yemenese government to make that happen. Right, right. But we were there in full force, and, you know, we had all our kit with us, and we were, running around I have to be careful we were doing operations in Yemen sure

right at the behest of the government with their police um no comments at the behest of their government with the blessing the government knew we were there

right some piece of paper was signed somewhere in a safe well do you want to talk a little bit about that because you had mentioned that before we started the show about how you guys come in and you're the law enforcement capability and maintaining that chain of custody. I mean, you're actually putting metal bracelets on bad guys and then escorting them back to the United States for, you know, criminal prosecution.

And that's why the HRT exists. And we talked about this before the show. So I'll get into a little bit of the history of HRT and the genesis of that. The HRT was the idea of the HRT was actually born as a result of the 1970. summer Olympic Games in Munich, Germany. If you remember way back in 1972, Palestinian terrorists took 11 Israeli athletes hostage. And, you know, at that time, the Olympics were like the only television show that was

televised worldwide. So worldwide audience saw these Palestinian terrorists take these Israeli athletes hostage. And then they were transported to the, airport where the hostages were going to be released and the hostage takers are going to be let go. Well, the German government decided to do an assault to, you know, free the hostages and kill or capture the terrorists. But during that operation, 100% of the hostages were killed. And I think seven of the nine hostage takers escaped. Again, that was 1972 Star Olympic Games.

President Nixon was in office at that time. The United States government or the United States had already been offered the 1980 Lake Placent Winter Olympics, as well as in 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympic Games. So President Nixon gathered his National Security Council and asked him this simple question. What is the United States response should an incident happen at our Olympics that happened like? in Munich and the National Hearder Council basically raised their hands and didn't have an answer. At that time, CIL-Team 6 wasn't even in existence and what I thought at the time, they did have Delta Force at the time, but it was so secretive that the government disabothered they even existed. Now, I heard from you, Jack, that you said didn't think that Delta Force even came to existence in 1980.

Yeah, so what's, what from the military side, you had a couple things happen. There was the radon and Deb that the Israelis did. And, yeah, the National Security Council asked the Pentagon, like, do you have this capability? And they're like, well, we have personnel, but not really trained and equipped for this. And then GSG9 rescued those guys in Mangadishu. And again, they were asked, can you guys do this? They're like, no, no, we can't. And so Charlie Beckwith finally got his way.

They started standing up Delta. In the interim, they created Blue Light, which was like 1977, 78, which they took a bunch of Vietnam vets who were in special forces and created an interim counterterrorism unit to give Charlie Beckwith the two years. He said he needed to train, assess, and basically validate Delta for their mission. And so blue light was pretty much gone by 78 or 79. And Delta, I believe, got validated the night before the hostages were taken in Iran in 1980. So that's the Army side of how that came about. Well, that's got to be very much a similar time frame when HRT was started. Because, you know, we got validated in 1983 just prior to the 84 Summer Olympic Games of Los Angeles.

So the HRT, they wanted to be operational for the late class of Winter Olympics in 1980, but they weren't certified yet. And I know that the first selection of HRT operators, they went down to meet with Charlie Beckwith, and they trained with the new Delta Force for, I think, like 18 months. So Delta trained the first operators for HRT. And as a result of that, we still maintain that really good relationship with CAD and Delta Force because of the genesis. of the HRT. So long story short, HRT was operational for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games and been operational every sense. And, you know, we, you know, of course, we work domestically. Again, I mentioned earlier about the Posse Kilmottis Act referring to the Coast Guard. Well, it's the same thing for

Delta 4th and CIL Team 6 or Kagan or Deb group that those tier 1 units of special mission units, they can't operate domestically because of the Possee Klamatatatis Act, which prevents the military from enforcing federal laws unless martial laws declared. So the United States arsenal needed that tier one capability, which had law enforcement authority. So, you know, when we were looking for Osama bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora, there was always HRT on site as well in the event that we did locate UBL in those caves. there would be an FBI agent, an HRT operator, who was there on site who could go to court when they brought him the trial in the Eastern District of New York where he was an indicted subject and say, yes, I was in the cave.

I took custody of the cell phones and the computers and all the documents and all the files. And I arrested him myself and that information and all that, you know, all the data and all the materials that were collected have been in my custody every sense. Because you will never see a Delta Force or SEAL Team 6 operator in a court of law raising his right of hands. So when the HRT operator can do that. Talk to us then about 9-11 and what it was like at HRT that day in the subsequent weeks and months afterwards. Well, like anybody else in our field at that day, you know, when we saw that first plane hit, we knew our war had changed. again like anybody else that is in our field we know is like where we were in what we're doing the minute that happened we were gearing up we have this beautiful incredible shoot house at hr t it's 45 rooms it's two stories and it has multiple

staircases it has an aircraft fuselage up in the rafters that comes down on the floor for aircraft assault training and we're getting prepped to do our daily cqb that starts at 0900 that morning And just about that time, you know, first plane hit with before 9 o'clock, we're getting ready to, you know, we're putting our flashbacks in our pouches and loading our magazines and get ready to start a day of training. And we hear, or the loudspeakers, all operators returned to the classroom. And we got to the classroom. Most of was still in full kit. And we saw the result of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center. And then we're in there watching live television when the second plane hit.

And we all just kind of looked at each other. and we knew that, you know, things are about to change. About half the team was sent up to the Pentagon area to do counter surveillance after the plane at the Pentagon. Half the team went up there in plain clothes, you're dressed way down to do some counter surveillance to see if anybody was kind of, you know, tracking what happened at the Pentagon. The other half the team was pretty much sitting on the bags waiting for the call to go somewhere and do something. about, let's see, about two months later, we were in Afghanistan. You know, the special mission units, you know, looking for UBL,

who was already identified in the person behind it. So after 9-11, HR team, you know, we always had that domestic capability still in the states where we had kept a team, you know, available for a hostage situation in the United States. but for the most part, it was a rotation, a three-team rotation that would spend three to four months at a time over in Afghanistan. And then in 2003, when we invaded Iraq, you know, it doubled our presence overseas. So we would have a team in Iraq, we have a team in Afghanistan and the United States. So obviously, the workload was quite intense. You know, our families, God love them, still behind us and supported us, just like they did in the military.

And, you know, we were in Afghanistan and Iraq until the last people left. I'll return back to Afghanistan, Iraq. I'm sorry to go a little bit out of order, but there was a prior incident before that. I wanted to mention and have you talk about, which was the D.C. sniper. And that was a big act of terror before 9-11 that was, as you said, I mean, it shut down Washington, D.C. for like three weeks. I was wondering if you could tell us about that from your perspective. Yeah, the DC snipers, John Lee Malvo and John Mohammed, or Lee Boyd Malvo and John Mohamed,

that was probably the most interesting three weeks of my life. You know, these are two individuals, you know, a man and an 18-year-old boy in the 1996 Caprice Classic, carrying a Bushmaster AR-15 with a Pasco stope, I think it was. and the two of them literally shut down the D.C. metropolitan area. Now, I'm talking southern Maryland, northern Virginia, and all in Washington, D.C. They shut that place down for three solid weeks. There wasn't, you know, imagine being a, you know, I played football in high school, maybe you probably did too. Imagine being a football player in high school, your senior year, and you're not playing games.

And you're looking to get a scholarship or you're looking just to play the ball, you know, play ball. But Friday night football games are canceled. You know, Starbucks came out later and said, you know, they had like an 80% decline in revenue during those three weeks. Gas stations were putting those blue tarps up in front of their gas pumps because the first couple of shootings occurred at gas stations. So when the D.C. snipers happened, we hooked up with the Montgomery County Sheriff's Department. And that was where the first shooting occurred. and we had a lot of intelligence coming in from multiple sources. You know, these guys were shooting in D.C.

They were shooting in Maryland. They were shooting in Northern Virginia. So it was just a cornucopia of law enforcement agencies involved. And we, in the HRT, two of us were assigned basically to like another SWAT team and there be four of us in a vehicle. And we were just leaving driving around the entire metro area, D.C., waiting for a to occur hoping that we'd be nearby. So I remember one of the shootings occurred, and I was on the American Legion Bridge.

And you're familiar with D.C. It's a bridge that connects Maryland to Northern Virginia. And it's a major thoroughfare. And this is like 8, 39 o'clock in the morning, high to rush hour. And a shock rang out, and we were told shut down the American Legion Bridge. So there's four of us in one side and one side, the north side, and another set of four on the other side of the highway. We shut the place down, you know, we're fully kidded up, and we're searching every vehicle one at a time. We put cones out, so one from a six-lane highway down to a one-lane highway.

And we're pointing guns, you know, almost in people's faces trying to identify who these shooters are looking for something. And nobody complained. They're telling us great job, catch these guys. I mean, it really was seeing America at its best. and, you know, ends up that, you know, they get a little cocky and they leave a note at the site of the middle school shooting where they said something to the fact that they didn't, that the authorities didn't catch us in Alabama, and you're not going to catch us now. Now, at that point in time, the FBI had no idea how Alabama was even in play. Again, this is about halfway through. I think they shot 13 people, remember correctly, and this is a lead.

two-thirds or halfway through those shootings, and the FBI had zero to go on. We had no idea who these people were. We didn't have any kind of connection to anyone or any organization. We were chasing around white panel trucks, because when shocks rang out, people would look around and what did they see? Well, they see what they always see, white panel trucks. Right. So we're looking for a white panel truck because all those shootings, somebody reported a white panel truck. Well, it ends up at the time of the arrest, they're dressed. They're about a 1996 Navy Blue, you know, Caprice Classic. You know, farthest thing from a white panel truck you can possibly get.

So, again, long story short, they leave a note in Alabama, reference in Alabama. Now the FBI has something to sniff. You know, this is where the FBI does its best work. You know, we get a scent, and we don't stop until we find out where that scent takes us. So the FBI looked at all the unsolved shootings in Alabama and came up, with a shooting at a gas station in Alabama from several years earlier where some evidence was left behind. They re-ran that evidence through the system and up pops John Mohammed. I think it had

to do with his DNA when it was in the military. So they reran the DNA to let that crime scene. John Mohammed names pop up. They realize he lives in Seattle. So they go to Seattle where they had the most recent address for him. At his Seattle address, there was a big oak tree that was chopped down in the backyard that had a bunch of bullet holes in it, that he was using for target practice. The FBI dug out some two, two, three rounds from that oak tree. And sure as nothing, those rounds matched, realistically, was some of the rounds that were captured from the killings and the shootings

in Northern Virginia, America. So now we had a guy, we had a name, we had John Mohamed. So now that we know the name, now it's only a question of time before we catch him. And, you know, we had somebody call in. We found out he had a Blue Caprice Classic. Now I want to go for that vehicle. A couple, about a week goes by. We get a tip that there's a Blue Caprice Classic at a rest stop just outside of Baltimore on the highway.

HART is deployed. We go to the rest stop and sure enough, we find him and Lee Boy, Malvo, or sleep in the vehicle. We'd bust the windows and arrest both of them without incident. It's amazing. And, you know, I don't know how many people, like, are old enough to remember that. But it was, it was a horrifying time for people. Like you said, the first couple of people were people in gas stations just filling up their tanks or whatever

and getting shot from nowhere and no trace. They shot five people on day one. Day one, they shot five people. Yeah. Greg, I mean, the important thing is you guys busted them. What was the motive? I don't recall reading anything about it. I mean, did it ever come about why they were doing this?

This is the most crazy motive you'll ever hear. John Muhammad was going through a divorce and won in custody of his kid. His plan was to include his ex-wife. in these random shootings in D.C. So that it would never come back to him. If he just shot his ex-wife, of course, he was going to be the first suspect. Right.

So his plan was to kill multiple people and one of those people would be his ex-wife so that he either gets custody of his kids. That's about the most bad shit crazy motive I've heard. Yeah. Yep. That's pretty high up there. That reminds you.

It reminds me of a story I just heard, though, about the whole, like, the whole aspirin poisoning thing that happened a long time ago where I think a woman was trying to murder her husband. So she was going to poison him, but she dropped off a bunch of poison and, like, aspirin bottles in a grocery store or whatever so that when she poisoned him. She could clip him, but got a whole bunch of other people to do it, too. Yeah. It's insane. I mean, it's smart. It's smart. But like you said, like his hubris, his ego got in the way.

He wanted to taunt everybody and blew his own game. Yep. Absolutely. They're still in prison, aren't that? One was put to death and one's in prison, yes. All right. The young person, Lee Boy, Malvo is still alive. They actually, recently were thinking about releasing him and that got shot down.

But John Mohammuz put to death. So back to, I guess, you know, you see the USS Cole, you see the D.C. sniper thing. And then you were there when 9-11 happened in the unit. You were seeing terrorism sort of like escalating. I mean, do you think that's accurate from your point of view that you're seeing this issue get larger and larger for America? And then eventually you find yourself in Iraq and Afghanistan. I mean, was it surprising when the dam broke? Yeah, I think, yeah, I mean, 9-11 kind of everybody was a surprise.

Yeah. So, you know, of course, that changed the world. And, you know, the whole NCTC was now, you know, 9-11 brought a lot of things alike. And one of the key elements that came to light was the fact that the FBI and the CIA were talking to one another. And it wasn't because we didn't want to, it's because we couldn't. You know, there was actually laws in place. You know, we called the Chinese wall. at the time, where national security information cannot be used with criminal information.

And it's still true today, you know, the difference between a Title III wiretap for a criminal investigation versus a FISA wiretap for intelligence investigation. You can't use the information gleaned from a FISA wiretap in a criminal investigation. You have to somehow marry the two up. So, you know, back before 9-11 happened, the national security side of the FBI, those chasing the spies and the terrorists cannot talk to the criminal arm of the FBI. Now, we know now that terrorists raise money, raise funds by doing criminal acts. So they have to talk to one another. But before 9-11, it wasn't allowed in the FBI. We couldn't talk to the, you know,

an FBI criminal investigator cannot talk to the CIA or an FBI counterintelligence agent about anything because those streams cannot cross. And as a result, from 9-11 and if failures there, you know, we had the National Counterterrorism Center that was established in McLean, Virginia. It's literally three miles down the road from the CIA headquarters. And at the NCTC, again, National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, that's where all 80 of the intelligence community agencies came together, you know, NYPD, Coast Guard, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, you know, ATF, Customs, Border Patrol, CIE, DEA, and the whole game, you know, every agency out there, It's now under one roof sharing information and working together.

So I think that was the reason why we, you know, have come so far in the global war and terrorism that we finally started working together. Before you left HRT, were you one of those guys that got sent over to Afghanistan and Iraq? I did two tours in Iraq, yes. And what was that like for you going over there as a cop, but you're in a war zone? Well, again, yes, I was a cop, but I was an HRT cop. So, you know, we got a lot of enhanced training. You know, again, we did train side by side with the special mission units. So we felt very comfortable in that arena.

You know, fortunately for us, too, we only did four-month deployments. Okay. So we're on the same rotation as the special mission units were. We didn't have to do the 12, 14, 18-months. deployments that most of the Marines and the Army guys are doing out there. So we did three or four months in, country, and come back home. So that was a huge benefit. But, you know, we chose our targets.

We were surrounded by, you know, a bunch of very highly trained, you know, special mission unit individuals. You know, I had my six great guys with me who I trust with my life and were highly trained. And then we usually had a bunch of Army Rangers, you know, sent in. the Inter-Primidary Force as well when we hit these houses in Baghdad. So I don't want to say it was fun, but it was- You can say it was fun if it was fun. We, most of the people on the show get it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you're putting your skills that you train so hard for to use. Yeah. Every night. Yeah. You train so hard and you just run scenarios and scenarios and practice.

So it's good to see, you know, it's enjoyable. And, you know, it's, again, I don't want to use the word fun, but it is enjoyable to put those skill sets to use. And, you know, having yourself realize, you know, I am well trained. This stuff does work. And I'm surrounded by some of the greatest warriors in world history. And I can't say enough. I mean, the guys I served with was guys I served alongside with. I mean, God love every one of them.

And, you know, we were fortunate. We didn't lose anybody over there. We have lost some operators in training, but we didn't lose anybody over there. A couple were injured. We had, you know, one, actually we had two HRT operators who left the team and went to ground branch, and they were severely injured. One lost his leg, one loss his vocal cords in operations. But, you know, the guys, and you guys know this, the guys you serve next to the guy to your left and guy to your right, I mean, you love them like brothers. and I just can't say enough great things about them.

And I know that they had my back in which I had theirs. And you walk into these operations with a sense of confidence that, you know, it's not bravado. It's not conceit. It's just confidence that you know what you're trained to do. You know the guys you're left and your right is equally as well trained. And you walk in these operations saying, we got this. We are better than these people. We will win this fight.

Out of curiosity, how would people respond initially? Like when you would be introduced to them when you were like the FBI guy, like when they clamp up like, oh shit, I don't want to say anything that's going to get me arrested? And then were there awkward moments, like once they did get to know you and they were talking about stuff? They're like, oh, shit, what am I saying? Well, for the most part, most people had no idea who the hell we were. You know, the HRT contingent of there was like 10 or 12 strong. It wasn't a big footprint.

Yeah. So it was a very small footprint. So, you know, we had, you know, we would go to, you know, meals over at Biap. And not Biap, over at what we did buy up as well, but over at De Palis, we have, you know, lunch and dinners there. And we're walking in and we have, you know, we're in our, you know, our BDUs, but no insinios, no ranks, no nothing. We're totally just, you know, bear. And we have these high tech weapons with. you know, all the, you know, all that, you know, one thing about HRT, their budget was, was really good.

And we always had the best equipment that was out there, whether it was, you know, the lasers, the iron lasers, you know, the H&K 416s. I mean, we always had the best gear. So we walk in with this gear that most people, you know, would just, you know, drew over. And they're like, and we have no seen there's no rank. So most people had no idea who the hell we were. But working with the special mission units, you know, we use. usually did the workups with them as well. So we already spent two or three months training with them doing workups. So they know exactly who we were and what our skill sets were. So they really

didn't have an issue with us. Yeah. It was the Army guys and the MPs and everybody at both biop and at the palace. We just had no clue who we were. Yeah. One, I have a quick story about the cultural difference between the Rangers and the FBI. We, uh, so we yeah, we were working with, I think there are FBI SWAT guys in Afghanistan. We had, a couple of HRT guys with us in Missoule. But in Afghanistan, I remember we were doing like a class on like EPW searches, right? How you, if you kill the enemy in combat and you come up to them and you search the body. And there's a methodical way you search the body for, you know, intelligence and stuff like that.

And one of the guys is like, okay, so you come up to the body, the barrel of your rifle is really hot because you've just been in a firefight. As you come up to the body, you shove that barrel down in his eyeball. And if he flinches, you pull the trigger. and which is technically as far as I'm not a jag, but I think it's legal to check the body to make sure that they're actually dead. But you could have seen, you should have seen the look on the FBI guy's face when you heard this. It's like, oh, my God. That is something you would not repeat in a court of law.

Yeah. Yeah. I've met like a couple of FBI agents overseas. And I always want to say, I take the fifth. Like, I don't know, I don't know why you're here, but I take the fifth. But no, it's, yeah, I didn't do it. Yeah, I don't know why you're here, but whatever it was. Yeah, if any of those ops that you did with those special operations task force in Baghdad, like, really, like, kind of stand out your mind is like, that, that was pretty eventful or like, that's the way you get it done.

Yeah, there are a few, but, you know, I can't, it's their operations. I can't talk about their operations. Sure. But, you know, there were a few that were just, you just sit back and you look at it, like, wow. I mean, that just was impressive to watch, impressive to see, the teamwork, the execution. So, yeah, I mean, I can't say enough good things about those guys. They're the best of the best. And, you know, I'm still friends with a couple of guys that were former tag guys.

You know, a shout out to Chris Dutch Moyer, who's a friend of mine who was one of the dog. angers on CAG. He'd be a great guest in your show, by the way. And he's on a new show. He's on a new show on dog hamlers, a new documentary on war dogs. But Chris Dutch Moir would be a great guy for you to have on your show. Just a salt to the earth guy. And, you know, I think he did 14 deployments overseas, you know, numerous broad stars. I think he's a superstar as well. Just a great guy with amazing, you know, pedigree. But, you know, just, I, I, I, I, you know, I, you know, They're the best America has to offer. Hands down.

They are the best America has to offer. And to call them friends, I'm humble. And then the HRT role, you guys were doing like the evidence collection, like SSE before we had SSA. That was that kind of their part of it? Exactly. That's kind of the reason why we were there was for, again, the evidence and the chain of custody, in case anything had to come to trial in the United States. And one of our initial missions overseas was training these, especially,

mission unions and how to do SSCs, you know, sensitive site exploitations. So, you know, you guys never worried about evidence before. And now all of a sudden you got to worry about evidence, how you can't get it and tag it so that when it gets back to the intelligence analysts, they know what they're looking at. So one of our first missions was to teach those guys how to do that. And that was one of the big problems with Gitmo, too, is it was supposed to be military tribunals. These people were rolled up in a military action. And then all of a sudden, it became a law enforcement thing, but there was no chain of custody. There was no evidence. There was like there, there were none of the procedures in place that needed to happen when somebody goes to, when somebody is prosecuted in the United States.

So it sort of created this big quandary. And so it even became an issue in Iraq with when we got the Iraqi courts going. Right. And if you don't have any evidence, I mean, even if the court's doing their. job. Right, right. Yeah. Like, okay, we, we track this cell phone to this person, but what other evidence do we have? You know, yeah. So it's very interesting because the addition of the FBI and that law enforcement element was really critical in some places, because it allowed the military to do things outside of just killing somebody. And you know, you're not killing people unless they're not just randomly going in and and shooting up targets. So if you are detaining people, then what?

In the beginning, it was like just shoving all the evidence in like a black trash bag and bringing it back. And now you don't know who cell phone is who. There's, yeah. Yeah. Well, in your conventional war, you know, he who kills the most wins. Right. But when a war on terror, you needed to learn who the leadership was, who was given the orders, where they are. So there was a huge intelligence component that the military really wasn't accustomed to.

You know, military intelligence in the past in a conventional war was, where's the enemy at? Let's go kill them. You know, and the GWAT, the war on terror, it's like, we didn't know who the leadership, we knew who they were, but didn't know where they were. Right. Where all the tenants were and all the, you know, mid-level and senior-level manager were. So just killing people, you never get to that level. So you needed to be judicious and who you killed.

And then when you did capture him, getting that intelligence, you know, the cell phones, the files, computers, the laptops, getting all that information to give to the intel people so they can,

like a cartel investigation, move up that chain to get the next, you know, next person in charge. Right. And the other difference, I think, is like in standard wars in the past,

we've had POW camps. We've had prison of war camps. You know, you were, you were a uniformed soldier under the Geneva Convention and there's a whole process. And, you know, we put you in a POW camp in that last until the war ended. But there wasn't that type.

There weren't uniformed soldiers in the Taliban or an al-Qaeda. You're rolling up people who sometimes you know exactly who they are and sometimes you don't. And it takes somebody with, you know, that sensitive side exploitation, the gathering of it. evidence that type of expertise which soldiers were not trained for, you know, to facilitate that. Well, a great example of that too is when Saddam Hussein was captured, the individual who spent nine months with him interviewing him and talking with him was a good friend of mine by the name George Piro. And George Piro was an FBI agent. Everybody thought he was CIA. George spent nine months. He was the guy who sat and smoked.

cigar and drank whiskey with Saddam Hussein for nine months. And, you know, he came to HRT and talked to us after Saddam was executed and told us a few things. I think you and your audience will find interesting weapons and mass destruction, the whole issue. Saddam Hussein knew that the U.S. government, British government, Australian government, the Big Five, were listening in on their conversations, on the Iraqi general's conversation. They, Saddam Hussein knew that his communication network was compromised and that the Americans were listening in.

Saddam was afraid that Iran was going to attack him again. So Saddam told his generals to intentionally speak about weapons of mass destruction as a descendant, knowing that we would overhear it, that word would get out, and that

war would prevent the Iranians from attacking again because Iraq had weapon the mass destruction. So the whole weapon mass destruction thing, everybody gives, you know, George Bush a hard time about it. Well, it was an intentional misinformation campaign by Saddam Hussein because he was still fearful of being attacked by Iran. That's fascinating. We have never, I've never heard that before. And one of the things that came out of that too is, like Saddam really did, he thought we were bluffing too that we weren't going to invade, right? Yep, exactly. And this

came from George Piro himself. And George, like I said, George spent nine months with Saddam before he was executed. The other thing that George said I found very interesting is that is this. He said that Saddam said this pretty much pervade him. You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family. I know my two sons are sociopaths. Holy shit. Oh, my God. So all the stories about them, you know, picking women up off the streets and putting them in, you know, human trafficking, slavery.

They're all true. And Saddam knew about it, but didn't do anything about it because he knew his sons were sociopaths. When we interviewed Sam Faddis, he told us a pretty horrific story about Uday and QSay. And, you know, actually the whole Uday and QSA kind of story arc, the only part we haven't interviewed somebody about is like some of the operators who went in and smoked them up. Yeah. Smoked up the two. And also the younger son, Ibrahim, was killed also. Another time.

Yeah. No. I'll tell you what, if you want to see a great 60 Minutes interview, go to 60 minutes and look up George Piro, P.I. RRO and he'd be a great guest for your show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He spent he spent nine months with Saddam. He was the guy and he's again, one of the most articulate, well-spoken, intelligent men I've known and hear the stories of him sitting with Saddam. In fact, he grew a mustache like Saddam just to appreciate himself. Yeah. Saddam thought if you grew a good mustache, it was a sign of your man. Yeah, yeah, it's a sign of masculinity in Iraq. And they take the

So David, you're in. Yeah, I got it, ma'am. They take the, what is it, the eyelash stuff and put it through their, through their beard, their mustache to make it darker like Saddam. It's so fascinating, too, because now, like, why would Saddam think that we would come after him? Because we had funded him against the Iranians. We had, we had been on his side. But we've also had people on the show that have said that even before Bush, like during Clinton, like there were people in the government. there were always angling for war against Iraq.

Yeah, yeah. Like, that has been the angle for some of the, you know, administrative like constants for a long time. So, well, yeah, the Iran, you know, the Iran hostage situation. I mean, Iran has been on our enemy list ever since that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, we've always looked for ways to get into Iran because of the whole 44 days of hostages. So, um, you kind of like, had like the run at HRT, kind of got to do a little bit of it all. What was it like leaving HRT and then going over to the National Counterterrorism Center? That was a hard choice. In hindsight,

I think it should have two more years in HRT. I did six years total. I think I had two more years into me. But, you know, it's a young man's game. I mean, doing those kind of deployments, carrying that kind of weight, all that training.

again, I was married at the time. So, you know, marriages, you know, have, there's definitely a strain on marriages, just being away knowing, you know, knowing that you're at the tip of the spear, knowing, you know, every time you go away that, you know, my wife knew that my life was, was endangered.

I wasn't sitting in the back, you know, reading the intelligence reports. I was going out there, you know, getting into fights as much as I could. So leaving the HRT was a very, very difficult decision. But again, just by the greatest six years of my life, I mean, again, the guys in that team are just, they're the best individuals on the face of the earth.

But going to National Counterterrorism Center was really eye-opening because I went from seeing the war on terror at ground level to now seeing the war on terror at the 35,000 foot level. So here I am at the National Counterterrorism Center, getting all of the all these reports from Australia, from the Philippines, you know, from Kuwait, from Saudi Arabia, and they all tie into one person or one thing or one event that's happening, you know, here in the States or whatever the case is. So it's the, the realization that how global this terrorism thing was where you have Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, you know, into Philippines, and now is a arrested in Pakistan and all these other connective points from Southeast Asia to Africa to the Middle East to the United States to Europe, just to see that from that level and see the how they're able to connect those dots.

I mean, people far smarter than what I am or I was doing this and able to connect the dots and to stop a terrorist event from a piece of information they got from the Philippines. that connected a dot down here in Kenya to a dot over here in Kuwait to now a terrorist event against our troops in Iraq and to tie that all together. So that was amazing to watch. And I learned so much in those two years. What were some of the more significant like international terrorism cases you worked on during that time? One of the big ones I worked was the ballet bombing. Indonesia killed 202 people, I think 80-some-od Australians.

I was provided, or I was given the position of focusing on Southeast Asia terrorism. So that 2002 ballet bombing was one of my biggest cases. I worked very closely with the Australian Federal Police and the Australian ASEO, which is Australian service of intelligence, something like that. but working very close with the Australians because they had so many citizens killed there. I think only four Americans were killed, but it was a huge explosion at that nightclub in Valley, Indonesia.

So we worked that quite hard to try to find those responsible for that bombing. And what came about out of all of that from that investigation? They made several arrests. The Australians made several arrests. The Indonesian government made several arrests and putting people to death as a result of that as well. but, you know, again, to see the cooperation, you know, when events like this happened,

it's great to see the cooperation internationally and interagency-wise to see how everybody comes together to get to the bottom of these incidents and put those responsible behind jail, you know, put him in death. So with that, I'm sorry, with that 30,000-foot view, did you feel as though there were a lot more terrorist attempts that were, that were like stopped or that they're just kind of random sporadic and that and that the intelligence community is doing it stopped the best it can yeah i'm i'm confident we stopped many attacks um you know most you can't talk about but uh but yeah i mean the nc tc it worked uh it did it did exactly what it was supposed to do and that's getting everybody on the same page, sharing information, again, not only interagency in America, but globally. So, you know,

I am confident we thwarted multiple attacks across the world, particularly, again, I focus in Southeast Asia, so I know we stopped attacks in the Philippines, which was at the time bubbling up as well. Southern Philippines has always been a huge hotspot for terrorism. Indonesia at the time was a very hot spot. There was a couple of attacks in eastern Thailand that happened, that we also assisted in the arrest of those individuals and stopped several more. So, you know, seeing how it works at that level was very gratifying. And after two years there, you landed at the JTTF, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Dallas. Yeah, can the Dallas, Texas, JTTF supervisor in 2007 is when I got to Dallas, Texas.

you know, at that time, you know, we had several terrorism cases that were, you know, not that large, but Dallas was a huge point in the 9-11 investigation because the American Airlines headquarters is here. And the planes, three out of four planes were American Airlines planes. So, and we also found out that some of the people that were responsible for 9-11 came through Dallas as well. So the terrorism JTTF here was pretty busy. We had a couple of incidences. One came to light that got a lot of media attention where we had an individual who wanted to blow up a tower in downtown in Dallas. We had our agents here on the task force, the bomb techs worked with this bad guy who didn't know he's working with the FBI course.

And they made a truck bomb, wired it all up with 55-gallon drums of explosives. and he parked it under this fountain. It's called Fountain Tower. He parked under Fountain Tower in downtown Dallas and went to a parking garage roof about two blocks away where he met with other FBI agents undercover. He was given a cell phone

and he was told a punching discoding the cell phone and the bomb would ignite. Well, that cell phone number went to an FBI agent SWAT team that was in a stairwell and when he hit that number, the SWAT agents came out of a stairwell and the rest of the individual. So I know, again, that is,

definitely an instant where we stopped terrorists from doing bad things because we were able to inject some undercover agents involved and get him to show his hand. Right. I remember reading about this when it happened now that you mentioned it. Yeah. So and then in 2010, 2011, we had the NBA All-Star game. We had the Mavericks in the NBA We had a 2011 Super Bowl. We always had two PGA events here. We have Texas Motor Speedway, which is a big NASCAR Speedway. We have those events a couple times a year.

We have the Armed Forces Bowl. We have just a lot of large events here in Dallas that are a target for terrorism. So as a JTGF supervisor, in charge of special events, I was in charge with working closer with the locals in ensuring that these big events. events, the Super Bowl being in Vegas, or, you know, security was planned and executed and we prevented any kind of terrorist attack on those events. There's an acronym for these events that gets used within the JTTF. It's like HSI or something like that. Yeah.

National Special Event. Yes. Security. NSSE, National Security Special, National Security Special Event. And it's like Level 1, 2, 3, something like that. Yeah, okay. And the level one is Olympics and inaugurations. And then level two is a Super Bowl.

Level three is like the World Series. Level four is like PGA events, stuff like that. And I mean, I know you can't get like into specifics about what you do to defend and prepare to defend that kind of event. But I mean, what was, I mean, I can only imagine for you guys, it's a nightmare to try to manage that and keep everyone safe. Yeah. I was identified as the lead agent for state feeding security for Super Bowl in 2011.

I was identified in 2008 by my SAC. Now, the good news about that is I was able to do the Super Bowl in 2008, 2009, and 2010. So that's a good thing. So one of those Super Bowls, you know, prior to my Super Bowl, was fantastic. So I went to those three Super Bowls prior to the one here in Dallas to observe the security they have there. So you learn a lot by what other people do, of course. I don't want to reinvent the wheel. But, yeah, I mean, just the number of agencies involved,

there was over 100 agencies here in Dallas. You know, of course, you shut down the airspace over the stadium. You know, you just have, you know, concentric rings of security, you know, outer middle and inner security. You have, you know, snipers up in the rafters of the stadiums. You have snipers overlooking the highways. You have, you know, just the transit of the players from the hotel to the stadium for practices and for the game, you know,

is a huge movement in and of itself. So, yeah, the amount of work involved and the amount of manpower involved, you, and there's no lie, I literally started working on the security, the 2011 Super Bowl, the Monday after the 2010 Super Bowl. So all my JTF, all my JTTF responsibilities came to a halt on the day after the 2010 Super Bowl. At that point in time, on that Monday, my entire focus for the entire year was nothing the Super Bowl. Well, and

like what what does that include? Like how do you even plan for that? What are some of the considerations you have to take? Everything from severe weather to WMDs, to

air dispersants, to sniper attacks, to VBIADs, to food poisoning the players. I mean, you know, The red cell, this is, you know, it's everything imaginable. I mean, you have to take in consideration every threat and try to mitigate those threats.

I mean, that's what you get paid for. You know, identify the risks and then mitigate them. So, you know, there is an office in the FBI called the Special Event Office, and so they work closer with the NBA and NFL and everything else, and these people go to all those special events and assist the division. So, you know, I had a big hand, a big helping hand from headquarters from the National Special Event Office, you know, who do all these year after year after year, they come to me and tell me pretty much how to do this. So, you know, I have to give them a lot of credit. You know, the FBI has, you know, again, an office that's specifically designed to look at all the threats, you know, from the, that may occur for these special events.

And then you have Intel analysts that do nothing but scrub the, you know, social media and scrub all the dark spaces out there looking for threats and everything else and trying to identify what may happen and looking at chatter. So there's nothing, nothing overlooked. I mean, every federal agency, every state agency is evolving in the Super Bowl. And there's not a stone that's left unturned. It's wild, man. Yeah, I can't even imagine the scope of that. And after that high stress event, you went to be the legal attache in Budapest. Yes.

I'd tell you what, again, some of the best years of the Bureau, you know, I went to high school in Paris, France. I've traveled all over the world. And I'll tell you what, Budapest Hungary is one of the most amazing cities you'll ever visit. I highly recommend it. If you go to Europe, bypass London, bypassed Paris, bypass rule, just go to Budapest. It's amazing. The people are amazing. The history is amazing.

The city's beautiful. It's clean. It's safe. And, you know, I went there and the timing was really unique because they had just started their counterterrorism team. Cool. Called the Tech, T-E-K. And they just started it. They just had their own building dedicated to them.

They identified who the individuals were. So I get there. And, you know, for, for 18 years, 17 years, I went all through my career in the FBI and never get my picture in the paper. you know, being the gray man, being the ghost, you know, having, you know, having my home, not even listening to my name or in my wife's name. So, you know, trying to be an invisible person. So I get the Budapest Hungary, like day two, I'm on Hungarian national television, all three stations. This is Greg Schae for the new Ligwatashay, Burupest Hungary, former member of the FBI's HRT, blah, so to get my entire history on national television. And for me, that was a huge paradigm ship and something that was,

really difficult to grasp. But bottom line, the Hungarian National Police and their counterterrorism people are just great guys. I actually was able to bring three of their senior operators back to HRT, and they observed our selection process, and they took back and mimicked our selection process for their selection for their individuals. And I was able to help them out designing a selection process and designing CQB rooms for them, because they were just really at the forefront of designing this new counterterrorism team.

And with my experience in HRT, they took advantage of that, and I worked very closely with them. It was just a lot of fun. Okay, so what the hell is this title legal attach? Sounds like you were a tactical attach to the Hungarian kind of terrorism. Now, you basically are, every legal attache, and most

embassies in the world, U.S. and businesses in the world have them now. you work closely with the national police of that country and you assist them in any investigation they have that has connectivity to the United States. And if it's any organized crime, chances are the money from the organized crime is going to go through a U.S. bank at some point.

If it goes through a U.S. bank, we have jurisdiction so the FBI can help. So that's how the FBI gets involved in overseas investigations is that we find that connection to a U.S. entity, whether it's a bank or a cell phone carrier or anything like that. If anything associated with America, the FBI can now use this resources to assist the foreign nation in their investigation. And so then you finished out your career with FBI going back to Dallas. You told me you wanted to go back to being a bit of a knuckle-drager and a door kicker.

Yeah, I went down two ranks from GS-15 under GS-G-S-13. Wow. The ASAC, assistant speciality in charge, a Dallasville officer was a friend of mine, and I told him I want to come back to Dallas. He said, what do you want to do? And I'm like, you know what? Here's what I want to do.

I want to be on a, you know, violent crime task force. I want to step down. I don't want to be a supervisor. I want to be, like you said, a knuckle driver. I want to be on the streets. I want to arrest people. And, of course, again, again, with my tactical experience in HRT,

he was more than happy to put me on a squad. And we had a lot of last 12 months of my career. I put a lot of people in prison and kicking a lot of doors, a lot of fun. So before we get to sort of your post-service career and are there any user questions? Yeah, there are few. We'll get to those. Sort of the other topic I wanted to bring up with while we have you here is in recent years, especially, there's been a lot of talk about the politicization of the FBI.

and I know it kind of like breaks the hearts of yourself and a lot of other FBI agents that I've spoken to over the years because they have told me they spend so much time trying to be nonpartisan and unbiased and stay out of the politics. And we're just cops. We're just enforced in the law, right? And I want to ask you what you thought about this, whether, first off, whether it's right or not that the FBI has been politicized if you think that's accurate. And second, you know, how you respond to seeing kind of your bureau being dragged through the mud in the press at the time. times. I tell you, Jack and David, and I mean this with my whole heart, it questions my soul to see what's happening in the FBI. It just questions the soul. I don't have the words describe how much it truly hurts me. The good news is I feel in my heart of hearts that a majority

of the field agents out there running cases and investigations are true American patriots. and don't give a lick about what political party are affiliated with. They have one goal online, and that is to do an investigation and put guilty people in prison. Put bad people away. That's their job. That's why they join the FBI. That's why 90% of FBI agents do 20 years and make a career over it. They don't leave because it's in their blood.

It's in their DNA. It's who they are. And a vast majority of those agents are good, solid American patriots. again, not caring what political party they're affiliated with. That being said, yes, there is corruption on the seventh floor of headquarters, and it's rampant. And one of the problems with the FBI is the SAC, the director of the FBI chooses the SAC, which stands for special aid in charge.

The director of the FBI hand-selects all 56 SACs in 56 field offices and bureau. So if you have a director who is not above board or has political aspirations or political biases, he's going to choose those SACs that feel the same way that he does. So that's how it trickles down into the FBI offices is the head of the offices, is hand chosen by the director. And then that SAC, he picks his ASACs. Those ASACs picked their supervisors. So you can see that the crap flows downhill.

And it's starting to affect those street agents that want to do nothing but put bad people in jail. So we, the American people, have got to hold the FBI's feet to the fire. We have got to demand a change. We have got to hold our Department of Justice's feet to the fire. Because what's happening right now where the FBI, I feel truly is a political arm of the Democratic Party has got to stop. That's a new phenomenon. And it never happened before. We have got to get the Americans trust back in the FBI.

And right now it's not there. And it's not, I mean, the challenge is, is even if it's a political arm of the Democratic party or like the arm of the Democratic Party right now, it could easily be the arm of anybody at any time. You know, these can go either way. If we don't, if we don't enforce like the neutrality of these types of organizations, right? It all starts with the director. Whoever the next president is has got to select a director who has a strong backbone,

who knows that the buck stops at his desk, and he's apolitical, and his goal in life is to bring justice. That's all. Just justice. It doesn't matter what side of the aisle you come from. Justice is justice. And they just need to pick a director who is willing to stand up for that and hold his feet, you know, hold his feet to the fire.

and make sure that he does that from the top down. And it's not a difficult fix. I really don't think it's a difficult fix. It can be fixed. But we need to have a director who's just really an effective leader and truly has no political biases in mind. When we had Danny Colson on the show, he told the story. I think he was pretty senior at the FBI at the time.

And it was someone from Clinton's, the Clinton administration, and Janet Reno was in the room with the Department of Justice, and the person from the administration asked Danny to open investigations into everybody who was protesting abortion clinics at the time. And Danny looked back at them and said, I can't do that. That's not constitutional. And to her credit, he says Janet Reno backed them up and was like, yeah, he's right. Do you feel like that's the kind of mentality that's not happening right now, that there's not somebody putting their foot down saying, hey, that's not who we are? absolutely i mean you look at the uh the parents of you know london county school district you know children

yeah and being investigated by the department of justice because they stood up against a schoolborn right there there's there's no investigation there's no fbi violation there so why is the fbi even involved in that um so i mean i think this perfect example of how it's being corrupted right now right and then you have people like stragg and you know we we talked about that a little bit that it's they get off with a with a light tap so it doesn't discourage any type of politically motivated behavior whomever is doing it and for whomever they're doing it for yeah and i'm going to you know i'm going to throw a bomb out there right now talk about january six real quick i mean why is the fbi investigating people for trespassing last time i checked trespassing is not against the united

states code you know 18 u sc is what is what the fbi investigates and charges people with trespassing is not a federal violation. So why is the FBI even involved in this January 6th? I mean, if they're, if they're going to be arrested for insurrection, then arresting for insurrection. But to this point, I don't think there's been any cases for insurrection that I know of. It's all been trespassing. So it should be like a capital police issue. Yeah.

One of the complaints I heard from a retired FBI agent was that a lot of the agents had a problem with the director of the FBI going down in front of Congress and talking about, I think when they decided not to charge Hillary, and they felt that that really politicized the FBI to have the director in front of Congress kind of giving this sort of speech under oath about that. But certainly, yeah, I mean, there's definitely a public perception now that the FBI has been politicized. And I mean, from your point of view, you're saying it certainly has been. Well, when James Comey went on television, national television, to discuss the Hillary Clinton investigation that they would not indict her or arrest her, that was unprecedented.

You've never seen an FBI director go on national television to talk about an investigation. That was never done before. He broke every FBI rule and regulation there is. He went on national television, and when you first heard the speech, it's like, oh, my gosh, they're going to arrest Hillary Clinton. And then he gives all the reasons why she should be arrested, and then changes too and it says they're not going to arrest here because of whatever his reasoning he was. I think the precedent was really the only thing he said.

Yes. And look, I get that. Like, I get the precedent. Like the going back to the precedent of like trying to impeach Bill Clinton, that sets impeachment up sort of as a precedent. Right. And now we're going to see that probably every election cycle whenever, you know, Like, I understand the precedent and not wanting to do it because it, it, like, if you start arresting politicians, then it doesn't end because they're all pretty dirty.

I'm actually okay with them arresting politicians. I honestly am too, but they do it as long as they arrest everybody because they, because most of it would go to jail, honestly. But like, I understand the precedent, the idea of, you know, not arresting because of a precedent, but also like you say for him to do that it it's sort of like the meeting on the tarmac right just discussing the emails with bill like that's it's yeah that's just something that that you can see how that should not be involved in yeah and the optics are horrible and it sticks right American people know yeah right I want to jump into some questions yeah let's do that uh so uh thank you jackson

what was your favorite part of selection or nots? Well, there is no favorite part of selection. You know, that's just too hard. Do they still make you climb up to the top of the bow of the ship and then jump down into the water from like 90 feet? They do that, yeah. Over in Little Creek, Virginia, we do a couple days out in Little Creek.

And they make you climb on a bridge wing, a very large ship and make you jump off. So, yeah. Like I said, if you're afraid of heights or spiders or snakes or dark spaces or confined spaces, any phobias you have, they're going to find them. You know, but nots, the best part of knots is just developing those surgical shooting skills. I mean, just to see your own development and getting better and better and better is very rewarding. They had the best instructors in the world and they bring in the best instructors in the world. So again, when it comes to HRT, funding is never an issue.

You always get the best training and best equipment. So that's part of the best part about Knox is just getting all those toys and all that training and just knowing that such a small percentage of the world gets that kind of training that kind of equipment. Out of curiosity, in a lot of military organizations, the overall military has this sort of love-hate relationship with their special missions units because they're envious of the funding and the capability and that they're sort of outside of the system, but also they love them for what they can brief and bring to the table. Did you guys have that too with the FBI at large?

Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a little bit of animosity between the SWAT team than HRT. You know, obviously, you know, some of the senior leadership, you know, they don't want to release the 800-pound gorilla. So they're always hesitant to use us because they think we're heavy-handed. Right. So that was always a sword you had to bear. But for the most part, the guys that are on HRT, again, they're hand-selected. And for the most part, they had great personalities. You know, they're outgoing.

They're gregarious. They're humble. So when you meet them in person, you know, the persona or the reputation that you're told that these people have is, you know, is not true. that they actually, you know, they are good guys, and they have good heads on their shoulders. They're special agents first, their HRT operator second, and they have the best interest in their mind at all times. And they're just generally good guys. So, you know, we, I like to think that we destroy a lot of false information on us when they take the time to get to know us.

You guys aren't just sitting there like throwing Sampsonite luggage down and jumping on it to see. Justin, thanks again. How much did the GWAT change the capabilities of HART? And how similar would you say HRT became to other tier one units after Afghanistan and Iraq? I'm not going to compare HRT to other tier one units. I mean, they, you know, their skill sets are far greater than ours. You know, we can run alongside them. And I like to think our CQB skills are equal to theirs.

but they have skill sets that we would never be able to mimic only because that's not our mission. But the GWAT definitely changed the HRT's training regimen, I mean, drastically. I mean, you know, the NOS course that I went through in 1999 versus the Nott's course now is completely different as well. Because, you know, now we do know what we have to do work alongside those special mission units. And I think the training and operation for both CAG and for DEB group as well has changed. I mean, you learn so much, you know, during, you know, during those operations, you know, real workup operations, you learn so much. So, you know, our training, our equipment, how we go about things, you know, for the HRT,

the amount of change I can't even begin to describe because it went from, you know, being, you know, looking at things strictly from a domestic terrorism, you know, hostage situation to now a, you know, you're looking in the hills of Torabora, Bora. Right. Or you're in Fallujah looking for, you know, Saddam Hussein. And those things are so vastly different from each other. So, yeah, great question. But, yeah, HRT has changed so much in the last decade.

So, Christian, thank you very much. FBI, HRT, work at the Super Bowl training. Well, and we talked about that at length. Christian, I hope that answered your question, if not ping us in the chat. Danny, thank you. Does FBI's hurt ever augment support to Secret Service, SRT, or counter-assault team?

My brother was a counter-assault team operator when I was on HRT. So we actually, they came to our shoot house. They held it in our shoot house. We heathed in their shoot house. So, yeah, we work alongside them a little bit. You know, if the president of everyone was taken hostage, I know the HFT would get the ticket on that much to the cap team's demise. You know, the cat team has a very specific skill set. They really do.

And again, my brother was a cat team operator for five years. they have very specific skill set but hostage rescue is not one of so they would defer to us but you know I like to think that my brother and I had a large part of developing a

close relationship between the cat team and HRT and what was the other part of the question with who else? The yeah the SRT and cat so when you guys are like sitting in a bar drinking and talking shit about like other services what are some

of the things you guys say about the secret service. I'm just kidding. I will not want their job. As my brother said, he spent way too much time standing in a stairwell. Yeah. Wiz-Wiz, thank you very much.

Any advice for those considering the FBI as a career? If you're, geez, be diverse. I mean, take a boxing class. I love boxing. I think it's the best form of martial arts because that's where all fights start. Everybody goes to jiu-jitsu, everybody goes ground fighting, which is a great skill to have. But I would definitely learn how to take a punch and how to give a punch. I think boxing does that for you.

I would learn some medical skills. I would learn a foreign language. If, let's see what else. If you can get some police experience and military experience, that helps. The computer skills, that helps. So just get as much varied experience as you can. Now, I have heard that for every one slot at Quantico for a special agent, there are 10,000 applicants. So I know it's very competitive.

Wow. Drew, thank you very much. Does HRT solely recruit prior tier one operators now these days? Yes. Yes. There are like seven or eight ways to get to the FBI. specialties. One is general, you know, former military guy, but nothing special forces-wise. You have pilots, you have linguists, you have computers, you have accounting, you have attorneys.

Those all get special consideration when they apply to the Bureau. They have now what's called the tactical recruiting program, TRP. So if you are a former member of the Special Forces or you're a member of a large city swap team that will give you special consideration in getting into the FBI. Because what happened when I was on the team is that they started recruiting a lot of linguists and computer operators and stuff like that to fight terrorism. When I came into Duburo, half my class, so 25 to 50 people in my class were former military or former police officers. Now the HRT recruits a lot from those individuals.

Well, halfway through my still in HRT, the class of 50 coming to the FBI Academy had like five former police officer, the military officers. Oh, wow. So the HRTs pool to recruit from became very small. So the HRT actually went to headquarters and got them to, to make up this tactical recruiting program, where we could go out and actually get people with special skills, special consideration, so they can be hired by the bureau. So answer your question on the net there, yes, we do recruit highly from,

those other units from special machine units and rangers and stuff like that greenberries. So if somebody comes in from one of those units, do they go straight to HRT or do they still, but it's like a pipeline where they have to go, they go serve their time as a field agent and then come back? It's a pipeline only into the FBI. Okay. So there's no promises or make HRT. A lot of guys come in and they don't want to get HRT.

They got into the bureau. They like what they're doing. They're seeing their family now. They're home at 6 o'clock at night. They're not being deployed. Their wives are they very happy. So they say, I'm not going to go to HRT or try out. So the TRP technical recruiting program gets you into the FBI.

And once you're in, after that, it's totally up to you. If you try out for HRT, you start at ground zero like everybody else. There's no special consideration to get on the team. And what are generally like the minimum requirements to get into HRT to go to selection? Again, only two years of experience. in the FBI. They like four or more, but only two-year minimum, and then you have to be invited.

Okay. David Maynard, thank you very much for both your donations. And David asked, and we love you, David, what fictional FBI agent was the best and which one was the worst? The movie Heat and the movie The Town are two movies that depict an FBI agent, both are bank robbery squads.

I think both heat, I think it was Al Pacino that played that role. And then in the town, it was I forgot who played the FBI agent in the town. It's with Ben Affleck. He put her bank robber. Those two movies depict the FBI pretty much real world

of the bank robbery squad. And then the worst one is probably Sandra Bullock. She's an FBI agent and becomes a beauty queen. Right, right. Our favorite, of course. is the one that's based off Danny Colson. Yeah.

Agent Colson of Shield. Of Shield. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And for those of you don't know, Agent Colson literally was based on Danny Colson. The writers of the Marvel films, they would, he was telling us they'd take down his book, his memoir, and like flip through it to get like lines of dialogue,

like some inspiration for Agent Colson, who's named after him. And so what are you up? Oh, and also we have a couple questions. I got it on that. there. Let me look at those real quick. Okay. Isaac asks, he does a couple questions, so we'll just

get a couple of them. So he says, I'm a 29-year-old computer information systems major in my second year of state, and I plan to get my master's in cybersecurity. Couldn't join the military. Jack and Dave might know my story. I want to get into the intelligence community,

But the truth is, I'm having trouble deciding what agency do you apply for. I want to do cyber operations. And I want to do special operations like you guys did. But I don't know what to do. I mean, FBI is huge into that field, aren't that? Yes. You know, I wouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. I'd apply to all the agencies.

You know, ICE has a great cyber platform. Secret Service has a great cyber element. Of course, CIA, FBI. So, you know, once you get into one and get that security clearance, it's a lot easier transfer to another agency if you chose to do that. So I would not put all your eggs in one basket only apply to one agency and apply to them all and see who, you know, see what happens. And then did you ever work for the GSG9? And if so, what were they like? You know, we did a lot of cross-trained GSG9 and red in France and the GIGN in France.

Australian SES, the British SES. So, you know, we cross-trail with a lot of them. We do a lot of fun things. You know, like when we do like Mountain Warfare training or rock climbing, we'll do a lot of that with those other agencies. I know prior to meeting the team, they used to have counterterrorism, like Olympic Games that GSG9 posted. I know HRT participated in their nose.

And I know that a good friend of mine who's a former HRT operator who participate in those Olympic games. It's still very good friends with some retired GSG9 guys. And then when we were over in Iraq as well, we always went by their camp and they came to our camp and we would share beers together and stuff like that. That's pretty cool. And one last question from Artie.

Thank you very much, Artie. Personally, I think white chicks was the best FBI representation. Wasn't that the Wayne brothers? That was the way. Yeah, it is. So, Greg, talk to us about what post-retirement life has been like for you and what you've been up to since getting out of the FBI. Well, I started a little security company. It's called Schaefer Security Group.

It's based out of here, Dallas, Texas. And I do a lot of security consulting, a lot of risk management. One of the things I'm doing now is a lot on active shooter response training, Act Actuals, consulting. I was a part of the Parkland prosecuting team. I'm looking to get involved

with some other instances that occurred recently and there are lawsuits against people who didn't do what they're supposed to do. We do a special event security. I have upwards about 25 guys that are subcontractors

that can call on to help me out. We do some executive protection. We do a lot of politicians, actually, for the executive protection. But for the most part, I do a lot of consulting, risk management, a lot of going to corporations and training their individuals and training their staff and their leaders and how to not only respond to active shooters, but how to implement, you know, counteractors shooter policies and procedures. I did write a book, Security Secrets for Today's Dangerous World, stays safe. Actually is doing very well. And in this book, I talk about one survival mindset,

situational awareness, everyday carry. I talk about security and offices, church security, school security. Again, how do you respond to actress security events and acts of violence? You know, the book really is for the layman. So if he has kids going to college or high school kids. I highly recommend that book. I like to think that it has made a difference a lot of people's lives. I do a lot of speaking at schools, not only to the teachers, but also to the students. And then I always try to bring in the parents of the students for an evening event. I love getting the parents involved, letting them know how to keep their kids safe, telling them to hold the teachers' feet to the fire and the administrator's feet to the

fire because the amount of act of should be a response training in schools when it does happen most of us happen very poorly and it's not happening enough. So I guess my focus right now is just school safety. And what happened at Parkland, what happened to Louisville and

what's happening across our great nation is just, it's horrific. And I do think that we can stop this scourge of killing. I think we can do things to recognize those pre-incident indicators of violence. I do think it's a mental health issue. I think it's a counseling issue. I think it's a church issue. I think it's a

family issue. I think it's a gun issue and all those order to one. And one, one answer is not going to be the right answer. This is a multitude, a multifaceted issue. It's going to have a multifaceted answer. What are some, it's just like an elevator pitch for people, like just lay people out there to stay safe? Well, first and foremost is just have good situation awareness. I mean, just know who and what's happening around you. You have good situational awareness. And it's a trained skill.

It's not difficult. It's very easy to develop. But most people just go through life with blinders. You know, most people have not been a victim of violence. So their response is this. It's not going to happen to me. Well, it's not going to happen to me. It's not a good plan.

You have to be, you know, here's a, here's a knowledge that you're used. We all know, been told us you're three years old. Should our clothes catch on fire, we spontaneously combust, how do we save ourselves if we catch on fire? We do three things. Stop drop and roll. Yeah. Right. Perfect.

Now, personally, I can't think of a worse way to die than burn to death. But I have a plan on place. If I catch on fire, I know how to save myself. I want to stop, drop, and roll. Well, we need to do the same thing for violence. We need to have a plan of action in our mind so that our body will go where our mind has already gone. Because I teach that the body won't go where the mind has never been. Most people don't think about what will happen while I'm in this restaurant and somebody pulled out a gun.

They don't think about what they should do. If they just took 10, 15 seconds to think about it, if that event ever does occur, their body will respond to where their mind took them to earlier. The body won't go where the mind has never been. So I stressed that really hard in my presentations and my lectures because I think it will help save lives. If you think about what you will do when the time come to do it, you will do it until you thought about. And not, you know, having that, you don't ever happen to me, you know, security plan is not a security plan at all. I think, you know, I heard Pat McNamara say something that's like very simple, but also like very profound when you really think about it.

You're saying when you look at someone, you're immediately depriving them of their greatest weapon, which is their element of surprise. Just by what I got them. Yeah. I mean, I'm a living testament. to being blindsided and not having my head on a swivel. So, you know, I don't know if you know, but like a couple of years ago, I got assaulted on the subway because I was, there was nobody else on the car.

It was laid at night as reading a book and didn't see somebody get on with a rock. So, you know, and it's just letting your guard down. And it doesn't mean being paranoid all the time. Yeah. Right. It's not paranoid. Right. It's relaxed awareness.

And, and your statement of the body won't go where the mind, say that, one more time. The body won't go where the mind has never been. It's, I mean, it's a brilliant statement because even when you consider like Olympic athletes and how much time they spend like just in the visualization process. Yeah,

visualized. Exactly. Of, of like doing the perfect pole vault or doing the perfect hurdle that, that if you just imagine yourself in those situations and reacting that you're sort of training yourself. Exactly. You're exactly right.

If, if people want to have you come and speak it, their school or function or they want to get a hold and hire your security service or your security company services where can people find you how can they get a hold of you they can email me at gregg at shafer security group.com or then go to my website which is shafer security group.com the trick is to spell shaffer correctly it's shah a F-H-A-F-E-R so wwwshafer security group.com contact us and i'll get an email or heck i'll put myself phone out there. Call me at 4-69-279-2696. I'll take your call directly. Awesome. And we have two more

questions just popped up. Christian, thank you very much. What type of helicopters do the FBI use? We use MD-530 Littlebirds. We use Bell 420s, and we use the Blackhawks. And then David Maynard, thanks again. What is the oddest skill you got trained on but never thought you would use but then had to, like rock climbing or whatever? Well, one of the fun with lot picking, that's kind of a fun skill set to learn. How to pick lots. Yeah.

Did you ever get an opportunity to use that real world? Yes, absolutely. Yep. Did you fumble? Like, was it tough because you hadn't been practicing it, or did you, like, breeze in? I mean, it took the amount of time I thought we'll take. I mean, no more you do it, the better you get at it.

I think I was able to pick a lock in under a minute. That's impressive. So coming up on Tuesday, we're having another former FBI agent on the show. I don't know if you know them or not, Holden Triplett. He is the former director of counterintelligence at the National Security Council, served in the FBI, FBI office in Beijing, second in command in Moscow, a lot of experience, 15 years of the FBI. So that's coming up on Tuesday. And then on Friday, Chad McCrude. Roy, who served in 24th STS with the Air Force. Both in studio. They're both in studio guests, which is- Oh, we're getting drunk.

Super cool. Yeah. And Greg, I hope, you know, if you're ever coming through New York, you'll hit us up. And, you know, you're welcome to come here, smoke cigars with us anytime. I'd love to you guys. It's been a great pleasure speaking with you guys. I love your show. Your guest list is just truly spectacular.

I'm humbled that you even have me on your show. Thanks. Knowing that you're looking at your previous guest. I mean, I can't hold a candle what they've done in the past. And thank you for what you do, putting a word out there. And God bless you guys and have a great holiday season coming up. Thank you. And we're humble that you come on and spend your Friday night with us and our audience.

So thank you very much. My pleasure, guys. All right, guys. We'll see you Tuesday and then on Friday. Take care.