The Team House - Former CIA Ground Branch Officer Bazzel Baz, Ep. 83

Episode Date: March 6, 2021

Bazzel Baz served as a Ground Branch paramilitary officer in the CIA. For the first time, insider details about the CIA's stinger missile program in Afghanistan are revealed and the never before discussed stinger missile program in Angola is also discussed. Baz talks about leaving the Marine Corps when he was recruited by the CIA, the training he received at Ground Branch, and much more. We also talk about his work with ARC, rescuing the victims of human trafficking. Get access to bonus segments with our guests: https://www.patreon.com/m/TheTeamHouse Bazzel's books: https://www.bazbooks.com Association for the Recovery of Children: https://www.recoveryofchildren.org Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 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/RemixSampleBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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

and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Special operations, covert ops, espionage, the team house with your hosts, Jack Murphy, and David Park. All right, guys. Here we are. Episode 83 of the Team House. We are live tonight. I am Jack Murphy here with Dave Park, co-hosts in the show. And tonight, our guest for episode 83 is Basil Baz. And I hope I got that right, Baz, because I keep switching your name. It's a dyslexic part in my brain. Basel Baz, right?

You can. You can pronounce it that way. You can pronounce it Basel Basel, or you can call me a bunch of names like people have all my life. It's fine. Well, thank you so much for joining us tonight. I know a lot of people were excited for this episode, excited to hear from you. Baz served as a U.S. Marine. He also served in for, you know, the other governmental agencies working on covert programs for our country for many years. And he is also an actor. So you guys, many of you probably recognize Baz from television shows. I think you were on Blacklist and a few other like fairly big, big. network television shows. Yeah, it's been good. I've really been

blessed and fortunate to be able to fall into that career. It helps pay your bills and offers you a lot of flexibility from time to time. I'm not so sure that any of us that get there want to be famous. There might be others. I certainly didn't strive to be that. I just kind of wanted to find a career path outside of what I was doing to just pay the mortgage. Yeah. Now, Basel, Jack and I are both big comic book geeks. And so one of the things we like to ask people is what's your origin story? Where did you come from? What were your formative years like that gave you the superpowers that you have today? That's funny. Thanks. That's a compliment. I think the only superpower I have is being able to get up in the morning and get to the toilet, you know, take a piss better than without peeing all over myself sometimes, you know. But thank you anyway.

Dave. You know, I come from a pretty interesting background. My grandfather was an immigrant here. He fought during the Ottoman Empire and actually in Beirut, Lebanon. Made his way to the America. Met my grandmother, wonderful lady, Native American, Waukema, I believe. And they had 12 kids. And he was so excited to be in America as an American. He did one. whatever it took to feed his family, work three jobs, and it encouraged all of his sons to actually go into the military to serve the nation. A real believer in the Constitution, a real believer in literally in what our forefathers had done.

So I kind of grew up in a not a wealthy family. My grandfather wasn't a rich man. He lived in Georgetown, South Carolina, an old pirate revolutionary pirate town and probably one of the less wealthiest areas of the town probably the only Caucasian Native American in his neighborhood the rest of the neighborhood were

not African American they were black Americans I always like to make that straight because I learned at a young age that most of them were like we don't know anything about Africa or Americans so we grew up in a world of non-discrimination and just people trying to make it. They grew up during the Depression. And then my father went on into the military. He was Green Beret.

I originally got in there with eight special forces prior to Vietnam. And so I grew up around that military atmosphere. Not really thinking that I would follow in his footsteps. My grandfather and probably my parents thought I would probably do better as a doctor. probably a little bit safer but the downside of watching your boy

and grow up in a military family as you get really excited about being a warfighter so at a young young age I remember asking my dad when he got back from Vietnam I said you know why is it that I got this feeling I want to go to war

you know I don't know what's all that about my dad said that's normal he said you'll go and you won't like what you'll see and you might not want to ever go back. He goes, the reason you go back is because of your buddies. He goes, as you get older, you'll understand the politics behind a lot of war fighting.

He said there are times and moments where discretion is the greatest part of valor. And he said, but until you go, you're not going to know. He said, so go with my blessing. And so I ended up going to a school called the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, military school. steeped in this is probably not politically correct to say in our day and time but heck, I'm going to say it, you know. They were involved in the Confederacy

during the Civil War and so it's steeped in a lot of that old southern tradition despite what you may think about the war of northern aggression or the Civil War, whatever it may be. So by the time I finished that school as it's known for being the the howled halls of the wards of discipline, the Marine Corps was pretty much a piece of cake.

For me, I went to OCS, went in the Marine Corps, became an 03, O2 infantry officer. And somewhere in my career, right in the middle, the Marine Corps really wasn't going to war. They weren't really on the cutting edge of, well, they're on the cutting edge always, but somewhere there after we got hit in Beirut, you might remember that.

We lost 22, but 222 maybe more, Marines and Navy personnel. And I became one of the Marine Corps' first counterterrorism officers to help develop the Marine Corps program along with a really great group of people from the National War College and some other places. And it wasn't soon after that. that, unbeknownst to me, the agency, the CIA, had their eyes on me. And one day, somebody asked me if I wanted to do God's work. I didn't really know what that man, but I do now.

It's kind of a funny story. I don't know if we have time for it. If you want to hear it, I can tell you how I got recruited. People imagine, like, a couple guys in black trench coats coming to you, like, in a bar, you know, over a glass of whiskey. I'd love to hear the true story of how that happened. Yeah, it was kind of funny. I was at the National War College at this terrorism symposium, listening to all these non-experts pontificate on terrorists.

You know, we were new in the game. We didn't really know a lot about guerrilla warfare and terrorism on the fronts, as we do now. And during the coffee, while I was sitting there, I looked over my shoulder, and there were a couple of guys sitting behind me in suits. had big old CIA badges on like, you know, and I thought,

wow, that's really weird. You know, I thought those guys were invisible most of the time. And so I thought, well, you know, what's probably going to happen is I'm going to look during the coffee break and they're just going to have vanished. And sure enough, when they broke for coffee, I turned around and, yeah, they were gone. So I was down getting a couple Joe,

and they walked up to me and one of the gentlemen's first name is John. said Captain Boss, he goes, we'd like to speak to you. We've kind of know about you. We've been kind of keeping our eye on you. And I was wondering if you'd be interested in joining the CIA. It's like, what? So anyway, I said, well, I'm not really sure. So he said, well, we'll be in touch.

And they walked away. And I was kind of trying to figure out how they were going to be in touch because they didn't leave a business card. I didn't enter number. So about two days later, I was back at my office at Quantico, and it was a little sticky on my desk. It said, go see Colonel Dorman down at the certain building. Now, in the Marine Corps, especially Quantico, it's pretty spit and polish.

But when I went down, took a walk down to this, I asked everybody in the command, I said, does anybody know who left this note, what it's about? and everybody was like, no, we don't have any idea. Just go to go to the meeting. So I went down to this building, and it was just grown up. The building was falling apart. It looked like it needed to be torn down, actually. The grass was growing.

It was anything but the Marine Corps. And I almost walked away from it because I thought I was at the wrong place. But went ahead and knocked on the door that all the paint was coming off of it. And the civilian lady opened the door, and she said, Captain Boss, we've been expecting you. And so I came in, and inside this building, it was plush. I mean, it was like, it was like nothing outside looked like it needed to be scraped. And inside was like, so she said, Colonel Dorman, whose code name later I found out was two dogs, is waiting for you.

And so I knocked on the door and I reported in as Captain Bob is reporting, sir. And I'm staring at the back of a leather chair, high back leather chair, and I can barely see the top of someone's head, there's a flat top, silver flat top, and a trail of cigar smoke is kind of going up. And all of a sudden, the chair swings around. And now I'm staring in the eyes of this Marines, Marines, you know, square-jawed, death in his eyes kind of guy. You know, he's probably seen more than I would ever see in a lifetime.

and he takes the fire stick and he puts it down in the ashtray and he looks at me and he says cap'n boss i understand the CIA's been in touch with you now you got to keep the mind i didn't tell anybody anything nobody it was like i just kept my mouth shut you know and i'm wondering how he knows this this is a colonel in the marine corps how does he know that this civilian organization's gotten in touch with me so i just didn't say anything and he gets this little crack this little smile on his face and he goes, you're probably wondering how I know that, aren't you, Captain Boss? And I'm, yes, sir, I actually am wondering. And he said, well, he says, you ever remember Beirut? He gives me a date. And he says, Naval Atteche is coming out of a Hilton hotel. He's crossing the

road and all of a sudden a car full of terrorists drive by and gunning him down in the street. He said, you hear that story? And I said, yes, sir, I do remember about that naval attach. He said, but did you hear the rest of the story? And I'm like, now I'm wondering where we're going with this whole thing. And he's like, that naval attach stood up in the middle of the road, opened his briefcase,

pulled out his zuzzi, locked and loaded. And when that car came back, he killed every one of those SOBs. He said, and then he went into the Hilton Hotel and said, get me a doctor. And he said, and that, sir, is why I stay at Hilton hotels all over the world. And I'm trying to put the pieces together.

And he goes, and I'm saying, sir, are you telling me that you were the naval attache? He goes, yes. And I was, I'm here to tell you that I was working for the CIA. And he says, and son, I want to know, do you want to work for the CIA? Just kind of brash, you know. And I'm like, by now I'm not really understanding what's going on. And he says, look, he said, you're a Citadel grad. You probably get a star if you stay in the Marine Corps and you can retire.

He said, or you can join the CIA and see the world for free. He says, well, does that sound? I looked down, I said, sir, I said, I don't really know. And he goes, well, he says, Captain Bond, you think about it. You let me know by tomorrow what you want to do. And so he says, you're dismissed. And so I'm dismissed, so I'm starting to walk out. And I stop at the door.

And I turn around, I said, sir, man, ask you a question. What would you do if you were me? All of a sudden, he swivels back, grabs his fire stick, he swivels back around. Now I'm looking at the same picture I looked at when I came in, the back of the leather chair, the top of his head, and the smoke coming up from the cigar, and all he says is, why boy, I'd join the CIA if I were you. That was it. Two weeks later, I'm gone. My records are cleaned up. I've left the Marine Corps, and I report into the most amazing place I could have ever dreamed of as an operator. I end up going to what's called Ground Branch, Special Operations, SES, Special

Activity Service, sometime known as the President's Secret Hand, you know, and next thing I know, I'm in the CIA, and from there on, I have absolutely no regrets. It became, it was a dream come true. the world of the clandestine service, the world of a paramilitary case officer, and then for 10 years I got to work with people that were just the most amazing operators that I ever could have experienced. In those days, there were only 23 of us for the whole world. And so these are guys from Delta.

These are guys, some were Navy SEALs that were mostly into maritime. There were guys like Ron Franklin, Popeye from First Sergeant Major Delta. Delta Force, who's now retired from the agency. And then a couple of guys showed up that I had known in the Marine Corps, and I had wondered where they went. They just disappeared, and all of a sudden, I'm in a hallway, and someone who says, you know, says, hey, boss, I turn around. It's like, Garne, what are you doing here?

And he goes, well, I work here now. So it became a, it became a fascinating, very fascinating, very rewarding life. And that's how I ended up in that. Can I, I'd like to ask you a few questions just to get to know you if we rewind just a little bit. When you decided to go into the Marine Corps in the first place, why did you do that instead of special forces? Like what was your thought having already seen your dad in the Green Beret? Yeah, you know, I was a pretty big soccer player. One of the things I wanted to do out of college was I just wanted to be a pro soccer player.

come up on my last year of college, I couldn't afford, our family couldn't afford my tuition. And so, well, actually, near my junior year, and my father came to him and he said, look, you know, we need to send your sister to school on it. And we can't afford both tuitions. Can you look at getting a scholarship or something? So I got an ROTC scholarship. And then I chose out of all the services, I chose the Marine Corps. because Marines were first to fight, you know, and every Marine is special.

And I knew that if I could get the best of the best training that I thought the services had to offer, that I'd find my way into some type of special operations world, or quite honestly, I had made phone calls. I was just going to be a mercenary, you know, in those days, you know, it was all glamorous and everything. And, you know, executive outcomes wasn't really, that large at that time, but there were a few. And I made some phone calls, like there were guys fighting in Beirut and other places. And I had an old, actually an old army sergeant who was actually contracted out.

We call it contracted now, but, you know, he was contracted and someone put me in touch with him. He said, look, he goes, it's not as glamorous as you think right now. He goes, you come over here. You're going to scounds for your ammo. You're going to be lucky if you get two meals a day. You're going to get shot at, blown up. And he said, it's not where you want to go as a young operator right now. He said, just get your education and get in service.

And maybe years later, he goes, trust me, there's going to be enough wars. And it was really good advice because, look, we have one more after another. So I went that route in the Marine Corps because they allowed me, the Marine Corps scholarship program allowed me to go to Holland my junior year and study along with my soccer team under with the National Dutch. team to train and I thought that was all great and then I owed them only 40 years that was going to be it so after I got out the catch was you're going to you're going to go to bulldog now you remember bulldog was like it wasn't bulldog was that accelerated course that was half the time of of what OCS was and if you

flunked out you went in the Marine Corps as like a Lance corporal so you kind of were taking your chances so you know anything could happen get an injury or whatever it would have to you But I did go to Bulldog and did really well there. And from there, I ended up on my way in the Marine Corps. There wasn't a Marsock then. There was Marine Corps recon. And so I kind of had my eyes on going Marine Corps recon, but those slots weren't available as I continued through my 03 career as an infantry officer. So I was just waiting my time to try to do that.

And that was the closest I could get. You know, I didn't know a lot about Delta at that time. I knew blue light existed. I knew Buds was there. I knew those things. But I was already in the Marine Corps. And it was like, well, you know, I'll go recon and then hopefully something will open up. And there weren't a lot of a lot of options back then.

You either, you know, you got into recon or you got someplace else. And so I think that's one because I didn't get into recon, it's one of, the things that was so appealing when I got approached by the CIA, which was, you know, we're real small and we do things that we won't talk to you about. And you're not going to tell anybody else about it. And if you're the kind of guy that can come here, being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for

help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family. resource network.org today. And do a lot of really cool things and not look for anybody to thank you for it or write a book

about it or a movie or and you can stay under the radar, then we'd like to have you. And that's the world I came out of in the agency. It's interestingly enough, it's not like that anymore. Now, the later generations, you go and run a big operation or you do something. And next thing you know, there's a book about it. There's a movie about it. And there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, I guess you can do what you want to do.

And I even wrote a book, but the things I wrote in my book aren't the thing. They're not the operations I can really talk about. Sure. And we'll never talk about those things. So our generation is one where, even like my father, you know, I sit down now and I've only found out some of the things. I didn't know that my dad worked with the agency in Vietnam. until the agency told me. You know, guys would come up and go,

hey, I worked with your dad in Laos. It's like, I don't think so. My dad was a green beret. And they just laugh. And then, you know, and then later I find out that like, he'd been working, you know, all kinds of stuff.

But he never talked about it. Even now, I can sit down with my father and go, hey, dad, let's share some operations. He won't say a word. Yeah. He just doesn't talk. So, you know, when we have things like, when Osama bin Laden was taken out

I was really surprised that people were really bold about hey I'm the guy that did it look more power to you but I've got things in my past that we've done and I'm not going to ever talk about them because let me tell you something KGB has a long reach

you know other people from other countries they can come and do what they want to do just to make a point so it's not that we're scared but out of respect for the other operators. Look, if they come get me, they're not going to come get the five guys that worked with me. And if they get the five guys that worked with me,

maybe they're going to get their families too. And so there's a lot of responsibility on your shoulders when you start saying, yeah, I want to become famous because of what I did, well, maybe you were doing it for the wrong reason. I don't know. That's just my generation. I'm interested also in this question of your recruitment. If I understand this right, did you leave the Marine Corps?

You left the military as you were recruited to become then a CIA Green Badger. Or were you still technically a Marine but had been given a sort of liaison duty attached to the CIA? Yeah, no, I left the Marine Corps. I don't know how they worked it out. It was very defined. It was like I'm no longer in the Marine Corps. Now, you know, you go into, in the clandestine service, obviously you have a cover story and they do that.

And I'm not at liberty to say what that, what it was. I was working for somebody else sort of, you know, like McDonald's. Oh, yeah, I work for McDonald's, you know, right. Or Pizza Hut or something, you know, something crazy. While you were in, while you were in Ground Branch and SOG. Now, once you, and you know this, once you leave, they give you an option. You can go out and still hang on to your covert status or overt.

And for me, when I finally got out, I kept asking myself, what am I going to tell people I did for 10 years? They're going to think I'm in prison or something. Right. You know, like I can't talk about it. I was in prison. So I made a choice of getting out under an overt status. But with the understanding that there were a lot of operations,

we would never talk about. might be places that we share, like, like it's, I think it's pretty common knowledge. I was in Mogadishu in Afghanistan. I mean, those operations are the Iran-Contra thing. But when we get down to disclosing specifics or tradecraft or how we operated or where we did and who was with us, you know, we're really not at liberty to really talk about it a lot. Maybe you write a book and then when you're 90 and you die, you know, maybe all the secrets come out there.

How was that culture change for you? going from the Marine Corps to like the next day or within the next week, like showing up at this place with all these different. It's civilians with a mustache and covers and all this other jazz. Yeah. I stayed really quiet. I didn't, I just listened and learned. There were people, you know, number one, you go in, you don't know what operations they've been a part of.

So if you walk in with a little bit of ego or arrogance, you're going to get shot down like really fast. I mean, I was among war fighters and teams of guys that were being dropped behind the lines like one man at a time or two men at a time, you know. And so I gained a lot of respect early on. There were a lot of things about people that I didn't know and I had to take time to learn. So I just kind of sat back and watched and listened and just kind of took my orders as I should and proved myself in the field so that I could be given more. responsibility. You know, you know, when you, when you walk into an office and you're standing in front of the former Sergeant Major Delta Force, I mean, like, seriously, what are you going to, what are you going to brag about? Yeah. Yeah, right. Like, you weren't on the, you weren't on the

raid, the Iran hostage, you know, operation, or, or you didn't battle out, you know, being in Vietnam, being surrounded by a battalion of VC, you know, so it's like, you don't really have bragging rights and and over time when you are a part of things um and you might have done some things that nobody else has done but you know don't regretging about it because there's a lot of people that have done a lot more you know and so you know in the civilians eyes it's like really cool stuff and and we did do some cool stuff and and we still you know you maintain your training your trade craft and you still have the capability to go do cool stuff and and we still have the capability to go do cool stuff, but it was a little different.

I thought it was really cool that I didn't have to have short hair any longer. Yeah. You know, I could wear civilian clothes. It's kind of cool. Ground Branch, most of the time everybody went to the office in T-shirts and blue jeans. And, you know, you only put the monkey suit on when you had to go over to headquarters, you know, which we honestly tried to stay away from as much as possible. One thing about special operations guys, which was great is they love their country,

but they despise bureaucracy. You know, it's just stupidity sometimes. Particularly when you have people that were making decisions above you that had never been downrange. You know, you just learned really quick. But it was fun. It was fun. Being clandestine, it wasn't, you know,

it's not like you come home and you pluck out and you're not a spy anymore. Yeah. You know, you're just kind of that all your life. Now, the transition that was a little difficult is when I got out because I had lived that all my life. And I literally had to sit down with my dad one day. And he just looked at me and he said, son, let me tell you something. He goes, it was just your job.

It's not who you are because you're a spy 24-7. And so you kind of realize that, okay, well, yeah, yeah, I guess it was my job. Yeah. BAS, could you explain a little bit about that job that you did? I mean, this is the mid-1980s. You said there's 23 guys in Ground Branch at the time. There's a lot of misconceptions about who you guys were and are and what that unit does for our country. I was wondering if you could dispel maybe some of the BS out there about what Ground Branch is and what you guys do.

Well, I can't speak to what Ground Branch does. now all the time because I don't have a clearance and I'm not I'm not working there but at the time we had just come out of the whole Vietnam error budgets had been cut so they had just started hiring back up so it was not uncommon for you to walk in the office and there were two section chiefs trying to recruit all the right people to bring on board and at that time if you think of the the time from Vietnam and then there wasn't a war and then we were going to get into wars, your pickings were pretty slim when it came to operators, who was qualified, and to do what. So, you know, there was a lot of R&D research and development that was taking

place with weapons and KLAVCOM and materials, new materials, working close with S&T, science, and technology and trying to actually rebuild a paramilitary force that was able to go out among the world and teach hostage rescue, direct action, airborne operations, water operations, whatever it may be. So oftentimes, if we needed to enhance the 23 of us, and I may have that number wrong. Maybe it was 20, 23, something like that. But to enhance operations, we would sometimes reach out to the community, which would be the seals or some Delta guys. Because if you're, and you know this, if you're, if you're a conventional military force and you're on somebody else's soil, that's a declaration of war. That's an invasion or can be misconstrued as an invasion.

Whereas if you're attached to a CIA unit, that's fine. So you just get hung or shut. shock for spying. I mean, you know, it was like, you know, and it can be a denialable operation, which a lot of those operations that we ran were denialable. So on any given day, depending on if it was direct action against terrorism or training up people around the world to assist the United States and going after terrorists, or whether it was a, you know, joint operation, seals or Delta, as well. as what happened to Mogadishu.

Most of the time, what was happening with ground branches, they were the first guys in. We still had a little bit of separation between Department of Defense and the agency doing what it needed to do and what it wanted to do. And there wasn't as much trust between what happened,

between the CIA and conventional forces. That, I think that was just a matter of, I don't know, we just did things differently and we were allowed to do things in other countries that we didn't talk about. And so you just didn't share it outside your ranks. It would take a long time before a Delta guy or a seal guy really received the trust of guys in ground branch or maritime or Arab branch. So I don't know what the rumors might have been.

It's just that we were doing laundry and then we were out a lot. You just turn around time was really short. 23 guys for the whole world. And on any given moment, you could be attached to a division. So, you know, there was in the DO, there was, there might be AF at that time, Africa Division or Central America Division or South America Division or whatever it may be. So guys sometimes with PCS out and a lot of times we were TDIY supporting operations like the whole Iran-Contra training thing that took place

which everybody kind of knows about that, you know, or there was the Russians invaded Afghanistan and of course we ran there and that turned up a great operation. I mean we kind of kicked butt and took names on that one and they eventually left door, whatever it was around the world. There was always stuff going on. Could we get into that, Chas? I'd really like to hear about the Stinger Missile program, the CIA's covert program in Afghanistan,

well, actually in Pakistan, but directed into Afghanistan, about, you know, how that came up on your radar and how you got involved in the program? Well, you know, let's talk in the third person. I'll tell you what I heard, okay? Let me just tell you what I've learned about that. You know, the Russians invaded.

There were a number of ground branch guys that were involved in trying to prevent the air war from continuing because it was the thing that were killing the Mahajahdin. any any other support that was going in there. They had a pretty good ground game going. But between their hind helicopters and their bombers and their fighters, those things were making a mess. And I think from what I understand,

the hind helicopters were just notorious for putting the fear of God in anybody. I mean, even though the Taliban, the Mahajadine love to stand up on rocks and yell Allah Akbar. and there were great fighters. You know, once the United States was given approval to get run clandestine operations in there, and I think books have been written about it, then the agency got involved. But it got involved with really a small unit of people. And initially, the blowpipe was deployed, and there were three guys, and we'll leave there.

I mean, I won't tell you who they were, but those three guys had a, they went in and were trying to deploy the blowpipe, which was a wire guided missile system. And the Shorts brothers out of England who were producing that, the electronics on the package, just kind of, it was, they were failing quite, quite miserably from time to time. So that system in itself just wasn't going to do the damage that needed to be done. So somebody within the agency said, hey, you know, I hear there's this general dynamics. It's got this new weapon system called the Stinger Missile System, and maybe we should think about deploying that. And then I think Milit Bearden, milk was the COS in Islam. lot at that time. And Ren Stillow was with AF, was with Near East Division, and he was spearheading some things. And so he reached down to SAS and said, hey, is there anybody there that could

kind of go tell us if this system is worth it? So they, from what I understand, they sent somebody. And they got trained down in El Paso. the problem was that in the Stinger training there's a big dome and you know you get inside the dome with the trainer and you're probably familiar with it and you track and you learn your skills there but we couldn't fly 30 Mohajadine to El Paso for many many reasons keeping it quiet a budget whatever it may be so I'm told and And so, Wren had a conversation with somebody in SAS and said, hey, what do you think about the system? And that guy told him it's a great system and think they should consider it.

And they had to go out and find the money for it. And there was a brief moment there where they, Congress and a few other people just weren't buying off on it. They were really going to just drop the money. program thinking, well, we'll, look, we can use sticks and stones and slingshots and, you know, British infields and maybe we could pull it off. But somebody got a really smart idea that cost them about $15.75 worth the training materials and said, you know what?

we can teach them to use this weapon system if we just use these simple things. And so the agency sent a guy over to a training site at a non-disclosed location, and they set up this really, really simple mechanism where they took a line, and they ran it from one building down to another one, and they stuck a little airplane with a flashlight in the back, which would produce the heat with some weights on the bottom, and they would stick a mooch up on the top. And when he was given the go, he would just let it go,

and it would actually just kind of move down the rope, right? But in the background, it looked like an airplane flying in the sky. So I hear that the theory behind that for that guy was that he believed that if you could just keep people put in their memory what they needed to see every single time, they would know how to fire. So on the stinger, there's three reticles, you know, and you need the, when you're looking through one of the reticles, you need the airplane to be a certain size. If it's too small, that's too far away. And if it's too big, bigger than the reticle, that's too close. The missile won't have time to arm itself. But if it's just right, and that's what you see, then you could fire the weapon system,

and it would give the missile time to activate, and, of course, you could hit your target. So if you repeat this, and this is the image that they get in their head, it doesn't matter if they have a third grade education, they're going to see that, and they're going to know, well, if I see it and it looks like that, then I can shoot. And so I understand that, believe it or not, that was Make fun, it really wasn't Charlie Wilson's war. It was somebody else's. And through $15.97 or 79 cents, whatever it was, that little amount of money is what taught them to become.

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and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Excellent, Jedi Masters of the Stinger Weapons System, I guess. And then I hear that they deployed a number of guys

and they gave them cameras so they could record, you know, their first shots so they could take that back to the division and they could take that to Congress and say, hey, look, it works, it works. And I understand most of the footage on those cameras, at least 75% of the footage was just the mood jumping around and joking around fireplaces and dancing. and I think, you know, like the last third of the footage was actually some things being shot down, actually. So, you know, you put cameras. I don't think anybody expected that. But from what I understand after that, it got deployed there and then it got deployed down in Angola here. And that guy kind of faded off into the shadows.

Um, you know, probably to this day, he never realized, realized how that an entire nation would be brought down to its knees with $15.97 cents. Yeah. Because that substantially changed the course of the war there. What's that, David? I said that substantially changed the course of the war. Was that training those stingers and everything? And so I hear. Yeah, I did.

And, uh, I think one day, if I ever meet that guy, I'll shake his hand and, say, wow, did you have any idea that, you know, that was going to be David Slaying Goliath or that that history would be made or that one person could change the course of history like that? And I don't know what he'll say, but, you know, I look forward to meeting him one day. I look forward to meeting him too one day. And I just have to, I want to unpack this a little bit because I don't think most people realize that this person started that the I've even been told this person brought the first stinger shipment was actually to Zavimbi in Angola rather than Afghanistan like most people think you know I I heard something like that the timeline's a little

confusing I probably could have some conversations with a few guys and find out exactly I heard a lot about Sivimbi I heard he was an incredible general um And always on the front lines. It was sad to hear when he died in that one battle at the end. I don't think that surprised a lot of people that it would happen that way. But I hear he was a remarkable man. I heard he was a big guy. And I hear his people loved him.

And yeah, I heard they were pretty successful there too because I think the Russians might have been down there in Africa too. Or the Cubans, the Russians supporting the Cubans, excuse me. Were there any shootdowns with Stinger systems in that part of the world? Good question. I'd have to ask somebody. Yeah. $15.

And $97. And 97 cents. Pennies are important. You never know. Those pennies add up. Basel, getting back to first person, when you showed up to ground, branch. Was that a surreal experience for you? And having been a Marine Corps officer and working with some of these legends like Ron and others, did you feel out of your element at first, or did you

have any self-doubt? I didn't have any self-doubt. I was definitely out of my element because I didn't know what they knew. I didn't know where they had been. I mean, look, these guys were not just on super spooks. These are, you know, operators that had these amazing histories. And then, and along my career, you'd find out other things that they had done. And you were just biting at the bit to go, man, if I could go on an operation with this guy or with that guy or how cool is this? And even within our ranks, what was interesting is that people didn't tell stories. Right. They were really quiet. And you would think that, you know, there's your whole tribe together, that somehow somebody was saying, well, yeah, we were here, we're there.

But you just get bits and pieces of it. And there were some funny things that came back. Mostly the funny stories were told. And you had an idea, but, you know, we all work on a need-to-know basis. And it was very compartmented. So if I wasn't on an operation that, I mean, I would know the operation that two guys were going to go on. But if I wasn't on that operation, when they came back, I didn't ask them about it. it. What in my business? I didn't have a need to know. Wasn't read into that. And those, you know,

that was, that was good offset, to be honest with you. And if you were on an operation and people did crazy things, like one time we stuck a chicken inside Ron Franklin's footlocker. And, you know, Ron, even in the bush, one of the things that helped keep him civilized, and I know he's going to hear this, so you'll probably laugh at it. But, We, myself and a guy named Greg, and Greg rose within the ranks of the agency to become a very, very powerful guy on the seventh floor. Love him to death. But, and he was a Citadel graduate as well. But Ron would have his laundry done and he would fold it up and put it in this foot locker, all his nice white t-shirts and underwear.

And we thought it would be funny to stick a chicken in there. And when he opened his locker, right, that chicken would jump out and scare him, right? So we put the chicken in there and it was about an hour before Ron got back to the hooch. And he opened it. He took a shower and we're out in the bush and, you know, and he opens his foot locker and he just stands there staring. Like the chicken doesn't jump out, right? And he looks and he's getting madder and matter and matter.

Now, right then I knew Greg and I looked at each other and probably thought, you know, we're going to die. That's it. I mean, he's going to kill us with a pencil or something. You know, he's just going to do it. And he just looked and he looks up at us and there's like death in his eyes. And he goes, chicken crap. Chicken crap.

Clean up my laundry. And so he looks out. We look and the chicken has crapped all over all of his laundry, all of his shirts. And we start laughing. And it's not funny. And we just grab his laundry and it's like, we got to get it clean, man. we're going to get killed like that. So, you know, it's a funny stuff like that, you know, like, you know,

and it wasn't funny, but it's kind of funny now and I'm thinking about it. So those are the stories that kind of got told, not the, not the stories about guys that died or, you know, the guys that didn't come back. I mean, we had, we had casualties. And a lot of those casualties people don't talk about as much. I mean, you know, it's pretty well-known. Larry, Larry Friedman, you know, was the first officer. operator killed and no good issue.

But I think that what a lot of people, since you've got me on the interview, one of the things that I wrote about and now I can talk about is that Larry actually took my place on that operation. I and a couple of the guys were scheduled to be the first ones in on the ground, Aaron Bardera. And I was ready to go. And I got a phone call from my mother who said, the guy who, and my mother didn't know I was in the agency, only my father did.

And my parents had never asked anything of me, ever. I mean, they just, you know, my mom kind of knew, I think, but they would just say, hey, you know, I'd say, hey, I'm going on a trip, be back in a month, and they would just say, hey, we'll just pray for you. That's it. Keep you on our prayers. My dad knew, but they had never asked anything of me, my entire career. and then on this given day, I was four days out from launching to go in.

And my mom called and said, hey, you got a call from Columbia, South Carolina. The guy that broke in and assaulted your grandmother and your grandfather last year is going to be standing trial. And we don't have anybody in the family that can come represent us. And if someone doesn't, he's just going to go free. And this guy had brutally beat up my step-grandfather and stuff. And so I had to make a hard decision. You know, here I am getting ready to be on a team going in to be the first guys then, man, with the Civil War. And I was just, this is great.

And it was a tough decision. And I hung up. I told my mom when she was on the phone, she goes, will you go? And she didn't know anything about my life. And I just said, yes, ma'am, I'll do it. So I went in to headquarters the next day. and kind of told my section chief what was going on. And look, you know, guys know this.

If you've been down the range and you're with your buddies, the last thing you want to do is not be on the team. I mean, it doesn't matter where you're going. You just don't, you get this opportunity. You want to go. And so they said, graciously you said, yeah, we get it. We understand. Do what you need to do.

and I was leaving out the hallway and Larry came up to me and he said, can I take your place? And I said, sure, sure. And so Larry did take my place and as you know, the story's out now, of course,

they hit a landmine on their way from Bardera out to to do some stuff. And that was probably going to be me. And so one day, when I get to heaven, get to look Larry and say, whether you knew it or not, you know, thanks. I appreciate it. So I'm here and he's not and it breaks my heart all the time.

But those are the kind of guys that I get to serve with. These are the kind of guys that stepped up to the plate. And when you just have that example set before you, and I'm coming kind of full swing, David, to your question. even as a Marine Corps officer and as sharp as we are in disciplined, it makes you even want to be better. Right. You know, so everything I learned in the Marine Corps, it just made me a better person.

It made me a better officer. It made me a better operator. And any time I have the opportunity to be around, I don't care if guys are younger than me or older than me. You know, if I can learn from them, you know, if somebody was in Syria and I wasn't in Syria, and he's 20 years younger than me, I mean, dude, you know what?

Show me what you know. Teach me, you know. And for people who aren't aware, Larry Friedman, of course, was one of the plank owners of Delta Force, absolute legend in the unit. And, you know, as you just described as, you know, tragically, he was killed.

And allegedly, a few TFO operators were also injured in that vehicle that day. Yeah, that's true. No worse. So a lot of good people. That was an interesting Civil War to be in. You know, it became political after a while. Could you talk to us a little bit about Mungadishu and the larger operation and what you were doing there?

Yeah, yeah. Mogadishu is, it hasn't changed one bit. I was just there recently on a different assignment. And, yeah, I don't think it's ever going to change. Look, guys like us, if we had. billions of dollars, we could come and turn it into a resort. Some of the most beautiful water in the world, some great beaches, a lot of sharks. They've got an opportunity to become this amazing place that probably everybody in the Middle East would want to go to in vacation, but I don't

think it's going to ever happen. So, as you know, a civil war erupted there, and the agency was sent in there early on to do a couple of things, reopened the embassy, start sending intelligence from the ground, a lot of ground troops so the conventional forces could get in. There were a number of other people in there. Delta was in there. Center Spike was there. I went in and had a couple of center spike guys attached, and we were actually on Ali Madi's side in a safe house. And of course, the embassy was over in Adid's controlled area. And of course, you know, there was Adid and Alimadi were at war with each other. And Osama bin Laden was the bad guy for it, the bag guy for Adid. That's where the funding was coming.

in. When I got there on the ground, that's what we were doing as paramilitary case officers. We were providing intelligence assessments, whatever it may be, and just trying to really get the lay of the land and make sure headquarters knew exactly what was going on. What's interesting is that no matter how much ground truth you send and how much gets disseminated, there was always political decisions being made that really, were very disruptive. To this day, I, and I might say this out of term, but the information that we were providing prior to the Black Hawk down incident

basically got ignored. And, you know, I had kind of, and in my mind's eye, and I know Bill Garrison probably still wrestles with this to some degree, a good buddy mind Tom Flores, who was the director of security for Flore Corporation before he passed away, I was very good friends with Bill Garrison. I had an opportunity to speak to Bill a couple of times, and we're not friends or I don't know him that well, but I can't help but still think to these days,

especially after talking to General Boykin, who I have had conversations with, that there's a lot of question as to how things were done, what should have been done differently, and whatever. And I can't help but think that a lot of that push was politically by Clinton at the White House. Because we were providing intelligence that basically would have said, this is really, you got to really be careful here. Just because the skinnies are running around in shorts and flip-flops.

And are there not to be underestimated? Right. I mean, these guys have been fighting war for a long time and they fight it a lot differently. and there's a lot of them here. And when the shooting starts, they're like ants. They come out of nowhere. But I think that good soldiers did their duty. They saluted and said, okay, this is what we have to do.

But I look back as an agency officer, as a ground ranch officer, and think, you know, it could have probably been done differently. It could have been more strategic, a lot more surgical. And I just think sometimes there's just too many people on the ground, you know, and when you have that many conventional forces on the ground, it gets really uncomfortable for special operations teams because you can't move in secrecy like you could if there's two or three of you or four or five or if your state department cover or you're just, you know, something else. But there were a lot of people there. And

And so sadly, it ended up to be kind of Custard's last stand, you know, and I wish it hadn't have happened, and it probably shouldn't have happened that way, to be honest with you. But politics got involved, and that's why politicians should keep their, excuse my French, their asses out of war and let warfighters do what they're designed to do. you know, we provide intelligence. We don't set policy or at that time. And I think just some of the policy is what has caused a lot of blood from a lot of good patriots and good soldiers.

I'm never going to change my thoughts about that. And that comes from experience. And I think most will fighters would agree with us. You know, you want the job done, then send them in and let them do their job and don't ask any questions. You know, and so, Mogadishu was a place of unpredictability, ever-changing climate on the ground,

and not really knowing who you could trust or who you couldn't trust there as far as the locals were concerned. With that said, I do remember we had about three or four guards, and I remember one of them was a devout Muslim, and I never forget this. He was an older guy and his two sons. were part of our compound. And I remember he would be down praying, you know, five times a day, whatever it may be.

And I finally got the idea that I was going to go down there. And I got down next to him while he was praying and just started praying. You know, now, he was praying to Allah and I was praying to, you know, a God. But the respect that both of us got out of that was really interesting. That guy and I, our teams, we became so tight after that, that he would provide us preemptive Intel so that we knew when we should be at the safe house and should not be at the safe house. And it built a really good relationship for us.

So we're far and few between, but people were dying every day in Moby-D issue. It was just war out of hands and probably not unlike Volusia and every other place that we go to. So good place to go visit. I don't think you'd want to live there. was in your time, I mean, whether in the Marines or in the CIA, was that something a common thread you saw with our military involvement in other countries? Was it just kind of a voting issue or a kind of check the block issue for the politicians where they'd either kind of get involved, but it would be tepid involvement without the actual resources necessary? was the politics and the policy very counteractive to like the things that you guys would tell them or see on the ground or whatever?

Yeah, we had a lot of times where we were sending intel and they would do just the opposite. I mean, no common sense, you know, particularly when politicians got involved. You ever remember the agenda on the hill. I mean, look at this past year. I mean, look at where we are now. Look at the politics that are constantly played throughout our own country. I think that, you know, good war fighters, soldiers, you know, we're used to upholding the Constitution and saluting and taking our orders. But I think that generals or leaders in the military are a lot smarter now than they used to be.

Now they ask, okay, why are we going there and what's our goal? And so if I know why we're going and what our goal is and our timeline, then I know what our resources. are. And most of the time, I think the military always tries to go in with as much resource as possible, knowing that more is going to follow. Where we come up short as all of a sudden, you know, we commit our military, and then all of a sudden Congress gets involved, and now there's no support, which means there's no resupply. There's no resources. There's no, and now we're basically Fort Apache. We're asking people, to do stuff on a shoestring and that's when people get killed you know it's one thing if you're

a special operations community and you're going to be very searched going you got three or four guys go in do a job and come out which can have a really big impact uh on the turn of the events but once you start committing uh committing conventional forces and you got trains planes railroads cars and people and you know now you're going to get starbucks coffee on the air force base and it's bogram all or whatever it may be. A lot of, that's a whole different ballgame there when it comes to sustainability.

And you have two types of military leaders. Well, you only have two types of people in world, leaders and followers. And in the military and the leadership, we have two types of military leaders. We have those that aspire to be in some grand and glorious, self-ponteficating political seat one day.

And then we have war fighters, generals that remember when they were lieutenants or remember when they were sergeants or whatever and they go out on the front lines and you can tell you can tell the difference between the two real quick and so can you're men they know who they want to follow to hell and back and the other ones they could care less how many stars you've got on your shoulders they'd soon spit in your face right you know then you try to tell them how to fight their battles for them because most of those guys, I mean, they don't even go down there sometimes. Right.

Vassel, when you got to ground branch and then throughout your time there, what was your training like? How did they, you had, it sounds like a lot of different mission sets. How did they prepare you for that and then keep you strong? Yeah, I came with an, like sometimes you came with the training you had and you got set out in the middle of nowhere and you had to be the electrician, you know, the range master, the explosive ordinance guy, you had to kind of have some of those skills with you. And then when you would get back, you could gather other training. We would

schedule up scuba training or dive training or we were jumping a lot. You know, we were, the agency was involved in some of the first, I guess the word could be mechanisms for Halo and Hey, oh, I mean, you know, I think we came up with, you know, along with probably, well, this could be disputed. I'm sure the Seals and Delta, who they would say, no, we invented it. And it's like, okay, well, maybe you did. We're all working on stuff together a lot of times. But, you know, the ability to do a tandem jump at 40,000 feet with the guy below you with

the compass board and you travel over two countries before you land, you know, that kind of stuff. We jumped motorcycles. We jumped boxes. we jumped everything we could jump, you know, and sometimes at the risk or the detriment of a lot of people, or, you know, trying to see how fast and how low you could jump out the back of the C-130 or an otter or whatever it may be, 150 for, you know, five for 150 or whatever it may be.

And then we would get to go out to sniper training. You're always going down to the farm to get drivers training. E&E, you're on the range, shooting. You know, the Browning High Power was the choice of weapon for us at that time. It was a great weapon. So you were always, you were always training around the clock. If you weren't out on a mission, you were training. And if there was a certain mission you were going to go on,

you would actually go somewhere and have rehearse. You would rehearse for that specific operation or whatever. It may be communications training. whatever the latest and greatest was. Sometimes science and technology, those guys would come up with some kind of cool gadget. It just depended on where you were going to go. A lot of times you didn't have the opportunity to be trained fully on stuff.

So sometimes you ended up in the field and you had some widgets and you had to figure out what they were. Or they would send somebody in to cheat you. You know, if it was a new satcom system, and you didn't have time to understand what a burst transmission was or how to get that intel out. You know, they'd send somebody in the field and he'd spend two or three days with you, and you might learn it there. So we weren't ever cutting corners, but it was not a lot of us,

and we were moving kind of fast. And so a lot of times you did the best you could. I received probably, you know, I probably got 20. 25% of my warfighter training in the Marine Corps, and 75% of being a better warfighter came through Ground Branch and maritime, just learning from other people that were really good. We had the best of the best. We had some of the best snipers in the world.

Larry Friedman being one of them, you know, they called him Super Jew, great sniper. You could get out in the range with guys like that, and they teach you how to be better. You have an explosive ordinance guy, and he would teach you how to blow things up better or how to set of charge better or if you were doing hostage rescue stuff

where we had these programs where we would go in for six months at a time and literally build out an entire unit. Their shooting house, their command structure, guys that never even knew how to pick up a weapon. And after six months, you'd have some of the hottest hostage rescue forces around the country.

I mean, these guys, so much to the point that most of the time what happened was the presidents of those countries, would like take them and make them their own personal bodyguards. Right. You know, and so then you didn't have an HRF any longer. But they learned medicine and, I mean, everything, how to bandage up people. I mean, whatever it took for you to survive and learn, it was available to you.

And you found time to actually learn those things. You also had mentioned in passing, and I'd be remiss if I didn't ask or ask you to elaborate, the Iran-Contra affair and that you were somehow involved in training guys that were involved in that. Yeah, I think that's pretty much out there. I don't mind disclosing that. I won't talk about specific operations in the bush. But, you know, there was a training base. It was being, and there were ground ranch guys running that. Some amazing guys. I won't get into their last names. Mitch, Tom, guys like that. But as you know, Congress approved that training, and a lot of that training was done.

I don't think it's a big secret anymore in Honduras. And then, of course, people would be inserted in the Nicaragua. And so ground branch guys would go down to help train, whether it was shooting skills or navigation. Sometimes something simple like land nap, which, by the way, if you don't have to navigate in the jungle, you're not going to get to your target. And then there were other guys that were even closer to the border of Nicaragua that were running camps there. Tom, who's not alive any longer,

and who would basically be like a one-man show out there. And the war was going on, so prisoners were captured and prisoners were kept, and people were taught to jump and fly and shoot and everything you needed to do to build up the contrafore. and then get them back in. And I think, you know, there was some controversy. I think when that program got shut down,

Alan Fires and those guys were running that program. And I think Allen and them kind of got in trouble because somebody, Congress said, did you shut the program down? And I think Allen and them said, and Alan, if you're listening to this, forgive me if it got this wrong. But I think they said, yeah, we did.

and then later Congress called up people that were actually running the base. And one of those people who I just loved to death, an Irishman, said, hey, I can't lie about this. What am I going to do? So when he briefed in front of Congress, he said, no, the program wasn't shut down. And they said, well, what do you mean? And he said, well, look, we had people in country. You know, yeah, officially we stopped the program.

program, but we still had people that we had dropped in there that were fighting a war that we needed to get out. So that took us some time to get out, you know, which is, that's the reality of any program. You're not going to, now here's what I found interesting about that. And this kind of frustrates me a little bit. No, not a little bit. It makes me really angry. You got politicians saying the program's over, but they could care less. They could give a rat's ass about the people that we put behind the lines that they allow.

to go behind the lines, that they approve to go behind the lines to fight that war. Right. And they don't want you to get them out, right? They don't even care because it's not on their watch. Right. But these are the people that we cared about and that the Irishmen cared about. And so they weren't really lying, you know, they still had stuff to do. So that was Ollie North.

I never met Ollie. He was doing things above us. We were on the ground, just doing things. the training. And I'm glad we were because, you know, Nicaragua probably and all the other countries in Honduras would probably be socialist countries right now if President Reagan hadn't allowed that program to move forward because that was a direct threat of communism right in our own backyard. And there is a funny story I can tell that you guys would probably like.

So there was a guy who was with the air branch named Eugene Hossenfuss. Oh, yeah. So as you know, Hassanfuss was based out of the base we were training on it. And Hassanfuss, an incident happened, an error incident happened, where Hassanfuss actually got captured by the Sandinistas, right? And I think his wife finally realized he was at the agency, and she kind of exposed all that.

And the agency was obligated to get Hassanfuss out. So while I was at the base, we were eating beans and rice every day. And the beans weren't cooked very well. So they were like rocks and rice, you know. And I remember we were, a number of us were in the hooch that actually was Hossenfusses. And every night I would look up and see these boxes on the shelf that said, Eugene Hossenfuss. And we never thought, well, that's just private stuff.

I mean, we're not going to go up there in time. But there came a time where we thought Hossenfuss is probably not going to get. get out of there. So maybe we should look in the box. Brother, let me tell you what, he had so much top woman up there and food that his wife had sent him, like real food, real food up there that Eugene, if you're listening to this, dude, we ate your food, okay? I mean, like, for the next, for the next month or so, it's like, we ate everything that you had in your boxes, okay? And, of course, we asked the Irishman for permission to do it. But thank you. Eugene for having your wife ship that stuff down because it it saved us a lot a lot of pain

and just to flesh this out a little bit Eugene getting shot down and captured by the Sandinistas is what kicked off the entire Iran-Contra conspiracy if you will the scandal but the public that's how it reached the public was that he got captured and the whole ball of yarn unrolled from there I believe you're right. Yeah, I don't think anybody knew we were running clandestine operations up to that point that I'm aware of. I don't know. You know, it gets briefed on the hill. Who knows how it leaks out.

But yeah, I think once that hit the paper, people were like, what do you mean you're down there like training contras? You know, and for whatever it's worth, look, I'm telling you why. People that were fighting for the freedom of their country, they were kids. They were little kids. I could show you pictures of us out in the junk. with literally kids that were willing to fight for their freedom and their families there. And I had never experienced that before, to be honest with you. You know, when I go to, when I go down range, even now if I contract out on something like,

I don't know, an exhale, somebody's in the Congo and they got to get out, right? You know, I'm generally downrange with a lot of guys that have a lot of experience and we're men, we're men. But these were literally children. Right. And they were brave. And they, I mean, it was just remarkable. I look at some of the pictures now.

I go, you got to be kidding me, that this guy must have been 14 years old. Right. Well, and I was going to say that a lot of them probably were there because they had suffered in some way at the hand of the San Anistas or, you know, seen what was happening. Yeah, David, you're right. I think that would be the majority of them. were there for that same reason.

Their families had been thrown in prison or killed or tortured or they understood that democracy versus socialism, they want democracy. You know, and I think that's true. I remember some pretty horrific stories that were relayed to me with some of them where, yeah, the San Annesas had just gone into their houses or their village and just basically raped and murdered their family members. and they managed to escape and they were going to go back and not seek revenge, but they wanted their country back, you know.

Right. And Boslos, that brings up actually an interesting point about it coming to the public's awareness because it's something you had firsthand knowledge of this and other things. And I remember as a teenager, some of the media reports at that time, the CIA and particularly paramilitary guys are painted as villains. right? The CIA is in this country training assassination squads and doing this and doing that. How, like, how did that affect you or did it affect you? How did the guys deal with that type of publicity and the media in general, like painting the agency as this villain in most of these

circumstances? Yeah. You know, because we were running operations so frequently and we weren't really out in the civilian world. We didn't get to hear a lot about that, the opinion of, because no one knows that we're doing it. So no one's going to look at us and go, hey, you're one of those guys. So we would hear about that kind of stuff every now and then. I mean, my mom did tell me one time she said, and when I got out, she said, don't tell a lot of people that you were in the CIA, especially special operations. She goes, because they're going to think you were an assassin. And I laughed. I really did. And there was a time after I got out that when I finally came around to people going, so what did you do? And I would say, well,

I was in the CIA and I was in special operations. They would just kind of, kind of disappear for a while. You know, and I remember a buddy that that I surfed with eventually like five years later, we reconnected. And I said, dude, where'd you go? And he goes, well, he goes, you know, man. He goes, when I found out that you were in the CIA, I thought, you know, I don't want this guy anywhere to run near my family. You know, he's an assassin. And it was like, dude, I'm not an assassin. He goes, well, I know that now. He said, but we watch movies and we see this. So a lot of those pictures get painted based on what the public sees.

Now, I'm not saying that any member of the president's secret hand or whatever it may be. I'm not saying they're not qualified to take care of business if they have to. And I'm not saying they will shy away from taking care of business because, you know, out there they understand that the next terrorist is going to destroy another 13,000 Americans if he gets his chance to it. And that guy is not somebody you're going to sit down on a tea and say, please don't do that. Not happening. That's not that world. And what's interesting with the civilian populace and sometimes politicians is they haven't been out there. So they don't absolutely know what they're dealing with. I remember when being a parent can be really challenging.

Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. President Obama was trying to talk about how he didn't like how we were interrogating terrorists. And I so wanted to be in that crowd when he was given that, talking to whatever it was town hall meeting and say, let me ask you something. Your wife and your two daughters are now being held by a terrorist in some country.

And you've got 13 hours before their heads are going to be cut off. And you've got another terrorist in front of you right now. What are you willing to do to get that information out of it? Now, he would have never answered that question. If he had have said, well, I wouldn't waterboard this guy. Then just what, shame on you, because that's your family. Right. So they're so hypocritical because they don't know what we're dealing with

and what special operations community deals with to keep America safe every day. Not just special operations. I mean, our military to begin with. So it's pretty infuriating when you've got people kind of making you into something that you're not. Right. When they don't understand what takes place so long. I think. I think that we get painted.

We can get painted anything we want to paint. And I don't think we should ever be ashamed of what we've done. But not every CIA, Ground Branch guy is a bad guy. In fact, you know what? They're all very, in my opinion, they're all great patriots who are willing to go out and die for the country. And no one will ever know that they gave their life unless you walk in a Langeling, you see a star on the wall and says, well, who is this guy? they don't ask for anything.

They don't ask to get better pay. They don't ask for more vacation. They don't ask for anything. They just go and do their job because they love this country and they love Americans in this country. And it doesn't matter. Look, in Ground Branch Special Operations, there's no diversity.

That term sickens me in America. There's no diversity. There's just unity. That's what it is. And it doesn't matter what color you are. It doesn't matter where you came from. It doesn't matter your social status. is you're all there to do one thing and let's keep this country safe.

And it's pathetic when you've got civilians running around in our country with all of this crap that they're throwing around, you know, by, you know, talking about racism and all this stuff. And they have absolutely no idea that every single day, their entire life, rest in the balance of somebody that's out there protecting them from the next terrorist bomb or the next, you know, the next threat or the next 9-11. They had absolutely no idea. You know, it's crazy.

But you got off subject there, sorry. No, that's okay. That's not a bit political, didn't it? No, no, it's okay. Baz, one thing I wanted to ask you about is, and I think this is something that gets lost in the public conversation about the CIA, is that people act as if this agency is rogue, that they are off the rails, just doing whatever they want,

killing whoever they want at any time. The reality, correct me if I'm wrong, is that you guys are doing what our democratically elected leaders, our policymakers, are directing that agency to do. They say, this is your mission, go execute, and they do it. And then when they do it, and especially if things blow up in our faces and it lands on the front page of the newspapers, a lot of people act like you guys were these, you know, the rogue assassin trope when really you were doing what, you know, our elected leaders asked you to do. Yeah, you're right. I wish we could all be John Wick. That would be really cool. Yeah, that's true. You know, there's policy set in place approvals by Congress that allow us to do, or us, I'm not there, allow the agency to do its job. Now, I will say, in all fairness, particularly in regard to the agency now, compared to the agency that I was a part of, and this comes from discussions of recently retired, officers, both case officers and paramilitary officers.

The agency is not like it used to be. It has taken a turn for the worst. Politics have invaded it. Liberalism has invaded it. There are, you know, there's various clubs that exist, as if it's some kind of social institution and we're afraid of hurting someone's feelings. you know, Gina has left the agency.

Who knows on what terms? Was it because she was forced to? Was it the agency have its hands and things that it shouldn't have had its hands in? You know, particularly with the last elections. There's a lot of questionable things. When John Brennan took over the agency, I can tell you right now that in my conversations

with 80% retired officers from the agency, they hate John Brennan. He's the worst. thing that could have ever happened to the agency for multiple levels. And so it, the institution itself has become a not trusted bureaucracy rather than what it used to be. It used to be the very welcomed, the very feared institution of espionage that can keep us above water and can fight against the KGB, the threat of other hostile intel services. And now from what I'm I understand the quality of case officer, the quality of employee at the agency is nowhere

where it used to be when Bill Casey ran it. Bill Casey was a spy spy. He came out of the ranks. Now most of the time, what do we have when it comes to who's being appointed that's a DCI? It's a political appointment. Not from people that were former spies that understand what it's like. So I think that we're going to see a big change in the future. I think it's questionable to be honest with you right now.

I mean, John Brennan, who I know some people say he's a failed case officer, and so he went over to the administrative side. But nonetheless, Brennan and Mrs. Haspel, they were both promoted from within the agency, right? I think they were promoted from within agency, but they were handpicked by the administration. You know, there's a lot of influence, a lot of phone calls that take place. You know, Obama wanted Brennan.

Obama got Brennan. So, and I think our audience can see what I'm talking about because let's take a look. Socom. Look at all of Socom's missions. Look at Marsock. Those guys are a lot of the guys doing the work right now, out of the military, right? The agency, it's still got ground branches, still got a lot of people, I'm sure. But there's a reason why a lot of these missions are now being.

and run by SOCOM or Special Operations Command someplace, because guess what, they don't have to deal with the politics. Right. They're out there, and now they have the same training. That ground branch used to be the only guys that had that training, you know. And so now they have, look, they send their, they have their own intel units. They have really smart operators now. Look, honestly, when I was in the CIA, we didn't think that anybody that was currently in the military,

I don't know why we thought this, but we didn't think that, you know, knuckle-draggers in the Army or the Marine Corps or wherever had the intelligence to be a paramilitary case officer. That's the dumbest thing you could ever think, you know, because we all came out of that, right? But we thought, hey, we're the only guys that can do it

because it was a spy, it was a spy arena. And one of the reasons we thought that way was because we had become really good at keeping our mouths close. So nothing leaked out. And we always thought, well, if you're in the Army or the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines, you're going to leak something out unless you finally get trained under the clandestine service.

Well, I think the military units, they get that now. And they understand because a lot of them send their people to the farm. A lot of them go through that same type of case officer training, and they're getting really good at it. So this is a dangerous part for the agency because guess why? Every year, every four years, the agency has to fight for its budget. And every year, somebody wants to get rid of the CIA for various reasons. Guess what?

The CIA could be hanging itself now. You got NSA, you got DIA, you got DIA, you got Socom, you got all those guys that can do it. The question is, well, why do we need the agency any longer? Yeah. We failed miserably at stopping China from the case officer side. We haven't done a good job. The FBI hasn't done a great job. The FBI even now, and I have friends that are still in the Bureau, it can't even be trusted.

The public, you know, based on all of that corruption. And so now we're seeing corruption in the ranks of the CIA within the FBI, the institutions that we leaned into for so many years going, These are the guys, if this is our last straw, these are the people that can do it for us. And now, the American public doesn't think that way anymore. Right. Let's jump into some user questions here. We do this live, Bass. So we have, viewers actually have questions for you.

Richard, thank you. Jerry, he said, this is an awesome video. My mentor had Zerkinsky Higher School of the Kempski Higher School of the KGB? I'm not Russian. I'm not sure what you mean by that, Jerry. I'm sorry. Brad asks, what's the difference between a contractor assigned to ground branch, what a contractor assigned to ground branch does and what a paramilitary officer does there? Well, there's some things when it comes to a contractor that I'm not at

liberty to talk about, because it involves lots of sources and methods. A paramilitary case officer, or a paramilitary officer is a person that has military skills. And then, of course, a paramilitary case officers, once you've been in the agency and you've been trained to be a spy, so to speak, now you've become a paramilitary case officer. So in other words, let's say a regular case officer that gets hired at Harvard, right? Chances are most of his tour duties are going to be places like Germany, Paris, you know, all the really cool spots, you know, in the city.

The paramilitary case officer is the guy that you're going to send into a combat zone that needs to collect intelligence, but he can stay alive because he can shoot and move. And that's a big difference. And it's kind of easy to pick out a paramilitary case officer versus a case officer because a case officer weighs about 90 pounds and looks like Pee Wee Herman. And a paramilitary case officer kind of looks like Thor and a three-piece suit. It's very easy to find them in halls. Thank you. D. Kroll, thank you. B.P.A. Z. Thank you. So one of the questions I actually wanted to ask you, I know, oh, I'm sorry, here we go. Ian jumped in. Oh, oh boy, he's asking, this is sort of an inside joke. He's asking, what does Baz think a giraffe sells for on the black market? Well, I don't know, but I can make a phone call in about 15 minutes and tell you exactly what it goes for in the black market. They don't go for as much as small rabbits do, though. I'm pretty sure.

Really? You mentioned the difference between a paramilitary case officer and a regular case officer. what was your relationship as a branch? What was the relationship like with the CIA at large? Did they get you? Did they like you? Or think you guys were Neanderthals? We got, it's interesting.

A lot of the divisions, if they had not worked with us, called us knuckle-draggers. So they thought that we had a very low IQ, that all we did was jump out. of airplanes and crawl under Bobwire and probably couldn't speak the King's English very well, that, you know, we probably didn't know any other languages. I mean, that's generally, at the same time, they feared us. If we walked among them in the halls, they got out of the way.

And I don't think they really understood us, but they were always quick to call on you if they needed you. I think a lot of controversy took place when all of a sudden you'd have a chief of station who found himself in a combat zone and he needed to collect intel on the ground. And so Ground Branch would send somebody. And if that paramilitary case officer had not had the opportunity to go to the farm and learn how to write intel reports or how to collect intel properly, in their eyes it was a waste of assets.

And I understand that now, and it was. And it's one of the reasons why in Ground Branch, we had to try expanding ourselves and getting officers out to the division, getting them to learn other languages, getting them to the farm to learn how to not only collect intel, but to write up those reports, because that's what was required in the field.

It just wasn't always someone dropping you behind the line, and you're, you know, sneaking 15 miles to hit a target and then come back. I mean, those things can occur, but it wasn't. And so that in itself became, was the rumor that it perpetuated itself throughout the agency for years and years and years that if you walked in to a division to help them, sometimes the chiefest station or whoever it may be would go. So have you been to the farm? Do you know how to write an intel report?

Because we're not going to send you out there if you don't know how to do this. But outside of that, over the course of time, and particularly after 9-11, I think that changed. There are a lot of paramilitary case officers that can operate in the bush and can put a really nice suit on and operate in Paris, France, as well, and do a really good job. Some of them have risen to the ranks and surprised a lot at the agency, I think. And I think that's a good thing. But yeah, that's kind of how we were looked at.

And I think we tried to change our image by wearing cleaner suits and nicer ties just so people wouldn't be afraid of us. But, you know, we weren't comfortable in that during my day. We just wanted to be out in the bush doing that. And so much to the point that myself included, I had no aspirations to be an SIS or a GS-15. Look, I could have stayed a GS-13 all my life

as long as I got to go on the field and do what I enjoy doing, which was all the cool paramilitary stuff. I mean, that's where we wanted to be. But, yeah, we weren't much that favorably. Were there, did you run into situations where you would have to tell a, regular side CIA officer or a chief of station or chief of base or something like that, that what you're thinking of is what happens in the movies.

We can't really do that. Can't backflip over barbed wire fences? No, no, we never told them. I told them everything they saw in the movie, we can do. That's it. We can do it all. And more. No, you know, we ran into two types of chief of stations.

You had a good COS that understood your background where you came from. and he knew how to deploy you properly. I would never ask more of you than you were probably capable of doing it, and would take you behind closed doors and say, hey, I got this idea. What do you think? Can we do this? And, you know, and if you could, you couldn't, if you couldn't, you couldn't.

And then there were always those other chief of stations who were just buttheads. You know, they didn't want you. They had their own insecurities. They would, you'd be used in the wrong way. and then if there was any fault to be had, it was all on your watch. You know, and you know, you saw a great example of that

when the GRS guys were in Benghazi. And it was portrayed well in the movie where, and I've had conversations with Teague and other guys about that COS. And look, he wasn't favored before he got there. And I think they probably portrayed him correctly in the movie. And here's the irony of it. After all of his malfunctions, he actually went back and got a big award.

You got a big award from the agency, you know, for whatever he didn't do. You know, all the mistakes he made, he stole. And so that's the old boy network there that basically covered his six for him. And so we run into guys like that as well. And you have to kind of navigate the fault lines when you're dealing with those type of personalities.

And we saw that play itself out in the movie as well as finally, you know, they gave him as much respect as possible until now people were getting killed. And then the GRS guy stood in and did what they were hired to do. It's like, you know what? Get out of my way. And I still get to speak with some of those guys from time to time and they're training now.

And, you know, you're going to always have people, you know, like that, no matter what, that are politicians. I had it in my time, I had guys that did goofy things. They came out of a division. And then I had guys out of a division that did great look. I mentioned another name, Milbierden, you know, he was the chief of station in Islamabad. Amazing guy, amazing guy, helped run the program. Barn Anderson, another amazing guy who's retired now, was one of the first chief of stations in Gobel.

I mean, he went in when no one else was there by himself, you know, former Marine. You know, a guy we call the Russian. I love that guy. Just a lot of really good guys that had become chief of stations. And Greg, I think, Greg Vogel, who was, you know, all the way up the top of the food chain, loving to death, great guy, just with following anywhere. Just there were a lot of really good guys out there. BAS, some of our viewers are asking if you have any book recommendations, like if somebody wants to learn more about Grand Branch, if someone would like to learn more about Ground Branch,

where can they go to learn more? And you should take this as an opportunity to also plug your own book and tell viewers a little bit about that. Yeah, thank you. You know, one of the best books that's been written recently, and a good buddy mine, Rick Prado, who is retired from the agency now. If you guys haven't had him on board, you should get him on board. I want to. Yeah, and we can make that happen for you. Rick sent me a book called, oh, my gosh, something kill and vanish.

Oh, my gosh, I read it. Oh, my gosh, if I could take a break here from you guys, I can get it. Did Rick, he wrote it or he recommended it? No, somebody else wrote it. Yeah. He's actually in it. Surprise, kill, vanish. Surprise kill vanish.

Yeah. And Jacobson. Yeah. It's a great, I mean, it's true to core as it was and probably how it has been. It's one of the best books I've ever read on kind of describing the president's secret hand, so to speak. So that's one of the best books, I think, out there. My book is called Something Bigger Than Overthowing Small Governments.

It talks a little bit about my career in there, but it segues into how I, went from becoming a CIA operative to a humanitarian and rescuing children. Because I run a nonprofit now called the Association for the Recovery of Children. And it's full of Tier 1 operators. We've been around since 93, probably one of the longest running child rescue organizations in America. But that books about 538 pages. If you don't like to read, you could use it as a bulletproof vest. I don't think any 9mm is going to get through it.

But it's a good read. I've gotten great reviews on it. And it talks a lot of, a few things, a number of things about, you know, my time in the CIA and stuff like that. It gives you a really good flavor for what I, you know, what it was like as well. Now, but yeah, go ahead, David. You don't, that's not on Amazon, right? That's on your personal website. It's on Barnes & Noble.

And if you go to bosbooks.com, I'll post that. You can get it there as well. But it's a pretty good read, or at least I'm getting good reviews on it. People like it. And, you know, I talk about things like when I was in Mogadishu and Osama bin Laden was like probably 35 feet from me. Had I known who he was at the time, I would have taken the shot. Sure. You know, buddy of mine, Rich, and Rich is, I don't know if Rich is retired.

I won't give his last thing. But we were actually had come from our side over to trying to get to the embassy. we there was a you know the crowds were there and and and there was a Toyota pickup truck with this Messiah looking guy in the back and it was Osama bin Laden you know and I remember asking Rick I mean I don't mind being naive you know I hadn't been following you know the the Osama thing and I asked Rich I said so who's the Arab guy in the back of the truck and he goes well some guy named Osama bin Laden and And he's a deep bag money guy, and he's here to fund probably what's going to be the next conflict we have here in the next 30 days.

And I had no idea. But if I had, yeah, knowing what I know now, I would have taken a shot in a heartbeat. You know, so and probably, I'd probably gotten killed in the crowd or not. But, you know, who knows? But, yeah. I want to get back to a couple of questions real quick. because actually one of the guys, a DK role, he actually donated to the feed, but he wrote his question underneath.

He said, did Baz ever work with or meet a gentleman named Matt Gannon while at the agency? He would have served in the Middle East through the 1980s killed in the locker rebombing. You know, the name sounds familiar. And one of the things that's interesting is that, you know, most of us worked in alias. so it's a lot easier to recognize a face than it is a name to be honest with you so a lot of times people will ask me if I remember working with a certain individual and unless it's their alias I don't know they'll show me their face like I've been places before actually contracting

and been in country in you know recent years and I would walk be involved in something it'd be a guy and I see his face and go you know you look really familiar and we start talking and come to find out we had served together on something. It was like, oh, my gosh, yeah, you were the guy that was in Ethiopia or whatever it was. You know, so, yeah. One player, Paul, I think he's saying he wants to be a doctor, but he's asking, is it worth it when you're losing friends, family, in your normal life to go and work at the CIA?

And also, he wants to know, do doctors work at the CIA? Yeah, there's a group called OMS, Office of Medical Services. They have physicians there. They have combat medics. I don't know how they're structured now, but there are some really, really wonderful people that come out of that, and a lot of those guys go into the field. I have a really good friend named Dave.

He's been around for a long time, and he's definitely the guy you want with you down range in case you get popped, you know. And, you know, so that's the first, to answer your first question, yes, there is. The answer your, well, actually, your first question, I guess, is, is it worth it? You know, it's only if it's worth it to you. You know, no one knows what you deal with every day in your life. If you want to be a physician, it'll be a physician.

You know, I always tell people this is that, you know, when you hear stories or you hear guys like us talking, and you go, well, if I were to be a part of that, what would I do? I don't know. You know, you have to come and understand the A.O., the area of operations first. You kind of have to go through a little training, and once you go through a little training, and you'll know where you fit in. You'll know what your bandwidth is and you'll know what you can do and what you can't do, or more so what you're willing to do and what you're not willing to do.

I will say that everybody that I knew in Ground Ranch at the time in Maritime and Airbrain, were always willing to lay their life on the line. They all knew that there was a mission that they could go on and not come back from because we'd had guys do that. And that means sacrificing your family. That means your parents. I think we had a little incident happen in Mogadishu, and it kind of woke me up, and I realized that I wasn't afraid of dying.

I was afraid of not being able to say, goodbye to my parents before someone shipped me home in a body back. That's what I regret it. It wasn't I was scared of getting hit by an IED or dying with my buddies. It was just, it was like, man, this sucks. I didn't even get to say goodbye to my mom and dad. And I think that with a lot of us that I knew in Ground Branch, that was kind of always the same thing.

Because when you left, you never left. You never told anybody where you were going or what you were doing. you just said, I got to go, and I'll be back in a little while. And if you had a wife or something, you know, the secretary and Ground Ranch would call your wife every week and say, hey, just want to give me an update. They're doing great. Is there anything we can do for you? How are your kids doing? They were really good about that, you know.

But your spouse, they never knew what you were doing or where you were going or if you were coming back. And it's good because if they have known what you were doing, they'd probably scare them to death, you know. Right. Probably, yeah. And how do you maintain any sort of civilian life or relations with that when, when obviously you have a cover story, you have a reason while you're traveling so frequently, but that still has to be difficult to maintain like normal relationships, like your neighbors and your buddies that you want to watch a game with or whatever?

I think you have to live your cover and it has to be really tight. and you have to realize that if you're a single guy, you're not going to have your relationships with dates aren't going to go real well. I mean, how do you date a girl and then you just leave and don't call her up? That's not normal. It's like, oh, he doesn't care about me.

You didn't even call me in 30 days. What are you going to say? Oh, I'm sorry, I was an Angola and I didn't have comms. I mean, you know, and all the carrier pigeons died so I couldn't get, you can't even get into the conversation. So, you know, I will tell you, that, you know, I was married. I'm not, it took its toll.

In fact, when I was going to get married, I was told not to. And, of course, you always do things you're told not to. I did. And then when I was getting divorced, I remember some people laughed at me and said, well, we told you. We told you not to, right? But so, yeah, it's difficult. When it comes to your buddies, you know, as long as you're living your cover story well, then if you're part of your cover story, it's like, look, I go out of town a lot of times.

And I mean, it had to be a really good one. Like, I don't know. Look, I go to really weird places to sell Evan Rood motors, you know, sometimes in the middle of Africa. And there's just no communication. So you're probably not going to hear from me for a couple of weeks or months. So I'll get in touch with it. You know, it's just the nature of my job. And, you know, that kind of stuff.

I remember I was sitting at a Thanksgiving dinner. And my buddy Tom Flores, who's not alive any longer, knew what I had done because he had worked at the agency. And there were people. probing and they were kind of hinting that they kind of knew what I did for a living. So they were kind of hinting around Langley and stuff. And I just was kind of quiet. And I was just trying to in my mind, trying to figure out, how am I going to play this off so I don't blow my covering?

You know, because they're, these are people that been around government. They lived in Virginia. They kind of knew what you smelled like, you know, whether you were DOD or state department or whatever. And they were about four or five of them at the table. were getting close to, you know, things. And I finally, I just finally said, look, I just, like, I remember I banged my fork on

the plate, like I dropped it in the plate intentionally to get everybody's attention. I said, look, I said, you guys are a bunch of over-the-top democracy lovers. I said, that agency should be fired. I said, I've never seen one good thing come out of that agency. It's full of assassins. It's full of people that don't tell the truth. They're always lying to Congress. And I just went off on this rant, right?

And then I just said, and as far as I'm concerned, I don't even want to be here among you guys anymore. Just be your way. I look, I love my country, but that place has got to go. And I left, right? Well, never any problem after that, you know. So it just depends on how you play it off, you know, I think. Yeah.

Yeah. Did you know any of those people when you actually left the agency and they rolled back your cover and were any of those people still in your life? Gotcha. I was one of the assassins. You know, only one person.

My sister is funny. My sister, when I left the agency, I went down to, I went over to headquarters and I went down to like, I don't know what it is, the CIA shop or something. I'd never bought anything from there.

And I bought a little ornament to go on a Christmas tree, right? and it said CIA or something on it, I think. And that following Christmas after I'd gotten out, it was that we were having Christmas together, and I hung it on the tree. And my sister was coming out. She was serving dinner, and she came out,

and I saw her look over at the ornament, and then she went and put something down on the table. And she came back and looked at the ornament, and she started crying. She goes, I knew you were. doing stuff. I knew it and you didn't tell me. You know, and so that's kind of the, that's kind of the other, I'm sure there are people now that since I'm going to have a lot more exposure with the blacklist and, you know, my books and stuff. And I'm sure there are people that if I run into

them that knew me, they'd probably go, you know, I kind of thought you were up to something, maybe, or maybe there'll be people to go, wow, you did that really well. I had no idea, you know. But to answer your question, David, most of the time, your life is a pretty long, life. You try not to put yourself in those positions where you have to ask, answer questions. And so you don't, at least a lot of guys, we either hung around each other, but a lot of the guys, you know, maybe they knew their neighbor on the right and their neighbor on the left, but they didn't really go out of their way to become real socialites because it was just too much exposure. And, you know, you're just busy and you don't really have time. You don't want it.

You know, there's nothing to brag about. You're trying to live your cover. And then, every now and then you'd have these guys that really didn't have their cover down. They'd be on an airplane. And they'd be sitting next to some really, some person. And that person would go, oh, so what do you do? And they'd go, oh, I'm a doctor. And they'd go, oh, I'm a doctor too. Where'd you go to math school? And they don't know anything about being a doctor. Right. So this became real, I saw that happen in real country.

So you always tried to live your cover with something that you really knew or really could do well with, you know, whatever that was that you could really speak to and speak to, uh, long enough to bore the other person. So they quit asking your questions. Right. Yeah. So it's interesting because, you know, you have these movies. Well, like the Blacklist or the BORN series or these. or these, and they really glamorize sort of the espionage and the action, this and that, but they really don't focus on that, that sense of isolation that can be felt because you are,

you do have to segment yourself off from society. Yeah, you know, if I ever get blessed enough to do my own TV show outside the Blacklist, I'll portray that character and how lonely it really gets. I could like speak to it, but they don't because it's called, entertainment. And so they, you know, and they wanted, well, so what's entertaining this way? Should we be upbeat? Should we be downbeat? Right. Now, in the blacklist, which is interesting, you do get a sense of that with James Spader because he has those moments, those alone moments. And interesting enough, when Bokin Camp and those guys wrote that about the cabal,

it wasn't so far from the truth of what we are seeing in politics in our country right now. it's interesting and um and my part of course it was pretty easy if you if you do something on camera that you normally do for life like shoot people i guess it's pretty easy to do you know right i have a funny story when i a really dear friend of mine he was the executive producer that show michael wotkins and a brilliant director love him to death probably the best director in hollywood and uh we had i don't know if you guys saw that episode where we shot it out in a church. Do you remember that? Did you see that? So we all got trapped in a church. We're surrounded and we're shooting our way out. So it's this great scene of just blowing caps all over the place, bullet holes all over the place, right?

And in the scene, it says that I come in the front door and I've been nicked. But I don't really know what nicked means, though. The director, which was this big Viking guy, I said, excuse me, before we shoot, what? How do you like me to play this? What's nicked? Does I mean I'm shot? I just got straight. And he goes, Nick, shot, shot, nicked. I don't know right now. He goes, but we'll talk about it before we shoot. Well, we never talked about it.

So I just do my best job that I can do. I come in and I pretend I'm been nicked. But on camera, it plays like I've been shot. So kind of a little bit over the top, I think, you know. So we shoot the whole scene. And when I finish, I'm sitting in the dressing room. Michael comes in and he goes, stop acting right now.

He goes, people watch you because you're the real deal. He goes, and I said, well, I didn't know, Mike. I said,

it says I'm Nick, and I didn't know what that was. And Michael goes, well, I knew I should have been on set because I could have helped walk you through that. And I said,

well, Mike, look, I said, look, the character's name is Bos. Who is he? Michael goes, look,

Dend they carries Reddittington's car keys. When you come to town, people die. And so from that point on, it was like, oh, okay, I'm this kind of like not smiling guy that just kills people. And it became, and so it became easy to play that character after that. So, yeah, it was really funny. They didn't embellish it too much.

And everybody on the show was wonderful. And they knew where I came from. And they respected it. And when we got in front of camera, they just expected me to do what almost all of us know how to do, which is just shoot and move. Yeah. You know, it was easy. Yeah. That's fantastic.

And fun. Brad asks if you know Ishmael Jones or Billy Waugh. I do know Billy Waugh. Ishmael Jones is not a name that I'm familiar with. Billy Waugh is a legend amongst us. all the guys in Ground Branch knowing. Amazing, amazing guys. My utmost respect.

Jerry says on the CIA page, I always end up with PMOO when asking for a job. DeCrawl. E.S, you already answered this about Matt Gannon. T-Barr, what's... Oh, where to go? I lost the question. It was here. What's Basil's take on the balance between counterterrorism

and the great power competition talked about today. What's the role of proxy forces in that realm? I'm not sure really understand that question. What's the second part of that? Between counterterrorism and what? I think he's asking, you know, what is the difference between the sorts of counterterrorism operations we've been waging since 9-11? And now it seems that we're shifting back to, I don't want to say back to the Cold War,

but back to the time where we're facing powerful countries like China and Russia. Yeah, I think what happened was when we were trying to define who would be involved in counterterrorism, so to speak. And we were so focused on that, at least the CIA, ground branch and so common, whoever it may be, that politicians chose to allow the gate to remain open. and we know that because policies changed and we allowed, like the China Commission will talk about this, of how all of a sudden jobs went overseas to China, and then we let China in the United States.

After the Cold War, we just opened the door and let all the Russians come in, you know, as if all of their nasty habits, if all of their threats were not real. That was an administrative problem. That comes all the way from the White House. That comes from Congress and the Senate. And those people who are in the counterterrorism realm that are actually fighting on the ground can never be faulted for that at all.

These are, this goes back to, again, allowing politicians to set the pace for the security of the national security here. So, you know, if you were to have left it up to good war fighters, they'd probably already be in China taking care of business. But no, what do we do? China's our friend. It's like, how can China be our friend? They look at us in the face and say, we're going to destroy America. And yet we still do business with them. I mean, Trump set the stage correctly and, you know, for many reasons.

So I think that I'll tell you what I think. I think, particularly with this new administration, I think you're not going to have to worry about us shifting back to espionage. It never went away. You know, it just disguised itself. The KGB is all over the United States. I mean, the FSB, excuse me. The Chinese Intel service, they're all over the place, like ants. What you're going to see is you're going to see us fighting a war of espionage in the United States

with a very, very, very, very poorly trained FBI and CIA. And you're going to see us fight terrorism in the United States again. That border just opened back up. I think last week you guys might have heard we caught a Yemeni terrorist trying to get through the border. Maybe that didn't make the news. Probably didn't. The mainstream media is not going to cover it. But what you're going to see with this policy is you're going to see another open gate

and we're going to be fighting multiple wars here on our own soil. And the American people are not going to be prepared for it. You think Antifa and BLM are bad and everybody else? Brother, we haven't seen anything yet until all of a sudden we have hardcore terrorist units. back in the United States, cells being activated, and espionage, you know, spying in America. There's just, I think we're in for, I think we're in for a pretty tough time here coming up, to be honest with you. Yeah. Jerry says he'll be meeting with Rick Lamb later this month, can pass on the message.

Brad asks, what was your biggest challenge as an actor? being able to memorize more than 15 pages of dialogue. You know, like in my acting career, I don't act. I don't try to be something. I'm not. Look, if somebody were asking me to do Shakespeare, it suck. I'm not that guy. I'm kind of like one of those.

And I say this humbly because these actors that have gone before me, like Clint Eastwood and John and Wayne and all those guys, you know, John Wayne was always John Wayne. Clint Eastwood's always Clint Eastwood. Boss was going to always be boss. So if I get chosen for certain roles, it has to be roles that I feel comfortable with that are going to be me, so to speak,

and I'm not going to try to be something other than me. And in my acting career, it's a facilitator for me. I love it. I've met a lot of great people in the film industry. A lot of former war fighters, actually, they do a great job, you know. And I love being around them. But it's acting and it's not the real world.

So it allows me to pay my mortgage so that I can go rescue more kids. And I mean, a lot of people in the film industry may think that that's, well, that's not true to your cause because we have people that all they want to do is be an actor. You know, well, okay. You know, and I love it and it's a business. You know, I was told by Michael Greenberg, a great friend of mine was Sharon Stone's first husband. he said, don't go to Hollywood parties and don't date actresses. He goes, this is a job. He goes, do it.

Come home, be with your family. He goes, and you'll have a long career. And most really big executives like Dick Lindheim who just passed away and other people that I know that were studio heads, they'll tell you the same thing. You know, this is a business and it's a fun business. And it is exciting. Look, it is a lot of fun. I admit, you know, you're not shooting real.

bullets at you. You're not really getting blown up. You know, it's kind of, you get to play. And it's great and I love it. But for me, that's what pays my bills. So I can go rescue kids. We're going to ask about the rest of your kids thing in just a second.

I just want to ask one more thing about the acting. Does it ever bother you or has it ever been an issue when they want you to do something that you as a gunfighter no is not technically or tactically correct, but they want it for, you know,

thematic or dramatic effect. Yeah, there sure is. There sure is. Like one thing, well, on the black list, no, they let me have full rain. They knew that when we performed, they just loved it because it was better than they thought it could be, because they had been watching,

and I apologize for using this term, but they had watched a lot of yos, you know, people that weren't skilled. And so when you're skilled, they see it and they're just go, wow, that's amazing. How did you do that? But the last scene, if you saw where I got shot, there's a scene where I'm asked to, we run a truck off the road and I pull up next to it. I get out of the car.

I'm aiming at the vehicle. And Susan love her to death. Mr. Kaplan is what they call her. She's a cleaner for Red Reddington. You know, after he assassinate somebody, she comes in and mops it all up. A teeny little lady, and they had given her a like 357 magnum, which, and told her she had to hold it with one hand, which was difficult. But I'm supposed to say, Susan, get out of the car.

Please get out of the car, right? And I actually walk up to her door with a, I'm holding a weapon on her. And they want me to like figure out a way where she can shoot me. Well, I just like, how am I going to do this? So I think, okay, I'm just going to glance away for a second and watch my hand go to the door. And that's going to give her her moment to shoot me, right? Which she does. She goes, she looks at me and goes, boss.

And I'm going to let her out of the car. So I look over and she sticks to big 357 out the window and blows me away, right? Now, no one knows if I'm dead or not. And then she drives away. I must have heard from every special operations guy in the community that I know that said, you idiot. What were you doing? You would never do that, you know, on it.

I mean, it was relentless. They never stopped, you know. And the only response I could say was, like, like it's TV. They told me to do it. Yeah. You know, they told me to do it.

Like, Baz wasn't right in the script. You weren't kind of like, no, I'm saving myself and you're changing the whole script for the show now. Right. Right. So,

you know, I had to go with it. They were in my paycheck. And, you know, it was better that than falling down a set of stairs, which no one would buy. You know,

it's like, what, I roll down some stairs and I break my neck. No one's going to buy that. So, yeah, that was the one big time. And I just went,

and they knew. I mean, Michael knew that I would never do that. But the writers had to figure out a way for me to get shot and that's the best I could do. Right. Right. Let's talk about

ARC then. You said you guys have been around since 1993. Human trafficking issue it's huge worldwide cuts across all social classes, all races, all countries,

all nationalities. It's truly massive. It's something that's been with the human race since the very beginning. And sadly, it looks like it's going to be with us well into the future. But we're lucky in the United States. We do have folks like you. We have law enforcement. We have FBI, local state law enforcement that combat this issue. Talk to us about ARC and what you guys do. Yeah, thank you. 2019, there was 421,000 American children missing. We don't know where they are. Child pornography is in the billions of dollars. Kids are being transported all over the United States and undetected,

which is a security issue because if we can transport kids undetected, what else can you transport undetected? Terrorist nuclear weapons, of course. So we have a real problem. 1993 in Mogadish, Somalia, we rescued a couple of little girls that were the children of, I believe, a former maybe an Italian engineer that had left the country during the Civil War. probably had two families. We rescued them and got them to an orphanage. And when I got back to the United States, I just wrestled with it on my heart.

I just like, is there something happening in America too with missing kids? And at that time, there were like 250,000 missing according to my friends at the FBI. But when I went to local law enforcement, they said, look, missing kids aren't really a priority for us. We have jurisdictional issues. We have budgetary constraints.

We have communication problems with other, states, there's no coordination. And so we just count them as missing kids, runaways. And so I just wasn't really satisfied with that. And so I started the Association for the Recovery of Children in 93, kind of under the radar because I was still in the agency. And so I took it upon myself to kind of go out and rescue a hit here on Thanksgiving or another kid on Christmas. And The first couple of cases were kind of tricky. One, it was a cartel case, and I won't talk about it because I don't want that coming back to me. But I realized that I could do this.

I could use the tradecraft and the things I had learned in the agency to kind of go across lines and get kids out of the country. But all of a sudden I realized we had a problem in the country. and everybody was thinking it was happening over there. And so by 1996, I had made my mind up that, as it's on my book, there was something bigger than overthrowing small governments. Now, you have to understand that there's nothing I wanted to be more than a paramilitary case officer. I mean, I could have gone, done that the rest of my life. So you have to imagine that something must have been pretty powerful to tug on my heart for me to give that up.

And it was, you rescue one little four-year-old out of a closet that's got cigarette burns all over. And she's been molested 20 times a day and starved and chained to a bed. And your whole life changes, particularly when you realize it's happening here in your country. And so I realized that with all the constraints that law enforcement had, that I wasn't going to wait around to wait for them to do their job because their hands were getting tied, politically also. There's so much corruption across the United States when it comes to child trafficking that it runs rampant in some of the highest echelons of our government to the lowest guy on the totem pole. Pastors, doctors, police officers, technicians, CEOs. I mean, I could

sit here in name, it'd blow your mind who's involved in it, you know, gangs, cartel of MS-13, Bloods and Crips, and it's a perfect business model. It's perfect. They make so much money off of it because you can traffic a kid, let them go to school by day and traffic them by night, and sometimes their parents don't even know. So with $421,000 missing in 2019, we have a problem. So I created an association for the recovery of children, and not as a business model, but just as a platform to go do it because it's the right thing to do.

in my mind, I just said to myself, if I don't, then who will? And that became our motto, if we do not, who will? And then slowly, guys like yourselves, friends would call me up and go, hey, I'm out of the agency or I retired from the military and I want to come, I hear you're doing this thing. I want to come help. And I would say, well, I can't pay you a salary. It's all volunteer. And you know what? It would just go, okay, I'm going to do it anyway. I don't need a salary. I got my retirement. And so we started growing. And in addition to that, people that I had met in the intel service from around the world offered to jump in as well. They would say, look, if you come to my country and you're trying to find an American kid, I'm not in the service

anymore, but I'll help you. We'll help you get that. We won't help you with anything else, but we'll help you because I have children. And I don't want this thing to happen. And so we grew the organization, it became a 501c3 nonprofit organization of former intelligence, military, and law enforcement officers that were dedicated specifically to that, just rescuing, missing and exploited American children, now mostly trafficked American children. And so we have a small group of consistent operators, and I get resumes literally every week. we would like to grow. I'd like to be able to staff up 100 operators

and put them in a facility and pay them a paycheck. And just, man, we just, you know, every month, bring it in 25 or 100 kids. We're not at that yet. We don't have that sustainable funding. And everybody still does volunteer work. So donations trickle in. We take an operation where I have 40 operations cases

sitting on my desk now. Literally 40. We know where the children are, but we can't go get them because we don't have the money to get a team on an airplane. That's sad. So there are a lot of NGOs out there. I'd say because we get to go behind the veil and we vet a lot of strategic partners, and we have some really good companies that help us with that, I'd say it's safe to say that 60% of the NGOs out there that claim they're doing anti-characterial.

traffic inter-trafficking aren't. They have grants. They have a great business model. They have the same business model that the pimps have, you know, and they tug on the hard strings of Americans and people donate, but these people don't vet to see if they're really doing it. And so these people know that we know who they are, and they're no strategic partners of ours.

You have a lot of aftercare facilities that have grants, and they'll say they have 40 beds. They don't. They have four, you know. And so a lot of smoke and mirrors with a lot of people. So I would say that in the United States, I can probably count on two hands, all the really solid organizations that know how to rescue kids. And then probably on two hands, all the aftercare facilities that really do what they say they're doing. The trafficking arena has gotten more dangerous.

We mostly, once all local state and federal law enforcement efforts have been exhausted, we get involved. Because we don't want to interrupt our partners, our law enforcement partners, kind of on an end up and get an investigation. But we deal a lot with MS-13, bloods and crips, people on the streets, and these guys are all armed,

and they're very sophisticated. They have their own COVID-com, they have their own listening posts. They listen to people's conversations. Anytime you get a big Zoom meeting, with 200 people and organizations on there that haven't vetted who the applicants are. The pimps are in there listening to figure out what you know and they know. So it's actually everything that I learned in the world of espionage applies now.

So we got to the point where we realize there's a lot of organizations out there that teach what we call awareness. Awareness doesn't bring a kid home. Yeah, yeah. You know, remember those things where you see a missing kid on the milk carton? and people look at the thing and they think they've done something about it because they look at the picture on the milk carton. But at the end of the day, that milk carton goes in the garbage. The kid doesn't come home.

So what we did is we created a five-day training course to equip people. In other words, to teach people how to start an NGO, how to actually use trade craft to some degree and actually go out and rescue a kid out on the streets. So, you know, they learn SDRs. They learned COVCOM. They learn all the stuff that we're allowed to teach them without, you know, without reaching any classified stuff.

But what we've seen now is that we're starting to build this army up. And it's a big difference between teaching awareness or having people in your class for five days for 12 hours a day. And when they leave, they actually go out and rescue a kid. And so that's where we've gotten now with that on time. of running our own operations. Baz, can you walk us through an example of saving a kid? How does that go down from you receiving information or going out and finding it

to actually go in pulling a kid off of the streets? I mean, I understand maybe you can't mention names and things like this, but could you explain to people like what that looks like? Sure. We may get a call from Homeland Security or we may get a call. from DOJ or may get a call from another NGO and they'll say we've got a 12-year-old missing. This is her name. She went missing at this point and she was in the, we saw her with this guy and this is his thing. So they'll give us that information. We'll do a contextual analysis

to number one figure out if we think the girl, the 12-year-old was even still alive based on the circumstances and we'll look at all the flags. we'll start getting our analysts to dive in and trying to locate either on social media or other methods where this girl might be. So let's say the 12-year-old all of a sudden pops up on social media and she's being pipped out. And we know that, right? So we have ways of looking into all of that and locating pretty much where she may or may not be, where her perpetrators may or may not be who they are.

that ends up turning into about a 93-page Intel report because we want to be able to hand us over to DOJ or law enforcement as well. We want to do our homework and we'll vet resources and we'll do whatever we can to locate her. We may locate the car. We may locate her through her phone. We may locate it through technologies. On the most recent case, there was a girl that went missing in Texas

and we, so we did all this and we found her. She showed up in Vegas. not a good place for a 12-year-old in Vegas, not at all. And then we found out who she was with, got a location. So then all of a sudden, we'll try to contact our local law enforcement and see if they can go in on it. And if it looks like they're dragging their feet or whatever, then what happens is we'll bring a team in. We'll fly them from different places of the United States to our non-disclosed headquarters. And we'll do a five-paragraph order with all.

All the intel. We use the five paragraph four all the time. It works great. Then what will happen is we'll rehearse on site, whether that's, we map it out on the board or whether we actually get a similar location. You know, and then what happens is we'll drive the team to where we think she is,

continuing to monitor her. Maybe we'll use some overhead imagery. Maybe we'll use a drone to pinpoint a few things to collect more intel. maybe we locate her last five movements through some type of technology, you know, and then once we, then we'll run surveillance and counter surveillance. And that all is done with good SDRs to make sure there's no footprint contamination. If we haven't been able to coordinate with law enforcement to that point, then what will happen is we'll run surveillance until we see where she is and the condition she is

if she's being held there, the law allows us to actually enter that door if a crime is being committed and actually retrieve her, or we'll look for a window of opportunity. Most of the time we look for a window of opportunity because we don't go armed. If we're in Syria and we're going after some kids that ISIS may have, then maybe we're dressed out. But here, we're not armed because it's just, it's trouble. If you show up and you're rescuing a kid and you're armed and law enforcement shows up, up you probably could end up getting shot because they don't know what's going on. And then if we wait for an opportunity like in this last one,

the perpetrator actually left the location to go get something to eat. And we were able to enter and remove her and the perpetrator never knew she was gone until she was already safe back. We don't arrest the perpetrator. It's not our job. We're not dog the bounty hunter. We're not trying to be. And then we'll get her out and get her to aftercare.

Or we'll generally what we'll do is we'll do what's called secure transportation. And we have a certain vehicle that will take that person into a safe house. And a safe house, they'll receive medical or psychological help, whatever it may be. And while we're doing that, law enforcement is being located, you know, being informed as is the aftercare facility. And then once the aftercare facility says, yeah, we got a bed for her or whatever it may be, then we'll securely transport that individual to that facility. And, of course, most of the time the after-action report will end up with law enforcement as well. A lot of times we get really good health from law enforcement, which is really remarkable.

In the fact that sometimes when we vet our law enforcement partners, and this is sad to say, we'll find two or three people in the department that have trafficked children. Really? Oh, yeah. And so we don't want to get into the battle with the head of their chief or whatever going. We're not going to work with you because of this. He may know it. He may not know it.

A lot of times, most of the time they know it. And it's an old boy network. And they're just trying not to embarrass the department. More and more we're seeing chiefs now stand up and go, hey, guess what? You're going to jail. You know, we haven't had, I will tell you this, we haven't had one female under the age of 18. since 1993, okay, that has not had a law enforcement officer as a client. And they can tell you what tattoo, they can tell you their scars, they can tell you not one.

And that's pretty sad because I've had these discussions with my law enforcement partners and I've said, guys, look, America trusts you. If you got dirt in your department, this is not funny anymore. It's not funny that there's a law enforcement officer dragging a 10-year-old girl. in the back of his cruiser, and tapping her. I said, this is not funny. It's against them all. And if we can't trust you,

who can we trust? So we've got some cleaning up to do in America, to be honest with you, on all fronts. Bess, did I hear this right? I mean, are you saying, it sounded like you were talking about that you had run ops like this in Syria?

We've run lots overseas. I was just using Syria as an option, of course. Yeah, yeah. What are some of the biggest challenges facing or infighting child trafficking in the U.S.? Is it that there are people at various levels of government and industry that partake in this? And so set up roadblocks. Like it's not something that is as aggressively pursued as say the war on drugs or, you know, or these other things, is something that by and large goes ignored in the United States.

It does. Apathy is a big challenge here in America. Like, if it's not happening to me and my family, I don't care about it. I've got other things to worry about, you know. Apathy is one. Two, is corruption is the big challenge. Give you a fine example. I think this is pretty much everybody knows it.

I had a conversation, and I won't name the name, regarding Hunter Biden's laptop. That's all over the news. I was told by a certain government official that everything that we suspect is on there is on there. I was also told when I asked what's going to be done about it, they said absolutely nothing. And I think that your listeners on here need to know that I had that conversation. You know, to certain government officials and law officials that said,

because his father is now the president of the United States, we've been told to stand down and nothing's going to happen on. So, you know, it used to be a time that if we expose things, justice was served. We're in a time in America now that you can expose it, but there's no justice being served. And it's frustrating to the American public. And I think we're at a tipping point where it doesn't surprise people anymore

when they hear things that we're talking about right now. So those are two big challenges right there. And probably the third challenge that we have is just funding. That's going to always be a challenge. Look, there are more people that put money into, let's save the worms or let's save the daisies, then there are people that are willing to save children. And I used to think that people just weren't aware.

And there are people at a time when I mentioned this. They go, I had no idea. The question in my mind is like, well, what world are you in? But once you know that we have a problem like this with our children and you still choose not to get involved, you know, that's, it's just not right. Look, I know we all have things we have to do.

And not everybody can fight this battle. And there are a lot of battles to be fought. But I got to tell you what, sexually abusing, I always ask people, how do you murder a child without killing them? You sexually abuse them. Because their soul is ripped from them

and they die every single day of their life all the way up into their adulthood. And it is probably the most heinous crime that I have ever seen in my life. I mean, I know homicide, a murder. I know those are bad, but they're not like this. This is like, imagine this. Imagine someone stab someone to death, right? Okay. So now they stabbed him one time they die. But we walk up on it and the guy is standing in with a knife and he's just stabbing the corpse over and over and over and over again. after a while you go

dude that's messed up well that's what happens to children that are sexually exploited they're just stabbed over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and so there aren't enough people to get behind it when I when I look at what has happened in our nation over the course of the last year or two years and I see all the people

rioting and I hear all the people talking about slavery and reparations. And look, I'm not a racist. Let me tell you. People know that. Anybody knows me? Look, I'm not even a white guy. You know, half Lebanese, half Native American, you know.

And I don't even go down that road with people. But let me tell you what. We have more slavery in our country now than we had 150 years ago. I mean, it's active slavery. You know, people that are enslaved and sold as sex slaves in our country. And all these people out there in the streets, talking about something that they were never participated in. It never happened under what.

And yet in their neighborhoods right now, they're sexual abuse of children and slavery and trafficking, and they're doing absolutely nothing about it. You know, it just blows my mind. And let me tell you what, across the board, it doesn't matter what color you are to be trafficked, red, white, blue, green, whatever it's happening in neighborhoods. And when I hear people talk about my people,

I don't care who my people are. black, white, green, whatever. Let me tell you what. Some of your people are trafficking your people. There are white people trafficking white people, and there are black people trafficking black people. And there's Asian gangs trafficking Asian people. Like nobody's business.

And so if you really, really care about your people, which in my book, it's Americans, totally. You know, get rid of the race car. Get rid of the color stuff. Just look at the American children that are being trafficked. in our country and you're not doing anything about it except for screaming about something that never happened on your watch and burning down buildings or whatever you need to get you need to get yourself in line you need purpose in life and you need to do what really counts for

your country and that is save the kids out there that are being horribly trafficked every single day and so have there been i mean obviously in the internet age you know there's more and more awareness of things or the ability to become more aware. Has the government taken steps? Are they slowly moving in that direction? Are they not moving that direction? All has anything been done? Yeah, the Trump administration came on and they jumped on it hard, man. They, they, a lot was done under President Trump. Now with President Biden, that trafficking, it's going to go away. I was told by a member of Department of Justice that we won't, you're not going to see this issue tackled by the Biden administration like it was the Trump administration.

You know, I imagine that we'll see just the opposite. And if we do see it or we hear them speak of it, it's only going to be in words. It's not going to be because, you know, there's, there's questionable members of Congress. There's questionable members of this administration. You know, that's not new. you know, it's been talked about for a long time. So I hear from very high authority that if the NGOs aren't going to get involved in local law enforcement or communities aren't going to get involved in their state, it's probably not going to get done. Don't look for the government to do it.

The government can't, they can't handle it all. You know, and look, we're still wondering about the Jeffrey Epstein thing. you know we have this habit of finding something and then over the course of administrations it just dissolves it goes away and people are like where did it go where's the justice in this and we're still sitting back going Jeffrey Epstein his girlfriend we haven't heard anything about that and guess what she can name names the question is who's covering up for who you you know it's it's a dirty bass this has been a amazing competition conversation and I hope I would like to ask if I can get you to stick around just like another 10 minutes 15 minutes to do the bonus segment if that's okay

Sure, whatever you guys. How about your service? Thank you so much and and thank you everyone who joined us tonight Bass there was like 275 280 people watching this live tonight and many more will in the subsequent days. So thank you everyone who joined us tonight to watch the show And thank you, Baz for spending so much of your time with us tonight everyone please make sure that you've subscribed to the channel if you haven't already you know give us a little thumbs up leave some comments and down in the description you'll find a link to our patreon page which if you subscribe to patreon if you want to support the stream you also get access to all the bonus segments we do with our guests and there's also a link down there for the merch the merch if you want to get the coffee you want to get yourself a

team house coffee cup coffee mug they're in there there. So again, thank you everyone who joined us. Next week, we're going to have Craig on the show. He served in the FBI in DIA. Has a whole bunch of super cool stories. We have one last question or one last statement from Jerry Jay. Thank you very much. He said, I was responsible for human trafficking in Europe as an intel. It is really bad. If I can help, let me know. And I think there are a spot. There are actually places on your website for people to volunteer correct? Yeah, you know, if you go to info or recovery of children.com or you go to recovery of children.org, you can get in touch with us that way and we'd be more than happy

to have a okay dialogue. So that is recovery of children.org if you're listening to this on a podcast. And also check out Basel's Books at www. bosbaz-Bazzo Books.com. So that's bosbooks.com. And not only do you have the book that something bigger than the overthrowing of small governments, you have some self-help books on there. You sort of have quite an expanse of writing. Yeah, I do. You know, I got in some life coaching. A lot of veterans were coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

And a buddy mine who's not longer alive, Rick Lombard created a trauma protocol that we've been using quite successfully. The VA wanted to know about it. We probably got 98% success rate with it. It worked really fast. And so when I got into that as a life coach helping our friends, I started writing and these self-help books just are kind of funny, but they came about and so they're on there as well. Fantastic. Yeah, so check that out. And, you know, if you have a few extra bucks, please, you know, please think about donating to recovery of children.org.

It sounds like you're doing amazing work. And like you said, and Jack and I've actually talked about this before, there are a lot of organizations, even those spearheaded by former special operations guys who say that they're doing this work and they're actually not. But you guys are the real deal

and you are actually doing this work and making a difference in the world. world. Yeah, yeah, we are. We've got a great staff. We've got just the best of the best. So we've got a director of human trafficking, Tina Paulson, who's this incredible woman that has been downrange, and I don't mean warfighter, but she actually goes out. And if we can get her to keep her bulletproof vest on when she goes and rescues these kids from places like, you know, MS-13 and whatever, it's crazy. And then I've got Thad Turner and Juan Gonzalez and Kirk, for even and just some just guys that all have great experience they're very easy to work with and they're

they're not glory hounds at all they love to stay under the radar and uh i'm i'm really grateful because it's our success is more about them than it is me um it's really more about the team to be very honest with you um and their dedication to it and i'm i'm very grateful for each and every one of them Fantastic. We really, really appreciate you. And we appreciate you being here.