The Team House - Former CIA Officer Breaks Down Source Operations in Afghanistan | Delbert Roll

Episode Date: June 6, 2026

Former Army officer and CIA operations officer Delbert Roll joins us to discuss his path from Third Special Forces Group to the Agency, including joining CIA just before 9/11 and working counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan. He breaks down CIA training, running sources, building targeting packages against al-Qaeda, working with JSOC and indigenous forces, and the realities of protecting assets in the field.The episode also covers covert action, counterintelligence, counter-WMD work, teaching at the Farm, CIA bureaucracy, writing after retirement, and the bizarre CIA gold bar scandal.Today's Sponsors:GhostBed ⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 10% off! Blue Chew ⬇️https://bluechew.com/Get 1 month free when you buy 2 of BlueChew Gold with code "HOUSECALL"For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouseTo help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early access to shows-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseSupport the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________PRE ORDER JACK'S NEW BOOK "THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN" ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/803651/the-most-dangerous-man-by-jack-murphy/paperback/Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured__________________________________Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"00:00 — Start / Delbert Roll joins The Team House01:10 — Growing up in Pennsylvania and joining the Army07:06 — Third Special Forces Group, Africa missions, and comms work in the 1990s15:09 — Leaving the Army and trying to join the FBI before the CIA16:04 — Joining CIA three weeks before 9/1121:09 — The day after 9/11 and CIA’s shift toward counterterrorism23:46 — Moving from analyst to operations officer25:20 — CIA training and “Ranger School for your brain”30:42 — First Afghanistan tour and arriving at a forward operating base33:22 — Running a source operation against a senior al-Qaeda target39:13 — Building a targeting package without GPS coordinates44:40 — Airstrike decision, protecting assets, and the target slipping away48:54 — Working with JSOC and indigenous forces to shut down rat lines52:47 — CIA support to conventional Army units in Afghanistan56:17 — Language training, European posting, and traditional case officer work01:04:25 — Covert action, liaison partners, and gathering intelligence through proxies01:05:05 — Counterintelligence, recruiting foreign officers, and disrupting Russian operations01:09:07 — Counter-WMD work and handling sources without being the technical expert01:12:50 — Teaching at the Farm and training future CIA officers01:22:29 — CIA bureaucracy, NSA comparisons, and publication review problems01:27:58 — Recruiting, technology, and learning how to talk around classified subjects01:28:57 — From CIA officer to fantasy, spy, and horror novelist01:43:42 — CIA gold bars, non-traditional payments, and final thoughtsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, I want to tell you tonight about my new novel, The Most Dangerous Man, coming out June 9th. I think, like a lot of you, I read in high school, the short story, the greatest game, which is almost a century old at this point, but it's the classic premise of man-hunting man for sport. This book is based off of that a little bit, but also on stories that I have heard over the years about safari guides that have actually taken hunting parties, wealthy people, hunting poachers in West Africa. That idea kind of cooked off in my mind when I was asked to write a novel and get back into writing fiction again. And this book is about a ranger with the Ranger Reconnaissance Company who's on a mission in West Africa and gets kidnapped

and hunted for sport by a group of wealthy tech billionaires. I had a lot of fun writing this book, and I think you'll have to have to be a lot of fun writing this book, and I think you'll have a good time reading it. It's a quick, fast and furious, fast-paced action novel. And I hope you all check it out. It's up there. You can find it wherever books are sold, the hard copy, the hardback, the soft cover, and also the Kindle eBook edition.

We'll have some links down in the description for you. The book comes out June 9th, and I hope you all let me know what you think of it. Hey, folks, welcome to the team house. I'm Jack Murphy here with our guest tonight, Delbert Roll. Delbert served as a signals officer and an Army infantry officer in Third Special Forces Group. He was a commo guy. And then he made the jump over to the CIA for a short period of time. He was an analyst and then transferred over and became an operations officer and had a whole 20 years career there doing a lot of CT work in places like Afghanistan, but also covert.

action, counterintelligence, countering weapons of mass destruction, and many other things that we'll get into in this interview. Del, thank you for joining us. My pleasure, man. Pleasure to be here. So, I mean, the first question I always ask folks is about their origin. If you can tell us a little bit about, like, where you grew up and, you know, what your upbringing was like. So, yeah, I was born in Pennsylvania. I grew up on a small farm outside of a small town in rural Pennsylvania. Not so small, not so rural anymore, but yeah, grew up on a farm. Normal upbringing. Basically, joined the Army really as kind of a lot of my free time when I was a kid, I was a voracious reader only because it really gave you the opportunity to see the rest

of the world. So, joined the Army, a military police soldier initially while I was in the reserves in college, graduated from college, commissioned regular Army infantry, basically spent the next 11 years, 10, 11 years in the Army, kind of got to that point where, you know, and you know, because you were active duty army, 10-year mark at that point where you're like, well, what am I going to do, right? Am I going to stay at 20? We're going to do something different. And at the time, I was married at the time and literally, you know, I was stationed in Fort Bragg. She lived in another state. We rarely saw each other just because you were gone all the time and you had a serious workload.

And wanted to do some different, wanted to so continue to serve the country. So initially, I wanted to be an FBI. It's fascinated by the FBI. I read lots of books on it, saw lots of movies, watched all the TV shows, had been really interested in the work of John Douglas. He was not the pioneer of profiling, but one of the early guys. Found that fascinating. And I probably had an unhealthy fascination with Dana.

I initially put in my packet, for your viewers, back, back, back in. back in the day before we had computers and we had to like type everything, you would get like you had to type out literally this application form. And I remember getting, getting a copy and the recruiter saying, oh, here's five. Take five because you are going to screw this up. So go ahead, you type that out, you submit it. That's going fine. You start with some initial interviews.

You go through some testing. It's moving along and it's it's looking pretty good. And then one day I get a letter in the mail and it says your file has been basically put on pause your recruiter for more information. So I call my recruiter and the guy tells me, he goes, listen, there's a hiring freeze. So yes, your stuff is on pause. And I'm like, well, how long is that going to take? And he's like, well, it could be three months, could be three years, could be six months, could be six years.

who knows? And ironically, I have served with enough FBI personnel since then to know that in the 1990s, that was a constant thing. They would have just hiring freezes for no apparent reason. In any case, I started looking at a couple other things, martial service, DEA, a couple other things. It was around that time that a friend of a friend who had left the Army to join the agent, I was put in contact with him and he kind of talked me, talked to me about it. He goes, so is this something you'd be interested in?

And yes, he made that hand gesture. But it sounded like a pretty cool thing. So again, went through the process of typing up my application, submitted that. Similar thing to what you've had other guests tell you about where you go to a hotel in Northern Virginia, then a bus shows up and takes you a non-descript location. and you have a series of interviews and some tests. And I don't remember exactly when they gave me the poly, but they did give me the poly at some point.

Anyway, that goes well. And eventually you get this provisional letter of acceptance. Well, because they still got to give you a TSSSEI. This goes on for like a year. And I'm coming down on the point where it's like, listen, I have already told the army that I intend to leave. I've submitted the paperwork to resign in my commission. What the heck's going on?

And I remember calling the adjudicator and they're like, well, hold tight. More time goes by. Talking to a friend, my father's best friend from like growing up who had been a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who knew a couple people who got me in touch with somebody. whose real name i have no idea what it was but i kind of walked him through hey this is the situation we're in i'm coming down the wire and he's like all right hold tight let me make a couple phone calls literally three hours later i get a call from the adjudicator i explain the situation it's like listen i cannot extend my resignation again i need this knocked out right and and

and then like a week later boom it's done um so yeah then then left Fort Bragg, went to Northern Virginia. Del, before we jump into the agency training, I want to ask you a bit more about your time in the Signal Corps with third group. This is in the 1990s at this point, right? Yeah. And what was sort of the mission profile, like what was your job at that time? So my job as the combo guy was basically to do what,

the hell the battalion commander XO and S3 told me to. But as far as like the mission profile, that was a weird time because and some people may cringe when I say this, but at the same time, folks that were there will know this is true. It had essentially become kind of like the Peace Corps with guns. Right. Like third group is Africa facing, right? And third battalion is sub-Saharan Africa. We spent a lot of time doing a lot of FID missions, right?

So we did a lot of FID missions, but we also did a lot of demining operations. So you'd send an ODA to a given country and they'd be working with contractors, but they would be leading the effort to demine the area. because Africa was utterly lured with landmines. So that was a big effort. I know it could be deeply rewarding, but at the same time, deeply frustrating. Sure. And what I mean by that is, a guy, an ODA would go down, right?

And it's set up the infrastructure or demining operation. And that might include, you know, building, you know, like the shack that you're going to store equipment in or fences, or specifically radio type stuff. And this is where I would fit into this stuff is they go out and they set up a series of repeaters for the Motorola radios that they were going to be using with the locals to, you know, orchestrate and manage the demining process. And then they would rotate home and they'd come back like a month later.

And all the repeater towers have been torn down. The wires have been stripped out. The wires are then fashioned into, you know, little elephants and helicopters and motorcycles and they try and sell them back to the SF guys who you know spent like a month putting up this repeater network but that was that was an interesting that was an interesting period of time because yeah we had satellite communications at the time right but that was really kind of space available and it was not a frequently available resource so a lot of our guys we were making regular communications between Bragg and say Botswana Zimbabwe and what have you

with HF radio shots and as when you stop and you think about it HF radio it's that really long wave radio signal and making a shot from Fort Bragg North Carolina all the way to say the southern part of Africa it takes it takes skill it takes technical acumen to make that sort of of thing happened. And that was also back in the time of day where you had communications windows. You couldn't just call at any time. You had specific com windows. And that was not merely just administrative purposes. It's also like the how you're going to make that shot depending on the various elements of the stratosphere that are going to affect that signal wave that factors into it as well but yeah really really cool experience and honestly it's the

sort of thing that I think help me along help me later on down the road when you are because I think you know that's the reality is that you take your cumulative experience and apply it to new things so like when you're trying to figure out how do I make a good robust um co-com plan for my asset right So as you're well aware, when you're planning a comms plan for in special operations, it's based off that Pates methodology. So primary, alternate contingency, emergency. And we use the same planning methodology, you know, when we were planning similar, you know, com strategies with assets. You know, you get your primary means, your alternate means, you've got contingency and emergency, you know, kind of like a universal fallback. and that's designed so that in regards to what happens,

you're going to be able to establish or reestablish communication with that asset. So the last thing I would say, it was interesting because at that point in time, you know, deployable computers were pretty nascent. I mean, we've had deployable computers like since World War II, But in terms of the modern era, I remember one day the S3 coming to me and saying, I want a paperless ice effect. And I'm like, okay, how the hell am I going to do that? And essentially, and this was before Wi-Fi, but we built a deployable local area network where you had, you know, laptops, computers spread out across the ice effect, all of which were connected with.

No, it wasn't fiber, but, you know, cat five cable. Yeah, cat five. And, you know, we, we build a server. The funny thing was, I remember the boss saying, all right, make it happen. I'm like, well, how much money? How much money do we have? Like, what's the scope of this project? I'll find you so, right?

And I think we got like $2,000 or something like that. It was like this. So you get to go down to Radio Shack and. Yeah. Exactly. And we eventually, we made it happen. We built like, you know, one of the first deployable local areas. And that was, that was cool. That was a, you know, you felt like you accomplished something. After that, I went on the 112 and had a company command there. And it was great. You know, they're all great Americans, but, you know, I just wanted to do something kind of different. What is that, what is the 112th? Is that like the predecessor to like the joint communications unit? No, it's a slightly different sort of thing. So it used to be like, I want to say 30, 40 years ago that each Special Forces Battalion had a

basically attachment, right? So sometime in the early 1990s, the decision was made to ensure that, technologically speaking, that they were advancing and bringing the best, you know, to. to the fight, he was brought all together to establish the 112. So the joint communications unit that you're talking about down in Tampa, that is a bit more of a strategic element and it really exists to support, you know, the much more senior elements, whereas 112 is really a more tactical technical communications element.

So basically, and when I think back to when I was there, the level of technology, comparatively what they have now. We're talking about cave payments, really? I mean, it was the best we had at the time for what they do now. Right, right. And so you did your company command there, and that was when you started really planning to make that jump over to the agency. Yeah, yeah.

And like I was saying, I looked at the FBI, looked at the Marshal Service, looked at a couple different things, but then really kind of got hooked by the idea of going to work at the agency. And I realized that's kind of vague and whatnot, but I will tell you that my career management has been a lot, very similar to that. There's never been really a plan, Jack. It would be easier to, you know, predict a trajectory of a ping pong ball

being frowned down a sewer system. Yeah, I just kind of, hey, this sounds awesome, so let's go do it. Yeah, so join the agency. Like I said, three weeks before the attacks, that was a crazy day. The great irony of it was about a week before it happened. We were all sitting in the bullpen. And somebody had made the comment that how easy it would be to hijack and aircraft taking off a rig and get into the cockpit and then just drive it into the White House or

whatever. And nobody really thought anything about it. But a week later, I'm sitting at my desk and I'm going through basically a target deck looking at collection that's playing for the next 72 hours, you know, kind of organizing my thoughts as to what I'm going to have to do in the days ahead. And I get a phone call from my wife at the time. And she's like, did you hear her? what happened. I'm like, I don't know what. And, you know, one of the, a plane instruct the World Trade Center. And I'm like, that can't be right. So in the call, get up, walk out of the bullpen, down to the next bullpen where I know there's the TV. And I get there just as you see the second aircraft hitting the second tower. And in that moment,

you kind of know, well, the world just changed. We're going to war. We're already at war. you know, now what? So lots of confusion. And that day, that day was so maddeningly confusing because people were reporting all kinds of crazy stuff that they thought. There was a report of a car bomb going off at State Department. There was a report of a DC helicopter that had gone missing and possibly been hijacked, none of which turned out to be true.

eventually the decision's made we need to evacuate the agency. I'm working in an analytical cell at this point people are just running for the doors and I'm like, where are we supposed to go? Because we're at war and apparently the enemy's here. So I just kind of sat up my desk for a while

and eventually this officer comes through and you gotta go home and so I'm like, all right. So I'm walking down you know, downstairs. In this point, like, the agent I can do. And I'm like, you know, we gave a bunch of stinger missiles

to the Mojadine, like, a little over a decade ago. I wonder if we have any left over, right? And so I go to find the closest foe. You know, I just got out of the Army. You know, technically I'm still in the Army. If you got any stingers, I can be in a funny.

A little wall hanger. Yeah. And, of course, The guy looks at me, so I was told no. There was still like a lot of going. So I left. Del, that reminds me of, well, a couple stories. Did you ever cross paths with Justin Sapp?

I know of him. I don't know him well. As I recall, he was at, I may be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure he was at Key West at the Dive School. They call all the students out to pull like security duty after the attacks happened. And they're all kind of wondering like, what are we guarding against here,

scuba bin Laden? What's this about? Or another story was, and it wasn't immediately after the attacks. It was, I think, the first state of the union address after 9-11. And Bill Gage, Secret Service agent, was doing security planning for it

and goes up on the rooftop of one of the buildings there in D.C. And there's like a Marine unit or something with Stinger missiles up there. and they had been instructed to shoot down commercial airliners that are like coming down on the Capitol. And he was like, who gave you orders to do this? Like, who authorized this? And it was just some unit that just decided on their own like contingency planning.

Bravely showing initiative. But I guess like the listeners just point out like this was such a super chaotic time for some of the younger folks out there who maybe don't understand what it was like in the immediate aftermath. it was super chaotic because there was no clarity of what exactly was going on there was lots of people who were trying to do the right thing report what they were seeing you know people were confused and freaked out and at the same time you know you've got recently separated from the army knuckleheads who are like I want to do something so yeah all kinds of can all kinds of confusion absolutely nuts what happened next for you I mean what was what was the next next day like at work.

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And it was like stunned silence. You know, if you were in the, if you were in the counterterrorism center, you know, they never left. They just worked all night long, right? Everyone else was kind of like, what can we do? How can we help? Over the weeks that would come, like literally everything started shifting to counterterrorism. terrorism, right? Literally everything. That is that is something that the agency gets criticized about that over the course of the 20 years war, we basically focused way too much on CT. I don't agree

with that. I also don't disagree with that. I think it's like, yeah, we did, but that's what we were told to do. You had to prioritize with limited resources too. Oh, for sure. And at some point, we can talk about limited resources of the agency and why that kind of makes us a pain in the butt to everyone. But like literally, you know, I was being asked to look at imagery for various islands in the Philippines, just like looking for any evidence of, you know, strange or anomalous activity. You know, and I was supposed to be focused on the WMD program of a specific country and it wasn't the Philippines. But yeah, there was a constant shift. But the other thing I would say is, you know, if you were in the agency in the 60s, 70s and the 80s and you didn't work

against the Soviet target at all, I would ask, well, what were you doing? Because that was the primary, you know, issue. Now, that's not to say that you're not going to work against other stuff as well. And those things kind of fed into it. But yeah, that was the primary threat of the day, whereas counterterrorism was the primary threat of the 20 years that I was there. And yeah, you always hope somebody was thinking about Russia and China and everything else. But yeah, argumentally, that was the case. But getting back to your original question, what was it like? It was a lot of stun silence.

You know, people were just kind of like, what the heck just happened? It was honestly, it was kind of like the day after Bed Laden was killed. Right. you know, you basically got out, walked around in your underwear, not knowing what the hell you were going to do for the rest of your career because, like, all of a sudden, Ben Madden's doing. But I remember going to my supervisor and just being blunt, I want an immediate transfer to the director of operations and start training. And he was like, yeah, that's, it's good to want things, you know, good to have aspirin. Because, you know, when you join, you have a contract, right? So they made me do a year's analysis.

Why did you sign up as an analyst rather than going to ops? Didn't I tell you before about my professional plan was always like a feather floating around in the air? Honestly, it just didn't occur to me. But I think, but honestly, if I go back and think about it, the reason why I left the military was I wanted to have family, I wanted to put down roots, wanted to have kids. I did eventually I'm a father of two sons both of which were in college one just finished his plea year

at West Point he's currently out in the field learning he's probably out in the field learning oh you do patrolling loving it but yeah that was that was kind of why

I was like I want to contribute but I want to do something where I can have a family but then the war happens and you're like there goes that idea yeah yeah I mean it's like you know kind of going back to the movie Patton you really want to tell you know your grandkids

that you were shoveling shit in Louisiana when we were at war you know no so um but eventually did my time as an analyst made it over started going through the pipeline um that that took about a year because you you have some initial training in the northern Virginia area and then you go down to the the schoolhouse and that's, you know, six months of high intensity. It's funny. Sometimes people call it, you know, it's ranger school for your brain because it just doesn't stop. But I think I had an advantage in that I was a little bit older.

I was in my early to mid-30s at the time. And I say that was an advantage because most of the folks who had a little bit more life experience, right? They knew they had a job to do, right? It's like, okay, you know, I'm going to do whatever training during the day. And then at night, you usually go back to your home room and your writing reports, right? You're from your notional exercise related, you know, clandestine meetings and intelligence you've acquired and all this stuff. Well, us older guys would go in, we'd sit down, we'd write our reports, submit them, and head back to the barracks. by like 9 o'clock.

Right. Whereas the younger folks who were just out of college with jibber jabber, chit-chat, and they would be up until like midnight or later. And doing that every once in a while is fine, but you need to understand you're going to do this day after day, after day, after day,

after day for months and months of births. Yeah, being a soldier taught you that. Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure. And the funny thing is, like, years later, when I came back and I was an instructor, you'd see the same exact stuff. you're like watching these like youthful young people who are in their you know mid-20s just out of college and over a period of a couple weeks you see them just get beat the hell down because they're getting like

no sleep trying to write and that's another thing is um don't let perfect be the enemy of good right because i would see um colleagues when i was a student but then also see students, was when I was an instructor who would stay up insanely late to try and write the perfect missive, the perfect intelligence report. And you're like, listen, you're going to run yourself into the ground and you might physically harm yourself or others if that happens. You know, you've got to like provide the raw intelligence in your operational cable and get the hell to bed.

That's what you need to do. but you're going to do this tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. So that's why it sometimes gets called read your school for your brain just because it just doesn't freaking end. But, you know, the one thing I'll tell you about the farm experience and you are going to make friends that are going to be your friends for the rest of your life, right? Ironically, Alana, Alana and I went through the same farm course together, a bunch of other cats. Brian Hoke, who was like dear friend, one of my best friends. He was in the class with us as well as a bunch of other folks. Ironically, Brian was killed in action almost 10 years ago this fall.

And several of us got together on Memorial Day or the day before Memorial Day to go see him in Arlington. And so, you know, it's just really, really tight bonding experience. And it's just some great people. So, yeah, went through the farm. Then I got mowed for a year. Did that. Came back and then started into a series of overseas gigs. I ended up going to Afghanistan a couple times.

Then through a language program. Got to go to a, a, eight, nice, clean European assignment where you can drink the water out of the tap, which was awesome. Did some good work there, came back and then

went on to do a time, a stint in the in the schoolhouse and then on to another overseas Wurzan tour and then went on to my final gig, which

was running that that kind of a it was not the farm it was a training platform for the whole of the intelligence community and basically I went that route to do that

simply because by that point in time the marriage had failed I had ended up with primary custody of my sons and you know I promised them hey I'm not going to move you around yeah

and eventually retired. Again, because, you know, my son was like, Dad, I want to, I want to graduate from high school here. And I'm like, okay, I'll make that. So tell us about that first overseas assignment. It sounds like it was Afghanistan. Yeah, yeah. It was a crazy, it was a crazy thing, right?

So you fly over there in this contract. to aircraft, you get there. You spend like a day or two at station learning what's what, getting some inbreaves, getting right onto a couple things. And I will note that Taliban was a real thing. It was real. Not there anymore, obviously. And then you fly out on an MI17 in the middle of the night to your four operating base where

you're going to be. And you get there, middle of the night. you're tired as hell, you go in, you meet the chief, he tells you go to bed and you get on it the next day. But it was really, and I think this is going to be the case for anyone, any type of assignment is the most really awesome, crazy, robust experiences you're going to have is going to be on your first store. Because you're fresh off the farm, it's time for you to earn your stripes and get. after it and that would be that would be the same whether or not you were at a war zone in a semi permissive environment or permissive environment doesn't matter the expectation is once you get there on the ground and you immediately take your training and experience start applying it

and spotting assessing and encouraging developing and handling sources um that one i want to say within within a couple weeks uh i ended up taking uh it was kind of a an overnight trip, if you will. Actually, it was like a week-long deployment up deep up in the Hindu Kush. That was pretty crazy. Great experience. Lunched up there with some military folks as well as some of our indigenous personnel. Really an amazing experience. Within about a month and a half, though, it was probably one of the more, what's the word?

I'm looking for. One of the biggest operations of my career, you know, that you directly run yourself, right? Because you're going to do, you're going to continually to do bigger things and things you are going to have more responsibility for. But, you know, it's during that first tour when you run an operation in. It's like, no, you are the man. You are the one doing this. Make it happen.

I was having a regular scheduled meeting with a source that I just picked up that had been turned over to me from another officer. And good individual, well-veted, one meeting, really like working with us. Well, one day, we're having a meeting, and it's getting towards the end of the meeting. And I want to say this is like mid to late December timeframe. And he says to me, he goes, it's the end of the meeting. And I'm like, you got anything else, man? Is there anything else you want to tell me about?

And for context, I had before the meeting reached out to one of the targeters that was supporting our operations at that specific base. And it was ironically Elizabeth Hanson, who was later killed in Coase in 2009. And she tipped me on a couple things that were coming up. Like there were some Pakistani military activity that was planned in a given region. and essentially, you know, kind of focused on, you know, taskings or requirements for this individual based off of that. Because what we were expecting was if there was military action that there would be kind of a reflexive movement of AQ and Taliban personnel.

So the meeting goes well, given tasking. And as we're wrapping up, I ask him, hey, do you got anything else? Anything else you want to mention? And he goes, yes, sir. Do you know these two people? And he pulls out of his pocket, these two paper photographs that he cut out of the newspaper of two individuals. And he lays them on the desk. And I'm like, yeah, I know who they are.

Do you know who they are? And he goes, I don't know who they are. But they have been in my village before. So without getting into specific details, one was a mid-level Al-Qaeda individual, and one was a very senior, very senior Al-Qaeda individual. And don't really want to get into specifically whom, but you get the picture. So this individual, this kid, the source, really had no idea who these folks were. And I'm like, I get it. And one might ask the question, is like, how could you not know who that?

this person is. It's like, hey, you know, we live, um, we live in a world where, you know, not always, not always does, uh, uh, everybody know what's going on. So in any case, take the information right up the report of historical travel to this, uh, this general area. Um, but, uh, put it in, everything's fine. What's Ramadan, right? And at the end of Ramadan, there's, um, uh, Eid, which is kind of, have a celebratory period where essentially, you know, people are celebrating the end of the fasting period of Ramadan. And I get a phone call from him.

And it's late in the evening and he said, you remember those, that individual that I showed you the picture of? I go, yeah? He goes, I don't remember if he was here or if he was coming here. I want to say that he was there. that he was there in the village. And I'm like, really? Huh.

Go figure. This basically kicks off, like, I want to say the longest four days of my life. Really, for the next four days, we're running constant operations, connecting with him via a technical means, commercial technical means, leaving at that. getting reports as to what's going on. So who the individual will keep that discreet for the time being, but basically National Command Authority is eventually notified probably within about 12 hours. You've got various elements of the military that are requesting orifies.

We should point out for folks, National Command Authorities is the President and the Secretary of Defense. Yes. Sorry about that. And RFI is a request for information or intelligence, depending on who's asking the question. But, you know, we start just this constant cadence of communicating with him, providing with taskings, taking his reporting. And we're getting really good stuff. We're identifying who are the key individuals that are visiting the village in question, what compounds they're in.

you know, really solid stuff and kind of building the targeting package that this individual of high interest is in this village. We don't know how long he's going to be in the village, but you can assume that he will probably be leaving after this religious period is over with. So, you know, like when I say it's the longest four days in my life, I mean, it was because I would just be at my desk typing reports, taking, phone calls from the agent doing all this stuff. At one point, we got to this challenge of,

he would report that so-and-so was in such-and-such a compound within this village. And the challenge there was, well, that's not really helpful. What we're looking for is, you know, 10-digit grid coordinates, right? So at one point, we contemplated how could we get him in GPS? And we looked at a couple different options to include having one of our indigenous paramilitary types infiltrate into Pakistan to hand off the device. But that had all kinds of risks associated with it. But what we eventually remembered was the high-resolution plotter printout of overhead imagery of that village, right? And so a plotter is just a really big printer.

So you're talking like a sheet of imagery that's like three feet by six feet, what have you. Now, the thing about imagery taken from a satellite is that is menstruated at an even greater degree of accuracy than a 10-digit gridboard, right? So if you can identify what specific compounds, then they have all of the targeting information they need in terms of like where it is. on the planet earth. So we went through basically a process of, and this took hours, of basically doing a verbal map trapping, map tracking exercise with him over, over the phone.

Like, you know, I would ask him things like, okay, if you're in this compound and you're looking north, and you're right outside of it, and you're looking north, what do you see? And he's like, I don't know what this north is you speak of. And that would be, you know, something that would come up more often, you know, or frequently throughout time in Afghanistan was that certain concepts that are elementary to you and me don't necessarily translate. It's not part of the world. I was going to say, Del, like, you know, a lot of people don't understand.

Like, if you had taken that guy and had him in your office and were showing him that, you know, classified high resolution imagery, say, here's your village. show us what building it is, he would not recognize it or even know what the hell he's looking at because he's never in his life seen an overhead representation of his village and probably not any other village either. Yep, no, it's totally true. Because they've never been in airplanes. Right. They just don't have that visual understanding of looking at the world in two-dimensional concept.

And the other reality is there's certain things that you, when I take for granted that people in the developing world, like, they don't. It's outside of their scope of exposure. At one point, I was, and this is completely, we'll get back to this story, but completely different operation, at a walking come in, and we were debriefing them. In Afghanistan, especially in the Hindu Kush area, you know, you get quakes all the time. It just happens all the time. So we're sitting in this cargo container, debriefing him, and we have a minor quake, right? And guys, I just get like, pull up, man, this happens all the time. He goes, why does that happen?

You know, he asked me through the translator and I go back. Without even thinking of who I'm talking to, I start to explain plate tectonics theory and how the Hindu cush, because it's part of the, you know, yeah, you get the idea. I'm just like, it just rolls off my time. You should have just said Allah wills it. Leave it right there. Well, the funny thing was my interpreter looks at me like, I will try and interpret what you just. And he tries.

And then the source looks at him like there's something growing out of my head. And so that does make any sense. And then it's like, and you know, the crazy thing is these are, they're not dumb people. No, they're not. They're very intelligent. but when you don't have access to certain things, it's like, you know, it's just outside. Yeah, they're uneducated.

But at the same time, they have this tremendous local experience. And like, as far as like them doing ad hoc repairs to a Toyota high lux, like they can do things to those vehicles you didn't think was possible. Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. And they can literally make a broken down vehicle operate. fully operational with like bubble gum 550 core and you and you and me both they're amazing beautiful wonderful people I remember on my first tour um some of the locals got together and

made me a birthday cake um yeah and birthdays are really not a big thing there honestly yeah that's why everybody's birthday is the first of January any given year and the birthday cake was it was like really a really big scone. It had the density of a tile off the space shuttle. Like you could strap at your feet rear enter the earth's atmosphere. But you know, that was the point was they're just beautiful people and they recognize that. Yeah, they're just wonderful. But getting back to the original story. So we we were able to basically identify key compounds where, you know, the target is entourage, where people were located. This is being reported up to the National Command Authority. Eventually, the decision's made. Big strike, and at the end of it, he wasn't there.

Was it an air strike or a ground raid? Air strike or a ground raid? Air strike, because it was cross-border. There was some debate of sending in a tier one element to go across the border. There was some discussion of it, but that was the point where they were asking, they were requesting information that there was just no way my guy could possibly use. Right, right, right.

You know, things like, well, you know, disposition of, you know, weapon systems, caliber weapon systems, frequencies that the enemy QRF might be using. And I totally understand as a former soldier that you want that kind of intelligence, but there's no way at hell I'm going to ask him to go get that because he will utterly be fingered and he'll be dead. And it won't just be him. It'll be his family too, which is something that, you know, I'm glad we're talking about it because it's something a lot of times gets missed is besides collecting intelligence for the good of the nation, job one of an operations officer is the safety and security of that asset.

their asset, their family. We take it very, very seriously. So yeah, there's just like, I'm not, I'm not going to ask him that. So there you have it. But at the end of the day, when the strike occurred, it was unclear where he had gone, but I think in the aftermath, he was either departed like an hour before or earlier that day. This is like HVT number two or three. Something like that, yeah.

I've seen your target, right? But there's a couple things here that I personally don't doubt the individual question was there for a couple of reasons. Because there's never been any defender reporting that said he was somewhere else at that day and that time, right? So, you know, that's one of those things that an absence of evidence is not evident in and of itself. So there you go. The other thing was about six years later, I was in another location, again, overseas. And there was a newspaper report about how Pakistan military moved into a certain area, a certain village.

They'd seized it, arrested control of it from al-Qaeda and Taliban, pushed those folks out. And part of it was they discovered this kind of a... cave complex in the mountain above the village. And they start describing the cave complex. And they showed some sketches of it. And I'm reading this. And I'm like, God,

this looks so familiar. Like, why does this feel so familiar? And then eventually I remembered that one of, I had written a report based of a reporting from that asset about that compound, how it was laid out, where approximately was, how many people could be fit in it.

And the point here is that his reporting and what was eventually an open source, kind of married up. So even though that high-value individual was not at the target at the time of the attack, no one's ever been able to say that it was somewhere else, and everything else that the source provided was spot on, authenticated, and authoritative. So, yeah, that was probably one of the bigger operations I got to do. Did some other good stuff that year. For a while, was working closely with J-Soc elements and basically our indigenous troops

to basically shut down rat lines that were moving troops out of Pakistan and to Afghanistan. in. So I would basically work with my guys to develop source networks that could articulate everything we needed to know about the facilitator who was moving troops in and out, eventually set up a targeting package for the facilitator's compound. And then when we go move on it, I would go with the paramilitary force basically to manage and handle that source because we wanted to get him. on hours before the actual hit and then I would take control of them when you know

once the blocking force was in place the assault forces moving in because after we got the guy our source needed to positively identify it's like yes this is him and we would we basically put the source in you know fatigues balaclav over said to obscure who he was and that was a pretty productive effort. But the thing was, you go, you hit a target, you remove the facilitator, you shut down the rat line for a week, and then another facilitator moves in, and the whole thing starts over the game.

And we did that a few times that summer. And, but yeah, that was the first door. And then ended up coming back. Well, I went home for a period of time because my second time. son was being born. So I wanted to be around a little bit for that. Went back out again. Then as a deputy chief of base.

That was a good year, but not as, not as exciting because by that point, movement was being far more restricted. Like, for example, during my first tour, and the first tour was just best, not Bessel them in a bad way, but you just got to do so much, right? During the first tour, Tenth Mountain went into the Pesh River Valley and basically seized control of it, reestablish a number of bases in the area. And we were able to go out with Tenth Mountain. We couldn't go out on the infill. We had to wait like 24 hours so things calmed down.

But, yeah, we went in and spent two weeks on the ground with Tenth Mountain, an amazing experience. I remember working closely with Lieutenant Colonel Cavalli, great guy. So we insert on this mountaintop Abbascar and meet with him. He's like, okay, here's the patrol base, move there, and be safe. So I'll look at the map, but it's like a one mile straight line distance on the map. I'm like, okay, it's an hour long movement, no big deal. It took four hours. And of those four hours, it was three hours of sliding down the side of the mountain,

such that when I finally did get to the patrol base, I was exposed from like my right ankle all the way up to my right hip. BDUs were totally shredded. Yeah, it was awesome. It was awesome. But then, yeah, on a later tour, when I went back as a deputy keep of base, you know, not as exciting movement. much more restricted, you know, and more, you know, management role.

So you're not doing as much. I was going to ask, Del, what's it like supporting a conventional Army infantry unit as a CIA officer? Like, this is a far cry from doing brush passes and Bucharest or something like. I mean, this is a whole different sort of thing. And it's something that for, except for maybe some of the SAD guys that were active in Central America, It's kind of a new thing for the CIA, isn't it? Absolutely. And it's challenging because for a couple of reasons.

It's like conventional U.S. military was in Afghanistan to essentially conduct counterinsurgency against the Taliban, right? That's their job. We're there to be running cross-border operations into Pakistan to find fix and facilitate the finish of al-Qaeda senior leadership. right so our job our mandate our authorities and what we've been told to do is run cross-border operations not conducting intelligence collection inside of afghanistan now that being said if we if we run into it great we will share it immediately and that and that was the normal process like whenever i got any intel that you know could be of use of them i shared with them immediately right We didn't even, you know, get to the point of, well, it depended.

If it was something that could wait a day for it to be pushed up to states and informally published and released, we wait. But if it was like shorter, you know, this is going to happen in the next 12 hours, then I would like take my notes, go find Colonel Covelli or, God, I'm blanking on some of the other guys I work with. But you would go straight to them, tell them, hey, this is what I got. this is who I got it from. This is what we assessed the credibility of it to be. You know, so you constantly share that thing. But that was also by 2005, 2006, really when I was a deputy 2007. I will also say that we learned as an organization over time.

Like Sean Wiswitzer, I know you interviewed him a couple weeks ago. Sean's a good friend. he had served in a chief of base position earlier on in the war and he will also tell you that he was hesitant to share information until basically there was a meeting of a meeting of the minds between him and the ODA team leader and warrant that kind of like they had a robust discussion I'll leave it at that because it's his story not mine but at least for us I could totally understand there was a hesitancy to share information, but also being a former army officer, I also know that these guys need this stuff, right? The challenge really became, and I think most of military leadership understood, it's like, listen, I'm here for this mission, you're here for this mission, right? This is all in the greater good of national security. But yeah, there were, there are, it's always going to be individuals

and a lot of times it comes in personality of that why don't we share this you know because this is a secret stuff like yeah

we're all on the same team man so and in between these tours you got to do some language training also I did I did go through a language

program I will tell you that it was frigate intense. It was as intense as going through the farm because that is your day job, right? In language training, plus there's an expectation you're going to do five hours worth of study, you know, in addition to that. And the expectation is for the language I had, I had to learn it in nine months, right? And that's like from zero to at least level three for you to go out there. What was the language?

Oh, it was Spanish. Come on, they gave you an easy one. They did, they did. And, you know, yeah, I probably should have said that. But anyway, not that important. You know, what I feel bad for was, like, you know, my friend Brian, he had Greek, right? Because he was going to Athens. And what I remember him telling me about Greek was there were 18 different forms of

conjugation for verbs. And I'm like, brother, how in the hell do you do that? But then, like, you have folks who go through learn Russian, learn Chinese. It's like, that's usually like two years, something like that. Yeah, Chinese or Mandarin has something like

nine different intonations or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. But even so, like, Ari, I am not going to try and tell you that Spanish is as hard as, say, you know, Chinese. Obviously, it's not, right? But why the hell are they having you weren't Spanish when they're deploying you to Afghanistan?

Well, this was after my Afghan tours, right? So this was, I was going to a place where they spoke about. Okay, okay, got you. But, you know, for other things like Urdu, Pashtu, that sort of thing, did they send people through those training courses? Yeah, they did, but they did it really. push it as a priority because let's face it, where are you

going to use posthew? You're going to use it in, you know, that's reality. And you end up picking up like a little bit of the language while you're there. So it would be the equivalent of like kitchen pox stew or kitchen erie where, you know, very

basic stuff where you could like ask them, hey, how are you doing? How's your family? Isn't the weather nice today? You know, that sort of thing. but not a, you know, high level, not a high level at all. Leet, do you really want to spend the next 30 years of your career in Afghanistan?

No, do you know. So the next, the next tour was somewhere a little bit more inhabitable? Yeah, and honestly, the nicest assignment of my entire professional career. Like, I had done a tour in South Korea when I was in the Army in the mid-90s, and South Korea is nice, but

Back in the mid-90s, the pollution was insane. Like, every time you'd go out and go for a run, it was like smoking an entire pack of cigarettes. It was just, it was crazy. I hear it's much nicer now, but yeah, it was a European posting, very nice. And it was a good change for the family. Still working various, you know, challenging and interesting target sets.

So that was a great experience. And then after that, went down to, went down to the farm to be an instructor. So that was pretty cool. So they wanted you to get like a traditional case officer tour? Yeah. And the beauty of it is, so, you know, first tour, you know, a line officer, just doing the job. second tour, deputy two base in a war zone, third tour, go back to being more of a, more of a line officer, but at the same time you're, you know, a referent for this and you're a referent for that.

But it's great because then it gives you the opportunity to do things like signal sites and stuff like that. So, you know, at the same time, you're working, you know, lateral activities. You're also working with a liaison. on. So it's a, it's a, it's a good rounding experience, right? Because you don't want individuals to be nothing by war zone type stuff. That's not good for them. It's not good for their career. And even paramilitary operations officers, at certain points in their career, they're going to be pulled out of the cycle of going and doing paramilitary stuff and be sent to a traditional tour so they can get that exposure. You know, that's, that's one of those,

I am not a paramilitary operations officer. However, many of them are very, very good, not simply at the paramilitary stuff, but the operational, the traditional operational stuff as well. So, but yeah, that's very normal. But then, of course, you get promoted to a point where it's like, all right,

now they're making you management. So then you're managing like a, a, you know, a global covert action program from HQ. I tried to approach it from the perspective of, yeah, I'm HQ, but I'm going to go out and try and visit every platform at least once, if I can. Did I get to all of them? No, I didn't get to every one of them. But we try to go out.

And sometimes it would be just to like a site survey, check on things. sometimes it was to deliver, you know, some variant of training. So, and the beauty of that was you're, if you do and you're giving them a training course, you get to spend several days with them one-on-one. You actually get to see who they are, how well they perform. So did that for a couple of years. This is like a, we eight liaison type operations. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And here's what I would say, without going into, details that I can get into. It's really the sort of thing that I think the American people would expect, right? So what do I mean by that? There's going to be certain target, certain issues that we can't

go after for a variety of reasons. Like, you, me, all right, even if we spoke level five near native multiple dialects of Arabic.

Neither one of us looks Arabic. Neither one of us looks Middle Easter. And same thing if you're talking about the Balkans or if you're talking about South America, if you're talking about wherever. Language is important. It's absolutely

critical, but it's more than that. It's understanding the culture. It's understanding the culture. It's understanding the fabric of that society at a level that an outsider is never going to get. Right? So, depending on what the issue is, and we do this for counterterrorism, we do this for counter-narcotics, we do this for a bunch of different things, and we've done it for decades. You partner with the local

liaison because they have people who, it's more than just speaking the language. They know the culture. They know the history. And we work with them, and basically we run them as proxies, as a proxy force to gather information than we can. And that's a critical point. Co-reaction is a lot of things, and sometimes it does have a kinetic or lethal component. But 90% of the time, it's about gathering information for other things to happen, whether it's for a policymaker to make an informed decision, or maybe you're working closely with the liaison on government. They're going to do take action on something.

But, yeah, most often it's about gathering information. And I think, I honestly think that's what the American people would expect of us to figure out a way to get the job done. Yeah. So there you go. I'm talking a lot. No, it's great. You also got involved in the counterintelligence side of things at one point. Yeah, a little bit.

I really can't get into detail at all about that. But, you know, think of it in terms of potentially recruiting. intelligence officers of another service. So, but yeah, I really can't get into that. That's like a pretty high stakes, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure, definitely, because they're like very much taking significant risk in terms of, you know, if they get caught, they're all kinds of screwed.

But I, like, there's, yeah, I remember. This had nothing to do with me, but it's an example of where things can go horribly sideways for like foreign intelligence officers. There was, and this occurred roughly when the time I was over in Europe. There was a Russian foreign intelligence officer who was basically working a series of penetrations of a given service. or not a service per se, but really a government. So he made a mistake. And this is funny because it kind of harkens back to Sean's book about kind of highlighting that the Russian intelligence services are plagued with corruption.

And a lot of times they make horrendous mistakes. in this case the Russian intelligence officer had been basically running penetrations that government and what he would do is he would pick him up in his vehicle and he'd go to a certain place and he park and they have the meeting in the car and then they drive away where the guy made mistake was one he parked his vehicle in the same place literally every meeting with this with this agent right literally the same place problem number two was what he didn't realize was where he was parking was immediately next to an apartment building where a senior member of the

national police force lived so this senior liaison officer would be coming home at night and he would see this diplomatic-plated vehicle in the same location every three weeks and that That only takes, you know, a couple times to happen. And he's like, ah, something's happening. Without getting into details, basically they immediately put that individual under surveillance, both human and technical, basically watched him for an extended period, somewhere between six and 12 months. And then in the course of a weekend, basically wrapped the every penetration he had of that government, was wrapped up and arrested.

And then probably a day or two later, he was identified his person and nangrata and sent home. Wow. Are those the types of operations that like the CIA would engage in, like disrupting Russian intelligence abroad or here maybe? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. We're absolutely going to work with our foreign partners to disrupt, you know, Russian intelligence

operations. When it's, you know, a traditional human operation or if it's, you know, covert influence, whenever we can, wherever we can, we're going to work in this. And the, it's pollen season. And when did the counter WMD stuff come in? Probably around mid-career. That's also something that I really don't want to. get into detail with. What I will tell you is, and it kind of goes back to,

kind of speaks to how we'll approach things like that. In, at least in one of those instances, I had recruited the individual. And to be clear, right, I have a degree in humanity. I do not have a deep scientific background, right? But my job, as an operations officer is literally to handle the operation, right? So I'm focused on things like training the individual, ensuring their communications are robust and secure, the security of the overall operation, making sure that he remains committed to the cause, committed to the relationship with CIA, all of that traditional operation stuff, right? But when it came to having substantive understanding of the science around what this individual had access to.

That way over my head. So what we did in that case was we worked with elements back at HQ and we were able to meet in a third country location where we could bring in a no kidding PhD to be part of the debriefing. So because at the end of the day, like I just cannot, I just cannot. I just don't know, you know. Yeah, I think Jim Lawler talks about this, about, you know, training the intelligence officer to, you know, speak about nuclear fission

and things like this. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And ironically, again, later on in my career, when I was running that community platform, one of the things we focused on was developing a course that was focused on emerging in, and disruptive technologies for that exact reason, because overwhelmingly, when you look at like who becomes operations officers, there's a lot of finance individuals, there's a lot of lawyers,

accountants, the sort of things you'd find at the FBI. Having people with deep scientific background doesn't, I'm not saying that they're not there because I've actually known to operations officers who had degrees in business and advanced degrees. But, most of us don't have that background. So what we'll do is we'll partner with the Directorate of Analysis back at HQ and we'll bring a no kidding PhD to whatever country we need to bring them to so they can sit in the room and have a robust discussion about something that's just going to go over my head. Now I'm still there, I'm still participating, but my part is the management of the meeting,

management of security for communications. I'm making sure the room you're facilitating. I mean if I've had to bring in some kind of surveillance team to put a bubble around the safe house or the hotel or whatever. I'm managing that component as well. But then I'm going to literally use the analyst from back at HQ to help debrief this guy and make sense of it because I'm not going to be able to. Jim's a great guy. I would love to call him a mentor, but we never got to work here. We never got to work together in the agency, but he is, he's an amazing man and a true national treasure.

Yeah. And going back in being a instructor at the farm, you kind of touched upon that a little bit already. But what were you, were you just one of the instructors that kind of like does the source meets and stuff with the students? Like, how did that work? So, you know, like any sort of thing like this, you can approach it where you're just going to do, you know, the bare minimum and kind of it becomes a low-key break assignment. Because the reality is when you live in, when you work for the agency, there is really no such thing as work-life balance, right? That's why I kind of like my post-retirement career as a consultant is. I have a work life balance that I never had before ever.

So to answer your question directly, there are going to be folks who will use it as a break from the grind of their career. And I totally understand that, truly do. And those individuals will be instructors, they'll maybe do some role playing, but they're not going to request to be a referent for anything. They're not going to request to be, you know, chief of a training LMA. And that's fine, you know, but then there's going to be some of us who are going to get more involved in different elements of it. So, you know, you're going to teach classes on, you know, everything from the asset recruitment cycle or the Asian recruitment cycle, depending on, you know, however you want to phrase it, to maybe you want to focus on counterintelligence methodologies or defense against counterintelligence methodology. So it makes it sound a little bit like Hogwarts, but it's things like teaching a student, what do you do when you are driving down a dark road in the middle of the night after an asset meeting and you run into a roadblock? How do you deal with that?

How do you deal with your meeting an agent, you know, hotel room and suddenly there's a knock on the door and they say it's housecum. And there's there's general tips and procedures as to how we we handle that sort of thing. And the reason is they work. I want to tell you that one of the one of the most rewarding emails I got from a student years after he had been a student, he sent me an email one day. He goes, hey, you remember that thing you taught us to do in this circumstance? Well, it happened to me and I did what you told me to do. it works. And I'm like, that is why I told you to do it. But yeah, it's, that's incredibly rewarding. So you may have, you may have officers that specialize in commercial

operations, right, who are kind of leave the curriculum in that direction. Yeah, there's just so many different things. And there's definitely curriculum referents for things like surveillance detection routes. high threat meetings, basically covering the gamut. And then, of course, maybe you become the chief of the operational training base, which is essentially being chief of the home road. I think we also got to mention kind of blew past this, Dell, but during this time, or maybe the first half of your career at the agency,

you were still a reserve officer in the Army. Yeah. Yeah. For anyone who might be considering that, I would highly recommend it against you. Especially during a period where the nations have war. And the reason being is you're trying to battle both things that argumentably should be a full-time career. So there's things like, you know, the Army wants you to do something called ILA, which is intermediate level education, which is kind of the equivalent of getting a master's kind of sort of. And you're trying to do that while you're a full-time CIA operations officer,

kind of hard to do. The worst for it for me was when I was doing Afghan tours. What I would do is I would come home on like an R&R for a couple weeks, And I was like, all, I'm going to pick up a week's worth of military duty while I'm on R&R. Doing military duty on R&R is just dumb, but that's what I did. And one time, I got off the aircraft, the next day reported it to support like a week-long surveillance training exercise. And I made it through the week and collapsed. ended up in the hospital.

And basically, I collapsed and they just didn't know what the hell was wrong with me. And they're like, he's exhausted. You know, he's getting, he's getting through the week chewing stimulants and consuming coffee because he hasn't freaking slept. So after that experience, I basically would attempt to front load as much military duty before I deployed and then pick up the rest of it when I got back. But yeah, you mentioned that. It's like trying to do both of them at the same time.

It's just nuts. The Army did find a way to utilize your newfound civilian skills as an intelligence officer, though, which is interesting. Yeah, there's, basically it's something that I think most of us would expect for once the military. term me to do. And that is, basically, there is a memorandum agreement between the Department of Defense and the agency that essentially allows you to continue your military career as a reservist while you're working for the agency with the understanding and the agreement. If you should be mobilized, you are going to be used in a capacity that is commensurate with your agency, official specialty. So, you know, you could be, you know, maybe you're a logistician in the military,

and that's great. We need we need logisticians, but then you're, you know, an analyst. If you get Moab, they're going to use you as an analyst, not as a logistician, unless it's something, you know, cool like you're an aviator, right? So, so yeah, I was able to do that and basically was used as a operations officer with a J-Soc element for a year. Tremendous, tremendous opportunity. Just really super impressed with everybody I got the opportunity to work with. Yeah, it was fantastic. And then basically, it stayed attached to them.

And I was a unit member for that mobilization tour, but was able to stay associated with them for the rest of my career. we're basically facilitating your training operations and things of that nature. I'd love to ask, you know, because you have this really unique insight, the difference between how J.S.S.K. and the CIA go about collecting intelligence. Is there everything I hear, you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that the CIA kind of is like long-term strategic intelligence, where J-Soc is more like short-term targeting intelligence?

In general terms, yes. that's accurate. However, it really depends on what element you're talking about. Like, so CAG, for example, has its own internal collection capability. For something like that, for CAG, for Deb Gru, it's going to be very short-term, tactically focused. Yeah, I think if your readers were wondering, burn up readers, if your viewers were wondering, what would that look like? If you remember in the movie Blackhawk Down, there's that, seen early on in the movie where hanging out downtown in Mogadishu

and he gets on his bicycle rides away that's what we're talking about JASC operators that are doing close recourse recourse for something so it's very tactical in nature it's very it's high risk to be sure

so yeah a lot of J-Soc is going to do that agency tends to be much more long term that being said there's also certain organizations within J-SOC that will be looking at what they refer to as the third original. So they're looking at things that might be an issue at some point in the next decade or two. And they're basically establishing, you know, a pattern of activity that will facilitate either commercial operations or something like that.

Because sometimes they're commercially covered, sometimes they're doing some other thing. most of it, yes, is going to be very short, fused, tactically focused, but, you know, I assure you there are deeply experienced professionals there that do look at that third Ridgeland. My understanding also is that J-Soc is sometimes the more aggressive of the two, where the CIA is a little more risk-adverse, where the military being the military is more like there's a bit more of that move fast. to break things mentality. Yeah, yeah, that's true, but it is true, but I think it really just depends on the situation. It depends on a bunch of things. It depends on like, what is the purpose of the organization, right?

You know, the military's purpose is to, you know, conduct warfare, and that usually involves breaking shit, right? And if J-Soc comes in, they're going to be there for a relatively short period of time, and they're probably not coming back, or maybe they will be. but it's also very short duration and their specific focus is to execute whatever that mission is. You know, whereas the agency, and actually glad you brought this up, it does take a longer optic in terms of what is it trying to do. It's trying to go in a little bit softer. They've got to maintain the presence. There is, you know, there is concern about equities, right?

because ultimately if you piss off the local service, right, if you do something to upset them, they can make your life a living hell. They can lock you down. They can surround your entire, you know, station, embassy, follow your people home, bumper lock you to the point where you cannot accomplish anything. So we have to look at it from the perspective of, being able to do the job and run the operations and do the mission, not just in the next 72 hours, but, you know, for the next 24 months.

Because the thing is, and Sean actually has a couple good stories about times where liaison, you know, got upset with us for something they perceived that we did. and you know they just made it very very hard to operate for the duration of the time they used in that assignment but again that's his story not mine um but yeah they can they can absolutely make life very difficult and i'm glad you bring it up because you know one of the one of the things people don't get is how small the agency is right um i'm not going to confirm or deny numbers but like let's just say for argument's sake that the whole of the agency is roughly somewhere between one and two infantry divisions, right? I've heard numbers out there, and truthly, I don't know if those numbers are accurate because

I never knew and didn't care to know how big the agency was. But let's just pick a number of, say, 20,000. That 20,000 includes everyone from the director to that brand new officer that just, you know, started duty yesterday, right? Everything in between. But that's also all five directors. So director of operations, director of analysis, directorate of support, science and technology and digital innovation. That's all five directors. When you get down to operations, right, you're really looking at maybe less than a regiment,

maybe two battalions. It's not a big number. And then you take that number and you break down all of the different, you know, occupational specialties went in. You've got so operations officers, your case officers, you got paramilitary operations officers. You had case management officers who are reports officers. Now, those three categories,

they are trained and certified and authorized to conduct operations. But then you've also got staff operations officers, and the targeters. And more often than not, those individuals are not operationally certified, and they don't conduct operations. They absolutely support and they're critical to our success.

But my point here is you keep refining this number down into the number of individuals who can actually run operations is very, very small. We used to say things like there was more FBI agents assigned to Manhattan Island than there were agency officers covering the blows. I think that's a slight exaggeration. I think I was reading Tim Weiner's book, and he was saying how some politician was shocked to find out that the CIA's budget for covert action was under a billion dollars. Or DOD has like billions and billions and billions. And it was just kind of shocking how little they actually had to play with.

Yeah. I mean, we can get more if we need it. But the point I'm driving at here is it's a very limited resource. Um, you, you have a real limited resource. You have a limited number of officers to cover an entire country wherever you are overseas. And we just cannot afford to not play the long game. Um, we can't afford to break, break stuff and, and enrage the local service. Uh, and potentially make our jobs impossible to execute.

It's, it's, it's a really long-winded answer. No, no, no, it's good. I mean, it, that people need to hear some of these things. because like I've had conversations with people here in Brooklyn, you know, normal people. And, you know, they find out I'm a journalist. I cover this and that, blah, blah, blah. And they start telling me that, you know, the CIA installs all of the presidents in Central and South America. Did you know that? And I try to explain to them like, they couldn't do that if they had 10 times the resources that they actually have. And then the other uncomfortable part of the conversation is I hate to break it to you.

but America doesn't really give a fuck about your country as much as you think it does. And that's kind of a difficult conversation to have with some people. No, it's true because, you know, we have this thing called the NIFF, National Intelligence Priorities Framework, right? And the reason why we have that is to articulate and make crystal clear to operators in the field, chiefs of station. This is what you need to focus on. And it breaks it out by country category, but also like themes. So the top of the stack is something like counterterrorism. Then it's like probably weapons of mass destruction.

Then it's like China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, right? There are a long list of things after that. But you know what? Basically what we're focused on more often than not is counterterrorism because you've got to do it. weapons and mass destruction because it is a no kidding, existential threat if they're used. And then the, you know, China, Russia, North Korea, in Iran. And there's plenty of other horrible things that happen.

There really are. You know, human trafficking is, you know, a stain on humanity. But we don't have the bandwidth to do to address that. it's not a national security threat. We just can't. It's just not fair. So, yeah, just kind of elaborating and unpacking what you're saying. You're right.

We don't really care about your country. It's nothing personal. Yeah. We have some priorities. And then you finished out your career. Was it community intelligence? So it basically was a, it was a, It falls underneath the director of operations or it's managed by the director of operations on behalf of director CIA.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's what they call community human. And basically it was a training platform that was ironically mandated by the 9-11 commission report to basically enhance interoperability between various members of the IC. So sometimes that was really educating folks on who everybody else is once they bring on the table, which is a critical, an important thing, right? Because so much of our ability to work together and collaborate effectively is inhibited by not fully understanding what is important, or understanding the culture of other groups, right? So, like, I'll give you an example.

Operations officers, right, you're going to get promoted because there's a requirement for you to recruit an asset in every assignment, right, for the most part. That's something that if you don't do that, if you can't do that, your career is going to flatline and eventually you'll leave. And I've known officers who good people, charming, can handle very well. they could not pull the trigger on recruitment to save their lives. They just couldn't. It was not in their character. And their career is flatlined and they eventually left. But that applies to lots of other organizations as well.

So I don't remember if it was DEA or it might have been the Marshals, but I think it was probably DEA, where in order for a special agent to be promoted, they've got to have X number of. of cases with a wiretap. They've got to close X number of cases every calendar year. The point here is that every organization is going to have metrics and KPIs. And that's not just bureaucratic tomfoolery. That literally has an impact on individuals' personal lives. So when you have a better understanding of that,

of what is, you know, what's weighing on the individual across the table for you, it's more, you get more productive collaboration, right? And the ironic, the irony is we will spend so much time training you to, you know, to leverage empathy and to focus on understanding what motivates a source that you want to recruit some penetration. And yet a lot of times we struggle to apply that same mindset to the people that work. So there was a lot of that. We also did some specialty courses. We did one that was focused on emerging and disruptive technology, which was incredibly, you know, eye-opening. I remember when we initially did that course, we were talking about quantum computing.

Quantum computing was theoretical at that time, and then like a couple years later when I was taking my son to visit universities, and we were at RIT up in New York, And it's like, oh, here's our quantum computer. I'm like, what? You have a computer? And they're not commonplace at this point, but there's a lot of. But yeah, that whole thing was to at least give an operations officer or other core collector a baseline understanding of a given technology such that they could at least begin the process of connecting with and assessing and evaluating.

somebody for potential recruit. Yeah, I can see it. I just recently finished this book written by a de facto. I think he was the deputy head of the Russian bio-weapons program. And Ken Alebeck is his name. And he, uh, oh, you know that, dude? Oh, yeah. I don't know him personally, but I've, like, I've read, like, I think all of this for us.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it's interesting the way he, like, I mean, the book, It's called biohazard is really fascinating. But then also when he gets to the United States and he's being debriefed every day and he's like, you know, a lot of these people have no idea what I'm talking about.

Like they don't really understand the dangers of what we were working on. Oh, oh, for sure, for sure. Yeah, when earlier on in my career, when I was on the analytical side, and I handled some things in a certain countries a WMD portfolio, but yeah, Alibek was required reading. There was also like familiarization training.

And, you know, the irony of it was when the pandemic kicked off, I'm looking at it with all of that stuff in my head, right? You know, because people were commencing about like, you know, their movement being restricted and not having school and not being able to play sports. And I'm like, if this was like smallpox or weaponized tularemia, we would be stacking bodies in the street. It would fucking overwhelm our ability to deal with it. So, yeah, Alaback, his books are, I'm not going to say they're good reading because they're horrifying. But once that knowledge is in your head, you will see the world in a different life.

Yeah. And so you cycle out of the reserves in 2009 and then you retire five years ago. So I guess kind of on the tail end of the pandemic. Yeah. How's retirement been treated? It was one of those things that to be brutally honest with you and with your viewers, I would still be doing the job because I loved it. I love the mission.

I love the people. You don't always love the agency. I mean, it's got a great, it's got a great cafeteria, an amazing gift shop. But not really. You do it for the mission and the people, right? But my son was like, dad, I really want to finish school here. And at that point in time, basically, I was being told by HQ, it's like, listen, it's either time for you to come back and take a management degree or a management position, you know,

in headquarters or go back overseas and take. a field game. I was just like, I can't do that. So it was time to wrap it up. And I don't regret it. I mean, I missed the job. I miss the mission and the people every day. But, you know, my son, my son finished out high school with as captain of the football team, captain of the wrestling team, captain of his club rugby team. He's a plea at West Point. He made the varsity. He made the varsity squad, you know, first semester as a plebe. He's doing fantastic. My older son, he's going to graduate from a really good school in Virginia, you know, at the end of the year.

At the end of the day, it's like at a certain point you can't make this stuff work. Yeah, yeah. And there it is. Yeah. You want to set your kids up for success, and it sounds like they're doing pretty well now. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. How has retirement been treating you personally and professionally?

What have you been up to the last couple years? So my day job is I work as a strategic implementation consultant. So that's a lot of project management, change management, process improvement. It's with a company called Greencastle. Green Castle, it's a good, it's a good outfit. What's interesting about it is it's 100% veteran owner and operated. So they literally will not look at your resume if you're not a veteran. So that's been a really interesting experience because, you know, like you spent your career,

your rangers in SF, right? And you have an optic. This is what the Army is. It's what the military is. You know, and I had my career. So I look at it. This is what your, you know, life of services. And then you start meeting every other member of the military. And you're like, oh, wow. It's a much bigger universe than I thought.

But separate from that, I've been writing, kind of writing military espionage type stuff, or really more espionage. If I were to describe it, I would describe it as if, Jean Lique Rey wrote Saccario. So looking for that, that gritty realism, but at the same time, I want to be able to write something that if one of my former colleagues picked it up and looked at it, they would be like, you know, yeah, that's good stuff. You don't want them to say this is garbage.

But also with a healthy dose of kind of Kurt Vonnegut-esque humor, you and I were talking earlier today about, You know, there's that reality of when you're in the service, whether it's the military or the agency, there's a distinct tendency to have that, to mess with your teammates, to get under their skin, to screw with them. And I personally have brought their wives into the conversation. It's like, you know, wait. The woman you refer to is your sweet boo-boo? She let you leave the house wearing that? What the hell?

Is she got vision problems? Yeah, you know, and Gallo's humor, you know, it's part of it. But I think it also offsets, you know, the other elements, the darker elements of those types of stories. But yeah, it's coming along. I've been working with a great agent. Have the interest of a significant, let me rewind that a second. Been working with a great editor. have the attention of a really important agent,

and hopefully we will be getting something in front of a publisher later on this year. That's awesome. And I know that's vague, but you being a soon-to-be public, well, no, you are a published author, but you're about to be a published fiction author. Yes. You know that the whole thing about the industry is, it's like they treat that stuff like it's top secret special compartmentalized information you cannot you know yeah it's it's just bad but public publishing is a harsh mistress uh i i i can say they've

never really asked me i think you know if i can be honest i think the whole reason why i was given a book deal was because they knew i would be a loudmouth and talk about it a lot on podcasts Well, I'm excited about it for a couple reasons. One, I read your first book, and that was very cool because, you know, being assigned to Fort Bragg for five years, you know, I totally remember certain physical places at Fort Bragg that you kind of spoke about in your stories. Like when one of those things you talked about in the first book was, you know, Hey-ho insertions with man-portable tactical nukes. And I remember the place where those were supposedly stored. Oh, yeah, on Main Post.

Yeah, yeah. And I remember being out for a run with a couple of my guys. And they're like, hey, you know what they used to do over that building? Yeah, it's like, that's where they kept the nukes. like, oh, wow, it's kind of cool. But, yeah, I'm excited because, you know, kind of what you kind of shared about the, you know, most dangerous man about how it kind of, it's going to focus on a character or a protagonist more representational of the Ranger Regiment.

Yeah, yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah, thanks, man. I'm looking forward to seeing your book when it gets out there. It sounds like, you know, we're a little ways out, but we'll have you back when it's closer. Oh, for sure. for sure brother and i will i will definitely let you know when that you know comes is closer to being reality yeah yeah um well so a few things as we kind of wrap things up here um some recent

controversies involving the cia i wanted to ask you about this cat that had uh you know however many dozens of gold bars in his home that he liberated from the cia's coffers Well, so a little bit about that. What that is is basically non-traditional remuneration, right? So obviously we pay assets and more often than that you're going to pay them in cash, right? And either it's going to be the cash that's native to that country or maybe a regional currency. Sometimes maybe you pay them in euros, potentially in dollars, but there's problems with that, right? because they can be traceable.

Even if you go through the process of cleaning that money, you're still taking a degree of risk. In some cases, we may, depending on the amount of remuneration, facilitate it through other means. So in this case, they're talking about diamonds and gold and luxury watches. But I would say that more often that non-traditional remuneration is going to be things like getting

them access to health care that they need that they can't get in their country. Maybe it's for them, maybe it's for their mother or spouse or what have you. And it could be, you know, facilitating some kind of scholarship, if you will, so their children can go to the school that they want them to go to. The thing I would say about this situation is it's interesting because, you know, the first thing people ask it's like, what is the agency, how like a warehouse, and diamonds and gold. I literally don't know and never cared because if I needed something like that, I would just say, I would send in a requisition report saying, I need to get me this.

And they'd figure it out. Here's the thing, though. If it, if it was acquired from the agency, it's not a good thing, but it could be worse. And what I mean by that is my understanding what's been in the news is that this was a result of counterintelligence investigation, right? So if this had been discovered in his house and it couldn't be traced back to the agency, then I would be

terrified because that is a lot of remuneration. I'd want to know, was he working for the Russians, the Chinese, or who and what he'd sell? So that's actually a good thing that it's not that. But I think the

The bigger issue becomes, apparently this was acquired in like a period of like a year to a year and a half. So I've got to wonder if he's the only person who involves. And when I say that, it would be one thing if you have a situation with an asset or some kind of entity where, you know, you're paying them, you know, three bars of gold a month, right? That's a ridiculous amount of money, but whatever. and you're going to actually give him only two and you're going to hold on to one. Right. Even with that, that would take a really long time to pilfer the amount that, you know, supposedly is in the news. So it kind of leads me to believe that, one, you know, all of this is alleged.

It's eventually going to come out in the wash. But it just strikes me that it just doesn't seem realistic that he did this on his own. I mean, it's a lot of cheddar to walk out the door with, for sure. But I mean, what you're alluding to is that there are some checks and balances in even covert, you know, accounting or finance, so to speak, that you as a CIA officer can't just like walk in and take the gold bars out without signing for them or whatever the accountability mechanisms are. There's a requisition process, you know, that you have to go through.

There's regular accounting. like every month you have to account for what you spent on your revolving fund right so you get a revolving fund it's you know x amount of money depending on where you are do you take contacts out for dinner and cocktails or whatever you know if you're going to pay an asset that may be a separate account but you have to record all and like literally when you pay an asset they're going to sign a piece of paperwork they're going to you know it's going to say Mickey mouse or you know Mickey Rooney or it's not going to be their name but like literally I am required to provide receipts Wow so put it next.

Yeah that's real and that's what you'd expect. So how on the devil he walked out with all of that money and diamonds and watches is mind-boggling so either the system utterly failed or other people could potentially be involved. But again, I don't know, but it is deeply concerning. What a heist. Yeah. No kidding.

Crazy. Well, Del, anything else you want to hit up before we get going tonight? Really appreciate it. I think this is a great interview. Hey, I loved it. Great. I think one of the reasons why I love doing these things is, you know, the agency is a secret intelligence organization operating in an open society, right?

Right. And unfortunately, we don't, we can't really do press conferences, right? I mean, we've done a couple, right? But those are outliers. One of the things I learned from working with the Bureau periodically was, what is the, the Bureau's center of gravity, right? It's the faith and confidence of the American people. That's why they do press conferences, right? It's not, you know, for the glory at all that they need to be transparent as best they can. And they've got to maintain the commitment to the

United States people so that the people of the United States have full faith and confidence in them. Because if they ever lose that, they're dead in the water. we are the agency on the other hand really can't do that because the moment you step in front of a camera your cover is burned and it's not it's like losing i'm not going to say that but it's just gone it's just gone it's over and so all the time all the effort all the resources that went into building that cover you know as a rule we just don't do it well so an opportunity like this to kind of get out there and talk about the agency I think it's important. It's an honor. And bluntly, the one thing I'd let people, what I'd like people to lead with is the understanding that this, the people that join the agency are the same people that serve in uniform. They're the same people that join the FBI and the Marshal Service and our local police and firefighters and first responders. They're all the same people. They're people that have chosen to serve something greater than themselves. Do we sometimes make

mistakes? Do we sometimes like cause more problems? Yeah. But for the most part, we're people that just want to serve something greater than themselves. And I think we're blessed and incredibly fortunate to have folks like that. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Del, thank you for doing this, man. I really appreciate it. And thank you everyone who joined us tonight. And we will see you next week. Take care.

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