The Team House - From the Ranger Regiment to Planning the Bin Laden Raid at CIA | Aaron Brown | Ep. 194

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

Aaron has over two decades of experience in law enforcement, Army Special Operations, and national security, including as a senior operations officer and field leader at the Central Intelligence Agency. Aaron is a proven problem solver and innovator, with experience leading complex, dynamic, and multimillion dollar intelligence missions across the globe, in war zones, austere environments, throughout the Near East, Eastern Europe, and Asia. Aaron supported CIA’s response to the Khowst Base bombing, one of the deadliest events in CIA history, and served as a leadership executive assistant during the Usama bin Ladin operation, one of CIA's greatest successes.  Aaron is a recognized expert in the exponential risk of surveillance technology. He has advised numerous intelligence community programs about such risks and developed advanced solutions for this rapidly growing threat–hundreds have attended his sensitive talks on technology, including CIA executives and senior leaders from the Special Operations community. Aaron‘s final role at CIA was as Deputy Chief of Operations for Southeast Asia, where he gained deep regional expertise. He has earned numerous Meritorious Unit Citations, 14 other CIA Awards, and the 2015 CIA Director’s Award for Mission Impact in a Foreign Language (Arabic). ​ Aaron currently works as a senior director at an open source intelligence company he helped found. He helps private industry protect themselves from foreign nation state adversaries like China and Russia. He also helped found a nonprofit working to protect the U.S.’s critical infrastructure and technological edge. He advises DoD, CIA, the National Security Council, Department of Commerce, and numerous big tech companies, and is a guest lecturer at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service.  Check out Aaron here: ⬇️ https://www.undersimplified.org/undersimplified-podcast.html Today's Sponsors: BetterHelp ⬇️ https://BetterHelp.com/TEAMHOUSE ● If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. ● Visit https://BetterHelp.com/TEAMHOUSE today to get 10% off your first month. Groove Life ⬇️ https://GROOVELIFE.com/TEAMHOUSE It's time to bring your wallet & belt game into the 21st century.  Head to https://GROOVELIFE.com/TEAMHOUSE for 20% off ALL Groovelife products! Thank you for supporting the companies that support the show ! To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #cia #armyrangers #osamabinladenBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, covert ops, espionage, the team house, with your hosts, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 194 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park. And our guest tonight is Aaron Brown. Aaron

served in the 75th Ranger Regiment and in the Central Intelligence Agency. I had a lot of experience in the Middle East, including part in the planning of the Van Laudan raid. So there's really a lot to talk about tonight. We'll get to as much of it as we can. Aaron,

thank you for joining us tonight on the show. Yeah, guys. Thank you very much. be here. Yeah, dude. You know, could you start off by telling us a little bit about, you know, how you grew up and what sort of your path was towards, uh, towards initially military service? Yeah, I had a fairly, uh, standard childhood in the Midwest. Uh, and then, you know, heading into high school, I was not a very good student. In fact, I, I think I would consider myself, uh, having been a terrible student. I barely made it out of high school. I think, uh, I haven't told the, the GPA story in a while, but I, uh, I, I think, uh, I haven't told the, the GPA story in a while,

if I was above a 2.0, that would have been a miracle. And so that landed me on track toward the army. And I went into originally a Navy recruiter officer. I said, hey, I really want to be a Navy seal. And they said, well, you know, there's quite a bit of swimming involved in that. I said, well, no, no swimming, please. Thank you very much. And they said, the Army's recruitment officers right down the hall. So I went down there. I said, I wanted to be a Navy SEAL, but they said there's a lot of swimming and he said okay then you you want to be an army ranger and so uh i signed up and uh you know it was late 90s so it was a very a very peaceful time to go into the army and yeah i went in and uh managed to make it through the ranger

indoctrination program at that time and went on to first ranger battalion in uh late 97 cool uh as a 11 bravo 11 trouble. Yep. Cool. So what was it like in First Ranger Battalion when you first got there? Yeah, I imagine this story. I'm thinking right now, I don't know if I've ever heard anyone tell the original arrival of a Ranger to Ranger Battalion on your program before, too. That's a story, I'm sure, well-worn out here. But it wasn't much different. I think the late 90s were somewhat unique because there hadn't been any type of combat or conflict in quite some time with the exception of third battalion going into Mogadishu in 93.

And we, you know, Rangers really looked at that as a watershed moment in the transition from sort of the Vietnam era to what was going to be the new era, though we didn't know exactly how that was going to turn out. It definitely started Rangers and special operations thinking about, you know, how the world had changed and how dusty fights and backwater places were going to be the new norm. And so, yeah, anyway, you arrived to Ranger Battalion. as a new private, and it is a hair-raising experience. I haven't thought about that in quite some time, so I'm dredging it up right now, but you sort of arrived at a battalion and you're the new person,

and there's quite a bit of additional indoctrination than that happens at that point, right? I remember some of the stories. I didn't, fortunately, I didn't have to deal with this too much. I do remember, though, others having to go through what was, I think, then considered hardening of young Rangers. And now is, I think, called hazing. Though we could debate that. Physical correction. Motivational. Yeah.

I was okay with the physical correction was okay. I think the mental part was, you know, the more challenging part. I don't know if this is apocryphal or not, but one of you guys might be able to tell me this. but I remember the story being told that the incident that I think it was, I can't remember what movie it was, where the individual is signing up to be a member of a fraternity and they have him, you know, tie a cinder block to some sensitive parts. And they make it seem like the rope is very short. And then he stands on the top of the building.

He throws the cinder block off and you think that, you know, the rope is going to run out long before the cinder block hits the ground. I believe that they actually did that at 2nd Battalion for a while in the early. in the early 90s. And one very brave ranger or very dumb ranger decided that it would be better to follow that cinder block off the second floor building than find out what was at the end of that rope. And that changed a little bit from there.

So we didn't have to deal with anything quite like that. But that was a wake-up moment when you arrived to Ranger Bintan and you see all these folks who, you know, for a young person like me at that time, you really, you've built up that point. place in your mind quite a bit by the time you get there. And it's almost mythical in status. And you really then assign these myths to those folks when you arrive. And once you're there and you're sort of kind of part of the team, yeah, it's an amazing experience. It was definitely formative for me. I was 18 when I arrived to First Battalion and I was still very fresh. And

you know, when I left there, I was 21 and life-changing experience for me. Certainly set me on a path to much greater successful life than I would have had otherwise. What was your perception at that point? I mean, what were you guys training for? What was the mission that you thought? I mean, maybe nobody really knew what the big Mish was that was actually coming in the near future. But I mean, what was sort of the attitude of the vibe in Ranger Battalion at that time? Yeah.

So, you know, when I first got there in late 97, it was, there was quite a bit of the, training effect from Black Octum and Mogadishu. So a lot of the training events that we did revolved around, you know, helo insertions into, you know, farmlands and then walking up onto, you know, fake cities, effectively mount cities. Right. As you guys know them, right? So these cities that are built by the military to do close quarters combat.

And so we must have done helicopter insertion, walk, two, three, three, thousand meters onto one of these objectives, take down the buildings, you know, rescue the hostage or pull out the, you know, innocent civilians in a country where they no longer want to be or some version of that. And, you know, that was, I remember thinking at that time, you know, I wasn't really sure that we were ever going to do anything like that. And then in August of 98, which was less than a year from my arrival, but after I had gone to, or while I was in Ranger school. Actually, this happened. I think it was in Mountain Space when this happened.

The bombings in Africa, the two embassy bombings in Africa that ended up being, you know, Al-Qaeda's coming out attacks happened. And, you know, at that time, we all sort of thought, well, this is it. Now we're, you know, we're off to war. And those of us who were in Ranger School, I remember

we were plotting our escape from Ranger School because we were so scared, you know, as young Rangers at that time, all we wanted to do was go to a Conflict, right, go to a combat zone. And here we are stuck in Ranger School. We were certain that the battalions were going to leave without us and that the only way we would make it is if we quit and, you know, hitchhiked back to our

battalions, I guess. I don't remember exactly what I thought process there was. It was a bad one, a really bad thought process, obviously, especially in hindsight. It would have been bad had they been deploying, but it was certainly bad because they obviously did not deploy at that time. And I thought about this story not that long ago, and I can't remember other than probably just fear of getting in trouble why we didn't actually execute that that operation to escape. But clearly we were right not to because, of course, that was followed up with cruise missiles

into Afghanistan and not a raid force, even though there was planning. And one of the interesting features of my career was I got to look back through a lot of the old information on those time periods, you know, from a higher classification level and see what was actually happening behind the scenes because we did spin up to deploy numerous times at that time period. I mean, we were locked down. It seemed like every other month at that point and doing the same thing over and over again. I must have taken down bin Laden's compound in the late 90s 100 times in 20 different ways.

And so that was all it was from 1998, August 98 until I got out. It was, we were going after bin Laden the whole time. But at that point, I didn't really know who bin Laden was. I mean, we knew he was out there. We got the briefing on him, but it wasn't something. I never really thought about it. I didn't go back to the barracks and think, oh, we might have to go after Bin Laden at some point during my time.

It was like the, you know, it was the briefing we received before whatever, you know, training mission we were doing. But then after the training mission was over, I feel like I mostly forgot that that was even the guy or the group that we were thinking about that time. It's really funny to think back to some of that stuff because when I was in Ranger Battalion, even though it was post 9-11, I remember training for a number of scenarios where we were targeting Mano Hohoi in Colombia. He was the FARC leader. And that mission never happened for us. But now I'm kind of, you know, journalistically revisiting that topic and, you know, kind of what actually happened down there. But yeah, it's a lot of people, it's interesting that you bring

this up. A lot of people don't understand, like, how close we come right up to the precipice. Like, they were going to deploy Ranger, Italian. Yeah, Haiti is a perfect example. But also when they cross the red line, Obama's red line. And that got crossed, like, we came like that close to sending the boys in. Yeah. No, I mean, that's, you know, that's a feature of the regiment, right? That's why it's kept the way that it's kept and the reason that they keep those, you know, those deployment cycles so tight, right?

You got to have a force that you can deploy on a moment's notice really anywhere. And, you know, with an entire, you know, logistics train and supply train and all the facets that you need to deploy a force of that size really on its own. And yeah, I didn't, you know, I got out as an E5 and even as an E5, I didn't have any concept of what went into that, right? You know, I knew about my fire team. I knew about the squad. I knew about the platoon.

I had a hazy understanding of how a company worked, but a battalion, no, you know, if there were other companies there, I'd heard there were other companies in this time, I had not visited them. Right, right. Yeah. Is that why you ended up kind of pop and smoke from Ranger Battalion? You're getting spun up all these times, but nothing happens. Yeah, no, absolutely.

So, you know, it was, I got out in November 2000. And, you know, at that time, I don't remember what the reenlistment rates were, but they were, they were low. And, you know, a lot of folks didn't reenlist. And so it wasn't, it wasn't expected at that time that you were going to reenlist. You know, there were great bonuses great for, you know, a 21-year-old D-5. But I remember that. And then, but that was exactly my thought. I thought.

I said, we're never going anywhere. you know we already had all of these opportunities to go somewhere and if we're not going for that stuff you know then maybe we're not going i had eyes on you know something like going to delta selection but that time i was only 21 and you know that that's 25 was the cutoff then i think still is the at that at that time it was like you know platoon sergeants it was like relatively senior guys who went to selection right and when an e6 went they almost never passed the first time right yeah it was e7s you're right buttoin sergeants it was you're right butoon sergeants it go back and then make it. And that's exactly who made it around that time. I had a pretty good buddy

who I think ended up going up as an E6. But it was just before September 11th that he ended up there and he's actually been up there ever since. But a stud, like just one of those people where you're like that person comes from a different planet. Yeah, yeah. Right guy for the job. I was throwing up at, you know, 13 minutes at two miles and like, you know, getting across the finish line by hooker by crook and you know he was like breezing in it like nine minutes and then like you know like hitting the gym right right yeah it's funny because i was i was in second bat at the same time you were in first bat and i remember that time from 97 2000 you'd get spun up like nobody thought i personally thought i know a lot of you know my buddies thought there's never

going to be another war like like rangers we don't really have a job anymore and it's exactly what I thought exactly you know and and a lot of guys left and it's funny because so many of those guys that left from 2000 2001 tried to go right back in um you know yeah shit like what am i doing that was me uh for sure and yeah i have to remind myself uh if but did i truly get talked out of it or did i allow myself to be talked out of it because i over the last um 20 years or so you know I think I've decided that I'm actually a pretty big coward. You know, I've been putting a lot of positions where I've never been into combat scenario or at least, you know, where I'm being fired upon or have to do any of the firing, you know,

indirect fire and all of that stuff is very different. But I have been in a couple of indirect fire incidents or at least nearby incidents. And I remember thinking, I'm like, I don't know that I ever had the courage. I think no one ever had to put me into a scenario where I had to show how big of a coward I am. That never happened to me. But yeah, that's the same thing. September 11th happened, I was in college. And I remember watching it and thinking, I was only a semester in.

And so I thought, okay, well, now I got to figure out how to get back in. And I had a very lucky phone call, more than one, with my old platoon sergeant at that time. And, yeah, I told him what my thinking was. And he was probably right, though some people did make it all the way back to battalion at that time. And a lot of people didn't re-enlisted and didn't make it all the way back. Ultimately, most of them got there that wanted to, but they didn't make the first deployment, which was their goal. And they ended up doing, you know, menial work for the first couple of deployments.

And that was a depressing event for them. And I think it would have been for me too. But anyway, he told me to stay the course. I'd already decided after September 11th, I was going to study Arabic and really get into this a cultural understanding of what we were up against and what we needed to know to really understand and how we got into this position. And he just coached me and said, look, this is going to last a long, long time.

Very prescient for what was then probably a 30-year-old platoon sergeant. Yeah, yeah. And he said, yeah, just stick it out and stay the course. You're going to get a chance to get into this. And you'll probably get into it at a better point if you just stick around. It was probably like phone call five. I was like, all right, I'll see what happens here. Yeah, that was some sage wisdom, you know, in retrospect.

So what was your path forward from there? So that story fortunately and actually unfortunately continues on. So fast forward to March 2002. And my Patoon, you guys I'm sure know this story quite well, Neil Roberts from SEAL Team 6, fell out of the helicopter in Tucker Gar. And I haven't told us one a little while. So let's see if I can get through it. So Tucker Gar happens.

Neil Roberts falls out. And my Patoon is the QRF. for that. So, you know, and I'm sure most of your audience knows at this point, that, you know, from November of 2000 to March, 2002, not a lot of turnover had really happened. So it was pretty much still all the same folks that I knew with a couple of exceptions. Well, they got called up one talk, so half the platoon got called up to go up there. And you guys, I'm sure know the story, right? And the helicopter ends up getting a little disoriented on the way up to try and find Roberts and gets turned around. And ends up landing pretty much right on the Taliban objective at that point and opens the ramp into crucifire right into the ramp. And two of my good friends, Mark Anderson and Brad Croce were killed instantly before they even got off the bird. And Mark Anderson was my assistant gunner and ended up taking over my gun after I got out of weapons squad. And then Brad Crows took over my team when I was a team leader. So I left and he moved up into my team leader slot.

So, and then Matt Commons was also killed from First Beach, and I didn't know Matt, Matt came in after I left. And then those guys, of course, fought unbelievably valiantly. You know, some amazing combat stories came out of that fight. One of my, one of the privates from my team, Pazdur, I remember this time, was it was just one of those privates where you're like, man, I've got to spend a lot of time with this guy. Like he's, you know, it's always forgetting something.

You know, he's putting a thing down over there when it should be over here. He's standard private stuff. And, you know, I got to hear this story straight from him. I heard his version of the story, which was very humble. And I heard the story of the folks who were around him when he picked up the gun. And it basically got off the bird. You know, Mark his gunners down on the ground. And he picks up the gun and gets off the bird and starts laying down fire.

And he earned the Silver Star for that act. And I remember seeing him at a bar, you know, years later. And he comes up to me and he says, hey, Sergeant, you know, How's it going? I was like, no, no, no. No. You do not call me sergeant at this point. You can call me Aaron and a lot of other names if you want to.

But you displayed uncommon valor on that battlefield. And for all the things that I thought about you when you were a private, which, again, he was a good private. Like, he wasn't, you know, you know how it is when you're like a, yeah, you're a gun team leader and you got a private. Like, of course, I made the same mistakes and didn't remember that I was making those stakes about myself. And yeah, of course, he just shined on the battlefield there and certainly saved some of his comrades' lives there.

And there's 100 stories just like that from that whole group. I'm doing a disservice. One of them is going to watch this and be like, oh, he mentioned Pazder, but not, you know, these other ones. I mean, it was just great. The other chalk ended up, you know, having to infill as well because those guys obviously got pinned down. And they infilled the second chalk and those guys had to walk up the side of a mountain. And what I, you know, it was way steep snow. so so hard was that March that they ended up flinging their body armor over the side of the

mountain in order to destroy it and not leave for the enemy but also so they could make the rest of the hike and I mean you could just imagine what what agony that must have been and then you get up there to find some of their buddies have been killed and that they had been in a pretty heavy firefight so that happens in March 2002 and I get woke up woken up in the middle of the night by another ranger buddy who was out and then ended up going back in and it's about to retire in under a month right now. So this is a really interesting way that life goes. He called me in the middle of the night and let me know those guys were killed. And we all got together and flew down for the funerals in Florida. Two of them were buried in Florida, Mark and Brad.

And so we went to one funeral in one week. And that was one of the first funerals that President Bush attended because it was one of the first true combat engagements of the war where multiple people died. And so it was a major event. And I saw that platoon sergeant down there. He had gotten, he had moved on from First Battalion at that time. So he wasn't downrange with these guys. And we had a long talk about how he, you know, potentially saved me from having to display my common, my common non-valor, whatever the opposite of uncommon valor is, as I would have probably crouched under the helicopter and waited for the situation to die down a bit. But anyway, so yeah, so that that put me then on the true path to like, okay, this is, I got it again and I got to focus on this.

And I moved out from there and to study Arabic. And I did a year in Cairo at the Arabic Language Institute and finished up my degree overseas in Egypt and then went on the path towards CIA. Dave, you give a shout out. Do you have the copy for BetterHelp? I do. Hey, so one of our sponsors tonight, we appreciate it is Better Help. look guys anybody who's you know been in combat and even people who haven't everybody needs help sometimes for a variety of things not just post-traumatic stress but anxiety all types of things

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That's like funeral crashing. Yeah, so like if you want to pick up chicks, go to groovelife.com slash team house. That only, that gimmick only works in military towns, by the way. So back to you, Aaron. You graduate from college. You have this major in Arabic. How did you get into the agency?

Do you just get on the website, submit an application? I mean, how did that work for you? And the next day you were in, right? Yeah. Yeah, all up until that last part is correct. Yeah. So, no, yeah, I was a very straightforward website hire. I knew I wanted to go.

And, yeah, I got on there and filled out the application. And, yeah, it took almost two years to get all the way in the door. That was a heavy recruitment time. So that was at the time, you know, if you're doing some of the math here, like a lot of people who decided they wanted to go in the CIA because of September 11th had to complete like me, either college or make some transitions in their life and then move towards that that recruitment cycle. So that was the height of agency recruitment actually in history. And it's never, it peaks then and some other historical event, which hopefully won't happen, but would have to happen for, I think. get to go ever to get back to those numbers yeah it peaked when i came in so it was a very busy time to try and get inside uh the CIA and what what did you do in that in that interim two years yeah so i got

i got lucky i uh i ended up knowing a a local police lieutenant uh where i was and he you know it was known that that that time applications were taking up to two years and so he said well if you can give us a year on the police department, we can send you to the police academy in Wisconsin where Wisconsin has a program where local police departments, when they're under-serviced, can use state grants to send people to the police academy. So it doesn't cost the local department any money. And my only agreement, which I didn't know at the time, what it was going to get me into was I had to agree to be essentially a part-time police officer where I would just take the shifts of officers who called out or, you know, if they needed another officer on duty for whatever reason,

you know, some kind of event in the city or, you know, they expected something to happen overnight, anything like that. And I was like, yeah, this sounds cool. And so, of course, as soon as I sort of made it known that I was doing this, every department in that little area was in need of my services. And so I worked at one point for four different municipalities, four different departments. So the sheriff's department as a 911 dispatcher and a jailer. That was really interesting.

and then patrol in the county, and then the local PD that was the county seat, and then another PD that was also located in the county that was somewhat smaller. So I ended up going back to Velcro patches. So I would go from sometimes one shift in one municipality to a shift in another municipality, and I would just change the badge and the patches on my uniform and go check into a different squad car. So I worked my tail off,

but it was just absolutely an amazing time. Were you still making that OT going from precinct to precinct? No. So because I was technically, part-time, right? I was working an enormous amount of hours and because I would take any shifts. So anything that popped up. So if it was like, and we need someone in the jail, you know, at 8 a.m., I would show up to the jail. I'd work a shift in the jail. And the jail was not jail in 9-1-1. So you threw an eight-hour shift. You spent, you know, half your time in both seats.

And then I would go from that to a patrol later in the evening and then potentially, you know, go home and sleep and start it over again. It was awesome. It was amazing time. Once you're attached to a sheriff's department in a place like that. You're really, you're a sheriff's deputy before you're anything else. And they certainly treated me like that. I felt like I was part of the team. And yeah, it was it was a good time. I learned so much. What happens when you get that envelope in the mail with that phone call and they're like, okay, yeah, we want you. You need to get your ass to Virginia. Yeah, that's a strange event, right? That's equally strange compared to showing up to arrange your battalion and but different in almost every other way. And that's exactly what happens.

right you get the envelope you called you called the number they give you some instructions they tell you where to show up uh and then you show up yeah it was i mean for me that was in an extraordinarily exciting time uh i i really wanted to do that job i was looking forward to you know essentially getting in the mix with all the things that was happening all the things that were happening at that time it was still the height of you know the the the war on terror and the deployments to all the places and i felt like it was time to to get to work on some these things so yeah showing up, going through the gate, going in the bubble. It's just like all those things you do in your life, that one's etched in my mind for all

time. I can still sort of take myself back there and kind of feel that excitement and what happened. You know, it's now a long time ago since I did that. I can't believe how long ago it is. And yeah, it's right there for me to recall. So now, yeah, I'm very proud. Having been a ranger, did you like apply to the, to like the paramilitary aspect? or did you go like the traditional case officer route?

How did that work for you? Yeah, I did. I applied to the paramilitary route at that time. And that's where I thought I was going to go. And actually all the way up until I arrived to CIA, that's the route that I thought I was going. But again, at least me, I didn't have, I didn't know anybody who was in CIA.

I didn't ever have a chance to talk to anybody. So I knew very little about what that meant compared to any of the other things. Right. I didn't really know other than whatever the little blurb was. you know, on the website and then what you could read about in some of the other places, but I didn't really know. But when I showed up, they had just changed the policy at that time that if you wanted to go to the paramilitary out.

Because, of course, this is also the peak of paramilitary recruitment, too, paramilitary recruitment. So they were getting a lot of amazing candidates, of which I was not one. So what they were looking for at that time was people who had combat experience, because there were a lot of people at that point that had combat experience in those engagements, those early engagements in Afghanistan and the mid-engagement, really, in Afghanistan. So they decided that paramilitary officers at that time, they wanted to have at least some combat experience, and I did not have that. And then, you know, like I look back on much of my career, and this was one of many examples

of where fate intervened and made a decision on my behalf that was just an absolutely fantastic decision. I did not have any, I was not meant to be a paramilitary officer. My personality isn't necessarily suited to it. what I wanted to do was not that once I finally really understood what it was. I mean, I would have had they offered me like, hey, you can go be a paramilitary officer for six months. I would have probably been very happy to do that, but I would have wanted to cycle back to what I actually did for the duration of my career. So when you showed up, you thought you were going to be a paramilitary officer

and you show, they say no, but you've gone through this process, so you're still going to be a case officer. Exactly right. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. Yeah, I was pretty. disappointed. I went and complained. They talked to me very nicely, but said, no chance. Like, this is how we're doing, doing it right now. And you're going to go this other route. And, yeah, I just decided that was okay and moved along. And in hindsight, it was, yeah, fantastic that that's how that played out. What was that other route where they signed you? Yeah, so just case officer. So, yeah, so, you know, I guess not just case officer. That's how I think about it, right? But I mean, yeah, so you go the case officer route.

So, you know, you line up for a date at the CIA's farm and you, you know, you do a little bit of, you know, sort of on-the-job training in advance of that. And then you go to the farm and if you make it through. And most people, honestly, make it through that. That's not meant as a means to weed people out, right? That's literally a training event. And if people self-select out or people are pulled out for one reason or other, those numbers are really small. It's not like a selection or, you know, NSFAS. or a Delta selection.

Like this is, you've already been selected at that point, and they're kind of hoping you pass. It's more like, you know, operator's training course type event. And so it's still not pleasant. I didn't find it particularly bad, but like, you know, your time is not your own. And it's a lot of, you know, doing things to just like learn them over and over and over again. And I never really had patience for that. I didn't have patience for that in the Rangers. And I certainly didn't have patience for it over six months at CIA.

But you get through it and it's fine. And then I went on to serve after that in a domestic tour. So this is where my time as a police officer sort of pigeonholed me into, and a couple other factors, pigeonholed me into my first job domestically. But again, it just turned out to be amazing. I got to work with the FBI, Joint Terrorism Task Force. I learned early what a lot of people took longer periods for their careers to learn how to work with other agencies and get along and work with in the, interagency community, which is not always the easiest thing to do.

And getting that out of the way up front in your careers is a pretty good idea. Was this sort of like a liaison position? Because I asked because, and I've asked past guests as well, a lot of people are under a misperception about what the CIA can and can't do domestically. See, I already know, and I want to chime in here because I know it was either on a CIA hit team. Yeah. or it was like delivering like crack i was thinking the formaldehyde over the face with a needle in the neck yeah no yeah we were smuggling fentanyl across the border actually that's uh yeah i knew it i knew it

you heard it here first folks yeah cia crack cocaine epidemic click that d uh yeah you're right like this is a really misunderstood you know one of the things now in in sort of private practice where I am now that I like to debunk at any possible opportunity, right? I always say this when people give me the opportunity, right? Anybody who thinks that the CIA can operate inside the United States sort of at will and do what they want to do has never been in a planning session at CIA with the five or six lawyers that are generally required for one of those sessions and try to get even the least risky thing you could possibly ever do across those desks

and then actually execute. Anytime someone brings up one of these amazing conspiracy theories about what CI has done. And, you know, to, I'm unfortunate I'm not being able to draw one right to my brain right now. But like, you know, 9-11 is inside job and CIA was part of it. I'm like, you have never seen. Right. We can't get two really amazing operators together in a room and have them agree on doing, you know, a covert action. And you think we got a hundred people together, got them all to agree. And then also would agree to keep it secret. Right. Right. No chance. Right. Remember, folks, no one ever violates an NDA.

Right. They work at keeping America's secrets. Yeah. You trust me on that. I have mine. I have mine up right on the screen here, and I'm like, I'm working through it as we talking about. No, go back.

Yeah. Yeah. And everybody who works in special operations or the CIA would be absolutely willing to jump on. When you have a plan to kill 10,000 Americans, everybody in the agency and the special operations units would be uh yeah let's let's do that let's kill americans because that's that's why i'm here we couldn't even get to agreement how we were going to take out bin laden right and everybody agreed that should be done uh yeah i yeah you can't even i mean i'm raulalaki was a great example

right like i mean uh they tied themselves in knots for months and months and months and months this guy was a guy who was he was absolutely known this he was telling people publicly that he was planning to kill mass as mass amounts of americans like he was saying i'm i'm a i'm a i'm a I'm a criminal. I'm a planning, you know, essentially a criminal act, a mass murder. I'm telling you this through my media persona and, you know, the agency still tied themselves in knots and whether or not they could, and they couldn't get to them. That's the other thing, right? We're like, well, you should have gone and captured on Ralaki. I want to be like, have you ever been to the mountains of Yemen? Yeah, yeah. Like, have you ever seen what it's like

to ride a helicopter in, you know, sort of nap of the earth and then land and then go grab an al-Laki out of the Al-Laki tribe? That's a fighting tribe. That's a fighting tribe. It's been fighting off invaders since the beginning of time, and you want to go in and try to find a guy who's hiding there? No. Like, that's not, he's going to, he said he's going to kill people. Yes, he's an American citizen. But at this time, you've got to weigh the odds here.

I know there are lots of people that come down, you know, on the other side of this debate. And again, debating the efficacy of it or whether or not it was legal or extrajudicial, you could go on for a long time of that. But did the CIA tie themselves and not? You watched, you know, the sort of the Twitter files recently with Twitter, you know, is tying themselves and not to like how to respond to the FBI requests and all of that. Like on the other side of that, the lawyers are doing that 10 times. Right. And I'm just constantly like, you know, don't make it worse, right?

These folks are your neighbors. They're great Americans. They're great people for the most parts. Some bad apples, just like there is everywhere. But the vast majority of them are just great people. You want them at your son's or daughter's basketball game. don't make their job harder. Certainly oversight, you know,

you know, separate branches of government to watch over the others is a great, great model. We're doing a terrible job of it right now, but the model is sound. And having a professional intelligence organization that is, you know, bounded by laws, but given freedom to do the things that all Americans should be okay with

is absolutely the right way to do it. And we have many examples of the wrong way to do it and they're atrocious. And we don't have that here. So they should be grateful. After you finished distributing crack cocaine to South Central, L.A., what was the next assignment? But wait, because we actually answered the question for you, but what were you doing? It was liaison.

Yeah, yeah. So it's exactly right. So, you know, joint terrorism task force was one of the primary features of those domestic tours at that time. And so basically, you know, this was a period where it was actually starting to work. were FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, DNI as a feature of the whole thing, was actually starting to work. And you really needed people sitting in the same space working together saying, okay, yeah, I can go back and find, you know, that nugget of intelligence that you need to make a local arrest. And, you know, we can figure out how to share that and make sure that you're not missing, you know,

some kind of dot to connect. And we're not missing some kind of dot to connect. You know, if you find a guy in the United States that's trying to get his pilot license, and all he wants to learn is take off and not landing. You can share that with me. And then hopefully we can find, you know, the person who sent him to do that. And then all the other people that are that the same person sent to do that. And that's the way it's supposed to work.

And it was not perfect, but it was definitely starting to work around that time period. And yeah, and I had a small, you know, I was a beginner at that point. So this was, I was, you know, carrying paperwork back and forth. How was that for you being in the CIA? And you're not really allowed, you know, you can only, you know, operate, you. in the United States under very strict guidance, but you're with the FBI, you're with the other, these other people

who don't have those same restrictions. Were there times when they just closed you out of the room, just not because you weren't allowed, like because they didn't want you, but to keep that separation very clear. Yeah, exactly right. So those lines were very bright. They were easy to interpret too.

Like it was very easy to know what you were allowed to do and what you weren't. And I never really saw anybody, get sideways of those because it was just, it would have been a career ender for sure, or at least a career adjuster to somewhere much less fun, and then they would have just allowed you to fix the glitch on your own. But yeah, you're right. It was, no, I never really came up.

There were things I would have loved to have done, especially having been a former law enforcement officer, right? Like, hey, can I go and, you know, help out on this interview of this person? but obviously you can't think of anything more tragic for a a trial or attempting to do disclosure to a you know a defense attorney and we had the CIA guy in there he asked a couple of questions it was only a few questions right right yeah he was very polite which you he was very polite and you know that's working because that's never come up like you probably there's not a single story of like yeah we let the CIA guy sit in the room for a couple of hours and uh with the election it just yeah you don't

use it. You just rev it up and people tend to fall right in the line. Yeah. Never did it. That's a joke. Never did that. Yeah, no, I get it. So after you did this domestic assignment, where did you land after that? So yeah, so this is where my story from 1998 begins to come full circle. So I got then the chance to go to CIA, Pakistan, Afghanistan department. Right. And so this is where this is the department that was really, fighting the fight against al-Qaeda at that time and i'm there then from 20 you know 2009 to 2012 which you know for anybody who's tracking history that those were these were the years when when almost all the things happened um and so yeah i end up landing in the pack afghan department in uh so i guess this is 2010 2010 2009 this is where uh i would quickly um do Wikipedia. My ability to remember specific historical dates is super faulty. But I arrived to Pakistan, Afghanistan department. And I'm going in to be, this is going to be one of my first base level leadership jobs that I'm going to take on in. But the leadership position that I'm

supposed to take is still occupied. So I've got to find a job to do in the meantime. Give me a job and they give me the inauspicious position of being the coast base desk officer. I'm going to ride my time on a fairly large base account at that time. And so one of the first things you have to do when you're arriving to a new base I got, or one of the first things is a good idea to do, not everybody did it, was to deploy forward to your base, get to know the officers that are downrange and learn about their operations firsthand, meet some of the, you know, do some of the things that they're doing out there, get a lay of the land, you know, so you can really visualize it and have a sense of it when you get back to that desk and can know what you're doing. The war zones were just a different feature for CIA, right? Because you did that same. That's how desk officers have worked at CIA forever, right? If you're the desk officer for Bulgaria, you at some point end up in Bulgaria. And usually you spend a longer period of time, you eat the food, you have some fun with the people. But in this case, you deploy out to the war zones. And so. I deployed out to Afghanistan that fall after having arrived and met those teams and hung out with them and learned what they were doing and ended up spending Thanksgiving out there, came back home.

And there was a major operation happening at the time. I was part of the early stage planning out in Afghanistan for this operation. And I haven't told this story chronologically before, so I'm failing at, I'm both weighing that stupid NDA in my head that you were talking about and also trying to remember exactly what the true chronology was of it. So I don't get called out and misremember this. But this time, this was when they had decided that they were going to bring over a guy by the name of Humam al-Balawi, who was at that time in Pakistan and claimed access to the senior leadership. of al-Qaeda and and and and and and seemed to legitimately have that access he demonstrated that he did have that access and he was a a possible informant that was going to come across and talk to the CIA nobody had ever met him up into this point and he had come to us by way of another

intelligence service in Arab Intel Arab intelligence service pretty sure the Wikipedia article articulates us quite well but uh so we started to do the planning for that while I was out there and and this will be important here in a minute as I moved towards the the the story here was a shaping feature for me for the rest of my time at CIA. And up until this point, this very day, I think about this often and I make decisions based on what I learned during this period of time. We had this. He told, he was constantly coming up with reasons why he couldn't easily get to this meeting

at Coast Base. And we attributed that to him being kind of a coward. Here's a guy that, okay, he wants to do it. He's saying he wants to do it, but he's coming up with reasons why he can't cross the border. and to be honest, like, that was carry bordered across, especially Pakistan and Afghanistan. Like, he and I would have gotten along as cowards had he actually been to coward potentially if that had to be true. But of course, it wasn't true. He was definitely not a coward, far from it, or at least not the coward that we had been to Mass.

I went home and went back to my desk in Langley, and they finally got to the point where they had convinced him or what they thought they had convinced him. to come over for a meeting. Then he came over for a meeting on December 30th. I'm sorry to interrupt for a moment, but it reminds me of a past interview. I'm just curious, were you working with Mark at this point? Because he told his couch story in our interview too.

I'm just wondering, were you in the same office? So he's very careful with his history during this period of time. So I don't want to do him a disservice and tell a piece of his story that he protects a bit, but for sure we were in the same. I'll just paraphrase real quick when he said, you know, on the show was that there was a, you had

like a chat program back and forth that you were able to talk to Koust. And he, the story he told was so terrible that you guys were talking and then everything just went silent. And at a certain point, it became obvious something was really wrong.

So for me, yeah, so I know Mark very well. And we've, we've commiserated over this story before and and I got to meet him at the location that he was uh look at I didn't meet him until after this so I didn't know I didn't know I knew actually no I guess I had met him but I didn't spend time with him until I good good hardcore time with him until after this um so I knew he was um he was at different location than I was but yeah you're absolutely right so that day um I mean it was a big day right like this was a we we thought we were bringing in you know a potential

and it wasn't an asset at this point right this was a a possible someone who was more like an informant at that point that could potentially become someone who would report on at this point he was the idea was he was going to report on imam al-zal-hiri who was the number two in al-Qaeda at that time and then the idea would be maybe that this would even turn into midlaten which was everybody's focus at that at that time and so it was a big day we started the morning it was morning time in d.C. and it was everybody was excited if you don't get excited about these things in CIA right you're in the wrong job. But there was a lot of people involved in this. And I actually had a conversation over that system with one of the individuals who was going out to bring Hamama al-Balawea on the base. I think I have this. I think I'm good here. So I'm talking with Harold Brown at this point, and he's very excited. He's like, he's coming. We're good. We're going to go do it. Now, that was my last interaction with him. And so I'm communicating this up like, okay, it's rolling out.

This is going. There's a lot of visibility onto this at this point. And then you're exactly right. Like we were expecting an update. The update didn't come. Coms went totally dark, which was extremely unusual. And we're like, what's going on? Can I ask you a question?

And I don't know, because I know you were very far removed from this in terms of distance and what was happening immediately on the. ground. But from your understanding, was it always the intent to bring him right in? Or can, do you know that process? Can you tell us what happened there? So let me, let me make sure I get all the appropriate stuff out here. So I can do everybody, the service that they deserve when I tell the story publicly. Because it's, I think this is a story that deserves to get told publicly. And I, and I constantly go back and forth. I'm like, is it, is it my story to tell? Do I have a piece of,

of this that gets a told, should it even be told? Are we doing a disservice to the families? And I battle with this a lot in myself right now. But I ultimately come down that it is a story that needs to be told because there are so many really important lessons in here. And there are so many people that did so many things right. And even the things that get held up as being done wrong, in my opinion, they've been made bigger in hindsight, I think. There were mistakes. There were absolutely mistakes. But what you're hitting on right now is should the search have happened sooner. And the answer is absolutely right. Yeah, it should have been.

But I'll say this right now. Searches were not a, it wasn't necessarily a totally common feature at that point, right? It wasn't like everybody got searched and this guy didn't. Like that wasn't the case. It ended up being the case that everybody got searched. But it was only after this. Lots of people did get searched, but there were definitely, there were lots and lots of exceptions. and most of the exceptions were for really good reasons.

You know, CIA is a rapport-based organization, and, you know, searching someone out in the middle of, you know, coast is a rapport reducer. But in this case, you know, that's a trade option you able to make, and really good case officers will tell you, you can earn that rapport back a million different ways. You take that risk for this very specific reason. But, yeah, there was originally a plan to,

search him that was before that incident. And I suspect we don't know, unfortunately, what exactly happened in that transition to that plan. I have some suspicions and some ideas, but they can't be founded at this point. There's no one to comment on this at all. So he ends up coming in and this is where I can speculate. I think what they ended up doing, but we don't know, nobody knows, is that they thought that they would search him closer to the meeting site. But at this point, right, the thought process is not that there's at no point to anybody think he was going to blow up the place, right? Nobody was like, this is what we're worried about. Like, that didn't come up. That wasn't even in the risk matrix. Like, nobody was like, oh, and there's also this, this possibility,

right? It's like, you want to make sure he doesn't bring a weapon. Maybe he's going to get upset. Maybe he's going to change his mind. Maybe he's been coerced into carrying something on on behalf of the enemy. We don't know that. I think, or maybe he's a double agent, right? But a double agent from the perspective of like he's going to consume whatever information he gets out of this media and take it back. That's what was really at the top of the threat matrix. Do we give this guy sensitive things or sensitive information about our gaps? And he's going to take him back because that happens all the time, obviously, an espionage.

And, yeah, instead, of course, he gets out of the car. The GRS officers go to approach him, immediately recognize. He gets out on the wrong side of the car, which is, I think, you know, for the GRS officers, the report from the ground was it was clear that they understood something, going wrong at that point, but didn't, again, it happened so quickly. I don't think they immediately knew what it was. They advanced on him. And then, of course, very infamously, he detonated an enormously huge suicide best and killed seven CIA agents at that time, including the GRS officers that were going up to get him. And then one one foreign service, or one officer

from a foreign service, and then one local Afghan commander at that time. And so, Yeah, that was an amazing event, obviously, in history of the CIA, but also in my personal history as sort of having, you know, just had Thanksgiving with some of these folks, having just talked to Harold Brown moments before this happened. And he was, of course, killed in this. And he's a fantastic guy. I'm just an amazing guy left behind a wife and kids and many of them left behind families. But that one was particularly acute for me. I knew, I knew Jennifer, and I went to training with Liz. Like, it was, you know, a fellow ranger from First Battalion, obviously.

And, yeah, I didn't know him, but, you know, still sort of an interesting way that history comes around. And, you know, Darren was key to that whole engagement, too, and for all intents and purposes, which is just a stellar officer. Anyway, so, yeah, I'm sure I'm leaving. something out here that I want to say, but most of the mistakes that make it out here right now, I think people misunderstand them. There's a lot of passion and emotion behind this. There's a lot of people that give grief to, in some cases, people are no longer alive and can't defend themselves. And certainly there were mistakes made there on the ground, but at no point was anybody,

even the people were saying, hey, something's wrong here. And there were people who definitely raised their hand and said, raised their hand and said, something doesn't feel right about this, which is a standard feature of CIA risk mitigation. But at no point, point was anybody like, hey, I think there's a chance this guy's going to blow himself up. Like, just didn't come in one, not one time. Did anybody say, hey, is anyone considered that maybe he's going to have a suicide vest on him? And I'm certain. I'm fairly certain.

I shouldn't say I'm sorry because there's no way to be certain. But I have to feel pretty confident that GRS was moving toward him to conduct that initial search and just had not gone through the calculation of people within 50 meters were at risk. Right. At that point, of course they were. But I just can't imagine that that had to be what was happening at that moment, in my opinion. Sorry, I went longer on that. No, no.

No. I was going on for you and your teammates in the office as all this happened and unfolded? Yeah. So, you know, a good friend of mine was the chief operations at that time in the department. And that's the number three there. So senior guy in what that time was the largest department. And still at this point, just like all the things at that time, that was the largest and there's not been a larger up until now. And, you know, we were close at that time.

And they called us into one of the conference rooms, you know, sort of anybody who was directly related to the op. And yeah, I remember he just, he sort of broke down in tears and said he, he, he, he, he, he, he, uh, Balawi fucked us. he fucked us. And then, of course, he just, you know, he told us a number of casualties, number of people were dead. We didn't have, I think, a full accounting of what was happening right at that moment, but it was already known that a number of people had been killed and injured. And there were people out there at that time who were from the department to support

this. So, like, people who were, like, you know, would be in that desk right there if they weren't out there with kids and families right there. So I think it was all what we always thought. about and you know what one in particular was was thought to have been orderly wounded turned out wasn't but but had a strap and old go through his brain survived it and continues in the fight today actually but but yeah the injuries were also you know massive for some of these folks and so yeah at that

point we just consume that and frankly I don't I don't remember it I can't remember any of the day after that as I sit here and think about I can't remember what we did for the rest of the day. I think we probably just circled up and started talking about it and trying to figure out what to do next. What did you guys do next? Like what was the fallout from this and how did the agency respond?

Well, we definitely built a list who we thought was responsible. We were very good at building lists at that time. And it did not take long to build out that list. And I will be glad to call him out and ask him if he wants to come meet me some of there. There's only one man left alive on that list. It's Sarajad Dean Hikani, who's in the Afghan government now as the Taliban takeover. So that man was absolutely in the upper level decision tree of that.

And he is the, I think, I believe, I haven't looked at that list a long time, but I believe he is the last person standing on that list. So that man is a marked man, in my opinion. But he is a little bit untouchable, I think, right now from a policy standpoint, or at least anyway, you can imagine the tangles. that are involved in that. But yeah, so we did. We got a list.

And then, of course, you know, the investigation started, I think, immediately into what went wrong, lots, lots, lots of conversations about what happened when and who was to blame and what do we need to do immediately. And, of course, they instituted a policy. I'm sure that I think they did a stand-down operations, but it wasn't long, couldn't do a long stand-out operations in that environment. And they rejiggered. And at that point, then everybody had to be searched.

So they went way deep into the sort of the knee-jerk response, which you can't blame them for that. Like that was an easy call at that point. Like everybody gets searched for now until we figure out why we didn't do better here. And that stuck around for a long time. I went back to, you know, a war zone many, many years after that. And that policy was still pretty strict at that time. It had been delegated down a little bit, the ability to make exceptions. But, you know, we were still having.

having to like bring rapport back from like local liaison partners who were allowed to carry guns like on our base who would like get searching like what are you looking for I'm carrying a gun like and you're not taking it from me I own this land underneath your feet and so we didn't that one never really that one's still not calibrated right I'm sure but it's also it's a disappearing adventure was there what was the environment after that directly after that was it was it very cooperative and understanding was there some scapegoating and finger pointing? What was it like? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, it's certainly finger pointing, certainly scapegoating. So this is one of the pieces. You know, I talk about this a little bit now as, you know, I talk to groups about how to do appropriate risk calculation and, you know, how to think about risk and then make. decisions when you can't totally eliminate risk, right? And that's a really hard thing to do. And the agency failed out of a bunch, but really started to get pretty good at it. And frankly, it's pretty good at when you compare everything that they've done over the years and not failed at, not had huge catastrophes happen. The scorecard is really good for the agency. But of course,

these tragedies, they go public. And every time you do a really hazardous mission in that no no shots are fired, nobody gets harmed. That doesn't go, you know, in the really awesome column. Nobody sees the really awesome column. And the really awesome column is stacked at CIA, especially during this time period. But yeah, there are certainly finger-proying. But when I talk about the risk, like the thing that the agency didn't do very well at that time,

and maybe, I would say it doesn't still do that well because it just isn't formed to do this. It doesn't have an ultimate leader at that point for the operation, right? because this was an asset coming onto a base with potential information that was really important. There's lots of people who had a stake in that. Senior leaders at the agency, all the way up to the director, whose careers were made or broken by this all the way up to Panetta. He was tracking this minute by minute. The director of CTC was very focused on this, but he was not exactly leading it, but he was influencing activities that were happening on the ground. So now you've got a very senior person influencing things, but not responsible for the ultimate leadership.

Right. The base chief, you know, quite famously, Jen Matthews, who I liked a great deal. I mean, she was a rough. She was a, not a rough, she was a sort of, she grew up in a time in CIA when like women officers were, you know, didn't have, this is where I'm going to like, I'm going to get myself canceled here. She was like one of the first. targeting officers, right? She was chasing bin Laden in the 90s. Right?

She's one of the first people that came forward with that group of women that said, this guy's going to do something crazy before September 11th. She was part of that cabal of women. And I mean, this is when, like, it was not easy in the agency to raise your hand as a woman and say, you guys are wrong and we're right. And at that time, it really was like a group of, I think, four or five women at that time that really were like raising the flag here. and, you know, this story's been told a billion times, too, and from 10 different angles,

and I'm sure I don't have it right because I'm not an expert on this part of the story, but, like, they felt like no one is really listening to them. I think there's lots of people say, yes, we're absolutely listening to them, but, like, what were we going to do? Like, we didn't have all the information, and so I won't bring down a decision on who was right or wrong there, and I'm sure I've already mistold that story, but she was part of that group. And then she grew up the rest of her time in the organization, you know, sort of battling these battles all the time. So she was, when I say rough, I mean, she was like a no-nonsense person. She was very sharp,

super smart, knew her stuff, and she's in this, you know, she's now essentially a battalion commander in a war zone, which, you know, there are lots of people who ended up in that role that had never been battalion commanders in war zones before, but here she wasn't a woman in this spot and having to deal with, frankly, I mean, majority of men there that thought that they knew the job better than she did. And many of, many of them, I'm sure did, right? They spent in time career's there. But you can just imagine like the pressure that she's in here and now she's got the biggest thing happening in CTC on her base. Right. And and she is ruthlessly trying to get to the end of this fight with Bin Laden. This is her life's mission at this point. So she is really

going to push the envelope to make this happen and to make sure it goes right. And so she's just having to make a decision after decision, I think. And again, we can't know unfortunately what exactly transpired there and there's a ton of people who will line up right now and say she it was her fault she made tons of bad decisions and that's that's why this happened I am not so quick um to to take that position because I can't put myself in her shoes or think about all the pressure she was under and who was calling her we don't know about those phone calls nobody stepped forward and said yeah you know I called her and told her to do this yeah yeah and then she got another call and it was someone more senior or laterally senior you know and so I really don't know but but gosh

for those of us who've been in those types of situations before, if you don't give the person making decisions at that point, a little bit of grace. In this case, obviously, like, a bunch of people are dead, and that's going to constantly be something that people have to think about for the rest of their lives and kids will grow up knowing about, and that makes it hard.

But, yeah, I'm not as quick to point fingers at her. If I point a finger at something, it really, I think, it's the feature of CIA that's tricky here. There's just not a leader. like if this was being run by a J-Soc unit, right, there would have been an 06 or something. That would have had an ultimate control unless things were going really sideways. The final decisions would have all rested with that 06. They would have done the risk calculation.

They still could have made the wrong decision. But the process for leadership would have been much more streamlined. And when you deal with risky decisions, you really do need a decider. You do not need an agency is really good because it can sort of do things by committee fairly well. where at the end of the day, the only person in the agency in traditional espionage really needs to make a decision is the officer on the street when it's sort of game time there and there's nobody to ask. And they want you to be able to act like that.

Well, that doesn't work in a military environment when the hazard is much higher and you have what effectively is a tactical situation being driven by an organization that was not ever really designed to be a tactical organization, at least outside the paramilitary arm. So, yeah, it's tricky. It's one that I think about all the time. the lessons there are plenty. But yeah, when you're thinking about risk and you're going to make a risky decision,

someone has to be in charge. And everybody has to know that that's the person in charge. And because this guy, you know, didn't fit like the profile of a suicide bomber who are, who are generally like not as mentally sharp, impoverished, you know, like, like there are, there are certain models. But now you're talking about probably what they assumed was. a well-placed man in an organization who had access. He wasn't like the courier. He wasn't, you know, and so back at headquarters, probably the idea of risk to them was the risk of pissing him

off and not having a source, right? This is true. They're thinking this in the terms of human intelligence, well, we risk, you know, what's the risk? Not a suicide bomber. The risk is alienating this man and not getting his intel. So, yeah, you're keen on some. I'll say one thing real quick. I would say many of the suicide bombers we encountered in Afghanistan and some of the other places in the ISIS suicide bombers were oftentimes, you know, lower educated folks, lower economic status, but an enormous number of people who decided to kill

themselves in the name of jihad were extremely sophisticated, well educated. In some cases, very rich, you know, the 19 hijackers all came. not all, but predominantly came from fairly well-off families with backgrounds. You also wouldn't have put in there, right? These were not poor people, you know, and other folks in some of the other places that aren't war zones where, you know, Al-Qaeda or ISIS isn't going in, essentially saying, hey, if you blow yourself up, I'll give your family, you know, $2,000 and you'll go, you know, paradise and you'll live ever after in Valhalla, essentially.

And that, I mean, I don't know what the numbers look like when you compare them up. I'm sure that number is much larger. But that's not necessarily the measure. At least that wasn't the measure. I don't think that we were going by there because I think if I looked back, I'll be honest. Anybody who ever asked me, like, I was, if I'm being honest with myself and somebody said, hey, had you been there?

And they said, hey, we're going to move the search point up from the guard post at the gate to GRS in the dusty compound for some really good operational reasons. You know, operational security, a little bit of rapport. We're still going to search him. I don't know. And I don't know this conversation happens. So there could have been like no search. We're going to bring him right in.

I don't know. But had you said that to me and I was out there, if I'm being honest with myself, I probably would have been like, okay. Yeah. This is fine. We're still going to search him. It's okay. At no point, I know for a fact I would not have thought he's going to blow something up that's going to launch BBs so fast and so hard that's going to go through steel beams 100 meters away. Right.

And so, yeah, I think the decision at that point was exactly as you're going to be able to be able to was exactly as you sort of outlined it, where it was like, well, we're doing this regardless. This is what we get paid for. Not only what we get paid for, it's what we're expected to do as our duty. And so had someone come in with like a piece of intelligence, in my opinion, said, hey, you know,

the psychologist say, or we've got a little piece of information that suggests Balawe could be considering blowing himself up. Or like we've looked at the video and it doesn't look like he's actually injured, like he's been claiming. So in my opinion, I would have been, I would have come down on that we're doing it anyways.

We're gonna risk it. Anyways, now we're going to move the search point well out. And we're maybe going to hazard an Afghan private from the Afghan army who controls the border point. You're still risking somebody's life, but in a much different capacity. And you're still bringing him over. And you're still going to see, is there something here that we need to be aware of? Because his story, the way he wove it, I mean, he was brilliant. He did a great job from the perspective of a double agent.

You hear lots of times that he was a triple agent. It's really hard to actually be a triple agent. There requires some high-level trigonometry to figure out what actually constitutes a triple agent. But effectively, he was a double agent, right? And he wove that story extremely well. They knew at that point exactly what would get us spun up CIA. They knew how to provide a bone a few days that we were going to look at and say, okay, this adds up.

This is what we'd expect to see from someone with this level of access. And then a lot of information about his history and how he was recruited and all that sort of broke down or didn't come through or people didn't consider it enough as they should have. I mean, in hindsight, it is not hard to figure out where this went wrong. But also in hindsight, when I've looked back at, I'm like, it's not even, it's not even that much clearer, except that you know he blew himself up, which is super clarifying. So as the dust settles literally and figuratively, you remained on the F-PAC account for a while. I mean, what did they have you working through that list that you guys?

guys came up. Well, there were many lists that time, right? Yeah, that was a very, that was an effective period in America's fight against al-Qaeda. I mean, if you, I don't know if you, I'm sure you guys are familiar with the Long War Journal. If you're not, the Long War Journal,

it's probably still being published now, but much less read. They were documenting sort of that war by day-by-day, the fight against Al-Qaeda, and they did an unbelievably fantastic job. We were constantly looking around the vault me like which one of you is reporting to the long word journal and that it's a it was a website a a you know essentially a daily uh newspaper for um the war on terror there in that region not just that region but they were really good in that region um and it was like every day there was some pretty um amazing successes and it was the fact that it was such a successful period that also i think

led people to maybe become overconfident in our abilities to get things done there but you're right So that was, you know, the end of 2009. You're going to 2010. I move into this position, you know, as a mid-level leader there. And then, you know, the fall of 2010 rolls around. And, you know, when you get into one of these leadership positions, you generally get thought of as part of the committee that sort of helps to make decisions about things. Or you at least brought in and talked about things that transpire. and the HVT1 team, high value target one, the bin Laden team,

had been doing their thing that they've been doing for years at that point and running out tons of leads. And they had found a historical leadership facilitator, who we now know is Abu Ahmed al-Qaeda. They had located him in Bashar, Pakistan, using some pretty sophisticated, siggint and surveillance means. and they had an entity followed him back to an amazing house in a badabadabad Pakistan

an amazing by standards in abatabad and the I don't know if again this is one of those stories I'm not 100% is true because I didn't hear it firsthand but some version of that when the individual who was one of the individuals that followed um AK as we called him to this house got to the house and said something along the lines of like, oh shit, knowing at that point once he saw the house, like, this is something. Came back and, of course, that started to make its way

whispering around the halls of the APEC department that Abba Ahmed al-Kuwaiti had been discovered doing some pretty amazing phone op-sect security, phone security. He was using one phone in Peshawar, shutting it off, and then he had a local phone that he was using in Abbottabad for, you know, the persona that he had adopted in Abadabad and his family had adopted. And he was doing a pretty good job. This was just a hard-slooting,

targeting effort, targeting an operational effort to find that he was communicating when he was in Peshawar. He made the smallest of small slip-ups in saying something to the effect of over the phone, you know, I'm still working for the same guys I used to work for. And these folks who knew at that point abraham had Kuwaiti story were like okay but this is something here then we shut up back at the house you know in in the fall of 2010 i think everybody was not like okay this is definitely something at that point you know a very small group of people were brought into that and and they started thinking about okay how are we going to how are we going to figure this out what are we going to do and what resources do we need they went to the president pretty quickly thereafter and president

Obama, to his credit, was like unlimited resources. You have no budget. There's no ceiling on this. Get to it. We are very lucky. America is very lucky that the director of the time was a guy with the name of Leon Panetta. Uncle Leon, as many of us, think of him or I do. My favorite director, just a straight talking, mostly straight shooter.

And when he wasn't a straight shooter, it's because he was doing something crafty most of the time that he didn't want everybody to know about. He's a little bit like Columbo. I kind of think of him. We're like, one more thing. I know all your secrets. And so I loved him, but I think he was, when he had a very good relationship with Obama. So, like, Obama really trusted him.

But then he was also willing to push the envelope on things that others might have been less risky toward. And so, yeah, we move forward. I'm doing nothing at this point, but, like, sneaking into the meetings. Like, anytime I, like, look on the schedule and see, because it's hard to kick out a brand. chief or I guess an anti-branch chief at that time from these meetings right it's like oh this is going to be awkward if we ask Aaron to leave but he's not actually invited no joke like I did this throughout my career where I'd be like I'm just going to show up right kick me out so I was regularly like sitting in the back row of these meetings as we're running up to it and then finally it becomes pretty apparent that you know there's a good chance anybody who says that they knew this has been London when those helicopters launched is absolutely lying there was nobody knew there was nobody knew the Pakistanis didn't know um that we in the PAC Afghan department didn't know. The president certainly didn't know. It was not known.

What were the indicators, though? Because I mean, some of the accounts, like even President Obama's account in his memoir, I mean, when he says he had to make the call, he was like, so at the end of the day, it's a flip of the coin, right? That's exactly what he said. It's 50-50. He said, stop telling me numbers. Stop telling me percentages.

You're making up numbers. This is a 50-50 call. He did. He said that in the, from the intelligence perspective, I mean, what were the indicators of like, maybe he's here? So yeah, I think between Obama, Panetta, and McRaven, I think they've done a good job of articulating, you know, what was being looked at, right? So there was never a clear indicator that it was been lauded. Like there were features of what they were seeing, you know, and I'm going to butcher this.

And any of my friends, or maybe they're not friends now that I'm talking about this publicly, we'll find out later. we'll be glad to correct me in some facet here but you know the number the family numbers seemed to line up pretty well which was always a pretty good way to know this you know had a pretty specific number of family members that were probably with them at excuse me and that matched up you know there was all kinds of trigonometry going on to determine you know if if the person pacing around the compound was 6-2 or 6 3 or however tall bin Laden was or if he was even that tall if this was an exaggeration. rated number for his height. But again, you know, never did that guy look up and, you know, give a

full face review. And so at this point, it was just the features that really, I think, made it clear that this was going to be something that was going to go were all the ones that are well known now. Like the third floor having no windows was just super suspicious. That that it had a third floor at all was somewhat suspicious, but that the third floor was windowless. You know, super interesting clues that on their own don't really mean much, but start to become interesting when you're just trying to add this up. Like, you know, a couple of the satellites were pointing towards Arab television,

Arabic-speaking television stations, right, rather than posture or do. You know, the stories about kicking, you know, the neighbor kids kicking the soccer ball over the fence and not getting the soccer ball back, you know, because they were just so security-oriented behind there. You know, there's a bunch of stories out there that are,

just not true about, you know, surveillance teams and, you know, um, safe houses and all kinds of other things that I think have just sort of grown up, um, as myth over time. Like, they were not taking the risk to put something too close to that and spooking, um, you know, whoever was there. But again, I remember, I was excited. I, I'm bad. Like, I don't learn lessons very well. I'm like, it's been like, this is it. Let's do it. This has been a lot and let's just get it over with. but the HVT1 team, they were divided, or I don't know if evenly divided, but there were at least a number of them.

They're like, no, they've been tricked too many times by Intel, right? What about the story, the story about the doctor? So. That was the longest pause in U.S. intelligence history. Yeah, so I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to be a bit of a, I'm going to be a bit of an, I don't know what you guys can't answer. What is it? obtuse.

Yeah. I don't know what it was. I was going to be go a little harsher than that. Okay. I don't know where this one stands. Okay. And I do not want to give any ammunition. I'm happy to go kind of crazy with some of the stories, stuff like that.

But I think there's actually a hazard there. And I don't want to give any ammunition one way or another to something that could cause someone who I think truly might still be in harm's way. And I don't know this story well enough to know. So yeah, I should probably wave off. Okay. that one. But so the team is divided though about whether or not he's really there. Right. Yeah. So, and this was fascinating, right? Because like, they're just like, they've been, they've been duped. They've been tricked. And they really want facts. Right. And so at this point, it was like,

figure it out. Use money. Use resources. Use creativity. This is when I got to see some of the coolest stuff, you know, sort of come out of the agency, things that I definitely should not repeat here because it's still very valid techniques. But like when I was like, what was I going to see when I got into the agency? You know, when I'm thinking in 1998 or, you know, September 11th in college or those guys getting killed in Tucker Garne. I'm like, I'm really going to do this. Like this is what I was expecting to do and finally I'm there. And I'm doing it from Langley.

But there wasn't really anybody doing it in Abbottabad. So it wasn't like you could get physically up against this. And so then therefore, in my opinion, doing it at headquarters was the coolest space to do it because you had access to all what that was happening. And I got to watch how these decisions were made, which for me, as a student sort of of leadership decisions, is a fascinating time. And so, yeah, you have this team who's debating it. And you just talked about, you know, Obama saying it's not 50-50. And the NCTC has, like, been asked to, like, review it from a red cell perspective. And that's where the percentages came out of.

And they're like, we think it's 68%. I think it's 72. And, yeah, Obama was like, stop making up numbers. If you don't know, you don't know. And so people who think, like, he ended up was like, this is, you know, people like, oh, that was an easy call. everybody would have sent the helicopters up in line. Absolutely not true. Like, if it had been Zawahiri and had launched that raid,

like the political reverberations for that, repercussions for that, would have been extraordinary because nobody would have ordered that raid force in for Zawahiri. People couldn't even pronounce his name. They still don't know. They didn't know when he died, however many months ago, now he died in Kabul. Like, that was a non-incident, right?

And it would have been there, too. You sent an entire raid force across the board in Pakistan without their permission to get the number two of al-Qaeda? That would have been unacceptable. Right. You invaded a foreign country. You did without telling them to get the number two. Right.

And we had killed number three at that time like 11 times. Yeah. Right. Right. I don't think people would have gone for it. And that was discussed. Like, what will happen if we go in and it's not him?

And the idea was that this is going to be a bad day for American policy. Right. And so anybody who thinks that that wasn't a call, that took some time, wasn't consuming what was happening at that time. Right. And usually I think they think all they knew was him. They didn't. Nobody knew.

They did not. So I have a story. the day I think it was a Friday so I got very lucky as we got closer to the raid I went to the head of the Pack-upkin department and people remember me as getting

selected to do this job and I don't usually disabuse them of that but when I actually have to tell myself I have to tell people what I actually happen I went in and I said hey chief I want a role I want to do something in this I don't want to keep sneaking into the meetings can you give me a job I don't care what it is I'll take notes and he said I'll do you one better you're from here on out go give your duties to one of your team and you're going to be my

executive assistant until we get to the end of this thing. I was like, yes. So I asked for that and I was given that job. And that's why I coach people like you're not going to get to do something cool unless you ask to do it. Sometimes you'll get called to do it. But most of the time, if you want to do it, just go ask. And if you're good enough to do it or in this case, if you're just, they know you're

going to show up anyway like I was. They might as well give you some work to be. You may as well. Yeah, I mean, you're already here. Right. I mean, I love the way you talk about this in such like a casual manner because for people who are kind of on the inside, it's a job. It's true. It becomes a job, right? But I mean, this was like, there was intense secrecy around this. Like, this was a big fucking deal as what was, as Biden who said that was after the fact. It was it. It was, I mean, I think I don't remember the exact number was, but it was the most, it stands up as one of the most secret things in the U.S. government history. I think the head of NSA's counterterror. As I said, it was the most secret thing that he was ever part of in his career. And coming from NSA, that's saying something.

Yeah. And I don't remember the numbers were, but at one point, it was a buy list read on. And I think it was like 78 or something like that, up until a point across the government, I think. Now, of course, they read people in executive positions that they didn't put on the list. That always happens. But for instance, like the ambassador to Pakistan didn't know until the raid day. And that's a pretty big deal. You mentioned how you guys couldn't really even get on the same sheet of music about how to conduct the raid.

I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to the different options that were looked at in the run-up to this. Yeah, absolutely right. I mean, you know, you guys have met some of the agencies paramilitary guys before. And when there was an option for them to potentially go and do this, of course, they were like, yes, we are going to do this thing. That's not what the CIA's paramilitary department is really designed to do. There can be people going to argue with me about this too. And there's one individual as well who could absolutely probably have done this, maybe even on his own, like had the skills.

Obviously that place is comprised of composed of a lot of amazing people. But like you're going to bring together a bunch of guys, many of whom are like in their 50s. They stretch out and like, you know, take their medication and then like get together and like doctor and invade them. But anyway, I'm like, I can get my butt kicked for this for sure. This is like not my place to talk. No, no, I mean, because they're like already retired J-Soc operators and stuff.

Correct. And their job is to, you know, lead a paramilitary effort, not be operators necessarily. Right. And I mean, by all means, like their path, I mean, and the stuff that they did in Afghanistan and other places around the world, again, uncommon valor. At the time that this is, you know, happening, there are our paramilitary officers in Afghanistan, you know, that are at the front lines of combat and lots of areas. And, you know, despite the three times they've been shot in the leg, you know, they're still, you know,

kicking down a door and entering a room. So they weren't supposed to, but getting it done. And there's no, no shit on them at all. I wouldn't have done it. I would have turned down the opportunity to do it. I still would turn it down right now. I would gladly hide behind the armored high bucks if given the opportunity. So don't take the wrong thing from here. But it wasn't, it shouldn't have been them, in my opinion. And I was on the other side of this when it was like, okay, can we make this work all in TIA?

And this was a secrecy thing. So it wasn't like they weren't being crazy. Like they were like how many, what's the fewest number of people we can tell about this? Because they're going to bring in the military. It's much harder. Right.

Right. To keep that secret, right, even J-Soc. And so they ended up keeping J-Soc out of it for a long time. I don't think they ended up, I have it in my notes somewhere, but like my cleared notes, for those of you are paying attention to the level of detail that I'm presenting right now.

It is pages and pages, take it up with the PRB if you think I'm overstepping my bounce area. I have a bullet point amount of information on this. But again, there's nothing about this is going to throw off a future operation. Or if you want to debate that with me, you can find me on Twitter. And yeah, so at this point, it becomes clear that, like, you know, we're going to need helicopters. Well, the big thing that came down was, like, what happens if it goes wrong?

Like, okay, you guys can probably do it, right? Like you get in, you do the battle rattle, and you probably do kill him. Like he ends up dying at this. But then all of a sudden, now you've got the Pakistan military coming, right? Yeah. And what do you do if that goes south? Because we're not leaving. Obama already said nobody, if we decided to do this, nobody's being left in Pakistan under any circumstance.

He's like, I don't care what the repercussions are. And so at that point, they're like, oh, God, we need a, you know, a 60-person QRF. We need a combat air patrol. We need all the same. And once that became clear. bigger and bigger right right um and of course they didn't institute that until very close to the raid day so but then they call up at admiral mccraven they briefed him in i've heard some good stories about him briefing his senior staff in and them not believing it um or not quite believing it or

wondering what happened i'm i think the one of the very first briefs that happened to this was down at brag like in a in a front yard on like a sunday or something like that and mccraven calls over one of his senior staffs like he can you come in he's like i really don't want to i'm mown the lawn he's like i'll come to you and he goes over there and says never going to guess and he's like oh my god he's like let me put the lumber away oh i think that i think that was tony thomas if i recall oh you okay did he tell you this story i believe i believe he's told this story publicly before okay good all right i'm glad he did that's exactly who it is um so hopefully you didn't dupe me into giving that one up because i know that's um general thomas's story but that that's exactly

i will i would like to invite him on the show to tell the story himself uh well i'll uh if i didn't just do him a disservice so i'll reinforce that in an email too okay um now At this point in time... He's got some great stories that go along with this, too, about what they were doing behind the scenes at that time. Sure. They're very funny. At this point in time, had it already been determined

that it was going to be SEAL Team 6, or was there jockeying going on between Delta and SEAL Team 6? No, zero. Seal Team 6 was the element that was responsible for Afghanistan at that time. If any jockeying, I would be really surprised to learn if it did. But I don't think there's any question at this point. They were the special mission force on tap to do this. They knew the environment.

They already had all their resources forward. It would have been ludicrous to swap it out. Despite, do I want to say this? Come on. I mean, I mean, you know, I can't remember many years. I have a special place in my heart, you know, for Delta Force. Sure, sure. And, yeah, I know operators from both sides.

I mean, it's like comparing, you know, Olympic gold medalist sprinters at this point, right? Like, um, and, and, and, and, and, and they, they already had some amazing successes in operations like this. So it wouldn't have been hard to make that argument, like maybe we should pivot to Delta Force, but it would have been, I think it would have been laughed out of the room. It's like, no, and we got to, the assets were already there. Oh, forward for sure. Yeah, they were right there. Yeah. Um, and so this was not a big shift. I mean, they brought in a team from outside theater because, you know, this was right. Because of the, the deployment cycle. Um, and this, and the secrecy element, right? You needed to be able to.

Could, were you part of the, I mean, I know now we're talking about J-Soc primarily, but allegedly they did their train-up, their rehearsals at a, you know, an undisclosed CIA facility that I won't mention here just to not put you on the spot. But could you talk about that? Could you talk about that kind of train up process at all? Yeah, I mean, it's fairly well documented. I'm definitely going to be speaking out of school to go in too much depth on it because, you know, I might have heard about this even third hand.

Now I knew some of the guys. I can't remember. I don't remember where I put this, but I had the chance to know one of the now more famous people involved in this and that he was my beanbag partner out in theater about seven months before. And he was pretty good at beanbags. Like Cornhole? Yeah, yeah, Cornhole, yeah.

I got to play Cornhole tournament. He was just coincidentally, matched up with me. So I got a chance to meet him before this. And then also he was, you know, we went down and talked to the teams in advance as we were sort of gearing up and starting to pass information at a pretty heavy rate. And so we got to go down and spend time with them. And yeah, it was just a lot of, I mean, we didn't, the lying people in the agency didn't have much interaction with the operators from when they started to get going. There's a couple people who did, right, for obvious reasons. But yeah, that didn't, that didn't come up to me.

The people that I ended up seeing were sort of the J-Soc elements that ended up posting up at CIA in the run-up to the raid and more from the planning, the higher-level planning side, you know, what they were going to do, contingencies. You know, CIA ultimately had mission authority for this, and J-Soc was seconded to the agency for this mission, which is just a cool feature of the intelligence community. I don't know how many people actually tracked that, but like this was not a military operation, right? which was a Title 50 CIA operation with JSOC moved over to the CIA for the operation. Right. Because of authorities between, like, right? They wanted to be able to potentially have deniability if you needed it. They wanted to run it as a covert action all the way up until the point where they maybe could,

would not have to disclose it. And so the only way to do that was to chalk JSOC over to CIA. And so, yeah, I think we might have skipped over this part. I'd like to go back to if you can. and maybe you can't. The jacket asked, like, what were some of the options on the table? Oh, yeah, sorry. So, I mean, yeah, these have been, yeah, these have been one worn.

And so, yeah, so there was a, the paramilitary option was on the table for a good long time, actually. Because they could actually run out a lot of planning with those guys sort of thinking about it. And they wanted to keep it pretty well secret. So that was one. That turned into, obviously, J-Soc Raid Force action. But again, down to the 11. 11th hour, there was strong consideration being given to a drone strike and then also just straight up heavy bomber run. And the drone strike was, that was a pretty well debated decision.

And there were people who went to bed the night before the raid still in favor of the drone strike. Wow. Or senior people. Senior people. And the bombing raid, you know, was ruled out pretty quickly once they determined how many bombs they were going to have to drop to be certain that they got bin Laden. And then at that point, there were people in the room that were like, you can send J-Soc can do this. And probably none of the innocent people, you can debate who was innocent and not innocent on that compound at that time. But like at this point, no one felt like any of the women and children needed to die in this. Like that was not a debate, right? In fact, it was Obama, I think, who ultimately said, if we can

do this and demonstrate the power of America to go in and get this done, not shoot any women and children, not kill any women and children in this, and get the guy we're going after, he wanted to be able to show the world that that was the class act that was happening. So the bombing raid was ruled out relatively quickly. It was kept there as sort of a thought exercise, but nobody raised their hand for that. The drone strike was, I mean, you know, I mean, the CIA doesn't conduct drone strikes. That's definitely not something that would ever happen inside a secret organization like that. but if they did, if they ever had conducted drone strikes,

hypothetically, they would have been extremely good at it. And it was a tool that would have been easy to roll out in this situation. But then you don't know it's bin Laden. Right. And what do you do then? How do you do the MEPA? Right. Yeah.

Yeah. You want this. The United States of America deserves to know that, you know, public enemy number one, you know, reached justice, you know, was dealt justice. and you can't, it just didn't sit well with the president. It didn't sit well with us. I was, I was, nobody was asking me. I didn't get a vote.

They didn't count my hand in the vote, but like I was, I was raid force from the second it became an option until the day of. And I didn't change on that. And ultimately it came down to what's the confidence level that it has been on, because now you're sending the raid force in, and this is where the politics become. And if you did do a drone strike and it's how we're here, well, not great, but not, not super painful. The bombing, also not great, but wouldn't have been extraordinarily painful. I mean, depending on exactly how many bombs they dropped in if they killed innocent peck Stanis or hit a military com boy driving by by X or something like that. That wasn't featured. But the raid force, that's just, you can just see the problem there. And so, yeah, one of the, this is a feature of the leadership that I tell when I tell this story, you know, they looked around and said, does anybody, you know, who feels like this is just, this has been modern? And one of the, this is a feature of the leadership that I tell, when I tell this is the story, you know, they looked around and said, does anybody, you know, who feels like this is just, this is bin Laden? And one of the, and one of the. And one of the. And one of the, leaders in this chain, who was a senior leader to us, but like in the government was not a

senior leader, raised his hand and said, yeah, it's been on. It's been on. And then came out of that meeting and told the rest of us that that's what he said. And we're like, we don't know. Nobody knows that. And he's like, look, they needed somebody to say it. They needed somebody to say it with like conviction. Right. And frankly, that's, I'm,

that's my job. Um, couldn't have been said higher up. Like, it just wouldn't happen and nobody could have said it lower. Um, so this landed on me. Um,

and I was like, wow. And there's still people to this day that disagree with that decision, even though he ended up being right. They were like, no, he shouldn't have said that. We didn't have the intelligence support that.

Um, and I was, I watched that and I've taken that. That's in my back pocket now when I give leadership. The fear is that becomes another WMD's in Iraq kind of deal. right oh you're done yeah you're done you go in yeah yeah yeah everybody remembers that now you know does you actually incur a repercussion from that um saying that and then it ends up not being him does anybody remember who who was the you know the senior person in CI but not like the director

of CIA that said that probably not but the rest of us do um and that that's not something you want as a as a person who you know um is their your entire um you know personal story is is wound up and are you right here. It's a zero or hero moment for right. Oh yeah. Who trusts your decisions after that if you're the guy that made that call and it turns out not to be. Right.

And you made the call afterwards. They would have been like, well, upon what information did you make that call? And you say, no, it was my. It was a gut call. Yeah. I felt like it needed to be said. Nobody else. Yeah.

That doesn't play the same way if it goes the other way. But it was clearly the right way to go. they needed that the president needed that um and and it was the right call but i saw that no so i we're going home friday um but i could back up too because i was in the very last um planning meeting wasn't even a planning meeting at this point because the green light had already been given so the friday meeting with pinetta um yeah i'll go from here since uh chronologies y'all's um one of your schicks but uh so i'm as a as the EA at this point at the executions at this point like i have a bunch of like super small duties like anybody who's watching this right now and like is he putting himself

in a leadership role what's he doing no absolutely not a towel boy um uh you know bench player whatever it was like i was you know moving binders around yeah i make a joke that like you lots of people remember these binders that were getting passed around at that point because it was like the binders that were getting passed up to people who were getting read in and it was like the story from you know start to finish in this little binder and they were kind of well known at that point i'm like hey do you remember that binder that you got and they're like yeah i remember that bind. I'm like, that was mine. I did that. I printed out those sheets. I punched the three whole punches in them. I put them in those binders and I put the cover sheet in and then we delivered

them around in boxes, all me. And of course, the whole story's in there. So this last day comes up and like I am literally, I think, going to be responsible for putting the placards on the chairs because it's like a fight. Like who's going to sit where in the director's conference room? Because it's not set up like a talk, right? It's just the conference room. That's where they're going to run it out of the director's conference room. So we're going to like put the placards up there and who's going to wearing and we're like figuring out like who you know who gets to sit closest to the director all this right um and we're going to have a meeting um at the chief staff of the agency at that point who is um jeremy bash and that meeting is like it's unclear when that's going to happen it's

like 10 o'clock or 1 o'clock i remember what it was and then at the same time another meeting has come together and it's this last meeting with the director of the senior staff um and the director is going to go downtown and have this last meeting with the president you know and this is in the run up to the um um oh my god the event every year you year that the president often goes to, President Trump thing go to. The correspondence dinner. Correct. The correspondent center on Saturday.

Yeah, thank you. So he's getting around. President Obama is gearing up for the correspondence center and then also consuming this last briefing. And so I'm going up and I'm with some other senior leaders. If they're going up to have this meeting, I'm going up to do the placards meeting. We get up there. We're walking down the seventh floor.

I've been up there a bunch of times at this point. But like I'm always going through like the main door with the seal and like there's protocol and all that stuff. We don't hit that door. We hit like some unmarked door to the right that these guys are. like totally experienced with now. And I'm just sort of following them. And like now we're back in the interds of like the senior staff rooms right there.

And I don't know where we are. So I'm just following them, following them, telling them. We go through another door and it's the side door to the director's office, like the inner director's office. I've never been through the side door. And I've never been through it. And the door closes behind me. And the meeting's already in progress.

Panetta at the head, deputy director at the other end. And the senior staff around a table and a bunch of people on his couch. And I'm like, oh, I am not supposed to be in this meeting. I quickly run through the calculations. Like, I'm the youngest person in there by a lot. Like, buy a lot. And I'm like, all right. I'm not going to risk this one.

This is to be super embarrassing. So I turn around and I go back and the deputy chief staff is standing at the door. And she's like, oh, yeah. It's a compartmented, you know, classified operation. Like, once you're in, you're not coming out. Yeah, well, her thing is protocol. We're not opening the door again. Like, that's a disruption in here.

It's rude already that your boss is, you know, we're kind of late for this. And she's like, take a seat. and I was like, yes. I run over, I got a section of the couch. You jump up and do a heel click. Yeah, exactly, right. Yeah, and I get in there and then this is like the senior staff like breaking down, you know, okay, here's working until the president.

Like the first time I've ever seen this, right? And I'm like diligently pretending to take notes. So like out of the ground. And at one point, the deputy director, Mike Morel at this point, he looks, he's got a line of sight to me on the couch. And this is the same people who have been in this room for like months now. Like nothing changes about these people. And he's like, and he leans over to the director of CTC who's sitting to his left and says loud enough that the whole room could say, who is that guy?

And I'm like, this is going to be really bad. And like, I know the deputy, I know the director of CTC at this point somewhat well, but like he never seems to recognize. Like I'm always like, how does he never recognize me? And so like when I'm like, when he says who is that guy to him, I'm like, oh, geez. He turns around. He's like, oh, that's Aaron. He's good. He doesn't know who I am.

And then they actually, I got a job. I got a little job out of it too. They needed a phone call into theater real quick. And they wanted it fast before Panetta was going to go downtown. So yeah, the director of CTC leads over goes, Eric, go get so-and-so on the phone right away and ask them blah, blah, blah, for the director leave. So anyway, I did that.

A great Panetta story came out of this too where like they're talking about all of these high-level things. I mean like hugely consequential things like earth moving things. And Panetta says, I have a question. Everybody's like, okay, here we go. Is it, do we think it's, is it okay if I go to church on Sunday before this or do I need to come straight in on Sunday and everybody, you know, like this tension releases in the room and everybody laughs. And I think it was maybe Jeremy or somebody said like, sir, if you wish to bring your

congregation to the CIA on Sunday, you can probably go ahead and do the service here. the senior staff room like these are the types of things you worried about like am i going to throw off um the day's events the planning steps if i like you know go to sunday service didn't obama go to the correspondence center just to make everything look normal because he was clear but i mean like you know penetta could skip like nobody's following uh penetta's every movement so like he was just worried about his team he's like where where do i need to be and i don't want to do a thing that i would normally do if that's going to disrupt that but you're right yeah i know Obama couldn't skip that right that would have been immediately um uh heightened uh situation it was that was unheard of to skip it at that

point, right? So, yeah, no, no, he couldn't. That was an interesting feature of that. And we, that level obviously did not come down to us. Like, I'm fairly certain, like, I learned about the discussion surrounding that after the fact. I mean, it was clear to us why he was doing it at the time, but that they had such a heavy discussion on that was I only learned about after the fact. And so anyway, just to round out that, that sort of day, because that was obviously super consequential day. I go by this boss's desk again. We're closing out for the day. It's it's late. And I say, so, what are you going to go do, Chief? And he's like, I'm going to go home. I'm going to make a huge plate of spaghetti. I'm going to fill up a glass of wine all the way to

the top. I'm going to drink it. I'm a pretty god that have been Lottin's in that cup. Anyway, and the rest of it, I think is pretty well known. I'm like, you know, that Sunday is, that story's been told over and over again. And, you know, we were no different. And, you know, sitting there and consuming it all as it sort of rolled out. And the entire department at that point was in there. So my only leadership story that I had from that was I made the case to read in the entire department that Friday. I think it was Friday after it might have been Thursday. Because I was like, you can't not read these folks in.

Like this is not where this is leaking from at this point. Like some people in Congress know, like it's going out in binders. And like you can't let 200 people that have been working in this department with all their lives work. or whatever it was at that point, and let them go home on a Friday, only to learn that the bin Laden raid is on a Sunday and not tell them. And so, you know,

and that was the role of like an executive assistant in a department like that. You're thinking, the bosses are all thinking about this high-level thing. And, you know, I can zoom in there and be like, hey, let's tell the team. And we can have everybody come in. That's not going to be a deciding factor on this.

And to their credit, they did it. So I have always had this question about you, brought up earlier that, you know, this was a Title 50 operation. There's, you know, the aspect of having deniability. How different would the bin Laden story have been if that helicopter had not gone down in Abbottabad? How different would the story have? No, it wouldn't have changed. I don't think. I think that the route you're going here is that we had to sort of cop to it because there was a black helicopter. Or would we if the helicopter had not gone down? We would have. No, the plan was It was already rolled out.

So, yeah. So they were going to, they were going to do the public relations campaign, regardless of what. The helicopter didn't have any bearing on what the plan was after. So it was from the get-go we were going to announce we were in Abbottabad and we did this. Correct. Yeah, there was a, I mean,

it was my first introduction to the TikTok. Was it TikTok? Is that what they call it? I'm not, I'm being corrupted by the social media app. the, now, I don't even know. This is demonstrated I did get this. It was, like, the press tick. It was first announced, I don't know if you're talking about, like, wire reports,

but I mean, the story broke, so to speak, on Twitter. It was some local Pakistani. He was like, there's helicopters over Abbottabad. What the hell? Yeah, no, that was a, that was a, that was a baller moment at that point. No, like, I'm talking about, like, the sheet of paper that, like, all the senior people have when they go to talk to the press. I think they call it the TikTok.

But now I can't tell if the social media app has corrupted my vocabulary on that area. Not important. But that was the first time, they saw that. And like that was all ready to go. And they were going to deliver it. And like, you know, Secretary Clinton was going to call so-and-so. And Bob Gates was going to call so-and-so. And the vice president was called this person.

And they were going to do that the second. The helicopters were back in Afghan airspace. That was part of the plan from, you know, whenever they made the decision that they were actually going to carry it out. So it was never, there was never any real deniability. I mean, even though. The deniability would have been if they had not conducted the raid but entered the airspace. And so had they gone in and, you know, apportioned. Yeah, Pakistani Air Force had challenged him and they couldn't get there. That would have been denied. Anything short of bullets leaving guns, I think would have been denied. What? So you had mentioned earlier that Obama really wanted the raid because he wanted to show this is the power of the United States. We want to pull bin Laden out of this and basically show this to the world. Was there consternation that Obama or that, uh,

bin Laden had been shot in the face and then buried at sea where where we couldn't really give that proof to the world yeah I don't think I mean it was definitely discussed um I didn't I wasn't part of any of those um discussions with any sort of substance like all of those discussions I heard secondhand and sort of like a brief back um but uh they've they spent a lot of time deciding on what they were going to do with the body in order to prevent you know sort of a location for people to go to and worship a martyr and they came down on that one they truly this is another example we're like you threw him in the bottom of the ocean like did anybody think this through oh my god like can you do you know how many scholars i mean it was like this whether or not they

came down the right decision nobody can say that they didn't talk to all of the people right for the decision um and so yeah i think you know i remember that time as being a much less um suspicious time i mean there were still conspiracy theories and did he really die um but like at that time it was I think people still took the government at their war and I think people felt like if we say we'd got bin Laden there they're gonna but I mean it's also you got to sell the Arab world on it which is a a society well I mean look we're we're heading that direction too but I mean rife with conspiracy theory right in the Arab world yeah no you're no you're absolutely right and yeah I'm not given enough thought to this like this would be one where I'd want to spend a little bit of time thinking about if there was a solution that should have gone differently here in order to maybe have staved off that that that conspiratorial thinking and right it still comes up today i can't remember the guy um the pretty famous reporter who he just said something recently too maybe there's the nord stream pipeline that way you're talking about seymour her is that it seymour hers yeah yeah um yeah it's longer

than i think but um that's him for sure um yeah he wrote this fairly long article about how bin laden wasn't killing him. It's the same example. It was like, how would you have gotten all of these people to not come out and do anything right now and like tell those little story from their little perspective about what exactly happened? I guess the answer there would be I was also duped. But like the way that I know it's true is quite descriptive. Right. Like it wasn't like somebody came back and briefed me that it was definitely him. Like it was definitely him. Right. And of course the, you know, the seals weren't going to. not say that either. So I think that was the feeling was like, we're not going to need to prove it through bringing back his body. Yeah.

That's really. Frankly, they could have. He was still intact enough that. Well, you did bring back his body. I mean, it's just he was disposed of rather unceremonious. What's interesting, I actually have never heard that angle of the reason for the burial at sea that it was.

was to to disable or to mitigate like a martyrs, you know, a funeral. But that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I mean, I think Jack just hit it right there. You know, it was meant to be unceremonious, right? It was it was meant to be like as much of a not issue as they could possibly make it. And then also, yeah, make it a spot that no one could go to and worship him. And I think there was also, you know, a little bit of.

a psychological aspect to that too like this is done right it's it's over he's at the bottom of the ocean um you can't get further away unless we had launched him into space right and you're right uh we obviously they brought the body out when i was meeting bringing the body back i was thinking like like back to the states back to the states or even in afghanistan and leave it there and you know do an auto whatever you would do i i can't think of i would have to really put some thought into like what would have been the alternate option i'm sure they talked about that i'm guaranteed they had you know six coas that they debated and ended up settling on that one.

And in hindsight, I would say, even, I can't think, I don't think of a very, very negative thing that's actually stuck around on that one, even in the Arab world. I think most people at this point accept that that's what happened or, you know, if there is a conspiracy, it's not a sticky one that causes major harper in there. The ones that stick around are like,

did the Pakistanis know and all that? And was there some kind of agreement with the Pakistanis to let us go in there? And so like that, both of those aren't true. I'm absolutely convinced the Pakistanis did not know. And there was certainly no agreement. That was a daring little thing that they did there. And you're right, that nearly got hosed up from that curious individual on Twitter.

Sort of went public with it a little sooner than people were hoping. So what was, I don't want to say fallout, but I mean, what was the aftermath of all of this at CIA from your point of view? I mean, the immediate aftermath was certainly celebratory. You know, it was an interesting time to be there. It was, you know, you didn't exactly know when you were supposed to celebrate, right? Certainly the helicopter went down and that, I think all of us were like, well, that's the end of that. This is done. This is totally screwed.

And to Admiral McRaven's credit, like, it's just a cool customer. I mean, he came over to the radio and he's like, we've had a minor, I forget exactly exactly exact words or he tells this story, obviously super well. But he's like, we've had a, I don't know if he tells this part, but we've had a minor incident on the objective. It's not affecting the mission. We're moving ahead as planned. I mean, it felt like it was probably four hours in between the helicopter heading and him saying that, but I think it was minutes, maybe even a minute. And like, unflopable. He was just like, small problem.

Yeah, I mean, you definitely got to give credit to the operators and the pilots. it's on that operation that they flexed from that that that that accident that crash and just drove drove on and completed the mission and got out of it and it caused a total adjustment in their raid plan too right like they they ended up fraggling to alternate movements on the objective which was like you know any operator that's been on objective when things have gone wrong of which I am not one of them but but even in training you know like this you train one way and maybe a second way, and by the time you're sort of the tertiary way,

you're just kind of making it up as you go along, but you're thinking, but damn it, like now we're now the plans host, and they had that happen, obviously. And to the uninitiated observer, it looked like they still executed exactly the way. Right, right.

Right. Yeah. Right. But yeah, then that, so once that happened, and, you know, they called Geronimo, and there was like a little small celebration at that point, but not a not a boisterous one by any means because like that.

It's obviously still a hazardous point in time. And I think that I've understood now from talking to people who are in different places, like it was much more stoic on the seventh floor and the conference rise down in the department at this time and sort of like a secondary, calling the command center is overdoing it, but the ops center, I guess, is a way to look at it. We weren't commanding anything. but we were a little more burst or so on there's a lot more people I was at power eating carrots out of a

vegetable tray like stress eating my way through a bunch of vegetables and then so then okay the little celebration there they get back on the plane the birds now there's concern that the Pakistan military has been mobilized and in fact had been mobilized but they didn't know they weren't designed to take off at night which was fun to find out after the words. And so they just couldn't figure out

what the steps were going to be to get off the ground, luckily for us. And then, yeah, the helicopters obviously take off. I can't remember what it was, a 34-minute return trip. And that was a very stressful period of time because at this point they were thinking, okay, what happens now if the Pakistanis do engage? And we weren't briefed in or part of the decision tree on what they were going to do at that point.

But obviously, in hindsight, we know that they were going to be challenged by U.S. Air Force if they did that. And so that would have been an interesting event. obviously. And they were told to not land. The helicopter were told you will not, under any circumstances, land in Pakistan if they try to force you down, which would have been obviously an event to be involved in.

But didn't happen. They crossed back over the border. And the second we got that phaseline call, seals in Afghanistan, then it was at least in our little shop interruption. That was hugs and crying and champagne being popped. And, yeah. It's the end of a chapter in American history.

Oh yeah, I mean, end of a chapter in American history and ended a chapter of meet my own personal history. I remember thinking, what am I to do now? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Like, that's it. It's over. Yeah.

Turns out we weren't done. Yeah. We're on terror one. Yeah. And then, yeah, Monday was a cool day. You know, Panetta came down and walked through the vaults and was giving out hugs and high fives and handshakes. And I think, you know, the next day or something. or very short that after the president came up to CIA.

And yeah, it was a cool, cool time to be there, but quite clearly. So what was, you weren't quite done yet. What was the next assignment for you? Yeah, so I ended up transitioning there and sitting, digging back into Arabic for a period of time and really getting pretty decent at it. then I moved to back to the Middle East, and then I spent some time in the Arabian Peninsula, you know, continuing to take the CT fight to, you know, the remnants were there. You know, a lot of people in Al-Qaeda decided that wasn't over. And of course, ISIS at that point had started to really come out of the woodwork.

And so all of a sudden we had a totally new enemy to fight, in this case, more brutal and ruthless enemy. And, you know, where I was at that time was, you know, moderately safe place. But, you know, suicide bombings and stuff started to happen there too. And it was unclear like, you know, now it wasn't even, we weren't even in the war zones. And it was kind of like being in war zones all the time at that period.

What year was this, roughly? This was 2013 to 2016. Okay. So what did it look like working against? you know, AQ and this new ISIS where you were at that time because like you said,

it wasn't, you weren't in a war zone, you weren't responsible necessarily for like Afghanistan, but, but like the Arabian Peninsula, like that area was still very influential and hot,

right? Oh yeah. No, yeah, absolutely was. Yeah, so that turned into just more the hard-nosed targeting for which CI was,

pretty famous and really good at. And that was the part that, you know, I was, I was good at. I liked doing that. I enjoyed the, um, the investigation sides of it and, and the, you know, the, being on the hunt. Um, for folks who we knew were, you know, just always a few steps ahead of us and always sort of planning to do something pretty epic. You know, Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, had, um, a couple of famous, uh, folks around that time, before that time and after my time and, and after my time, in some cases, just barely after my time. Ebrahim Alasiri was among them. He was known for making the bombs that are responsible for us.

I still having to take our shoes off in the airport, which is a ridiculous thing that still continues. Anytime someone takes my shoes off, you have to take your shoes off. Maybe you don't know what's happening here, but this is important for security. And I want to be like, let me tell you where this originates from. And how ridiculous it is at this point.

Yeah, at this point, they've gone beyond this. But so there's that. And Honoralaki was famous at the time, at least in our circles, an American citizen, but Yemeni born from the Alalaki tribe, which is a pretty famous tribe in Yemen, in a huge tribe. And yeah, there was just a lot of that going on. And there was a much different. And now, you know, bin Laden's gone.

So like the pressures. both the pressures off, but also now the money is sort of changing and the focus is changing and ISIS is there. And so at least on the AQ side of things, or even Peninsula side of things, it wasn't the focus anymore. But I kind of, I thought, I sort of enjoyed that because now you could do your work without the pressure of people wanting to see what you were doing all the time. And I existed in that environment, I think, better than the others. So we're going to brag about you real quick and then ask you a question. In 2015, you won the DCI Language Impact Award.

That's probably not an award that many people have heard about. Can you tell us what it is? And anything that you can tell us about what led into you winning that award? Yeah. This is from one of my various bios, and I will be quite straightforward in saying that I put it on there, and I put it on there because I'm proud of it. I'm proud of a lot of stuff I did at CIA, but I'm particularly proud of this one because it was related to the Arabic

that I put so much time into getting right. And this reward, this is for impact when you're doing something operational in the foreign language. And so people are like, man, your Arabic must be great. I mean, it was always decent, but I don't think anyone ever called it great. I would constantly get made fun of because I would blow through grammar, choose more basic vocabulary and butcher, you know, what actually is a very beautiful language in Arabic to get straight to the thing that I needed the fastest. But it turned out that's a good

way to do it for this type of work. I'm never going to be a UN translator or translate the beautiful literature that is Arabic poetry. But if you need to say the word carbom in Arabic, I'm at least as good as anyone. Right. And so, yeah, I was proud of that because yeah, I was able to have at that time what was the biggest success in CT with a fantastic team, working with a fantastic team, me getting used my Arabic, a couple of other folks using their Arabic capability to. Unfortunately, it was an individual award. So like, it should have definitely gone to the team from what we got. And we did get a team award as well for this. But yeah, we had what was the most consequential success of that little time period. I'll have to have a

to leave it to the internet sleuths to now take the time period and do some heavy division maybe in Wikipedia land to figure out what was done there. But it was certainly not of the bin Laden. I remember when I had to type up for the team award, I was sort of trying to articulate, well, this is the most important thing that happened since bin Laden. And my boss at that time was like, do you don't say that. That sounds obnoxious. I was like, okay, fine. But it is. It was, right. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, so that was a good, that was an interesting time.

It was a good time. Like, it's probably people who, I don't think we have this problem with your listeners. But I sometimes caution myself or stop myself. And I'm like, that was a good time. They're like, you just talked about car bombs. And I think you were talking about maybe eliminating someone and, like, you're saying good time. But like, if you're CIA fighting CT at this time, like, this is what you came to do. I know.

I did an interview recently. and I was talking about, you know, some terrorists we killed in Iraq back in the old days in 2005. And I was laughing about it. And somebody in the comments is like, this guy's a textbook psychopath laughing about killing people straight out of DSM4. He should be diagnosed. It's like, like we're talking about earlier, it's your job and it becomes a job. And hey, he was a terrorist. I was a soldier.

You're doing what you're doing because you want. We both show up on the battlefield. And, I mean, someone's going home in a job. body bag. It's not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And at that point, you're talking about like the Zarqawi era, which is like one of the most brutal time periods in all of this. I mean, ISIS did end up trumping him in brutality. But like ISIS grew out of Zarqawi in that 05-0-0-0-0-60 period. And like, yeah, celebrating that guy's demise, anybody who can't get on board with, maybe celebrating demise is not everybody's cup of tea. But like, choose a better word there. but like being totally okay

that that guy was not allowed to run around and chop people's heads off anymore. I think that's okay. I would be say, I would say celebrating demise is, is appropriate. But yeah,

I mean, but maybe I'm a textbook psychopath too. I don't celebrate people's deaths. Like I wasn't jumping up and down celebrating when bin Laden died, but I agree with the decision. Right. You know,

fuck that dude. Yeah. No, I think you're right. Like, yeah, celebrating maybe isn't quite, the right word, but like, yeah, being okay that it happened is, I think is fine. I find myself

in this spot right now because I, you know, I talk to varying degrees of audiences right now, and you sort of got to, you know, I can own my points if I want to and turn off the audience and not own these smaller points. Or I can, you know, land the bigger ones, which I think are more important in balancing, turning off one's audience and getting the point that I want to brand home is this weird, delicate balance. So I'm learning it right now as I do it, but I maybe catch myself a little too often. Yeah. Yeah, I just don't like making it like an emotional thing.

Like we shouldn't kill people because we're like upset. Like you kill them because there's a necessity for it. Because they're assholes and oxygen. Because they're a national security threat. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think in this case where it's, you know, there's, there's myriad examples of this person is.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. Really horrible. Right. We know it. It's a fact.

Like this is not. They've said it in some. cases publicly, I'm going to do this thing. And now you have a couple of options to deal with that. And in some cases, those options, they're not pleasant necessarily. But yeah. So Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and now you're also kind of witnessing the birth of ISIS across the border. Who said Saudi Arabia? But anyway, yeah. The Arabian Peninsula. well.

Yeah, so that moved from there to Eastern Europe and more of the same, counterterrorism, and a little bit of a leadership job there too, which was a school for me. And yeah, the Eastern Europeans are just fantastic. I mean, there's a little bit of a maybe of a hierarchy amongst them to a do. agree from the perspective of how great they are as a partner and her ally to the United States, but overall the Eastern Europeans are just really, really stellar at being good partners. And some of my friends, specifically, some of my Romanian friends are just like amazing human beings. I would constantly say they're better Americans and some of the Americans that I know.

And yeah, that was great. But less excitement for sure, as is often the case for some of those, a welcome to her, but less excitement. And but yeah, still pretty fascinating. And it was interesting to work with a lot of the Europeans and the European counterterrorism elements there had a hard job at that time because this is when the lone wolf's threat was at its height in Europe. And a lot of them are coming up from Syria and Iraq through Eastern Europe, actually. and then getting everybody remembers this in Belgium and Brussels and France and I'm sure I'm forgetting some spots right now. My history on these things, I seem to leave it behind when I leave these places by no intimately at the time.

And then I decided to, I guess, not preserve it, at least in for instant recall. So that was an interesting time, a much harder time, like road wolf terrorism, that it's not a bigger thing, even still to this day, which is very lucky because it's not easy to stop. So when you were in Eastern Europe, because normally when you think of CIA in Eastern Europe, you're thinking about, you know, countering the Russians and the Cold War and post-Cold war sort of mentality of the spy were a spy, how was it working more in a CT fashion, you know, going after like ISIS and whatnot? Were you still working sort of the traditional cases or was there a firm division in that area between like the anti or the the counter Russian effort and and probably counter

Chinese effort even though it was you know Eastern Europe versus C.T. Yeah. No. You know, for agency officers overseas in foreign posts, it's almost always like in all hands on deck towards whatever important thing is happening. Okay. At that time. I mean, you have some, you know, you're given delineations.

You should focus on this day to day and because we need some, you know, we need 40% on that and 30% on that and the remainder on this. And so, you know, keep up on that. But like, yeah, if something happens and you need, you know, three people from the office to go do a Russian thing, even though they're normally CT people, like the agency is extremely good at that type of, those type of pivots. And yeah, you're right. And this time, you know, this is, you know, Crimea and Georgia have already, or earlier versions of Crimea and Georgia have already happened. So that's a little bit of a heated area.

but not crazy at that time. And certainly the Russians are there, and to a great degree, they see that as their backyard. And that's, yeah, you can't go to Eastern Europe and not, as a CIA officer, and not spend your time thinking about the Russians.

It's not possible. But not much in addition to that at that time. That's changed a little bit. We, before, I want to talk about East Asia, but I'm going to hit you with just a couple of questions from our users. our viewers. Michael asks, what was the typical day like in Ranger Battalion? What was the typical day like as a CIA officer? Which was better? Your best day is a ranger or your best day is a spook. P.S. Guys, Verizon Fiber is a worthy upgrade from Comcast in this city. Michael, we agree.

And we will be upgrading. We will be we will be voting with our dollars. Yeah. I mean, they're not watching live. I think he probably would have recognized that that question, at least the latter of that question was an easy answer. Hands down, no question. Obviously that Sunday, May 1st, 2011 stands out easily. That's no question. And that was not anywhere near a standard day.

First of all, it was the Sunday. Yeah, second of all, it was one of the most consequential days in history. So just somewhat sure luck. And then it's been some measure of luck that landing me there and then some measure of persistence. and that seems to be the equation that's worked out for me way more often than not. And sometimes I actually actively tried, this is across my life, actively tried to make the wrong decision and fate has brought me to the right one by accident or by design that wasn't my own at least. So, but yeah, typical day, there's no typical day in CIA really. I mean, if you really boil it down to the most typical day, right, nobody would want to hear it.

It would be a horrible story because it's like you wake up, you go in, you read some stuff. You read email, unfortunately. You read some, you know, of the regular traffic. You sort of consume something that happened, you know, during the time period when you were asleep or not at work, especially if it's relevant to you. And then you're probably spending your day writing something about something you did. Like this is one of the things I tell the people who are thinking about a career in the CIA because you have to make, you have to be ready for this. Otherwise, you can be a severely disappointed person. Like most of being a CIA case officer is writing.

You know, the cool stuff happens, but it's like less than 5% of the time. Now, that stuff does make up for it. It definitely does. I used to call them CIA days. And you would know it when you're happening. Maybe sometimes you would know it after it or you'd know it when you're in it. And you'd be like, wow, okay, this is a CI day today. You know, we're doing something cool.

We're doing something you couldn't do. Otherwise, you know, we're breaking somebody else's law or something or, you know, we're going across a border. we're not supposed to be going across, but that's like less than 5%. It definitely makes up for the other 95% of writing. But like I don't like, I like writing, but I don't like writing about a thing that's already happened.

I'm like, well, that's done. Why do we got to write up? But you have to. It's a nature of the way that business works. And it is actually really important documenting all that stuff to both preserve it for the record, but also to have something to go back to and know what happened before.

you don't make bad decisions based on faulty information that's in the past. And obviously, the agency has an unfortunate history with bad decisions when things were not documented. They're not as many as people think compared to the successes, but of course they're the only one that we know about. Tom, this is a little confusing. He asks, were the CIA duties what you were hoping for or PSD and case officer security, etc. maybe he was asking about your, you know, potentially becoming a paramilitary guy versus a case officer.

I think he pretty much answered that. I'm not totally clear on that, on the question, though. Caleb, Caleb asked what selection was like for the agency. I think you answered that one as well. Yeah, I mean, there's a little bit there. Like, you know, selection for the agency is actually pretty intense,

but it's not selection, you know, like a military selection, you know, or I do a long walk for 30 days or, you know, Ranger's selection, which is less like selection and more like, do you really want to do this or not? And do you also have the aptitude to do it. It's changed now, I guess, to a certain degree to be a little bit more like selection. But selection for the agency is like lots of tests, lots of psyche vows, interviews, you know, background investigations. It's a long, it is a selection process and they definitely are selective. And, uh, It's not like anything else that I had done. And I think it does work to a larger extent. Like you, they,

they pigeonle a lot of people into certain jobs, but you look around and for the most part, I think most of us agree like, oh yeah, they got this, they got this right. And they got that, that person seems like they should be over there. And every once in a while it's not right. And usually they'll let people shuffle around. But yeah, the process does seem to work.

At least it worked for the past. Like things are changing rapidly now. And technology is changing rapidly now. And, you know, you might need someone who has a considerably, you might, you definitely need someone who has considered a more tech acumen than you needed to have 20 years ago to be a case officer, right? You didn't need to really have anything good judgment and some cultural knowledge and some luck. And now you need to know how to, you know, you need to know what an ISP is and, you know, how an encryption works and, you know, what is your signal signature and certain. places in the world when you're trying to do a thing and that that's just not it's not an easy thing to teach because there's not really an expertise on it right now we're learning it as we go

during you know during the war and just just in general the way technology has been evolving have you been surprised because you said like when you were planning for the bin la and stuff or when you were seeing what they were pulling and the things were pouring have you what have you thought about like the technological leaps that the agency has made over time since you first got in. Yeah. So that's tricky because some of the coolest features of this are also the features that are best left.

Sure. Unsaid right now is no doubt you know there. But like, yeah, I mean, it's been amazing the amount that's transpired from a technological standpoint. I mean, some of it we've learned about, after it's already happened. But, and we didn't know it was a risk, but it had already become a risk. But now we're watching this bubble up as they happen.

And so, you know, I'm a big, I was a big risk identifier for what is being termed ubiquitous technical surveillance. I don't know if that's come up on your show yet, but it's a clunky government term sort of meaning all of the possible technologies out there that can, you know, uncover things that were previously very difficult to uncover. So, you know, cell phones are the easiest example to use, right? My cell phone is just a hazard to all kinds of things. If I turn it off, it's a problem.

If I leave it on, it's a problem. If I take it to a thing, it's a problem. If I leave it behind, it's a problem no matter what. And for a long time, people are like, well, let's not use cell phones. Well, that's not an answer because everybody uses cell phones, and you're trying not to stand out. and it stands out if you don't use a cell phone. Right.

But you hear people when they talk about telematics, right? Telematics is really tough because almost all cars now have some measure of telematics, meaning they're tracked by some entity. There's less of a privacy issue there. And so no matter what, same thing you do with a car. I'm not going to leave a car behind? I'm going to take it with me? It's I normally drive my car.

So then therefore what happens when I'm not driving my car? I look not normal. And I'm always trying to look normal. And you'll hear someone say, well, I'm never getting rid of my 1986 Bronco. Well, who drives a 1986 Bronco abroad that works at an embassy? Nobody. And so, yeah, okay, now you're not tracked, but you're obviously the person trying not to be tracked,

and guess who then gets tracked more when that happens. And so this is a real tricky period of time, and there's no great solutions to it. And unfortunately, we have an adversary that is the People's Republic of China and the Communist Party of China that is really doing this particularly well compared to us. And frankly, we don't want to be as a country very good at this because what they're doing is just steamrolling over privacy rights and individual rights in a way that I don't think anybody in this country would be comfortable with it from any side of the spectrum. Some more comfortable with another's maybe and some less depending where you are, but no one could possibly like what's happening in China because of the Chinese government right now. And I am careful by design in separating out that people have tried to hear from the Chinese government because like not it's a good idea to do just from a cultural standpoint anyways, but it also does a disservice to look at the problem beyond the government because it really is the government.

And if you don't focus on the government, it becomes a much harder problem to deal with if you think it's 1.4 billion people and instead of the, you know, whatever thousands that are running the Communist Party. And yeah, what the Communist Party is doing both inside China and now outside of China is amazing what they're able to do from a tracking, locating, and data collection standpoint. I mean, speaking of which, the tail end of your career at the agency, you had an East Asia assignment. And I'd love to hear about that. Yep. So, yeah, that was a pivot for me. I was finally like, okay, got to try something slightly different here. And it was more than slightly different.

So, yeah, my last job was as the deputy chief of operations in Southeast Asia Japan department. And, you know, that's basically being responsible for oversight to the operations for almost everything but China. There's a couple of other examples that are included. But, yeah, that was a fascinating job. It was also about the time when I said, okay, I got to make a shift to the private sector because I'm really having trouble getting a lot of the things done that I would want to do here. that i think i could do if i was in the private sector and potentially maybe do better and i also wanted to try my hand at some things that i was never going to be able to do inside government before i got too old um but while i was there yeah i really got to see what our allies were like in that

region who some of our previous allies were and now we're no longer our allies you know um the government in cambodia is a pretty good example of this a really close partner for a long long time and no more they're kind of fucking things up in the region yeah oh it's a great great example of like what not to do from a partnership standpoint in pivoting from one partner to another now maybe they'll survive it by sideling up to China but there would have been better off I think trying to ride the middle ground for much longer because right now they've chosen a horse and they can't get off of it they can't change again but there's other countries that are kind of riding this line a little better but yeah I learned a lot there and I definitely

got to see what how that place now agency functioned a little different differently compared to CT. And I also got to see that, yeah, the threat that is the people from China is, I mean, there's no comparison to CT. Like, well, we would survive CT if we decided never to fight it. Like, it would have been horrible. I'm sure there would have been lots of tragedies, but the country would not have imploded because of it. Or the world would not have changed super dramatically because of it. But that the government of China is a totally different thing. What would the transition that Cambodia made? the mistakes that we made, the mistakes that they made, and where they ended up?

Yeah, so I mean, Cambodia, I mean, I think if the mistake that they're making right now is caving to, you know, what the, what ultimately the Chinese government's pressure to force them to essentially be a jumping off point for Chinese military operations there. You know, this is a fairly well-known example. They have a base there, Ream Naval Base, fairly well example to people who are following this closely. The Ream Naval Base there was up until very recently a place where the U.S. Navy was located as part of our joint operations with the Cambodians. And then almost overnight, the Cambodians kicked out the U.S. Navy and allowed the Chinese Navy to take it over. and that's obviously a very strategic and consequential decision from just both a regional standpoint

and what you do when you're trying to balance power in a region and trying to have allies in geographically significant places and then all of a sudden you know a geographically significant position is flipped and in the direction away from you know where we would want it to be I think that's significant. I think the Cambodians are short-sighted in that if this thing gets to the point where it gets hot, I'm not so certain that the Chinese military is going to come to their defense. There's going to be a green incentive for us to bring down the hammer on the Cambodians and potentially take back that space.

I don't think it'll come to a hot war in Cambodia by any means. But like from a political standpoint, we've sort of decided to cede that ground without really doing anything consequential. But if things really amped up, I mean, I think we would try to, you know, extract a cost out of the Cambodians and that or at least try to balance it back the other direction. And that's not good for anybody in Southeast Asia right now. What do you make of our efforts in the United States, not internationally, but just here in the U.S., at combating Chinese espionage, Chinese influence? I mean, I know that one of the primary providers, DGI drones, is a Chinese health company, and almost all of our law enforcement entities use their drones. Like, is there a way to stop them that our politicians will get on board with? So, yeah.

I mean, I wish it was just drones. We'd be in great shape if that was the case. frankly especially the the technocratic elements of the US government you know the people who don't move

along with administrations I think are doing a pretty good job at this right now like you're seeing a lot of pivots happening you're seeing a lot of pressure going back the other direction you're seeing a lot of monetary and trade restrictions being put into place you obviously are probably tracking the Chips Act

and what we're trying to do there None of these things are enough on its own, but there's certainly all moves in the right direction. This is a delicate balance, too, because, like, you disrupt, you know, global trade, sometimes at your own peril, right? You don't want to cut off your nose to spite your face. So this is a tricky thing. People are like, oh, just, you know, cut them off, like, you know, enact even rougher trade barriers. You know, this is the world economy is a delicate balance, and I am definitely not an expert to speak on any of the this, but I do understand that, like, making big decisions is not something really that

the American government has ever proven really good at. No government really is good at. So better to make small decisions and sort of read the tea leaves as you go. And I do think they're doing that pretty well. I'm not an expert in this by any means. So there are lots of people who are going to jump in here and speak to this more effectively than I am. But I will say, what I probably can argue I'm an expert at is what the Chinese government specifically is arraying against us from a hazard, right? And DJ drones are a pretty decent example from their perspective of what like a very easy to understand collection risk is.

But the biggest shopping application in the United States now is TEMU. TEMU has overtaken Amazon, Walmart, and another shopping application. I'm in a butcher the pronunciation of here, Cheyenne. Sheehan. It looks like shine, but I'm told it's pronounced. Sheen, sheen, was until recently the biggest shopping application in the United States until Timu beat it out last August. Timu had three Super Bowl commercials. And both of those, Shea Yan and Timu are owned, are Chinese owned.

They're ahead of Amazon and Walmart. Those are data-collected machines. Right. In the United States, they're ahead of TikTok in what they're doing. And when you can know this much information about an entire population at will in a second, and you've already proven that you're exceptionally good at knowing what populations are doing and then manipulating them, that's a hazard. And these companies, based on the way the laws are written in China,

they have to give up this information to the Chinese government if asked. Well, it's not even if they have to give it up. Inside the offices of those companies is like a piece. a CLA commissar, a political office inside the larger corporations. Right. Yeah. It's not a far distance for them to consume. It's not like an America where they have to like send a warrant to the company to get the

information or even like we've seen some recently where there's some sort of like back and forth going on. It's like no, there's an office of these communist party inside this corporation that just takes what they want because it's their company. And even I mean, even as insidious as things like, you know, T. and TikTok and these things are, there are even more insidious efforts in the sense of the clinics

that collect genetic information for mothers to be, mostly being Chinese owned or at least selling all the DNA and all the data to the Chinese. How do we, you know, I mean, because there's the idea

that there could be designer weapons created for somebody's specific DNA if they wanted to eliminate somebody, will know a trace. Yeah. Yeah, the stuff that used to be purely science fiction, you know, we're obviously watching come straight into reality. Yeah, genetic engineering, a bio weapon that's literally designed for a single person,

but it's quite clearly very possible at this point. And, yeah, the DNA of most Americans right now is either known indirectly or indirectly by one or two degrees. which is effectively still knowing it. This has been widely reported. And yeah, the Chinese ownership roles in a lot of these companies, 23 and me, is there's a reason for it.

And this is also where it becomes really tricky, right? Because you, again, xenophobia is unequivocally bad for a whole host of reasons, but it's also bad from the standpoint of if you turn, you could there's there's good reason for the 1.4 billion Chinese to sort of be upset

with the Chinese Communist Party right now right like or certainly huge swaths of them right the economy is not ticking away at a rate that it once was obviously the COVID policy

that's just now been reduced was absolutely abysmal policy and then the way they reduced it was also really bad there's a lot of reasons for the Chinese people to be upset the last thing we want to do is somehow reduce that natural ally to us by overreacting.

Right. I'm a constant supporter of subtleties in foreign policy and also subtleties in the arts beyond foreign policy. And this is where it becomes tricky because it is such an enormous problem right now. Like everywhere you look, data or IP or critical technology, are either being siphoned off or taken right out the front door. In some cases, most of this is going right out the front door. Like, Timo is not stealing Americans' data.

Like, Americans are giving Tumu. They're data for free. Right. Same with TikTok, right? And then you hear examples like you almost just brought around one a second ago where people are like, well, you know, yeah, but like Facebook's doing the same thing as TikTok. The difference is, despite the Twitter files, it is remarkably hard for the United States

government to go to TikTok and get anything but the most narrow of the, you know, data release and it's usually based on a subpoena or warrant. And anyone who thinks that there's like a bulk data collection happening by the NSA, even if you look back to some of the NSA programs where there was, you know, some bulk collection around metadata. Metadata. Thank you. Save me. Metadata. Like this is usually someone who vastly understands how that works, right? No one in the intelligence community is sort of sitting at Twitter or Facebook and consuming this stuff raw off the cutting room floor and then making

decisions about Americans. It just doesn't happen. Frankly, it would probably be better if it happens slightly more, right? It would be in the Americans' interest if we could use those tools slightly more than we currently do. But mostly it's not happening. But the difference is on the other side of things that you're right. There's a minder sitting right in that TikTok space that doesn't have to ask at all.

Right. They could just take or hook up the pipe and API their way to insights. Right. And they're taking it. And the difference between data on Facebook, which is data that you give Facebook, an app like TikTok is escaping the app and it's taking it from your phone. Like it's taking it from like general. It's taking it about you in general, you know, in addition to what you give to TikTok.

Correct. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And a lot's unknown about. that too. It depends on the phone model. It depends on the permission sets. Yeah, certainly some nefarious things that are also happening there. And it's not well understood really by almost anyone. Aaron, tell us about, you know, you left the agency. And what have you been doing since?

What was the next step for you? Yeah. So we kind of got into it here a little bit. So a few things started a nonprofit at the 2430 group. And the mission of that nonprofit is due much of what we were just discussing right now, bringing forward knowledge on a lot of these strats specifically from adversary nation states. So, you know, trying to identify how the Chinese government or Chinese companies are stealing intellectual property and exposing that so that, you know, companies who are less aware of how this is happening, have a chance to learn more about that, helping to build up mitigations and tools to defend against that IP theft, also helping to defend some of our critical technologies that we will need moving forward if, you know,

certainly if this goes to some kind of a shooting conflict, but even short of that, and I think we will probably stay short of that for quite some time. This is going to be a battle in the quiet spaces, and we need it. We're going to need those critical technologies to be able to conduct those battles. And if we want to keep it in the quiet space, it's going to be critical technologies that keep it there. So those critical technologies are under threat right now, and we can actually get a better understanding of what those threats are from the open source environment, I think,

in many cases. And so the nonprofit has decided to take this on. And when we have the opportunities to expose what's happening here and then offer some mitigations to folks, we're doing that. And that's dovetails completely with what I was doing inside the agency. And then we're also, I am personally advising a number of large, both technology companies and just large corporations on how to work within this new threat space and how can they, you know, if they're a startup that's building a critical technology, how can they,

you know, build a federal sub and still protect their IP, but maybe hire a really smart Chinese person who's gone to a great university to learn AI and is the smartest person on this piece, this feature of AI, and they absolutely need to have them if we're going to win the AI race or whatever AI race they're in, how can you, you know, make use of that person's knowledge and potentially very honest desire to work for your company, but not hazard your IP at the same time. Yeah. And so a lot of advising going into that and that's a space that's really interesting. And then finally, I just, I do a lot of speaking and trying to, you know, turn these stories into, you know, valuable engagements with companies and groups to, you know,

how do you take something like a Coast attack and bring lessons out of it from a risk perspective and use those lessons about risk and risk calculation to make better decisions in your your own company or your own life and frankly this last one is the one that i think i enjoy the most um it's the one that unfortunately i do the least um right now would like to do it more um but it's a hard market to break into uh and um it's it's not one for which i have a long long skill set but but it's growing and where can people like find you and find your services if they're interested in hiring your company. Yeah. So if they really enjoyed the conversation we just had about the threats coming from nation states, you know, 2430 group.org will bring them to that website. And

that one's fairly well explained there. It's new. So, you know, there's not a donate button just yet, but there will be soon. We're still trying to figure out exactly where we're going to fit into the nonprofit space. But they want to learn about that and they want to interact with that. There's there's ways to contact us there. If they, you know, if they want to hear me come, speak about risk and resiliency or, you know, leadership when you need it most and how to have a more, how to encourage risk without overstepping and causing, you know, actual hazard, then they can go to undersimplified.org and, you know, have a speaking page there and a way to get in contact with me there. And what about social media if they just love your personality?

Yeah, undersimplified gets you to the, the, the, various places I'm on social media. I've definitely gone and nailed the search engine optimization on Google. So I think now if you put undersimplified in, you mostly get my things at the top because it's kind of a made up word. And there's a podcast also, right? There is. That is, as you guys know way better than I do, trying to do a startup and a nonprofit and speaking engagements and also a podcast is proving extremely challenging. So, So keeping those episodes going, I would like to keep going at it. We have a couple episodes in the can that will definitely still release a pretty cool one with a Berkeley economist that talks about a lot of the things that I think are really interesting to me from an economic standpoint in the world of geopolitics.

And then we also have one that we're going to release now under some hazard with Jasper Jeffers, who is now the deputy director of special operations on the joint staff and was a special missions unit. commander up until very recently. And so he and I had, have been pals for a little while. He's actually in for a friendship time at the same time I was there, but he was in SICO. So I was in Aco. Never did we meet. He was also an officer and I was enlisted. So like we might as well have been right on different posts. Right. Different countries. Yeah. But he, yeah, he's a one star now and is a innovator and a disruptor and just a really fascinating guy. So hopefully we'll get those out. And then I just got to figure out how I want to divide my time up. And as you guys know, like producing a podcast, especially just me, is, I knew it's

going to be a lot of work. I did not have any idea of just how much work that was going to be. So I hope I can keep going. My plan is due. Awesome, man. Well, I mean, you have an incredible story, an incredible arc of experience through the war on terror. I really appreciate you sharing some of these stories and anecdotes just your life with

us. I mean, it's been really fascinating. It's been phenomenal. Like we've heard stories from you that, I mean, really sort of the backside, like the behind the scenes that we haven't gotten anywhere else. Yeah, I am grateful to come on and tell them. I love being a storyteller. I'll give you guys a heads up afterwards if I get a bunch of calls about how I'm never telling these stories again. So first time I've done anything at this length with good questions from knowledgeable guys who know the inside.

knowledge here so you guys know the questions I asked you you treated me very fairly you could have definitely hammered me on a couple more I don't know how much your audience knows how how much grace you give to folks like me because you could have put me on the spot with a couple things that you didn't so I very I appreciate that we're not we're not like Barbara Walters we're like we're not here for the hard hitting you know like we understand and we respect you know where what people like you have been through and what you are and aren't allowed to say and you know and we don't want to give you hard time about about the other stuff yeah no I definitely appreciate it I recognized it and I'm grateful for you're a little facetious about the crack cocaine stuff in in L.A but other than that

you know seem fairly straightforward but I'll think through part two I can I can I can shine it up a little bit maybe next time all right thank you well next time you'll be in studio drinking and smoking a cigar oh I hope you will I hope you'll come visit us and have a cigar with us and and drink some scotch. And next Friday, we're going to have, I don't know if we're releasing his name publicly. Yes, no, D? Okay, I'm not going to say it yet, but he's an aspiring peasant on Twitter. He's a former Navy SEAL. Dave. Dave. We'll have him on. I haven't pre-cleared his whole biography yet, but we'll have him on Friday, and we'll be talking about his time in the teams and afterwards. He's sort

of a homesteader now interesting interesting cat yeah yeah he's an interesting dude so uh we'll see you guys next Friday um another pre-recorded episode we'll get our internet situation sorted out and we'll see all of you then thank you