The Team House - Inside JSOC’s Most Secretive Undercover Missions | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

Jack Murphy, Sean Naylor, and Zach Dorfman break down the hidden world of JSOC non-official cover operatives — the military’s version of deep-cover spies — and reveal how elite units conducted clandestine missions in places like Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. The episode dives into secret front companies, undercover tradecraft, failed training exercises, and why modern surveillance and AI may be making human espionage obsolete.Subscribe to The Highside here:https://thehighside.substack.com/Find Zach Dorfman here:https://www.linkedin.com/in/zach-dorfman-1a64608https://x.com/zachsdorfmanGhostBed ⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/teamFOR 10% off! Support the show on Patreon:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseSubscribe to our newsletter!!!!https://teamhousepodcast.kit.com/joinAndy's new article:⬇️https://warontherocks.com/the-operational-case-against-israels-gaza-campaign/Jack's news outlet:⬇️https://thehighside.substack.com/Find Jon Hackett here:⬇️Jon's Twitter:https://x.com/jonathanhackettJon's LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejonathanhackettJon's books:https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0C5L659N5?ccs_id=e11a2062-f8d3-498e-bfd7-7d2f3869caf6Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejonathanhackettTwitter: https://x.com/jonathanhackettCheck out Mick's new podcast here:⬇️Apple Podcasts:https://podcasts.apple.com/at/podcast/pub-and-porch-applied-stoicism/id1836955475Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/1k3QPmkAMwnGJxMLDwUSSd?si=n6piIu8XRcag1Z0K43A3bQYoutube:https://www.youtube.com/@UCd0Hq6QFk8CoTu5j-VU0Ong Find Mick Mulroy here: Fogbow ⬇️https://fogbow.com/Lobo Institute ⬇️https://www.loboinstitute.org/Twitter ⬇️https://x.com/mickmulroy?s=21&t=-Ze3F_Ix2vlJ18KFvORTCALinkedIn ⬇️https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-patrick-mulroy-31198b52/Bluesky ⬇️https://bsky.app/profile/mickmulroy.bsky.socialMick’s publications ⬇️https://www.loboinstitute.org/publications/publications-of-michael-mick-patrick-mulroy/Whitefish security summit ⬇️https://whitefishsecuritysummit.comFind Marc P here:https://x.com/MpolymerFind Andy Milburn here: Twitter ⬇️https://twitter.com/i/flow/login?redirect_after_login=%2Fandymilburn8LinkedIn ⬇️https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmilburn2023Substack ⬇️https://amilburn.substack.com/Andy’s book ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/When-Tempest-Gathers-Mogadishu-OperationsBluesky ⬇️https://bsky.app/profile/andy-milburn.bsky.socialFind Jason Lyons here: LinkedIn ⬇️https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-lyons-666873316?uBluesky ⬇️https://bsky.app/profile/bgsilverback73.bsky.social"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio00:00 — JSOC’s Secret Spy Program Exposed02:40 — How Delta Force Built Deep-Cover Networks Overseas03:38 — Inside America’s Secret War in Lebanon06:17 — Why U.S. Intel Worked With Drug Smugglers & Terrorists11:53 — How JSOC Trains Real-Life Undercover Operatives13:50 — Why Special Operators Fail at Acting Civilian16:59 — The “Pedophile Van” Training Disaster Explained19:42 — CIA NOCs vs JSOC NOCs: The Real Difference27:54 — The Legendary Delta Operative Known as “The East European”36:06 — The Secret U.S. Mission That Infiltrated Iran45:14 — Fake Retirements, New Identities & Spy Cover Companies50:48 — Is AI & Surveillance Killing Human Espionage?Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Shenanigan was fake retirement ceremonies. That you'll have a guy who has, you know, maybe he already has his 20 years in, maybe not in the military. And they decide, hey, we're going to take this Sergeant Major or this lieutenant colonel or whoever it is. And we're going to put them under a non-official cover and send them to some part of the world to gather intelligence. We'll actually hold a fake retirement ceremony. And everyone in that guy's unit thinks it's real, thinks that guy's really retiring except for him. And then he will be given fake military paperwork, like fake discharge paperwork, so that if something, someone does look, it's like, wow, he's not in the military anymore that's done with. And then sent out and do his mission for a year or two.

And then when he comes back, he will have a second real retirement ceremony that puts him out of the military. Welcome to another episode of Aizond Geopolitics. I got a special one today. I have Sean Naylor, Jack Murphy, and Zach Dorfman on. They are the authors of an incredible new article on the high side. Go check that out. That link is in the description. That's Jack and Sean's news outlet.

They do stuff that, you know, most investigative reporters or journalists don't do at all. They dig deep. They probably have some of the best sourcing too in like special operations in the national security world. This specific article was incredible. It was about J-Soc Knox, non-official cover. And everybody thinks when you hear knock, you think, CIA guys CIA Knox and stuff like that but Jay Sox had a pretty a relatively robust program for going on 40 years probably right like since the 80s yeah uh so guys welcome I don't even know where to

start well I mean go ahead yeah I think maybe like the genesis of the article was actually Zach approaching me um and you know Zach do you want to plug your book a little bit and explain like how this article was an outgrowth of the large research that you've been working on? Sure. Although it's funny because I remember, it's interesting because the nature of memory being what it is. I remember both of us having a conversation and then I don't remember who actually like initiated the idea that we should we should do this. But we were talking about the book that I'm working on, which is a history of CIA's NOC program, or it's a history

of the CIA essentially through its NOC program. And then you and I were talking, I mean, I want to say almost like the like December of last year. It was like holiday. It was like around the holidays about how, you know, I mentioned it to you, and then you started talking about the J-Sock-Nock program and how the Special Operations World had been also engaged in the deep cover, commercial cover space for many, many years, and how there had never really been a, you know, an exhaustive look at that, or there's certainly not been reporting on that anytime recently. And from that, we decided to kind of, you know, start digging. And, through conversations with a bunch of folks in the space.

We, I think, I think we, you know, I wouldn't say exhaustively, but I think we, we have uncovered a good, at least first pass, you know, history of where things have, where things began and where they've gone over time and the challenges that are currently being faced by special operations folks trying to do deep cover work. When did this, when did the program really get going? Probably in the early 1980s. It couldn't be before the 1980s because J-Soc wasn't established until December 1980. But as we lay out in the article, J-Soc had a number of operations going on in the 1980s

that they used operatives under non-official cover or commercial cover, as it's sometimes called, four. And these stretched from Suriname to Haiti, but especially Lebanon. And Jack did a lot of reporting on

the sort of missions that they were engaged in, the sort of people that they were in contact with in Lebanon. Yeah. And so this is kind of like the fun part of being a reporter is that you meet with some spooky character at a bar in Manhattan with a notepad and ask him 150 questions over the course of an hour. And so this person that I spoke to worked under non-official cover. He was a member of J-Socq. He spoke fluent Greek and also learned Arabic. So he was,

you know, at least trilingual. And he was, you know, based out of Cyprus. And, you know, J. Sox was establishing sort of a front company, a logistics company that moved air freight back and forth from Cyprus to Lebanon. And that was kind of a way for JASOC to get into the country, to get people into the country, to get equipment into the country. And then a lot of it had to do with working through surrogates. There are different Arab groups and Christian groups that we were working with in Lebanon at that time. And the main effort really was about trying to recover American hostages that were being held in Beirut. And this was just one of those intractable foreign policy problems at the time. And J-Soc at the time was nascent. It did just come into existence. Right on the, you know,

tail end. It was created because of the failed hostage rescue in Iran, Operation Eagle Claw. So there are a few other interesting tidbits that I think we pulled out of the stuff in Lebanon that some Delta guys came in and working with surrogates on the ground, wiped out some of the guys that had killed the CIA station chief, Bill Buckley. So there's definitely some stuff that was going on in Beirut at that time. But unfortunately, as my source told me himself, he's like, we were not particularly successful in getting the American hostages out. You know, there were some like close calls where they're like, we think we located them. We think they're being moved from here to there. Maybe we can interdict them. But those operations just that they never reached enough,

the intelligence never reached the fidelity or the threshold that would need to be met for those operations to be greenlit. One of the things that I found pretty like wild. was like how they're working with a Lebanese like drug smuggler essentially like and it's just like and me and Jack were talking about yesterday he's like you know this guy was just hypercapitals like whoever had the green this drug smuggler was playing a ball with you know what I mean like if you can pay me I'm down to do almost anything yeah and I mean that goes back to this classic question that I know Sean and I have written about and I'm sure Zach has probably written about or at least encountered is, is it moral, ethical, and legal for our intelligence community

to interface with known terrorists, with drug smugglers, with like really bad people? If you want to catch, you know, a Pablo Escobar or a Osama bin Laden, you probably have to talk to some really bad people that are in his inner circle. Same thing with people like Soleimani, Saddam Hussein, and so on. And, you know, on the, the, like, pragmatic side of it is like, yeah, of course you go and do it. You know, you do what you have to do to get the job done. But when that comes out in the press, it doesn't look very good. Like, you've been rubbing shoulders and maybe even making, I'm not saying this happened.

But for instance, if you were making cash payments to an intelligence asset that had American blood on their hands, that does not look good to put it mildly. So I don't know. What do you guys think of that conundrum? So I think a couple of things that are interesting that you raise. I mean, one is traditionally, and, you know, my knowledge of this is much deeper on the CIA side, just having spent a long time done reporting in this space. But one of the issues historically for the NOC program inside the agency was the legal concerns and the strictures regarding the actions of a staff officer versus an assent or a source, right?

So it's like it's one thing to have a source inside Al-Qaeda or inside a transnational criminal organization, like drug trafficking organizations. A different thing to infiltrate a staff officer and have that person actually be engaged in the space, right? CIA folks will say that post-9-11, they actually set up a very stringent regime from the general counsel's office. And I imagine this was probably the case in J-Soc as well, although... There's always exceptions on these exceptions. You can sometimes drive a truck through these exceptions, right, about what you can and cannot do. But, you know, the idea was that you didn't want the actual shooters, right? You didn't want to, you didn't want to recruit a shooter.

You wanted to recruit a logistics guy. Logistics guys were much more less likely to actually be the people that were, you know, that were engaged in stuff with the head of American blood on their hands. CIA General Counsel post 9-11 actually told people in the field, Knox in the field, and assets. They told case officers to tell their assets, by the way, if you are ever in a situation where you think you might be engaged in a firefight, you know, with, you know, U.S. citizens, U.S. troops, U.S. personnel, you got to shoot over people's heads. The people, the U.S. troops firing it, you don't know that you're a knock or that you're a CIA asset, but you can't try to kill them. They can try to kill you legitimately and you can't try to kill them. So it literally put people in an impossible, it put people in an impossible situation. situation and the CIA lawyers knew they were putting their assets and their deep cover

officers in impossible situations. I mean, in general, one last thing, you know, having your source get close to people that were engaged in the drug trafficking business, like, part of me says, okay, yeah, that's why you have people under non-official cover, right? Like, you want to get them close to people that folks under official cover. cannot get to. The defense attache in Beirut is not going to get close to that guy, right? The second political secretary, you know, in the state department who's a CIA officer, is not going to get close to that guy. So the reason why you choose those covers is to infiltrate those worlds

that will provide you that access. But then the paradox is by doing that, you're putting yourself close to people who are doing very, very bad things and you get that blowback and you get that Washington Post, you know, smell test stuff. Yeah. On you're muted. Oh, so. Thank you, pardon.

I think it's worth pointing out that in the high side, we explored this issue some months ago with an article about sort of an elite CIA proxy force in Afghanistan, a sort of a CIA elite human intelligence unit that was basically directed by the CIA, even though it was all Afghans.

And they wanted to recruit, they had the apparent opportunity to recruit one of the men who was in the room when Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, was murdered in 2002, in the the months after after 9-11. And that, that, that, that raised a lot of issues at, uh, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, I think, you know, like it, I mean, I'm just really trying to plug, plug the high side here, but, uh, we, uh, you know, we, we've looked into this, uh, in, you know, in, in one of our other, in one of our other articles. All the more reason to get a paid subscription.

Yeah, the link is in the description. I got you, Sean. Don't worry. Okay. Thanks, Steve. So maybe we start talking a little bit about like how the military creates Knox and sort of the system in which that works. Because I think that's sort of like part of the mystery of it for a lot of people. And, you know, I think in the article we talk about both trying to take operators and, you know, people who are trained special forces guys to become Knox.

But also, it seems like it's really more common and more effective to use support personnel. Yeah, I mean, I think the military historically has, for missions like this, where your ability to pass as a local or as a member of whatever community you're supposed to be, you know, you're penetrating has to be basically perfect. The military is going to prioritize native language skills, native cultural skills, and ethnicity beyond, you know, how quickly you can get the long walk finished to get into, you know, to get into Delta. So they don't want them to look like Jack, basically, like six foot one inch white guy.

200 pounds like salt and pepper hair blue eyes unless they're going into into ireland or something you know Zach do you want to tell some of the stories that you reported on about you know these attempts to train guys who are operators into knocks um because i mean i think one of the things we talk about in the article is that it's very hard to take somebody who grew up in a ranger platoon or a seal platoon or something like that and it's like team environment and then turn them into to this sort of like lone wolf intelligence operative. This has been a consistent, persistent problem for the J.S.C. Knock program for many decades. And I don't know if they've ever been able to solve it. And it may actually be the great

unsolvable problem. It doesn't mean that there haven't been brilliant operators. It just means that doing this at scale has been very, very difficult. I mean, it's been very difficult for CIA, too. But I think that the, the history of folks, I mean, a lot of it is overt, right? And it's very hard to scrub, if not impossible, to scrub. And then there's the cultural stuff, right? I mean, the joke always is, is like, you can recognize these guys because they all have the operator beard.

They all, like, they're wearing the Merrill Watch. They got the boots. They, like, they're all super fit. Like, they look, there's a certain type. And anybody who is trying to spot them, when you marry that up with, oh, open source data about their past, it's not hard to be like, what's going on here? This isn't legit, right? You've got like three guys open up a dive shop in the Maldives, and it's like, what are these guys doing here?

We know something is amiss, right? It doesn't take, you don't have to be the world's greatest counterintelligence service to figure out that something seems wrong about a certain place and the folks that are working there. You know, when we were reporting this out, I had a sorts of a former contractor who, who who described exercises that he and others would put on for operators who were looking to get into this commercial cover space. And one aspect of it was they would, these guys would fly into, as part of the exercise, they would fly into airports in the U.S. And the airports were supposed to be, quote unquote, foreign airports.

And it was supposed to be like, this is a, you know, this is a denied area. This is a, you know. walk through the airport and we want to see if you could walk through the airport and the the trainers didn't had necessarily seen the guys faces beforehand and the trainers were saying i'm going to be able to spot every single one of you um and more often than not they would do it you know they would literally they would watch they would do surveillance on these folks getting off different airplanes from all over the country and all over the world flying into these u.s airports and the trains would say that that guy's an operator that guy's an operator that guy's clearly an operator and

And so you're already, you're blown from the moment you get in. We're not even talking about biometrics. We're not even talking about facial recognition. We're not even talking about gait analysis or whatever. I mean, this is just good old-fashioned CI work. And these guys would not necessarily know how to comport themselves either. They would get dragged into secondary as part of the exercise. They thought they were, you know, they were super slick.

They'd get dragged into secondary. The folks in secondary who knew who they were, right, would try to, you know, know, you know, ruffled their feathers a little bit. You know, one story that I was told, which is quite humorous actually is as part of the exercise. These guys were told to surveil a location. This is the best. I don't know. This story is amazing, right? Yeah. Surveil this location and do it in a way that is not going to draw attention to themselves. So they got what, you know, like a windowless van, you know, what my source said was basically like, you know, your class of a pedophile van, right? And they didn't realize that where they were

supposed to be surveilling was right next to like an elementary school or nursery school. And they just posted up there. And of course, all of these local moms were like, yo, who the fuck is that? You know? And they call the cops. They call the cops on these guys. And the cops knock, knock, knock on the van. And there's like three buff dudes or whatever. You know, with deer, it's just sitting in the van. And of course they get taken in. Right. Of course they get taken into the local cops. And then there's this whole ordeal. Because if they call the FBI, they get a little jet out of jail free card, right? Where if they're in real trouble, they can say, hey, I'm sorry, sir, you know, Mr.

officer, like, I'm actually doing elite military training. Yeah, I'm one of you guys. Yeah, here's, you know, here's a number of a local FBI agent who can, you know, who can attest to the fact that I am, in fact, a employee of the U.S. government. But you don't want to do that because then you can fail out. of the exercise. So eventually, after spending some time, you know, in the local jail or being interrogated by these police officers, they say, okay, fine, we give up. And they, you know, they admit to who they are and what they're doing and everything gets worked out and it's fine. But like,

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I love Ghostbed. That's ghostbed.com slash team and use the code Team, T-E-A-M, for. for an extra 10% offsite wide. Thank you guys for supporting the show and thanks GhostBed for supporting the show. Love you. Bye. There's a, you know, I didn't mention this.

It's not in the article, but I remember there were a couple Americans that appeared to be operating under some sort of official cover, diplomatic passports. They got hemmed up in Libya. This was quite a while ago. This was like 10 years ago or more by this point. And so this made the news, you know, these Americans got arrested,

trying to cross the border from Tunisia to Libya, what the hell's going on? The Libyans had taken pictures of these guys' passports when they detained them. And I went and looked up one of the guys' names. And oh, look, he had run in a marathon in Fayetteville, North Carolina, right next to Fort Bragg.

Oh, my God. So it's just, it's very hard to erase the past of someone who is a career soldier. Just their footprint is so strong and their associations with the military are so strong. And even those cultural things, you know, the way soldiers walk and stand and things like this, the mannerisms just separate them from the average person. I think one of the other interesting things that came out of it was the difference between

how the CIA uses Knox and how J-Soc uses them, which is... Because isn't J-Sochoc usually it's like a short-term kind of thing? CIA is usually more of a long-term kind of thing. Yeah. Is that why maybe they run into those issues because they're not like really homegrown? these knocks from like young the short term versus long term thing is like a product of what they're trying to accomplish really um j sock uses knocks for targeting and and for logistics too um but they're more interested of like go in find the bad guy locate him you know that kind of thing um or

maybe let's drive this van around this country with some surveillance equipment in or whatever the case may be um where Zach do you want to go and know like kind of the different of how the CIA utilizes them? Yeah, I mean, as far as I know, I mean, the JASC folks also, it's kind of like somebody gets into country, you get arms caches, you get, you recruit a, you know, a local vet who can serve as a, you know, as a doctor. If things go like really, really south, it's that kind of stuff.

It's like intelligence preparation for the battlefield, I guess, is a lot of it. CIA has a much different history. Traditionally, things are changing because of the difficulties surrounding what they call ubiquitous technical surveillance and just the way in which it's much harder to stay hidden than it used to be in the past. But CIA would try to grab people very young, put them on the deep cover, knock commercial cover track, and keep them there for their whole careers. like no connection with the U.S. government ever. And it was pretty successful in doing that for a long time. I mean, there were people who never went to the farm.

They never set foot in Northern Virginia necessarily. They lived abroad for 30 years. They never went to Langley. They never went there after they retired. They retired undercover. Some of them never touched U.S. soil or very, very rarely. And if so, they did it in a way that, you know, if they had a connection to South Florida, they would like go to South Florida for reasons that comported with their cover.

They sometimes successfully ran businesses, sometimes not. I mean, that's another, that's a whole other issue, right, that I think J-Soc and CIA has both had, which is like- Yeah, when I found this out where you're about to say, it blew my mind. Like somebody's working as a high-powered lawyer, let's say, and is also a knock for 30 years and supposedly making half a million dollars a year, they can't keep the money. No. They're getting paid as like a CIA officer.

Yes. Yes. Absolutely nonsense. So there was, I mean, not to. So in the book, I get into this because in the early days of the knock program, I mean, I mean, early days like 1950s, like right after the CIA was founded, there were debates about this. And there were folks within the CIA that were like, if we're going to make this work here,

we need to actually let these guys make a buck doing their job. because you can't have a guy be a, you know, be a CEO at GE abroad and working two jobs and just making a civil servant salary. It doesn't make sense. It also doesn't make sense as a cuffer mechanism, right? Because if you're supposed to be a high roller, you got to have that Mercedes. You got to have that apartment. You know, you got to be able to go on vacations where people in your kind of class group go, right? Like, everything has to become part of your cover.

And that has historically been an issue, too. And there's a lot of resentment in CIA, because there used to be this sense that CIA people under non-official cover were just kind of like gaming the system. You know, like, oh, I got to be a big shot. I got to drive the Bens, right? Like, I got to go to the South of France for three weeks because everybody else in my firm does, you know, in the summertime.

But, yeah, I mean, over time CIA would use Knox for Intelligence Gathering. they would use them to handle ultra-sensitive sources. Like if somebody was recruited by a case officer under diplomatic cover, the moment that person was recruited, let's say it was a high-level government official, right? They would not want that case officer to ever have any interaction with that senior government official again, right? So what they would do is they would turn that person over to a knock who had no USG connections. And that knock would generally fly in from another country just to have meetings with that person. There's a whole bunch of other stuff that CIA has done over time.

It's not really the like the core of this article, so I don't want to get too far afield. But the agency had a developed a much deeper, a broader theory of the case, right? A theory of the case for why you would have folks like this. It doesn't mean it didn't have a lot of problems. It just means that they had decades of lead time on J-Soc to figure this stuff out. And they had a broader set of uses for their not. and J-Soc came at it from, I think, self-consciously not needing it for quite as many things. And it had many decades it had to play catch-up.

And I think it's still playing catch-up. But to be honest, I think for CIA, there's also been huge issues over the last, well, arguably since it's founding, but particularly in the last 10, 15, 20 years and making the program work. So it's not, you know, not to skip to the end of the article, but like there's, there's a lot of questions about the future of the practice in general, not just for CIA, but you know, for J-Sog too. I think one of the other big differences that came out during our research was that these sort of non-official cover businesses that the CIA stands up can generate profit, whereas

the military cannot generate profit. One guy even told me he's like, if your cover is a carpet salesman and you buy a bunch of Persian rugs in the Middle East. When you bring those back to the United States, they all have to go into the burn pit and be destroyed. Can't even take one for the house, for the crib, nothing. Even one of the guys told me, he's like, there was a mechanism to return our frequent flyer miles.

Crazy. Yeah. I want to just say one quick thing, which is that that is a really important difference. And there's a, there's a phrase that I heard a couple times called non-appropriated income, not appropriated budget. And that refers to the ability to take those profits and plow them back into operational funds. But it is a black hole.

And there is very little oversight over non-appropriated funds or income. So there's anybody listening to this podcast who has any experience or insight into that world because it's a very important world. And it's one that gets very little attention because it tends to escape not only congressional oversight, but also oversight within the buildings themselves, because you can just take the money that you have earned and use it to, I don't know, purchase more real estate or go on operational missions. Like there's, we are talking, we are talking tens, hundreds of millions of dollars over time that can be, that can be earned in some of these, in some of these proprietary schemes.

And so it's a topic that generally does not get any attention. On the Contras. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. Yes. That is, I think that is a great example. Now that we got Iran back in the news, right, this idea that you are, you're taking covert action funds that you should not, that are arguably in Iran Contra is legal from the jump,

but like, and then you are plowing it into something else. And it is a kind of dark side of the moon aspect to U.S. intelligence activities. I want to know about the East European. Tell me about that freak. Sean about that one. Sean, give us the scoop. You're on mute. The East European was the sort of the name, if you like,

or that I gave to an individual whose true identity is known by Jack and me. But I first encountered when I was reporting relentlessly. strike my book about J-Soc. And some of the material in, in fact, most of the material in the article about the East European comes from the book because he was sort of the quintessential successful knock. I mean, even though we had sources that were claiming, oh, J-Socs, Knox only do short-term missions and so forth. This guy sort of was the antithesis of that. He had joined Delta Force early in its existence and he spoke, he was, you know, born in an East European country and had the, you know, had all

the cultural and linguistic skills, therefore, to pass us as a native of that. country. And in addition, as with others from the J-Soc and particularly the special mission unit community, he had a convenient missing part of his career because in the Army, those folks go into something called the DASA, the Department of the Army. What's the S-Stand-for? Jack, do you remember? Maybe, I can't remember either. But it's basically a restricted list of names that isn't made public that doesn't appear in other Army databases. So this guy was sort of converted into a knock and he had a sort of a commercial cover alias. I believe that his original country of birth helped to.

out with this. And he traveled the world, basically under alias, doing the, doing the, the J-Sox bidding. And in, you know, one of the cases that we describe in, in the article, he drove a, he drove an SUV, I believe, I believe. or certainly a car from Jordan into Baghdad, completely kitted out with hidden antenna so that it could pick up all sorts of communications from Iraqi government types in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And then he sort of parked this vehicle there and then, you know, and then basically stayed in Baghdad for a while, again, undercover, and then left.

You know, there's another episode of, again, a guy with a, I presume, a fairly long-term cover who was leaving a country near Lebanon, but not Lebanon itself, but was passing through Lebanon as part of his, as part of his cover and was basically jumped by some guys. Now, whether this was a sort of just a street crime and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time or whether this was Hezbollah or somebody like that trying to kidnap him, it's unclear. But he, you know, they had guns. He fought them off. He wrestled one of the guns out of their hands. but in the sort of process of all of this, he got shot in the gut.

And he had to basically go back to his hotel, and then he called a U.S. government doctor whose contact information he had and said, hey, here's my problem. I've been shot. What do I do? The doctor talked him through how to sew himself up. and then he continued with his mission. So, you know, there were all these steps he had to take to keep himself, as they say, clean.

And he did all of that before leaving the theatre. So he went through all the steps that he would have had to have gone through had he not been shot, despite the fact that he had a gunshot wound. And then he had to fly out commercial. and finally he flew into a friendly country that's not in the Middle East and got some real medical care. But that became a sort of a legendary episode. He was part of the sort of intelligence, special ops intelligence units, often referred to as Task Force Orange.

It's had a lot of different cover names over the years. and he received a silver star for his actions. But the citation for that silver star is classified. I found out about it many, many years ago and sort of looked into it. But I was told that that's a legendary case of a commercial cover operative, you know getting in the shit if you like and then having to get himself out uh jack i remember we had uh george hand on he worked i don't know if he was a knock suppose suppose like you know j sock knock but he was in delta force and he was he would go with like a a female operative

to was it bosnia yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that was not uh non-official cover i don't believe I think they were under official cover for the most part when they did that. But it's just to say like there's women that are doing this job too. Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think one of the more interesting aspects of this is that, you know, they recruit people from across the Army and across the Navy, not just special ops guys because they're looking for people who have those language abilities

and that ethnicity that the mission requires. And then they put them through a training course, actually a series of training courses, depending on what they need. But it's interesting that, you know, a lot of them are one and duns or two in-duns. So they'll go and do one or two missions. And then they're going, you know, presumably they'll get a bronze star and sent back to their parent unit. So, I mean, it's interesting the way it works. You know, as one person told me, you know, the CIA plays the long game with these programs,

but J-Soc just doesn't have a long game. There's no such thing. It's got to be weird. You do a couple missions, like super squirrelly secret shit, and then you go back to your parent unit. There's an even crazier story. I mean that Sean and I will try to write about in the future about a guy who's a conventional army dude, had those language skills, that ethnicity.

And the army plucked him up and put him undercover with some really bad people. And when that mission was done, he was awarded a silver. star and sent back to his unit in the motor pool or whatever it was Jesus Christ it was a year undercover oh my god yeah talking about like the male female like the TFO uh couple that when it's Iran in 2014 and they it's they've been doing it several times since 9-11 um tell us a little bit about that because that sounds like insane even before like we had all these crazy tensions and the sanctions and everything with Iran oh Sean you're on mute again thank you pardon I'm trying to protect everybody from my dog vetoes barking.

No problem. Yeah, that was a case in which Orange and J-Soc writ large had been sort of pondering how to get people into Iran. And it turned out, you know, actually to be a little easier than some of them thought. they had imagined that the easier way would be to drive overland and cross at a land border rather than go through where you can pick up a visa as you're going through the sort of the border checkpoint. But it turned out that they were able to come up with cover identities that withstood the visa application process at an Iranian embassy

and were able to fly in commercially into an airport. It's usually considered, that's usually considered a higher bar to get through the higher bar of security than just crossing at a desert checkpoint somewhere. But it worked and they were able to, It was a male-female couple, which, as we've discussed, usually is thought to attract less scrutiny than a singleton military-age male or, you know, multiple military-age males hanging out together. And they were able to stay in a hotel in a large Iranian city, you know, drive around. They could have sort of undertaken a sort of a mission there and then to sort of collect on the Iranian nuclear program.

But since that wasn't originally part of their mission, they chose not to. And they returned basically, I think, the same way they came in via commercial air. and when they got back to the states, they briefed the president on their, which was President George W. Bush at the time on their accomplishments. It was considered a terrific success and a template, you know, to base future missions on. It's safe to say we've been doing it since. ever since we saw that,

it's relatively easy to get in there. Yeah, I would, I would say that's probably true. I mean, with anything like this, and I'm just sort of, I think, stating the obvious, you don't want to do missions like this just because you can, there has to be a real need to do it, because just because it works,

the previous time doesn't mean that somebody somewhere in the Iranian government hasn't retroactively or retrospectively figured out what you did and taken steps to prevent it in the future. So, you know, I mean, there's some good fictional TV series both Israeli and French about people conducting non-official cover missions. against the Iranians, some in Iran, some elsewhere. Yeah, the Bureau, right? That's the French one. It's a French one. And I think the Israeli one is called Tehran, but I'm not sure. And I mean, they give you a pretty good sense of just the sort of the white knuckle ride that that can be.

The other difference, sorry, Zach, I'll let you go. the other difference to point out to listeners between official cover and non-official cover is that if you get busted under official cover that you're posing as a State Department person, even if you're in Moscow or somewhere, like maybe you get your shoulder pulled out of the socket when they arrest you, and then they dub you persona non-grata and you're deported out of the country, you're going back home. But if you're under non-official cover, you're getting taken down into a basement somewhere and shot. Like the U.S. government is not going to claim you at all. So the pucker factor in a place like Tehran has got to be incredibly high.

Yeah, that's 100% true. I mean, the best case scenario is that there's an implicit understanding that, you know, you're actually, like you never actually admit to it. But Iranian or Chinese or Russian counterintelligence knows that you're actually CIA or J-Soc and then there's somebody that they're willing to trade you for. but I mean, there have been cases where there was one case of a of a CIA knock in the 1950s in China who spent a decade in a Chinese dungeon and died. I mean, the U.S. government, they disavowed him and they just said he's not one of ours. And the Chinese government said, we know he is. And the U.S. government said, no, he's not.

And he rotted away in the dungeon and died. I mean, it doesn't get much more serious than that. Since we're talking about Iran, I think it's pretty interesting, actually, because, you know, Iran, well, this is the case for the Israelis too, but we don't have diplomatic relations with the Iranian government, right? So you cannot operate under a U.S. passport. And frankly, you wouldn't necessarily want to operate under a passport of a friendly Western country either. Although, more or less, some have been useful, right? I mean, there have been times where we've had allies from Eastern Europe who have provided cover for people going into Iran. And you've had people that have been able to speak those languages.

And so it's been like pretty effective. But again, these are sophisticated counterintelligence services. They know what they're looking for. And so then you need to really think about who do we have that can operate under a third country passport who is not going to attract any attention. of Iranian counterintelligence. And that's really, really hard. And I don't want to take anything away from the folks that Sean spoke about,

but I think it's very illustrative that as a mere proof of concept of getting what they call a tandem couple, you know, which is like when you have two operatives, two deep cover officers working together, pretending to be almost always like a romantic couple marry, something like that. Going into a country like Iran,

checking into a hotel and walking around and leaving unscathed was considered notable enough for those people to then brief the president of the United States. I mean, that tells you about how difficult this stuff is considered to be, how dangerous it is, and how rare it is. I mean, the truth is that we don't do a lot of this in denied areas because it's so dangerous, because the stakes are so high, because there is no recompense for people if they get caught. And there have always, there has also been periods of more or less willingness to undertake missions of this kind of dangerousness. Like you have folks at the operator level who are willing to go in and then you get people in the bureaucracy who pull people back. And that's been a source of attention to over the years. Talking a little bit about the bureaucracy just reminded me when, you know, if J-Socke sets up a shell company,

or a fake business to a cover business to like and starts making money or they want to make a business decision they have to to make that decision they have to like shoot it up the flag back to the flag officer to see like if it's a yes or no and it's like what the fuck is a one star or two star general or whatever a colonel how are they making the business decision that's like happening on the ground like why would that even be in like the flowchart described to me as you know you're undercover as a businessman that can't make any business decision Right. So it makes the cover just very difficult to work under. That's the great. And isn't like the key thing keeping your cover as clean as possible?

It's like, hold on. I have to call my wife or whoever he's trying to, you know, act like he's going to make it, you know, it just makes no sense. Yeah. There's all kinds of like shenanigans that go into trying to like maintain those covers as we found out that they'll go in and electronically delete all of your records. They'll go to like credit card companies and they have relationships with a. lot of these companies that they'll like, okay, we're working with the U.S. government. They'll delete your credit history. And it's like you're born again. And it creates a lot of difficulties because when you come back to the United States and you're trying to integrate back into life as a civilian, it's like on paper, you don't exist. Even just guys who are official cover guys that go on the Daser and they've been on that daser for like 10, 15 years,

it takes several years to just come off that damn list. And that's just official cover guys we're talking about there. Yeah, it's pretty unbelievable. There was one other interesting shenanigan was fake retirement ceremonies that you'll have a guy who has, you know, maybe he already has his 20 years in, maybe not in the military. And they decide, hey, we're going to take this sergeant major or this lieutenant colonel or whoever it is. And we're going to put them under a non-official cover and send them to some part of the world to gather intelligence. will actually hold a fake retirement ceremony. And everyone in that guy's unit thinks it's real,

thinks that guy's really retiring except for him. And then he will be given fake military paperwork, like fake discharge paperwork, so that if someone does look, it's like, he's not in the military anymore that's done with. And then sent out and do his mission for a year or two. And then when he comes back,

he will have a second real retirement ceremony. that puts him out of the military. But again, I mean, that just is, again, one of these problems with finding someone who's very late in career. You know, you imagine finding a special forces command sergeant major that's been doing the job for 20 years and then trying to put them under that cover versus trying to find a kid in basic training and then putting them in that cover. Jack, you mentioned about like us hitting up like credit reporting companies and

whatever to like delete uh information uh where did you did you say it where they do this if even if the company says no we'll just go in and do it ourselves anyway yeah i had a i had a guy tell me that that like yeah if they don't cooperate there are like ways we'll just hack into it and do it anyway there's something that that the nerds at the pentagon do to delete all that stuff um and we talked about uh this is another facet of of knocks that we haven't really talked about is that when they're under a commercial cover, that cover company that they're ostensibly working for is maintained. Sometimes up to 20 people are maintaining that cover. So it's super expensive to create and maintain non-official cover.

It's a really big undertaking. And that's why, as Zach was saying, we don't do a lot of it. You know, it's not super prevalent. Yeah, just to like put an exclamation point on what Jack just said. Every knock, whether J-Sock or it's CIA, requires an immense amount of support. All the support people have salaries. All those support people may or may not want to be doing something

with their careers that involve supporting a knock full-time. And then you got the actual costs of the knock, right? If you're going traditional and you have somebody that's a business person, there might be those associated costs that I mentioned before, right? Kind of keeping up the illusion of the lifestyle. So like one knock can be an extraordinarily expensive proposition. And if you have somebody and you have eight people supporting them and that knock, all they do is meet with sensitive sources in a couple countries. And people start looking at budgets.

There's the kind of the value proposition can be very controversial. It doesn't mean that they don't have really important uses, but historically there has been a stream of thought. a very powerful stream of thought within the U.S. intelligence community that the juice is just not worth the squeeze for Knox in general. And so, you know, for various reasons, there has been a lot of skepticism over the years about whether they are worth it. You have other folks who are totally, you know, evangelized about it and say, well, you know, you're not read into it, right? So you get into that game where it's kind of like, if you understood the compartments that I was read into, you would know why Knox are so valuable, but since 99% of the people don't actually know,

they don't know what they don't know. And it's impossible to make an honest assessment, you know, when people just kind of, they just say, well, you don't, you know, you're not ridden, right? So, but overall, I would say that, that the attitude has been pretty skeptical over time. And I don't think it's getting any less skeptical. Is that because we're like more and more reliant on like technical surveillance rather than actual human intelligence? Because there's no way we have a huge network in Iran.

Like, yes. I mean, I mean, yes, that's it. I mean, we could, we could write, you know, we could write an entire encyclopedia worth of books, you know, on, you know, like, like. I mean, yeah, if you're a bureaucrat, are you more comfortable with like signals intelligence and technical. surveillance, or do you want to rely on human beings, which have a track record sometimes of being unreliable? And as Zach points out, costing a ton of money and a ton of grief if they get caught. Yeah, although, of course, the Playdevil's advocate, I mean, oftentimes what the United States is relying on is human intelligence from partner nations. And it's not as if those satellites that are

collecting all the imagery for the National Reconnaissance Office and all the audio and other signals intelligence for the National Security Agency are cheap either. So there's, you know, there's, you know, swings and roundabouts, there's, there's a number of angles to this. The, I suppose, the intelligence communities polite, politically correct responses, they want all sources of intelligence to feed into one big picture. Yes. But without question, though, we have grown accustomed in U.S. intelligence to relying predominantly on SIGANT that has not changed, that has only become more prevalent over time. We do get important human from liaison, from intelligence partners, but like what they call unilateral human sources,

that are like recruited and handled by U.S. intelligence community officers from various three-letter agencies has declined significantly over time. And what that means for the future of intelligence is like, man, that's a whole other podcast that we could talk about for many, many hours. Yeah, what's the case officer's union saying about this? Like, they can't be fucking happy. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know, actually.

But I don't know if there's a lot of questions about whether those folks are going to be able to operate the way that they did, right? Because again, part of the, so if you look at one level up on this whole debate, it's about if we can't get human the way we used to, do we need to change the cover mechanisms that we have been using predominantly in order to get closer to sources that we need, right? And so if we can't rely on being military attaches and diplomats of various sorts, do we need to move out of those embassies to then do our jobs? Non-official cover has always been the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for folks who think that official cover is just not getting as close to the people that we need to,

but it has so many problems and structural issues of its own that it has created other issues along the way. And neither has been able to come close to pacing with the technical collection capabilities that the U.S. government now has. Yeah. It's going to be an interesting next couple decades. Boys, excellent episode, excellent article. The High Side, the link is under the description.

Zach, when is the book coming out about the CIA Knox? Are we working on that? Next summer. Yeah, next summer. Penguin Random House, the provisional title is Deep Cover. But it's, I mean, I got a long way before a publication, but the book is written. It's in revisions.

It's a new history of the CIA through this very problem that we've been discussing going back to the founding of it to today. So it should be interesting. I haven't seen a word of it and I can already tell you it's going to be well worth buying. Yeah. And for Team House listeners, eyes on listeners. I want to put Zach's links in the description. He's written a couple times, a few times with Jack before.

You guys did the solo. Moni strike article, right? Incredible one. Another one, too. Which other one have you guys worked on? This one blank. Yeah. This is the second one.

Have you guys done something else too? I don't think so. Okay. So the Moni article is incredible too. Really good. Worked with Sean a bunch. Worked with Sean on a big article on the first Trump administration's plans to potentially kidnap WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London

and some discussions they were having about even targeted, targeted assassinations. Um, so obviously on Julian Assange or just in general. Ange, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a smart. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, always have to work with you guys.

Not high profile at all. Not high profile at all. It's smoke the guy from Wikileaks. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it got stopped. But I mean, that's a whole other discussion, you know. But it was a, it was a wild ordeal, man.

They were thinking about doing gun battles just, you know, in the streets of London with, you know, the Russians that they thought they were going to put them on a plane to Moscow. But yeah. Was somebody smoking? fucking meth before they came up with that fucking idea? No comment. Like what kind of fuck? I mean how are these people like even working like in the government?

Wow. To ask that question is to answer it. Yeah. Everybody check them out. Check out Sean. Check out Jack. Check out Zach. Those links will be in the description. Of course the high side. Check that out. Check out their substack. And anything else? Oh yeah. Patreon.com slash the T-Mouse. You get both eyes on and

T-Mouse episodes. Add free. and early and you help support the show. Guys, a pleasure. Yeah, thank you, everyone. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Hey, guys. I want to take a moment to tell you about the Team House podcast newsletter.

If you go and subscribe, it's totally free. And what it will do is aggregate all of our data, all of our content that we put out, the things that are on the team house, on our geopolitics podcast, Eyes On, things that I write journalistically with Sean Naylor on the high side, anything else that we have going on, books we recommend, upcoming guests that we have coming on the show, and also filtering in some fun stuff in there as well.

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