The Team House - MACV-SOG, Special Forces, & CIA Officer | Jack Murphy, Sean Naylor | Ep. 33

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

Today we're joined by Jack Murphy & Sean Naylor to talk about the incredible life of service of Willie Merkerson. Enlisted at 17 in 1957, Willie retired from the CIA in 2011. He was a member of the 82nd Airborne, Special Forces, MACV-SOG, and the CIA as an officer.Jack and Sean are releasing an incredible, in depth profile on Willie on their substack The High Side. Check it out here:https://thehighside.substack.com/Support the show on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseFind Andy here:Twitterhttps://twitter.com/i/flow/login?redirect_after_login=%2Fandymilburn8LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmilburn2023Substackhttps://amilburn.substack.com/Andy's bookhttps://www.amazon.com/When-Tempest-Gathers-Mogadishu-Operations/dp/1526750554Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House. channel and podcast if you'd like to, and we really appreciate that. So go and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Izon. I'm Andy Milburn, and there is Jason Lyon and D. Tacos. See you see if you get that problem. But most importantly, and we're in a little bit of a time French, and we'll come back and hear more from D&Jason. We are very privileged today to have Sean Nela, who does need no introduction. And no notice I'm not going to go on and introduce them after saying that. And if you don't know about

Sean Naylor, please call out from the rock under which you had been hiding the last decade. And similar with Jack, his iconic good looks, freshly back from Ireland, freshly unsullied, if there is such an expression, delighted to have him. And we booked him two weeks in advance to ensure that he was out of bed and here and ready to go. He might show off. He might not. You never know with that guy. That's right. You know, sometimes I think we should record the conversations we had before this show because they're often more interesting than they are during, but enough, let's move on. And today we're going to talk about brilliant article, a series of articles that Sean and Jack wrote on their highly recommended substack article. No, they're not paying me

to say this stuff. But actually, these four articles entitled, and it's a super title too. Life in the Kill Zone about one Willie Macerson, who is an SF, a special forces, and an agency icon, legend, however little known outside those communities. We're just talking about how unusual that was. So for both of you, shoot, what brought you to this topic? And, you know, how did you, how, you know, here's a guy who's remained in the shadows for so long. and yet here he is finally spilling the beans with your help. What induced you to do that and how did you manage to do this?

And what have you learned? Well, it was actually early last year that Jack and I, not long after we started our substack, which is called the Highside. If anybody wants to go online, it's at thehighside.substack.com or if you want to navigate straight to the articles, you can do that through our Twitter feeds. We normally link to each article as it comes out, although, you know, fair warning,

you will have to pay some money to read them all because Jack and I actually are not independently wealthy and have bills to pay. I've got to mention that in your intro. But fairly early after we, after we started the high side, we got sort of tipped off that there was actually from the CIA special activities community, the sort of retired CIA special activities community, that, you know, an alumnus of theirs called Willie Murkerson,

who had previously been a green beret in Vietnam, had a distinguished service cross that was up for review for possible upgrade to a Medal of Honor. And to be quite frank, I thought this was going to be a simple story for us. I thought, okay, great, we'll interview the guy about, the episode that led to him being awarded the DSC. We'll write a little bit about his career, put a call into the Pentagon to get a no comment probably

on where the upgrade effort lies. And that'll be a simple thousand-word story to put out. And I couldn't have been more wrong. First of all, it took a long time, like six to eight months to get Willie to sit down with us. Secondly, once we did sit down with him, and we'd already spoken to a fair number of folks who knew him, it became very apparent that this was a guy

who, yes, had performed extraordinarily heroically in the battle in Vietnam, for which he was awarded the DSC. But that was just one of many, many extraordinary things about his career. And so, you know, we sat talking to Willie the first time for several hours in a... It was like five hours with him in a restaurant. No kidding. Where was this?

This was in the... This was in suburban... Maryland, trying to remember the name of the, it was just south of D.C. Yeah, unforgettable small town. Yeah. Well, it's where they, it's where they have casinos and so forth now, although we weren't in a casino.

And, you know, so, I mean, so many things were fascinating about his career. And it wasn't just things that he personally, had done that nobody else was involved in, but some of the things that he was a part of, particularly in the CIA. I mean, just to, you know, for the, for the, for the, for the viewers who, who, who, who haven't seen any of the articles, Willie Murkerson had a full army career to include three, uh, Vietnam deployments as a, as a green beret. And he then had an even longer full career in the CIA as an operations officer in the CIA and just was a witness to some a witness slash participant to some extraordinary things particularly in Africa I mean I'm you mentioned

Andy the four articles that we've we've got up on the site already from the in the kill zone series I mean it's deliberately titled the life and times of Willie Mercoson, because I wanted the freedom to be able to explore some of these things that were going on that Willie was a part of or that the CIA station to which he was assigned was a part of. But maybe Willie wasn't the central player in each one of those dramas, but they were incredible dramas that really haven't seen much in-depth reporting on. and I, you know, or any in some cases.

And so I wanted us to be able to sort of almost break news, albeit 40 years later on some of these things. You know, Willie, Willie entered the army in 1957, and he left the CIA in 2011. His first trip to a combat zone for the United States was in December 1916. which was Vietnam and his last one, which was Afghanistan was 2010. So you think about the life of service and sacrifice that is implied just in those few data points.

And you start to get a sense of the man. One other point I just wanted to make, which is that the series isn't over. We're probably not even halfway through. I mean, for instance, Willie was assigned in the mid-80s to the CIA station in Khartoum. What was going on in Sudan, the Khartoum is the capital of Sudan, in the mid-80s for the CIA, was completely off the hook. I mean, just an incredible series of, you know, activities, adventures, crises crammed into the space

of one or two years and, you know, just writing about those in the way that I hope the readers appreciate with the level of detail that they've, I hope, come to expect from Jack and myself is probably

going to take four parts of the series. And that's before Willie's career takes him down to what was then, Zaire, where he was in charge of an airfield running covert action shipments into Angola to support Jonas Savimbi and Unita. Just a crazy series of adventures that, you know, I hope the readers will appreciate.

Yeah, I just add that, you know, Willie is somebody I had heard about over the years from from Jason uh from guys like darrell blocker i mean and and and others other african american cia alumni that that i've come come across over the years would mention this guy willie as being like the o g like this guy did everything um but for the longest time i i felt like he was just one of those guys like he just wasn't going to talk like he's just one of those personalities that's never going to give up his story um But, you know, as this thing started, I mean, really, I think as Sean pointed out, this thing really started to take off for us when some of Willie's colleagues started the work to document his service in Vietnam for a potential upgrade to upgrade his distinguished service cross to a medal of honor. And that's what kind of, I think, broke the dam on this for us.

and although as Sean said it took quite a while for it all come together. And then the other thing that was very fun and very interesting about this article is like all of the OG paramilitary guys spoke to us, most of them on the record about Willie, because they were just so enthusiastic to talk about how cool this guy is. And Willie himself, when you speak to him, he's just from a different generation that like he just shrugs it. off doesn't like really think it's that big a deal. He's proud of his service but he doesn't see what the fuss is, I don't think. Well, they, you know, as you point out, I mean, the the, the, the fuss you sum it up very well. You know, Sean mentioned his dual service, but it's a total 50, what, 53 years. And then you, and then as you sum up, um, 82nd Airborne Division in the Army alone, five special forces groups, um, you know, and, um, um, and, um, um, and, um, um, um, and, um, um, um,

combat jump, two bachelor's degrees, a master's degree, because he came in without, you know, without those things, without a, I believe without a bachelor's. And he found time to do all that. He taught college while he was in the army, obviously completed the special forces, training course, ranger school, engineer course, armor advanced course, and most importantly, the Marine Corps commandant start college before going on for 30 years. that's the school that the Marine Corps invented the cotton gin, the internal combustion engine and invented America. Yeah, our propaganda machinist.

Sean, so you mentioned, you know, because he wasn't just kind of on the margins of history, he was an agent, but I mean, he had agent not in the, you know, super squirrel type, but he he had agency in these events. I'd like to go back and talk about Sudan, but could you guys talk a little bit about what was going on in Angola in the 70s, you know, between the MPLA and Unita and Ford's decision to back Unita in 75 and then how well he got involved in that? Because that is not cover. I mean, you can search through, I believe there was like maybe one US books. The Brits have written about it because they had 13 guys put on trial. for supporting mercenaries.

Oh, you're talking about the mercenaries that got executed. Yeah. Yeah. But from the U.S. They were with Fenla. They were with what? Fenla. Fenla and Unita were.

United at the time. United at the time, yeah. But anyway, over to you guys. I find that, you know, that's something. And we all obviously grow up with the legacy of Vietnam. But what was happening in Africa is fascinating. There's a couple books. Bob Woodward wrote Veil.

that covers some of it. There's a really, anyone who studied like African conflicts. Yeah, there you go. Knows about the book, it's called Conflicting Missions, which is about America, Cuba, and various interventions in Africa. So the war in Angola, I mean, it was another part of the proxy war campaign that was going on between, you know, us and the Soviets. There's Afghanistan, there's Angola, and there's Nicaragua.

were the three big ones. And like with some of the others, you know, the reason why we got involved is because, you know, communism, you know, international communism was, was a factor there. And I think when the Cubans, I'd have to go and check my history,

but I think when the Cubans got involved in Angola, that was like really what pushed things over the top and led to, you know, a covert action program. There's some... Yeah, the MPLA, right? There's some, you know, when you really dig into it, there's some dispute as to, you know, sort of a chicken and egg dispute as to who pushed who in among the superpower, you know,

because there's a feeling that, you know, the, I've certainly read some accounts that say that the Soviets only got involved because the Americans were getting involved. and the Americans were getting involved because they perceived the Cubans to be getting involved but the Cubans weren't really that involved for the time. I mean, it's

you know, once you peel back, you know, a certain set of arguments were made in the, in the sort of late 70s and early 80s, but it's important not to take political rhetoric as fact on it.

And just to your point, Andy, I mean, so the what happened was Portugal, which had been the colonial power in Angola, basically shut down its empire and pulled out. And the three political groups slash guerrilla groups that were three or four that were fighting, the Portuguese then started, of course, fighting each other. I'm going to totally oversimplify the history for the sake of the podcast and also because I haven't thought about it for a couple of months

since my head's been in Sudan for the last couple of months but basically the US was trying to decide between two groups who were the officially non-communist groups in Angola which to support because a group that was notionally communist had taken the capital and was basically the government. They settled on a group called Unita, which was run by a sort of charismatic leader called Jonas Sabimbi. And not for the first or last time during the Cold War, you sort of had a local civil war that to a large degree was operating on ethnic or tribal lines, but different groups played off the superpowers against each other to get sort of the large ass from the United States or the Soviets and the Cubans in the MPLA's case.

Congress actually stopped the support to UNITA for a while, and it didn't start up again until into the Reagan administration, when there was sort of, you know, a little bit more of a, let's say, an anti-communist fervor about the Reagan administration. Willie didn't get involved. Willie Murkison didn't get involved until the very late 80s. He ran from CIA headquarters in Langley. He ran sort of the ang, actually he was the, beg your pun,

he was the director of operations for a small Angola task force that the CIA had to support the covert war from Langley. And then he was assigned to Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, to basically he had two jobs, maybe three at once. He was a base chief of a very tiny base in Lubombashi. And when I used the word base, as probably a lot of our viewers know, but maybe not all of them, you know, when the CIA is operating abroad in the country, the office in the embassy and the capital is called the station and any other offices around the country are called bases.

And he was a base chief in a town called Lubbashi at the U.S. consulate there. But he was also in charge of the CIA operations at an airfield called Kameenah. And basically, whenever the CIA was going to fly covert aid into Angola, he would travel up to Camina airfield on a CIA aircraft. And basically with a very small team, if anybody, sometimes he was the only American, he would facilitate these planes coming in to Camina and then shipping the all of the lethal and non-lethal aid into an airfield called Jamba in Angola, where the, well, it's a town Jamba with an airfield,

which is where West of Inby's headquarters were. So that was in the sort of late 80s and early 90s, that part of his career. Excuse me for a moment. I'm going to shut the door because my dog, Vito, I was sort of wondering what's going on. It's okay. We welcome dogs to this episode.

Jack. Go ahead, Jay. No, I was just going to say, for me, this whole thing, this well-deserved episode of Willie's life is, it's a personal thing for me, not because Willie and I were extremely close. I knew him, you know, via my time at the agency. but he passed on some pretty awesome nuggets of wisdom to me about how to navigate, you know, the literal and figurative hallways of the agency.

I see it's writ large and, you know, not just as a black man, but also as a just a young guy coming into a world I knew nothing about. You know, I had been Marine Corps before that and in nuclear security, and I knew nothing about the agency coming in. he and Bobby, who was also my mentor and many others, both African-American and not taught me a lot. And it just, it was amazing to me because I'm a big history guy. That's one of my degrees.

And so listening to some of their stories and just even just stepping back and realizing what pioneers they were left me in awe every day. Like Jack and I have talked about the book extensively, The Spooky Sat by the Door. And if anybody knows anything about it, Sam Greenlee that wrote it. It's an amazing book. It's a fictional book, but it's based on, you know, I'm going to simplify this, it's based on what is supposed to be the first Black operations officer to say. And when I think back to my time speaking to Willie and Bobby and some of the others,

that book was written for that, not figured or literally, but it was written for them because they were the pioneers. Like, you know, it's one thing when the bullets are snapping over your head, the mortars are, you know, impacting around you. But it's another to think about what it took for Willie to get to where he was, even be in that position, you know, and to even in, you know, in Africa. Because common sense would tell you what makes sense. He's an African-American guy.

Stick him in Africa. But up to the point where he was able to be in that position, And there weren't people that thought like that. It was no, we got it. You know, we're more capable than them. And we know who they, you know, them are of doing it. And it took a long time to get out of that mindset. And people like Willie and Bobby and some of the others, it persevered.

And that's where I was able to, you know, do what I did. And I'll always be grateful for that. So I just jumped down on. I mean, Willie, Willie made that happen for himself with a sort of, he almost like a strategic vision for his career. I mean, when the army gave him the opportunity to get a college degree and he seized that opportunity with both hands,

but then he went ahead and on his own time got a master's degree and he got the master's degree in African history, I believe. And so that, and then he went to the armies, he became an army foreign area officer with a, you know, with a focus on Africa. And he had to actually dodge the army bureaucracy's efforts to send him to Pakistan instead to do that. And, you know, so he ends up in Nigeria when the capital was still in Lagos at the time in 1980 timeframe.

And he, he was an army attaché there. And the Nigerian government was. It had been a military dictatorship and it was in the process of shifting to civilian rule. And of course, the U.S. Embassy was a, you know, keen for that shift to occur and wanted to make sure that the military was going to uphold its side of the bargain. And Willie, one of whose many strengths is his ability to get on with virtually anybody and build. relationships quickly, knew everybody who was anybody who important in the Nigerian military and therefore in the Nigerian military regime at the time. And the CIA station chief, a guy called Philip Cherry, supposedly noticed this. Like how come this army officer knows

everybody that we should know. And he recommended that Willie, you know, who was eligible for retirement at that point, just join the CIA instead. And so, you know, a couple of trips back to the States. And, you know, Willie became a CIA officer. I mean, I think he sort of basically took off his army uniform on a Friday and, you know, started at Langley on a Monday. And that was in, I believe that was 1980. So quite extraordinary character. You know, I think there's one thing that I, you know, I've been thinking about, you know, obviously the reason why Willie's award is sort of eligible for an upgrade now,

and this is a bit complicated, I'll try to make it simplify it without being inaccurate. Until the last few years, if you wanted to get an award upgraded, you had to basically come in with substantive new evidence that justified an upgrade. But the Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin a couple of years ago signed a memo that said, hey, we've, and I'm obviously paraphrasing here, You know, we've looked at a lot of upgrades, potential upgrades for minority service members in different conflicts. But somehow African Americans in Vietnam had fallen through the cracks. That particular sort of category hadn't been recognized as possible, you know, the theory being, you know, the theory being, that sort of an institutional racism would have suppressed the number of medals of honor that otherwise would have been awarded to African Americans.

And therefore, he signed this memo saying you don't need to come in with substantive new evidence. It's enough to just say, hey, look what this guy did. Maybe he deserved a medal of honor instead of a DSC or a Silverstuff. And so that's why, that's why, you know, that's probably the best hope for Willie's upgrades. It's just the simple fact that, as a lot of people told me, when you, when they'd read Willie Murchison's, the citation for his Distinguished Service Cross, people would say, well, wait, why isn't this a medal of honor? So, you know, that's, you know, but so that's the sort of the angle of, you know, and one thing I've tried to do in the series with Jack is not, is not any more than Willie does and he really doesn't at all play up the sort of the race angle of this. but

you know when you think about a a 17 year old black kid from South Carolina joining the army in 1957 I mean the country the country's you know to state

still segregated forward an awful lot in the intervening period and and it you know it probably wasn't the most you know, it wasn't the easiest environment to go into and then to go into the 82nd Airborne Division

and then to go into Special Forces and so forth. And at the same time, I think it's worth pointing out that as much as Willie seized every opportunity that was given to him with both hands and with an absolute determination to make the best of those opportunities it has to be said that the army was giving him those opportunities at the same time.

I mean, somebody spotted him and said, we should send this this young soldier to officer candidate. Yeah, didn't he get, he got volunt told to go to OCS. Yeah. Was the same thing with SF or was it when he went to another school? No, I think he wanted to go to SF. There's some other school like, what was it when they sent, they ended up sending him to the armor course or something? like that was

he he he um he he was supposed to go to uh when he went to officer candidate school he was supposed to go and i mean again just for context for um you know uh for listeners and viewers who didn't know this special forces only became a branch of the u.s army in in 1987. And prior to that, it was just a sort of a qualification and a set of units. And so you had another branch when you were in special forces. And Willie was an infantryman as an as an NCO in special forces. And when they told him he was going to go to officer candidate school, which was organized by branch, he assumed he was going to go to infantry officer candidate school, but all the slots were filled. So they told him he had to go to engineer officer candidate school. But engineer

officer candidate school back then in the days of the draft and so forth was was full of kids who were sort of had had gone to MIT and Georgia Tech and all of these sorts of schools. And Willie had just a high school education. And so he went to officer candidate school. He'd just come out of it, He just graduated from Ranger school when he went. And so he basically cut a deal with his classmates, said, I'll teach you the tactical side of things. If you help me with the academic side of things, the scientific and engineering side.

Now, I think he sort of talks himself down a bit because he graduated like one or two, number one or two in his class, I think. And so, you know, that's a little bit more than, you know, just cramming on the night before the exam. That speaks to sort of a baseline intelligence that's obviously very high. So that, yeah, but that's, so he ends up being an, you know, an engineer officer for a while. And then the same thing happened with, you know, he ended up going to the armor officer advanced course, which he, you know, he has a few jokes about it. I feel like he wasn't, he didn't enjoy that maybe quite so much.

He's a bit more dismissive of it, not of the armor branch, but of the. God bless him. Yeah. We're all dismissive of the armor branch, at least on the wrinkle. In fact, we dismissed it, but that's another topic. We don't have an armor branch anymore, did you? He was very prescient. Sean, I, you know, you mentioned Sudan, and I want to come back and, you know, I want to prime you on this and our audience service.

You know, he ran a very unusual packaging service out of Sudan involving human beings. So I like to come back to that, but you, you know, you touched on a topic that that really made me think about, you know, one of the legacies of the team house, I guess, because unavoidably one of the hostess as SF is the fascinating history of Army SF in Vietnam and the, and the unique culture that was so separate from conventional military forces there, right? And that evolved. And one aspect of that, Jack, was, you know, we, and I've seen you. interview guys. In fact, we had a MacV guy on, is that everyday events, you know,

everyday events would have won them medals, you know, Valer medals in conventional forces. But it was kind of, you know, I'm not talking about yes. And then you add to that the fact that, you know, he, he won his in an army that had been segregated just, you know, 14 years before, but was kind of leading the nation into integration but was still a long way away from what we know as the military now. Anyway, Jack, you know, with your background is S-F, can you talk a little bit about Willie's, what it must have been like Willie's introduction to Army SF and that his first, his early torts back in the early 60s? Well, I mean, the SF qualification course back in those days was very tough.

and SF at that time was very small by comparison today. I think a lot of people don't necessarily understand like how small a community special forces was in the late, late 50s into the early 60s. You know, everyone up at Smokebomb Hill knew one another. It was just smoke bomb hill. Yeah, on Bragg. It was a very tight-knit group of people.

And Willie seems to have integrated right. into that fairly easily. You know, his tours in Vietnam, the one of them was, step in, if I'm wrong here, Sean, one of them was doing some stuff with Mike Forrest and with Montan yards. And then another tour, he was with Mac V. Saug. And then another, he was down, they actually did a combat jump into Vietnam, which did not get counted as a combat jump on paper but Sean can tell you more about that you're on he did three tours in

in Vietnam and I'm sorry I'm going to try and put my dog somewhere else excuse me for a moment this is maybe one of the things that you can but don't worry about it too much Sean we haven't even heard him but by all means

Is that right? Can you not hear the dog? Very very faintly in the background Yeah you can hear fairly yeah It's loud in my ear, but that's fine then. Okay. Yeah, I mean, people say that about their wife's voice, too. It's the, it's manor.

The, so, yeah, Willie, Willie had three tours in Vietnam. The first as an enlisted man, as an MCO in 63, 64. He saw a lot of action there. Then in a couple of years later, he was back as a, as a, As a second lieutenant, you know, you don't really have second lieutenants in special forces anymore, but you did then. And he was a team XO and a team XO. And that's when he basically pulled a guy, pulled a guy off the battlefield in a sort of hail of gunfire and, you know, an action for which he was,

He was awarded the DSC, which is, I mean, I say it like it was an easy thing, but I mean, he ran, depending on which account you read 100 to 250 meters through basically a hail of North Vietnamese army gunfire to pull a guy off the battlefield. He didn't even know whether he was still alive or not, another special forces. soldier and he did that you know he was unarmed no body armor no helmet just just sprinting through the sprinting taking everything off just to uh and he i mean the s f guys didn't wear helmets back then anyway but he he'd taken all his webbing off and and put his rifle on the ground to go look for one of his teammates who was missing spotted him picked him up and and throws him over his shoulder. The guy had been shot three times,

beg a pardon, four times. He'd been shot four times at that point. He survived. And Willie then sprints back with this guy over his shoulder. Quite extraordinary. I mean, and this is in the middle of Willie actually running the special forces slash military. Montenyard side of that gunfight.

So he's also controlling the close air support. He's calling in the medevacs, all of that sort of stuff. Just phenomenal level of leadership for a second lieutenant. Then as he said, it's the same tour. you know one of the interesting things for me was how fluid these special forces assignments were you know you'd end up with a team it'd be with a team for practically a matter of weeks or a few months and then he'd be assigned somewhere else so he ends up um he ends up uh in a in a combat jump he's sort of the engineer for uh the um the the company there were no, again, this was a learning, something that I learned, I had no idea beforehand that there were no SF battalions as such in Vietnam. The sort of the chain of command went from fifth group, which was in overall charge of all SF missions in Vietnam, and then down to

companies. And there was one company, but the company was essentially what a battalion is now. They were called sea teams and now the SF Battalion is a sea team. But back then, the company was the sea team and it was more like a battalion. It was run by a lieutenant colonel.

And Willie's battalion commander was a legendary German immigrant, fascinating guy. Lieutenant Colonel Ludwig Feisterhammer, like somebody out of a movie. In fact, there's a character based on him in Robin Moore's book, you know, later a movie called The Green Berets. And so, yeah, he organized this combat jump to reopen an A camp,

which was a camp that an A team would occupy with several companies or multiple companies of Montagnards. out by the border. The Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese border with Laos and Cambodia was dotted with these eight camps that were supposed to try to interdict and mess with the Viet Cong and the NVA coming into the country with all the little branches off of the Ho Chi Minh Trail that ran down through Laos and Cambodia. And yeah, they did a, Willie was in the past,

finder element for the combat jump. And he actually got caught up in a tree, you know, one of the occupational hazards of being a paratrooper and, you know, had to sort of climb his way down. They didn't see much action, but there was a little. They actually dropped into the wrong country. They dropped over the border and had to sort of make. make their way back. But just fascinating, fascinating stories like that.

And then, yes, then in Mac V. Sog, which was his third tour, he, he was, he, that was an organization that specialized in cross-border missions, deliberate cross-border missions, not accidental ones. And, and, and he, he, he was in a mission where basically the guy that, I describe it in some detail, you know, in one of the articles, but they were compromised, basically. They were supposed to be watching, you know, watching a roadway and reporting back.

And they get compromised. And there's a running gunfight, you know, that lasts, you know, almost a day. They have to sort of overnight in a patch of trees, surrounded by uh surrounded by claim or minds um and and then there's another big firefight the next day and the guy in front of willy gets basically blown apart by a RPG which also catches uh willy in the sort of upper body and uh and his hands and his head and so forth so

uh a lot of high drama i mean the guy the guy saw an awful lot of comment i mean the guy saw an awful lot of combat in in in in in vietnam that was his so the mac veto was his final yes in uh in v in v and so and so so so now we're in you know the late uh the late 60s um can can you take it from there you the next the you know the last thing i mentioned i heard you mention was you know he shows up in the agency in 1980 it was 1980 his retirement Yes. Yeah. Okay. So it was during the 70s where, you know, obviously peacetime army, but nevertheless he progresses. He does all these other things, all the courses, the education, the leadership stuff, right? Yes. Yep. And indeed, he finds out he, the army, he had been taking courses on his own at night. And the, so the army basically told him that they would send him to, they would pay for him to go be a full. time student and by this point he's married with kids and to a any university he could get in

they would send him for two years to get enough credit hours to get a four-year degree to get a bachelor's degree and he um he like i said he takes opportunities like that and makes even more of them than they represent in and of themselves. So he got into Hofstra. Now, he also was accepted into Columbia. But the letter from Columbia came late, and it only arrived after he'd settled his family in Long Island where Hofstra is and had made the decision to go there.

So he ends up literally turning down an Ivy League school to go to Hofstra. But while he's at Hofstra, he gets, he does enough credit hours. He asks them to give him every credit hour he's allowed at Hofstra. And he gets two undergraduate degrees. And in addition to that, he plays varsity football and varsity track and field for the university. As a walk on, he was a walk on. He's no spring chicken by then, right?

No, he's in his early 30s. Plus he's carrying around a little bit of metal. Yes, exactly. I mean, Extra weight. Extraordinary, you know. I mean, just as a, the guy's time management skills, you know, are sort of like Olympic class, you know, are world class.

I mean, I can't imagine, you know, doing half of that, you know, in my own. early 30s in a university. So fast forward, he's in Nigeria, I think he said, in 1980. Can you talk about the then Sudan? Is that what comes next? Yeah, well, he, so he goes to the CIA, you know, he becomes a CIA officer. He starts out in what at the time, I believe, was called International Affairs Division, which later became Special Activities Division,

which is now known as Special Activities Center, which is, you know, sort of if you want to run a covert off the books guerrilla war in, you know, some country, and you don't want to involve the U.S. military and you're the president, then you send these guys. and he did that for a couple of years, but he quickly became an operations officer as well. Not every CIA officer who's in special activities goes to the operations officer, of course, down at Camp Perry, Virginia, otherwise known as the farm,

which is where you get taught the sort of how to spot, assess, recruit and handle agents. But he went through that. So he was a sort of kind of a made man in both types of organization. I mean he could go he could go participate in the guerrilla war but he could also recruit spies as well. And he ends up, well not ends up but you know one of his assignments then was to be on the team that would go abroad to train, you know, foreign friendly countries security services. And in his case in particular, it was training close protection type skills. So he found himself in Sudan as part of a series of two-man teams training the

presidential guard for the Sudanese dictator, a guy called Jafar Nairmeri. And so Sudan was a country that was, you know, friendly to the United States, but could have certainly its security forces could use the help that the United States could give them, could use any help they wanted. Now, he's quite open about the sort of the motives for the United States in doing this. It's not really because they want the host nation dictator to live a long, healthy life. It's like they want access and placement to people. They want people with access and placement close to that dictator. So they know what he's doing. They basically want to know what his calendar is, what kind of a mood he's in, all of this sort of stuff. And obviously his bodyguards are

in a position to tell you that. And Willie makes no bones about that. So he's there and he catches the eye of the station chief there, the new station chief. This would be now, we're in 1983. It was a guy called milk bearden and um he again of afghan fame right subsequent later later on ends up essentially playing a a very important role in the uh in the CIA's covert war against the Soviets using the Mujahideen in in Afghanistan but at this point he's he's the station chief in Khartoum And so he basically uses his, you know, wester, if you want, to, his influence to get Willie assigned to the station full time. And then Willie's there for a couple of years, during which time the amount of things that that CIA station was dealing with, you know, sort of overlapping and simultaneously was extraordinary. They had, as I mentioned, they had the dictator there, Jafar Nimeri was basically a U.S., not just friendly to the United States, but was virtually an asset of the United States.

And his intelligence slash security service was almost an extension of the CIA. I mean, the guys who served in that station make, again, they're quite blunt about it. that, you know, one of them, I think it might have been, Willie himself said, we owned that surface. So they're dealing with that. Willie's job there was to continue working with the Presidential Guard and their sort of an airborne commando type unit that he played a key role in building up

into a more impressive sort of, to terrorism unit. And so that's happening. Meanwhile, the CIA in Sudan is playing an important sort of behind the scenes, at least publicly behind the scenes role in the Israeli efforts to move the Ethiopian Jewish refugees, the sort of lost tribe of Israel that called Beta Israel in Ethiopia, who were, you know, you think about Ethiopia in the 70s and the 80s and all of the droughts and famines and so forth that they had,

and the Jewish population had the worst of that. I mean, as bad as all the other rural Ethiopians had it, you know, they had it even worse. and the Israelis, starting with Prime Minister Menachembeig, and wanted to get those Jewish refugees out. Israel has this, you know, the principle of Alia, you know, the sort of return to the motherland, as it were. And, but at a certain, they didn't have Sudan,

a notionally Arab country, at least the north of Sudan and Khartoum, didn't have diplomatic relations with Israel. So the CIA played a key role in getting these fallasha, as they were known at the time, although that's now got a sort of a derogatory connotation to it. So I try not to use that word too often. But getting the Jewish refugees out. And that ends up with a sort of dramatic final airlift out of the desert, where Milt Bearden arranges for, you know, 10 or 12 C-130s to fly in and land on the, on a desert airstrip.

And, you know, they've got these, you know, malnourished, barely alive refugees that a Delta Force team has also flown in to help with and they've sort of tying them up in a yellow clothesline type string in groups of 25 and ushering them onto the C-130s. Most of these refugees, up to the sort of week of their of their rescue would never even have been on a bus, let alone an airplane, let alone a military airplane. So it's sort of fascinating. But what leads up to that, which we, you know, we talk about in some detail in a forthcoming article is pretty impressive. There's a lot of work that has to be done with the Sudanese security services. So you've got that going on. But of course, that ends up being publicized. There's some, you know,

newspaper articles that come out about it. And that makes Nymiri and his regime look very bad in a lot of Sudanese eyes. They're basically being paid off by Mossad and the CIA to allow this to happen and to look, to facilitate it and or to look the other way. Yeah. And so that is one of numerous factors that lead to a coup against Nimeri, ironically, while he's visiting the United States. and so now the CIA station is having to manage this, you know, this situation.

It's heavily invested in the Sudanese security service, but guess what? That's the old regime. All those guys now get put in jail. So a huge number of their sources in the Sudanese government are now in jail, which is, you know, is its own crisis. And then within a couple of weeks, two new issues rear their heads. One is that the Mossad had been running basically a station in all but name, a non-official cover station with a handful of officers in Khartoum who were helping with the Jewish refugee issue

and doing some other work as well there. And one of the regime leaders who is in the regime that's been toppled and is now being arrested and is trying to save his own skin tells the new regime, hey, look, I know where the Mossad safe house is. Now there's Mossad officers in Khartoum. You should go get them. I can tell you. why don't, you know, and trying to sort of trade his life and his freedom for theirs. And so the plan had apparently always been that if the balloon really went up for these guys, they were to head straight to the CIA Station Chief's house and throw themselves at the mercy of the United States. And that's what happened. And then the CIA station is having to fit.

figure out how to keep these guys alive and then how to get them out of Sudan. And Willie had a key role to play in keeping them alive. The station chief, Milton, basically moved them from safe house to safe house, kind of a shell game with the Sudanese security forces who were sweeping the town looking for them. but through Willie Murchison's contacts in the military, which were still good, they knew where the military was going to be going, where looking for them, and so they were able to move them out, stay one step ahead of the searches.

And they were under very thin cover as TDI wires. you know, CIA personnel on temporary duty in the Sudan. Bearden gives them sort of like, you know, U.S. sporting team regalia that he has a supply of to make him look more American. Was Bearden, did he talk to you about, I mean, were you able to interview him? Yes, yes, yeah, multiple times. He's waiting in Texas or something now? Is he?

Yes, I believe so. Yes. And so, yeah. I mean, not surprisingly, you know, he doesn't always remember things the same way as Willie, nor the same way as, I mean, I've spoken to, you know, five or six guys who were in the CIA station during Willie's time there. and, you know, there are differing memories, you know, so, you know, that's a challenge for us as right as to know when to drop something entirely because we can't get it confirmed and when to say, well, this seems important. This guy remembers it this way, but this guy says, no, that never happened or it didn't happen that way. But, you know, in the end, the way that they get them out is they put them in wooden boxes and package them as as diplomatic cargo.

The Israeli intelligence officers. Yes, yes. Four is right, four boxes, one Mossad officer per box. And they put sort of like a hidden plastic. breathing tube in these things and there's also a solid state oxygen generator if you need it except that it makes things it gets very hot if you if you use it and you know a bottle of water or something and they and that's how they end up getting them out i mean there's an enormous amount of suffrauge and drama involved in this because uh you know they had to keep it that

there were only probably outside of the cia station and the four Mossad officers themselves, I think only the U.S. ambassador knew this was going on. And, you know, it was described by the guys there as an incredibly stressful time. I mean, no, you know, they were approaching it with a, you know, a high degree of professionalism and even a land, but nobody was under,

any doubts about the fact that this was a life and death sort of operation. And they had to, you know, they had to persuade the Sudanese had the new regime had closed down the airport. So to get the boxes in and to get the boxes out, they had to basically say, oh, we need a U.S. embassy resupply flight, which was sort of routine. The big embassies would get resupply flights, you know, and you know, you put your diplomatic cargo on them and they'd fly in, and they would use C-141s, which at the time was the sort of the standard Air Force long haul transport aircraft. Basically, it's been retired and replaced by the C-17 now. But that's how they got them out.

And then I mentioned there was another crisis at the same time. underpinning all of this or in the background of all of this and also interestingly Willie's time in Zaire was the Libyan threat you know the Reagan administration and the Gaddafi regime in Libya were sort of at each other's throats

for a long time and Gaddafi you know Gaddafi hated Naiiri the

the Sudanese head of state and you know the United States was basically you know in both Sudan and particularly in Chad was trying to train up

guerrilla armies to go fight Gaddafi's the Gaddafi regime. So when Nimeri is toppled in this coup, Gaddafi takes immediate advantage and flies two plane loads of Libyan intelligence operatives slash gunmen into Khartoum

and starts trying to sort of make nice with the new regime slash intimidate the new regime. and this ends up being a really dangerous period for not just the CIA officers, but all of the Americans in Khartoum. These guys are basically hunting, hunting, you know, Americans on the streets. The way that Milton Bearden described them, I mean, I don't have any photographs of them, certainly at this point,

but he says that they would wear these long coats, almost like dusters that you would see in sort of a cowboy movie or something. And underneath the coats, they'd have their AK slum. And, you know, you'd see groups of two or three of these guys walking around cartoon, which was sort of a city in almost chaos in the sort of weeks after the coup looking for Americans. And, you know, some months later, they end up shooting a communicator from the U.S. embassy who was coming home late one night

and pulls up at a stoplight, car pulls up beside him, you know, windows come down or whatever, and he's shot in the head. He actually survives. The U.S. flies him to the nearest sort of good hospital, apparently was in Jeddah, and so they fly into Saudi Arabia. But there's all kinds of crazy stories from the Libyan time. There's some really incredible covert actions that I plan to get into, where the CIA discovers that, I mean, this is under Nai MIRI's, regime, they discover that the head of the, the head of the Sudanese Intel Services, Libya desk is actually a Libyan spy. And so that leads to a whole series of consequences.

But it, I mean, again, and this is, you know, we haven't written this part of the story yet, but I'll, you know, sneak preview time. You know, it ends up with the CIA setting off four car bombs in cartoon. What? And not control explosions so that nobody gets hurt, we're told. Would they yell like fire in the hole? Yeah. Well, I think it's probably at night, you know, they get some jet cars.

They put them at sort of key locations surrounding, you know, on the outskirts of the city surrounding, you know, access routes into the, you know, the city and blow them up as a what is supposed to be a Libyan intimidation tactic, you know, and they have, they have a false, so is a false flag operation. Exactly. And they have, they have a CIA, they have a CIA officer, you know, impersonating, you know, a Libyan sponsored terrorist leaving, you know, leaving pocket litter in his hotel rooms that would make it look like a Libyan terrorist has been through there.

This needs to be a movie. Yeah, and then to cap it all off, they fly in these sort of gray-beard CIA officers, you know, to give the, you know, to give the new Sudanese, you know, regime, sort of the straight, skinny on how the Libyan, this is our read on what the Libyans are trying to do to you. You know, the whole thing is a CIA operation to start off with.

So just you know, there's so many stories like that. The Libyans show up again and again at Camina Airfield in Zaire. You know, at one point Willie has to he

gets sort of a one, 24 hours notice that I think it's 24 hours. I mean, it's a while since I was writing on this, but he, you know, he's told at your airfield, where there's almost no Americans and very little infrastructure, you're going to have to put up 630 Libyan anti-Gaddafi guerrillas, you know, a day or two. What can go wrong? Yeah, exactly, you know. And then he has the Gaddafi Intel service basically starts making trips down there to try to, you know, kill some of these guys and so forth. I mean, just crazy, crazy stuff going on.

So I'm intrigued too, Sean is here, and I know we're coming to an end here, but you mentioned, and of course this is a topic close to your heart too, but, you know, this is 1980. course, which is the birth of Delta Force and the aftermath of Eagle Claw. And I know that, of course, Beckwith was the larger than life figure that within life, and let alone within Delta Force. But did he and Mercos and Neat at this time when they were working together? No, they met, they met Willie one of one of the many, many, many jobs that he had, far too many jobs that it seems possible to to actually fit into a 23-year army career. But he was on the staff at the Special Forces School at Fort Bragg for a while when Charlie Beckwith was running it in sort of this,

I guess it's at the mid-70s right before, you know, Delta, I think, officially stood up in 77. And so Charlie Beckwith, who founded Delta Force, but was, you know, already sort of a very experienced Special Forces Colonel with his own, you know, time in Vietnam. He was basically, he was basically Willie's boss for a while at Fort Bragg. So around that time frame, Delta was sending small elements to Sudan in the 19, like mid-1980s to train. Some of it was VIP protection, but also there, a Sudanese EOD unit they were training as well.

And then, and then of course, that's in addition to what Sean was talking about earlier when J-Socq was brought in to help with the refugees. Yeah, I mean, this is incredible. If you guys want to read the entire story,

which is four parts, this is literally should be a book and a movie or TV series. You could check it out at the high side. Substack. The link is in the description and in the show notes. So ease of access, if you're, you know,

you can also Google it, high side. and it'll come up first thing. Jack and Sean do incredible work there. Stuff you're not reading anywhere else. So it's pretty great. Sean, do you have another book in a world?

Just to be clear, there's more parts coming. I mean, the whole story told. I mean, some of what we're talking about today hasn't appeared in, I don't know if you can still say in print for an online publication, but hasn't appeared in any of our articles yet. It's,

you know, there's probably going to be. another six or seven. I mean, the whole, I'm thinking that the time in Sudan is going to be another four, it's going to be another three articles beyond the one that we've already written. And then one or two in Zaire and Angola and then sort of wrap it all up with the, you know, the rest of his career and the challenge, the sort of the uphill fight to have his award upgrades. Sean, let's make this a book, man, and self-publish.

Let's make, let's do it. And I'd like to point out to all of our audience, some of whom may not be, you know, such a voracious readers, but get their information from Aizan, which is, as we all know, it's like the Delphi Oracle of, so if you do continue want to, you know, to follow this story, stay tuned to us and certainly we all, you know, I'm volunteering Sean and Jack to come on

and talk more about this. Good. I know, Dee, you want to watch the way I'm blaming it on Dee, but I know we've got to end in a couple of minutes, but for both of you guys as not just writers of articles, but what lies ahead beyond Willie Murchison? Is there any, do you have any projects and in the works, either individually or together. Yeah, I mean, this week I'm hoping to get a drone story out, actually. And then there's Havana syndrome. That's a big piece I've been working on. Yeah, yeah.

In fact, on that, I learned a ton from Mark P, of course. I know he didn't get his in Havana, but it's in Moscow. but nevertheless, you know, for all of you guys, if you're interested in that, go back to Team House interview. I think it was the last one we did with Mark. A couple of them, yeah. Yeah, really, really interesting.

But yeah, I'm on the edge of my seat. John, what are you working on besides the Willie? Well, I'm not working on anything besides the Willie thing because believe me that I'm getting up at 5 in the morning and, you know, feeding the dog and reading the paper and then I'm working on, working on the Willie Mercoson life and times

until it's done. But beyond that, we have some kind of long lead investigations that I don't want to say too much about because A, I don't want to give them away and B, I don't want to overpromise. I mean, some of these investigations, you turn into things

that you know happened, but it's hard to get them reported out to a degree where you're comfortable publishing it. But we have a, you know, a couple of, I mean, one of them in, you know, one of them will, could be another interesting series. One would make, frankly, a fantastic movie. But I've got to, you know, we know the bare minimum of facts about it, so we got to try to report it out. Yeah, there's, I think after we finish the Willie series, and get the Havana syndrome story out, which that could be like maybe a three-part or even.

We'll see. I think, well, Sean and I will have to confabulate and recalibrate, you know, what we're doing this fall. Because, yeah, as you mentioned,

there's a couple big projects we want to work on. Awesome. Well, well, everyone, and again, that brings us right to the end. Yeah,

find them at the high side. Yeah, go ahead. The links will be in the description for the high side. You can follow. Andy, of course, he's got a substack as well. All the links for everything you need to know is in the description. And of course, our Patreon, patreon.com slash the team house.

The high side is really incredible. You don't see many journalists doing this kind of work. And I'm not just saying that because I know Jack and Sean. It's the truth. 100%. Hey, fellas, thanks so much. Thanks, look forward to, yeah, look forward to seeing you again soon. Thanks for having us.

Yeah, thanks, guys.