The Team House - MARSOC Intel Operator in the NSA | John Hackett | Ep. 351

Episode Date: June 7, 2025

For two decades, Jonathan Hackett managed complex intelligence operations and special activities in dozens of countries, serving with the NSA, DIA, and Special Operations Command. He concluded his military career leading the Marines' program for allied and partner engagement, and is now passionate about researching irregular wars, ancient Mediterranean history, and interrogation psychology. Find Jon here:www.linkedin.com/in/thejonathanhackettwww.jonathanwhackett.comIran’s Shadow Weapons: Intelligence Operations, Covert Action, and Unconventional Warfarehttps://www.amazon.com/Irans-Shadow-Weapons-Intelligence-Unconventional/dp/1476696934/Theory of Irregular War https://www.amazon.com/Theory-Irregular-War-Jonathan-Hackett/dp/1476689059/Today's Sponsors:StopBox USA⬇️Get firearm security redesigned and save with BOGO the StopBox Pro AND 10% off @StopBoxUSA with code HOUSE at https://www.stopboxusa.com/HOUSE GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 10% off! For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouseTo help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early access to shows-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseNew merch, patches, and stickers! ⬇️https://theteamhouse-shop.fourthwall.comSupport the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured__________________________________Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"00:00 Start 01:09 - Jonathan's origin story.03:16 - His start in Signals Intelligence.9:05 - Jonathan's experiences at the NSA.11:50 - Shifting careers to Human Intelligence.18:30 - Recounting the Camp Bastion incident.27:45 - Ops in Indonesia.41:22 - Airstrikes and personal story.58:56 - Diplomatic intelligence work.1:06:01 - Discussing his book's critique of conflict.1:23:47 - Details on his upcoming book about Iran.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Special operations. Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park. Welcome to episode 351 of the Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave in studio with Jonathan Hackett. He is a former Marine.

He is the author of The Theory of Irregular Warfare, or A Regular War, I should say. And the forthcoming book, Iran's Shadow Weapons, which is coming out this summer. Jonathan served in the Marines, worked in a sagan capacity, a human capacity, was with Marsok, all over the Middle East, and West Africa, Central Africa. Plenty of stuff to talk about here. Talk about you, and then we'll talk about your books and the theory behind your research. So thank you for joining us and coming in studio today. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Happy to be here. Yeah. So take it from the top. If you tell us a little bit about, you know, what was it like for you growing up and like what sort of like took you towards the Marine Corps? So I grew up in Maine, way up north, Caribou, Maine, like most northeastern city, the United States. A lot of snow. Love the snow. Then we moved to Connecticut when I was about 10 years old.

And from there, I met a couple of different people in the military, especially World War II and Vietnam people because that was that era. And I had a history teacher, Mr. Donahue, who fought in the Chosen Reservoir in the, the Korean War as a Marine. And he was so down to earth, like a really nice guy. And you wouldn't imagine if he met him on the street that he had fought in the chosen reservoir, you know, like fighting in reverse and all the stuff that they were doing. So that's one guy that was like in the back of my mind. Like something about him, I like that guy, you know. And then I met a family friend who fought in the Battle of Pelaloo, World War II. And he actually had a katana of one of the last guys that he killed on the island. And he had his house. His name's Butch Watkins. He has two silver stars.

from that battle. He's a crazy background. But again, if you met him on the street, you wouldn't know that that guy did that. He would like, you know, if your car's broken down, he'd go over and stop and like help you fix your tire, even though you're a stranger, like that kind of guy. But you gotta think like back to that time, you know, he was doing that stuff.

And there were people in my family who had been in like World War II and things like that in the army. Like my grandfather was in France during the liberation of France, which is cool and awesome. But like there's something about the army where it's just kind of like the army goes rolling along. But there's a difference with the way the Marine Corps is. Like these two individuals, for example,

like there's something about them that's more than just the military, you know. And I also like to be like a high achiever. And I was thinking, like, what's the highest thing I can do right now? And I was kind of a bad kid in high school. So like I stayed back in 12th grade because I didn't go to school for an entire year. I just didn't go. And my mom was too busy working. So like the Truman officer would come and I wasn't home.

And you can't do anything about that. So I couldn't go to college right away. I'm like, how do I get out of here? Well, I could do that Marine Corps thing. And so that's why I joined the Marine Corps getting out of my town in Connecticut, basically. And you came in the Marines doing the scene? Yeah, so I didn't even know what that was. I knew I wanted to do something kind of like unconventional and unique because that's kind of the way I grew up was just like almost no rules, no boundaries, you know.

And I don't want to be boxed in. The military can box you in, but I told the recruiter like, I don't want to be boxed in. You're going to find somewhere else for me. So he's like, okay, take this. this test, the ASFAB, the entry test. And back then it was on like a, like a, you know, black and white screen old computers, you know, and I'm doing the test and I'm doing the math test and like the science test. I'm answering the questions. They keep getting harder. I'm like, am I stupid? And I thought I got like a zero, you know, like I thought I did really bad. And they gave

me the sheet. And apparently I did really well. And I didn't know this, but the ASFAB back then, I don't know if it still does. They give you more difficult questions, the more you answer correctly. Oh, I didn't know that. I had no idea. And I just thought I was dumb. whole time. You know, and I'm like, looking at guys next to me, I'm like, are they all answering these correctly? Like, what's going on here? You know? But then they're like, yeah, you can't do infantry because your score is too high. You can't do this because this and this. And I'm like, okay, well, I don't even know what to do anyway because I don't know anything about this. And like, we'll just, you know, sign this contract. Don't worry. And so, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so I did. Making our numbers. Oh, yeah. And actually, he kept calling me. He's like, you want to go to boot camp like a little earlier? Because he had like a monthly quota. He's like, something to get you as soon as possible. You know, are you really serious about? about it, you show me you're serious. So I did actually went earlier. So I went there in October 2004 to boot camp and that was in Paris Island. Good time. And then at the end of boot camp, I found out what my job would be because I didn't even know like that contract I signed no clue what it was. And they're like, hey, you're going to Pensacola, Florida. Well, we did Marine combat training, which is what the, you know, non-infantry guys do. They're like very basic. It was still like

Vietnam era stuff back then. It was like 2003, 2004. We had like the old flackjackjack. is the tricolor flackjacket, it covers your whole body and all that, you know, and the Harness, chest rig that they used to wear back in the day. So we're doing all that, like, nonsense, like, patrolling around, like, idiots. And then even though the war had already taught us stuff, we weren't learning those lessons yet. And, like, teaching us to do, like, the Turkey Peak, but with a long gun, which is so stupid. They're just, like, dumb stuff. Anyways, they're like, yeah, you're going to Pensacola after that.

So I went to Pensacola where the NSA actually teaches, like, a joint school to teach SIGGON collectors, basically. So Siggyz, Ineligence Collectors, they collect foreign intelligence on nation states and any other target that we need. And so we learned all that stuff. And at the time, they were transitioning from the old way of doing SIGAN, like against the Russians back in the day, to a new way of doing it, which was all digital. Because before that, there was a lot of Morse code, especially during, like, the nuclear period. Because Morse code is the only thing that will survive a nuclear strike as far as communications are concerned. So like Russia, China, North Korea, and the United States all have Morse code backup systems. So, of course, that's a target.

That'd be very interesting to listen to, right? Because you could know what they're going to do in the event of a nuclear attack, because they're always practicing that stuff. So we learn how to do that. We also learn how to do something called hand graphic analysis, where you listen to some stuff over satellite communications, and you actually take a piece of graph paper and write down the bits on it and figure out where the bits start and end,

and you can actually decrypt stuff this way. and I'm way over simplifying it, but we did that for like three months. That's wild. There's a ton of trigonometry involved, and I am not good at math. So that took me a long time to master. I was spending a lot of extra hours in the schoolhouse. Eventually got it. The reason you need trigonometry is because you can actually figure out, like, the angle,

the amplitude, all these different things about the signal if you just do the math on it. Really? Which will help you solve the equation and figure out, like, what part of this signal is protecting the data, what part is the actual data, like, what's the nuclear communication in there, and what's just the error correction stuff on the outside of it. And when you collect it, you don't know. You just see zeros and ones. So you've got to figure out, like, first of all, where does it begin?

Because that will tell you everything else about the sequence and all that. And we were doing this on a piece of graph paper. They don't do that anymore. So this school then for SIGET is different. It's a different focus than the Boyce Intercept School Lab, a good fellow. So that is a complimentary school that is for the Air Force now. But it used to be, that school used to be an analysis school only. Oh, I'm not, I'm sorry. I don't mean good fellow. I mean, not good fellow. I mean, San Angelo.

Oh, okay, yeah. Yeah, that was a follow-on school for a, like, a portion of this stuff. Okay. What we were learning at Pensacola was like broad. Oh, interesting. From satellite communication interception all the way down to like tactical radio interception to digital communications, analog communications. We were using oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers and like all this stuff. Fascinating. Yeah. And then so I did that. And I was the honor graduate in the class, which meant I get to pick my duty station. And they listed all these places. And I thought to myself, like, I don't want to go to a

Marine Corps unit, even though I'm a Marine, because I know if I go to Marine Corps unit, I'm going to get boxed in. Right. So I was like, what's the least Marine Corps thing I can do? There was this thing on there that said NSA, CSS, which is National Security Agency, Central Security Service, Hawaii. And I was like, I'll do that. So I went to Hawaii to work in the tunnel, which is, there's a walkway three quarters of mile underground underneath the pineapple field that people who work there will know exactly what I'm talking about. It's a dull pineapple plantation that the U.S. government leases the soil underneath. And we have a gigantic three-story building buried underground that's no longer functional. They actually closed it a few years ago so I can talk about it now. But it was a huge

collection site. Thousands of people worked there 24 hours a day, mostly monitoring Chinese and Russian stuff and North Korean stuff. So I was on a mission there monitoring some nuclear stuff. and both listening to audio like you're talking about, but also looking at digital satellite communication, shipborne communication, all this stuff, because these countries have the nuclear triad, right? They've got subs, they've got aircraft, they have ground launch, all this stuff,

and they're communicating all the time. So we want to know what they're doing, just like they want to know what we're doing. Right. Because, I mean, the whole point of intelligence is to reduce uncertainty because that makes a decision easier to make. So that's what we were doing out there.

A lot of interesting things happen out there. One that stands out to me is one of our targets, was using that old-fashioned method of communication I was talking about. And we were using the old-fashioned method of breaking the code. And it was Christmas Day, 2005, I think. And I was on watch. It was like three in the morning. And I decoded the message.

And it was a bunch of at symbols in the shape of a Christmas tree. And it said, Merry Christmas Americans. Holy shit. And I'm like, what am I even doing here? Right, right. Why are you so secretive if you know, like, you know, I know, we know. Like, it was so, like, I felt dumb, you know. Yeah.

But it was kind of cool. And then, you know, that kind of stuff went on for a little while. And then my three years there was up. So I had to go choose another station. And again, I did not want to go into a Marine Corps unit. So I went to NSA headquarters. And I actually got to work on a more advanced SIGAN collection capability called Expeditionary SIGAN, kind of like exploiting targets that are like very specific with basically manufactured devices and kind of form factor stuff, depending on what the mission is.

So, you know, for example, if I can take a picture of the soil from space, see like a rock formation. So I know what those rocks look like. I can use some other measurement signature intelligence to figure out what the soil is composed of. Then in the laboratory, I can reproduce that sand and that stone and put a listening device inside of it and then kick it out of an airplane into that country. And it looks like a part of the desert that belongs there. And like you wouldn't know that unless you cracked it open, that it was not that. So that's the kind of stuff we were doing up there, which was really interesting. And it was definitely the direction I wanted to go.

problem is the more advanced I got in these things, they further from a window I became and like the less sunlight I would see. And, you know, I felt like I need to get outside and touch grass because I'm going to become like a shriveled vitamin D deficient person pretty soon here. So you weren't the guy that they sent up the telephone pole to tap the wire. No. Deep, deep, deep, deep in the a aft. You were like a skiff within a skiff within a skiff.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was actually funny because back then we hadn't like locked down. Like it was before Edward Snowden. So, like, things weren't as locked down as they are now. And I was a sergeant at the time. So I would just go around the NSA and the ops building where I worked. And I would go into random conference rooms and just listen to meetings that were going on.

And, like, nobody asked you if you were supposed to be there or not. Like, I would just sit in the back with a notebook and pretend like, yeah, I'm supposed to be here. Because I was, I was, like, so interested, like, what's going on in here? Yeah. And, like, back then you could do that. You could just, like, go sit in on something. I used to sit on General Ordeyerno's Iraq update, the MNFI update, every week. And, like, I wasn't supposed to be there.

But it was really cool. So the way that you found your way out of SIGN, out of the caverns of the skiff, was you made this interesting transition. I don't think too many people may. We've interviewed one or two, but not many. People go from SIGT to Humeet. How did that take place for you? So I was wondering, what will I do next? And the way our promotions work, I could see it coming where I was not going to be able to do operations anymore if I stayed SIGM.

And I was like, how do I keep doing operations? Well, Hument is there. I didn't know very much about it. I kind of took a risk on it and just said, I'm going to try it. If I don't like it, then I'm going to suffer. But if I like it, it might be cool. So we did a screener. They do like a board where they sit down.

They used to interrogate you for like eight hours with a group of dudes sitting across the table from you. Now it's not like that anymore. But I did that, past the screener, went to the school and had no clue what I was about to learn. So it was kind of a shock. I just was trying to get out. Kind of like when I joined the Marine Car, I was trying to get out of Connecticut. Similar thing where I was like, how do I pivot out of here? And it was the right move.

Was it difficult, though, because, I mean, here you are with TSSCI, obviously, you know, some SAP system like that. Were they reluctant to let you go from the Senate field anywhere else, not just human, but anywhere? Yeah, and actually, more so the Marine Corps was pissed that I hadn't served in a Marine Corps unit. and they were really resistant to approve my stuff. Yeah. But they, they, the local leadership, had no power over my package that I sent up. All they could do is non-concur, but it didn't affect the outcome. So I still got picked.

In the Marine Corps, if I remember right, working with some guys in Afghanistan, like, aren't most of their human terms warrants or is there, or I guess, can you tell us how it works? I'm not sure. I just remember working with some parts. So there have been some changes over time. It used to actually be two different fields. We used to have CI counterintelligence separate from Humant, just like the Army. Okay.

No longer is that the case. And there's actually a third field, which is interrogator translators, that they rolled all three of these into a single MOS. So what you do is you have the enlisted people there, and you usually have some junior officers. They don't do this anymore. They did it for about 10 years and then got rid of it. But let's say you're a first attendant out of Quantico and your MOS is going to be CIHumit officer. you would go through the class with us enlisted just like the rest of us. Kind of like through soft training where it's like the rank is not important.

What's important is the training, you know. It's very similar to that. The warrant officers have to come later. So, you know, you graduate, get a couple of deployments under you. It used to be you need like three or four deployments during the war. Now that the war is over, like nobody's deploying. So they're just letting people go in. But it used to be a lot more competitive.

They used to reject people all the time. Those warrant officers would become the team leaders. And you'd have like between three to five. CII human collectors and a team leader on top and then you'd go deploy to do either direct support or general support to a unit that needed you okay hey guys it's your pal jack i just want to take a moment to tell you about the sponsor for this show which is stopbox stopbox makes this very cool box to secure your items in or your valuables or weapons could be a firearm knife things that you want to keep away from kids uh

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but they are also giving you a buy one, get one free for their stuff. Stopbox Pro. That's 10% off and a free Stopbox Pro when you use the code house at StopboxUSA.com. Discover a better way to balance security and readiness with Stopbox. And what was your first assignment once you got into the human field? So I went to Afghanistan. That was like at the height of Marine Corps involvement in Afghanistan. Went there in 2011. I was there for a year. Went to Helmand Province. Super interesting experience. I went there with multiple functions. So I was general support to the area that we were in.

We were in regimental combat team five, which was a portion of Helmand kind of southwest-ish all the way down to the Pakistan border. So I was doing interrogations in our debt fact. I was going on raids with our aerial interdiction force, which was going out there and looking for dudes crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan with drugs. You know, land the helicopter right in front of the car

and grab the dudes, take the drugs, go back. I would talk to him for a little while and be like, yep, you're going to Bagram, you know, and then send them out or let them go, depending on what was going on. Did that at the very beginning. Then our policy in Afghanistan changed about halfway through the deployment. They started shrinking down base footprints. So they were closing down some of the bases like Delaram, for example. They shut that down.

So a lot of those guys to Camp Leatherneck. They sent us to Camp Leatherneck. I was at Camp DeWire before. So when we went to Leatherneck, the mission changed more to a CI-focused mission. But I still had all my source network that I had developed in Southern Afghanistan, him, which was really helpful because one guy that I had been working with, it's kind of unusual, especially in the military, to do a cold bump with a guy, which means your very first contact, run it all the way through to recruitment.

Usually that doesn't happen. Usually it's multiple handlers are doing this over time, and then finally, maybe the guy gets recruited. But this one particular source I had, I actually, the week after I showed up, I met him, started developing him and was able to recruit him in October the next year. So it was like less than a year. I was able to move through the entire recruitment cycle, which was like unheard of, especially in your first deployment. So when I transferred up to Leatherneck, that guy stayed on my books. And I'm glad he did because there was an attack in Camp Bashion in September 2012.

He had been reporting on that attack from February 2012. He was giving information on the vehicle to be used, like a high luxe, a white and red high luxe pickup truck. He knew exactly where the safe house was, where they'd be staging at. Wow. He knew where they actually were going to come up to the fence line. And the guys actually did a three, they did three dry runs cutting the fence using very good methods to cut diagonally across the fence and the base. They ran all the way up and tagged their hand on the aircraft there and ran back just to make sure they'd be able to do it. Nobody caught them. The reason nobody caught them is because there were Tongans guarding those posts and every other post had a silhouette, not a person. During this whole time, we've been telling General Graganis, who was the major general in charge of the Marines there in RC Southwest,

West, hey, this is a tax going to happen. Like, told them in February, tell them in March, tell them in April. Like, every month we were updating it. I'm like, hey, we got even more information now. We even know we had a video of them training with, in the video, there's a map of Camp Leatherneck and Bastion, and there are aircraft on the map. And the guy's there with a little stick,

like, back in the old days, teachers. He's like pointing to the points of entry and like, actually the place they'd already dry run. He's pointing to that, like, you know, going through the whole thing. The guys are all sitting around, like, watching, like, school children. and we're showing him like, hey, we have like direct evidence that's going to happen. And this source is like an A1 source, like very highly credible, very good veracity.

Like we've tested them, we've obsessed them a lot of times, very responsive. He's like, no. I know this base is impervious. There's no way they could get away with something like this. We were like, sir, they already have three times. They've done a dry run successfully three times during the day, not at night, right? And he kept pushing back. It came around like July, I believe, maybe early off.

August. And finally, we got a report from that source saying, the attack will be in September because Prince Harry is at the base. So they had this plan like in their pocket for over a year and they weren't doing it. They were waiting for like an opportunity where it would make, you know, the most impact, which totally get that. Prince Harry was very vocal about his visit to the base. It was like widely covered in the news. He even wrote a book about it later, you know. But that drew their attention. They said, what if we could kill him? He was actually staying over by the Danish tents, which was pretty far away from the aircraft. They were able to go in and destroy the aircraft. They killed two Marines. These guys were on PCP and a bunch of other drugs. They were getting shot

over and over, and they kept going like zombies. It was crazy. The only way they were killed is when they were cut in half by the 50 cows from the helicopters. And the helicopters took time to figure out that this was going on. And you had one dude cut in half from the waist down, crawling, like eyes wide open, trying to get a grenade out and open it. Like didn't know that his body was on, you know, like, and the other thing is the guys they selected for this were mentally challenged. Yeah. They picked them this way on purpose, obviously. And then they put him on drugs, and then they sent them on a suicide mission, right?

One guy survived. We called him Stumpy because he lost his hand during the fight. He was the one we interrogated. So my debt fact actually got him. And he was very mentally challenged. And it's sad because, like, this guy obviously didn't believe in anything that was going on. He was just mentally challenged and convinced this is what you're going to do, put on drugs. that's what you're doing. And while we're talking to him, we're trying to get him to talk.

And he's like kind of cagey, doesn't want to talk. And finally, we're thinking, like, how do we get this guy to communicate? And one of the other interrogators gave him a marker. And he just starts drawing. And he starts drawing that map that was in that video. And I got to rewind a little bit because in July that year, my partner and I, another counterintel agent, we're going around the base. And Camp Leibnick was huge. At the time, there was like 3 to 5,000 people at any given time living on that base in a small town. Well, there was a bus that would take third country nationals like Pakistanis and other people around the base. And there were maps that said, you know, this is the chow hall. This is the aircraft. This is the blah, blah, blah. Those maps were

secret no foreign maps that the Army Corps of engineers printed out, cut the classification off of, and then slipped into a plastic thing and then screwed them up all over the base, right? My partner and I went around and picked up over 60 of these maps, right? And we brought the actual stack of maps with us to this one meeting, and we brought it to the general. Like, these are classified maps. Here are the originals we found with Buckeye imagery, which is classified imagery right here. And here's the map that's printed.

It's the same. It's just missing this. He's like, well, how are my guys going to know how to get around the base? We're like, sir, this is classified information. You can't release it to third country nationals, especially Pakistanis, who we already know are doing things over the border, right? And he's like, but how will the third country nationals know how to get to the defect, the Chow Hall, and to the gym? Like, this is what he was saying.

It was like shocking to me. Okay, fast forward to the attack, Stumpy in his pocket is one of those maps. And it's just like mind-blowing, you know. Was the same base commander there when the attack happened? Yep. What was his response? And were there any repercussions for him? Oh, yeah.

So I don't know what his personal response was, but he got relieved. of duty, which is very unusual for a general to be relieved. Yeah, in theater. Yeah, for sure. That's good to hear, I mean, because usually, I mean, I think that we're just used to those guys getting off Scott, pretty no matter what happens. It was actually two generals. So there was Gregannis, who was the infantry division commander.

Then there was the Marine Air Wing commander, who was a one-star, Broadmeadow, I believe his name was. So right before that attack happened, like two weeks before it happened, the Maugh commander, that general came to visit us at Camp Dwyer because we were doing some stuff down there with the Afghans. And we had reports that the Taliban wanted to kill a general. Like generally, they didn't know which one or anything, but like target of opportunity, like hope it happens, you know. And we were telling that general, like, hey, just so you know, the Taliban has been thinking about attacking a general. And no generals have visited this base in a very long time.

If you come there, you're probably going to trigger an attack because they're going to know that you're there. He has this giant entourage. He was like, no, no, no, I have to see the troops. I have to see the troops. So he goes there. He went to the Afghan side of the base, which was separate from our side of the base. There's this massive crowd of Afghans on top of him because it's kind of like they're very excited, all the stuff. And this one guy comes running up from behind and plows his way through

the crowd and he's got one of those stick mines that the Russians had back in the Cold War in Afghanistan. And he lights it off and it blew his hands off. Didn't kill anybody because it was a it wasn't a dud, but it was like not functioning proper. Order or whatever. Yeah, yeah. So like if that thing had worked, yeah. He would have killed that guy. Yeah. That same general

that got relieved later on for not listening to us about the other attack, you know. So that's some of the frustrations out of that deployment. For sure. And after that Afghanistan deployment, when was it that you went over to Marsok? So the following year, actually Scott Stocker was the Marine in charge of assignments for enablers to Marsok at the time. And I called him up and I said, he was a master sergeant at the time. I said, master sergeant, you know, I'd really like to come over to Marsok. I've heard a lot of things because I actually worked with them when I was in Sagan back during debt. I was making stuff for their unit. And I said, you know, I'd love to come over there as a human guy.

And he was like, okay, let me see, do you want East Coast or West Coast? This is at the time when it was split across the coast. And I was like, well, I'm already in Camp Pendleton. California would be awesome. He goes, why don't you open up Marine Online? So I open up like our, it's like the thing the Marines used to look at all their personal information. He was like, do you see any orders in there?

And I was like, yeah, he gave me orders over the phone, which was crazy. So they, you know, they took a risk on me. I went over there and just up the road. It was fantastic. And greatest five years of my 20 years in the Marines. With enablers, they don't let you stay more than five years. So I stayed literally exactly five years and zero days over there. And you said something like you were part of a pilot assessment and selection course.

Yeah. So in 2013, they were piloting this assessment selection for enablers. So obviously not as hardcore as the operators. But what they were trying to do is like, you know, wheat from the chaff kind of thing. Because at the time, there was a lot of unknown about Marsock, at least in the conventional side, like, what is this place? So a lot of people who are going there that might not have belonged there, so they're trying to filter that. So a lot of physical stuff, a lot of psychological stuff, but packed down into about seven-day period. So it's not as long as others.

It was pretty grueling, though, for the time that it was. We slept like one or two hours a night the whole time, exhausted. A lot of like, okay, run down to the beach, now swim a kilometer out there, go over here, put on your camis, go run to the pool, go do pool PT, no, like, it was like thing after thing after thing, you know, like in midnight, we're going up over the Reaper, which is this really high inclined hill in Kent Pendleton. And as we're going up there, then we get CS gas blown up on us. And then suddenly we got a casualty. And then, oh, man, there now there's some ammo cans you got to carry two.

And like the whole thing, you know. So, like, they were just throwing stuff at us the whole time. And, like, guys were getting injured. Almost everybody made it. Only a couple of guys didn't. I think there was, like, 15 of us total. And then, like, two or three didn't make it. But it was all the enablers at the time.

they were going through. So like, intelligence analyst, dog handler, EOD, so like all the, all the dynamic people together. And it was pretty interesting. They actually did a good job of like monitoring it and kind of adjusting it. So like for example, they had this like mental task. It was like the second to last day where they brought us into this conference room. They took a trash can full of intel reports. And the guy stood up on the table and just dumped the intel reports out all over the table. He's like, you have one hour to figure out when the attack's going to be. and like all of us like look at each other like oh man here we go like we're all trying to read like we can't read because we're tired and me and one other guy who had worked on Asia stuff before started realizing like oh this is like an abu saif thing from the Philippines and actually he knew the thing that it was about and I knew the thing that it happened before that that caused it so like he and I were over in the corner like putting stuff together and like they could see that through the glass and they came in and like pulled me and him and one other dude out like hey guys come to this other room so they pull us over this other room and they're like do you have a new problem

you have this spaceship with, I can't remember the exact things, but it was like, there's a woman on there, she's 43, she had a miscarriage. There's a man who's 5'10 and has a history of cancer and his family. And all these interesting things with each person, like pick nine out of the 15 that can go to Mars and live there. And so like that was the problem. Like what? So we're like, we're trying to figure it out, you know?

And they wanted us to use certain analytical techniques to like very quickly solve a problem. And actually, we had a pretty good solution to it. So it's very interesting. It was like the physical stuff, and there was like a mental thing in between each physical thing. It's like forcing you to use your brain even though you're tired. So it's pretty cool. Then they did away with it because there was too much attrition for their liking. And instead of like calibrating it, they just got rid of it, which is unfortunate.

And from there, I mean, you did a whole bunch of deployments all over the place. I mean, where was the first one that they sent you off to? So the first one was really interesting. it was to Indonesia, but it was supporting a J-Soc preparation of the environment activity. And I didn't know that. I had no clue about any of this stuff. And they said, hey, you know, you've been selected to do an interview. This is how it started.

I'm like, oh, okay. But you can't do it in your uniform. You need to be in a suit. It's going to be at some early time in the morning. I remember what it was. It's because I was getting interviewed from a guy in Hawaii that was at the joint Intel Support element over there in Sock Pack. And I get on there and it's him and some other people.

he's a civilian guy and he's talking to me and they're like, what do you know about Jama Islamia? What do you know about Abu Sayyaf? What do you know? Like they're asking me like all these questions like, boom, boom, boom. And I'm like answering to the best of my ability. And they're like, what do you know about these strategic things and these tactical things? Like they're trying to like figure out stuff. And I feel like I didn't know anything. But I got the job, which I don't know why, or who else they talked to. But anyways, I got that. And they're like, now you're going to go to for an unknown period of time. We'll determine when you're ready to go. So I I went to Sockpac, and for 90 days, I worked with that guy that interviewed me.

His name is Dan. He is, like, the Indonesia expert in Sokpack, amazing counterterrorism analyst. And he actually was not in the military or in the intel community at all. He was a dendrologist major, like studying trees in college and his master's degree in Indonesia. He, like, knows Bahasa Indonesia. He knows, like, other local dialects. And somehow, like, you know, one thing led to another. and he started working for the government.

So he's like a true, like, cultural expert, which is really helpful. And he said, look, I know you don't know a lot about Jemma Islamia, but I need you to master it in three months. I'm giving you 90 days. You can be in the skiff as much as you want or as little as you want. And at the end, you're going to brief the sockpack commander, Admiral Kilrain about what you learned.

And then he let go of me for the next 90 days. I just went in there like 12 to 15 hours a day, reading every report since 2000. I think it was, no, actually from 1991. until 2014, which is when I was there. And I learned a lot about Gemma islamia. And I learned that there's a certain pattern about how they do their attacks compared to how they split into new groups

because they have a history of splintering into smaller groups. And there is a huge correlation between these two conditions, which is very fascinating. And I briefed that to the Admiral, and he said that he'd never heard that before, and that was great. And he looked over to Dan. He's like, what do you think, Dan? And Dan's like, he can go on the deployment, which is pretty cool.

Yeah. So then that like, I mean, we see with the Filipino groups too, is that like they split off because like there's a peace deal is about to go in and there's one group that or one faction that feels like they're not getting a big enough slice of the pie. Like from your analysis, why was that taking place? It's actually more a diversionary because if we're putting, they know how we work. We know like, for example, Al-Qaeda is an organization. Well, if there's a new group called JNM or JTWJ or whatever, we're like, well, that's not Al-Qaeda. Right. And then like three years later, like, oh, wait, it is al-Qaeda.

Right. You know? Right. So they understand that. And they're very good at like splitting off at the exact moment where it makes sense for them to do that. And that group becomes a target later and then that group disappears. And this one comes up.

And like, it's the same dudes. You know, and actually Humbali, who was in Jammah Islamia, was one of the original AQ dudes. He was Indonesian. He's in Gitmo right now. He's still one of the last people in Gitmo. He was arrested, I think, in Thailand. Yeah.

That was an interesting thing. Yeah. And I mean, I've tried to like figure out exactly. how that happened. Maybe you know better than I do. But there were Rangers standing by in case things went sideways. Yeah. That was the Krif 1-1, Charlie 1-1, probably. No, no, Ranger Battalion. Yeah, because I actually know the guys. Oh, yeah? Yeah, there was a whole thing. They went to Thailand to do a J-set, but there was a whole option to, like, switch it from training to live, like actually issue them live ammunition. This was like 2004. Yeah.

That that happened. Yep. And that did not happen. They did not. ever flip it green. I think it was a liaison thing that they arrested that guy over there. Yeah. It's fascinating too. I mean, the whole Al-Qaeda in Southeast Asia thing, I think it's like little understood or like poorly understood about like how pivotal the Jama Islamia and other groups that were associated with them were to like the Bojinka plot, which was the original aircraft plot and all those things. Those were like planned in Southeast Asia, like physically they were in Southeast Asia planning this stuff. Like, Kali Sheikh Mohammed also was over there in Bangkok, you know.

And Marwan. Yep. Yeah, all those, Singaporeans, Malaysians. Yep. Yeah, really fascinating. So, yeah, that deployment was basically working at the embassy in Jakarta, and it was me and an operator paired up,

and we would go around the country and look at places to do preparation of environment tasks, so like operational preparation environment, which means setting the conditions so that other forces can come in and do stuff. So big focus was, like, ports, for example. We wanted to have certain ports that we knew we could press a button, and that port will be available if something happens. something like of a crisis, you know, happen. Let's say a hostage was going on.

We need that to be secure so we can get to that airfield near this area and like, without any hiccups, let it happen. So that's what we were doing over there. It was really cool because we were actually partnered with station. Like our desks were in station spaces. And the analyst I was paired up with, the agency analyst, his name was also John, like me. But this guy was way different than me.

He had a PhD in Islamic Theology from Harvard University. And this guy, he was younger than me, and he knew, like, the deepest, deepest backstory of every single character in this counterterrorism story. It was crazy. Like, just the level of knowledge that he had, I felt like this big. So the next step, you know. But it was an awesome team to work on because there are people like that on that team. That's pretty cool. So it was all, like, kind of OPE, like, just in case there's an emergency.

Yep. So we do a whole range of things from, like, driving from point A to point B to see how much. long it takes to drive during the day, like kind of mundane stuff, like going out and trying to measure like the height of this stuff. So we knew if a helicopter could land there, these things. It's like more advanced stuff. Like we actually flew up to Natuna Basar, which is an Indonesian island in the South China Sea. It's the only Indonesian territory in the South China Sea. We went up there to do PE tasks, but we also had a secondary task to look at the Chinese overflights that were going on because China was like routinely invading their airspace every

second day. So we actually got up there. And then a third task we had was to confirm a location of a radar that the Indonesians had, and the Indonesians were, like, super hesitant to let us see it. So we had to figure out a way to, like, get a photo of us, like, with them, with the radar in the background, which is what we actually ended up doing. So we got the picture, and they were really upset that we were trying to find. They knew we were trying to do it, but we never, like, openly said it. I mean, I'm a little surprised that the Indonesians gave you as much freedom and free access as they did, like, from what I've been told anyway, that it's okay to, like, meet privately,

but they're much more hesitant to have like a public relationship with American officials. It's funny you say that. So in Natuna Bazaar, there was only one hotel. It's a very small island. And the people on Natuna Bazaar were not happy that we were there. Like the government people were not happy were there. We actually had liaisons with us from Jakarta, but they weren't happy they were there either. And so like we're rolling around the island, like taking pictures and like doing stuff.

You know, we had this aircraft called non-standard aviation, which is like a small little prop plane. We're like flying around the island, taking pictures and like doing the stuff. and then we'd land. Well, one day we went out on the other side of the island, like, two hours the other side of the mountain, and we come back, and there's like, you know how you get that feeling, like, something's weird. Come to the hotel, go to the front desk, the lady, like, looks up, doesn't speak, and then, like, looks back down. We're like, oh, somebody's in here, you know? So, like, go up to my room. I had brought a suitcase and I had some other stuff. It's, like, dumped out in a pyramid on my bed, and there is a memory card on top of my clothes. It was a blank memory card, because I had the real

memory card in my camera, right? I had a backup that was, blank and I think they were pissed that it didn't have anything on it and they like left their calling card like we knew you had a camera like okay you know like what are you going to do about that right right there's just like a really interesting experience what their intelligence services like is that compassus so caposius is their special forces which is actually for a while it was blacklisted because in timor they did a lot of stuff yeah there's a little there's a little bit of like a prisoner uh execution happening they're pretty heavily tainted yeah yeah well actually we came up with the solution for how to work with them still. So in 2014, we had a cutoff. If they had graduated

from their academy before 2008, we couldn't work with them. They graduated after, we could. And then two years ago, they just eliminated the entire blacklist. So now all of Kapasius is available because the president of Indonesia was in Kapasius in Timor. And he was one of the guys that was implicated. So he can't blacklist him. He's the president. And so what was the second one after Indonesia? I mean, you spent some time in West Africa. So that came later. I actually, I came back from Indonesia. And at the time, it was 2014, 2015, when ISIS was really morphing into this new thing.

So 2015, I come back and they're like, hey, do you want to go on another deployment right now? And I was like, yes. So they're like, we're going to send you to the Middle East. We're not exactly sure if you're going to go to Syria, Iraq, or Lebanon yet, because things are so dynamic right now. Like, at that time, like, we didn't know what we were doing, like where to go and stuff like that. And so I said, okay. So I started working up with a team. hotel company at Marsock.

And while we were working up, they were doing a deployment filialization training where they basically go out and like practice the full mission profile in the United States before they go overseas. On that DFT, one of the helicopters crashed, the Raider 7 helicopter. So we lost a big portion of our company's expertise and also those guys that died were in leadership positions within their teams. They had to completely restructure a lot of hotel companies' teams. So I got pulled off of the Iraq deployment, put on the Lebanon deployment as a result of this.

So I went to Lebanon in early 2016, and we were working with the Lebanese special forces and the Magawar, which is the Lebanese Navy SEALs, basically, and also the Mukhafaha, which is like their ranger unit, or kind of like a strike force, if you will. And we were training them, but also at the same time enabling them. There were some other tasks we had in Syria that we weren't going into Syria. Instead, we were going up to the last line of covering concealment with our partner force. They would go over there and do stuff. We would also, it was very interesting time, we'd actually enable some of our enemies to do things to ISIS at that time,

which is a pretty interesting, controversial period of time. But we weren't, like, directly involved in that, but we were doing things to help, like the Battle of Cusir up in northern Lebanon where Hezbole defeated ISIS. That wasn't like they weren't alone, you know, doing that. Yeah, I mean, it became like, you know, how we allied with the Taliban against ISIS later on. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting.

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ghostbed.com slash house for 10% off made in the U.S. Made in Canada. Shout out to our brothers in Canada. They rock. Check them out. I love ghostbed. Thanks, guys. Okay, so, yeah, Lebanon sounds interesting. And then Iraq?

Yeah, so in Lebanon, we were doing the training stuff. And I'll just tell you one Lebanon story. We'll move on. So we were doing Visit Board Search and Seizure Training with the Lebanese Special Forces. And we actually boarded a Chinese vessel that was parked in Petroon, which is a town in Lebanon. And the Lebanese are going up a caving ladder, which is this very narrow ladder, the width of your foot. And we're behind them as they're coming up off the rigid hold inflatable boat. They're going up the caving ladder.

It's a pretty high bow. I mean, it's a shipping vessel, you know. And the dude goes almost to the top, this one soldier, and then he loses his footing. And the way, you know, sometimes they're called the Lebanese special forces and some of them are really badass. But they're not all that way, just like any partner force where like some guys are just there because there's someone's cousin or brother or whatever. Well, this guy was one of those guys. And he was wearing his helmet in such a way where, like, It wasn't clipped on to his chin.

It was clipped on under here. And his rifle wasn't secured properly. And so, like, he flips backward. His Kevlar goes back over his throat and starts choking him. He's, like, choking out up there, upside down on the caving ladder, like, I don't know, 50 feet off the ground or off the water. Swirving like this right over the hole of the boat. And if that dude fell, he would be, like, squash like a grape on that because the front of the boat is metal. Yeah.

So that's happening. His rifles swinging around like this, you know. And so we actually had to go up the other side of the boat. and come rescue him from the top down. And we're just thinking, like, what if these guys have to actually do one of these things? Yeah. That was crazy. So that was like two weeks before I left Lebanon.

But yeah, in Lebanon, they're like, hey, because things are so dynamic in Iraq, are you willing to just go straight to Iraq instead of going back home? I was like, yes. So I went directly to Iraq. Like, I flew from, I think I connected in Jordan on an NSAv, the non-standard aviation, into Baghdad, and then up to reveal. And then at that time, we had just gotten authorization to start doing a lot of of airstrikes. So my mission up there was human triggered strikes where basically I have a source or a principal agent who has his own network that's sitting outside of a building and can see there's 50 guys, bad guys meeting in there and he's giving me information about it. Once we feel good about

that information or that the place is safe, then I'm going to be the one talking to the air officer. They're going to start sending up aircraft and they're going to blow that building up and kill those guys. So that's what that deployment was. It was one after another after another after another. And actually not just our deployment, but that like six-month period right before we retook Mosul, that the area we were in was around Mosul. Right before we retook Mosul, like the Joint Special Operations Task Force had killed like 30,000 people in air strikes, just like those airstrikes. And that was mostly all guys doing human-triggered strikes all around northern Iraq.

It was a really interesting period of time. And this is also, is this a deployment where you met your misses? It is, yes. Tell us about that because I think that's got an interesting story. Yeah, so I was working with a Lebanese guy who was helping us in a support capacity out in Erbil in Dream City, which was like the nice part of Urbeal. And he had a huge mansion. You're talking about that part of Urbiel that looks like Abu Dhabi? Yeah, yeah.

Real nice area. It's got the guys with the AK standing outside to make sure nobody unwanted goes in there. Like not bad guys, but just the unwashed, you know. So they would let us in. So we'd go in there. And this guy used to have dinner parties and his, you know, his big, courtyard that had these like high walls and everything so nobody could see in. And there's probably like 20 or 30 people there. And we're around this like very long table and there's only one

open seat. And I'm sitting next to that open seat. It's like 10 o'clock at night. And she walks in on the other side and there's nowhere for her to sit. So she comes and sits next to me. And we start talking. And like I said, it's like 10 o'clock at night. We talked to like three or four in the morning, just me and her. And like if you like, you know when you do those like time laps and like everyone's leaving. But you can just see like people leaving the table over time. And it's just me and her, like, yapping the entire time. And we just talked for hours and, like, she's amazing. And I think she had the same thought, too, because now we're married.

But she's an Iranian. And she was actually in Erbil working. She'd been living there for a few years. She was there when ISIS came all the way up to the edge of Erbil. And she couldn't go home because she felt unsafe in Iran. So she was basically trapped in Erbil right while ISIS was coming up there. Pretty crazy time. And she's been through a lot on her own, too.

and we were able to get her to come to the United States. She got her green card, then she got her citizenship last year. So really awesome. Yeah. Yeah, it's a wild story. She didn't feel safe going back home because she is involved in some counter regime activities. Yeah, you know, people in Iran, most people in Iran do not like the government.

Yeah. And they will take to the streets to tell you that. You know, they're very proud of saying what they believe, even if they get punished or hurt for it. The problem is the government is going to hurt. you. Yeah. Yeah. And people disappear all the time. So she was concerned back in 2009 during the Green Revolution, John Bashi Saabs. She was in that protest. A lot of Iranians were in that protest, and she didn't feel safe staying in the country after that protest because they were like rolling people up in the streets and they were just disappearing. You know, we're getting pushed off of

buildings and like all kinds of crazy stuff. And so she went to Iraq because as an Iranian, she can't really go anywhere else easily. Yeah. I mean, she's not from an affluent family. She's not the son or daughter of some Ayatollah who can just go to Canada or America and go to college, like most of them do, or live in Paris and have an Instagram account like they do. So she had to like really make her way out. And yeah, she went to reveal doing, you know, small jobs there. And that's when I met her. So you guys are in love.

It's great. But I do have to ask like, was this, were the CI guys like crazy about this that one of their huminters is dating a Persian? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You have no idea. Yeah. Nice bump. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. That's when the ignorance comes out too because, like, my assignment manager called me up like three years later. And he's like, hey, are you aware that you're affiliated with an Iranian? And I was like, yes. And I'm like, first of all, why are you calling me? You're my assignment manager. Like, you're not even involved in this, you know? And like, who is talking to you and like, what's going on here, you know?

But it was like that for the rest of my career. We're like routinely I was having to answer for this sin of marrying or being with somebody who is from the other side, right? Which is crazy because, like, the Germans, Koreans and Japanese are back during those wars. There were a lot of service members that married those people. And like, that's not crazy, you know,

but this is the worst. You know, some trips to terrain here in June? Yeah, nothing you want to tell us about? I wish someday. I hope the government changes. No, me too. Okay, so you meet your future wife. And as you come back home,

I imagine carrying on this long-distance relationship and I know from my own experience, getting a green card and immigration is a nightmare. Yeah. But what's going on with the rest of your career in the Marine Corps as all that's going on and transpiring? Yeah, so 2016, I come back from Iraq. And actually, I was in Turkey and Indralic Air Base. This was July 2016. And there was a coup.

And they told us to lock down and we couldn't leave the hotel. And it turns out that the leader of this coup was the base commander for Injurlik, which is where we have some very sensitive stuff for NATO. And it's just a while to be like, the guy with his finger on the button, besides Erdogan, he's like the closest dude to these things, is the one with the coup. They rounded up and killed like 3,000 people in like a month that they blamed this coup on.

And they actually blamed it on a guy based in the United States. Exactly, the Gulenists. Yeah. The Gulenistas. Do you believe that? I don't think so. But that happened. And so flew home.

Then as soon as I got back, I actually went into our team room when we had a big whiteboard and there was the deployment schedule up there. And I was like, And that was an awesome deployment, like the Iraq one. And I looked up there and I'm like, there is a lot of cool stuff going on in Africa. And I asked our operations officer, like, can I go on one of these? He was like, yeah, but you just got back.

And I'm like, I don't care. I'll go right now. And he's like, all right, you're going to Senegal. So I worked up and went to Senegal right after that. And what were you doing in Senegal? I remember we talked there's a Lebanese presence there. Yeah. So I was actually working with the Senegalese Special Forces, the FSS.

And there was also a team that was going into Mollong to Mali at the time because Manusma, which is the UN mission in Mali, a lot of the West African countries were actually like the ground forces for that UN mission. And they were doing combat operations in Mali. So what we would do is train them in our countries that we were partnered with. Those guys would then go for three months or however long. Was this part of like one of those like constructs like Amy Somm and some of the others? Yes. Okay. Yeah. It's one of like it's like an official UN mission. Exactly just like that. Yeah. But it's an the weird thing is like all the training and preparation is not in Mali. It was outside Mali, at least for the military part of it.

And then we would send the guys in there and they would go work with the Malians and stuff like that and try to figure the situation out, which they didn't do a very good job at. And how did you like Dakar? It was a really interesting experience. Some say it's a good introduction to Africa. And after going to some other countries in Africa, I mean, that's pretty true. I remember when I was landing in Wagadougu and Burkina Faso, I'm like, where am I? There's not any pavement anywhere in the capital city. And then Nizierre, similar situation, like, whoa.

But actually, I liked Morocco a lot more than Senegal, even though, you know, Dakar is a pretty easy city to work in, to live in. Something about Morocco is different, like the mountains, the Atlas Mountains, the Sahara Desert, you know. And the Moroccan Special Forces we worked with were really good people, like very good unit that we had. You ever see the movie? I watched it the other day, rewatched it. The Man Who Would Be King? No, I'd never seen that. with Sean Connery and Michael Cain. And it's supposed to be in Afghanistan, but it was actually filmed in Morocco.

I got to watch it. It's a fun movie. Yeah. Yeah, Sean Connery is the locals mistake him for a god. And he starts drinking his own Kool-Aid, and you can only imagine that it does not turn out. Yeah. So then you were also, you did make your way. You said, you mentioned Niger, Burkina Faso.

What were some of these other trips? that you're bouncing around. Yeah, so Burkina Faso is interesting. There was a team up on the Mali-Brikanifaso border up in a place called Kaya, which is like right up there on the border. And this was an army team that was there. And we found out that they hadn't been debriefed on anything they were doing. And they were doing a lot of stuff in Mali.

And at the time, we're like trying to figure out more about what's going on in Mali because our partner forces weren't involved in the things we wanted them to be involved in. And we were worried about Al-Qaeda. And there's other groups there in Mali as well that we're trying to figure out what's going on. like Jane M and the Mirabatoon was another big group that we're looking for. So I went up there for a couple of weeks and just spent every day debriefing the team guys on what they'd been seeing and doing in Mali and sent all that reporting back. And that was the first time we'd ever actually had reporting from that area of Burkina Faso

about Molly. So that was like a very fulfilling trip, even though it was short. That's cool. So they were doing like human collection up there? So they were actually working with people there. They weren't human people. They were guys. And nobody was talking to them, you know, because they were up there.

That was actually around the same time that, remember the Green Beret got strangled by the guys? Logan Malgar. Yeah. So one of the guys on my team was actually in that room, Kevin Maxwell. That happened at that time, that exact time. So like our task force got shook up quite a bit. So they started moving us around and things were changing very rapidly at that time. Any other West Africa adventures you want to?

to tell us about? You know, Morocco was probably my favorite, like I said. Really interesting. I actually went from the top of the country to the bottom, and it's twice the size of California. And that was a really eye-opening experience because I had always thought Western Sahara was a country because that's what the maps say. But then you go to Morocco and you ask a Moroccan, is there such thing as Western Sahara? They're like, no, there's only Southern Morocco. And that was a very interesting thing, because in the West, I think we don't understand that dynamic very well. We talked to an Irish guy who was part of the UN mission there, like, I don't know, find episodes ago. Yeah. Yeah, really interesting. There was an Irish guy in Lebanon, actually, that was there.

It's not related to that, but he owned a bar in Beirut, and he had been there since the 1980s because a lot of the IRA guys went to Lebanon and fought against the Israelis. Yeah. And that guy stayed behind and opened a bar. Like, just interesting. That's crazy. And then there's also like some other sort of like, this is more not administrative, but just the way that things get done and the way these missions get done. The 127 Echo program, you mentioned there's also a Delta Echo Foxtrot. Yep. I mean, they're controversial in some quarters. I mean, you want to explain, like, the reality of what those programs are and, you know,

what your thoughts are about them. Yeah, so the thing is, we have foreign partners we want to work with. In the conventional military, usually that's a military unit. So, like, if I'm from the Fifth Artillery Brigade, I'm going to go to a country that has an artillery brigade and train them. on how to use their stuff and we work together. That's pretty normal. Well, the 127 echo thing was like,

so this is a legal authority that Congress says, here's money to do this thing, we're authorizing you to do it. And for a long time, they didn't have that. There were some other authorities like 1207, 1206, 1208, which were these other like disparate authorities that kind of worked together, but they weren't really meant to work together for a while.

And they were trying to make us so that we could partner with entities that were not exactly the traditional entities. They aren't the fifth artillery brigade in Estonia. Instead, they're an irregular force in southeast Syria that's got some questionable background, and we're not sure what's going to happen when we leave Syria. This is the kind of people that we're trying to work with because the enemy and my enemy is my friend, and they are the ones closest to the problem that we need to solve right now.

So it's kind of an expeditionary requirement. We need to cut the timeline on vetting these guys because the big controversy with 127 Echo, there's no human rights checks. There's no way he vetting? There is not. So that's a problem. of course. Isn't the other controversy that these units get op-conned to the United States? Right, because they're working for us, essentially. And that's how this law has changed over

times, like from 1207 and 1208. One of them was equipment and the other one was training. With the new law, 127 Echo, it's equipment training and operations. And there's been two other things added, which is the Delta and Foxtrot. Fox Trot is preparation of the environment activities that is now codified in law. For a long time, it wasn't. And actually, when I was in Indonesia working on a preparation of the environment mission, there was no law that said you can do preparation of the environment, and it was very sketchy. The COCOMs didn't have like, don't they have like the human intelligence executor and all these other OPEE authorities? So we were working under the CT Exord, the counterterrorism Exord and the Al Q. Exord, which had language in it that said

you could do these things, but there was no law because that's just the military saying, that's not, that's not lawful. Yeah. So like there was no like thing to draw that from that would say like, hey, actually it's legal and there's money for it. And that's what these authorities do is they give you money and permission to go do something. So that didn't exist in 2014, 2015. So we were doing stuff. We actually had a piece of paper. It was a one-page piece of paper.

So if a congressional delegation came, we would give them this piece of paper that explained what preparation of the environment is. And it said like advanced force operations, Intel operations, and operational preparation in the environment, each with one paragraph. And that's what we were to describe to the Congress visitors. Right, which is crazy because there was no law. So we were basically telling them, like, hey, can you let us do this? This is what we think we're supposed to do.

But then they eventually made it into a law. It was a slow process where it kind of transformed over time. This last Defense Authorization Act last year or this current fiscal year is the first time that the preparation of environment one is actually in there. So now it's okay. After 20 years of doing it, it's okay. You talked a little bit, I mean, maybe for folks you can describe a little bit of what OPE is. I mean, you described it, I think when we talked about Indonesia, Is there anything else you want to tell people that, like, what that means?

Because a lot of things can be rolled up, you know, even the term operational preparation of the environment. That could even, that could potentially include, you know, kinetic lethal operations. Absolutely. Yeah. So there's another part of preparation. There's three buckets. Like I said, IntelOps, Advanced Force Operations, and Operational Preparation of Environment. Advanced Force Operations is the really interesting one from a kinetic perspective.

For example, when we invaded Iraq in 2003, there was advanced force operations going on in Iraq for a very long time before we invaded. Basically preparing the environment for the moment that the president said, go to war, all this stuff would fall into place and just happen. And it wasn't by accident that those things happened. And that's what preparation of the environment does. It can do it for a large-scale conflict like that or for some smaller raid. Like, for example, a hostage rescue, well, you need to have an airfield. You need to have basing access and overflight. There are all these things that have to be ready to go tonight right now, like within hours. And these teams are like all over the world doing that. And the thing is like, you don't know exactly what

mission, you're readying. Right. So you're like, okay, I'll do this landing survey. I'll do this route reconnaissance. And like, I'm not sure if these things work together. But some planner at whatever co-com and whatever socom desk is taking all that stuff and like weaving it together within like three to eight hours or 12 hours or whatever it is before. They're like, National Mission Force is going in to do this tomorrow or this morning or whatever. And they're taking all that stuff you've collected over time and putting it together. Yeah. So if the president pushes that button, everything's ready to go. Yep. And it's really fast.

around the world. We talked to somebody maybe a year ago now, he's a human mentor talking about doing the OPE for the Soleimani strike. And I think they were like, when it happened, they were like, oh shit. That's what we were doing.

Yep. Yeah. Okay. And so tell us about kind of like finishing out your Marine Corps career and then you went to work with the DIA, right? So I went to DIA while I was still a Marine. Okay.

So I left Marsok and my common theme is I didn't I want to go to a Marine Corps unit. Right. So I've actually only spent one year in a Marine Corps unit in 20 years. The rest of the time was somewhere else. So after Marsock was ending, I was like, first of all, I want to stay. I'm like, you can't stay. So I hit my five years and zero days.

And I wanted to go, I screened for this program at DIA and the director of operations to go to Defense At Tashay office, which is unusual for an enlisted person to do. So I went from very clandestine, low, like low visibility stuff, all the way up to strategic level overt, declared activities in a country, plus some other things that supported that, right? So I actually went to Jordan to U.S. Embassy Amman. We were supporting not only Jordan, but also the Syria mission, because in 2012, Syria closed, and Damascus went to two different countries, Jordan being one of them. So we were supporting half of that mission as well. And there was a lot of stuff still going on with Syria, especially southern Syria. There was a covert operation

called Timber Sycamore that went on for quite a while. And there's a lot of support in Jordan for that. that infrastructure existed even after the covert operation ended. So we were helping a lot with some of the things that still existed in those structures, basically working with guys inside of Jordan, then working with them inside of Syria, like at Tenef Garrison, ATG, and also up in northeast Syria, like Haseka and all those places, and kind of continuing our operations there separately from what the old covert action was that failed, essentially, and was closed down in 2017.

Hasika was YPG? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, actually, I was on a team where there was, one of our guys on the same task force that he was in a picture in the media and he has a YPG patch on. This was when Obama was saying, there are no troops on the ground in Syria is back to 2016 and we're like looking at ourselves. He's like, no boots on the ground. We're like, my boots on the ground in Syria. You know, like you're saying we're not here. What are you doing?

You know, it was just a weird time. Yeah. I was there in 2014 in Hasekka. Okay, so you're working now for the defense attache, the dad, out of an embassy. What's that job entail? Because you say this is like more over, like you're going out there and talking to government officials and things like that. It was really fascinating. I'll talk about the training first because it was very unique. So it's at DIA. It's a joint military attache school.

I think it's four months or something like that. They basically teach you how to be a diplomat, which sounds simple. but that means like teaching you how to use a crab fork properly, you know, or like these like very interesting utensils, you're actually graded on it. They bring in a wardrobe specialist to talk to you about why your suit sucks. And then they tell you like how to cut this better so it looks better for you, like all the stuff. From there all the way there's a sear portion to it that is a huge surprise towards the end. When the black hood goes over your head.

Yeah. And they do it to the spouses too. Wow. It's some very interesting stuff in there. they like everyone does a different job in the embassy but they teach you kind of the baseline of what all people do in in the defense at tessie office and every every embassy is different like if you've been to one embassy you've only been to one embassy and they teach you like kind of more theoretical of like the embassy writ large and then you go to your country and you learn your actual mission in that country

because it's very unique and jordan is an interesting one because it supports so much in the middle east we joke that it's like the world's largest land-based aircraft carrier because that's where most of our jets are in the Middle East besides Qatar. But, you know, so we're supporting that mission for Jordan, but we're also supporting the Syria diplomatic mission. So there's like stateless Syrians in Jordan that were part of the resistance to Assad that we supported. So we would have to also meet with them too.

And a day in the life is basically you're wearing a suit all the time, everywhere. You're driving armored vehicles. You've got escorts, security. You're also setting up visits. So like if, let's say the Secretary of Defense is coming to visit the country, you alone are setting up that visit. There's no, like, entourage to help you. So, like, you're the guy that's planning the aircraft landing. You're talking to the ice guy to get the correct amount of ice for the aircraft or the jet, like everything about it.

Plus the dinners, the security detail. You're going and investigating the hotel, top floor, middle floor, bottom floor. You're getting other places, you know, for their comm suite. You're getting all that stuff booked out. And you're the guy doing it, like the point, man. and they would rotate it around the office so that like, okay, you just got the SEC DEF this month, right, DASD, Middle East is coming for you.

You're going to do that next month. The COCOM commander is coming out. You got that. Like, they'll just, we're just rotating all the time handling these diplomatic visits or this distinguished visits. At the same time, we're meeting with our host nation liaison partners. So like the defense at Tesche office

represents the Secretary of Defense in that country. So you get to liaison with the Secretary of Defense equivalent in that country, usually a minister of defense. That's your primary contact, not his staff, him. So like on a weekly basis, the SDO dad is going to meet with that guy. And in Jordan, that's pretty big because they're coordinating a lot of stuff around the area, especially ship visits for the Marine Corps Navy side.

So a lot of those ships come to port in Akaba, guess who gets to organize those ship visits? You know, one of us. It gets picked like, okay, the Kier Sarge is coming. You got it. And you got to go do all the diplomatic communications with the host nation, the ministry and all that. At the same time that you're doing your overt collection activity, at the same time that some people doing clandestine collection as well in that same mission. So you have like multiple hats.

It was a very busy time. Yeah. I can only imagine. And what was your impression of some of these programs we had jetting into Syria? I mean, as far as the efficacy of some of those programs. It was very interesting. At the time that I was there, we had one major group left, the Mugawira Thaurah, the MAT, who was like a last vestige of the old program.

And they were basically just like professional smugglers who really benefited from all the ammunition we gave them, and they didn't really do much counterterrorism. And at one point, especially like 2020, 2021, after we killed Soleimani, you know, Iran obviously responded to that. They, Iran flowed so many guys into Syria. And that camp was surrounded by Hezbollah, Qatab Hezbollah, Syrians that supported Iran. There was like a ring around that base. It was a completely ineffective. And so we got our guys stationed there training the Mugweer Thaur to do what, I don't know, because they're completely surrounded. There's no way they're going not on any operations whatsoever.

Right. And then the next thing you did was teaching counterintelligence human. Yes, I went back to the schoolhouse that I had gone to a long time ago. And I taught there teaching interrogations, counterintelligence, surveillance detection routes, source handling. We do the whole gambit, you know, because we have both CI and humid. So the way the course is designed, it starts out very basic, like friendly force debriefing. Kind of like what I was talking about in Burkina Faso, where you're just like, hey, what kind of airplanes did you see?

That's how it starts out, and it just keeps advancing and advancing. Then you get to interrogations, and that's kind of the filter point where we drop a lot of guys, because interrogations is more dynamic. So you have, as an instructor, more freedom to say that that student probably shouldn't be here. So you filter out quite a bit of people in interrogations. The ones that survive that then get to do source handling. So we go into military source operations first, which is, you know, recruiting assets to support military defense collection things.

And we move into more advanced primary or principal agent operations where we have the students running a guy who's got several guys under him that the handler can't see or communicate with. And that's one of the more complex ways to handle a source. So that's kind of towards the end of the course. They're doing that. And then they do covert communications like dead drops, brush passes, brief encounters, things like that. And they finish out the course doing a final exercise. That's about a month long where they're doing the full range of tradecraft. and they use the entire Hampton Roads area to do this.

So it's an artificial geography that they have and there's role players and bad guy land. Oh yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's a lot of fun for the instructors. The students are under a lot of stress. Yeah. That's awesome.

Yeah. And then you ended up retiring as a master sergeant. I did, yeah. Yeah. What was like, I mean, you came up on your 20 and you didn't want to go back to the normal Marine Corps. That's what I'm thinking. So actually, you're exactly right. I was talking to the assignments manager, and he's like, yeah, I got to give you orders to North Carolina to be the intelligence chief for this thing.

And I'm like, I'm not doing that. Yeah, I don't want to do that. That would be a huge downgrade from the trajectory I've been going on. He's like, you have to give back to the Marine Corps. I'm like, I'm sure you can find someone that will go to North Carolina. I'm sure there are people in North Carolina that want to stay in North Carolina. He was like, no, no, no, you can't do that. I'm like, what about these other four assignments that I listed off?

Some of them were kind of concessions, like maybe he would say yes. He rejected all of them. He's like, if you don't accept North Carolina, then you're going to get retirement in lieu of orders, which is the thing in the Marine Corps. Like if you reject orders and you're at retirement, they force retire you. That's what happened, because I'm not going to camp on here.

Yeah. I think he thought I was bluffing. I wasn't bluffing. So we'll talk about your post-service life a bit. But before we go there, I want to talk about your book, and I want to chop it up a bit about the theory of a regular war. because this was, you know, when you open up a book like this,

this could be a pretty dry book about doctrine, you know, where's he going with all this? But actually, I was, I thought this was a great book. Thank you. I was really fascinated by it. And I think that the reason why I liked it was because you challenged the orthodoxy. Yeah. And you were willing to confront some of the failures of the past 20, 25 years

that we've had in the military with counterinsurgency theory. And, you know, some of the younger people don't, even remember. There's this whole field where people called themselves coinistas. Oh, yeah. You remember that shit? I do. So anyway, let's jump into it. Counterinsurgency theory, the theory of irregular warfare, it's fraught with problems. There's a lot of over philosophizing that takes place. One of the things you talk about is like all the lingo. And we're kind of baffling each other with bullshit.

words like kill webs, gray zone conflict and like all these where we're reinventing terms for guerrilla warfare things that have always been around um it start wherever you want with that as far as some of the the problems and the faulty assumptions that we've made uh as we approach the theory i'd like to starting before that what what caused your what was the genesis of you writing this like where did that idea start so i was doing some personal research on the five pillars of irregular warfare, which is like a very doctrinal joint pub, three tax zero type thing. And I was like, okay, so there's like counterinsurgency,

there's counterterrorism, foreign internal defense, you know, like all those things. And I'm thinking like, this isn't actually like what's going on. These are just descriptions of operations. And I'm like, okay, let's find out what's going on like with the people. And the more I was reading, the more I was realizing, like, that doesn't exist in military writing. It exists in like sociology or political science where they're like talking about some conflict in some country. But the military is not looking at that. They're just looking at like, okay, we've received information that we will now do this. How do we do it? Like they're skipping

the first part where you need to like figure out why is this happening. Because if you can just solve that, a totally different outcome. It's not going to be perfect. It's not going to be like you won the war. But it's going to probably be different than if you just, oh, I'm a hammer. Boom. Everything is a nail. Right. And that's basically what we do with our doctrine. So I wanted to research more. And the more I was researching, the more I just started taking notes and thinking about it. I had a lot of assumptions that were incorrect when I started out. I was a lot like these thinkers when I first started.

I was like, oh, yeah, there's got to be some like esoteric something, you know, and that's not correct. That's not true. Instead, it's human beings want certain things. When they don't get certain things, they have reactions to those things. It's extremely basic, which sounds like when I say it sounds very simple. It's not simple, especially when we don't look at it simply. You know, we come to it like, oh, no, it's very complex.

It's very difficult to solve. oh, this is a thousand-year-old problem between this party and this party. You know, that's not true. It's because this country invaded in this year, and then these people reacted to that invasion. And they don't like this other country, this other country invading their country. And then there's remnants that are now trying to take power because there's an imbalance in what's going on here. I mean, it's like super simple when you look at that. When you add like names of countries onto it, and now people like, oh, no, that's the country I like.

I can't disagree with that because I like them, you know. So that's kind of what pushed me to research as deeply as I did. I read about 500 books, over 1,000 journal articles. I was like steeped in this for a long time. It just happened that COVID kicked off. Right after I started doing my research for this, I was like, this is the perfect time to spend 12 hours a day reading every single day until this thing is over.

I had no idea, obviously, when it would be over. So I did that. The whole time COVID was going on, I was researching every day. Please say, how many books and how many articles? Around 500 books and about 1,000 journal articles. And I love, I love, I have. haven't read this yet, Jack has. I will, but I love that this is what you were able to boil it down to. Yes, it's the lemonade. Yeah. Out of many lemons. Yeah. But I'll say it's short-looking, but there's a lot in there.

I think a lot of books are long because the author wants them to be long. Isn't that what Mark Twain or somebody said? Sorry, I wrote you such a long letter. I didn't have time to write you a short one. I believe that, yeah. So from the bad analysis side, you know, you put your finger on, you know, some of these generals that came back and they wrote their memoirs and lawed themselves, some of the coinistas also. And then also this French dude who fought in Algeria and Vietnam completely failed coin efforts. Then he taught the Americans how to fail at coin also.

Yep. And it's funny because, so they failed in Vietnam and Algeria, him specifically. I mean, he was at the Battle of Diem Ban Pu. we're talking about Roger Trinkier here. Battle of Dan Pampu, the Vietnamese, is completely overwhelmed this massive French conventional force. And he, you know, the tail between his legs went to Algeria. The dirty war starts.

He fails at that. Even after torturing all these guys, still not getting any help and information from that. And then he turns to the U.S. Army and says, now that you've taken on our Vietnam problem, let me teach you how to solve the Vietnam problem. And that's how we learned our interrogation techniques at that time, was from this guy.

And if you look at his book, during that time, like the early 2000s, that guy's name was everywhere. Trinkier, David Galula, all of them. Like, oh, wow, these guys are geniuses. But then you go back and look, like Trinkier, for example, was out fighting in the Katanga secession in Congo, you know, fighting with a criminal organization against the Congolese. Like, this is the guy?

Right. Are you sure? Yeah, I mean, it was like a learning to eat soup with a knife. Oh, yeah. The accidental guerrilla. They're all all these different, like, thought leaders at the time. Yeah. What do you think went wrong, though?

I mean, what were the faulty assumptions that we took into the war on terror that didn't pan out for us? I think we in the West have a problem with mirror imaging, where we not only do we see the enemy as we see ourselves, we want them to be like us. And like, even with new information, we still are like, no, no, no, they have to want a democracy. They have to want. And like how we look at them and when we put them up on a PowerPoint slide, we structure it like a military, table of organization and equipment. It's like, wait, I'm not sure that's how the Taliban works.

Yeah. And I would add to that, though, not only the enemy, but our partner forces, like, the country that we're, like, you know, to think that Iraqis or Afghanis wanted the same thing we want is ridiculous. Oh, yeah. I mean, and also, like, with the Taliban, the Taliban was in power before we showed up in 2001, right? Like, they were the legitimate people running Afghanistan. Yeah. We got there and overthrew the government.

the Taliban didn't see it as a legitimate change of power. They saw it as an invasion and insurgency, right? Like, we were running an insurgency in Afghanistan. It was just with a large Afghan National Army force, right? So when you ask a Taliban guy, like, oh, who's the shadow governor of this province? Like, that doesn't mean anything to him. There is no shadow governor. He is the governor.

Right. Right. Right. Like, why are we calling him that when that's not what he is? But we'd have to admit that it's actually illegitimate that we were there. Like, you know, totally understandable why we went there. but the problem is how we're framing our discussion of the things the conditions that are there you know like you have an afghan that's running a village it doesn't matter where he came from or if he's Taliban or not like why is he running the village the way he is why are the people think this about him or that about him like we're not looking at it like that instead we're like well no he's he's a taliban guy he's a bad guy and you know in i mean from their point of view like we went in into afghanistan and we won the war in the first 30 days our job was to destroy a queue yep and then you know and once we destroyed AQ, we're like, well, why don't we just hang out for a while and find

somebody else to fight? And it was the Taliban. Yeah. And the thing is, I mean, the Taliban are not a new phenomenon. Operation Cyclone, I mean, we basically created them or the conditions for them at the very least. And even like Hekmatiar and all those guys, like those weren't new people, you know. It's just kind of shocking to look at it. Like we live life and little chunks of memory. Yeah. And we don't connect them all together. Yeah. These Mujahideen were the same Mujahideen. It's not like new Mujahide. Mujahideen showed up. They're the same Mujahideen. We didn't fund Al-Qaeda, you know, or create Al-Qaeda the way some people would assert. But you're right, we set their conditions. We normalized

these lawless armed groups running around Afghanistan. Well, we also allowed the Pakistanis to tell us everything to do in the 1980s. Like they were leading the show. They were like, oh, yeah, this group over here, you should work with them. This group, let's definitely give them weapons, you know, without really asking many questions about it, because our goal was to defeat the Russians. Right? It wasn't to stop insurgents. Right. Right. Yeah. But that short-sightedness, again, it will bite us and it bites us every single time. One of the assumptions you point to in the book that you alluded to a bit, but I think it's important to put our finger on is that one of our assumptions is we start with this idea that the insurgency is illegitimate and the government is legitimate. But you and others I've read over the years point out, like, in Afghanistan's a great example that you mentioned, that,

a lot of times this isn't the case. Yeah. Yeah, there's ungoverned spaces or semi-governed spaces, especially in Africa, for example. Like, you go out to southern Algeria, there's a whole state within a state down there that believes that it's the Sarawi Democratic Republic, right? The SADR. If you ask them, that's what they are. If you ask the Algerians, that's what they are.

If you ask the Moroccans, that's not what they are. But really all, it's all about perspective. And that's a lot what I talk about in the book is, like, where does sovereignty lie? And is it viewed as legitimate by that? specific observer. Because it doesn't matter how we observe it. What matters is how are they observing it? And we need to understand that and then work within the conditions of their vision of it. And if we don't, we're just going to be solving a problem the way we wish we could solve it, not the way it should be solved. Right. You get pretty in depth into the theory. You want to tell us

about the dysfunctional sovereign and the liminal sovereign and some of these concepts that you lay out in your book. Yeah. So the ungoverned space, as I was talking about, it's kind of that liminal sovereignty. Like if you go see the FARC and Colombia, for example, they govern a space, or they used to governs. government's in India. Right. Yeah, exactly. Because the government, the legitimate, quote-unquote, government cannot reach that space because of the way the terrain is structured specifically and also because of local support and other things. That's sovereignty over terrain that the legitimate government cannot control. So someone else is filling that space. And a liminal space is basically

a gap. So there's something filling in there. And that's in that case, the FARC. And in other cases, it's Cindera Luminooso in Peru, for example, right? Not because people love these groups, but because there is no other sovereign to look up to it. Like, well, how else are we going to have law and order. How else am I going to be able to take my trash out and make sure it goes away? I was in Lebanon for a while when the government was not picking up garbage. This was a big thing in 2016. And there was like garbage lining the streets because society no longer had the ability to move trash. Something very simple. But think about how that will affect a lot of other things in society, right? We don't think about it like that. We're like, well, let's have an election

and that guy's going to be the president. And we're going to support him, like Hummey-Karzai, for example. We're going to support that guy. Well, what about the other people and how do they actually govern themselves typically, you know. Then there's social order where the way the government and the people are structured is different in every country is everywhere. I mean, a country is a made-up thing. You know, let's be honest, like the concept of a country is pretty new. It's 400 years old. The Treaty of West Valley in 1648 is what made states. There were no states before that didn't exist. Even when you read like Machiavelli's The Prince, there was no such thing as a state. There were really powerful cities like Florence, which is where he was. There wasn't like Italy, right?

Not until like late 1800s, early 1900s. Yeah, yeah. So those are things that I think we ignore a lot, which is problematic. Because we look at our country that we have now. We say, we have this wonderful country, which we do. We have this amazing constitution. But we forget, like, how did we get that? How did the revolution that we had go?

How could it have gone sideways? Right. You know, the Constitution is not something that was agreed upon by everyone that was at the convention. It was actually a fight document. and the result was disagreements on a paper. That's what the Constitution is. Like the constitutional convention, almost everybody disagreed on something.

And that document that came out of it is because people finally compromised. But then we go to a place like Afghanistan and we're like, here is your new constitution that we've written for you. Right. Right. Like, how do we expect them to do that? If we couldn't even do that.

And we were fighting over it. You know, there were loyalists that were supporting the British even while we wrote the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, obviously. You know, but going back to that, the Declaration of Independence, if you read it, it has exactly the same stuff in it that a lot of these revolutionaries today say, you know, we want to shake off the burden of this and that and, you know,

have our freedom and the ability to determine our own X, Y, and Z. Like, these are just basic things that people want. And if there's group A and group B and group B is doing it faster and better and more trustworthy than group A, they're probably going to pick group B, you know. And if we're group A, kind of out of luck in that situation, just like Afghanistan. And we're like we're supporting the wrong side, essentially. Like it's not going to be the winning side, especially when you pull the structures away, which is us, and it just collapses. And I mean, we really have this naive, you know, kind of view these things through a moral lens.

Yes. Like, and a cultural moral lens, really. It's like, does their culture mirror ours? Do they do things that would be acceptable here? And the answer is no, then they're obviously bad people. We also do it in a really normative way where we say, you should be this way. Instead of saying, how would you like to be? Right.

We don't ask that question. Right. What do you think is the policy prescription as far as, I mean, you could use a specific example if you want or just like broadly. How could we do this better? I think what we need to do is empower the military to actually ask why. It's not designed to do that. For very obvious reasons, especially in a conventional war, you don't want people asking. You don't want that private on the front line.

Are you sure we should go to that trench? Right. But in a non-conventional situation, in a regular situation, or like when sovereignty has broken down, we need to really analyze that in the military. We don't need to rely on someone else somewhere else saying, here's the policy, go do it. We should be able to ask them, why is the policy like that? And that is actually not that controversial. Because if you look at the State Department, they have something called the dissent channel

where they're allowed to dissent all the way up to the secretary. in an official channel that is archived and actually George Kennan's long telegram was one of the original descent channel telegrams is very long. That's why it's called long telegram. But there was another one about the Syria policy during Operation Timber Sycamore

where the state department said, this is really stupid. The way you're armoring these guys is going to end up falling back on you. These guys are affiliated with Al-Nusra Front and Al-Qaeda and you know it. And they wrote that in this dissent channel memo to the secretary

and it's been declassified. You can actually read it now. But why can't the military do that? Right. It's almost, though, I wonder how that would go because the military, at least I think some of the things that we feel is that the military lied, whether they were lying to themselves or lying to the administrations. You know, we fought a 20-year war one year at a time with everybody saying, that's great. Victory is just around the corner. They never even really, I think that a lot of what the administration were doing were based on what the military was telling.

Oh yeah, and I think there's a lot of high-ranking officers, especially generals, that are very happy to have these wars because it means they get accolades, they get written up, they get all this credit and glory, et cetera, because that's what they've been waiting their whole career for. Sure. Hey, I've been here 40 years. It's my turn. And actually in 2016, when we were in Syria and Iraq, we had 22 generals in our chain of command of 500 guys. That's insane. That's one general for every squad. That is absolutely insane.

It was nuts. To get authorization, like those strikes I was telling you about, I was doing dynamic strikes, which means within like 12 hours we're hitting the target. There was also deliberate targeting, which was like days or weeks, right? You had to get like five different generals to approve your deliberate strike. And each general had a different reason for being the one consulted. So like this guy is to determine whether this is a residential facility. This guy is to determine the right level of men, women, and children in the house.

This guy is the one that gets to determine the time of day. Like they had distributed among all the generals. So everyone gets credit for. Exactly. Well, there's so many generals and not enough jobs. Absolutely. You know, everybody's kind of washing each other's back. Oh, yeah, sure there.

No general left behind. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. The other thing that, you know, you mentioned in your book, and we talked about before the show a little bit, was talk about the special forces side of things, unconventional warfare and the assumptions we get into going into that. Yeah. The opposite of counterinsurgency.

Now we are the insurgents. Yeah, I mean, insurgency is basically a people, repent. telling against the existing sovereign, which is something I talk about in the book. Well, unconventional warfare is us supporting them doing it, right? So if we're doing it, then it's okay. We're like, yeah, this is a legitimate unconventional warfare operation. If we're on the other side, though, if we're like the counterinsurgents, they're like, oh, no, those insurgents are really bad?

You know, so it's really interesting, like, are they bad just because we're on the other side? Right. And we're afraid to ask ourselves that. Right. And the new book you have coming out, Iran's Shadow Weapons, that's coming out, that's coming out this summer. Yep. You just got the proof copy.

Yeah, today. Okay. Tell us what that book's about. Yeah, so I think a lot of people misunderstand Iran for various reasons. It's kind of looked at as this evil monolith that's like got its fingers coming to take over the world and all this. I think that's a huge misunderstanding. And what the book does is it looks at what is the regime actually doing and thinking, not just at like a strategic level of like big picture stuff.

know, how are they actually spotting assessing and recruiting sources? How do they run SDRs? How do they pick safe houses and keep safe houses? How do they do kidnappings inside the United States? Like nitty-gritty details. And the really unique thing about this book, first of all, nothing like this exists in print. I guarantee you because I read everything else. Just like this book, other one, I did the same thing for this one. I read literally everything out there, including in other languages, too, a lot of Farsi sources in this. But the big piece is I got a bunch of stuff declassified. So there's a lot of stuff appearing to the public for the first time that was top secret, secret no foreign, ACCM, a lot of protected information that's now available showing things

we knew. Like, for example, during the Iran-Iraq war, we supported Saddam Hussein and we supported Iran. We supported Iran with Iran-Contra and some other programs. We also supported Saddam Hussein, because the goal there was not to defeat Saddam Hussein or defeat Iran. Just wear each other down. Exactly. It was to bleed them out, right? But with this declassified stuff, you can see way more detail about how that actually happened. And the Iran-Contra issue was only like one of many programs we had. And this is for the first time that people are going to be able to read about this. And that's just one example. What were the other programs like weapons programs also? Yeah. So actually, even after the war ended, we actually worked with the IRGC in Bosnia to arm

certain Muslims in Bosnia. ALA. Yeah, exactly. And all the memos between Clinton and his staff are now released that are discussing that. In fact, the Italian president was sitting in the Clinton's office saying, you know, you can try to tell us not to give the weapons to the Iranians, but we know that you're doing it too. It's very fascinating stuff that no one has seen in public. Jeez. And when does the book do it out? It's coming out probably early August. I got the proofs. I got to hurry up and do an index for it. That's actually going to make it go. We'd love to have you back in to talk about that. I'd love to. It's so fascinating. And you're now at Yale Law. So I'll go to Yale in August.

Oh, okay. You're getting ready for me. I'm in a holding pattern right now, just waiting for that. So how long is law school? Three years? Three years. Yep. And what are you like interested in, you know, you have this extensive national security

background and now you want to go and, you know, take the bar exam, become a lawyer. What are you going to go into next, do you think? So I like doing hard pivots. So I'm going to do like a 90-degree pivot away from the military government unless I'm on the other side. So I want to work in a big law firm, either doing international arbitration. Like recently, Facebook has had some problems in Ireland because they avoid U.S. taxes by being in Ireland, but Ireland has some issues. I would be an attorney representing Facebook fighting Ireland, essentially, which is kind of cool

at that, like international level, or doing things like export control. So there's a lot of stuff that has dual use, which means it can be used for civilian purposes and it can be used for military purposes, like countries, nuclear programs, for example. Iran has a lot of stuff from Germany and the United States. in a lot of their nuclear facilities. So let's work on the export controls of that and see how we can fix that problem or make it so that certain countries like Great Britain, for example, has easier access to certain U.S. technology.

That's national security in nature. But I'd be representing like the company, for example, Boeing or Lockheed or something like that. And you're also involved in the irregular warfare initiative? That's right, yeah. What is that? So that's a collaboration between Princeton University and West Point. and there's a podcast that's actually how it started, the irregular warfare podcast.

And then there is a series of articles that are published online, kind of like the Small Wars Journal. And actually recently we've paired up with them to do cross-collaboration of sharing each other's articles. And it's allowing practitioners and thinkers in the field to kind of come together and talk about these issues. You know, like recently we had an article about Boko Haram, like up to date.

We had one as soon as the India-Pakistan thing kicked off. We had an author in India writing an article about what's going on in India on the Indian unconventional warfare side. It's like very interesting. It's not just U.S. authors. So it's mostly U.S. authors, but not, you know, strictly. So pretty interesting space to kind of share that information. It's a nonprofit, so it's just there for people to read.

And it's actually open to anyone to submit articles if they want to, depending if it, you know, matches up with what we're looking for. But, yeah, all very irregular stuff. So special operations on the military side, all the way to some of the issues like I talk about my book, like the breakdown of society and what do we do about that kind of things. I mean, we covered a lot of ground here in a relatively short period of time. And thank you for sharing your experiences. Like, is there anything else that, you know, we haven't talked about that you'd really

like to discuss anything we overlooked? I think I would like to discuss the year on stuff in another episode because that will go on and on. Okay. Yeah. Shoot me a copy of the book when it comes out or an advanced copy. and yeah, I'd love to read it. It sounds really interesting.

Yeah, I actually have the IRGC station in Vienna line and block charted out completely. It tells you exactly who's who in the embassy and all that. Oh, yeah. Fascinating. Yeah. Okay. That's amazing, yeah. Yeah.

That too. Yeah, I'll get you one. Anything else do you? Like, where can people find you on the web? Where can people find your books? So I have a website, Jonathan W. Hackett.com. I've got my books listed there, and any podcasts I've been on are also there. best place to contact me is LinkedIn.

I'm the Jonathan Hackett on LinkedIn. The? The, yeah, because Jonathan Hackett was taken. So I was like, all right, well, I'm the Jonathan Hackett. So, yeah, LinkedIn is the best way. That's how I found you, actually. That's how I found you and that's how I found Milburn, too, on LinkedIn. Cool, man.

So, yeah, thank you for telling us about your career and, you know, your academic works and everything else is going on. And yeah, we'd love to have you back to talk about this second book. Yeah, I appreciate the time. Yeah, absolutely, man. Otherwise, we'll see all you guys next time. Hey, guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for a moment about how you can support the show. If you've been watching it, enjoying it,

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