The Team House - Relentless Strike: The Unauthorized History of JSOC | Sean Naylor (part 2) | Ep. 131

Episode Date: February 6, 2022

Sean Naylor is a national security journalist who wrote Relentless Strike about the history of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and many other journalistic works. In part two of our interview with him we will pick up where we left off with his embed with the US Army during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Sean’s book “Relentless Strike: The Unauthorized History of JSOC”👇 https://www.amazon.com/Relentless-Strike-History-Special-Operations/dp/1250105471/ref=nodl_ Today's Sponsors: 👇 A-TAC FITNESS (Veteran owned and operated) https://www.ATACFITNESS.com Use the promo code "TEAM10" for 10% off! Selection Starts Here. Thanks for supporting the companies that support the show! Want 2 bonus episodes per month and access to the bonus segments? Subscribe to our Patreon!👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media Links:  The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links): https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: 👇 [e-mail] #relentlessstrike #jsoc #theteamhouseBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five

with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Special operations. Covert ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hopes, Jack Murphy,

and David Park. Hey, everyone, welcome to the Team House. This is episode 131. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park. And tonight we're having Sean Naylor back for round two. We had him on about a month ago. He is a national security journalist, and he's the author of Relentless Strike.

And we had like a long three-hour conversation last time, and we kind of only kind of scratched the surface. We got up to the point where Sean was talking, about his embed with the U.S. Army during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and I realized at that point we kind of had to follow up with Part 2. And so that's what we're here for today. Sean, first off, how are you doing tonight? How's everything going in your world? I'm doing fine. I'm, you know, I watched last week's episode and took notes as to what not to do. so I'm still sober

I'm not jet lag you're not going to take your shirt off I'm not planning to take my shirt off flex for us yeah well the question though is are you going to get a Sumerian seal tattoo oh my god oh geez we had to go there right off the bat

yeah the episode with Andrew Milburn came a bit off the rails people seem to enjoy it I have no memory of the last hour or so of it, but oh my God. Yeah. And he is always awesome to have in the studio. He's like, you know, he's just, it's amazing. But, Sean, thank you so much for joining us, man. I really appreciate you coming back for round two. I want to ask you about this article you wrote that kind of rewrites the history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. before we get into that

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So, Sean, with that said, I'd like to dive right in. Tell us about this article that you wrote. It's an amazing article. I read it and I instantly felt jealous and I wished, damn, I wish I had wrote that. This is just an amazing piece of history that you had captured in this article. Can you tell us about how that piece of history came to you and how you began writing it and what it's about? Yeah, sure. So this is an article that appeared a couple of years ago in Yahoo News, where I was working at the time

and who I'm very grateful to forgiving me the time to sort of research the article and write it. that basically tells the story of the human intelligence side of the Cuban missile crisis that had never really been publicly told before. And in particular about the role of a CIA officer called Tom Hewitt, a paramilitary officer who had served in the merchant marine during World War II, and then joined the CIA. And he had been working out of the Miami station, and without going into too much detail,

it's a very, very long story. He basically had recruited and trained an agent and then infiltrated that agent back into Cuba, and that agent stood up a very very, successful at least in the short-term intelligence network that was able to basically lay out the part of Cuba of Pinard del Rio province in particular I believe where nuclear where the Soviets were moving nuclear missiles and it was that it was that human intelligence

that allowed the U-2 aircraft that basically told the U-2s where to go look to photograph them. And I found out about this through a friend of the family, of the Hewitt family, Tom Hewitt being the CIA officer. And it was actually some years ago, probably 2006 time frame. I think 2007 and this friend had been at the posthumous award of the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, which the CIA's sort of highest award really, to Tom Hewitt, basically to his, it was awarded, you know, to his widow, Millie Hewitt, for the role that he did. played and, you know, which had basically, for reasons that are not clear, being overlooked by the CIA up to that point. And so this friend of the family said, you know, you should write about

this. This is interesting. And he had with him some of the unclassified paperwork from the ceremony that just laid it all out. Wow. I mean, not all the details of the story, but basically said in black and white, this guy's team discovered where the missiles were and we sent the U-2s to keep the role of the team a secret. And so I made a number of sort of stalled attempts that basically stalled to get at this story. I mean, this was back in 2007, 2008, 2009. time frame and I met with Millie Hewitt, the widow of Tom Hewitt, on a number of occasions and got, did some interviewing with her. But she was very reluctant to, for various reasons, to do something if she thought it was going to get, if it was going to cause problems with CIA.

CIA weren't much help to me at the time. And, you know, I had other work projects that I had to be getting along with. So I sort of put it on ice for a while. And I mean, of course, one of the challenges, even back then, trying to report on anything from the early 60s is that most of the participants are have long since passed away. And that was the case. Unfortunately, by the time I found out about the award,

the person who had put Hewitt in for the award, the CIA officer who'd been his boss and had basically said, hey, you know, we never recognized Tom Hewitt for the extraordinary role that he and his agents played in averting disaster in the human missile crisis. That fellow had also died, you know, just a year or two previously. Oh, wow. And so when I got to Yahoo News, I knew that, you know, my editors there were very interested in national security things,

and I managed to persuade them, to their credit, to cut me loose for a while to dig into this. And I went, unfortunately, Millie Hewitt, by that point, had also passed away, but her son, Tim and his family, were still alive. And they had some of Tom Hewitt's papers.

I already had some that Millie had given me, and Tom was able to share, share more. And by that point also, there were more CIA documents that had appeared on one or two websites, sort of basically archive-type websites on the net that I was able to cross-reference some things on that I hadn't, I don't think had existed back in 2007 when I first started looking into it. And so I was, I was able to basically put the whole story together the one part of it that I I was frankly slightly frustrated with was that I wasn't able to tell the enough as much of the story of the Cuban agents

themselves as I would have liked to there's still one or two relatives alive down in Miami but the one lady I really wanted to speak with didn't speak any English and which wouldn't have been an absolute barrier if they'd been sort of happy but they were that they were quite unfortunately sort of suspicious of reporters looking into looking into these events from what is now 60 years ago but I was able to I was very lucky with the material that I did have and I was able to write a sort of a narrative style story about it and you know it was one of those stories where you're basically taking a little fact here a little fact here and you're putting the jigsaw together so i was

able to describe um with a fair degree of certainty the way that they infiltrated um into the uh you know into cuba um then describe that in a sort of novelistic sort of fashion. So anyway, if you, if anybody wants to read that and they Google Sean D. Naylor, Yahoo News, Cuban Missile Crisis, you know, that story will pop right up. I thought what was like really astounding about this story. And like I said, it, in my opinion, rewrites the history of the Cuban Missile Crisis, is we had always been told that these missiles were discovered via technical intelligence methods,

right. Your story is saying actually that what happened was that there were human intelligence assets on the ground in Cuba. As I recall, they paddled kayaks up a river and had eyes on the missile launchers and then reported that back to CIA. They were then able to confirm the information via you. So it's human being confirmed via a technical intelligence platform, the U2 spy plane at that time. And you're also saying that the U2 was able to provide some top cover for the agents on the ground as far as concealing their role. Right. The actual source of the information. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that, yeah, I think the kayak was actually the infiltration. I'm not sure that they were looking at the missiles from the kayaks. But I think you're picking up exactly why I thought this story was so important. It wasn't just adding new information to what's publicly known about how the missiles were found. It is that I think it's not much of an exaggeration to say that the Cuban missile crisis really marked a hinge in the history of intelligence, after which technical intelligence of all various sorts, but particularly imagery, intelligence from satellites and sort of spy planes and so forth like the U2 started to gain

precedence. And I think in the minds of policymakers and national security intellectuals, there was this sense that the Cuban missile crisis marked because of the U2s, because of the role of the U2s, you know, we can increasingly now rely on technical means to gain intelligence. And it began sort of the slow, uneven decline, I would say, of human intelligence, particularly in the civilian intelligence agencies that obviously have rebounded from time to time, depending on each president's priorities and so forth. But, I mean, I think, you know, I'm not saying anything unusual if I said that, you know, by the late 70s, a lot of people thought that the CIA's human intelligence prowess had declined significantly from where it was sort of 15 years previously.

And it's kind of ironic, too, because, you know, I think it was like around the Carter administration when they really. started saying, look, like, tech, you know, technical capabilities are the future of intelligence. We don't need all this human intelligence. The CIA lost a lot of their very experienced people, like from the OSS and things like that. And, and like you said, this was kind of one of the focal points or the genesis of it, this, the U2 is grabbing it or, you know, determining it when it was actually done by human intelligence. Yes, it's a classic spy operation. Right. You know, classic human intelligence spy operation.

I mean, it was a case officer training up a couple of agents, recruiting and training them, and then infiltrating them behind enemy lines into enemy held territory and them reporting back, you know, on sort of wireless. And, you know, that was, it was classic old school Cold War spying. And the lesson that probably should have been learned from that is it's a case study of these different types of ints working with one another and supporting one another rather than just relying on one or the other. Exactly, yes. It's also a case study. And I think the intelligence community being horrible at PR and, you know, like understanding that, you know, keeping your means and your methods a secret is very important.

but also is really recruiting guys and put him on the side of the road really that secret of a tactic that they're afraid even so many years later that they didn't want to come forward and say hey yeah like we won we achieved this this is how we did it not like this is how we recruited the sources is but everybody knows that every intelligence service across the world recruit recruits sources recruits assets. So, you know, when at that time, what we're hearing about the CIA, we're hearing about, you know, the failed assassination attempt with the cigars. You know, we hear about these bad things, but it would not hurt these organizations sometimes

to tout their victories. Yes. No, I agree. I mean, and I was sort of surprised that, I mean, the CIA, when I, when I, when I, when I really reported and wrote the story for Yahoo News. The CIA tried to help me, but they didn't come through with an awful lot. I mean, I came most of the stuff in that story I came up with on my own. But to, you know, on the flip side of that is they did actually tweet the story out when it was published on the CIA Twitter handle. So,

I suppose I should be grateful for that. Yeah, I mean, you did them a favor, really, Sean. Yeah. By the way, it didn't, getting tweeted by the CIA is great having a story to it, but I once was retweeted by then-president Donald Trump. And if you want to see traffic, that's how to do it. that that's uh right right you're either an instant hero or innocent villain what what what story was that that the president was

you know i as soon as i said that i'm like oh they're going to ask me what story it was it was it was one of the um one of the direct action missions uh in the middle east i don't think it wasn't al-bagdadi um it was one of the it was in yemen i think was it a it was sort of 2018 29 oh it's the one where the where the Osprey got shot down

right I there's a Navy seal who's killed on the operation no it wasn't the one where the it wasn't the one right after it was right yeah that was right after his inauguration

right after his inauguration now it was it was later than that because I was I wasn't working for Yahoo News in 2017 So, no, it was, I mean, it's embarrassing that I can't remember, but it was one of the, it was one of the, it was one of the, J-Soc missions. It wasn't Al-Baghdadi, it was somebody else. And it was sort of, if I recall, it wasn't immediately clear that the United States had done it. but it was a very quick story.

It wasn't like a story that I invested a lot of time. It was more like I wrote a story like, people are reporting that this guy is dead, you know, and I tweeted and then the president tweeted it out, you know, retweeted it, which seemed very much like an acknowledgement. The United States has done it. It seems like confirmation. Seems like confirmation.

Yeah, US killed top leader in Yemen Al Qaeda you leader in Yemen it was Qasim al-Ramee Yeah there you go

You Hats off to Dave for his Googling skills So Sean I would like to pick it up Where we left off In the last interview Where we got up to

Your Inbed with the US Army In Iraq in 2003 You had some wild story about going over the side of a Wadi and a Humvee, but I'll let you pick up wherever you want, you would like to begin with your embed experience during the invasion. See, to prepare for this, I watched the last episode

that we did the part one. Did I discuss the Wadi story? Very briefly, we didn't really get into it. So, yeah, so the, so I was very fortunate. This was one of the sort of professional highlights of my life, which was the embed in Iraq and sort of one of the most memorable experiences of my life. I was fortunate to be embedded. I mean, I'd sort of laid some of the groundwork for this in the sort of months prior,

but to be embedded with three, seven, Cav, third squadron, seventh cavalry, which was the division cavalry squadron of third infantry division. And therefore, one of the principal screening forces for the invasion out ahead of the sort of the main body of the third infantry division, which was the main army division that was launching the invasion. And what the hell? I I'm sorry I was just slightly distracted by

yeah sorry I think we're fine okay I had actually been writing not a good day to die and I was on book leave as the as what became the invasion of Iraq approached and you know being a sort of a selfish so-and-so. I mean, I was really sort of like focused on

on writing not a good day to down. I'm like, please, please, please, don't let this happen. Sure enough, you know. I get the call it looks, you know, and I get asked, can I take some time off to go cover the what looked like it was going to be the invasion of Iraq? So I did that. And 3-7 cab was a fantastic.

fantastic organization, very well trained and very well led by then Lieutenant Colonel Terry Farrell, who finished his career, retired last year as Lieutenant General Terry Farrell, the head of US Army Central or Arsaint. And we'll talk about the Wadi. I mean, that's lots of, that invasion is sort of like a series of images and memories for me now that are just sort of like higgledy-piggledy in my mind. And I would be hard-pressed to put them down one after the other chronologically in all cases. There was one period when we were basically in and out of combat for about 24 hours straight, just all kinds of craziness happening. we can get to that later that the wadi story is is always amusing to me because i think of all the

embeds that i've done this might actually have been the most dangerous moment and and it had physically dangerous and it had absolutely nothing to do with enemy action you know so it was like the second night of the invasion And I was riding, I spent most of the invasion riding in the squadron commanders Humvee. Now the squadron commander himself, General Farrell, was in a Bradley cavalry fighting vehicle. But I was in a Humvee driven by a terrific E3, a private first class, Randall Duke Newcomb. and and the squadron fire support officer was in the shotgun seat and then I was in the backseat. It was just the three of us.

And so the invasion started in Middle East time in the, you know, at night. So we'd been up all day and then we started that night, across the the line of departure of the LD, driving with nothing basically happening, just driving fast across hard-packed sand for the next day. Then it's night again, keeping driving, no pause, really. And, you know, of course, that's very tiring if you're the driver. I mean, I basically didn't have much to do, and I was sort of, if I wanted to nod off, I could nod off as a lot of your viewers will know,

the Humvee is perhaps one of the least comfortable vehicles designed for the military. And it seems to specifically have been designed to make it very difficult to fall asleep in the back seat. But somehow I managed. So the second night, I'm basically asleep in the back seat. and I I wake up suddenly and I'm asking myself you know a series of thoughts go through my mind in in half a second you know the first thought is you know oh I'm I'm awake and then the second thought you know and I'm awake in a Humvee in Iraq or in well I guess it was Iraq at that point then I was wondering well why am why am I awake something's wrong and then And then I was like, oh, no, this Humvee is not in contact with the ground at all. Okay. And so what had happened was the, I guess, the route, that basically there was a big waddy, you know, a dried up riverbed.

In my mind, it was like 50 feet high, but it was probably more like 10 feet high. And an engineer element that was, that Ford of us was supposed to have, well, I think did mark it out with sort of like white engineer tape and I think maybe a couple of traffic cum type. But PFC Nukem, you know, probably just missed these in the dark. I mean, he's driving with nods on. And that's, you know, these are early 2000. 2003 nods, right?

And they, you know, they're very tiring to keep focused on hour after hour. So he'd just missed this and we had gone sailing off the edge of this wadding. So I'm like, this is going to hurt, you know, and I'm like, get into sort of the talking cover. Yes, the crouch position. And I should have mentioned that this was a, The Humvee, it was not an up-armored Humvee, but it was more like a cargo Humvee with the kind that has the sort of the, I don't know what they're made of,

but the sort of the X-shaped sort of like canvas. Yeah, the canvas over the top of it, yeah. Well, yeah, but the things that are, everything in the back is being held in the back by these sort of, you know what I'm talking about? So like you've got the straps. Yeah, you've got like the cargo straps on the stuff. Yeah, so there's all it's between me and the cargo

is these cargo straps. Yeah. So the Humvee impacts the floor of the wadi. Fortunately, this was early enough in the invasion and in the war that we were wearing seatbelts. Yeah. Because as you're probably aware, once you're in an urban fight, yeah, there's different opinions. It's a lot of people think it's better to not wear the seatbelts. Somebody drops a grenade in the window. You can unass the vehicle quickly. Um, but we were all wearing seatbelts and we all had helmets on and the two guys in the front, their heads just

cracked off the windshield immediately. And for the rest of the invasion, it looked like we'd been the victim of two very accurate sniper shots because there was sort of like this sort of spider pattern on each side of the, on each side. But and all of the luggage, the straps just snapped and all of the luggage came flying through the back of the of the vehicle. So I'm like buried under this luggage, still strapped in, just sort of like almost immobilized. The two guys in front were basically unharmed. We were all with, they had headaches for a little while, but otherwise we were all unharmed. And, you know, I'm sort of lying there, sort of thinking, oh my God, what just happened? I was snoozing 10 seconds ago. And now I'm,

you know, I don't know what happened. And, you know, you could hear people who had seen this behind us, you know, they stopped their vehicles and you're like, oh my God, did you see that? Are those guys okay? And, you know, as I said, we were all okay. But what was even more extraordinary, the Humvee was okay. Yeah. And the Humvee just kept driving. I always think that I may have missed my opportunity for a big payout from AM General,

the manufacturers of the Humvee for sort of telling this story if you want a sturdy troop vehicle you know, I recommend I am General's Humvee but anyway that was the Wadi story but I mean it was

that was high adventure for a few seconds sailing through the air I mean honestly you're so fortunate that nothing in the back was sharp or weighted or you know to the degree that or otherwise killed you. Yeah.

You know? That's, that's amazing. Yeah. I mean, obviously we're all, I mean, I'm wearing body armor and hell, Kevlar and so forth. But, yeah, it was, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that was amazing because,

you know, you know, it was right at the start of the, of the invasion. And, uh, I'm like, oh my God, what's going to happen from now on? Yeah. And what happened from then on was just, um, It was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. And one of the things that made it so extraordinary was there was so much action and yet not a single member of the task force, which was a huge task force. I was going to say bloated, but that implies like it was too big. But I mean, what I mean is it was much bigger than sort of the number of soldiers that you would have in a division cavalry squadron.

I mean, there were all kinds of attachments to this force and, you know, artillery of various types and engineers and so forth and so on. And not a single member of that task force was killed or seriously wounded. in the invasion. And, you know, we would, you know, by the way, you weren't allowed to mention that. I remember sitting at one pause some days later, you know, sitting around, I don't think it was a campfire, but sitting around with a couple of the officers from the squadron headquarters from the, and saying, I sort of said, isn't it amazing that? And everyone just turned on me like, shut up.

Right. Got it. Right. Because they were afraid you were going to jinx it? Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's how you invite tragedy. Oh, I see. Yeah.

Because, I mean, that's kind of like the biggest achievement of their professional careers, really, that they, the 2003 invasion without taking a casualty. Yeah. I mean, that's, I mean, that was, and I mean, they did, you know, it wasn't for, you know, want of action. You know, I had, I tried to go back and find some of the stories that I that I wrote from that. Sadly, the, the Army Times archives have largely disappeared from the web

after a series of, I think, accidents and sales of the, you know, of that company. But, you know, some of the stories were reprinted, in people's blogs or other news organizations. And, you know, like I said, there was, you know, I have a very clear memory of setting out one evening after we'd sort of lagered for a little while. And I think the squadron commander or one of the troop commanders had said, you know, we're probably going to make contact this evening.

So I'm like, okay, Roger. and probably not an hour up the highway, and it's dark. And very clear memory of just before I even heard anything, just seeing traces arcing in onto the vehicles ahead of us from both sides of the roadway. And the lead troop commander's voice coming over the radio, just saying very, calmly like he was saying, I've got a flat tire.

Instead, he was saying, yeah, we're in contact. And, you know, then all hell breaks loose. There was some, there was sort of a memorable evening. One of my story says it was in a town called Alfizaliyah. When I tried to find that on a map, I couldn't just now. but where I believe they were going to try to cross the Euphrates and the first two tanks went over the bridge that they were and then the third tank collapsed the bridge with another tank on it.

Oh, geez. And so, and this was in the middle of a sort of firefight with the Fed Aene. I mean, not a little firefight, but like all over the place. And you've got this long column of vehicles, I think 500 vehicles in the task force that now has to turn around under fire and find some other way out of the town and across the bridge. And, you know, that was also sort of high adventure. A couple of the tanks rolled into a ditch, were immobilized. you know, I remember, I mean, Ferrell was doing a, you know,

superhuman effort really just C-2ing all of this, commanding and controlling all of this. And, I mean, the task force was stretched out over, you know, many kilometers. But right around us, you know, which would have been, I guess, the headquarters and headquarters troop,

um, part of the part of the, uh, part of the, column, voices were getting quite nervous on the radio, I'd say, quite strained. And there was a captain, and for the life of me, I can't remember his name. I was going to try to, hoping that one of my stories had mentioned it, but I couldn't find it.

He was a battle captain in the headquarters, so he was in the talk. So he didn't actually command anybody at that point. But he'd been an enlisted man in the Battle of Mogadishu. And so he was sort of at least had more experience than probably anybody else right then and there had in that kind of a situation. And just when it seemed like maybe panic was going to take over in that part of the column, he gets on the radio. and he was very firm and he was like, break, break, this is what we're going to do. And he just, he took charge and I thought that was really,

that was very memorable, that, that, that particular moment. And I remember PFC Newcomb just saying, thank God. You know, like thank God that captain took charge. Right. So that was, I mean, what else happened on that? I mean, just so much crazy stuff. that you didn't get a sense of, I think, from the big picture of the Iraq invasion. For instance, I watched a tank battle, like tank on tank, tank battle between, I think, T-72s and, you know, and the Abrams is from, and, you know, the Iraqi tanks came off, you know, worse.

that was like a 10 to nothing victory or something for the task force. But I mean, that was, that was. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting.

Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Amazing. Just watching that happen, you know, few clicks up the road basically.

Also came under artillery fire, Iraqi artillery fire at one point. I mean, it was sort of, that was sort of Murphy's lore. It was basically our first pause of any length of time, you know, anything longer than just, you know, time to go to the bathroom or something and get back on the vehicles. And we pulled off the road sort of into some field, basically. And at least the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the tactical command post and, and associated vehicles. And it was the first time that I, I think that I'd taken my body armor off in like several days. Right. Even to, and so I was like, oh, thank God, this is all, you know, sat down.

Next thing, you know, boom. And, you know, there was also a CBS team that was riding in, I think they actually had their own Humvee or their own vehicle, I can't remember. And they had, they had like a bodyguard with them, like a guy paid to keep them alive, who was a former Australian SAS operator. And I just remember him running past me, shouting, getting get your shit back on to the CBS crew. And, you know, I was very impressed with how quickly that all those armored vehicles went from, you know, we're going to sit down and, you know, maybe eat an MRI and have a cigarette or whatever to... Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children.

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Visit child and family resource network.org today. Wheeling out of there. I mean, it was in like 60 seconds that that happened. And, you know, we were gone before much more of that artillery fell. It did, it hit nearby as well. and I think wounded somebody from the second brigade of the third infantry division. But you don't hear much about tank battles or Iraqi heavy artillery zeroing in on U.S. forces. So, you know, another vivid memory from that time was we were sort of driving up the road.

this is in this sort of like 24-hour period when stuff just kept happening. And I should mention, by the way, that I mentioned the way that I mentioned the photographer that was with me for Operation Anaconda, Warren's Inn last and part one. And he was with me for this adventure as well. he was riding in a he was riding in um uh the uh the the i guess it was the j tax vehicle um and uh so uh i was i was in in our uh our humvee that was still uh you know still alive and kicking and maybe ten meters if that in front of us was

the squadron commanders Bradley and we're all obviously sort of looking forward although I mean I think we're also sort of scanning left and right and because by this point there's some small arms fire coming in

it's broad daylight and I see a round ping off the squadron commanders Bradley at like our head height you know and we're about to drive I mean in other words if that guy just keeps his finger depressed on the trigger. You know, we're going to have to duck or it's not going to be a good day.

And PFC Newcomb had his M16A2 between his knees. And I think he had his window wound down or unzipped. I think it was the wind down window at that kind of Humvee. And all of a sudden he's just. driving the Humvee with his knees and his left hand, and he is spraying bursts of M16A2 fire, you know, basically through the head, you know, at the hedgerows from which we're taking fire. And, I mean, I remember trying to just memorize this instant thinking, like,

this is a unique moment in my life, and I will never, ever be in this situation again. Yeah. know. And so that was, that was, that was memorable. Sean, what was it like, journalistically, what was it like for you going through this embed, but were you also filing stories as it went on? Were you on a satellite phone? How did that work? That's an excellent question. Remember, we're talking 2003, really early 2003 technology. Right. So we had various means, but the main way we were filing, and this allows for another good little story, was something called a Began, which is a satellite phone, but it looks more like a sort of a laptop than a handheld device.

Is that the one that folds out? Yes, yes. And so when we had pulled over and lagered, as I was just discussing, when the artillery came in, Warren had been trying to file some photographs. And you really needed the began, especially for large files like photographs. So he had it spread out on the ground in mid-file, and suddenly artillery is coming in. And so one of the officers from the headquarters troop, I believe it was a guy called Captain Brown, great, great guy, literally grabs Warren and sort of bodily throws him inside, I think probably Bradley or if it, and they peel off. And I'm unaware of this.

I'm, you know, and the vehicle I'm in is, is driving off too. So anyway, we get, we sort of move several kilometers away and then, and then stop. And Warren comes to me and says, hey, look, I got some bad news. The Began is still back in the field, right, where we just left. I'm like, oh, you go, okay. So I called back to the office on one of our handheld satellite phones. and told them the situation. Being a parent can be really challenging.

Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone is there of someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. They, look, I mean, I worked for some great editors. You know, I obviously didn't have to manage any budgets when I was a reporter for Army Times or anywhere else.

This stuff is very expensive. I certainly was back then. Instead of sort of saying, don't worry about it, Sean, you know, so long as you two guys are okay, that's fine. It was, is there any way you can get that piece of equipment back, you know? So the Air Force crew that Warren was riding with actually. volunteered to go back and get it without me even asking. And so we cleared it with the squadron commander.

They were going to be set up in the position they were in for a while. So I jumped in there, soft-skinned Humvee, and we drove back to the field. And I'm just, you know, just hoping against hope that this thing is still there. And, you know, it's a big field, small piece of gear. You know, there's been heavy artillery falling in that field, you know, and, you know, who knows who else has come by in the meantime. It was just sitting there right in the middle of the field. We grabbed it and got back. So we were still able to file using the Began, thanks to those fantastic Air Force guys.

We later got the main guy. Actually, I think it was just one guy. I think. I think it was the leader of that team. drove me back to the field. And we later got him like a, I tried to get him like a lifetime subscription to Air Force Times. You know, it's the least we could do.

There was another incident. During the tank, the tank fight, other, that was another interesting moment. I remember trying to file a story, about this sort of 24-hour fight basically verbally with my, I had a fantastic editor called Robert Hodeon, who was operating out of a luxury hotel in Qatar. And, you know, he took, you know, great joy. And, you know, I'd be saying, yeah, it's like, you know, 20 days since I took a shower.

and he's like, well, I'd like to hear more, but I've got to go and I've got a tennis game array. Right. I have a manicure. I have a manicure. I have a manic. So, so, so, so I'm trying to file this story and he's helping me, you know, and I'm, you know, I'm literally making it up out of my notebook, you know, sort of like, then you could throw a quote in from Colonel Farrell that says this. then you know and you know we're going back and forth but then more uh more artillery starts coming in i mean i remember while i was on the phone to him there was a whoosh and i look up on an RPG is just like flown over head it seemed like it was it was probably like 50 feet over my head but it seemed like it was 10 feet over my head and um and then there was an enormous explosion and and you know

I'm like, you know, I take the phone away from my ear. I'm like, what was that? Somebody said artillery. I'm like, oh, was it incoming or outgoing? They're like, incoming. I'm like, Robert, we have to go. And that was that. So there were challenges, but we got it done.

You know, I remember, I mean, that story about the, about that sort of, you know, running series of fights. It had a quote in it from a soldier. I think there had been some eight-hand. gun runs on some of the sort of the hedgerows from which we were taking fire. There was a quote from a soldier in it that said something like, you know, it looks like Apocalypse Now or something like that. So I threw that quote in. So, but my, and I'm probably going to get some small detail of this story wrong, but my father was in London at the time.

You know, we, we, my parents were living in Dublin, Ireland, the time but he was in London for business and the London Evening Standard, which is a big tabloid newspaper in London itself, somehow picked up the Army Times story that must have run on the web and then sort of like rewrote it, but to be fair attributed it to me and sort of said, you know, there are reports coming out of a major, you know, out of Iraq, you know, from army times about a major battle, you know, and there's a huge sort of block headline on the front of the London evening standard. It was their main story that evening, you know, it looks like apocalypse now or something like that. Somewhere in my basement, I think I have a couple of copies of this. And I should have

I should have brought them up for show and tell like we did occasionally in part one. But my father actually got to read this. He's like reading and then he sees my name in it. So that was, you know, he's sitting on a London tube or something. Like what the hell? Sort of like one of those small world things. But, yeah, so that was the invasion. I'm sure there's other parts of it.

But that was a, you know, that was a very memorable, very memorable experience. And I'm, you know, I'm definitely very glad that I had it. And I'm very grateful to the guys in 3-7 Cav for, you know, making me feel so welcome. What came after that, Sean? I mean, like we said, we'll want to talk about your book, Relentless Strike. Since the 2003 invasion, I mean, it's been almost 20 years now. Yeah. Where has your career taken you since then?

So I came back from Iraq and I finished, you know, over the course of about a, you know, more than a year, I finished not a good day to die. That came out in March of 2005. You know, it was a relatively successful book. And my bosses at military times then sort of gave me a dream beat, basically, of being a sort of an investigative reporter on special operation stuff. And so I loved that. And I did that basically for the next six years, six and a half years, with breaks for embeds. And a lot of the embeds were not, some of them, the embeds, one or two of them were with special operations elements, usually SF, special forces elements. But most of them were with sort of conventional army units or increasingly with sort of folks who were doing training and advising missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So in the fall of 2005, I went back to Afghanistan for a month. In fact, that was one of those embeds was with the Desert Eagles, the first battalion of third special forces group. And, you know, that was great. The commander of that battalion at the time was a fairly controversial figure in the SF community now, I think. and is a would-be Republican senator from, you know, Politico in New Hampshire, was Don Baldock. But, you know, he made me feel, you know, right at home. I mean, that was another, there was another episode there of, you know,

there but for the grace of God go ice. sort of thing. There was one mission they were going to do and I really wanted to go on it and I was sort of, you know, pestering Don Baldock about, could I go? Is there room on the command and control bird for me to go on this? Please, please, please. And eventually there wasn't room on that command and control bird that he obviously went on. And then the command and control bird crashed.

And it wasn't a fatal crash, but I mean, he was. banged up and in the, you know, in the little infirmary they had there for a while. So that was, I think that was in Kandahar. And so that was one embed then. Iraq basically, you know, was dominating a lot of my work even when I wasn't there. but I went to embed in Iraq in 2006, in late summer of 2006 for a couple of months in Anbar and in Baghdad with 414 Cav, which was a striker cav unit out of the 172nd Striker Brigade Combat team from Alaska. and we talked last last week about the article that you read.

Were you going through the Q course, I think, at the time, Jack, and you read the article about the hunt for Zarqawi, closing in on Zarqqqa. Well, you know, I had put in a request, just a normal embed request like you're supposed to, you know, a couple months, some months previously. and booked flights to Baghdad and you know there was a whole in-bed process back then

but it you know it rarely got turned down but you had to fly into Baghdad and then you made you had to make your way well you didn't make your way you got shuffled in an armored bus from the airport to the green zone

and in central Baghdad and you sort of had to basically spend 24 hours going through some bureaucracy to embed and getting a sort of an embedded reporter's ID card and stuff like that and then you would have to wait for a kilo to you know or a convoy or something to get you out to wherever you were going to be embedding um and uh you know the photographer that I was going with uh Scott Mahaski, another terrific photographer and great guy, great, great companion. We had tickets and, you know, I was getting a little nervous because I hadn't heard anything. And, you know, so I reached out to the sort of the public affairs shop in Baghdad.

And, you know, I basically had underestimated, even though I knew it had caused a big extinct in the soft community, the degree to which that article had upset basically the general US military leadership in Iraq, because I was told, and this is almost a direct quote, whoever I was speaking with in Baghdad said, Sean, I've just got to tell you, no army unit is going to embed. And so I'm like, Okay, so we canceled at short notice. But I can't remember how I made this happen,

but basically the Marines had control of Anbar. But this striker squadron had been somehow detached from Mosul, where it had been under army chain of command, and put in the Marines sort of, Marine owned territory in Anbar and under Marine command, under a Marine chain of command. And it wasn't like they gave him a Marine officer to command it or something. And somehow the Marine said, hey, we don't care about that. Why don't you embed with this striker unit that's in our neck of the woods?

So we did that. And it was another fantastic experience. they the town i mean if anybody's watching that remembers the geography of uh anbar that the towns that they were covered down on were rawa and anna and um you know terrific uh terrific experience there um we'd get occasional rocket fire i went for for several years i i sort of had a bizarre uh record of every incident every fob or cop that I was on got rocketed while I was on it, usually to no great effect.

But I remember that happening once or twice out there. So that was 2006. Of course, you know, Baghdad was a different story. That brigade to include that, you know, that striker brigade to include its, it's, you know, orphaned cavalry squadron out in, out in Anbar got extended, you know, for another three months, I think, or six months. I think it was three months. This was part of, I think, probably part of the surge.

And they were sent to Baghdad. And again, you know, one of these sort of. like, not wouldn't say it was a near miss, but two, you know, a degree or so away from being a near miss. I was bedding down in the sort of the GP medium at Victory Base Complex, you know, which is the big operating base adjacent to Baghdad International Airport, just a massive sprawling, basically coalition base. and I was I was betting down in the with the sort of the battle captains in their GP medium from the from the headquarters company and one day in the middle of the day while you know we're all in the talk I think in the tactical operation center the a rocket comes in and impacts like a yard from our tent and doesn't go off. Just like buries itself in the ground,

like a high angle to get over the T-walls and everything goes up, comes screeching down. And nobody, I mean, there was no eyewitnesses to this that I'm aware of. I mean, it just, you know, we come back at, you know, at 1630 or something. And there's this massive hole. And so many people are like, oh, yeah,

we think a rocket hit over there. And I think, you know, this sounds crazy. so I may have misunderstood, but my understanding was that EOD came over and took a look and it was so deeply buried, and they're like, well, it's obviously a dud, and it's all the way down there, we're just going to leave it there. So I'm like, okay. And so that was, you know, that was another interesting experience.

Sean, I'm sorry, when you were in Anbar, Were you like at Al-Assad? Were you at Haditha Dam? Like where were you based on? They were basically the land-owning unit for these two towns, Rawa and Anna. Okay. So that's basically what they were doing was doing, you know, everything from key leader engagements to, you know, patrols.

You know, and I was going out with them and, you know, covering all of that sort of stuff. I think we did get to Al-Assad on the way back. Okay. I think that we fly. I can't remember. I think we flew back to Baghdad somehow. I have memories of sitting around Al-Assad for several days. I remember there was a sort of very comfy chair in the Green Beans coffee that I would hang out in.

I also remember I've gotten my hands on, you know, you guys would probably remember this, you know, that there were the locals, the local traders who were allowed onto these bases somehow always had extraordinary collections for sale of pirated DVDs of like movies and TV shows, right? And recent ones. And so I remember getting the DVDs of the show, the HBO show, Rome. Oh, yeah. And just watching, watching those.

I mean, I hadn't even seen season two. So, I mean, the guy had both seasons, you know. And so that was, that's what I remember. So I know I was at Alasad. I mean, it's hard to describe to, you know, to folks who weren't, in one of these huge bases at the height of the wars in Afghanistan.

I remember when when I was in Ranger Battalion, the television show those on at the time was the OC. If you recall that, and it's a total lukewarm, mellow drama about teenage kids out in California. And we were like fighting over those DVDs in our platoon. And like we'd be sitting down,

to like brief con ops before we'd go out on missions and there'd be like squad leaders yelling at each other who has disc three motherfucker give up disc three right fucking now and then they're turning to fights about like you know who's sleeping with who on the show and which girl is is up to no good and there'd be big fights right there in a ranger platoon before going out on a mission and this is what we're arguing about yeah exactly exactly i mean what i remember also is just how just how vast and these fobs were, you know? I mean, there was a, you know, we obviously, the, the, I mean, it was a, it was a cavalry named unit, I think, but it was a striker infantry, part of a striker infantry organization. So there weren't many vehicles to go around. And so this massive, massive air base,

you know, if you wanted to go to chow or to, Green Bean's coffee. You had to take a bus. Right. I mean, there were literally mini buses and it was like, oh, if you want to go to Green Beans, the number two bus runs every 20 minutes, you know, from that stop over there. I mean, you literally waited at the bus stop to, you know, in the middle of a war. There got to be MPs that were handing out speeding tickets. Well, that's the other thing I was going to say, because you were mentioning that it's hard, you know, people weren't at these big bases. It's hard to, like, tell them like what how like how massive they were but also the level of bureaucracy because they run like small towns with with speed traps for people now yeah there's there's a some officer yeah yeah

but they had speed traps for for a little scooters you know for little four four wheelers and i don't mean like four wheeler quads i mean almost like golf cars but you know and there were regulations about wearing your safety belt across your body I mean, they were crazy. Is that shit street legal? Huh? Is that shit street legal? Yeah.

Yeah. We're in Iraq, bro. Like what? Yeah. Yeah. Like the belts. Yeah. I want to take one moment here, one minute just to give a shout out to people watching the stream or listening to the podcast and let you know that we have a Patreon site.

It's Patreon.com slash the team house. If you're interested in supporting the stream. And if you go and sign up, you'll get two bonus episodes a month. Plus, you'll get access to all of our bonus segments with many of our guests. And there's literally days worth of insane stories on there at this point. And so there's a link down in the description if you want to check that out. And we appreciate everyone who supports the stream. And also, I mean, definitely if you guys have not read Relentless Strike,

which the secret history of joint special operations, I mean, this is really probably the book on if if you watch the team house like you kind of have to own this book right you'd have to read it right um and it's on amazon it's on you know anywhere you can buy a book but you know i read a lot of ebooks it's nice there and also not a good day to die which is sort of the untold story of anaconda and and you know afghanistan what happened there sure sure could you tell us a bit about like how how did this book relentless strike come about because um just on my mom end for whatever that may or may not be worth. I remember going in to have a meeting with an editor at St. Martin's Press, and your main script for this book was sitting on the desk, and it was like

this high. And I was sitting there trying to focus on whatever the hell we were talking about, but I was like, damn, I really want to read. Because he told me, you're like, Pat and this, this bad boy right here. This is the history of J-Soc from Sean Naylor. And I was like, damn, I want to read that right now. And then I remember when your book was published. And Like people at Socom were running around with their hair on fire that day. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about the genesis of this book and how it came about? Sure.

So, I mean, I had been covering special ops almost exclusively from 2005 to 2011, late 2011. And like I said, other than the embeds. And I did embeds in 2009 and 2010. I went back to Afghanistan in both those years, for a while part of each year. But I'd sort of doten the J-Soc bug, if you like, from Not a Good Day to Die. There's a large J-Soc sort of oriented section

and narrative thread in that book. And it was becoming increasingly clear to me, really by 2006, I suppose, that J-SOC was the organization that was the lead effort in, you know, what at the time we were still, I think, calling the G-WAT, the global war on terror, but certainly the lead military organization. And that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, the other U.S. forces were essentially supporting J-Soc or certainly were whenever J-Soc wanted them to support them.

And I realized, you know, and I certainly became aware of this with the article on the hunt for Zarqawi that we've talked about in 2006, that this was sort of like this, this cloud, this black hole in the middle of the United States public's collective knowledge about the wars that they were paying for or we were borrowing the money from China to pay for, I can't remember, but and their sons and daughters were fighting. And it became, you know, I sort of added to this sort of level of knowledge that I had through various stories, beg your pardon, you know, in 2007, 8, 9, 10. And the last project that I did, really,

the last stories I wrote for Army Times of the Military Times papers was a six-part series that ran, took me months to research and report it, and it ran towards the end. of 2011 on the secret war in the Horn of Africa. And I'd been talking with my agent, Scott Miller, not the same Scott Miller that commanded Delta and just retired as a four-star about, you know, what to do next. And, you know, we were thinking about because in 2011, of course, there was the

bin Laden raid. And, you know, there was some interest in having me write a book on the bin Laden raid. And I sort of put a proposal together, but, and, you know, we could have sold that pretty, pretty easily. But I, I didn't, my heart was not really. in it. I didn't like the idea of being, there were going to be other people writing that story. And even if there weren't, the pressure to get it out quickly was going to be intense. Right.

And I really didn't want to try to work under those conditions. And so I sort of basically ginned up a quick sort of one or two page proposal for a history. of J-Soc and Scott loved it and you know Mark Resnick was probably the editor that you were meeting with in St Martin's Press so Mark Resnick bought it and you know that was you know I was then writing that book for 2012, 2013 and most of 2014, or researching it and writing it. The researching is always more fun than the writing. But that's how the book came about. And the book came out on September the 1st, 2015.

So I think it's, you know, I think it's, you know, It's held up rather well. One of the things I think is interesting, and this sort of, this really ties us together in a way is since the book came out, the amount of information on J-Soc has just proliferated. And obviously I'd like to think that the Relentless Strike has some part. in that. But you think about the years that I was reporting that, 2012, 2013, early 2014, there weren't all these podcasts on like special ops and intelligence. There was no team house then.

I mean, I could really have used you guys doing these sort of like three-hour interviews with guys who were getting slightly more sloshed as the interview goes on. I mean, that, you know, that would have been, I mean, I would have been sending you lists of guys. Could you please arrange an interview with this guy, you know? You know, and there's lots of, you know, people on Twitter now constantly tweeting about J-Soc and so forth. And there just was very little of that. Different environments, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it took a while. I mean, most of it was either person-to-person interviews, but with an awful lot of background research done up front.

You know, so you're fully armed going into the interviews with as much information as you can get. And, you know, I had a great time researching it and had a great time writing it, actually. And, yeah, I mean, we touched a little bit on this in part one, but the, you know, it did create, I think it's fair to say. it did create some controversy, certainly with the various higher echelons. I mean, I know some of the stuff that I've been told is that people in certain units, in a lot of units and organizations,

were ordered not to buy or read the book because it was classified information. allegedly. I also heard a story of, you know, some DoD libraries. It was getting pulled from the shelves. And I've also sort of received anecdotal reports that people who were, let's say, going to be augmentees in one of the J-Soc task forces. you know, they flesh out their staffs with a lot of individual augmentees.

And when these folks got read onto programs by security officers or given briefings by security officers, they would sometimes even flash a photograph of me up and say, you know, do you know this person, don't ever talk to this person, that sort of thing. So I strive in my professional career to reach that level. one day, Sean. I hope to one day arrive where you are, where I'm coming up on PowerPoint presentations and they're saying, do not talk to Jack Murphy. It's an horrible person. Don't do it. And, you know, perhaps the greatest compliment that was paid to the book. I mean, we can talk a little bit more about some of the controversies, but the General Tony Thomas,

when he was the Socom commander, I believe. leave, gave a, he was giving a public address a talk in Washington that somehow I didn't know about or didn't attend, but he was quoted in the Washington Post apparently, you know, without naming me or my book, but the post sort of said it looked like he was talking about relentless strike, calling it, quote, the motherload of information that should have never, ever gotten out of our camp, which if he'd said it about a month previously, it would have been in time to put it as a blurb on the back of the paperback. Right, right.

It just missed that deadline, unfortunately. So, you know, I mean, it's, you know, I actually have a lot of, the folks that get really angry at me, sometimes it's unfortunate because I have a lot of respect for them, you know, professionally and what, and what they've achieved. You know, the other thing that happened was Socom sent letters out to just about every person who'd ever been in the military, not just J-Soc, but in the military and who was mentioned by name in the book. And I think they FedEx these letters, at least I know one or two people who got them FedEx to them. saying, you know, it's basically, it's come to our understanding that your name is going to be featured in this book. I think they, I think what Socom had done was they'd gotten some friendly reporter probably in the Tampa area to,

to drop a, you know, a galley, a bound galley by. And so they went, they were able to get a head start on the book's publication. and they made it out like the threat to whoever they were sending the letter to was identity theft. Here are all the identity theft resources we can place at your disposal, you know. But then they got to sort of like the real reason they were sending out the letter I always felt, which was they basically said, on no account should, you know, should you discuss or confirm any information in this book, you know, with your family, with friends and so forth and so on. I mean, somewhere I have a copy of that letter, of course I do. And, but I should have looked it up before we started,

before we started streaming. The book is 439 pages and then there is an additional about 100 pages here of end notes and the index. I mean, it's a thoroughly researched book. And I'll tell you, Sergeant Major Mike Vining, who's been on this show before, told me this book is highly accurate. And if you got an endorsement from Sergeant Major Vining, I mean, that's about as good as it gets.

Well, I appreciate that. Yeah, I'm going to have to go back and rewatch that stream now just to make myself feel good. that episode Sean, what is your like what for people you know for the people who have like criticized

you know the so called classified nature of the book or that it's spilling you know secrets or the what is like your take what is your counter argument of that my counter argument is you know is sort of

multifold really or manifold one I actually reached out to very senior people in the sort of Socom and J-Soc world while I was in the fairly early stages of working on Relentless Strike. And I basically tried to get them to, you know, I said, look, I'm going to write this book. If you would like to help me, that would be great. And that would have given them, if they, that would have given those commands an opportunity to, to leverage some of the greater access they might have given me to individuals and to information. And even to things like, you know, predator feeds and stuff like that, you know. And they could have then tried to at least bargain for keeping, I mean, one of the things that, you know,

really upset them, supposedly, was the amount of names that are in the book. Now, I mean, at the time, I don't know whether this is still the rule, because I don't cover SOF on a day-to-day basis, but at the time that I wrote the book, the general rule for embedding with SOF was, this is a SOCOM rule. You couldn't name people under the rank of 05. Now, I think, and I, you know, this is my, this is my memory, but I mean, again, I haven't read through the book for a long time, that there isn't anybody, when the book came out, there was nobody under the rank of 05 who was still in the military, you know, in a J-Soc job and named in the book. But be that as it may.

It would have been, at least from my perspective, perfectly easy and reasonable for those senior figures to say, all right, well, you know, let's do this on a case-by-case basis. And I could come to them and say, okay, look, I'm, you know, I'm in the section of the book where I'm writing about the cross-border raids into Pakistan. And I would like to talk to this guy, this guy, and this guy. You know, I know, I want to talk about the raid that occurred on this date and the rate that occurred on that. And they could have said, tell you what, we'll make those individuals available.

But you can't use their last names or something like, you know. I would have been perfectly willing to engage. I mean, my hard rules are no false information. goes in the book and I try very hard in any time this sort of thing comes up to not use fake names. You know, I'm okay with initials or first names or, you know, if you have to, you just use the position, you know, the team leader or something like that. I mean, I think real names are the best. and I think if you're writing a history, you should always try to be as

as detailed and as granular as possible. So that was an opportunity that they basically spurned, which I thought was unfortunate. I mean, it was very respectful. It wasn't, these were not angry conversations, but they sort of had to sort of basically politely

decline. I think they felt like they were in a position where they could not and this is something we talked about before, you know, the culture and the, you know, but by making the sort of the first rule of J-Soc, you know, the Fight Club rule, you, the first rule of J-Soc is you can't talk about J-Soc. And making that a hard and fast rule and so forth and everybody signs non-disclosure agreements when they go into those units and so forth.

It's painted them into a corner where they've got very little, room to maneuver when a guy like me comes and says, look, I'm going to write this book and you can have some leverage and some or not. Sean, if you can indulge my minor rant, of which I have many, I'm going to try to keep this one brief. But when people talk about or when the command says you're not able to name anyone who's below the rank of 05 or 06, I think that also speaks to the military's class system or cast system. And what that's really about is they don't want NCOs taking credit for operations.

And they want colonels out front and generals out front taking credit for military successes. And they absolutely do not want a sergeant major, a master sergeant, first sergeant, or sergeant first class out there talking about operations because it is an officer that is supposed to take credit for those. And no, I mean, am I wrong? I'm not a mind reader, so I can't tell you why. I mean, I tended to, I suppose, think that it was more to do with the fact that once folks reached 05 level, they're not operational. They're not far less likely to be in any sort of like covered position or something. But when they're out of the military, they're more of a public figure at that. Yeah, yeah.

That argument starts to hold less weight, in my opinion. Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, I'll grant you that. I mean, there's some other things. I mean, one of the things that you ask for what, what Dave asked, what, you know, what, what is my counter argument to all of this? I mean, I also, you know, one of the ironies about them sort of getting so upset about the number of names in the book is what they don't know is how many. names I kept out of the book. Right. I mean, I kept a lot of names out, some because, you know, I'd maybe be talking to, you know, a source who was telling me something, but he'd be, he might be recounting a mission done by his men or some other men, and he would actually say,

I'm telling you this, but you've got to keep, you know, Sergeant Snuffy's name out, because because, you know, now he's gone to this other unit or whatever the case may be. And so, you know, I actually did keep a lot of stuff out. And any time that I was asked by a source to keep something out, you know, I normally did that. Because as I mentioned in part one of our conversations, you know, a lot of these sources were, were career special operators and career J-Soc operators in many cases. And so, you know, if I trust them to know what's really sensitive and what isn't. And if I've got a guy who spent, you know, 20 years of his life going on these missions

and describing one of those missions to me, it's not. not doesn't seem feasible to me that he doesn't care whether the you know the guys who are still in the unit live or die i mean that's that that's just not credible to me and you know like i said enough times people would say hey maybe don't put that in or don't put that location in or something i uh you know i i would i would do that um the book also you know i went through as as most non-fiction books do i think uh went through a thorough legal review um and a few things were sort of taken out then um as well so you know but you know the other part of of of the argument is you can't wage two huge wars in secret really you know you can't keep the main effort of the

war's secret i don't think that is dealing in good faith with the American people. And, you know, so that's why I decided to write the book. And, you know, look, a lot of folks wanted, not necessarily their individual stories told, but their organization stories told. You know, and the effort that had gone into, you know, grinding down al-Qaeda into Iraq into sort of basically a beaten organization

you know later to arise Phoenix like from the ashes as as as ISIS I suppose but nonetheless I mean the and some of the you know a lot of the missions in the early days of

of both of those wars and the stuff that didn't get covered as much in Horn of Africa and in Yemen and and you know the odd singleton mission that people had never written about. All of that, you know, I knew there were great stories there,

and, you know, I, I, you know, and enough of the JSON community also wanted those stories told. Right, right. The book, you know, resulted. And, you know, I remember talking to a, and I may have, if I'm repeating myself from part one, which was back in November, I apologize. But I mean, I remember talking to a retired special operations colonel, sort of about this, you know, about this subject that we're talking about now. And he said, you know, Sean, they'll hate you now.

this was not long after the book had come out and he said, and then in 20 years' time, your book will be the only proof that they have that they did what they did. Right. You know, that's true. So, so that's... Do we have any viewer questions for Sean?

Well, David A, thank you very much for the very generous nation, but he didn't ask a question. No, we don't. Okay. I don't think so. What were some of the big revelations for you personally, Sean, that came out of your research for this book? I mean, there's a lot of, and I could self-indulgently dive into this thing, chapter by chapter. But what were some of the big revelations for you as you were writing Relentless Strike? A ton of them. I mean, I can, I'm, if you'll end up,

tells me, I have a, you know, I have a memo that I pulled out of a draw like half an hour before we went on air, and I should have been memorizing it over the previous 48 hours. But, I mean, it's, this is a memo that is basically what I consider to be all of the, all of the scoops. And each, each bullet, each bullet is a scoop. And it's, you know, it's like a six-page memo. But, you know, I've got, I think a lot of, just as an example, I think it had the most detailed description up to that point in time of Seal Team 6's Black Squadron, you know, which specialized in sort of advanced force operations and,

undercover reconnaissance and surveillance. There's some stuff about the SDV teams leaving sensors on the Somalian coast, as I recall. Yeah, although that's true. I'm trying to think if that was in Relentless Strike. It was definitely in the six-part series in military times about the secret war in the Horn of Africa. but I mean I wouldn't have included that as a scoop because I'd already published it. It was interesting how much tension there was at different times between different figures in J-Soc. Admiral McRaven, you know, who commanded the J-Soc after McChrystal.

I think certainly had some tensions with some of the SEAL Team 6 folks. And that certainly exhibited itself in the run-up to the Bin Laden raid. I'll just hit a few of these at random. It might give the reader some idea. I mean, there are new details of SEAL Team 6's free fall parachuting expertise, including the revelation that for years, Team 6 kept a unit on standby in Afghanistan, ready to do a high altitude, high opening parachute jump across the border into Pakistan in the event that JASOC received actionable intelligence on Bin Laden's location. And there were some in Team 6 who thought once he was identified in a Batabad that that option still should have been chosen rather than the stealth helicopters as the infill technique. The revelation that US intelligence tracked an unknown caller trying to reach a mobile phone in the Bin Laden compound as the helicopters bearing the Team 6 operators approached. There's a whole chapter in there about Task Force Orange guys doing ops in Syria.

That was very interesting. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I had no idea about that before I started researching the book. And, you know, Task Force Orange, this sort of, you know, organization, army organization that combines sort of special forces and human intelligence and technical intelligence. basically doing incredibly daring undercover missions in Syria at the height of the Iraq war, basically trying to track the foreign fighter flows from through Syria and into Iraq, you know, to include, you know, breaking into safe houses and, you know, copying hard drives and then, you know, getting out without anybody knowing they were there and stuff of all kinds of clever

disguises that they would use and so forth. There's a lot of, there's a lot of detail in that. There's a lot of detail about Task Force oranges focus on the Iran target. I mean, they've basically been the organization that J-Soc has asked to focus on the, on the Iran target, not just Iran the country, but the sort of what they, you know, they call countering Malign Iranian. There's a whole chapter in here, is I, if I recall correctly, Sean, about J-Soc and the frustration in targeting Shia militia or Iran-sponsored Shia militia in Iraq during the heyday of the war. Yes, yep. And the Xbox device, which was a device developed by, mostly by Delta. My understanding, you know, I'm again recalling this from memory was that

Team 6 was involved in the early stages, but actually didn't want to, uh, didn't want to get involved operationally with it. Um, uh, this was a, a device. Um, that they were basically reverse engineered IEDs. Um, and, uh, that used, uh, that used, local components or would be made to look like they were locally made IEDs by some local actor in Iraq. But they were, Delta used them to basically kill the facilitators in Iraq of the Iranian, the, the Iranian Quds Force EFP IEDs that were being brought in. These were the very, very lethal IEDs that used copper-shaped charges that Iran sort of smuggled into Iraq and then used to kill hundreds of U.S. soldiers.

And Delta went after the folks in Iraq who were sort of key nodes in that chain. And it was a very, again, a series of daring missions because there were very tight rules about who could, you know, about collateral damage really. You know, I mean, they didn't, I mean, I'm assuming you didn't want to kill the guy when he's driving his kids to school. So they had to sort of develop a pattern of life, and they had to gain access to the vehicle somehow, often because they were usually bombs in vehicles. And then, you know, when the guy gets into his vehicle to go pick up the groceries and he's away from everybody else, you know, the headrest of his seat explodes. So these were deniable assassination devices, essentially. Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah.

So that, that was, you know, that was one of the, I remember the New York Post did a big sort of takeout on that when the book came out. So, I mean, that was, I, somebody else told me, I mean, you know, this is an almost hearsay. So I sort of hesitate to sort of say this stuff. But I remember another reporter telling me that they had, that they had been talking to a public.

affairs officer in the Pentagon and said, you know, I want to talk to you about something in relentless strike and the PAO was like not the Xbox devices. And, you know, the report was like, yes. And sort of the PAO was like, you know, so, you know, yeah. I mean, look, there's, I, I'm, I'm not a natural self-promoter, but there's a ton of that sort of. of stuff in the book. I mean, I mean, I took every single thing that I could find out that I thought was interesting and relevant and squeezed it onto the pages of that. And it's not just the war on terror either. I mean, it starts off with Operation Eagle Claw in Iran and goes through the whole history of how SEAL Team 6 and Delta Force were stood up and then J-Soc, the command itself,

was stood up. So it's historical. It's not just not just the war on terror. Yeah, no, it's a full history of the, of the, of, of, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the organization, you know, starting with the very meetings in the Pentagon that, that, that, that, that created J-SOC, you know, and the bureaucratic sort of slight of hand that had to happen, even, you know, to, to basically ram it down the, the throats of most of the joint chiefs who were virulently opposed to creating a permanent, you know, elite special ops task force like that. Right. So yeah, but I mean, if, you know, I, I try to treat in as much detail as I

could, you know, every major theater that J-Soc was involved in, especially in the post-9-11 era. So, you know, Horn of Africa, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and so forth. We have a question from Righteous Name. Can Sean talk tell more about the interagency support activity, not TFO, and their short-lived, violent life that he briefly mentions in his book? It's alleged they were more secretive than Delta. Yeah, this is my great fear. Somebody's going to ask me something, and I'm, like, slightly confused about which organization that I'm going to look.

So it's like, yeah, I looked it up. It's only like a page and a half, but it's about the guys living in the safe houses out on the economy. Yes. Yep, yep. And doing, like, cyber type stuff, I think, as well. Yep, yep, the internet cafes and whatnot. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I mean, look, the short answer is, I think was the question, can I say anything more about it? And I think the short answer is no, because every single thing that I was able to find out about that organization is in that book. Right, and it's a page and a half, right. Yeah, I mean, there's, there's, I do find this, I mean, I wish that this were true,

but I'm quite frequently, well, sometimes asked by people, you know, people say to me, I'd love to know the rest of the story. I'm sure that's just the tip of the iceberg. I'm like, no, that's the iceberg. That's it. You know, that's there's no, you know, I wasn't like, oh, there's all this juicy detail I'm just not going to put in the book. Right.

No, all the juicy detail that I have is in the book, you know. And if it's not in the book, then I didn't trust it. I mean, one of the interesting things that you find in, or, you know, or I couldn't justify it, you know, maybe I trusted the person that told me, but I couldn't justify it if it was sort of single-sourced and otherwise not backed up by anything, you know. I mean, one of the things that that I found in reporting this book, and even the period after it when people would come up to talk to me and tell me about stuff, is the number of missions that I have been told about, three or four incredible daring missions

that one person has told me about and absolutely nobody else has ever heard of or can confirm. and and in addition, a number of people say, that could not have happened. I would have been in the chain of command. I would have known about it. Or we never did missions that way back then. I mean, I can think of three or four crazy. And they've never come out in anybody else's writing or reporting that I'm aware of. And, you know, so, I mean, I keep them in my hip pocket.

And occasionally if I run into somebody that I think might know about it, I'm like, hey, did this mission ever happen while you were, you know, the commander or you were the ambassador or whatever the case might be? And I've never been able to confirm them. Sean, I would love to dive a little bit deeper into that. subject because I think it's really interesting from a national security standpoint, but also like journalistically, it's interesting to explore. Exactly as you said that there's a such thing as, you know, unacknowledged special access programs where the commander of the unit may not necessarily be read onto that program

that one of his subordinates is working on and has been assigned to. And I have certainly had, you know, somewhat similar experiences where you will get a whiff of a certain program or a certain mission or something that happened. And everyone else in the command is like, what? That didn't happen. Or even different squadrons in a J-Soc unit or different troops in a J-Soc unit. Unless they got together and had beers together in between deployments and talked about it, they might not necessarily know that that op ever went down. Oh, yeah.

Which is very interesting. And I've tried to explain on this live stream and this podcast in the past. Like, everyone talks about how, like, there's tier two and tier one and all this stuff. But in reality, there's all these little tiers, smaller tiers above that with these little intel programs where like only two or three people are even read on to them. Yeah. No, I think that's right. And, you know, that is one of the problems. I mean, the other problem is, in addition to being, to the dynamic you just described,

there are also bullshit artists. And so you've got to be careful that somebody, especially if you don't know them well, is not just trying to make a fool out of you. So I'm trying to impress you because. Well, yeah. Yeah. And there are two sides of that too, because Jack and I run into this also just in terms of people reaching out to us saying, hey, I did this or you should have me on. And then we have to go to our networks and say, hey, have you ever heard of this person?

Then they have to go to the networks go, hey, you know, because. And so there are those people who are posers. And I'm sure you've run into a lot of those people who have tried to claim this. sort of black ops you know background their stuff was so secret that nobody knows about it and then there are also the guys who no shit did

stuff but for whatever reason the stuff they did wasn't enough and so then they want to further embellish you know embellish a little bit more like maybe added an additional silver star to the resume or whatever you know and it's always

it's always hard to trade in this in this you know, you know, in this world. Yeah, no, I mean,

that's, that's, that's absolutely right. And I, I, I, I, I,

I, I, I, don't think I've run into too many of, of, of, of,

of the latter category. I mean, and the other dynamic, of course, to get it back to sort of

more sort of like nuts and bolts stuff is, you know, some of these would be probably title 50 missions,

you know, maybe can, conducted in conjunction with central intelligence, agency, for instance. And so, you know, then you're not even talking about necessarily a military chain of command, even being read in on it. It's kind of nuts when you think that there are

certain operations that maybe only 35 people in the entire world are even aware of. Yeah, I mean, I think for a long time, and I don't want to miss speak here because it's a long time since I thought about this, but the stealth helicopter program in, you know, was basically kept secret from a lot of the 160th people. And I think, I think, and I'm prepared for somebody to tell me I'm completely wrong. I think sometimes certain, at least incoming commanders didn't know about it. It was sort of left dormant for a while. I think I describe in the book that, you know, they they moved those helicopters down to, you know, the southwestern deserts and kept them there. And, you know, they weren't flying around Kentucky.

And, you know, so that would be one of those, you know, one of those programs where you've got a few guys down in, down in, you know, Nevada or whatever who are flying these. helicopters ostensibly belonging to a unit that most people in the unit don't even know those guys are down um so there's a i don't know if you guys saw it but there is a video that popped up online and it was a uh like a what what is it what's a hip the russian aircraft like it m i am i eight am i and but this was like a gangster-ass m i that was like souped up and it made an emergency landing in like some guys cornfield in Virginia and like all these like dudes were in 511 511 pants get off and they fix the helicopter and take off but this was like a gangster ass badass MI8 that landed with all this like

high speed sensor arrays on it and everything it was like holy shit it's that you can find it on YouTube if you guys go out there and look for it it's pretty cool yeah yeah I and I mean, that was probably an agency. Or, I mean, I would argue possibly an Echo Squadron. Yeah, possibly, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, that's occasionally happened with Echo Squadron, where they've had to, you know, they've had a Echo Squadron for,

is Delta's Aviation Squadron, but it's based out of Fort Eustace, Virginia. At least it was last time I checked. and which is of course conveniently close to Camp Peary, aka the farm, the CIA's training facility. But they've had on numerous occasions that I've heard about after the fact, you know, had to put down various, supped up birds on sort of freeways or side roads and so forth. Well, we saw it this week where a MH-60 had to be put down in Itlib, Syria, after taking service to airfire, and then after the crew was crossloaded, blowing up with an airstrike. So, yeah, it just happened this week. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure.

Every account that I, well, I watched all of the press conferences on that, and it seems like there's some differences of opinion that. The official line is that that helicopter, that MH60 did not take hostile fire, or at least was not, the thing that went wrong with it that forced it to land was not sort of a hostile fire-related damage, that it was some mechanical problem. Have you heard different? Yeah, when I spoke to my... sources on it. They said they did take surface air fire and suffered mechanical

malfunctions and had to land. As a result of the surface to air fire. I mean, I think they may not even know. Yeah. Because they had to land in the night and crossload and then blow the aircraft up.

So I don't want to say for a fact, but I was told that yes, they did take some ground fire. Sean, just have curiosity, because you said you had an experienced really the latter, you know, people like who had accomplished things fabricating more. I mean, to my knowledge. Fair enough.

How many like in your writing, whether it's with relentless strike or with your articles, how many posers like just total absolute fakes have you had to deal with and fair it out? To my knowledge, and I mean there may be some obvious ones that I'm just forgetting. I can't think of any. Yeah. I mean, one of the benefits of having, you know, when I started reporting Relentless Strike, I'd been at Army Times for almost 22 years. Yeah.

So, I mean, I sort of knew a lot of who was who. Right. You know, and you can at least cross-reference to a certain degree. And the digital world has been. made that a bit easier as well. Sure. I mean, if somebody comes in and they tell you their, you know, retired master sergeant Joe Schmoe and there's absolutely, you know, except that it wouldn't be a name as common as Joe Schmo. And there's, you can't find that name anywhere on the web at all. You know, and then you, you know, then you go to some other people who ought to know,

Sergeant Joe Schmoe and they've never heard of him. You don't even have to say that you've talked to this guy. You can just say, oh, wasn't that a mission with Master Sergeant Joe Schmo? And they're like, who never heard of him? I mean, that's... Yeah, yeah. You know, I think it's just like anything else. The digital world is making it harder and harder to hide.

Yeah. I mean, I'm still amazed that people are trying to do any of the stolen valor stuff now. I am too, and yet they still do. We definitely had that experience where Dave and I have reached into the deepest, darkest recesses of the military and the intelligence community. And people are like, what? No one in this office has ever heard of that guy. Yeah. What are you talking about?

Yeah. And a lot of times dealing with these people, like they'll be really squirly about where they were or what they did. And it's like, like, there's probably, between the two of us, there's probably nothing. that you can say that we haven't had some whiff of, you know, or at least our contacts. It's weird. I don't know how people still think they can get away with that stuff. It's so bizarre. And interesting you mentioning the media, you know, digital media, because T. Barr just asked a question,

how has the prevalence of real-time social media, like we say in Syria this week, change reporting on the military and soft? And he said he loved the book. Yeah, oh, thank you. And yeah, I mean, it's really changed it. I mean, it's changed journalism in many ways, which I can get to in a moment. In terms of covering soft, well, certainly that sort of operation,

if you're doing any operation now in a, not even a first world country, just a second world country, or an urban area, which in most developing countries are usually the most connected parts of those countries, you're going to, you can expect to have your mission tweeted out and Instagrammed out and so forth, potentially in real time. I mean, the first time we saw that was the bin Laden made. and you know that's now you know more than a decade ago again this week we saw it in itlib yes yep and you know i mean it's there was a raid in in in to syria that uh i wrote about trying to think

what year it was maybe 2008 i can't um that's in relentless strike where there were some photographs taken and eventually put on the web of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment birds, the Nightstalkers flying to or from the mission. And that was a huge deal. And oh my God, they captured the Night Stalkers, you know, on a real world operation. And, you know, now you, you know, you can go online and find film of DAPs, firing rockets, you know, in any number of places in real world missions, if, you know, if you look hard enough, I think. So, I mean, that's an obvious change is that there's, in a way that helps journalism, because you've got something to look at and ask questions about, and you can put a a time to something maybe if there's a timestamp on it and so forth. Of course, I mean, this is a slight aside, but increasingly now, any visual media like

that, we're about to enter a period where you can't trust what your eyes are seeing anymore, you know, because of, you know, so-called deep fake technology and so forth. I'm sure if you wanted to hook up a, you know, if you wanted to make a video of the 160th assaulting the Empire State Building, you could probably do that and somebody who isn't an expert in that technology wouldn't be able to tell you that it's fate. Right. So, you know, that's one change. I think another change, and I'm not really.

covering soft as I've said as much as I used to is there's so many people with a soft background who are now online. And so again, this is sort of like, wow, I wish Twitter was as big of a deal back in 2011. I mean, it was in existence, but you go through Twitter. Now, I'm following all these sorts of people that I would have loved to just, you know, gotten in touch with and said, hey, look, can I fly out to your neck of the woods and sit down with you for an afternoon and just talk to you on background about what you did or what your unit did or whatever? And some of those people would say no and some of them would say yes. Right.

And so that's that's another difference. I mean, I can guarantee you that there are, you know, a lot of the reporters who are doing now what I used to do for, for Army times and for other publications. are doing that. I'm getting sources from Twitter. They're getting sources. I mean, LinkedIn is an incredible resource. You know, I mean, that's just, it just blows my mind.

How good of a resource LinkedIn. It blows my mind even hosting this podcast that, and I think it's a healthy thing and a good thing that we have these conversations, but it is a somewhat incredible amount of openness, even from people who served in the CIA, J-Sox special operations, highly sensitive positions that they're able to come on a show like this and speak relatively openly, okay?

They can't tell you everything. It's not quite open kimono, but they can tell you quite a bit. And you would never see that. I mean, certainly you would not see that in authoritarian countries, but you wouldn't even see that. see that in a country like the UK, France, Germany.

You wouldn't even see it in countries like that. No, no, no, you're absolutely right. I mean, one of the, you know, one of the great differences between, you know, the United States and the United Kingdom is the United Kingdom has an official secrets act. We have a First Amendment. Right. Right. And so, yeah, I mean, that's the other. thing. I mean, we touched on this a bit earlier in the

broadcast, but the proliferation of of special ops oriented podcasts and sort of YouTube shows and so forth, of which yours is obviously

the best, right? I agree. Granted, I agree. But there are quite a few out there now, and intelligence focused ones. I mean, everything from, you know, I mean, I listen very carefully often to Michael Morrell's podcast and stuff. I mean, there are, there are little diamonds. Sometimes, you know, even when people are trying to be, you know, or are being very secret, there are little diamonds in

there that, you know, may not even be classified information. They're just interesting nuggets of information. And, you know, you can use them to, build the jigsaw, you know, to create the picture that you're, you know, you're trying to create to put the jigsaw together. I thought it's safe to be drinking whiskey. I figure we must be in the last hour. We are. We won't keep you too much more.

We can get as shitty as we want at this point in time. Only true believers are listening. That's right. Only the hardcore is left at this point. And listen, Sean, it's just between you, me, Dave, and the entire internet. Right. You know. Right.

It's a close circle. Just between us. Just between us girls. Brad Ork, thank you very much. He says, any difference found in your research of human collection capabilities that focuses on between like Orange and Cag and Dev Group? Did you find big differences? No, but that's probably because I probably didn't go deep enough to disenfranchise.

discover those differences. And of course, if you're talking to, nobody ever says, or very rarely do they say, yeah, our unit's the worst. Right. You know, I don't, you know, and so I, you know, what I make clear in the book, and of course, I, I suspect this is only, that this trend has only continued in, in the meantime, is that, you know, as the war on terror, you know, when, on and on that the special mission units, particularly Delta and Team 6, each basically developed their own AFO capability. In Delta, it grew out of operational support troop OST that was a relative handful of people, and then it just sort of became much larger in. In CL Team 6, they created Black Squadron. You know, in Delta, operational support, it became a squadron. I mean, it changed names a couple of times.

They actually changed letter, the lettering that they gave that squadron changed at least once. But I think it was G Squadron for a while. But, and, you know, I mean, I was quite surprised when I wrote the book. I mean, there's a lot of stuff I found out that surprised me, but how hard Team 6 had gone after that mission with sort of all kinds of cover apparatuses, you know, covered platforms being set up, you know, intelligence platforms and so forth.

And, you know, ocean-going craft and so forth. I mean, that was surprising to me. I thought that would be more down the CIA's sort of line of work. And of course, as J.S.K.'s capabilities are doing this had expanded, that certainly raises the question of who does what, not just internal to JSOC, because you still had Task Force Orange that was sort of supposed. to do a lot of that work. And you have the CIA that is supposed to do it for the nation, if you're like.

And so, I guess the official answer to these questions is always, oh, there's more than enough work to go around. You've probably heard some variation of that yourself. But the CIA is usually quite protective of, of its mission set and of its reputation as the premier human intelligence organization in the United States government. And so, you know, I'd be surprised if there, you know, wasn't some friction about the burgeoning capabilities that, you know, J-Soc has sort of nourished. I think that it's interesting that this is going back to 1980 with Eagle Claw, of course, that the CIA specializes in gathering more strategic intelligence and not necessarily the kind of tactical intelligence that JSOC needs.

However, I think it's very interesting when you start talking to people, how often J-SAC operators are working under Title 50 CIA authorities to go and do operations. Yeah, I mean, I think I mentioned in the book that by sort of the middle of the second decade of this century, someone told me that there were more undercover, more individuals, more covered individuals in the military than in CIA. Maybe. which kind of really surprised me but I mean it was told to me like as a fact

not like I kind of think this so I mean I think I think that's I think the questioner was getting at an important topic I I couldn't I I try very hard also I mean I don't have an opinion on the answer to that. But even if I did, I try very hard not to, you know, get into the, yeah, well, and get into the who's better at this than that, you know, who are the better pilots, this units or that units? Who are the better operators, you know, who are the, you know, who are the, who are the better snipers?

Is it Delta's snipers or Team Sixth? I mean, you know, that's. All you do is confirm some people's prejudices, piss some other people off, and you probably, if you're me, you probably don't have the, you know, the basis to express a solid opinion on it. Right. Yeah. And it's like you're saying every unit now has become like Walmart. Like they all want to offer the same capabilities because. Oh, yeah.

That's a budgeting issue. There's money in it, you know, like. And, and also. You know, when something happens and it happens because you didn't get the information that you had or you had the information and the target didn't get executed correctly or whatever else, like, you know, you want to say, well, we're going to correct that by making up for that deficiency by creating this element. Yeah. You know, so it's all going to be in-house. Like, we trust our guys. Creating an army within an army.

Exactly. And I mean, the other, the unit we didn't mention, of course, is the Rangers and the Ranger, you know, reconnaissance company that sort of really grew over this period of time as well. And I wonder if another factor in this was the, you know, the decision to assign each major theater in the GWAT to one of the J-SOC component units. So if you're giving the Rangers, Afghanistan, as has happened,

and you're giving Team 6, Horn of Africa and Yemen, you're giving Delta, the sort of the Iraq, Syria, theater, you're giving, you know, Orange, the Iran, counter-maline Iranian influence target set. It seems to me it's more natural then if I'm, if I'm the Ranger regiment commander and, and me and my deputy commander are swapping out every six months or whatever it is in Afghanistan. And I want some kind of, you know, organic intelligence capability in my theater. And Delta's not going to give me their best guys, because that, or gals, as the case may be.

Because they're consumed in Syria and Iraq and fighting ISIS as, as, as, as. they are now. I mean, so I can see why people and, you know, they probably have to ask very nicely for the CIA to do something. And as, and as you were mentioning earlier, CIA, more specializes in strategic intelligence than, you know, which way does the door open, you know, in this way or that way to blow, you know, if we want to, you know, if we want to, you know, if we want to storm that, that compound. Right. So, you know, I think that's another factor.

Yeah. Sean, I'm going to, I want to ask you about what's coming up next from you, but I am going to take a moment here to shamelessly self-promote because, and it's not completely unrelated to what we've been talking about today. I had an article come out on Yahoo News today. The title is a clandestine army operative concealed its mental health. health problems until it was too late, is the army to blame. It's up on Yahoo today. It's about a guy who served in a clandestine army unit, and he sadly took his own life. His name was Michael Frody

and it examines the issue of mental health and how do we get better mental health care to clandestine personnel in the military and, you know, some of the unique issues that affect them. I read that article and I endorse it and I and I would tell you if you are the anybody listening or watching that you should you should definitely go and read that article because I mean it told me a lot of stuff that I didn't know a lot of interesting facts not just on the mental health angle but but on other things as well so yeah it's that that was a fascinating article yeah thank you Sean And I hope it gets around and I hope it, you know, elicits some change, you know, maybe in the military and how they go about monitoring mental health and taking care of some of these guys because there are some pretty serious issues.

But for you, Sean, what is the next step in Sean Naylor's career? Where are you heading next? What are you working on now? I'm, so I'm, I'm trying to think how much I want to say. I'm not, so I, first of all, I'm, I'm not, you know, working on some great big secret, uh, come on, come on, come on something. I'm, I'm, um, I have a few ideas about things that I think that I'm interested in and I generally figure that if I'm interested in something, some, some reasonable number of other people would be interested in them, in them too. And I'm intrigued by the number of online platforms that are now out there like substack, Ghost is another one. That basically for somebody who basically feels like it's a small,

personal triumph when I successfully change a light bulb that make putting stuff online, you know, apparently I haven't tried them yet, but you know, apparently, you know, very easy and allow you to sell your material online easily as well. And I have a couple of projects in mind that I think, you know, that I'm pretty sure I can report out and put online that, that are not, they're not, they maybe wouldn't be huge selling books. Maybe they would, I don't know, but that they, but they might be if you, you know, if you set the price, or as people in business say, the price point at the, at the right level, you might be able to make it, you know, I might be able to make it worth my while to spend

several months reporting them and, and then putting out a series of articles on the web and charging people to read them basically. You know, one of them is, is, one of those ideas is a soft related specifically. One is more, it's more got to do with the history of the Afghan conflict and maybe a different way of, a different perspective, a different way of looking at it. You know, I'll say this, I'm, you can't see here, but I'm sort of surrounded by by the autobiographies of just about every principal and other senior figure from the Bush administration's national security team that has that have that have written their stories the George W. Bush National Security team as I'm sort of mining those for material at the moment.

you know, it's a slightly challenging time to be a sort of an an investigative reporter in national security because I like to think I do most of my best work in person-to-person meetings and, you know, for a long time, I haven't been particularly comfortable doing person-to-person meetings, let alone, you know, the people that I want to meet. I mean, it's hard enough to break down all the barriers that we've been talking about, you know, in this episode and the previous one, without having people think,

not only do I want to be talking to this reporter, but do I want to be talking to this reporter and maybe he's going to give me a fatal illness? And so, you know, hopefully we can all emerge blinking into the sunlight again in the not too distant future and I can, you know, get back to that sort of reporting. sort of reporting. But in the meantime, I'm fortunate that I have a lot of paper to go through. And I'm intrigued to see if this works, but if it doesn't, I'll try and do something else.

I mean, there are certain books that I know would sell well, but one of the reasons I'd sell well is that be really, really hard to report and they might be impossible to report or somebody else might be reporting them already. And so, you know, I'm trying to think of what, you know, what can I do in the art of the possible. Is this a little bit like a return to your roots from episode one when you used to publish a zine on rock and roll music? I don't think, I don't think It's going to be quite like that. Not so punk rock. I mean, I have these ideas and I'm not sure.

You know, I think they would work as a series of long form articles. I think I could write them as books. I'm just not sure that the market for the books as amongst publishers would be there so much. you know i mean just to throw some numbers out you know i mean if a publisher may only be willing to pay i mean a book takes longer to write and if a publisher wants to pay you good money for that maybe you have to sell 60 80 100 000 books to make it worth his while to make to pay you that money or her while. On the other hand, if you can write a series of articles that a certain subset of folks will find interesting, and 10,000 of them will pay 10 bucks to read that series of articles, I mean, I'm throwing numbers out here at random, right?

then you can make a decent amount of money from fewer readers. And you're charging them a lot less than they would have to pay for the hardcover book as well. So, I mean, I'm playing with these ideas, but I am a babe in the woods in that world. So, you know, I might be, you know, talking out of my, you know, fourth point of contact. And, you know, we'll have to see. But, I mean, these projects are sort of in their infancy at the moment anyway. I will definitely let you know if and when they come to fruition and plead with you to put me back on the team house to... There will never be a reason to plead.

We would gladly do it any time. Do it again. Guys, out there, please go out and pick yourself. yourself up a copy of Relentless Strike. And also not a good day to die. Yeah, I'm not BSing anyone out there. Like, if you watch this podcast, it's kind of stupid that you have not read this book. Like, it's kind of.

Jack's saying you're all idiots if you haven't read it. I'm saying it's necessary. It's part of the required reading requirements for this class, right? Okay. You'll enjoy it, is what Jack's saying. Like, if you enjoy the show, if you enjoy the history of, you know, these organizations and these people. If you like this show, you'll like the book.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Next episode, we're going to have a former Australian diplomat on the show who had some pretty significant crossover with their soft and OGA component telling some fairly interesting stories. So that's going to be next Friday. We have two more questions real quick. Delta Zulu, thank you very much. Any insight in the exercises conducted by J-Soc on U.S. oil, such as Jackal Cave? Ooh, spicy.

Well, I mean, I describe in the book how J-Soc for years, and I presume this is still the case, but I don't know how to, a quarterly series of exercises that they call the joint readiness exercises. And they could take place anywhere in the world, you know, but some of them might take place in, or parts of them might take place in the United States. And, I mean, they became a little bit controversial in the immediate. get post-911 era because there were folks, particularly folks in Delta who felt that they, that those exercises were starting to basically be the organizing function for J-Soc as opposed to something to test whether or not they could actually do what they, you know,

were being, you know, what their resondetra was, whether they could do the missions that that the National Command Authority needed them to do, that they became sort of the be-all and end-all. And there were some people who thought that in the immediate wake of 9-11, after spending a month or two conducting some operations in Afghanistan, that the J-Soc commander at the time was sort of eager to pull everyone back to the States to get back on the JRX schedule.

And so that's so there's certainly you know that those sorts of missions have to be have to be exercised at to some level. And the smaller, I'm not exactly sure, you know, which training events that the The questioner was referring to, but I mean, you often see now, I mean, there are websites that cover these things in some detail. Yeah, I'll give a shout out to the drive that does a lot of it. The 160th and parts of J-Soc will often train in urban environments in the United States. And there'll be major American cities where they'll sort of put out a little notice 24 hours ahead of time that, hey, there's going to be some training in the dockyards by the military tomorrow night. If you hear a lot of explosions, don't be, don't be alarmed. It's called RUT or realistic urban training.

Yeah. And I've heard some funny stories about that, about how they'll put out the notice and they'll have like the mayor. Sometimes it'll be, you know, people are familiar that these training exercises happen in New York, L.A., Atlanta, etc. Sometimes they happen in like small town rural America. And I heard some pretty funny stories about how like the mayor will be on board. But then after the locals complain about having all these blacklocks and Chinooks flying over their neighborhoods at night, there will actually be like town board hearings. And some squadron commander from Delta will have to show up in his class A uniform and like explain to the man. Really? And like rural Virginia, like, yes, ma'am, yes, sir. I'm so sorry that our helicopters made so much noise and flipped over that rooftop at the scaffolding at this work site and, you know, and have to like try to make amends.

Yeah, no, I can believe it. And so, you know, I, you do see, I mean, I mean, you get this with some of the, the non-JOC special. training as well, a lot of, you know, paranoid conspiracy theorizing about the black helicopters and so forth. But, but no, I mean, J-Soc does a lot of training. It does a lot of training in, you know, in the desert southwest, you know, that they have to train down in some of the missile silos in Utah with sort of going after deep, hardened, you know, underground buried targets and so forth. So, yeah, there's, there is a lot of training. I don't know whether the question or read the book, but I mean, I go into some of this in some detail. Right. So in the book. And it's interesting because, you know, for civilians, you know, who,

are unfamiliar with anything J-Sock or Special Operations-oriented, if you see those black helicopters, like, I don't, I don't blame them for thinking, oh, there's something. Spooky. Yeah, there's something really weird going on and sort of extrapolating from that. And, you know, it's like, oh, there's something. Like, our government is doing something. But it's kind of, it's.

I don't want to say mundane, but 13. Yeah. Yeah. And then Jake Baker, thank you very much. He has two questions. One, are the majority of low-vis non-uniform ops title 50 in your experience? And two, what functions do you see JREG, Orange playing in great power competition? So the first question is, I don't know. I mean, Jack might know at this point. I mean, I haven't asked that question recently. I try not to get out ahead of my skis. If I don't know something, I just don't know. I would suspect not. I would suspect most of them fall under operational preparation of the battlefield or of the environment, which is legally considered, rightly or wrongly, a traditional military activity.

And the Defense Department has stretched, that definition of traditional military activity as far as it can possibly stretch to to say that sending somebody in undercover to country X to rent a warehouse and a fleet of vehicles you know for use in an operation under you know completely undercover is you know is operational of the environment and that is a traditional military activity. So my guess is that they're not, but I don't know the answer. I don't know whether either of you guys have an opinion or any, you know, recent knowledge on that. Yeah, I mean, I would not necessarily want to speculate either.

I just, I think you're right. A lot of it falls under OPE. Some of it falls under official cover, where the, they're in uniform but embedded with a conventional or special operations unit. So they look like everybody else who's out there in the battle space. And then others are, yeah, plain clothes, low visibility. So, yeah, all of the above, I guess. And what was the second part of the question or the second question?

What function do you see Jerry G slash Orange playing in great power competition? what was the first part orange and who jr eg maybe he means jac i don't know i'm not sure um well i i think i think they're going to do the same sort of stuff basically that they've

that they've always done which is uh close in reconnaissance and especially the sort of signals intelligence stuff. I mean, I have a story in the, it's not great power conflict, but it's the sort of thing that that JSOC has often done. I mean, it wasn't, it actually, to my knowledge,

wasn't an orange operation. It was a Delta guy, but basically doing an NSA mission where they drove a, this was before the invasion of Iraq, and they drove a like an SUV into Iraq, obviously under cover that was packed with hidden sensor gear. And they sort of parked it in downtown Baghdad near, I don't know, the Ministry of Defense or something like that. I think I'm a bit more specific in the book. I just haven't thought about it for many years. but they you know that that sort of thing could potentially be done in ukraine in in russia in you know in in china or more likely in in third countries with which the united states and

china or russia are you know are are in competition um so maybe you're trying to to keep tabs on the Wagner group, the Russian mercenary group in Africa. And you're running some undercover mission to put some signals intelligence gear close to their headquarters. I mean, those would be my thoughts. Jay Sock is an extremely powerful bureaucracy in the military now. And bureaucracies don't like to give up power and influence. And so I would imagine that CESOC has been sort of for several years looking at the way the wind was blowing for furiously figuring out what arguments it was going to make to policymakers to prove. prove its relevance in great power competition.

I very much doubt that we're going to sort of hear about units being disbanded. I mean, the J-Soc Intelligence Brigade is a huge organization. Now I doubt that's going to go away. So I would imagine, frankly, that one area that J-Soc, you know, and people had told me this years ago to keep an eye on, The one area that J-Soc will probably try to expand into and probably has already been trying to expand into is cyber. So, you know, that's, you know,

what's that space, if you like. Yeah. And then I think we had one last question that just came in. All right. One more. And this is, oh, it's just Jake saying, I understand ISA old name and Jerry G, new unit name for TFO. Thank you.

So, ma'am. Oh, okay. So, Sean, thank you so much for joining us tonight and spending your Saturday evening with us and answering all these questions and humoring us with these inquiries. Again, guys, go pick up relentless strike if you haven't already. And also not a good day to die. Like, both of them are phenomenal. I appreciate that.

Thank you. Yeah. And thanks for having me on. and thanks to everybody who's either spent their Saturday night with us or, you know, maybe is going to listen to us on the car on a long car drive sometime in the next week or two. That's right. Get those long car drives on.

Yeah, and I look forward to seeing what you have coming next, Sean, and, you know, please stay in touch. And, you know, I hope we can have you on again sometime when, you know, your next work comes out. We have some more to talk about. Okay, yeah, I hope so too. All right. All right, guys.

So I'll see all of you on Friday. speaking with our next gets about some interesting stuff from Australia. Put it that way. We're going to put another shrimp on the bobby. Yeah.

Yeah, that's not my fine. Anyway, thanks guys. All right.