The Team House - Ron Moeller Returns! Reflections from a CIA Para-Military Operations Officer, Ep. 32

Episode Date: March 7, 2020

Former CIA Para-Military Operations Officer Ron Moeller returns to discuss deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. This is our second interview with Ron, the first can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2RYJ... Support the stream on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/m/TheTeamHouse SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links): https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team..Become 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. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Team House, the Ron Mueller returns episode. Ron is our guest. I'm Jack Murphy. This is my co-host, Dave Park. Ron is joining us for the second episode. He has turned out to be a fan favorite. You're the VIP of the show. I think our most watched episode thus far.

And I can understand why the first one we did was fascinating. Ron served in the CIA as a paramilitary operations officer for many years, spent a lot of time in Air Branch, spent a lot of time deployed to Iraq, to Afghanistan, spent some time in the Philippines. and we really only scratched the surface I felt like in the last episode. So I asked Ron if he would come back again. I think some of the viewers were also very keen to see him come back for a second episode. So that's why we're here tonight. And we're going to talk quite a bit, actually, about your time in Afghanistan and Iraq

and a lot of, I feel like pivotal moments in the war that you were either present for or had a bird's eye view for it. I'm really excited to talk about all that. So, Ron, welcome back to the show. Thanks for joining us. Well, thank you. It's great to be back. The last episode was certainly educational.

My son-in-law used it to help him write a paper at the Socom Senior NCO Academy, and he got a 100%, which I wouldn't have expected anything less. So he certainly appreciated it. And, yeah, it was a lot of fun. Ron, that makes me so happy and so proud to hear. I mean, I'm glad that he got 100 on his paper. But beyond that, one of my hopes for this live stream for this show for this podcast is that what we contribute and what our guests contribute,

that this show becomes important enough that there are journalists and students and academics out there who are like, wow, this is really important information. this is an important primary source and that they're able to quote it and use the source citations in their work. So that little story you told just makes me so happy to hear that we're early on in our lifespan, I feel like with this show and we're still getting started. But I hope, it's always been my hope that we're able to bring that sort of credibility to the table. So thanks for telling me that. You're welcome.

So Ron, I was looking over. and we were discussing a few bullet points, a couple different moments in your career that we were not able to get to on the first show. And I thought maybe we'd go chronologically. And also this is interesting because you were involved in the hunt for Piff Wicks, as they were called,

in the Balkans back in the day. I'll let you hash out what all that was about. But I would just point out that this story will certainly intersect with our interview with H.K. Roy, a CIA officer. We interviewed a few episodes back, and he was present in Bosnia. He was the first station chief in Sarajevo. So I think then, again, I hope that this show is interesting for viewers because you get to hear about these conflicts from different perspectives and different people and the different experiences they had.

So I'm very keen to hear your point of view, Ron, and what you were doing over in that region. at the time. Well, I came into the Balkans way late. I mean, you know, H.K. Roy had already, you know, moved on, and the I4 and S4 and whatever for was all pretty well established. But somebody back at J-Soc got a wild hair and decided it was prime time to hunt for Piffwicks. So, Ben, Piffwicks, by the way, is this tongue-twisting acronym that stands for persons indicted for war crimes. So we were going after, gosh, Slobodan Milosevic and the Radovich or

whatever, I can't remember. We were going after. Yeah, all the high hanging fruit. So we, it was in coordination with J-Sox. So we brought over the same platform that we had used in the PI with Abu Sayyaf. And of course, Tuzla is a lot different. And Bosnia and the Balkans is a lot different flying environment. You know, we had to stay so many kilometers away from the river that, you know, was the border of Serbia and Bosnia. So it was exciting. The mission tasking came from the military and it was it was it was three months of eating good food and being pretty bored there at the at the i4 s4 base and tuzla at the air base there we didn't really do much a couple times when we did do stuff it seemed like our erstwhile NATO allies had uh you know done the little

hey dude you might want to move to the next safe house because the aren't the americans are coming for you. So we can never prove it, but it was always frustrating in that regard. And that mission didn't really last very long, but it was an interesting introduction to a lot of the conventional military. We had a lot of brigade and battalion commanders that I later would run into in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so I was able to, you know, at least establish some sort of baseline of credibility, trust, bona fides, pick your adjective with them. So it was good. So no great, you know, there we were in the shootout with Bonnie and Clyde on the border and, you know, in the Serbs. Although, you know, a couple, you know, when we're in, I had to go to Sarajevo, you know,

every so often to check in with station and, you know, fill out the expense reports and, you know, Everything lives on paperwork. So we went out for lunch. And Sierra Evo had sort of recovered, but a lot of the skyscraper, the taller buildings were still very devastated from the Serb bombardment and things like that. But as we're walking along, on the sidewalk, there are these giant red splotches that have faded a little bit with the weather. but they're they're they're they're splotches and no it's not real blood but so we're sitting down in the sidewalk cafe and and the you know the where it's it's it's summer in seriavo so and you know the bosnian girls are you know they're you know one-eye jack muslims and type of thing so they're

they're a little bit freer in their dress and so we're we're having a good two-hour lunch watching the traffic go by and I asked the proprietor, I say, hey, so what's with these red splotches on the sidewalk? She goes, oh, those are the Sierra Vora Roses. I go, well, what are those?

And she says, well, that's where the Serbian snipers killed our fellow citizens, and that's how we memorialize where they fell. So that was a little awkward, weird. And then she added,

you know because you're kind of going gosh are you guys ever going to get over this or is this going to be one of those you know a thousand years civil war genocidal you know ethnic conflicts it's just we will never forget and we will never forgive and i'm going oh great you know i guess i i better find a good place to rent because my grandson's probably going to show up here yeah job security what year was this wrong oh yeah uh this was two thousand 2003. I can't recall exactly, but it was in the early days of the war and for some, that's why I'm saying, somebody, J-Soc decided to dilute the, the CT effort in Afghanistan. We hadn't gone into Iraq yet and to start hunting PIFWix. And so, you know, we get to the airbase. It's, it's a NATO airbase. So it's, it's real funny, you know, we're the OGA guys. We don't exist and this, this airplane doesn't exist. And so, so. type of thing. So we have to be really careful how we, but luckily there's a bunch of contractors running around. So we're, we just blend right in with all the KBR toads and everybody else. So the, but we're living in Sabre City, which was the old soft compound, plywood village,

if you will. And we're, we're sleeping one night after a long, long night of mission. It's like three in the morning and all of a sudden it's literally like you know every every there's a massive commotion outside it seems like the the the the siff from a patent barracks or or concern up in germany had showed up for a training exercise and they were bursting into my hooch and bursting into my pilots hooch and my mechanics hooch and yeah it was uh probably not most diplomatic with any 10th group people but we worked it out so the the Green Barreys the Special Forces commanders and extremist force right decided to come in RIP huh RIP yeah yeah right yeah yeah but they decided to come down and just

do a training exercise on you guys it yeah it was I mean you know the other J-Sach guy that was at the headquarters hooch he was he was his shock about it as we were. So, you know, left hand, meet right hand. Nobody really knows what was going on. But we worked it all out. And we did a couple, we showed them what we could do with our platform. So I think, as I mentioned earlier, that helped us out later when I ran into 10th group guys in Iraq. And we were working in Samara and up that away. They, they go, hey, I remember you. You're the guy we woke up. So what was the situation at that time? I mean, was there a threat to you or was everything so stabilized at the point of time that the pitfook was pretty much what?

These guys were on the run in the wind. Yeah, right. They were. Yeah, things were pretty stabilized, although, you know, made sure you stayed on the hardball road between Tuzla and Sarajevo because there were still, you know, mines everywhere. And although at the halfway point, there was this great mountain in where we would always stop for refreshment and a potty break type of thing. thing. But it was, I mean, there was still hulks of vehicles off on the side that had either been shelled or, you know, had run off the, been run off the road or whatever. You know, so it was, one of the interesting things was though, when I was listening to H.K. Roy's thing about the Iranians and meeting his Iranian L&O counterpart or however he put it. Yeah. I remember talking to the J-Soc guy. We were just sitting around chewing the fat, and he'd been there off and on throughout the beginning when, you know, the Americans first arrived. And he talked about the different, different U.S. soft forces going out into the woods, where a lot of the rat lines were for the smuggling routes of weapons and support lines for the service. for the Serbs and all the other bad people.

And they encountered Iranian Kudzforce guys and things like that. So, you know, I don't have any confirmation of it, but I, you know, it was, you know, the Iranians were not limited to the Middle East. So HK was right, was spot on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They saw that as their way into Europe, essentially, the continental Europe at the time.

It's pretty incredible. So, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. wrong here, Ron, but it was a situation that your agency was, you said the platform was providing, you know, this sort of ISR intelligence and there were operators from the military side, standing by to action, any targets you were able to find on the ground? Correct. Correct. And we'd also give them Overwatch as they were ingressing and egressing an area because

the Serbs like to set up interdictive road. blocks in route to the target or returning to home base. Yeah. So ISR is, we're over there today. ISR is Intellis Srinxor reconnaissance. We say ISR, that's what we're talking about, a platform that can provide that. We're talking about a drum. Yeah.

Is what it comes down to. Yeah. But this is before drones were cool. Exactly. Drones were still experimental and, we're not experimental, but we're still the new technology. you know, nobody was quite sure. It reminded me of my early days in the Air Force when desktop computers, of course, they were ginormous, you know, the size of a Volkswagen Beetle would show up. And with those, you know, asphyxating dust covers that they had to put over them.

And, you know, all the senior officers would get them and the things were just monuments to nothing because they were afraid to utilize them. And in the meantime, the rest of us were sitting there pounding away on our selectric typewriters. trying to type stuff and going, damn it, anybody got more corrective tape? So, you know, we, so new technology is always, you know, it takes a while to get adapted to, but boy, it's, now that it's, it's addictive.

I mean, as I mentioned in the last broadcast, we, you know, when the, and during Anaconda, when single Pred would show up, everything stopped in the talk to watch Pred TV. It's, it's extraordinarily addictive. It's like watching the Kardashians, but with, violence yeah yeah and it's also I mean the thing that every commander

covet so much I mean it's near real-time intelligence it's like what like a five-second delay or something but it is it is it doesn't get better and it it's it's it's always getting better I mean in in 06 when I was chief of base in Bagram Afghanistan we had a single predator line that's what they called the you know we we had one line dedicated to ourselves when you know, it was to the CJTF 76 folks. And but the problem wasn't. It was still, it was a training thing and an experiential thing,

was the operators back at Creech or wherever at Creech Air Force Base outside Las Vegas. They tended to, because they're seeing the same thing we're seeing. And they would tend to like, ooh, bright, shiny object to the left. And they would skew the camera. We're like, no, dude, we're really following that vehicle or that person or that, that motorcycle or whatever they're on the right so you know and then of course you're trying to yell at them over the over the hot mic and you know tell them where to skew the camera no that's it's interesting because i didn't realize that around 2002 that they tried to ramp things up in bosnia also i would have

thought that all of that would be getting it's not closed down but deprioritized yeah you would think so but I mean Kosovo was still going on. So I think they were trying to put it to bed. I mean, while we were there, the Army National Guard switched out, and it was, I think it was Idaho National Guard showed up with a few of their Apaches. And so it was, you know, and it's still going on.

I mean, we're still deploying, what, a battalion plus or a brigade minus worth of U.S. troops out there on a continuous basis. and also in K4 in K-Fo, as well. So it's freaking ridiculous. Did the boys haul anyone in while you were there? We did not. Like I said, a couple times we had good indicators, good humant, sigint, and we would get overhead,

and we would basically surveil the location for signs of life, you know, of the type of person we were looking for. And yep, there he is. you know, that one guy with the pompadour hairdo was, he was a dead giveaway. So we would, you know, we would launch the force. And, you know, of course, even though it was an American operation, we had to coordinate with all our NATO partners. And that's why we always suspected that, you know, somebody, you know, got on the cell phone and called somebody.

And the next thing we knew that, you know, we're watching that guy skedaddle either across the border into Serbia or, you know, he disappeared. into the woods. So yeah, it was, we always blame the French, but they were easy to blame. And then Iraq happens, well, just the next year. And I mean, you found yourself there pretty quickly. It sounded like. Right. Yeah, it was the first of three times. I, again, I got there right after Baghdad had been occupied, captured. And we were flooding the zone with U.S. troops. It was it was interesting. I mean, we were, again, because I'm in Air Branch, so I'm obviously going to be

at Biap at Baghdad International Airport. And we'd occupied a little niche corner of the airfield there that was isolated enough, but had access to the taxiways and runways, et cetera. So we were good. It was interesting. I mean, it was, we were living in a building that was, I think, built by the highest bidding Italian architect, because I discovered that right angles are plus or minus five degrees, but the marble sure was expensive. And we discovered one of the, it's not so unique,

you know, the gold plated or solid gold AK-47, we found one of those. And, you know, yay. I think that's in the CIA Museum too now. So it was, but it was,

it was interesting. Primarily at that time, we were just doing logistical support to our teams that were spread out everywhere and supporting either the J-Soc guys or the conventional military because our big thing back then was we were still looking for weapons of mass destruction. Yeah. I mean, that's a whole other can of worms right there. How did that turn out?

I mean, how did that go down? Well, I don't know. 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. 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. David K. who I think succeeded or a new Scott Ritter, one of your previous guests, and he was also a UN inspector or something like a real nice fella. Him and I talked a lot because he asked me to transport him and his inspectors to X or Y or Z.

And, you know, I'd pick him up in a day or two. And I'd say, well, he says, nothing. You know, it was frustrating. But he'd been charged directly by some senior levels in the Bush administration to do this. So it wasn't like we could, you know, send the ambassador off somewhere else. We had to, we supported him. And like I said, he was a very nice fellow. There was this one story that you had brought up to me that you tried to steal Uday Hussein's Porsche,

which would be the Porsche that Scott Ritter talked about in his episode that Uday came, hauling ass doing Tokyo drift right by. during the 90s when he was inspected. And to be fair, to be fair, I don't think we can say that you tried to steal it. It did not have an owner. Well, I don't know. I don't know. Well, you know, I owned a Porsche Boxter at the time, and this was a gorgeous yellow one.

And I think it was a boxer, but it was, I knew it was a convertible because the, the top was missing or had been tattered or ripped and shredded. but we discovered it in one of the parking lots there at the airport as we were surveying the primary terminal building, which is where we were discovering that the duty-free shop needed to be secured, so we took it upon ourselves to secure as much of the liquor as we could. But in the parking lot, we discovered this, and there's a bunch of Iraqis milling around, and I speak enough Arabic to get in trouble. So I asked them, I said, so, wow, a Porsche, and they claimed it was Uday's. So, and I don't know, I don't know if Scott described the color or not, I can't remember, but it was a yellow.

But the, you know, all the instrumentation had been ripped out, and somebody tried to do the, the gangster, you know, do the, on the steering column, the whole bit. Yeah, it tore it up to shreds. So I say we tried to steal it. I mean, it would have been great if we had some sort of like Jordan flatbed to tow it back. And I could have my mechanics. Hey, when you're not busy keeping the airplanes flying, here you go. Here's another project for you. So we could have used that to tool around the airfield to meet the different. Because the Army and the Air Force were on the other side of the airstrip.

So it was always a long drive. And we might as well arrive in style. That's an unceremonious end to Uday Hussein's sweet ride. well he had a lot of he had a very unceremonious stand up north anyway so it was no big do you want to talk about great loss you want to talk about sure so so one day it's it's a it's a normal brown day in bagdad you know it's like yeah I mean you guys have been there it's like oh you know it's another another day in the desert and it's brown and occasionally people are mortaring you and shooting at you and things like but all of a sudden some people are scrambling around

everything's you know there's there's the buzz of excitement in the air and come to find out that that the tier guys the task force guys had had located and were in the process of swacking the crap out of Uday and I think his brother too yeah so right so anyway so they so they were doing that and so but then there was a question because the bodies were so irretrievably decimated I mean, they literally looked like hamburger meat, ground chuck, that they weren't sure that they got the right people. And they wanted to, and the special representative from the Bush administration, the Bremer, you know, he wanted to make sure that everything was like that. So what they got was they got a bunch of tissue samples from the different corpses. and they put them in one of those medical transport boxes for like transplants and blood or whatever

and brought it back down. As that thing is coming down screaming on a Black Hawk, David Kay approaches me and explains the situation to me because he's the next senior administration guy in country after Bremer, you know, the guy with the blue sport jacket and the desert combat boots because he was too cool for school. and he says, hey, we need to do this, and we're getting a plane, an Air Force plane flying into Amman, and they can't fly into here for whatever reason, again, the Air Force.

And so how can we do this? I go, well, we'll fly it, you know, and of course. So, of course, but my crew had already flown a bunch of missions that day, so, you know, there's always that thing about crew rest. Well, I go explain it to the pilot and the co-pilot, and they have no problem with crew rest. I mean, they're not under Air Force orders or Army orders or anything like that anymore. So we make the arrangements to fly to Amman. I coordinate with the folks in Amman, hey, we're going to fly into the airport, make sure we get landing clearances. You know, you guys can make it happen a lot quicker than I can from here with my limited comms.

And they did. And so we flew off and we flew to Amman. And we turned it over, had them sign a chain of custody thing. So if it ever went to a court of law, you know, I couldn't be held responsible for peeing on Uday's corpse or remains or whatever. So sorry, graphic, yeah, you know, contaminating the evidence. And so I asked the guys there to say, hey, you know, it's pretty late. We've been up busy all day. I started really, really early.

I don't suppose we could stay overnight of the Sheridan here in Amman and go back to back to head in the morning. Nope, nope, nope. The chief wants you guys to go. You guys can't stay. You don't have that kind of diplomatic clearances. See, that's the pilot has to pull the crew rest thing, though. That's what the pilots got to play a crew rest part of. And also the plane broke.

Right? Plain bro. Yeah, well, that wouldn't be part of the air branch motto. Our airplanes don't break. You know, damn it, I got scotch tape and bailing wire around here somewhere, you know. We'll make it go. But anyway, so we at least get a squirt of fuel and fill up the tanks, and off we go flying back to Baghdad. As we're about 30, 45 minutes out of landing at Baghdad International, we're talking to the control tower.

There were Australians running the control tower as part of the coalition forces. and the Australians in there, you know, Australians have such a great way of saying things. They explain to us that we, for our own safety and health, we needed to take an unconventional approach and, you know, come in at a lot lower altitude and fly a very, lots of hard right-angle turns and things like almost like we were following a highway or some streets and things like that. And we go, okay, and as we're getting very close to the airport, and we're about five minutes from landing, and we can see Baghdad is, you know, the city had intermittent electrical power at that time because of the infrastructure damage. But this place was lit up like a Fourth of July celebration, or like London during the Blitz,

because it seemed like tracers were going up every which way. So I guess every Mohammed and Uday and Mahmoud or whoever grabbed their AK-47 out of the closet and was shooting off all his ammo into the sky, which was also quite dangerous because what goes up must come down. Was it because Uday and Kusei were killed? Is that why they were celebrating? Right. They had heard the news, even though it hadn't been confirmed. Oh, yeah, they were, I mean, so yeah, there was no love loss for the Saddam regime, but it was like, really people? Can you like maybe just, you know, dance and clap and cheer, but you have to shoot every gun off type of thing. It was, that was a little, that was, I think that was about the dangerous time. Most dangerous time I ever had in an airplane with Air Branch. It was like, I'm going to get shot down by self.

fire. Yeah, it was like that during the World Cup too. It was an singer in the World Cup when Iraq could win a game. I mean, it did. It looked like you know, World War II. So, yeah, it was

exciting. I mean, you know, flying, you know, to the from the airport over to the U.S. compound over in downtown Baghdad there, and I'm temporarily having a brain brain fade. I can't remember what we used to call it, the zone, the green zone. That's it.

And we're flying over, and we're just sort of tootling along, flying over the stinky river and things like that. And I'm looking out of the side of the helicopter. And there is, literally like right out of the old DIA fact book, which used to have, it was like the Sears catalog of Soviet weapons systems. There is a gorgeous SA2 sitting on a launcher. Missile with his fansong radar parking in the middle of a residential street and I'm going Oh, so not that I don't think it was plugged in and operating, but I think that's where they they were trying to disperse some of their weapons before we rolled into Baghdad, but it was just kind of like wow, so that stuff really does look like that up close So it was it was a little funny. Surreal. Yeah, it was surreal. So it was yeah Baghdad was weird that time. I

I mean, we would, so, you know, once, by the time I got there, about a month into my three-plus month first trip there, the Washington VIP started arriving because, you know, war teresta gets you like, I don't want, double passports, green stamps or something like that, I'm not sure. And we had a Buzzy Cronguard show up. He was at the time the executive director of the agency. It's a position that doesn't exist.

anymore. He'd convinced Director Tennant that he could be like the chief operating officer of the agency while Tenet did his thing at the White House and with the congressional leadership and things like that. So Buzzie shows up and he's a multimillionaire Baltimore investment banker and things like that. And he gets off the airplane and he's wearing a safari bush jacket and things and he immediately wants me to issue him a weapon and go out on patrol somewhere because he wants to hunt Hodgis. Yeah, no, that's not going to happen, boss. By the way, let me introduce you to the chief of station and so on and so forth. But he was really frustrated.

Yeah, he was, afterwards, he stopped me. He was frustrated because he stopped me. Oh, sorry. Yeah, he was probably, you know, Buzzy always postured himself as a man's man and he always, you know, he would always, you know, thump his chest and try, you know, like, let's do push-up contests. I mean, that's sort of an attitude. Yeah, it was because he felt, I don't know, it was like his midlife crisis late in life or something like that. but after one conversation we had in at the at the little bar we had there in the in the building is he's asking me how things are going and by this time we'd been up and down route Irish and tooling around and you know done the teresa pictures under the under the cross swords and things like that and I said well you know the Iraqis aren't getting the people aren't getting the word they don't know what's going on so the only people tell

telling them are the bad guys who were out in the suits, in the marketplaces on the streets, spreading rumors and bad news. And it's, you know, we're losing that fight. And he looked at me like I had a dick grown out of my forehead, so I'm not quite sure what was the problem. But, you know, by the time I came back the next time, the insurgency was just starting to really get going in full bore. It was bad. I mean, Bremer had made some pretty terrible decisions, disestablishing the bath party, which was one, and then, and then, you know, telling the Iraqi army who had all basically gone home. They'd taken their bat and ball and gone home, but the U.S. was still paying their salaries.

So, I mean, it's good work if you can get it. I can be an Iraqi soldier and I don't have to do anything. Well, Bremer cut off their paycheck. So, you know, like, gosh, what am I going to do now? I know. I'm going to get mad at the people who cut off my paycheck, and I have skills, and there are people around here that could utilize my skills. So we really, we really effed that up a whole lot.

Yeah. That is for sure. Let's get some questions real quick. We got a couple questions for you, I think. First off, welcome, everybody. I know Jack already walking you, but thanks for joining us. So Andrew Dunbar, Jack and Dave are creating a repository of oral history. Meanwhile, I am asking serious people dumb questions about giraffe prices, only in America.

Andrew, I don't, that's an important part of American history. The giraffe stuff? Yeah. That was the J.T. Patton episode. Yeah. But Andrew is criticizing himself for asking questions about giraffirks. but I it's one of those questions I didn't know how much I wanted to know that a giraffe sold for until he asked it yeah and then I really wanted to know yeah I think

inquiry mine wants wants to know um if it's the giraffe in the Skittal commercial then I'm all for it uh Ron did you ever run into uh the perfumed prince aka a general Wesley Clark and were you there uh when the pristine incident happened Wow, well, yes and no, I was not in Pristina. As I told you in the last episode prior to going to Air Branch, I was in the Office of Military Affairs and working in their exercise shop. And one of the things, one of the exercises I got to participate in was in Kaiserslaut in Germany at the U.S. European Command's Warrior Prep Center, which was a,

a build or a building's set of buildings that have been reconfigured for simulation exercises uh command post exercises that sort of thing and general clark had gotten into his his peabrein that he wanted to uh invade montrano so uh he um you know he uh decided that we were gonna we were a war sand table this or war game it if you will at the at the warrior prep center at first and um he gave us his commander's intent and guidance and you know he you know i'm thinking oh lord everybody wants to be everybody wants to be lord nelson napoleon bonaparte type of thing i mean the way he was he was strutting and posturing and you know it's like really i mean mcArthur did it really well gregory peck did it even better in the movie but dude you're you just don't you can't carry the tune

But anyway, so we were all putting it together. As the exercise guy running for the agency, I went and got a guy from the Balkans shop to come in, and he had a lot of experience. And one of the things when we got together and we were putting together the plan, he talked about how the Montranagans, they were the super serves. They make the serves look like pussies. I mean, they're the ones that the Ottomans never could really defeat. And as we were putting the plan together, it was, well, I'm glad it was never executed,

because they were going to drop at least a battalion, maybe two, and the 173rd guys, into Pristina, that's the capital of Montereygra. And it sits in a bowl, and the Monteregrans had triple A sites on all sides of the upslope on the valley. So the C-130s would have basically been flying through crossfire, and we would have lost a lot of good people and a lot of good airplanes and things like that. In the meantime, the Marines were going to do over a landing and then advance along a single threaded line route or LLC line of communication route into Pristina. this route was flanked on either sides by some bodies of water and so they were basically going to be single-filed

and it was like you know even Ray Charles with an old World War II cannon is going to be able to knock you guys out and then you're going to I mean it's like has anybody seen the movie a bridge too far you know it's like the single line of advance is not a good thing so we pointed all this out

General Clark and his synchophatic staff were not too happy with that. So, yeah, it was, like I said, I went back to the agency and I said, we are not going to do this. And the officer I'd brought with from the Balkans area, he was even less diplomatic than I was to his bosses and to the chiefs of station there throughout the Balkans. What was the rationale for this proposed operation? You know, it never really came out. I mean, for some reason, the Monterenagrans weren't, I don't know, jumping into bed with us. And they were sort of the outliers. They were allied with the Serbs, but they were independent.

They were doing their own thing. And, you know, so we were going to, you know, I don't know, Clark thought he needed to show somebody a lesson. they were going to be an object lesson. He thought it was going to be an easy nut to crack. And it turned out not to be so. And thank goodness we didn't do that. And I believe now they're members of NATO. So, you know, small favors.

Yeah. Vesilis Chronopoulos. That's my friend. That's Bill. Oh, yeah. Okay. He just said, yo team house. Or is it, yo team house.

You have to say it with a Greek accent. Go ahead. Yeah, T-Mouse. Perfect. Let's see if there's anything else there. I heard it was called Crack for Generals. Jack, can we please, please get some more Samara-Pencock swag? I can work on it.

Okay. So, Ron, let's transition if we can. over to Afghanistan because when we were talking a little bit earlier about some of your you know multiple deployments to Afghanistan There's some things I didn't realize that you had a pretty unique perspective on some pretty major events that happened over there One of them was when our base I don't know if you guys can if you can say the name of it, but when Bob Chapman got blown up and Koust That was a pretty significant event major event for the CIA and

lost how many people were lost in that attack seven I believe so yes and a lot of a lot of critically wounded as well and how did you intersect with that event well I fortunately I was not in in country at the time however I had before I had recently attended the chief of station seminar which is a I think they put it on three or four times a year It's to train the outgoing chiefs of base, chiefs of station. Everybody from Chief of Station Moscow to lowly chief of station, Bagram, or where else. And I had been slated to go to another chief of base assignment.

And one of my classmates was Jen Matthews, the now deceased chief of base of Kausk, Coast. We was called it Coast. So anyway, so. And she was a brilliant, brilliant, smart person as regard to the Al-Qaeda target set, the Hakani set. But she was nervous is maybe too strong. And I want to say up front right before I get too much further that I have, this is not to denigrate her and her sacrifice and the sacrifice of the others. But it just, it goes to something that I'd been worried about, starting it about that. point in time and continue to my last trip out there into 13 was that the

agency was looking around going hey you you've never gone you go and but these people BC people weren't as well qualified as as they needed to be or should have been and now Jen on paper was was extraordinarily well qualified I mean she knew the target set but managing a base in a war zone especially coast at the forward edge of the battlefield. I mean, they were directly opposite the Haqqani's in Miram Shah. And, you know, they were fighting a lot of twilight battles. I mean, the old Coast Protection Force, which was probably the most awesomest OGA paramilitary

force that we had, you know, and they were going, they were given the Haqanis as good as they got. In fact, that Khanis, I think, were losing more than they were winning against the KPF guys. but Jen sat next to me and because hey you've got a lot of Afghan experience blah blah blah and you know she's I'm really nervous you know so I'm really worried about the ground branch guys are are they going to be a problem I go well what do you mean a problem well are they just going to run off and do their own thing I go yeah no in fact the opposite these guys are I mean a lot of these guys especially the contractors they seem to rotate you know like a like an old Navy

submarine crew a blue blue goal they they they do you know three months in three months out and then they just you know it keeps going like that they have a lot and i told her they these guys have a lot of area knowledge a lot of they they know the different personalities not only the the local on the base but with the u.s military down the road there at um gosh what was that salerno yes always always always always always forget it because it was always under water whenever i would show up there after a range store. Way back one. So the, so, you know, I tried to reassure about both the ground branch officers and the, the, the

GRS, the, the, the security folks, the global response staff, which was our security force, which is both staff officers and, and contractors to do it. I, you know, we, we had multiple conversations on this, trying to, you know, get her comfortable with working with SOG people and GRS people. I mean, she came from a staff position in CTC and she'd done a European PCS assignment there in Europe. So, you know, that's a totally different leopard,

a whole different bunch of spots there. And from everything, you know, you learn after the fact the way she, you know, negated what her chief of security told her, what the ground branch guys told her about bringing the bad guy, you know, directly into the post without any sort of searching and things like that, which violated a bunch of tenants. I mean, you try to drive onto the station in Kabul. I don't care who you are. You're going to go through, you know, lots of different checks and things like that. So, you know, it just, it just seemed like, you know, I go, I don't want to say I blame myself, but I like, you know, I got really mad because I told her, I said, you know, you need to trust this. But then, you know, going out a couple more years later, I was invited to sit in on a review of the after action review or the incident report, investigation that the agency had done.

So a bunch of us people show up and it's, hey, I haven't seen you since, you know, 2001, 2002. So we all go into this room and we sit down and the lady, the senior officer there, she sits, she stands up and says, okay, we're going to go over this. But there will be no criticism of any agency officer or, or, or, office. So of course, being the stupid ass that I am, I go, so if we haven't to, you know, even if XYZ station made a major boo-boo, made a mistake, we can't acknowledge that or, and the

report doesn't even acknowledge that? And she just looked at me and says, what part about not criticizing anything? Don't you understand? I'm like, oh my God. So I'm going, you know, this is, this is going to be educational. And I... They brought you in for, to help put together the after-action review. Was that the point of it? No, it had already been done. We were just there to receive it.

And basically it just came away as, you know, shit happened. And there's nothing that none of us could have done and foreseen it. And everybody, you know, everybody gets a gold star. and we more, we lost. No accountability, and nobody paid the price. I mean, it was a, it was a lot, it was almost like the perfect storm. The chief of station had just arrived in country maybe less than a week before. So, and thank goodness he had been there.

This was his second tourist station. So he was able to rapidly fly out there and he was able to get the people squared away and things like that. Because the previous chief of station who let a lot of this stuff go or had approved a lot of the planning, he would have been absolutely the wrong person. Those people would have fallen apart. And then other stations in the region as well as elsewhere in the greater neighborhood, if you will, Europe. You know, everybody was, I think everybody was so excited about this asset or what he represented that we failed to do our due diligence and ask the right questions. Everybody was like, oh, it's the golden goose. we're going to you know we got it and it was always when you I would think you would be a little

skeptical that you're getting baited into some sort of an ambush if it sounds too good to be true well yeah I say that with hindsight of course I'm here you know all these years later saying that I understand right and I understand too but I you know I've always had a healthy dose of skepticism and as you say if it's too good to be true and plus you know like I said in the last broadcast, I'm married to a counterintelligence officer, so, you know, I've learned to be quite skeptical. So, you know, our kids really had a hell of a time growing up because we never let them get away with anything. But the, you know, this guy would file the potential asset, the person that killed everybody. He, I mean, he failed so many operational tests,

and he failed to adhere to some security checks and protocols that for anybody else, he would have been dropped like a hot potato. But because he offered, you know, I can get you to the inner sanctum of the Haqanis that everybody like, well, he can't give us that because that'll ruin his, you know, his security with the Haqanis and things like that. So, I mean, they played us and they played us. really, really well. And we paid the price. And the bad thing is, is I'm not sure that we truly really learned the lessons that we needed to because, as you pointed out, Jack, that nobody

got held accountable. And your point is that the After Action Review also did it, it just kind of chalked it up to an act of God that this sort of event just happened that there wasn't a cause and effect involved. Pretty exactly, pretty much. Right. You know, and, you know, and, you And those seven Americans lost their lives and all that could have been prevented. And it was terrible, just terrible. Yeah, that's horrible. But from there, some of your deployments to Bagram, you were telling us how you had kind of, I don't know, I mean, I guess all of your time over there was unconventional, so to speak,

but that it wasn't a traditional agency posting, that you were doing some fairly irregular things that maybe some of the other people in country weren't able to do. Right, yeah. So Bogram Base was a unique base in the Afghan theater. Of course, the agency has its station, and then they have other bases throughout southern and eastern Afghanistan,

and all these bases have a counter-terrorist and an intel collection mission. Bogram Base was a little bit different, It had started out as an OMA Office of Military Affairs liaison post, but as Boggram became the head shed for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the establishment of the BTIC, the Bogram Theater Interment Facility or BTF, and the Siege of Stodaf guys headquartering there as well and the Task Force guys, it became more of a base. and with some limited collection with the detainees in the in the BTIF.

And so it gets advertised and I'm reading the advertisement. I'm going, yeah, I can do all this. So I apply and I get selected and off I go. And luckily the chief who happened to be the same chief that had just taken over during the coast when the coast bombing happened was there. And of course I meet him because I'm the outgoing subordinate commander, if you will. And I've got to get my commander's intent. And, you know, like, you know, what do I do, boss?

What are my left and right limits? You know, where's the touchdown zone? What do I need to do to get at least a survivable fit rep at the end of this tour? And not that I was worried, I mean, you know, but he looked at me and he, you know, the normal platitudes, you know, how's the wife, how's the kids, blah, blah, blah. He says, I need you to make sure that there is zero daylight between what we are doing, what the agency's efforts are doing with our counterterrorist pursuit teams out there and our collection assets and the U.S. military. And he didn't further define the U.S. military.

So that included both the conventional folks, the siege of soda for the combined Joint Special Operations Task Force Afghanistan, and the task force guys, the J-Soc guys that were there. So I had basically three accounts that I had to manage massage and make nice, nice with. The person I was relieving came up to Kabul to meet me. Great, great officer. I owe a lot of my success that year, the year I served there in Boggham to him. I told people he poured the foundation and framed the house, and all I did was put up some drywall and made it look. made it look pretty, but he did a lot of good work for me, and I always appreciated that.

And if he's listening, see, I told you I'd say that in public. So, but anyway, so I get there, and the old Army unit is still present, and they haven't quite ripped out yet. Well, they're in the process of changing over. It was CETAF, the old Southern European Airborne Task Force guys out of Vicenza, before they became the 173rd and everything like that. And it was a general Camilla. And so he would come to the morning update. I observed this for at least two weeks.

And of course, my predecessor, he told me this was his entire year's experience. Camia would get the update and then retreat, not retire, but retreat to his office and close the door. And you wouldn't see him again until the evening update. And getting access to him was extraordinarily difficult to, you know, talk about anything. thing. Our primary point of contact at that time was a up-and-coming Army Colonel by the name of Bill Mayville, who later went on to command the 173rd that did the extraordinary combat jump there into Kurdistan. Sorry. And he went, yeah, sorry. I love Bill. He's a good people and everything like that. But, you know, I always, I got to rib him on that. But, and, you know, and I intersected with him at other points, you know, on other trips to Afghanistan when he was in the 82nd and then later at the Pentagon when he was on the joint staff. But so, and Mayville was a good guy. And one of his, and the deputy, the, the J3 was a guy who went on to command the 173 also, or one of the battalions.

Anyways, and he got, he got wrapped up in a lot of bad stuff. he didn't last long. But anyway, so in a commander's update brief for people listening, you are where you sit. So obviously the general, the principal, he sits at the head of the table, and his immediate deputies sit on either side of him. It's very much like the royal court. It's like a bunch of 16-year-old girls in the cafeteria in high school. Yes, yes. And I wasn't one of the mean girls, so I didn't belong.

So the, so, and then all the other, you know, staff codes, the intel, the ops, the plans, whatever, the, they all sit around the table. We were relegated to the side, side chairs along, along the wall. So basically we had to do the little prairie dog pop up to get our attention, get the general's attention when we wanted to input. And of course, my predecessor, his input was whenever they would go once around the world. nothing to add, nothing to say. And I'm going, well, that's crazy. Why am I wasting two hours of my life here in the morning if I've got nothing to add? Because I'm sure I do.

But that way was still his base, and I was just transitioning. So two-week transition time goes through. And the chief of station comes up and gives me the once over and says, you know, gives me the and says, you're good to go. And he takes my predecessor with him on the airplane back to Kabul and that's it. So suddenly I'm going, oh, shit, now what do I do? So in the meantime, the 10th Mountain guys are ripping in. And so it's a totally different dynamic.

They're energetic. They spent over a year and a half at Fort Drum training for this assignment. So they were extraordinarily well prepared. The funny thing is, so Mayville and all the his senior colonel staff, all his S codes or J codes or whatever codes they were, they all got kicked out of their hooches by their 10th mountain replacements. He had nowhere to stay. Well, Bogram Base, we had a pretty large facility and not very many people. So I said, you can stay with us.

So Mayville always appreciated that because he had his own. room with his own shower and everything like that. So it was good deal. Good deal for all of them. And they were still close enough to the headquarters building or the hangar with the headquarters building built inside of it that they weren't that far away. Anyways. So the CTAF guys eventually I'll leave and it's just the 10th Mountain guys. And I'm still not all by myself and I'm sitting along the side. And I meet the J2 for the first time and him and I have become extraordinary, very good friends and and and it's a sad shame that the army didn't promote him to general when it was they had that opportunity because they'd rather promote sigan people than uh you know combat intel

officers but he was he was um he jumped into panama as a as a young lieutenant in the ranger ranger bat as the as the assistant s2 and i understand that the s2 got injured so he suddenly you know lieutenant you're the you're the battalion s2 don't fuck it up and And he did great. And he did great. And if you're listening, Mo, you know, thank you. So anyways, the, so I meet Mo, and Mo had spent a lot of time with the Rangers in Iraq and elsewhere. So he had some interactions with the agency in the past, which I discovered and shocked me is that not everybody loves us.

I was shocked. And he goes, and he's very busy shuffling papers, and I'm trying to block his way because I want to, like, dude, I'm your, I'm your guy, I'm your counterpart here, you know, help. You know, come on, let's work together on this. He says, you know, I don't have a very good opinion of you guys. Oh, God. You know, you know, it's going to be a hard, it's going to be a hard target recruitment. I mean, KGB guys would be easier. It was, but anyways, we ended up working it out and he pulled me aside.

He says, hey, you know, you got to get to the table. You got to get a seat at the table. And the only way you're going to do that is if you start sharing stuff. So I started looking for stuff to bring to the morning meeting that I could reasonably share without violating sources and methods and things that would contribute to their mission. and not impede ours or anything like that, but to show I was willing to give them something. And I got to sit at the table.

You know, Mikey got to sit at the big table. Did they have to kick somebody out of the table to get you there? Or did they just do... Who's the over chair did you steal? Yeah. I don't remember, but I know that the chief of staff, he had a lot of fun rearranging the seating assignments. and somehow my seat kept migrating closer and closer to the head of the table.

So it's like I must have been doing something right. And in fact, towards, you know, after a couple months, so after these normal briefs with the entire staff and the peanut gallery filled with important or self-important people, the briefing would conclude and everybody would be dismissed. The general a lot of times would ask for his inner circle to stick around, which would be the deputy commanding general for operations and for support, the two and the three, the Intel chief and the ops chief, maybe the ops plan or food plans, food ops guy, future operations, future plans, and me.

So, boy, that was a fun little email to send to the chief of station saying, you'll never guess where I'm at, you know, like, so I'm trying to let him know that I'm doing a good job. I'm adhering to his commander's intent. So it was pretty cool. And because of my sharing, and I would be sharing stuff like, hey, you know, our guys that down in Schen are reporting XYZ and the guys over at, you know, Oregon E are reporting this, dies down in Kandahar, so on and so forth. So they say, hey, you know, I'm taking a battlefield circulation trip in that way.

You know, why don't you come along? And you can introduce me to your counterpart there at Asada Bad or Jal. Lollabod or, you know, coast or wherever. And, and, you know, so I said, yeah, great. So I would send them a little saying, hey, hey, we're coming out. I'm coming in the General's Blackhawk. And he'd like to meet you and just kind of get a, you know, a five-minute, you know, data dump of what you can tell them and, you know, things like that. Here's what I've told him, you know, already so you don't bore him with repetition, even though he is a general.

probably needs some repetition. But the, sorry. So anyways, yeah, it worked out really well. So I got to go to a lot of places that OGA guys never got to see, except read about it in books and things like that. Got to go up to Cop Keating, which was the cop that got pretty much overrun by the enemy, I think a year or two later. It was like incompetently planned where the fog was built.

We flew in on the blackhawk, and literally you got to fly up from a Sadabad, and you're following one river, and it's basically like doing a slalom course in a black hawk. You're veering from canyon wall to canyon wall. It's, you know, thank God I didn't get air sick. And then you're flying up kind of to the north-northeast, and then you hang a hard left. and you're going pretty much straight west to Keating along another river valley. And again, you're looking out and you're seeing the little villages basically hanging on by their fingernails along the mountainsides along the river. There's a POS road. POS for those listening is a piece of shit road.

Well, Dave always explains the acronyms. I figure I need to as well. Well, one of those roads is basically hand carved out of a mountainside, right? side, right? Exactly. When they take, like, the jingot trucks or the buses down, they'll do about a 16-point turn. You got a guy in the back that's hard-chalking it when it backs up so that it doesn't go too far. I've been in some of those slot canyons where it's like, like you said, either somebody took a pickax

and maybe like 100 years ago, they actually got to hold a dynamite and blew it wide enough to drive a high-locks through. But, I mean, yeah. And so. Yeah. And in the springtime, of course, the floods would always wash out parts of the road, too. So it always, you know, it was a never-ending battle to keep land transportation going. What, like, what area was that in? What was the strategic importance of it?

What was the idea behind it? Well, it was up in the middle of God knows where Neuristan. And it was, the strategic value was, you know, at the time it sounded really great. And everybody was on board with it. Of course, looking back on it now, you kind of go, were we really that stupid? The strategic intent was to constantly put these little ink spots or places where the A&A and coalition forces could then extend their influence out and basically push the bad guys out. And so we were trying to get it right. And this was in the middle of a heavily, according to the intelligence at the time, heavily infested.

area of Taliban and al-Qaeda and all sorts of bad people. So, of course, once I saw that, I go, you know what, they can have this because I know they're physically fit and they can hike like nobody's mother, but good Lord, it's going to take them at least a few days to get anywhere to do anything. But, yeah, so we flew into Keating and the Blackhawk had to land on a gravel bar in the river where when the water was low and we observed the basin I basically got a neckache from looking up everywhere around me and they pointed out where where the Overwatch OP was and how do you get there we walk and I go Jesus you know I mean the the the slope must have been I don't know 30 degrees

it was I you know and then of course you know U.S. soldiers are carrying you know you know you know body armor and, you know, their basic kit. Oh, geez, you know, it's like, guys can't get a Black Hawk to do an elevator lift for you? You know, they got, yeah, no, because people shoot at us. So, and then, of course, you know, the rest is history. I mean, Jake Tapper's book, The Outpost, is actually a pretty good, you know, overall, you know, view of what it happened and things like that and the bravery that the U.S. soldiers displayed that day. and I mean, yeah, but yeah, Keating was, was interesting.

And what I would do after these things is I would write a little report to the station, and then I would send email copies to, and then not a formal report like a cable, but just an email to my boss at the station, who was the chief of ops, and info the chief of station. And I'd send it to various offices in headquarters, you know, CTC and the, and the people in the conventional ops division dealing with FKS. And the analyst people as well. Because to give them a sense, it wasn't a well-scripted intel report or anything.

I was like, hey, I flew here. This is what I observed. These are my concerns. These are some of the good things. You know, this is how maybe we can help support them, things like that. And in fact, at one time, they were thinking of opening up, I think, Dave, you mentioned Falcon earlier Falcon Base

earlier and or later earlier today. Anyways. So Falcon Base was another base that was created and at one time they thought they could establish Falcon Base co-located there with Keating and so I had to, I brought the guys

up there and we landed in a 47 and we had to unload everything and yeah. It goes back to my earlier comment about selecting the right people for the job. He, none of them, none of them lasted very long. And we had to re-evaluate them after about a week. And then they established Falcon where it was finally established afterward, after that, which was much, much closer to the target sets that they, they determined they wanted to go after.

So, I mean, it's just insane to hear, you know, straight from you, how all this stuff kind of shook out. I mean, and I want to ask in the aftermath of the attack on Keating, what were the findings from that if you were present for the development of some of those AAR bullets and whether or not it was a whitewash like Chapman was? I don't think it was. And I wasn't asked to participate in the AAR or I wasn't interviewed or anything like that. And I haven't read Tapper's book in a while. so I don't remember what the AAR reporting said or anything like that.

But I don't think anybody got severely punished. I mean, everybody tried to do a good job. I mean, the reasoning at the time, I mean, looking back in it now, what, 10, 12 years later, the reasoning then was legitimate. And according to all, we all felt it was legitimate. But now looking back on it, we kind of go, really? you know, it's like the invasion in World War II of a couple of the islands. We really didn't need to do it, but we had the Marines floating around there.

We needed to do something with them, I guess. So that's not to denigrate the sacrifice or anything like I had, but it was a good effort. The problem was, while we could sustain it as the U.S. Army, as the United States of America, you know, the A&A, it was multiple bridges too far. there was no way they were going to sustain that or even participate in it with any sense of active participation. And just to back up a moment, or not necessarily back up, we're kind of right smack dab in the middle of it. So maybe it's a good time to mention this. I just wondered if you could talk about the relationship, the liaisons, because you were talking about how your job was to make sure there wasn't any daylight between the agency endeavor and the U.S. military.

And on the U.S. side, you've got to juggle, you know, the prima donna soft guys and the conventional guys. And then also, you know, the agency has their agenda, which is, you know, strategic intelligence. The military likes to go out there and blow things up and do kinetic operations. And the agency also had, they had their ninjas on the ground too. But I'm just wondering if you could speak to that a little bit about how you kind of like juggled all these balls and maintain those relationships and de-conflict. because I think it's just very interesting that you have these two institutions that their mission statements are just very different. And from what you're telling me, it kind of worked in this situation because of your personality and this guy, Mo, you were able to form a friendship. And it just speaks to the fact that literally the strategic success or failure hinges on the personalities and whether or not they were able to mesh together.

And you guys hated each other's guts. I mean, there really could have been strategic implications from those kinds of lack of coordination. Exactly. You're absolutely right. And once I'd established that relationship with Mo, then it was Mike Koss, who was the three, and Kurt Vanderstein, who'd come over from the Command and Staff College to work in the Intel Plan section. and a bunch of other great American officers who I could be here like the Academy Awards and I could thank everybody. But seriously, they were all, you know, they were all good people.

And I really, and as I told visiting congressional delegations and staff delegations, that in my estimation, the 10th Mountain team, they brought over Third Brigade, Spartan Brigade, headed by then Colonel John Nicholson and then their headquarters, they had really formed a, they were like a ginormous ODA. They really went out and were trying to work it hard from a, from a, from a FID, internal defense, unconventional warfare, you know, get the population off the fence and onto your side type of thing. I was always, I was always really impressed with that. Major General Frakeley, who retired as a three-star out of a Sessions command out of Fort Knox, he was the C.G. He did her tremendous job. He expressed a lot of confidence in his staff. He showed that he picked the right people. One of the first things he did after he assumed responsibility, not a command, but assumed responsibility for the CJTF, was,

he hosted a luncheon for all the players. And there in his little general officer's dining room, which was no better than the regular defect, but it was cool. We actually had linen. So it was, it was neat. But anyways, so, you know,

there was, there was Colonel LeCamara from the task force. And so, and then Ed Reeder from seventh group. And so it was, you know, a bunch of people. So it was an opportunity to meet them.

And, you know, Ed Reeder was, you know, I was, I love Ed. And he was tremendous American, you know, great special forces officer. Yeah, yeah. But we was, we was behind his back. We'd never say to his front because he'd rip, he'd rip your face off. He always called him a silverback. Because he always reminded us of that old far side cartoon where all the young gorillas are in the gym class.

And the one kid's already a. silverback, you know, type of thing. So he was, he was that big of a guy. And so he was, but, you know, you ask the question, how do you do it? Well, I'd work with the different ODAs from all the different groups in Iraq prior to that. And so, you know, one of the things I've learned early on is, is to talk to them, is to them being your, your audience, your military audience, you've got to speak their specific language. So if I'm talking to a, a, uh, a, uh, a, uh, Special Forces guys, you know, I'm not going to go in there and, you know, I can be all, you know, agency and, you know, er, or, type stuff. But I'm going to go.

Let us have a meeting today. Yeah, no, I go in. I go in and I'll say, so who's the two? Okay. So I'm kind of speaking in militaries. And I say, so who are your, where your 18 foxes hanging out and things like that? So, you know, you start, oh, you know a little bit about the way we're structured and how we do things. and stuff like that.

So, you know, it's, it's, you know, I was asked several times at the agency later on to, you know, like, I don't know, bottle this recipe for success and pass it out. And it's, it's just really hard to do if you, you know, because a lot of agency guys are like, well, you know, we're title 50 guys, you know, we don't have to answer to anybody, you know. And they're trenching up in the fedora. Yeah, the green door syndrome, yeah, behind the green door. you know, and no Maryland Chambers did not live back there. So the, but it was, yeah, I, I approached it from the, from the aspect that my, my children were both in the, in the military at the time. My daughter was a corpsman who later ended up going to Kuwait and Iraq. And my son at the time, before he saw the light and joined the army, he was, he was a sailor.

He was on a frigate. And he was actually deployed, so we would actually communicate via CIPRNet, which I thought was always kind of cool. So he was somewhere in the Arabian Gulf, and I was stuck in Afghanistan. So, but anyways, it was, so I was approaching from every one of those soldiers, whether he was the grizzled sergeant major of the division or of the group or whatever, to the brand new PV2, who literally just showed up out of A school and tech school or whatever. and, you know, still doesn't know how to put on his brand new ACUs type of thing. You know, each one of those has represented one of my kids. And I felt it was my job to make sure I could, you know, I could get up to the line where, you know,

I couldn't reveal sources and methods and, you know, and all that, you know, cool, secret, you know, Obi-Wan Kenobi's agency stuff. and then kind of lean way, way over as before my fat tummy, you know, pulled me over the line and made me do bad things. But it was, that was the way I always approached it. And I, you know, I think Ed Reeder and his staff and later Chris Haas, when he brought third group over, they picked up on that. I know General Freakley and James Terry and Tony Teta, the three general officers in 10th Meadow, I think they picked up on it. Plus, I would never lie to them.

If I couldn't tell them or if I didn't know, I said so. And sometimes I, was anybody listening? I would say, you know, I can't talk about it. And then I'd pull them aside later and says, yeah, wink, wink, nod, nudge, nudge. You guys are, you guys are barking up the right tree. So let it go at that. and I had to keep that level of trust because as soon as, you know, I mean, you lie to, I mean, these guys were my battle buddies and I couldn't lie to them. The task force was a little harder nut to crack, and I don't think I ever really cracked it, which was fine, because I'm not sure the juice wasn't worth the squeeze with them.

They were, a lot of respect for the Rangers and the seals that were, that constantly rotated through. But their agenda was very much different from everybody else's. They did not do a good job of cross-coordinating with the conventional or the – Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, we did it. We did a capture kill on this one compound.

Oops. We killed some bad – we killed some good people, some bad people, things like that. But it's not our job. hey local battalion from 10th Mountain or local ODA guys you know you guys get to you know clean up my mess and you know and make it all better that's why a lot of people on the conventional side get a bad taste in their mouth about the special operations dudes because we go in there we do the quote-unquote night raids as they call them in the new york times and it makes it not legitimately i mean whether we we do it right or we do it wrong we go in there

we kill some people and then we leave, we disappear on the black helicopters, and that conventional unit that's stationed in that area or an ODA ends up feeling the brunt of all those retaliatory IEDs and rocket attacks, etc., etc. Or just the people shutting you out. I mean, you were just starting to establish people because you want to find out where the IED networks or who's implanting the IEDs, where they're being built, where they're being assembled, where they're being implanted. You know, the local population knows everything.

I mean, you know, you know, that's why what's the old, I remember in the early days, we wanted to put out some sensors. And so we, you know, like you can go to like Costco or whatever, those outdoor radio or speakers that look like boulders, but that don't really look like boulders. Or the things that you used to cover up those big green transformer boxes in suburbia type thing. So the tech wizards built a few rocks to look like this. And we put them in a rock field. Well, good Lord. A couple weeks later, some Afghan boy shows up at one of the fobs. Hey, mister, I found this.

Is this belong to you? Did you lose this? Oh, yeah, I'll take that. No, no, no, it's mine. You pay me money. I'm like, yeah, okay, God help us. That's awesome. That's all the best part is that he brought it back.

Was like, is this your spy gadget here? You want, do you want this back? Well, he didn't know what it was. He just knew it wasn't something natural. And it must be from the Western people. And, you know, it was a chance to make a dollar or several hundred or a thousand, whatever. Oh, my gosh. So.

But, you know, just on the relationships thing, I just wanted to mention this quick anecdote. I have a friend who was a Marine Corps officer. And he was one of those Marines that got and got, you got. to do an exchange with Delta and go over there and be an operator, go through OTC, and then deploy with them, all that good stuff. And when he came back from that and came back to the Marine Corps, all the guys are asking them, you know, what did you learn? What were the big takeaways? You know, what's the greatest new, you know, gadget that you strap to the side of your gun? What's the new tactic that you used to enter and clear a room? And he said, you know, the thing I really took

away from my time at the unit was relationships and the importance of building those relationships. relationships with the adjacent units, with the interagency process, because of the dividends they play down the line. And that's, I just feel like it's kind of important to bring that up because, you know, they make the movies about the dudes blowing down the front door and going and entering, clearing the room. But sometimes it's those liaison operations that pay the most dividends for you at the end of the day. It really does. And, you know, also liaison with the host nations. I mean, as a as a SF guy, you understand about building those relationships. And that was the one thing I always admired about 10th Mountain.

They really tried to mentor, train the battalion and hire staff of the A&A because the C-Sticca guys, the combined whatever training command for Afghanistan was an abortion. So it was not a good to do thing. When you talk about 10th Mountain silverbacks and grizzled sergeant majors, I have to ask. Did you ever get a chance to work with Frank Rippy? You know, I don't remember name tapes. I remember faces and getting yelled at. So I got my face ripped off a few times for stuff that other OGA guys did. Well, no, he was certain major Frank Grippie out of Tethon.

I didn't know if you had met him or not. No, I don't think I had. But I remember one time I'm sitting in my little OGA office there, minding my own business. and my phone rings and it's Ed Reeder. And why Ed had to use the phone, I don't know, because I think I could hear him yelling from a kilometer away anyways. He was pissed. So I dutifully, you know, made haste to his office

where he had calmed down just a wee bit, but God, I'm glad I'd establish some level of rapport and trust with him before that, because if not, it would have been irrevocably harmed. But yeah, so there was a total miscommunication fuck up, however you want to put it, between an OGA location and his ODA and involving local Afghans and things like that. They decided to, the OGA guys had decided to detain some Afghans that the ODA guys that the ODA guys were developing as, you know, sources for their, for their operations. And despite the,

the ODA captain going to the OGA base chief and, you know, explaining the situation to him, trying to be professional without getting, you know, because they, they lived right there in this small little fob. And he wasn't having it. So, yeah, I got my, I got my face ripped off. And so I had to get on the horn to station who then called the base and the base finally said well okay well if you're telling me to do this i'll let these guys go but i just know they're bad well if they are they'll be bad again next day and but let the oda guys know you know but it was you know it was it was hard because you know every every od a when i tried to meet the oda's before they would uh when they would come into bogg and before they would you know go out forward and uh or if they would rotate through

or something like that and just say, hey, this is your nearest or your neighbor, OGA guy. You know, here's his personality. Here's what buttons you don't want to push. Here's his, here's his good points. Here's his bad points. Here's how I think they can help you. And if they don't, well, you know, go through your chain of command, but I'll try to do what I can for you. You know, probably probably not the smartest, you know, usurping my chain of command.

But again, like I said, I'm looking at all those, all those ODA, you know, troopers as is one of my kids, you know, because my kids were wearing the uniform, too. And I'd want somebody that could possibly make a difference, make a difference. Was that a common issue in your experience, that there was tension between either the military or the SF forces or the military, the military, shwacking agency assets or vice versa? I mean, or a refusal to cooperate? Like, was that a thing? Or was there, you know, Did it happen often than not? The case I just brought it was probably the rare, rare instance.

I mean, most, I think Reader had a pretty good handle on his ODA, his team, his team captains and team sergeants. So they were, they, they, they tagged team the guys pretty well. In fact, in a lot of places, like when we went to Schen, they were thick as thieves. So that's always the best better solution than antagonism. And with the conventional guys, not so much, again, because I'd worked really hard with the staff there at Boggham, as well as the different battalion chiefs out in Oregon-E and up at Jabad and down in Kandahar.

So it was, the problem really was, Dave, was with the task force guys. they kind of wanted to do their own thing a lot of times, despite having programs where they would operate under our authorities and with our funding, but they would refuse to adhere to some ground rules. When you say task force, or are you talking about like J-Soc elements essentially? Right, yes. Yeah, I'm not sure. I've seen it written as task force, so I'm just going to say task force

and hope that my jail cell's comfortable. Let's get some questions real quick, if you don't mind. Go ahead. Let's get some questions. Yeah, no. And let me just point out, I just want to give the little pitch. Thank you, everyone, for joining us tonight. And if you haven't subscribed to the channel yet,

please go ahead and hit that subscription button down below so that you get notified. You hit the bell icon, so you get notified in wherever we go live. We're trying to be pretty consistent now about going 8 p.m. Eastern Standard time every Friday. Yeah. That's our jam now. That's it. And if you look down in the description of this video, there is a link to our first interview with Ron. A few episodes back, you can go check that out if you like this one so far, if we're not boring you to tears.

And there's also a link to our Patreon. If you like what we're doing and you want to support the stream, keep the lights on here, go take a look at that. And actually, it's as little as just a dollar a month. Honestly, $1 a month from everybody would, like, it'd pay our rent. It'd keep us in LaFroid. It would help us out tremendously. And you get access to the bonus segments we film, which are like, honestly, they tend to be 30 to 60 minutes long each. Yeah.

And if you are a Patreon subscriber and the live chat or down in the comments, please, if you enjoy the content on Patreon, please mention it to other people. Like, a lot of people know that it's good content. Yeah. If you give this little video a thumbs up, if you leave a comment down there, all that stuff plays into, like, YouTube's algorithm and helps us spread the meme of the team house around the internet. Yeah, the virus, the virus, exactly. The infection. Exactly. Okay, so Ian's asking, were any of the three of you in Iraq during the Fallujah ambush in 2004,

thoughts of the general atmosphere at the time? I wasn't. No, I don't think I was. You know, I may have been, but the atmosphere was, like I pointed out, you know, the population, when we first took control of the country, they were kind of like, okay, you know, my daddy, Saddam is no longer around, so Uncle Sam's now my daddy,

you know, what do I do? How do I, you know, what's going on? You know, am I going to have electricity every day? Am I going to have fresh water supplied? I mean, the basic necessities. And we, I don't know, I think we really, we weren't ready for that. And then of course, Bremmer and the Army 3-star who came in, who got fired pretty quickly after that, both were pretty weak in doing that.

And so the population was sort of like aimless teenagers. You know, they're sort of wandering around going, you know, somebody, give me some guidance, tell me what to do. And there was a lot of bad influencers in the, in the marketplaces and in the villages, you know, that were not so much sedentary. dumb loyalists but they were just they like to cause trouble and or they were jihadists and I mean we we know after a while I mean you know Iraq was like you know like the burning man for jihadist reunions everybody showed up that's I know it's like it's terrible I mean you know we I mean I remember we were in Al Qaim along the Syrian Iraqi border and we got we got wind of

some Russian tourists had entered Iraq and were making their way to Ramadi and Fallujah. And they were Chechians. They were bad guys. They were, you know, they were hardcore, you know, killers of people. And so we're chasing them down the highway to Fallujah. And of course, the U.S. Army's got little checkpoints along the way to make sure that, you know,

everything is basically harassing the population because nothing had really kicked off then, at least, you know, in that neck of the woods. and so we're radioing ahead and of course you're dealing with multiple different units and you have to tell the same story and you know try to establish rapport and trust over the radio or over a telephone line with some you know major or some sergeant first class explaining this and you're saying just hold them at the checkpoint we'll take care of it all we'll be explained to you you know well but so literally we're We're catching up because I'm not driving.

I'm pulling security on the passenger side. But Mario Andretti here, he's driving on the road. And, you know, potholes be damned. It's not my vehicle. I don't give a shit about the suspension. And we're coming up to these check. Of course, we came up to these checkpoints. We got to slow down because the last thing I want to do is scare some poor private

into thinking I'm, you know, Mahmoud, the suicide bomber. And we say, hey, did a couple of, You know, did a couple of white guys just come through here? You know, oh, you mean the Russian tourists? Yeah, the Russian tourists. Yeah, yeah, they showed us their passports. I says, tourists in a war zone. Suspicious?

Did you check the trunk? No, okay. How long ago? Oh, just a few minutes ago. You know, I'm talking to some corporal who like a few minutes ago could have been like, really, dude, I got a can of coping. you can hear you know tell me honestly you know and uh I was like five or ten minutes ago I said shit here you go home and and eventually they they get caught they

they get caught in Fallujah I mean but it was you know but we're chasing them down the road it was like it's just it's one of those little silly things you're like you should up you know we go Al Qaim it's been a really long day and and the vehicle's pretty well beat to shit by now because of all the potholes and things like that. And, you know, Bradley's do wonderful things to asphalt roads. And so we're dog-ass tired. And the boss there at Al-Qaim says, so how'd you spend your day?

Jason, it's chasing. Yeah. Jason Jihadis. I was in Iraq in 2004 during like that. I was nowhere near Fallujah. But Fallujah, in all the face of Fallujah, presented a problem throughout the rest of the country because I mean a lot of times like Iraqis didn't understand why we didn't project more force you know

I remember and I don't have the iron fist yeah I remember and to them that was that was that was there was nothing wrong with that and that could have been part of the Sunni Shia split But I remember, you know, an Iraqi, you know, saying, you know, Mr. Dave, you know, you guys have nuclear weapons. Why don't you just drop a nuclear bomb on Fallujah? And I said, well, you know, the United States doesn't want to hurt innocent people. And he goes, there are no innocent people in California. You know, and so they, it just, things like that really, in some ways it diminished our, our image.

as this. I remember I had a conversation with the SWAT team leader that I was working with in 2009 over there. And the conversation of the invasion came up. And I made some sort of like very American comment like, you know, it's tragic how many, you know, Iraqi people died in the invasion and that this happened. And, you know, it's tragic that it happened like that. And he just looked at me and shrug. He's like, America is strong. Why wouldn't you invade us? Yeah. I was like, And that kind of mentality flies in the face of all of the political theory that, you know, I was taught at Columbia University about, you know, liberalism and cosmopolitanism and that people like you and respect you when you come up and shake their hand and are nice to them. That's true in a lot of situations. But in the context we're talking about and when you're going into these sorts of counterinsurgency environments, a lot of people respect strength.

Well, you know, we've talked about this on the show before a little bit about the sort of the built-in fatalism in Islam, you know, the whole inshallah, you know, whatever God wills, right? Inshallah, you know, and, you know, you wonder how somebody like Saddam could stay in power so long, and a part of it was because, well, he's in power. You know, that's sort of the way it is, right? But let's see, we got a couple more questions. Oh, and thanks, Ian, for the donation. Alex, thank you.

We passed, oh, Alex is saying we passed 100 on the subreddit R team house. Can you talk about the coffee shop at HQ? Can they not look at customers, say names, or use cards as payments? Oh, is he talking about the Starbucks at Langley? Well, we have a Starbucks and a Dunkin' Donuts. We believe in competition. And there are two schools of thought in the headquarters building. You're either a Starbucks, well, there's three actually.

You're either a Starbucks guy or a Dunkin' Donuts person or maybe the cafeteria coffee. And then a fourth group, which refuses to set foot in either one because it's undignified in the agency to sit in a Starbucks, which is just like a real Gucci Starbucks down in Georgetown. down. And, you know, yeah, the employees are, they're cleared. I mean, they have the yellow badges like the cleaning crew does. And I don't think, nobody uses their credit card there. So it's like, if you do, you buy one of those with cash, those Starbucks rewards cards or whatever it is. And, and, but it was, you know, I, I will say I enjoyed going to the Starbucks. It was, it was nice. Although Dunkin' Donuts had the better donuts, obviously.

Are they allowed to look you in the eye? Or do they have to keep their heads down? Of course they are. So what happens when they go, John Smith, John Smith, and like 10 guys come up to the counter? Yeah, they're pretty good about it. They just like at a regular star ice, you know, just, you know, Ron, you know, boom, there's your triple cappuccino, mocha, latte, venti, whatever.

I don't remember, you know, so. You know what image came to mind is, um, yeah, the Austin Power is where, uh, Dr. Evil has the Starbucks and his evil headquarters. Yeah. I mean, I'm not comparing the CIA to the evil headquarters, but, but just the fact that Starbucks is, is so like everywhere, you know, um, why didn't we need to, we need to a wreck, Starbucks and McDonald's. You know, haven't there yet?

no because they have Seattle's best they're it's actually not bad coffee sorry come on I went to green beans all the time too you know I mean you got to go to green beans Seattle's best and the um Hortons um Hortons um Hortons um the the Cinnabon on the Cinnabon on the base in Telafar my last deployment like we have a Cinnabon really Yeah. Well, no, the worst is the is the quadrangle in in Kandahar. Oh, I've never been there. Bagram had a well, not as not as bad. I mean they had a god, they had like a Ruby Tuesdays there at Kandahar and oh and also because

the Canadian forces were there right? Yeah, I mean there was a lot it was a lot of NATO people there and it was I mean I remember Kandahar way back in the early days right you know right after like fob rhino and things like that so but then i went down again and i never really had to go back and then i went back in 13 and i was amazed at the i mean it was it was like summer camp you know oh there's a war on oh shoot you know i can't be bothered i have dinner reservations at ruby tuesday it was hilarious um thank you Alex for the donation uh Thoughts on Army SF, Special Forces, Disbanding SIF teams. Oh, I'll let Jack answer that one.

He wrote a nice article about that, and it was actually well reasoned and thought out, Jack. Good job. Thank you, Ron. Yeah, I did. I wrote an article on my, I wrote it as a blog on my personal website. I figured that was a good place for that. And what's the personal website? It's Jack Murphy writes.com.

And I have some writing and articles and stuff on there, but I wrote kind of just, I guess, an opinion piece on all of that. So apparently the decision is sitting with the Secretary of Defense right now. And I believe what's happening is they are. So let me start back one second. The SIF, also known as the CRF, the I think Crisis Response Force, before that it was called the commanders and extremist force. Each Special Forces group has one company that had the counter-terrorist hostage rescue mission, specialized in direct action, all that good stuff. They are apparently losing the in-extremist portion, at least, of their mission.

So all these units, all these companies were supposed to be, at least on paper, they were on standby for no-notice deployments anywhere in the world and could ostensibly respond faster being forward deployed. I mean, some of them were forward deployed in Germany and Okinawa. And back in the day, some were the seventh group loan was deployed to Panama, but they're stateside now. That was the idea behind it, that they could get there faster than, say, some of the J-Soc elements from Fort Bragg or Damnack.

So apparently the Secretary of Defense is looking at taking away that specific portion of their mission. S.F. will probably still retain. direct action companies, but they'll be out of the hostage rescue business. They will be out of the, you know, no notice rapid deployment business. So that's what I think is happening. What's the, what's the justification behind that? I think, again, I'm saying I think because I wrote this as an opinion piece. I don't have all the facts. I think it has to do with a couple of things, but one of them is they never really did that mission. Right. I'm, I'm, not really aware of them ever doing in extremist rates or operations.

I mean, maybe they, I mean, I know they've gotten spun up a few times in the past, but I'm not really aware of them ever actually doing that portion of their mission. So that may be the rationale. They look at it and they think we have a duplication of capabilities because the J-Soc guys can do this and have done it. But there's probably a lot of other things that go into it. I mean, maybe SF is deciding they will. want to, you know, really reinvest in unconventional warfare and get away from the direct

action side of things. But I, again, I don't have all the facts, so I think it remains to shake out and see how... It's an extremely expensive. I mean, if you're not just doing it in name, if you're actually doing it, it's very expensive to maintain... Because we're not just talking about CQB, a close quarter battle. We're talking about... hostage rescue, which requires a level of training and precision. Right. Right. That is very, it's very hard to maintain. And the other thing, too, with that, with the inextremist portion of that mission, was that the J-Soc guys, Ranger Regiment, they have dedicated air assets. So there are airplanes and pilots standing by, and, you know, in J-Soc's case,

I'm sure the real answer is classified, but in case of the Ranger Regiment, we all know they can be wheels up in 18 hours, right? Having those air assets and those pilots, I mean, without them, you're not doing anything. You're not going anywhere, right? The SIF never had dedicated air assets. Yeah, they have to fly space. It's a specific air rating. It's like, I think the president has A1A, and I think like the guys, like the J-Soc guys, it's like 2B2 or B2B.

I can't remember the name of the air rating offhand. Maybe you're the expert, right? Oh, no, I'm not. But I can tell you, you know, it's interesting. You talk about ODAs and direct action. You know, everybody wants to be a door kicker. And it's, you know, it's a wonderful, it's wonderful to do, but it also, you know, never, you know, what's the first rule? Never be the first guy through the door, right?

So I'm traveling around with these general officers during my stint as COB Boggerman. and we're at, I can't remember, it's some fob cop that open and closed so quickly, but there was an ODA there, and the general was talking to conventional guys and the A&A people, because, again, they were always trying to mentor and include the A&A and try to professionalize them as best they could. But the ODA captain sought me out, and he was pissed.

He says, we've been forbidden to go out on, unilateral, you know, direct action missions. And I'm looking, I'm going, well, yeah, I mean, aren't you supposed to be taking the A&A guys out? You know, this is all before the commandos, the A&A commandos really took off and sort of like, you're supposed to advise them and let them go do this, get that experience. He says, yeah, but that's what we want to do. That's all we want to do. I go, you're supposed to, you know, develop, you know, I'm trying to go back to the, you know,

the whole FID, UW mission thing. And like, I think you're, you know, you're so caught up in the, in the, in the, in the, in adrenaline rush of, of DA missions that you're, you're, you're forgetting your, your core competency. And, and, you know, I, I, I, I, I tweeted my, my, my brief opinion on, on your, you know, commenting on your, your, your, your, your blog post, Jack is that I really, I really hope and pray that the regiment does embrace the UW FID mission again because, you know, every time they stand up and tell the National Command authorities, you know, the president and the sect F, why, well, yes, we can go do

this raid. You know, they, I mean, they're, I'm sure they all can and they do it really well, but it's not their core competency. And then they complain that they're exhausted. And then, you know, they have all sorts of other problems with retention and trying to expand into the 4th Battalion in the group, the Jedberg Battalion thing. So it's, you know, maybe this is, this is that shot of medicine that they need to focus. The other challenge with that is, like when you're talking about hostage rescue,

then you're generally talking about sort of a SWAT action, right? You're talking about, a 12-man team can do that mission in a permissive environment, right? In a permissive environment, they can do a hostage rescue or whatever. or, you know, a direct action. And there were times where they were doing unilateral special forces company level operations. Really? Yeah, that happened. And that's not doctrinal.

That's not how. And that's the challenge is that when you start talking about, you know, direct action in a non-permissive environment. You know, when you're talking about J-Soc elements, they have, you know, they have support, they have security, they have QRFs, you know, they have all. know they have all these all these pieces in place that enable them to to do these things in a non-permissive environment it's not just it's not just a handful of guys out there on their own with no backup um but i think that sf was putting themselves in these situations so they didn't didn't have those assets you know they were right because i'm not saying they can't do it they're capable obviously they're very capable dudes uh it's it's all the extra stuff that protects those guys

that are going in and, you know, and whatnot. Right. Right. You know, there was an incident with an ODA. They were in central Afghanistan. And the big thing was then everybody had to grow the big deployment beard. And, you know, the thicker, the better the beard, the more, you know, the more you would get accepted into your local Harley Club when you got back to the States.

So they're out doing a patrol in there. in their gun vs and they're driving around. And unfortunately, one of the soldiers gets killed. So Chris Haas is in command of third group. He goes down with the group sergeant major, and a few of us accompany him. And he's interviewing the ODA and trying to figure out, you know, this injury was avoidable.

The fatal injury was avoidable. He said, why weren't you wearing your Kevlar? Why weren't you wearing your helmets? And God bless the ODA detachment commander for being honest. He said, well, we keep our ball caps on because the chin straps on the helmets ruins our beards. And the sergeant major who liked to shave his head every day because I think it made up for what little hair he didn't have or what hair he didn't have anymore. Anyway, so he looked at Chris, Haas, and said, well, I guess we know what we're going to do now. We're leaving in about an hour.

All your be be shaved and taken off. You will be clean shaven from now on. You will adhere to Army grooming standards. And you will wear your protective headgear as per regulation. And, you know, and that went out throughout siege of soda after that because that sort of thing just was, I mean, you know, if you're going to have a beard, got it great but don't sit there and go and be a fashionista and say I got to wear my cool guy ball cap and because I don't want to I don't want to you know ruin my my my beard so it was yeah it was all this talk about beards and ball caps I find rather triggering Ron I'm just going to

throw that out there right now um I saw your pictures in your book well I here I am right now but um but no I understand your point um you know if you need to have well you're You're talking in a war zone. There's, I mean, you have protective gear. I mean, the task force guys in the early days in Iraq used to just wear protects. The skater, the skater snowboarder helmets, the rock climbing helmets, you know, had zero ballistic protection. So they did a couple of raids and, you know, operators got shot in the head. And the pro tech did nothing to slow down the AK-47 round.

So that's why they all wear Kevlar now. You know, it's, again, sometimes it's ego overrides judgment. And that's, you know, it's. So, I mean, believe me, I'm all about wearing a ball cap because, you know, wearing a helmet, a flight helmet, a Kevlar, you know, a battle helmet, you know, especially with a battery pack and nods on it. Good Lord, you know, I get a sore neck, I get a headache. And, you know, plus the, you know, your, you're, you're,

all your kit and stuff like that that you have to wear it you know it's I think it's a question of you know which rules do you bend and knowing when to bend them is really what it comes down and some of that is part experience too in the sense of you know TBI is you know in head trauma and stuff like that what was not it it wasn't an issue be you know it wasn't something people we didn't really think of it worried about you know prior to I'm still standing we're still gaining understanding of what causes it and how to treat it and things like that. And you're in you're right. I mean, I remember the early, early days in Kabul.

I mean, it was, I mean, good Lord, it was a lot of fun. I mean, you know, we got a couple hours between missions. Hey, let's go down to Chicken Street, which is we're all, they used to have chickens, but where all the carpet stores were. And we'd buy carpets. I mean, we'd walk around. I mean, we'd wear a Cavlar and Carriac, our glocks. But, you know, we were just, you know, we were mixing with the population.

and we were, you know, it was pretty wild. I mean, fast forward to a year later. I mean, good Lord, I had to write a trip plan and have, you know, a three-vehicle convoy to, you know, just go to the airfield from the station. So it was a lot, you know, it's a, you know, the early days were always the best. So, Ron, I did want to hear. Is there another point? Yeah, we got two more real quick.

Let's see here. Oh. okay thanks Alex what are the skills the 10th Infantry learn that separated them from the rest

we don't have one mountain division and we've been in a mountain war for 20 years well yeah and of course they're stationed

in the flatlands of upstate New York so it makes a lot of sense but you can thank Senator they get the snow though they do get the snow

which is sort of a mountain qualifier, but that's okay. You can thank Bob Dole for that when they brought back his division that he served with in Italy and in World War II. That was the compromised position they made to open up Fort Drum and put the 10th Mountain there. They had over a year and a half to prepare for this deployment, and I can speak more to the intel people that Colonel Morris, and prepared. He sent a lot of them to push to and Dari language schools. He gave them a lot of

cultural training and things like that. The different battalions, including the logistics units, which General Freakley operationalized, he made them a, you're not just going to sit around and do warehouse ops. You guys are actually going to run convoys and, you know, be in charge of fobs and run, you know, combat like missions out, out and about. So they got a lot of training and they, and they learned the cultural stuff and they, and it was an attitude. They had, they had a positive attitude towards it. You know, and this, again, this was 2006.

So they got alerted in, they got notified sometime in late 2004. I mean, so we're talking the early, early days. I mean, you know, fast forward now is like, Hey, we're on the patch chart to go back to Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, the units prior to that, you're right, they had the advantage of they were getting all the AARs.

They were getting, you know, whereas other units were just kind of dumped there with minimal you know, first in and stuff like that. You know, they had the advantage of, you know, learning all this stuff and they had great leadership, you know, they took advantage of that and I mean, CTAF suffered from poor leadership and poor preparation. I think their combat unit was a brigade out of the 82nd. And, you know, I love the 82nd Airborne Division. My son's a platoon sergeant in it.

But, you know, they're paratroopers, and they constantly want to reenact Normandy and Market Garden. And they want to attack things. and maybe in the early days in Afghanistan that wasn't the right tactics or operational plan. And of course, the other thing is that we have to keep in mind, you know, as we, you know, open up our site aperture a lot, is that, you know, Iraq had begun, and a lot of people weren't quite sure, okay, now that I've got Afghanistan, what do I do with it? I had a conversation with General Franklin once. he was one of the things is when the divisions get ready to go do this or division headquarters

they go do a Washington DC they spent about a week in Washington DC meeting with all the major interagency units CIA NSA DIA State Department so on he said he mentioned that he had some meetings at the Pentagon I said well did you meet anybody like an OSD in policy or something like hey he says he says I had I had like two minutes with Rumsfeld second Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who wasn't, didn't even remember that I was going to Afghanistan and didn't even realize that we still had a thing there. So it was kind of, you know, he was, yeah, it was, you know, and that's, so he, they didn't have a lot of top-down guidance about, you know, what is, what is the Commander-in-Chief's intent, you know, the four-stars intent from,

you know, Combined Forces Command Afghanistan, and ISAF, to what do you want, what do you want us to do? What are we running combat operations? Are we, you know, training, mentoring, you know, working side by side with the A&A guys. I mean, what are we doing here, you know, talk to me? So they got a lot of, they suffered from, and, you know, if any of them are listening and they want to, you know, yell at me later because I'm wrong, that's good. But from what I gather, they took what minimal guidance they had and they did the best.

they could with what they had so but the previous unit like CTAF like I told you was they were they were they were their leadership was weak they weren't really engaged in the mission I think they were they were more placeholding um did you mark uh Ian yes and and thanks for the donation and Tbar thank you for the donation can Ron speak to the situation where it was difficult to decide if a problem set was best suited for the military or the agency? Good question.

Wow. And who would make that decision? Well, it would depend on the type of problem. If it's like in-your-face tactical problem, who's ever facing it would take care of it. If it's a bigger issue, then we would generally sit down. Either the local OGA chief

with the senior military officer in that fob or battalion commander would fly in or whatever, and they would try to, you know, hash it through. If it needed to get elevated, obviously it did. And so it, you know, it really depended on the problem and what the issue was. I mean, that's kind of hard to answer that hypothetical. But, I mean, there were issues where,

and Jalalabad where we had problems with between the base, which moved from one location to Jalalabad. Airfield. They moved from in the city to Jalalabad Airfield. And Chris Cavoli and his battalion had already occupied part of the airfield. And the OGA guys, you know, I tried to tell them, I says, hey, you know, these guys are already here. So, you know, they're kind of the landlords that they can help you.

But, you know, but again, the officer that was in charge of that, he walked in and says, I'm a title 50 guy. I don't need to listen to you. You title 10 decks. And you're going to do what I say. So next thing I know, I'm standing in front of, you know, Frakley and Terry and Teta, and Chris Kavoli's on the phone. He's a three-star general. He's commander of U.S. Army Europe, great, great officer.

And he is, and Kovoli's normally even keeled as they come. I mean, he's diplomatic to the core. But Kovoli's pissed. I mean, he did learn a few swear words in Ranger's school, and I got to hear him all. And multiple times, you know, he was pissed. And, you know, what could I do? I'd sit there and go, I'll look into it, I'll do, da, da, da, da. But it was, eventually we reached an uncomfortable truce.

The agency guys just did what the hell they wanted there. And the Army guys sort of had to suck it up. And it was one of my failures I always thought because I wasn't able to ameliorate that situation to make it better. And that was always bad. left a bad taste in my mouth. One of the things I did want to follow up on, too, was you mentioned your second deployment to Bagram, where you were with Admiral Bill McRaven,

and you were present when the, what was it, the Maersk was hijacked. Right, the Maersk, Alabama, the Containership, right. Yeah, I was there working with the task force on something else. and the J-Soc commander back then, you know, McChrystal started it, they would alternate between Iraq and Afghanistan, where they would put there, where they would have their flag. McChrystal, of course, spent 99% of his time in Iraq.

McRaven was more even-handed about that. So he's there, and we're working this project, which is never mind. And it's just... What's that? No, no, I can't talk about it. I can't talk about it. So it was just one of those things. You kind of roll your eyes going, you know, is that like the Mike Bloomberg math?

Everybody gets a million dollars kind of approach. Somebody thought of it like that. You know, it's like, oh, my God. So, but we, so the Mars, Alabama happens. And so McRaven's got most of his staff there. So there's a lot of VTCs back to, back to Fort Burrack. back to J-Socke, to the Pentagon, to the, to the, to the White House and other other players. And so McRaven's back forward.

Then a lot of times he'd have to kick us out of the, out of the room because he would have to talk one-on-one with the National Security Advisor and sometimes even the president. So, and then afterwards he would, he would give us a little what his guidance was. Excuse me. so anyway so he finally gives the go and you gotta love you gotta love joc they seem to have this unlimited video budget i mean makes would make hollywood jealous because we get to watch the uh the free fall drop of of the boat drivers of the swick guys well the boats the swick drivers and the seals and they're all flying and you know so we we have we have a camera bird i'm going this is great this is like a Howard Hughes production, you know, of Hells Angels.

I'm watching all this, you know. It's like, you know, it's, yeah, and you can even, I'm even talking with my hands now again. This is bad. I'm going to need more scotch after this. The, so, so anyway, so, and we watch them all fall into the ocean. I mean, you know, plop, plop, plop, and then the video cuts out. And maybe, I don't know, 20, 30 minutes later, a video cuts in again, and on one of the

Navy vessels, one of the ships, that is the, going to be. be the command post for the for the seals that dropped in and so there's there's scotty more who i've known on and off for years uh he's he's he's the captain of this and he's he's got that brown g-i towel and he's drying his hair like he just came out of a gym workout he's gone on a nondescript no-mex flight green flight suit and he's going sir we're we're ready to go execute right now I got my guys right. We're going to go right now. And McRaven goes, Scotty,

Scottie, calm down. Let's make it slow. Let's think about this. And, you know, I don't know, Scottie was always very, very aggressive. And so, I mean, but it was funny. So from there on, we were always like big brother looking over the shoulders of the seals there on the scene

about what was going on. and we were hooked into all the comms and things like that. So it was interesting and kind of, you know, weird at the same time because occasionally McRaven would, you know, click the talk button and ask a question or, you know, and thanks for your donation, Tate, and things like that, you know, go, you know, type. But now, I'm serious, but he would ask a question, and here's a three-star, sort of interfering with with a tactical commander's

control of his battle space it was just kind of interesting but and then of course when you watch the Tom Hanks movie you see it from a different perspective and you go okay but it was it was just interesting just to watch Mick Raven's

the way he he commanded and leadered his through that crisis with not so much with his his subordinate units because you know that was all good but with you know negotiating with the with the White House because there were there were numerous plans being proposed from the beginning of the crisis till the

one that was accepted and was executed so he would always come back with additional planning guidance or like the White House is worried about casualties or you know it was it was the Obama administration they wanted you know ironclad guarantees on everything and and McRaven and, you know, did his best to assuage those concerns. So I thought he, you know, the thing is what I learned there was that he not only had to manage the crisis and lead his support unit and people and coordinate their resources and come up with a plan, but he had to manage the expectations of the civilian leadership in Washington.

And that may have been the more difficult challenge of them all. I always admired him for that. Was that because President Obama and the National Security Council really had this expectation that it was all going to be nice, clean head shots on the bad guys and ticker tape parade for the hostages coming home? I mean, that must have been very difficult for Admiral McRaven and for the guys working the ground game to make those kinds of promises. I don't know.

I think that's what it was, the way McRaven would intimate the gist of the conference. conversations that he would have. They wanted those ironclad guarantees that it was either going to be, you know, surgical, clean, and there was no chance of any, you know, oopses or anything like that. But he, you know, he, like I said, he had to, he had to guide them to the reality of where he had to keep them. So it was, it's probably his biggest leadership challenge, I think, at that time. And how, I mean, from your perspective where you said, I mean, how did that operation actually shake out? I mean, the details at least we learned were pretty interesting as far as how they executed. I mean, a well-executed operation, without a doubt. Oh, it was.

I mean, you know, the good thing was, I mean, he knew all the players, all the senior players, because it was, you know, the damn neck guys were coming out to do it. So he knew all the personalities. He knew their capabilities. It wasn't like he was. you know, tasking the Ranger Regiment to do something, and he'd have to look around for his Ranger expert to let him know what was what was what. But I think, you know, it was, the plan, of course, always starts big with lots of, lots of explosions

and lots of, lots of assets and lots of bullets flying, and then it goes through all sorts of branches and sequels and twigs and things like that, and it finally distilled. down to what what they actually could get away with because they wanted to keep the footprint small and everything like I'm going really these these three four starving Somali pirates you know or you know I mean they took what three Navy ships and you know the C-17s had to fly you know to drop the boats and everything I mean it was pretty intense to make to decide how to deal with three or four starving Somali and pirates that's really interesting right

Right, yeah, because I remember my son would tell me war stories between his time in the Navy and the Army when he was on a Navy frigate doing anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Yemen and Arabian Gulf, Arabian Sea area there and things like that. And, you know, talking about interdicting these Daos, you know, the small, oh, no, no, we're fishermen. You know, these aren't AK-47s, really. You don't see anything. So it was, you know, they had some fun. but it was as you say it was amazing because because the vessel had returned to control of the crew so the vessel it was just the captain was the captain Phillips was the only one that was endangered or being held hostage but um i mean it could almost goes back to your your discussion and your reasoning on on the abolishment of the of the of the of the of the of the siff or the or the criff is they had all the resources to achieve this multi-dimensional multi-domain maritime anti-piracy hostage rescue you know whatever type things so it was

yeah it's interesting i mean because you know andy milrun uh you know you talked about that you know the idea of leading up you know dealing with leadership above you and i mean i i feel as though since sort of clinton's uh what uh like zero failure or what was it like this idea that if you make a mistake in the military or something that was bad on your watch that zero defect the whole zero defect

yeah that you make a mistake in the military you're out you're done especially if you're an officer or whatever I mean even during the Carter administration you know they were freaking out that the Delta guys were going to kill

Iranians when they went into the embassy and rescued our hostages I mean there were there were stories that like he was suggesting you know shoot the terrorists in the shoulder and Charlie Beckwith was like hey that's not how it works yeah you know yeah well I mean we have the same problem with our police force and I have this theory uh about the long ranger you know that that I mean most people now haven't didn't grow up with that didn't see it but but it carries on with the idea that like the Long Ranger never killed anybody right we grow up with this

hero who all right who can shoot people's hands like Batman can throw some bats And that's what a good guy is capable of, right? A good guy is capable of taking down a bad guy through superior skill and not actually have to harm the bad guy. So now we have this sort of idea in our culture that, you know, if somebody's coming rushing a police officer with a knife, that they can either, maybe not shoot the knife out of his hand, but shoot him in the leg. They go like, shoot him in the leg.

Walker, Texas Ranger, roundhouse kick in his hand. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Because that's how good guys win. Good guys don't have to kill people, you know. That's right. because Chuck Norris will show me how. Yeah.

That's right. Well, you know, it's interesting because, you know, one of the questions I had in one of my leadership classes was we talked about this sort of thing. And I said, you know, when George Marshall was the chief staff of the Army to FDR, you know, he was pretty open. He says, we're going to, you know, he didn't mince words. He, I mean, he just was straightforward. He told the president, you're going to expect casualties. this is going to happen. This is the bad, this is the good.

And I asked the question with that preface to my leadership class, I says, do we have leaders now in the military or in the intelligence agencies that are willing to be that forthright to the decision makers to say that? And, yeah, I did graduate from the course, but it was only by the hair on my, I was like, because I was not supposed to ask, the impolite questions.

And it was something I observed that, you know, I was, you know, you try to see, I've seen way too many political generals and obviously politicians in, you know, in the agency and elsewhere. But it was, but yeah, it was, but anyways, the three generals I mentioned from, from 10th Mountain as well as Ed Reeder and Chris Haas, you know, they, they were pretty forthright and honest. I observed them when they talk to the codels or the congressional delegations or the visiting staffers who were even more terrifying than the congressmen and senators because they really do have the power of telling the senator or the congressman what he, what you, this is what you need to know type of thing. They were pretty forthright and honest.

And so we had some interesting discussions with them. They were like, well, that's not what we've heard elsewhere. So I said, well, this is the truth. As we see it from our vantage point where we sit here in Afghanistan, back in D.C., everything looks different. Yeah. Well, I really, I mean, we could talk all night again. I really only had like one other big question to ask. Is there anything else?

No, I just want to thank Graham. Graham, thank you for the donation. He didn't ask a question. Oh, actually, he did a little bit further down. You wanted to ask, Ron, if you knew Doug Lau, L-A-U-X at all, or if he has any thoughts on his book, Left of Boom, about counter-IED work in Afghanistan? I do not know that gentleman, and I have not read that book.

I worked with some of the counter-I-E-D people that were associated with Tenth Mountain. they they it was an interesting again it was a it was a nascent effort back then because the IED threat was just beginning to

really come come to the forefront in Afghanistan of course then later in Iraq even more so and also with the explosive foreign penetrators in Iraq and then of course

the whole you know joint IED whatever Jayito you know came you know so yeah the contractor money hole in DC.

But the thing was the IED guys, the counter IED guys in Afghanistan in 06, we had the clue and the couple of the other electron systems to try to predetinate. And we emphasize the tactics, techniques, and procedures about when you come to culverts and bridges, you stop and you do the probing and, you know, all the. the stuff that so you move at the at the pace of snail going to your objective the uh but uh the some of the id guys then that would go out and do the uh the iED exploitation to discover you know because like any like bomb makers leave fingerprints they leave you know everybody has a signature you know like he this oh this this guy does like a three twist on his wire type of thing or whatever and and but they tried to uh form themselves into an action arm so they were like a an iED qurf they would go out and and and and do raids and so i think that lasted for about three three

seconds and and the poor colonel that was it was it was one of those wet dreams he had and it was it was kind of fun to see him get chopped down to size and in front of everybody because he would lord this over everybody and yeah in general frankly not knocked that out of the out of of the park that was funny but because he was he was also interfering with other operations elsewhere so it was but you know he was he was the most important guy in country sure and alex just asked favorite memory of working with state department dss any plans to have cairn on the show uh and when will you have oops and an oops all cia edition episode i are practically asking us to play like strip poker right here.

Hey. I mean, that might be a little bit much. Yeah, no strip poker on this end. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I live near Deadwood, South Dakota. I'll hold a Bill Hickok hand. But I do have a DSS vignette. So, Khalil Azad, the current

special ambassador that's negotiated this agreement with the Taliban, During the first Bush administration, he was like the senior special dude for Afghanistan for the Bush administration before he became appointed ambassador there and everything like. So he flies in on an aircraft, not one of ours. And there's his DSS team. And I'd never met these guys before, but you could tell right away they were, these guys were, they were good. They knew what was going on. and the DSS, the team chief, come up and met me because we didn't have a whole lot.

This was my first tour when we were like pulling triple duties on everything. And I gave him the 4-1-1, and they had their little suburban. They went and drove to the embassy. A little while later, he calls me up on my little cell phone that we, you know, it's a remarked we had cell phones in those early days there in Afghanistan. And he says he lost Khalil Azad. I said, well, what do you mean? He says, well, I need your help finding him. He just walked out of the embassy, and he's just, he's walking around town.

I says, he didn't tell you guys this, or he didn't, he doesn't have anybody with him. No, he just has his aid. And I met his aide when they'd gotten off the plane. His aide, he, very, reminded me of like Beaker from the Muppets, very officious little guy. And, sorry, I don't know how to describe him, but he comes up and says, because they called him an ambassador. So he says, the ambassador needs to use the facilities. So can you point out where the business class lounge is?

Now, this is Kabul Airport. I mean, I've got eroding earth revetments around me. I've got acres and acres of destroyed Russian aircraft that have been pushed off into a minefield that are waiting to be scrapped or pulled out and then demined and everything. I mean, I'm talking the craters of the moon. I mean, you're lucky the tarmacs in one piece. But we're surrounded by this earthen berm. And I look at the A and I go, well, there's the berm. You knock yourself out.

You know, pee anywhere you want. And he just looked at me like, he was shocked. And, oh, God, this is the ambassador. I go, this is Afghanistan. He ought to be used to this. Knock it off. Shit. Enjoy the cycle.

Yeah. Anyway, so we mobilized a bunch of some of our other guys, and we went out with the DSS guys, and we found him. And he was mad because he was getting to know the man on the street stuff. I'm going, okay, whatever. I mean, if something had to happen to you, you know, that would have really looked bad. But I love those DSS guys. They seem to be very focused on their job and very professional, so a lot of respects for them. Um, any plans for Cody Perron, Peron, Peron, Peron.

Cody? Oh, yeah, I interviewed Cody once before. No plans right now, but we can arrange that in the future. Yeah, yeah. We're like scheduled, like, right now, like six weeks out. Yeah. Yeah, and we have our list of potential people that I'd like to reach out to. It's pretty long.

So no promises about doing it in a timely manner, but we'll get there. Yeah, we're almost two, we just got booked one for June. So we're very forward planning right now. I mean like the next six weeks are solid. And then after that we'll start lining some other people up. And I got to talk to you off air about some other interesting folks that will, you know, I think be interested. Stay tuned.

Yeah. No, I'm excited. And actually, that brings us to the next episode, next Friday, and that's what I wanted to ask Ron about. So, Ron, next episode, we're going to have Michael Ames on. He's going to be here in studio. He's the guy he wrote the book. I know you know this, but for our viewers, he wrote the book, American Cypher, about Bo Bergdahl, how he wandered off the base, how he got captured, his captivity.

I'm about halfway through reading the book. And so I'm asking this question to you, Ron, not to start a food fight, not to instigate anything. But really, I just want to develop some interesting conversation points as we roll into the next episode next Friday. What questions do you think I should ask Michael? Or what questions do you think Michael should be asking people like you? well when uh when i heard the book was coming out and i i um i um i got it and i read it and i i reached out to michael and uh he never interviewed me and he uh he didn't seem to interview and michael and i've had this discussion so here this is like round six of the food fight

so no i don't need to kick anything up yeah no no it's okay it's okay i mean i mean it's okay i I mean, it's all done in a very, you know, mature manner. I mean, there's not no name calling or anything like, yeah, but it's just, it's just the disagreement about research methodologies and that sort of thing. But the, you know, it seemed like the people he interviewed were confirming the conclusions that he'd already made. And when I spoke to him about what we just talked about in the last episode, the last broadcast I was on about the wandering off the thing like in the in his book he either ignored it or

discounted it and um plus he got some he got some basic facts of of the of the agency wrong and uh so it was um oh come on Dave you can have a little more and but uh so uh yeah it was you know I I guess part of me was miffed, insulted, because he hadn't reached out to me to get an alternate theory to the crime. He, and a couple of the people that he'd interviewed for sources, they attacked me on Twitter and everything. It was like, yeah, okay. I was, whatever. You know, I was like, Twitter's like the playground with chains and knives. It's not a big to do, you know, it's whatever.

and you know the I don't block people I just mute them you know because you like you know talk to the hand I can't you I mean but but Michael was Michael was he seemed to want to do better but the book was already out and everything like that and I guess my primary objection to the thread throughout the whole book was he made Bo Bergdahl somehow the poster child for the entire failed and Afghan adventure in, to kind of paraphrase his words. And I thought that was not a, he probably could have chose a better, somebody better for to use that for an example. I, you know, I mean, I talked to my son at the 82nd. Now I realize Bergdahl was at the airborne unit up in, up at Fort Richardson, Alaska. But, I mean, the, you know, none of them. None of them thought he was a good soldier.

I mean, there's some people that have moved into my son's unit from that unit. And they, you know, they have nothing. I mean, Bergdell is the kind of guy that if you had enough time, you would have probably chaptered him out of your unit because he was just a poor performer. And so it was, you know, again, I just, I think he put too much emphasis on Bo's character and making him out to be some sort of misunderstood. you know, innocent child of, you know, of the evil military industrial complex or something like that.

You know, Michael, I'm sure you're listening and you're probably, you know, getting ready to send me, you know, a bomb or something like that. And I'll listen. And I, but I just, I just found an interest in that he, his research, I thought was flawed. So, bottom of my. Like I said, I'm halfway through the book. I'll finish it before we have Michael here next week. But I mean, I think what really comes through, at least in what I've read thus far, is, you know, like you said, Bo Bergdahl is somebody who never should have been in the Army to begin with. And he is, you know, I think you'll see when we talk to Michael also, Dave, he is, Bo Bergdoll is that guy.

Like, you knew him when you went through basic training. I knew him when I went through basic training. There's that one kid where it's like, dude, what are you doing here? Like, how did you even get this far? Like, you should not be here. You're not mentally well. Yeah, you're not in a good place. I had to join up before I got drafted.

Well, in his case, he wanted to join. It's an interesting personality. It's like the over-earnest, like I'm going to be like a samurai warrior kind of guy, but has delusions of grandeur. Sure. You know, like his mind is like, he's in a very alternate universe. And when you understand his upbringing, I think it begins to explain a little bit of that. But still. It does.

It does. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and I would hate to have been his platoon sergeant or his team leader, his squad leader, because, God, I would have been in the woodland doing burpees from sun up to sundown just because. Yeah, I had a guy in my platoon in Iraq that was like that. And I did have him doing, you know, ground drills in the gravel until someone made me stop. Yeah. That's a whole other story.

I've told them about that there are those people who, yeah, they shouldn't be. Is things against the law? I mean, one of the challenges is, I don't know how it is now, but for a while, it was very difficult to chapter people out. They would be considered leadership challenges and instead of like, okay, look, you're done. And they would move them to an early, you came in during the surge when they were just taking any time. Yeah, you know, they would move them because like, okay, well, he's a leadership challenge. Obviously, his team leader

and his squad leader are failing him. Right. You know, so let's move somewhere else where he can flourish, right? And I don't know if that's what happened. Him, but that was the mentality for a while. Bo was not going to flourish in the military. That just wasn't going to happen.

There's a good job in the gym to hand out towels, dude. Go there. What were people were some of the specific or why were people attacking you? Simply because you question the research methods or for other Well, I'm trying to remember. I mean, it's like one of those things, you know, I like, you know, I mean, they, they didn't, they were sort of defending Michael because I was, I, I, like I said, I said, you know, you didn't interview me.

You interviewed people that were really on the outside pre. You didn't interview general scaparade. You didn't interview, you know, any of the, any of the real players involved. you had a pre you know like it's like a bad investigator um i know you're guilty dave and now i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna find evidence that proves that and you know it's instead of follow the evidence where it leads instead of you know michael's saying i want to i want to know what this whole bo bergdoll thing he's he decided i think early on that bobergdall was innocent you know mis-

right. This is, you know, he was, he was, he was going to be my, my, my,

my, my, my, my symbology through this, this tail, I'm going to weave this tail using

Bo as my protagonist to show how, how bad the entire Afghan, you know, program, strategies, you know,

adventure, whatever phrase you want to use it. That, that I would disagree with that. I don't know, or I would agree with you that I don't think Bo is the lens through which you can view the war in Afghan

understand that that would be right now be a bad take as the kids say yeah and you know and and so I I I did not write a review in Amazon on Michael's book or anything like that I just I let it go I figure out just like whatever you know it's like you know it's this isn't about poisoning them off for next week like we I mean it's a point I want to get to the the truth of it so and that's why I ask different people and you know try to generate some of these these different thoughts on it and see what comes out of that. Yeah. Well, you know, yeah, I mean, you know, again, I'm like, I'm multi-people removed because

when I relate, you know, the NCIS agents debriefed us and what they discovered and what was in their report. And, I mean, to find the truth, you'd have to interview some of his platoon mates and things like that. And I think they've been on enough media, you know, when Bergdall got released that, you know, their feelings are pretty well known. and so it's like it's a controversial subject and and you know Bose you know hopefully Bose made peace with himself and he's he's faded away into the woodwork somewhere so

I mean the interesting thing is the I wonder if his if him and his family his father and mother have actually reconciled I'm not sure they they have it's there's been some some debate on that he had he didn't go home or he didn't go back to them or something like that. So it's interesting questions you could ask. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Okay, Dave, you got anything else? Because I know we could go on all night.

Oh, we could. Are we going to do a members only segment? Do you have, you think you got something else you want to lay on us? Well, we can talk about the corn gall. Okay, okay. That sounds like a plan to me. Cornagall Valley.

Yeah. All right. Well, guys. Not nice. Well, thank you, everyone for joining us live tonight, watching the show, asking questions and participating. Really appreciate it. We've been here with Ron for about two and a half hours, more than two and a half hours. Please make sure you subscribe to the channel.

If you haven't already, please hit that bell icon so you get notified. Give this video a little thumbs up. write some comments. All that helps bump up the video in YouTube's algorithm and gets more eyeballs on it. We really appreciate it. And if you go down in the description, you'll find a link to the first interview we did with Ron a few episodes back. And some of the other people we mentioned tonight, CIA ops officer H.K. Roy, UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter. Who were some of the other ones we mentioned in this? We mentioned Andy Milburn, SOTIF commander, fighting ISIS in Missoule. I mean, a whole bunch of cool interviews in there that kind of reference

and factor into this interview we have been doing on. Well, J.D. Patton, we didn't really mention him, bet the price of giraffes on the open market. The thing that people have to understand is like all these interviews and all these personalities are all intertwined with one another, whether they know it or not. So it's very interesting to look at it, you know, as a gestalt. That's my $6 million word. Nice. A gestalt. A gestalt. Oh, that Columbia education wasn't wasted. There you go. A part of the greater hole.

I like it. That's GI Bill paying off right there. And also down in the description is a link to our Patreon. If you want to support the stream, you know, we really appreciate it. Go take a look at that. And I don't know. That's it. Ron, do you got anything else that you want to plug while we're here?

You mentioned you give leadership courses. I mean, how can people find you out there? Oh, no, no. I'm a student. I don't give anything. Gosh, no. I'm just, I'm a quiet country retired gentleman now. You've got something to offer, Ron. Don't say yourself short.

What's your Twitter handle so people can find you on Twitter? Oh, it's, what is it, Ronald J. Moeller? My full name with my middle initial, molar, yeah. And there's a picture of me kneeling in front of the Peshwire base sign, so it's me. And I'm Jack Murphy, RGR on Twitter, Dave. Jesus Christ, Dave. He's on Twitter so much. Find me on Twitter and you'll find Dave through me.

I mean, that's the best we can do. Yeah. Also, speaking of social media, we do have a subreddit. We have a subreddit, the team house. Also down in the description, you'll find it. also down it's I think it's Alex right has done a really good job of setting that up it's not super active if if you guys get active on there we'll get active on there in the sense of if there is questions or input or feedback Jack and I both check it out

so we don't want you to think that that we're never there we don't look at it because we do and that's that's about it thank you very much already we really appreciate it we appreciate you Ron thank you for joining us again yeah and we will Very welcome. We'll do the bonus segment now, and that'll be up on Patreon later this week. Thanks, guys. Good night. All right.

Ciao.