The Team House - Special Forces officer and United Nations Security Chief Robert Adolph, Ep. 37

Episode Date: April 11, 2020

Robert Adolph retired as a Lt. Col. in Special Forces having been a combat diver and deployed around the world as a soldier all before starting a second career as a security chief for the United Nations. That job took him around the world a few more times, particularly to Sierra Leone, Yemen, and Iraq where he had some really hairy assignments. Many of these stories are detailed in his new book titled, "Surviving the United Nations." Robert's book can be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/Surviving-United-Nations-Unexpected-Challenge/dp/1733398007 Support our sponsor Ned by visiting www.helloned.com/TEAMHOUSE to get 15% off your first order and free shipping! We are also excited to announce our second sponsor, HighSpeedDaddy.com. Use the discount code "JACK" at checkout to claim 10% off your purchase. Support the stream on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/m/TheTeamHouseBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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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. Okay. Okay. All right. It looks like we're streaming live here, Dave. All set? I believe so. All right.

It says that we're streaming. Okay, well, let's go ahead. It doesn't. Yeah, yeah, we're up. People are watching already. So here we are. So guys, welcome to the team house. Sorry, we're just running five minutes late.

A couple little technical issues. I'm Jack Murphy, here with Dave Park. And, you know, joining us from quarantine in Rome, Italy is Robert Adolf. Robert is the author of Surviving the United Nations. I finished this book just this afternoon. Robert or Bob, as he goes by. had a nice long career in U.S. Special Forces. He retired as a lieutenant colonel,

and then he had a second career working security for the United Nations and some pretty hot areas during some pretty key times. So, for instance, Sierra Leone in 2000, or actually in 2000, when the RUF was sweeping through Freetown, then in Yemen in 2001 during the 9-11 attacks and everything else that was happening over in that part of the world. And then right after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, So we're going to get into all that with Bob, including talking a little bit about what's going on in Italy with the coronavirus.

And so Bob, thank you for joining us. I know it is like 2 a.m. over in Italy right now. So we really appreciate you taking the time out of, I'm not even going to say out of your day, but out of your night, you're losing sleep for this. Yeah. Thank you for your invitation. Yeah, no, we're very stoked to have you. and we appreciate your commitment to doing this. So I think maybe, well, actually, I have a couple sponsorships to get through.

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Please. Yeah. So I was wondering if you could give us a kind of a brief update right off the bat about what's going on in Italy and what your experience is like in Rome. I know you've been writing about it. and you guys as a country are a little bit further ahead of where we are in the United States as far as being deeper into this. Well, my wife and I have been in lockdown now here in Rome for at least six weeks. And it's been, it's kind of like NBC training that we had when we were when we were all young soldiers.

When I step outside the house, I go in mask, I go in gloves, I do grocery shopping. When I come back, I go through disinfecting procedures and then I take a shower. The bottom line is that neither my wife nor I has gotten infected. And as a consequence, I think, because we've been pretty cautious about it. As you mentioned, Italy is at least six weeks ahead of the United States. And I think it's probably a good idea for those people in America to take a look at what we're going through right now. because what's happening right now in Rome is likely going to be happening in the United States six weeks from now. So I think everybody needs to buckle down and recognize that there's going to be a long, dry spell.

There's going to be a long dry spell about going out. How are you and your wife coping, you know, mentally or psychologically? I was wondering if you have any Any thoughts you could give to Americans who are currently experiencing this? And I mean, you come not only that your direct experience of going through this crisis, but also you were a special forces officer. You were a head of security that had to kind of mentor UN employees on both the physical and also, you know, the mental mind game. I was wondering if you have any advice for people on how to cope with this situation from that standpoint.

Yeah. Actually, if you go to military times.com, I actually did a series of commentaries on the circumstances here and what you can do in order to make your time in lockdown a little bit easier. I don't know if I'm unique, but I do have a unique hobby in that I'm a writer. This gives me an opportunity to do something with my time instead of just watching. Netflix or becoming a couch potato. I've knocked off, I've knocked off five commentaries for military times that have been published in the last two weeks. And I've got three more that I just sent to the editor there today. Plus, I'm working on another article for Atlantic Perspective magazines out of Holland. The Netherlands, what do they call themselves? They call it.

themselves the Dutch? Yeah, the Dutch. It's the Netherlands, Atlanta Council. Those are the guys. So my wife, I'm lucky, my wife is an absolutely superb cook. So I go out and I do that. I do the shopping and our relationship actually works out pretty good because she loves to cook and I love to eat. It's symbiotic. It is. I mean, it works. I think we'll get into a a little bit more later, but I mean, your wife is Egyptian. Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct. There's a, you know, your book is a professional memoir, but I really enjoyed some of the parts of it where you talk about your mother and your big presumably Catholic family. Yes. And talking also about your, you know, meeting your wife in Yemen. And you met her by her

showing up in the hallway of the UN building screaming in your face. Yes, she was. And she did. And it was a very funny meeting. And then, you know, we'll talk about this too, but you both survived a massive bombing in Iraq in 2003. And that was probably the most harrowing part of it of your book to read, not just because of, you know, I mean, it's a special forces guy. I mean, we know you're going to be in some dicey situations, but when your wife is there alongside you, that takes on like a totally different dimension. It really does. And I'm glad you picked up on that because I had to include my wife did not want my wife is a very private person she did not want me to write about her in the book and i said then i can't write the book you're too big a part of the narrative i can't ignore

the space that you fill um so she finally acquiesced and um i was able to write the book that i wanted to write and included her because she's such a big part of it and you're absolutely right uh We had a big argument in Amman Jordan before she went into Baghdad. But essentially, she gave me the speech. If you're a husband, you've probably gotten the speech at one time or another, maybe multiple times because we tend to be a little bit thick-headed. And the speech in this case essentially told me, I don't have the authority to tell her what to do, where to go, or when.

So she went into Baghdad with me. And yeah, it was really tough all the way around. I wasn't crazy about the idea. I tried to talk around of it. But she was having none of it. And she was going to share the risk with me. It's definitely pretty incredible the whole story. And everything that happened after the bombing also from her medical recovery and your administrative professional recovery after what they tried to do to you.

But before we start going in all that stuff, I was wondering if you could kind of briefly take us through your military career and then how that kind of led you into becoming a UN employee? I'd like to take credit for this. I've had so many people tell me, Bob, you were so smart, you handled it just right. And it's all bold, all of it. I went blindly through my life, bouncing off walls, brick walls mostly, and I just got lucky. So anybody that, any of my friends that might be listening to this podcast out there that remember me from the old days might remember that I was not so bright

and that I was not so good. And I managed to just kind of limp along. So, but I was lucky. And there's no question that sometimes being lucky is better than being good. I was going to say, the old gunfighter at it, just better to be lucky than good. Yeah, and I believe it. I absolutely believe it. My life is just living proof of it. But come on, Bob. I mean, you were the team leader on a combat dive team. I mean, it takes some work. It's some pretty tough stuff. It's not everybody gets that assignment.

It was a wonderful assignment. It was one of the best jobs I ever had in the military. I was lucky. I had an opportunity to command four different times, two different special forces teams, two different military intelligence companies in Europe, got selected early for the foreign area officer program. They sent me to a master's degree program in Washington, D.C., in American University. I mean, I started out as a PFC or a private. I made staff, Sergeant, and 10 Special Forces Group, went to Officer Candidate School, got branched in military intelligence, got qualified as a counterintelligence special agent. I had my first assignment at Bragg as a young lieutenant,

had the opportunity to command those teams. I was just so damn fortunate. And then to be selected to go to a master's program in Washington, D.C., who gets that? I mean, wow. And then three years in Europe, almost a whole time in command, and back to Bragg. And then probably the pen ultimate assignment for any special forces officer,

three years with the Joint Special Operations Command shortly before I retired. Three years assigned to J-Soc. And I think if memory serves about five months physically there in North Carolina and the rest of the time deployed. When out of curiosity, when you went, you went from enlisted special, or special forces, NCO, and then you went, M-I-C-I, military intelligence, counterintelligence. And when you went back to SF, you were a captain, I assume, you had to. No, no, actually what happened?

I did everything wrong. I was actually in, I was the deputy chief of special operations proponents at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center in school. And we stood up the Special Forces branch. And I actually had a hand in helping to do that. And when that happened, when we stood up the Special Forces branch, I called up military intelligence branch and set up on branch transferring. And they said, Bob, you're out of your bloody mind because I had already done my command time in military intelligence. and I was already a senior major by that time. I was never going to have the time to punch all the tickets I needed to punch

in order to get a Special Forces Battalion Command. So I essentially committed professional suicide. So for our viewers who don't know what you mean when you said you stood up to Special Forces branch, up into that point in time, officers would go to Special Forces, but they were still branched to whatever infantry military. Correct. Whatever they were. But they were still sort of, you know, beholden to, to the branch of the Army.

To another branch of the Army. And the branches, the branches promote. So this is the bottom line. The branches promote. So you spend too much time in special forces, okay? You commit professional suicide. I did it in reverse. I went to special forces, decided I was going to commit professional suicide, knew that I would probably

end my career as a lieutenant colonel and chose to do it. I started out my career in special forces. I wanted to end it there. That's amazing. And then go ahead, Jack. I was just going to say, I mean, unless there's anything else you want to hit on there, I was going to kind of move into asking you about UN security. Yeah. You retire, as you said, you retired as a lieutenant colonel. You had a really successful career, like you said, going from private to lieutenant colonel, getting to do a lot of things that a lot of people wouldn't have opportunities to. And then you decided to start the second career. I mean, how did you, how does that work? How did you find yourself getting into becoming a security officer for the United Nations?

Again, I backed into it. As it happened, one of the things I didn't mention earlier was in between assignments, special forces and military intelligence, I did. a couple of tours in the United Nations peacekeeping, one in Egypt and in Lebanon, Cambodia, and then my last assignment before I retired in Iraq and Kuwait. So I had a background, or at least a familiarity, with the United Nations. And I kind of liked what I saw, at least in terms of the aspirations of the United Nations, those things that we had always like to think of how can I say this. Everyone has an idea about the UN, what it ought to be. Very often it fails that test. But I had it in my head that I liked the United Nations. I liked

what it stood for. I read the United Nations charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which were both based on the American Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. Essentially, Americans very much, Eleanor Roosevelt, as a matter of fact, was one of the primary authors of those documents. So when I retired, I was rooting around for something to do. I actually taught, I worked as a substitute school teacher in the Cumberland County school system for about six months, which was a riot. It was $50 a day, $50 a day, and I got to tell you, you earn every penny. So I did that for about a year, and then I took a job as a defense advisor

to the Bosnian Ministry of Defense in Sarajevo, post-conflict Sarajevo. I did that for a year. And then I started applying for other kinds of jobs, and I started looking at the United Nations. As it happened, There was an American military officer, a retired lieutenant colonel, who was working at the U.N. at the time. I was introduced to him. I said, this sounds interesting. He told me a little bit about it. I applied for a post, and after a year was accepting. I didn't actually, I didn't know what I was getting into. What was the year delay? Was that just the bureaucracy was at them running your security? Was that just combination of everything?

The job was chief security officer for a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone West Africa. And if you know anything about the history, about the Revolutionary United Front, they were the worst of the worst. Okay. Yeah. I was going to say, can you give us,

I mean, for me, because I'm not very well read, and maybe some of our viewers are right there with me, can you give us like a brief rundown on Sierra Leone prior to this, what led up to it, and who they were? and what made them the worst of the worst? Of course, the Revolution United Front was established several years earlier, and there was a succession of coups in Sierra Leone, which is a former British Crown colony.

So the Brits actually established a place, or established the country of Sierra Leone, as a home for freed slaves. You might recall from history that the British were actually highly active in the emancipation movement and then taking those free slaves, bringing back to the African continent, putting him in Sierra Leone. It was a British Crown Colley up until the 60s when they gave Sierra Leone its freedom. Shortly thereafter, the Revolutionary United Front, under a guy by the name of Foti Sanko, who was a former corporal in the Sierra Leone army, led a revolution. Now, Sierra Leone has a problem. It has a resource

problem. It's loaded with diamonds, meaning literally what they call alluvial diamond fields. In those allumian alluvial diamond fields, you can walk along the ground and pick up diamonds off the ground. The problem with the diamonds is everybody wants them. Charles Taylor next door in Liberia, later convicted by the International Criminal Court of crimes against humanity, was engaged with the Revolution United Front in order to steal as many diamonds as they can get their hands on. And when I say that the ROF was the worst and the worse, they were criminal rapists. They used rape as a weapon of war. Every single day in my office, we will get reports of rapes. They were absolutely brutal. When they conducted the first invasion of Sierra Leone, a year earlier to my arrival,

They cut off the hands of roughly 1,000 people because they voted the wrong way. Cut their hands off. You had a story, Bob, in the book, which I thought really illuminates the child soldier issue. Because on one hand, I think as outsiders, we can look at them as a bunch of thugs or something of this nature. but you tell the story about how the RUF's kind of standard operating practice was to go and round up all the kids in the village at gunpoint, pull them out with an old woman and have them like rape the village like eldest woman, like a senior citizen, so that the boys are so shamed by this crime they've been forced to commit that they are now tethered, they're coupled to the RUF, they can never go back home. That is correct. Essentially what they do is they create a psychological circumstance where the boy will. never want to go home because of that shame you were just mentioning. So literally, the recruitment techniques of the RUF were despicable. And you arrived in Sierra Leone not long after the South African

executive outcomes firm, Evan Barlow's company, left the country, right? Actually, yes, they did leave the country, but many of the soldiers who had fought with the executive outcome remained in in Sierra Leone, as advisors to the Sierra Leone Army, as providing security for a diamond mines and for gold mines, Sierra Leone, also is as considerable reserves of gold. And you describe this bar in Freetown. It sounds almost like the canteena in Star Wars as far as how surreal it was with all the different colorful characters inside it. It was, if you know the old comic strip, Terry and the Pirates, okay, it was very much like that.

It was very much like the Star Wars Bar. You walk into this place, it was absolutely surreal. There were literally dozens of prostitutes, ambassadors, RUF themselves, Sierra Leone cops and military, UN military, U.N. security, and all mixed together. Mercenaries. mercenaries, okay, all mixed up in this great mismash. And I had, I think I had to rewrite my description of Paddy's Chinese Bar and Grill

three or four different times because I didn't feel like it was giving it justice. It was these special forces bar. Any special forces soldier walking into this bar would have felt right at home. I would like to, because we have limited. time with you, skip a little bit further ahead to when the RUF actually invaded Freetown and you had to affect a, not an embassy evacuation, but a UN mission evacuation out of the country. What was kind of shocking to me to read, maybe it shouldn't be shocking, was how ad hoc all of it was. Like, for instance, you called back to the UN headquarters in New York and said,

hey, do you have like a manual on how to do a emergency evacuation or do you have best practices? Do you have lessons learned? And they're like, no, you're on your own, Bob. Sorry. Well, I was kind of shocked the way it went down. When I get out, well, let me back up. In those days, we're talking well over 20 years ago, UN security was in its infancy.

And at that time, there was just literally a few dozen guys. And it was a few dozen folks up in New York. and it was a mom and pop operation. And the overwhelming majority of the guys who were doing a security job were guys like me, okay, retired officers who had had long military or police backgrounds. And we were expected to go out, hit the field, and figure it out, just do what needs to be done. Now, 20 years later, they have training courses considerable, and they have a certification. program. They had none of that when I came on board. So you just kind of figure it out as you go.

But the mission statement was pretty straightforward. My job was to preserve the lives of the civil staff of the mission. You get a nice, clear mission statement like that. That's something I can work with. That's something any one of us can work with. And how did that all go down? Because you were through your connections at Paddy's at the bar and some of the, you know, being an SF guy and at MI officer, you kind of made your connections around town and got pretty good forewarning that the RUF was going to invade. Is that right? Actually, I'm almost a little bit embarrassed to say what my best source was. Were you able to figure out the best source in the book? It sounded like it was the waitress. No, no, it was the prostitutes. The prostitutes were the

number one best intelligence source any intelligence officer could ever hope to have. Okay. These women are literally sleeping with the RUF. They're sleeping with members of the embassy staff. They're slip. Come on. It doesn't take you very long to figure it out. And guys tend to talk. And these girls were happy to talk to me so long as I kept on buying them drinks. They told me things nobody else knew. I think my reputation probably took a hit in the mission because, I mean, I'd be sitting there in Patty's Bar and Grill, okay? And there'd be two prostitutes sitting at my table. Never took these girls home, but they kept on giving me good information so long as I kept on buying them drinks.

I mean, did you, did you go into that sort of knowing that they would be that good of source? because I think historically speaking, I mean, prostitutes have always been the best source of intelligence. I mean, throughout the dawn, I mean, all this problem. You remember earlier on, I told you, I attended the counterintelligence special agent course. At that time, it was taught at Fort Worthook, Arizona. Some of our instructors were actually pretty good, pretty knowledgeable.

They kind of tip their hat to these things. There's a lot of things we don't talk about in the Army that we probably ought to. but my, you won't find it on a formal POI. Right. But an experienced agent will look at you and say quietly, put your side and say, look, check these women out. Okay, they'd be a good source for you. Yeah.

Yeah. And they were fascinating. So when the bad guys came to town, how do you organize that evacuation? Because, like, really, it was just all riding on your shoulders. It was just like up to you to figure it out. I think I think it would be too kind to say that it was that organized. That would be too kind. It'd be and it'd be inaccurate.

We had a lot of problems, a lot of issues. But I was lucky in several different ways. One, the force commander, an Indian major general, he and I got along real well. He gave me his military police company. He literally handed his military police company to me and said, okay, you can use these guys essentially have operational control. I used them to secure an out of perimeter and to bring all the UN staff into the Mammioco Hotel in Freetown. Then I was able to call New York and arrange for IL76s, those huge old Soviet-era cargo aircraft, to fly out of Brindisi, Italy with UN markings on them. to fly down to Lungi International Airport.

Aal also had other Soviet-era aircraft, MI-26s, the biggest cargo helicopter in the world, and one of the most capable too, in order to move them across Freetown Bay, put them on the aisle 76s and send them to the Gambia, which is about, I wanna say, about 750 miles to the north. Weren't there some intoxicated Russian helicopter pilots too? That's another great story.

I was just, I've stayed in touch with a lot of the guys that I used to work with. And one of them, one of them was this guy. So what happened was, we were prepping the manifests and the people to get on board the aircraft, to fly him over to the I-O-76s at the London International Airport. Everything was sitting ready to go. The senior officer comes in and he refuses to fly the man. mission. I said, you've got to be shitting me. What are you talking about? We choose to fly the mission. I don't understand. He said, then he leans in. He says, look, some of my

crew are stuck in a whorehouse on the other side of Freetown. And he says, I'm not flying this mission until you extract them. So I took two of my guys. They're both, they're both New Zealand special ops. Okay, what I owns a major international security company today. And I was just talking to him yesterday. We've stayed in touch throughout the years. I hated them, I had a 9mm in a pancake holster in the small on my back and I handed it to him. And I said, take my vehicle, go get them. Now this is Freetown in the middle of the night of an invasion. Yeah, in an invasion, okay? We have no idea with the RUF. is, okay, and I'm giving him a very, very tough mission. To his credit, he took it. So there was

Richard Mitchelson and Graham Mahuka, both from New Zealand. After a two-hour white-knuckle weight, they made it back with the errant aircrew and were able to fly the evacuation mission. they must have came back like what is a ghost from the way you made it sound in the book Mitch was he said like understandably yeah yeah understand of me I just handed him I just handed him a 9mm shooter I might I know everybody else has got AK 47s F and FALs I got some machine come on okay and I had him a 9 millimeter yeah and then you it's had these like other crazy experiences were like one guy came to you for the evacuation. One guy came with his pet monkey.

Another guy came with a prostitute that he wanted you to put on the helicopter. Only because he had married the prostitute. He actually showed me a piece of paper. He said he just married this prostitute. Everybody that went to Paddy's knew that she was a prostitute. Everybody. I married her. She's my wife. You are required now to evacuate her. And I said, no, I'm not. He didn't understand the rules. It was a non-family duty station. I had no responsibility to move a citizen, particularly a citizen of Sierra Leone, even if it was his wife, because she was a non-family duty station.

So by policy, we weren't supposed to move her anyway. But how did that go down? How much advance notice did you have, did you try to start the evacuation in the collection of people? Did you receive any pushback from, you know, do you? UN command from other. I got nothing about pushback, okay? It's very, very difficult to explain to people that haven't had a UN experience

how difficult it can be working within the United Nations. It was not my decision. I was a chief security officer. I had no authority outside my own office, zip, none, okay? Nobody has to do anything I tell them to do. It takes the Secretary General of the United Nations to make the decision in order to evacuate staff members from any country anywhere. The head of the mission, the SRSG was from a West African country. He wasn't even in the country at the time.

And the UN is not permitted to conduct intelligence. So here we go. Let me back this up a little bit and explain the circumstance. The mandate that was given to the UN peacekeeping mission was to protect the civilians. That was one of our missions to protect the civilians. We're going to do it with the UN military that comes predominantly from West Africa, Jordan, and India. These guys have never worked together before.

Not only that, but several of the battalions weren't infantry battalions. They were actually composite units composed of clerks, mechanics, cooks, and other non-combat specialties. They weren't combatants. They were incapable of fighting. And to add insult to injury, we suspected that many of those units were not up to full strength. So the United Nations was paying, let's, I won't name any countries here.

pick any country in West Africa, that West African country gives a battalion to the United Nations and the U.N. pays the country for it. Let's say it's an infantry battalion and maybe 500 guys. But they only send 300. So they're under strength when they start out. So everybody's flying to everybody all day, every day, and everybody wants to keep a wrap on it. No, nobody went. So when this invasion happens, yeah. I mean, like you had advance notice, but you were getting pushed back. So then was the entire, it was all under duress by the time you finally got people moving? Oh, yeah. Yes, absolutely. Yep.

At the same time, Tony Blair and Great Britain had made a decision to militarily intervene. He did that with the first paris. with the SAS elements of the SAS and SBS. They later took Lungi International Airport. The RUF decided at some point, foolishly, to tangle with the first Paris. They didn't do that again. And the SAS ran, I think, was it Operation Barris?

No, well, they had, what was it? It's in the book, okay? Yeah. Yeah, they actually named an operation for it. but the British did intervene and the RUF did halt their invasion. Where they halted it, we don't know because in the United Nations, we don't have an intelligence system worthy of the name. In other words, most of the time we go around blind.

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. So Bob, I'm going to skip a little bit further forward because we have limited time again. But we'll talk about Yemen for the first. the bonus segment about this episode after after sierra leone you go to yemen and there's this episode i want to talk to you about for the bonus segment about um uh the uprising of refugee

camp we'll get to that later um but i want to go into iraq and you know how you fly from yemen to jordan and get put in charge of essentially infiltrating the u.n mission from jordan into iraq which is crazy but for everyone who's joining us live who just kind of tuned in We're here with Bob with Robert Adolf. He's the author of Surviving the United Nations, Special Forces Officer, also Chief Security Guy for the United Nations in Sierra Leone, Yemen, in Iraq. And so could you tell us a little bit about... Real quick, before we move out of here, we've got one question.

Thank you, David, and thanks everybody for joining us tonight. David Maynard wants to know what kind of 9mm did you give your New Zealand friend? It was a standard UN issue, Smith & Wesson. There you go, Smith and Wesson. Yeah, I, not my personal. I'm a Glock lover from way back, but that's what it was UN standard back then. So can you tell us that about being in Amman, Jordan, and what you thought your job was there versus what ended up very quickly happening? Well, I was in Yemen.

They gave me a call. They interviewed me over the phone. I got on an airplane and I flew to Cyprus. And I met up with everybody in Cyprus, all the UN. And, of course, it was after. Now we're talking about late April of 2003. And the American invasion took place in March. The month prior, yeah, in March.

So they decided very quickly that we were going to go back in. So we had to fly from Cyprus over to Amman Jordan, and then the next morning we were going to go to take off for Baghdad. What I didn't know was my boss had devised a plan for moving us by a vehicle from Amman Jordan to Baghdad. I knew how to do the security piece of this. And I won't bore you guys with it, but, you know, we know how we all. know how to do movement security. What I didn't know was, was that when we're going into the Intercontinental Hotel in the Mon Jordan, my boss looks at me and said, okay, there's going to be a briefing at 9 o'clock in one of the ante-rooms. And I said, okay, at 9 o'clock, who's briefing?

He said, you. Literally, literally, two hours before we were to get the, I was to give the briefing, he told me that I was going to be in charge of everything. And then the movement is the next day, right? Yes. Now, and I talk about this in the book. Every ranger student there ever was knows how to put together a five-paragraph field order. So I did one from memory, did the briefing, okay?

Just like any buck sergeant in the 75th Rangers, could have done what I did. could have done what I did and probably better. But it re-impressed the UN people. When I got done with the briefing, they looked at me and said, wow, that was really great. And I'm going like, Jesus, you know where I pulled this out of? Okay. So the next morning, 5 o'clock in the morning, everybody goes downstairs,

and we hit the road. And we make a mad dash. It's over 586 miles, I think. We made a mad dash across the Jordanian and Iraqi deserts in royal blue UN vehicles. Now, have you ever seen a royal blue UN vehicle? Not like a coach bus. No, they're all white. They're all white.

But we changed delivery of the vehicles to blue and day glow orange, you know, the UN symbol, put it in day glow orange. The reason why is because some of Salam Hussein's boys during the invasion, stole a bunch of white UN vehicles, okay? They put some of their paramilitary units in them, okay? In order to get close enough to American formations who were coming from the South, coming up from Kuwait, okay? And so they can fire them, fire up, get inside, and then fire them up.

So American commanders told their troops, obviously, you see a UN vehicle, light it up. Oh, my God. I wasn't, none of us were looking for. to get lit up where it coming across to Western Desert. So we changed our livery to blue and day glow orange. Why, I'm sorry, why was the UN, what was their charter to go in while this act of invasion is happening?

Why do they want to be there? No, we're talking about going into the wake of the invasion. Okay, so the invasion is in, okay? Yeah, okay, so talking actually on the 1st of May. Okay. This took place on the 1st of May. The United Nations was the George W. Bush administration. actually wanted the UN in Baghdad at that time who the Americans, the CPA, O.H.R., the coalition provisional authority, at some point had to turn over Iraq to somebody. Who were they going to turn over Iraq to?

I see. Okay. That had to be the UN. And the UN was already in Iraq all throughout that time conducting the oil for food program, which turned out to be the single. greatest, most corrupt program in the history of the organization. Over 60 billion, that's 60 billion without being, 60 billion dollars worth of corruption. And you thought you, or there's some thought that that corruption led to the indemnity, the anger of the Iraqi people that may have contributed to attack. No doubt. There's no question. There's no question of it. None. You may imagine earlier, my wife's Egyptian. Yes, she speaks Arabic. She was there with me. Okay, she spoke with the Iraqis. And the Iraqis knew that the UN administered Iraq oil for food program was corrupt. They knew it. Absolutely, they knew it. Okay. It was in their face all day, every day. They said nothing about it under Saddam Hussein's regime because you could end up with a split throat. in a dark canal somewhere if you made too much noise. Then, after Saddam Hussein is overthrown,

the same Iraqis now working for the United Nations. Again, they say nothing about the corruption because now they're afraid of losing their jobs. And what did nobody have in Iraq after the American invasion? Nobody had a job. Right. Could you talk a little bit then about the security situation when you got to your building in Baghdad and what that kind of looked like.

And I'm also kind of interested in hearing because we have heard from other guests of ours who were working for the CIA at the time, for instance, about the day that Uday and QSA got hemmed up by the American forces and that you talk about that in your book a little bit also. When we arrived there in the 1st of May, the compound, it wasn't, it didn't have a lot. There was no walled compound. It was a building. It was a hotel, the canal hotel, and it was the UN headquarters. It was unsecurable. It was right on the canal road. There was another small road going to a hospitality school, essentially people that learn how to work in hotels and stuff like that that was behind us, but it was wide open. It was absolutely wide open. I told my boss on the first day, there's no way in hell I can secure this place. It's unsecurable. We can't

We can't stay here. You know what he said? You read the book, you know. Yeah, this is what we have to live with. So we went from an extraordinarily peaceful circumstance under Saddam Hussein. He maintained security there, absolutely, because if you stepped out of line, you didn't step out of line a second time. Right. And no one wanted to stop that corruption from happening either.

Well, Saddam Hussein was the genesis of that corruption. So he benefits. And there were several other people who benefited in France, in Italy, in Russia, and perhaps some UN staff members as well. Yeah. It was pretty bad. It was pretty ugly all the way around. But there was at least like a one good thing that happened. And, you know, it was interesting how, like you said, UN did not have a big security footprint.

So you were kind of like relying on the charity of others, like the Indian military in Sierra, we own. And in this case, you had an Army Air Defense Company that was kind of seconded to you? What happened was, was that Terry Wolf, then a full colonel and in command of the Second Armored Tavory Regiment, Terry came to me before he left and said, Bob, would you like me to leave you a platoon? Because I had no security, had zip, I had nothing, I had no armed security. People don't understand this when I say. You have to, my guards are unarmed. Anybody with, I could have taken that compound with a platoon of half-trained Boy Scouts.

That's how bad it was. Anybody could have done it. So Terry, God bless him, left his air defense artillery platoon with me. And they provided me at least, they could, there's no way 30 guys. And that's what they were, around 30 guys, could manage the security on a complex this large. It was too big. It was too big. But they could give me some augmentation.

So it gave me, and it's having somethings better than having nothing. And they were a visual deterrent in a way. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. But not a natural deterrent. Yeah.

What was it like then as like, I remember another thing that was kind of shocking to me was that, like, for instance, you guys were. spending money out of your own pockets. You were spending money out of your own pocket, Bob, to pay for things for the transit from Amman to Jordan. You were spending money, you and the other employees were spending money out of your own pocket to build, put up like steel plates in front of the windows and things like this. And what was it like trying to, you know, essentially beg the UN headquarters in New York for added security? And, you know, it was like they were, like you were doing something crazy. You were asking for something totally nuts. and making these requests.

Yeah. I knew that the United Nations was not very good at providing fast administrative support. I knew that. So before I left Yemen, I took out, if memory serves, about $8,000 out of my personal account, and I carried $8,000 on me.

And that's what I spent for the next two months And I bought, I bought fuel, I bought food, I got a place to sleep. I mean, everything that was required. I hired Iraqi staff to work in my office on the promise of a contract because I had no budget yet. And the thing you were mentioning about the steel blast fields, there was one building in that compound that I was personally responsible for. and that was essentially the guard shed and the security information and operations center that was at the front gate. I owned that building. It was my responsibility. It was all security all day. So what am I subordinates came in to me one day and said, Bob, give me a hundred bucks.

I'm happy to do so, but please tell me why. And he said, what he could do is he could put steel plate flash shoes and mount them on the inner walls because we had to protect the radio operators. We all knew that something bad was coming. We all knew it. And we told our bosses a lot that something bad was coming. Make a long story short, they didn't listen, and something bad came. So on the 19th of August, late in the afternoon, a suicide bomber driving a flatbed truck with roughly 2,000 pounds of explosive materials in the back, hit our compound and killed 22 and moved it over 150.

It was a real bad day. And there was a guy I was talking to at Port Belvoir. Anybody said been through anything like this, and many of us have. You need to talk to somebody about it. I didn't talk to anybody about it for a very long time. there was a therapist over at Fort Belvoir. I went over and talked to him on a fairly regular basis. He told me, you know, Bob, you've got a skill set.

A lot of people don't have you. You can write. He, along with my wife, both suggested that I write the damn book as a way of, well, being therapeutic. And in fact, it was. The process of writing about that day was extremely. ordinarily difficult, but it got it out of me. And I mean, just reading it, and I just read it, you know, read all that stuff last night for the first time. And it's very harrowing to kind of experience it through your eyes.

It is very well written. And just some of the things that like stuck out at me was, you know, for instance, while your wife working down the hall from you and you went to go get her and, you know, you recovered her. She was alive. Thank goodness. But she also had a piece of glass sticking out of her eye. And I mean, that like, yeah, the tension in it is like very real. That's because the tension was very real. Yeah. And I don't know why.

And this is probably, I'm probably a chauvinist, but for saying something like this. But when it's a guy, it's different. Yeah. Yeah. It's different. I can do it. If it was a teammate as opposed to your wife, it would be very,

Very different. Yeah. But it's a woman. It's my wife. It's different. It impacted me much more severely than, say, if it had been you. Not that you're not a great guy, Jack. No, I understand.

It just ain't the same thing. Yeah. Yep. Just some of the moments as you were going through that day and you were like, you know, I met this Marine colonel. I don't remember his name. I don't remember his face. You know, you mentioned, you know, finding a body, you know, someone who was killed in the explosion.

I never really found out who he, like, because you hadn't slept in like over 24 hours. You were exhausted. You're just so much going on. And as you're reading it, you tell, you know, your senses are overwhelmed as you're trying to rescue as many people as you can. Yes. I don't. It was the worst day of my life. And it's something that's haunted my memories.

I know exactly where the scar is above my on my wife's forehead, where she was cut, and she bled all over me. I remember all the carnage. I remember all the scenes, but they're disjointed. The book helped me put them into at least some kind of, chronological order. However, and I had my book reviewed by a lot of people who were there with me, and they corrected a lot of things that, they corrected a lot of things that I got wrong. One of the things I found out, and I should have known before, was that with only one pair of eyes, you only see one part of the disaster. You only see the part that's in front of you.

And you actually described it very well, Jack, when you said that my senses were overwhelmed. And it wasn't until weeks and weeks after when I'm in a cabin in Vermont with my wife, when I realized how much. Yeah. Do you want to give the viewers the good news, though, that your wife is in the next room over and that she... Oh, yeah. Yeah, she's in the next room. She's fine. She did. She made a full recovery. Did what did you immediately leave Iraq like after that? No, no. So what happened? I mean, and what was like if you didn't leave and what was going on both career wise in terms of what you were doing and then also like emotionally like did you bear resentment towards the UN for being so non-responsive? I mean like what how did what happened to next I guess?

Oh, it's even worse, however bad you think it might have been, double it. And it was actually, or the emotion, the resentment, and what they did to me. Okay, so I've got a stack of documentation like this, okay, several inches high. Of all the recommendations I've made, are things we need to do in order to improve security, threat analysis, risk analysis, mitigating. measures. Okay, it's mom and apple pie. Every soldier that ever lived, okay, is going to recognize the kind of recommendations that I would have made. It was a piece of cake in many ways. But the United Nations at that time was not supportive. I didn't have enough people. I didn't have enough

money. I didn't have enough equipment. I didn't have enough of anything I needed. Plus, they were pouring people into Iraq in order to shut down the oil for food program, in order to support the SRISG's political mission. The bottom line is they were pouring people into Iraq at a time when the security situation was actually getting much, much worse. There was two attacks down in Alhila. There was a major attack in Baghdad on the Jordanian embassy, 17 people killed. Helen Keller could have seen this coming.

We all, every security officer was working with me, we all saw it coming. It was written up in my threat assessment. Nobody wanted to hear it. Nobody wanted to believe it. And then after the fact, they tried to have that little sort of like after action review. And it was like the narrative was exactly the opposite of what you're saying. Like no one could have seen this coming. How could anyone possibly have known this was coming?

And you had this moment of like outrage, just like furious moment, you know, lamb blasting. these people for the lackadaisical approach they've had to security. I've never been madder in my whole life. I was I was I was shaking I've never been so mad my whole life. But I was still I'm glad I was able to keep my temper and I was able to tell them to their face that essentially in a very professional manner that they were lying sax and shit. That did not endear me to them. And it also made me a potential whistleblower. So Dave, it was bad enough what happened up until that point. But then the UN started looking around for scapegoats. Right. I never imagined they could come after me. I was the one guy who was

the poster boy for security for the UN in Iraq. Every time they said, yes, I said no. Every time they said no, I said yes. And even from just a CYA perspective, it was like you had emails, emails, emails, emails. Huge. My documentation, 95% of everything was documented. 95%. So when they came after you or tried to make you the scapego. Oh, they did. They fired me. And none of that documentation, helped you because they were set on it. No, Dave. They made it all classified. They have a classification system. UN Confidential. They conducted an investigation.

Went through all the bills and whistles. We're conducting investigation. Then they took all the key elements of the investigation, declared it. UN Confidential wouldn't release it to anybody, except the small extracts, of it, okay, and then fired me on the front pages of the New York Times. And what, what, there's a security council, right?

What, who was running, like, what country was running the security council at that time? Or do you recall that, no. Okay. That would have been within the secretariat, the secretary general is the one who makes all those decisions. Okay, okay? So the secretary general made the decision to select me as one of the scapegoats. I was fired on the front pages than New York Times. At the time, I was in Ethiopia near the Sudanese border, a place called Gimbella, on mission. They had to call, I was recalled from that mission, told I could no longer perform security-related duties, and was recalled to New York. And do you feel, I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'll say in my mind, like one of the chief

failures of the UN or one of the chief problems with the UN is it's rarely like the UN doing something, it's all these competing, it's all these countries or all these people trying to get to do what's best for them. Of course. Which creates like the... Well, it's natural. Yeah. It's natural. But I don't blame the United Nations. If the United Nations did not exist today, we'd have to create it because it provides humanitarian support, UNICEF. Nobody else does that. UNHCR, nobody else can do that. International Organization for Migration, World Food Program, World Health Organization, nobody else in the world can do what they do.

You can say that they don't do it well. Well, they do it poorly. Okay, fine. I'll sign up for that. We still need them to be there performing their functions. Long story, very short. I ended up engaging in a seven-month-long pistol whipping contest with the Secretary General of the United Nations

that I was pretty sure I was going to lose. I mean, who was like? I was nobody. I'm fighting with the most powerful man in the organization. Long story short, I won. It surprised me and everybody. What does winning mean? What happened? I was winning meant full reinstatement

to my full position and status. Did you get like that? Apology, was there a retraction on there? Oh, God, no, no, no. No, no. An apology would have had to, they would have had to admit it that they made a mistake. Or they made a series of mistakes. And of course, that that was never going to happen. You're a better man than me.

Like, I don't understand. I mean, what propelled you to fight for reinstate? I would have gone away mad. I would have taken my toys and gone home. with that. I mean, I would have been, so I keep on thinking of, was it Rambo two or three when he kicked in the, like, the talk door and, like, just fires the machine gun? That would be first blood part two. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think of, like, how angry in your situation, and I can't even imagine, like, I, I wasn't even there, and I'm just kind of taking on your experience and thinking

how angry it would have been, like, what, what did that do for you reinstatement-wise, and what were you, Was it just for vindication or did you stay with the UN after that? Did you want that? No, I stayed with the UN after that. And I get this question actually a lot. After being treated so shamelessly by the UN's leadership, why did I stay with the organization? There may be some, to some degree, it has to do with my own native idealism. But I loved the job that I was doing. Okay. My job was to preserve the lives of those individuals, humanitarians, who were trying to save those who are the most vulnerable among us, but the most vulnerable amongst humanity. So rape victims, victims of war, refugees, come on. That's if for someone with my training and background, Sure. That's the best job I could possibly have. I had a fact. My life mattered. It was a, I spent over 25 years in the American Army in service to our nation. And I know it sounds maybe a little Pollyannish, but the fact is, I felt the same way about the United Nations in terms of aspiration. The aspirations of the United Nations are much like,

the aspirations that are represented in the Constitution and in our Declaration of Independence. We, people, we are in perfect vessels. And the best of us are trying to be better than the sum of our parts. It's a struggle. But the fact is, the struggle makes us better. Once I was vindicated, if you will, immediately they gave me the best possible job I could have. and it would be the UN Security Advisor for Egypt, which took me to my wife's home country. And I spent four years there trying to recover from some of the body blows I took from the United Nations.

To get, to become a victim of terrorism in that way, and then to be fired for doing your job, it took a lot of getting over. I can make a lot of it. And when you phrase it the way you did it, makes sense in the sense that you separated the people you were protecting who were the humanitarian, the people

on the ground who were trying to help these victims from the bureaucracy that wronged you. I can understand that. And I think that any any U.S. soldier can feel that, you know, in the sense that when people like, oh, well, your country just sends you here to go do whatever.

You're like, yeah, but I'm there to protect, you know, to do this job, whether or not our politics are always, whether they're about oil or, you know, whatever, like I understand. That makes sense. The job I did was important, and the job I did was something I loved doing. Yes. The politics, I've never been a politician. Makes sense.

That makes sense. Robert, towards the end of the book, you mentioned there's a whole afterward in the book where you got a hold of the confidential, the UN Confidential General Secretary report on this bombing in Iraq. And I was wondering with the remaining time we have for this interview, if you could take a few minutes to talk about what the Secretary General was saying in that report versus what actually happened. Well, it wasn't what the Secretary General said per se. There was an investigation. And the investigation was, its job was to assess accountability. Who was responsible for failures in Baghdad that led to the deaths of 22 staff members and over 150 wounded? By the way, even today, the UN has never lost that many people all at once in one violent event. It was a one,

watershed moment for everybody. And of course, all the people that were senior wanted to keep their jobs. But in order to keep their jobs, they had to find someone to blame. Right. So, even though all the key decisions were made in New York, only one person in New York took the fall. Everyone else was in Baghdad. But we didn't have the money to impact those things. We couldn't approve the pot. We didn't have. the authority. All the key decisions were made in New York. Ah, and it just sound familiar to anyone. It's a familiar refrain. So everyone above the, everyone that was at the rank of undersecretary general, okay, got a pass. If you were below the

rank of secretary general, you didn't. So they essentially fired the whole chain of of command to include me. It was pretty incredible that you were able to surmount all of that, as you mentioned. It was kind of a knockdown, dragout fight for a while there. It was bad. It was bad news. And the fact was every single day I would get more and more bad news. I honestly never believed I'd win.

I fought for two reasons. One, because it's in my nature to fight. Yeah. Any special operator knows how it. It's in my nature to fight. Okay. I may lose, but I'm going to fight. Yeah. And the second thing was my wife, my wife wouldn't let me quit. She wouldn't, she wouldn't hear of it.

And she was right, she really was right there alongside you, literally from the day of the bombing all the way through this whole process in New York. Yes, the whole thing. She was beside me the whole time. And she also- She never faltered. And she also never said, screw those guys, their response for all this, let's, you know, Let's take her boys and go home. Nope. She said what they want. They want you to quit. Because if you quit, the story ends.

She says, you don't quit. Who was the Secretary General at the time? Coffee non. I never name him in the book. It's not, it's just a Google quick Google search. So it's, you know, but. I understand. Yeah, yeah.

But it was coffee not. Guys, we are going to do. After we finish here, we're going to do the bonus segment for our supporters with Bob talking about the UN mission in Yemen and a really dicey situation with an uprising and a Somalian refugee camp in Yemen. But, guys, this is Bob's book, Surviving the United Nations. We get a good view here by Robert Adolf. Again, I finished reading it this afternoon. And we just scratched the surface in this area. We really did just cover the bare bones basics of it.

So, I mean, you should really go pick up this book. There's a link down the description of this video. You can go get it on Amazon. So go check it out. Yeah, please buy it book. Yeah. You know, it definitely, for our viewers, the type of people who watch this show, it definitely belongs on your bookshelf.

It's an important read from a unique perspective that you don't normally hear from, you know, a UN security chief speaking out like this and really detailing all. the lessons learned. There's also down in the description as a link to our Patreon site. If you guys like what we're doing on this stream and you want to support us, you can go check that out down there. Otherwise, you know, leave a comment, like it, share it with your friends, et cetera, et cetera. And thanks for joining us live, everybody. Yeah, a couple things real quick. Please subscribe to our channel. You know, hit the notification so that you get notified. Please check out Bob's book. And obviously, we barely scratched

the surface of, I mean, we didn't even really get to talk about the current virus. I mean, some of the conversation Bob and I had earlier about the thin veneer civility that things like pandemics and emergencies, both natural and man-made, can strip away from society. There's so much here, but it's very late. Bob's in Rome, and we cannot keep that one. Yeah, Bob's one of the all-stars for keeping this interview with us through all this through the pandemic, through the fact that I had him come on at two in the morning. So, I mean, we really thank you for doing that. My DJ, thank you for the donation.

And guys, please donate to our patron because you get exclusive content. Even a dollar a month helps us out tremendously. Yeah. Bob, amazing. We want to have you on again sometime. I mean, we be my pleasure. We really appreciate it. Even if we have to do a recorded interview at a better time for you.

Yes. and just posted. Well, recognize it. I hope to be back in the United States on book tour because I had to postpone my book tour. I should be in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. in the September, October time frame. Hopefully, the corona will have burned out by that time. Keep me on your mailing list, Bob, when that happens. Yeah, that's fine, because I'm doing presentations at New York University and at Fordham and St. Peter's as well.

Perfect. Okay. All right. I think that's it for the live stream. We will see you guys next week. Dave, do you want to tell people just before we go who our guest is next week? Yeah. So next week we're having on Patrick O'Donnell, who is, he's been a historian and author for over 20 years now. He has one of the, he's conducted thousands of interviews with intelligence operators, OSS operators, Meryl's Marauders. He's written 12 or 13. books now, 11 or 12 books, most of them on special operations and intelligence. Fascinating. Fascinating the books he has. We'll start putting links out to that and everything. But he's actually a friend of mine. We met through, we met, same time I met Clint Sforman with Carl Sustari doing all the hand-to-hand stuff is when I met Patrick. So check out, you know, you can look at his bio and stuff like that. But,

Yeah, that's who we got. Next Friday. All right, Dave, you want to kill it? And then we'll record the bonus segment. I will give it the ronies. And we will, sorry, that's horrible. Thanks, guys. We appreciate it.

Again, thank you, Bob. We really appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you.