The Team House - Special Forces, Secret Service, and White House Communication Agency | Steve Stratton | Ep. 127

Episode Date: January 8, 2022

Steve Stratton started his Army career at the White House Communications Agency supporting the communications needs of President’s Ford and Carter, Vice President’s Rockefeller and Mondale and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. His work took him around the world introducing him to new cultures, ways of thinking, and the various agencies tasked with projecting and protecting American interests abroad. The jump from WHCA to the US Secret Service was an easy transition but after several years and election campaign Steve left for the commercial sector. Steve was awarded his Green Beret in 1986. From the 80’s through 2000 he deployed counter-drug and training missions in the SOUTHCOM region. During this time his civilian work included supporting CENTCOM, SOCOM, and DIA. Today he develops cyber security products that support the DOD and Intelligence Community.  https://stevenstrattonusa.com  Today's Sponsors: 👇  A-TAC FITNESS (Veteran owned and operated)  https://www.ATACFITNESS.com Use the promo code "TEAM10" for 10% off! Selection Starts Here.  Thanks for supporting the companies that support the show!  Want 2 bonus episodes per month and access to the bonus segments?  Subscribe to our Patreon!👇  https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse  Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963  Social Media Links:  The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21  Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6  SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/  Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241  The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links): https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/  Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample  Want to sponsor the show?  Email: 👇 [e-mail] #specialforces #secretservice #cybersecurityBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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This is the best we can do. Samsung Neo-Q-L-L-EyD 8K, unreasonably good. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your hosts, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hey everyone, welcome to the team house. This is episode 127. Hope everyone had a great holiday. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park. Just pointing out I'm the real Jack Murphy, the true jig-a-chat of our times. Not that fake guy, John Goldman. So don't ask me about the cuck article. I mean, you can, but I didn't write it, okay? So it's not my fault. Today, we're very happy to have

Steve Stratton here. He is a former Special Forces soldier. He served in the Secret Service and the White House Communications Agency. He's also the author of a new book called Shadow Tier that we're going to talk about in a little bit. Steve, thank you so much for coming on the show tonight, man. Thank you for having me. It's really great to be here. Yeah, I appreciate it, man. I wanted to start off, just kick off the, oh, yeah, sorry. First, a word from our sponsors. Yeah, real quick, for the people who keep the lights on. Hey, one of our sponsors tonight, or our sponsor tonight is ATAC Fitness. Selection starts here. If you go to their website, you'll see they have a great selection of gear for your water training, your pre-scuba, your U.S.R. Force Power Rescue, your special forces, whatever you have.

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ATACFitness.com. So back to you, Steve. I'm going to ask you the question. We ask all of our guests. We'd like to hear about your origin story about sort of your upbringing and where you came from and what was that path

that took you into governmental service. Yeah, so grew up in Northern California up into Redwoods, Eureka, Arcata, you know, about 200, 300 miles north of San Francisco. And it's funny, family's 100% at least until my generation 100% Navy merchant marine on the water I'd go on all the time when I was a kid growing up you know we would go to Oakland Navy Yard and watch my dad sail off to to Vietnam with like third cab on the boat stuff like that and so I was always outdoors

as soon as I heard my name called my maitasaparandi was to go deeper in the woods And, you know, we just spent a lot of time in the woods making forts playing army, you know, and my dad would help with make us weapons and different things like that. So, yeah, in the woods a lot. Then after high school, I really didn't want to go to college. I really didn't want more schooling, as a matter of fact. So I was looking around for what to do. Started working in the lumber industry. Found out how hard that was, how easy it was to lose fingers and eyes and things like that.

And so I went to go see the Army recruiter. And the first thing he showed me was this video. This would have been 72. And he shows me this video, the Spartan video, in its Special Forces training. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. You know, part of that looks like it sucks, but it looks interesting. And then I went and checked out the Navy, realized, you know, I get sick real easy on the water. So that wasn't an option.

Looked at the Air Force and the Coast Guard and thought that's not hard enough. So I went back to the Army recruiter and went down to Oakland and took all the tests. And then, of course, he's trying to sign me up. I wanted to go to Fort Lewis just back up the road. Washington, you know, and be part of the Ranger bat up there. I scored really well in electronics. I thought I'd be in, you know, single signal company or something like that. And so I joined up. But it wasn't until that was late 72 and it wasn't until late 73 that I joined up because I kicked around for a while and goofed off, fishing, hunting, goofing off and stuff like that, occasionally

living in my parents, you know, basement kind of idea. And, uh, So I went to Basic at Fort Ord in December, spent about two weeks down there, and then they let us go back home for Christmas break, and then did Basic down there. And they were, you know, we're talking about the end of Vietnam. So they're like getting rid of thousands of helicopter pilots, right? With 18 years, you can stay in if you want to be an E5 kind of idea, where they were just kicking them out.

So for some reason, these DIs put me through all these tests, like language school tests. You need an 18 to pass to go to DLI. I get a 17. You need something, something to go to OCS, and I get one less than that. I kept scoring just right under the ability to go like to OCS or DLI. And then one day, all these guys show up, and they're in civilian clothes and longer hair looking good. And I'm way in the back of the theater and they're way up front.

And they're talking about this agency. We can't talk about it too much. But, you know, it'll be good duty. You'll be in D.C. And so I kept sticking my hand up because I wasn't going to the field because at Fort Ord, it's rainy and pissing down all the time. And so I thought, okay, well, I'll just stay here in the theater. Keep raising my hand. And finally, they said, yeah, your scores are high enough and stuff.

We're going to actually switch your MOS. and we're going to make you what they called at the time a 31 echo. And that's like a depo level repair person where you get right down on the board and take out resistors, transistors and stuff. And I thought, okay, cool. So after basic, my first course was this like, here's an eraser, don't touch the radio too much kind of maintainer school at Fort Horde. I mean Fort Sill, sorry.

And while we're at Fort Sill, we're two funny things. happened there. One is, I'd never seen this happen before, but there was a rainstorm and a windstorm at the same time. So when I came out to my car, it looked like it had been covered in mud, like it was just, you know, ready to throw in the oven, bake, bake it. The other thing that happened is we were marching to the classroom one day when all of a sudden there's a huge explosion in a mushroom cloud. And we're all like, you know, we're new guys. We don't know what the hell is going on. So we're all freaked out and like, Sarge, what do we do? What do we do? It's like, keep marching, you idiots.

And then eventually I learned that it was some kind of demonstration, big 55-gallon drum thing, some nuclear explosion simulator. Really? Yeah, yeah. And I've not seen one sense because I've been around the real thing that. we used to strap up, but the, uh, that was, that was strange. And, um, the other funny thing at that school was right next to our class was the ground surveillance radar guys. And, um, they had, I saw this thing and it looked like a big fencing foil, but it was a big steel thing with a huge rubber handle and stuff. And it turned out this was for, uh, grounding out the clistrons and

and the big heavy capacitors in this like hawk missile system kind of radar. And it would make the biggest Frankenstein kind of noise when these people would ground out stuff, right? In the other room, we'd all stop a couple times during our class. The medics came right down with a stretcher because somebody had their arm in the wrong spot, grabbed something out, you know, blew a hole in their arm, that kind of thing. So Fort Sill, not one of the, those places I'd wish on anybody.

No. Not a fun place. No, no. If you're looking for big snakes, you like rattlesnakes. Not bad. Not bad. But a lot in Oklahoma, not a place. So from there, he put me on the bus, and it's off to Fort Gordon.

Now, Fort Gordon's got some culture, right? Because I'm a you know, eat a peach kind of guy. I like the Allman Brothers, and they've got a bar downtown, whenever they're going to let us new guys get released, you know, after the, you know, your obligatory, you know, three or four weeks on base, locked on base. And that course was self, what would you call it, where you could test out.

You could go as fast as you could test out in this course. And it was a 16-week course, and some of this gear, by today's standards, this course, is very old. We're talking a lot of things they even talk about nowadays. But, HF. So learning antenna theory and how to make antennas and how to bend antennas and talk around the world. And we had students with us from Lebanon, from Jordan, and a couple African countries. And, you know, it was fun because they were sort of like they were warrants or officers who were in the course to take the course to get the certificate. but, you know, the language barrier and everything else. They were being, they were being assisted through the course.

And it turned out to be a real fun place when we got weekends off, you know, whether it was to go see if the Allman showed up, Elman Brothers showed up at their bar or go down. I forget the name of the lake there, but to get on to the lake and go camp and to just get away from the base was a lot of fun. And a couple of times we did that classic young soldiers. thing where after last formation, we jump in a car, we bolt to it down to Florida, and then we come back, you know, stuff on our uniforms on to jump into formation kind of thing, hoping we don't get arrested on the way.

And there was a couple other guys that were headed to interesting units, like I met a guy who was headed off to 10th group to be in the Signal Company in Germany. He was a good buddy there for a while. another couple of guys. And we started to race each other into courses. And we were all pretty neck and neck. And I got to this one test and I could not figure out what was going wrong. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with this system. And I looked at this system and the instructors like, I'll be back in a minute. I'm going to have a smoke break. So as soon as he left the room, there was a can in the middle of the system. And it didn't have a keyway. So I didn't, So I picked it up, turned the system off, picked it up, turned it 90 degrees, stuffed it back in the system and turned on the power.

And little smoke came up. And I'm like, there's the problem. And I actually got away with that and passed down that part of the course. But it was a fun course, but it was also totally irrelevant. Because when I got to White House Tom, we were using Motorola walkie-talkies for the, the Secret Service. We had some RCAA radios on White House Air Force One, and, but mostly we just had Motorola gear. We had walkie-talkies, big long things like this, and we had some other five-watt radios where the whole bottom was full of decal batteries and the handset looked like

a phone. And that was really cool because you could be, you know, on a trip in Wisconsin, and pull up to a stop sign next to a young lady and go, here's a phone call for you, you know. And of course, that never worked. That line never worked. You know, we had some pretty fun gear. It was, Waka was very strange. I was always tested on army gear.

I had to take tests on the army gear I trained on, but never used for promotion. Right. And like, say, we used everything else. I trained on this Army system, HF system, big, huge thing. And as it turned out, our backup for the president, when the president would travel in the U.S., like when Carter went to St. Simon's Island, and he's out there fishing, we had this Navy system called the U.R.T, big HF system, would be our backup communications. It's amazing that they do it all with cell phones now, huh? Oh, man. Yeah.

A private email servers? Yeah. Yeah, private email service, exactly. The, yeah, the gear. Yeah, so I'm, you know, I learned Morse code. I had, you know, a leg key and stuff when I eventually got into SF, but I can remember the first secure facts we had that included encryption. It would take eight of us to get it off the back of the truck. And yeah, so when I started at WACA, we actually ran the White House, and they probably still do, run the White House switchboard.

But down in the corner of the EOB, if you've got the White House, you're looking at the White House and the EOB is on the left, then on your far left front corner was the WACA switchboard. And so we had red switch, and we could do all these connections. and connect to the Cremble and do all kinds of fun stuff. But it was literally a cord with a plug. Right. And, you know, you would tap on it to see if somebody was on the line and all this. And when the president would go to New York, we had some pre-positioned, what they were called,

555 switchboards up in New York, that we would have to roll out and plug in and connect the lines So the job of WACA, to back up for a second, the job of WACA is to support the president, the vice president, whoever else, you know, who, the office there determines we should with communications. So back in my day, it was radio communications. So we had many sites around D.C. to provide communications for motorcades

and movement up to up to the hill or, you know, out to Andrews and things like that. So we had radio sites all over. But what we would do is we would take this gear and we would go to Atlanta and set it up for a presidential visit. So we would go in advance. And it was all this radio gear. And so when I was installing this stuff and maintaining it, and along with a lot of other Waka people, and then there was another group that was the audiovisual group that would like put the presidential seal up on a podium and have the mics ready, things like that. We even had, WACA even had right near over there by NPS on polling, we had a photo lab.

So WACA back in my day would do all the photos for the White House photographers. So like Nixon's, Ford's, photographers, things like that. that you could just walk up into that lab and I've got stacks of pictures that had blemishes in them but it's like a picture of Ford at Vale or I've got a picture down here with Rod Carew right the baseball star meeting vice president Mondale but they didn't give it to anybody because they had a little blemish in it kind of thing so Waka was you know for a 19 year old who never left California, right, whose first duty station is in Georgetown at the corner of Wisconsin and M right above the bayou, a great place to go see John Prine, by the way, back in the day.

It was amazing. I thought the Army's the best thing ever. Compared to crawling in the mud, you know, with the battalion, ranger battalion up in Fort Louis. Yeah. I thought I was in pretty high cotton. Yeah. Do you have any interesting time?

When you got there, were you first working for the Carter administration? No, funny story. So I come up from Ford Gordon and my sponsor meets me. There was a place called the Chart House, which would be right inside where the Beltway is now on 95. And so I'm just there waiting for my sponsor to show up. He takes me around the Beltway over to the bowling and Acosta side. And I'm thinking, I've never seen so much chain leak fence and Bob wire. And I asked him if we were near a federal prison.

And he said, no, we're just in Anacostia. And then we crossed back down over into town. And he says, you know what that is? And I said, is that what they call? Isn't that the Watergate? And he's like, yeah, don't go there. I got to Waka two weeks before Nixon resigned. And my sponsor said, don't go to the water gate.

Do not eat it that Howard Johnson's across the street. I'm like, yes, there are got there. I see the significance of this. But so, yeah, the place where my first duty station was that is actually now a set of shops in underground parking. And the underground parking was an alternate communications area where you could see where there were televised. types used to be hooked up and stuff like that, just all this old gear. And so we were, you know, we were getting into more, you know, 70s technology and radios and things like that. We had, we had made this first secure fax machine. Man, I mean, this thing was big, right? And then I got asked,

one of the first things I got asked to do was to finish a secure telephone switch. Here's the plans, the guy who built this just passed away, we'd like you to finish it. So I'm like, I don't know, you know. So that's what I worked on when I wasn't prepping to go on a trip. So my first trip after Ford took the presidency, and my first trip out of the United States, or actually out of California besides Fort Seale and Fort Gordon was to Daka, Bangladesh. And we went through Paris, and I thought, because of the flights, we got to stay over, and I got to see the lights and things. And then it's get on the plane and go.

We go to New Delhi. And for some reason, we ended up in old Delhi because somebody wanted to buy some gold and that kind of thing. And then we go to Adaka Baghladesh. And as a kid growing up, I had been a voracious reader of National Geographic. That's how I saw the world. I could care less about the states and their capitals. I could care less about the, yeah, we had a gold rush in California. Thank you.

Whatever. You know, I wanted to see the world. That was part of my draw to the military, actually, was wanting to see the world getting out of the northern California. And the further, the closer we got to Bangladesh, the more poverty I saw that, I know woke up, woke is a bad, funky term right now, but it just shocked me to my core that there were people living like this, right? Because even in national geographic, they make it look like, well, their natives and they live in huts, and this is their way.

When you see people in abject poverty, one of the first things I saw in Bangladesh was, I'm not sure where it came from, but just being aware of what's going on, it's like, okay, here's the guy sleeping on the median. We go to the consulate, and I'm noticing the holes in the wall as we go up into the building. And I'm thinking, okay, this is interesting. And we have our meeting. We come back out. he's still sleeping there. We go back the next morning, he's still sleeping there. The next, you know, we come out that evening and he's no longer there, right, but the

dance there where he was laying. And so I had never experienced that before, and it really, you know, opened my eyes, right? And, of course, we, back in those days, we had to fly American carriers. So we flew on Pan Am, if we flew commercial, and we stayed in the Intercontinental Hotel. And I was, didn't really drink. I forget what I was having. I didn't even drink coffee at this time or liquor or anything like that. So I was probably having a ginger ale or something at the bar.

And this pretty little French girl showed up. And I ended up buying her dinner and making the mistake of eating shrimp out of the Delta. And yes, yes, you can imagine I had to apply some medicine to slow that down. So that was, that, that was interesting, as was all of my time in walk. There were times when I was bored, just because I'm that kind of guy. I'm always looking, you know, to get into stuff and look at stuff. And so I'm, I'm. I'm in the electronics branch and they moved us out of Georgetown to those old French airplane hangers that were there at Bowling Air Force Base.

They built buildings inside of them because they couldn't get rid of them. They're historic, right? So they build these buildings inside the hangars and they move us in. And then within six months, I could put my hand between the cinder block and the steel pylon, I mean, Samapilon, because we're right there on the Potomac River and the building's starting to sink. already. It was pretty funny. My boss is, what's the story about the French hangars? I mean, I imagine they weren't from the French and Indian War. No, evidently, you know, Anacosta was a naval air base at one point.

So, so we're a DIA and Marine One and Waka is now, had a history of pre-World War II, like testing Buffalo aircraft and things. like that. I don't know a Buffalo was, I think it was a fighter bomber or whatever they had. So there was testing going on there and somewhere I don't know if it was back in Billy Mitchell days or something

they ended up with these they just looked, they weren't metal but they were like metal with like cement over them almost like you see at a normal fighter base today. But they had some kind of preservation you know,

encapsulation around him. So Waka decided to build the building inside of them and that sort of failed pretty badly. My boss at the time, I'm in an electronics branch and my boss was a Navy, he was a Navy EA. Oh, he was in LDO, I think is what they call it in the Navy, right? Limited duty officer.

Yeah. Yeah, and so he had, he had. had his E8 suit behind the door, but he was a lieutenant commander. And we're in electronics, and his name was Bob Ome. And I thought, okay, this is a little strange. He's a great guy. So I was getting a little bit bored with the radio stuff. I mean, love him going on trips, but just sort of being in town and fixing transistors and radios and stuff,

not such a big deal. So I just start sneaking over to the administrative building. and that's where our electronic countermeasure guys were. And they had this system from Fox, and they were dialing and tweaking and looking for stuff. And man, that was exciting. That was interesting. Now we're really in the spy business. We're looking for stuff into walls and things like that.

And finally he started to look for where it's strat go, you know, see A wall, what's going on? And he found me over there. And I said I'd like to transfer over here and learn this technology and stuff like that. And he wouldn't let me do it. So carry on a couple more years. He leaves. We get another guy and another commander and stuff like that. And during my four and a half years of Waka, I went on presidential trips.

Like I went on every trip that Ford went to Vail. That's where I learned how to ski was Vail. and but I really really I had this I don't know if they like they like me or whatever but I ended up going with Rockefeller a lot so at Vail one story and it's funny because when I read Lions of Lucerne from Brad Thor right I'm reading it it's like it's like he's written this

from somebody who knows what goes on at Vail with the Secret Service and the president But I used to literally have PRC 77 on my back and ski as once again as just an alternate level kind of communication ski behind President Ford. And I wasn't paying attention one days and he slipped on big steps or giant steps. He slipped down and I look up and it's like lifting a foot and going by the president and the Secret Service is yucking it up about, you know, Stratton's trying to kill the president, you know. Gorham with the ski and stuff like that. So I had to live that part down. It's not the only time I had to live down with the Secret Service.

But, yeah, it was a really good time. I remember talk about deep snow and the snows that you guys have had on the East Coast lately. We would fly the 141 into Grand Junction. And after the first sort of, like pre-visit trip where we're bringing the whole team in, right? And we've got a, we've got a, uh, the president's going to fly our force one into Grand Junction and then motorcade all the way into, at this point, he wouldn't fly into Eagle or anywhere closer.

So we would motorcade him in. And, uh, I had to go up on top of this bluff to put up this radio antenna. And my friend John's with me. We're in this snow cat. And John's not feeling good. He's not doing good at altitude. We're, you know, 10, 11,000 feet. And I'm like, hey, excuse me, I've got to go.

You know, I'm just going to step out the back of the cat. And I opened the door and thank God I held on to the door because I was hanging from the door. The snow was so deep that it was well over my head. And I'm like crawling back into the cat, snow cat. And when we got to this site, we would usually put our, we would put our antennas up on like old fire towers, right? None of them have, it's funny, fire towers and municipal airport towers, you know, for their traffic control folks are always like 99 feet high because if they go 100, they need an, they're supposed to have an elevator and none of them have it. So you get to carry all your gear up. But this thing was like coated in ice and I'm like, how the hell am I going to put this antenna up there and I'm slipping and sliding?

And thank God I had some climbing gear and built myself in, but poor John, he didn't feel too good. And when we got down, when we got down and back down to where we were going to head back, the Kerr's distributor was sitting there. And he's like, I need you to fill up your, because we drove station wagons at the time. I need you to fill up your station wagon, take this back over to Vail. And I'm like, no, I can't. I can't be taking your. And he's like, dude, take it easy, you know.

Talk to chief so-and-so. He said it's okay. You can take, you know, you can carry this big load. beer back over to the station. So we ended up... 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. In Vale, RCP was Billy Jack's house, Laughlin's house, and President Ford stayed at another house right around the circle belonged to one of the oil big guys in oil. And in the back of our command post, it was just stacks at Kurzbeer and stuff like that. You know, people are, people going out the back and sliding around and falling down the snow. Steve, you looking at your bio, I mean, you pulled the communications details for presidents Ford Carter

and Vice President's Rockefeller and Mondale, as well as Secretary Henry Kissinger. You must have a few spicy stories from working around that crew. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. The Secret Service managed Kissinger before, you know, diplomatic security DS put a detail around him, right?

And so we're running back and forth doing the shuttle diplomacy with Kissinger. And I don't know, know if this is spicy, but this is the kind of power, these kind of people can wield, right? His wife, Nancy, Kissinger's wife, Nancy was with him, and they were like in Israel, and she wasn't feeling well, and Kissinger had the Air Force fly in some, like, foremost milk from California, so she could feel better, right? It's like, just, I don't care what else is going on, just get the jet out here with some milk for my wife kind of idea.

President Ford's sons love to ski the back bowls because they could get away from everybody else in the back bowl with a bowl. Right. Yeah. So another funny one is Mondale. He's going trout fishing up at Big Meadows in Skyline Drive. And back in these days, right, we didn't. We had the cellular phones, but they only worked in town, like the big suitcase phone, right, which was the start of cellular. So we have to do this radio patch kind of idea.

So I'm in the middle flipping a switch, you know, and Mondale's saying over, and his wife is saying over, and we're flipping a switch. And he's like, Steve, put in a call to the BP's residence. And I put the call in, and he gets his son on the phone. And it turns out his son has been writing his most. motocross bike tearing up the yard and the lawn around the VP house there on Massachusetts Avenue. He's like, damn it, if you're having a party, you better not be smoking weed. And I'm flipping the switch going, oh, man, I don't know. I'm doing this shit, you know.

Crank on the newspaper, you're breaking up there. Yeah, yeah, no kidding. No kidding. And just, yeah, stuff like that, you know, but mainly kids. Like, I sat outside the presidential yacht there at Anacoste. of because Susan Ford had a party. And I was the communicator of the day and, you know, sitting there with a couple of Secret Service guys. And I'm just like, are we going to go in?

Are we going to have to jump in the anacoste if one of these idiots falls over drunk? And all the agents are like, no, I'm not getting in that river. There's a Navy dive school, but, you know, they put on serious gear to go into an anato costume. Yeah. So, yeah. Spicy stories. Yeah. The other one that was pretty funny was

77 Carter goes to Poland. Then he has meetings and stuff, and then it is snowing like a son of a gun when he's at the airport getting ready to leave and he's going to give some remarks. Well, I'm in the back just sort of monitoring or radio gear

make sure it stays up and things like that. And the Polish Secret Service assigned a guy to me. you know and the next thing you know he's getting salmon which in poland you get a can of salmon and the salmon's just cut through like if the salmon's long they just cut it through and it's got the bones and stuff and we're eating salmon and we're having and of course we're having not vodka but what they call the spiritus which is like moonshot and we're drinking and stuff like that and listening to the president out there and then the president says his interpreter said that he

lusted after the Polish people like sexually lusted after them. It was a big deal. And the Polish the secret service guy is spitting his food out. I'm crying and laughing and we kept after he left, I kept

waiting for people to pick me up and nobody was picking me up. So I kept drinking stuff with this guy. And then all of a sudden he starts pulling out his pistols. He's got like three. He's got two ankle holsters and he's got a pistol. And so I'm just joking around. They're all sort of like Walter knockoffs, and I'm taking them apart, just joking with him.

Turns out he doesn't know how to put him back together, and I'm too drunk to put him back together. So anyway, it all worked out okay. I woke up in the basement of the embassy and with some friends around me going, what the hell was all that about? Well, it all worked out okay for you. You don't know what happened to him after when he shows up with three disassembled pistols. Like a plastic bag. Yeah, exactly. In an empty tunic can. Oh, man, they were some hard drinking people.

So, Steve, how did you then make this transition from Waka over to the Secret Service? How did that take place? Well, yeah, working with them every day, right? Because we're providing the Secret Service with their radios that they're using out in the field, changing their batteries, all that. We set up these base stations they're using to communicate. on different frequencies, part of the advanced team, and when the full team comes in with the president. One of the other things we did is we would set up these phone systems and radio systems

on what we called alpha frequency, and those were for the staff, you know, the real people that could piss you off, right, the staff members. And so we're working with them all the time. So they actually asked me and said there was an opening, and I said, where? And they said, in the ECM, in the ECM unit, I'm like, oh, man, that'd be so great. And so they're like, all you got to do is take the civil service test. So I'm paying no attention.

I'm goofing off. I take the test. I fail it. I don't like, oh, shit. By one point? Like, you. Huh? By one point?

I'm just. Oh, no, by a bunch. I, you know, there's all this gymp part that I just not paying attention to. And so I study, I go back and take the test. And by this time, that position is gone, but there's a position in the alarms in video shop. So making sure the video cameras and all the alarm systems around the White House, the VP House, presidential candidates and all that kind of stuff. So I took it. I was a GS-5, you know, roaring and Rippin and my, I mean, dressed to the nines, right?

I'm in my Jacques Penae reversible, you know, vest suits and stuff like that. I mean, you know, I've gone from E5 to GS5 and a little bit more money. But yeah, so the transition there wasn't hard. If you, if you worked hard, they liked you. They liked your attitude, whatever. You know, it was pretty easy. So during that time in the Secret Service, there was, The funny thing was when I got there, they're like, here's your bulletproof vest and here's your radio and here's your credentials.

You know, you're good to go. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, well, you know, where's the sidearm? And at the time, the Secret Service used a Model 19, 357 Magnum Revolver. A little nasty thing that tear your suits up and all kinds of good stuff. but I mean, you know, pretty powerful, even a two-inch, 357, and put a herd on a person, right? And they're like, no, you know, you're a technical security specialist. You don't get one of these.

I'm like, what do you mean? Am I just supposed to jump in a way, take a bullet? They're like, yeah, your Secret Service. Of course you are. I'm like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. So every time I went on a trip, you know, I told I would, the Secret Service guys got to know my background. So I had a soft pack shotgun or I had a Uzi.

So if you remember when President Reagan was shot, you know, that dog pulled out the jacked the oozy out of this Samsonite briefcase. And so I was always around that kind of stuff. I didn't, I like the idea of become an agent, but I just didn't want to, as I said, used to say, I didn't want to stand in the hallway waiting to get shot. So being on the advance team all the time, working tech, I got to go to scorn. schools like EOD school out, the Navy school out Maryland. I got to go to Harvey Point for IEDs, Fort Bragg. I got to go a lot of places. And this is just when I'm just the communicator, knucklehead, you know, just switched to secret service. So is that because even though you were a communicator, was it just that the tech side was one big umbrella that where you

could kind of pick any school? Well, yeah, so being a tech security specialist, they expected you to be able to work with EOD teams and handle advance work like that. Now, I did alarms in video normally. There was an EOD chem weapons team in TSD. There was a locks, you know, kind of group that did locks and ciphers and safes and stuff like that. The Secret Service itself had the whole driver side, the guys that drove the vehicles and the

beast and, you know, all the backups. And in my day, my day, another funny little story is, right, like I said, we drove, we didn't have SUVs yet, suburban yet, so we were driving station wagons. We had armored station wagons. We had armored Continentals. We had the Cadillac, Hess Eisen Park Cadillac, and we had these station wagons. A guy who had been there since LBJ told me that one time LBJ gave one of the Arborate Station wagons away to a Baptist minister down at Texas. You know, it was Christmas present.

And those things stop on a dime, too. Oh, yeah. If you got a whole shit ton of dimes, right? Yeah, so. So, yeah, normally I did the alarms in video, but then on advance, I'm there for. for the, I would bring in the EM team, right, to do their scans. I would schedule EOD teams to help, you know, whether it's the elevator in the hotel or work the route, right? Because back in the day before we had the concrete barriers, we used to do barrels, right?

And then put tamper tape on the barrel, fill it with water, put tamper tape and police tape on it, you know, up and down like, Pennsylvania Avenue, like when the Pope came, you know, things like that. So, yeah, it's funny how much tech, like you said, guys, how much tech has evolved in my lifetime. I've seen the tech evolve. But, yeah, the craziness got, it got really crazy in the 80 campaign, right? I was now at GS-7, and I was working so much. that like halfway through the year, I burned through all the scheduled overtime and unscheduled overtime. I could make no more money in the year, sort of, you know, July, August time frame.

And I'm like, oh, well. And, yeah, still traveling. We had our own, even in WACA in the Secret Service. I have my own GTR book. I could write a plane ticket to anywhere. You know, I had my credentials. I had a black passport, you know, for GS-7, just living pretty high. I just didn't have a gun. And I remedied that most of the time by carrying my high power. I'm a very, I'm a high power fan. And besides the 1911, it fits my hand best. And so I would, I would carry it. And most of time, the special agents in charge were fine because they knew they could trust me. I'm not, you know, just going to start banging away with the gun. And, uh, Yeah, so it was, I, there was, I think I worked 11 months out of 12, and I decided I needed a break.

I'm going to go down to Florida. I'm going to scuba dive, skydive, goof off, sit at the beach. And I like that a lot. So I said, by the way, you know, I'm not coming back. that was the end of my Secret Service career. I have a lot of, I think these secret service guys are great. I think personally the Secret Service got a little bit too big for their pants, leaving bullets and rooms, not paying for ladies, doing things that we would never consider, right?

We always paid for leaves. we did we did we we we did things but we also just made sure that we didn't embarrass the secret service or ourselves right now and yeah so yeah it was a good time there was like say lots of good travel but you know unfortunately when you're in that mode whether it's walk or secret service you're going all these great places people like wow you've been all over the world and I'm like, yeah, and I had about 12 minutes to see it. You know, I need to go back. Now that I'm getting ready to retire, I need to go back to those places and actually explore the town.

Right. Probably not going back to Dhaka, Bangladesh, but, you know, maybe some of the prettier places have been. And, yeah, so that was, that was a switch, a break in my career. And it was, it was welcome because I was pretty, burnout after eight and a half years between WACA and the Secret Service of being gone going all the time. I want to talk about the next stage of your career, Steve, but before I get into that, I just want to tell our viewers about our Patreon. So the Team House is also on Patreon. And if you guys go and check it out, it's patreon.com slash the Team House. There's also a link down

in the description. And consider supporting the show, supporting the stream. You guys have kept us going over the last couple of years. You keep us in the booth and you keep the lights on, so we appreciate it. And when you join, you get access to two bonus episodes a month and also a lot of bonus segments with our guests that we've recorded. I mean, there's probably days and days worth of bonus segments on there at this point. So back to Steve. What was it then that got you back into, I mean, back into, in this case, special forces, but I mean, after you kind of had this experience like I'm kind of done with working for the man. What brought you back? Well, yeah. So, you know, running my own little alarm business down in Florida and stuff

like that, just not real exciting, right? You know, some interesting problems. You know, I had this one customer, he was a ham radio guy. He loved ham radio stuff. And, up in Brooksville north of Tampa, nowadays when you watch the map of lightning hits, there are places that turn black, right? There's so many lightning hits in Florida. And this poor guy kept putting up his antenna and then a storm would come along. And it would vaporize my alarm connections in the windows.

It would burn the ends of the wire off and stuff, the lightning. It would kill every appliance that was plugged in in his house. Anyway, did that a couple of times. And I thought, you know, this isn't, this isn't really getting it for me. I need more action or stimulus, right? So I started checking around. And back in those days, we had the 11 special forces, the reserve headquartered out of Mead. And then we also had the 20th out of Florida.

I mean, Georgia or Mississippi? Mississippi, I think, is where group headquarters is. And the 20th wasn't taking anybody. So I thought, oh, okay, I'll join up and do the 11th thing. Did a little bit of signal company rat rig stuff just because, you know, I knew what it basically was. The rat rigs still had teletypes in them and stuff like that. And about this time, you know, Commodore or Victorique. computers, Commodores are starting to get into the public, you know, with your little cassette

to tune them up and a little program. And so I did the 11th for a little while. It was very interesting. We had, I was very lucky as, even as, you know, non-jump qualified, then go into Benning and doing jump school, there were people who were advisors that would come through, like Kenny Mullen, who was on Basante Prison Ray, learned a lot. You know, Sergeant Major Jacobenko came down and I hosted his scuba team and stuff like that. And so there are just a lot of guys still, sort of at the end of their careers, is still in.

And so I'm absorbing everything I can. And I was really interested in becoming a Delta, you know, a medic. Yeah, right. Yeah, right, Steve. Once they find out what you did, you're going in one direction only. I know. Well, they let me go to,

the 11th let me go to a 91 bullet stopper school, you know, combat medic, you know, Band-Aid medic. And, of course, being at Fort Sam with all these young ladies right out of basic training, was a fun time. And, but then when I got over the 20th, they're like,

No, no, dude, you know more commo than some of these radio guys. I was like, okay, thanks, you know. And so I started to learn how much you could stuff into an Alice pack, right? Right. Radios are batteries and more batteries. And anyway, so it was a really good time. I had gotten a job at DOE, well, with General Electric at a go-co. So the Pinellas plant, what we did there,

was we made we made batteries and parts for the initiators that would end up going back to sandia rocky flats and other things so we're making nuclear weapon parts and so i found out the hard way that being cleared for ridiculous on the doD side they could care less on the on the on the doe side i went i went 18 months before finally the site manager just said here's your cue clearance this is ridiculous i don't know what you do you did to piss them off, but I'm going to give you the clearance here now because I'm tired of escorting you back into the queue space at the plant. And I got really lucky I hit this plant right as they were, had led a contract that Johnson Controls won to take the analog, you know,

switches, your normal home alarm system and digitize it. So my first computer school was right up In the middle of New York City, there was a deck computer school right there next to the, I forget it was next to the gardener, the train station. But so they started sending me to computer schools. And that's how I got the transition from radios, alarms, and video to actually computers. And GE helped me with that, which was sort of funny. So I'm starting to learn these high end, what would now be called. called Skata type computers for managing plants and things like that. And at my 20th group, I've got this aluminum Halliburton case.

And it's black. And it's got a dial on it. It's got all kinds of tape on it. And I crank it open. And the guys are like, here's your crypto gear. Check this out. And my crypto gear, part of my burst radio gear was a wind up toy. So literally you would take the one-time pad, you would make your own strip, you would load this in,

and then you'd hit the button and it would unwind. And that's how we did burst transmission. Wow. And so I'm on the one hand, I'm a computer geek, and the other hand I'm going back into the 50s. Of course, this stuff's in the Crypto Museum now. And that's one of the things that cracks me up about. I'm 67. I can go to a Boeing Museum.

I can go to the Crypto Museum. I can go to the Fort Bragg Museum and there's stuff I used, you know. It's like, that's how you know, that's how you know you earned the gray in your beard. Exactly right. Exactly right. So, yeah. And so through that work, I started to, Centcom was standing up over at McDill. There was readiness command, but Sentcom standing up.

And through a friend, I heard that that, SAIC was hiring. And they're interested in network people. And I'm like, well, I know a network. They network. You know, I don't know what they're talking about. So I checked in with them. And the guy who was running the program was the former J6 from Readiness Command, Bob,

and former colonel, of course. And because SAIC likes to hire colonels, likes to hire former directors of the CIA and other people, right? influencers and I ended up over there helping you know stand up more of the digital framework in J6 of Centcom. So I transitioned over there at the same time you know I'd already done you know jump school and I got like 86 now I'm getting you know got my beret and stuff like that and starting to go on on more than just training or like Florida-based AT, right? You know, we start heading down range. The first place we went, though, we were still tied to 10th group.

And the first actual mission I went on is a, you know, as a certified cream beret, so to speak, is Tunisia. So we're what you know, we connect up with the Sahara Brigade, we're putting on all the gear, you know, you know, Lawrence Arabia, it's really cool. And I remember this, this camel spit on me and pissed me off. So I smacked it as hard as I could. Oh, like Arnold and Conan. Oh, man. No, this thing, I couldn't use my hands for about four days.

It hurt so bad. Those things got the biggest. I used to think my German Shepherd had a hard head. I hit it in the wrong spot, but it sort of obeyed. So we went to Tunisia, got a Tunisian wing city, Guffed off, whatever, did that mission. We tried to get over to the border with Libya, but they didn't want to go over that side. They kept saying the guy over there was crazy. So we came back, and then we got re-focused to where, as part of 3rd Battalion,

And we were focused with a seventh group now. And that's where the work down into South America started, Panama, Ecuador, and Colombia, primarily for the three places. So I'm working at CENTCOM, helping stand it up, traveling as a contractor to Egypt and Jordan, you know, and things like that, building computer systems, figuring out how to stuff them in boxes so we could transport them 7,000. miles because we didn't even have SATCOM overhead, right, right, when we kicked out the first Gulf War. But one of the cool things was being on base, SAIC won the J2 support contract. So now I'm over there helping them in the new SOCOM headquarters, right, where they just sort of took a bunch of guys from readiness command and grabbed some other guys and

created a special forces command, special operations command. And I knew the National Guard Bureau advisor. I knew some people in the J3. And that's how I started to get my team counter drug missions. So, right, the president had signed that direct you say, you can go train. And so we would load up a 141 in Tampa. We'd throw a couple helicopters in it, a couple teams. And for example, we flew out and did a counter drug.

mission at the behest of DEA in Los Prajarez National Forest north of L.A. Really? Yeah. Yeah, it was an area they had touched in a while. This was before, you know, the wildlife guys started getting into working the counter drug stuff, you know, that they do nowadays and stuff like that. And so DEA, it said, you know, it's like, hey, Steve, here's four different things.

What do you want to do? And it's like, well, that's nasty Arizona. I don't want to do that. Let's go to California. So we worked out of Vandenberg and we would fly in, Heelow in. And we were so lucky. We had some, we had a CW5, a couple guys. I mean, these guys, like, had more hours in a Huey than I had on the planet, right?

These guys were ex-Vietnam guys and stuff. Great helicopter pilots. And so we did our intelligence practice battlefield. field and we're looking and it's like, why do you want us to go work here? It's like, you've been in like three years of drought, you know? There's like, you know, if somebody's got water, they're going to be bringing it in, right? Or they're going to dig a well or they're going to do something else. They're going to make some kind of give us a signature, right?

And they're like, no, we haven't checked this. You know, the thing that we're really worried about and we'd like you guys to check out is we think there's gangs in there making, making, making drugs in semi-trailers. And I'm like, oh, you want us to go in there and check and see if the gangs are in there, who are probably better armed than we are, right? So we did. It turned out it was drought. There was very little water.

We found a trailer near an old grow. And what they were starting to do was like take pots of pot and bring them up into the trees, right? So they would water them and then pull back up in the trees because it was hard. for the guys with infrared to see them when they're in the trees versus down on the ground or in a big old field, right? So we found a trailer. We found a runway, probably been used, you know, 30, 45 days earlier kind of idea. I could see some marks and things like that. And we found a trailer.

And I tell you what, the pucker factor was pretty high when we come over the rise and we see the trailer and we're all like hair on it. on end, you know, wondering if the gang's around. And they had, they, there was artifacts there, drums there, some chemicals, but nothing, nothing of substance. Nobody there hiding it and stuff. So that was really good training, getting those kind of missions because on the border, because DEA paid for everything. They paid for the C5A.

They paid for the helicopter fuel. We had, we probably, we almost burned out our barrels. So we had so much ammo, you know, we probably, we probably, you know, we probably, practice for hours until we get sick of, you know, movement to contact and all those kind of things, you know. We also took some of that money and used it to buy some Harris gear that the active duty guys didn't have. And the latest, you know, Harris gear and stuff like that. So I remember one funny story. We were set up near some water and a little three-man element.

We're taking turns. And I'm asleep. and and and and and and and and john is john is watching the water and looking out and stuff like that all of a sudden it's like hey man dude look at this and then i i wake up the captain and we're all like oh look at those ladies oh you know that was all we saw the whole time is we saw some really pretty ladies in the water some of the guys got you know poison oak but it was really for realistic training it really worked right because there was we had people that when we went into the woods that weren't confident enough to carry around in the chamber with the rifle on safe for example and and I'm like excuse me we need you know I it was a different team but I'm like are you sure you guys don't want to practice for war here you know it's like you want to practice the way you want to go right

But all in all, it was really good training. We did a couple of those. One of the interesting things was that they didn't want us to do anything in our own home state. As parents, there's enough to worry about and plenty to figure out alone. So isn't it nice to find answers? To worry less with people who get it. Saving for college is a journey made better when guided by experience. At college well.com, we have excellent.

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You can receive over $500 the first month. Learn more about plasma and how it helps people at Gryphalsplasma.com. So they didn't want us to do anything in Florida. You know, it's like we'd go to Oklahoma, California, somewhere else. But they're not going to let the Oklahoma National Guard originally do these kind of missions in their own home state for fear of getting targeted. stuff like that. Right. Now, were you guys reserved or guard at this point in time?

Had they made the switch yet? Well, yeah. 11th had not been absorbed into the 20th and 12th hadn't been absorbed into the 19th yet. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So they were still there. But no, 20th was always a guard group. Yeah.

So what were some of the ops that, like you were down in Columbia, for instance? Was this around the same time that like snow cap was kicking off and some of those big operations? Yeah. So, and I'll mention a snow cap story in a minute. But yeah, so we in support of seventh, right, we would go down to Ptolemati to like the Lancero School, the Columbia Ranger School. So we fly in three man pods in different commercial flights. We get up to the embassy. They stuff us around Ogata in different houses and stuff like that.

And we listen to the automatic gunfire at night and go, you know, hey, we're really in it now. And then we would fly down to Toulamati. So seventh group would predominantly was focused on training the officers. They're at the Lansera school. So they're all sterile, you know, because they don't want the officers know that it's an E7 teaching them in the class that kind of thing like that. And we ended up several times doing like a, in Ranger School, there's a pre-class. What do you guys call that in Ranger?

Pre-ranger. No, the Pre-ranger school for Pre-Ranger. Got it. And so we taught groups that were forming up, getting ready to go into the Lansero training to see if they could make it through that class. I know Jackie mentioned a friend had done that before. That class was the real deal. And the Colombians did not have the safety.

Yes. Identities you might find in a U.S. school. It was, he's been on the show before, Jim West of seventh group. Jim Smokey went to Lancero and he has some pretty hair-raising stories about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, for example, the last time I was down there with the team, they had just gotten a whole bunch of brand new skydiving rigs, not what I would consider.

You know, they weren't like strong military free fall rigs or anything like that. They got a bunch of skydiving rigs. They got all this gear and brand new altimeters and a system to make sure the altimeters are working and stuff. and no training. And Emmanuel's, they ran English and stuff like that. And I'm like talking to head instructors. And I talked, you remember, we used to have those books, those cassette tapes called Head Start.

Yeah. So, yeah, and it was like how to learn Spanish. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Dave remembers that. Anyway, they used to call me Sargento Premier Head Start. You know, like I was, that's about as much Spanish as I could talk. But I knew how to work all this gear from Strong and all the parachute manufacturers.

So I literally started training a training class while the rest of the team is doing sort of, you know, comma, basic medical, movement to contact, all that kind of stuff. I started this little training, payload training regimen just trying to make sure that they could be safe with this new gear. and make sure that like when they stowed the pilot shoot that they weren't putting underneath the, you know, the leg strap and things like that, things that'll kill you, you know, in a skydiving and halo environment. And so that's going along really well. And unbeknownst to me, the seventh group guys had done a Halo night jump. And one of the guys, the seven group guys didn't make it back because they had jumped out over the water and were coming in or something. something like that. And there was a, there was a countrywide stop on halo jumping. I have no

clue about this thing. So they talk me and it's going up with their black falcons, their demo team, because the secretary of defense of Columbia is going to be there and blah, blah, blah, and the seventh group colonel and all this stuff. And we do this parachute jump. I land and they come over and they're high-fiving me and the colonel's seeing me and I'm talking English and I switched to really bad Spanish and started to run off but he caught me

and that was another one of those Steve moments that the 20th group commander the battalion commander the company commander, you know, my team commander they all got to you know experience the steveism of you know of not being

in Coots but that that training down there, that training, the training in Panama, once again, really good training because much more alive, you know, in the reserve and the guard so much, especially back after Vietnam into the 80s, you know, you're lucky if you get to go away to a school and, you know, or you're just, you know, spending two weeks up at camp something, you know, in the state, right? And so that training was really important. In Panama, it was the first time I got to work with the CCTV

and see the other guys that carried a lot of batteries back in the day, right? They were lamps, right? They weren't digital. They were just big lamps. And I remember we had a, I had a halo team, but only had six of us that were Halo qualified. And so they decided that we're just going to helo everybody and it's too much trouble to take the rest of, you know, six of the guys up to 10 grand and let them jump. And so we do this surveillance mission and then we're supposed to fall back to the runway, you know, protect the CCTV guys as they set up there.

The lights and then a ranger company is going to jump in. Well, this one young guy, I guess he decided he, he, I guess he decided he. was just stronger and more manly than, you know, 98 degree temperature and the 97% humidity. And he just fell out. And this guy, I was told by his mates that he didn't have a vein on a normal day, much less down there and now he's super dehydrated and things like that. So the way I got him up and walking, as I said, I'm not going to try to. and stick a bunch of holes in you. I'm not doing it a juggler.

So I'm going to take this and you're going to drop trow and it's going to go and you'll hydrate that way. It's going to go where? We missed that part. Right up the poop shoot.

Up the key sir. Exactly. And you never saw, you never saw an airman get up and march on out like he was okay. We eventually got a stick in him, But, yeah, that I thought we might, I thought we might lose him at one point. He was being stubborn.

He was being disoriented and things like that. Was he a CCTV guy or an SF guy or a ranger? No, CCTV. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I expected if there'd been any rangers, they'd just be drinking out of the swamp water. You know, who cares, you know?

Yeah. But, yeah. So that kind of training was, was. was good. It was focused. We got to do a wet well, a wet well big helicopter with our

RB 15 and a Chinook. Thank you. Sorry. Having a brain cramp. Chinook. So all in all, good training. A little sometimes unfocused, in the guard, I mean, you know, because you take what you can get.

But that's really why I liked, I mean, working at CENTCOM so common, having that access, even with my contractor badge, it was, you know, they knew who I was, and I was with the 20th and stuff like that, and so I could go talk to people. And make things happen for your team and whatnot. Exactly. Yeah. What was the crossover? You said you had a story about snow cap.

Oh, yeah. So my weapons sergeant, his brother, who was a ranger, was snow cap. His name, DEA agent named Jay Seal. And so he was in the Kossack aircraft when it went down in Peru. There were a couple other snow cap agents on there. And there was a young lady from like Arlington, Virginia there. She was like the first snow cap agent. And the seventh team went in to get, went in to get them.

And, yeah, so they, you know, they think it was just an accident of flying. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't foul play or anything like that. But that was, that was tough because Jay, Jay was such a great guy and his brother, too. And he and his, he and the brother and I still talk today. he's one of my beta readers for my novels and stuff like that. Great guy. But yeah, we had a pretty good team. Actually, I think about eight of the guys on the team had gone through Ranger School or Ben and Ranger Bat.

My heavy weapons guy, Mongo, Mike, he was that classic big beast of a guy that could make a, you know, M60 look tiny. Yeah. And, yeah, so we had some great people. And one of these pictures who sent me said it's right before a counter drug op in Columbia. And you guys are all kidded out wearing face paint in front of the huey. It looks like almost from Vietnam. Yeah, very much so with our A2 long plastic, plastic rifles and stuff. That was actually the counter drug mission into Los Padres.

I think that picture was not a not a Columbia mission but yeah we they didn't you know having the guard guys down there and some of the things that guard guys had done so in the 20th group I retired out of in Maryland we had this warrant officer he was John was the kind of guy that if you said don't do this John immediately went and did it so so the teams in El Salvador and John decides to go see what it's like in Nicaragua, right? And not in the years that it's a friendly, friendly crossing, you know, and waving, crossing the border and stuff like that. So we had a little bit of a reputation, I think, during the 80s and early 90s.

And I think really certainly our adjutant general in Maryland Guard, he became the three-star in charge of NGB, and we had a million-dollar budget for stuff. So we had really, not only did we have the 19th group in West Virginia right out at the training site for the boys, you know, the selection site, and they would bring us tractor trailers full of halo rigs. But so the AGs let us use his, his Sherpa, his QE to jump and maintain efficiency and things like that. And then we had these, we had satcom radios, crypto gear before active duty guys, because we had this budget. Right. The general wanted to spend it.

And I think to explain this to people who might not be aware, before the war on terror, there was the war on drugs. And so all the money that goes to war on terror now, at that time, all the money was going to the war on drugs. Like it was the big thing that were on drugs. And the National Guard, Special Forces and the National Guard, walked this very fine line where because they were under state authority didn't really, I guess they weren't really subject to posse comitatis or whatever it is that keeps federal, like you can't bring troops in, but you can bring the National Guard in to do these counter-drug operations in these places.

Well, no, no, we still had posse comitatis. We still get the seventh group, Jag would give us the spiel. Yeah, but because you guys aren't federalized, you can, they can call you in. I mean, not just war on drugs, but I mean, civil disturbances, natural disasters. No, you're exactly right. Yeah, they have National Guard guys do like infrastructure, security, and ports and things. Yeah, and the National Guard guys were doing a lot of the counter-drug stuff that the act in state side and stuff that the active duty guys could not. Right, right, right.

Right, right. And supporting Epic and stuff like that, right? Yeah, so absolutely. And it's interesting after the, you know, of course, after 9-11 and the changes that happened, what we saw too was that the commanders, the ground commanders in Afghanistan, of course, you know, after a couple of days in Afghanistan, we've got to invade Iraq. So we've got to hold another focus point, right? We're going to turn things over to NATO. But there was that whole gap where, you know, commanders are telling the sect deaf and the president,

you know, all this Afghan opium is not my job. My job's counterterrorism, right? And so this is actually, you know, a very interesting, the transition between the war on drugs and the GWAT. There's also, you get a lot of contractors helping out, right? So a lot of my SAIC friends, we're doing a lot of human and gathering data and doing things like we're in, right? Because when first, like the first Gulf War, when we went there, we didn't have. have satellites overhead. We're using old British and Russian maps. You know, we had we had to learn the area, right? And during the GWAT, same thing. There were contractors doing a lot of that support, even from stateside, you know, supporting the teams forward. But one of the interesting

things for me was, was that gap between what the EA's special mission units and different people are trying to do in Afghanistan, which unfortunately for me sort of replicated the work that the things that didn't really work in Vietnam. Right. You know, some of those, hey, grow oranges once a year, you know, versus two crops of opium, you know, things like that. You know, same stuff that we try in Columbia, right? You know, we just keep trying. It's going to work somewhere.

Right. But so that's an interesting topic for me because actually in my third book that I'm writing now, that's one of my focuses. It's 2003. And you've got that disparity. and how do you fit in there, right? There was that big operation. I remember the war started,

and I think Tony Blair, he sends the SAS over, and it got nothing for him to do, right? So they go home. And then they find a processing plan. It's like, let's go. And literally, I don't know how many people know this story, I can't remember the name of the op, but the SAS actually lands eight C1,

30s worth of guys in their pink, in their pink, you know, jeeps and, excuse me, in their land rovers and the rovers and stuff. And they assault this opium processing plant and stuff like that. And so it's a very interesting that the war on drugs, we keep fighting, we keep pushing. And the global, you know, they're estimating by 2030 that Afghanistan will account for but is that 12,600,000 pounds of opium, right? It's just crazy that, you know, we have focused rightly so on kind of terrorism. But in the meantime, taking our eye off the ball, right, the war on drugs. I mean, you know, in 2012, I can remember the we had this not a town hall, but immediately,

it up in DC and the SOCOM, CIO and some other people are talking about what's going on. And it's like drug smuggling is worth $147 billion in 2012, right? It's compared to human trafficking at $32 billion, you know, which is very gruesome. And I'm not trying to downplay human trafficking. But can you imagine the growth? Because now we've got more people using heroin. You're going back to using heroin and a whole new group. group of people with more money using heroin and we've got meth and now we've got these synthetics

and the fentanyl thing it's just nuts anyway yeah it's tough it's for me for sure so i think that i think one of the challenges is is is the whole terminology because now the war on drugs and the war on terror narco-terrorism and the war on christmas and the war on you know poverty and the war on you know what i mean it's like it's uh everybody uses this hyperbolic language in a order to, you know, to couch their what's important to them, understandably, but then it all just gets lost in the mix. But yeah, but the war on drugs or the, the counter drug effort, as it were, it's, it's been, it's been forgotten. And we've talked about this on the show before where guys who were in seventh group who used to have, it was the heyday during the war on drugs,

and then the war on terror and all of a sudden, seventh group who were focused in Latin America, where do they want to go? You know, because where's all the money going, right? Not the guys themselves. They want to go to war, but I mean the commands in general. They all want to couch it in a way that they're part of this global war on terror because all the money's being funneled to. That's the funding line, right? That's, yeah. So, Steve, before we move on in the next part of your career, again, any spicy stories about Central South America that you want to lay on us? actually more about more about Florida right as the as the receiving end of a lot of what goes on right I mean thank you back when I was active in this we really didn't have the idea of the

semi-submersibles right the submarine semi-simmersibles we had fast moversals right we had aircraft of all kinds and stuff like that. And we were doing some cross-training with SAS guys south of the Oke Phanokey. And there was a, believe it or not, his name was General Peanut, and he owned like 10,000 acres of swamp down there. So great training area. We took the SAA. We had half the company went to Britain to do training with the SAS reservists. the 21st and 23rd TA, their reserve guys. And some of these SAS guys came to America, and we took them to the Air Force School,

the water survival school at Turkey Point at the nuclear power plant. And so we teach them all about poisonous things in the water and Hammerhead Sharks and Homestead Bay and all this. and we jump and have a good time. So we go down into the swamp, and we're doing different missions and stuff like that. And just one funny side story, not real spicy, but we're going to cross this canal. So we're making our, you know, wrapping up our rucks and making stuff float. And I start to go out in water, and all of a sudden I'm like pulled back.

And I hear this whisper, look at that, look at that. And there's these eyes out in water, right? But they're only like this far apart. I mean, it's just not, I'm like, you know, dude, that's a little one. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. So we start swimming across. And then it shows up on the other side like this.

And those SAS guys push me along. I think I had a bow wave. They pushed me out of the followers going along. So a couple days later, you know, I'm trying to make sure stuff staying dry. I mean, my like one-time pads like rotting away. It's wet and stuff like that. and I'm trying to make commo. And it's night.

And we have no night vision or anything like that. And it's just dark as hell. And I hear this airplane, but I don't see the lights. And I'm like, and all of a sudden, boom, boom, boom. Bales. It turned out to be bales that were tossed out of the aircraft that were, I don't know, 150 feet away or whatever. But this Cherokee or whatever was flew. by and toss some stuff out of the airplane.

And I'm like, you've got to be lost to tossing it out where we are. So that was a little interesting. But you guys were out there smoking marijuana in the, in the BB that night? We have to test, you know, you have to enforce light discipline, right? Right. And you have to, you don't know if it's marijuana unless you test it. Right. Unless you know, right.

You have to test it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, same thing. comes to the same thing down in Miami it's like you know and when you see a key of cocaine you don't know it's cocaine to stick your finger in it right is it coke or how it sugar who knows yeah yeah yeah i thought like yeah i thought it was for the donuts um but uh yeah so uh we would do just sometimes in uh when we had nothing to do some of our guys were PD and we do ride-alongs with them and That could get spicy into Miami.

Oh, yeah. South part of the areas there. There were some particularly hardcore parts of Miami and stuff like that. I remember a funny story. The Florida Guard, our former company commander, Major Stanley, he went off. He went to Fort Wachuka, and he came back in Intel Wheatie Lieutenant Colonel. And I'm like, what are you doing? He's like, oh, I got this new job.

I'm supposed to stand up a counterintel. linguist battalion there in Miami. I'm like, where are you going to get people to stab this? And he's like, well, a bunch of the E7s are coming over to get E8 positions and things like that, you know, the normal movement around the garden, stuff like that. And I said, yeah, but all your language speakers, aren't they like first or second generation Cubans? How are we going to clear these people?

He's like, I don't know, but by the way, you're my intel sergeant. So for about 18 months, I was his intel sergeant trying to do paper. and get first generation humans of clearance. It was, I'm sorry, but it's impossible. We had a great time. We did a lot of part of part. Yeah, we had a lot of parties, but we didn't clear a lot of people. Yeah, I bet.

You know, it's funny because I had a buddy who had been a seal and then, or he'd been Miami-Dade SWAT, and they're like, you don't hear anything about them, but they're a top-notch SWAT team with. with very, I don't want to say loose rules of engagement, but, but, but, but they're law enforcement. They play hard. Like, they're like Las Vegas law enforcement. Like, they're there to maintain the peace regardless. Right, right.

And that was, that was some of the more interesting things we would do. Those guys, you know, it's funny, because they're always so buff and in shape and things like that. And, you know, we're sort of joking. And then when we saw how they could shoot move and communicate, they were tight, really tight. And they still do really well, you know, in some of the SWAT competitions they have there in Florida. I've got a friend who was a D-Boy and then a contractor acquisition guy. After Major got stuffed into acquisition. And yeah, he's invited me to a couple of those competitions, just to watch.

And it's pretty impressive. what some of those guys can do. That is, you know, people might joke around and things like that, but some of those teams, some of those gangs like LA Kings and MS-13 and stuff, they got some no-kidding kind of almost,

not sit at low-level, you know, kind of bad, bad guys, but, yeah, tough stuff. Yeah, and they're not just this motley crew either. they're organized, they're trained, a lot of them, like, they know what they're doing. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's not just, you know, you're on the duty. You've got a long gun today. You're on the duty, right? It's just not a pickup team. Right. Well, I didn't mean Miami-Dade. I meant like the L.A. or not the L.A. or not the L.A. but I meant like the gangs down there. Like, they're not just. Yeah. You think of gangs. You think of, you know, a bunch of like street thugs with like no. Oh, no. Very militaristic. Like you see in Seniloa and a lot of the Mexican cartels, literally plucked right out.

How'd you like to make five times more than you are in the Army, you know, SF, Mexican SF and Marines and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. People are bad, bad people. When they're shooting helicopters out of the sky and stuff like that, right? And all of a sudden they show up to the party with an igla missile. It's like, okay, this is real. Steve, can you get that story on us that you were telling me a little bit about before that during the Gulf War and you were doing something at the SAIC at the time?

Yeah, so right before the Gulf War kicked off, there was the Baltic Maritime Council decided to put out this contract. The shipping industry in 1989, to my surprise, was doing its contracts and most of its work over time. teletype still. And at the end of the teletype, there's this three-digit code that equals your teletype. It's like the physical code of, you know, like the Mac address of your teletype. And they would do contracts. I've got, you know, 10 tons of bulk ore and you've got the freighter and we're doing a deal. And so we won this contract to help bring them into the so-called digital A.

And so I went over and I was working out of the Baltic Exchange, which is the old exchange before they built Lloyds to do the, you know, like the Chicago Exchange and stuff like that. And so we're working out of the basement there and we're figuring out how to build this worldwide network using IBM and deck and their different networks to make these connections. So I'm traveling all over to place, Stockholm, Oslo, back to New York, Japan, Tokyo. And the most interesting place that I went, and that's that picture that you put up on the site there. That picture is myself and an Air Force intelligence officer. Unfortunately, he passed away a couple years ago out there in front of Red Square. And part of BMCOM was so-com, I think it was called So-Com fleet at the time and So-com Fract. Well, I think it's shortened its name down to So-Fract now.

It is the Russian shipping conglomerate. And they also do ground logistics and things like that. They've been, I don't know how many times they've been sanctioned by different administrations for sentenced up to Iran and, you know, breaking sanctions and things like that. And the idea was like and out of, also out of Greece. So one of the big backers of this idea was a Greek tycoon called George Lobanos. And he owned the majority of the world's oil tankers. And I didn't, this is another thing I didn't know is I got into this business is they protected the, the whereabouts of the oil tankers very vigorously, right? because, you know, somebody might, you could affect, you know, the trade and the value and things like that if people got to the port before you, right?

And this was pre-GEPS day, so there wasn't this automatic tracking. There was more of like a beacon that used Loran and things like that. So we started putting this system together and stuff, and then I get a call from a three-letter agent. when they're very interested in this. You're going to Russia. I mean, they know everything about what I'm going to do. I'm like, you know, oh, geez, who's listening, you know? And we're very interested in what you're going to do while you're in Russia, right?

You're going to be in Riga, the Port City, in Latvia. You're going to be in Moscow and such like that. And so I'm all teched up. I'm all psyched up. I'm going to do something a little spooky, you know, whatever. I don't have no idea what they're going to do over and around and on top of me, but, you know, I'm going to go do this work. And we get there, and it is like,

sort of like when I got into SF and had the wind-up toy to make my burst transmission, I get there, and it's, I can't even get a modem to work. The lines are so bad. I can't, and I'm talking about, you know, the kind of modem where you have to, you can hear the individual tones go, you know, like nine-dine. kind of modem and stuff, you know. And then it goes, would you like to play a game, right? Or your porn screens sort of unload like this.

For two hours, line by line. You're like, get out of here. No, I'm done, I'm done. Anyway, we go to this work. And before I got in there, I heard the conditions were so bad that I actually took a kit bag, an aviator kit bag and I filled it with with like dance cams and beans and other things not to trade but just give to people who would help me out right so like dollar bills uh lucky strikes were huge ride at carton you get anything for you know you get a taxi ride anywhere around

moscow for two hours for a pack of lucky strikes kind of idea um so we start doing this work and i got like seven minders around me of watching what I'm doing they put me in one of the old Olympic hotels, you know, and I'm joking around going, I could really use some ice, you know, just waiting for the ice to show up kind of idea. My boss and his boss, our bosses, he came, and they were in Dersinsky Square at the Savoy, right? More bugs per square inch in the Savoy than an NSA guy could ever count. But so it was an interesting time. I got a connection for a little bit.

it didn't work. And then we just had to leave at one point. And I debrief the guys and said, I don't, you know, I don't know if it's working or not. You know, we'll see. I'm probably going to end up going back. Well, about the time we're going to go back and do some more work and clean this up, Saddam invades, Kuwait. And I had left Centcom to go do this piece of work. And I'm getting a call to come back to Sentcom.

And I'm like, no, no, no, I'm having a lot of fun. I want to stay here in the UK for another couple of years to mess around Europe. And they're like, no, no, no, you can come back of your own free will or we can send a Marshall to come get your house. We'll put you on orders and then, you know, life will be terrible. So I ended up coming back. But we were in Riga. It was like a week later, you know, tanks are rumbling around the square in Riga. and you know not too long after that d'ersinsky's getting torn down in the middle of the square and

it was an exciting time to be there um if it wasn't for saddam i could have probably stayed and been even even you know more in the middle of the action because that was very very interesting to me what was going on you know at that time right wait so they told you to come back to centcom for the first goal for did you make did you manage to book a flight and get back to send com before the war was over. Oh, yeah. But then I got the suck job with the gun and the networks in the back.

I'm like, come on, you guys. Just let me come forward, you know, for a month, you know, get my tab, get my patch, whatever, you know. Right, right, right. I had a young captain friend that I used to work out with at Socom. He goes forward.

And the next thing I know, I see him on the damn TV make an entry into the embassy. he's got he's a helicopter pilot he's got and he he he's hold he's holding uh a uh a car gustav and make it like a bad guy like he's gonna go in the embassy and do something i know it was all photo shoot but i was anyway i was pissed but nice number one man with a carl gustav spray and pray you know just let him in the i mean you really don't have to pray if you're gonna i mean pray for yourself if you fire a carl gustav in a building

you're entering. So for those of you don't know, Carl Gustav is like a, I don't know, the it would have been the 90, the 90 millimeter back in those days. 90 millimeter recallless. Oh, no, no, no. When I say Carl, I'm sorry, you know what the, you know, the, maybe I'm using the wrong term. There was a, there was a sweet, oh, Swedish K, the nine millimeter machine gun. All right, okay. Machine gun. Okay. Okay. I'm thinking, sorry. I just He's going on with a shoulder by him. Like he's playing, like he's playing Col of Duda or something like that. Yeah.

No. Yeah, yeah. It was a Swedish case. Sorry. Sorry. So any other, before you were, I imagine you were getting towards like the tail end of your military career at this point. Any other highlights you think we should hit up before we move into, you know, your kind of post-military service? No, like when I was down at CENTCOM, you know, the Secret Service guys came down.

and that I all knew when the Queen knighted, knighted, you know, General Schwarzkopf, you know, that kind of thing. I got to catch you up with a bunch of guys and stuff like that at a fun time. But yeah, by that time, I'd really switched over into cybersecurity and the business of what we call these cross-domain systems that allow you to share data, you know, either access data or move it across classified networks. So I'd really sort of switched into that mode at that point. But, yeah. How did, because you really started out in hardware.

And then when things went, when things sort of went digital, I mean, because cybersecurity, a lot of what you're talking about is a lot of software. Was that all self-taught then? Did you go from the hardware to the software sort of on your own? Yeah, well, like I took a Fortran class along the Beltway, you know, stuff. like that, but I was never really a programmer. I picked up on the networking as we started to get PCs and, and this is, I'm looking at you guys thinking, this is a long time ago. No, no, no, I, I had a commoner 64. Like I'm, I'm, yeah, yeah. Okay. So you remember, you remember in the military,

the 186, the 286, and eventually with 386, we got the Pentium chips and things like that. So, yeah, I was never really, I never really knew enough to, like, load software, do things, but I was really interested in the networks and communications. And so that's, you know, early, early networks. I remember when I got to CENTCOM, we had this big, thick RG-58 cable, looked like the kind of cable you would send out to your big antenna. And you had to drill a hole into it and put this thing called a vampire clamp on it to make the network. connection. And I was, when I, I built this worldwide military command and control system computer in a shelter that we could take overseas. I wrote that out on yellow legal pad and our lady used a word processor, it's word processor to put it on a big eight inch floppy, you know.

Oh, wow. It was just, it was really, really old technology. So I got to see, the commands, the military, not only on the communication side, but in the networking IT side, see that growth and see how eventually the intelligence systems like, you know, the massive systems that are doing all that collection of that signals intelligence finally are integrated into the network and we can start to, you know, move off the paper and get digital, things like that. So I've been very lucky with that. So, Steve, actually, there's something we've talked about sort of hypothetically with, I can't remember who it was, we spoke about it with, but none of us were a technical expert in this field. So we were talking about like emerging technologies and how, especially with the military sometimes falling behind, you know, in like from what you can buy on the shelf, that things like Blue Force trackers, things like if we ever start using, um,

like not virtual reality, but more like alter reality for headsets and things like that for combat, how those might be vulnerable. Like we don't even think that a blue force tracker, right, something to help us just, you know,

friend or foe type of system. Don't shoot my, don't shoot my buddy on the left and right. Right. But how those can be turned against us because they're not necessarily created, you know, they're not put forth to like bug bounty programs

say, hey, hack this system and see what you can find. Yeah, oftentimes those kind of systems, they're just literally have an overlay of encryption so that we encrypt those links, you know, hoping nobody can break those links, right? Because the core security elements of what's needed inside the software are really not as deep and broad as you might think, right? So there are those kind of things, like edges like the solar winds, you know, kind of thing, right? the kind of system that I make actually goes through six to nine months of NSA testing because we sit between, right, we might be, we could be seen as a gateway between the young class

Nipper network and the SIPR secret network. And so movement of that data, all that open source data up and then information back down is important from top secret to secret for the warfighter and all that intel summaries, whatever it might be targeting. So we get tested very rigorously, and then even around us, the systems are built to very NSA-specific requirements and focused requirements to ensure the security efficacy. We are 100% paranoid about can somebody take over my system, right? Can somebody find this back door a computing mistake, a coding mistake and make that change?

or, you know, then start hopping themselves around and collect data. Right. I have friends that are CIOs, you know, Raytheon, Lockheed and other places. They used to be that we had firewalls and all this perimeter defense. And we've proven that's worthless, right? Kids, kids, but also the nation states, of course, Russians, Russian sponsored, Chinese sponsored, you know, APTs, things like that. The advanced persistent threats, the APTs. Exactly.

Exactly. And that is one that lives in your system and then just quietly goes around and starts pulling it apart and looking for interesting things. But it's got a beacon home. So what a lot of those experts are starting to look at is, if I can stop the beaconing home, your APT doesn't hurt me. If it's in the system and I don't find you right away, it's okay, as long as you can't call home. So now you're starting to see a resurgence of actually hardware devices called diodes. And a diode is a one-way transfer that goes through a light, you know, a fiber optic transfer. So the data can only go one way.

And they're proven they work. They don't know what's going through. It could be very bad stuff that might dump your system or cause a, you know, a denial of service. But nothing's going out. So we're seeing the military start to employ. those more because even though it's just a modicum of security, it's like, hey, if the bad guy can't beacon home, he can't send all that information out of solar winds back to me and my control systems that I have all over the place, you know? Right. Because as a hacker nowadays, I can make use of

thousands of computers to give me power, right? Right. There was a huge denial of service outage last year or the year before where the bad guys used the processing power out of video cameras and used that process and they essentially created a distributed

monster mainframe like create mainframe and used all that processing power to stop computing in a you know in this across this space so it is there's there's a lot of different viewpoints and vectors

on what on cybersecurity and what's the right thing to do and it really has been, always has been and continues to be a layered defense game, right? Yeah. Right. I have kind of a tech question as well. I've been having some conversations with some folks this week for a story I've been working on. And one of the issues that came up was that the Department of Defense is now using private, commercially owned server farms for cloud computing.

And the question being, are these servers? server farms now legitimate military targets for foreign nations if they're hosting U.S. military data. And if those server farms are civilian, does the people who live in the nursing homes and the schools next door realize that this is a beacon for cruise missiles or whatever other sort of attack? I was wondering what you think about that, like both practically, but also I guess theoretically since it hasn't happened yet. Well, one of the things that having started life in physical security, right, in the Secret Service and things like that. One of the things that really disturbs me is how many big data centers that corporations and the defense,

you know, industrial base and the government relies on and they're in the flight path of Dulles Airport, meaning that somebody loses an engine, you know, somebody has a flame out, and the next thing, you know, there's a big furor in the ground through three data centers, right? And some of these data centers, like an Equinex, is actually a data center where they provide all the communications, but you put your stuff in a cage and you manage your own stuff. Other ones are, you know, Google, the standards, Google, IBM, Oracle, Azure, Microsoft, AWS, those kind of things. And so I know for sure, because I've seen the security reports and things like that they're regions that they build to work with the government. they're fully isolated. They're built on their principles,

but they're not connected to the regular internet, to the commercial regions and things like that. They're fully segregated. But there are very well-known places, you know, X miles south of D.C., where, you know, you could just do a Google search and see that the FBI's got a lot of stuff in this data center, right? or somebody else has it in another data center that supports the IC.

So, yeah, there's still the physical aspect of the issue there. And then, yeah, targets, right, the more, there'll always be a need for tactical systems and your tactical data set that you take forward with you. And I'm, you know, the cloud service providers are trying to provide these capabilities to say, here's this package and you can consider it. It operates the same way as your cloud that you buy from us and a service you buy from us, but you could take it forward tactical. But the use of these systems to consolidate data to reduce my cost,

I don't have to, with Azure virtual desktop, I don't have to have Booz Allen or Lockheed Martin set up this, big environment so I can have these desktops all over my command, I just buy it. And it's right there. But that means it's just right there. And if it's not reliable and spread and distributed, huge target, huge target, Jacob. Right. And, you know, and they can say, you know, they can say that everything is compartmentalized,

but they've shown that even a virtual machine can be breached, right? that a skilled person can find their way out of a virtual machine into the actual. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we use the term tech containers now, right? Right. The containers. Containers is just a neat way to have some business logic and in a container that communicates a certain way, right? And there are different companies that do that.

But you're right. I mean, we have, bar none, I believe, we did we did with nsa and now with cybercom and now with the the cybercom support units that are out in the states in the national guard we have scary good people that as much work as i put into my systems you know they they they anyway they're they're really really good and yeah if if we can do it then then you know that the chinese are focused on that that right the russians with all their mathematicians physics people that that look for for ways to do this right we've seen these really railies are brilliant it's somehow hopping right into

from the air gap into systems and things like that so yeah i mean they're able to hack i i i read some they're able to hack computers by by by by by like at a distance not and not and not through the internet, but at a distance from the computer, right? So, yeah, one of the easy ways to think about it is every computer has an electrical connection. We are

actually doing networking over our own electrical grid system. So what's to say that we can't use the electrical system to see what's going on and some things that are rotating in you know, in Iran, right, or things like that?

So there's a whole space of security. Another part of what I focus on is the insider threat. And then, you know, so there's people. But there's also a series called UEBA. That's user and entity behavior analysis. So you've got users that have behaviors. And you're in this behavior. You're good.

All of a sudden we see Jack at 3 o'clock. take something off a sipper and try and put it into his trash can and then he's copying it over. Yeah, yeah, you're sneaking it. You're folding up the paper and putting it in your sock. Take a photo of the screen. Yeah, but no. Exactly. Yeah.

Exactly. So, so you've got that. But entities, right? So now we're very, very interested in is, wait a minute, why is this server trying to talk out of the network? Right. The server, the entity, a non-human thing, is trying to do something odd. And that's a real interesting point. You know that that also plays into what has been going on in the military and even down at the unclass.

So oftentimes when data is scraped from top secret and secret, the bad guys will try and exfilterated out the unclass network because that's really where they have the connections. I'll just quickly say that we are now looking at things, right, because of the Navy Yard shooter. You remember the Navy Yard shooter, we find out later, here's all these things in, you know, speeding ticket, this, that, the other thing, you know, that. Here's these indicators, right? Indicators of behavior. Right. IOPEs that are not good. We should have noticed that he was not in a good state.

He was mentally ill. Yeah, exactly. And so now there's even, how do we bring in those kind of data sets, do it in a way that's legal to bring in those data sets from Lexus, nexus, other things like that. But yeah. Yeah. It's really fascinating.

Do you find that people are more willing to embrace this convergence of physical security, human intelligence, cybersecurity, like this whole list? Because they used to operate on very separate. channels, right? Right, right. Yeah, yeah, one of the systems that we build, for example, can take in travel data, can take in alarm systems or badging data, you know. It's like, wait a minute, Steve's on travel in Germany, how come he's badged into building four, right? So we are looking at those kinds of things, a more holistic view of, you know, certainly what the human element can do. Right. Can you talk?

to us a little bit about because you are now a novelist, can you tell us about how you got into writing, what inspired you to start writing? I mean, it sounds like you have a real wealth and depth of experience to kind of bring into the fictional realm. Yeah, so in 1993, I had moved up from CENTCOM and was working DISA, multi-level security office, and get a call one day in October. that my parents have been in an accident. They're coming back from Puerto Panesca, which is like in the crown of Baja, you know, in Mexico. And they would go down there with their fifth wheel trailer and party on the beach and everything's cheap, you know, drugs and pharmaceutical drugs, sorry. And then they're on their way back and they,

or they're somewhere, they're in movement. and they get hit and there's an accident and it crushes my wife in the truck, my dad's truck and stuff and crushes my mother, I'm sorry. And she ends up in the hospital, ends up dying there. The federalies, right, do what they do, which is arrest everybody, throw everybody in jail. And it turns out that that truck, the guys were high, they had drugs, and that's why the accident, And they crossed over the middle line and hit my parents. My mom died in a Mexican hospital.

So after that, I thought, you know, I need to let this go because I'm not in a really good mood. I'd like to do it in mini invasion of my own and, you know, get after it with some people in Sonora. And so I even put it up on a storyboard like it would be a movie or a television show. And so this is in 93. So I started doing this in 94, 95. I put it away. I get back to it. I put it away.

And then finally, my wife's like, when are you going to write that book? You know, you wanted to do it. You want to tell this story. You know, get it out of your system. Why don't you just start doing it? So I start. And I've always been an avid reader. Originally, it was more sci-fi-oriented, of course, Dune and, you know, other sci-fi

kind of things. And then I start reading Ludlam and, of course, Clancy, when it comes out, take your tailor, soldier, spy, all those kind of things. And I'm like, okay, I'm just going to start putting the story down. I really don't know anything about writing. And so a couple years ago, I just started banging on the computer and putting this down. And that was my genesis to start writing. And, you know, there were some spots where totally,

made up for some reason it was impactful you know and i had to step back and let the writing go for a minute you know that kind of thing like that um but uh yeah it's been a fun fun i've always like the idea of telling a story and so it's been a fun fun road since then can you throw the book cover up on the screen because this book is coming out pretty soon right well yeah it looks like we're probably going to try for a June update. Whoops. Sorry, my computer just fell down. Oh, we thought. You fell down.

Your seat. Exactly. But so we'll get that all figured out. But yeah, there's a cover of reveal I can show here. Let me. You're seeing it here first, folks. By the way, yeah. So I'll just say real quickly, I'm proud to announce that I'm signed with a publishing

organization started in 2018 called Force Poseidon. J.T. Patton, who's been on your show before, is one of the people they represent, K.R. Paul, Eric Bishop, so Active Duty Air Force, B-52 got us, you know, just a regular guy on the street, somebody who's been in the Intel community his whole life, J.T. Patton. So they're really focused on. on giving folks a chance who are not, you know, not able to hit it off with a big publisher, you know. So I'm very lucky and honored that they were able to want to take me on board here. So let me get this thing shared.

And the book is called Shadow Tier. Right. There we go. There it is. Yeah. That's awesome. And that idea is my protagonist, The protagonist is Lance Bearworth.

He's native crow Indian. He was a ranger. He was a, he was a reky guy. He was an ISA guy, SF guy. Just sort of trying to figure out what he wanted to do when he grew up. And now he's a contractor. But he's in, he and his parents, first time in 12 years, he's gone on vacation with his parents.

They're coming back from Port of Iyarta. they stop at a restaurant. There's a gunfight. They get involved because that's what his stepfather and Lance do. And it goes from there. The parents are killed and Lance starts a one-man war against the Sinaloa cartel, Alchapo, and his West Coast lieutenants. And so I'm excited.

And this is intended to be like the first in a series, I take it? Yes. I've got the second book is already with the publisher. The first one's not out. I'm sort of a writing fool like that. And I'm working on the third one that actually takes place in 2003. Awesome.

It's a three book deal. And looking forward to do more if people are interested in reading. And when do you think the first one is coming out? You got the pre-order page there. Yeah, yeah. It looks like June. You know, the discussion's been. Let's do it on the Army birthday.

June 14. I'm not sure if we need to do that, but somewhere in that time frame. Yeah. And if you go to my website at stevenstratton, USA.com, you can sign up and I'll send you the first three chapters of the book to read. And you can see if you like it. Awesome. And go from there. Yeah, go pre-order it on Amazon.

Actually, it looks like it's out on Kindle right now. It says it doesn't say pre-order. just uh, it does. It's right there. Oh, pre-order with one click. Okay,

there we go. Yeah. I'm going to put the link, uh, to the Amazon in the chat. And, um, for those of you who are listening.

Yeah. We got a couple, uh, user questions too. I'll, I'll hit up real quick for you. For those of you are listening, yeah,

I don't know how to do that. It's websites in the description. Yeah, the websites of the description. so they can find it. Yeah, just look on the, yeah, when you get home, look on on the podcast and it's there, right? Yeah, it's there. Okay.

All right. So Lassick, I think he's asking about your time in the White House communication agency. He says, did you ever overhear someone's mistress? No, not a mistress. But I did hear the story that the press pool was actually a pool at one time, a real, swimming pool that LBJ used to go swim with his, one of his secretaries with. So that was one of the,

one of the White House stories. So, yeah. You know, what's interesting about Secret Service guys that I found. And, I mean, is that they will talk,

like they'll, when you're having drinks, they'll talk, but they'll never talk publicly about what they heard or saw. Yeah, yeah. And that, yeah,

there's, I get it. I understand. But, but, like, I've heard some hilarious stories from Secret Service guys, but they will never go public of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of a thing.

Yeah. Ian says, who the hell is this guy? I tuned in to see the Manosphere guru Jack Murphy. I'm sorry to disappoint you, Ian. I am the true Jack Murphy. And I have this article you wrote. I have ascended to my rightful place. It's not my article.

It's John Goldman's article. You have to ask him. He's currently unavailable. This is the team house, not the liminal order or the riminal orderer or the seminal orderer, whatever he's calling it now. So, Steve, I mean, this has been awesome, man. I'd actually, I'd love to have you back sometime to talk about your other books when they come out and some get maybe even deeper into the technology side of things that we don't get to talk about so often here. This has been really cool, man. I appreciate you taking some time on your Friday to talk with us.

Well, thank you very much. It's been a great pleasure to be with you guys. I mean, Dave, we could just sit around and talk, you know, acronyms, you know, ODI and I and blah, blah, blah. But, yeah, that would be a lot of fun. Thank you. And so, folks, Steve, actually, first off, can I get you to stand by for just a moment? I'd like to do a bonus segment if we can. Sure.

And everyone else, we'll see you guys next Friday. We're going to have a former dev group squadron commander on the show. Our second seal. Third. Third. Yeah. Jeff, Chuck. Oh, that's right.

That's right. That's right. That's right. So we will see you guys next Friday. In the meantime, if you want to join our Patreon, it's down the description. Steve's website is down the description. We also got merch down there if you want a T-shirt or a coffee mug or something like that. Check us out on Instagram.

and that's all we got for you this Friday. We'll see you next week. And pre-order his book. Like, hook your brother up. Thank you. Appreciate it. The price of two cups of coffee.