The Team House - The CIA's Secret War in Kurdistan with Sam Faddis, ep. 35

Episode Date: March 28, 2020

In early 2002 Sam Faddis was named to head a CIA team that would enter Iraq, prepare the battlefield and facilitate the entry of follow-on conventional military forces numbering in excess of 40,000 American soldiers. This force, built around the 4th Infantry Division would, in partnership with Kurdish forces and with the assistance of Turkey, engage Saddam's army in the north as part of a coming invasion. Faddis expected to be on the ground inside Iraq within weeks and that the entire campaign would likely be over by summer. Over the next year virtually every aspect of that plan for the conduct of the war in Northern Iraq fell apart. The 4th Infantry Division never arrived nor did any other conventional forces in substantial number. The Turks not only did not provide support, they worked overtime to prevent the U.S. from achieving success. An Arab army that was to assist U.S. forces fell apart before it ever made it to the field. Alone, hopelessly outnumbered, short on supplies and threatened by Iraqi assassination teams and Islamic extremists Faddis' team, working with Kurdish peshmerga, nonetheless paved the way for a brilliant and largely bloodless victory in the north and the fall of Saddam's Iraq. That victory, handed over to Washington and the Department of Defense on a silver platter, was then squandered. The surrender of Iraqi forces in the north was spurned. All existing governmental institutions were, in the name of de-Baathification, dismantled. All input from Faddis' team, which had been in country for almost a full year, was ignored. The consequences of these actions were and continue to be catastrophic. This is the story of an incredibly brave and effective team of men and women who overcame massive odds and helped end the nightmare of Saddam's rule in Iraq. It is also the story of how incompetence, bureaucracy and ignorance threw that success away and condemned Iraq and the surrounding region to chaos. Sam's book "The CIA War in Kurdistan" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/CIA-War-Kurdistan-Untold-Northern/dp/1612008348 Support our sponsor Ned by visiting www.helloned.com/TEAMHOUSE to get 15% off your first order and free shipping! Support the stream on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/m/TheTeamHouseBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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. Let's give us. Okay, here we go. We are now streaming live on YouTube. Is that correct, Dave? We are setting up our meeting for YouTube. Like, we should be right there.

The line is going. Okay. The line is going. On mine, it says we're alive already. Mine as well. Okay. So I'm going to operate off of the assumption that we are actually streaming on YouTube. And whether or not this turns out to be a huge embarrassment for us remains to be seen.

But anyway, welcome to the team house. This is episode 35. I am Jack Murphy here with co-host Dave Park and here with our guest, Sam Fattis. Sam is the author of the CIA war in Kurdistan, new book out. He is a retired CIA officer himself. His book details a paramilitary operation. He led into Kurdistan, into northern Iraq in 2002 ahead of the 2003 invasion. I've just finished the book last night.

I thought it was absolutely amazing. I thought I was familiar with the subject matter. I really wasn't. So we're really excited to have Sam here. just a couple announcements I want to make before we dive right into the interview. First off, you might notice that things are a little bit different here tonight. We are doing this interview via Zoom remotely, just like everyone else in the country. We are socially distancing ourselves. You know, Sam was going to be an in-studio guest, and he was actually one of the first people.

I know who came to me and was like, hey, this is a lot more serious than maybe you think it is. So can I schedule this remotely and said, yeah, sure. Well, here we are now weeks later. And I am up in God's country in New York, upstate New York, distancing myself. And Dave is, Dave, you're actually still in the city because of your job. So Dave has his multi-pass so he can transit across the city without getting hassled. I have my papers. So anyway, I just wanted to explain.

that's why things look a little bit different tonight. And, you know, it's a small sacrifice we're all being asked to make, you know, not going to complain about it. And this works as a improvised way to continue doing the show. Dave and I are fully committed to doing the show. And if this goes on for the next four episodes, five episodes, we'll adapt and overcome. It's not a big deal.

Other than that, I just wanted to bring you a quick word from our sponsor. We are sponsored by Ned, which is a wellness company. You can see here one of the products they sent me that I've been using. It's hemp oil. They offer some various CBD products, but they're also branching off into other products. They're not just a CBD company. But they sent me some asked me if I would take a look at it. And if I liked it, you know, maybe I could talk about it.

And I was very skeptical about it to tell you the truth. Maybe it's because of the way some of these products get advertised. I thought it was, you know, the way they, some companies advertise it like it's snake oil or something. But after using it, there really is something to it. I've been using it at night to actually help me sleep. It just kind of like mellows you out. No, it does not get you high or anything like that. It's like 0.3% THC in it. So all it does is mellow you out a little bit. And I take a couple of drops before I lay down and go to bed. And quite frankly, I probably fall asleep a lot faster than I ever have before. And I sleep a lot deeper than I ever have before and wake up, just feeling a lot more

energy because I'm one of those people that I'll be up to two in the morning on my computer every day. That's just how my mind works. So using this product that just helps you, you know, mellow out and lay down and go to sleep really when you need to. And for our listeners, they have a special deal for you guys out there. If you go to hello ned.com slash team house, you will get 15% off your first order plus free shipping. That is hello ned.com slash team house, h-E-L-O-N-E-D.com slash team house. So go check them out. Go support our sponsor. They've been great with us so far. And we're really looking forward to working with them in the future. So without further ado, I will kick it over to Sam Faddis. Thanks so much for joining us tonight. I know you've got a

lot going on. Happy to be here, guys. Happy to have the invite anytime. Yeah, thank you. You sent me a copy of your book. I finished reading it last night. Man, I can't recommend it enough. I mean, you brought it. The meat and potatoes are in there. There is no like naval gazing. There is no like, you know, Sam Fattis grew up in the cornfields of Pennsylvania. It's like, no, you jump right into it. 9-11 happened. We're going to war. And this is how it was. went down and Sam walks you through this operation step by step. And I feel like there have been a couple books out there written about the paramilitary operations in Afghanistan.

But really, this is the, it's only one I know of, unless I'm ignorant of it. I think this is the only one about the operation in Iraq. And I was wondering if you could start us at the beginning, kind of jump in right into it just the way you did in the book, Sam, and talk about how you got this mission because this mission was not assigned to you,

you actually went up and demanded it. Yeah, that's right. So maybe that shows you how smart I am. I don't know. You know, look, 9-11 happens. I'm a case officer. I was back, I came back from overseas that summer, sitting around at headquarters,

any case officer worth his salt, sitting around a headquarters basically wants to know when the hell can I get out of here, when can I go back to the field. 9-11 happens makes it that much more intense. Guys are going into Afghanistan. We're at war. And people are still telling me I'm supposed to be riding a desk at headquarters and shuffling paper and attending meetings.

So then I start hearing rumors. You know, the secret about the CIA is inside the CIA. There are no secrets. It's not quite true, but it's a pretty good rumor mill. And so I hear rumors that, look, this is early 2002, very early. Rumors that we're getting ready, the decision has been made. The White House has decided we're invading Iraq. We're finally going to get rid of Saddam.

And so my attitude is, well, I'm not sitting on the sidelines and watching this happen. I had done a lot of Iraqi operations. I had a lot of history in Kurdistan, significant amount of which we still can't talk about, but in any of that, I knew the area. So, yeah, I went upstairs and talked to a friend of mine who was basically the chief of operations for Iraqi ops group at that point and confirmed that it's true and told him, okay, well, then I'm the guy you need to run that team. You're not going to find somebody that knows more about the area, knows more about the Turks,

knows more about everything. I need that job. So he gave me the job. Then, again, to show you how bright I am, then I began to ask the operative questions. So what's the plan, man? And yeah, and that's when things began to unravel a little bit because the plan wasn't wired real tight. But anyway. Yeah, you mentioned that, you know, they had already.

started buying gear and you went down and you kind of looked at the palette and they had bought like ankle holsters and like you're like what in the hell like what am i supposed to do with this stuff yeah because there was no team leader there was this concept that we're going to send a team in and as i say in the book you know one of the great things about the agency is it can sort of morph into anything at once you want a team to go do this job in wherever well we'll figure out what it needs to look like we'll create it from scratch. There's no, it's not, you know, it's not like we're going to send a mechanized infantry platoon and this is what it looks like. So that's great. It's also, if you're not careful, a disaster because it means, well, until somebody draws that blueprint,

there's no plan. There's no, we're sending a team. Awesome. What's that mean? How many people, what kind of people, et cetera. So yeah, in the absence of somebody being in charge, people are just excited about going and running an op, whatever the hell that means, and they're buying everything in the world. I mean, I point out from all across the spectrum, I mean, I had a conversation that I detailed in the book with the logs officer. She had actually, we sent some guys in ahead of us very briefly to talk to the Kurds and they came back, basically to say, hey, we're going to send a team.

She decided that the number one priority was we needed bathmats for the Kurdish guest houses. I'm not making this up because it had been there for a couple of days in the winter and the floor was cold. And therefore, she had ordered a bunch of bath mats. And so we got a, you know, we got pallets that we're building. You guys are familiar with that concept sitting in a log center and I got a foot thick layer of bath mats to go to war with. But, I mean, all sexism aside, because that's really not where I'm trying to go with this. Meanwhile, all of the guys have every cool guy catalog that was ever made by man.

Sure. And if it's made out of black Goretex, well, they're buying it, man. Sure, it's a free shopping trip, right? Oh, absolutely. We got, we got like vests with pockets and, you know, for holding clips and magazines and, I don't know, hanging grenades on.

one that looks like something Arnold Schwarzenegger would have worn in some movie that I never put on in my life. It's still laying in a bag in a storage closet here. Plus, you know, like, I have no idea how many holsters per person. Every kind of holster you could imagine, inside the trousers, outside, concealed, drop-down shoulder holsters. You go on with any verbiage you want, leather, plastic, any substance, we got these. We got like a pallet, a holster. For a bunch of guys whose first job is to be invisible and never get in a gunfight, like that, right?

When we get in a gunfight, it means something went really wrong today. It was a bad day for us. It's just crazy. So, yeah, that's like one of the first things I have to grab a hold of is go find. First of all, go find these pallets, go look at them, determine what the hell's there. and then literally just start throwing stuff off of them, like in a giant pile. Like, forget this.

This is not happening. We are not flying bathmats and 12 holsters port per man into Iraq. This is silliness. So who at that time, who was making all, I mean, obviously the logs officer bought the bathmats, but was everybody involved from the people going on the op to the people. trying to plan it to the logistics. Was everybody like buying what they thought they would need or putting in the procurement request?

And you were just getting everything from everybody? So really none of the guys, prior to the time that I formally took over the team and then just started announcing in effect, okay, this is the way it's going to be from now on. Nobody told me to do any of this stuff. I just like, okay, I'm in charge. start figuring out what the heck does that mean discovering things as I go along, then I would go back at each stage and say, okay, so here's my list of stuff that's all messed up that I've discovered so far, so far,

and this is how it's not going to work anymore. But it really wasn't any of us that were ever going in country making the decisions. It was every guy, most of them, seniors, sitting on a desk back in headquarters, fantasizing about, I don't know, some action movie they saw one time. Yeah. And just buying stuff and then just telling the logs officer order it and get it. And then it would show up at the log center, our log center, and get stuck on a palette and just sit there, taking up multiple pallets actually by the time we were done.

Sam, the interesting thing, I mean, as you were saying, you know, the agency can kind of morph into it, whatever it is it needs to do. But what comes with that is that, you know, you don't necessarily have a team of badasses just sitting there, kidded up ready to roll out, you know, like you would find, you know, in a J-Soc unit, you know, guys who were there, all the dudes, all trained with all their kit ready to roll. But in your case, I mean, it was interesting that you actually got to go around and, like, hand-select the people you wanted for your team. I was wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about the recruitment and who these people were. Like, what were they like? What was their backgrounds? Why did you pick them? Yeah. So, I mean, I probably accurate to say

it ends up being a mix of me picking people and people being shuttled to us. But yeah, we have to go find everybody. One way or the other, we got to go find everybody. So, I mean, the first group of folks that when we first went in in the summer of O2, when we finally got in country, I'd say finally because, you know, we were supposed to theoretically be in country at least 90 days earlier than we were. And the Turks just basically were a roadblock. The first team that went in, there's a grand total of eight of us. So, I mean, they were all, everybody was prior military of one type or another. One of the guys, Army medic, but it wasn't really a military.

ground branch guy, but he spent a lot of time with ground branch. Another guy who'd been a Marine Scout sniper, again, not ground branch, but strong military background. He was a case officer. Another young case officer who'd been a Marine, guy that had been with Dev Gru, who was now part of ground branch, let's see, two ground branch, two ground branch guys, one of them was. senior guy, Uncle Andy. Another guy who was a seal, never a member of Dev Gru. I think he was with Team 2, maybe, if I remember correctly. Anyway, a variety of backgrounds, but the common denominator is everybody had prior military

experience and let's see, at least a couple of the guys that went in with us initially had also just come out of Afghanistan. The medic that we had initially and the guy that had been a Marine Scout sniper had both been in with Gary Burnson and Afghanistan so they kind of came back, barely changed clothes and turned around and went out with us.

But that, I mean, there's a good example of the challenge. It's like you're going, we end up with eight guys. I think our communicator out of those first eight was probably the weakest, and I don't mean that to denigrant. him. I just mean he was a little long in the tooth at that point and maybe not physically. It was a little more demanding for him when we went in than maybe he was prepared for. He never dropped

the ball. He was a trooper. He did his job. I think in retrospect, he would say as well, hey, I was not exactly the dude you needed for this particular job. In any event, it ends up being a strong team, but it's eight guys you've got to go find. I mean, they were not sitting in a cubicle somewhere or came out of one station. You collected them from a variety of locations. And this ends up being a problem as we go through this whole time delay that I'm talking about, right? Theoretically, we're going to be in March months go by. There are all sorts of complications. Well, some of the guys that were supposed to be part of the bigger team, not included in the eight, but the eventual compliment were guys that get pulled from other field stations sent back to headquarters my deputy

falls in this category come back to headquarters sit around for a couple of weeks well we're not going the turks still haven't moved we're hanging fire meanwhile his field station is screaming hey nobody took our workload away this is a senior guy very capable experienced fellow you got him sitting around twiddling his thumbs at headquarters send him back and then when you're finally really ready will make him available. Well, that's wonderful, except in the meantime, you're trying to build a team, and folks are being assigned,

then not assigned, then reassigned. You're going to talk about things like unit cohesion and that kind of thing. That plays hell with that, obviously. So did you have much of a turnover and personnel because of that, like during your whole waiting period? No, we didn't. I mean, ultimate.

I think we ended up with largely the same the same group. It just meant that, you know, you're still, well, I mean, it means ultimately you're on the ground, especially in the fall when we really began to plus up. You're on the ground. You're already in action, if you will. We're operating all day every day. There is no training. There is no prep.

We're live. But we're still building this thing for real. Right. In like building an airplane in, in flux. Right. I mean, in the terms of the whole deployment, I would say very, very few people that came in that we ever sent home. And mostly, and really what I'm talking about is if we send anybody home, it was a medical issue. So from there, you know, one of the big misconceptions I had about this operation going when I started reading the book was that your mission was simply. to target Ansar al-Islam, which was a terrorist organization over around Halabja.

And actually, your mission was much bigger. Your purview was much larger than that. So I was wondering if you could tell us what that mission was and then how you started carrying it out once you get the ground. Yeah. So, I mean, this is one of the things that I think because of a lot of the ways that the war was explained later, the justification where the war was explained later, that a lot of people are confused on this. I mean, from day one, when I went up and talked to my buddy and said, hey, man, you got to give me this job. The mission was very clear cut. We're going to prep the

battlefield for an invasion of Iraq and we're getting rid of Saddam Hussein. No if, Sands, buts, no collect the intel and see if we can justify that. No, find out if we need to do that. I mean, obviously, we're going to collect intelligence. But that decision's made. The president already crossed that bridge. We're getting ready. We're the first guys in the ground to prep. Tenth group will come in after us. We're going to war. As we're sitting around in the spring of 2002, the threat from Ansar al-Islam in northern Iraq materializes. So we, you know, so Ansar is another of, I mean, these days, everybody in the world calls themselves Ansar al-Islam, I guess. It's like the go-to name for jihadis. They should get more creative. But this particular version of Ansar al-Islam

is a Kurdish Islamic extremist group in northern Iraq wedged up against the Iranian border. I'm talking early summer O-2. So you have the Kurdish area above the green line, which is not really controlled by Iraq. And within this Kurdish area up against the Iranian border, you have an area adjacent to P.U.K. Patriotic Union of Kurdistan territory, but not under their control either. It's no man's land. It's controlled by Ansar al-Islam. It's a separate, crazy little caliphate, kind of a precursor to the caliphate we subsequently saw in Iraq and Syria. And these guys are also taking in as refugees, if you will, al-Qaeda guys fleeing Afghanistan because we've invaded, making their way all the way across Iran with Iranian assistance. And now we're building a new crazy little Taliban-like enclave in northern Iraq. And we hear that from the Kurds, not only is that happening and our al-Qaeda guys fleeing there, and this is getting bad, but these guys are doing a lot of work with weapons of mass destruction,

in particular chemical weapons, but also some aspirations, at least for biological weapons. So that becomes, that goes from not being on our screen at all to as soon as we can get in country, that's job number one. We got to go find out. Really what we got to go find out is, do the Kurds know what the hell they're talking about? Are they exaggerating this? Are they spinning this for political purposes? Are they overblowing it? What the hell is going on?

Basically, that's it. So when we cross summer 2002, the 8th,000. of us, the advanced team of our team, that's what we do. We make straight for PUK territory all the way down, Kalachulan and east of there into the area surrounding, which one at the time they were calling the Kermal enclave. It's really more appropriately the Sargat area, but anyway, these are all little minor places of no significance in the middle of nowhere, so who cares. that was our deal go find out what's going on and so to that end you started debriefing prisoners that the Kurds had right right so the Kurds had a bunch of guys that they had managed to capture

they had some of them they had captured like patrols some of them they captured trying to get through their territory in a variety of ways they had laid their hands on a bunch of guys which included Kurds who were members of Ansar al-Islam and also included members of al-Qaeda who were fleeing from Afghanistan. And so we started debriefing those guys, interrogating those guys, whatever the phraseology is, and turning some of them around, those that could be turned around,

putting them back out on the street, but working for us now, doing what we do. And then we started expanding from there to just recruiting our own assets from scratch and running sources. And the short version is, what we discovered was that if anything, the Kurds were downplaying the threat. They didn't really understand how big the threat was. It was a mess.

Yeah, this is a disaster. We got a bunch of Al-Qaeda guys here. They're building their whole new crazy kingdom in northern Iraq. But the good news is they don't even know we're here. For once in a blue moon, we are in the right place at the right time ahead of the curve. Eight guys, invisible. by the time we're done with this collection, I mean, we're working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, doing nothing but just run and run and run. Within, you know, a couple of months, it's, look, I get 10-digit grid coordinates for every gun emplacement in that enclave. I know where every compound is.

I can tell you not only the floor plan for every floor in every building in every compound, but frankly, no kidding, I can tell. you the names of the guys that sleep in which rooms. So it includes the al-Qaeda compound, which was separate from where the other guys were. And so let's vaporize these guys right now before they even know what hit them. You know, my definition of the ideal engagement is one that's over before the enemy knows it started. Sure. Let's do it. Let's just press the button and get rid of this whole pestilence right here before it infects anything else. And we proposed that. directly to Washington, D.C. And they were on board with it, right?

Yeah, right. Yeah, Washington, it was amazing. There was song in the air and flowers everywhere, and everyone in Washington had made a rational decision. Right. They all happily ever after. No, you know, we proposed a plan that basically, I mean, I'll break it down this way.

This is obviously simplistic. We didn't just propose an idea. We presented them. We had, you know, amongst the individuals on the ground, we had sufficient background and knowledge to put together for them. I'm not talking about necessarily a military-style plan, but a very detailed operational proposal. Look, this is what we want to do and how we want to do it and what will be required to do.

So phase one of that is we need some measure of U.S. force on the ground, boots on the ground, with U.S. air support, and let's go get these. And the Kurds will obviously pitch in, but let's go, you know, if that's a Ranger battalion, if that's whatever. That plan goes nowhere. Second plan is, fine, forget that nonsense. Bring us air support and maybe some additional guys to work with the Kurdish forces. And since this engagement is going to begin by essentially every compound and gun emplacement

in Ansar al-Islam territory, vapor off. We're pretty sure we can make this happen. That plan doesn't go anywhere. So the fallback position is send us ammunition for the 120 millimeter mortars that the Kurds have and other logistical support and we'll do it with the currents. Just stay out of the way, just what they need. Their biggest concern at that point, quite frankly, was this, that if we deplete our ammunition stocks killing all these guys,

we're going to leave ourselves weak as far as Saddam is concerned. We won't be ready to repel him. Fine. We'll address that concern, bring in X number of plane loads of what we need. That didn't go anywhere either because the judgment was too much chance this will somehow jeopardize the invasion. Saddam will get spooked. Leave it all alone. So, you know, in the spring of 03, a battalion, a 10th group with some.

with some other folks and the curbs finally did go into this enclave. 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. But by then, I mean, by then you talk about telegraphing your brain. punch by then. By the time that assault came, everybody inside that enclave knew it was coming. Yeah.

And every senior guy that was later going to lead much of the insurgency killing Americans across Iraq walked out of that enclave long before that attack. So taking nothing away from the 10th group guys who finally went in and launched that operation, they did the best they could. But the, you know, the decision was made nine months before that. to basically let that opportunity walk, let the target walk on by. Out of curiosity, you know, this is almost a year before the invasion. So Iran was not playing against the United States this time.

Why were they allowing al-Qaeda guys through Iran? I mean, they're ideologically opposed, right? They're not allies in any sense of the word. Were they doing it in hopes to putting that these guys, were going to put pressure on Saddam or do you know why like Iran would let Sunnis through? Yeah, I mean, they have done a variety of different things in regard to Al-Qaeda guys over the years. I mean, without getting too deep into territory we can't go into. I mean, in this case, in some cases they've done what they did with most of these guys.

They let them walk because it's like we don't really want to deal with you. You're not really worth our time. if you're going to go cause trouble for the Americans have at it. There have been other cases where they've kept al-Qaeda guys on their soil, and it's a little hard to tell sometimes are they guests or are they under house arrest or exactly what their status is. I mean, Saifal-Ado was in that category for a while, right? where he was in Iran, but it's a little unclear.

He's not in prison. He's living in a house, but we're not quite sure that he's free to go. And the Iranians are kind of hanging on to him maybe because they're thinking, well, he's sort of a pawn. This means al-Qaeda won't do anything to us because he's like a hostage, but maybe in the future he'll be useful some other way. Sure. You know, it's just this very cold calculating case-by-case. assessment, what's best for us today. Right.

Well, and definitely, I guess, by using them as a proxy force, it really keeps like any attention away from them because why would Iran work with Sunnis? You know, why would Iran work with it? You know, if they're going to, in this case, if they're walking across Iran, they're traveling across Iran and they're not traveling across Iran and noticed. I'm talking about the guys that we found. Okay, whatever. I mean, what's in it for me to imprison these guys, execute?

these guys kill these guys. They're not attacking Iranian targets. All they're going to do is go to Iraq. Yeah, maybe they'll cause trouble for Saddam. Maybe they'll cause trouble for the United States. Maybe they'll go blow something up in Paris. Right. Whatever. Why do I want to stop this guy? That's before we even get to the level of, you know, in some cases it's as simple as some of these guys are traveling with wads of cash and they're just paying people off and doing it the old-fashioned way and bribing people as they go. Yeah. So.

Turn in the other way. Hey, yeah, I'll take, I'll take this money. So you guys got shot down as far as that golden moment that you could have wiped out Ansar in one fell swoop, more or less. Then could you talk about preparing the battle space as far as Saddam's regime was concerned in the Iraqi military? I thought that was very interesting because now we're kind of, this is not a, the way people typically think of a CIA operation. It's more like the Jedberg mission. You know, when we parachuted

guys into occupied France, it was really like this intelligence-driven commando mission that incorporated propaganda and sabotage. It was just really fascinating to read about. Yeah, well, I mean, I suppose one way to look at this and think about it is we're kind of making this up as we go along, which is another, which is another way to say, which is another one of those things about the central intelligence agency that depending on the day can either be one of its great strengths or one of its great weaknesses right but you know we used to tell us to junior officers all the time with you know we're going to make that we're going to make a really detailed plan or we're going to go get in the car and this is what i'm going to tell you about three minutes after we get in the car

the whole plan's going to change and we're going to make up a whole new plan in 20 minutes between then and the time we arrive on site and if you can't handle that you need to find another job because It's not my ideal, but that's just the way it works. So, yeah, we end up in Kurdistan, right? We're now, I mean, I originally am the team leader running everything in all of Kurdistan. Eventually, we split the territory between Puk and KDP territory, which are the two Kurdish parties at that point that more or less divided the north. And at that point, I took over in KDP territory and another guy takes over down in PUK territory.

And now it's, look, what do you got to do? We've got to find out what the capabilities of the Kurds are. We've got to figure out what they need. First of all, we've got to figure out who the hell they are, how many of the guys they got. I don't have any idea what weapons they got, what explosives they've got, what training they've had with their capability is. We've got to map all of that and just figure out what they need for this war that we're getting ready to have. Meanwhile, we've got to start recruiting sources somehow inside of Saddam Hussein's Iraq on the other side of a militarized border. I mean, between us on the Green Line, which is the area of separating Kurdish and Iraqi territory, there's 150,000 Iraqi trips.

So there are, and it is a, you know, a tightly controlled border. We got to start recruiting sources and running sources all the way down into that territory to find anything out. I'm, we're on site. I have exactly zero assets. I inherit no assets, pick up no existing asset network. we don't pick up contact with a single existing guy. So it's zero to 60 in no time. So we got to, and you got to somehow find these assets inside of an area where you can't even get to.

And then we got to take this to a whole other level, which is we're not just collecting. We got to get ready to go to war. So we got to take out site targets. We got to blow up rail lines. We got to blow up intelligence headquarters. The Iraqis have a plan. Obviously, they know U.S. air power. The day one, they're going to displace everything worth a dam from wherever it is during peacetime to an alternate location.

So you can drop all the j dams you want through the roof of every building that you've mapped forever on imagery. But the core headquarters is not going to be there anymore. the intelligence headquarters is not going to be there anymore. Headquarters of Fed of Yen is not going to be there anymore. So we got to figure out where they're going, follow them, and put together all those teams that are going to call in air on them. Yeah, propaganda. We set up a radio station.

We played a lot of country music on the radio station, mostly because that amused me. I felt like that was, I actually like country music, but I had a feeling it would inflict the most pain on the Iraqis list. to it. We even smuggled a transmitter into Mosul and set it up inside a car to start blaring out on the airwaves, country music and pre-recorded propaganda messages right next to Fifth Corps headquarters. Not like that was going to win the war, but I figured that would really bother the Fifth Corps commander. Sure. Plus, it's just another way of saying to everybody on the other side of the green line, you know, the end is nine. It's coming, man. The days when Saddam controlled everything are all gone. And there's a picture in the book.

...order into markets early in the morning with backpacks filled with leaflets that say Saddam's done, the Americans are coming, get on the right size, you know, didn't say this literally, but basically come to Jesus. Jesus. And what timeframe was this? Because the invasion was March 2003, right? So what, when was this roughly? Well, you know, the start the recruitment of assets and standing up in teams and trying to figure out all of that stuff starts summer O2. Right. Yeah. Propaganda, you know, that's that's time to sort of the air war is coming. Then the air war is underway. We really revved all of that up right before the air war. So psychologically, it would coincide with that. And then the sabotage, I mean, sabotage and the sort of, we end up with a lot of teams, which in the end are mostly Kurds, operating inside Iraqi controlled space, 70 plus teams of guys.

And those guys basically perform a dual function. They, in some cases, I mean, and they make multiple trips across the green line. So it's not like they're permanently in one category of the other. Some of them are sometimes they're spotting where's the finding the headquarters. Where did Fifth Corps headquarters go? Or where this brigade headquarters just moved to so that we can be prepared to call in fire in essence. And then they're also themselves blowing things up. So, I mean, which means we have to train them all. We have to get the explosives. None of these guys are, there are no, none of these teams

are in existence, right? There are no standing explosives, sabotage teams. So we got to recruit all these guys, train all these guys, arm all these guys, dispatch all these guys. And in the case of the teams where they're calling in fire, they're not talking directly to anybody in the U.S. military. So that means basically every team is sitting on a Theriah phone parked somewhere and giving us GPS grid coordinates for a target, sending them to us, we're getting them to the military so they can be punched in so that B-52 can put that ordinance on target. So when the air war starts, I mean, you can move anywhere you want in northern Iraq on our front, on the Iraqi side. It doesn't make any difference because we see everything.

Yeah. I mean, you can move your brigade headquarters many times as you want. When you're all done playing games with it, we're still going to blow it up because you are watched all of the time. But all, you know, logistically building all that, training all that, recruiting all those guys. that's I mean, you know, I'm running the show. That means somebody else is doing all the work, man. I mean, the ground branch guys that are training these teams from scratch are our explosives guys that are coming in on a short fuse.

You're not talking about, I talk about an episode in the book where at one point, one of the ground branch guys comes to me in a, I mean, he's exhausted. He almost sort of mutinies. I mean, that's a little strong, but it's like, I can't. train these guys under the time frame you've given me. And because we're going to get somebody killed training people to blow things up, moving as fast as you're going. And as I say in the book, he's 100% right. Right. I mean, by the book, there is no question that he is correct. What I'm telling him is here are these really good guidelines that the U.S. military has put

together over many, many years of training people to do this and knowing how to do it without killing people in training. Now you need to take all of that and throw it out the window, forget all of that. You figure out a way to train these guys in like half the time the military would. Oh, and by the way, they're not then going to go and work with anybody and get OJT and get better. Right. No, the next day we're going to put them across the line and they're going to do this for real. And they're the experts on the ground. Like there's nobody else that has the expertise. There's nobody else. For, for, for, in CIA lingo or in terms, when you say that you arrive and there are no assets, you're talking about sending up the, the saboteur teams and

the spotters and, you know, the propaganda. Is that what you mean by assets or do you mean something entirely different when you say that? Well, I mean, I mean in, in all, possible senses of the world. So I think what I was really thinking of when I said that was, we don't have any sources. So any Iraqis, people like people with access in the Iraqi military who, I don't arrive. And I keep saying that just a shorthand, you know, this is not, this is not a story of what Sam Fattis personally did over the course of this. In fact, the reason I wrote this book was exactly the opposite to ensure that the men and women who did all the work, get the credit they deserve.

But this is not like we showed up, and there are 25 existing Iraqis who spy for us and give us intelligence, and we pick up contact, and now we're the ones meeting them. When we arrive, there's not a single such guy in existence. We don't have a source. Right. You don't have an asset.

I don't have a general, a major, a corporal, anybody who works for me inside the Iraqi military who takes money from us who gives us information. we're as close to ground zero as you could get. And there's a whole other context that you just alluded to, which is, yeah, and we're going to go to war. Yeah. And you want sabotage teams on the other side. And you want guys to hunt down where the Iraqi, Iraqis displaced to.

And you want all sorts of capabilities, propaganda mechanisms. You want radio stations and leaflets and you name it. Well, none of that exists. there's X number of guys and we got a house. And it's not like you can go to an embassy party and do a cold approach on somebody. So when you're in Kurdistan and you need an Iraqi officer or Iraqi corporate, somebody with access, how do you make that happen? Well, I mean, the way I describe it, this is sort of shorthand is you start finding threads and you pull on the threads.

I don't know if that makes any sense, which means wherever you can get an angle, wherever you can find a thread, you pull on it. If an Iraqi officer the next day comes across the green line and says he wants to defect and he'll tell us everything and but he needs to, he needs to know that he'll be on the right side of things and we'll take care of him and yada yada. So after that, you know, my, take on that is, and we talk about this in the book to some extent, yeah, that's wonderful. That's not the way this works. We're going to debrief you. Yeah. And you're going to turn your butt around, you're going to go back across the green line, resume your job. And then every couple of weeks, you're going to come across the green line. You're going to meet with me. And if you do that,

we may not blow you up as the first guy when the war starts. And if you won't do that, then I'll just turn you over to the Kurds. I don't care. But there's no get out of jail free card here. You've got blood all over your hands. You're working for me now. In some cases, it's the Kurds know somebody. His, you know, there's a lot of weird stuff that goes on across that green line, even though it's a barrier between arch enemies. They're smuggling stuff in all directions. Okay, this guy has a cousin who works somewhere in Mosul.

Let's get him over here. Let's recruit him. He doesn't know much of anything, but he does know a guy who's a colonel who does know some stuff, and maybe he can convince him to come meet us. Let's just grab that thread and start pulling and just see where it takes you. And I mean, you know the game. I mean, sometimes that pays huge dividends. Sometimes you spend a lot of time doing that.

And at the end of it, you're like, well, that's a dry hole, man. We put a lot of money and a lot of time in and we got nothing. At the same time that you're doing all of this, you know, the Iraqi military and the Iraqi, the Saddam regime becomes aware of you guys that you have a team house over there in Kurdistan and they start feeding you double agents trying to say, hey, Sam, why don't you come across the green line for a little meeting, you know? Yeah, so we get into this whole thing that goes on for many, many, many months. I smile because it ended well as far as I'm concerned on our side. But yeah, so what you end up with is you end up with a situation where the Iraqis are aware that folks are now talking to you.

Folks are coming across the line. You know, the price of making progress and picking up speed in operations in espionage is if you're doing your job and you're making progress, you begin to kick up a little bit of dust. The price of staying totally under the radar is moving into snail's pace. Some places you've got to do that. but this is not Moscow rules. I got X number a month. I don't even know exactly when the invasion is starting. We're already three months behind schedule before we ever get in country.

Then we got to spend time on Ansar. Now I don't have any. So we got to move at light speed. I don't have time to crawl. So the Iraqis become aware of that. And basically what they do is they start feeding us guys. Guys that come across the line, they talk to us. and it's classic what we would call dangle stuff.

They're putting a guy here, he's feeding us information, and the whole idea is not only just to feed us information that's garbage, because some of it's true. In all double agent ops, you've got to run, you've got to feed the opposition some real stuff because it's too easy to find out if all you do is tell a guy lies, that becomes apparent too quickly. But the end goal is we're supposed to fall into this trust.

these guys, love these guys too much, and then start letting our guard down, instead of meeting them on our terms in controlled situations, we're supposed to allow ourselves to be lured out by promises of introductions to bigger and bigger fish into settings where we will either be killed or kidnapped. And that's the game. They want to either kill or ideally, I think, kidnap and parade around and back on CIA personnel. So the good news is that, I mean, a variety of things are going on by the time this starts. First of all, by this time, we do have a lot of assets. By this time, we got a lot of guys talking to us. So I know a lot more than I knew a few months before. Second, some of these guys are not very good at their jobs. Third, some of them

aren't really that excited about playing the game anymore once they get to our side. Right. But in a variety of ways, we in succession, identify these guys and wrap them all up, which is really, I mean, by this point we got a bunch of SF guys. We had some tier one guys with us. We got some number of ground branch guys on any given day, maybe they're bored. they're super psyched by us ending each meeting with these guys by letting them barge into the room and take these guys into custody and drag them away. That's just, you know, because when you bring this guy in, you don't want to just say, hey, I got you, you're a liar or you're a scumbag.

What you want him to do is tell you his whole schick, right? You came here to feed me a line. You came here to give me your play. So fine, I'm going to hear you. Give me the whole thing. Tell me everything you were supposed to tell me. Show me every car. Now you're done.

Okay, good. I'm not meeting you again. You're a liar and I knew that when you came through the door. Now I'll grab you. But first, we want to make sure you gave us everything first. And then so typically, you know, you stand up. The CEO doing this, listens to this guy for two or three hours, acts like he believes and says, hey, that's great.

I opens the door to the room where we're having the meeting. And instead of the guy walking out and getting in the car to be dropped off, there's like six guys with M4 standing there all all gunned up and ready to rock and roll, just to see if they can scare the living crap out of this guy. Anyway, that's, the game goes on for, a game goes on for many months, until finally we start trying to lure, we start trying to turn the thing around by convincing them that they, by that we can actually,

we take one of their guys and we start turning, we start turning their guys around and turn them into double agents for us. So now they're going back and talking to their people, but now they really work for us. And we actually at one point gave them pictures of one of our guys in a military uniform lying on the side of the road with stupid, chili hot sauce on the side of his head, which sounds about as amateurish as you can imagine, but actually in the picture looked like he'd been shot.

And this guy goes, is supposed to feed his commanding officer this and show him that, look, I've already killed one American. And if you'll agree to come to this location, I can even get you an American that you can take possession. We're sort of turn the game around. We're trying to get them to agree to come to someplace or we're going to put hands on them. And did they, like, did they go for it?

Did they fall for it? No, the guy, no, they did not go for it. In the end, in the end, we end up on the phone with the guy that's running all of this out of Mosul on the Iraqi side. I mean, we don't. The guy that's now working for us does the Iraqi and we're listening in. And it becomes clear at the end of that conversation that the colonel down in Mosul knows his business. He does the same thing to us in the phone that we would do to him. Yeah.

He sort of smiles and nods and agrees to everything. And by the time he hangs up the phone, we're like, he ain't coming. He didn't buy any of that. He knows dropping the cell phone into the river and walking. He knows we ate. He knows we ate his lunch. He knows all of his guys have gone over. And he tries to disappear.

I don't know whatever happened to him. I do know that subsequently we had a team go blow up his building, which made me feel pretty good. Put satchel charges in his building and blew it off the face of the earth. I don't know whether the colonel was at work that day or not. It might be alive and well in Baghdad for all I know. I think that anybody who is high up in the military or high up in the intelligence apparatus in Iraq, just by virtue of working for Saddam, they had to be savvy because they had to survive him. You know.

Yeah, no doubt. I mean, you know, used to, when I first started working Iraqi stuff, you know, I don't know, 90, I don't know. It puzzled me at first why Saddam had like all these different intelligence services and security services. They seem to have all these duplicate functions. It didn't seem to make any sense. And then it dawned on me one day, you know, okay, well, I know exactly why, because they all report on each other. I mean, a centralized service would be too much power in one place too likely to get ideas about replacing him. Right.

So it's like when we used to work Iraqi targets, you were referring to a diplomatic circuit earlier, right? Standard old school, U.S. embassy thing, go to a national day, bump into people, try to recruit other diplomats. Okay. If you walk up to an Iraqi in that setting, when Saddam was in charge and you start trying to chat him up as an American diplomat, you know, is what we, would say to junior officers who wouldn't listen would do that. Okay, so I'm going to tell you what.

First of all, it's not just you didn't make any progress. You just removed yourself permanently from the list of people this guy will ever talk to. Because every Iraqi in that room has to report on every other Iraqi in that room. And when you went up and spoke to him, he has to turn himself in before everybody else turns him in. And then he's still going to be subject to scrutiny because you talk to him. Yeah. So what you told him. him right there by that brief conversation was, I have no idea of the reality in which you live. I'm a guy who's likely to get you killed. Right.

Stay the hell away from me. Don't ever have a conversation with me because I'm a dangerous person in that sense. You know, you bump into that guy fortuitously on the sidewalk at the market with no other Iraqis around. You have a very brief conversation and then move on. You told him exactly the opposite. This is me. you can trust me. I'll keep you alive. You know, when the day comes, you want to come across the road, I'm the guy you want to come talk to. I just want to give a quick shout to the viewers,

people who are just joining us midstream right now. You know, thank you for joining us tonight. Thank you for coming and listening to, you know, Dave and I, but most importantly, our guest here, Sam Thadis. Sam is a retired CIA officer, and he is the author of the book. The CIA, war in Kurdistan. Sam, do you have a copy of the book with you? Hold that back way out. I carry it everywhere I go. There you go. There it is. People like to see it. So this is Sam's new book talking about the paramilitary operation he led into Kurdistan in 2002

to prepare the battle space for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. So that's what we're talking about tonight. I can wholeheartedly endorse the book myself. I finished it last night. The only other thing I just wanted to point out was down in the description of this video, there is a link to Sam's book for Amazon. It'll take you right there. There's also a link to our sponsor, Ned, if you hit them up, that's down there.

And there's also a link to our Patreon page. So if you like what we're doing and you'd like to financially support the stream and get some extra bonus interview clips and things like that, that's all down in the description. One dollar a day, I'll keep us on the Freud. Hey, Sam, we all saw some questions. People sometimes, one, give us donations to get their questions highlighted. And two, we have some good questions. Well, first off, Andrew, thank you very much.

And I guess this is a question for all three of us. What is the most, and this question came up when you're talking about, you know, all the swag that people were ordering. What is the most useless piece of cool guy gear or cool gear? Sam, like, when you were going through those pallets, did you find something that just, like, worked in the movies, but it was absolutely ridiculous.

So I'm going to exclude the bathmats from cool guy gear. Right. For me, it was the stupid black vest, black Gore-Tex vest, you know, with somebody's version of something that, you know, that somebody in a legitimate,

special operations unit might wear in a paramilitary function, you know, that carries all your gear and actually has legit function. I mean, this was some sort of commercial knockoff of that, first of all. So I think it was more like what looks cool, vice, what's functional. But also, I mean, look, you know, our function, our function in the environment we're in is to be, if you will, the force multipliers, the guys behind the scene, right? When I wrote a book a number of years ago called Beyond Repair about the agency and it was really sort of a parallel to the OSS. And I did, and how do you get back to the roots of the OSS? And I read a tremendous amount of stuff about the OSS. A lot of books that are very hard to get a hold of written by guys and gals that were in the OSS.

And one of them was this book called, I think, like behind Japanese lines or something. That's a terrible, like, old detective story style title. It sounds like, oh, my God, this is going to be the most cheesy thing in the world. It's actually a very self-effacing firsthand account of a guy who ends up in the Burmese theater of operations, right? And he's with what they called Detachment 101. and he goes in, he didn't jump in, but he goes in in a small aircraft to a dirt air strip behind Japanese lines to meet up with another OSS guy working with Native Forces. So this dude, the guy who's the narrator, writes the book, he's got every weapon known to man on him when he arrives. I mean, he's got like five or six different firearms and machetes and knives and just, he's just, he's,

just out forbear him. And he arrives. And the guy who meets him is wearing shorts, no shoes, no shirt, a bush hat has a walking stick and no weapon of any kind. And so the guy that's been there for a while looks at him, he's like basically ends up explaining to him. Look, your job here is to direct the actions of 10,000 native troops, to arm them and train them. And, you know, and And when the day comes that you personally shooting at the Japanese makes the difference, that's a really, really bad day. And everything has gone wrong. Right.

That's, and, you know, that's just not. So kind of like that scene with Charlie Sheen in Platoon where he's falling down the trail. I was like, so let's take 50 pounds of crap and let's just throw it on the ground right now and get rid of it and get to work. So we were armed in Kurdistan all. the time. In fact, my policy was people wore sidearms. Your sidearm was on you or on the next to you in bed, 24-7, no exceptions in the house, don't care where. You leave the house, you leave with your long gun and with a rucksack packed with the stuff that will keep you alive if you can't ever come back to this

house. So we operated in that mode all the time. We were, but, that's a long way from needing that ridiculous vest with hand grenades hanging on it and 12 magazines and all this other nonsense. Not relevant to what our core mission was. Jack, do you have an opinion about the most useless piece of that year? Geez, if I thought about it, I'd probably be able to come up with something. But the one that jumps out at me right away is in Ranger Battalion, there's an item on the packing list. that was notorious. Net multi-purpose.

So there's a multi-purpose OD green net that we all had to have on our packing list, but nobody knew what it did or why we had it or what was it for, and none of us ever used it. But it had to be, because it was part of the RF1 packing list, if you got a word it, it would be coming with you. But it was the damnedest thing. None of us knew what that net was for or what it did. It wasn't like a camouflage net or anything.

It was just like a nylon green net. yeah i think for me i guess it's like super high speed like high end hiking boots when just you know you throw on merrills or you throw on uh you know uh chuck taylor's you know get them resold with some vibram and and chuck taylor's because they were light and you know if i had to walk a long way but uh all those like alpine hiking boots and stuff that you know people would go out and buy it's like after two ops they'd be done with them because you know it's not what you're doing. You're not climbing mountains, you know, and you've got to stay active and, you know, so, but anyway, then we have a question. Oh, Clint, thank you for your donation,

Clint, and he just says Jack and Dave, your podcast is really great. Keep up good work. Thank you, sir. Yeah. So then we have a question. Quick question for when the time pops up at this point, and he's going back to when you guys were arriving in, you had no assets, you're trying to make contacts, you're kind of setting up your teams. At this point, pre-Iraq invasion, about a year before, would the operation be considered civil affairs or intelligence collection due to the overall nature? And if it does, or, oh, actually covert action, CIS covert action, and if it does fall under covert action, which discipline would it overall fall under?

PM, paramilitary, political, interesting how things like battlefield preparation convert, like when you guys are doing those, you know, how was it, what was the concept of ops for you guys when you went in? Yeah, so I mean, probably the simplest answer to the question that you phrased is all of the above. Okay. How's it phrased to us? Do whatever is necessary to make the following happen.

We got to, the Kurds have to stay on our side. We got to figure out how to arm and work with the Kurds. We got to be ready to introduce 10th group. At some point, we had a pilot team come in, but we got to bring in the whole group at some point. We got to start trying to collect intelligence. if we possibly can we want to sow dissension in the Iraqi ranks

if they'll get rid of Saddam before we have to invade so much the better if not can we persuade them to at least sit on the sidelines on and on and that the objective of getting them to overthrow Saddam was ultimately undoable mostly because we had made noises too many times before and then walked away right so So, you know, all of those conversations end up in summary as the day you guys actually kick this thing off, I'm with you. Or at a minimum, my brigade will just move over here and sit quietly. But I'm not doing a damn thing until I see you actually get real because I'm way too concerned that you're going to make a lot of noise.

You're going to piss the man off. And then you're going to change your mind and go home. and you're going to leave me being hung by the neck down in Baghdad. I'm not jumping before you guys do. Well, we'd kind of done that to that. You've done that 10 years earlier, you know? We had done it a lot of times. And, you know, look, I mean, the Kurds, I said at the beginning of just keep the Kurds in the game.

And I don't mean that disparagingly at all. I mean, good God, how many people, they lost to this monster for real. How many times did we make noises? before that we were going to do this thing and then walk away and leave them to deal with it. Sam. You got to keep them in there, and that was not easy at many times. I was wondering if we could also get you to comment on, because amongst these many other things that you've mentioned, the other cloud hanging over this to some extent was the WMD's

issue. And you actually had some pretty wild stories, I thought, but I mean, I'll let you tell them. I mean, what was the mandate as far as WMDs were concerned and what were some of your experiences investigating that while you were on this mission? Right. So weapons of mass destruction is clearly on what I would call our OD, right? It's on our list of targets. Things I'm supposed to be collecting on Iraqi weapons and mass destruction programs without any question that's on our list. Never prescribed as we need to go find out if he has this because if he doesn't, we won't invade.

or that's the predicate for the invasion or anything like that. As I said before, from day one, the way this is described as the decision was already made. We're invading. We're getting rid of this guy. That's a done deal. But clearly, we want to know as much as we can about the status of weapons of mass destruction programs. And we spent a lot of time on that. It's kind of a very strange dynamic that I think most Americans really don't understand.

I mean, Saddam had had weapons of mass destruction programs for a long time. for real. He killed, God knows how many thousands of Kurds with chemical weapons. During the Iran-Iraq war, routinely chemical weapons were used. They were part of Iraqi order or battle. So it's not as if one day Saddam might get chemical weapons. He's had these things forever. He's used them. He's killed hundreds of thousands of people, probably. The question is, if there is a question, is he's telling the truth now that he got rid of him? So also keep in mind, Really, a weapons of mass destruction program is not really about the weapons. It's about the personnel.

Nerve gas technology is 1930s Nazi German technology grown out of insecticides, right? I mean, there's nothing cutting edge about it. You can blow up a nerve gas factory. If the scientists and engineers are still there, you can rebuild the thing and be back in operation six months later producing nerve gas. So the idea that you're just going to find his munitions and find his, factories and then disarm him always kind of misses the point. But in any event, we're trying to collect on all this. Saddam had, in fact, largely divested himself of his weapons of mass destruction.

As it turned out, there were some old munitions dumps and things that even the Iraqis had forgotten about that were ultimately found. But basically, he was telling the truth. He got rid of the stuff. But here's the crazy part. He doesn't dare, he wants us to believe that, but he doesn't dare go into a world where his own people or the Iranians or the Kurds believe that. Because the day the Iranians wake up and think he doesn't have chemical weapons or his own people do or the Kurds do is the day he's gone. They're doing this weird dance where he's telling us the truth, but really wants all of his people to continue to believe, I'm lying. Yeah, yeah, I got rid of the weapons. Wink, wink. Sure, I did. And everybody buys it. So I give you a classic example. I think I talk about this in the book.

And an asset, very senior Iraqi general that I was personally meeting. By this point, we've recruited this guy. He's on a base in the north. I ask him, do you guys have chemical weapons? His answer is yes. I mean, I'll give you the shorthand version, obviously. You have chemical weapons, yes. But the answer is more like yes. Are you stupid? What kind of do you have? Well, I have these kinds, and they're in these kinds of munitions, and he can describe the markings. These have blue stripes. Those have yellow stripes, all the stuff which you would expect, and frankly, it's all correct based on what we know about Iraqi ordinance. He's obviously seen it, worked with it, used, it, knows it.

He can bring you the documents, in fact, does bring me the documents with their war plans that show the chemical weapons will be, in fact, used from the outset of the conflict, blah, blah, blah. Are they on your base? Yes. Where? In these bunkers? Can you show me those? Yes. Confirm it.

It's on imagery. The bunkers exist. Obviously, things are in there. They're guarded. Things go in. Things go in. What's in this bunker? He can tell you.

What's in that bunker? He can tell you. When was the last time you looked at him? Again, it's like, what are you stupid? I can't go in that bunker. That's under the control of the Republican Guard. I'm a regular army officer. It doesn't matter how many.

what rank I am. So I've never seen them. End of story. That's what you tell Washington, right? It's like, okay, I will move on to now attempting to recruit a member of the Republican Guard who has access to that particular bunker who can open the door and walk inside and solve the last remaining riddle. That's going to be a trick, and it isn't going to happen in a week's time for me to find some way to get access to a guy in Mosul where I can't go and recover.

him and if you're getting ready to invade Iraq, it's sure as hell not going to happen before that. That's more or less the status of where we end up with WMD across the board is like, if you're waiting for me to tell you I have conclusive evidence that we found it, the answer is we have not done so. I have no such evidence. I never found it. Can't prove it exists. This is what I can tell you. I thought there were some interesting experiences you had also where they actually brought you

what was or what they thought was fizzile material or nerve gas and I handed it to you like, this will kill you in a heartbeat, Sam. And you're like, what the fuck? You're supposed to tell me that before you hand it to me. Yeah, by the time we're done with this, we end up with basically like this toxic waste dump in the yard of our base house where we keep having to bury. stuff that that people bring to us that because every weird thing in the world ends up in Kurdistan right that hottest cesium source I think still true that the CIA ever recovered

we recover one day from some random guy who's frigging carry in this thing in his pocket and you know uh but yeah I mean yeah So we had a guy, a guy, you know, my job as base chief is not really to be running sources, right? I got 9,000 other things to do. But I'm a big believer, first of all, that I go crazy if I don't get out on the street some. And second, that if I'm going to ask people to do stuff that I need to be getting out and doing it myself. I'm not going to send everybody else out running around, risk and getting blown up and then sit in the house all day. So I'm going to run a certain number of my own sources as I can to demonstrate that.

So I'm meeting with this guy who was a wacky opposition guy who sometimes told us great stuff and sometimes told us nonsensical things. And he just gets in the car, gets in the land cruiser, and we pick him up wherever we pick him up. And he gets in and he reaches inside his jacket and he hands me a piece of garden hose. Just like you took your hose at your house and just hacked it like with a knife at both ends. And it's closed off with electrical tape, like electrician's tape. And he just hands this thing to be not, doesn't say apropos of nothing. No intro, no like.

And I'm like, take it. And there's a guy in a jump seat behind me in the Land Cruiser, one of the SF guys with a, who's basically whose job is to shoot this guy in the head if things go south but anyway that's his job and I hand it back to this guy named rabbit he's also carrying Ziploc bags because we're always ended up with nonsensical stuff and we're going to bag it and figure out what the hell it is at the house and as this is happening the guy says to me he just does this and then I say to him so what is that and he says this is a very dangerous subject if you substance if you touch it you die. That's what he says to me. After I've already got it and after I've already passed it to this

guy rapid, I'm like, I'm in the mode of like I don't care. So my response is, you know, you need to work on the sequence of your sentences because the sentence where this is a really dangerous substance if you touch it, you die, comes before the part where you hand it to me. I take it and hand it to another guy. And then we have a long rambling conversation that would be familiar to many case officers where we're just trying to establish some very simple, very basic things, like where the hell did it come from and what is it, which we only make marginal progress on, but it's clearly, the gist is it's supposed to be a sample of a chemical agent of some kind, probably nerve gas. So we go back to the house and the team house.

And by, you know, I mean, needless to say at this point, I'm skeptical would be greatly exaggerating with the chances that I thought this is anything. But in any event, me and Rabbit drag out this chemical detector piece of gear they gave us, which is commercial. It's not a military manufacturer thing. It's a sniffer, and it's supposed to sniff stuff and then not only alert, but actually tell us what the agent is. And we're being a sloppy. We're being lazy, which is a bad idea. It's a good way to get dead.

And we don't mask, and we don't put on an air of chem gear, but we put the probe right at the end and crack the tape. And the thing goes crazy and tells us it's nerve gas. Oh, my God. And so now we're not, you know, we're not having a good day anymore. Now, now I'm focused on doing this the right way, which again, before I'm lecturing the asset on how he's doing things out of order, now clearly I'm the one doing stuff out of order because I'm like, now I'm going to get my shit together, but after I've already cracked

this thing and potentially been exposed to some deadly nerve age. So we go inside and well, we go in the team house. One of the first things I did was go in the team house, go in the base and get on the computer and write up everything that had transpired. Because at this point, I'm thinking, if I'm going to croak, we better get down all the facts as to what just happened. Let's write the text of a message to headquarters. And then we go back out and do this right and put on all our protective gear. and take this thing and bury it next to God knows how many other things that we had. In the end, it turned out to be a simulant, but we didn't know that for many, many months.

It turned out to be something, as far as we could determine, that the Russians manufactured that was designed to be used in training exercises for their chemical weapons units to not only trip alarms, but to simulate the properties of nerve gas. Really? So they had made this, and who the hell knows how this material made it. Inside the hose was this container that had this simulant in it, and it was the original container that had been in, apparently, for the Soviets. So who knows how many years it had wandered out of the Soviet Union to wash up

in Kurdistan and somehow or another make it into our hands. Did your source know that or did he actually believe that it was a kind of he had been scammed so he believed that it was nerve gas. He'd been given it by somebody else. I mean, you know, once you, in a situation like this, right, I said before you kind of kick up some dust, you get moving, people begin to. So your sources spin off to know other sources,

but also there begins to become a certain awareness that you're in the area. And everybody thinks the Americans are basically walking ATM machines. Right. And so now we got people wanting to basically, looking for something to sell. And that can be a good thing because it means people are coming to you, but it also means you've got to be constantly worried that, all right, is this guy coming to get paid because he's got something real

or is this guy just feeding me silliness? because he wants to get paid. And in this case, at some point in this chain, somebody knew what they had and had passed it on. We were paying this guy. He was probably paying somebody else

a certain amount. In the meantime, they scared the living hell out of us. I can tell you that. Next time I test a nerve gas sample. You know, it's interesting. We had Scott Ritteron, who was the chief in SCOM,

inspector. And, you know, from his, from his perspective, you know, when he was saying, when they were doing all their accounting, you know, their furnishing accounting, they're like, look, it's all destroyed. Like, we, we have every single part. And then the, the CIA was reporting that there's stuff. And it seemed, I mean, from hearing his side, which was 100%, you know, believable from his side that the agency was up to this nefarious sort of, you know, well, there's stuff there.

But then listening to you explain how Saddam was trying to play all the sides because it was in his interest to do it and that his own officers believed that he still had all the stuff and they needed to believe it. It makes sense why there was this discrepancy between reporting and what inspections we're finding on the ground. Yeah, I mean, you know, the thing is it, and at some point, back to something I said much earlier about walking in and, okay, I got no sources and I'm on a timeline and I got about 27,000 jobs here and where you want us to, I mean, by the time we're done, we have, I have no idea how many reporting sources inside a rock, but a huge asset stable in the course of less

than a year really from the time we ramp up. That's amazing. So we're running like hell. But there's only so much you're going to collect remotely from outside over that time period. I used the one example about this base in Mosul before, not because it's unique, but just because it illustrates concretely what I'm talking about. Okay, well, fine. So now if that's the question, are those munitions, in fact, still inside those bunkers? Or were they eliminated?

Okay. Now let's sit down and start figuring out. Now, how can we determine that? And one of the ways, obviously, is to recruit a guy who can actually physically go inside. But I can't do that in 48 hours or necessarily the next 60 days or 90 days. I mean, so many times you basically end up on a conversation with headquarters and say, look, I don't know, man. I've told you everything I know.

Right. So does that general believe that those weapons are still in that bunker? I would bet my life on that. based on everything I've assessed in this case. Have they historically been in there without question? Have they historically used them? Yes. Is there a real war plan that I actually have a copy of now that says they'll be used day one?

Yes. Still didn't answer the question to whether they're still in there. Now, if you want the answer to that question, I can probably get it for you, but you're going to leave me alone for about another year. And if we're lucky in a year, I might be able to find a guy, we're going to recruit. I mean, you were talking before about the impact of being higher and higher or closer and closer to Saddam. Well, the closer we get to Saddam, the more we get to the inner circle, the more we get to the Republican Guard, and then the special Republican Guard,

and the security service. Now we're very much into a group of guys that had so much blood on their hands and were so part of the regime that there was no way they were going to survive the fall of Saddam. Like there's no way to get right now. I can't guys lower down, even regular army officers who are lieutenant generals can say, I'm going to come over. But a lot of these guys at the very core of this thing, they're like basically in a criminal enterprise where they're never going to be able to escape.

So the job of recruiting those guys to help take down Saddam gets harder and harder and harder. Not only are there less of them and they're harder to get to him, but they're like, but no, if he goes, I'm a dead man. Right. Yeah, you can't give them a visa and an apartment in Virginia. We're never bringing those guys to the States. Right. We're never giving them a get out of jail free card. We're never. And they know that.

And they've also, of course, all lived forever in a regime where you don't have to be convicted of anything to die hideously. Right. If I think 12 people, one guy out of 12 might be a spy, I'll just torture all 12 to death. Why do I have to find the spy? He was in there somewhere. And even if he wasn't, even if I was wrong, who cares? It's irrelevant. Human life doesn't matter.

So they live in that hideous world. So that's, you know, on the WMD thing and a lot of stuff that's you hit against a ceiling, you're like, okay, can I do this? Yeah, we can do that. I'll get you a source. I'll get you inside that bunker. I won't do it in a week. Right. It's going to take some serious doing and it'll take some patience to do that. Sam, I just want to make sure that we have enough time at the end because I want to do a bonus segment with you. but so i'm sorry tell me on tom i'm good for another 30 minutes if you are okay yeah i mean we'll do another 15 minutes and then we'll do 15 for the bonus segment um i did want to i mean there's a lot we're not even going to be able to get to but that's okay people can go and read your book um i did want to ask you though about shalabi um who he was what he was doing over there and what your impression was of our of america's relationship with this individual yeah oh it's so hard to know

where to start with mr chalaby you know the shorthand version is that chaliby is a guy who was by the time this all happens in oh two oh three he's in iraqi but he's he's an opposition figure he hasn't been back inside iraq for a very long time um name any country that has a regime that the U.S. might be trying to overthrow or thinking about overthrowing, and you will find any number of guys like Chalbby. They wear nice suits. They speak great English. They look like what everybody in the West wants our new leader of name a country to look like. But they don't necessarily have any support whatsoever from their own people on the ground. And on the ground inside the country, they may not even know who they are. And that's

the case with Chalabee. He hadn't been in Iraq forever. Not one Iraqi and 100 would have known who Chalabi was. He had a long history with the agency, which I really can't go into, but suffice it to say that there was a burn notice issued on Mr. Chalaby. And unlike the cool TV show that I really like, that doesn't mean you get to live in Miami Beach and drive around a sports car. When they issue a burn notice on you, it means nobody's allowed to talk to you anymore. It means this guy has been such a colossal waste of our time and sucked up so much of our resources that if we're not talking to him nobody is authorized to meet with this guy we're done we had cut him away undeterred he had managed to cozy up to senior people in the department

of defense and who decided they wanted to play directly in this game so all of a sudden it's like spring early 2003 and chalaby show up in Iraq, in northern Iraq, where he had like a mansion, like an estate in the mountains. And it's just absurd. I mean, it's like something out of, it's like something out of some surreal catch-22-esque movie. Like when you think about everything associated with him, it's just so absurdist that even when I think about it, I'm like, did that really happen? because that seems too weird to have happened. He showed up and he showed up actually with an Army colonel

and with his own DC hired representatives from a public relations firm. The Army had made a full bird like his aid and then he had two people from a PR firm, including this woman with an eye patch, which again just made. makes it seem more like a Tarantino film or something. Yeah. And he shows up in northern Iraq and I went down to, he had a big meeting at his house where he was going to address all these Kurdish figures and so forth and tell them about how he was going to be.

I don't know what he was going to. How I'm personally getting rid of Saddam Hussein and I'm going to be your savior or some such nonsense. And I showed up at the house, basically uninvited, I should add. I just, he didn't talk to us and we didn't talk to him, but we obviously knew he was going to have this. And I'm like, well, I'm going. I mean, you're here. And I don't think anybody's going to stop me because we have the contact.

So I end up in this room and there are all these people and he talks. And it's literally like snake oil time, man. It is, it's like you can't believe. Like he's talking and everything that comes out of his mouth is just, nonsensical. There is no reality anywhere to be her. Is this this guy just babbling and I'm like, you showed up here two days ago. It's just you. There's a house. I don't even know what you're talking about. He's just peddling this silliness. And that colonel, I think his name was seals. I could be wrong in that was standing a few feet away from me. And Chalaby finishes talking and I walk over to

this guy and say and look at him and I say something to the effect of this is unbelievable meaning can you believe anybody listens to any of this this is madness and he looks at me with this glazed look in his eyes and he goes he's a great man isn't he whoa whoa what you have you are a disciple you what what mind control is this guy exercising over you yeah the next thing you know, we're getting messages from headquarters that the Pentagon wants us to liaise with Chalabi because he has a secret army in the mountains of northern Iraq. Like the Pentagon is, in Washington, D.C., somebody in the Pentagon is sending this message to us, the only people in northern Iraq who've been there for a year telling us that there's a secret army. I'm like,

no there's no secret army here man i mean there's not a square foot of kuristan probably by this point we haven't been in he doesn't have an army got a house which i think was paid for largely by the american taxpayers for money we gave him for some other purpose he has no army whatsoever it's just madness yeah didn't deter nobody in the pentagon listen they still believe Why do, why are frauds like this just able to capture the minds and the imaginations of so many people in Washington, D.C.? Because this seems to happen over and over and over again, not just with Shalabi. I mean, we went and we repeated this whole thing over again in Syria. I mean, it's like case by case.

Exactly as you pointed out, these Americans in D.C. thought that Shalabi was going to be the next George Washington. We looked to these Syrian rebels who are a bunch of, you know, dirtbags and mafioso type. as if they were going to bring Jeffersonian democracy to Syria after Assad was deposed of. I mean, how does that even work, Sam? Because, I mean, I'm just a regular guy here. And I'm like, you know, you think people in our government are smarter than this. Yeah, you would like to think so. Well, I mean, part of it I alluded to before is some of these guys play the part and they're very good at playing us.

So Chalaby is a very, you know, in his case, He's a very polished guy. I mean, he's got nice suits that are hell of a lot more expensive than any suit that I've ever had in my life. And he speaks with a wonderful slightly British accented, you know, slightly British accented English. And he looks like what everybody wants to believe they're going to find, right? Right. I'm not going to talk to some guy who we're going to have to find a narrow area on which we can agree.

know, this guy really is going to tell us everything we want to hear. Part of it, though, you know, I think we have this problem in general, and I kind of try to get to this at the end of the book, kind of broaden this out to messages, is, you know, we now have sort of everybody playing in everybody else's lanes, everybody, a lot of slop. We got a lot, we've got way too many people behind way too many desks in Washington, D.C., sticking their fingers into things at the operational level that they have no idea. They have no business messing in. We ended up, you know, I mean, this is part of the reason for decisions that were subsequently made so tragically in the spring of 03.

We end up with a bunch of guys, even guys on the ground. I'm not talking about our team, but folks that flow in who their analogy is this is just like going into France in 1945. You're like, no, it's nothing like France in 1945. I mean, forget about the language and all that other stuff. In France, in 1945, you liberated an existing nation state with a democratic tradition and existing civil structures from a foreign occupation. And your job was to help them reconstitute all of those structures that had existed prior to the Nazi invasion. Here you have a nation that frankly doesn't even necessarily think it is one nation with 1,500 years. year old animosities only held together because basically Saddam has been so brutally repressing

everybody. No tradition of democratic rule. None of these institutions. You're going to be lucky if this whole thing doesn't blow up in your face. And then what do we do? We say, well, the first thing we'll do is disband the entire Iraqi army. Well, that's a good start. Every guy that might help us keep order in the country, we're going to fire. Also, we're going to stop paying them and send them all home. And by the way, they went home with their weapons. So now not only can't they help us, but they have every reason on earth to want to kill us. Then you're going to tell us that if you remember the Ba'ath Party, you can't hold a government

job anymore. But the only way you could have a government job was to be a member of the Ba'ath Party. So you just permanently fired the fire department, the guy that runs the electrical substation, the postmaster, all the cops. You fired everybody. Oh, and now you're going to give power to the Shia and set loose that 1,500-year-old animosity on a disarmed Sunni minority. like, can you even say all of that and then wonder what the end result of that is? Like, wow, the whole country is going to blow up. That's a great plan.

That's fascinating. And yet all those decisions were made by folks jetting in from Washington, D.C. over the space of like a couple of weeks. And the thing that stuns me to this day is that somehow the U.S. military, despite all those decisions, not walk through that fire. storm and actually won that civil war. Actually, despite all of that, still won, beat all of those guys. That's got to be one of the most amazing military accomplishments in American history.

Should have never been necessary, but anyway. Yeah, we turned it over to people who wore desert boots with their suits and potentially hung out with their female Iraqi interpreter. Yeah, and, you know, I mean, this is obviously going off on another tangent, but I mean, We've also somehow moved into the world where mission creep is the order of the day, right? I mean, it's like Afghanistan. Why'd we go there? Get rid of al-Qaeda and topple the Taliban.

Boom. Five months, that's done, probably the most brilliant military campaign since the Second World War. All of a sudden, the mission is gender equality, paving roads, introducing Italian goats, on and on and on. you're like, what, what are you talking about? How does any of this have anything to do with American national security? And you have any idea how much blood and treasure it's going to take to pull this off? Yeah. Because you're going to be here for the next hundred years.

And it's really, I think a lot of times a general lack of understanding that other countries just are not America. You know, I remember when Trump was doing, or, you know, they're trying to do the troop withdrawal or the, the, we're leaving Afghanistan. And all these people are like, oh, no, you can't do that. Because now they're going to have Sharia law. It's like, what? Like, when was last time you're on Afghanistan? Because Sharia law is kind of the, it's the rule of the day.

Just because there's no Taliban, doesn't mean there's no Sharia. And always has been. Yeah. So it's fascinating. Yeah. And by the way, why do you care? Right. If your answer is that we can't leave until you've transformed it into Switzerland and

Central Asia, then after, we're done in about 100 years if you're and God knows how many more people dead. Right. Which country are you moving on to next? Because there's about 150 after that that we need to go fix too, right? Right. It's this lack of focus and I think Trump is big about talking about this, to his credit in my opinion.

Where's the American national interest? Why did we go? What is our focus? Yeah. I you know as an anecdote I they sent us all kinds of nonsense in the spring of 03 including a Kurdish flag that they created back at headquarters in a vacuum which we burn a whole stack of them gotten us how much money they spent on them no relevance whatsoever to the Kurds no consultation with the Kurds invented a Kurdish flag and sent it showed it to one Kurdish guy one of our senior interlocutors he said it looks like the flag of an African country. We just put them all in a burn barrel and torch dump. I didn't even ask

headquarters like I don't, I'm not even there's no way I'm taking that to know. They also sent us all these little American flags. I got like thousands of little American flags. So I'm driving down to the Green Line. This is after the, you know,

the ground war has started and I'm going down to the Green Line, I think to visit one of our forward teams before we went into care cook. And for whatever reason, I just got these things and I threw them in the land cruiser. And I think probably because I was sick of them lying around. I was just looking for an excuse to get rid of them. So as we're driving along, I'm just randomly stopping and handing them out to kids who all they all want them. They probably don't have any idea what they are, but they're pretty

little things to wave around the breeze. So like the next day I run into this officer, I think, He was from the 173, who just coincidentally happened to be traveling down the same road shortly after we were. And he's telling me how excited he is because he drove down the road and all these Kurdish kids had American flags. And they were all waving them and how it heartened him and how it showed him that they really loved America. I was like, I didn't say anything to him because I just didn't want to blow it. You know, I didn't want it. There's a novel. Yeah.

Where would they get American flags in Kurdistan? Do you think they went to their American flag store? Did they've been ordering them on Amazon? What are you talking about? You think they just spontaneous? It's not France, man. It's not in 1945. You're not with George Patton.

I'm sorry. Yeah. Sam, we really only got through like maybe half of my notes. There's so much more here. But people can go and read your book. if they want to get the rest of the story because we kind of did not get to the best part, which is D-Day and H-hour.

I mean, the war pops off and your op center turns into like chaos as, you know, it sounded like you had a sat phone in each hand, like just all day. And you got guys, your personnel maneuvering around the battle space. There are sabotaged teams out there. There are scouts out there.

You're talking to the U.S. military. 10th Special Forces group rolls in, in force and you did not unfortunately have a very good relationship with them they did not want to work with the CIA for the most part which is kind of bewildering but you also talk about um some of that was because of rules that rumsfeld had laid down there's stuff in there about you day hussein being a complete psychopath which we we talked to ron and we talked to scott about that in the past total lunatic um the the 173rd jump in iraq and just that was that's like Kafkaesque in of itself.

And then, yeah, the actual invasion of Iraq and how that panned out. And on the bonus segment, after we finish here, I just wanted to talk to you about the sabotage teams because I thought that was particularly fascinating and blowing up real lines and everything else. But if you could show people the book again, for the people who joined us midstream, the CIA war in Kurdistan by our guest,

Sam Fattis, retired CIA officer who led that team and wrote the book to kind of explain to people what that mission was and the highlight the accomplishments of the people who are a part of it. Well, and yeah, and one of the things I think you, like you mentioned, the very first part is that everybody who is with you was supposed to be put in for an award and then, you know, and then it gets lost. So the people, you know, the administrators or whomever just to size the kind of willy-nilly and they even give awards to people who weren't even in theater, but miss some of the people that were there and, you know, integral to the plan. And so this book, part of the reason for this book was to honor those people that

didn't get honored. Is that? Yeah. When I made the decision to write this book, I mean, obviously, I hope it has relevance on a number of other issues that we've talked about. But, you know, I had one laser single purpose, right? There's a bunch of people here that I feel like have not gotten the recognition they deserve. I ain't talking about me. I'm talking about the men and women who did the work. I'm sitting in my office, the picture that I talk about in the book of me and my deputy and the person I call Citizen in the book is right there hanging on my wall to this day.

They did incredible work. Citizen is one of the people who somehow she can be literally in the first team into Mosul risking her life, doing all of this stuff. Headquarters manages to lose her name and not give her. her an award and a recognition. And when I spend a better part of a year banging on people to fix it, they're more concerned with covering it up than they are with ever giving her that recognition. Well, you actually get told to stand down, right? Ultimately, I got a message directly from the chief of the division, which is not, you know, as a chief of station, usually not a good thing.

Right. Might be a really good thing, often not telling me, yeah, it's time to shut the up and stop making noise because we're not going to go back and fix this and you're annoying people at this point. And that's amazing. So, you know, at chief of station, I had to take that order. I'm not at chief station anymore. I don't have to take that order. I want to mention something about the book.

So Sam's book, it's the number one new release on Amazon. When we started this, when we started this episode, I think there were 11 copies left. they're only nine in stock. I would challenge you guys, if you have any aspiration to read this book, go ahead and order it now. Like, let's deplete Amazon stock so that it is published.

And the link is down in the description, so it's real easy to find. You just click down there, you'll find it. And we have just a couple of questions we need to get to that people donate and, you know, and we always like to get their stuff. Sam, do you know if the KCM guy had any? kids? Which guy? The Cassium. The Sessium-137 guy. Yeah, the Sessium-137 guy.

No. And then did you have any non-native Kurdish speakers on your team or did you just use interpreters like local nationals? And did you have to declare yourself to the Kurds as an Intel officer and what was that process like and was it unnerving in any way? Yeah. So if we're talking, talking like actual intelligence operations, we talked before about how we're doing a bunch of different things, if we're talking like meeting with sources that we were running, that we were recruiting, we would not use a translator who's a non-US sit who's not agency for our operations. I mean, if we're training a Kurdish sabotage team, we probably have a Kurdish translator there for that. But if we're doing a source meet, either the guy speaks English or he speaks a language

that our guys speak. So in many cases, that would be Arabic if he's Iraqi, but for some of them, the Kurds also Farsi. What was the second part of the question? So when you went in, like in trying to link up with leadership or establish yourself, did you declare yourself to the Kurds as an Intel officer? Like, what was that process like of establishing going to feel? 100%. My, in that sense, my primary interlocutor, my counterpart would have been Masur Barzani, who was the son of Masu Barzani, the head of the KDP, and it was the head of their intel service at that point. So I didn't necessarily see Maser every day, but I would see him multiple times a week, and if I would see, and we would interact at the working level with their people. That said, as I also say in the book from day one, we ran our own operations. in addition to working with the curves.

And so they knew we were running ops, but those ops were not always, we weren't including them. We would share intelligence, but they weren't part of those ops. That's just another way of maintaining security. There's fewer people involved. And I gotta tell you, all credit to them.

You got basically an independent country, which is in effect what they had. And you got an intelligence service like the agency on the ground, And we're running our own operations all by ourselves on their turf, providing our own security. And they effectively gave us carte blanche to do that because that's the close relationship we had. And certainly I could not have done any of that without their approval.

Couldn't have moved to muscle without their approval. So they basically, they kind of blessed off on you guys. Yes. We would also do stuff with them. There's a whole range of options. But most of the assets I've been talking. talking about our assets, we met personally and we met by ourselves. And then we share intelligence with them, obviously, but they're not involved in the operational

stuff. It lets us move faster. Like I say, it just limits the number of people with knowledge of anything. It's just good security practice. It's just, but it's a measure of the relationship. That is a, you know, for them to give us approval to do that is a measure of the relationship we had with fun. Yeah. Fascinating. One more question, what were we done? It's kind of an off tangent question.

So it's kind of interesting. How would you characterize or would you characterize the early activities of US oil companies seeking a toehold in Kurdistan and how they impacted the course of the war if they did? When I was there, they weren't there. Okay. Now, I know that since then, I mean, including,

they have obviously become heavily involved there. In fact, I have former colleagues who are retired who have gotten into that line of work themselves since they got out based on their relationships. I don't have any involvement with that, have not had any involvement with that. They were not there when we were there. All right, guys. So we're going to get going and record the bonus segment with Sam. Thanks for joining us tonight. And next week, our guest is going to be a fan favorite.

it you guys asked for him, George Hand, retired Delta Force operator. And I have a few choice topics in mind to speak to him about. He's always a lot of fun to talk to. So we'll be back next Friday at our normal time, 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. And Sam, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Really appreciate it. We could have gone another two hours here. So we need to have you on again. We have a whole, another half of the book to go over. I'm happy to come on anytime, guys. I have a blast and Jack not going not going anywhere for a while Sam

what's that not going anywhere for a while well you know I I'm capable of moving in and out without being seen so I okay guys there are only six six of Sam's books left in stock on Amazon go grab those go get them

go get them be the be the Jones I got I have grandchildren they need toys Exactly. And it's a great thing to do if you're on, you know, a coronavirus lockdown, you know. Exactly. It's a fascinating part of the war that you're not going to hear anyplace else. And please subscribe to our channel if you haven't already.

Give us a like. Share the video so we can get, you know, Sam exposed to a greater part of the public. And hit that notification's bell so that YouTube will intermittently let you know when we go live. And please join our Patreon. Even a dollar a month really helps us out. You know, we're paying rent for a place that, well, I have free range of it. I'm not going to tell you what I'm doing here now, Jack. But yeah, thanks, guys.

We really appreciate you all being here. You're the master and commander, Dave. You have the off button. I think you do. Did you pass me back the, we're still learning the ins and outs of Zoom. Yeah, I think you're the host, Dave. I am the host. Okay, guys, thank you very much.

We really appreciate it, and we will see you next week.