The Team House - Ukraine War & Wagner Coup w/ CIA Officer | Marc Polymeropoulos | Ep. 219

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

Marc Polymeropoulos retired in June 2019 from the Senior Intelligence Service ranks at the CIA after a 26-year career in operational headquarters and field management assignments covering the Middle East, Europe, Eurasia, and Counter Terrorism. He served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and he is one of the CIA's most decorated field officers. Marc is the recipient of the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the Intelligence Medal of Merit, and the Intelligence Commendation medal. His last position was overseeing CIA's clandestine operations in Europe and Eurasia. He is a respected commentator on foreign policy and intelligence matters and is widely quoted in both the US and international media. Grab Marc's book here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Clarity-Crisis-Leadership-Lessons-CIA/dp/1400223865 Marc’s podcast:⬇️ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deep-state-radio/id1245002955 Today' Sponsors: Kim Kipling's New Book "THE FLICKERING TORCH"⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Flickering-Torch-Kim-Kipling/dp/B0C5YQLBS5 A love story and action/adventure thriller, set in an all-too-real universe of the USA's accelerating political and social collapse. America is politically polarized, culturally divided and on the brink of civil war.  Grab it here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Flickering-Torch-Kim-Kipling/dp/B0C5YQLBS5 Vitamin 1 Water ⬇️ (VETERAN OWNED & OPERATED) Hydrate Your Health! https://www.amazon.com/stores/Vitamin1/page/EE9B1311-273B-4D86-B4D7-D8BD1CFE62F8?ref_=ast_bln ELECTROLYTE AND B-VITAMIN ENHANCED / SUGAR-FREE / CAFFEINE-FREE / DYE-FREE / GLUTEN-FREE / NUT-FREE / KOSHER / 4 DELICIOUS FLAVORS / JUST 5 CALORIES PER 8OZ. SERVING Buy Vitamin 1 here⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/stores/Vitamin1/page/EE9B1311-273B-4D86-B4D7-D8BD1CFE62F8?ref_=ast_bln Rocket Money⬇️  https://ROCKETMONEY.com/TEAMHOUSE Stop throwing your money away.  Cancel unwanted subscriptions – and manage your expenses the easy way – by going to https://ROCKETMONEY.com/TEAMHOUSE To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #russia #ukraine #cia 0:00 - start of show 3:00 - origin story & recruiting agents 1:36:25 - Wagner coup, Ukraine, RussiaBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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David Park. Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 219 of the team house. I'm Dave Park with our special co-host, our guest co-host, Andy Milburn. Tonight, we invite back an old friend, Mark Polymeropolis. Mark is a former CIA case officer and went way up into the ranks, actually, a very high into the agency. and Mark is first off Mark, welcome back.

We love having you, man. Thanks. Awesome to be here. I love the show. Something that I've followed for a long time. And I will flatter you guys by saying that as I go around the country, I do a lot of public speaking. People come up to me all the time, having watched some episodes. And so it's a deep dive into our old world. I love it.

A lot of people love it. So it's an honor to be back. Real quick, for the people who haven't seen like your first show where we go over your, you know, your biography, basically. I want to do that in brief, but first I want to plug one of our previous guests, their new book, The Flickering Torch, by Kim Kipling. Kim was on our show to talk about his book Dutch,

about CIA, paramilitary CIA officer, Dutch Waringa. Fantastic book. He's also written another great book, just called Sea Stories. Kim himself was a naval officer and spent 30 years in the agency. Part of that is a paramilitary officer. And his newest book is a, it's a modern thriller about a CIA paramilitary officer in today's world. And it does, I haven't had a chance to finish it yet, but it does a really good job of sort of breaking down the politics in America, either left or right, just showing how they're pulling us apart. And his protagonist, retired paramilitary operations officer, Dylan Morgan, takes on one last mission for love.

Fantastic book. And if you guys want to read a book that was written by somebody who really knows what they're talking about. The preparation, the intel prep, I mean, everything that goes into, you know, operations, it's a fantastic book. Anyway. Oh, and the link is in the description. You get on Amazon, and you can either buy it on it. Amazon or if you have a Kindle Unlimited, which you should if you're a reader, you can read it for free on Kindle Unlimited. So, Mark, back to you. Thanks. So, you know, again, for the people who have

not met you before, can you give us your origin story, sort of how you grew up, what took you to the agency and the things like the major highlights of your career? Sure, sure. And by the way, I, you know, I love when you have this for, you know, when you have guests talk about this. And as I've gone and I've done a whole bunch of stuff in public. I think that's it's one of the most effective things because that's where you know you get to know someone and people become authentic. So I you know I was born in Greece. My dad was Greek. My mom was American moved to America right away. But because of that, you know, in the summers I'd go back to the to Greece, the Greek islands, they'd travel a lot. And so I always had an itch to do something a little bit more when I was, and this is relevant,

I promised that. But when I was 10 years old, my dad took a sabbatical in Algeria, you know, in North Africa. This was before kind of an Islamic insurgency destroyed the country. So when I was 10 years old, my mom stuck down on an airplane from JFK airport by myself. Well, it's insane. I got kids now. I wouldn't. I don't know if I'd do that. And I flew to, I flew through Paris to Algiers. And my dad and I spent an entire month in a Volkswagen minibus driving 2,000 miles to the Sahara Desert. And I think that's when I, you know, I wanted to be Lawrence of Arabia and I kind of got the itch. So, you know, I joined the CIA out of, uh, out of college. The first desk I had was the Afghan desk, 1993. I think there was about three or four

people on it. All we were doing was looking at the Afghan kind of the mess after the Soviet withdrawal, after the U.S. kind of lost interest in Afghanistan, the rise of the Taliban. I think it was 94. We were trying to buy back a lot of shit we gave, which is, of course, we're Stinger missiles. But no one really cared. It just was ironic. I remember there was someone wrote a paper on the Afghan Arabs. These are the Mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan. against the Soviets. And there was a young financier named Osama bin Laden. I remember there was a little box in the paper.

It seemed pretty prophetic for later on. Went off. I did seven operational tours, mostly in the Middle East. So I was a Middle East hand. I learned Arabic. I served across the Levant, North Africa, and the Gulf. And then as I got kind of, you know, unfortunately what happens is I got kind of longer in the tooth. I came back.

I did a whole bunch of assignments at CTC. in the Counterterrorism Center back in Langley at the CI headquarters. And then I was the deputy ops chief chief chief chief chief chief for the Near East. And then I was the chief operations for what we call the Europe and Eurasia Mission Center, which covers about 50 countries from, you know, Ireland to the farthest time zones of Russia, which is when I retired out of there. So the last, when I was promoted to the Senior Intelligence Service, the last job I had, which I thought would be boring, would be overseeing what, you know, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey,

and it was certainly not that. But in 2019, I had to call it quits. I got kind of jammed up on a trip to Moscow, December 2017. It's what people are, you know, call Havana syndrome. And I got, had some really severe health problems that it's taken a long time for me to get over. I've talked about it to you all. And you all actually have been really supportive of kind of my health struggle and

some struggles of others. So I appreciate that. And now, you know, I wrote a book on leadership. I kind of one of these pundits talking heads in the media. It's weird. I have total imposter syndrome all the time, wondering what the hell I'm doing. And, of course, as I'm wearing a Red Sox hat, I'm kind of a fanatic baseball fan. So that encompasses 54 years of my life right there in about, I don't know, two minutes.

And your book, just for people who should read it, anybody who is in any kind of leadership position is clarity and crisis. And where, what, what spurned you or what was the origin of, you know, you deciding to write this book? I'll tell you. And it involves a previous guest of yours, too. So I was, uh, chief of one, I was a, I was a line, you know, I was a case officer. Um, I was not in, in our, uh, special activities center. Um, but, but, you know, during the 20 years, it was quite often that even in our paramilitary bases, they would send a, uh, you know, a regular case officer out, especially I, you know, I'd done stuff, uh, in Iraq and Afghanistan before. So in 2011, I went to be our base chief in a place called Schen, Afghanistan, which is pretty funny. I remember before I left, I you know I we had come back from another assignment in the Middle East and I told my wife hey I you know I got to go back to Afghanistan I just I get him getting the itch to go back and she said where and I said it's a place called skin there's nothing going on there and she Googled it and it was time magazine said that this is the most dangerous place on earth so that's a great great dinner table conversation but I tell the story because as I'm flying into skin and you know

for those you know in our old world you know you're you're you're an MI7 you're coming in your nods on, you have night vision on. The base is getting rocketed. We're trying to find a window to get in. We're hovering in this pass. To get into skin, you have to go into, you know, in between these mountain passes.

And I land. And the current, the base chief, the guy I'm replacing is a previous guest and a good friend of mine, Mick Mulroy. And Mick tells a great story of my eyes were just bugged out. He's like, you look like, what in the fuck have I gotten myself into?

And so, and I tell that story because that's where I, that's where I, that's where I, I was a GS-15 at the time, the equivalent of a colonel, but I didn't know shit on leadership. And that's where I, that's when I really learned about leadership and leading in, you know, in what I call in periods of, you know, in crisis situations are what you call in the gray and being comfortable and the uncomfortable. And so I started thinking about as we had an incredible year there, taking high-value targets off the battlefield. I started thinking about things I had done well and not well, like coming up with some leadership principles. So that's where I really started with the idea of the book. And then, you know, what, eight years later, when I retired, I decided to put it down on paper, you know, thinking that, hey, maybe people will like it. Maybe they won't. But it's, it's what I learned from kind of some tough places around the world. Were there some things that, because you're running a base in Afghanistan, so you have your, your regular CIA personnel, you have special activities personnel, there are probably maybe some military personnel or whatever. were there things that you thought you knew about leadership that you learned?

Like what were some of the lessons learned for you? Oh, that's a day. It's an awesome question because I learned that, you know, it's good to have people around you who are smarter than you. And that could be, I mean, everybody could be the logistics officer at the base. I mean, you know, our support staff in, you know, in these kind of war zone, these conflict zone environments are lifeblood. They build everything. they fix everything the base gets rocketed something gets get gets damaged they'll fix it in you know in a matter of minutes or hours um i learned obviously from our paramilitary personnel there um you know

know what to do or what not to do you know after you know we would get rock every morning for a year we took 107 millimeter rocket fire um we're firing back into pakistan that's that's that's a you know it gets a little touchy sometimes particularly when there's pack military who was helping al qaeda shoot at us. And so, you know, I would sit around with the kind of, you know, I called it my leadership team there. Everyone, it was kind of a leader of one, whether it's a logs officer, the paramilitary officer, you know, other support officers, the case officers. But, you know, at one point, I realized, holy crap, everyone here is, is smarter than me. And that's a really good thing. And you embrace that. And you come up with a decision-making style, which is not autocratic. You know,

when I first, I remember the first station I went to, you know, in the Middle East, you know, it was a, you know, the station chief was a former Marine. There was no open door policy. I think I talked to him, you know, twice in two years. But what I learned in, in that conflict zone environment is that, you know, it's what I call the power of contribution. Everybody really matters. And then you learn that, you know, you can be a great leader and have people who are better than you at a lot of things, and that's just fine. I mean, you embrace that. Hey, go ahead.

Mark, I've just got to jump in there because you said a couple of things that I think are awesome. I mean, everything you've said since we started talking before this has been great. So you came in, you said, you know, fairly senior, which is very unusual to admit this, but you're saying, but you know what, I had very little leadership experience before that. I would argue, though, there's some couple of things that you learned made you more receptive and at the end of that year put you in a better position than the vast majority of Colonel's 06s in the military. Why? Okay, you mentioned imposter syndrome and that's cool.

I love that topic. But the cool thing about people with imposter syndrome, and I'm one, you know, I think is that, you know, once you kind of stabilize and you're realize, okay, I'm really fucking lucky. I shouldn't be here. But then you start realizing, but I've got these people around me who can augment things that I'm not great at, right? Yeah. You know, so all of this kind of feeds into it. And it makes you a far better, in my mind, a far better leader. What you're talking about is persuasive leadership. And you didn't come in with the weight of rank, you know, and, and just start pushing people around. but understanding that

I think frankly somebody puts on leadership but that is the crux that is that is it okay I'm not that good at these things but these guys are how do I augment that

but still still not not abdicate my responsibility or my authority that's that's that's easiest said than done one of the things I thought was what I found there is

and I'll never forget this I remember one of our, one of our paramilitary officers. And of course, this is, everyone has, you know, you go to Afghanistan or a rocker series, someone's coming down with some gastrointestinal hell. And I remember, you know, literally walking out one day and you see, you know, we're out with the trucks or get ready to roll out. And there's a couple of our guys who have IVs stuck to them because they're so dehydrated. They're so sick.

And we had our, you know, we had our medics there, you know, it's probably, I can't remember exactly who it was, but probably they had the same job in the military, but they came over the agency and they're treating them. And so I started, it started, I started thinking about, you know, one of the kind of the leadership principles I had. And I called it the glue guy or the glue gal that you have all these people behind the scene. So if that medic, a physician's assistant, what we call it, the agency can't put an IV into one of our guys, get him ready to go back out on some type of app that we're doing. We don't have success as a base. And so what happens when we, and again, we had an incredible.

incredible year. You know, we, there is, and I'll tell you a story. I think I've told it before in the show, but we actually, you know, our job was pure. It was a great job I had. It was a fine fixed finish. I didn't, we weren't building wells. I wasn't sitting with tribal chiefs. We were there to kill al-Qaeda or the Taliban. That was the only mission in South Waziristan. But so let's say we have a big success and we put someone on the X and our military partners or other U.S. assets take out an al-Qaeda or a Taliban member. Did I, you know, one of the things I learned is, you know, is what I got to do after that happens is, of course, there's going to be a cable to headquarters, and the case officer who was running the asset that did it, is going to get a whole bunch of kudos. And what about that medic who helped that paramilitary case or go out and meet the agent? And so what I would do is I try to celebrate everybody at the base. And I got so passionate about this. I remember, you know, we have these third country nationals as our cooks. The agency has freaking great food.

I remember, I mean, I remember they were getting air dropped like crazy stuff. But I remember we had these third. I think it was a chef. Where was he from? I think it was from Bosnia or Serbia, whatever it is. It doesn't matter. And I remember I brought him into the base one time. And I was like, he shouldn't be in here.

I'm like, it doesn't matter. We're celebrating the success because you fuckers eat well to get you out to go on opts to meet an agent to put a high value target on the X. And so I even had the cooks kind of celebrating our successes. And that to me was just the essence of leadership. And that's what I kind of try to take from there. And I think a lot of that has to do with just being humble. because people want a skin base to be a success.

No one gives a shit about me. Right. You know, Mark was a good base chief. Yep, he was. I mean, people might think I'm an asshole, whatever in life, whatever I do. But my rep would be that I ran that base really well. And we had great success. But I think a lot of it was because, you know, you empower your people.

And so that was, it was just such an amazing time. But then back to the original point is that's when I started thinking about, I got to put some of these things on paper. So maybe, maybe someone will care. And, you know, by the way, when you write a book, you don't make a any money on this. It's just, it's just a kind of a legacy that you have. Unless you're Jake. A labor of love. Right. But, but, but the thing is, is it's interesting without a lot of guidance,

I'm assuming that you went one way because I know other leaders when they have imposter syndrome or when they find themselves in a place where there are people smarter than them, they, they get covetous of the recognition. And they think they're worried. that their subordinates will out shine them when they don't understand that by making their subordinates shine, they're going to shine because the mission success is ultimately on them. So, you know, and Dave, you bring up such an interesting point because I think, so the thing is a CI case officer, it's funny, you know, I think about this all the time. The type that the people we recruit, this is not our agents, but this is the case officers, we recruit, paramilitary officers,

whatever, are probably borderline sociopathic narcissists. And the sense is, you do the job on your own. So my job, everything, everything part of the training I had was not to be in a team environment. It was to be, you know, you're posted an embassy, you're out, you know, hunting targets. This is obviously, you know, Russians or Chinese or Iranians or North Koreans to recruit. And then when you're handling an agent, you're out on your own. you run a surveillance detection route for four and a half hours and you have to make those calls whether to abort the meeting or go forward if you're if you're in the black if you're surveillance

free or not so everything you do on your own but then you get promoted and all of a sudden you have to shift that focus it's not about you anymore it's not about how many recruits you had it's not about what you know what kind of intelligence you provided that got in the president's daily brief all of a sudden you actually have to you know there's there's you know you have to have this more of a selfless attitude and it's hard to make that adjustment and and i and i didn't do that great at first. And so I, before I got to Schen, I did have a couple field management jobs where I was like, I look back now. I was like, I was probably not that great. But what Schen taught me was everything about that kind of that selfless leadership, because I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. You know,

I was, you know, and but the agency had enough sense to send me there knowing that I figure it out. And so, so when I say I didn't know what I was doing, that's not, that's not the case. I wasn't expected to be an expert on, you know, how to shoot mortars back into Pakistan or how to build, you know, some kind of, I don't know, latrine system for the 1,000, you know, Afghan Indage who've never used the bathroom before. I mean, I'm joking when I say this. But there's a million things that went on. We're not getting an airdrop that night or we're having problems with the co-located SF team. And so you just kind of, you learn on the fly and you've got to have a lot of humility and um and and you know one of the coolest things i remember when i when my book came out

i you know the book release was at a small independent bookstore here in vienna where i live and it was wonderful because my town and but one of the case officers from schkin who's going on to be a multiple time chief of station came and um and he saw my son who at that time was it was in high school and he said your dad was the best leader i ever had and my son was really proud and he told me this story later and he said why and and so this is the story that this case officer told he said he said He said, you know, when we were in Schen, what your dad used to do was he'd have to go back to Kabul. Probably I was getting yelled at by the chiefest station for, you know, starting World War III with Pakistan or something. But I'd have to travel around the country.

And so each time I left, I would, you know, let's say it was 48 hours. And, you know, there's no formal, you know, I'm still in charge. You know, I don't have to write a cable. But I would take each of the five or six case officers. And I would say for the next 48 hours, you're in charge. And I remember jumping on the Hila, the MI17 one time, taken off. One of the case officers looked at me and said, hey, boss, you know, I want you to, you know, I'll hold down the fort. And this is not the right management technique.

But I grabbed him by the shirt and I said, what are you fucking talking about? You know, when we're taking fire, which we're going to, guaranteed, you know, shoot back. You know, you have, there's a big asset meeting coming up. Really big deal. When I come back here, you know, we can go over the decisions you made, but I don't want to have to make any decisions that were that you held. Right. And so, and so the case officer said that taught him so much and gave him so much confidence. And the reason why that matters is because shit goes wrong all the time.

Right. You know, whether we're in some kind of crazy engagement with, you know, a cross-border or, you know, God forbid, you know, there was five of our Afghan indigenous, you know, heroes, I call the members of our team who were killed, our, the commander of the unit was killed there. There's some really horrible things that happened. And so in crisis situations, all of a sudden, what have you done? You've taught other members of your team on how to lead. And so, you know, it just, to me, that was just. kind of cool that this guy, you know, took something. Because here's the one thing, Dave and Andy.

When, you know, when I'm long gone, like everyone has their hero room. I'm sure you guys do too. So you can come down and we can have a, you know, look, I'm drinking. In honor of Dee, I'm drinking a glass of Uzo. So, because I can't drink any bourbon or anything like that anymore. But, you know, we can go down and I can show you the hero wall, all the fancy shit I earned. But nobody remembers that.

Nobody cares about that in statistics or medals. Someone's just going to say, like, hey, Mark was a good leader. And he taught me a lot of stuff. And if you can walk away with that, I think that's what you want your legacy to be, not all the, all the crap that you hear about accolades. And of course,

I sound like a hypocrite because if I, you know, if I'm introduced somewhere, they'll say some of the things that I, some of the awards that I won, but I don't care about that. It's really just, you know, how you pass the torch to the next generation.

That to me was always the coolest thing. It was a feeling of love. Most valuable thing you have is your rep. That's it. Yeah. That's the, you mentioned that, you know,

you grab this, this case officer and said, hey, you know, kind of gave some leadership direction. Was there anybody senior to you or even junior to you that had that kind of influence on you when you got to Schen? Oh, my God. What a, yes. And so, you know, he was not in the agency anymore. But my mentor at CIA was a guy by the name of Charlie Seidel.

And he's passed away now. He was probably the CIA's greatest Arabist. You know, his dad was in the agency. He grew up in Iran. He went to school in Beirut, spoke perfect Arabic. And I served with him in three locations, including in Iraq when I went in with him just with the J-Soc forces. I was one of the case officers assigned to Dev Group going in in the infill. And Charlie had incredible effect on me because, again, he, I remember, you know, he gave me some insane cases to handle,

which were, you know, changed U.S. policy. He put so much faith in me, and he also did it with a smile in his face. And so he was one of my mentors. And I think if you look at the leadership of the agency now and the director of operations, not just in Near East Mission Center, but the two, I got to say this, right, the last two DDOs were mentees of his. And he's passed away now, unfortunately. But let me tell you a story about Charlie.

So after six months in Iraq, you know, And we were, this is, you know, going back to the late O2, I went up living with the Kurds up in the mountains. It was a joint agency, 10th group team. And then I got pulled to go with Dev Gru in for the HVT hunt. We're going after the, you know, the deck of 55. And I had a wild ride and came back. And I was all fucked up from it. I was waking up in the middle of the night, seeing dead bodies everywhere.

I mean, you know, we were collecting intelligence and we're, you know, we're catching people. and then we were also, you know, passing some targets. You know, I literally would have an agent meeting and I'd knock on the door of a Bradley. And I'd give the coordinates to the Bradley crew and you go and then you hear that gun go off. And so there's a lot of nasty shit that I saw. And again, I was a regular case.

I was not former military. So I was a regular case officer. And so I came back, but I spoke Arabic. But I came back all jacked up from that. And my wife was really scared. And she calls up Charlie and says, hey, Mark is fucked up. Like, I'm worried about him.

He's waking up in the middle of the night. He's having nightmares, dead bodies. And Charlie, just said the goodness of his heart, and we were all back from Iraq, the original team. He invited 20 of us and all of our families up to his cottage in Cape Cod for two weeks just to get the team back together. And the cover was that. But it was really the reason was because I was really suffering. And, of course, what did I refuse to do? You know, I remember going back in front of the shrink at the agency.

You know, how you doing? I'm fine. You see anything any nightmares? No, good. And so because I'm not saying anything because I don't want to lose my security clearance because I had a follow on assignment after that. Right. But Charlie, you know, what he did for me for those two weeks, and I, and I, and I really helped my healing. And I came back and, you know, the nightmares went away.

But that's that. I mean, you want to talk about leadership? I mean, Charlie did that just for me. And so I got a lot of love for that guy. And just, just one of the greats. But, you know, again, that's what, that's the, that's the legacy that Charlie will have, not the great operations he ran. And he ran some great ones. It's the things he did for people.

Yeah. Yeah. So real quick, we need to give a shout out to our sponsor. First off, hey guys, do you know about how much your subscriptions, your monthly subscriptions really cost? Most Americans think they spend around $80 a month on subscriptions, but the actual total cost is closer to 200. If you don't know exactly how much you're spending a month, you need rocket money. And we all need rocket money. Rocket money is a personal finance app that fines and cancels your unwanted subscriptions,

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So, you know, Mike is a special forces legend. And one of the things he realized when he was overseas a lot that, you know, guys were drinking a lot of energy drinks that had a ton of sugar and it was just dehydrated them. So he created vitamin one. You can get it on Amazon under our lung, under our link. It's got no sugar. I mean, all the vitamins you need, the electrolytes you need. It's great tasting. It has a really light taste to it.

And you can drink this without getting that sticky, like, gooey, and dehydrating feeling you get with... Or taking your shirt off. Well, but we always encourage that here on the team house. Yeah, I was not paid to drink this. It's actually, it's great stuff. Yeah. So go to Amazon. The link is below.

And, you know, check out Mike's Drink, Vitamin 1. will love it. Thanks for being patient with us, Mark. So what, when you got up to, can you tell us what SIS is in the CIA? So the senior intelligence service, it's the equivalent of getting your, you know, your one star in the military. And so you just kind of rise up the ranks there. You know, it's, you know, it's a pretty big honor.

I do, I saw it's, you know, there's a big ceremony at the bubble at CIA headquarters. It's the auditorium at CIA headquarters. And it's, you know, I think it's a very small percentage of director, of any officers, but for the director of operations officers who make that. So it was a, it was a huge honor. I remember, though, sitting there. And again, this is just, you know, my weird kind of whole story. And there's, we could spend hours here.

I'd have to go get some, I'd have to get, have Dee get me some more Uzo. But, but I remember feeling guilty sitting there because I had also been involved in something. earlier in my career, which was the Operation and Coast, where some of some of my colleagues were killed. And so I remember sitting there thinking, I don't deserve this. And so that's a kind of whole other different story. But, you know, talk about having highs and lows in one's career. And I think that's another reason, again, where you know, you can't do this job without a sense of humility, because you have, you know, we do things that are unbelievable, can, can, you know, affect U.S. policy. he certainly can affect world events,

especially in counterterrorism, removing really bad guys from the battlefield, but then there's some terrible tragedies that that happened too. So I remember really reflecting in that ceremony and thinking that I didn't deserve. But I rose to the ranks. I ended up being at the SIS 4 level, which is, I guess, the equivalent of a three- or four-star general.

I think at my last job, I probably had a thousand or plus people working for me across Europe and Eurasia. But the truth be told, and I think everyone will say this, who makes it to the SIS ranks is that is by far the worst part of my career. I mean, you know, being a line case officer, you know, doing an operational meeting in the back alleys of Damascus, you know,

that was a high that you can't even describe. Or times in Iraq or Afghanistan, you know, places like that. But, you know, your last jobs, even though you have a fancy title, you're doing people and resources and worrying about personnel issues. The one thing, and I'm sure it's the same in the military, you know, for both you guys. But maybe Andy can comment. I mean, you know, at some point, you get to a place where there's just every day, you know, you have six different personnel issues to deal with. Someone's done something stupid.

You know, how do you do this? Do you rehabilitate them? You try to keep them. I mean, that takes all your time. And it's important because people are everything. But there's nothing like being that line officer in a conflict situation. You know, getting promoted is kind of crappy. Yeah, I think probably the direct correlation for, you know, us in the military.

military. I mean, I, too, we all, all of us can absolutely relate to that. But, but for me, the times of direct leadership were the purest. You know, even, even in peacetime, even prior to, you know, kick off the wars that we, we became involved in, company command, you know, company command was great. And then as you, and then, you know, battalion command was cool. But as you get more and more indirect, but you touched on, there's, there are rewards in indirect leadership too. You use an example with your case officer, right? So you're not, you know, you are, you're training, you're focusing on other guys, developing to be leaders.

I never got to the level you did. So I never got to, you know, quite to that. You're lucky. Yeah, never quite got to that. I mean, where you are so, so removed. But I, but yeah, absolutely. Reg metal command. this is blasphemy in the Marine Corps

was not fun. It wasn't even that rewarding. Yeah. It was, you know, but everything that came before it was great. You know, one of the things that what I try to do when I go around, I talk to a lot of colleges and I try to get people

kind of jazzed up about national security in anything, whether it's going in the military, the FBI, CIA, being a diplomat of the State Department. But, you know, one of the neat things about what I tell people about CIA is actually the most rewarding parts of your career are going to be in the beginning. So why is that as a case officer? Well, you're clean.

Nobody knows who you are. The Russians and the Iranians and the Chinese have no idea. So you're probably right on, it's almost counterintuitive, but you're going to do the most sensitive stuff, the most sense that you're going to run the most sensitive operations very early on in your career. The other thing is you've been through training recently. You've been through maybe advanced surveillance training. All the, you know, you've been through all these schools where your skills are so kind of finely tuned. And so the great thing is that you actually, don't wait years and years to do really cool stuff. You do it right off the bat.

And at a pretty young age. And one of the things that I'll never forget, I was training, I'm going to be careful how to say this. I've had so many of these stories cleared by the agency's publication review board. So I'm okay to talk about it. So here's the story. So I was training an agent of ours, a member of an Arab government, to go back into his home country.

And it was a high counterintelligence threat environment. We're on the streets of Europe, and I'm teaching them trade crafts, surveillance detection routes, communication procedures, how this guy is going to survive for hopefully two or three years. He's posted back in his country. I'm assigned to that country or will be. And we have this incredible bond and relationship. And so we're going through this training. And one of the things that he said to me at one point was, and people will get this, especially if you served overseas. He said, Mark, I know you're going to be watching.

And he knows that he knew this. I know you're going to be watching AFN, Armed Forces Network. Everyone knows AFN if you've served at embassies or the military. So you're going to watch AFN. You're going to watch football on Sunday, that afternoon's nights or whatever in the middle of the night. You're going to think about me every once in a while because maybe our meeting cycle is once a month or once every two months. It's such a high threat environment. And so you're going to think about it.

He goes, I know you have other things to do, but let me tell you something. I'm going to think about you every single day. Because if you make one mistake, you know, I'm going to get killed, my family is going to kill, my tribe is going to get. killed and he said so you have to be perfect and so i was 25 years old when he said this to me or 26 years old and that's stunning and so and so i was like holy shit i have this guy's life in my hands and i never forgot that and i told that story to so many case officers who i've managed in the future and because i've said you know this is this is it's it's an honor you have you know someone has put their life and faith in the u.s government they've made this incredible uh psychological hurdle to spy not

against their country, against their government. It's an Iranian or a Chinese or Russian or Iraqi or Syrian or whoever. But the pact that we have is we're going to keep them safe. And so, you know, that's your responsibility. And that to me was an incredible part of the job. That person, you know, I call it, it wasn't a psych 101 class. It was a psych 501 class. And you better take that shit seriously because also in my career, I lost agents. You know, agents were caught and compromised and killed. And that's horrible. For whatever reason, whether it was. was, you know, I had some responsibility or just bad stuff happened or the agent screwed up. But what a job where you have that, that, you know, someone's life in your hands, you have

that responsibility of another person, the bond you form with another human being. It's, you know, it's not, it's not a marriage. It's not a relationship like that. But it's certainly very personal. And I found that remarkable. Mark, how, you know, especially as you were going up the chain, whether it was at Schen or when you got to the SIS level. You know, we talk about leadership in the military. And at the end of the day, like, you need to be a good leader in the military, but you also have the UCMJ, right? And you have a lot of,

you have a lot of resources, you know, non-judicial punishment, you know, just little dings on somebody, like you can smoke them sometimes. Like, you have all these options. In the CIA, especially in these war zones, you don't have, especially, somebody wants to go home or somebody wants to quit midway through or if they decide they just want to be shitty at their job you don't have the same sort of like legal a recourse so how do you handle those types of in these extreme environments how do you handle the leadership in those situations no i mean so because there's the safety element there um you know i certainly you know I sent people home from, you know, as a manager in the field, both from kind of regular, you know,

embassy assignments, but also in conflict zones because you have to. You know, there's the idea of the element of safety. There's a counterintelligence threat as well if someone's disgruntled. And then sometimes, you know, there's, I would say, you know, there's people who shouldn't be carrying a weapon for one reason or another. And the agents, I found the agency was, was, because one of the things that you, you know, this is not necessarily a ding on their career forever. But if you're saying, hey, this person is a risk to themselves and to the team, we can get them out of there pretty quickly.

And to me, that was, you know, I took that very serious. I clearly remember sending someone home from a conflict zone because it was a support officer who just didn't want to be there, shouldn't be carrying a weapon, you know. And when you have other people or team coming to you and saying, hey, you know, we got a problem here. You got to take action on it. One of the things that I think that, you know, the agency is not good at is, is kind of is accountability in the sense of, you know, very often we don't, you know, some of this stuff wouldn't be recorded.

And so someone would get kind of shipped off to another assignment and you hear something that something bad happened down the road. I mean, it's the difference between, here's a, here's a perfect example. And I think, you guys correct me, both of you, correct me if I'm wrong. promotions at the agency, you know, are not blind in the sense when people come up in the promotion boards, it's a small place so people know who's, you know, if you're sitting on a promotion panel, people are, you know, know who's, who's, their name and what they call the hall file, which is actually kind of bad. My understanding is in the military, they're,

for a long time, they're blind promotions, which I think is good because then you take that that personal kind of part of it out where people, you know, kind of bad apples can be protected. But is that still the case? It is in principle, Mark. Yeah. But like everything, it's run by human beings. So the whole file is still there. The whole file is, the whole file gets discussed in the hall.

It just can't be discussed in the room. But everyone leaves that room to talk. Yeah. So, you know, I, and I'm not sure that's, I'm not sure that's a bad thing, frankly. You know, and it ties in with what we discussed earlier. The most important thing you have is your reputation. Yeah. Mark, I would that ask you something because it's very intriguing.

So you're talking about, and Dave asked you what do you do when you don't have that weight of UCMJ behind you in a combat zone? But you, at the age of 25, that was a really, I thought that was a really cool story, you know, about your source explaining to you exactly. you took that very seriously. There must be a lot of case officers who do not and treat. I mean, this is not a critique of the CIA at all. I'm just saying, you know, when you are focusing on bringing that sort of guy in, you know,

you said narcissistic, borderline narcissistic, borderline sociopath. Yeah. So, I mean, did you see it as your role subsequently, though, to kind of remind case officers that they weren't dealing with chattels, they weren't dealing with markers on the way to promotion but human beings. So there's a, there's a term that's used at the agency, which I hated. And, you know, I mean, I was not a dictator. So I, you know, when I told people I don't like it,

I hope they would just listen and not use it, but it's called scalps. And a scalp is a recruitment. That means that a case officer has, you know, done a full cycle recruitment, spot assess, develop, recruit, an agent. But they called them scalps. And that has a pretty negative connotation that is certainly not personal. And I hated that because, again, the beauty of the job I found

was that personal interaction and the relationship between a case officer, a recruiting case officer, a handling case officer, and the agent. But, you know, some people did kind of, you know, treat it as a number. Because, again, it's a bureaucracy. So to get promoted at CIA as a case officer,

you have to recruit agents. So people would have, you know, it ended up being a numbers game and they'd call them scalps. And I thought that was gross. And I hated that word. And, but, you know, at the same time, it is, it is something that you have to understand a relationship between an asset and the agency is institutionalized. So, you know, I will, you know, throughout the conversation tonight, you'll see there's a lot of elements of humility. There's some things I was bad at as a case officer. So I was a good recruiting officer.

I would recruit a target. I would have a hard time turning them over because often the target would say, well, Mark, I know you work for the CIA. I've met analysts who have come out. You know, I'm getting paid. I know I'm spying against my government for the CIA. But I'm really doing this for you because, you know, we met a year ago. And, you know, my family.

Of course, I was developing them. So it was using all that. It was manipulative in that sense. But one of the things I wasn't good at sometimes was turning over the asset, the agent to another case officer because it was too personal. Yeah. And I cared too much. And that was one of the kind of the reputation I had too. And so the case officer is coming after me is saying, oh, shit, you know, I got a big, I got a big task.

I almost have to re-recruit this asset because the asset knows he's taking money. He's providing secrets. He's working for the CIA. You know, it's a clandestine relationship. But he freaking loves Mark. And so, so, yeah, and so I was not good at institutionalizing it. So I think there's a, you know, there's, there's a line between kind of that very impersonal view of calling it a scalp, which again, I find gross. And then the really personal bond that I had with, with agents as well.

And but, but I, but I tell you know, there's that that, that's psych, that it's so interesting to me, you know, the agency obviously has psychologists and psychiatrists, but the idea of, of, of, of a Russian or a Chinese or an Iranian, you know, government official making that decision to spy to me is a staggering decision right to make which is which has just incredibly profound implications for their entire life and security um and and let me tell you one other kind of cool story we we exiled an agent one time uh on on one of our aircraft i think it was a g5 and you know and so we pick up this agent his whole family the family had no idea he worked for the cia we fly him a thousand miles we land down in the florida keys and i walk out in this dock and i tell them you know, I mean, it was funny that the wife of the agent, the agent's, the agent had to leave. He was under duress. He was going to get caught. The wife is freaking out had no idea. And the two kids

were like, they're psyched. They're like, we're going to America. It was awesome. But I remember giving this speech to them saying, you know, welcome to America. And they're crying and I'm crying. And it's a there is really this emotional bond we have with these people. And so I don't want, I hope we never lose that. And sometimes you call them, you know, there's a number. game case officers have to recruit to get promoted. But these are these are real people who make some really astounding decisions to work for us. And I think let's let's, you know, let's even, even when you talk about just kind of big things in the news, about, you know, our withdrawal from Afghanistan or pulling forces out of Syria. I mean, the U.S. doesn't have a great track record of,

you know, of keeping our alliances. And I think, I think that's something that I struggled with a lot, too. the Iraqi Kurdines or the Syrians. That's been really troubling to me over the years. Again, because I got too close to these people. Yeah. I mean, you'd think at this point in time, the Kurds would just look at us as that abusive boyfriend that keeps coming back and promising them. I'm not unbelievable. Right? Because we've done this to them since like the late 90s, you know, the late 80s and 90s. Dave, Dave, Dave, this is December 2002. We're up in Kurdistan and I'm talking to senior Kurdish official, who of course has dealt with the CIA, Mossad, the Iraqi, the Iraqis. the Iranians, the Brits. And I'm a young case officer.

And I'm giving him my like motivational. America's going to save you. And he stopped. He's like, stop it. He goes, this is a marriage of convenience right here. Right. He goes, don't ever just lay this bullshit on me again. I was like, all right, sorry.

Mark, I'm curious because, you know, case officers we've talked to in the past. Like there's obviously a lot of them become very close to their agents. And that type of rapport. is essential in the intelligence gathering process, right? You have to have empathy. You actually have to, even if you don't like what they do, you know, if you're, you know, recruiting an arms dealer or whatever, even if you know they're a criminal, like you have to find the humanity in them.

Yep. Right? And but you also mentioned this idea of scalps. Does the agency, and, you know, sort of going back to the whole relationship idea, There are people who, there are guys who are great at picking up women who at a bar who will drop them the next day, right? And even anybody in a serious relationship has probably manipulated their way into that relationship a little bit. But is there a metric in the agency for the case saucers that are just getting scalps and those that are capable of developing those relationships that lead to real intelligence, production?

Yeah, I think that's based on your hall file too. So, you know, there are certainly great recruiters, but are not very good at handling. Right. There's great handlers who are not very good at recruiting. There's case officers who, you know, were known to kind of, you know, recruit a lot of assets, but they didn't stick. So, you know, what you want to do is you recruit someone, you want to turn over. If you turn it over to the next case officer, that means the relationship is institutional

Right. You know, and so, so it is, and it's a mixed bag. Now, going back to a leadership piece, I remember, you know, I was the deputy of a 400 person station at one point, and we had some case officers who were great handlers, and we had case officers who are great recruiters. And so your job as a manager is to balance that out. You know, you want to get them promoted, so everyone has to recruit, but you still have to write your production. You still have to, you know, you have your agency you're handling, so you have to write your foreign intelligence reports. But it's, but, you know, Not everybody's great at everything, and that's okay, too. And so I definitely know of officers who, here's a great story. I've got to kind of sanitize this a little bit. One of the great, the best asset I ever handled, extremely senior level official in an Arab government, long since been resettled in the United States. And I asked them what time I said, you know, and of course I knew from the file, I said, what happened? How did you decide to make the jump? He said, well, I've been going to these diplomatic receptions,

and I saw all these kind of, you know, American diplomats who were kind of these glad handlers. They'd walk up to everybody shaking their hand. Hey, how's it going? Life of the party. And he's like, those are the fucking CIA guys. I'm staying away from them or gals. And he goes, and then I picked this one guy.

And he was quiet. And he sat in the back of the room, just observed people. And he was invisible. And he's like, he's like, I know that's a CIA officer. and that's the guy I'm going to trust my life to. And he walked up to him one day. And so I remember back in the bullpen with all the case officers, they're like, that's bullshit.

And he was recruited, and he was an incredible agent. Change the course of U.S. foreign policy to this particular country. And I remember people saying, well, that officer shouldn't get credit for the recruitment. And I was like bullshit. That officer is not like you assholes or like me. I'm a type A personality. I was probably the jerk trying to be the life of the party. That officer actually was really smart because the agent

candidate was looking around saying who is not who's the life of the party who's the outgoing American he's saying i want i want this i got to find someone who's going to protect me right you know i'm not going to get caught and that's the guy and i love that story and i told that again i tried to teach that to a lot of officers too because we have great case officers who were introverts and we have we have great case officers who are extroverts but you know you can be an introvert and be extremely successful and i think that's i'll never forget that story mark too that's that's that's fascinating story because what you're talking about is culture right you're talking about

the CIA I'm asking to go out on the limb here does the agency have it right when it comes to culture you know I mean do you I mean is it self-regulating do you yeah no no I think that well let me just preface as I have great friends who are there

and then I went through my troubles with the organization when they kind of I felt they kind of abandoned me with some health issues. But the culture is one that is, it is so focused on that, that, that ideal of a case officer operating on their own. So, so I think it's almost,

again, it's the sociopath narcissist. How do you then switch that to it to a culture of inclusion? Now, that's not to say there were not incredible people there and heroes that I met along the way and people who took care of me. But the culture of the agency, you know, I mean, it's, you know, it's still a place. and you know Bill Burns,

the director would be horrified if I said this, but I still think it's a place where, you know, where it's harder for women to advance in the operations officer ranks. It always has been. We have a problem in recruiting minorities.

And this is not political at all. I would talk about the power of diversity because everywhere I went in every station our female case officers handled the most sensitive agents. Now, why is that? It's because in the Arab world, a female officer can put on

an abaya be covered walk out to a surveillance detection route never be found um you know there's you know but but again it's you know they handled our most sensitive uh assets and so uh but it but it's not necessarily a friendly place or it's better but not necessarily a friendly place towards women and the promotion statistics are terrible and the director of operations and so i think there there is an issue with with culture there it's hard though again because you know you want this type a not type a personality but a sociopath, narcissist, or borderline. You have to make decisions on your own. Everything is, you know, is focused on that, on the case officer out on the street, making critical operational calls. How do you mesh that up with a culture of teamwork and,

and kind of inclusion? That's hard. Now, real quick, you know, for anybody who's sort of, you know, questioning the language you're using or is critical of it, there, there are There are specific reasons. Like, there are specific reasons you want sociopathic traits, same as in special operations, right? In special operations, you need to be able to kill somebody without feeling overly remorseful about it. In the agency, you have to get some, you have to put somebody's life in peril in order to gain intelligence for our country. Now, you're not intentionally putting their life in peril, right? You're not like hanging out.

By definition, you are. Dave, you're right. If I, if I, if I, if I, if I'm trying to recruit you as a Russian, what I'm doing to you is putting you in danger. Right. Now, you're going to do it for the right reasons. Right. Right. Um, you're right.

So it's, you know, that's a, that's a, that's a hundred, that's a weird thing to do. That's not what someone who's working at, I don't know, at Apple or Google does. Right. Right. Right. And the borderline narcissistic thing is, you are. You're not persuading them to change shops. Yeah.

Right. And the borderline narcissistic thing is you need people who are confident. You need people who aren't like second doubting. you know, second, you know, doubting themselves constantly, uh, like you need somebody who has a lot of confidence. And again, you're saying borderline narcissus. You're not saying narcissists is somebody who's just like, oh, look at me, how great I am. You know, they're not like Archer.

Like, you know, what's the point of being a secret agent? If you can't tell people you're a secret agent, right? Like, right. Right. Right. No, I look back on my career. And again, there were some highs and there were some lows. But, you know, I'm still in contact with, you know, my whole kind of network of,

of folks who did kind of crazy stuff, whether it was Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan. And, you know, so my wars were different. I think CIA's wars are different than perhaps the regular military in the sense. You know, we were there for a specific mission in the counterterrorism center, was to kill al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and we did it really well. Right. And so when someone asked me, you know, what was Afghanistan like?

I was like, it was fucking awesome. I'm sorry, it just was. Right. Now, I was not in the Karengal getting my ass shot off. And so there was people who really had tough job. I was there. We were recruiting agents to put bad guys on the X and taking them off the battlefield to protect Americans.

And these were some senior HVTs. I'm sorry. It was awesome. Right. And I can't apologize for that. But that's who you want to go to a place like that. Right. You know, and so, you know, let me tell you one.

I don't know if I told this story, but this goes back to kind of the essence of what we do. When I was in Schen, I got there. There was a Taliban member who was on. on our, obviously on our target list, and he was responsible for killing two of our former colleagues from ground branch. And I remember gathering the team around in the beginning,

and I'm saying like, whatever we do this whole year, we're getting this dude. We just have to for the honor of our former comrades. And I remember sitting around the fire pit and you know, everyone knows that's caveman TV in our old world, but sitting around the fire pit after he was removed, this Taliban member was removed from the battlefield,

I think my, you know, classified email blew up with about 400 messages from all over the country, from all over the world, and thinking like, holy shit, we just did something really good. We eventually death of two of our colleagues. And, you know, in typical fashion of the way I kind of, you know, like to run things there, you know, we picked up a satellite phone. We called back to one of the widows in Fort Bragg. And of course, this is not authorized. And the organization probably would not be, be, would, would, would, would, would think this was a good idea, but we told her that we avenged the death of her husband. And I thought that was, I remember sitting around that night and I was, you know, tears in my eyes saying, you know, we did good that day. And so, you know, so in one sense, there's the culture of that, which is really good. And so, you know, it's, you know, it goes, it's, and I think that everyone is involved in that

office will forever be proud. I don't, you know, this is a, this is a really bad person who took off the battlefield, still plotting attacks against U.S. in military. But we did something special for the organization. And that to me is something that I'll never forget. And I, you know, I won't say the names of the two of our two deceased officers, but you all would probably know who they were. Mark, so you talked about sort of the agency not supporting you.

Can you tell us about a little bit about Moscow and the repercussions? Because really, you were the person who brought Havana syndrome to light. or you were the person who had the most, like, weight in order to bring this to light. And, no, thanks for asking, Dave. And again, you guys have been really supportive of me. And I've come on and told my story every now. And then this is such a controversial topic. And I've had such a miserable, you know, fight with the agency about this.

But essentially, in December 2017, I took a trip to Moscow for what we call area fam, which is area of familiarization. You know, I was at that point, I was a deputy ops chief for, you know, overseeing 50 countries in that region of the world. But I had never been to Russia. I was a Middle East hand. So I wanted to go see the embassy. I wanted to meet with John Huntsman, who was the ambassador in Moscow at the time.

And it just, I think it was a trip was Moscow and St. Petersburg. And, you know, one of the first nights of the trip, I woke up completely fucked up with massive vertigo, a headache. My room was spinning. I was physically sick. something really bad happened. And it started this terrible health journey because when I came back home after 10 days, the agency docs didn't believe me.

My condition was deteriorating terribly. It was to the point where I lost my... Mark, can I say, what do you mean they didn't believe you? So they said that, well, they didn't believe me in a sense. I came back. I said, I think something happened because this sounds familiar with what had happened to the officials at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba. the year before in 2016.

And they put me through some rudimentary protocols. And they said, no, you don't look the same. I was like, well, wait a second. I have terrible vertigo. I have a splitting. It's called occipital neurologia. I had a splitting headache. At that time, I lost my long-distance vision.

I couldn't drive. My cognitive abilities were all screwed up. Meanwhile, I had this super important job, but I was struggling to go to work every day. And often I was, I was gutting like we all do, kind of trying to gut through it. And ultimately by mid-19, well, no, I'm sorry, even early 2019, I couldn't do it anymore. Ironically, the DDO at the time asked me

to come up and be one of the ADDOs, which is a huge promotion at one of the top levels of the operations director. This is a dream for any case officer, but I couldn't barely go to work every day. And so I had to retire. And what happened after that is, I continue to ask the agency for access to places where the Havana,

Embassy Havana victims were being treated, which was University of Pennsylvania or University of Miami. And the answer was no. And so they were just, I mean, it was incredible. All I needed was, all I wanted was to get medical care. And so this was a staggering leadership fail. It kind of culminated in me actually taking this crazy step. And it's something that I have, you know, you always have to live with.

you know, consequences, but I went public with this. I went to a journalist named Julia Yaffe, who was writing at the time for GQ. She was a Russia expert, and she wrote this massive, you know, 20,000, 30,000 word story about me. And it caused this enormous shitstorm. Three former CIA directors who I knew called me and then called the agency and said, what the fuck? How can you not send this guy to care? And within days, I was admitted to Walter Reed's TBI program, the national interest. Center of Excellence. What were they, what was the agency in the government's position on the officials from Havana

who had had symptoms? It was very mixed. You know, they knew something had happened. So these, you know, Havana is a denied area. So the case officers that I knew there were tip of the spirit guys and gals had gone through advanced surveillance detection, trading young in their careers. And they were totally fucked up. And so they were, but it's, but, you know, the, they.

They really didn't know what to do about them or with them. And so it was very mixed. They were getting treatment at University of Pennsylvania, but there still was this kind of question on what happened or not. And so they were kind of in this limbo with some people believe them. Some people didn't. But they did get, they did get health care. What were they being treated for when they were there, just the symptoms?

So they were diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries. And they were being treated for, some of them had vertigo. terrible cases of vertigo but mostly it was tbis and then this happened to me in moscow and but then whatever for whatever reason they kind of rejected all of my claims now this is this is strange i'm pretty senior in the organization the ddo was begging the office of medical services to to send me to to walter reed and they refused and they were saying things and then i retired but then even then i had points of contact there so i was asking to get treated and they just they were saying that was making this up for workers' comp.

I was a equivalent of a four-star general. I don't need fucking workers' comp. My pension was great. Workers' comp would have screwed me up and six ways to Sunday. And so I finally went public and I eventually got to Walter Reed. And this story I've told to you all before, but there's actually more that I haven't. So I'll tell you some more things that happened since then. So I went to Walter Reed and it was at NICO, the National Intrepid Center of Excellence.

It's an incredible program and they definitely saved my. my life. And we'll talk about that in a second, but let me also say that in the last time I've talked to you all in this period, Congress passed what's called the Havana Act, which provides a certain amount of compensation in the six-figure, low six-figure range for victims of Havana syndrome. And this became quite, you know, I helped with this. It became quite controversial, and the agency had to implement it. And they fought this for a long time, but I will be happy to tell you and listeners here that I won my case. Because Walter Reed at, you know, NICO, the TBI clinic, said the following to the CIA, that I suffered a TBI in Moscow.

It was not a pre-existing condition. Imaging, there's plenty of, you know, clinical studies that have, or tests that have showed what happened to me. And so I received a settlement. I essentially won my case after this enormous struggle with the agency. And, you know, I don't think I've told you all this before, but that was, I remember when they, the, the, the agency called and Bill Burns actually called me and the CI director called me and told me this. And I had tears in my eyes because it had been such an incredible struggle. And, you know, with treatment at Walter Reed, but also some other kinds of new treatments I'm getting as well.

And, you know, it's taken five or six years for me to finally feel better. But I was really, I was really jacked up. You know, Walter Reed every day if you go there, they ask you, you know, do you want to kill yourself? And I would say no every time. My wife, they bring the spouses in at the end. And they asked my wife, are you worried about Mark taking his life? She said every day. And I was shocked because I didn't realize how jacked up I was.

But I am feeling much better now. Remarkably, you know, better. But it's taken six years. Yeah. And what, did you ever get any sense of what the hesitation or denial? Because we've seen this with veterans, right? We've seen it with Agent Orange. We've seen it with Burn pits syndrome.

Burn pits. Yep. Yeah, like we've seen this denial from the government. Is it a lack of understanding on their part? Because you're not private Joe Snuffy, like showing up to medical with a migraine before PT. Like, you are a senior executive officer in the CIA. Did you get any sense of like where this, like I said, do you think it's a lack of information? Do you think it's an institutional, like, fuck you guys?

I mean, where do you think it is? Yeah, Dave. And so people have asked this question so many times. And so one of the things I always come back to, usually there's no conspiracies in the government. Usually it's just people are incompetent. And you're going to laugh when I say that. And so in the one sense, I'm like, these people just are, we're incompetent. But the things that, and the one thing about the agency is that I still mean.

really great ties inside. And so when my case would come up in a meeting somewhere. And I remember I told this to Bill Burns as well, because Burns, ironically enough, believes me that something happened. He was the ambassador in Moscow. So with whatever's going on with all the studies and all the analytic kind of diarrhea that happens here, he actually legitimately believes something happened. But I told him, I said, every time someone says some shit about me in the building,

I find out about it. And they would say things, senior people would say things like Mark wants workers' comp, or Mark's making it up to, you know, sell his book or just some nonsensical shit. Meanwhile, I am suffering. Right. And I'm not, you know, you know, people, people might, you know, obviously I'm a public figure now, so I go do TV stuff and some people might like me or not like me or whatever. But the amount of suffering I went through for five years is staggering.

I mean, you know, if I, it's amazing. I don't have, even though I'm drinking a news on now here, I really don't have an addictive personality. If I did, I'd be dead. Yeah. I would have. And because the chronic pain of waking up with a five level, six level headache every day for years of having brain fog, you know, the inability to kind of deal with any kind of problem or any kind of, you know, deal with life. It was horrible. Yeah. And, and, and but, but the agency folks would just, what's amazing to me is all I was asking for was a doctor's appointment at Walter Reed. Right. And so is it is incompetence? Are they worried about lawsuits? I will tell you one thing. And again, I haven't said this in public. I don't think I have at all is I went and I testified in front of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House permanent selecting Committee on Intelligence. And I said to both the House and the Senate and I name names.

And I said, I blame individuals at the agency for my suffering. Only because they didn't get me a fucking doctor's appointment. I'm not even talking about this. Like, how can you, by the way, and one of the great things about NICO about Walter Reed. I remember meeting with the deputy director as I left there and they saved my life. And I said, you know, the agency for a long time was whining and bitching that it was too expensive. How much did it cost to send me here to NICO? And he's like, this place has ingested thousands of people.

And he goes, it's funny you ask that, Mark. Because I, and I knew you would. He goes, we figured it costs you $37 to the U.S. government for you to come for a month here. How much? $37. So what in the world was the agency doing and not sending me there? Because it's a place where there's, you know, there's so many people going for TBI treatment.

And so, you know, to me that there was such a massive leadership failness. Bill Burns corrected it, to his credit, you know, and certainly the implementation of the Havana Act, you know, many of us have received compensation for the government. But I'll tell you, you know, I would have paid six figures back to anybody for me not to have gone through what I did. Right. So, Mark, you described that. You described it almost dispassionately.

but what was this doing to you? I mean, this was an organization you've devoted, risked your life for, and the sense of betrayal must have. I mean, betrayal maybe, maybe. Oh, no, no, that's the word I used. They're trading you like a Walmart slipping fall or compensation kicks, right? So I'll tell you, you know, and I went through so much at Walter Reed, and they do, you know, obviously they try a lot of pharmaceutical stuff,

and that never worked for me. I didn't react well to it. I did a lot of kind of the softer side of healing, which is everything from, you know, meditation to, you know, deep breathing techniques. A lot about nutrition and hydration and exercise. But there's a person I'll never forget there. He was, you guys will love this. He was a Marine Corps chaplain, obviously called Chappie. And so, and so he comes to me one day.

And he comes, it was me and some guys from, from Dev Group there, because you go through with a cohort. cohort of four. And he's like, he's like, do any of you have any kind of qualms about, about killing people? And everyone kind of laughed and said, that's not what we're here for. And then he said, you know, and he said, well, individually took me aside. He goes, what's, what's your issue? And I said, betrayal. I said, this organization that I dedicated my entire life to, my wife worked, you know, worked there as well. She's retired now. I gave everything to go. I volunteered for every goddamn hard assignment. I was in every conflict that was out there. I think I was involved in every covert action program in the Middle East.

I said, but I feel an amazing sense of betrayal. Also, after when I went public, I was shunned by people inside. These are some of my friends. And so, and this Marine Corps chaplain was great. And he taught me about forgiveness, which was so important for me. And it's not saying that these people, you know, didn't do stuff wrong. But he's like, you have to, you have to kind of remove that anger. Yeah.

Or you'll never get over this. Right. And, and, you know, I say this very dispassionally now, but it was incredibly emotional time for me. And I'll tell you that one story. It doesn't make the agency look all that great. But I went back, you know, Bill Burns, when he became director, had me in every once in a while I'd go in to see him because he actually genuinely, he was one of my ambassadors overseas. So he generally cared about how I was doing. And I remember seeing senior officials.

They saw me. They're like, what the fuck is he doing here? I thought he was on the outs. But all of a sudden, he sees me with the director. And then all of a sudden, my phone blows up and all these people are asking about me again. Right. So I have to, there's a, I have to. embrace what chappie the Marine Court chaplain said about about forgiveness yeah um because if not it would

it would eat me up yeah yeah but i still you know i went to a nat's game you remember last year and i saw some some former or you know they were still in mark how you doing man it's so good like i i see you like we're we're following your recovery i'm like what i want to say is fuck you guys i haven't heard from you for five years right you forgive you have to forgive for selfish reasons you have to i mean i have I've learned that. Otherwise, your days become consumed with. I had a lot of anger. A lot of anger towards people I thought that really cared about me. Now, to be honest, but but this is really important, there is probably half a dozen officers. So literally when I went public with this, the seven floor CIA told my colleagues, don't talk to Mark anymore, cut him off, which is totally

fucking illegal, by the way. Right. There's six or seven senior officers who said, nah, we're not doing that. Yeah. And so I still have some people who remain loyal to me, and I'll never forget them. Do you think that any of the denial,

and not from the people who thought you were doing it for compensation or from people who didn't think it was real? But do you think there was a campaign of denial put out there because of, the system that was used and there are people who are aware of those systems and don't want them public knowledge? Well, I think that so, so first of all, the idea that there's, you know, so, you know, there's parts of this. There is the accountability part on how people treated us really poorly. There's the medical part, which is getting treatment.

And then there's the, there's the part about culpability, who's doing this. And that gets a little more controversial. I mean, I still to this day think it's the Russians, you know, it's, it's a, it's a controversial view. I don't think so because they have a history of directed energy weapons and you know, National Academy of Sciences and other, you know, you know, scientists and the, and frankly, the doctors at Walter Reed, they would point to the back of my head. They said, this is where this thing hits you in your occipital area. It makes sense. It's the smallest area. You know, there's just this soft tissue. So, so I think that that, that, and both of you will understand this,

the notion of trying to solve this will be problematic because I think it's an act of war against our officials. To me, it's the same exact thing as the Russians putting bounties on our personnel in Afghanistan. You know, Russians paying bounties to the Taliban in Afghanistan, which was everybody I talked to was a slam dunk. Sorry, it's a terrible world word in the intelligence business. But no doubt that the Russians did this. But the agency and the analytic community said, well, It's low confidence, medium confidence. Well, it's bullshit.

They definitely did it. I talked to everybody out in the field. There was no doubt about it. But the question is, if the Russians did this, what do we do about it? Yeah. And so it's the notion of if we end up solving this thing. And, you know, I don't think there's a thousand cases of Havana syndrome out there. There's probably several dozen.

But the friends I have were really fucked up from this. You know, I mean, you know, whatever you think of, and I like him, whatever you think of Chris Miller, you know, former, what, acting secretary of defense for about 70 days under the Trump. administration, former fifth group, a special force guy I met in Iraq and I've known. Former guests of the show. Former guests to the show. And he, you know, and he has friends who have been jacked up by this. And so I met and I, you know, I had a beer with them. I didn't see him Chris for a long time. And I really like him. And Chris is like, look, I wasn't sure about this until I saw one of my guys from special forces who was going off and doing other embassy related stuff. But he came back and he was totally jacked up. So if you know someone who was at the tip of the spear, something happens to them and they turn into a fucking vegetable.

I'm sorry. You know, that has, that has an effect on people. And so I don't know if there's, I don't think there's a thousand cases. I think there's a couple dozen. And it's really suspect because people who were really at the top of their game are really jacked up from it. Yeah, but admitting it and investigating it would lead to confrontation. Well, what do you do that?

Yeah. Right. And I'm telling you the, the, the, the bounty story to me is just a massive failure of the U.S. government because there is no doubt. And I talked to everybody involved in this thing. I was out of government when this happened, but my friends swear to me because there's a hundred percent the Russians did this. Yeah. And but there's, but then, you know, but if it becomes a low to medium confidence assessment, then it gives an excuse of any administration.

Well, we, what the hell do we do? We can't deal with this. Right. That's pretty damning, isn't it? That the doctors can look at your brain just as though you've been hit, you know, by a projectile, something physical. And they can see the damage and they can speculate as to. you know, what caused it, but the damage is, I mean, it's irrefutable. Well, Dee will love this. I'm going to give a Greek analogy. This is Aristotle's law of, you know, every case officer is a philosopher. So this is Aristotle's law of non-contradiction. So you can't say nothing happened to me, right? Which is what the CIA is saying. Yet,

compensate me for injuries because Walter Reyes. the preeminent traumatic brain injury center on the planet has diagnosed me with a TBI and based on an event that happened. Right. How can this all be true? Right. But that is conveniently what has happened now. And so a lot of us are getting compensation.

And you can argue that they're, you know, they're, you know, they're kind of paying us off to be quiet. But I'll tell you one thing. If you're a GS-11 or GS-12 who's been fucked up by this and you get a six-figure settlement, that's going to put your kids through college and you take that. Right. I don't blame anybody for that. So, you know, you talk about this law of non-contradiction.

How obviously the U.S. government or the CIA or people of the CIA, whether it was intentional or not, were gaslighting you. When you were at your worst and going through this, and especially when it was new and fresh, did you start to doubt your own sort of reality, start to doubt your own experience because of what these people were telling you? No, no, I didn't because, look, I mean, I, you know, I knew something happened to me. I mean, it just, you know, I was, you know, the, I mean, I was in good shape. There's just, you know, and again, it's something terrible happened to me that night in Moscow. Now, if it comes out that it was, you know, it wasn't a directed energy attack, they poisoned me, but, you know, fine, but something happened. Right.

And I'll tell you one thing, Dave, you know, when you're suffering like this, I was like, and the great thing about Walter Reed is like, they actually don't care what happened. Right. We're going to try to make you feel better. Right. And one day, you know, I think I was telling you guys before when, you know, in the in the green room, I had a conversation with the Walter Reed docs recently. And I was like, you know what? I feel so much better now. It's been like five, six years.

I've really followed all the protocols. I'm getting this kind of this new kind of treatments. We can talk about it in a second. But I'm feeling better. And they're like, yeah, you know, it takes a TBI patient five to seven years to really make that kind of progress. And I was like, well, you guys didn't tell me that before. That's a long time. Yeah.

Yeah. So if you told me in 2000. 2018, you know, in 2023, you're going to feel better. That's, that, you know, that's, that's, that's good, but that's five years of suffering. And that, to me, that's something that, again, when you talk about, you know, coping mechanisms, and, you know, at the TBI clinic, when you walk in there every day, you take your vital signs and they ask you, did you want to kill yourself last night? Right. So, but five to seven years was a, was a, was a freaking long time. Well, I have to, you know, I'm a weird type A personality. so I'm never satisfied.

And so, you know, I love coming on the show here. But after this, I'll be like, like, what am I going to do next? What am I doing next week? Why am I not on TV? They haven't asked me to be on talking about Russia in 24 hours. And so, you know, MSNBC hates me. So, again, I have all sorts of kind of neuroses and weird shit. Yeah, which probably helped you in your job, right?

100, you're never satisfied. So you recruit one agent, you've got to recruit a next. I mean, that's, that's classic. Like, this is what, you know, you see elite athletes are like this. I'm never. Derek Jeter, who played for the Yankees, was never. happy. He won World Series titles all over the place. That's exactly what I'm like. But the thing for me is I have to sit back sometimes and think, and this is not patting myself on the back. It's just saying,

like, holy shit, am I better than I was a year ago? And like, that is incredible. And so I'm very thankful. And then again, you go, you kind of, I mean, you guys have been awesome on the show here supporting me. And my family has been incredible. I have great friends. And so, you know, and, but holy shit, the last five years. It's a, it's a scary story in itself. It's particularly scary, Mark, because of the stature that you have. And it, you know, leaves us on it. And we know stories on the same, similar stories on the military side.

And we always ask the same questions. What about the guy who doesn't have that Wasta, that rep, that self-confidence? How is he going to survive those five years? If it hadn't have happened to somebody with your Wasta, you know, like, then what happens, you know? So both you guys bring up a point which I'm proud of. So there's a couple things on this. One is, you know, people, people for a couple of years

who've been affected by this have, you know, have always kind of reached out to me. And so I've been a little selfish sometimes. And I don't have the bandwidth to help them. Sure. But, but, but, but, but, but there's, there's a couple officers, including the one Chris Miller knows about who said, Chris Miller's guy, um, who was overseas, uh, said that when this thing hit him, he thought about me. He thought about, holy shit. I read that article in GQ about that CIA guy.

I think the same thing's happening. He got off the X. And so, so Andy and Dave, you know what that means. Yeah. Yeah. So in the old world of kind of kind of counterterrorism or any kind of, you know, your world of spec ops. is getting off the X means, you know, not being at a place where you're getting a shot or blown up. But in this sense, is something's happening.

I got to leave. And so there's been four or five different victims of this. And these are folks that 100 percent. I've seen them at Walter Reed. They're being treated. They've been compensated. So, again, it's, you know, obviously something happened to them. But they said that because of my going public, they knew something was happening.

And the doctors then say, well, whatever happening, you didn't have that same level of exposure. And so that makes me in some sense feel good. But on the other hand, too, is I also got to, you know, understand that or just be honest, that there's a lot of people who reach out to me and I don't have the bandwidth. I got to take care of myself. And that's, it's selfish. And so people say, hey, you've been awesome to so many folks who've been affected by this. I'm like, sort of, but not really.

Yeah. Because I've got to be selfish about that. I got to deal with my own shit. I mean, it's, it is freaking unbelievable how much better I feel today than I did even a year ago. And so, so I'm not a. That's fantastic. I'm so happy to hear that. But I think going, I would, I would offer that going public was incredibly unselfish.

And, and there's really, there's nothing, there's no greater, there's nothing, no greater act you could have taken to, to help those, you know, others who affect it by the same thing. So, you know, Andy, one of the things is I hear you, and it's nice to hear that, but also, you know, like the last thing, and I'm sure, you understand this too like don't ever google your name yeah because you know so so you know you put me i'm being like put me in line with like all the ufo chasers and like yeah vana syndrome people get a little freaky about uh and and and i also get like a hundred emails every week about people who are you know who are think they're getting hit with this and you know in in in in in iowa or Nebraska you know because they're being targeted by the government so the whole thing is really weird Yeah.

But I'll tell you one thing, the idea and both you guys, so obviously, Dave, you have the podcast, Andy, you've been so prominent in your work in Ukraine. When you decide, like, think about our old world, you decide to go public, whether you write a book, whether you're in the media, whether you know, whether you're trying to do something good, you expose yourself. And I tell you, you know, you think you're a tough guy sometimes, but there's, I get death threats. all the time there's all i mean it's i get crazy people calling i have i have the local vienna police department i'm like i'm listed as a high threat uh you know protectee it's a war it's a horribly raw feeling yeah it doesn't matter what you know this i mean andy you've been through so much stuff and i you know i admire so much of of what you've done in ukraine and then you obviously had the kind of the mess with your the business partner but but it's you know it's embarrassing is the wrong

word it's just you're raw you're exposed yeah holy shit everybody knows every flaw about you. And that's a really weird thing to do. Not only do they know every flaw about you, but you'll have people, I don't know, whose names rhyme with Rax Stumenthal, who will,

you know, who will not even be honest about, you know, they'll take sound bites and not even be honest about actual things that you say. And we can rail against, you know you're right Dave and we can rail against guys like that Max Blumenthal Peter Moss but Mark

the part that really hurt me and this is why it's it gives me it's actually really really comfort I know this isn't about comforting me for me to listen to you is you know there were Marines who I've known for

years who who cold should have me even now you know based on a based on a fucking article they read or in one case, you know, because their boss told him, you know, that former some retired general who they look up to, he said, hey, stay clear of Andy Melbourne, he's off his rocker, he's become unhinged. You know, that word was put out in the core in certain circles. A lot of people who served in combat with me, not a lot, but, you know, that's what hurt me.

So I do, no, I'm not comparing myself to what you've gone through. deal with you. No, but I was excited. I was excited you were guest hosting here today because I think there is some similarities. I mean, again, it's, it's the idea of, so it's not only being exposed out there, but it's also, how do you deal with it? Okay, so now what? I mean, so, you know, there's times, I mean, so, you know, I still get invited to, I, you know, and I'm not proud of this, but one of my really good friends had a award ceremony you know you retire and you get some kind of metal down the road

and so he called me up he goes hey would you know would you come to the ceremony at headquarters I'm like I'm not comfortable going in there I don't want to go see and that's sad it's unfortunate yeah yeah I mean I'm like you too like intellectual power house still but good on you for saying that yeah you know

yeah because it would have been a game I look I this we're not here just simply to throw accolades of you mark but i think it's important to pull out things that are that that way you've you've shown i mean you've really demonstrated courage and other people can can learn from it myself included right and and so that is one who not showing up to an award ceremony right

we're so it's so ingrained to us of course we fucking go to it more whether we like it or not but you you know you had the courage and presence of mind i can't i can do it yeah I don't want to. Hey man. That's yeah. But you know why for you know, uh, David and Andy, it's because it's not going to be healthy for me. Right. Yeah. I could do it in a fucking second. It's fine. Not going to be healthy. That's all you. I'm going to like, why would I do that for my own mental health to go back into a place, which I, which I know betrayed me, some of these individual people. The crazy thing is I still love the organization. I love, I believe in what we do what we do there. I still go around the country and

advocate for, you know, for kids coming out of college or coming out of the military to join the agency. I have 10 emails every day. I mentor kids doing this. But it's just that's not a healthy place for me to go back into. It's just there's too much has happened. And again, I go back to that Marine Corps chaplain about just that notion of, he goes, he goes, his, this is a great line. He said, you've had a divorce from the agency. Hopefully you can have, you know, an amicable separation and agreement. it's a divorce and so he's right i got i got to let it go right yeah right much easier said than done but yeah but what's our identity too that's your identity yeah yeah yeah and my whole life

was involved this this was everything that that that i did in life yeah uh was was based on that place because they also build you up to be this kind of you know superhero right or you know super person Superman to go do really weird shit. And all of a sudden, you know, you don't have that identity anymore. That can be hard. And, you know, and the unfortunate thing is it's very possible that some of the people that you hadn't heard from in five years, some of the people who said that, you know, oh, you're just doing it to get compensation.

Like, they were just going off of what they thought they knew at the time, you know, that OMS told somebody and somebody. And so they're not, they're not operating from any place of like malicious intent, but they're just repeating what they heard from people they thought were experts. Let me tell you a story on it. So I think you're right. And one of the things is, so that's correct. And on top of that, everyone's got their lives.

Sure. So I am, I am, you know, you think I was a case officer. So I'm a really good judge of character. Well, good judge of character, yes, but I'm a good assessment of situations. How many times in life you don't hear from someone? And you're like, this fucking asshole is not calling me for whatever reason. Then you realize, oh, my God, this person that has had open heart surgery or is having a terrible divorce. And you're like, why did I think it was about me?

It's not. Everyone has lives. Right. And so sometimes, you know, what I tended to do was sometimes go to dark places when I shouldn't have. Why didn't I hear from this person? Well, they got their own shit going. on. That's okay. Yeah. How do you stop yourself going to dark places now? Yeah. So it's trying to, well, first of all, my wife has been fabulous on this. You know, she's the most optimistic person around. And you

just kind of, you try to give people the benefit of the doubt. Again, and because everyone has their own issue. One of the, you know, one of the things is that, especially in our old line of work, everyone, you know, I still think that that if you do this in the intelligence of the special operations world for two decades. There's a whole bunch of weird shit going on in your head. And so if you haven't heard from someone from a while, you know, maybe it ain't going to be about you. It's what they're going through. So I try to give people the benefit of the doubt now. And then just and then, but then, you know, I also try to pick my friends carefully. The other thing that, you know, I'm 54 years old now. I still have this group of college

roommates and we're all still friends. But I remember my wife came back one, you know, one day recently she's like hey i met this you know this great couple let's go out to dinner with them and i'm like i don't need any more friends right right yeah yeah you know you i pick my friends carefully yeah um and and one other part of it is the whole other kind of side of me that is you know has to do with kind of my love of and i mean this seriously my love of baseball and so my son plays baseball in college i do i do a lot of leadership training for baseball teams um and that is a is kind of completely separate from anything to do with my old job. And that can be really healthy.

Because a lot of people, I mean, just because I'm on TV a lot, I'll go through an airport, people come up to me and say, hey, I saw you on TV. And all of a sudden, you got to realize, you got to tell yourself, I'm not doing it for that reason. This can't be about ego. But then you go to places. I was just down in the Outer Banks, you know, for a weekend. No one gives a shit who I am.

And I'm hanging out. This kind of, there's a great, in Duck, North Carolina. There's a great outdoor surf bar. and hanging out with the bartenders and stuff like that. And they, if I said I work for the State Department, they'd be like, can you get me a license at the DMV? My license is, they have no fucking clue. Right.

No, the biggest thing that went on in the last year was that damn spy balloon that kind of floated over North Carolina and South Carolina. And so sometimes I try to surround myself with people who have no clue about my past. Don't care at all. Yeah. And you just kind of talk about separate issues. There's great, great reassurance in anonymity. I'm trying to say it.

Anonymity. me. Yeah. No, yeah. Yeah. Is that like alum, aluminium,

however you, Brits, say that. No, I, no, I've, so,

so that's why I'm asking these questions because it's having, so you're talking about baseball, right?

You are not a, you know, I mean, you probably weren't, you, you weren't ever in running to be a professional baseball

playing, my apologies, but choosing something at which you know, you're not that good. Yeah. But you love it.

Yeah. And you want to listen to other people. Yeah. For me, that's being hugely therapeutic. And too often we just don't, we don't have a, we don't, we don't have something that we do just for fun, just for the love of it. We get so consumed by what we're doing. When that thing betrays us, we need something to fall back on. Yeah.

You need that. 100%. Yep. Yeah. You know, family. Family, yes. Absolutely. And I'm with you 100% on.

on narrowing you know one of the cool things about being portrayed is you you really learn who your friends are and and you and you draw a perimeter around them and you you don't necessarily want to bring other people in yeah but then the other piece is just having something you love that that is totally selfish you know that you can on the flip side of that too it's interesting because when you say you know that you haven't heard from somebody in a while like a friend or somebody and that it's you have to that's not about you. Andy and I actually talked about this. The last time he was a guest on the show after the show,

we talked about how when we get into our spirals, right? How it's hard for us to even respond to friends or reach out to friends, how we go into isolation modes. And that has nothing to do with the person on the other end. Yeah. Right. Right. The effort, the effort of communication. I don't know if you ever hit that,

but it's even people reaching out to reassure you, is just the effort of of establishing that content of responding because it's not just going to be the response it's going to be exactly yeah yeah i feel so guilty about that yeah again no no no for sure i think and then you know i think that going back to that notion of imposter syndrome i mean you know we talked about it earlier that that to me has been such an enormous part of my my life now you know so you know, I go on MSNBC once or twice a week on Morning Joe, you know, whether you like it or not. It doesn't matter. But I find it's a really interesting deep dive on issues.

There's a million people who fucking watch that. And sometimes I'm really good on it. And sometimes I screw up massively on it. And all the time I'm sitting there thinking, how have I gotten here? Right. You know, so, you know, I like talking in the media. And, you know, we talked about this before the show because I think that. that those of us in the intelligence and special operations world have a unique view of foreign policy because we're on the ground in places.

So it's the guy or gal in the ground. So I look at everything that I talk about. You know, maybe we can talk about Russia, Ukraine in a second. But that's perspective is that, okay, what would it be like if you were from, you know, 10th group or you're a case officer on the ground in Ukraine right now or in the European theater, to be fair? instead of what's the what's the policy deliberations at the national security council or you know what's going on in the hill in terms of support for ukraine so i always like but but there's still times and so so i know i offer a unique perspective but i'm still sitting there um and my my son was awesome one time i was i was going on there i was going down to the set and i'm like god like i'm talking about something and i'm like i'm a little i told him i said i'm a little nervous and he's like dad

stop being a wimp. How old is he? You know, he's going to be 21 on Monday. He's going to have his first beer on Monday, which is, of course, bullshit. But it's pretty fun. We're going to take it before. But I, you know, but I would think, you know, like, what am I doing here? But he reminded me like, hey, you offer a different perspective.

And so I really struggle with that, that notion of imposter syndrome of like, what am I doing commenting on this stuff i know i have a unique angle to this um and i've gotten more comfortable being in in in the media on tv but it's still weird and and the other thing too is just like you expose yourself so i say something some people aren't going to agree with it and you're going to be really pissed right you know and dave what we talked about before that's just part of the part of the whole thing and and all of us are wrong at every one of us oh my god yes right and one of the great things so let me say i'm wrong when some of my commentary on so so it's really So someone would say, Mark, based on your conversations with people inside the agency, I'm like, I don't call inside anyway. I'd never call back inside. And I think the reason why the agency knows I don't do that is because I freaking get things wrong all the time. Right. That's good. Right. And you make it very clear, too. And I would offer having been an observer, a liver of imposter syndrome. I've come to the conclusion that actually,

actually any leader worth his soul has imposter syndrome. You know, as long as he doesn't devolve into paralysis because of it. Sure. You know, and it's how, but it's the guy who doesn't have it that I, that who really thinks that he has a right to be where he is leading whatever,

you know, 500,000 guys. That is the guy that disturbs me. Yeah. The guy who thinks he's reincarnated. Right, right. Charlemagne. Yeah.

Pardon. Here's a great. So the other day, someone asked me on one of the TV hits, you know, especially, so, so the notion of what's happening in the Wagner group and Yvgeny Progosa, and I find the Wagner group so interesting because it's a Middle East and I followed them for years, you know, and then I'd never forget the engagement in 2018 in Syria, which was a great day when we kind of kicked the shit out of them. But someone asked me, so, so, you know, what do you think's happening now with Progoshin?

because now he was, you know, obviously it was this coup slash mutiny. He gets banished to Belarus, but he's not there. He's actually back. And I said for the, and I said, which I think was honest. And I said, I have no idea. So like, by the way, that doesn't cut it doing a TV hit. But how I, we have no clue what's happening. Right.

And those experts and all the old Russia hands and everyone who's going to give you their pontificating on what's happening now, they have no idea. Because I don't think the U.S. government has an idea. you know, National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan today said, do you know where Poghazin is? He's like, no. Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely.

But by the way, so it's okay to say, I don't know. It's opaque. That's right. If they're worth their salt, we'll say. I set it up on the seventh floor to CIA directors all the time. I mean, I just, I'll, you have to be kind of honest. Because if you don't do that, you know, things can go really awry, especially if you're in a serious business. like you don't even have to pretend to know because there's so many interesting things you can talk about from what we do know right you know what makes a successful coup right you know yeah did did he have a viable shot who came to his side who did not come to his side why was why was their scant opposition you know it was like apathy it wasn't hey let's flock to him or let's

you know, barricade the streets of Moscow. It was, you know, you saw street sweepers, like in between his vehicles and the, you know, joint forces, I mean, sorry, the Southern Command headquarters at Rostov, you know, I mean. Rostov, it was amazing. And so, that's exactly what I did. So, so, so, you know, you do, I think, again, having been, you know, all over the world in, in crisis situations, I've written a billion sit reps. for the agency. And so what do you do in a sit rep? You say, you know, what, you ask, you,

answer two questions. You know, what happened and what does this mean? And the what does this mean part? Sometimes you can't get to because you have to, you know, what happened. And sometimes that's very incomplete. And so I think that's the smartest way to kind of approach these things. So, so what happened with Progozen? It's obviously, it's pretty clear to me that he had support inside the Russian military. And if you know the Wagner group, and that's the other thing, too, So I can't go back on anything classified that I know. But, but, you know, like, the Wagner Group is an arm of Russian military intelligence, an arm of the GRU.

That's just, I mean, I was on MSNBC one time, and some guy came on, and he was debating me on this. He said, it's a PMC, it's a private military contract. I'm like, no, it's fucking not. Yeah. And by the way, Putin just went on national television and Russian said, totally funded by us. You know, and so, you know, it's an arm of Russian military intelligence.

Clearly, Pergozen had some support inside. for some reason he abandoned the coup my sense is that probably his family was threatened but that's only speculation on my part so that's just kind of my two cents and and but so what so so with all the putan not putinologists what Wagner group ologists and criminalologists none of this fucking matters for the main foreign policy concern the united states is ukraine that's right yeah and when you take the Wagner group out it's a capability gap yeah and so it's i think it's very fair to say, you know, is this going to turn the tide of the war? Probably not. Who knows? But they lost a significant capability. And Andy, you know this, the Wagner group, while they were kind of

disgusting, you know, war criminals. They did provide a capability for Putin. And he doesn't, and he's lost that, at least for the time being. And that, to me, my analysis would be that is, that is potentially significant. And Ukraine should take advantage of it. I think that kind of analysis is, you know, was pretty solid. Yeah, even though... Sorry, go ahead. No, I meant, yeah, even though they've been pulled out of the line, you know, they were out of parliament from there onwards.

But you've got 25,000 dudes with combat experience who potentially, you know, in a military, that is really hurting for trained manpower. Well, the other thing, too, is so if you're... And one thing, again, and I prefer to you all on this, you actually are more kind of cognizant of what this would mean or not. But if you were a member of the Russian Air Force, and these Wagner forces killed about, what, 13 pilots shot down a whole bunch of aircraft.

Yeah. The Wagner forces, if they would be reintroduced into the Russian military, how's that going to sit? Yeah. With the Russian Air Force who just lost, I mean, you know, who lost, you know, that was, I think, the single biggest. Some really rare assets to EW. EW aircraft.

Yeah. It was about 20% of their pre-war. They lost a command and control relay, which was even rarer. I forget the, it's something, something 29. Do you remember? No. I.L. 29 or something. But yeah.

So there's one, again, I'm not speculating causes or anything, but there's a couple of other interesting aspects of this that aren't, you know, that aren't picked up on by a lot of the pundits. One is that on one July. the Wagner group was to fall under, you know, the Ministry of Defense, right? And that was a Shogu and Grasimov initiative pissed off at Progoshin, you know, progoshin poking them in the face constantly. With that, that would have undercut Progoshin. A lot of this. I mean, he, so the Wagner group, you know more about this than me, Mark,

but the Wagner group is sustained by a bunch of holding companies, money is transatlantic, flowed through them, but progoshin is the nominal owner of those holding companies. So to say, okay, the Wagner Group now is going to fall under MOD, all of the resources now are going to flow through that chain was going to deprive progotion, perhaps in his eyes, of a significant power. Oh, huge. So, Andy, as you know, the Wagner Group is, you know, is operated, you know, globally, and particularly in Africa, where they were kind of, you know, kind of raping all of these countries of precious minerals. That's how they were funding their operations,

whether it's gold or, you know, but that's how they received their actually operational funding. You know, the, you know, Progosion is an oligarch who, you know, I mean, the story of him is so remarkable. He was a freaking hot dog vendor. Yeah. When he got out of jail.

And then he rises up, of course, you know, runs the catering company, becomes, you know, serves U.S. presidents as one of Putin's chefs. But the interesting part of it, and I think a lot of people forget is before he, before he started the Wagner group, he was, or concurrently, he was, you know, he was head of the internet research agency, which is this, you know, a troll farm in St. Petersburg, which was responsible for interfering in our elections and other elections all over the place. So progoshin is a real, is an expert in information operations and why this is important. He also, you know, he almost was a cult figure. And the Wagner forces were really loyal to him because he inspired them. And I think that was that clearly was a threat. He's a great speaker.

He's a great speaker. Yeah. He's charismatic. That's right. He's yeah. But the one thing that I go back to time and again and just this is kind of my overall, you know, feel on the whole conflict is there's an army of pundits in Washington. I call, you know, it's the foreign policy blob, which I hope I'm not a part of,

but I'm afraid I fall into that sometimes. But these are part of the think tanks. These are part of folks who followed Russia for a great deal of time, but they've been wrong on everything. And so, you know, Russia was 10 feet tall. The Russian military was this powerful force. The Russian intelligence services were so great. But the matter of fact is they were not.

And so, and even the Wagner group, which is as capability for the Russians, it's very good. Remember in 2018 with the, you know, with the engagement with the, with SOCOM with JASAC and Dariusur when I think we killed about 300 Wagner forces. And Putin does nothing in response. And so, you know, but overall, I think there is this Which by the way, by the way, Mark, that should have been a lesson to everyone about, you know, the escalitis, right? So, so we're, but we're caught in this myth that Putin has created

that he is some kind of brilliant tactician. And even that kind of the nuclear escalation talk is just i think is all bullshit yeah um and so so ultimately you know i've been a kind of a wild hawk on ukraine but not doing so irresponsibly it's it's based on just you know experience in the sense of you know when a bully punches you you're punching back and they don't do anything yeah and and i think that that that engagement in derisura in 2018 is so telling uh but we still don't seem to learn we're caught in this uh do loop of iv league math you know hey if we uh we can give them you know the Gimler's but not the attackams. Tell me again what the ranges are.

Okay, let's get our, oh shit, they can hit Russia with the attack him. So instead of, fuck, man, they're not idiots. But this also goes back to something that we talked about on our show that there are, there are people in the administration, not the Biden administration, not the Trump, not the Obama, but people who have been there forever, who, will find themselves there at any point in time who, you know, the same people who wanted Iraq, not necessarily same people, but a group of people wanted Iraq, and they wanted it through multiple administrations. But a lot of people see Ukraine, you know, the invasion as an opportunity to bleed

Russia. And so, you know, I think they have enough of an ear sometimes where, you know, it might be the, the strategic well we don't want them attacking into russia because we're worried about repercussions but also there are people you know i think that are helping set policy people who have been there forever who are like why give ukraine the capability of winning decisively when we can use this as an opportunity to to stretch russia out and drag this along well so one of so yeah One of the things that that's amazing to me is for 5% of our military budget, we've attritted 50% of the Russian military. And I go back to my previous comment that the Russians paid bounties to the Taliban to kill our soldiers.

Russia is an enemy of the United States. And so, you know, if we are doing damage to the Russian military, I'm fine with that. I really am. Yeah. And so I think the other part of it, too, is there is, there, there seems to be this people are there's a lot of experts in washington who are kind of stuck in the notion of russia as a great power and i think they're not i think they're frankly right now they're a client state of china i mean china you know is is certainly the big brother in this um but uh but

ultimately you know we have an opportunity to um to help the ukrainians kind of regain their territory and i really do think that there's there's a lot of unfounded fears of of kind of nuclear escalation. Look, the Russians were beaten, the Soviets were beaten Afghanistan, they picked up and left. Same thing has to happen here. And I'll make a really stupid joke. And I'm sure, we were joking before the show. I will manage in any one session to piss off the right and the left. So what I'll say now will anger people who are supporters. And I'm generally supportive of the administration on the Ukraine. I think that I think that we have, we have done a tremendous amount. I don't think we've done enough. But we've, we've, we've done a, we've done a,

fairly good job. I just wish we would give attackums and others. But here's my joke. You know, that cocaine that was found right outside the West Wing certainly must have been from some colleagues of ours who needed to get high to go through another fucking NSC meeting on why or why we shouldn't give

attackers. That's a really terrible joke. But seriously, give the fucking attackums. Like, yeah. Are you kidding? We just gave plustered munitions. Right. Which is controversial with all the kind of the... Did we give it to them yet? Or are we talking about it? We talk about it normally forever.

No, they announced what we're doing it. Okay, yeah. Yeah. But no attack them's like, this is crazy. Yeah. Right. Especially when they can, you know, if you look at the storm shadow cruise missiles at the Brits, let me switch focus, one thing.

Because I jotted down a note, I wanted to say this. The Brits have been freaking magnificent in this. And I'll tell you, and what's interesting, it's across kind of the British political divide between the conservatives and kind of those in the left. There's universal support for Ukraine. But my sense, and I've got to be careful, and I say it's, my sense is the British special operations community is much more involved inside than ours, number one, and number two,

they gave the storm shadowed cruise missiles, which is doing incredible damage to the Russian military. I mean, the Brits have been fabulous partners on this. And I think the Brits have pushed us in some sense, particularly on the F-16 issue as well. And so, you know, it's, again, but at a price, Mark, but wouldn't you say at a price for them, Ben Wallace, veto, you know, is not going to be NATO. That really pissed me off. And so, so in my little weird circle of, you know, we have all these, you know, we got to get you on one of our signal chats because this is kind of the, you know, but, you know, the Ben Wallace piece is bullshit. He's been fabulous. Yeah. And so that's, that's, that's, that's too bad. But you guys explain that? Can you guys explain that a little bit? for the layman yeah

Dee is asking us to explain for the for the layman you're the guest Mark you're you're the so I think it's the notion of who's going to be the next yeah the next the native secretary general

and so and so Ben Wallace would be an ideal candidate but I think there's feelings and correct me if I'm wrong on this but there's feelings the the sense is the administration is pissed because Ben Wallace pushed on the F-16s. Yeah. And that's right.

Maybe that's wrong. But he's been fabulous. The Brits have been fucking great partners. You know, everybody I know who comes back from there, like, holy shit, the Brits are just total badasses inside. And, you know, again, I'm okay with that, you know, because, again, it's that power of contribution. The Brits, you know, I think the intelligence community in the U.S. has been amazing. Ucom has been great.

Soccer has been great. And there's been, obviously, constraints put on our folks. I think the Brits are, have. have a very different risk versus gain calculus, and I love it. Using a British passport at checkpoints there got you automatically, you know, cries of Boris Johnson, who's a, you know, who's a hero there. I'm not going to comment on that, but he's a, there are Ukrainian women, you know, naming their, I mean, Boris, it's not a far stretch anyway.

But, but yeah, it's kind of interesting. So who's the, so it looks like it's going to be, I'm going to mispronounce the name, von Leiden. it's the journey right right that makes no sense yeah but but ben uh just just you know to to amplify ben wallis um by you know i i want to say by all accounts by most accounts the best um minister of defense absolutely that the british brits have had for long long time very highly respected former army officer has just uh just been a real solid actually was uh in in the running for prime minister when borrass got the heave her you know one of the things that i that i think

was going to be interesting is you know we have the the the nato summits coming up obviously the cluster munitions are going i think attack them's i'm hearing kind of in my my little world that attackums are are close behind which would be fantastic um and here's the reason why i think this is really important um you know one of the things about the the the coup or the mutiny whatever you want to call it is i think it shatters this notion about this timelines um you know there's been this kind of bullshit i think in the in the u.s media or the western media or anywhere um that somehow this ukrainian counter offensive has to be successful because why because Putin can outlast us well maybe he can't you know maybe he has problems under his own roof and he does that's great point and so so why not you know

have to show it some some you know u.s and western resolve um and i and i think that you know one of I'm going to get wrong the old adage, you know, whatever the Churchill's saying was about America, you know, doing everything really well but late. But ultimately, if you look at a wish list, and I was reading online just before this of what this A package that we just announced today is, it's extraordinary. And so the Ukrainians are getting everything that they wanted. They're just getting it late and really late. But ultimately, I think that I think this, this, this, this, this, this mutiny or coup of progosin shatters the notion that Putin can outlast us. He has his own problems there. And, uh, and let's kind of kind of, that's a really interesting, that's a really interesting point, Mark. So,

so basically it showed, you know, Putin does not, the regime does not have the monopoly of the violence, you know, with the internally a monopoly on the use. What, what's, what's, Monopoly on the on the legal use of violence legitimate use of violence right so when you lose that Right and it's very clearly you've lost that publicly And especially in Russia I mean you do you who might say this in front of you mark But that's I mean that that that that is that's essentially what has happened Well Dave and Andy here's what I do if I was in it back at my old job I would make sure we'd have an information operations campaign I would send a text message

And I know we can do this a text message to every Russian deployed military unit, every soldier in Ukraine, and say, hey, what are you fighting for? What are you dying for? You know, back in Moscow, there's a shitstorm brewing. You know, so do you really want to sacrifice your life for Ukraine? I mean, there's so many opportunities. Yeah. Even on that and that kind of information operations realm, along with the notion that, you know, they've lost the Wagner Group's capability. and the other part too, and you guys would know this perhaps more than I would, but my sense is everything that I've been told

is that Ukrainians have not actually put forth in the counteroffensive, the really kind of the most, the units that have been trained by the West, that we really have not seen anything yet. And that, again, it's kind of the slow rolling counteroffensive, but certainly not, they have not put forth the forces

that are going to contribute. to any kind of really serious push. I think they're, you know, but I defer to you all as the... No, I think you're right, Mark. You know, when you look at the, I mean, the term transparent battlefield has become such a cliche, but it really is, it really is true in Ukraine. And with all the bloggers, you know, the mill bloggers, especially Russian mill bloggers. And so a lot of the info, as you know, that us who don't have access,

to classify is coming from the from russian mill bloggers and they so hey they've seen you know whatever it is a leopard tank i mean clearly some of the leopard tanks been used but to your point i think there's eight or nine brigades were trained specifically as assault brigades by the west none of those brigades conclusively have been seen in the bridge that's that's my information too so right uh some of the odds on some pieces of equipment here and there few leopard tanks have been knocked out, but you haven't seen these formations yet in the, in the

working their way through the, the main Russian, you know, we talked about, we talked about, you know, pundits having to have the answer and often being wrong. Like, they're all sort of like, often the Jim Kramer of, of foreign policy, right?

Keeve is going to fall in 36 hours. Right, right, right, right. But, so if we're just speculating, right? If we're speculating for the possible reasons why we haven't seen in the sort of this counteroffensive, why we haven't seen these Western trained units moving forward, do, and I know there are lots of reasons, and I'm not asking you guys to commit an answer, this is why I know, but what do you feel some of the potential scenarios are, I mean, is it that Ukraine doesn't feel

its time? Is Ukraine waiting until they get more, more armament from the West? is Ukraine potentially holding back at the advice on the West to, you know, like what, well, I think this is, you know, this is classic operational science, right? I mean, you, you've got a thousand, a thousand kilometer front. The Russians are, the Russians, it's not that they have, they've manned that thousand kilometer front with a lot of guys, but they have positions in depth. I mean, the Russians, if they can do one thing well, they can build fucking defensive positions with fire sacks,

and they have done that. So even if the guy's manning it, and the Russians always, always plan for low morale. You know, if you look at Second World War, I mean, even back then they had that, that's their operational level, right? It's kind of a low morale country. So they make sure that nothing depends on the morale of their troops, right? You move out of your trench line,

get shot but they've got you know they've got artillery I mean we've talked about this yeah ammunition still out the wazoo which is an incredible feat of industrial I mean when you think about it we're learning hard lessons in the United States about what it takes to sustain modern warfare we can talk about modern weapons all the time but just generating you know the artillery rounds at the rate that they're being fired, the Ukrainians getting through in one month more than the United States has typically manufactured in the year.

But on the Russian side, you know, so my point is this, okay, I'm getting to you. The Ukraine, and again, with drones everywhere, surveillance everywhere, the Ukrainians have to keep just shaping, what we call shaping, right? until they see a gap that they think consider worth committing the main effort. That's, that's my, that's my thought.

I mean, because it's, it doesn't take a genius to deduce that. That's just what we got to talk to do, right? Yeah. Mark. And I guess, and I, go ahead, Andy, sorry. No, go on. Go on. No, I sense that you're 100% right.

And again, if we weren't so constrained by these timelines and this kind of, in the 24-7 news cycle and you wake up in the morning and it's a week after the offensive and they say it's stalled. I mean, even the economists, even the economists is going, well, they started on June the 4th. Right. Oh, for fuck, say, come on. It's ridiculous. So I think you're right. They're going to probe and see where there's Russian weakness.

You know, clearly they're also going to be training new elements. They're going to be waiting for more advanced systems to come. But again, it's also the idea of, of. Ukraine with Western support can outlast the Russians. Yeah. And so, you know, maybe it's not weeks or months. Maybe it's a year. But I just, you know, I think that we just, I mean, for God's sakes, in World War II,

what if we had social media? Right. Right. Yeah. Holy shit. Oh, we would have quit after Normandy. Right. Yes.

Yeah. And one of my favorite things is you saw after the first couple of days the counteroffensive some U.S. equipment, whether I think it was Brad. was it Bradley's or maybe it was leopards, but essentially being destroyed. Like, what do you expect? It's war. The enemy gets a boat. Right. And so, you know, and for an end, and then the comment, what actually turned out to be true is actually

Ukrainian units in Western equipment actually survived. They weren't killed and they could, and we can repair some of this stuff. And so I think you just have to kind of take a deep breath, but it's, uh, it's something that I think we're in it for the long haul. I mean, sometimes, you know, Secretary of Defense. Vince Austin did say, you know, we're in it for, it's a marathon, not a sprint. There's different mixed messages, but what you don't, what you should not hear anymore, I hope, is this notion that, you know, somehow the U.S. is going to reassess after the counterfeensive future support. I think I really do think the Russian coup shattered that myth, and I think that's really good.

And, but, but let, you know, look to the NATO summit coming up. Obviously the conditions is done, which is good. Sorry, I don't fucking care. It's war. They need this. And the second part is attack them's, which is the ability which the Ukrainians need to hit targets, you know, kind of back in the rear of Russian lines logistics targets. And we got to give them what, you know, how can you criticize a country for not doing well in a counteroffensive when we haven't given them all the means to do so? That's the thing that I don't understand. And one last point. I'm going to get on my soapbox now. No, it's your. It's your soapbox. smart no no so when you talk about nata so the ascension to nato this is the thing that i find hilarious and again i'm i'm a think of me as a street case officer sitting in the ground you know in ukraine

somewhere with my my ukrainian counterpart for military intelligence how do we tell the ukrainians you don't belong in nato while the but the ukrainians are the are the only entity fighting for the actual reason for nato's existence which is to resist phobia and aggression I mean, not only that, but Ukraine arguably is the most powerful military nation in Europe on the right side, right? I mean, but this is the country that's doing what NATO existed for. And frankly, when I go back to think about the old days of the agency or of soccer, I mean, of all the, you know, they're doing exactly what NATO was created for yet. we're not going to let them into NATO. Now, I think that I'm being a little silly here because I think there's going to be a path to NATO.

Yeah, that's good. Yeah. But the reason why they're not being embraced right away is for what? It's fears of kind of escalation with Russia. And I think that's really unfounded. And the magic Article 5, which by the way, it's kind of interesting. When you read, you know, I'm not that much of a nerd, but when you look at Article 5, yes, it says an attack upon one country will be considered attack upon all, but the language, and I'm not going to

quote it, but the language is not directive. Everyone now will form together. The language is something along the lines do whatever it deems necessary. Every country will do whatever it deems necessary to support the hot. So there's some latitude there. My point is that it's kind of a cop-out

to say, well, of course, we're not going to bring Ukraine into NATO while Ukraine's still at war, but as you said, Mark, a pathway, a pathway that gives some better assurances than Budapest and Bucharest did, right, in 1992 in 2008, where we basically just fucking... Let me say one other quick thing. The head of Ukrainian military intelligence, a guy by the name of Kudanav. He is fabulous.

Yeah. So for me, you know, and, you know, the H-U-R is, that's the, that's the new Mossad of the intelligence world. I was going to ask you about him. These guys punched so far above their weight. They're doing deep penetration ops inside Russia. They obviously have some Russian partisans. I love these guys.

I knew them before. Part of my old job was, you know, one of the cool things that I'm proud of is, is, you know, when I was there, what, 17 to 19 in my job, is we kind of put in this plumbing, which is in the sense of the relationship we have with the Ukrainian. So it's not like Zelensky last year in February called up Langley, at headquarters and said, holy shit, I need help. He actually said, hey, go down to the guys and gals down the street. Because we've been there for a long freaking time working with the Ukrainians.

And that was the, you know, if you think about it, that was the non-sexy deployments. Everyone was going to Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria. But, you know, we had a lot of folks and effort in building those relationships, personal relationships in Ukraine. And that certainly has paid off because we know these guys, Budanov is a badass. and these guys screw with the Russians on a it was amazing to me both for both you guys a drone hits the Kremlin and all these Russian experts are like well that could never happen because the Russian air defenses I'm thinking fuck that that's that's fucking Budanoff did that and he did and he did it with

Russian partisans that they recruited and I think it's pretty badass he was very open about it he's open and one of the great things too is that and then the agency comes and wags their finger stop doing that he's like oh of course I'll stop yeah he goes and does it again Yeah. You know, but enough, by the way, for listeners, 37 years old. Yeah. Yeah.

He might have turned 38 now. A young guy, legitimate hero, badly wounded. I think it was in 2015, right, on a deep raid. And fighting in the East, right? In Dombas, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the guys in his headquarters suggests that he's being,

on, you know, on missions even as a, as a flag officer. But, but he's not, he's beloved. He's beloved in our old, in our world, in Helen SpecOps. But that's, that is, that to me, I call them the new Mossad. I was going to, I was going to ask you about it. Mark, Mark, the economist claims that he's in, he's been in contact with Progogian. Yeah, love it. During, during, during, while all this was going on, which adds, if it is true, adds another

a beautiful twist to this. Andy, I think it's true. Again, from all my information, again, it's probably we're all talking the same folks inside, you know, inside Ukraine. But ultimately, he was, you know, I think that they were not sure what they had, but they certainly were talking to him. But what it does do is, you know, so all sorts of confusion and chaos and doubt inside kind of Putin's circle. But the idea that, you know, Budanov had made a contact with Progozen. I believe it. It's exactly the kind of stuff that he does. And again, I think that they also

are very cognizant that, you know, who knows what we have, but hey, we're going to screw with them. You know, getting their head, I think it worked. But the point that I think is really important is every time there's something that blows up inside Russia, you know, someone's assassinated inside Russia. All the old Russian hands say things like, oh my God,

You know, the Kremlin has things under such control. It could never be the Ukrainians. And it's the Ukrainians. Mark, I was going to ask you about something else, too, that I thought was significant. Maybe it isn't. I think it was on 23rd of June, and this may have tie in with the, you know,

Progogian and Budinov. It was, do you remember, Progoshin came out with this most extraordinary statement about the rationale for the war in the first place? Yeah. I mean, it undermined everything that Putin had said. Ukraine was not an aggressor. This stuff about neo-Nazis was bullshit.

That the only civilians being killed in Dombas were killed on both sides, but largely, you know, by Russian artillery. I mean, he was, it was so someone had handed him a script. It was incredible. So two things on that. One is my birthday was June 24th. I turned 54 that day, and I got a Russian coup. I mean, come on. What could be better than that?

I thought I died and gone to heaven. But no, but I think what you said is right, because actually, Progoshin shattered all of those, all of the statements, all of the reason that Putin was trying to sell this whole kind of military operation or special operation to the Russian people.

And you can't take that back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the fact is that Russian military or Russian soldiers listened to Progoshin. And so I think that's important. One of the things that I still don't understand, again, I'm being very open on this, I'm trying to say as a former intel officer,

it's okay to say, I have no idea what's going on, is the sense of, my thought always that is that Putin saw the world, you know, very, very kind of starkly. You have Russian traders and Russian patriots. That's it. And Progosen's a traitor,

and so he's got to be killed. I mean, Vladimir Putin has assassinate, you know, there's been assassination operations all of the world, including they tried to kill a defector in Florida. I mean, you saw that with an indictment, you know, recently where they sent, they recruited an agent, a Mexican guy to go do kind of counter, I'm sorry, to do surveillance on one of our defectors. Obviously, the attempts that Sergei Scrippel in the UK and Salisbury in 18, they killed, what was it, a Chechen in Germany. So Putin sees the world between traders and patriots.

How progosan survives this, I don't know. Right. really is a miss. I can't explain what's happening. And it's going to be really interesting to see what happens to aggress him off and Shogu. Who he hates. Yeah. You know, who, you know, absolutely.

Now, the deputy defense minister has been missing too. Yeah, sir. Serafican, sir, is that it? Yeah. Mark, do you, you know, we've talked about like the attack comes, the longer range, you know, some of the weaponry that we give Ukraine or haven't given Ukraine. and we talked about Ben Wallace who you know

by all accounts an incredible secretary of defense for the UK and was nominated to be the head of NATO right the chief of NATO and that was shut down by Biden apparently because he was in favor of training

Ukrainians for F-16s do you feel this that the Biden administration, that their denial of him, do you feel as though that shows a a reflection of what part of our administration, how they view Ukraine? Do you think it sends a message to Russia? Do you think it sends a message to Ukraine to the rest of the world? Like, how do you think that decision to shut down Ben Wallace, like, affects the entire thing? And what And what do you think it reflects on? Right, right.

So first of all, you know, I've heard all this. And so I'm not, it's not confirmed. I suspect it may be true. I mean, I think that, you know, that, you know, the administration gets prickly sometimes when they're, when they're pushed into a corner. And perhaps that's what they thought. I mean, it's not flattering. It's not good. I mean, I look, I call out the administration when I, when I, you know, think it's required.

And I think that in this case, it's probably a mistake. any kind of long-term effects I don't think it necessarily will have that but we have to see what happens at the NATO summit I mean you know again one of the things that I've found NATO is divided to the wrong word but certainly front line states

are hawks on this issue some of the traditional NATO partners are not never underestimate the French ability to kind of prevaricate and you know Macron will say all sorts of weird things sometimes about, you know, worrying about, you know, Russian stability. But, you know, in the Wallace thing, I think it'll pass. It's just, it's not flattering. It's not great. And there's been so many times where I've been really frustrated with some of the things that the Biden administration has done. And then they seem to finally do the right thing after a while.

So, and again, this to me is these are reports that are coming out now. I don't, I get a sense that it might be true, but I need a little more confirmation on that. I mean, you know, again, and from an ally, the Brits who have been about as good, you know, for Ukraine as, as absolutely any. The other country that I love talking about, the Estonians, as you look at frontline states, you know, they are so absolutely focused on the threat from Russia. And so that, you know, the NATO summit's going to be interesting. You know, you know, is what happens to Sweden, you know, is Sweden going to be led in? what's going to happen with Turkey now? I'm not sure.

I think the Turks are still, I think Zelenskyy was meeting with Erdogan in Istanbul today. And so kind of lots of different machinations, but overall, the positive trend, the thing with the Brits and Wallace, unfortunate, we'll see where it goes.

Yeah. I'm not sure. And this isn't so much commentary on Biden or his administration, but in terms of like the fickleness of the United States government at various points in time. Yeah. You know? Dave, I don't disagree at all.

I mean, look, there has been, I think that I don't want to give any of us any credit, you know, from the kind of cheap seats. But, you know, I think there is something to be said when they are, they get wobbly and they have and we start screaming about things. I mean, for God's sakes, you know, February of last year, I don't think we would, we would have sent a hello kitty bag with some MREs in it. And so, you know, there's been, there's been, you know, a. a lot of people who have been very vocal that we have to do more. And I think that does have an effect. But there's no question. It's an administration and national security council that, that, you know, urges caution is very

nervous about Russian escalation. I think they're wrong. I think there is a huge sweet spot where we could have done a lot more. But it also is quite characteristic. I mean, again, I think that Biden's going to go down in history, is helping having saved Europe and saved Ukraine but done so at a very slow pace that probably costs a lot of Ukrainian lives. And I say that and people get really pissed at me. But I think that we could have done a lot more, a lot sooner.

But again, we'll, you know, but let's do. But if attack them's come next week, I think a lot of us will say, thank goodness. And this is, this is, you know, not just in time, but it's long overdue, but still really important. Mark, on topic with that? Yeah. Can you share your thoughts on the State Department after Action Review on Afghanistan, all 23 pages that were released? All right. So I love this.

I love this. This gets me crazy. So this is where it's funny. So again, I go on MSNBC and I go kind of, I have a nuclear meltdown on the administration and everyone gets pissed at me there, but that's okay. because I think that, you know, basically the Afghan withdrawal, this is just my overall thing, the Afghan withdrawal was an utter complete debacle. I think that the Doha cords that the Trump administration negotiated were terrible, but Biden chose to implement them.

And I, you know, to me, I still don't understand why. And, you know, there's never been ownership by the administration on this. And if you just, all you have to do is look at the television. Yeah. This was a really dark moment in U.S. foreign policy, diplomacy, and just in the U.S. around the world, it was horrible to see. Not only did thousands of Afghans, you know, 100,000 plus get left behind, you had U.S. military members who lost their lives. There was total confusion. This was a debacle.

I mean, I think the administration kind of got their sea legs with Ukraine, but this was a, was a mess and a half. And, you know, what I tell people all the time is, look, there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of kind of, I think, performative theater that goes on in Congress about congressional oversight. The Afghan withdrawal deserves congressional oversight because it was a big mess. So what happened? So the NSC in April puts out a document basically

blaming the Trump administration, which was ridiculous. And I thought I almost had a nuclear meltdown on this because I just thought it was it made no sense. They were being totally defensive. And what do you do when you screw up? You own this problem. I mean, the idea of ownership is really important. They didn't do that. This, you know, what was put out

on july you know mind you on the friday before the july fourth holiday you fucking kidding me um this is the state department a or the after action review which is i mean so so give it even if it was a good report putting it out the friday before a holiday sends to everybody the message that they're trying to bury it right so that was shit if you read it it's a mixed bag it's better than the the nc memo but it's still kind of wishy-washy and one thing they don't address in it which is something that i think i care about and and you guys too is the notion that the special immigrant visa status for tens of thousands, 100,000 Afghans, you know, people were screaming about this, you know, a year before the withdrawal.

And it was ignored. And so the report, the State Department report does not address this. And to me, that's the biggest kind of shortcoming in this is that we left, there's still 100,000 at-risk Afghans we've left behind. And that, to me, is abhorrent. And so, you know, we'll see some congressional investigations on this. But, you know, the, and then I think the last part is, again, President Biden was asked, I think it was, you know, it's not in the press conference, but it was, I think he was walking to Marine One or whatever. And he's, or maybe he's at the White House, he said something about al-Qaeda is no longer there

and the Taliban are helping. I mean, why, I commented on TV the other day, I'm like, they got to try to walk that back. That's absurd. Al-Qaeda is still, of course, prevalent. in Afghanistan, you know, we killed Imanzahiri, who is staying at a Taliban guesthouse, so that kind of doesn't make any sense. And the idea that the Taliban are a counterterrorism partner, I think that's what the administration, the military, and the IC want to do.

I find it disgusting, and I've talked a lot about this. Obviously, I'm biased. But Biden's statements were not helpful. And so this is something that we still have to get to the bottom of. This is a terrible moment for the United States. We screwed this up six ways to Sunday. and so the State Department, AAR, well, probably better than the NSC memo from April. It still left a lot of people with a lot of questions.

And again, putting it out on Friday afternoon before a holiday, come on. And, you know, this is one of these situations where the politics blur people's opinions because, you know, the Doha Accords, like Trump could have pulled out of Africa. Four years and four years he could have worked to pull people out. like that could have been a thing. And so you can criticize Trump for not having done that. The same, you know, but at the same time to to then say what the Biden administration did was Trump's fault. It's like, no, the president can do what the president wants to do.

Absolutely. The president can. The thing is too, the institutions need to isolate themselves from policy decisions. Right. So in other words, contingency planning, common sense contingency planning, worst case. scenario has nothing to do with policy. And if those organizations had been planning since the Doha, of course, we wouldn't have seen the disaster that we saw.

Well, Andy and Dave, for both you, both you know that the special operations and the intelligence community wanted to keep a residual force. I mean, that's open. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and so, you know, and so Biden decided not to do that. Yeah. So, so they have, and to me, so here.

Here's two things. One is you make a decision. It was the wrong decision. It turned out to be, I think, a catastrophe. But it's the thing. The American public, what, here's what I don't understand. American voters don't give a shit about foreign policy. Absolutely. But what they do care about is authenticity. So I think if Biden actually came out and said, you know what, this is a mess. We messed with this talking. But you know what? We're going to learn this. I think it's not a political issue anymore. Exactly. But they're acting so the connection. Mark, you're breaking up.

Mark, did you pull your head plugs out of your thing? You're breaking up a little bit. You got it right now? You got it? Yeah, that's good. Yeah. So I think that there's this reflexive defensiveness, which is just silly. Own it.

Own the mistake. This is what happened. We got it. We're not going to do the same. And they've talked about lessons learned for other conflicts. Okay, but own it. And my sense is when people do that, it's that they're forgiven. But especially with the American people who don't care about

foreign policy when it comes to voting in elections. They don't. I think the Biden administration would, it would do them a better service. I mean, Admiral Kirby, who is the, you know, the NSC, that spokesman, who is a, you know, decorated military officer,

it seems to be a good guy. With the NSC memo, he actually, when he, in April, he said, you know, I watched the withdrawal look that bad. And you're like, oh, my God. Oh, yeah, what do these people do? Yeah. Yeah. It was terrible. Yeah. And, you know, from where I was, from where I was in my living roommate, but it seemed okay. Yeah. I mean, come on. So it just, to me,

that these are, these are own goals. Mark, you said, you said something I thought that was key, and that was the withdrawal of the 2,500 enablers. I don't think that the anyone in the administration understood intellectually how important they were, and still, you know, because you hear kind of dismissive comments, well, they wouldn't have made a difference. They didn't understand that what they represented to the Afghans and what they represented to 8,000 NATO troops who were there, too. That was our skin in the game, our visible skin in the game. You know, it wasn't. Andy, I go back to, I tell you this, this is just a weird part of my day.

Mark, you're breaking up a little bit. I'm not sure what it is. You hear me here? How am I doing right now? You're still a little garbled. Sorry, I want you to say what you want to say. I just want people to be able to hear it. I'm doing right now.

D? Okay. Still a little garbled. I haven't touched anything. Okay. Yeah. Let me give it. All right, so let me give it a shot.

So in 19, I go back from my time in looking at Afghanistan. And actually, Afghans don't necessarily win and lose wars. They switch sides. And this has happened throughout the history of Afghanistan. And so one of the things that we did by signaling that we're going to have a pullout is we told the Afghan military Afghan military it's time to go and I and I think that was a catastrophic error and so there's huge criticism of the Afghan military in effect giving up but that's what Afghani do this is not a criticism of Afghani for today just that's the way power shifts I remember meeting people that

I trust in Afghanistan and I can give me your history you know you're your argument story well you know you know under the I mean the communist regime not jibula I was a communist and then the Lujidine came and I switched to that side and you guys came the Taliban came I was like I was remember the Taliban then you guys came and I'm with you that's just what Afghans do so when we telegraphed that we're going to pull out everyone of course the Afghans yeah one of the things that you're right any any CIA officer they heard on the ground that Afghanistan and again I love our Afghan individuals but no one special activities world no one from the case officer world no station chiefs in Kabul

would ever say that if we allowed the applicants to admit it on their own they just they just wouldn't do yeah so uh i think that uh we could allow 25 so what don't we have now which is really important we don't have an embassy what is an embassy it's an intelligence footprint um what don't we have we don't have any any military bases for special operations for people and really important we don't have the act on intelligence service which was a huge partner in the counterfeiters of operations So we are effectively blind in Afghanistan. And I think that the notion we can do these over-the-horizon operations, yes, we did kill Imansdhariri.

High-value target operations are a little bit easier than what the Israelis call, you know, low-in-the-one, which is what we have to do. If we want to degrade ISIS and Al-Qaeda, it's got to be a sustained campaign, not only of the leadership, but also degrading the footstangers. We don't have that capability now because we're not there. And so to me, this is just a mess and a half. And again, not a crowd movie.

Mark, I'm going to interrupt you real quick. Are you on a browser? Are you on the app? I think I'm on a browser. Okay. I'm going to take the show of this opportunity. See if you can refresh the browser. I might have you actually close it and reopen it from the link.

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Still a little broken. You might need to just close it and rejoin it. Okay. Yeah. Sorry, guys. Hey, everybody. Please like and subscribe here on the YouTube channel. It really helps us.

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Check out Rocket Money. And check out vitamin one water. And Mark will join us real quick. We'll go ahead and get to the questions that people have asked as soon as he rejoins us. And thanks very much for your patient, guys. As you all know that sometimes technology fails. Hey, but. Yeah, perfect, man.

better yeah all right there we go yeah so um so what do you see our because Taliban is now sort of positioning as a legitimate government uh what do you see the future our future with Afghanistan being and their future in the world yeah sure I mean so you know I think that there's always been the question is this the Taliban 2.0 um which I think is not the case um you know this is still the same Taliban which is an incredibly repressive, terrible regime that is cracking down on everything from, you know, education for women, women's rights, certainly going after our old allies. And so the question the international community is going to have to face is, what do you do about trying to provide assistance and aid to a beleaguered population?

One of the things that the U.S. government certainly is struggling with, and I get a sense from reading the tea leaves, is that, you know, is the Talibanic counterterrorism partner when it comes to ISIS. You know, and I really struggle with that. You know, this idea, the enemy of Miami is my friend. I mean, I think there is clearly there is some type of consultation going on between U.S. intelligence and special operations world and the Taliban. I find it a little important.

It's enormously controversial. I've written about this in some pieces. But, you know, the Taliban is still. harboring al-Qaeda, but their enemy is ISIS, and that's our enemy as well. And can you have a cooperative relationship like that? I have a problem with that. Right. That's, it's sort of like, like the bloods are our allies because the Crips, because we're all

against the Crips, right? In a way, it's like saying that Iran is suddenly our friend because they are also against ISIS. Well, I think that, you know, we sacrifice some of our morals and principles, and perhaps I'm biased. And perhaps you guys are too. I mean, you know, I have friends who were killed there in Afghanistan and I spent some time there. And so the idea of aligning ourselves with the Taliban, I think that, you know, ethically and morally is, you know, you can see it in the short term while people would advocate for this.

But, you know, one of the things that I that I remember in my career is we always kind of chase this kind of sexy, shiny object, which is having some kind of liaison relationship with some terrible shitty character. And it just never works. You know, whether we did it with the Syrians, we did with the Libyans. And now we're doing it with the Taliban. You know, I always, I mean, I, you know, some people might disagree, but, you know, we're the members of the cool club. Nobody knows, but the agency or the IC is somehow has some kind of relationship with a rogue, terrible actor, but there's some greater good. You know, we sacrifice our principles when we do that. And I remember talking about this with David Ignatius, who's this, you know, this esteemed Washington Post columnist.

And he said, I'm surprised you're feeling on this because of your career in what you did in the past. And I'm like, well, it's based on the conversation. experience. Like I don't, you know, our counterterrorism cooperation with the Syrians or the Libyans really didn't do much at all. Right. And you end up, you end up propping up these regimes. And the same thing with the Taliban. I think that I would, I would, obviously, if I was still in government and you're asked to do it, you do it. But I don't think it's the right move to make. Now, again, the real question is there's terrible suffering going on in Afghanistan. So what do we do? How do we get aid to these countries? I'm just not sure. ultimately the right answer. But we've got to be really careful in giving legitimacy to what's still to me as a terrorist state. And again, I'm biased. And so maybe I'm not the right person to ask on this.

And maybe a lot of us, you know, I actually went and I, when I was thinking about this, I called up a whole bunch of former station chiefs in Kabul. I said, what do you think of this liaison with the Taliban? And I said, it's a freaking terrible idea. And then I went and I asked some other people who was not as involved in the conflict as many of us were. and they said, well, I understand why we would do it. And so maybe it's just a generational thing, and it's based on our prior experiences.

But, I mean, there may be that, but it's also sort of like, it's sort of like that's yesterday's bad guy. Let's look at the bad guy that's in the news today. But yesterday's bad guy is still a bad guy. There's still equally as much a bad guy. It's like, but we're willing to work with them because they're not in the news now.

ISIS is in the news now. And Dave, they kill. our friends. So I'm sorry. I have a hard time with that. And so again, maybe I'm the wrong person to be involved with that kind of stuff. I could not in good faith go do this. Right. My friends are dead because of them. And so, you know, it's, and it's not like they're reforming in any way. It's not like there's a prospect for a better Afghanistan. There's actually a prospect for a very terrible Afghanistan. Right. It's not, it's not post-World War II, Germany. No, not at all. Three-quarters of the population in need of humanitarian assistance by conservative estimates.

And ironically, ironically, the one thing that was, you know, allowing some Afghans, you know, groups of Afghans and rural areas to eat by was the opium harvest right now. The Taliban's going after the opium harvest just about the time when it doesn't matter anymore because of synthetic opioids. Right. So they've destroyed, you know, again, I forget where I read this, but they've destroyed in some. areas you know 90% of uh and no one knows whether this is because they want to have a monopoly on it or whether there's some reason they've just got a hair up their ass and now opium's a bad thing or what uh but it's but you can imagine if you're an afghan farmer and that's your only line to sustenance and you well the Taliban comes in and destroys yeah but i mean at the end of the day it's

they always tell it they're funding they have to fund themselves somehow yeah yeah yeah so if they're saying they're saying they were they're saying they're saying they're saying And opium is bad, then it's like, okay, well, they've found something else or it's just not profitable. Yeah. So I'm going to get to some questions. Kayla Davis, thank you very much. Why start a coup just to give it up 24 hours later? Is Perkinson that naive that he thought he could just walk away from what he started?

So, you know, my sense is that his family must have been, there must have been something that has to have him stand down. Maybe his family was threatened or something. It was surprising. Again, it's one of those things where you can honestly say as an observer, I don't know. It is strange because he certainly seemed to have some type of support within the military. Clearly, there were messages being passed back and forth between Progoshan and Putin, but, you know, someday the story will come out. But there's something that caused him to turn around. I would imagine it's threats against his family, but that's just speculation.

So I'm going to ask you to speculate a little bit more because there are the theories, and I don't want to call them conspiracy theories, because that's really dismissive. Because if they turn out to be right, they weren't conspiracy. But there are sort of these theories or isolated theories out there that it's a big sort of sciop or information option, right, that Putin and Prigieg are running in order to a accomplish some goal, whether it's with Western intelligence or whatever. But there's that idea, too. Do you give any credit to that? Do you or any possible? So a former station chief of Moscow wrote a really interesting piece on the messenger about this.

And I think it's worth, it's, you know, and it's, it's worth considering. What causes me some doubt on this is just, well, first of all, because that's kind of the, you know, the Russian kind of conspiracy-minded way. And then, you know, Soviet intelligence over the years has, you know, certainly kind of had this, these type of kind of Machiavellian things in their mind and practiced it. But what causes me some doubt is the fact that they, that Wagner Group killed or shot down those Russian aircraft. Right. That to me, now, you know, is Putin okay with sacrificing some of the Russian Air Force? Sure.

But the other point, too, is that, and I mean this seriously, is that, this kind of thing, you know, the way the U.S. media works and the way the U.S. intelligence community kind of or the national security community leaks, I think, I think U.S. intelligence would have picked up on this and we would have heard it already. So, so, you know, if this had come out right away that it was some kind of, you know, you know, comes to some crazy Putin's sciop, I think we would have known. But the fact that we haven't heard, you know, nothing is secret in this town, as you know. So I think, I think if it was something like that, we would have heard.

kind of leaks because that also would have been, you know, the whole idea of this is to kind of, is to kind of cause, our goal would be to cause doubt and so confusion. So if we picked up on that, that's a heck of a way for us to kind of turn the tables and say, hey, this is how crazy Putin is. He actually killed, helped kill 13 of his U.S. of his Air Force personnel. Right. For some kind of weird conspiracy thing with progerzion. So, you know, but in Russia, again, being, you know, trying to be, you know, humble on this. I mean, you know, leave anything on the table. Right.

And the question assumes that a coup was the objective. Right. I mean, Progoshin, it was a mutiny, certainly. And again, without speculating, if you look at the facts, the Wagner group was getting ripped up in Bar Murt. Yeah. You know, Pregozion had said, Progoshin had made Bar Murt when he thought it was

going to be an easy run. He had made it the Wagner groups kind of join the crown. This is where we show how good we are. And yet by his own account, 20,000 dudes dead. The place is called the meat grinder. And then he gets word of the July 1 law whereby, you know, the Wagner group gets. So there are incentives. I'm not saying this is what happened, but there are incentives. for him to want to get out of play, to get always pieces off the table. Right. And if you look at it that way, if that was his goal, it wasn't a bad way to do it. Yeah.

You know, he succeeded. He bought his fighters, he got them out of the meat grinder. Yeah. And, you know, as you said, Mark, I mean, he was probably under threats himself anyway. Who knows? So this is chapter one, you know, this is the, I think that we're not, we're not, done with this with the story but again keep your focus on on what this means for ukraine and i think ultimately it's a positive yeah uh danny thank you very much was havana syndrome and allowable precondition

to use as a waiver to refuse the mandated COVID vaccines uh i've never heard that i don't know um uh i think that uh in fact i've retired by that point so i'm not sure uh Danny thank you very much uh again did any current or former NFL player are suffering from CTE, the chronic, the brain swelling, reach out to Mark. No, no, I haven't actually heard from that. But what's amazing, I've heard from so many other, you know, people who suffered from an injury from athletes, certainly to not NFL players, but from athletes to tons of former military.

I mean, TBI is, I mean, people get TBIs all the time. I have friends who've had skiing accidents, they've had multiple TVIs. You see there's TVIs that are endemic kind of in the soccer community. And so, but it's, you know, it's, again, it's this invisible injury. It's something that, that I think, obviously I had a hard time explaining this to my colleagues, but so does any athlete. Because, again, you know, if you see right behind me, and if you guys can see, there's a, there's a picture. I made that picture, that painting at Walter Reed.

And it's a black canvas with a red kind of splotch, which was, blood, but that, you know, we called that the gunshot. I called it the gunshot because you almost wish you were shot. You wish you had something that was visible because people didn't give you if it was not. Something that you could point at. And, you know, and, and I mean, it really took a long time, even into the war that people started looking at concussions and TBI and blast injuries as like something more than just something that would go away after 20 days. who we're joking about that right yeah walk it off yeah walk it off take a motron right no so you know when i went through uh nico um you know the cohorts again were from the special operations world

and then you go and you do something called uh art therapy and people make masks to kind of it's a way to express yourself and each it's amazingly amazing you go in there and you see um there's a wall from from delta and there's a wall from dev group and there's a wall from kind of air force, the AFSAC folks, there's an agency wall, there's a force recon. So, you know, it's just, the, the amount of individuals who have been there after 20 years of war is staggering. I think National Geographic had a cover story in 2015 about their, their art therapy program. And so it's just, it's an invisible wound. And it's something in that, and you go through the court, again, I was, I was fortunate. I really got along great with these other guys. And same thing. Every,

everyone there's stigma attached you know people don't understand you know you know why can't you are you you're not going on this deployment right now really um you know we've been all gone for you know six seven months and we got to go out again you're you're taking a knee and meanwhile you know they're they're getting crushed yeah and it's it's sad yeah um thank you very much uh playlist are us what is the role of directed energy weapon uh weaponry in modern combat well well right now it's so interesting because the us army the u.s military has actually started fielding directed energy weapons to knock down drones uh you know there's i mean there's so much open source research on this there's so much open i mean so much so much information but um

that is something they're doing for kind of anti drone uh operations and and also for crowd control uh you can go on youtube you can see how uh us has directed energy weapons that are um kind of uh uh you know, using, using that technology to kind of disable individuals who are, you know, in terms of riot control or things like that. So it's, it's out there. This is not, this is not anything new or sexy. It's just one of the questions that we all had with this, if this is what occurred to us, is that this was done kind of an offensive move against personnel rather than trying to knock down a drone.

Right. Right. um sorry uh Alex thank you very much um congratulations on reaching 1,000 subscribers in the subreddit. Oh, I didn't even know we had it. Uh, been here since episode one. Looks like more brads are getting shipped over to Ukraine. Keep up good work. Uh, guys from the merchant, uh, Mariner.

Alex is with the merchant Marines. So you saw, and you saw the list of the list of items being sent. is out on social media now. It's pretty impressive. So when they say there's more Bradley's coming, so what that tells me is that's to provide more bradley's to more of the Ukrainian units. It's not, it's not for, it's not for Bradley's that have been knocked out. So again, I think that's a good sign in terms of long-term commitment. What are your impressions for either of you about the accounting errors that have come up regarding the Ukraine? Like, Like what job can you have a $6 billion accounting error and keep that job?

Andy, I'll let you take that one. I don't know. DoD is a big entity. Yeah. I don't have an answer for that. I remember last time I was on thin ice when I said. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, let me, before we get to one more question, I want to raise one thing.

And I would be remiss if I didn't want to, if I didn't talk about this. you know, we're talking about the book I wrote on leadership, and I do a lot of leadership talks. But one of the things that was really cool, we're not cool. It's actually kind of maybe it's a reflection of society these days, is I do a lot of work with the Philadelphia Police Department. So I go down there and I go out with cops in the street. I go out and ride along as I talk to different districts,

just about leading in crisis situations and again, being comfortable and uncomfortable, all the principles I talk about in my book. And if you saw the other day, there was a mass shooting in Philly, a guy with an AR-15 went out in the street and killed a whole bunch of folks. Well, the two cops who actually tackled him, these two cops were from the 18th District in Philly, you know, ran towards gunfire, running towards an AR-15 with your sidearm is quite a feat. But they tackled this guy and my buddies in Philly told me that these two guys, they sent me a picture of it actually attended one of the leadership classes I gave.

So I was super proud of that. And it's one of the things I'm doing now in terms of leadership. I work with a lot of police departments and particularly the Philly Police. A lot of similarities to what I did in the past, just having kind of a job where, you know, no one's going to give you a pat in the head. But it's indispensable. Yeah. So CIA is indispensable for the national security of the United States being a cop, policing, indispensable, you know, regardless of anyone's political views. And both of them are thankless jobs, aren't they?

Thankless jobs, yeah. But you know what? And people do it because they love it. and so I love working with cops and it kind of gives me that charge my wife's like are you seriously going out in the middle of the night and a ride along in Philly again I'm like yep so I still get a little charged up to do that and maybe we'll get a cheese steak on the side. Andrew thank you very much can Mark talk about the situation of Moldova? Oh my goodness now we're getting kind of deep stuff. I'm going to be dated a little bit but the you know the Moldova situation I think in my in my sense is is is a potential flashpoint in that you have certainly,

I think the Russian military is still there in some areas of Moldova. You have a government which is kind of trying to hold on, although I'm not sure exactly what's happening right now. But you also have other powers or other countries around that as well. But I think that one of the worries about Moldova is that also could be a pretext for a Russian move there. but it's a country actually didn't get to get to visit i always i always certainly wanted to and and a place where i think that we did it we had a whole bunch of success and kind of

counter-russia operations sorry that was a very incomplete answer but i'm dated uh we have a couple questions on patron and then and then we'll just find out where people can find you because you have a podcast now yeah yeah sure book um so from patron um mark olson Thank you. What resource can NATO send Ukraine who will help veterans struggling with PTSD from this war? Do we have an obligation to not only say weapons of war, but also resource necessary to help them rebuild their lives after using said weapons? So I think that's a great question. It goes so much in what we're talking about today. You know, my sense and Andy, you've been there recently is that this is a country that has suffered incredible trauma. So we're not talking right now on this issue about rebuilding Ukrainian infrastructure, which is going to take billions.

But this is talking about a collective trauma of a country that's going to be suffering from PTSD for a long time. And I know there's NGOs that are involved in this right now. But my friends who have come back there say this is a real issue. A huge issue, not only with Ukrainian military forces, but also with the Ukrainian population. Remember that the amount of civilians who have been killed. the trauma of torture and rape with the Russian atrocities. So I think this is something that I hope that people can get galvanized behind. I mean, everyone talks about military assistance.

But when it comes to things like this, I think this is a really long-term issue for the Ukrainians. Just knowing what we've gone through after our 20 years of war, I think they're going to have a huge, huge undertaking in dealing with this kind of collective trauma. And Andy, want to hear your thoughts on this too. No, I just agree, Mark. There are stories that don't get told here about, you know, the level of PTSD that they're dealing with this. So you can imagine, I mean, they're doing what they can.

They, you know, they're pulling guys off the line. They have rest areas. But the state of a lot of these guys. And it just, it's very poignant. because it just makes you admire them. You know, and I'm not a Ukraine. I've got in trouble here before for being honest about what Ukraine needs to do, you know, going ahead, not slip into the bad habits of the past.

Zelensky himself said that. But their soldiers are salt of the earth and it, you know, just gets me kind of upset just thinking about it. What the problem is that they're seeing all the best guys go into this channel this this you know first world war type scenario and they and they're struggling for train manpower they're doing what they can to bring guys off the line but there are things you know alcoholism and and just the guys unable to cope anymore with what they've seen you're talking about units with casualty rates in the you know 80 percent times

over the course of three months. Anyway, I didn't. But I think it really, you know, again, we talked about infrastructure. The need to rebuild infrastructure. But this is something that I think is, it needs more attention. But my understanding, there are NGOs that are working on this now. And so I think that's certainly, you know, Western assistance, you know, who knows, but I think there's a lot of private sector efforts that are underway on this.

I'm really glad you mentioned it, though. I think it's going to take a, I think there's going to have to be a country. or countries who stand up, you know, it's kind of a lead, the framework for the mental health on the mental health piece. Civilian, it's just going to be a massive task. Isaac, I'm going to, I'm going to summarize your question. Thank you. He says, Mark, what are your recommendations that someone should do to have anonymity,

privacy, and security that even you or your former colleagues would have a hard time finding, like someone who's a journalist or activist in the PRC, Iran, Russia or corporate whistleblower in America. Like what are some solid steps that people can take for their online privacy, for anonymity? Everything, everything, everything I don't do. Yeah. And how do they stay up on the, you know, the latest TTPs or whatever?

Well, that's what, you know, what a great question. And obviously, I have not followed this whatsoever, you know, whether I'm tweeting two or I don't use VPNs or all the things that, you know, my life is out there. You know, I think one of the things that that you have to understand is in the age of technology, what we call the ubiquitous technical surveillance environment, the UTS is the word in the intelligence community, is that, you know, even when you do take steps, your life is out there. So when you use your cell phone, when you drive, your car is a GPS. I mean, there's everything you do, your shopping habits, if you're online, if you're ordering on Amazon.

I mean, so if an adversary wanted to build a target profile of you, it is so easy to do. We do that to them, but it's particularly easy. In the United States, we're just so interconnected. I mean, you know, there's, you know, we have smart cities everywhere. There's camera systems all over the place. So the idea of having any kind of anonymity is really tough right now. And again, and we'd live in an age where, you know, with the age of, you know, biometrics, you know, you go to airports, you go into cities, you're on your computer. I guess, you know, if there's a way to shut that off, I'm not sure you can, you know, I mean, God bless, you know, you can move out to Montana and get a log cabin and kind of shut off in the rest of society.

But save that, it's extremely hard. You can do some, you know, some kind of safeguards. But, you know, if you, I mean, there's been one of the things that I saw. it was incredible. I think the New York Times did this a couple years ago with geo fencing, which is it's the notion of basically they take your ad ID data from phones. And they did, and they took a look at CIA headquarters. Well, everyone had their phone and they left it on.

And so then every, every COVID employee at CI headquarters, you know, was parked in the parking lot of CIA headquarters. So, you know, there's, there's, it's just, it's just exceedingly different, difficult to hide your presence, you know, these days, unless you really want to go off the grid. And that has, you know, implications, you know, for privacy, for security, certainly for our old world. But it's, that's just the age we're in right now. Yeah. Yeah.

They did do the Secret Service to around the White House and tracked like the Secret Service movements around the White House into off-sites. Yeah. I think it was, I think it was New York Times that. I can't remember. They did the same thing. I mean, it's wild. Yeah. Yeah.

And by the way, if the New York Times is doing it, so are the Chinese. Yeah. So are other adversaries. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. Jeff Shickland, thank you very much. So this is, what's your response to the whole Hunter Biden laptop, Russia disinformation stuff? Sure, sure. So obviously, I've been, I was involved in this probably a little more tangentially than people thought. First and foremost, you know, this is my view, these were, you know, former intelligence officers like myself who signed a letter, but

we were in the private sector. You know, we were fully retired, had nothing to do whatsoever with the government. Sometimes people have a hard time kind of differentiating with that. But it's, you know, there's a First Amendment right to, you know, to free speech, to express an opinion on something. I mean, I think there's a question always on should former military seniors or intelligence community seniors have any kind of comments on politics. And that's a legitimate debate. But again, these are these were retired officers. In terms of my own involvement in this, you know,

and people can take it what I say, you know, as the truth or not. But I was, but this is what I testified. I testified on the Hill to the Judiciary Committee is that, you know, I was asked about whether I thought early on whether the, the Hunter Biden laptop had any kind of could possibly be involved in any kind of Russian intelligence operation. And my sense was it could because Rudy Giuliani, who was the president's lawyer, was working actively with a Russian intelligence agent, Andre Dirkash, in Ukraine. And so Rudy had a lot of Russian stink on him. What I was asked to do by Mike Morel was write a talking

points for an op-ed. Him and I were going to write an op-ed together in the paper. I didn't know of any of any of his contacts that later turns out he had contacts with the Biden campaign. And then it turned into a letter. But my role in it was simply, but based on my expertise, I saw Rudy Giuliani as someone who was compromised by Russian intelligence. I gave my two cents for what was to be an op-ed. It turned into something else. And of course, it's kind of blown up into something much bigger. I will say that, I think that, again, there's a First Amendment right for people to speak their mind.

others may disagree. The one thing that is unfortunate in this, and I think is that people have kind of conflated this somehow with, you know, with having altered the results of the election. I think there's no way to know that. I would dispute that. But the result is that I get death threats all the time. I mean, you know, my local police department here is involved in protecting my house and my family. I've gotten multiple death threats on the phone. I had one literally two days ago. and email as well. And so I think that's unfortunate, and it kind of gives a sense of where we are as a country.

Again, I think we can disagree on things politically. People can voice their opinion on a First Amendment basis, but the idea that it should lead to kind of threats against individuals is unfortunate. And by the way, one of the things for myself is I testified, again, I voluntarily went and I testified in front of a, Jim Jordan's committee, the Judiciary Committee. But on this whole issue, I gave the National Review, a very conservative publication, asked me about this right after it happened.

I gave open interviews on this. I have never in one way hid my involvement in this. I've been very open about it. Again, take it or leave it. I am responsible for my actions. And what I did was write talking points for an op-ed based on what I thought my professional experience, you know, warranted. And so that's where it is. although many people probably won't believe it.

And I think I would appreciate not getting the death threats. That would make my life a lot easier. Probably the Vienna Police Department would be happy as well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, we have the First Amendment America, and nobody, regardless of their political opinion, regardless of things like that,

nobody on any issue should be subject to death threats. That's just not how America is supposed to work. Right. It's just not. you know like death threats are what happens in russia happens in afghanistan happens in these other places like that is not you know you can take somebody to task for something you disagree with you know but death threat should not be yeah uh should should not be a mechanism and if you know and i i would i would hope that none of our viewers ever gives death threats to do to anybody

regardless of how, you know, their political position, their opinions, things they, it doesn't matter. That's not how we're supposed to work. And, you know, one of the things, Dave, is that, you know, in, you know, I, I, I've worked for 26 years at CIA. Half of my friends are hardcore conservatives. Half of my friends will probably vote for Trump again. these are still my dear friends and and you know i think that we can disagree on on on on things without certainly going kind of down that that crazy rabbit hole of getting so so upset and so kind of violently obsessed with this but um you know that's a that's where it is i i will

i will say that probably two of my closest friends are diehard conservatives will vote for trump again are pissed at me about the about the whole hunter-biden thing but you know what um And they've shown this in the past. If I ever called them for anything, anything I needed, they would be there in a millisecond. Right. And I think that's the way we should be in America. Well, I mean, honestly, and that's, look, a president is four years or eight years. Like, we, we've all been, we've all been through, like, at this point in our lives, multiple presidents of United States.

Not a single one has ever drastically, like, changed the nature, I would say. You know, like we have an entire process for that. We don't elect dictators. We don't elect tyrants. We don't elect people who could, whether it's Biden, Trump, Obama, Clinton, Reagan. It doesn't matter. You know, it's not worth what we're giving it these days. And let me say one other thing, too, as much as kind of the crazy, there's so much performative theater out there.

When I went to testify in front of the judiciary committee, they were exceedingly polite. it was not contentious it was a you know and so so I think that what you see behind the scenes is a lot different than what you see on kind of the theatrics in public I went there they thanked me for my service I explained what I did

they said got it and you know and I went my way and so you know behind the scenes there's a lot of things I think that people would be surprised because people get so fired up by a lot of this stuff but but you know my my dealings with this

have, you know, unfortunately the death threats. And by the way, I told the committee about that too. I said, this is really unfortunate. We've got to be really careful about this. You can be really, you can be upset about, you know, a bunch of us making what I think was a First Amendment statement. But, but boy, you know, the kind of the dialogue gets so heated that it turns into something that literally, you know, I mean, two days ago.

I came back from the beach the other day. It was down the Outer Banks. and I hit the play button on my answer machine. And yep, there's another one. Yeah. And we see it like we see people with this responsive on both sides. Like we said, Brett Kavanaugh, you know, that whole thing with the person with a gun outside of his place. Like, you know, like we're seeing it everywhere.

And people, it's like you say about the contention. Yeah. Our politicians, they eat at the same restaurants. they drink at the same bars, they send their kids to the same schools. They're not, like you say, it's performative. It's perform. I think it's a lot of performative theater. You know, Senator Josh Hawley lives in my town.

I don't agree with Josh Hawley on much stuff at all. But you know what? He lives in our town. And there are people demonstrating it outside his house. I'm like, get the fuck out of here. Like, I like, just, you know, let these guys poor family just be. Yeah. That used to be the case, if you remember, you know, Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill getting along.

and we're so far from that. Obama and McCain, as recently said. Obama and McCain, right? Yeah. I mean, I saw something the other day that made me smile and, you know, I don't think it's going to matter much one way or the other. But, you know, it's the idea, but we're talking about it before about, you know, psychedelics. And the notion that psychedelics should be used for treatment of PTSD and TBI and other things like that. Well, there's a weird coalition on Capitol Hill between AOC.

and Matt Gates on this issue. And so I thought that was kind of interesting. Someone from the hard left and the hard right, you know, maybe there's some hope for us after all because that's the way Washington used to work. Yeah. You can get really pissed at each other. You can get really angry,

but there wasn't kind of that kind of that threat of violence that I think is there now. And it's, you know, I mean, it concerns me a little bit. Again, it's something I got to deal with. And one of the great things, about living in northern Virginia is that all the police departments here all have top secret clearances and they're tied in with, you know, the old outfit. So I think it will be okay. Yeah. No, I mean, you guys talk about, you're like, look at Scalia and Ginsburg. Like that,

to me, they're friends. To me, if anything points to how people can hold very different opinions and still be friends, like it's Scali and Ginsburg, right? But anyway, that's it for the question. So, everybody, please check out clarity and crisis. It's a fantastic. Like, it's, it's, it's very digestible, which I really appreciate because I feel is in most, in a lot of nonfiction books about things like leadership whatnot, people feel the need to really like pack their chapters full of fluff in order to make the book larger and seem weightier. And you don't do that. Like, it's very concise. It's very to the point. It's very, you know, very illuminating.

And also, you're on a. You have a podcast now. Can you tell us about the podcast? Yeah, sure. So it's a, and again, this is, you know, what I love, the title, the production company is called Deep State Radio, which is a, of course, is a, you know, we're kind of making fun of the notion that's a deep state. But it's called the spy show. And it's been really fun. And so basically I've had, you know, it's, it's, it's 30 minutes.

It's kind of a quick review of kind of current events, but we'll have people on, you know, we had, you know, Jim Lawler, who is a, I think you've had Jim on show here. just talking about recruitment operations, but we had a former CIA lawyer the other day, Jim Petrilla, talk about the notion. It's important. It's about 702, FISA 702 reauthorization. And so it's trying to be kind of current on events. Certainly he's not going to compete with a two and a half hour or three hour mega podcast like this. I will say that it's been a hell of a lot of fun. And again, Andy, talking about imposter syndrome, what in the hell am I doing hosting a podcast? But it's been great. And so again, it's on the deep state radio now. network and it's called The Spy Show and it's been it's been it's been fun.

I think we're going to the next podcast we're going to do is talking about that's actually it's a pretty interesting issue is should there be kind of an MI5 in America? Should there be a domestic intelligence service? Which again, there's so many strange top, so much strange kind of alliances on this. The hard right and the hard left would say hell no. But maybe people in the center would say yes. And so just trying to be a little provocative, but it's been it's been fun. Thanks.

Thanks for the plug. One podcast to another. I appreciate it. Of course, man. We support everything you do. I mean, you are a patriot who spent, you know, your entire life, like working for the benefit of the country and a job with no recognition. You know, you were wounded in action, essentially. And, you know, and all the loyalty that you gave the agency in the country initially was not returned. and you know we support you completely like no love you guys thanks i love the show yeah it's been a glass and andy it's good to get to meet you let me tell one quick one final

quick story i told andy before i was going to see andy speak at one of his fundraisers um and this is really kind of this doesn't this is not a great testament to me but it was in dc but i was dying to go to this indian restaurant i love indian food i think the restaurant the restaurant's called um uh raki and so there was a reservation conflict and i ended up going to to eat Indian food and not go see Andy speak and I kick myself for this forever but uh you know you made a wise choice food one out of Indian food one out but uh thanks for you know thanks thanks thanks again for all you did for you know you had some Molagatani in in uh yeah market soul yeah you take me out for an Indian meal and he's man yeah it was good close to my heart

so afterwards afterwards afterwards I was like I told my friend I'm like we can't ever tell anyone this and I just told like thousands of years Well, thanks, thanks, Mark. We appreciate it. Everybody, check out his book. Check out his podcast. Thanks, guys. Join our Patreon.

Get all of our episodes ad-free. And we have a show on Tuesday with Dale Hanson. He's going to be in studio, too, because we had some issues with the Internet last time. So we're going to get it all down. Perfect. With Dale. And then Friday, I have no idea. Tune in.

It's going to be great. Yeah. So. all right everybody thanks very much thanks guys much thanks everyone awesome thanks for me