Special Operations, Cobert Ashby an eye the Team House with your hopes, Jack
Murphy and David bark Hey, guys, welcome to episode two hundred and thirty
one of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park and we're
really happy tonight to have in studio with us. Christopher Whitcomb. Chris served
in the FBI as a special agent as a member of the Hostage Rescue Team
HRT, involved in all sorts of national level operations, and then went on
to have a very interesting career outside of the FBI as well. He actually
retired on nine to eleven on September eleventh. So it's very interesting period of
time that you kind of cross pads. And as I was telling you before
the show, your book came out like right after nine to eleven, Cold
Zero, your memoir, and I read it as a senior in high school,
like I and I loved it. I thought it was so awesome.
And so You've been on my radar for a very long time and I'm glad
we could like make this happen All these years later, there's still parts of
your book that kind of like resonate in the back of my mind. From
you know now, twenty years ago. Yeah, it's hard. I mean
it's so long ago. I always say I forget the lead character's name,
and which is true. But I think history is important in the world that
you guys document on the show. And I got to start out by saying,
I'm huge fans. I was. I was, really I couldn't believe
it when you called me up and invited me on the show. I'm a
huge fan. I think it's remarkable what you do to document all the heroes
and the remarkable human beings that are out on the line doing what they do
for this country. And anyway, I really really appreciate you bringing me.
I got to give a quick shout out to sponsor of tonight's show, Augustus
Precious Medals. Go check them out out Augusta Precious Medals dot Com. Appreciate
it, guys. So Chris, I mean, yeah, man, I
mean, this is like right in our wheelhouse. I'm really glad to have
you here today. Let's start off talking a little bit about you know,
your background, your your origin story as it were, how you grew up,
your upbringing, and like how that sort of led you towards uh,
you know, eventually federal law enforcement. I guess I'll warn you right off
the bat. We talked a little bit about this, but my story is
very odd, and for a period of time it made sense. Small town
kid joins the FBI, ends up making the hostage rescue team, and during
that time was involved in a lot of really high profile and some notorious cases
or actions over a course of time. And then when I left the FBI,
and I resigned on nine to eleven. Coincidentally, by the way,
it was horrible. Nobody ever wants to leave the war on terror on nine
to eleven. That was horrible. We'll come back to that later. But
then the story after that is really kind of wild, and I guess we'll
get there, but start out, you want me to talk about yeah,
and we're gonna you know, we want to spend a sort of the majority
of the show talking about your post FBI career because it's fascinating and it's it's
an angle of like the intel world that doesn't get talked about often, if
at all, So that'll be great. But we do want to talk about,
you know, your time in the FBI, what it was, What
year did you go into the FBI? I'm joined in nineteen eighty seven.
Yeah, I was twenty seven years old. And when when I was twenty
seven getting to the FBI, I think is a crazy part of the story.
I grew up in a small town in northern New Hampshire at the ski
area. Small town meaning two hundred and fifty three hundred people home of I
was born in Bethlehem and then in a town called Frank Cooney the skier,
a Cannon Mountain skier, and Frank Cooney in New Hampshire, home of Bodie
Miller, who's the most successful ski year in ski racer in American history,
but also home of four FBI agents. I was the fourth FBI agent to
come from this tiny little town, which sounds very odd and uh and I
always say that I was. I was born on a Thursday to seventeen year
old sweethearts, exactly nine months after the junior prompts. So my uh so,
not only did I start out in a small town, but austor beginnings.
I suppose My dad was a My dad and mom dropped out of high
school. My dad was a ski patrolman at Cannon Mountain and worked summer's mowing
ski slopes with a sling blade, a scythe, a handsaw for like a
dollar eighteen an hour. So it was a It was an incredible youth.
It was a great place to grow up because everything was outdoor. You know,
in those days we had one television channel and all we did was hike,
rock climb, ski, race and spend our time outdoors. So,
you know, I spent my youth outdoors with no parental controls whatsoever, you
know, for better or were. So I grew up in New Hampshire and
then went away to college and really never came back after that. And so
you joined the FBI at age twenty seven? What I mean? I take
it you had to go to college first. Three. I mean there's different
ways to get into the FBI. You could go become an accountant, a
lawyer, or have some sort of law enforcement background. I mean, what
was the path you two? Yeah, I think people probably find it interesting.
I think many shows I watch, I think a lot of people would
say, ask this question or ask that question because a lot of people don't
really know. There are a lot of myths flying around the FBI or the
CIA or military. But the FBI has very basic rules. I never applied
to the FBI. I was living in Washington, DC writing speeches. I
was a speechwriter for a member of Congress named Silvio Kanti was a chairman of
the Appropriations Committee. And I was fighting boxing out of a gym called Finlay's
Boxing whatever in northeast Washington. There's a rough place, really rough place,
and I went sparred one night and this guy named Big Bob Moore knocked me
the fuck out, I mean cold, and so I was a little dizzy.
I go home, sit down. I was married. My wife was
reading a book and she said, hey, you got mail, and I
said, okay, whatever. I checked the envelope and it was from the
FBI. So I just got knocked out. I was twenty seven years old.
I think what most people would, Why the hell is the FBI after
me? You know? So I opened it up and it was an application.
So she had seen you talk about recruiting. How do you get recruited
to this, and how do you get recruited to that? In my case,
she watched a television commercial on local TV in DC. They were recruiting
Spanish speakers and I said, I don't speak Spanish, and she said,
well, one's that is, when has that ever stopped you? You know,
give it a try. So I ended up in the FBI kind of
by accident. And then the process you apply, you take a test,
If you pass the test, you go on to a background investigation. Then
they get an interview. And in this case, it was interesting because going
back to my youth. At the time, the Washington Metropolitan Field Office in
Washington, DC was at a place called Buzzard Point and it was a hellhole.
I mean, you didn't want to get down there unless you are already
had a gun. It was a pretty rough spot. Go in, go
up to the whatever seventh floor, sit down at the table in a conference
room with you know, the President and the Attorney General with pictures on the
wall and the big FBI seal, and I'm wearing a suit, and you
know, I'm thinking, how do you get in the FBI? It just
seemed kind of odd. And there were three people that did the interview.
And we go through the whole interview and tell all the stories in the background
investigation, and one and we got to the end and this one agent,
the lead agent in the interview, said, uh, I had told him
that this story about the CIA. I guess should back up at some point
toub about that, but I was really should have gone into the CIA.
I should have applied to the CIA, and I told him that. He
asked me why I wanted to be an FBI agent, and I said,
well, I don't know. You know, I think I might want to
go into the CIA as well. And he said, well, why didn't
you go? He said, I know why he didn't apply to go to
the CIA, and I said, you do and he said yeah, because
the CIA doesn't take people who have used illegal drugs. And I thought shit.
When I was in college, like most people in college, and I
didn't want to go into the FBA. I never thought about it. I
was in this band called Doctor Neptune and the Rare Organs, the College Ban.
We did Frank Zappa covers and uh, you know, I might have
dropped a bullet two every you know, every once in a while, but
you didn't inhale. I never inhaled r I had inhaled the shit out of
it. But anyway, so he was so he was a great guy.
And he said, look, the FBI has changed his policy and they allow
experimental use of marijuana but not within the last three years. And he said,
so, I'm going to say that again. The FBI allows experimental use
of marijuana, but not in the last three years. So let me ask
you, mister Witcam, have you ever tried illegal drugs? And I thought,
I've tried it, experimental use of marijuana, but not within the last
year. So he goes, fantastic yet, and he said, because if
you make it, you know, if you get hired, you'll be the
fourth FBI agent from frank Coneina, Hampshire. And I thought, well,
that sounds almost impossible to believe because it was such a small town. But
then it goes back to this story. When I was growing up in this
tiny town, the FBI agent that I knew was living in town. His
name was William Sullivan. William Sullivan had been the number two assistant director behind
j Ed Gohoover in the FBI during the co Intel years. He was in
charge of domestic intelligence gathering Martin Luther King, He was in charge of the
Kennedy assassination investigation, and he was air apparent to j Edghover. He gotten
some kind of a pistoon match with Jedghoover and jedghover looked over him handpicking his
successor. So William Sullivan said, screw it. He retired, He wrote
a book, and he retired in Sugar Hone, the Hampshire. He was
scheduled two weeks before the Senate hearings on the Kennedy assassination to go and testify
before the United States Senate that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill JFK by himself,
it was a conspiracy. And two weeks before he scheduled to testify,
a guy that worked for my dad shot him and killed him in a hunting
accident, and that was big news in frank Conis, Hampshire. I didn't
notice you didn't do the accident, No, because I know the kid,
the guys. He's a really really nice guy. And the guy's dad was
a state trooper. He's a remarkable guy, great guy. It was just
it was a tragic accident. But when people talk in my life, and
I've been involved in a lot of things in life, but people talk about
conspiracies. I always look back on that and think to myself, you cannot
tell that story and say you've got to have the right that's the way that
goes. But to grow up in a town that's small and where you know
everybody. I knew the chief of police, this guy Barney Young. As
it turns out, there was another FBI agent named Tim Casey who was at
the chief of Police's house the night that William Sullivan was shot and killed.
The next morning he was hunting season and you put all of it together and
it's just it's one of those stories. It has not been widely written about,
but it is a compelling conspiracy. It's and it's not a conspiracy.
It's just a tragic accident. But that's, you know, that's kind of
whey that world works. So Tim Casey, William Sullivan, h the FBI
agents, the gentleman that was interviewing me at the when I got in,
and I was the fourth. I don't know about anybody since then. So
that was that small town. But what was really remarkabout it remarkable, I
think, is that an adjacent town, Land affterw Hampshire even smaller. The
man that I grew up calling uncle Harold's name was Harold Janine. Harold Janine
doesn't mean much now, but at the time he was kind of Bill Gates
and Elon Musk and several others all put together. He started a company called
itt Itt now as Community Colleges or something. Yeah. At the time it
was the world's first multinational corporation. They had Sheridan Hotels, they had Avis
Renakar, they had Continental Bakery. They made wonderbread and Twinkies Wow. They
made Cony shock absorbers. They made the tele communication cables that go under the
North Atlantic. They were the biggest multinational corporation in the world. He was
the chairman of the board and the CEO. And he had had a farm
which they called the farm which comes in later on this hilltop in hand and
excuse me, on land after New Hampshire, and that's where I grew up.
Harold Janine paid the CIA in nineteen seventy Harold Janine paid the CIA one
million dollars in cash to overthrow the government of Chili. And this is widely
written about New York Times books, and the CIA I think did not take
the million dollars in cash because they got onto it. Somebody discovered it ahead
of time, but it was widely written about at the time. But the
government was overthrown. Salvadori Enda, the president of Chili, was killed and
hit squads came after Uncle Harold. They blew up the Itt Office building,
Madison Avenue, Manhattan, and they came to kill him. He and his
bodyguards went to the farm in New Hampshire. So I grew up with those
guys. I grew up with Jerry Sabbatino, who we called Bullet, who
had because odd Job was already taken. He looked he looked just like Odd
Job. And so I grew up with all of these guys coming and going
at all hours a day and night, briefcases and limousines, private jets.
He had a Grumm and Goose, an amphibious plane that would land in the
water in the Connecticut River and take off. It was It was pretty incredible
and everything that goes with it, Like we there's a pool room, right,
I mean, this was a mansion. It was a really remarkable place.
And we were playing one day and we found this secret door in a
closet by the in the pool room, full of all these eavesdropping devices,
you know, the pelican cases, full of all of these weird looking guns
and stuff. It was pretty incredible. And to hear the stories that he
would tell about the way the world really worked. I was thirteen, twelve,
thirteen years old at the time, but I remember it very well.
And he hired a guy named John mccoone, who called Jack. Jack McCown
was the most recent director of the CIA. So Harold Janine was intimately involved
and historically documented as the private arm of the CIA at a time when that's
what was like David Rockefeller or Ross Perrot in later years. Exactly right,
exactly right. So, I mean he had started out at Bell and Howell,
and he had worked classified projects all the way back to World War Two.
So to grow up in a tiny town with those stories about the guy
that worked for my dad shooting the number two guy in the in the FBI,
and uncle Harold, who was literally the the cliving in a Spye novel.
For a twelve year old kid during the height of the Cold War,
I mean, I'd duck and cover in, you know, in school,
and I'd go home and we would check it out as fucking secret stashes of
guns and closets, and all his bodyguards would teach us how to shoot.
It was. It was really remarkable way to grow up. So then I
went away to school and that's how I found my way back in that office
at Buzzard's point. So one of the things that stands out in my mind
again, you know, after I've read your booking like two thousand and one,
was you're going through your FBI training and your instructors are trying to drill
into you like, hey man, this isn't like the movies. You're you're
not a g man with a Tommy gun shooting up gangsters. It doesn't work
like that. And then you get to your first station, your first day
as an actual FBI agent out somewhere out in the Midwest. As I recall,
Yeah, can you tell us a little bit about that day. Yeah.
So, for those who have ever thought about joining the FBI, you
give up your entire life and you go to the academy at Quantico. The
CIA has basically has two academies, right the Farm and Harvey Point and other
places here, schools and stuff like that, But the FBI has one.
The academy. It's on the Quantico Marine Corps reservation. You show up with
a suitcase, you check in on a Sunday night, and you stay there
for now. I think it might be eighteen weeks. When I went through,
it was sixteen weeks. So you live there for four months and you
never see I didn't see my wife, I didn't see my had a brand
new baby. I didn't see him at all. And you live there and
uh, you know, it's it's it's very different. You really consumed by
that world. Then one day they give you orders. In this case,
it was Kansas City. I didn't even know what Kansas City was. I
mean, I show up in Kansas City, checked into the Adams Mark Hotel
or something, and I'm looking out over the sea. I remember very clearly.
We've driven from Quantico to Kansas City and a Jeep c J seven with
a lift kit and a canvas top, miserable drive with a baby who was
like eight months old and my wife was pregnant with the next one right nowhere
conditioning in July, and we roll up there. She's tough as nails and
uh but that's where it started. So check in, you look out over
the city and say life a fighting crime, you know, And at the
time it was it was kind of cool. So the next day go into
the office, You sit around and you look at read the newspaper, have
a cup of coffee, like you think of a you know, sitting around
an FBI agent. And so it was like ten o'clock in the morning or
something like that. I was in the I was in the bathroom, standing
at a urinal. This guy, Roger came in said, hey, kid,
let's go. We we got a situation. And I was on the
bank robbery squad. Now, when you go in the FBI, you could
work a lot of different classifications. You could work violent crime, you could
work white color clime, you could work invest applicants, you could work a
million different things. I just got lucky ended up on a bank robbery squad
for what I wanted to do. So we jumped in the car. And
now, remember going Before going in the FBI, I'd been all over the
world. I mean I'd probably been to twenty countries at that point. I'd
lived in LA and I had a lot of experiences before I went in.
So and I had been a speechwriter for a senior member of Congress. I'd
go to every Thursday. We'd go to the Oval Office, to the to
the White House. My boss had a nineteen sixty eight gto judge with factory
flames on the side, a red gto with a white convertible top and I'd
get in the car with him when we drive down Pennsylvania Avenue, turn left
into the White House park in front of the Oval office. It was cool,
I mean it was remarkable. So I get in a car with the
supervisor and with the squad supervisor and with the ASAC. The ASAC is the
Assistant Special Agent charge, like the number two and one of the number three
guys in the office. And I'm in the back seat right so I'm thinking,
cool, I'm riding with the big boys, first day on the job,
and just complete moron. I was an idiot, complete idiot. We
roll up on this thing and the bank robber squad had found a guy in
a house and they thought he had kids in the house with him and didn't
want to have a hasted situation, so they put together a ruse where they
dressed two guys up, they dressed two guys down, and they went to
the front door with like a TV or something. There was selling raffle tickets
for a Literal League giveaway or something. They knock on the door, the
guy comes out, Oh, I'm sorry. We were all stationed around like
because a big HiT's gonna go down. Right, We're taking down this armed
bank roarber, armed and dangerous, and there are streets shut down and people
hiding behind trees like you see, and I'm thinking cool. The door opens
up and this guy comes out with this big chrome you know, three fifty
seven forty four magnum whatever, and it was on man. It was the
guys dive off and everybody's piling out of their cars with their shotguns and it's
going down ten o'clock in the morning, the mean streets of Kansas City.
And I remember clearing the backseat of the car coming around, and they teach
you to kneel down behind the tire because bullets go through sheet metal, obviously,
And I'm behind there and I've got my gun and uh, you know,
trying to draw a beat on the guy. And all of a sudden,
I hear somebody yelling wick um, wick um, and I'm thinking,
am I supposed to charge the house? I'm like, you know, I'm
the one who's gonna save the day. And it was the boss. It
was the Asac and he goes, you put that fucking gun back in your
holster and you hide behind that tire, and I don't want to see you
again, and I'm I mean I was destroyed. I was ruined. So
I go, what am I going to do? So I sat down behind
the tire and then everybody else who's there, who's fully involved in this thing,
and it was a pretty big deal and they all see me and they
start screaming at me, what the hell is wrong with you? Get your
gun out, getting the fight. So the bosses yelling at me to hide,
and the rest of the crew is is calling me names but not joining
the fight. So it was that was quite a first day on the job.
I love the idea of like your first you know, your first day
on the job. Everybody has this image in the cells and it sounds like
you're getting called up to the show. Like they see like they see how
cool I am. I'm they recognize talents exactly right, Like, let me
just think about it, getting called by name up to the show. It
doesn't matter what you go into, any brands of the military, ating laws
and whatever else you think. When you join, you're a special. You're
special. I mean they give you a badge and a gun. Yeah,
and you've got thirty statutes that you can enforce. You know, you're the
guy who's supposed to save democracy, the hero in the Western world, and
it happens. It's not like I gotta wait two years before I get involved
in something. It's day one, ten o'clock in the morning. It's not
your first cup of coffee. The next thing you know, you're in this
but row down. But but it's just it's just the reality. It's like
it reminds me of Star Wars, whereverybody feels like, you know, they're
Luke Skywalker and you know they're usually like read two or whoever gets blown out
or you're like, yeah, but the idea that I'm getting called up and
then from put your gun away, it's like, oh shit, yeah.
But well, in my case, I was an idiot, complete one,
but I didn't know what to do. But you know, it worked out
and they sent me. The FBI has offices field offices around the country,
and they have satellite offices they called resident agencies, and it was a resident
agency about two hours south, two or three hours south in Springfield, and
they sent me down there and then it was four years of just incredible work.
It was just it was a dream come true. Flip me read these
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So, Chris, when did HRT first come up on your radar? Like
that even becomes something you hear about in those days? Very different world.
Back then. In those days, nobody really knew a lot about anything.
I mean, now we live in a magic age of information. You guys,
as in this podcast bring the average person face to face with remarkable human
beings who've done incredible things. Right, None of that existed back then,
even within the FBI. So all I knew about the Hostage Reski team at
the time, and we're talking now nine ninety one, nineteen ninety all I
really knew was there was a group at the FBI Academy who had a compound
off in the woods, off to the side, and they had helicopters,
and they wore No Mac's flight suits, and you'd see him in the gym
or in the cafeteria. You did, people to talk kind of in hush
tones about them. You didn't really know much about it. So the way
the FBI works, in particular at that time, they would they the FBI
would move new agents or excuse me, would move agents based on the needs
of the bureau. So if you had been a certain amount of time in
one office, they could arbitrarily move you without much notice at all. So
after four years I got a call from Kansas City and they said, look
at your time's up. You're going to rotate out and you're gonna go either
in New York or to la I had two sons at the time, Mick
and Jake, and it was great. I mean, working in the FBI
at that time in Springfield, Missouri was kind of the white picket fence,
right. I had a nice house. You worked essentially from eight to six
or something like that. It was really a straightforward job, and you're kind
of a small business person, a contractor really in the sense that you go
find your own cases. You don't just go in In a bigger city,
it's different New York Field office, it's very, very different. But a
resident agency, you would have a case load in my case, maybe twenty
twenty five case or something like that, and I could go out and work
a bank robbery suspect in the middle of the ozark someplace by myself and not
see anybody else. So it was a great gig. My gig was up.
I didn't want to go to New York and I didn't want to go
to LA. Talked to Rose, my wife, and said, what are
we going to do? And I had heard about knew something about this hostage
Rescue team and they had a selection once a year and the selection came in
March. So I said, I'm going to try out. So I applied,
I got a try out. I went back to Quantico, I made
it through the tryout, and I somehow got picked for the team. That's
how it happened. And what year was that? Ninety one? So yeah,
and this was also I mean you didn't know it at the time,
but coming up on like a pivotal time of American history. Uh. You
know, we've had Danny Colson on the show, who you know, has
created HRT. We've had Gary Nosner, yeah, who was one of the
negotiators. So do you want to start talking about a little bit about,
you know, what was going on domestically at that time and sort of like
what HRT's portfolio looked like at that moment. Yeah. Two things. One,
the United States government at that time looked at terrorism as a domestic law
enforcement function, and it was the domain of the FBI. It was a
federal offense terrorism at large. So at that time, just for example,
on nine eleven, well I'm skipping ahead. Let me come back and just
say that at that time I joined HRT nineteen ninety one, they were about
seventy seven zero designated terrorist organizations throughout the world, one of which was Al
Qaeda, just one. I mean, they might have been number thirty down
the list. There were Red brigades, and there were endless numbers of them,
and they were prolific. In the nineteen eighties, hijacking was a regular
occurrence and they I mean, anybody that goes back and does a research.
Terrorism was a completely different world than it is today. Something would happen all
the time. There would be a bombing, a hijacking, a murder,
or something really extraordinary, and the United States government looked at it as a
criminal, criminal enterprise that would be investigated by the FBI and prosecuted by United
States attorneys. That's the way the system worked, Okay, So anywhere we
found terrorists, we would go and get them, like the weatherman and the
weatherman, I mean there were so many. I mean, yeah, but
we would then, Yes, Irish Republican Army Black September Red Brigades. I
think I'm shun Rico was a little bit later, but there were so many
of them. My point being that prior to nine to eleven, it was
not the per view of the military. It was almost exclusive the FBI.
So we the FBI would work with the CIA in terms of putting together different
actions, especially outside the United States. And one myth many people think the
FBI works inside the United States and the CIA works outside. Couldn't be further
from the truth. The FBI has legal attaches or field offices throughout the world,
and we can chase, investigate, and help prosecute crimes wherever they occur
in the world involving Americans. Okay, so that's one aspect of what HRT
did at the time in the early nineteen nineties. And then also we would
work anything that was a high profile crime that would escalate to that point.
People think various things about HRT because it's very very poorly understood. The Hostage
Resky Team is not a swat team. They are not a negotiation element.
They are a tactical hostage rescue component. That is, and people talk about
Tier one. Yea, I don't even know what that means. There are
certain entities people who say that term don't know what it means. Yeah,
I don't even know where that came from. In the nineteen nineties, there
were three tactical elements the United States relied upon for in extremist violence. Delta
Force or whatever the unit or Combat Application Group in the day, it was
still called Delta Force, Seal Team six with DEV group, and because of
a lack hall the Possecommatatas, the United States government could not send military in
a law enforcement crisis in the United States. So if you had a hastage
situation, well, I'll use the Olympics, the Olympics in Los Angeles.
Coming out of the Olympics in Munich where all of those athletes were killed in
the terrorist action, the United States government didn't want that to happen. So
the Attorney General at the time went to Fort Bragg to see a demonstration by
Delta to show how they would resolve a hastage situation for the Los Angeles Olympics,
which was nineteen eighty four I think was eighty four eighty six, So
he went down. It was a very famous story, and he went up,
I mean it was Delta, right, I'm sure it was a remarkable
demonstration. Went up and said, fabulous. The only thing I don't see
is handcuffs. Were the handcuffs And the guy, one of the operators,
looks at him and goes, I don't know what you're talking about. We
give them all too right here, right, the handcuffs. And he thought
to himself, as Attorney General, you know, the number one law enforcement
agent agent opera official in the United States, and he said, okay,
we can't have that. So, and I've said this before. When Delta
started as a hostage rescue component, not even a special warfare component, but
a specific entity, they had to invent all that shit. They invented CQB,
they invented fast roping, they invented tactical rapping, they invented all of
those different things, and a lot of that came out of the swap community.
So when Delta started, they pioneered those tactics based on what had come
from the Los Angeles Swat Team Los Angeles Policeman squat Team, and received a
lot of help from the FBI. And I've said this before, and I
hope I'm right, But I've been told by numerous sources that most of the
original Delta guys came through the FBI Academy undercover in order to work in that
world, right, which will come back, because I truly believe you never
know who the fuck anybody is anyways. But so anyways, when HRT,
excuse me, when the US government decided to get ready for the Los Angeles
Olympics, they decided to put together a civilian component that became HRT, and
they had to put it someplace, so they put it in the FBI.
So they created a civilian version of Delta, same weapons, tactics, same
command structure, even a very very similar selection process. And they built and
they built that put it in the FBI, and that started. Danny Colson
started that nineteen eighty three. So I always found it interesting. Fascinates me
about HRTs. They have that counter terrorism capability that you describe, but they're
also cops. They can investigate crimes, collect evidence, make arrests. Well,
the short answer is yes. So you have people who ask me,
what are the legal justifications and it is Title eighteen us COO. Title eighteen
provides for certain capabilities and authorizations for federal law enforcement. And you could have
a special agent in different agencies. But the special agent people always say,
what's so special special about you? Right, you're not going to trail apark
at two in the morning. And that's the first thing I always say,
what's so special about you? That's the that's the authorization, and the specific
designation is eighteen eleven. That is a specific designation that you can carry a
gun and you have arrest authority and all of that. The FBI has certain
criminal violations that they investigate, one of which is not murder. Murder is
not even a federal crime except in certain applications I mean, like political violence,
political violence certain judges. Yes, exactly right. So you have late,
local, state, and federal organizations. Each has their own jurisdictions.
The FBI has a specific one has a set of specific Did they also get
involved where in it's across state lines? Like yes, that's how it originally
started that if you have a crime in Iowa, you can't chase across state
lines to another And Jed Goober what started as the Bureau of Investigation before the
Federal Bureau of Investigation was designed to allow an entity to chase crime across borders,
and then it went from their financial crimes, financial instruments, things like
that. So at the time terrorism was considered a federal crime, the Hostage
Rescue Team was a highly evolved tactical component that could chase anywhere in the world
any crime involving an American, specifically terrorism, with the idea that if someone
were taken hostage, you would need somebody to go in and resolve it,
and that's what they did. So when I joined HRT, that was their
primary operation. Coming back to this the second point, which is some of
those crimes escalate too unusual circumstances, which is where this conversation always goes,
which is Ruby Ridge and Waco. Right, I was a both. Some
people may have seen the Netflix documentary Abound Waco, and I will say two
things. One that I'm sick of talking about it, but I understand that
it is a pivotal thing in America and history. And I fully understand that
it is a hot button issue that I hate to talk about just because I
have to go over and over and over and over again. But it's a
tragedy. I mean, eighty five or eighty seven people or something like that
I died at Waco and on both sides enforcement and the civilians inside, and
the same with Ruby Ridge. So they are events that I remember in a
lifetime of events, but they are events that stand out as pivotal moments in
American history, and I respect that. I try to do my best to
explain my perspectives, fully aware that there are many different perspectives. So if
you have any questions about did you watch the documentary? Yeah, did?
What did you think of it? Do you think it for people who are
curious about it or want to know more that it's a good source of information
for them. The director's name is Tilla Russell. He's a brilliant guy.
He did an impossible job, and I think it was if I could leave
any lasting testament to Wakele, that would be it. I think he did
a brilliant job in a theatrical setting, meaning you know, we had to
present it in three hours, and you can't tell something that lasted that long.
You could do three hours just on the last morning. So there are
lots of things that I would have talked about in the documentary, But there's
lots of things that Branch Davidians would have as Well, so I thought Till
a remarkable job, and I think it was a very fair and very balanced
way of saying everybody dicked up. I mean, it was a it was
a mess. It was awful, had tragic consequences for federal law enforcement officers,
and for for women and children and and men that died in that thing.
It was a It was awful, and the same with the same with
it would be rich Well in the it's the documentary is called American Apocalypse.
Yes, yeah, if people want to go and check it out on Netflix.
I've I've watched it. It's definitely worth worth your time. Well,
I guess, well, one of the one of the big things that you
know, I think it's kind of a kind of shocking or interesting to hear
you know, your part in it. I mean you were a an HRT
sniper on both events, and you talk at one point about having David koresh
himself in your sights and how that's kind of like something that haunts you even
even today. Yeah, I wouldn't say, han, I think maybe the
show made it sound like that. Yeah, yeah, that's not what's your
perspective. My perspective is this that we had a specific mission. And you
guys know this mission, right. The objective is to go in and kill
the bad guys, and you save the good guys and you go home.
That's it. You're you're a strike a fast action asset. We didn't.
We were not designed to go in and say, dropped the gun. We
were not designed to go in with smoke and mirrors. And it was a
last resort. So typically at that time, Delta or six or HRT would
be held in reserve until every other thing, every other option had failed.
There were no more options. At that time, negotiation was just becoming a
big deal. Gary probably talked about this. It was a new construct.
It was a new concept that you could talk somebody out of a situation,
because, let's face it, what the Texas Rangers and law enforcement through the
Wild West, up through the Prohibition errors with al Capone and the Saint Valentine's
Valentine's Day massacre, law enforcement up to a certain point in American history was
we're the good guys, you're the bad guys. Do what we say.
We're going to kill your right. When we got to that point nineteen ninety
two, ninety three Waco first, were we origin and Waco were right together.
When we get to that point, we the United States government had new
assets, specifically the Hostage Rescue Team, and did not as a government as
a country, really have a strong sense of what we would do with them.
And I'll say it for this very specifically. At that time, in
the early nineteen nineties, the most prevalent conversation about what was wrong in America
at the time was what was called white nationalist, white supremacist organizations like the
Covenant, the Sword in the Arm of the World of Mission Danny was involved
in, and there were a lot of those organizations that came out of what
was called the Turner Diaries. There was a book called the Turner Diaries,
and it was the end. It was Zionists occupied government. It was a
big deal. And people don't know those things now, so they don't put
it in that frame of reference. Domestic terrorists based on white supremacist, white
nationalist identity politics movement was the singular focus of federal law enforcement at that level
at that time. So when we went to Ruby Ridge and we went to
Waco, they were wrapped within a national sentiment that you've got these crazies living
out in the woods or living out in the field and they're dangerous. I'm
not saying that's the reality of it. I'm saying that was the perception that
they had these training camps that they're basically preparing to that's exactly conduct violent accents.
That's exactly right. So we now know Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris in
the Harris family. That's not the that's not it at all. But we
didn't have the information at the time. We the hosted Rescue team had information
that we got from other entities. And I mean we didn't even have We
had no Google, we had online based, computerized system of gathering information.
It was it was primitive. You were reliant on the agency, the organization,
right, And I talked about in the ATF right well, one was
the marshals and one was the ATP. Well, the ATF at wake Marshals
and ATF it was an ATF investigation. It became a marshal's response because they
were supposed to go into the arrest. But they were both non FBI cases.
But because you escalate the latter, remember that we had the United States
government had one counter terrorism excuse me, had one tactical asset that was the
hostage Rescue Team, and it could go anywhere. It could go to a
to a county in Tennessee, it could go to a federal UH install,
to an airport, and to JIKI standard. It could be absolutely anything.
So it was a time in American history where a set of circumstances met with
a set of demands that led to a set of failures that was still talking
about thirty years later. Did that lead to I don't know about the overall
FBI that specifically for the hostage Rescue team. Did that lead you guys to
distrust of other agencies, you know, whether it was the ATF for the
marshal or even local law enforcement. The idea of you guys landing on the
ground and not having a recall from reading your book from cold zero, I
mean, if I recall correctly, I mean expressed even like outright anger with
the negotiators that there you guys were did not have good comms with each other.
Well, it's very tough, and I'll say this a couple of things.
One, I was a member of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team a long
time ago, and it is a very different entity. It is a remarkable
organization that you should have somebody newer on to talk about what they do and
how they do it and the endless series of successes that they've had. Right,
there were a remarkable group of people that I'm no longer part of.
I was a member of that team at a time in history that people still
too to talk about. But you should really have an HRT guy we're talking
about, Yeah, Well, I mean there's some truly some remarkable human beings.
I mean, these guys, we can tell stories about who they are
and where they come from, but they're just anyway. I'll go back and
say at that time my personal perspective, and everybody has a different perspective on
something like that. For example, at Ruby Ridge, I heard more gunshots
and testified before the Senate that I heard things that nobody else did because the
way sound moves in mountains, everything is a little bit different. My perspective
at the time in Waco was that we were going in to kill the bad
guys and save the good guys. That night, I was on a climbing
trip. As I said in a documentary, we had a climbing team,
and I grew up rock climbing. We had a climbing trip in Phoenix,
Arizona, and Tucson. I guess, and we went back up too.
Or we flew to Waco and the rest of the team hadn't come in,
but they came in later that night. There were seven of us that arrived
first at Waco, and I thought we would do what we were supposed to
do. At the time, negotiations was becoming a much bigger play, and
negotiation is, in my opinion, always the best way to go. Loss
of life and a military action is part of the process. Loss of life
and a law enforcement organ and a law enforcement action in the United States of
America is a It's bad, it is costly, it is irrevably. It
lasts in ways that surprised me. Now we're talking about this thirty years later.
It causes lasting harm to everyone. Yea, to everyone. So my
lasting harm was saying I thought we were gonna go in, We were gonna
do what we did and resolve it and go home. It didn't work that
way. We stayed, and then you have I don't want to use an
improper metaphor, but if you have the shop trip of a spear or whatever,
the metaphor you want to use and you just lay it there. Eventually
it's going to rust, or eventually it's going to get lost, or it's
going to get knocked around, whatever metaphor you want to use. And it
just became a two month long babysitting enterprise, and everything broke down. It
broke down within the FBI, It broke down within the federal government, Janet
Reno and the Attorney General, Bill Clinton, the president. It became political.
It became everything that it was not. And so I have my perspectives.
I don't think anybody should really care what my perspectives are. I did
my best. Yeah, I did my job. And then the last day,
the ship storm went down of heroic proportions. It was awful and that
part was not really talked about in the show. But when we started the
operation the last day, so we go in secure the compound. The United
States government, through the FBI hostage negotiators tried to talk this thing out.
Everybody came down. The director of the FBI wanted to come down, The
sheriff was involved, everybody was trying to get involved in this thing. We
just sat and watched. We would do whatever anybody wanted. So we had
armored vehicles. Everybody's seen the videotape. The last day, six o'clock in
the morning, we are told that we're supposed to insert gas into the building
to force the people out of the building. And that's where you see the
tanks going up to the building construction the cev's construction engineering vehicles. Instead of
turret mounted guns, they had turret mounted gas projectors, poked holes, put
in gas. The moment they pierced the skin, the branch Davidians opened up
on us and hosed us thousands of rounds for hours at a time, and
we wrote it out. I mean, I was sitting behind a plates of
steel and sand dikes. It was no it's no threat. Nobody shot back.
Took a cease fire about ten in the morning, ceasefire from now and
uh. And then after negotiations broke down again, we started inserting gas again
and then the fire started in the place burned down. So it was that
last morning. It started about six in the morning and it ended about noon.
And I remember you talking about, you know, watching the compound burn
to the ground and you came down out of your sniper hide with your partner,
your sniper partner and standing there, like, what are you thinking as
you're like watching this this catastrophe. What I say would not come across.
Well, so I'm not going to say anything about it. I mean,
when you sit there and you count fifty one days and all the shit that
you go through not knowing what's going on, and what you think about the
world, and what you think about right and wrong, and what you think
about those children that you'd see every day, I mean they I have photographs
of everything. I have a complete archive of every photograph taken during wake,
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of photographs, and I I you know, I
showed some of them to tell them, not all of them, but a
few of them. But I have a series of photographs of this little kid,
probably four years old, little blond headed kid, and he's wearing a
red puffy jacket. It was cold, right, It's March, February,
March, and the mighty men David Koresh's soldiers, his branch Davidian followers.
I shouldn't call them soldiers, says he called them mighty men. I will
call them branch Davidians would come to the window and hold this little kid up
as a human shield. And taunt us, or they'd have their guns and
they set up their sniper hides, and they were very militaristic in their own
right. We knew they had grenades, we knew they had two fifty cows
because we saw them. They were very, very, very heavily armed.
But to see these kids and to see them in the windows every single day,
we all had kids, we all had families, and then that last
day realized that they're all dying. There's no way a human being, in
my opinion, can go through something like that and not stumble fall down a
little bit. I mean, it's that That's sort of what I was what
I was trying to ask, Like, as a as a cop, you
know, you have this as an HRT agent, you have this vision in
your mind of like, we're the good guys, We're here to save people.
Yes, I mean did standing there watching that? I mean, did
it? Did it change your view either of yourself or of your country or
of that of the Bureau. Now it didn't. It didn't change any sense
of myself or the mission or the people that I worked with, because I
believed in them, I believed in myself. I still do. I still
I believe in the heroism of all who serve first responders, and I mean
across the board. I come from a family of fireman and military, law
enforcement. Anybody to put their ass on the line in the cause of good
and my book is a hero and I will always believe very very strongly that
those guys rank among the very best, because not only could they have done
anything else in life. Just getting into the fbis kind of hard, right,
I mean, you gotta have a master's degree and you got to you
got to live a good life and stuff. Getting to HRT is harder.
I mean, getting on HRT is hard. There was thirteen thousand FBI agents
and this fifty guys, fifty shooters on HRT. In my opinion, there's
some of the most remarkable human beings I've ever met in my life. The
smartest, the fastest, the most dedicated. They're devoted at the risk of
their own life. And you know, I say it, a significant number
of HRT operators have died in training. Yeah, it's a very very dangerous
job, and you have to commit in ways that most people don't even think
about. And you have to do that for a reason. And the reason
is good and when you do something you think is in the name of good
that turns out to be something different, it really makes you think what went
wrong and how to make it better. Well, and that's one of the
things that uh, you know, the HRC has. They have an incredibly
difficult job because a lot of times they can face the exact same threat profile
of somebody and the military special Operations unit, but without the lethal recourse,
right, you can't if you start taking fire from an objective, you can't
step back and then bomb the objective. You know, there's well and we
don't. I mean, we didn't have suppressive fire, right. I mean,
let's just let's just take a Waco. Let's say let's say they shot
ten thousand rounds. Nobody fired a shot back. Not one. Now,
people would argue while we were in tanks and we were behind sandbags, and
I would say, you're absolutely right, that's why we didn't shoot back.
But you know, I walked out at the end. I talked about it
in the documentary. I walked out when the fully the building was fully involved
and I walked out of our position to cover just to watch the fire.
I mean, I was dumbfounded. Nobody could believe that the place burning,
and you saw it on television. It was a horrendous fire. Yeah,
And I walked outside and I was standing there next to a guy that you
used to work with, and we were standing there shoulder to shoulder, and
a guy cranked off around and it went right between our head. And anybody
who's ever been in any kind of live fire situation, you know, you
know, you feel the vapor trail going past your head, and that snapped,
that hype supersonic snap. And it's not that he almost killed us.
I mean, you know, it's not the first time I was almost been
killed. But it was that the building was fully involved in flames. And
I said this in the documentary, The guy that tried to kill me,
that almost did kill me, had to have been fully involved in flames.
When he pulled the trigger. His legs were on fire, his arms were
on fire, his clothes were on fire. And the last act he took
as a human being on the planet Earth was to try to kill me.
So, you know, I always say, in terms of commitment, you
can look at Waco anyway you want, but law enforcement is a very very
difficult function in a lot of different ways, and we did have military situations
outside Waco and didn't have the same things. We had flash bang grenades instead
of frag grenades, right, we didn't have we could not use suppress a
fire. We had helicopters and saws and sixties and fifties and everything else,
but very very carefully prescribed rules of engagement on how we could use them.
So it's a very tough thing. And you know, as a sniper,
a lot of people you've had on with snipers, you talk about it,
and I've talked to various people. In a military application, you can have
two guys stand by side by side in the combat situation and you shoot somebody
with a fifty eight at a thousand meters and if you hit the wrong guy,
it's still wins, right, Right, if you shoot somebody in a
law enforcement action and it's two twin brothers and you shoot the wrong twin,
even if a good shot you get the wrong guy. If you fuck up
for any reason whatsoever, you're probably going to jail. You're definitely going to
get civil action. You're probably going to lose your job, and it's going
to ruin your life. So you say I'm gonna take this job, and
I'm going to give up my family. I'm going to do all these things
to make these sacrifices, and the margin of era is so small it's hard
even to explain. Yeah, And so I'm not saying that's a bad thing.
We all take that risk understanding that is the liability. But I think
people outside of Waco and Ruby Ridge, I'm just saying, there are human
beings working today and tonight in the military and law enforcement, first responders of
every kind, who put their lives on the line, who take extraordinary chances,
make extraordinary sacrifices, and occasionally they get it wrong. Yeah, because
it's it's what humans do. Ye. So final thoughts on Waco and Ruby
Ridge. You know, from your perspective, I mean big takeaways, lessons
learned, things that changed within the organization. In the aftermath, everything changed,
everything change, the world changed. The first thing, the first and
most obvious change, was the creation of the Critical Incident Response Group, the
mechanism within the FBI where the federal government said, we are going to pull
all of the component parts together and we're going to create a super unit that
can look at all eventualities so that we never fuck up again. In those
ways. So what do you need in a crisis situation You need to resolve
You need to deal with the criminal with the what are we gonna call the
psychology the threat, the psychology of the threat, but the human mind,
the human construct of decision making in a situation, the first thing you want
to do is figure out who they are. So we have the behavioral scientists
or what we call profilers, the profiles, a national what most people call
profiles. That unit is part of critical critical Incident Response Group. The negotiators
who take that information and time proven methods of influencing behavior to try and resolve
the thing peacefully. Those guys are part of that organization. If that fails,
you need a tactical component to save those lives, and that's the hostage
rescue team. And then there's a logistical component. There's there are other components,
all brought together are palletized air mobile. At a moment's notice, they
can get on the ground and address a situation in a coordinated manner to try
and prevent that from happening. And they've been remarkably successful. I mean,
if you look at what's happened within the FBI, within federal lawnforcement writ large
since nineteen ninety three, in thirty years, it is a remarkable history of
extraordinary successes. Yeah, we don't talk about wacos because there haven't been anyway
in thirty thirty years. And wasn't the bunker boy, wasn't that what an
incredibly heroic When you actually look at what happened, I got goosebumps on the
back of my neck. That's why I say you should talk to real HRT
guys. You should talk to current HRT guys. I mean, you know,
I'm old school. The new guys have tactics, they have techniques,
they have process that didn't even exist in those days, and that's why they're
so successful. But when you look at what's been printed about what happened with
that bunker and how they went down excuse me, and save that child,
it was remarkable. I mean these guys jumped into a phone booth and a
live fire gunfight. Yeah, I mean you talk about having a knife fight
in the phone booth. These guys had fully automatic weapons and it was wired
to blow up, and they jumped in there, and I mean they're literally
gunfighting hit I mean holding each other and feeling body parts to know where to
shoot. So the success is I come on these shows and I feel really
badly about it because I go on and I talk about something that's a that's
a failure thirty years ago, and I say, talk to the heroes,
talk to the remarkable guys and ostrage rescue team that did this today, and
they will. I mean, you'll get them on. Yeah, we'd love
to. We'll want to hand it off to the guys that really do Yeah.
Now, and they're there. And here's here's the other thing. And
this is true about the military, is true about true about the intelligence community.
It's true about the law enforcement community. Is that you're always going to
hear about the failures, and and everybody who's going to judge those organizations based
on their failures, you know, whether it's a single competent abuse of situation,
whether it's Waco, whether it's you know, like my lie or you
know or or you know, even in the grade that Danny Coulson talked about,
where they diffuse the situation successfully, and there is no laws of way
like those judge. I hadn't heard of that. It's not newsworthy, it's
one exactly one the successful operations generally won't even get acknowledged because they were successful
and they just happened. And two, it's just not news where that nobody
wants to really, unless it's something like the Bunk Roar, where it's you
know, this insane situation and these these men act with these outrageous courage.
But generally, like most situations, if it if you resolve a situation safely,
that's not sex. Nobody's going to print that. That's not sexy.
First of all, HRT has been involved in more than eight hundred, eight
hundred tactical resolutions in the last thirty years since Waco eight hundred and how many
of you heard about zero, Well, you heard about the boy and the
bunker. Yeah, you don't hear about him because they're successful, right,
and that kind of a track record eight hundred and zero, right is I
don't even know how to put that on. My sense, correct me if
I'm wrong, churis. My sense is that they often try to blend in
with the local law enforcement guys and you just never really know. Okay,
So here's the perfect example, right, and this is where we're gonna go
somewhere down the line. So in my crazy life. We haven't got two
yet. I ended up in Patriot Day, the movie about the Boston marathon
bombing, right Buddy, Mine's a movie director, and I ended up righting
part of it, and I ended up being playing a guy they call the
Virginian. His name is Derek. I'm not going to say his last name,
but he was the head of a hostage rescue team component that went into
Boston to get the Sarnev brothers. Once they'd been identified, they found one
of the kids in the boat in the backyard. And maybe you've seen the
movie. If you've seen the movie, there's there's a Netflix documentary on the
Boston bombing too that okay, I found very interesting. Okay, Well,
these guys came in and it was funny because he's thinking, can a fast
rope in and and uh, you know, saved the day for Boston.
What they came in in a minivan. They got to Boston, all the
rent at cars were taken, and so they showed up at the gunfight in
a minivan and went out and instead of coming in and saying, like you
see in the movies where the FBI, we got it, boss, you
know, and whatever you hitting the piston match. They went in, talked
behind the scenes with the Boston police entities, not just a Boston police department,
And you talk to any of them, and I have. I've talked
to them all and dragged beer with them, and you know the time I
was up there for the movie, which was two months or whatever. And
to a person, they'll all say the same thing that who were those guys?
They were remarkable that the way they came in out of nowhere, they
contributed, they helped to resolve it in a professional, tactical and silent manner,
and disappeared without a press release. And I think to this day you
would talk to anybody involved in that situation and they'll still say the same thing,
who were those guys? Yeah, And that's what you want, an
entity that is so good even to this And I'll say this, Once HRT
got the guys out of the boat or they talked to him, a negotiator
who happened to be this remarkable guy. He was an HRT operator, became
a negotiator, left the team, became a negotiator, and he talked him
out of the boat and HRT affected the catcher. But rather than hook the
guy up and take him away, the best known terrorist in America at the
time. Once it was resolved in the backyard, away from the cameras and
away from everybody else, they turned it to a component of all the different
law enforcement organizations who went in handcuffed him and took him out themselves and brought
him to justice. Meaning they went in resolved and disappeared. And what the
quiet professionalism you would most want in an entity like that. There were absolutely
remarkable group of guys, Yeah, that have been very badly misunderstood, mischaracterized,
and I hope that changes. But another moment, you know, kind
of wrapping up the HRT stuff, another moment that stands out all these years
later from from your book is you talked about being down, you know,
behind your long gun out at the range one day shooting. You're going to
the Marine Corps Scout sniper cours as I recall, Yeah, I graduated Marine
cors Scot Sniper school, and so you're you're out there on the range shooting
and you said you got up and you just realized that they you were,
you were done. You had proved everything you felt you had approved to yourself
behind a rifle. Well, could you talk a little bit about like what
that moment was. I mean, you said also quitting HRT was like one
of the hardest decisions of your life. Well, I wrote a book about
it, you know. But the book came out twenty three years ago.
Yeah, twenty three years ago, and not happened after that. Well you
can see it had like an outsized, you know, impact on a teenage
Jack Murphy. You know. Yes, these things stand out my mind.
No, and listen, what I wrote about it at that time was accurate,
It was honest, and I'm and I stand by what I wrote.
There was a day when it was over. It was more complex than that.
And here's why. Yeah, I way it out. Man, when
you're an FBI agent and you want if you're an FBI agent, you can't
have an outside job, right, you can't work on the side to make
more money. You've got to get anything has to be approved. If you
write a book, you're stepping in ship. Yeah, you just can't write
a book if you're an FBI agent. But what we haven't discussed yet is
I didn't want to become an FBI agent. I wanted to write books.
I grew up. I thought it was going to be. I was a
speechwriter. I went to Californity to be a rock star right out of college.
Right I went to California be a rock star. I didn't work out
very well. So I served and I was a bartender and I wrote.
I got my first gig writing for Orange Coast magazine, Big Deal. I
wrote about alternative energy in the eighties. Right then I got hired from there
to teach English at a boarding school. So I went to the Berkshire School
in western Massachusetts, and I taught English and ran the theater program. That's
what I thought I was going to do with my life. I had no
interest in all this other stuff. Then I went from there to a newspaper.
We're going to get to the rest of the story. I went to
the North Adams Transcript in North Adams, Massachusetts, and I became the city
hall reporter, so magazine writer, rock filled rock star magazine reporter, English
teacher at a boarding school, newspaper reporter. I left the newspaper reporting job
for a couple of different reasons. And the guy that took my job was
Danny Pearl. Daniel Pearl, Yeah, he took He took the city hall
reporting job the North Adams Transcript. He was even the same fraternity I was
in. I was Aha Alpha Delta Phi fraternity in college, and so was
he. These these bizarre parallels that kind of follow through my life. But
I left the newspaper and I got called by this congressman who said he had
read an article that I had written about him, and said, hey,
you want to come to work for me. But I said, all right,
I got on a bus, or excuse me, I got on a
train and I went to DC and I wrote speeches. So it had all
been writing, it had all been chasing art, It had all been something
that had nothing to do with law enforcement, but always with the CIA and
the back of my mind because of Uncle Harold. I mean, I literally
grew up at the farm with surrounded by guys with weird guns and recording devices
and people coming from Chile to try to kill him. And I mean you
can read about all this in the New York Times, in various books.
I'm you know, I'm not exaggerating. Any of it was wild. So
anyway, so I got into the FBI and it went from there, but
that's not where it was originally intended to go. So while I was in
the FBI. I continued to write after Ruby Ridge. I wrote a novel
called Rules of Engagement, and it was basically about a white supremacist group and
a guy goes in undercover and had a lot of overtones of Ruby Ridge.
I kind of played it out in a novel. Couldn't sell it, couldn't
get arrested. In those days, you would send out a self draft stamped
envelope in a query letter and they would stack some of them. You know,
it's just the stories were ridiculous. Couldn't do anything, and then one
day, well backup on a second. So I wrote one of these.
I wrote this novel. One of the guys on the team had gone to
law school with a guy named let's called Joe. He's gone in law school
with a guy named Joe. Joe had moved to Hollywood and he was trying
to make it as a screenwriter. My buddy said, I'll introduce you guys,
maybe you can turn a novel and a screenplay. He did. We
tried. He introduced me to another guy who will call him Pete. His
name is Pete. He's a big movie director at the time. He wasn't
at the time he was an unemployed actor, and then they introduced me to
this person and that person, and it was this who's who of household names
who were just getting started. Tayleyoni and Jason Patrick, Christy Turlington, this
guy Terry Quinn, this New York City firefighter, Terry Quinn is one of
the most remarkable guys you ever met in your life. He would have Cindy
Crawford would come up to the firehouse and cook dinner and they and he had
one of the hottest clubs in New York. He's a prince of the city.
And everybody, Eric Roberts and Vince Vaughn, I mean, anybody that
was big in those days all came through that circle. And they all started
out with this guy in the FBI who had a forty five and was,
you know, flying around the world doing all this weird shite. So somehow
it all came together where I was on the hostage rescue team. I had
written a book that took me to Hollywood, and all of a sudden,
I'm hanging out with people at the time who were just trying to make it
and now they're all huge stars, including one who I met at the Mercer
hotel. So I mean everybody as a clubhouse, right, we had a
clubhouse in la and a clubhouse in New York. The clubhouse in New York
at that time was the Mercer Hotel when it opened. For those who don't
know, SOHO in the late nineties was kind of a hellhole, right,
it was. The Gougenheim was there. He had Lucky Strike and Finelli Bob
the bartender at Finelli's right. And but for those who don't know, the
Mercer Hotel was Andre Blaje opened this really swine hotel and you had to be
somebody to stay there. And I got to stay there because all my friends
were somebody, right. I was just a mutt. I was an idiot.
And so one day I go up. I had just come back from
Yemen. I'd just done a gig in Yemen, which I'd like to talk
about, and so I go up, and I think we would go up
have these fascinating dinners. I was up one dinner and one night it was
lou Reid and Henry Kissinger at this Turkish restaurant. I mean, you never
knew who was going to show up. It was wild and it was you
know, it was three years or something. It was a long So anyway,
I go to the Mersey Hotel, just got back from Yemen. It's
almost Christmas. I go, what do we doing tonight? Big dinner party.
He says, no, we're playing cards, and I said, whatever,
We go up. We're having a card game. All the boys coming
in. One guy, you know, meeting all these guys. One of
the guys's Red Pitt, one of the greatest guys in the world. All
the ship that you see, you know, the pikey look, and you
know, the tongue and his teeth and stuff like that. He's just a
guy. He's just a fucking incredible actor, but just a guy. If
he was sitting here now, he'd be like whatever. Anyway, in that
card game, I ended up winning eight thousand dollars in cash I didn't even
have. I had a two kids, a government job, a mortgage.
I don't even think I had the money for the buy in. I went
eight thousand dollars and the next morning I sell my first book and I get
an agent. I get The whole thing came together just like that, so
I couldn't get arrested selling the novel that I meet all these guys in Hollywood
have this insane three or four or five years and then I saw my first
book at a card game with Brad Pitt and uh and then everything changed,
everything everything, And that's what would the you know, your decision over.
Yeah. So so I did not retire from the FBI. Have to be
quite yet fifty and twenty, and I think I was. I think I
had eighteen years in government service because I was so amidst all this Hollywood partying
and shin digs. I mean, what was the the Yemen job that you
went hit on? In between this one particular job was the cold the coal
bombing? And I'll say this just because you know we talk about Ruby Ridge
and Waco. Oh what I was going to say, The reason I started
up talking about this book is the FBI said you can write this book.
And I've got to go back in time and say, people have said,
well, why would you write a book about HRT? Why would you write
a book about the FBI? And the reality is that I've not talked about
much in public, But the reality is that the FBI was us Right,
you say they did this, and that's bullshit. The FBI at the time
was the three of us. Literally, I mean it's guys. I knew
everybody right, and these guys, this group of friends, these group of
people that I was the new decided it would be a good idea to support
a book that wrote in realistic terms and honest ways about the good parts of
the FBI coming out of Waco and coming out of Ruby Ridge and looking at
something that was a positive way where a small town kid from New Hampshire grows
up, joins the FBI and has all these experiences. So when Cold Zero
came out, it was fully one hundred percent sponsored and backed by the Federal
burb of Investigation, meaning specific individuals at headquarters who supported this to the point
where they even brought Brian Williams and NBC News and all these other entities down
to go through the shooting house. They rolled out the red carpet to try
to support the book when it came out. So I've not talked about that
in great length, but I didn't. I didn't do just the book just
for those reasons. It was a fully supported public relations support from the FBI.
So the book came out, and the book was scheduled to be released
on September twelfth, two thousand and one. So, like I said,
you can't write a book and stay in the FBI. So I had to
resign. So I said, Okay, the book's coming out on September twelfth,
So I put in my resignation and I was in London the two weeks
before nine to eleven. I flew back to the United States on September tenth.
I got back at midnight September tenth, two thousand and one, on
a seven forty seven, sitting right behind the upper deck, right behind the
cat the cockpit, and the door was opened. In those days in two
thousand and one September tenth, two thousand and one, you could go and
sit A first class passenger could sit in a jump seat on the flight deck
behind the captain of a seven forty seven landing at Dullas Airport YEA. And
I was sitting in my seat holding a wood handle serrated edge state knife,
looking at the back of the captain's head, thinking this is unseat. The
saying right and terrors, I mean, hijacking was already a thing. So
that I got home, got a few hours sleep, and went into my
office at the Critical Incident Response Group on September eleventh, sign to sign your
papers, basically saying goodbye everybodek And I was supposed to go to New York
that afternoon to do Larry King Live because that was part of the press junket.
And September twelfth and next morning was my first book signing at the Borders
at the South Tower Mall at the South Tower of the World Trade Center the
next morning. So then I have the exact same experience you and everybody else
had. Sit in my desk. I had three televisions in my office talking
to the guys about how we got to do something about state knives and seven
forty seven. Somebody goes, holy shit, look at that, and we
all had the exact same experience at the same time. So now I've got
to leave the FBI on September eleventh, which feels kind of like what you
would expect, you know, made me want to throw up. It was
it was. It was a horrible moment. And then going to New York.
I did go to New York, and then you see the smoke coming
up from the towers, and so I guess we can move on to something
else. But questions before we get to the next stage the Yemen. Oh,
the Yemen. I'm sorry, so Yemen. That particularly Yemen trip was
the USS coal bombing. And because the FBI investigates terrorist acts, Remember what
I was saying, that terrorism want to mary enterprise American citizens. Someone in
the federal government decided that it was the purview of the FBI, not NCIS
or other organizations. But I want to bring it up for this reason because
we talked now after the two longest wars in American history, and all the
things that we should have learned since two thousand and one in Afghanistan and Iraq,
and I went and I just got to point this picture. We the
FBI flew a component on A there's probably a C five. I guess whatever.
I think I went over on A. I might have gone over on
a different hot but went into land still Germany Ramstein and interviewed some of the
sailors had been blown up. And I wrote about it in the book and
about what it was like to watch that skiff run out toward the USS coal
with a guy in a bow waving and smiling and then detonating the bomb and
blowing everybody up. And I'm talking to this guy and his face is half
blown off and he's all fucked up, and he was courageous, he was
composed, and all we wanted to do is give us information so we could
find them. Cut on another plane flew into aid and Yemen. When we
flew into aid and Yemen, the Yemeni military locked on us with surface to
air missile radar. We did a combat spiral, you know, we bit
on those things there. Unpleasant landings right, and slammed down on the runway
and promptly sit there for four hours on the plane because the many military came
out and circled the plane with belt fed machine guns and wouldn't let us off
the plane. Eventually somebody prevailed. We got off and they took us to
the Aidan hotel and then they surrounded the hotel with guys with machine guns.
But it was not tell them that you were coming. Well, they did
tell them we were coming. But okay, we're getting there, and there's
a point in this whole story, the point in the story. Well,
so now we get in the hotel, we being I don't know what it
was, maybe two hundred FBI agents or something like that, and but we
can't leave. But this I bring this up because this is how so many
operations I've worked on in my life went before we got it all figured out.
I mean, we did things in those two wars that got threings straightened
out. In those days, it was not. And here's where we're going.
So in Yemen, they chew the ship called cotton, right, they
call it mirror there, but it's cotton. It's the same thing, and
uh, you know, it turns your mouth all arms and you get all
fucked up. And these guys had they had I don't know that. I
think they had. Mostly they had pkms, and I think they had some
douscas to some dshk heavies and most of their stuff was Russian, including the
anti aircraft stuff was rushing. So we get in, We go in the
hotel and you go in there's a little bit of a lobby. There was
a bar. Now it's a dry country, but they had a bar and
then cafeteria, and the Yemenes had decided to let the bad guys in,
so but they wouldn't let us out. So we're in there and we all
got M four's and forty fives and they've all got a K forty seven's and
beards, and we're sitting and we're having breakfast together. So there's a table
of us and a table of them, and you know you're ready to go,
and they're ready to go. And it was like that day after a
day, and they could come and go all day want and it was the
same people. You could look out and you could see the coal, you
could see the ship with a hole in it. So this is where the
story's going. So I want to tell the whole story. But one of
the weirdest gigs I ever played, they had had a bar in there,
and the head of the hotel had gone to the Cornell School of Hotel Operations,
or I mean American. I went in there one one night and there
was a band playing. Now granted there's nobody there, but there's a nine
piece band playing and I see a guitar leaning it up on an amplifier,
and I'd like to play guitar, And I said, hey, I think
they'd let me sit in. So I go up on the stage and my
buddies are mortified, Right, what the fuck are you talking about. You're
not going to go up and play guitar in a band? But I did,
and so we play Proud Mary keeps On, or we played some like,
you know, many music, and then they played Proud Mary. And
then this guy looks at me. Didn't speak a word of English, and
he goes Hotel California, and I'll go, I know that one didn't speak
any English whatsoever. We start the intro and he's and he starts singing on
the dog does it in my hair. We're playing and ripping it up,
and here come two Russian belly dancers who were doing a little hooking on the
side in the hotel. And I'm standing on stage and I'm look out and
here's a bunch of my it's like four or five guys at a table over
here with them fours. And here's a table over here with a bunch of
guys with beards in a K forty seven's And I'm playing Hotel California with two
Russian hooker belly dancers and a bunch of guys who don't speak English. And
I'm thinking, man, this is great, you know, yeah, yeah,
Jack Murphy, And I'm gonna tell him this story. You can't make
it up. And I'm thinking this is awesome. So I go back.
Everybody takes off. I go back. Oh, I had the m force
slung around my back and walk down our stage, go to the elevator,
and we had the sixth floor. The entire entity had the sixth floor,
so we'd get we were hot sheeting bed so you get eight hours in a
bunk and then you'd sleep. Yeah, unpleasant way to get your rest.
But so I walk up, take the elevator to the sixth floor and it
opens up in the hallways kind of a why two hallways like why wings and
there is a Marine Corps fast team there with a sixty behind sandbags pointed at
the elevated door. So it's like for me, you know, it's twenty
feet away, and you get an eighteen year old kid staring at you at
one o'clock in the morning after I've been drinking two borgan playing with the house
band. We're going to Sigon. We're going to Sigon, right, and
I'm and I just smile and say, hey, guys, you know,
can I get your coffee or whatever. So the bunks were all down this
wing. The other wing was all the different entity, so their hotel rooms.
So it's FBI, CIA, d I A NCIS. It was just
alphabet soup all the different offices. And then at the end they had moved
the embassy from Snaw down to the hotel, and the ambassador's name was Barbara
Bodine and she had come down, so she was running all in country operations
from that hallway in that hotel. And I get off and I still have
this. I was looking at it the other day. I get off the
elevator and I'm walking down the hall just to see what's going on, you
know, like you hang it out in the command center. And it hands
me a piece of paper and it says, I can't remember the exact words,
but it says something like, uh, we have received information that the
element that blew up the coal is coming this way with a band full of
explore. They're gonna blow us up, right, And I go, uh
oh, And it says, you know, destroy this or something like you're
not supposed to say, because yeah, yeah, exactly, because the whole
fucking thing was was wired right. They told us everything was video and audio.
It was a fuck show. Ulous. So the the FBI program was
run by a guy named John O'Neill. John O'Neill, contrary to what Richard
Clark or any of these other guys say nothing against Richard Clark. I liked
the guy. But what these guys say. John O'Neill was the guy that
knew terrorism. He ran the what at the time was called the UBL Task
Force Sama bin Lad Task Force in New York Field office. And he was
the guy. Right. We would go and support of him, but he
was the guy, so he was running the investigation. Barbara Bodine despised him,
and anybody knows John O'Neill, A lot of people despised him, or
a lot of people loved him too, right, but they were big personalities
and they hated each other, and he would call her it was it was
ugly, right. So once the word got out that they were coming to
blow us up, the US government didn't want to have two hundred and more
FBI agents getting blown up at a hotel to go with a coal bomb.
Here, it looks bad on TV, right, looks bad. If if
you're me, you know it's whatever. So so here's the way it goes
from here. And this is so many operations I've been involved with the exact
same way. So John O'Neill says, fuck this, you're not going to
kill any FBI agent's on my watch. He calls the National Security Council.
The National Security Council calls the Pentagon. The Pentagon says, yeah, we'll
go get those guys. But they locked on our C five with a surface
to air missile radar. When they come in, tell them to turn that
shit off. Barbara Bodine says, I'm not telling them to turn what to
do with their missile radar. And in a hallway at the Aiden Hotel,
under the circumstances that I described, you've got the Department of Justice at war
with the Department of Defense at war with the Department of State, with Barbara
Bodine, the ambassador who is the queen of the country, that's her country,
and John O'Neill, who was the king of all that he surveyed.
He was a big personality, screaming you mother, screaming all these insults.
And I was into mediary and I was the guy two New Yorkers fighting over
a parking right and I'm standing there and I'm trying. So I would talk
to her. Then I would talk to him, and then the CIA would
come up and say you got to do this, and the d I A
and the MCIs is pissed off because it's you know, there were sailors that
were killed in the thing, and it was absolutely insane. It was mayhem.
So eventually they ended up they being somebody I don't even know who it
was, eventually ended up putting on us. In a little bit of a
convoy. We drove out to the port at in the dark. We got
on a fifth a couple of amphibious landing vehicles, and we go out over
the horizon pitch black, and I'll never forget it. You guys do this
all the time, a lot of your years ago. You know what's so
big about that? But I had never seen the nose of a naval ship
open up. It was the I think it was a Duluth, the USS
Duluth. It was a helicopter carrier. And I remember, I don't even
know where we're going, right, I got an M four and I'm going
to and I'm with a bunch of people. I don't even know whether we
could have been going to Africa for all I knew. I didn't know where
we're going. And I look, somebody goes holy shit, and I look
up and it was just like a James Bond movie where the front the nose
of the ship opened up and we drive these amphibious vehicles up in the ship
and then the nose comes down and then the red lights come on, and
you know, and then white lights and stuff like that. And we hung
around there for I don't know, we floated around for a couple of weeks
maybe, But I saw them when they came up with the ship that sunk
down underneath the coal, lifted it up and floated it back to the States.
But so that particularly Yemen mission was interesting in a lot of ways.
It was tragic in obvious ways, but it was interesting other ways, primarily
because everybody who thinks that what we do for a living is all one lockstep,
smooth operation, it's it's never that. It's just in my experience,
Yeah, it was the clusterfuck every time. Why did you going in that
the Yemen military, the Yemeny military, the government was willing to be so
hostile towards you, And what was the US's responses to that? Response to
that? Given it, you guys were there to do an investigation and you
couldn't do it right. I think my personal perspective was I did so many
of them in so many places. I just didn't give a shit. I
just assumed whenever I showed up someplace, we can talk about classifications, and
we can talk about whatever. But my world was so bizarre that, you
know, I would show up for dinner with Madonna, and then I would
show up in Yemen watching a fist fight between the ambassador and the head of
the FBI. Yeah, it was. Everything was so bizarre. I didn't
I never wanted to know anything. I just wanted to do what I could
do. Yeah. I just wanted to do my little part, yeah,
and then go on to whatever the next, whatever next was. So I
wonder if you ever crossed paths with Gary Harrington. He had some interesting Yemen
stories about that time. I'm sure I did. I had. I still
have a pass to the embassy in Sanah, so I probably at some point
did. That's the other thing. You know, I'm already taking too much
time. But we haven't got the classifications or names yet. Which is I
mean, we've talked about everything I didn't want to talk about so far,
but the really crazy shit. You keep asking me these questions and I want
to tell you the answer, But I've got to make sense of him somehow.
The thing about HRT at that time was we were involved in everything,
right, it didn't matter what you were. So people, can we just
go to classifications? Absolutely so classifications as you guys well know, you get
into these gigs and you get a t SSCI, right, that's that's basic.
There's only three real classifications. Right. And but when you get in
that, if you get in various programs, you get read into different permissions,
and some of them could be very broad, like Q. Right,
Q is DOE because Department of Energy needed help moving, locating, dealing with
nukes in various ways. That was our gig, right, So you got
to get QUE, and I say, I bring up Q. For this
reason. When I got Q, you could say Q and you could say
Clarence. If you said Q clearance in the same in that combination, it
was a felony, right, So I go, well, why do I
want that? Right? I don't want to. I don't want to.
Why do I give a shit? I don't want to do this, Clarence.
You get into this weird position where you can't say what your job is,
your own colleagues, you can't talk to anybody. Yeah, which is
which is going back to Germany in a second. So it's okay with Q
because that's one thing. But then you get ready in on a on a
specific like all these parts, a special access program that is one thing.
Here's one one example. I don't know what I can say about this,
but I was involved in this one thing that you could research it and google
it and you could find little bits and pieces about that involve I'll just say
that it involves Osama bin Laden in Sudan when he came out of Sudan in
ninety six, when he went to Afghanistan. There was an aspect and I
almost say anything about it, but it was it had a had a special
access handle, right, And I was watching some Billy WASH's book. He
talks about it. Oh he does well at the Hunt for Bin Laden and
Sudan. Does he name that program? I don't, I don't, probably
not, but Hunt Thing the Jackal is his book he talks about being there.
So let's just say hypothetically I was somehow involved in that. I was
watching back in the day when I was doing a lot of TV. I
see this guy come on and I've never seen him before, and he's doing
MSNBC or Fox. He's one of those things. And he's getting up there
his first time on TV, and he goes, yeah, blah blah blah,
and he spits out that fucking name, that specific thing, and I
almost choked on my brought worst or whatever the hell I was doing at the
time, and I thought, I can't believe he just said that on national
television. And then I realized at that time how impossible it is to keep
track of secrets because there are so many of them. I mean, when
I think about how many programs I've been involved, like darper projects or specific
missions, were specific programs that are that are like like some of those things
only last for a day or a week or a month, and some of
them lasts longer. But anyway, classifications. While I was on HRT and
then afterwards after I left, that became a huge pain in the ask because
every time you get one, it's more it's more ways to fuck up.
Yeah, right, yeah, And here's where So I end up on another
gig, and I was doing something in Germany and we were on the economy,
so I think we were working in Ramstein, but we were living in
one of those little towns one of those little villages around there, and uh
I was in It was the end of the day. It's probably eleven o'clock
at night, and we're in one of those little rath skullers drinking beer and
we had these two NSA guys who in my experience were most often staff sergeants
in the in the Air Force right there cover because official cover. Yeah,
they're administered by the Air Force. Yeah, or were they actual Air Force?
A lot of time, yeah, a lot of times you might actually
be yeah, exactly, Yeah, it wasn't necessarily come yeah, and uh
I got to when one of the thing to go back to in a minute.
But so anyways, so it's eleven o'clock at night on a Thursday night,
having a couple of beers with the boys, because you know, you're
not on twenty four hours a day forever, and uh so these guys came
up. I knew who they were. I knew they were somehow involved with
us, but they were in a different side of things. But I basically
knew what they were. It wasn't a skiff, but it was a secure
comms thing that they were doing. So they go up and they go,
sir, we need to talk to somebody who has this, and they set
it out loud in a bar, and my first reaction is, where's the
camera? Yeah, my first reaction is that they were setting me upright,
because even when you're in something, they'll still run ups on you just to
fuck with you, to make sure that you're credible. So I'm sitting in
this bar and and I just had this weird moment where I thought to myself,
what do I do? I mean, do I dim these poor kids
out? Because just trying to they're trying to find somebody that they can pass
the COLMS traffic, you know, for whatever else. But you just you
end up in those things all the time where you never I personally, in
my experience, running across all of those different things, I wouldn't know if
you were part of the gig, or if you were on the gig just
to test me because you wanted to get me off the gig. And it
just became insanely confusing. I've heard that so many times that in those little
like that world of SAPs, that it becomes kind of like cutthroat because like
as far as like being being read onto all of these programs, some people
perceive that its power, and there's always someone who wants to fuck you off
of the program so that they can have it right. Well, plus there's
guys, and all they do. Their entire job is just to go in
and try to find guys to to wash them out. Yeah, that's all
they's It's like the internal affairs offer, but not just not just investigating,
but actually offering bribes to see what you just do. That's exactly right.
Their entire job is a control officer, is to find vulnerabilities in the program.
So now I'm in Gramstein, Germany, getting ready for a real gig,
sitting there talking to my buddies, and these two staff sergeants come up
and they either stepped on their dick in a really bad way or they're stepping
on my dick in a really bad way. And I had no clue as
to what it was. So those become a big, big problem, became
a problem with me, names and programs because just two quick examples, maybe
we're going off track here, No, okay, it's your track, So
there is true. I mean, I know we're doing this thing, but
you know, we don't whiskey and cigars and this guy's talking right, But
so anyways, the first one I used to work, I used to go
to the farm a lot, not the farm in the Hampshire, but can't
Perry. And because they you know, at the time, in the early
days of HRT, there was a killhouse at Fort Bragg, there was one
at Little Creek, there's one at HRT. And they had one a very
very crude one. I think it was made out of canvas at Camp Perry.
But they had that track and you can shoot and use any kind of
explosions you want on the track, and we would use that so we would
just circle around. Everybody would oh and we had the air the aircraft fuselages
at Davis month and for practice and CCP on planes. So one of the
first times I go down to Camp Perry and we're running. Uh we were
doing these. We used to wrap axles with decord or flexi linear and blow
the wheels so that you could stop somebody if you're like doing some kind of
an interdiction, right and uh, so we're out. It's hot July or
August and Virginia. We're covered in spawling and you know, a mess,
but you got to eat lunch. So we go up to the cafeteria,
and you go into the cafeteria like any of the cafeteria at the farm,
and were standing in line, and we were all were in no Max flight
suits tied around our waist, and you would never tell anybody who you were,
right, never. They told us not to say anything to anybody.
And so we're standing in line and there's these two chicks in front of us,
and they're looking and they're talking, and they're looking and they're talking.
And this buddy in my Charlie, was a real good looking guy, and
so I just figured they were hitting on him or something. So finally they
turned to him and they go, who are you guys anyway? And you
know, they're wearing their Royal Robin's cargo pants and a Polo shirt, and
Charlie doesn't know what to say, so it looks at him. He goes,
we're with the Justice Department. She goes good cover, and you know,
it goes through. And I realized sometime around that time that nobody is
anybody. I mean, I would tell somebody on this, and somebody would
tell that we did a thing one time. I don't I'm sure somebody,
maybe somebody who would watching this say or were part of it. But we
got ready to do a hit one time in a Caribbean island through a d
E A referral. So d EA had found some violent gang that was doing
some drug thing. I have been Saint Thomas, Saint Croix was, I
mean, you guys were down in Puerto Rico a lot too. Back in
the Yeah, we were everywhere. I mean just traveled. I think some
of those years we were on the road three three twenty days a year.
It was constantly gone. So anyways, but it was it was a delta
app up. It was a delta like some some kind of a training thing.
It wasn't a real thing, but we almost went down on a d
E A referral to shoot it out with Delta on Saint Thomas or Saint Croix
because we just didn't have the comms in those days. Someone didn't deconflict it.
Yeah, I don't even think they knew it. They didn't even have
that term rights, right, It was just you just didn't have There were
no colms. There was just it was a very very very different world of
those days. So talk to us about you know, getting into all this
uh this murky world. Tell us about you know, September twelfth, and
you know, driving down the street Langley and the pah So for whatever reason,
and by the way, do you want to drink? Do you want?
I think it's time? Do you do you like rocks? I don't
care whatever you got, No, we have just pour something in that one
right there would be fabulous for anybody doesn't know what's going on. I purposely
did not want anything to drink for a certain amount of time with you hooligans,
Like, there's no point in adding alcohol to one of these conversations,
okay, which is what we're known by known for by the like. I've
watched it a million times. Yeah, I watch all your shows. Thank
you, and I'm a huge fan. I think you guys do a remarkable
thing for America to give people an idea. You bring people in in their
own words, they tell what they've gone through. My experience is probably only
my experience. Everybody I've ever worked, will you know that's not the way
I remember it, But that's you know. The beauty is you bring in
everybody. But the thing is we wouldn't be here without people like you coming
in and willing to share your stories. I think you know we are humble
paupers in the presence of people like you. I mean, okay, let
me just back up a second. Let's suggest something. If people really know
what you guys did and do and are, I'm the humble popper and it's
I'm an inteloper. I shouldn't even be here. No, I mean every
guy we have on here, no matter like how girls, how heroic they
were, and girl, it always always plays like, oh man, you
have some like real heroes on there. Yeah, I don't think I should
be on there. And I'm like, yeah, like Dave said, I'm
like I was like a arranger and a green beret for like a short period
of time and a little microscopic slice of history. And I mean, I'm
just flattered to that these people give me the time of day, and I
like done this dragon, so like everybody's cooler than me. I've just seen
so many guys come on this show, and there's no point in going through
the names, but that are just absolute. They're remarkable human beings, extraordinary
patriots, and I want to know what they did and how they did it
in a respectful way. I Mean, nobody's in here telling secrets and and
blowing various things. Nobody's getting anybody in trouble or anybody hurt. But if
you don't record history, yeah, then you're gonna do it to repeat.
Yeah, how can you be How can you turn around and say, hey,
the American public doesn't understand what we do as rangers or FBI agents or
seals or whatever the hell it is if you don't talk about it at all,
if you just maintain that like wall of secrecy, then yeah, of
course the public has a total misunderstanding of yeah, you know what these groups
do. And also, like you say, it's it's not just pr but
it's history, it's I mean, you know, I think Jack was fortunate
enough to get a lot of interviews with you know, the some of the
last living OSS guys A while ago OSS guys. Not No, I thought
you had a few interviews. I mean, I've interviewed some people from way
back in the day, mostly mostly starting with the Vietnam era. But I
mean, I mean, yeah, I've been very fortunate to interview like a
lot of the ogs who like stood up Blue Light and Delta, like there's
a red imagine if we could you know, get you know, like the
OSS on interviews, or if we had guys from War one, if you
know so much what we learned from history is written by historians and not the
actual people who so tell us. But anyway, you retire and drive down
the street with your resign. Thank you, David. Anybody who listened to
this thing, every detail, they'll say, that's not right, right,
No, you resign. I want to make sure that I that I say
that I resigned for sixteen years, but I did right card game with Brad
Pitt September twelfth. I wake up at the Mercall Hotel and I go,
fuck, what do I do now? Right? We're going to war like
the world's on fire, and you just left the job that would would have
put you there. Yea. And not only that, but John O'Neill,
who had done within Yemen, came back to the United States, gotting a
piss and match with the Bureau and retired. He took a job and you
may know the story, but John O'Neill was the head of the UBL Task
Force, who was the number one guy in my opinion, in my opinion,
in the United States government when it came to al Qaeda, big personality,
whatever you want to say, about John. He left the FBI and
he took a new job as director of security at the World Trade Centers.
In September eleventh, with his first day on the job, and he died
in the attacks. So any sack of shit that tells me some conspiracy theory
about nine to eleven and we knew this and we don't it makes my blood
boil. Yeah, I mean, September twelfth, I've got to figure out
a way back into the war. And it just so happened that I had
spent a good deal of my time in other government agencies because we collaborate,
right, So you could be in the FBI and you could work with other
agencies, one of which was the CIA. So I said, okay,
I got an idea. So when I sold my first book in those days,
if he sold the book, you gotta you know, publishing a book
is one thing, selling this another thing altogether. You got to get on
all the shows like this show. Right back in the day it was the
Today Show, Oprah or whatever the case was. So back then, if
you got if you published a book and a magazine exerpted you a book,
that was a huge deal. At the time, there was Esquire, Vanity,
Fair, Playboy, Maxim. There weren't many time, Yeah, because
I still read Time. I don't know, But I mean to have your
book reviewed or feature magazine, yeah, I mean if they review it,
that's good. I mean if they review it favorably, that exp They actually
took chapters and they published them in the magazine, which was a big deal
at the time, GQ magazine. As absurd as that sounds, and as
much shit as that caused me with everybody that I knew, you know,
you don't want to be right, it was. It was awful, but
at the same time it was good. It really helped, and the bureau
supported that. Like as your author was perfect as yes, as a former
action guy. It was horrible, and I showed you right. They put
me on the inside cover. I showed you the picture and I was like
in a jungle and I had this shirt on and too much shit in my
hair. It was just it was a glam shot me and you were a
sex bomb in that photo. I'm gonna hang that up on the wall here.
It was horrified, but it happened. The good news was the guy
that ran GQ magazine is a guy named Art Cooper and Art Cooper had a
kung fu grip. I mean he was among guys who were camouflage, Tidy
Whitey's, Mark Wahlburg models and stuff like that. Among magazine publishers. He
was a stud, a remarkable guy. I loved him. And so anyways,
he invited me over to his office. I'm sitting in his office,
had his incredible bar chain, smoking cigarettes, and he goes, hey,
you want to go to go to Afghanistan and find Bin Laden. And I
thought to myself, And now this was like a month after so this is
maybe the first week in October after nine eleven. And I thought to myself,
yes, I do, so I go. I know just what to
do. So I went down. I went home. That was in New
York. I went back to I was living still in Virginia, and I
got my car and I drove out to Langley. And I told you this
story before, but this is what a moron I am. So let's say
that I had a pass. I had a haul pass at Langley, right,
and then there's one primary entrance what is it one twenty three, one
twenty three, I think, right into the main gate. Yeah, and
the main gate there's two lanes going in. There's a guard shack on the
right, and then if you're a visitor, you just go around back,
you park your car and you go in and you sign in and you go
in. Right. So I at the time, I had a portion nine
eleven, and so I'm hauling ass up there, and I've got my sniper
partner on a cell phone, one of those no keias like it had the
black and white screens, you know. Yeah, and I've got I've got
the top down, yeah, and I've got I was listening to Ludicrous.
I'll never forget it. I've got don't ask me why, but I had
Ludicrous pumping. I had this big subwarfer in there, and my partner,
sniper partner, and is given me incredible amounts of shit. You you know
about the GQ things saying everybody hates me and you know, kids show my
face there anymore. But we have a tea time, we're playing golf that
Saturday. Yeah, he's just fucking with you though, right he was,
because he's a great guy. Yeah, I'm sure there was a lot of
concentation. Yeah, And and then I've got Art Cooper. You know,
back in those days, you have a little car phone right on, like
a little it's like a landline, but it was in your car. Yeah,
right, So I've got one on each ear and they're yelling at me,
and I'm feeling happy because I got a war back. I gotta find
a way to back into the war on terrorism. I got a press pass
to Afghanistan and GQ is sending you there as a journalist. Right, Conde
Nast is going to pay my first class air, fair and reasonable expenses to
go find bin laden check. So I roll up one hundred and ten miles
an hour, pull off the exit, I go through the gate the way
I've always gone through the gate. I get to the gate and I realize
I don't have a pass anymore. I'm out. I go fuck hit the
brake and or I hit the clutch, and they're very close together on that
car, and I locked up the tire, shift into reverse, back up,
go around back park to go in, and go in like a visitor,
and I'm looking in the rear view mirror and here comes a swat team
MP five's leveled at my head. They surround the car, you know,
doing a felony car stop on me at the main gate. The CIA headquarters
and because you know, I wasn't thinking, but anyway, I knew the
guys and it all worked out just fine. I go in and this woman,
I know, this, this friend of mine. A hero. This
woman, she should be on your show. She's absolutely crazy. She's a
She was a colonel in the army who had two high speed parachute failures,
one of which put a steel plate in her head. Is titanium plate in
her head, and she would get vertigo real bad in certain situations. And
you guys probably know there's there are certain configurations at Langley that I've never seen
them printed anywhere, so I'm not going to say what they were, but
this, you know what I'm talking about. The there's place as you walk
in Langley that are really weird geographically geometrically like they look similar. Anyway,
the point of the story was she the only way she could get through these
places in the building was to walk with their hands closed with their eyes closed
on the walls. So we'd have to walk down the hallways so that she
wouldn't pass out and throw up because of the steel plate in her head.
She was incredible. Anyway. The point of the story is she'd set up
on lunch. So we go into they have three I think there's three administrative
dining rooms there. It's like a d R one, two and three or
something like that. But anyways, so we go not to the cafeteria at
Langley, but go to one of the big wig dining rooms with a linen
table cloth. I'm looking out into the you know, over the Potomac through
the woods, and I'm thinking, man, I've arrived. Yeah this is
I haven't got to the Madonna story. Yeah that's a fucking hysterical story.
But see, I shouldn't have done this even yet. So anyways, we
go in and I go, so these two guys she's with me, and
these two guys I do not know, but I know who they are.
And so we're eating broccoli and sir waying tips or whatever else, and I
say, here's my plan, and I remember very clearly. The guy looks
at me and he's nodding his head, and he goes, maybe you have
forgotten a couple or haven't thought about a couple of things. One, the
United States government has sixteen intelligence agency and B fifty two bombers, five brands
of the military, and B fifty two bombers. He said, the CIA
gathers intelligence for clients that include the White House, the FBI chases thieves.
And I go, well, I guess you put me in my place,
but you know how we are, right, which is not what I was
really thinking. And I said, well, yeah, I get that interesting,
but maybe you haven't thought about this. And I went over the plan
again and his buddy goes, wow, okay, that makes great sense.
So he pulled out a car and he wrote down a number and he said,
go see this guy right now. I'll tell him you're calling. So
I got in my car. I drove from the Pentagon and I went into
the Pentagon and there's some guy. I have no idea what he was,
but I only remember this. He had this heavy, heavy Boston accent.
And I grew up in the Hampshire, right, so I know Boston accents.
So he's I walk in there and he's got on a like this shitty
look at nit tie, like with a square nittie, and he's got on
his shirt, his shirt sleeves rolled up, and he's got three watches on
his arm. And I go, hey, how you doing? I said,
you from Boston and he said, no, he goes talking. Anyways,
he was. I still have no idea who he was. I assume
he was some aspect of d Ia, but you know, I still don't
know who he was. But he put the whole thing together, and so
I flew to London. I flew to at the time you could go through
his you could come through his beck Stand and you could come down to Jikistan,
which was a very very long overland drive and it was dangerous, but
each had plus is a honus. But it was Bekistan. At the time,
Victoria Tenzing had put together the MBED program. So they were putting guys
like Carldo Rivera and what's her name? Who is that chick with the blond
here? I'm sorry that was unkind, not that she was incredibly famous and
very Ashley Danfield. Oh she was huge. Yeah. Anyway, these guys
were getting all the great slots. So I decided to go into Islamabad and
then go north through the Kibra Pass. But when I got there, they
were killing everybody that was coming through the Kibra Pass, so I couldn't get
there. So what do you do. The first thing you do is you
go to the embassy. Right, So I checked into the hotel and everybody
was there and all the Western news outlets were there at the hotel. So
I go to the embassy. I've got a meeting at the embassy, and
we all know who's at the embassy and put the whole thing together. And
I remember I walked in there. Can I tell the story, Yeah,
it's a I tried not to swear in this thing, but I gotta tell
this. Oh, you can swear like this is there's we're an adult channel.
So well, I'll just tell nobody under or at the age of eighteen
or sixteen or whatever. So my partner and I don't know how to describe
this guy, but this guy was before he joined the FBI, he was
a controller for a company in San Diego. It's a very very, very
smart fucking guy. And he had a solid gold rolex. I don't know
what model was, like a date jest or something, but solid gold,
which he wore on HRT and every most of the guys on HRT. Some
of the guys on HRT had Rolexes, but they weren't solid gold, right,
there was like a sub or, right, and so, but he
was an incredible guy. And he was unbelievable with a rifle. I mean
he was just incredible. So great guy. So my partner. So the
point of the story is this. So his somebody he had worked with was
now working in the league at in Islamabad, and he'd set up a meeting.
So I go in to see him and this your guys. And so
I go into this office and it's got all the GSA furniture and he goes,
hey, what's going on? He goes, how do you know?
I said, how do you know? Buck? And he said, well,
they were they were agents together in San Diego and they played together on
a softball team and the softball team was called my dick is so hard,
I don't have enough skin left to close my eyes. And I said,
I look kind of men a goal? What who would even think of something
like that? And why would you say it to me? In the league
at in Islama? Bade you know. It was just such weird things happening.
And and I look over and on his desk he had that book,
the first book, and he had a copy of GQ magazine opened to the
and it said that part of it said has on license to kill? No
has the ability to kill and the license to do so, and he had
highlighted it with a yellow magic marker. Oh my god, I am the
world's biggest moron. Absolute fool. So anyways, the point in the whole
story is that the agency guy says, you know, this country is a
dry country. You're gonna need some leverage. I'll be right back. So
he goes and he gets me two bottles of Johnny Walker black, which in
Islamabad, I'm sure you know it is the goal. Yeah, So because
I had to get a multiple entry piece or whatever. So I get my
two bottles of Johnny Walker and I go back to the hotel. And there
were two bars in Islamabad. One was at that hotel, one was at
the other hotel, the other Western hotel. So here's the point of the
story. So I've just I've got this buddy of mine who is ah he
has a very very famous girlfriend. I told you who he was, who
his girlfriend was, right, and he's got it. He's a very he's
a I don't know how to describe this guy. He's there because he's my
buddy and he's taking photographs for GQ magazine because he's a really great photographer.
But he's also a bad, bad dude. I mean he's fearless and he's
good anywhere you want to go. So we go back to the hotel and
he's an extremely worldly guy. So we go down to the basement. He
gets in about three fit fights trying to find a drink. We go into
basement as a bar, and you've got to sign in a testing that you're
not Muslim in order to own to buy a drink, right, So he
says, fuck these guys. So he signs in as our buddy, the
movie director. He would always call himself Elbolaggio, like his undercover name when
he's going to a UFC fight, and he checks into the Four Seasons,
right, So he signs in as El Bolaggio and I signed in as Team
Rope Header. We'll get to story something that's like one of my cover identities.
Says that I was a cowboy, you know. And so we signed
into this book and we go into the bar. Were the only two guys
in the bar, and they have this stuff is called I think it's called
Murray. You are are ee Gin vodka whiskey beer all on the same manufacturer
and it's manufactured by Pakistani's even though it's a dry country. Oh interesting,
So you can't buy any booze in Pakistan except the booze they make, which
I still have not figured out. So we're sitting at the bar and Joe
says, get any women around here, and I said, Joe, come
on, man, relax, you know we've got a job to do.
He goes, shut up with let me work. So he ends up it's
Ramadan. He ends up negotiating one of the bottles of Johnny Walker black for
like the bartender sister and like four of her best friends. And Joe cut
this shit out. You know it's ridiculous. But now eleven o'clock or twelve
o'clock at night, we've had six or seven beers. The guy comes walking
in. This is all the same day. Arrive, check in, go
to the embassy, get the booze. Joe's trying to trade it during Ramadan.
And it's now almost night and I haven't slept for three days. And
a guy comes in, taps me on the shoulder and he goes mister Christopher
or something like that, and hands me a piece of paper and walks away.
And just like a bad movie, it says meet at this address.
The fuck is this? So we go upstairs, walk outside, get directions,
walk four blocks and we're standing midnight in Islamabad on a street corner and
a car pulls up, a sedan like a Toyota Corolla, and the and
the guy basically says get in the car. And I'm thinking to myself,
We're not getting in the car. Yeah, And then I think to myself,
well, how do they know who we are and what are we doing
here? Maybe maybe we should get in a car. But my point is,
this is in the from the embassy bar, right, This is no,
no, no, no, this is in the hotel hotel bar okay,
with no other Westerners, zero other people. So the point of the
story is I'm going from being part of an organization that, through my clearances
and through my covers and through all this insane shit I did around the world,
all this stuff was great as long as you trust your backstop. Right,
you know who gave you the cover, and you know who's the Blockbuster
video card and somebody else's kid and your credit card age. Yes, you
know it's all backstop, and it's all right, and you know the people
you're interacting with have that code like having Ramstein and if they say something that's
yeah, you know, it all makes sense. There's a transition where that's
I realize I'm not in that world anymore. Right now, I'm just the
moron who's decided he's trying to do this by himself. Right. Oh,
I forgot to tell you there's nobody coming for you. Okay, Yeah,
I forgot to tell you. When he gave me the two bottles of Johnny
Walker black, he said, listen, dude, he said, I don't
He said, I don't know what they told you. But there's no we're
not giving you a blood hit, and we're not giving you a phone number
to call in West Virginia for Xville. You're on your own. There's no
CRRAF, nobody's coming to get you. You can go on your own.
We're not going to stop you, but you need to know nobody's coming to
get you. And I go, okay, that was it. So then
I end up in this car. We drove outside, like on the other
side of the mountains, outside of his Lamabad, and we end up by
this time it's probably one o'clock in the morning, and we end up pulling
into a polo club. It's it looks like a country club and you know
and oh cricket. Yeah. Yeah. So one o'clock in the morning,
pulled into this country club and there's three protos parked in a you know,
in a dirt lot. So we walk in this building and a guy points
to Joe and says, you sit over there. And I walk in and
I walk in and there's this guy and he's wearing I forget what the hat
is called, but you know, different tribes who were different types of hats,
and he's wearing a specific hat that meant something. I just don't remember
what it was. And he and he points down. I sit down at
the table. Guy brings tea, thinking, okay, this is going pretty
well, and he goes is he goes, do they call people team rope
heaters in Northern Virginia? And I and he and I looked down and he's
got a copy of my passport on the table and he knows that I just
signed in to the bar as Team roll Petter and he's telling me he knows
where I'm from. You it was I, SI guess right. So we
had a stern talking too, and then they were incredible in how they set
up and interact fixers and everything else, and so Joe's sitting there like,
so the girls are like now now. When he said in northern Virginia though,
was was because you were there under very real journalists to cover. Yes,
right, you were there as a journalist, yes, with with the
proper backstops, because that was the real thing. Correct. Did did they
know? Why did he say northern Virginia then, because the CIA is in
Northern Virginia, right, But did did did they know? Like, were
you able to talk your way out of that and say I'm just here as
a journalists? There was no there was no talking. I don't know that
I said anything. Yeah, you know, I think I had my tea
and I nodded, and he just basically said, you know, we're on
He said something like I think he said, Miss Shariff, you should recall
that Miss Shariff came to power through force. I think he said we're a
very old country, or he said we're a very new country and a very
old part of the world. That's exactly what he said. We're a very
new country and a very old part of the world. And then he said
something about Miss Shariff. But he was just basically telling me, don't suck
around. Yeah, don't wuck around. We're on it right. Yeah,
as it turns out, I mean, I found this out after the fact
that in anybody that was involved in that from the CIA side, or from
the FBI side, or from the military side, or for anything else at
that time, no matter what your gig was, and I know this now
after the fact, no matter what your gig was at that time, there
was ship going on that you did not know about. Unequivocally. I don't
care who you are or what you say. I know you've had those guys
on the show. I'm huge fans of enormous respect that there was, no
matter who you were, there ship going on you didn't know, but you
weren't read on. Yeah, And my thing was very specific, so to
be, because there's not about the stories. The bottom line was I was
supposed to go first to Peshawar and then because the the Kibra pass was closed
down and my job was to go to Deer in a Northwest Frontier province,
and I met a cleric who took us to an overland route to rat to
the north, a real fucking off grade place, and there there is a
very there's a there's a story that you guys may know about where what was
the name of that fucking town outside of Deer I can't even remember now,
But there was another town that something happened at that time with a military operation
that crossed over with some people, which there are there are references to it.
I don't know what it was, but I know they were there there.
Yeah, I mean, there are a couple of different things. I
mean, it could have been a rator. There's like some stuff where like
drones went down and stuff had to be recovered. No, no, this
was a transport of people across. But I don't want to get into that
because I don't know what it was. I don't want to say anything.
And I know something happened and I was there. Are you talking about when
they brought the al Kada guys from Afghanistan and the Pakistan? Yes, yeah,
Miller talks about that when Okay, So anyways, it was at that
time at that place and so, but it was a specific it was a
specific mula who was taking people from Pakistan over and he went in like the
legend, not the legend, but the roomor at the time, was he
took thirteen thousand people over when he came back with five. You know,
it was one of those stories, who knows what the numbers were. But
he was a problem. So the my my my hypothetically speaking, my intention
was not to try to stop him, but to try to get an idea
of who these people were and where they were coming from. Right. So,
anyways, the point of the story is spent time there and then went
very very unpleasant time there, then went back to his Lama Bod where I
got really bad dysentery. Flew to Quetta and the south drove from Quetta to
spend Baldock crossing over at the West Trauma crossing going up to Condahar when the
fighting moves south, and that's uh, that's the last story there. And
here it is. We get there, sick as a dog. I'd been
in a in a like a safe house, huddled around a tot, a
floor, a hole in the floor, delirious for three days with fever.
And I get in the back of yet another Toyota Corolla and we make our
way over and uh, and get to the border crossing and anybody that spending
that border cross and there's nothing there. It's like talcum powder. You know,
it's like the whole south of moon dust, the moon dust, right,
everybody knows the moon dust. So but there were the refugees will come
across and a lot of the guys that were getting in the fighting, we're
coming across the border too to try to get help in in uh in Quetta,
right, it was just like three hours away. So anyways, the
point I mean, Quitta is the port's town in ports city in Pakistan.
Right, it's not a port, it's inland, but it's a it's a
it's a huge transport facility. And uh, I don't even remember landing there.
But so but I'll just end the story here about how how how the
thing worked out. So then at that point had been there quite a long
time. We killed two different guys with cars. I mean, we hit
two different guys with cars. And there's a lot I'm not telling you about,
a lot that I'm not telling you about. But we got this uh,
like I was telling you before, we pull into this thing, and
it's now seven o'clock at night, it's dark, it's Ramadan, so you
can't eat. I'm sick. The driver uh stops at the Sindom block building.
You can see the border, and uh, we're supposed to meet a
guy named Zeke, a warlord name or Zeke that I don't want to say
world. He was a you know what I mean he was he was a
local leader. Yes, he was a local an influence. He was an
influencer. Yeah, he was not a fixer. He was the fix.
Right. This is a real fucking deal, right, But we're three days
late. So we pulled into this send the block building. Stop the story
here. So Joe and I get out of the car and we walk in
and the driver is kind of our translator, fix or whatever else. And
walk inside and there are like three four tables off to the to the right
hand side. Everybody has an ak and a beard and show walk committees.
But we're dressed local too, right, But I look like a diamond and
a goats ass. I mean, I looked like a complete utter idiot and
Joe. And Joe looks very plausible because he's got a beard, he's swarth,
he's like savit guy, and he's got a camera, so he looks
plausible as a journalist. So we go over to the side to order some
tea and there's nobody there, but on the wall was a framed, not
a framed, a big poster like you'd have behind like I had behind my
bed when I was a little kid. And it was Clint Eastwood from the
Dirty Harry movies with a forty four magnum pointing it like most people have seen
that poster. Yeah, And I look at Joe and I go, what
the what's he doing in you know, the on the border crossing into Afghanistan?
And right next to him was an eight by ten glossy of Assama bin
laden with it with an ak car being pointing it at Clint Eastwood's head,
and I go, you can't make this ship up. It was just absurd.
So we walk over and sit down in a corner, sweats dripping off
my face. I look over. They're all staring at us, and all
of a sudden, one of these guys stands up. And Joe had a
casting company, was a casting director in Hollywood, but he said it looked
like Cat Stevens on crack, and it did. He was mangy, it
looked like he had rabies. And the guy picks up his ak in his
hand and a chair and so it's I'd say, it's a big room,
so probably twenty twenty five feet from that pot of tables to where we were
sitting. He brings a chair in the middle of the room. There's nothing
there, it's just open space in middle room, puts his chair down and
goes like this like he's eaves dropping, like he's listening to us. And
I go, look at the what's going on with this guy? What an
idiot? And uh. Then he picks up his chair and he walks the
rest of the way to the table, puts his chair down with his knee
touching Joe and says, who are you guys? Kind of like that,
I mean, not much of an accent. And Joe thinks about it for
a minute and he goes, suis journal least Joe doesn't speak French. I
always say that he like he has occasional dinners at tour Dargan. He has
reef Ghosh hair. Right, he's wearing a proud of jacket right right,
And I go, oh fuck, and uh, and I say, you
know, I don't feel like I mean, yeah, he goes, you're
French, and I said maybe. Joe said weird, but I couldn't tell
because all the blood shunted into my Nutsack couldn't hear anything, right, And
so so I go, We're we're dead now for sure? Yeah, right,
because he doesn't speak French. This guy, I'm sorry, this guy
spoke French. He spoke English and he spoke French and he was one of
them. So I go, who would have thought that? Yeah? So
I go, okay, Well we're gonna die. I know we're gonna die.
And the only thing I've got is a fighting chance in this thing is
if I can get in those guys and get one of those ak's they're shooting
at each other, and maybe I'll get some of them. But it came
to that. You know, every time you get in a fistfight and there's
that moment just before the first punch lands and you know it's on. It's
just nobody's bleeding yet, right, We're there, right, So I go,
okay, I just say anything that Joe, I stood up, Cass
Steven's on Crack is still sitting there, and get up, walk across the
room. As I'm walking straight at him and they're all staring at me,
and I'm delirious, sweats pouring off me, trying to close the distance.
Because they've got the weapon exactly right, because I don't, you know,
the Danny Pearl thing. I didn't want my head shopped up, right,
I said, I'll die. I don't want to die get my head cut
right. It's a ship way to go. Yeah. So I go by
the door and I forget to say, this door was literally shit, you
not had like a swinging swinging doors with a couple of movers broke out.
So I look out and I see in the parking lot there was one bulb
over a gas pump and the car's gone. The driver's gone, so the
part the parking lot's empty. So it's not just me and Joe in this
room with these guys. And I go all right, and then you know,
you put together a five paragraph order and I'm thinking, you know,
it's three hours back, and it's it's I'm doing math, and the math
sucks flapping, flapping, I'll flapping and I know I'm flapping, but I'm
too sick to care because I think I've really got one shot at this thing,
and fucking I mean, if I'm gonna die, it's not gonna get
my head shopped on, not getting on my knees, not getting my knees
right. So anyways, I walk up to the table and these guys are
looking at me, and I don't know what they're thinking, but they got
these looks on your face, like who is this fucking retard? And I
get up to the table and one of the aks was on the table and
it was had the boltop you know the flip switches down right. So I'm
thinking, I don't have to do anything. I just got to grab it
and pull a trigger. And so the guy looks up at me, who
I kind of thought was the leader, and he puts his hand on his
like his finger on the pistol grip, and he looks at me and he
goes. And then two guys stand up and they go and watch and walk
over to the door. And I go, oh, I mean, what
am I gonna do now? So I walk back to the table. I
get back to the table and cast Stevens is standing there and picks up his
chair and he walks back. And Joe looks up at me and he goes,
he's gone his knee. The driver. I go, yep, he
goes, wit. I gotta tell you, the spy ship's getting pretty fucking
old. It was the only thing he said the month we were there or
whatever, five weeks were there, the only thing he said, and all
the ship that we've been through, and and I always said, the first
rule of not letting people know you're in the intelligence community is not making obvious
lies about not being an intelligence community. You know. So anyways, obviously
I survived. And but that was This is one of those like programs that
some weirdo and some sub office somewhere authorized in those fearful days after nine to
eleven that never ever, ever would have gotten approved. Otherwise, if the
Pentagon hadn't just had a hole blown in it, there's no way somebody would
have signed off on this. I don't think anybody did sign sign off on
Let's see. I think somebody said. The guys I had lunch with said
okay, I get it, but I don't want anything to do with it.
Go see this guy. And I went to see that guy, and
I think he thought I came from there, didn't know how. Yeah,
hooked this guy up. We got up. Yeah, we got him.
We got him. And he didn't have to hook up ship because I got
myself there. All he had to do was put together the pieces it's like
I'm hiking the Appalachian Trail, people a stage in food as I go home,
right, So the fixers and the places to stay and guns, I
mean, that's another thing when you do things like that. If you've got
a gun, you're only two things. In a situation like that, you're
either media or you're not right. And if you've got a gun, you're
not you're not media right, right, And there's times when a gun would
help you fight in a situation maybe like that, probably not, but you
know, two or three guys at a roadblock or something like when I went
to someone right there. But the but in that situation. The point I
think in this whole story is that was the first time I realized that I
could build a world around what I knew of your world. I knew what
you guys agency Special Worse is Delta Seal Team six, all the agencies,
all the teams, all the countries. And at this point I'd probably been
to I'd say at least forty five or fifty countries doing different things. Yeah,
and I knew what I could get away with, and I knew how
to work around those different things. And then it goes back to Uncle Harold
paying the CIA a million dollars building his own private enterprise, and that that's
really what it became. Yeah, a month after I got out of SO
so Joe, because we haven't really talked about it. You know, you
mentioned Joe was with you and that he was the photographer. Had he had
an intel background or or was he just you just kind of brought him on
and I just brought him on. Joe had no background in anything, but
he had spent a great deal of time at HRT, So had Al Balagio.
So my director friend. Those guys were there and they knew that world.
Sorry, well, probably want to turn it off anyways. But no,
no, no, he was. I mean he's a remarkable guy.
He can tell his own story, he can write his own five books,
he can. I mean, his life is so fucking aile it makes me
look like an amateur hour. But he was that guy that could survive in
any situation. And there were there are a lot of others. I mean,
there's some other stories that through this, like Misadventure, you sort of
realized that you could create like an intelligence platform. That's it, and and
here's where it goes. I figured a way to make money off it.
I figured out a way not to because you can. What people don't realize
about the intelligence community, in my in my opinion, in my experience,
based on my twenty something thirty something years in that world overtly and obliquely,
is that, uh, it comes It all comes down to tasking. There
is benign intelligence, human intelligence gathering that gives nobody heartburn, right, like
National Resources Right, Yeah, like n R. If you're working an NAR
thing, you can an intelligence agency can gather information from somebody who is not
otherwise involved in the game in any way. They don't have any training,
they don't have anything. They just fly on a regular basis to Indian and
come back. You have a meeting and you feel like a patriot and you
get some information. Right, there's that aspect. The moment you turn to
tasking, bells go off, it's espionage. It's espionage. Right. As
soon as they tell you to do something, right, and it could be
any day now, there's eighteen intelligence agencies. As soon as you do something.
It all comes down to tasking. What I realized early in the game,
and I'm talking October two thousand and one, was that there is a
line in between. If you know it well enough, if you know the
system and you know the players, and you know how everybody works what they
want, you can be a patriot. You can have a hell of a
time, and you can make a little money. And does that does that
come from knowing what the taskings would be, knowing the requirements so you don't
need to be tasked. You can say, hey, I'm either you say
it or you just do it, but I'm going to get this information.
But nobody's ever tasched you on it. That's correct. But I knew the
task so when i'm when I presented a plan, it did not need to
be signed off on by anyone. It was plausible and it provided benefit to
someone without any downside whatsoever. I mean, if I died, if I
had gotten my head cut off and said of Danny Pearl in Lahore and I've
been there are many plenty of times, yeah, and it could have happened.
When I went out to the polo club, that could have happened.
I'm just a lucky fuck. That's all I canna say. But if you
know and listen, there are probably people watching this right now who are CIA
case officers, operations officers at b I Agents, Delta Force operated Seal Team
six guys. They've all got stories on the side, They've got everybody's got
a story where they were a little bit off to the side, and you
know that, right, and there are all things that don't make sense.
What I found a way to do and did it for a very long time
time, was to work in between those things. It's very smart because it's
very because again it's like, hey, especially when you're getting the journalistic top
cover, when you're like, hey, I'm going to be doing this thing.
I'm going here, I'm going to talk to these people. I don't
want any task, but I'm curious. I'm curious, like what what types
of things you guys are interested in this area that I'm gonna be It was
kind of it was not even that it was that idea. Yeah, when
I when I first introduced my plan, I'm not going to talk about what
I actually did or how I actually did it, but I think it was
clever, yeah, and I think it benefited in significant ways. Is if
you're in the intelligence community, like you had a very minimum needle waver to
use journalistic cover, like that's like one of it's like using uh, it's
like using red cross as cover, like if there are things that are members
of the clergy. Yeah, journalists, it's just not yeah, it's not.
Well, I got bad news for you, gentlemen. That's where this
goes. Well, So the curious thing is, I don't remember seeing any
articles written by Chris Whitcomb. Yeah. Were they out there? Oh fu
yeah, yeah, I wrote. I wrote. I wrote for the New
York Times. I had an op ed contract with the New York Times.
I wrote about all aspects of this stuff. From New York Times. I
wrote about I wrote for like the Sunday Magazine section. I wrote for fious
things, but I wrote. I think I wrote six six different articles for
GQ. But that whole thing was it was a horrible article because it was
I got back, like editors and writers. I'm a writer who does all
these things, but writing is important to me. And I got back and
Art Cooper assigned this editor. And I'm not going to make statements about men,
females, uh, you know whatever. Else. All I can say
is this editor was trying to make sense of my article, the subtext of
what you and I are talking about right now. How And she left after
I got to piss and match with her, she left and went to Red
Book Magazine and started editing cookbook recipes. Right, so you take a cookbook
recipe editor from Red Book Magazine trying to make sense of me and all the
ship that I did, right, Yeah, the articles written it. I
mean, it's got pictures of me wearing all the vocal garb, like that
picture that I sent you with the whatever the fucked up head the head gear
that was one of those things up there. And there's like there's this one
place where I was sleeping in a in a goat shed, and you know,
there was this anyway, just to wrap the story up, this guy
Zeke came in after the whole thing happened when I almost tried to get in
the gunfight in the corner. He came in, and those were his guys,
And what I had manufactured to be great drama in life in reality was
his guys watching over us. Oh. I just didn't realize it. Yeah,
you know, and then and I was okay from that point on.
I mean, I was okay because the other elements, but it wasn't.
Those guys were not the threat that I thought, even though it was a
legitimate concern, you know. So, yeah, that's a pretty wild ride.
Well it hasn't even started yet, man, I mean that was just
that was the dry run. That was like the fucking that was you.
That was proof of concept. That Yeah, that's all concept. When you
when you came back to the debrief, you like, how did that work?
What can I say about that? I came back to the States and
I had to present I had to write an article for GQ magazine. I
know that sounds absurd, but I did. And the first thing we did
was go to la I mean it literally flew from Okay, we shouldn't tell
all these things. But so the thing about Joe is, Joe was the
first guy I ever knew that had an American Express Black Card. Remember when
those first came out, there was invitation only. Yeah, right, you
couldn't get one. If you wanted one, you didn't have a chance they
would call you up and invite you. Joe was one of the first guys
I ever knew that had a black card, and he had a cell phone
with overseas coverage. The black card meant you had a concierge, right,
so you'd call a number and he'd go mister Joe and he'd say, I
need a vegetarian restaurant and her rot and you know in in some like some
Acacia t or something like right, and uh, because you know, I
told you he had just come from Madonna's wedding and his girlfriend was like this
household name right. So anyways, we get on a plane. Uh fuck
one more. We're gonna have to cut this thing off pretty quick because I'm
gonna have another Scotch and it's gonna go south. So anyways, just to
close up the Afghanistan story, we go back to he found. He calls
his concierge and he gets us two tickets on a seven forty seven one hundred,
one hundred out of Islamabad Airport and uh, we take off. Now,
I haven't taken a shower in a month. I'm not exaggerating. I
mean I looked like I mean it was. It was. This whole thing
was much worse than I'm letting on. It was much worse. I'm just
I don't want to make the whole thing about one story. But so anyways,
he would always say at claridges and for those who don't spend a lot
of time in London. Clarridges is one of the great hotels on Earth.
I mean, it's the bar and Joe the bartender, he know, he
knew everybody, you know, mister so and so and uh So we go
there and let's say, I went, I'm not gonna tell you all those
stories. But so we go back from London after a stay at Claridges,
take a shower and get regrouped, fly to La and he sets up a
dinner with this U with all these actresses in uh this place called the Buffalo
Club, which in Santa Monica, California. It was a it was kind
of a secret restaurant in those days, but put together by Tony Jerkovic,
who created Miami Vice and he was one of the biggest television producers of the
nine. He's huge guy, and he started this a little restaurant. No
Son Buffalo, New York. No, No, he was from Buffalo and
New he called at the Buffalo Club. But it was on Olympic Boulevard in
Santa Monica, California, back when that was still a shithole. So there
was this little, hidden, secret restaurant in Santa Monica that you could only
get into if you knew where it was if you knew somebody, it was
one of those secret places. Yeah, regular people can't go. So but
we had our own table, right, I mean like permanently. So we
go in there. I'm just trying to wrap up the story. So we
go in. We're eventually going back to Langley, eventually going back to the
CIA. So we fly to Clarridges and we have this big time in London.
Then we fly to la and he puts all these actresses together because he's
a casting director and I mean some really household names. So we have it.
We have a nice dinner and we're telling stories. And he was a
ladies man, as I may have mentioned. And one of the ladies was
a bartender at the Buffalo Club who we had a liaison with in the Men
and the Gentleman's restroom the previous night. Good conversation, last room, good
conversation, intellectual. Yeah, And so he had gone to a private event
in a garden out behind the place while we're having a conversation. So we're
having this meeting. We're having a dinner in a booth at the Buffalo Club
with all these actresses and I'm trying to tell this story to them, and
they keep saying, wit cut to the chase, was you know, how
the fuck did you escape? And you know whatever. So anyways, the
point of the story is Joe goes back and he gets a piss and match
with the bouncer, who was a large man, a pretty boy, like
a Hollywood bouncer. You know, they're like one minute they're in a runway
show, in the next minute doing a UFC fight, right, And so
I'm we're holding court and it's fairly late. We've had a couple of cocktails,
and I'll never forget it. I see Joe coming around the corner and
he's walking straight at me. And Joe would always start the fights and then
point to me. And we all like to fight, right, some of
us like to fight a lot. So he comes comes walking straight at me,
goes, wait, we got a problem, and I go, I'm
sure we do. So we walked to the front. Now, the Buffalo
Club is a is an elegant, little hole in the wall restaurant and there's
a little tiny bar in the front, maybe four seats, and you would
walk in off the street and you get a table. Right, So we
walk up at this by this by the time we get up there, the
bouncer has come around the corner from the garden party out back who wouldn't let
him see the woman that he had interesting liaison with. And I look at
this fucking guy and he's so big. I mean, I'm not a shrimp,
right, I'm a fairly good sized guy, and this guy was huge.
And he was so big Joe's maybe like five ten. He was so
big that Joe had to jump up in the air like he's trying to dunk
a basketball, just to punch him in the mouth. And he locked him.
I still remember, you know that sound. And he clocks this guy,
and the guy just looks at him, like, what are you an
idiot? And then he looks at me and I don't want anything to do
with any of it, right, But it's on, right, So it
goes to the floor and it's on, and you know, it's two on
one and we're losing, and it it's not pretty. So all of a
sudden, I hear somebody start yelling, yelling, yelling, and I look
up and it's Tony Jerkovic, who is the biggest producer and the biggest TV
producer in Hollywood, Miami fis and I mean, like analyst shows and he
goes, Joe, you're out of here, and nobody fights in the buffalo
called you're a band, You're band, full of life, and Joe goes,
you can't ban me. I built this place. He goes, you
didn't build fucking anything. You're out of here. So then we're out in
the sidewalk, sitting on the sidewalk, you know, trying to get a
ride home, and all the weight and the famous actresses are all gone because
I think we're a bunch of morons. So then I got on a plane
and I fly back to Langley with all the film of all the things we
haven't you know, I mean there's things you gather, yeah, visually.
Yeah. And so I took, you know, a couple of things for
GQ, for the photographs for the magazine article, and they kept all the
other film. They kept all the film, and he was furious about he's
furious to this day, he's furious that they kept all this film. But
then the only thing that was interesting there is that sometime after that, I
did a like a group debriefing, a lecture. I did a lecture at
this you know, a lecture Hall, and I was. I was shocked.
To this day, I'm shocked at how many people came. I was
really, really, very very surprised. To this day. I don't know
why that many people came to the lecture because it seems like they would have
known that stuff. So anyways, that that was the That was the my
transition from the FBI into the world in October and November of two thousand and
one. So that's your first trip, and then you know, things continue
to pop off. Of course, two thousand and three happens the invasion of
Iraq. Yeah, how how does this thing progress? Okay, you build
this as you build this capability slash business. I mean because it is a
business now at this point it is a business. But I didn't think of
it as a business. I thought of it. There's a disconnect in my
mind. This is like old school like French jet birds that like go into
the private sector after World Wars. I mean, it's a little bit of
like it was. It's a little bit of like Dewey Claridge like setting up
Yeah, you know, I'll tell you what it was. It was a
moron who didn't know any better. I just thought I can do anything I
want in the world. Hold my beer. Yeah, and I did.
I did. So I moved to New York. I didn't move New York.
I built or I got a place in New York on the Upper West
Side, and I went to work for NBC. So I worked for MSNBC
NBC so I did. I did the Today Show. I don't know how
endless times did the Today Show. Matt and Iron k I've got the best
Katie kirks Or in the history of the world. But I don't forget to
that. So get us there walking, We'll walk us in. Maybe we'll
maybe we'll save that for a bonus segment. Oh my god, we got
a lot for the bonus segment. Yeah, we just wasted two hours talking
about Waco and Ruby Rich and we apologize for that. No, no,
but nobody knows the stories. I mean. So yeah, anyways, Okay,
So I come back and here's where we go from there. The last
thing that I built in the FBI before I left was called the Strategic Information
Management Office, Critical Incident Response Group, Negotiators profile is hostage rescue team logistics.
All the different agencies whenever we went to a crisis. The biggest problem
was controlling information, which is the media, and what do we know about
the situation, how do we want to control the information which is the lifeblood
of any crisis. Information is And it can become like I don't I don't
know precisely what you're talking about, of course, but like it can become
an issue like if the press is recording the operator's staging to go in and
well here's a perfect example. Uh, Puerto Rico spent a lot of time
in Puerto Rico. There's an island called viz Vicz. There's a bomb site
for the navy, and the people of Vics didn't like that. Right,
You're you're blowing up all these like endangered birds and some non gelatinous foremennifference and
it's like all this all this ship that you get, right, it's crazy.
So we fly in what's the helicopter with the chinook with chok? Yeah,
so I remember we fly in, We do this big assault into the
island and we're on the chinook and I get off and off the back and
it was the island had all the soil was kind of flinty. So maybe
you guys have seen that. You see it in a rock in Afghanistan or
in a rock. It's a dust stop. Yeah. No, it lights
the light, the lights the end of the blades on. Yeah, so
you get yeah, it's beautiful. Yeah, it's beautiful. So get the
whole thing. We couldn't land because it was dust. The point of the
story is there was this one op just as an example, in Vicks Island.
We fly into Vicks and they had these I think there were two s
cong They had some protesters, and the protesters were on the beach and they
said, we want you to come and arrest us on national television. So
they called NBC, ABC, CBS, everybody came down there with the camera
crews and they were saying, we are going to watch the next Waco.
We're gonna watch these guys come in. And they had sling shots and spark
plugs. Right, I mean, I get an M four and a bag
of grenades, right, and they've got sling shots with spark plugs and to
United States congressmen. So all that's going to happen is they shoot us with
a sling shot and somebody does something stupid and the FBI is back twenty years
right, So I said, wait a minute, let's relax you a little
bit. We know what they want, we know how they plan to do
it. All we've got to do is walk down there, get all the
media together, and say, come with me. We want you to record
everything that we're going to do. So we went up to them and said,
the SWAT guys were pissed. All the the San Juan Swat guys will
piss Fuck these guys. We're gonna we're gonna make an example of them.
And I said, maybe it's not the way it's gonna go down. De
squads and police force you down, no foster, no solid public, no.
But I listen, you know, I didn't have anything to prove.
I'd already been through wake up. But I did not want another debacle for
me or for the FBI. I love the FBI, I believe in the
FBI, at least in those days. I didn't want that to happen.
So I said, look, let's do this. Let's just think about this.
Let's walk down. We'll bring the media with us. I'll go up
to whoever it was at the time, you know, all the famous people,
And I said, we go up. So we walked up to them,
and I said to the to the two congressmen and the people with the
sling shots and the and the spark plugs. I said, these are flex
cuffs. We're gonna put them on you and we're gonna walk you out of
here. And they said, no, you're not. Whatever else, So
I put the flex cuts. All they wanted to do is beyond national news.
So we put the flex cuffs on them, but didn't tighten them up
so if they dropped their hands they would fall down on the ground. So
we put the flex custs because that's what they wanted. But then they realized
they looked like complete morons because they I mean it looked like a blacksmith,
like a wizard's apron, you know, hanging off their wrists. And it
diffused the situation. There was no fight, nobody got hurt, nobody caused
any problems whatsoever. All the media had no story to write at all.
Then I found a deuce and a half someplace. It was like a bomb
target, and got it running, drove it up, put all their ship
in the back, and drove it back to the airport and away they went.
And it was no story whatsoever. So realizing that nothing really matters unless
it appears on the news right or in those days, right now with social
media with their else right or your show, but back in those days,
and that changed the show. So this lightning boat goes back to the seventh
floor of FBI headquarters saying, wait a minute, you did what you know,
but it was a different way of thinking, and all of a sudden,
these are awesome, thank you, They're good, are very fantastic,
They're really tasty. So that was a paradigm shift in the way we looked
at things. Yeah, but it came through the Strategic Information Information Management Office.
And here's where it gets a little weird. Perhaps during my time I
may have come across the fourth psychological Operations element and perhaps they are the craziest
motherfuckers I've ever met my entire life. And I'll say this. When you
join the FBI, you go through sixteen weeks or academy. It might be
eighteen weeks. Now, you go through the farm, you go through you
know, it's different because the CIA training case officer training is a little bit
different. It's a little fragmented, right, But you go through operator training
school, you go through any program that you guys have been through, and
they have a timeline, it's usually not that long. Psy Ops basic school
is forty three weeks, yeah, four three weeks away from your family,
away from any There are some true believers in that outfit, and there's some
wild outfits. In my personal opinion, in my personal experience, I think
I've worked with everybody around the world. We haven't got to it yet,
but I've worked with everybody. Is rarely is the Turks, the South Africans,
the anybody. I don't give a shit who you're talking about. I've
worked with all of those intelligence organizations up until about a year and a half
ago. In my opinion, those Psycho those psy OPS guys are some squirrels.
I mean, there's some one of the Psyops guys. The Army Psyops
guys are like widely misunderstood and even derided. You have the letter for Chris
Oh, it's right here, and even derided in the Special Operations community,
and a lot of people I think don't really understand what they do. A
lot of them. There are a lot of CIA details that they work.
A lot of people don't get that. And if you know those guys through
what they're you know most people think of it just as pamphlet drops, but
there's a lot of other stuff going on, and they are and they are
so controlled, like psyops in the military in particular, are so controlled because
it would be like you would be like shooting around from a sniper rifle and
then an atomic blast going off as a results. Yeah, they're literre like
left and right limits. And another thing they do is that a lot of
people don't realize this, even produce films anti extremist films around the world that
show up in places like Indonesia, Kurdistan else that's one of their critical languages
when you join. They have a certain number of critical languages. Indonesia is
one of those languages. And I'll say this the based on my experience,
and I don't know shit compared to I know what I don't know. They
have white, gray, and black categories of operations. Right, white is
the pamphlet drops, gray is the movies. The black shit is when you
don't know where it's coming from. In my opinion, that's some of the
wildest shit that I've done in my life, that aspect of it, and
some of it's weird. So anyways, the point of the story is that
I put this all together and I said, look, what we really want
as a government is to protect Americans. We're patriots. We believe in what
we do, and we believe that is good, and we believe that good
is going to make America whole so that our kids can go to sleep at
night. That's why we all serve and die if that's what it takes,
right, I found a way I felt that I could contribute. In terms
of information management, It's not new. I mean we've been doing that.
Propaganda's been around forever, not always well, but not always well. But
look, and it's not even government. It's a public relations advertising. It's
advertising, it's marketing. It is human being. It is trying to manipulate
human beings to do what you want them to do right right, And it's
not it's not even done best by government. It's done best by corporations because
they make money. I mean, look at bud Light, the debacle they
went through. That was a simple mistake that cost billions of dollars and everybody
knows that example. They even went back in history, any government, kingdom,
any populace who thought that their ruler was ordained by God or part of
some historic lineage. They were sold, right, they were SOLDI sold the
bill of sale. You know, it's yeah, it's it's good marketing.
It's good marketing. But I think everything in life comes down to objective and
you've got to believe. I believe a certain subset of things about human beings,
and when it comes right down to it, they are as old as
human beings and it's never changed. Human beings do what's in their own best
interest. It might be Mother Teresa helping people in the ghettos of Calcutta,
it might be a politician running for office. Human beings do what's in their
best interests. There is an underlying sense of truth. That truth is objective,
and it is different to people that right now in America, you're right
or leftter. You believe Joe Biden is the truth, you believe Donald Trump
is the truth. And it's about split down the middle, and you believe
in the truth, and that is your obligation, your duty to try and
sway opinions on that. Right. So, whether it's trying to sell a
used car or whether you're trying to make, you know, a political debacle
seem good. So I look at all those things and said, Okay,
let's put those together, and let's say that we understand certain things through math.
I love math, right, so we all know the algorithm. Google
came up with the algorithm that's changed the world. And it can tell you
what you want to listen to on Spotify. It can tell you the tea
house mostly, the team house mostly, it tell what ads you want to
see. All of those things. But it's not about the math. It
is not about the underlying reality. Is about understanding human beings. Humans are
so fucking simple. I used to do party tricks. I got to dinner
party, and I would and I would leave the room, and or you
would leave the room, and then we would all get together and you would
tell me what you want me to get him to do when he comes back,
and you'd come back and sit at the table, and I would get
you to do what the table told me to get you to do. Or
detection of deception. It's it's very very simple. But we've gotten to a
point in American culture where we can do that very very well. It's not
just about math anymore. It's not just algorithms. It's more complicated than that.
But I first learned that from fourth I use that and built that,
and then I took that private when I when I went which is which is
where we go from here? So what was that intercedition? The intersection is
media the intersection, and here's how it and here's how it goes wrong.
I was one of many many people. People let me go back and they'll
say, what's he talking? I'll say, what I'm talking about is Victoria
Tenzingg. That was a name, right, the woman the Flak of the
Pentagon who came up with the MBED program, which was an enormously effective way
of mixing reporters with the people who were keeping them alive while they were getting
a story. It's a brilliant idea. She's a brilliant woman. You get
the reporters to start relating to the soldiers Stockholm syndrome by proxy. It's a
very very simple human construct. There's a brilliant idea. I have enormous respect
for that woman and what she's done. Whether you believe in what she did
or not, it was a very effective model, right that works in a
private sector or not. Then you go to you look at what happened after
nine eleven with Fox News, Rupert Murdoch was brilliant in the sense that he
said, I am going to ride nationalist, patriotic pride to a billion dollar
pay day. You can hate Robert Rupert Murdoch, but what he did was
brilliant. And here's here's what I'll Shortly after nine eleven, I'm gonna say
two thousand and three, maybe I had worked at for NBC. So I
was doing daily I was on MSNBC every day all day. I was on
The Today Show, Meet the Press, Nightly News, all of those shows,
and CNBC, of all people, CNBC came to me and said,
hey, at the time that the talent coordinator at a at NBC was a
woman named Elaine. I'm not gonna say her last name, but she was
a brilliant woman. I thought the world of her. She hired all the
everybody from Matt lower to whoever, and she said, Okay, we're gonna
do a show on CNBC. I don't know why. It's called Checkpoint CNBC.
It's every day at six o'clock and I was going to co host it
with Martha McCallum, who was now at Fox News. Right. She didn't
know I was a co host. I think she thought I was just in
some goofball sitting next to her every day, which I probably was. So
I had I had a daily news show on CNBC where we would interview basically
this but on cable news. So I did that. So again, I
can't say how I did this because I don't want to get anybody in trouble.
But let's say again that I understood the mechanism of the FBI, I
understood the mechanism of the Defense Department, and I understood the mechanism of the
CIA. And I knew people at all of those organizations, and I knew
what they did, how they did it, and what they wanted to achieve.
That makes sense, Yeah, it's a fairer. So I called him
up and I said, I now not only am on TV every day on
all these other shows, but now I have a daily format that I can
help shape opinion of what's going on in the world of terror, the global
War on Terror, but the world of military operations. And it was a
big problem because they were because George Bush declared mission accomplished. Remember on the
Rialship, it started to slide very bad. Is this related to the military
analysts program? There was no program. This was me This was no program.
I mean, it's very simple from a world that we all know very
well, which is regimented, like nothing happens without a piece of paper.
Not this is me saying I'm going to do this. It's not about tasking.
Remember we always got back to tasking. You do not have to task
me. I'm telling you what I want to do, and I will do
this if you give me X and X as a phone call. So I
remember very clearly numerous conversations over the course this went on for two or three
years. Right, So when something happens, you need to wait, Like
here's a perfect example. This is not in affairs. There was a there
was a story that came out with the Secret Service had a bunch of guys
in South America I think it was Columbia, right, and they got a
little jam. Right. So when I went on and this, I didn't
call the Secret Service, I didn't call anybody, but I said, I
know a lot of Secret Service agents. I love those motherfuckers, and I
love what they do and how they do. It's such a hard job.
It's a thankless, brutal, endlessly difficult job. And there's some really really
great patriots and so I went on and I said, what you don't know
is X, Y, and Z, and I said it as loudly as
I could, as often as I could, and it went away. I'm
not saying it went away just because of me, but I did my part.
They didn't have a program where they would trying to manipulate the media.
I was in the media and I knew that how to manipulate opinion, and
I did it. So that was an example. But there are a lot
of agencies, and I know a lot of people at those agents. I
mean, I know this is like a murky world that we're describing here about.
I mean, are you just going on television and giving your opinion,
your expert opinion as a former law enforcement official, or are they giving you
talking points and telling you what to say, because those are two very different
things. Yeah. So I started doing all these shows and one day I
got a call and I know I didn't answer to your question. I'm fully
aware I didn't answer your question. And I got a call from this guy
and he says, hey, I gotta you know you and fantastic, and
I get a little story for you. Story is the USG just rolled up
some I have Bin Laden's son. You may remember that story. You might
have been part of that up. I don't know. And I said,
okay, you want me to go out with this And they said, we're
not saying that, but I'm telling you what just happened. And it's going
to be this, this, and this, and the president is going to
make an announcement. And I said, okay, So the way a TV
show works is this the way TV shows work that I worked in work this
way you get you go in. I would get on a bus or car
service. At first, I'll get in a car from my apartment in Upper
West Side, New York. I would go to CNBC a c NBC World
headquarters, and I would sit at my desk. I had a desk right
next to Joe Kernan, and I mean literally we're adjoining and all the people
that you see there, you just I mean you work with them every day,
the personalities, but there's really great people and very smart, very smart.
So I go on and oh, so you go into this office from
my show see at Checkpoint CNBC and you sit in the producer's office with ten
people, and they go, what are we going to do today? And
somebody would go, well, what's the New York Times doing? And you
check the New York Times, what's the Post doing? And check the Post.
Then ultimately they would say, what's Fox doing, because that's all that
mattered, because they had all the ratings. You want to generate ratings so
you can sell advertising, so that you make money, so that you do
what's in your own best interest, which is build your career. Right.
That's all people need to understand about the media is that it's all about money.
It's the product is news. The product or the result is money.
That's I mean, that's the only reason they're not doing it to keep you
informed. They're doing it for bigger bank. Listen, I remember Columbia Business
School, I mean Columbia Journalism School. Columbia Journalism School used to be the
arbiter you want to I didn't go to Columbia Journalism school, but but you
know, yeah, I'm just saying, yeah, the Columbia guy. Yeah
right, I'm just saying that there was a day when the Fourth Estate would
find stories about Watergate that would splash presidents. I was thirteen years old when
Nixon resigned. I remember that very very well. Those days are gone,
Yeah, the poolishers. If you do a list poolishers have been received in
journalism in the last five years, it is it is a debacle, is
a disgrace, right, And a lot of them were like are for stuff
that has since been debunked or all of them? Yeah, I mean,
excuse me, I'm sorry, not all of them. Many of them have
become shameful, but they're not taking them back. My point is this that
we'd have a meeting in the morning, we put together a story based on
what other people were doing, and it would feed itself because ultimately, you're
trying to make a show that people watch, so that you record the ratings
for advertisers who pay, who make money for all the people involved. That's
the whole point, and that's the way a show would happen every day.
So we'd go in and we put together a show. Ultimately I'd end up
in front of a camera, reading a teleprompter and doing some kind of a
story about that. And I did a lot of them, like I flew
in a in the back of a what has a backseat? And at fifteen
fourteen fourteens do and I think I have sixteen I think it was sixteen.
I can't remember. I get, we need to get we need to ask
Alexon. Yeah, yeah, but yeah I did. I did a million
story. These weren't stories that I said at a desk and with a teleprompter.
I was going out like like I went to Guantanamo Bay, right,
I went to GITMO. Now I knew everybody. I knew. I knew
people at GITMO that we're doing the investigations. I didn't say anything, but
there was. I spent two years at the FBI Academy after HRT, where
I taught interrogation. At the FBI Academy, I was pretty good at it
and uh and I taught interrogation to various other agencies, including the CIA,
which called it elicitation. Prior to enhanced interrogation, the CIA used to call
interrogation elicitation and they had some funky ways of you say what you want about
interrogation. The FBI interrogates people and puts them in jail for life. It's
hard to get somebody to say, yes, I committed this crime, knowing
that if I say it, I'm going to jail for life. That's difficult.
They're very, very good at what they do. They're very it's a
difficult art form, and they're very good at it. The CIA didn't have
that consequence part of nine to eleven. You know, it was a very
very different thing entirely. But anyway, the point of the story is that
going into media and having a platform where I was on television every day in
different media, and what I said mattered to a certain extent, where I
could do this. I would go on TV and I would specifically and intentionally
say X, because I would sit back and wait for you to go on
TV and say X, and then you would go on TV and say X.
Because human beings are extremely predictable and they will follow what benefits somebody else.
And I'll say this, if you look at society today, you look
at misinformation and disinformation. Those terms did not exist six months ago, a
year ago, didn't exist. Somebody made those terms up to exemplify something they
didn't believe in. Once you come up with a word that people can get
behind, or you can look in any aspect of sidy like like right now,
one of the big phrases is unpack. Let's unpack this, right,
That'll be a big thing for a while. It used to be cool beans
or sort of burnt your cookie. Cookie. Yeah, there's always something and
you can follow that path through culture, right, like this song, the
song the guy just came out with Richmond North of Richmond. Yeah, that
lit fire. Everybody in the world had to be part of that, because
that's the way it is. Masks for coronavirus. There are predictable behaviors.
You can call it whatever you want, to collective, somebconscious, you can
call it whatever you want. Human behavior is incredibly simple to predict and if
you can predict it, you can shape it. And if you can shape
it, you can benefit whatever program you want. Right, But to what
end? I mean, what what is it? What end? That's what?
Right? And the problem what we believe about the world is that I
don't hold a single belief that I think is wrong. Otherwise I wouldn't believe
it. Right. So but but what I'm saying though is right. But
what I'm saying, though, is that whatever I believe, I believe fervently.
Otherwise, you know, I because I don't think I'm dumb. No
human being, no human being thinks they're dumb and that the ideas they hold
are wrong. So once we make an emotional decision or get behind an idea,
we hold on to that idea with tenacity. Yes, but what a
lot of people don't realize is how simple the mechanism. Yeah, people are
dumb. I mean, well, well, I don't people are impression Yeah.
I don't think people are dumb. I think people are pretty dumb.
I just people are impressionable. I think that it's been shown that people make
emotional decisions in the middle of the logical structures to support that decision. But
we're all saying the same thing, just using different words. But but but
I don't think what I'm saying is I know how to shape it. Yeah,
and but again, what what is it we're trying to shape? What
is the end? Whatever? You're objective and who? But you had a
specific objective? Yes, I did, because my objectives was what I perceived
to be patriotic obligation to make the world a better place for people that I
loved and cared about. I wanted your children, my children, people that
I love to be safe in a world that, for a long time was
pretty fucking scary. That was my personal opinion. I'm not saying it was
right or wrong. I'm just saying that's what I believe to be the case.
And I think a lot of people joined the military, joined the law
enforcement, joined the cause because they believed, for a long time, from
two thousand and one, maybe ten years, believe that we were vulnerable,
believe that the United States needed people were scared. People were scared. They
people people join Antifa and the you know and and they you know the problem
like they believe, like they have. They are every every bit as certain
in their beliefs that they're making a better world. Right again, whether it's
Antifa or Proud Boys or whomever, they believe that they are making the world
a better place. Yes, based on I don't want even want to say
facts. I want to say based on their filters and perception of what is
wrong in the world. True, but that perception, excuse me. The
mechanism, in my opinion, that mechanism is exactly the same for every human
being. Right. There's just there's a part of your mind. And my
wife's a PhD in psychology. I'm not, but she knows what that place
in your brain is called. There's a place in your brain just like the
mammalian reflects fight or flight. Some people fight, some people flight. There's
a part in your brain where you say I am right and I want to
I want the world to be right. So you could be. It could
be a missionary and a religion. It could be a you know, Russia
as a monolithic, monolithic threat to the United States. Could be what we
feel about China, could be all those six It doesn't matter. The mechanism
is exactly the same in the human mind. It just takes a different direction.
It look like wrestling. When I was a kid, I loved wrestling.
So you see Hulk Hogan stand up against Randy man Savage over Miss Elizabeth.
Remember that that big that terrible, terrible time in American history. Yeah
right, Yeah, it doesn't matter if you were behind Hulk Hogan or if
you were behind Randy Macho man Savage. And I know this is absurd,
but a metaphor is a metaphor, right, it doesn't matter. It's bud
light taste great less filling. My point is this that human beings have the
same exact mechanism. You're a Yankees fan, you're a Red Sox fan.
Human beings need a monolithic threat to align themselves against right, and always have
since the beginning of time, always will when you understand that, and you
understand that you want to shape how that picks aside that can be incredibly yeah.
Powerful, It's that idea that we all want to belong to something,
and in order to belong we have to other. So it doesn't matter if
it's the chess and Checkers club. Oh I'm in the chess club. Look
at those fuckers in the checkers you know, checkers club. Or if it's
you know, America verse China. And again I'm not breaking I'm not I
believe that American is a beacon of light and has been. Yes, but
there are probably people in China think that too, But but we don't.
We don't have wagers in torture camps, so fuck them. But but the
thing is is that and and you know, like I know, one of
the parts of the brain is like the reticular activating system or reticular activation activating
system, which is it allows us to see we see in the world,
like if I have a jeep, all of a sudden, I see everybody
driving a jeep because that's sort of oh look, even though there aren't any
more jeeps on the road now. But if I'm for Trump, or if
I'm for Biden. I'm only going to see the ship that supports yes,
like it just my brain filters it. I see the stuff that supports my
views. But both sides are doing the exact same thing. They just drive
different conclusions. Right when you understand that you can be more effective at it.
And we're coming up on that now, we're coming up on in a
presidential election, and it's say what you want. People talk obliquely about a
culture war. I think war is not an is not an understatement. I
think it is a very significant time in American history, at least in my
life. I lived through the sixties, I lived through the Nixon resignation.
I've lived through some tumultuous times in the United States. In a history of
United States, I think right now is a very difficult one. Yeah,
but we all believe the same way. We all believe the same way about
different things. In my opinion now having been in the media and and understanding
how to form these opinions, because do you see this as a political divide
or that the politicians are utilizing this divide because they already have sort of the
party right, if we were like the Republicans and the Democrats, the GOP
and the dncales say, aren't that different in the sense that they eat at
the same places, they send their kids the same schools. Is this Do
you feel as though this is a mechanism they use? I don't. I
strongly believe there is no they. Okay, I really believe there's no they.
I talk to people all the time and they'll say I believe this,
and I'll say, well, why do you think that? And I said,
because they say this, they say that, I go, who is
they? Nobody can ever define they right, because it's more uncomfortable to say
it's us, it's us right, there's there's just there is no I could
never get four FBI agents to decide where they were going to go for lunch.
So putting together a conspiracy where everybody has this secret cabal and they're putting
together these nefarious beliefs, it's really hard to put together. Now, I
did that myself, but that was one human being moving a message because I
understood things. And granted, I mean I've been talking for a long time.
Uh, it's it's more complex than than than what I've said thus far.
But but I believe this, very very strongly, that human beings believe
that they're doing good and and I don't even I think even Ted Bundy,
in his own fucked up way, thought it's good that I'm gonna eat this
guy, right, I mean that's what we do it, No, I
really do. Yeah, I mean I think human beings. I did this
this thing for HBO called Police and Thieves where I went to. The idea
was, I was going to take you as a viewer, and I was
going to go around the world to places where I've done bad things, like
Indonesia, Detachment eighty eight and uh, this group the hung La in Columbia,
right, yeah, the crazy eighty eights, Yeah, crazy eights.
But so I I went to Columbia and back to bow Guitar right from the
old days in the old world, and got two guys together, two guys
named El Diablo, right one. El Diablo was in this. I don't
even know how to describe these guys. They were an entity. They were
a US government backed gorilla entity. They lived in this villa up on a
hill overlooking Bow Guitar, and they had a weight room, a bunch of
chickens, some pit bulls, and a really great bar. And all they
did was fly out and kill people, right, and I worked with them.
So I went back and I found a guy named El Diablo and we
started talking about killing people and death and what it's like. Then I went
into the favelas, which nobody fucking goes into the favelas, and I found
a guy that was supposed to be the bad guy and his name was El
Diablo. Right, So I've got an El Diablo who was supposed to be
the worst of humanity, and I've got an ld Blow who is supposed to
be the beacon of hope for society. And it was like talking to the
same guys. They were both great guys, and to a certain part of
humanity, they were both scary as fuck, you know. So, I
guess what I'm trying to say for people trying to make sense of my point
is this that human beings since the beginning of time have been very predictable.
I mean, let's just say hypothetically that you believe in Adam and Eve,
Right, Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, there was a murderer,
a victim, a woman who might have might not have banged a snake,
and a guy who got reminded these naked, right, and it's got to
wear fig leaf. Right. I'm saying that if you take the first four
people hypothetically, you know, a foundation of two primary religions in the world,
and you look at the first four people, they had some issues.
Yeah right, I don't think we've ever made that much of her recovery.
So we do the best we can to raise our kids with right and wrong,
to love each other, to be kind to other human beings. And
you know what, if we think they take a step across the line,
We're going to shoot him in the head with the two two three. You
know, it's are we right or the Chinese right, of the Russians right
of the Colombians right, or the we haven't got to Somalia. All the
time I've spent I've seen. I was in Kosovo during the war. In
Kosovo and I walk across the bridge and there's this old man. I'm an
old man, but he was like older than me, and he's crying,
and through the interpreter go up to him and say, what's you know,
what's the problem. And he pulls his pants down, and the bad guys
said, cut off his pecker. Here's an old man just walking down the
street and they pulled his pants down. They cut off his pecker. I
go up in the mountains and I found it looks like the sound of music.
It's terroll and some of the most beautiful places you ever seen in your
life. Chalets and the sound of music, Julie Andrews singing, and it
was fucking beautiful. Right. These guys came in. They killed eight members
of a family, and they stuffed them down the well to ruin the water,
so when the family came back, they couldn't drink the water. I
go to Somalia, and I've had all the experiences that people have in Somalia
which are unpleasant. I go to Indonesia. I lived in in East team
Or. I had a company in East team Or. I lived there for
seven years. I got two guards outside my office, like my primary guys,
my close quarter guys, the guys who protected me. One of them
chops off the other guy's head with a machete, Like from me to that
wall. It doesn't matter if you're black, white, yellow, red,
whatever, it doesn't matter. Human beings do a lot of really bad stuff
to each other. Yeah, but we're also capable of love. YEA so
how do you find the line between the two and how do you end up
in our world trying to make sense of it so that we can protect.
So how does all of this evolve? I mean, you're a media personality
that you're saying that you're not receiving taskings but guidance perhaps, and that evolves
in you're you know, you're building this intelligence platform. You said you're all
over the world with I mean, how does how does this sort of evolve
over the years as the world in terror progressive? I wouldn't say it was
that I built an intelligence platform. I think there's a there's you know,
there's a selfish aspect of it. And you know, backup on a second,
you know I did. I've done a couple podcasts by accident. Mike
Glover, who I met whatever, I did his talk to him, And
when I talked to him, it was an entirely different thing. I didn't
talk about any of these things. We just talked about it was like a
historic thing. Right. He's a remarkable guy, an incredible patriot, an
entrepreneur, remarkable in a million ways. And then my daughter somehow called up
Andy Stump and said whatever, and he said, Hey, come on out.
So I flew out to Missoula and I talked to him, and I
didn't go very well because I had taken my sons to a war zone,
and in each team wars, it was another thing altogether. But I guess
what I'm trying to say is I've talked to a couple of people about these,
about various things, but I've never gotten to I mean, I've way
way over outstayed my welcome here. Look you have not well, we don't
want to keep you. Nobody's gonna want No, it's not me, guys.
I'll sit in and drink scotch with you all night. But we haven't
even got to the to the heavy ship at all. But what I'm going
to say is this that I spent in the evolution of my process went from
two thousand and one to about two thousand and six. Somewhere in that line,
I went from saying I'm a patriot going to go to Afghanistan and try
to contribute to the global war on terror in a way that is maybe maybe
it's creative, certainly productive, and that people think is good people in organizations.
I think it is helpful, But then I end up more and more
with dinner with Madonna and card games with Brad Pitt and and dinners with with
all of these other household names who are remarkable in their own way. I
mean, they're they're incredible, but the world is exactly the same that the
difference between getting a Q. Clarence and getting dinner with Madonna is there is
no difference. Right, You've got it. You've you've got to learn certain
behaviors. You've got to keep your mouth shut in certain situations, obviously not
this one. And you've got to think on your feet in creative ways because
they live in a world that is completely closed off from the reality that we
see. It's not their fault. You just can't be one of those people
and think you're going to have a normal life because you walk out in you
know, you go to Soho for dinner at Indosheen and you know you get
one out indoshing. But you know what I mean, whatever, nobody or
whatever. Yeah, it used to be Rayos. Now you can buy Yeah
it used to you know what's so fucking funny In the day it was Rayos,
right, there was six tables, right, right, I know,
an eight month wait list. Yeah, you know when in those days when
I was in that world there, I would never wait in line for anywhere
if I couldn't get in. Somehow I want nothing to do with it.
But Rayo's was kind of the spot that was kill the last place. And
now you can buy Rayo's sauce at fucking price, Chopper. Yeah, you
know the world's change, so time the war is dragging on here. I
mean, walk us into the heavy shit since you brought it up. Okay,
the heavy shit is that in two thousand five, I had written three
books and my my ultimate world was to make it as a writer, have
a decent life. Was a writer. I hated TV. I hated TV
from the day I started. I hated the makeup. I hated the falseness,
the lights come on, you talk, you go back. I hated
everything about it. I think it's a scuzzy, vapid in human I'm not
a fan of television in the old school, right network TV into case will
news. The only thing that saved us as a species is podcast like This
Week can talk long form and actually give people something to talk about. They
might hate me, they might find it's fascinating, but at least they have
a legitimate position based on a long conversation. So as two thousand and five
I wrote my third book, everything was great. I wrote a fourth book
and it eight shit and basically my publisher dropped me. And here's why.
I don't know, here's why, but here's what went wrong. I think
when I was in the FBI, I could write about things that were non
classified Cold zero, I wrote, I could write fictional accounts of things that
were classified. Most of the stuff I did was classified. So I said,
okay, I'm going to tell those stories. So I wrote a novel
called Black, which is Black Operations, and I wrote the sequel, which
was called White, was like clever thing on words. White. I said,
I'm gonna talk about things that I've done on the classified side. I'm
gonna fictionalize them. As long as they're in the public domain, it's okay.
So I wrote about like a sonic cannon that I developed with DARPA,
a project which is now used in SWAT teams. Right, you can get
riot control with sound, right, or maybe even the maybe even the Havana
syndrome. The agency guys that you know that head brain stuff. So I
wrote a novel about that one thing I stepped over the line is the most
bizarre things that I've ever been associated with. Even more than PSYOPS is FEMA,
the Continuity Government plan. Right. People talk about all these classics,
they talk about all this FEMA has got some fucked up shit going on.
No, I'm dead. I mean, you guys probably know what I'm talking
about. I actually don't. Outside of like all the Oh my god,
let's let's unpack that. I unpacked it one time and it ruined my life.
I'm not going to pack unpack it again, but I'll tell you the
basics of what happened. So let's say, hypothetically speaking, that you'd googled
Mount Weather, right. Mount Weather used to be a really secret place.
It's not. It's not that secret anymore. I mean you can google it,
right. I only talk about shit that you can that's in the public
domain only. So I got this wild hair, and I was I was
writing a book in the New York Public Library, the Rose Reading Room in
the New York Public one of my favorite indoor spaces, and I said,
you know what, Mount Weather is a crazy place and I can't write about
it. But if I go out there and I look at it, and
I see it. Whatever I can write about it, right, So I
go, okay, cool. So I take the train to DC, I
get in the car, and I drive out to Mount Weather. For people
who don't know, you can google it right. Mount mount Weather is where
Cheney went on nine to eleven, right after nine to eleven. It's a
government evacuation. It is. It is a secure location. But that's really
not what it's about. I mean, that's really not why I'm Mount Weather
exists and there are all these names for it like site this and aspect are,
and they've got all these fucking it's a bunker where the government can consul
Mountain, like like Norad or whatever. Yeah, yeah, it's yes,
it's like Norad, right, but it's you can you can get some stuff
on Google. So I said, okay, listen, I've been there a
bunch of times, usually in a helicopter, but I know how to get
there. I'm gonna jump in my car and I'm gonna drive out there.
So this is this is hysterical, but it's true, you know, in
all these risks. So I drive up there, and you drive up this
dirt road, I mean you'll literally drive up dirt like a gravel road and
you get to the top of this mountain and you when you get close,
there's all this chain link fence and on one side is chain link fence and
a certain type of the insulation. On the other side is a whole different
fucking game, like doors and weird access points. Right. So I drive
up to where it. I know the entrance. I've never dreined there,
but I've flown in there. So I get up there and there's a guardhouse.
I mean it's literally now this is two thousand, I think two thousand
and four, so it's only three years after nine to eleven. We've got
two wars going on. We've invaded a rock. It was a hot time,
right, So if you are one of the most secretive installations in the
United States, you would think it would be kind of locked down, kind
of heavy. That's what I was thinking. So I drive up and I
shouldn't be laughing. Maybe I should be laughing. This is what happened.
So I drive up in this rent a car and there's the guard check or
the chain link fence ends and there is a turn off and there's a guardhouse.
But the guardhouse looks like a guardhouse at like a the neighborhood pool,
right. I mean, it's just this like an eight by eight little guardhouse.
And there's a woman there who is wearing a two tone polyester in a
form light brown and brown like you would see in a sheriff's department anywhere else,
right, only only worse. And she's got a couple badges and whatever.
So I pull up and I'm looking over there, and I know what's
over there because I've been there, but I can't write about it because it's
secret, right right, Like there's like I can say this because I said
this in the book, but I can say this because I think it's it's
online. There's a house and it's not really a house. It's a it's
a house to cover a ventilation shaft from satellites. So if you look down
from Sputnik or whatever the fucking rests are flying these days, it looks like
a house, but it's you know, it's it's a The whole thing is
fake, right, It's it reminds me of the house and resident evils,
right right, Yeah. So I drive in and I go up to the
gate. Excuse me. I go up to the guardhouse and I go,
hey, how are you doing? And this woman looks at me and she
said, sure, good. Did you forget your idea again? And U
if I had said yes, maybe it's good to see I forgot my id
I could have driven in and just wandered around right, and I knew where
to go. And I said, well, no, not really. I
said, I'm a novelist and I'm writing a book, and I know that
if I come out and I can see this, then it's legal for me
to write about it. And it looked like she looked like I pulled a
gun, a big gun. She shit herself, and maybe she'll watch this
and goes, I remember that asshole, And so she stepped back, kind
of staggered back, and I think she pressed a butt. She did something.
I forget something, And literally it was like like a bad movie.
It was that fast. There's two suburbans, blacked out suburbans pulled in behind
me, out of nowhere, and they get out of the car. They
walk up and then they motioned, I don't think anybody ever said anything to
me. I don't think they said a word. And they took me to
a like a trailer house, you know, you go to a construction site.
They get a temporary building. It's got that fucked up looking siding,
the white pebbles side never you know. And I go in there and they
asked me for my idea. I gave him my id. I knew the
game, so I was being professional and nobody ever said a word to me.
And when I asked a couple of questions, they handed me a business
card of a number to call, and I said, okay, thank you
very much, and I left. So the story is not about that.
The story is that I was a complete nutter fucking moron, and I wrote
about it in a novel in that book right there, white right, And
in my experience, I don't about yours. In my experience, there is
a line, and when you step over that line, somebody who doesn't look
like anybody is going to tap you on the shoulder and say no. And
somebody tapped me on the shoulder real fucking hard, and that was the enemy.
That was the end of it. So that was the end of your
writing career, writing career, or you're I would think your intelligence business was
over, but no, because no it wasn't. Because my my intelligence business
was okay. But they didn't want to write no more. I'll tell you
where it goes. That was the end of my That was the end of
my writing career because all of a sudden, I was writing about something that
I stepped over the line. I didn't know that I stepped over the line.
I did not do it intelligence. Well, yeah, that's the thing
with a lot of people in the intelligence communities. You don't you don't know
where that well, you don't know, like I don't know what mechanism,
like what their publication review board is like. But we've talked to people on
here, like with the CIA and with the CIA, apparently even if you
write a book, if you know, one of our prior CIA guests had
written a book on fiction, a fantasy novel that had nothing to do with
the CIA and no details was over technically there's still was supposed to send that
in and get it. Yeah. Yeah, like allowed to write a single
thing. But let's sort of like unpack that a little bit. That the
continuity of Government program, Like for people who are watching this have no idea
what we're talking about the continuity of government protocol is that if we as a
country suffered at nine to eleven, and if somebody had gone into the Capitol
Building and incapacitated the elected government of the United States. We as a country
need a way to move forward under the provisions of the Constitution in order to
remain it was. It was designed for nuclear war. It was designed for
has other yes, but nuclear war. That's another thing I want to talk
about real quick, Okay. It was designed for nuclear war because nuclear war
used to be the end all. Yeah, right, it used to be.
When is the last time you have heard anyone in a public forum talking
in real terms about nuclear war? I mean, like like elected officials,
like in anybody. I mean, when's the last time anybody talked about North
Korea being a threat, or about Russia being a threat, or about about
China being a threat. Nobody's been talking about it, but I will say
that it and like about what rain Like New York came out with their first
one day, Yeah, one day, and you know what, that was
a way way, way low appointed official making a colossal fucking mistake. The
world has changed. I mean, I'm not gonna I'm not going to qualify
this or come up with any of the provisions, but I am going to
say unequivocally that what we look at as a government, as a threat has
changed in terms of what we tell the public. And this is not me
talking. This is me saying, if you're watching this thing, look at
it. Look at it in the terms. When is the last time you
heard anybody talking about blowing up the North Stream pipeline? Right? When is
the last time you've heard anybody talking about North Korea launching missiles with nuclear weapons?
The conversation has changed in fundamental ways in the last eight to twelve months.
I'm not saying what it is. I'm not saying that. I am
saying that we as a country look in different terms at threats and seems like
people would ask why, dude, So as a country, as a populist,
you're not saying the politicians or the administration or anybody else. You're saying
that the populace responds to the threats. I'll ask you. Are you saying
that the the the populace response to the threats that the media tells them are
threats. I'm saying that the conversation has changed, and I can't tell you
why, but I can tell you what I used to do right, and
I can tell you that we're better at it now. Than I was then,
right, Well, I mean in the media. I mean Tucker Carlson
was in the media this week talking about We're going to have a nuclear war
with Russia. But he's not in the media anymore. He got fired.
He's in the media. Yeah, in the media. Look, I mean,
yeah, he's You could argue that he's bigger than he was. I
mean Tucker Carlson. Yeah, whatever you feel about it. I mean,
I think there's a lot of talk about war. That's but again, you're
talking about Tucker Carlson, somebody who is not in in mainstream He is not
on a corporate owned network news. I mean, to your point, right
after the war in Ukraine started, or a few months after, New York
came out with the first sort of like public service announcement for nuclear war,
there's nuclear threat, and then it disappeared like immediately it was an accident.
Somebody very low in a total pole made a colossal mistake and it evaporated very
quick, and someone in the media decided to pick up on it, and
if they had maybe that it would listen. You know, I've just used
as an example, and I don't know the answer. I'm not I don't
really have a position. But I remember very clearly the way the system worked.
When I was on television every day for five years, almost six years.
I knew all the people involved. I knew Jim Mikolschewski, I knew
Pete Williams, I knew Jim Stewart. I knew all of those guys.
You know, I didn't know them all well, but I knew some of
them well, and I knew how they worked. So do you have If
you're the Pentagon correspondent, you have an office at the Pentagon, and you
go in and you want to feed a story every day because that's your job,
right You get paid a certain amount of money. So you go up
and you talk to whoever the flag is that the Pentagon, You say I
need a story today, and they would come up with something. They turn
to spig Off and they turn to spig it Off. That's exactly the way
it works at every agency. And if you're a reporter, you know,
on day one you're looking for a Pulitzer Prize. Three days later, you're
just trying to feed your kids. You're trying to put food on the table.
It's just a job. It's just a job, and If you do
it properly, you can keep your job and you can work and you can
get promoted or whatever else. If you do it improperly, you fucked.
And that's the way the system works. I was a reporter and I got
my information that way. I controlled the information two reporters, and I knew
the information that way. And when you say properly or improperly, do you
mean if they're a great investigative journalists or do you mean if they follow their
marching orders. Seymour Hirsh is a great investigative reporter. And half the people
if you said Seymour Hursh's named half the people to one hundred people, fifty
of them would probably say complete crackpot. Fifty of them would probably say genius,
hero of the American information system. Right. I don't think there is
a way for an investigative journalist to do their job today in an effective way.
And I will say, look at and this is not a political thing.
I'm not saying if I'm a Trump guy or Biden guy, whatever else,
it doesn't matter. But if you look at the hatchet job that was
the Russia investigation and where that came from and the people that won Pulitzer prizes
from that complete utter fraud, not intentional. I'm not saying these reporters woke
up and said I'm gonna commit fraud. I'm not saying that at all.
But I'm saying those stories are proven through investigation not to be accurate and falsified.
Do you think that's a problem with people in government who are providing guidance
everybody in government is trying to get I'll go back to what I said before.
Human beings act in their own best interest. If you are a patriot,
administration journalists are following what is in their best career interests. Human beings
do what's in their own best interests. It's not bad. I'm not saying
it's bad, but I'm saying, if you wake up in your what's your
named Korean Jompierre the Yeah, If you wake up in the morning, what
is your job? It is to say Bidenomics work? And you know,
Joe Biden is not this, and he is this, and it's you know
whatever. That's her job, and that's their thing. If you are on
the Trump side and you wake up every morning, you're trying to do the
exact same thing. And I'll go back to what I said before, The
human mind is the same. How you decide to exercise that process is different.
So in my opinion, based on my experiences, I did my best
to influence opinion based on what I thought was right as what I perceived myself
to be a patriot and a good father and you know, in a loving
human being and a good person. Right, I mean, I'll shoot you
in the head. But if I'm going to try and do something for humanity,
and I ain't gonna do it right. So my point is that I
went real deep in that process, right, And I think now looking at
what's going on right now, I think people really think it out, Like
like maybe I came up with some ideas, but now it's a whole different
Really, they've perfected it. And like even two thousand and eight, two
thousand and eight, in my opinion, will never happen again. I have
friends, very very wealthy friends, billionaires, and I'll ask them about it.
I don't want to get into this, but I know people who were
in the left seat with a hand on the stick in two thousand and eight
shearson the splash of the economy, right, And I know where they are
now and they did not suffer, right, I mean, I know them
personally, like hanging out and have dinner tomorrow, right, And and I'll
look at it and say, two thousand and eight helped the financial world perfect
what they fucked up in two thousand and eight, and politicians have now perfected
things that they fucked up in the past. Yeah, So yeah, I
just I just think right now, and maybe this conversation is getting over sideways,
but what it came to in my life experience was that I found a
way to work as an individual doing what I thought was best in a world.
I understood what you guys understand very well, which is the mechanism of
organization. I understood in my own mind. I understood the CIA and the
d i A and the NSA and the FBI and the Army, Navy,
Airforce, Marines. In my own way. I understood those things, and
I knew how I learned how to work between them in effective ways. And
we haven't even gotten to I mean, right now, we're at two thousand
and one, right, But I mean, isn't isn't part of the problem
though, that these journalists are being fed stories, and these stories are being
placed by the intelligence communition in major papers. I know it's the way it
Isn't that a problem? And it's a problem in the sense that these journalists
published these stories, these editors published these stories, but they don't understand the
backroom politics that are going on inside these offices at Langley at DD that those
stories are being given them for reasons they do not comprehend in any sense.
I don't think that people do. Here's the thing. Let's say that the
three of us are the cabal, right, and we're gonna like the Wizard
of Oz at wheels and levers, and we're shaping all this opinion. Right.
We're going to do this for a certain amount of time, and we're
gonna move on to the next job. We're gonna do a great job for
two years, and we're gonna get promoted. We're going to get a new
special access program Moniker, and we're going to get read into a new permission.
We're gonna get promoted. We're gonna go on to the next thing.
There's nothing behind that. It's the problem. My experience in life is that
there is other than a continuity of government plan, which is genius, in
my opinion, is brilliant. There is no fucking way to run the world
with politicians. Politicians come and go. Right now, we have Mitch McConnell
and the Senate who freezes up, cannot form a sentence. He is the
majority leader minority leader in the Senate United States Senate. He came out former
sentence. The doctor just yesterday declared him. Find it's all good, never
mind, go home, don't care about it. On the other side,
you've got Diane Fine, who is exactly might might be a little bit worse
off. You've got Fetterman. I was flying out here, right, I'm
so fucking excited you guys brought me out here. I appreciate it that I
flew out here, big thing in the airport, showing this Fetterman on the
cover of Time magazine as a testament to man's ability to overcome depression. And
I'm thinking to myself, maybe you know, thank God, you wish the
guy the best. It's all great, But should Diane find Stein and Fetterman
be members of the United States Senate with their various issues, and should Mitch
McConnell, and what's this guy Santos who is out of control on the Republican
side. It doesn't matter. You've got the same issues on the Republican military,
everything everything. Yeah, judging either and I'm saying it doesn't. And
the American people. I think this is the the the the challenge that the
American populace face with social media, because like we've had political parties in the
past, we've had this political divide and and whatnot. But I think that
it in days gone by. And I could be fantasizing, because you know,
I wasn't alive in the fifties, but I believe that there was always
a healthy distrust of the government where yeah, we want our guy to do
be this, or we want our you know guy to be that. But
now it's almost as if we don't we will allow our side, whoever our
side is, to get away with anything as long as it's our side and
justifies the means. Ye. Meanwhile, meanwhile, all the politicians are voting
to remove you know, insider trading restrictions on themselves. Meanwhile, they're extending
the Patriot Act every year, every year, and it's I don't think I
don't think it all seems like a tool. I don't know that they're so
all in so nefarious as to you know, be conducting this big op against
the human But people want power. Like you said, people do what's in
their best interest. And if politicians can make eleven million dollars from you know,
buying Nvidia after they pass a bill, then they're going to do that.
Yeah, listen, go say what I said before. People do what's
in their investors. It's not a bad thing. It's just if you understand
that you can keep your Yeah, you know, I mean you can sell
them a refrigerator, sell them a car, Yeah, get on a podcasting
run for president. I mean you can. You can sell them, you
know, a congressional bill that restricts their fears and so anything else you want
to get into any any more heavy show to have come. I want to
keep it keeps because you talked about the tap on the shoulder and how that
ended your career, as can you and you talk about that a little bit
more. I don't know how to say it because I'm not sure I truly
understand it to this day, but I can say that I had a moment
after Mount Weather where I was advised that I wasn't as smart as I thought
I was, that I was not as clever as I thought I was and
that. But the problem was when I when I had that moment, I
felt really badly because I really truly wanted to do the right thing right,
and I really truly thought that I was doing the right thing, and I
was told by this entity I was, I was the information was conveyed by
the entity that that was not accurate, that I didn't really know what the
fuck was going on, and I had stepped over the line, and that
was it. That was over. Did you feel as though you had barely
avoided jail time? No, I don't think. But how did they I
don't think I've ever been It's never been a jail issue as far as I'm
concerned. It was never an over at issue. It was never something they
could jail me for. How did they kill your career as a novelist?
Though? If you write books, great, if you can publish books better.
But if you publish books, you got to sell books, right.
I mean I got a certain amount of money for that book, and I
got a certain amount of money for that book. And I got a certain
amount of money for that book. I would not have gotten that amount of
money for another book. Because they put the word out that you were persona
non grata. I don't think it's a word. I don't know the answers.
I don't know, but I can tell you what happened. I don't
know the mechanism, but I know how that. I know the mechanism,
but I don't know how it happened. In my money, like, I
know one person who writes novels and he had to clear his books both through
d D and CIA, and the mechanism they used was, you know,
DD has the first purview or as a CIA has a second, and then
I say no, CIA has to have it. And so they basically found
a way to fuck him because both entities were saying we have to have the
first look. Yes, and that's the way they essentially shut him down and
stop him for listening. The mechanism is way stronger than I think. I'm
clever, like I'm a moron in certain ways. I mean, I got
a couple of things up my sleeve, but it all comes down to objective.
In two thousand and six, if I had wanted to write another book
and publish another book, I would have had a zero chance. And I
had everything. My agent at the time was one of the I would argue
that I don't want to exaggerate, because I would argue that she was probably
one of the top three agents in the world because of her position at the
time. My publisher at the time, my first agent. Excuse me,
my first editor is now the or until recently, the publisher of all of
time warned books, I mean these people, you didn't get any better.
I got, I got the fun I got the Illuminati. Yes, listen,
I'm not saying how I sold a book after winning eight thousand dollars in
a card game with Brad Pitt, But I got fucking everything. I got
the lunch at four Seasons, I got the GQ excerpts, I got the
agent and the book. These guys, Robin Webstone, two with the great
fucking guys in my life. I'm incredibly grateful to them, how they helped
me out. I got everything, the whole fucking Enchilada, and somehow I
blew it and how I'm not entirely sure the mecham and I'm not entirely sure
what. Who did? What? How said? I can tell you what
happened. So anyways, I went to Somalia and I did this fucking insane
gig and Samalia, and I got stuck at K fifty, you know,
the second best airport in mogid Issue with no with no passport and no money
and no technical How the fuck do you not have a passport? They took
it. I mean, I mean, listen a lot of I've I've heard
guys on here talk about Samalia. I might argue, I would always argue
that that that I'm the only person. I'm the only American that ever fought
his way into mobid Issue. I think that's accurate. Like, I know,
we haven't got there yet. In two thousand and six, I came.
I just I said, I'm fucking done. I was. My life
was over. My New York life was over. TV was over, books
were over. I was over. I was a speaker's bureau. It was
over. I was literally I was a dead man to the world in two
thousand and six, and I said, all right, I got an idea.
I'm gonna go to Samalia. The US government has stood up the Transitional
Federal Government from put it together in Nairobi. The biggest problem in two thousand
and six was bad guys were going from Iraq and Afghanistan into the Saudi Peninsula
down through Saudi into Yemen, and it's I think it's like twenty two miles
from uh in a skiff from Somalia from Yemen. It's a short, it's
it's I mean, you could do it in a fucking robot, right and
once you get into Somalia, you're fucking you're free. Right after ninth,
after the black Hawk down, there was nobody there, I mean, there
was nobody there. So the US government put together Transitional Federal Government. They
sent him into Nairobi. They built him. There's a lot of guys from
Minnesota did d asper right, the Somali's well educated, successful businessmen who had
been fucked out of by warlords, out of all their money. So the
US government sponsored it, the United Nations backed it. They all got together
and buy do with Somalia in February, like February twenty six of two thousand
and six, and I said, you know what, here's here's the last
story, because you guys gotta get rid of me. It's fun way too
fucking long. And we got questions for you too, all right. So
so I mean we haven't even got to the fucking we're bringing you back,
just you know, no, I mean, oh what, no, I'd
love to yeah, but I'm just saying people, there's no fucking way any
he's going to listen to me anymore. But we haven't even got to the
great Ship yet. But anyway, So the point of the story is I
came over this idea and I said, I gotta figure out. I knew
all these guys, right, a lot of guys that we haven't got to
yet, five eyes, guys like Australians and Brits, and we haven't even
got to them yet. But so I came up with this idea. You
gotta hear this idea. So I go, all right, I'm fucked in
New York, right, I'm fucked in DC, I'm fucked in America.
What am I going to do now? Because the people who really matter,
I've decided they put the the fucking fit print you thumb. Yeah, yeah,
you have the scarlet letter now the scarlet let. Yeah. So I
go, okay, So I knew that the USG was going to stand up
the Transitional Federal Government in baidoas Samalia because Mogu was too hot. It's like
this fifteenth Transitional Government. Yeah, yeah, fifteenth exactly right. So The
idea is that the bad guys were coming across Saudi Peninsula. They were going
across the streets at I'm in into Somali Land, then into Somalia once you
were in your off grid, because after nine to eleven, we had very,
very very meager resources in Somalia. Right. I know you've had guys
on here, they've talked about it, but nobody's going to come on here
and say we knew what was going on in Somalia. Nobody. So I
said, okay, So I got I got my shots up to date,
and I flew into Nairobi. Right. I love Nairobi. I'm a big
fan of Nairobi. So I always stay at the six eighty Hotel because that's
where all the spooks in Nairobi. They in East Africa. They all stay
at that ship hole. It's on Kenyatta Boulevard and it's it's a fucking hysterical
place you gotta go at all time. So there's only two clubs I ever
really wanted to join in my life. One was Hell's Angels and two was
the East Africa Flyers Club at Wilson Airport, which is the civilian side of
Nairobi. Airport. Right, So Bluebird Air flies all the cought flights.
They've got a bunch of king Air five hundreds and they fly all the Cot.
And you know COT's got a shelf life was like eight hours. Oh
I didn't know that. Yeah, it's like eight hours. So you fly
it up. They would cut My dealer never tells me how well your dealers
would tell you. So so I go, look, I'm a huge Hemingway
nut. Right, I'm all my life. I'm my Hemingway night. So
I go, okay, Hemingway had this big thing in Kenya. So I
fly anyways, I fly in. I gotta tell you this one quick story.
So I fly in, and I've got this guy and his name is
for Raw for Raw. Back up at the time, in two thousand and
six, I bought a house in the Hampshire. Right, a couple issues
move the family into Hampshire and this great place. So I'm watching black Hawk
Down. Black Hawk Down's got this great scene where for Raw? Now,
what's his name? Not for our Indeed, Osman Aliato. Osman Aliato is
in the in the Baccara arms market reading you, I say today, right,
go back to black Hawk Down. And all of a sudden he goes,
he walks over to a prado. He gets in this prodo and he's
driving out of town. He's right a red dirt road through Somali. Right,
it was actually in Morocco, but Ridley Scott shot in Morocco. So
he's driving down the road and a fucking black Hawk comes down and a couple
of Delta guys tag him with like an I think it was like an M
fourteen saw it off or something. Yeah, And they tag the engine thing
and there's oil on the thing. And I'm in Hampshire and I'm watching this
with my sons, Mick and Jake. Bad motherfuckers, these two guys.
And so they so Mico's dad will will a three o eight break an engine
block? And I said, no, no, sir, no sir.
But it's a movie, right. So the black Hawk lands, the prado
comes to a stop. They kidnap Osman Aliato and they take him to Sam
Shephard, right, and Sam Shepard goes to him and and he goes,
you bunch of Arkansas white boys, you come in here thinks this is your
war. This is not your war. You know that it was a great
scene, right, and Ozma Aliato is uh, you know, he's a
great act right. I forget his name, but the whole thing. So
anyways, we will watch this movie. Let's say it's a Wednesday night.
Forty eight hours later. I'm in the Westlands in Nairobi, right, and
I'm meeting with this guy for Raw, and I've got a plan, one
of my plans, one of my famous plans. Right, So I'm talking
to Ozma. I'm talking to this guy for Raw. Was a lieutenant under
what was that guy's name. Who's the guy for Rah? Now? Yeah?
Under indeed? Okay, So he was in the Somali Army, a
lieutenant under add and knew him very well, and he went to Syria and
received intelligence training from the muhabor Rat. It's in fucking in Syria, right,
he's my guy, so I hire him and this guy for Raz the
ship. He was a linguist, so he spoke English, he spoke Somali,
he spoke all those clicking languages like uh like the Swahili. But I
mean, this guy was shit. This guy was such a bad dude.
So we're sitting in the Westlands and we're putting this plan together. So I'm
getting ready to go into Somalia and I and I hear somebody yelling witcom.
The Westlands is like a shopping mall with a bunch of outdoor cafes and stuff.
So having a cup of coffee, and uh, I hear somebody owned
witcom witcom, And I look up and here comes a guy from HRT.
This guy, I'll say, his name is Ricky. Right, he's a
man of color, and Ricky everybody loved Ricky. He was an incredible guy.
Big, big, jacked up guys like two sixty doing like two hundred
and fifty milligrams of susting on every three days, wearing his little sister's medium
sized tea, and I mean, he's jacked hiss shit. And he comes
up and I go, Ricky, what the fuck are you doing here?
Right? And he goes, oh, you know whatever. He had left
the bureau when he'd gone to work for Triple Canopy or whatever else. So
he was working in country. But he's got a place in Nairobe. He
moved his family in to n Iirobe, so we can go back and forth.
So he comes up and then this guy comes up and he goes.
This guy comes up and he's got oh, he's wearing a he's wearing a
Big Johnson T shirt, Big Johnson, remember that Big Johnson stupid Yeah,
it was a goofy T shirt company and a bing golf advise, a big
golf eiser with no no fucking top on it, just a visor. And
he's wearing bud shorts, beauty t shorts. You know, they got a
buckle in the front, and they got they got fucking fanny packs on with
you know, with the pack meyer grip showing out of the fanny packs whatever.
And there's other guys with him, and he's got this this handlebar like
village people mustache, and he's got a list he's gotta fuck listen. So
these guys come up and I go, Ricky, what the fuck's going on?
Man? And so he looks and he goes, what are you doing
here? And I said, you know, business, And he looks at
Farrah and I go, this is John you know he works for Google or
you know whatever else. So we have that moment. And then the guy
with a lispez athla you know, and whatever. It was one of those
moments. So I went to the store and I bought a bunch of tampons
and duct tape because I wouldn't carry they didn't have like that. Gel.
Tampons are easy, right, right, so I'd carry duct tape and tampons.
Yeah, we're talking about wound managed wound manage, right, Because if
I'm going in and I get shot, there's no hospitals of smat. So
then I ran at hundred seventy two b Assessna and I fly in and long
story short, next next time we talk, I get stuck there, I
get stuck. The idea is this, Somalia has a translational federal government.
A government needs GDP. GDP Somalia has the longest coastline in Africa, meaning
they have the longest legitimate fishing grounds in the Indian Ocean, which is rich.
The Chinese want it. So if I can sell the coastline of Africa
in grids to China, that's money for the transitional federal government to stand up
and run with GDP in Somalia. Right. The idea is the US government
wants a government that can tamp down the warlords, find the bad guys,
and get a toe hold in Africa. Were dreamcasting here? Yeah? No,
no, this is real shit. So well, yeah, you're right,
it's mcast. But I thought it was real shit because I'm delusional fifteen
times times, sev seventeen times. Not saying that your plans dreamcasting. I
think the government's dream That's what's dreamcasting. That's exactly right. Yeah, that
the face ringing or whatever. Yeah, but you know I always said,
fuck it, I'm gonna give it a try. Yeah, So I fly.
So it was like seven thousand dollars or something like that to hire this
plane to fly from Nairobi from Wilson, you know, like the Wilson Flyers
Club where Hemingway used to drink. Right. For me, it was all
about Hemingway. But I just want to be Hemingway. So listen, seriously,
it gets better. So I go, fuck it. So I fly
into buy Doa. For those who have not been to buy Doa, it's
a ship stain on the world. There's nothing there. It's been fucking blown
to the ground and everybody. So the first thing I did was hire a
technical. Right, so I've got like, I got like two I think
I had two P two p k ms. I had an M sixty.
What's that go for a day? To hire a technical? Five hundred bucks.
That's outstanding. That's new teamhouse floor right there. If you want five
hundred bucks. If you want to know how much you get a technical,
well, no, that was two thousands six. I don't know what it
is now. Two thousand and six. A technical was five hundred dollars a
day you get. I think I had two pm p k ms. I
think I had. I know I had one M sixty because it caused me
a lot of grief because I'm thinking, where does an M sixty come from?
Right? Right? That really bothers right? Yeah, So I had
the M sixty and then and I had there's like a technical mark that you
isn't like avis technicals or something like how do you hire a technical when you
I'll tell you where. A tall, skinny white boy goes to Buidoa,
Somalia with a shutload of money in their sock. Yeah, technicals up here
out of nowhere, fucking magic here out of nowhere. Yeah they were standing
when I get there. Somalia really might be one of my favorite places on
Earth, just because it's like a last type of thing. Like they've got
different classes of people and I know we're getting to the end. The people
got to go home. But but different classes of people. And they had
this one class of people that were kind of like gypsies, fortune tellers,
and they would cast spells. Right, so I could go to them and
say, I'm going to pay you a certain amount of money and you can
cast a spell on such and such a person. But the same people would
have the genital mutilation. So they have like a fourteen year old girl selling
Chinese watches and ambulance to cast a spell when the village senior was cutting off
for oh, with a broken piece of glass from a bottle. Yeah,
I mean, it's fucking bizarre somalia. Yeah, it's it's it's it's primal.
So anyways, the idea was to the issue was pirates, right,
the pirates. The only reason the Chinese wouldn't buy the fishing rights is because
of the pirates. But you had to Naval task force in Jibouti. So
if I could put together the whole package, then the an aspect of the
intelligence community I'm not gonna say, which would work with the naval task force
to tamp down to patrol the coastline closer, to shut down piracy, to
sell the fishing rights to the Chinese to produce GDP, to stand up a
federal government and give the USG a decent go at fighting terrorism. Yeah,
that was the idea. Didn't go well, it didn't go well. No,
no, So i read on one seventy two and I fly in and
I land in, buy Doah, and I've got a certain amount of money,
and they ain't no ATMs, there's no credit cards. Right, there's
nothing. Right. You get a certain amount of money today, you've got
five hundred bucks. Tomorrow you're dead, right, dead right. I got
to that point. So I didn't like where I was in my own right
because you know, it was untenable. But the government didn't like it because
all of a sudden, the government this me gets kidnapped by El Shabab and
tortured to death. It does not look good for the transitional federal government.
So all of a sudden it went within a very short period of time,
meaning like an hour, they realized that I was there. They being else.
Bob realized I was there, and they were coming up to get me
because I had great value to them. An intelligence component of the United States
government was trying to put together various interests to work a stabilization program for the
transitional federal government. And I was a big fucking problem. So I ended
up in a space between the wall of a mosque. I mean, and
that's saying stuff because a mosque and BIOISIMALI is not really much, right,
It's like a loud speaker and a fucking remains of a broken vall of that's
been chopped up with RPGs, right, And I'm hiding in this thing.
There was this little piece of corrugated tin, and they give me two bottles
of Nestly water, because you find Nestli water anywhere you go, right anywhere
in the world. Thank God that this really nice guy. This guy,
I've got pictures of all this. I'll show you these pictures after we're done
here. But this guy that was there was a guy that had started like
a bed breakfast for the government, except a bed and breakfast was a pile
of rubble with like some blue paint, right, And he had he had
survived various wars, but he took a fucking hard frag to the face,
so he had I mean, he was gnarly to look at. He had
a real problem of his face. And so anyways, I got stuck between
under this piece of corrugated ten And then finally I was running out of money
and I said, I gotta make a run for it. I mean it
was it's a long walk back to Nairobi, so my only choice was to
go to Mogue because it was the only Oh I'm sorry, I forgot to
say. Every day the King Air. The plan was that an intelligence community,
an intelligence component would fly Bluebird Air would fly King Air five hundreds caught
flights in the morning that was eight hours. Then an intelligence capability would hire
them for the second and third shifts and they would just fly the planes around,
moving guns and warlords and trying to put the whole thing together right.
They decided they didn't have room for me, so I would get up every
morning with my technical and I would go to the Baidoa Airport, which is
nothing but a dirt strip with a pilot rubble there. It was like one
tree and we'd go out there and all the technicals would line up to go
out and get the cot because that was the only money. The plane would
land. They'd throw off the bales a cot. The guys would run up,
grab their ship and go sell it. I'd go up to the plane.
The pilot would come out and say, fuck you white man, go
away, and the plane would fly away. And that's a ship feeling.
Now I've got five hundred dollars less, five hundred dollars less, five hundred
dollars less. My socks getting empty, right, So finally I had no
place to go. I got one day left, so I said, I'm
going to make a run for it to Mogadishu. I didn't know how far
it was to Mugidissue. I didn't know what was there. When I got
there, go to the Modishu airport, which was closed due to you go
to check points. You know, you get hung up at checkpoints with a
like a twelve year old with a AK forty seven yea and my technical.
So I'm in a Toyota Corolla. The technical would try to catch up.
They would scream at each other. They yelled at like the twelve year old
doesn't care if I go through or not. But oh, I forget to
tell you. Osman Aliato, the guy from black Hawk down, I met
him like. So I'd go from the Hampshire to night to Nairobi and then
into Baidah, and I'm in this warehouse. I got a fucking picture of
him with me, and he's stayed in there. Not in a fucking montage
walking suit with short sleeves and epaulets. He's got on a fucking suit from
Herodge and he's wearing Aramis cologne, right, And I'm in this warehouse with
him. It's one hundred and four degrees and I'm going, what the fuck?
And I'm shaking his hand Osman Aliato, the guy from black Hawk down,
I'm going, what the fuck is going on here? But anyway,
the point of the story is that I eventually ended up in Mogue. They
shot out. They shot out the window of the to Corolla, which is
a problem because then they could see me right ahead right head reflective windows.
And so I get to the airport and I see that there was whatever that
plane from dB Cooper, the one with the stairs that come down like a
DC tannery and I can see it. So have you guys been to Swelling?
No? Okay, So so mog you know, got Mogadishu Airport right,
uh main airport, And then about I have like twenty five miles south
is this place called K fifty And K fifty is an old Russian airstrip and
it's literally a red dirt strip and a bunch of shrub brush, and then
a couple of tents and piles of rubble and fifty guys with machine guns who
all want to know what this fucking retard me. You can't say retarding this
guy? Whatever this me? You're a fender yourself, yea, he goes.
And so they're all looking at me, and I'm going and the only
reason and I know, I'm looking at them, and they're looking at me,
and I'm thinking, the only reason I'm alive is because the Agency is
making deals with all these guys trying to put together what turned out to be
the Second Battle of Mogadishue, and they're all looking, going, can we
take him? Can you take him? Nobody knew who I was there with,
and that's what saved my life. So anyways, the guy came out,
Oh, they didn't want to cut off the money tap, Well,
they didn't know who I was there, right, right, So it's like
your crew didn't want to take a chance you steal me, but I had,
But the agency was paying you, and then the agents are going to
pay you to kill you, right, So I think it was confusion.
It was it. So anyways, the point of story is that so I
said, you know, I gotta get on that plane. It was a
charter plane. It was not a scheduled flight. There were there were no
planes and mogad issue that day zero, but there was this one plane.
And I still have the ticket, but it's not a ticket, but I
still have the handwritten thing. But anyways, the part of the stories that
came out and they said how much money do you have? And I had
six hundred bucks left, My technicals gone, the car's gone, I'm all
by myself. So they took I gave him six hundred bucks. They came
out, they searched me, They went through all my ship. They stole
the duct tape, like they left the tampons. But oh well, that's
another story. But I had some guys with some real health issues. So
they search, They search your stuff just to make sure that you had nothing
else of value. No money, Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, I
mean I I was wearing a nice watch. But they do we have questions
for Chris. We do should probably roll in the Chris were we are like,
we guys, I know this is way the fuck it happens. It
happens sometimes. Everybody who watched this show knows I'm a talker, like I'll
go all night like Jackson one who's good about keeping us like on the rails.
But the other thing is is is we just like we want you back
and want to hear Yeah, we can do it against all of this.
Well, the crazy shit we haven't got to you know. It's just that's
why I've been trying to get to crazy shit for like four hours. Well
this is the start of the crazy. But it's all been good though.
It's okay. The crazy shit we haven't got to you yet. Is I
moved to Asia after Somalia because I needed a war that I could survive.
Was just madness? Just shut up? Have you back next time and we'll
talk about that. We'll talk about South East Team or was madness? I
was called key to Belong Keita Belong is number one ghost because I was the
number one ghost. I was number one ghost man Casper but not so friendly,
right, I was not friendly? Jackson? Thank you so much.
How much A Black and White was based on your overseas hr keats. Did
you prefer domestic opts or renditions? And why Also, we need another Waller
novel. That's a really nice guy. I don't know who he is,
but I mean anybody even knows. First of all, Waller is a real
guy. He was an NSA guy, great guy, a great friend,
and that's why I used his name. But they were one percent, uh,
I shouldn't say one hundred sent They were very literally really based on my
life. Harold Janine Uncle Harold that I grew up with was the industrialist,
the kind of the protagonist guy that was based on his life. And Black
was stories that I couldn't tell when culture, why do you think? Why
do you think like you didn't get the tap on black and white but you
did on your fourth book. No, I got it on white. Oh
you got it. I didn't get a tap on black because it was you
know, it's not a big problem. I stepped on some dicks of white.
Jackson, thanks again. What was the hardest part of selection? And
an ots n ots is a new operated training school. I don't think there
was anything hard hard about them. It was I've never been really good at
anything athletic except violence. I mean, I'm I was like a C lacrosse
player and a C football player. And a C. I was never really
get anything. I just had endurance. You know, you guys know Q
course or the long walk. It doesn't matter what you go through, it's
endurance if you just can shut off pain. Yeah, that's it, Jackson.
Thanks again, we have some part of yours outside. It sounds like,
as an early plank owner of the team, what has impressed you most
about the team today and the direction they have taken since you left. I
could not make HRT today. They would hand me my fucking bus ticket in
a banana sandwich and say, what you know, leave me alone there there.
They've evolved in ways that are remarkable on so many levels. I almost
feel embarrassed that I, you know, I get to meet you guys because
I was on HRT. But I'm just you know, there's so much better.
But I think that's true of of I think anybody that was part of
any force prior to the GWAK, you know, and looking back, because
the training technology has changed, you know, just technology has changed, knowledge
has changed. I mean all of these units are doing things. Yeah,
I mean Jack's ranger of Italian experience and who the rangers were then was way
different and way better than what it was not. The Rangers weren't great when
I was there, but they didn't have that Giott experience. So I think
that's different than it is today. I think that's true of anywhere you look
well. Have enormous respect for these guys. And I just hate this,
you know, I don't I don't want to step on there. You know
whatever, Marco, thank you very much. Have you ever worked with Army
CID and if so, what was your honest opinion of the agents? I
love CID and I'll tell you Randy Mullins and Willy rawl I worked at Fort
Leonard Wooden, Missouri with those two guys. They were both wore on officers.
Willy Rowl ran the entire operation and I they had shitty suits. They
were Polyesta suits like ninety nine dollars. And Randy Mullins, I love the
guy. Randy Mullins had a car like his main personally owned vehicle, and
he had a bumper sticker that said, this is not an abandoned car,
please don't tell it was in forty seven coats of bondo. They made no
money and they were true patriots. I love those guys, so I loved
my experience with cid IS as some of the greatest people that I've ever worked
with, dedicated, capable and great guys. Uh, Lewis asked us,
thank you very much. What lessons do you learn an HRT UH that the
general public could benefit from knowing? Oh my god, great question. The
short answers, I don't know. I don't know that I have a huge
that I have a great opinion of the general public. To be honest with
him, I mean, I'm not really a humanist and I and I've lived
a really fucking weird life. And HRT Delta, Marco, Seal Teams,
Rangers, special Operations, the Marshals, the Bore Attack. I mean,
I could talk for hours and hours about all the great people I've met working
for different organizations that have devoted themselves to a greater good. I don't see
that in general, you know, in general population, I think you try
hard, you do the best you can to be a good human being,
and uh and you hope it works in my opinion, cat Chaser, thank
you very much for the cat sticker RS. Thank you very much. Thank
you for mentioning John O'Neill thought provoking conversation. John O'Neill is an American hero,
gave his life to gave it his life to the fight on al Qaeda,
and it's just bizarrely ironic that they killed him. Yeah, I mean
it's crazy. He fought his entire life against al Qada and he died in
the World Trade Center bombings. It's crazy, Kay, Jam, thank you
so much, echoing the rust and peace for John O'Neill, shout out,
thank you for the unique kend or Chris, And there's an asterisk on unique.
I don't know if there's something I gotta say to anybody that's still hanging
on here. I apologize for the rambling. I mean, I've got sorry.
The problem with my life is it's it's so widely unwieldy and and it's
hard picking a couple of things to talk. Chris again, just you and
me here. I'm a rambler too, so I'm right there with you.
You don't have to apologize for a thing. There's so many fucking stories that
I don't know how to get there. We'll do it again next time,
and we we'll hit up all the other sidebars. Okay, damn, thank
you so much. It can be another three and a half hour show like
I'm down come back to discuss the topic of propaganda. Pre uh pre whiskeyed
in the meantime, about to send Jack and David minimum fifty questions I have
for you on the topic. Uh slant like the is that's that's the hours
true right Slante st Yeah. Thanks Mohammed Sabanni. Just for the record,
whoever wrote that half Irish got the shamrock on my sleeve Mohammed uh Sabanni,
thank you very much. Thank you for the sticker. I think we got
a couple more after that. Thank you for the sticker. So one of
the things people can do instead of making comment is they just put a sticker,
which is like a little like I'll show you right here. It's just
that it's just somebody like donating without really having a comment, but just like
being generated. Very generous for us, helping us like buy booze and pay
the rent. Uh. I want to get this right, do daf fuck
down anyway? Thank you very much, teamhouse killing as usual. Thanks Fellas
dog Point, Thank you. What do you think made you attract to a
life adventure? Were you looking for inspiration for writing at first or was it
something more personal? Great? Great, great, friging question. It was
personal looking for a life adventure. I was two things. One, I
wanted to be Hemmingway by A. Curtz going up the heart of darkness.
Ye, so you know, as a writer, those things are important to
me. And I just happened to be born into a place where there's nothing
else to do. I mean, from the time I was a little tiny
kid. I mean it's like five years old. I would go in away
in the morning, and I would come back if I was hungry. So
I lived my entire life in the mountains. I mean, did you were
when you were doing that? Were you were you there as an outdoorsman,
sort of a naturalist enjoying what you were or were there fantasies around what you
were doing? Both? Great question. Both. I had my mind tends.
I'm a romanticist to a certain extent. I wanted to be uh.
I literally wanted to be a under Stemon Way. I mean he lived a
life of extraordinary adventure other than smoking a shotgun in Cortlin, Idaho, July
third, nine sixty two. Other than that, I kind of dug his
whole thing. I had shitty taste in women, you know, But like
when I was my junior in high school. I drove from from Hannover to
Hampshire to Key West, Florida to drink in a titty bar across the street
from where he wrote The Snows of Killamancharo. Right, I mean, I
mean, who does that when you're fucking seventeen years old? Yeah? I
was into it. I was way into it. I wanted the life of
adventure. I wanted to go out and break and heal at the broken places.
Yeah. I wanted to go home and write it all back. It's
fantastic. It's it's interesting too, because there was a whole generation, not
even a generation because obviously him like I don't want to say necessarily Caroact,
but Andrew Thompson, but but Jack Jack London. Yeah, like like there,
I guess it's worthy. Yeah. They they saw the world. They
saw the world. It's it's hard to see the world that way anymore.
Yeah. People were people forget now, you know. I've told a lot
of stories about things. They were before the internet. They were before cell
phones the way we see him now. When I first went to Morocco in
nineteen eighty, it was dangerous, right, and that was just Morocco.
I mean, now you go there and you have dates and take a photo
tour of the rolling Stones and go surfing. Right, I did go surfing
here. But but in those days it was a very different world. There
there were no uh snapchat h shuffle dance videos, you know, overlooking Mogadishu
Airport with a bunch of like gluten free chefs who were you know what I'm
saying. We live in a different world now. In those days, adventure
meant something right, because if you fucked up, you were dead. Right.
Look look what I was gonna say, go back to Somalia real quick.
Two guys in my crew. One guy had just really fucked up cut
on his hand and I was trying to debride with a little bit of iodine.
The other guy maybe sixteen years old, seventeen years old, and he
was he was laughing at the guy with a cut on his hand, and
I go, what are you laughing at? I mean, you know,
through a translator, he pulls up his leg he had Beatu pants on.
Pulls up his leg and he had what looked like a rubber band around his
leg and bones like his fucking tib fib bones to his boot, there was
no flesh. He got hit with a grenade and the flesh died and atrophied,
and and they were going to cut off his leg, and he said,
no, I'm leaving this life with this leg one way or another.
So somehow, because the world is weird, somehow his leg had healed around
the bone and he was walking around on two fucking bones like a pig.
So anyway, the point of the story is, you know, a lot
of the stuff that I did in my life, there was no there was
no backstop. You know, it was just it was simple. It was
analog. It was not a digital world. Do you do you think that
like, I mean, obviously we still have space, we still have the
ocean, But do you feel like, especially with the Internet and with like
Wikipedia, like you know, if you've never been to the you know,
to the Nile or to the Amazon or whatever, like you can just kind
of look at all up, you know, see travel videos on YouTube or
whatever, do you feel like it's removed some of the mystery and some of
the towns in life. Percent Look, you know, I we haven't got
to this point yet, but I've I've been to I don't know what the
numbers, but I'm guessing it's like eighty countries every continent except Antarctica. And
I've been a lot of places. But you go to the you go to
the Istanbul airport, there's two, not one. There's two fucking Krispy Kreme
donut shops in the Istanbul airport, right, I mean Istanbul is the like
the center of the Silk Road. It's like the center of commerce for the
world. And it's two. I mean, maybe it's right that there's two
Krispy Kreme donuts. I'm just saying that they that world's gone right, it's
right. The world of discovery and exploration, it's hard, man. You
gotta go deep in the ocean or far into outer space. Yeah, uh,
Mohammed's SAPANI thank you very much. Someone's coming to take that ghost title
one day, you Patriot drinks on me when I see you, gentlemen cheers.
As a young businessman, how should I best fun and shape new politicians
and crush the socialist left? Jesus. My daughter Chelsea, who I love
dearly, said Dad, No matter what, don't mention these fucking things.
Right. One of them was politics. I'm not gonna say and that's fair,
and we we generally like we try to avoid that on our show.
But let's say it's not the socialist last or the the capitalists. Right.
Let's say, as a young business person, how would somebody going up go
about buying politicians? Well, you buy them. You know, it's just
a campaign contribution. That's pretty simple. Yeah. I mean, you know,
I've got a great buddy in Hartford, Connecticut, and I'm I love
this guy. And he paid a little here, and he paid a little
there and found out he shouldn't have. You know, he did it honestly,
he did it righteously. It's hard, man, it's really fregetting hard
getting all the rules right. So great question. I love the entrepreneurial spirit.
I don't know. I don't know how you buy them. Our our
audience outside love, they love you. I've kept you here is so freaking
late. Nobody loves me. I think it's we got to wrap it up
for you, poor guys. I think it's just a way of wait.
One last question ye hey, do you have you checked patron? He's asleep?
Yeas one last questionnaire? Uh, Gene, Kylie, thank you very
much. Will the current focus on white nationalism leads to results similar to those
in the nineteen nineties. Great another, I mean, some really brilliant questions,
and it's really cool to know that your audience, we have the smartest,
the incredibly smart people. Right. My position is this that I think
that the white nationalist you know, I didn't make up that phrase, but
that phrase, in what it common means, commonly means in the nineteen nineties,
had a basis in the Turner Diaries, and it had a basis in
the Zionist occupational government. It had a certain legitimacy, and somebody has come
up with a way to re manufacture that. I don't think because you vote
for Trump and this is not politics, that you are automatically a white anything,
right, Right, I mean I watch YouTube and I watch black people
and brown people, and red people and yellow people and various colors. Would
or else that like Biden and like Trump, that the world is changing and
it's not just because you're a person of a particular color you have a particular
affiliation. It's not that way anymore. So saying okay, I'll lend on
this. My mother is a piece of work, all right. My mother
is a piece of work. My mother called me up one day and she
said she was in a rant about something. She is way left, she's
on a rant something. And she said, she said, all those racist
gun carrying military people. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa,
whoa, who wo Mom, what the fuck are you talking about? What
about a military person would be anything. I mean, I know military people
that are left, right and in between. It's not a political issue.
You join the military because you're a hero, because you believe in the greater
good of humanity, in my opinion. And I said, what are you
talking about? And she said, well, you know, it's all the
same thing, these right wingers. If they like guns, they hate this
right and I and I thought to myself, oh my god, I've known
this woman all my life. There's some really sideways thinking out there. So
anyway, I don't think white nationalism these days is anything. I think it
is a they're usurping a term that meant something thirty years ago. Yeah,
well, there's something to distinguish between nationalism and white nationalisms. Exactly. What
is the nationalist? Because you love you a country, because you believe in
what makes this a great place to live. Right, I've been a lot
of places. I've been to, some good places and some shitty places.
I don't know of a place that I wish I lived other than the United
States, right right, we have a remarkable constitution that guarantees freedoms that we
should be proud of and enjoy, in my opinion, and protect, and
a lot of people die to protect those rights. Right now, I'm right
there with him. I mean, obviously we're not perfect, because the country
is just humans, and humans are never perfect, but the Constitution ensures that
we're as close to that as we can be. I wish i'd did that.
I agree. Check if you knew John O'Neill, Alice Huffon, but
you pretty much. O gotta say thank you for asking that question. When
I go down on the list of people I've known in my life the benefited
America who were heroes and do it who did extraordinary thing, Alice Font would
be at the top of the list. Alison I met in Yemen, who
was a junior FBI agent who was working his way up, and he is
one incredible guy. If you could get Alice Font on this show, it
would be remarkable. For are you still in touch with him? Help us?
I'm not because he left the FBI, he went to the New York
he worked for some aspects of the NYPD and there he built a terrorism aspect
within uh in New York. But I mean Alice Safon is is he's a
hero. It's easy to bandon that round. Like anybody serves in the military
as a hero, maybe Alice Safon's hero. I mean he almost you know,
he lived or died to protect Americans, and and he came from you
know, a different route than a lot of people would. So anyway,
all this spot was an FBI agent who worked counter terrorism, and he worked
ebl and he was who worked with John O'Neill. And that is it.
And all right, well we killed something. We will we will, We'll
do it again. Name we can do it quick right now if if you
know, Jack can go home and and uh, Chris and I'll sit here
d drink and talk. We get drunk all night. No, No,
I mean we should do it a second episode at some point. But I
mean, this was this is a good time. Man. I'm glad that
we have also wide ranging conversations. I will say, the really great stuff
we haven't got to yet. Seven years in Asia in Indonesia and where it
goes after that. We'll do it next time, We do it next time.
Yeah, all right, guys. So also, uh we have cold
zero No no, no, those are ancient. I don't want to matter.
It doesn't matter. I get zero out of those books. I don't
make any money, no nothing. I just you know, in the publishing
industry, they say, if you out earn your advance, you didn't get
a big enough advance. Right, So yeah, I read. I read
these two. I read both. I brought those books for you guys.
Put on your shelf, score your literary guys. And because it tortures me
that I have to, you gotta put that next to we'll put it right
next to know heroes. But anyway, if you guys want to know more
about Chris, if you you know, I want to see, yeah,
the old Chris a book that Yeah, I mean, there's a Chris of
his time. But there's another one coming now. The new one is Crazy,
the book that's coming out now. I just finished it. I submitted
it to Random House. It's called Anonymous Mail, and it is very specific
details about the stories, some of the stories I've told and the stories that
I have not told Yet it's about what happens to a person in our world
that falls too deeply into it, the anonymous male aspect of it, and
and and how you come back out of it, because you know, I
went through what everybody does, the suicide and you know, all of those
things. I feel like I have some perspectives on that. But the new
book is about that probably six months all right, we'll talk about that.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, But honestly, Uh, if you want to
read a book uh that gets somebody canceled by the US government, that got
me canceled by the US government, read White. And if you want to
understand why, better read Black. And if you want to know what type
of person writes a book like books like these, read Cold Zero and they're
all antiques like me. All right, guys, Uh, thank you,
thank you everyone for joining us. Man. Well, well we'll do this
again with Chris and we'll see all of you guys again next Friday. So
thank you for joining us. Thank you for something shorter, maybe