Speaker 1: The Team House with your hopes, Jack Murphy and David Bark.
Speaker 2: Hey, everybody, thanks for joining us on the Team House,
Speaker 2: Episode one and forty seven. I'm Dave Park. This is
Speaker 2: Jack Murphy. Actually Jack is queuing us up behind the
Speaker 2: deck right now. D D couldn't be with us tonight,
Speaker 2: but so Jack's filling in for D and Jack, and
Speaker 2: we have a great guest with us tonight, a very
Speaker 2: special guest, Douglas Wise, former SIS six correct SIS six
Speaker 2: of the Central Intelligence Agency. So, Doug, the way we
Speaker 2: love to start these things is, you know, by learning
Speaker 2: how you got your superpowers? What is your origin story,
Speaker 2: where do you come from? How did all this happen
Speaker 2: in the very beginning.
Speaker 3: I mean, like many of your guests, the first thing is,
Speaker 3: let me just say it's an honor and a privilege
Speaker 3: to be with you and and to be able to
Speaker 3: to help provide a little bit of insight through my experience,
Speaker 3: you know, to this arcane world of you know, special
Speaker 3: operations and and UH and then the business of national
Speaker 3: tactical Intelligence. I also think it's a great thing for
Speaker 3: you guys to you know, provide a platform for for veterans,
Speaker 3: you know, to give voice to the voiceless, which I
Speaker 3: think is spectacularly great. And I just want to thank
Speaker 3: all of the people that have dialed in and and
Speaker 3: logged in today, you know, for supporting the program and
Speaker 3: for making this such a great success within the national
Speaker 3: security and the veteran community. So I think it's absolutely great.
Speaker 2: It's because of people like you, Doug, I mean, honestly
Speaker 2: like you. And if you make the show, not us,
Speaker 2: We just took a couple of du Gamoran, so we
Speaker 2: appreciate you.
Speaker 3: Well, well, I think you're you're uh, your participants are
Speaker 3: going to find me yammoring a lot myself, so I'll
Speaker 3: do my fair share of yamoring. Perfect. Yeah, So let
Speaker 3: me start at the end end for just a sec,
Speaker 3: and then I'll come back to the beginning if I could.
Speaker 3: My beginning is kind of unusual. I grew up on
Speaker 3: an homage farm. I don't think many people in the
Speaker 3: intelligence community started out. You know, I'll harvest and crops
Speaker 3: by hand in Bancaster County, Pennsylvania. You know, at the
Speaker 3: end of the ride, you know, I had the pleasure
Speaker 3: of serving in public source for fifty years. That's a
Speaker 3: half a century, and it was you know, not as
Speaker 3: I've said, and I think many of you who are
Speaker 3: listening to me and watching, I think you can kind
Speaker 3: of resonate with this that you know, I never had
Speaker 3: a bad day. I've had better days, right, but I've
Speaker 3: never had a bad day. I think the worst day
Speaker 3: that I've experienced was probably in December two thousand and
Speaker 3: nine when I was in Iraq and we had eight
Speaker 3: of our colleagues that were you know, murdered at CO
Speaker 3: space in Afghanistan, and I knew every one of them
Speaker 3: from the base chief on down. I knew all the
Speaker 3: all the officers, including the g RS guys who were
Speaker 3: who were wounded and fell in the line of duty.
Speaker 3: So you know, that was not a good day. But
Speaker 3: in the end, you know, I looked for the positive
Speaker 3: that you know, their sacrifice was not in vain because
Speaker 3: we took a hard look at the positive of that
Speaker 3: and we were a better agency and so they didn't
Speaker 3: die in vain. Their sacrifice actually produced probably life saving
Speaker 3: changes in the way we did business. But I never
Speaker 3: had I had a real, a real bad day. One
Speaker 3: of the things that's interesting is after you come out
Speaker 3: of the ride, and for those of you that are
Speaker 3: younger on this podcast and have either at the beginning
Speaker 3: of your national security journey or you you know, are
Speaker 3: contemplating you could take a look at me. This is
Speaker 3: on photoshop. This is what you're going to look like
Speaker 3: at the end of the ride. So if you want
Speaker 3: to if you want to look, if you want to
Speaker 3: look like a hard ridden mule, you know, beaten mule,
Speaker 3: well well then you know you may want to get
Speaker 3: off the train right now. But anyway, it was, it
Speaker 3: was great, but you know, the challenges galore throughout my
Speaker 3: entire career, and it didn't end when I left, as
Speaker 3: a matter of fact, because when I became the Deputy
Speaker 3: Director of DA, they rolled back my cover from day one,
Speaker 3: which went all the way back to nineteen eighty seven
Speaker 3: when I entered on duty with CIA. And if either
Speaker 3: you gentlemen are interested, you know, I'm more than happy
Speaker 3: to talk about that that process as well later. But
Speaker 3: you know, one of the things that when I came
Speaker 3: out from undercover, and and I'm able to tell people,
Speaker 3: you know, with even with great pride, quite frankly, and
Speaker 3: legitimate pride for the for the officers like you both
Speaker 3: who you know, I serve with, serve for who served
Speaker 3: for me, UH made it. You know, always a good
Speaker 3: day and often a better day. But you know, I
Speaker 3: when you come out from undercover and you can kind
Speaker 3: of shed and take off the jacket and you and
Speaker 3: you really expose your real self, you know, there's there's
Speaker 3: a lot of benefits to that because you can talk
Speaker 3: about the power and the majesty of the of what
Speaker 3: you experienced and and help to provide a little bit
Speaker 3: of insight into what those of us who are working
Speaker 3: outside the public eye, you know, what contributions that were
Speaker 3: making with the risks we're taking, the challenges we face,
Speaker 3: and and and how we feel when we when we
Speaker 3: do that, uh, sense of pride, the sense of accomplishment
Speaker 3: and UH. And so you know, being able to discuss
Speaker 3: that finally and attribute it to CIA is is a
Speaker 3: wonderful thing. But then what happens is usually to the
Speaker 3: person that you're talking to who may not know you.
Speaker 3: Particularly when I public speak as I do a fairmount,
Speaker 3: you know, you collide with the public perception of what
Speaker 3: a CIA officer looks like. Uh. And I think that
Speaker 3: you know, David, you and Jack would agree I do
Speaker 3: bear a striking resemblance to Daniel Craig. But I'm maybe
Speaker 3: maybe Matt Damon. I'm not. I don't. I don't look
Speaker 3: a lot like Matt Damon. But the but the perception
Speaker 3: of what CIA officer is, it is really framed by Hollywood.
Speaker 3: I do. I do a fair amount engagement with with Hollywood,
Speaker 3: and if you want to talk about that, we can
Speaker 3: talk about that as well. But I was given a
Speaker 3: prestigious invite to go speak at give an evening lecture
Speaker 3: at Chathamhouse in London on James Saint James Square. Wonderful institution.
Speaker 3: It is one of two think tanks that exists in
Speaker 3: the United Kingdom. In America, we have a lot of
Speaker 3: them in the United Kingdom. They have to are U, S,
Speaker 3: I and and Chattermouse. And Chatham House was where Chathamhouse
Speaker 3: Rule came from and they're the ones that started it.
Speaker 3: And so it was really an honor. And I had
Speaker 3: never been there and I had no idea what to expect.
Speaker 3: So I'm waiting in the wings of this huge auditorium
Speaker 3: insider building with my American program counter sponsor, my wife Cindy,
Speaker 3: you know, who was just absolutely spectacular, lay put up
Speaker 3: with me for decades and was a super professional in
Speaker 3: her own writer, as an FBI special agent, pioneer, female
Speaker 3: first pilot for the Bureau, female pilot for a whiles.
Speaker 3: I'm more proud of her than I am of myself.
Speaker 3: But she was in the audience because you know, I
Speaker 3: thought it'd be a great thing to share. And so
Speaker 3: the audio, quite frankly, autorium was getting full. So I
Speaker 3: turned to Jacob and I go, hey, Jacob, is this
Speaker 3: a big audience? And he looks at me. He says,
Speaker 3: second largest audience we've ever had here at Chathamouse, second
Speaker 3: second largist. I said, who, Who's who drew the biggest craft?
Speaker 3: And he goes, Benjamin Netanyao, he was here two weeks ago.
Speaker 3: And I go, well, I'm honored, but I'm not a
Speaker 3: Benjamin Yeo class figure. But the attractiveness for all of
Speaker 3: these people was the fact that I was acknowledged and
Speaker 3: open CI officers served in clandestine service. They marketed it
Speaker 3: heavily as a note for our audience. The British Secret
Speaker 3: Intelligence Stores have a secrecy agreement. We have sort of one,
Speaker 3: but they have one for life where they can't they
Speaker 3: can't acknowledge their association with m I six. So the
Speaker 3: fact that I was a spy and could acknowledge and
Speaker 3: could discuss by stuff, even though my topic was actually
Speaker 3: Russian disinformation. I think they came to see what a
Speaker 3: real spy looked like. So I hadn't really thought through
Speaker 3: what the what the collision would be from perception to reality,
Speaker 3: but I learned that pretty soon after the thing was over.
Speaker 3: So Jacob and I walk in, We sit down on
Speaker 3: the stage. There's a podium there. He's going to go
Speaker 3: introduce me. In the meantime, my wife's in the crowd
Speaker 3: and being an FBI special agent want to be you know, hey,
Speaker 3: your timeline target got to be tot is. Now this
Speaker 3: thing should have this thing should have be done here
Speaker 3: at that you know, at at seven pm. You know,
Speaker 3: she leans over and you know it's now seven ten,
Speaker 3: seven fifteen. So she leans over to ask the the
Speaker 3: British guy sitting next to her in the audience, and
Speaker 3: she goes, hey, uh, seven fifteen, it's supposed to start seven.
Speaker 3: When's this thing got stuck? And the guy goes, uh, man,
Speaker 3: I think it's going to be when that fat old
Speaker 3: guy introduces the c I speaker. And so when she's
Speaker 3: telling me that story, I go well, well, babe, didn't
Speaker 3: you only put him on the spot and tell him
Speaker 3: you were married to me? And she goes, nah, to
Speaker 3: apply the need to know principle, He didn't need to
Speaker 3: know that. So I'm under no illusion, you know that
Speaker 3: you know what I represent. Maybe this consonants with what
Speaker 3: the public expects. So again, kudos to you, gentlemen, for
Speaker 3: creating this platform that allows you know your guests many
Speaker 3: have done much more than I have along this special
Speaker 3: obsens Spina's journey, you know, to kind of a inform,
Speaker 3: dispel mythology, and to be able to maybe not inspire.
Speaker 3: I don't think I'll be inspirational, but maybe to you know,
Speaker 3: get over some obstacles and come and join the family,
Speaker 3: you know, put an application and be part of service
Speaker 3: to America and the safety and security of the American people.
Speaker 3: But anyway, back to you, gentlemen, where you want where
Speaker 3: you want to go from?
Speaker 2: Well, back to you, you're on an Amish farm, uh
Speaker 2: churn and butter.
Speaker 3: I suppose, oh, harvest, harvest and crops by hand, and
Speaker 3: that was that was nice. But you know, it's a long,
Speaker 3: complex journey to go from the Armish farm to northern Ohio.
Speaker 3: But it was my my father who actually ended up
Speaker 3: going Greatest Generation World War two vet uh, and you know,
Speaker 3: decided that, you know, he didn't want to do farm stuff,
Speaker 3: so he went to get an education, became an academic
Speaker 3: and moved the family. And so we moved to northern Ohio,
Speaker 3: which was kind of an interesting experience. Although Northern iiO
Speaker 3: was very agricultural, so that wasn't wasn't all that bad
Speaker 3: that you know, people didn't dress the same as we did,
Speaker 3: but the but it was kind of interesting. And I
Speaker 3: grew up there, you know, typical Midwest kid, you know,
Speaker 3: monocultural experience. You know, I don't believe there was a
Speaker 3: single Hispanic in my town. There was, I think a
Speaker 3: small number of African American families, and most of us
Speaker 3: were sliced white bread kids, you know, growing up to
Speaker 3: you know, four hundred kids in high school to varsity sports.
Speaker 3: And you know, ultimately it was John Glenn that appointed
Speaker 3: me to the military Academy at West Point. So I
Speaker 3: joined the class in nineteen seventy two. In nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 3: not a not a good time in America, a very
Speaker 3: unpopular war, and so joining the military was not was
Speaker 3: not fashionable. Can I say that what John Glenn did
Speaker 3: was he used a screaming mechanism that doesn't exist anymore,
Speaker 3: and it was a civil service aptitude test and kind
Speaker 3: of like sat like, and all he did was use
Speaker 3: that to discriminate, you know, first order throw out to
Speaker 3: people that can't fill out the circle with their number
Speaker 3: two pencil, you know, throw that guy at So told
Speaker 3: to go to Findlay, Ohio, which is a modest sized
Speaker 3: town in north northern Iisle, a little south of Toledo,
Speaker 3: and go to the post office upper upper level ink
Speaker 3: well desks. You come in and they give you the
Speaker 3: test Booklet tell you don't open it up until we
Speaker 3: tell you because the time tests fill out the first page,
Speaker 3: and the first page all biographic, right right, So you're
Speaker 3: writing all that stuff down, putting your initials of your name,
Speaker 3: you know, down in the in the block and then
Speaker 3: the seminole block that found about midway was what academy
Speaker 3: are you are? Are you do you wish to attend?
Speaker 3: My dad flew in World War Two. Ultimately my younger
Speaker 3: brother he flew US fifteen Strike Eagles, and so I
Speaker 3: was raised to be an Air Force kid, you know,
Speaker 3: so my job was to go to the Air Force Academy.
Speaker 3: So it was a no brainer for me. So I marked,
Speaker 3: I put the darken that little circle, you know, Usafa.
Speaker 3: So there's a seat in front of me, and all
Speaker 3: of a sudden puff of air plot this guy sits
Speaker 3: down in front of me. His name is Kent Cartwright,
Speaker 3: you know Hollywood name, and Kent looked like the epitome
Speaker 3: of you know, weightlifting surfer, if there was such a thing.
Speaker 3: Broad show narrow waste captain of both the football and
Speaker 3: the basketball teams, had an active social life which I
Speaker 3: didn't have, and was an academic star and was the
Speaker 3: most popular guy in school, you know, homecoming king of
Speaker 3: the wholeworks. So I tap him on his shoulder and
Speaker 3: I go, hey, Kn't, what academy are you going? What
Speaker 3: do you academy are you going to? And he turns
Speaker 3: and looks at me and he goes, I'm going to
Speaker 3: Air Force Academy. And I go me. So I turned
Speaker 3: that number two pencil around and I just erace that, Usafa,
Speaker 3: and I just mark sense not the Coast Guard Academy,
Speaker 3: not doing that, Naval Academy. Now my mom knew my
Speaker 3: dad I wasn't eligible to go to the academy. So
Speaker 3: I'm going to USMA. So I have Max and said
Speaker 3: it the winds of fate blew cut right to the
Speaker 3: Air Force Academy. They threw him out after a semester.
Speaker 3: The other wind of fate blew me to West Point,
Speaker 3: and as I said, I entered and commissions second lieutenant
Speaker 3: in nineteen seventy two. So that's kind of my journey
Speaker 3: to get to that point, right, and not some not
Speaker 3: an outcome that I think anybody, any of my relatives
Speaker 3: back in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, would have anticipated. But anyway,
Speaker 3: that's that's that's my early story.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you had a pretty interesting military career.
Speaker 1: I mean, can you tell us a little bit about
Speaker 1: becoming a junior officer or some of your duty stations,
Speaker 1: what that was.
Speaker 3: Like for you. Well, yeah, that's a great question, thanks
Speaker 3: for asking. In nineteen seventy two, it was a bad
Speaker 3: time to be in the army. It was you know,
Speaker 3: racial violence, it was a narcotics related violence, ill discipline.
Speaker 3: You know, it was a draft army and it was
Speaker 3: a combination. There were you know, volunteers and the army
Speaker 3: was trying to transition, you know, read the book Prodigal Soldiers,
Speaker 3: and you'll really understand, you know, some of the courage
Speaker 3: that was necessary for the army to transform itself. And
Speaker 3: we had not yet gotten to the point where we
Speaker 3: even you know, began the first step of a twelve
Speaker 3: step program by acknowledging that the army was really in
Speaker 3: harm's way, quite frankly, de professionalized. It was ridden with
Speaker 3: all kinds of corruption, moral corruption, ethical corruption, tainted by
Speaker 3: this unpopular war, you know, underappreciated, not even under but
Speaker 3: not appreciated by the American people, really not understanding what
Speaker 3: Vietnam veterans had gone through, you know, all of the
Speaker 3: horrors of war, all the trauma, all the shock, you know,
Speaker 3: all of just the whrrors, and then to come back
Speaker 3: and not be welcomed back as a member of American society.
Speaker 3: And of course she had the whole thing of a
Speaker 3: deranged Vietnam veteran, right yet, that kind of mindset that
Speaker 3: I think a lot of people, a lot of people had,
Speaker 3: so entering the army at that time was a really
Speaker 3: difficult time. And I think one or more or of
Speaker 3: your guests I think had mentioned, uh, you know, pulling
Speaker 3: duty officer armed because you know, as a young officer,
Speaker 3: if you were alone, you didn't go alone into the
Speaker 3: barracks because that was that was the same thing as
Speaker 3: going being the point man, you know on a on
Speaker 3: a jungle patrol. You know you're going to hit a
Speaker 3: trip wire and you were going to be the first
Speaker 3: casualty of that, and uh, you know it was it
Speaker 3: was frightening, to say the least. But you know, here's
Speaker 3: how my first day, you know, in a real unit began.
Speaker 3: You know, I show up in the unit and I
Speaker 3: show up into the replacement detachment. On the walls of
Speaker 3: the replacement detachment these big posters and it said, if
Speaker 3: you're going to this outfit called this autobon number, somebody
Speaker 3: from the unit will figure out how to get you there.
Speaker 3: And so I called the unit and there was in
Speaker 3: the unit was the first battalion five or ninth Parish
Speaker 3: Airborne MECH Infantry. If there ever was a dichotomous concept
Speaker 3: having mechanized airborne battalion. We didn't do a lot of
Speaker 3: MECH because none of those M one one three's worked,
Speaker 3: and we never did any maintenance saw him to make
Speaker 3: sure they didn't work. Because we prefer to be paratroopers
Speaker 3: rather than the motor Pool monkeys. But uh, it was
Speaker 3: an elite unit at that time. If the US Army Europe,
Speaker 3: we were in an entire aborn morgety of the eighth Division.
Speaker 3: So I call, you know, uh, my sponsor expected to
Speaker 3: show up first. Lieutenant Morrison was his name. I don't
Speaker 3: know why I remember it. And all of a sudden
Speaker 3: I hear my name, you know, and I jump up excited,
Speaker 3: and I got a ton of wives, and I go, yeah, here, here, here,
Speaker 3: and E seven walks over and introduces himself because of
Speaker 3: a Sarah, welcome to Charlie Company, first time five a
Speaker 3: night parachute, and I said, well, thank you, So I
Speaker 3: appreate to welcome. Where's my sponsor? I thought he would
Speaker 3: come and get me, and he goes, nah, he de
Speaker 3: row style, he's gone, And uh, I said cheekily, not
Speaker 3: too seriously, but chicily. I said, well, I'm surprised the
Speaker 3: company commander didn't come to personally welcome me to the
Speaker 3: And he looks at me and he goes with tennant,
Speaker 3: you are the company commander. I'm your first off, so
Speaker 3: you can imagine you don't even know where to put
Speaker 3: your second Lieutenant bar you didn't even know you guys
Speaker 3: to go on the left or right, you know, And
Speaker 3: all of a sudden, now you know, everything you've ever
Speaker 3: been taught is now going to come into sharp focus
Speaker 3: or be defocused. So, without a doubt, I was the
Speaker 3: acting company commander for about ninety days of Charlie Company,
Speaker 3: and out of doubt, for me personally, it was the
Speaker 3: most formative, immersive, challenge laden leadership development experience that just
Speaker 3: really educated me on the thing to do and things
Speaker 3: not to do as the leader that in the Army
Speaker 3: of nineteen seventy two, And for me it was just
Speaker 3: a platinum, gold standard, absolutely spectacular leadership experience.
Speaker 2: How can you give us some examples.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll tell you. I'll explain what I mean by that.
Speaker 3: And my having said that that it was a formative
Speaker 3: and very invaluable leadership experience. To your question, I think
Speaker 3: if you asked the troopers a Charlie Company, I'm thinking
Speaker 3: they'd have a whole different perspective on my ninety days
Speaker 3: in command. I think they were sitting there happy that
Speaker 3: they weren't back in Vietnam. Every one of them were Vietnam.
Speaker 3: That's every one of them. Were draftings. You know, they
Speaker 3: knew that nobody could they could act anyway they wanted,
Speaker 3: and so they knew that there wasn't enough time for you,
Speaker 3: you know, you to threaten somebody what's sending you back
Speaker 3: to Vietnam. Have to ease it, come out? Did thirteen
Speaker 3: months in Vietnam come back? They had a short time
Speaker 3: left and then they were leaving the army for the
Speaker 3: most part, and so using the power majesty of a
Speaker 3: go bar of a second lieutenant and to be able
Speaker 3: to issue peremptory orders and expect them to be obeyed
Speaker 3: like all military academy cadets, and you know, pretend second
Speaker 3: lieutenants at the Infant Officer Basic Course and Ranger School
Speaker 3: at Bathronder School and all the other courses that I
Speaker 3: jumped atter school that I went that I went to
Speaker 3: in preparation for this assignment. You know, all of those
Speaker 3: skills were helpful but not essential. And so you quickly
Speaker 3: found out that you know, ordering, pressuring, you know, directing,
Speaker 3: and acting like an imperious you know, company commander was
Speaker 3: not going to get you to an outcome that would
Speaker 3: be useful for you personally and more importantly for the unit.
Speaker 3: Or would it benefit the soldiers early company at that point,
Speaker 3: And so I realized and got a chance to learn
Speaker 3: that sweet spot you got to be in. You've got
Speaker 3: to be strong, and you gotta be you got to
Speaker 3: show confidence, but not overconfidence. You got to make good decisions.
Speaker 3: You got to allow the soldiers' deaf some freedom of action,
Speaker 3: particularly at that point. You've got to allow the NCOs
Speaker 3: to really you know, you command and the NCO's lead.
Speaker 3: And I really learned the distinction between that as the
Speaker 3: Russians are finding out now, you know, when they're performing
Speaker 3: so poorly on combat because the NCO, we always joked
Speaker 3: right the backbone of the army was the nonconditioned officer corps. Well,
Speaker 3: guess what it turned out to be true. You know,
Speaker 3: Ukraine has proven that to the Russians beyond the shadow
Speaker 3: of death. And so knowing that, determining where that sweet spot,
Speaker 3: how hard you could push, you know, how often you
Speaker 3: had to push, but how much freedom but not too
Speaker 3: much freedom? You know what kind of relationship that you
Speaker 3: had to have with your E seven first sergeant and
Speaker 3: your six platoon leaders. Uh, you know, because I was
Speaker 3: the only officer in the company on top of that
Speaker 3: you know at the time. And so that was an
Speaker 3: interesting experience to say the least. And uh yeah, and
Speaker 3: the way you learn, at least the way I learned,
Speaker 3: it's not not the best way to learn, but the
Speaker 3: way I learned was by making mistakes. But you don't
Speaker 3: want to make big mistakes because then your soldiers will
Speaker 3: lose confidence in your ability. But you do have to
Speaker 3: you do have to get out on the edge, not
Speaker 3: over the tips of your skis. But you got to
Speaker 3: be leaning forward, and you got to be you gotta
Speaker 3: be you got to be comfortable in taking some risks
Speaker 3: when you're an inexperienced, you know, really naive commander and
Speaker 3: you're trying to command you know, men who are really
Speaker 3: combat veterans and who are you know, quite jaded and
Speaker 3: affected by the attitude of the American people and by
Speaker 3: the experience that they had traumatic in many respects, but
Speaker 3: you know, learning where that sweet spot is and learning
Speaker 3: how a good leader will be able to operate in
Speaker 3: that sweet spot, to be effective, to be confident, not
Speaker 3: over confident, not to be unaffective, to really be able
Speaker 3: to have your soldiers benefit for the period that you're
Speaker 3: in command, to have soldiers be at one level when
Speaker 3: you begin, and have them be at a better place
Speaker 3: at the end. I'm not sure I did that real well,
Speaker 3: but learning that I needed to do that in that
Speaker 3: ninety days was probably the most important thing for me.
Speaker 3: And I'll tell you what, the lessons I learned in
Speaker 3: those ninety days carried me forward and later on in
Speaker 3: my career. I mean, had the honor and a pleasure
Speaker 3: to be a company commander in the first Ranger Battalion
Speaker 3: when it was established. I was in the second wave
Speaker 3: of company commanders and then the only battalion. And you know,
Speaker 3: had I not really learned those lessons and applied those lessons,
Speaker 3: you know, I don't think the chief staff of the
Speaker 3: Army would selected me as one of the captains to
Speaker 3: come in and command then the premier unit in the
Speaker 3: United States Army, frankly, and I would have never I
Speaker 3: would have never developed into something that would have been
Speaker 3: even competitive for them. And then later on in my career,
Speaker 3: and as many of your guests have said, you know,
Speaker 3: it's a little awkward to talk about yourself accomplished. It's
Speaker 3: easy to talk about what you did. Talking about what
Speaker 3: you've accomplished. Kids to be a little self serving, but
Speaker 3: you know, I had the unexpected honor to be, you know,
Speaker 3: two years below the zone selectee to for and there's
Speaker 3: goods and bads in it. I lost a lot of
Speaker 3: time to learn what it's like to be a major
Speaker 3: in the United States Army, and that was unhelpful to me.
Speaker 3: But one at one point, you know, I think the
Speaker 3: statisticians would delia. I was one of six youngest lieutenant
Speaker 3: colonels in the United States Army when I made oh
Speaker 3: five and and so that's a good thing if your
Speaker 3: name is me. It's a bad thing if you want
Speaker 3: an lieutenant colonel that's got all the experiences that you
Speaker 3: want a lieutenant colonel to have when they make lieutenant colonel. Uh.
Speaker 3: And so for me, I found myself to be at
Speaker 3: a professional personal disadvantage by the time I got to five.
Speaker 3: Proud to be early select but really paid a huge
Speaker 3: price for that because I was woefully untrained and inexperienced
Speaker 3: to be a very good lieutenant colonel after my time
Speaker 3: in the in the Rangers. It was interesting because and
Speaker 3: I mean no disrespect to the US Army Recruiting Command
Speaker 3: or whatever they're calling it now, but I remember the
Speaker 3: team for mil person from the Hoffman Building, then the
Speaker 3: head of all Army Personnel, and the people from Infty
Speaker 3: branch or whatever. I don't remember. You know, they came
Speaker 3: down to Fort Stewart and they were giving us career
Speaker 3: advice and guidance and talking about, you know, what we've
Speaker 3: done and what was in the future, and you know,
Speaker 3: giving us an opportunity to say what we wanted, and
Speaker 3: they had the opportunity to totally reject all that and
Speaker 3: tell us what we're going to do anyway. And so,
Speaker 3: you know, I go down and they go, well, let's
Speaker 3: look at what's coming next for you, and so they
Speaker 3: open up the big musty book of Common Knowledge, you know,
Speaker 3: this big home boom, and they flipped through some parchment
Speaker 3: and then they go down. They finally wise, Wise, Wise, Yeah,
Speaker 3: there you are. Yeah, you're going to go back and
Speaker 3: teach at the Military kit And I said, no, sir,
Speaker 3: I'd rather just stay with troops, that's all right, And
Speaker 3: they go, okay, so you don't want to go back
Speaker 3: and be a member of the faculty at the Military KIP.
Speaker 3: I said no, I said, they want you to come back,
Speaker 3: and I said, I'm proud of my four years there.
Speaker 3: I didn't enjoy my four years there. I wasn't a
Speaker 3: good cadet. I was a crappy cadet. And quite frankly,
Speaker 3: if I never go back there again, I'll be perfectly happy. Ironically,
Speaker 3: my wife just encouraged me to go back to my
Speaker 3: fiftieth reunion. And I will tell you this, when you
Speaker 3: have a fiftieth reunion of any institution, there's a lot
Speaker 3: of old people there, you know, and I like to
Speaker 3: think I was one of them. There's a lot of
Speaker 3: old people there. A lot of guys brought their dads,
Speaker 3: I think, and so I said, no, I'd rather not go,
Speaker 3: and they go, not a problem, not a problem. We're
Speaker 3: flexible here. Let's see what the book the Common Knowledge
Speaker 3: has for you. So they go back a few pages
Speaker 3: and they go, oh, you're going to command a recruiting
Speaker 3: but diying in Detroit. And I, you know, kind of
Speaker 3: looked and went, hey, can we go back a few
Speaker 3: pages and talk about that West Point? And they go, yeah,
Speaker 3: we thought you'd kind of your senses stay. I ended
Speaker 3: up going off to graduate school and teaching and teaching
Speaker 3: at the Military Academy, but I only did two years there.
Speaker 3: So I went to troops and back to troops, and
Speaker 3: I had a couple of tactical assignments, and then I
Speaker 3: ended up at the Pentagon and deskhops for anybody that
Speaker 3: served in the Deputy Chief Staff for operations. I think
Speaker 3: it's called the G three of the arm now. And
Speaker 3: I was in the basement of the Pentagon where all
Speaker 3: the special ops guys were, And one day I got
Speaker 3: told that go up to the personnel office. You've got
Speaker 3: an RFO request for orders. You know you're going you
Speaker 3: got a new job. I didn't ask for a new job.
Speaker 3: They go, we're not interested in what you want. You
Speaker 3: go up get your So I go up in an RFO.
Speaker 3: It was pink if I recall correctly, and you know,
Speaker 3: it was a form that turned it out on pink paper,
Speaker 3: and it was at my name and date of birth
Speaker 3: and solid security under and all that, and then it
Speaker 3: said assignment day. It effective and it was like tomorrow,
Speaker 3: and then the to do what classified to do? Where
Speaker 3: classified to do this? So the whole thing was just
Speaker 3: useless in terms of me being able to figure it out.
Speaker 3: Nobody in desktops knew what was happening, and so what
Speaker 3: had happened is apparently CIA had asked for a military
Speaker 3: detail with you know, some semblance in my background, you know,
Speaker 3: my at my rank. And so the next thing I
Speaker 3: know is, you know, I'm going off to some mysterious organization.
Speaker 3: So I was told to call this number. So call
Speaker 3: this number, and a guy at the other end goes hello,
Speaker 3: and I go, oh, yeah, this is Colonel Wise. I
Speaker 3: just got a military piece of paper that told me
Speaker 3: that I was getting a new job, and I was
Speaker 3: supposed to call you, and I don't know who you are.
Speaker 3: And so I apologize if I'm bothering you, But maybe
Speaker 3: I called the wrong number. He goes, not, you called
Speaker 3: the right number. Here's what I want you to do.
Speaker 3: The intersection to three ninety five in Franconia Road. You
Speaker 3: know where that is. Yes, there's a hotel there. Interestingly enough,
Speaker 3: some years later a Russian kgb offster you know, hundred covers,
Speaker 3: was arrested by the FBI there meeting an American spot.
Speaker 3: So anyway, he says, go to that hotel, walk outside
Speaker 3: into Portico, have a red ball hat, have a magazine
Speaker 3: under your right arm. He's going to pick you up
Speaker 3: in a pickup truck. He's not you get in the back,
Speaker 3: don't talk to him. He's not going to talk to you.
Speaker 3: And all will be explained in two cours. So you know,
Speaker 3: I do the whole ball hat magazine under pickup truck
Speaker 3: shows up Johnny on the spot. I get in the
Speaker 3: back of the truck. You know, I want to be
Speaker 3: able to say, hey, thanks for giving me a ride.
Speaker 3: But you know I'm follow the rules, so you know,
Speaker 3: I have no idea. And then he drove me to
Speaker 3: CIA quarters where it became obvious to me he may
Speaker 3: not be the brightest bulb in the drawer. This to
Speaker 3: me that now I understand, you know what I'm going
Speaker 3: to do. Well, it turned out, you know, to be
Speaker 3: a a a temporary status as a detailer while all
Speaker 3: this excurity process and at that time was totally different
Speaker 3: than now we do. We have to be assessed as
Speaker 3: a full staff officer for CIA, uh, not just as
Speaker 3: a detail A go through the you know, the counterintelligence polygraph.
Speaker 3: We had a whole lifestyle than get abused by the poligrapher.
Speaker 3: And you know, someday when I pass away and I
Speaker 3: meet one of those guys in Hell, I'm going to
Speaker 3: kick his butt because you know, uh, you know, a
Speaker 3: number of them abused many of us. But uh I
Speaker 3: was asked to join the counter Terrorism Center, which was
Speaker 3: quite a new institution, was an innovative institution at the
Speaker 3: time because the director of Operations for CIA, WASH was
Speaker 3: organized geographically. And of course, as some of you that
Speaker 3: are that are older than others, you know who may
Speaker 3: remember terrorism in the time of hijacked airplanes, the Ntebbi
Speaker 3: raid and by the Israeli Defense Force and and that
Speaker 3: period of time. You know Steedam being you know, murdered
Speaker 3: and thrown out on the Tarmact, and you know Egypt there,
Speaker 3: you know, aircraft being hijacked to Malta. You know, all
Speaker 3: of this stuff, all of which was state sponsored, but
Speaker 3: all of which was transnational in its execution. And so
Speaker 3: having to deal with the issue of terrorism which knew
Speaker 3: no boundaries. Terrorists generally don't care about political boundaries and
Speaker 3: they don't care about national affiliation so much. And so
Speaker 3: you know, some iconic last in CIA took a big
Speaker 3: risk and created the counter Terrorism Center and pulled us,
Speaker 3: pulled people out of the geographic divisions which is what
Speaker 3: they were called, and put them in to the counter
Speaker 3: terrorism Phil Mutt for example, you see him on CNN
Speaker 3: all the time. He and I were branch chiefs and
Speaker 3: counter Terrism Center together at the same time. Mike Schuyer
Speaker 3: a little crazy, uh, you know, Mike Schauer was another
Speaker 3: branch chief you know at that time. But you know,
Speaker 3: I think the reason why I was there one from
Speaker 3: my military backgrount and to be able to, you know,
Speaker 3: so they didn't have to waste a real talented, real
Speaker 3: CIA officer in this experiment known as the counter Terrorism Center,
Speaker 3: which was not career enhanced. Quite frankly, you know, you,
Speaker 3: as a young operator, you wanted to grow up in
Speaker 3: an area division the feudal lord owned you, abused you,
Speaker 3: rode you like a rented mule. But at the same time,
Speaker 3: if you were worthy of his attention and investment, you know,
Speaker 3: your career, you know, would be guided and enabled to
Speaker 3: nurture by by your division chief serving and counter Terrorism
Speaker 3: Center wasn't going to get you that nurturing and that
Speaker 3: mentoring and that that developing, and so nobody wanted to
Speaker 3: go there. So I'm being honest. I think you know,
Speaker 3: they picked me for a couple of reasons, one of
Speaker 3: which was they didn't want to waste to perfectly go
Speaker 3: to CIA.
Speaker 2: You know, know, just real quick, because you know, for
Speaker 2: a lot of our younger audience, you know, if they
Speaker 2: know anything about the CIA, like the counter Terrorism Center,
Speaker 2: the CTC has been basically the star of the CIA
Speaker 2: since nine to eleven, and so they might not understand why,
Speaker 2: you know, like why it was such a risk for
Speaker 2: somebody to take this idea when all these other, like
Speaker 2: you said, reasons were so siloed, Like what was so
Speaker 2: groundbreaking about CTC and what were some of the naysayers
Speaker 2: about it? Like like what because you think now we think, oh,
Speaker 2: a counter terrorism center that makes sense? Why wouldn't Why
Speaker 2: would that be a problem? But like what were the
Speaker 2: problems that they ran into in the early days.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll try to answer your question in a way
Speaker 3: that's understandable. You know, as I said, the Directorate of
Speaker 3: Operations both and Washington, d C and in the field,
Speaker 3: and the interaction between a CIA station chief which is
Speaker 3: the senior CIA officer, and a foreign location and the
Speaker 3: headquarters component of that are all ruthlessly geographically defined. Not anymore,
Speaker 3: but in the context to your question, back in the day,
Speaker 3: when before the comet hit the Earth and killed all
Speaker 3: the dinosaurs. And to give you a sense of scale,
Speaker 3: when I joined CTC back then count of Terris and Center,
Speaker 3: there were ninety four of us, and that included four contractors.
Speaker 3: At the time that I served in CTC as a
Speaker 3: senior Intelligence Service officer. When I came back to be
Speaker 3: the assistant director of Operations, there were two two hundred
Speaker 3: officers in that center. To your point, and further to
Speaker 3: your point, if you were a traditional CIA officer and
Speaker 3: a traditional geographic division and you hadn't served in a
Speaker 3: counter terrorism capacity, that had some career impacts too. And
Speaker 3: the idea was to incentivize talented officers to acquire that experience,
Speaker 3: and we needed that talent and we needed those officers
Speaker 3: to contribute. My career, like many like you, gentlemen, your
Speaker 3: career is defined by nine to eleven. You know mine
Speaker 3: as well, And so back to your question. You know,
Speaker 3: the demarcation between authorities were sharply defined by geography. You
Speaker 3: had the Near East Division, you had European Division, you
Speaker 3: had Africa Division, you had Latin America Division, you had
Speaker 3: you know, Asia Division, and the Boar and the boundaries
Speaker 3: between those divisions bureaucratically were impermeable and I horus. Nobody
Speaker 3: crossed and there were no defectors generally who who were
Speaker 3: of any value. You know, if you were a talented
Speaker 3: aufstar and you decided, hey, you know what, I'd like
Speaker 3: to serve an Asia division, your European division would would
Speaker 3: say absolutely, and the shoots you in the back as
Speaker 3: you kind of climbed over the border. Uh, it was,
Speaker 3: it was really, I mean, and I used the term
Speaker 3: feudal lords in a way that is very accurately descriptive,
Speaker 3: and yes it does negative connotations. And then and so yeah, uh,
Speaker 3: there were some negative aspects to both the people and
Speaker 3: the and the organization. So when the CIA, and I
Speaker 3: wasn't part of the discussion obviously, you know, I came
Speaker 3: in after the decision had been made. So there are
Speaker 3: probably many people who you could get on your podcast
Speaker 3: who could talk to you about the early history of
Speaker 3: the counter terrorisms much more authoritatively incredibly than me. But
Speaker 3: if you look at somebody who wanted to literally shatter
Speaker 3: the organizational structure of the Director of Operations, somebody had
Speaker 3: to make that decision, and obviously that decision had to
Speaker 3: be made, had to be endorsed or made, you know,
Speaker 3: at the director's level, right, it couldn't be made down
Speaker 3: at the GS twelve. And so you not only had
Speaker 3: to create a res on debt for this new enterprise,
Speaker 3: you had to rationalize the value it would it would
Speaker 3: bring because it would create all kinds of chaos and
Speaker 3: disruption if for another reason, just in a personnel system,
Speaker 3: in the cable traffic system, because nothing existed. You know,
Speaker 3: this was new enterprise created out of whole cloth. And
Speaker 3: it's a zero sum game in CIA. So it's not
Speaker 3: like you could just hire ninety four additional officers to
Speaker 3: be professional counter terrorism officers. And in fact, the term
Speaker 3: of art was you were home based in the geographic division.
Speaker 3: There was enough resistance that senior leadership of the agency said,
Speaker 3: will authorized CTC to be to come into existence, but
Speaker 3: it won't have the authority to home based officers. They
Speaker 3: didn't want officers to permanently homestead like you could in
Speaker 3: the geographic divisions. So I can only infer from what
Speaker 3: I know of the rigidity structure remarkable flexibility operation.
Speaker 2: Let me do I think Rick.
Speaker 1: When we interviewed Rick Prato, either either in his interview
Speaker 1: or in his book, he's talking about the really unique
Speaker 1: thing about CTC at that time being that they could
Speaker 1: read the reports the cable traffic coming from any division
Speaker 1: from everybody.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're right, and thanks for mentioning that, because I
Speaker 3: was going to talk about, you know, one of the
Speaker 3: some of the challenges that the creation of CTC and
Speaker 3: some of the value. Reck and I were in CTC
Speaker 3: at the same time. So I'm a big fan of
Speaker 3: Rick Prodo. He really he made a huge cun let me,
Speaker 3: as you all know already, I haven't written a book yet,
Speaker 3: and I don't think so because you know, I don't
Speaker 3: have a big family, so I wouldn't sell very many.
Speaker 3: But the but you can imagine a terrorist, you know,
Speaker 3: a terrorist originates, you know, even if state sponsored terrorists
Speaker 3: originates in one country, transit to another country, ends up
Speaker 3: in a third country, links up with another dude, then
Speaker 3: travels to another part of the globe, gets all gunned
Speaker 3: up and equipped up. You know, it does this all
Speaker 3: pre mission rehearsals and then do this. So you can
Speaker 3: imagine if there is ruthless guarding of operational turf created
Speaker 3: by the structure of the do you'd have to coordinate
Speaker 3: and who would do the coordination whose terrorist is that right?
Speaker 3: You know, is that terrorist the wholly owned property of
Speaker 3: where that dude originated, where he transited, or where he's
Speaker 3: going to conduct the operation or everybody. So who's in charge?
Speaker 3: Everybody's in charge, but nobody's in charge. So somebody had
Speaker 3: the guts and the wisdom to create as they looked
Speaker 3: at this emerging terrorist threat as they got more violent
Speaker 3: and more large scale, to create this pioneering institution called
Speaker 3: the counter Terrorism Center, which ultimately became instantiated and was
Speaker 3: truly part of the magic of CIA in post nine
Speaker 3: to eleven. Time for it. And so once you had
Speaker 3: CIA to your point able to see all of the
Speaker 3: information flow from all the area divisions, none of the
Speaker 3: other area division terrorists could originate in any division. All
Speaker 3: that traffic for counter intelligence reasons was need to know
Speaker 3: for any division, wasn't need to know for AF division.
Speaker 3: So how do you break that compartmentation barrier in a
Speaker 3: timely enough fashion to actually mount an operation counter TERRORSM
Speaker 3: operation to interdict and maybe remove the guy from the battlefield.
Speaker 3: And so you know, we we had an optic sitting
Speaker 3: in seat TOC that no other division had in the agency.
Speaker 3: And so we proved our worth every day. I'm not
Speaker 3: saying I did. I'm saying that the officers who pioneered
Speaker 3: that center, you know, proved their worth every day in
Speaker 3: providing safety and security to Americans by this emerging threat.
Speaker 3: My job was very narrowly defined. I was a renditioned guy,
Speaker 3: and so my job was to help start the in
Speaker 3: perpetuate the nascent rendition program. And arguably, you know, we
Speaker 3: had a modicum the success. We captured Kanzi, the guy
Speaker 3: that killed our officers, We captured Ramsey YUSAF from a
Speaker 3: number of others, and we kind of learned and those
Speaker 3: were all weren't based renditions and so are also one
Speaker 3: of the by products of counter Terrorism Center was, you know,
Speaker 3: we were able to create partnerships with institutions across the
Speaker 3: US government that none of the area divisions wasn't because
Speaker 3: they didn't want to, they had no need to. With
Speaker 3: federal law enforcement, right, who's our natural partner, Federal Feer
Speaker 3: of Investigation, right, Federal law enforcement, Customs and Border Patrol
Speaker 3: you know now known ice. You know, yet all of
Speaker 3: these partnerships because of course, in the beginning days, we
Speaker 3: didn't have you know, non warranted operations directed to remove
Speaker 3: Terrace from the battlefield. We didn't have lethal authority except
Speaker 3: for personal protection when we're out on operations, and so
Speaker 3: it was warrant based, and so we had to have
Speaker 3: not only we would in the parlance of standard crystal,
Speaker 3: we would find and fix and then partnering with the FBI,
Speaker 3: they we would together do the finishing. But the front
Speaker 3: face of that finishing was very naturally and very appropriate
Speaker 3: preserve the judicial process because all of these guys, we
Speaker 3: brought back many minor terrorists. If there is such a
Speaker 3: thing to Rom's the use of class terrorists. You know,
Speaker 3: the Bohka operation, you're going to drop eight United Airlines
Speaker 3: out of the sky, you know in Asia, you know
Speaker 3: glad we took him off the battlefield and so our
Speaker 3: team got him.
Speaker 1: And it still happens today, right, But you don't see
Speaker 1: the CIA fingerprints on it.
Speaker 3: A lot of times you don't and that is very
Speaker 3: natural and very necessary, and because you know, our colleagues
Speaker 3: are you know, not acknowledged, and so they can't be
Speaker 3: in the front face of even major successes. Obviously, CIA
Speaker 3: IS has become more widely known for in the counter
Speaker 3: terrorism business because of their roles not only in Afghanistan,
Speaker 3: but in Iraq and in other places in the world.
Speaker 3: Quite frankly, you know, every station and base in the world.
Speaker 3: You know, I had a counter terrorism responsibility, and we
Speaker 3: understood that that was the existential threat to America. You know,
Speaker 3: Eastern Europe was still coming out of the disintegration and
Speaker 3: the Soviet Soviet Union, China was still you know, had
Speaker 3: you know, come on to the world stage, and North
Speaker 3: Korea was being its petulant teenager pubescent in the geopolitical terms,
Speaker 3: you know, you know, immature, you know, infantile behavior, but
Speaker 3: which was an irritation but not a not an existential issue,
Speaker 3: you know, And so it was terrorism that became the
Speaker 3: threat to Americans, particularly when America's was still as you know,
Speaker 3: global power with big embassies, and we had very active
Speaker 3: foreign policy, and we were very much at risk. And
Speaker 3: so having officers like many of us on this podcast,
Speaker 3: you know, to be part of that that process was
Speaker 3: was key and essential for American security and a huge
Speaker 3: part of American foreign policy and national security policy. As
Speaker 3: I think you.
Speaker 1: All know, the last what was it like five years
Speaker 1: of your military career, you were a liaison with the agency,
Speaker 1: with CTC.
Speaker 4: You spoke, You spoke a little bit about some of
Speaker 4: the things that you were evolved in.
Speaker 1: What was that like for you as I guess your
Speaker 1: career evolved and maybe your thoughts and perceptions evolved about
Speaker 1: the agency?
Speaker 2: What what?
Speaker 4: What was? What were some of your big takeaways from
Speaker 4: those five years?
Speaker 3: Well, the big takeaway for my five years is actually
Speaker 3: the magnitude of anti military attitudes inside c I A.
Speaker 3: And some of that was because you had, you know,
Speaker 3: young CIA officers with a modicum of military experience that
Speaker 3: you know, it was quite unpleasant for them, and so
Speaker 3: it was an opportunity for them to action that in
Speaker 3: some degree. Some of that, some of that minatory and
Speaker 3: negative attitude was out of ignorance and out of basing
Speaker 3: on tribal lore and and and and mythology that had
Speaker 3: no basis in fact. Uh, some of that was by
Speaker 3: you know yet you know guys that just now they
Speaker 3: could call General's bob, you know, as opposed to general right.
Speaker 3: And so I found I concealed my military affiliation in
Speaker 3: my time in the counter terraces. You know, I grew
Speaker 3: my hair bout the same length I have it now,
Speaker 3: and which was quite awkward when I went to retire
Speaker 3: from the army in nineteen ninety two, I had to
Speaker 3: get aircut nor to process out. You know, the bastards
Speaker 3: made me cut my hair. If you talk to anybody
Speaker 3: knew me back then, they go. We always thought he
Speaker 3: was an it guy, you know, because he had that
Speaker 3: long hair, and but I found the anti military attitude
Speaker 3: there was was was mystifying to me. The longer I
Speaker 3: stayed there, the more I am understood that it wasn't
Speaker 3: out of evil, it was out of really not understanding
Speaker 3: what the power of majesty that comes from the intersection
Speaker 3: of the military and CIA, which we learned and we
Speaker 3: can talk about that, you know, we learned in other
Speaker 3: battlefields and other places antecedent or Afghan experience. But I had,
Speaker 3: you know, my first leaderships as a real CIA now
Speaker 3: I had led as a branch chief. I had the
Speaker 3: rendition branch chief, and then rendition program was taken to
Speaker 3: a fine art by generations way beyond me, you know,
Speaker 3: to scale and professionalism far beyond what I and my
Speaker 3: team would have ever envisioned. And it was also across
Speaker 3: discipline team by the way, and interagency team. So it
Speaker 3: was kind of unique that we had, and nobody. And
Speaker 3: a nice thing about my job is nobody would say no,
Speaker 3: you know, because really you're not interested in saving American lives.
Speaker 3: You can say no and say maybe you don't want
Speaker 3: that guy to be a spy because we can't afford him,
Speaker 3: but oh really, you put a price tag on American lives,
Speaker 3: sir ma'am, and you immediately got a U. Well, well,
Speaker 3: I mean that's essentially by saying no to my budget request.
Speaker 3: You know what a sect you're doing, right, You're putting
Speaker 3: so and so. I had Actually, you know, I'm being
Speaker 3: a little facetious, but nobody said no, you know to
Speaker 3: those of us who are doing God's work in the
Speaker 3: counter terrorisms. Tenter, but the military editor is interested. So
Speaker 3: I retired in nineteen ninety two, took an appointment as
Speaker 3: had to go through the old security process again, matriculated
Speaker 3: as a full CI staff officer, got an appointment, and
Speaker 3: then I ended up advocating for my first official CIA
Speaker 3: leadership job, and I found it interesting. I interviewed with
Speaker 3: an SIS three, so he had an opening for a
Speaker 3: branch chief, and I figured, what a great place for
Speaker 3: me to begin, because I just was a branch chief
Speaker 3: of a large branch. Quite frankly, okay, and so I'm
Speaker 3: having this discussion and he goes. He goes, you were
Speaker 3: a military officer when you for the last five years,
Speaker 3: I understand. I go, yes. He goes, so when you
Speaker 3: led your branch, you were using military leadership and I go,
Speaker 3: no response, and he goes, what I need you to
Speaker 3: do is use CIA leadership. And I go, sir, I'll
Speaker 3: due respect. Leadership is leadership. There's different aspects of leadership
Speaker 3: that are environmentally you know, appropriate, but fundamentally defining the mission,
Speaker 3: identifying the task or accomplish the mission. Build a team,
Speaker 3: you know, resource them, help them understand opportunities, help them
Speaker 3: understand what obstacles are, provide feedback. I said, sir, that
Speaker 3: that's not the sole purview of the military or CIA.
Speaker 3: That's called leadership. One O one. So we had these molt.
Speaker 3: I had a two hour conversation with this guy, and
Speaker 3: he said he was very gracious, and he was very patient,
Speaker 3: and he's very understanding of my plotting discussion academic though
Speaker 3: it may have been about the issue of leadership. Uh.
Speaker 3: And finally at the end he said that he said, hey, look, Doug,
Speaker 3: I really got to admire you. You gave it your best shot,
Speaker 3: he said. But you know, and I understand what she said.
Speaker 3: A lot of it makes sense, he says, But in
Speaker 3: the end, I need somebody that's led in CIA before.
Speaker 3: I'm thinking back of my mind. You know, well, if
Speaker 3: leading in CIA for the first time requires you to
Speaker 3: have led before, then that wasn't the first time. So
Speaker 3: how are you going to ever lead if you got
Speaker 3: to have led before you? So I couldn't figure out
Speaker 3: the logic that he was applying, right, And so I
Speaker 3: finally I said, sir, look, you've been very gracious for
Speaker 3: your time. I've taken way more time than I had
Speaker 3: asked for. You know, you listen to me. You gave
Speaker 3: me my opportunity to speak, and I respect your decision
Speaker 3: and I'll just go away. And he goes, well, thank
Speaker 3: you very much. I appreciate it, says I did learn something,
Speaker 3: and I said, I'm glad, and I start to go,
Speaker 3: and I go, but sir, can I can I just
Speaker 3: make one more point? And he goes, yeah, what's your
Speaker 3: final point? I goes, there's only one officer in this branch,
Speaker 3: and I'm and that's the branch chief. It's a branch
Speaker 3: of one officer, it'd be me working for me. I said,
Speaker 3: take the risk, and he sits back and he goes, well, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's a good point. So anyway, the point of my
Speaker 3: long story is this is all predicated in this somehow,
Speaker 3: you know, somehow the perception of what the military was right.
Speaker 3: And as you all know, if there is a critical
Speaker 3: not just necessary, but it's strategic partner for CIA among
Speaker 3: the many strategic partnerships, certainly within the IC, but outside
Speaker 3: the IC, it's certainly CIA regardless to enough to be
Speaker 3: s sad in my day. You know, paramills the strategic
Speaker 3: partnership is with the special operations community of the United
Speaker 3: States military. And if America has a machine that is
Speaker 3: paramount and pre eminent in the world of clandestine operations,
Speaker 3: it's because of the intimacy between those two communities. Extraordinary, extraordinary.
Speaker 3: We could not have done what we did without our
Speaker 3: special operations partners, whether they were whites offt or blacksof
Speaker 3: And I'm convinced that our soft partners, if they were
Speaker 3: on this. I mean, don't get me wrong. CIA is
Speaker 3: an acquired taste. I get it. I get it. We're
Speaker 3: an acquired taste we're kind of like Caviat, very expensive
Speaker 3: and we're not very flavorful, but you know, we are neutral.
Speaker 3: But the fact of the matter is that the partnership
Speaker 3: between our two communities was what has brought us success
Speaker 3: in the counter terrorism domain. Yes, it's from the skills,
Speaker 3: the talent, the experience and the application, the leveraging of that,
Speaker 3: and the dedication and commitment of the women and men
Speaker 3: who have given up years of their lots to become
Speaker 3: experts on terrorism and how to defeat it, how to
Speaker 3: mitigate it. Yes, I get that in both communities. But
Speaker 3: the reality is that's that intersection, that power that is
Speaker 3: more powerful than the arithmetic some of our two halves.
Speaker 3: And you know it is I can say now, and
Speaker 3: I know you degree and all of our colleagues who
Speaker 3: on this podcast who have had similar experiences would agree.
Speaker 3: You know, the collaboration and the cooperation between the two
Speaker 3: communities was not only mission success, but it was also
Speaker 3: life saving at the same time. And I can say
Speaker 3: that today, but back in the early days, it was
Speaker 3: really hard. It was really hard, and it wasn't all
Speaker 3: anti CIA attitude out of the Special Operations community, who
Speaker 3: in and of itself as a reason to be prideful
Speaker 3: and self sufficient, you know, and and highly skilled and
Speaker 3: highly committed and courageous, very capable. But you know, we
Speaker 3: learned an awful lot of lessons, and some of them
Speaker 3: hard won by blood and sand, by learning how to
Speaker 3: work together. But you know, we began with baby steps,
Speaker 3: and those baby steps eventually got us to be a
Speaker 3: you know, one hundred meters sprinters, world class printers.
Speaker 1: Working to that relationship is now formalized under its a
Speaker 1: defense sensitive support system, right that isn't that the bureaucratic
Speaker 1: mechanism that allows the two organizations to support one.
Speaker 3: It allowed essentially for our audience, it allowed it's a
Speaker 3: it's a highly classified process to essentially share capability, you know,
Speaker 3: to it's a very it's bureaucratic, but it's very crisp,
Speaker 3: and it really allows essentially, you know, special operations Community
Speaker 3: to go to Special Operations Amazon and order up some
Speaker 3: CIA stuff. It allows us to go to CIA Amazon
Speaker 3: and order up some soft stuff you know, when we needed.
Speaker 3: And blending of authorities and blending of funding and yeah,
Speaker 3: consistent with American.
Speaker 1: I'll give a very public example for the audience out there.
Speaker 1: The big laden rate is alleged to be or not alleged.
Speaker 1: I think Obama said so in his memoir. That was
Speaker 1: a CIA operation executed by Jaysack.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we actually did something similar to that when
Speaker 3: I was a Chief of Station in Iraq. It certainly
Speaker 3: wasn't of the import by any means, but we did
Speaker 3: test this process where under my authority we did something
Speaker 3: in a sovereign nation, non non allied nation that that's
Speaker 3: our nation was unwilling to do at our request. So
Speaker 3: under our authority, you know, we positioned our special operations
Speaker 3: colleagues to go do something. Uh. And so, you know,
Speaker 3: learning how to work together in that very unique way
Speaker 3: right through the defense Sensitive Support system is was you
Speaker 3: know again this was all pioneering, right, Yeah, we were
Speaker 3: all we were all pioneers. You know, there's no there
Speaker 3: was no book, you know, you go chapter nine how
Speaker 3: to work with Jason there there was no such a thing.
Speaker 2: So ahe no, I'm sorry, but you know you could
Speaker 2: you talk about this with like the ct like CTC
Speaker 2: sort of the sniff test that went on between the
Speaker 2: CIA and the military, you know initially because there was
Speaker 2: distrust on both sides. Was it similar? I mean, did
Speaker 2: you have that same experience with the FBI with the
Speaker 2: rendition program when you needed there like did did they
Speaker 2: look at you like you guys are all assassins and
Speaker 2: you're looking at them like you all sticks up your asses?
Speaker 3: Now it's a good question, you know. We're there similar
Speaker 3: challenges with other strategic partners in the early days, and
Speaker 3: quite frankly, my my experience was now with with with
Speaker 3: the FBI, because the lanes and the road were quite clear.
Speaker 3: We were the find We were the find and fixed guys,
Speaker 3: and the FBI were the finished guys. Uh. Yeah, we
Speaker 3: were part of the finishing process because we had presence overseas,
Speaker 3: we could deploy overseas. We had we had we had,
Speaker 3: we had point A to point B capabilities that the
Speaker 3: f b I didn't possess. This is before they were
Speaker 3: legal legal attaches and every embassy in the world. And
Speaker 3: so the f b I was pioneering and having extra
Speaker 3: territorial squads and in the FBI and and getting involved
Speaker 3: in in mitigating the criminal and terrorst threat before it
Speaker 3: got to inside the United States was pioneering for the FBI.
Speaker 3: I didn't find as much, uh much attitudeinal collision between
Speaker 3: count or terrorism center. Others may have a different view.
Speaker 3: So I was in a rendition business. The agents we
Speaker 3: worked with were just extraordinary.
Speaker 2: So your marriage then was not one of political necessity
Speaker 2: to bring two kingdoms together.
Speaker 3: We both realized that, you know, that they can't do
Speaker 3: what needs to be done by themselves. And we certainly
Speaker 3: realized that, you know, we can't acquire evidence, acquire you know,
Speaker 3: transport fugitives back to federal custody and mount a prosecution.
Speaker 3: That that's nobody wants CIA to do. Law enforcement. Constitution
Speaker 3: doesn't like that, right, you know, so stick to your lanes.
Speaker 3: We were able to do that. The friction comes in
Speaker 3: generally when when you have overlapping capabilities and overlapping authorities,
Speaker 3: and then you get into the you know, I won't
Speaker 3: do it on the podcast, but I can show you
Speaker 3: the title fifty title ten scars I have and they
Speaker 3: had when the mL and you know, the militarily is
Speaker 3: on element wars in the early years, and but it's
Speaker 3: really where you had you were operating separately, but you
Speaker 3: had overlapping authorities and sometimes you had undisclosed overlapping presence
Speaker 3: in each other's I used the term battle space because
Speaker 3: I think it's probably the best descriptive. And then we
Speaker 3: learned that actually that's a prescription for disaster, right. And
Speaker 3: so over time we learned through exchange of hostages and
Speaker 3: just through just brute force, uh, training and educating and
Speaker 3: beating the drum that you know, the military, you know,
Speaker 3: and I and I said all the time, I said,
Speaker 3: we need to identify opportunities to help our soft brothers,
Speaker 3: you know, succeed. And I like to think that they're
Speaker 3: doing the same thing. When we observe behaviors that are
Speaker 3: not consistent with CIA normative behaviors, I urged all my
Speaker 3: officers take a deep breath, impute evil, because what they're
Speaker 3: doing may be very consistent with their mission, their organization,
Speaker 3: and their own culture and authorities. And so doing a
Speaker 3: little investigative work before you enter into judgment mode is
Speaker 3: the most helpful thing. And I told my officers every day,
Speaker 3: talk to any of the officers serve with me interact.
Speaker 3: I said, it's been a good day. When you can
Speaker 3: say that you helped another officer CIA or not succeed,
Speaker 3: that by definition is a good day, you know. And
Speaker 3: so we learned an awful lot and I think the
Speaker 3: probably the classroom where we learned at was in the
Speaker 3: Bosnian theater of operations. And if I don't know whether
Speaker 3: you might.
Speaker 1: Be interested in it, yeah, it was those early assignments
Speaker 1: before you got into the Balkans. I mean you were
Speaker 1: a branch chief of one I think you said, and
Speaker 1: what were some of those early jobs?
Speaker 4: But before you got sent to the Balkans, I.
Speaker 3: Was a branch chief multiple times. I was what it
Speaker 3: was called a group chief, which was you know, one up.
Speaker 3: Think of a branch chief as being an infter squad.
Speaker 3: Think of a group chief as kind of being a
Speaker 3: little more than a platoon leader, because you had much
Speaker 3: more than just you know, twenty people. I was also,
Speaker 3: you know, I was base chief a couple of times.
Speaker 3: Throughout the entirety of this process. I was a station
Speaker 3: chief four times. And I might say, as an aside
Speaker 3: for your audience, you gentlemen know this many many in
Speaker 3: the audience tough, but some might not. You know, a
Speaker 3: typical CI station is quite small and modest and deep,
Speaker 3: and we have a broad range of obligations and record
Speaker 3: gronments and uh, you know a lot of us very
Speaker 3: sensitive and we can't talk about it here. But but
Speaker 3: you know, for the most part, they're right quite modest.
Speaker 3: I mean, these are not like Treadstone class CIA presence.
Speaker 3: If I could use adjacent Bourne analogy, the Treadstone was evil.
Speaker 3: We're not evil. But the fact of the matter is that,
Speaker 3: uh to your question. You know, I had really escalatory
Speaker 3: and graduate graduating, you know, leadership experiences both at Starfleet Command,
Speaker 3: you know, and in the field, which helped prepare me
Speaker 3: to be you know, my first chief of station job,
Speaker 3: which was in the Balkans. I was another chief of
Speaker 3: station in the Balkans as well, and I supported a
Speaker 3: number of programs in the Balkans. I was a base
Speaker 3: chief in the Balkans, you know, And and that experience,
Speaker 3: you know, was where quite frankly, you know, as as
Speaker 3: all the people in the audience know. You know, America
Speaker 3: invested eavily and built in creating order out of chaos.
Speaker 3: You know, you had to date in the courts, which
Speaker 3: I think a lot of us who experienced and who
Speaker 3: benefited from that. You know. It's a great way to
Speaker 3: end the war and end genocide, but it's a real
Speaker 3: crappy way to birth a country, you know, and try
Speaker 3: to imbue it with jeffersony empluralistic democratic tendencies, you know,
Speaker 3: with all the trauma that comes from genocide, you know,
Speaker 3: and so America's investment, which was quite controversial at the time,
Speaker 3: and I wasn't a policy maker, so I'm not facile
Speaker 3: in the intimate policy history and all the blood letting
Speaker 3: that probably came from making this decision to deploy US
Speaker 3: military forces. Nobody wanted to put US soldiers in harms way.
Speaker 3: Nobody did. Nobody wanted to put US forces into a
Speaker 3: situation eerily similar to Vietnam. What was the US interest
Speaker 3: in Vietnam? There was no Domino theory of play here
Speaker 3: in the Balkans, so you know, rationalizers didn't need and
Speaker 3: have that. There was no Gulf of Tonk in analogy,
Speaker 3: you know. And and even though that was fake if
Speaker 3: you read the Pentagon Bakers, uh, you know, none of that.
Speaker 3: This was an unforced initiative by the United States government,
Speaker 3: on both the military side and on the non military side,
Speaker 3: particularly in diplomatic and CIA. This was unforced. We weren't required,
Speaker 3: and by doing what we did it did incur risk.
Speaker 3: We had no risk. And by putting Americans into that
Speaker 3: environment automatic whether they're a ten Special Forces Group colleagues,
Speaker 3: whether they're for you know, Dave Grange's Divisions colleagues, whether
Speaker 3: they're in Multinational forces because we're part of ESPORT and
Speaker 3: on before IPHO and then spur I was there for
Speaker 3: all of that. And this was America at its finest.
Speaker 3: This was a story that should make Americas proud. It's
Speaker 3: going to get lost in the very necessary asked the
Speaker 3: discussion on Ukraine. But this was America at its finest.
Speaker 3: We didn't have to do this. No Americans were harmed
Speaker 3: by this genocide, weren't even injured. No Americans the big debate,
Speaker 3: no American equities. And the reason why we had made
Speaker 3: this investment is because of what makes America great, American
Speaker 3: core values. That's why we were there. We were the
Speaker 3: power projection of American core values into an environment that
Speaker 3: was absent of anything similar to American core values. You
Speaker 3: were having women and children that had just been slaughtered,
Speaker 3: hundreds of thousands of Boshniaks slaughtered on the battlefields and
Speaker 3: then the towns and the villages. And when you go
Speaker 3: and part of your job is to find mass graves,
Speaker 3: which wasn't hard because you could see body parts sticking
Speaker 3: up out of the ground. That was the easiest part
Speaker 3: of what we were there to do. And CIA's presence
Speaker 3: was traditional CIA presence to be able to provide actionable
Speaker 3: intelligence to a wide variety of customers and to be
Speaker 3: able to inform the policy makers, because again, America was
Speaker 3: pioneering its way through this very ambiguous, ill defined environment,
Speaker 3: highly politically charged, you know, post genocide trauma and anger
Speaker 3: and need for revenge, and Americans were there to kind
Speaker 3: of be the cadmium rod in this geopolitical reactor. And
Speaker 3: America did amazing work. They did American work just extraordinary.
Speaker 3: And I'm exempting myself from that. But in the in
Speaker 3: that battle space with CIA where our special Operations colleagues,
Speaker 3: and I.
Speaker 1: Think a number of year I'll point out we've had
Speaker 1: a bunch of them on the show. George Hand was
Speaker 1: one of the wrecking guys with Delta over there. Ron
Speaker 1: Moehler was there with the agency. H K roy pen name.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you knew him or not, but
Speaker 1: he I think he went the first U c I
Speaker 1: A station in Sarajevo. He was obviously there investigated a
Speaker 1: Sabornita for the agency. They sent him over there. Geez,
Speaker 1: who else have we talked to that was in the bulkans?
Speaker 1: I mean quite a few people on the show in
Speaker 1: the past.
Speaker 3: Well, I worked very intimately with a young Army captain
Speaker 3: named Scotty Miller. Yeah, who some some on the podcast
Speaker 3: may know, you know, the future you know, future Delta commander,
Speaker 3: future JAZA commander in future ISAF commander, you know, uh,
Speaker 3: just a legendary, iconic American in his own right. But
Speaker 3: he was just a young captain, you know, sitting up
Speaker 3: there in a special Mission unit in TUSA, And so
Speaker 3: that was hard. We learned very quickly that their culture
Speaker 3: and their their US, you know, both with ten Special
Speaker 3: Forces as well as Special Mission Unit, their ethos mirrored arrow.
Speaker 3: And as your guests that have preceded me have told you, uh,
Speaker 3: you know, we learned a lot. We learned. We learned
Speaker 3: how to respect each other's capabilities. We learned how to
Speaker 3: without judgment, to understand shortcomings in capabilities, understand strengths. We
Speaker 3: understood how to how to respect each other, how to
Speaker 3: not be caught up in mythology and misperception. We were
Speaker 3: we were sharing the mission, we were sharing the risk
Speaker 3: such as it was, and our success was very dependent
Speaker 3: upon mutually supporting each other. Uh and uh. And it
Speaker 3: was a way for us to really understand, you know how,
Speaker 3: you know, for us to learn the hard, difficult to
Speaker 3: learn lessons on how to coo, cooperate, collaborate, to how
Speaker 3: to share and and and how to disagree in a
Speaker 3: respectful way that doesn't affect each other's mission or the relationship.
Speaker 3: You know, we learned that as young. I wasn't chronologically young,
Speaker 3: because you know, I had a job before CIA that
Speaker 3: wasn't working for dead, and so I was chronologically ordered
Speaker 3: older and so but all of us, I was experientially young,
Speaker 3: you know, just fifteen, and so was young you know
Speaker 3: in see I speak. And so, you know, the opportunity
Speaker 3: to undertake this exciting mission to represent the ideal of
Speaker 3: America to an environment that is absent of any concept
Speaker 3: of American idealism, and to be able to save lives,
Speaker 3: to be able to bring order out of chaos, to
Speaker 3: help the United States foreign policy, to bring genocide to
Speaker 3: an end, and to do something about that genocide, and
Speaker 3: in many cases, to bring the perpetuators and the perpetrators
Speaker 3: of that genocide to justice. The American presence in the
Speaker 3: Balkans was all of that, was all of that and
Speaker 3: all of us that were part of their rom Uller
Speaker 3: and the other game. You were proud to be part
Speaker 3: of that because it's one of the reasons why we
Speaker 3: signed up for this. Me granted as a draftee to
Speaker 3: the agency, but I could have left, I could have
Speaker 3: retired and not signed.
Speaker 2: On to the agency.
Speaker 3: But the opportunity to spend decades with extraordinary people doing
Speaker 3: extraordinary things in extraordinary places is not an opportunity you
Speaker 3: want to ever turned out. And so I was smart
Speaker 3: enough at the time to be able to say, no,
Speaker 3: you know what, I'm not interested in making money in
Speaker 3: my time. When I took an appointment with CIA, I
Speaker 3: forfeited my military retirement. It wasn't put in escrow, and
Speaker 3: they pay me when I leave federal service. There was
Speaker 3: dual compensation that statute, which lasted for eight years my
Speaker 3: CIA CIA service that I forfeited my military retirement in
Speaker 3: exchange for Yeah, it was all all civil service. Pack.
Speaker 3: They eventually what are they called, not revoked the legislation
Speaker 3: that they whatever you do to laws, Yeah, repeal, that's
Speaker 3: really repeal. Uh. They repealed that because they realized they
Speaker 3: were you know, they were you know, essentially disincentivizing some
Speaker 3: incredibly talented you know, military officers from joining CIA.
Speaker 2: It's almost it's almost punitive in a way to say
Speaker 2: you can't, you don't get your military retirement because now
Speaker 2: you because now you're doing this.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, But the bottom line of my my long
Speaker 3: oration and my my bo aviation and I apologize to
Speaker 3: you gentlemen into all the participants of the podcast, but uh,
Speaker 3: you can tell I'm kind of passionate about what we
Speaker 3: did there, and we couldn't have done alone. This was
Speaker 3: a whole of government, uh, and a spectacular accomplishment of
Speaker 3: the United States of America at a very difficult time,
Speaker 3: you know, political political turmoil in America coming out of
Speaker 3: the Vietnam experience. You know, it's the first time that
Speaker 3: the modern army, you know, the reformed army, you know,
Speaker 3: CIA came through its own reformation, the Church and Pike
Speaker 3: Committee hearings, all in the Crown Jewels and all of that.
Speaker 3: You can go back and study that we were a
Speaker 3: totally different agency than we were back then, the United
Speaker 3: States Army Special Forces to come from my day, you know,
Speaker 3: whereas an alternate specialty. And you were a shitty SF
Speaker 3: officer and a shitty traditional officer at the same time.
Speaker 3: Works Yet you're a shitty aviator and you were a
Speaker 3: shitty tanker. You know, you weren't good at both. That
Speaker 3: was great. You always tapped a guy on a helmet
Speaker 3: and said, how long have you been flying? Well, I
Speaker 3: just came out of a tank armor company. Come in.
Speaker 3: You're going, oh wow, how about having that warrant officer
Speaker 3: take the controls? You know? Is that kind of thing?
Speaker 3: And so this was a professional army, this was a
Speaker 3: professionalized intelligence community. It had learned a lot of lessons,
Speaker 3: had a lot to learn, and out of that came
Speaker 3: a lot of incredible connective tissue that ultimately that we
Speaker 3: all who went to Afghanistan, you know, benefited from and
Speaker 3: saved lives and accomplished.
Speaker 2: Tell us that's really that's really interesting because I feel
Speaker 2: like that's a story that doesn't really get told. First off,
Speaker 2: Bosnian is kind of Bosnian is kind of a forgotten endeavor,
Speaker 2: uh you know across I mean, I was I was
Speaker 2: in the military when bosiing was going on, But to me,
Speaker 2: it was just something that a few people wasn't huge. Yeah,
Speaker 2: a few people went to, you know, is this random thing?
Speaker 2: But I think that at least for me a lot
Speaker 2: of times, the perception is nine to eleven Afghaniste in
Speaker 2: Iraq like nine was was that was that formative moment
Speaker 2: for you know, uh, special operations and the CIA. But
Speaker 2: but you're saying that it it goes back to actually
Speaker 2: bossing where those were those roots our first our first
Speaker 2: laid you know, and and it grew from there.
Speaker 4: You bet.
Speaker 3: And I believe that neither CIA nor are special forces,
Speaker 3: both white and black special operators both like white and black, uh,
Speaker 3: would have been able to be as as as responsive
Speaker 3: uh and as and as flexible and as and us
Speaker 3: included if we hadn't had that experience in in the
Speaker 3: in the Balkans. Uh. Yep, there's still a lot of
Speaker 3: lessons to be learned. Yeah, there's some latency, you know,
Speaker 3: and that's very understandable. But we shortened the timeline from
Speaker 3: orders to to action by what we what we all
Speaker 3: experienced out of out of the boss name theater.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's fascinating and you know, like we appreciate you
Speaker 2: sort of pointing that out because again that is like
Speaker 2: by doesn't get much attention.
Speaker 1: They were pioneering the nandhunting that came to dominate what
Speaker 1: we were doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Speaker 2: Right, which really is the fine picks finished cycle.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, and we and we didn't do we didn't
Speaker 3: call it that. I didn't stand the crystal creating the
Speaker 3: definition of F three A right, right, right, But we
Speaker 3: were functionally developing that kind of process, I guess, you know,
Speaker 3: in addition to national intelligence collection and provision to policymakers
Speaker 3: and ambassadors, because there's a lot of political interest in
Speaker 3: making this work. Yeah, you know, I'm under no illusion
Speaker 3: the impact of the United States from nine to eleven dwarf.
Speaker 3: You know, you know what we did in Bosnia, and
Speaker 3: so I'm not offended at all that it is kind
Speaker 3: of fallen beneath the American consciousness. But for those of
Speaker 3: us that have experienced that, I think anybody on this
Speaker 3: podcast and anybody who anybody talks to and carry some
Speaker 3: of my remarks will find a deep resonance between what
Speaker 3: we all experience. I'm exempting the conventional unit because we
Speaker 3: didn't have a lot to do with you know, the
Speaker 3: big armored divisions and mechanized divisions that rotated out in
Speaker 3: and out of Bosnia. But I'm talking about you know,
Speaker 3: our Special Forces and Special Mission unit. Uh. You know,
Speaker 3: we learned a lot and we became fast friends, tight
Speaker 3: colleagues through that experience, and it's it's saved us a
Speaker 3: lot of time and a lot of lives on future
Speaker 3: battlefield that we could not possibly imagine.
Speaker 4: What was the next assignment. Then after your Bolcan years.
Speaker 3: Doug, let's see in Sarajevo, my my third time in Sarajevo,
Speaker 3: I was promoted to the Senior Intelligence Service unexpectedly given
Speaker 3: the fact that you know, most of my background was
Speaker 3: you know, I didn't go to George Washington University. Mom
Speaker 3: and dad didn't work for CIA. You know, I didn't
Speaker 3: speak five languages. I didn't I hadn't you know, spent
Speaker 3: an extraordinary amount of time overseas outside the military context.
Speaker 3: And and so I considered it It's very true, and
Speaker 3: I know it sounds very begging for compliments, but I
Speaker 3: considered myself part of the blue collar of the director
Speaker 3: of Operations. I didn't come with the with that kind
Speaker 3: of Washington education and development kind of kind of background,
Speaker 3: and so I figured I was I was the military
Speaker 3: equivalent of uh, you know, in the Navy, you'd say
Speaker 3: a Mustang, right, right, And I was the I was
Speaker 3: the CIA equivalent of kind of the you know, the
Speaker 3: East six who went to O c S came a
Speaker 3: COMPS an officer, you know. But having said that, you know,
Speaker 3: the unexpected, totally unexpected. I think a lot of a
Speaker 3: lot of women and men who get promoted to the
Speaker 3: senior service are are grateful, uh, but they're they don't
Speaker 3: expect it. But I think they probably know whether they're
Speaker 3: made of the right stuff, and so the promotion isn't
Speaker 3: a surprise, and they get enough feedback, you know, what
Speaker 3: they have to do to improve, to make themselves more competitive,
Speaker 3: and they get a lot of interaction by their senior
Speaker 3: mentors and chain command. And you know, I guess I
Speaker 3: got some of that. I don't remember, but I didn't
Speaker 3: take any offense if I didn't, because I didn't think
Speaker 3: I was worthy of it, quite frankly, you know. And
Speaker 3: I appealed to my boss. I appealed passionately to my boss,
Speaker 3: please don't bring me back at the end of my
Speaker 3: command tour from to Starfleet command. You know, I don't
Speaker 3: have my light saber is just not going to work
Speaker 3: back there, and my Jedi knight you know, fire passion,
Speaker 3: they will go disappear. Look, send me to any crappy
Speaker 3: place you want, where you need a good, solid field leader.
Speaker 3: I'll go lead myself again as I did my first
Speaker 3: leaders are. I made it the argument I possibly could,
Speaker 3: and it seemed to fall on deaf ears. And the
Speaker 3: next thing I know is I get a call from
Speaker 3: a guy you made may know, Zay Rodriguez, who is
Speaker 3: the DdO at the time, who said, I got some
Speaker 3: good news and I got some bad news. The good
Speaker 3: news is we've selected you for promotion to the Senior
Speaker 3: Intelligence Service. The bad news is you're in a g
Speaker 3: S fifteen position. You're coming back to Storrowfleet Command. And
Speaker 3: he said, so you're coming back to the counter Terrorism Center.
Speaker 3: And I was the deputy for the director of Ops
Speaker 3: for CTC and I did that. You know, when I
Speaker 3: came back, that was my first SIS job. And I
Speaker 3: had a couple I had. I had a couple of assignments.
Speaker 3: I think I was in you know, what's now known
Speaker 3: as the Center for Cyber Intelligence. I think I dabbled
Speaker 3: in that a bit. Somebody said, well, you got you
Speaker 3: got a graduate degree in an arcane sign it's you're
Speaker 3: perfect for this. Yeah, yeah, well maybe I don't remember
Speaker 3: any of that. I can't even read my dissertation and
Speaker 3: understand what I wrote. And so I did that for
Speaker 3: a little bit, and I had another assignment in there.
Speaker 3: Memory escapes me. It was a highly classified project that
Speaker 3: I worked which was known to very very few, and
Speaker 3: it was quite an exciting thing. The cool thing is
Speaker 3: is you can apply the cult of secrecy and you
Speaker 3: can emanate that, you can exude the cult of secrecy,
Speaker 3: and that makes you very special. The bad news is
Speaker 3: you can't cooperate and collaborate with anybody. You just can't
Speaker 3: tell anybody what you're doing, so you got to do
Speaker 3: all the work yourself, and that sucks. I'm just telling you.
Speaker 3: So a team building how you get a team of one?
Speaker 3: You know? Okay, this is great, this is great. But
Speaker 3: if memory serves me correctly, I went from there back
Speaker 3: to Iraq, and we didn't talk about my affirmative Iraq
Speaker 3: E three and four.
Speaker 1: Yeah, before Iraq, I want to ask you because you
Speaker 1: told me after nine to eleven, like two days later, you.
Speaker 4: Were you were gone, you Iraq out I was gone.
Speaker 4: What happened on nine to eleven for you?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, and and so on nine to eleven. You know,
Speaker 3: I kind of I kind of skipped over some history here,
Speaker 3: and I attribute that to my age. You know, I'm
Speaker 3: seventy two years old, so I'm becoming a little mentally
Speaker 3: infirm here. I don't impute that to all seventy two
Speaker 3: year olds, but to me. So, I was in Bosnia
Speaker 3: as part of as I said, you know, as I
Speaker 3: gave you more than you ever wanted to hear about
Speaker 3: America's presence in Bosnia. So nine to eleven, we're sitting
Speaker 3: there and the first aircraft I did the tower and
Speaker 3: we all rushed into to scramble to watch TV. And
Speaker 3: I remember to myself it was it was just shocking.
Speaker 3: And I remember the way I rationalized and dealt with
Speaker 3: that sickening feeling in my stuff was I said, oh,
Speaker 3: this is a navigation era, this is some pilot you know,
Speaker 3: pilot out art attack. You know, never occurred to me,
Speaker 3: even though I had done tech counter terrorism for like
Speaker 3: ten years, you know, the fact of matter, I was
Speaker 3: just sitting there, you know, mystified, shocked, mystified, sickened by
Speaker 3: that and it wasn't. But you know, after, you know,
Speaker 3: America's policymakers really digested what had happened, you know, from
Speaker 3: the attacks on nine to eleven to two aircraft Flight
Speaker 3: ninety three in the attack on the Pentagon. And ironically,
Speaker 3: one of the officers of my cross agency, large cross
Speaker 3: agency team that I had in the field from DUD
Speaker 3: from uniform military, multiple civilian agencies, and yet and some
Speaker 3: of our special Forces College. So we had a pretty
Speaker 3: powerful team. One of my team members who happened to
Speaker 3: be named Mike stan who meant who left immediate because
Speaker 3: Sad called him back immediately. U s a d and Mike,
Speaker 3: of courses, all of the snow is the first American
Speaker 3: to die in the line of duty, you know, and
Speaker 3: the expulsion of al Qaeda and Taliban from Afghanistan. Mike
Speaker 3: was really just a spectacular guy. He was. He was
Speaker 3: everything you'd ever want in any kind of officer, a
Speaker 3: gentleman warrior, you know, just extraordinary, gracious, courteous and yet
Speaker 3: steal hard. You know. Of course he's a former marine,
Speaker 3: right and uh so I lost him immediately there it
Speaker 3: was like hours, if I recall correctly, Boom. He was
Speaker 3: summoned back. We sent him back a couple of days
Speaker 3: later after they made a decision to mount the US response.
Speaker 3: Of course, he had Jawbreaker, which you know you've covered extensively. UH.
Speaker 3: And my job, I was immediately summoned up to US
Speaker 3: Yukon to work with then to me a very unknown
Speaker 3: UH Seal one star who some of you may have
Speaker 3: heard named Bill mccraven, who's the commander of SAKI, and
Speaker 3: we were trying to figure out what it was that
Speaker 3: the US in command in soak here needed to do
Speaker 3: in response, you know, because the attack on the homeland
Speaker 3: was not going to be the only attack. And it
Speaker 3: certainly added because there have been three embassies hammered hard
Speaker 3: the usas cole Kobar Towers. We had all kinds of
Speaker 3: explosive history in the business of terrorism up to this point.
Speaker 3: And the other thing that my job was to be
Speaker 3: able to work with soak here to prepare the support,
Speaker 3: the special operations support requirements because of the emerging soft
Speaker 3: contribution to America's response. Then I went back to back
Speaker 3: to Washington, d C. To you know, to equip myself
Speaker 3: to gun up and get ready to go to Afghanistan.
Speaker 3: Myself and I and I remember one of your guests,
Speaker 3: can't I can't remember who, uh Mick maybe who said
Speaker 3: who talked a little bit about it. I think you
Speaker 3: asked him the question. Tell us about the time that
Speaker 3: you were preparing to go to Afghanistan. Mine was spending
Speaker 3: hours in r I. I remember going in there in
Speaker 3: a place for stripped I think, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: And I remember going in there and you know, one
Speaker 3: of the ari I sales sales ladies comes up to
Speaker 3: me and says, so can I help you? And I go, yeah,
Speaker 3: I got this list. I need to get all this
Speaker 3: stuff on pick cash. I need all this all this stuff,
Speaker 3: and I need it right now. And she goes. You're like,
Speaker 3: you're like the fiftieth guys been in here. I think
Speaker 3: I think a lot of stuff. I think they bought
Speaker 3: all that stuff. So, you know, I had to run around,
Speaker 3: you know, and others like me that were in the
Speaker 3: in the in the latency part of the response, you know,
Speaker 3: the month after sort of thing, and so you know,
Speaker 3: you're buying sleeping bags and all kinds of stuff because again,
Speaker 3: you know, as as I think a number of your
Speaker 3: guests of you know, Cee, I was not. You know,
Speaker 3: our military things was not de regord for CIA, right
Speaker 3: it is today, but back then it was. It was
Speaker 3: an aberration. It was an afterthought. Those were the officers
Speaker 3: that would get you in trouble because those retired Special
Speaker 3: Forces E eights that were now GS twelves and thirteen's.
Speaker 3: There's no good it's going to come. Have a ground branch,
Speaker 3: a ground branch team. I've been a cos couple of
Speaker 3: times for ground branch guys. I know the mythology. Having
Speaker 3: him come from a community, I wasn't as fearful, but
Speaker 3: no good could come from having a ground grand branch guys.
Speaker 3: And you go, you know, you know your your family
Speaker 3: aren't safe, the animals aren't safe. Fruit and not safe
Speaker 3: is going to know up all that, you know, all
Speaker 3: of that kind of bizarre thing, you know. So there
Speaker 3: was paramount. So CIA was not prepared to go. I
Speaker 3: when I when I had my team in Afghanistan, we
Speaker 3: had a Sony Vial laptop through an encrypt to an
Speaker 3: in mar set. We were creating cable traffic and Microsoft
Speaker 3: word you know. Yeah, we had Satcom And that was
Speaker 3: just to tell the gang back at Starfleet that we
Speaker 3: had a couple of files for them, and then perhaps
Speaker 3: maybe in another episode sometime, you know, if you ever
Speaker 3: want me back, I can tell you a little more about,
Speaker 3: you know, that kind of pioneering that was done by
Speaker 3: many who didn't way more than I did, in way
Speaker 3: more dangerous places. You know, My my gang was in
Speaker 3: a sadabab, you know, way up in the southern end
Speaker 3: of the Conor Valley north of Jilal. But but you know,
Speaker 3: we were learning how to how to do this. We
Speaker 3: were you know, creating capability on the fly, you know.
Speaker 3: And I was just a cognet machine. I wasn't a driver.
Speaker 3: I wasn't you know, a pioneer leader. I wasn't taking
Speaker 3: the decisional risks, you know. I was just excited and happy,
Speaker 3: you know, coming out of that bossing exp It's flush
Speaker 3: with pride, you know, wanting to you know, be part
Speaker 3: of America's response, you know, to bring justice and righteous
Speaker 3: revenge to those that had you know, killed our citizens
Speaker 3: and those of other nations who had despoiled our country,
Speaker 3: you know, forever, and as you know, I, like all
Speaker 3: of us you know who served there, proud to be
Speaker 3: part of that, whether in the early days or even
Speaker 3: more dangerous quite frankly, you know, days that most of
Speaker 3: you served in Afghanistan, we could even go downtown and
Speaker 3: have dinner at an Afghan restaurant, you know, without getting
Speaker 3: blown up and shot and stabbed, you know where. Many
Speaker 3: of you weren't able to do that, but you know
Speaker 3: it was and we immediately began to apply the experiences
Speaker 3: that I just discussed the length, you know, and the
Speaker 3: lessons that we learned, you know, and that you know
Speaker 3: what turned out to be a much more pacific battle
Speaker 3: space known as the Balkans. But uh, you know, who
Speaker 3: do you find in places like Afghanistan? You know, no
Speaker 3: longer Captain Scottie Miller. I think he was Major Scottie Miller,
Speaker 3: maybe lieutenant colonel, So you found it was you know,
Speaker 3: as I think we all used the expression same dude's different.
Speaker 2: Places, right right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And now I obviously don't don't mean by using
Speaker 3: the term dude that it's just all men, because number
Speaker 3: of courageous female officers and operators have served as well,
Speaker 3: and we're part of our growth. But you know, we
Speaker 3: benefited from I think what we learned.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, what was the trajectory like for you when
Speaker 1: you got into theater and you make it sound like
Speaker 1: were you in the background kind of running logistics for
Speaker 1: these guys or what what was your role?
Speaker 3: No, No, I was. I was. I was part of
Speaker 3: the operational presence there. Uh so, my my engaging with
Speaker 3: soak you're on the support side. That ended when I
Speaker 3: left and I went back and I became part of
Speaker 3: the operational CIA operational package. I want to say, initially
Speaker 3: we had you know, probably the sum total. I think
Speaker 3: the guy you should have on here was Hank Hankrupton's
Speaker 3: deputy guy named John Massey and an amazing American in
Speaker 3: his own right. He has a little blemish because he's
Speaker 3: a Naval Academy graduate and he's the nuclear guy too,
Speaker 3: you know, like that who's that guy Rickover? Or is
Speaker 3: that that? Was that a German pilot in World War One?
Speaker 3: I don't remember who was the guy started nuclear Navy.
Speaker 3: I don't know the Navy is relevant to me, but
Speaker 3: the but uh, you know, the total numbers. But I
Speaker 3: think we only had like I think it was around
Speaker 3: twenty eight, you know, in the initial initial presence there. So,
Speaker 3: but we had a huge force multiplier in uh in
Speaker 3: in uh you know, the the g's and in Swick speak,
Speaker 3: the g's from the Northern Lions. And so the picture
Speaker 3: you so kindly put on the advertisement for this was
Speaker 3: my leadership team. With my team. It was myself a
Speaker 3: ground branch guy, and we had one hundred Northern Alliance
Speaker 3: you know, colleagues that were there to take the fight
Speaker 3: to the enemy. And that was not unique at all,
Speaker 3: and so there are very few in the beginning. So
Speaker 3: I was in Afghanist Fans and opera.
Speaker 4: Which team were you guys on.
Speaker 3: It was called Team Mike and it was like I said,
Speaker 3: it was in Masadaba at the southern end of the
Speaker 3: Knar Valley. What was interesting is we occupied a totally
Speaker 3: shredded Soviet Russian military installation. I could motorized artillery. It
Speaker 3: was at a Mujahdin it like literally just eradicated it
Speaker 3: off the face of the earth that I plowed through
Speaker 3: a bunch of rubble. And I found because thank you
Speaker 3: for the climate there which is absent of rain, I
Speaker 3: found a real Russian military map with hands draw on
Speaker 3: military symbols to show where they positioned, you know, rifle
Speaker 3: companies and infantry platoons in the mountains around around the
Speaker 3: Sadabad and so I have that framed, you know, on
Speaker 3: the wall on my I Love Me and I Love
Speaker 3: You wall here in New Mexican or New Mexico home.
Speaker 3: But I was an operator to your question, and I
Speaker 3: came back and I was the acting because we didn't
Speaker 3: have a permanent station. I was the acting deputy chief
Speaker 3: of station my second go around, and so that took
Speaker 3: me through the end of two thousand and two. I
Speaker 3: became a chief of station after that for a year,
Speaker 3: and in Iraq happened. And then I got a call
Speaker 3: from the Deputy Director of Operations said, have your wife
Speaker 3: pack you out. I want you I want you to
Speaker 3: Kuwait in twenty four hours. So that's how things are done.
Speaker 2: What yeah, you know, I know that, like like bases
Speaker 2: like a sod of body, and then going into Iraq
Speaker 2: when it first started, Like those were very unique circumstances.
Speaker 2: But you talk about going back to Starfleet Command with
Speaker 2: your light Stabur and I love the I love the
Speaker 2: coalvision of the two worlds. But but you know, when
Speaker 2: you talk about Starfleet Command, obviously you're talking about Langley.
Speaker 2: What was it like being at Langley? It was different
Speaker 2: than being at a base or a station somewhere else
Speaker 2: in the world.
Speaker 3: Well, I suppose it's kind of you all are military veterans,
Speaker 3: and you will understand as well, the vast majority of
Speaker 3: your audience it's the same thing when they go okay,
Speaker 3: you're going to the Pentagon. What you know, your first
Speaker 3: reaction is this, you want to go vomit, You want
Speaker 3: to go you want to go buke in the street.
Speaker 3: You know, what did I do wrong? You know? And
Speaker 3: then what happens is you end up serving and I
Speaker 3: jokingly and very critical as a many officers you know
Speaker 3: who are operators. You know, there's life forms in CIA
Speaker 3: that love Starfleet Command. You know, they like to commute
Speaker 3: and they like to live, and they don't want to
Speaker 3: be overseas. Vast majority of them are are you know,
Speaker 3: hunger for the core business of what CIA does, whether
Speaker 3: you're an operator or an analysts, board officer, a techops officer,
Speaker 3: or something in between. But there are many officers who
Speaker 3: don't need to go overseas and make a seminal and
Speaker 3: existential contribution to what we're trying to do overseas, and
Speaker 3: they're very necessary and just like service in the Pentagon,
Speaker 3: and granted, you know I was in the Pentagon, as
Speaker 3: a No. Five And for those of you that have
Speaker 3: never served in the Pentagon is No. Five. There is
Speaker 3: no lower life form in the Pentagon, in an army
Speaker 3: lieutenant colonel. Yeah, you don't even you don't even get
Speaker 3: donuts for generals, get donuts for for sixes. You know, Hey,
Speaker 3: you go over there and attract the index away from
Speaker 3: those uster making you know, doing some real work. You
Speaker 3: go over there, Carl, you go sit there in the corner.
Speaker 3: Go get me a Dona. Yes, sprinkley. I like to
Speaker 3: watch sprinkles on my Donna and cream into coffee and
Speaker 3: let me know when it comes back, because I don't
Speaker 3: want to call it. And so there's no lower you know,
Speaker 3: you know, you know, just insignificant life per formed in
Speaker 3: a lieutenant colonel and Pentagon. But what you do see
Speaker 3: is the same thing that I found out in my service.
Speaker 3: And I began life at Star Free Command. So I
Speaker 3: understood and it made me a better field leader. I
Speaker 3: understood the culture of head quarters. I understood the challenges
Speaker 3: that they were facing. I understood the sludge in the
Speaker 3: machine and why the sludge is not capricious sludge, it
Speaker 3: is inexorable, just necessary slowness and glacier times. It's just
Speaker 3: part of large bureaucracies, even chrisp bureaucracies like CIA, which
Speaker 3: is probably the Christmas of them all. Without question. You
Speaker 3: know you have sixteen days after nine to eleven, you
Speaker 3: have Gary schron and Johnpricker on the ground right, no
Speaker 3: other institution.
Speaker 1: The agency has Correct me if I'm wrong, Doug, But
Speaker 1: I mean the only political appointees you guys really deal
Speaker 1: with is like the director director and maybe a chief
Speaker 1: of staff and the director and.
Speaker 3: The deputy director of political appointance.
Speaker 1: And then when I had someone tell me once about
Speaker 1: when you guys deployed for that first Afghanistan trip, like
Speaker 1: the very like short fuse on the chain of command,
Speaker 1: like from the President to the director to maybe like
Speaker 1: the head of SAD or something like that. I mean,
Speaker 1: you tell me, Doug, but I mean it was a
Speaker 1: very short fuse going from point A to point B.
Speaker 3: You had it. You hit it right on the head.
Speaker 3: And that that short interval between the most senior decision
Speaker 3: makers in our government and the Plebeian operator based chief
Speaker 3: like me on the ground that was built and with
Speaker 3: great risk, because all of a sudden you add a
Speaker 3: guy like me talking to a guy like George Tennant,
Speaker 3: you know, and you could only imagine that George taking
Speaker 3: advice from a GS fifteen versus taking advice from Sis four,
Speaker 3: five and six, advice that is well formed, well studied,
Speaker 3: well wrung out, well read teamed, and all you got is,
Speaker 3: you know, opinions from a wellspring of opinion GS fifteen.
Speaker 3: You know, who thinks that he knows everything is to
Speaker 3: know that's useful for the director, you know kind of thing.
Speaker 3: And the same thing happened when I was chief and
Speaker 3: station in Iraq, conversations with the Leon Paneta, for example,
Speaker 3: when he was the director and Leon's deputy, you know.
Speaker 3: And so that shortening of the chain of information and
Speaker 3: the chain I guess, well is it? You know that
Speaker 3: that Air Force colonel created that oodle thing? Right, I
Speaker 3: don't know what to stand for, but you know, at
Speaker 3: least one of those os.
Speaker 4: Decide an act Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: For us, it was act and then engage sometimes uh
Speaker 3: and other times it was where you know, the director
Speaker 3: understood the confidence and the trust and confidence at all
Speaker 3: levels of his chain of command. And and so you know,
Speaker 3: being able to take a phone call from the director
Speaker 3: of the Central Intelligence Agency who's part writer is the
Speaker 3: President of the United States, the pre d and I uh,
Speaker 3: you know that shows that the agency has a trust
Speaker 3: and confidence. Because they didn't have that, they wouldn't have
Speaker 3: been able to shorten that decision making timeline, right, you know,
Speaker 3: because nobody would have allowed a guy like me to
Speaker 3: talk to provide advice and recommendation to senior officers on
Speaker 3: the seventh floors. Yeah, or directly to the d d
Speaker 3: O or to the to the Director of the Counter
Speaker 3: Terrorisms Doug.
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Speaker 4: And then the other thing I want to tell you.
Speaker 1: Guys about real quick before we get back to Doug,
Speaker 1: is our Patreon page. If you guys are interested in
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Speaker 1: of this video or podcast to our Patreon page and
Speaker 1: you can jump on there right now.
Speaker 4: And we really appreciate all the people who support the
Speaker 4: stream absolutely, so Doug, back to you.
Speaker 1: Tell us about you told us that you got pulled
Speaker 1: into Iraq on about a twenty four hour notice.
Speaker 4: Tell us about that experience.
Speaker 3: Well, again, you know, I need I need to full disclosure.
Speaker 3: I'm on the record of having said in public on
Speaker 3: TV and in print in print that I thought the
Speaker 3: invasion of Iraq was the worst foreign policy decision in
Speaker 3: modern American history. It opened it geopolitical tectonic plates that
Speaker 3: we had no idea what we were creating, because we
Speaker 3: had no plan in the notion that we could create,
Speaker 3: you know, pluralistic Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq with all the
Speaker 3: secretarian vicious sectarian fighting, and anytime you remove a brutal dictator,
Speaker 3: you know how the dictators roll very brutally, and you ask, hey,
Speaker 3: you're a dictator, why you got to be so brutal,
Speaker 3: because I'd be dead if I didn't, because I got
Speaker 3: to keep you know, my hands on a pressure cooker
Speaker 3: that lives going to fly right up. So anyway I
Speaker 3: was at the time, I wasn't quite as as I
Speaker 3: didn't have that insight, but I was proud again, you know,
Speaker 3: to be part of the next grand American experiment to
Speaker 3: move American foreign policy and to kind of be part
Speaker 3: of a cog in the new SI machine and the
Speaker 3: next big, big thing that we were doing, which was Iraq,
Speaker 3: and CIA played it. And I don't go through the details,
Speaker 3: but there's probably some people that I give you a good,
Speaker 3: good description of what we faced. But we accomplished an
Speaker 3: awful lot. We were lean main CIA machine in Iraq,
Speaker 3: and it was a bad time in the beginning because
Speaker 3: apparently there were a lot of people there that didn't
Speaker 3: like Americans. You know, there are a lot of Kurds
Speaker 3: and a number of Shia in the beginning were appreciative
Speaker 3: that we removed this brutal dictator. But there are apparently
Speaker 3: a lot of Sunnis who took great offense at our
Speaker 3: removal of Saddam, in our our destruction of the entire
Speaker 3: Sunni socialist socialist system of power and wealth and support
Speaker 3: that existed. And of course the bath party we were taking.
Speaker 3: I have it's a video, but it's it's audio because
Speaker 3: it's at night. We would take when we were first there,
Speaker 3: seventy six indirect fire shots at night at what was
Speaker 3: the American presence inside the Green what would ultimately become
Speaker 3: the Greens On. It was just a gigantic impacteria, seventy
Speaker 3: six you could count them all, from artillery to rockets
Speaker 3: to mortars, and it was just a very very difficult
Speaker 3: time and we were getting hit every every night. And then,
Speaker 3: of course, as the American military presence went from you know,
Speaker 3: from you know, invaders, and I say that in a
Speaker 3: very positive way, not in a negative way, and as
Speaker 3: they consolidated their games and as they were able to
Speaker 3: really start to deal with some of these vets in life.
Speaker 3: Strangely and bizarrely turned to normal where you could actually
Speaker 3: go down on town, you know, along the river and
Speaker 3: actually have some mos goof, you know, in a restaurant. Now,
Speaker 3: you know, the last time we ate in this restaurant,
Speaker 3: you know, thirty days later it was totally blown up
Speaker 3: by a suicide bomber. And that was that was late
Speaker 3: in two thousand and four. I want to say, but
Speaker 3: I considered a rock to be you know again, you know,
Speaker 3: just an opportunity to do a lot, and when we
Speaker 3: were sort of missionary, like I guess at the time
Speaker 3: myself included bringing some kind of better outcome for the
Speaker 3: Iraqi people. Maybe that's naive. I believe that was naive
Speaker 3: and myself at the time. But you know, the American
Speaker 3: soldiers tremendous courage under very adverse circumstances, and particularly as
Speaker 3: the years went on, you know, two thousand and seven hardyre,
Speaker 3: Iraq hard. But we were there again in the early days,
Speaker 3: you know, our natural partners who were there with our
Speaker 3: Natural Partners Special Mission Unit, and of course it was
Speaker 3: Stand the Crystal and who was himself transforming at Jaysak,
Speaker 3: which was the National Mission Force into the premier counter
Speaker 3: terrorism force that we now know and love today. You know, find, fix,
Speaker 3: and finish, and he and his staff battle engineered you know,
Speaker 3: that shortening that that information circle from intel to actioning
Speaker 3: that intel where you pull guys off the objective. And
Speaker 3: many of you know this far better than me, and
Speaker 3: many of you participated in this. You know, where you'd
Speaker 3: be pulling a guy off an objective and you'd be
Speaker 3: interrogating them in the air on the way back. Another
Speaker 3: assault force is waiting to action that before they're even back.
Speaker 3: And so you all of a sudden have one force
Speaker 3: coming back, another force going and and that requires a professional, professional,
Speaker 3: competent lethal choreography that is unparalleled in military experience of
Speaker 3: my view, and it showcases just extraordinary capabilities. And so
Speaker 3: in the end, you know, that was intelligence driven. You know,
Speaker 3: you needed intelligence to make that happen. That was the
Speaker 3: fuel that started that process and it was the fuel
Speaker 3: that kept going. And Jason pioneered a huge amount of that,
Speaker 3: and CIA to our natural partnership, you know, we were
Speaker 3: feeding into that as well. And the CIA presence and
Speaker 3: I'm not going to talk about numbers, but you know
Speaker 3: the CIA presence expanded dramatically, uh interact, and eventually, you know,
Speaker 3: we became the size of what you could argue was
Speaker 3: an ifter brigade, which isn't much for the army, but
Speaker 3: for CIA is an extraordinary investment.
Speaker 4: You were the OPPS chief over there early on.
Speaker 3: I was the OP chief in the beginning, and then
Speaker 3: I was chief of station in eighty nine and ten.
Speaker 3: Got an opportunity to see liberation, to transition a sovereignty.
Speaker 3: And so it's interesting to see, you know, kind of
Speaker 3: those book and experiences, you know, and you know, challenging,
Speaker 3: to say, the least largest usse embyssee in the history
Speaker 3: of diplomacy, and as my CV my bio rip at
Speaker 3: the time, at the time, it was the largest station
Speaker 3: in the agency's history.
Speaker 4: I have I have a ton of questions for you, Doug.
Speaker 4: Some of them you may even be able to answer.
Speaker 3: I'll try.
Speaker 1: You.
Speaker 4: I think you said you were a chief of station
Speaker 4: four times throughout your career.
Speaker 1: What were the unique challenges of running intel, running case
Speaker 1: officers out into a war zone like bag Dad. How
Speaker 1: how did that differ than some of your previous assignments.
Speaker 3: Well, if, for example, if you were a case officer
Speaker 3: in Geneva. You know, one, you weren't likely to get
Speaker 3: killed on your way to an agent meeting. Your agent
Speaker 3: was not likely to be killed while you were meeting
Speaker 3: him along with yourself, and you weren't likely to be
Speaker 3: killed coming back. And that's not meant to disparage traditional
Speaker 3: espionage by any means that it is hard. It's more
Speaker 3: than just meeting a dude, Okay, And you could talk
Speaker 3: about I couldalk about that at length, which would be
Speaker 3: digressive for what you're trying to accomplish here. But the
Speaker 3: reality is we had to take the traditional elements of espionage,
Speaker 3: the trade craft that worked for CIA for generations since
Speaker 3: nineteen forty seven, and we add to it, carefully, adapt that,
Speaker 3: tailor it, and modify it so that we could still
Speaker 3: do the business of meaning human beings and extracting intelligence
Speaker 3: through that meeting without bringing extraordinary risk to that individual
Speaker 3: that is working on bath of the United States subjectives
Speaker 3: and our own officers. And how do you do that,
Speaker 3: because inherently that has to be a non public, very
Speaker 3: secret enterprise and in a non lethal environment in the Genevas,
Speaker 3: you know, in the Paris, you know, blends of the
Speaker 3: world extraordinary counterintelligence pressure. Don't get me wrong with Moscow.
Speaker 3: Impossible to work there. You know, it takes an incredibly
Speaker 3: special officer to do that. I would never be able
Speaker 3: to do that. I was never able. I would never
Speaker 3: be good enough. So I wouldn't have done well in
Speaker 3: the traditional espionage business. But because of my military background,
Speaker 3: because of my counter terrorism experience in CIA, I think
Speaker 3: I was well experienced enough to be a constructive part
Speaker 3: of the adaptive process to figure out how does CIA
Speaker 3: do business without getting people killed and still providing you know,
Speaker 3: valuable and intelligence for the policymaker and actionable intelligence, you know,
Speaker 3: for the war fighter. And so we had to do
Speaker 3: a lot of a lot of adaptation, a lot of modification,
Speaker 3: and kudos to the officers who took those risks when
Speaker 3: we were trying new stuff for the first time. You know,
Speaker 3: you had no idea. I don't say you implying that
Speaker 3: I was part of it. They had no idea that
Speaker 3: they were going to come back from them, right.
Speaker 1: You know, did you feel that your mission over there
Speaker 1: was shifting from the agency's traditional strategic intelligence mission to
Speaker 1: now collecting more like tactical level intelligence, Oh.
Speaker 3: Without a doubt, and that that cause, and that was
Speaker 3: very necessary. Quite frankly, as I, as I told my offer,
Speaker 3: there is all the time, and I reinforced it with
Speaker 3: our colleagues, whether it's in Afghanistan, what is in Bosnia
Speaker 3: for that matter, or in Afghanistan, or in Rock or
Speaker 3: in serially, you know, I said, job one is forced protection.
Speaker 3: Keeping American soldiers alive is job one. Everything else it
Speaker 3: is totally subordinate to that top priority. We will spare
Speaker 3: no effort to keep American women and men alive. That
Speaker 3: is a sacred obligation and we must do that. That
Speaker 3: is job one. Nothing else going to be done. The
Speaker 3: second priority ends up being providing the intelligence so that
Speaker 3: our military partners could smoke on the battlefield those that
Speaker 3: are creating the force protection issues that we were trying
Speaker 3: to mitigate. And so job one force protection, job to
Speaker 3: actionable intelligence to the warfright. Then, of course, CIA, unlike
Speaker 3: you know, our military colleagues that are very focused on CT,
Speaker 3: very focused still going uh. You know, we had the
Speaker 3: broader rate broader we had to worry about the stability
Speaker 3: of Iraq. We had to worry about Iraq, we had
Speaker 3: to worry about Saudi Arabia. We had to worry about
Speaker 3: the golf Arab States, We had to worry about the
Speaker 3: third country presence there. And even though Bagdad was an
Speaker 3: incredibly challenging environment, there were still other embassies that were there,
Speaker 3: and other diplomats, and they all played a role in
Speaker 3: either helping us or impeding us, and so we had
Speaker 3: to pay attention to them and had to engage them.
Speaker 3: And so the broad, incredibly complex and diverse mission that
Speaker 3: cias everywhere and every place that it is was complicated
Speaker 3: and made more existential by job want to jump to
Speaker 3: and that required a very special structure, a very special culture,
Speaker 3: and more importantly, some just extraordinary women and men who
Speaker 3: were really who volunteered to come out to that kind
Speaker 3: of environment. You know, thrived in most cases in that
Speaker 3: kind of environment. And it really says a lot about
Speaker 3: you know, those young and often inexperienced CIA officers who
Speaker 3: I hold in the highest of regard because they volunteered
Speaker 3: to get involved in something that they had absolutely no
Speaker 3: idea what the con personal consequences were. I think as
Speaker 3: soldier kind of recognized we expect that you kind of
Speaker 3: expect that, right and and uh and and but in
Speaker 3: in CIA, because you know, we didn't train for war, right,
Speaker 3: we didn't train for war, and and not not you know,
Speaker 3: not a major portion of c I A, you know,
Speaker 3: got the Afghan experience. So there were officers rogered up
Speaker 3: to leave family, single moms, single parents, single officers, married officers,
Speaker 3: huge families, small families, you know, elder care issues, you know,
Speaker 3: all of the obligations of life. And these remarkable officers
Speaker 3: were willing to set that aside, to undertake a task
Speaker 3: and put themselves into an environment that they had absolutely
Speaker 3: no conscious appreciation for it. And it was such a
Speaker 3: dynamic and unpredictable environment that you could think that this
Speaker 3: neighborhood of Bank Dad was actually pretty safe, and then
Speaker 3: you find out that ussed wrong, you know, because it
Speaker 3: changed literally last minute. And so I sit and just
Speaker 3: hold in the highest regard. I obviously hold my military
Speaker 3: colleagues in extraordinary high regard, and that goes without saying.
Speaker 3: But you know our CI officers, and what's interesting, I mean,
Speaker 3: you think you had an EFTRA brigade size investment in Okay,
Speaker 3: and I had a SUB I had like the twelfth
Speaker 3: largest air force in the world. I had everything from
Speaker 3: you know, shall we say traditional CIA authorities. And what
Speaker 3: else say euphemistically is non traditional military authorities always say
Speaker 3: aggressive authorities, which we used in times when our military colleagues,
Speaker 3: by policy, were precluded from exercising, you know, their own
Speaker 3: aggressive authorities, shall we say. And you know that was
Speaker 3: a large number of officers that were there that you know,
Speaker 3: that adapted and they learned, and they worked together, and
Speaker 3: they were sharing the mission with their own colleagues, and
Speaker 3: they were sharing the mission with their military conart and
Speaker 3: they were committed each other's success. And I know I
Speaker 3: sound like I'm a Polyannish guy and I'm over exaggerating.
Speaker 3: And for those that haven't had that EXPERI I understand
Speaker 3: why you'd probably think I'm being a little traumatic. But
Speaker 3: I can't begin to tell you that I don't think
Speaker 3: I'm exaggerating very much. If I am, it's not by intent,
Speaker 3: but it's just I don't know.
Speaker 2: I'm curious about you know, your because and this is
Speaker 2: sort of fast forwarding a bit to ask you to
Speaker 2: reflect on something that you may have thought while you
Speaker 2: were there at a future day. But you did eventually
Speaker 2: become the deputy director of the d i A. The
Speaker 2: d A was very active, but also the DEA doesn't
Speaker 2: get much credit for anything at all, really, but they
Speaker 2: were very active there in Baghdad, particularly in those early
Speaker 2: years and everything, being at the station and being being
Speaker 2: the big dog of the intelligence world, as you know,
Speaker 2: as the CIA is. What did you have an impression, awareness,
Speaker 2: and knowledge opinions of the D I A presence there, Uh,
Speaker 2: the d.
Speaker 3: I mean obviously there wasn't. The answer was, strangely yes,
Speaker 3: I had a positive view of the military, irrespective of
Speaker 3: what part of the Defense Department you came from. So
Speaker 3: I was predisposed to look for the positive and maybe
Speaker 3: that maybe it didn't make me unique, but it may
Speaker 3: put me in a select part of I think the
Speaker 3: CIA workforce. Second was, you know I had found in
Speaker 3: my formative experience with the power Majesty of the d
Speaker 3: D was in Bosnia, where I had a major defense
Speaker 3: human Defense case officer operator presence there, all of whom
Speaker 3: had gone through the formative same formative experience operational certification
Speaker 3: experience that we CIA officers went through in the same
Speaker 3: location actually with a shared gagery of trainers and educators,
Speaker 3: and in the same environment against the same task so
Speaker 3: we were virtually identical life forms and so we're now
Speaker 3: serving together. So I had an extraordinary positive. Plus, there
Speaker 3: was significant defense human separate presence there. There was a
Speaker 3: strategic base that they had to and then there was
Speaker 3: this thing I think called Eskimo Base that was there
Speaker 3: that was doing their thing, and the inmacy and cooperation
Speaker 3: was absolutely important. And I think any of those base
Speaker 3: chiefs would tell you that CIA was a really good
Speaker 3: partner because we really respected their capabilities and what we did.
Speaker 3: I carried that and so yes, there was a DIA
Speaker 3: presence in the rector was right across the street at
Speaker 3: FOB Union three, if I recall correctly, and I would
Speaker 3: go all there all the time as a CIA station
Speaker 3: chief of that with a major amount of presence, a
Speaker 3: massive diversity of responsibilities. Investing my time was an expression
Speaker 3: of what I thought was valuable, right right. I went
Speaker 3: over to that little detachment almost every day. Wow, and
Speaker 3: I had developed as close a partnership and interestingly enough,
Speaker 3: that detachment was not just what you and I now
Speaker 3: call Defense Glandestine Service defense human that they were all.
Speaker 3: They were actually uh you know, Naval Criminal Investigative Service,
Speaker 3: you know agents that were in there. There were agents
Speaker 3: from other federal law enforcement who themselves to source operations. Right,
Speaker 3: maybe they don't use the same trade craft in the
Speaker 3: same kind of environment, but they were also out there,
Speaker 3: you know, putting themselves at risk to provide intelligence. And
Speaker 3: of course, being the quote the d n I REP,
Speaker 3: you know, the Defense the Director of National Inteligence Rep,
Speaker 3: the senior intelligence officer in Iraq, MY job was to
Speaker 3: integrate and coordinate. So yeah, I had an obligation to
Speaker 3: make sure I gathered all the intel guys, you know,
Speaker 3: under my warm embrace. But the reality is I did that,
Speaker 3: whether I was required to do that or not, because
Speaker 3: I really thought that those those women and men over there,
Speaker 3: we're bringing some significant value to what we're trying to
Speaker 3: accomplish in our our compound. So yeah, DIA was there
Speaker 3: in space, and you're right, d I A doesn't the credit.
Speaker 3: It's the part of that Stuart's positioning in the political
Speaker 3: battle space. But the IC in Washington, d C. Part
Speaker 3: of that's due because of just the necessary obligations of
Speaker 3: secreceed and part of that's because they just don't have
Speaker 3: the prominent infrastructure for collection. I think everybody's probably heard
Speaker 3: of military ad tche so every one of them works
Speaker 3: for the director of di A. They're all dias, Okay,
Speaker 3: So the defense at say, service works for the director
Speaker 3: of d You know, some people know that, some people don't.
Speaker 3: But everybody's heard of military ada chet. Probably very few
Speaker 3: people have heard of the defense Clint. Fewer still because
Speaker 3: they toil away and anonymity to a degree which is
Speaker 3: imposed on them, but it's a very necessary part so
Speaker 3: they can be effective. So yeah, they don't get the
Speaker 3: credit they deserve. And there are remarkable officers and de
Speaker 3: I as an inherently an all source analytic agency, and
Speaker 3: that's what the culture India is. It's designed to support
Speaker 3: the analytic machine and the purity of the analytic processes
Speaker 3: within d i A. So it it does have a
Speaker 3: very analytic you can smell, you know, it's very analytic
Speaker 3: smell in the enter of the building, joking, but you
Speaker 3: can smell it when you have the building.
Speaker 1: So, I know, we're kind of just hitting the wavetops here, Doug,
Speaker 1: and I know we're probably gonna have to have you
Speaker 1: back again on some time because we're glossing over so much.
Speaker 1: But what came after Iraq for you? After you know,
Speaker 1: twenty ten, well.
Speaker 3: After Iraq, the Director of Operations thought that the best
Speaker 3: place for me to take my multiple years as a
Speaker 3: COS multiple times a CS. And I should say for
Speaker 3: your audience that may not be as familiar with the
Speaker 3: CIA structures as some of us are. You know in
Speaker 3: the director and first thing is you know in the
Speaker 3: Director of Operations, I would guess probably you know less
Speaker 3: than a quarter operators get to be a CS one time,
Speaker 3: and with me having the privilege and the honor to
Speaker 3: be a four times extraordinary, it says more about the
Speaker 3: agency's risk taking than it does about my competency. But
Speaker 3: I think that the Deputy Director of Operation time guy
Speaker 3: named Mike Silik, who was a consultant for the for
Speaker 3: the Americans and wrote a book about the Russian intel
Speaker 3: operations in the United States. Great guy, former marine is
Speaker 3: the anything I could say bad about him? Uh via
Speaker 3: Harvard Graduate Vietnamese linguist if you can believe that marine interesting,
Speaker 3: Mike is an amazing.
Speaker 2: Guys do the Vietnamese have Yeah?
Speaker 3: And uh yes, so uh so Mike decided that you know,
Speaker 3: whatever it is that I represented, uh, that he needed
Speaker 3: that as part of the you know, the training machine.
Speaker 3: So uh, you know, the agency has not allowed me
Speaker 3: to use the F word, and I'm not talking about
Speaker 3: you know the other F words. Training.
Speaker 4: Training, the next generation of spies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, training, Yeah, training. I was in charge of all
Speaker 3: operational training for at an undisclosed location. But you know,
Speaker 3: Mike thought that I had a contribution to make him
Speaker 3: growing the next generation of me and UH and to
Speaker 3: be able to do that, you know, at our facility,
Speaker 3: it was a singular honor. And given my blue collar
Speaker 3: perception I was, I was kind of a fish out
Speaker 3: of water. I felt very out of water. Well, I
Speaker 3: was there because I just didn't still you know, here
Speaker 3: I am an SIS three or four, you know. Now,
Speaker 3: you know it was at twenty and ten. You know,
Speaker 3: I'm now from nineteen eighty seven to two thousand and
Speaker 3: ten at that much time in the agency, and I'm
Speaker 3: still you know, I wasn't acting like it, but I
Speaker 3: certainly believed it. You know, I still wasn't worthy of
Speaker 3: this kind of opportunity. I really didn't think I was worthy.
Speaker 3: And maybe there are others that would I agree with
Speaker 3: that as well, But you know, that was a wonderful
Speaker 3: opportunity to kind of go back and see how you know,
Speaker 3: the big the big training machine worked and you know,
Speaker 3: to be an advocate, to be a champion, to be
Speaker 3: able to take credit for you know, the training cadret
Speaker 3: of both former officers as well as current officers, military
Speaker 3: accomplished military officers, and I should say other non military,
Speaker 3: NONKAY members of the leadership and training cadret as well,
Speaker 3: who themselves were graduates of that program. So it was
Speaker 3: a wonderful opportunity for me to really reconnect with the
Speaker 3: basics of espionage and and really realize, hey, how much
Speaker 3: I failed to learn and how much I had learned
Speaker 3: but forgotten. Yeah, and so for me, it really as
Speaker 3: I think anybody who was an instructor you know at
Speaker 3: that location, we'll tell you they came out of that
Speaker 3: as a much better operator than they did going into
Speaker 3: that assignment.
Speaker 2: Had there been many changes from the time you went
Speaker 2: through to the time that you you worked there, or
Speaker 2: did they really hold on to that core?
Speaker 3: The certification for case officers is predominantly unchanged because quite frankly,
Speaker 3: it's all about the fundamentals. And so even if you
Speaker 3: know your instructor was a retired officer who spent his
Speaker 3: or her career in Eastern Europe and in Moscow, and
Speaker 3: had no exposure to Afghanistan, rock coin, CTC, none of that. Fundamentally,
Speaker 3: you can't be a good CTC officer unless you understand
Speaker 3: the basics of espionage. And that's where you learn it.
Speaker 3: And yes, there are adaptations there. There are always improvements
Speaker 3: to the course as you would expect, you know, interjection
Speaker 3: of modern technology, because that was critical and important for
Speaker 3: officers to understand the benefit. It's the risk of technology.
Speaker 3: And what you found is down in those in those locations,
Speaker 3: you found you know, the record of science and technology,
Speaker 3: presence and training and graduate level, you know, courses. You
Speaker 3: found the rector of analysis. So all of a sudden
Speaker 3: you find in that environment, in close geographic proximity, all
Speaker 3: of a sudden you find the other tribes that are there.
Speaker 3: And then after I left that location and became the
Speaker 3: Grand Puba, I was the you know, the Emperor Palpatine
Speaker 3: of the entire training machine. Uh. You know, we tried,
Speaker 3: we built a greater integration from a visionary standpoint, you know,
Speaker 3: even more integrate and better integrate and develop better appreciation
Speaker 3: for the different life forms within the doos, some of
Speaker 3: which you mentioned, Uh, you know, targeters, cmos, you know
Speaker 3: support officers all of that, and I only you know,
Speaker 3: kind of kicked that rock down the hill. I fought
Speaker 3: the visionary battle. But it was you know, guys like uh,
Speaker 3: you know, Darryl Blocker, who's who's an over officer, Mike
Speaker 3: Lacombe who was a multiple COS in Iraq, who had
Speaker 3: been my d c O S when I was there.
Speaker 3: There were guys like like Lacombe who really really made
Speaker 3: the transformation of that entire you know, operational training enterprise
Speaker 3: to be a modern one, to reflect the demands of
Speaker 3: the environment in which modern CI officers were finding themselves.
Speaker 3: And so, you know, my role was minor, and it
Speaker 3: was and it was interesting. If I could go back
Speaker 3: to something I said is you know what I did
Speaker 3: was created a vision where you come in entry on
Speaker 3: duty and you go to graduated leadership and operational development
Speaker 3: process until you ended up as a as a proto
Speaker 3: wretched pensioner at the end of the ride. And there
Speaker 3: were some CIA officers who are quite you know, you know,
Speaker 3: impervious to and insoluble and new ideas. Fortunately minority. You know,
Speaker 3: I had conversations like this, which is where that's not
Speaker 3: going to work. And I go why not. And they go, well,
Speaker 3: because it's not. It's just not gonna work. We don't
Speaker 3: have time, we don't need any of that, and it's
Speaker 3: not gonna And I said, what's the fundamental objection? And
Speaker 3: they would go, well, well, let me not object let
Speaker 3: me just say this. Let me go. You're a military guy, right,
Speaker 3: isn't that where you can I go, yes, sir, And
Speaker 3: I go, yeah, that's a military thing. That whole thing,
Speaker 3: that whole thing from basic course to advanced course, to
Speaker 3: leaven Worth to the work College, you know, all of
Speaker 3: that stuff. It's a military thing that's not us. So
Speaker 3: going back to my conversation in nineteen ninety two on
Speaker 3: you know, this non existent process of military leadership versus
Speaker 3: CIA leadership, now I'm facing that, you know, you know,
Speaker 3: as a very senior officer in the Director of Operations,
Speaker 3: I thought it was very ironic. The good news is
Speaker 3: that their vision didn't take the day. It was guys
Speaker 3: like Blocker and Mike Lacom and others who followed them
Speaker 3: that really made it happen and created a fully integrated
Speaker 3: program that you know, is still under improvement every day
Speaker 3: that that thing exists.
Speaker 1: This is a little spicy but you were also a
Speaker 1: senior guy during a time where the agency had some
Speaker 1: pretty spectacular public successes and failures. You had the the
Speaker 1: Biladen raid, you had been Ghazi happening, you're the director
Speaker 1: stepped down. I was just curious, if you're from your perspective,
Speaker 1: if you had any insights into sort of the internal
Speaker 1: dynamics of what was happening in the agency as those
Speaker 1: events kind of unfolded in a very public way.
Speaker 3: Any institution that's going to be buffeted around by anomalous
Speaker 3: behavior by the environment, outside forces, and certainly by behaviors
Speaker 3: of individual officers, whether they're junior officers or senior officers.
Speaker 3: But the agency's got a resilience that is is just
Speaker 3: another another example of why it's such a remarkable institution.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: When you have a number of very public incidents like
Speaker 3: the one you mentioned, one you didn't mention was the
Speaker 3: you know, the leaking of the IG investigation on a
Speaker 3: detention program.
Speaker 4: The RDI.
Speaker 3: That RDI, Yeah, that was quite controversy controversial, and I
Speaker 3: remember that.
Speaker 1: Diane Feinstein was publicly saying that the CIA was going
Speaker 1: to be disbanded over.
Speaker 3: That Californian What can you say, Uh, you know, no,
Speaker 3: just no disrespect to the fine people of California. We
Speaker 3: need California because you know, for various reasons. But the
Speaker 3: liberal thought it just happens to be one in Hollywood
Speaker 3: might be another Silicon Valley. But the politicians, you know,
Speaker 3: Devin Ninyas and others not not so helpful. Uh But
Speaker 3: I don't want to get political here. But the it
Speaker 3: really is because of the strength of the agency workforce,
Speaker 3: you know, the commitment to not only American core values,
Speaker 3: but also the agency ethos. You know of being right
Speaker 3: when nobody's looking at you, whether you are being right,
Speaker 3: you know you're doing the right thing when nobody's looking thing.
Speaker 3: And so you kind of you know that stuff's going
Speaker 3: to happen. You can't plan for it. You just plan
Speaker 3: for an existence of some negative thing, and you know,
Speaker 3: you just get beyond it. You got to get through
Speaker 3: all that. And because the agency officers, you know, the
Speaker 3: women and men regardless of the tribe you know, and
Speaker 3: in the agency are just so remarkably resilient. You know,
Speaker 3: there are remarkable people throughout federal service who are who
Speaker 3: are remarkable. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that
Speaker 3: the only remarkable stuff that exists in federal service is
Speaker 3: in CIA. You know, the personal side of me wants
Speaker 3: to say that, professional side say that, but the reality
Speaker 3: is it's the strength of the and the caliber and
Speaker 3: the quality of the people and the leaders in CIA
Speaker 3: that make it so resilient and we get through that stuff,
Speaker 3: whether it's Durham investigating guys like me and others, whether
Speaker 3: it's you know, all the things that you mentioned, whether
Speaker 3: it's rd I, whether it's you know, traitorous behavior by
Speaker 3: by respected colleagues. You know, Jim Nicholson was a branch
Speaker 3: chief in CTC when I was there, you know, and
Speaker 3: he of course was recruited by the KGB. And you know,
Speaker 3: it's just to answer your question, it's the the strength
Speaker 3: of the agency's officers and the strength of the culture
Speaker 3: and in the commitment to do what's right. You know,
Speaker 3: we get beyond that. We just say, Okay, this happened,
Speaker 3: let's fix the agency and let's move forward.
Speaker 2: Well, the agency is also sort of in this unique
Speaker 2: position where if there is somebody if something goes wrong,
Speaker 2: or if somebody does something wrong that like the agency,
Speaker 2: there failure is whether it's organizational or individual or mistakes
Speaker 2: or whatever get broadcasts, but none of this successes ever
Speaker 2: really get recognized. So it's easy for the public. It's
Speaker 2: easy to paint this very dark picture of this shadow
Speaker 2: organization when all you hear about it is the things
Speaker 2: that don't go right, you know.
Speaker 3: And I think that's an excellent comment that that is.
Speaker 3: That's the most important thing actually that's been said during
Speaker 3: this podcast today is that question and the reason, and
Speaker 3: it really gets to the heart of why you and
Speaker 3: your platform exist, right why the teamhouse exists because all
Speaker 3: of the professionals that you have is as speakers, we
Speaker 3: all come from that underappreciated, under understood community, and so
Speaker 3: you give us an opportunity to appropriately explore and help
Speaker 3: to educate and help to spell mythology. And he wrote misperception.
Speaker 3: And that's why I'm telling you a lot of my
Speaker 3: very traditional minded CIA colics, probably a number of current
Speaker 3: officers who may be part of your listeners watch it
Speaker 3: on YouTube, might sit and go, you know, I can't
Speaker 3: believe that guy's out there just blabbering away, just yack
Speaker 3: and yack and yac and about stuff. And I think
Speaker 3: I have because I can't, because I'm undercover and because
Speaker 3: that my career represents a decent part of the agency,
Speaker 3: you know, and so I can do my part and
Speaker 3: taking advantage of your kind invitation and and be able
Speaker 3: to speak and be part of this incredibly respected enterprise
Speaker 3: known as Teamhouse podcast. Uh, and so being able to
Speaker 3: you know, be a little more transparent with the American people.
Speaker 3: Well he wrote what you said, Dave. You know, and
Speaker 3: and current officers can't do, you know, because they because
Speaker 3: there's stuffs too secret. But former officers like me can
Speaker 3: give our opinions and our perceptions and and and to
Speaker 3: talk about you know, the you know, in very general terms,
Speaker 3: you know, the magic that makes CIA so remarkable. And
Speaker 3: in the end, as I've said multiple times at nauseum, look,
Speaker 3: the magic is because of the magicians and CIA, you know,
Speaker 3: and all of those women and men, all those officers,
Speaker 3: you know, our magicians in every.
Speaker 4: Way shape you make it sound like Disneyland, Doug.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well we have a couple of goofiest. You know.
Speaker 3: He retired to he retired to New Mexico.
Speaker 2: So, uh, you know, did you did you see a
Speaker 2: shift in agency culture or the PRB where where we're
Speaker 2: where it started to become okay for guys once their
Speaker 2: covers were rolled back to to publicly speak because you
Speaker 2: know that it I don't know if it was ever
Speaker 2: a rule, but it sort of wasn't acceptable.
Speaker 5: For a very long period of time that you early
Speaker 5: early on you know, we we as you well know,
Speaker 5: and you mentioned we sign on entry on duty a
Speaker 5: lifetime obligation for pre publication, review of any any prepared remarks,
Speaker 5: any document, any publication or if in fact you had
Speaker 5: rendered to me.
Speaker 3: All of the questions you were going to ask me,
Speaker 3: I would have had to write up an answer sith that, okay,
Speaker 3: we all sign up for that. It's burdensome, it's real
Speaker 3: painting about. And where the frustration came from is because
Speaker 3: the agency didn't live up to its side of the obligation, okay,
Speaker 3: and the agency would sludge it up that they found
Speaker 3: something that was they was unappealing, and they had amateurs
Speaker 3: that were doing it. They didn't have a system. And
Speaker 3: I'm not denigrating, you know, the earlier generations of those
Speaker 3: suffering officers that served in the PRB, but the reality
Speaker 3: is nobody had ever put any serious systemic, any time
Speaker 3: and attention into creating a system that allowed the agency
Speaker 3: to live up its side of that that obligation, and
Speaker 3: then what would happen inexorably when the agency didn't. They
Speaker 3: should have guys and galas who would just say, you know,
Speaker 3: screw up. I'm not a publisher anyway, what are they
Speaker 3: going to do? I'm out of the agency. They got
Speaker 3: to fire me. I don't have a clearance. You know,
Speaker 3: what can they do? I don't I don't work for
Speaker 3: the agency. I'm not a green badger. You know what
Speaker 3: leverage did they have with me? You know, some federal
Speaker 3: prosecutor are going to prosecute me for publishing the you know,
Speaker 3: a document and the stife for brief. You know that
Speaker 3: they didn't clear with the PRB. You know, no, they
Speaker 3: the agency has very little options when it comes to
Speaker 3: those of us on the outside. It don't live up
Speaker 3: to our obligation. But the agency had to do its
Speaker 3: part to keep us on task because it had to
Speaker 3: create a realistic response. The response was pathetic in the
Speaker 3: early days, horrible pathetic. Now it is very crisp. The
Speaker 3: other thing that the agency made a dramatic change is
Speaker 3: in the early days of the previous presidential administration, if
Speaker 3: an officer was to say something that was politically unappealing
Speaker 3: to the White House, the agency would try to wrap
Speaker 3: that up in terms of redacting that as a contingent
Speaker 3: contingency for approval of your document. In the early days,
Speaker 3: the agency's PRB was known as the Pre Publication Review Board.
Speaker 3: Now it's known as the PCR, the pre Publication Classification
Speaker 3: Review Board, because its mandate is to review for classified information,
Speaker 3: not for inconvenient facts and truths and opinions that a
Speaker 3: certain White House administration you know, found to be unappealing
Speaker 3: and was pressuring in the agency, you know, to stifle
Speaker 3: those of us that were exercising our First Amendment rights.
Speaker 3: But again back to my point about how resilient the
Speaker 3: agency is now transformative it can be. It immediately responded
Speaker 3: when that criticism was loving boom, got it right. You
Speaker 3: send something to the PRB. In some cases they will
Speaker 3: turn it around within hours. Wow, they've got they've got
Speaker 3: a chrisp machine. Now. Now, if you're writing a book,
Speaker 3: you know, and and it is a turgent tone, of
Speaker 3: immense number of pages and consists of every boring fact
Speaker 3: about your agency existence from all the e pas except
Speaker 3: for performance awards. You've got all the meetings, you attended
Speaker 3: everything at that and you don't know And so yeah,
Speaker 3: they've got to shot that out to people that actually
Speaker 3: understand where the secrets reside and who are the custodians
Speaker 3: of secret. So there is a little latency in there
Speaker 3: that is very very reasonable and very realistic. But if
Speaker 3: you're writing an article for political magazine or for the
Speaker 3: Cipher Brief, which I think is a great outlet too,
Speaker 3: and if you guys published documents as part of your podcast,
Speaker 3: which I wouldn't recommend you to do, I might stick
Speaker 3: with your business file. You know, you find that the
Speaker 3: PREB was very very responsive. Now they've made some dramatic improvements.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know, you know some former colleagues of
Speaker 1: yours have had to file lawsuits against the agency to get.
Speaker 3: There, Mark a well known attorney.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, I mean, just from our
Speaker 1: own experience interviewing people here on the show who have
Speaker 1: had their books put through PRB, I mean, there is
Speaker 1: a quite a bit of material that they do, let
Speaker 1: you know, former agency employees say publicly, which is uh.
Speaker 4: As you mentioned at the beginning of the show, you
Speaker 4: will probably.
Speaker 1: Never find an I six officer from modern era on
Speaker 1: this show talking because they can't they can't buy a lot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, well you could get them on. But he
Speaker 3: or she would be a foreigner gun wealth officer. Yeah, now,
Speaker 3: I mean would that be a very thin veil? I
Speaker 3: think so. But you know you're right, absolutely right. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and you and you got to give credit with credits, dude.
Speaker 3: That's a tough job. That's a tough job. Suppose I'm writing.
Speaker 3: I suppose I'm making stuff up. I'm writing a book
Speaker 3: about my agency experience, and I talk about you know,
Speaker 3: the agency's you know, development of cold fusion reactors that
Speaker 3: could power to meet the entire global energy needs, you know,
Speaker 3: and and and the pr B Sitstan says, all right,
Speaker 3: it's could that be compartment? Could that be real? This guy?
Speaker 3: You know, I'm making it up? You know. So you know,
Speaker 3: when you when you read fiction and very closely mirror
Speaker 3: the real world, and even in the most naive of
Speaker 3: cases where you make up some bit of trade crafter,
Speaker 3: you make up some technical widget, you know, wizard and
Speaker 3: only Q could love. Uh you may you may not
Speaker 3: even know that there is such a very similar to that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: all of a sudden, there's some SAP some places, right,
Speaker 3: you know, and and then all.
Speaker 1: Of a sudden you find I've seen it on the
Speaker 1: on the military side where there were things, you know,
Speaker 1: factual inaccuracies in the book American Sniper that were called
Speaker 1: out and the authors of the book said, whoa, whoa,
Speaker 1: whoa hold up, This book went through d O D review.
Speaker 1: So d O D who said all this is true.
Speaker 1: It's like, no, they didn't. D O D reviewed your
Speaker 1: book for classified information. They're not a fact check. That's
Speaker 1: not that's not what they're doing. And that's not what
Speaker 1: a c O D review represents of your book.
Speaker 3: And when the per B gives you their response, uh,
Speaker 3: you know that little caveat is is explicit as part
Speaker 3: of the pr B, you know where they sit and
Speaker 3: go you all we reviewed was for for you know,
Speaker 3: embargoed content. We're not we're not validating this. We're not verifying,
Speaker 3: we're not corroborating, you know, at all. And it'd be
Speaker 3: impossible for them to do that quite frankly.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And and the thing is, like we've talked about this before.
Speaker 2: When when some of these uh LARPers, you know, some
Speaker 2: of these people who claim to have been in the
Speaker 2: CIA never were our boy Wayne Simmons, you know, and
Speaker 2: they get to a certain point people are like, well,
Speaker 2: what how come the CIA doesn't call him out? It's like,
Speaker 2: because that's how they retain to dieing ability with with
Speaker 2: people who were. If they were to sit there, if
Speaker 2: they call out somebody who wasn't, but then they don't
Speaker 2: call out somebody who says they were, then what does
Speaker 2: that tell you?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, yeah, they can't get in that business.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the pure bee can't be the truth police, got
Speaker 3: to be the classification police, right, and their remit ends there.
Speaker 3: Uh But you know, bottom line is, I think the
Speaker 3: pure be has come a long way, and it's it's
Speaker 3: it's meeting the needs of those of us, you know.
Speaker 3: I want to get stuff in the public domain as
Speaker 3: part as part of the providing appropriate insight so that
Speaker 3: the American people could be more informed citizens. And that's
Speaker 3: what you're all about. That's what you guys provide this
Speaker 3: remarkable platform for dudes like me, you know, and others
Speaker 3: have done far more. Doug to be able to explain.
Speaker 1: I would love to have you back on the show
Speaker 1: again because we've we've run two and a half hours
Speaker 1: here and We still haven't talked about Ukraine, we haven't
Speaker 1: talked about Cereal, we haven't talked about your time at
Speaker 1: d i A. We haven't talked about your life after
Speaker 1: the agency and becoming a wretched pensioner as you.
Speaker 4: So I would love to have you on again to
Speaker 4: kind of talk a little bit more.
Speaker 1: But I really appreciate your time tonight and kind of
Speaker 1: illuminating all of us to some of these issues, some
Speaker 1: really unique insights.
Speaker 3: I think, well to me, who needs to give you,
Speaker 3: gentlemen thanks as well as the participants in the broadcast,
Speaker 3: you know, both this podcast and the many other stuff
Speaker 3: sort of honor that you've already produced. Again, you know,
Speaker 3: there's no other you know thing that that hasliked this,
Speaker 3: and so it's it was a singular honor for you
Speaker 3: to reach out to me and ask me to come on.
Speaker 2: It's our honor. Like we're just like you said, we're
Speaker 2: a couple of shows who like have some cameras and
Speaker 2: and a YouTube channel of basement and yeah, exactly like
Speaker 2: we We deeply deeply appreciate you know, you and and
Speaker 2: everybody else who agrees to come on and spend a
Speaker 2: Friday night with us. We appreciate all of our viewers,
Speaker 2: you know, people who make this show happen.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: We appreciate our Patreon supporters a little bit more than
Speaker 2: just our regular viewers, but not much, not much because
Speaker 2: they pay the rent. We have a couple of questions
Speaker 2: from from our viewers, uh, speaking of money that we
Speaker 2: we want to get to Jackson, thank you very much,
Speaker 2: He says, what was your experience with the paramilitary uh
Speaker 2: the p m oos like and how much has the
Speaker 2: organization transformed over the course of the G one?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, you know that that's a whole other
Speaker 3: episode right there right if we could, we could discuss
Speaker 3: that and and I think would be useful to have
Speaker 3: more than just one dude on. I think we have
Speaker 3: a little panel.
Speaker 2: Discussion that would be amazing.
Speaker 3: I think to get it to get other, you know,
Speaker 3: other perspectives on that, you know, because you want to
Speaker 3: get a broad view rather than just you know, my narrow,
Speaker 3: myopic view. Uh. One the paramilit to PMO Paramilitary Operations officers,
Speaker 3: which are you know, certified to be case officers to
Speaker 3: handle to develop and handle spies, recruit spies and handle them,
Speaker 3: and to also be able to continue to maintain their
Speaker 3: military skills, because everyone of them had a military background,
Speaker 3: whether it's you know, ten years or whether it was
Speaker 3: a full career, whether you were a traditional you know,
Speaker 3: military officer, or whether you were coming from a special
Speaker 3: mission unit. You know, paramilitary officers bring a unique capability
Speaker 3: to the agency. You combine that with the extraordinary authorities,
Speaker 3: your operational authorities and financial authorities of the agent, and
Speaker 3: you got a tool, a foreign policy tool is second
Speaker 3: to none for the President of the United States. So
Speaker 3: those women are currently serving them the Special Activity Center,
Speaker 3: who are not all of them are p and moos.
Speaker 3: Many of them are just paramilitary experts, if I could
Speaker 3: use that term. I don't know what the term of
Speaker 3: art is.
Speaker 1: I think paramilitary specialists. I think it is a special
Speaker 1: for the Green Badgers at this point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and and uh, you know, I think, you know,
Speaker 3: the combination of all that expertise is extraordinary. The challenge
Speaker 3: with PMOS is you got to maintain your military your
Speaker 3: paramilitary skills, and yet you got to maintain your case
Speaker 3: officer skills. And both of those sets of skills are
Speaker 3: quite perishable. So it is a very tough tough job
Speaker 3: to maintain that because you know, the two years you're
Speaker 3: the deputy chief of station and in some station someplace,
Speaker 3: you know, that's two years somebody else's carrying your rucksack
Speaker 3: and sac. I have always been well by every paramilitary officer,
Speaker 3: whether they're pm specialists or whether they're pmos, I have
Speaker 3: always well or they are an extraordinary enabler, they are
Speaker 3: an extraordinary capability. I have found them to be constant
Speaker 3: professionals in every way. Uh. Yeah. Sometimes they wear ocalice
Speaker 3: inside an embassy and we don't fire at the pants on,
Speaker 3: but we just if somebody comments on that, we just
Speaker 3: tell them they're from this fifth Special Forces Group. I
Speaker 3: don't know any better.
Speaker 2: With their mouths open, they put their elbows on the
Speaker 2: table and.
Speaker 3: I'm obviously I'm obviously kidding. But you know, paramountary offsters
Speaker 3: have been been, I've been I've had an exceptionally positive,
Speaker 3: uniformly positive experience with them. In terms of the transformation
Speaker 3: of the agency, it is uh. I mean, first thing is,
Speaker 3: we we have a totally re engineered and restructured agency.
Speaker 3: Controversial to some degree. I am one of the critics
Speaker 3: of that U but then again I never served under them,
Speaker 3: so I don't open criticize it because who am I
Speaker 3: to criticize something I never experienced. But the agency is
Speaker 3: physically restructured to meet the modern demands on the senior
Speaker 3: agency leadership and on the intelligence requirements of its customer base.
Speaker 3: The agency has created another director, the Director to Digital Innovation.
Speaker 3: That's to reflect, you know, the impact of digital based
Speaker 3: technology in terms of capabilities and threats. So you have
Speaker 3: the Director of Digital Innovation, which in and of itself
Speaker 3: has evolved since its birth in some years ago. So
Speaker 3: that's all changing, and so you know, and the Director
Speaker 3: to Support has mutated in a positive way over time,
Speaker 3: and the Director of Analysis is always so well plugged
Speaker 3: into the customer community and the collect and community kind
Speaker 3: of they're the connective tissue in the bridge. And they
Speaker 3: have evolved in restructure and their training program has kept
Speaker 3: pace with that with modern demands. So the agency of
Speaker 3: the Central Intelligence Agency that I served in is not
Speaker 3: the Central Intelligence Agency today. If I went back, and
Speaker 3: I don't. I've been back four times, one time to
Speaker 3: do a personal meeting with Gina Asport, whom I know
Speaker 3: and admire very well, and it was at the end
Speaker 3: of her ride. The other was for promotion and in
Speaker 3: a medal ceremony. And so it is an agency that
Speaker 3: in some respects I wouldn't recognize. But the commitment of patriotism,
Speaker 3: the capability, competency, the energy, the passion to patriotism, you know,
Speaker 3: it's the same. But the agency is totally different. And
Speaker 3: that's the way it needs to be. It needs to
Speaker 3: be a different agency. And three years from now, the
Speaker 3: kids that are serving in the agency today, I shouldn't
Speaker 3: use the word kid, but now everybody's a kid. You
Speaker 3: guys are kids. They uh, you know, it's it won't
Speaker 3: be the agency that they recognize her. The elements that
Speaker 3: are recognize. The core values that the agency are immutable
Speaker 3: and haven't changed, right, And that's that's the most important thing.
Speaker 2: At his core, it's still the same oss that it
Speaker 2: was like, it's it's still the same people with the
Speaker 2: same desire to serve the country, no matter how that
Speaker 2: service changes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the way you serve the nation and the American
Speaker 3: people has dramatically changed. But you're absolutely right that the
Speaker 3: commitment and the focus on the safety and security and
Speaker 3: the well being and the American people this paramount in
Speaker 3: CIA that will never change, right Yeah.
Speaker 2: Uh, And then uh, I think last comment even as
Speaker 2: any question. Thank you, love Star. We really appreciate it,
Speaker 2: and no questions. Thank you three for your services and
Speaker 2: sacrifice self selflessly given when called upon by your tribe.
Speaker 1: Guys, we will see all of you next Friday with
Speaker 1: Fred Galvin, one of the first MARSOC officers.
Speaker 4: He has a book out about their.
Speaker 1: For Marsocks first deployment to Afghanistan, some of the controversies
Speaker 1: around it.
Speaker 2: So we'll be talking about the controversies. Yeah, big time massive.
Speaker 4: So we'll talk to Fred next Friday.
Speaker 1: Doug again, thank you so much for joining us tonight,
Speaker 1: taking you know, two and a half hours out of
Speaker 1: your Friday evening to speak with us.
Speaker 4: And I'll be in touch.
Speaker 1: I mean, if it's cool with you, I'd love to
Speaker 1: reschedule you again, maybe sometime over the summer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely I would. I would let the trauma of
Speaker 3: what I had to say it.
Speaker 2: It was such an honor, It was such an honor
Speaker 2: for us to have you on it. Really we deeply,
Speaker 2: deeply appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Like, look, you guys are remarkable. I appreciate it very much.
Speaker 3: I look forward to coming back, and we ought to
Speaker 3: do that panel thing sometime in the future.
Speaker 2: That would have been.
Speaker 3: Doesn't have to include me, but I can help you
Speaker 3: field the panel.
Speaker 2: No, that would be amazing and you would absolutely Thank you, tagles,
Speaker 2: thank you everybody, and I have a great night.