Speaker 1: Imagine a government operation, a really specialized one, and the
entire job description, you know, the mission statement they give
the operatives. It's not about stealing secrets.
Speaker 2: Right, not about analysis or recruiting.
Speaker 1: Assets exactly, none of that. Instead the job and this
is coming from a former CIA officer, it boils down
to two just incredibly blunt verbs to killer kidnets to
killer kidnap. That's it. That's the mandate we're pulling apart today.
It's really the story of a moment the CIA changed
fundamentally from a classic intelligence service to well, something much
more kinetic.
Speaker 2: Welcome to thrilling threads. And yeah, the source material we
have for this is it's incredibly focused. It comes from
a really candid conversation with a former CIA officer, John Kerryak.
Speaker 1: He was on the Dolt Official podcast that's right, And.
Speaker 2: Our mission today is to use his first hand account
to peel back the layers on these these incredibly secretive
paramilitary and security units inside the agency, the ones that
operate way outside what you'd can traditional spine.
Speaker 1: And they raised some, i mean some profound questions legally
and ethically about how we fight wars. Now, definitely we're
focusing on the insights Kuriaku brings out in that YouTube video,
the title itself is a hook. The one CIA unit
no one talks about. It just screams classification, layers of secrecy.
Speaker 2: And we're going to get into those layers. This is
you know, this is really for you if you've ever
been curious about that huge shift that happened inside the
CIA right after nine eleven. We need to understand how
military special forces, you know, Seals Delta guys, how they
were brought into a civilian intelligence agency, How completely new
lethal units were created seemingly overnight.
Speaker 1: And the really critical part that moral tightrope, the tension
between national security and well, the rule of law, the constitution.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's try to unpack this. I mean, what
jumps out right away from me, even before the missions themselves,
is just the sheer number of these groups.
Speaker 2: The alphabet soup.
Speaker 1: It's an alphabet soup, exactly. There's this deliberate secrecy, this
confusion around them. We've got the Special Activities Division, Special
Activities Group, Ground Branch, the Global Response Staff GRS, and.
Speaker 2: That alphabet soup. It's not just a bunch of random names.
It's actually it's like a timeline at tracks the evolution
of how the agency thought about direct action and even
just protecting its own people.
Speaker 1: So it's not all the same thing, not at all.
Speaker 2: I mean, Historically, before nine to eleven, the main game
in town for covert action, for the really synthetive stuff
was a Special Activities Division right SAD right, and they
were housed within the Director of Operations the DOO. Their
work was, as these source says in the cover of Darkness,
very traditional, very clandestine.
Speaker 1: But nine to eleven just shatters that old model, doesn't
it the pressure, the immediate need to hunt people down.
It just it creates this explosion of growth in one
particular place, the.
Speaker 2: Counter Terrorism Center the CTC.
Speaker 1: Right, and as we see in Kuriaker's account, the CTC
needed its own muscle, it needed its own way to
take direct action, and that's where the friction starts.
Speaker 2: It's a classic bureaucratic turf war, but with life and
death stakes. The CTC becomes the new center of gravity
for the entire agency, and they want their own dedicated operators.
They don't want to have to ask the DOO for permission,
and that leads.
Speaker 1: To creating these new units, often just out of sheer necessity,
pulling guys over from the military on a temporary basis.
Speaker 2: At first, exactly, but it was also a cultural shift.
The CTC was where the action was and they wanted
control over that action.
Speaker 1: And the story Kiriaker tells about how he even found
out about the Global Response Staff the GRS, it just
feels so telling.
Speaker 2: It's incredible.
Speaker 1: It wasn't some official briefing or a memo. It was
almost accidental, but it signals this huge change inside the agency.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the detail is just fascinating because it shows how
quickly these things were being stood up, sometimes completely out
of view of even veteran case officers like him.
Speaker 1: So how did he find out?
Speaker 2: He says he was dating a woman and her soon
to be ex husband was a GRS officer. She just
casually mentions the acronym.
Speaker 1: He had no idea what it was.
Speaker 2: None. He had to ask her what's GRS, And when
she explained what they did, his reaction was just, oh shit,
they've made it official.
Speaker 1: They've made it official. That's the key phrase right there.
It is It implies that for years, protecting officers in
dangerous places was probably handled by AD hoc teams, temporary details,
maybe marines from the embassy.
Speaker 2: Unofficial arrangements, yeah, yeah, gray areas. But the creation of GRS,
the Global Response Staff, that formalizes it. It creates a
dedicated internal professional fighting force whose only job is to
protect CIA personnel.
Speaker 1: So what was that specific need? Why did they have
to make it official?
Speaker 2: Well, the GRS was stood up specifically for that reason,
dedicated security for case officers, for station chiefs, for anyone
operating in really high thread areas. And you have to
remember the context of those early war zones.
Speaker 1: And the source gives a perfect example of why this
was so critical. He talks about the Green Zone in Baghdad,
which was supposed to be this impenetrable fortress, right the
safest place in a rock, but he says it was
easily infiltrated. Just moving from point A to point B
inside the zone. He says, you were taking your life
into your hands every time you got into a car.
Speaker 2: That's a staggering level of threat. I mean, if you're
not even safe inside the supposed safe zone, you can't
do your job, you can't read sources, you can't gather intelligence.
Speaker 1: So GRS becomes absolutely essential. In Baghdad, in Kabul, anywhere
like that.
Speaker 2: And if you think about their role, it's pure defense.
It's sacrificial. The Source's right to emphasize just how brave
these individuals have.
Speaker 1: To be because their job isn't too attack, it's too shield.
He describes their function as literally to throw your body
in front of the other guy so the other guy
doesn't get killed and can complete the meeting.
Speaker 2: I mean, just think about that. That's the entire job description.
Your purpose is to be the shield.
Speaker 1: It's the complete opposite of a traditional spy mission. It's
all physical, all tactical, all close quarters protection under the
worst possible conditions.
Speaker 2: And he calls it a thankless job, but it's completely
non negotiable. If the agency wants to operate in these places,
it requires this, this incredible commitment and a willingness to
face almost certain danger.
Speaker 1: Which leads us to the people who actually fill these roles.
Because whether it's GRS or Ground Branch or these other
kinetic units, they are not your traditional CIA recruit.
Speaker 2: No, not the Ivy League history major who speaks four languages.
Speaker 1: Not at all. This is what changes the culture of
the agency. These people, as the Source says, come from long,
successful careers in special forces of some sort.
Speaker 2: He lists them out, Navy Seals, Army Rangers, Delta Force,
the absolute elite of the US.
Speaker 1: Military, and their training is not about intelligence gathering. It's
about mission execution, direct action.
Speaker 2: And the way they were brought into the CIA, it
wasn't some neat, orderly process. It really reflects the chaos
of that time, right after nine to eleven.
Speaker 1: How did it work initially?
Speaker 2: At first? In those first frantic weeks, these operators were
often secunded to the CIA, basically loaned out.
Speaker 1: And for our listeners, let's just clarify that term secunded.
Speaker 2: Sure, it means they were temporarily detailed or assigned from
the Department Offense to the CIA. So they were still
technically military, drawing military pay, but their orders and their
mission came from the CIA.
Speaker 1: It's a bureaucratic workaround.
Speaker 2: It's a fast way to get guys with guns where
you need them without going through a long hiring process,
a quick strike capability.
Speaker 1: But that temporary solution couldn't last forever.
Speaker 2: No, as the Global War on Terror became the new normal,
the agency realized it needed this capability permanently in house.
Speaker 1: So Kiriaku describes two paths for these special operators to
join the CIA long term.
Speaker 2: Right. The first path was that many of them just
became official CIA employees. They'd trade their military uniform for
an agency ID in a different set of rules. They'd
go into units like Ground Branch or the ctc's action groups.
And the second past the second path, which he notes
was seen as a much more efficient way of bringing
them on board, was to hire them as contractors.
Speaker 1: So they would retire from the military, often after a
full twenty year career in Delta or Seal Team six.
Speaker 2: And the very next day they'd come back to do
pretty much the same job, but for a private company
that's contracted to the CIA.
Speaker 1: And that detail using contractors for what is basically warfare
that that opens up a whole other can of legal
worms that we definitely need to get into.
Speaker 2: It does, but whether they were an employee or a contractor,
their core skill set was the same direct lethal action.
Speaker 1: And this is where the agency's focus completely solidifies. It's
moved from spying to.
Speaker 2: Paramilitary operations, which brings us right back to that mission statement.
The part of the source material that's just so shocking
because it has no euphemism, there's no bureaucratic language to
soften it.
Speaker 1: This is really the core of our whole discussion today.
Kiriaku gives that blunt, unfiltered definition of the job for
the Special Units.
Speaker 2: The job is to kill or kidnap and render anybody
who might be a threat to the United States to
an American citizen or to an American installation.
Speaker 1: Kill, kidnap and render.
Speaker 2: Now. To be fair, the source does acknowledge the official
high level targets. He talks about the top of the
food chain, going after people who are genuine existential threats, people.
Speaker 1: Like Osama bin Laden. I'm in al Zawahiri right, who he.
Speaker 2: Refers to as the Imanis of the world. It's an
interesting term. Animam is a spiritual leader in Islam, so
he's likely using Imani's as shorthand for the ideological heads
of al Qaeda, and.
Speaker 1: For those guys, the goal was simple, we want them dead.
That's the clean strategic objective. But the source material it
just immediately pivots from that to the dark side, the
ugly reality of what happens when you have these high
stakes operations running so fast with so little oversight.
Speaker 2: The reality that mistakes get made, and.
Speaker 1: These aren't small mistakes. The human cost is just catastrophe.
Speaker 2: The specifics are horrifying, and they really expose the systemic
risk of the whole rendition program. And we should be
very clear what rendition means.
Speaker 1: Go ahead.
Speaker 2: It means people are snatched off the street in one
country and then they're secretly flown rendered to third countries.
Speaker 1: And the reason for doing that, for moving them to
a third country is just chilling.
Speaker 2: It's because those third countries don't have the same legal
rules as the United States. They operate outside the US Constitution,
outside international law. And Kirie kusays the result is the
victims are then tortured in those third countries.
Speaker 1: For a long long time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you have to just absorb the scale of
this failure. He says, this happened repeatedly where the intelligence
service of that host country, the ones doing the torturing
for the CIA, eventually come back and admit, look, this
is the wrong.
Speaker 1: Guy, but only after the person has been tortured mercilessly
for the last nine months.
Speaker 2: Nine months, a merciless torture for a case of mistaken identity.
It's just devastating.
Speaker 1: And this is where that ethical problem becomes a real,
profound conflict inside the US government.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this part of the source material really demands we
stop and think about the legal tyrope. Kirie Kup frames
it perfectly with two opposing viewpoints that really define the
agency's culture. After nine to.
Speaker 1: Eleven, Okay, what are the two sides.
Speaker 2: On one side, you have Jose Rodriguez. He was the
former Deputy director for Operations, famous for ordering the destruction
of the CIA's torture tapes, and Rodriguez is quoted as saying,
you need someone willing to take these guff decisions.
Speaker 1: So that's the operational perspective. It's a kind of utilitarian argument, right,
that these actions, even if they're legally gray or morally awful,
are necessary to protect the nation. The threat is so
big you have to bend the rules.
Speaker 2: That's the argument. The ends justify the means. But Kuriaku,
who represents a more traditional legalistic view, maybe the conscience
of the agency, he pushes back hard against that.
Speaker 1: What's his counter argument as.
Speaker 2: Very clearly that as American government officials, their primary duty
is to live by the rule of law and by
the Constitution period.
Speaker 1: So the implication is that this kill or kidnap mission
as it was being executed was fundamentally unconstitutional.
Speaker 2: That's exactly what he says. His words are just going
out there wantonly murdering people and kidnapping people and tort
from people. That's not upholding the constitution.
Speaker 1: And that's the core conflict, this deep tension between the
perceived need for immediate brutal action and the promise to
uphold the nation's own laws. You're trading one for the other.
Speaker 2: And you see that tension in the operations themselves. He
talks about Ground Branch in the Special Activities Division. When
he thinks of them, he pictures those retired Special Forces.
Speaker 1: Guys, the ex Delta ex Seal Team six operators right.
Speaker 2: Who are essentially hired to keep doing the exact same
missions they did in the military, but now under a
civilian banner.
Speaker 1: And the standard mission for a unit like Ground Branch,
according to the source, is very kinetic, very direct.
Speaker 2: It's the classic raid. He says, put a charge on
a door, blow it open, shoot people in the face,
and leave.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's that's military force. There's no other way
to describe it as just being directed by a civilian agency.
Speaker 2: But then he immediately contrasts that with the other kinds
of things these units do, the more specialized, truly covert
stuff like what he brings up the attempted assassination of
Cold Meshal in Jordan back in ninety seven, where operatives
spray him with poison.
Speaker 1: So it's not just raids, it's everything from kicking down
doors to well chemical warfare. It shows the incredible range
of their mission.
Speaker 2: Set, an incredible and frankly terrifying range, and this new focus,
this new capability. It wasn't a slow change. Kyrieku was
adamant about this. It was a revolution that happened basically
in a single day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's one of the most powerful claims in the
whole interview. He says he saw the agency turn into
a paramilitary organization the day after nine to eleven, not.
Speaker 2: A slow policy shift, not a series of debates. It
was a crisis response that just became permanent.
Speaker 1: And he describes the scene, the actual moment where this
cultural turning point happens. It's just an hour after the
attacks began.
Speaker 2: Koepher Black, who is the head of the CTC at
the time, stands on a chair right outside his office,
looking out over this massive bullpen and the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: He describes, you can just feel the gravity. The whole place,
hundreds of analysts and officers was dead, silent.
Speaker 2: They'd all just watched the towers fall. They knew their world,
their jobs, everything had just changed forever.
Speaker 1: And the message Koepher Black gives them it's not a
strategy meeting, it's a call to arms, a declaration of war.
Speaker 2: He tells him. Today we're at war and we're all
going to have to fight. Not all of us are
going to come home. So if you want to walk out,
now walk out, and no one will think less of you.
Speaker 1: That is an incredible thing to say to your stat It's.
Speaker 2: A clear choice, stay and fight or go. And the result, Kyriak,
who says, was dramatic. Only one woman walked out, just one,
and she faced immediate consequences for it. Her bosses basically
said they'd lost confidence in her and she was removed.
But the point is everyone else stayed, everyone volunteered, and
that transition to a kinetic war fighting organization was locked
in within twenty four hours.
Speaker 1: And the mission changed completely before nine to eleven the
core job was recruiting spies to steal secrets, the slow,
patient work of intelligence.
Speaker 2: After nine to eleven, it became singular, obsessive just about
destroying al Qaeda, destroying it permanently.
Speaker 1: Okay, But here's the part that is really fascinating, and
I think we need to pause on this. It's the
claim about how quickly they actually achieved that initial goal.
Speaker 2: Right. This is a fact that often gets completely lost
in the narrative of the long wars that followed.
Speaker 1: The source material makes this astonishing claim that the core
of al Qaeda, the group in Afghanistan that actually attacked
the US, was destroyed by Christmas two thousand and one,
in a matter of months. Wait, let's break that down.
He cites a study, right, he does.
Speaker 2: He says he's citing a Senate Foreign Relations Committee study
that he thinks probably should have been classified and wasn't,
And that study concluded that by the end of two
thousand and one one there were only twenty five active
al Qaeda members still in Afghanistan.
Speaker 1: Twenty five twenty five people's I mean, that's barely a
platoon after what was supposed to be this massive global organization.
Speaker 2: It suggests that the initial strike, that combination of CIA
and military special forces was unbelievably effective at its stated
short term goal.
Speaker 1: So if that's accurate, what does that mean for the
next two decades of war?
Speaker 2: Well, the source clarifies the new landscape. He says, yes,
you still had the affiliates AQAP and Yemen AQA in
North Africa, the seeds of what would become ISIS, and
of course Bin Laden in the Zawahiri were still alive.
Speaker 1: But the Central Command, the group that hit the Twin Towers.
Speaker 2: As a functioning fighting force in Afghanistan, he says, they
were done by Christmas of one.
Speaker 1: The implication of that is just enormous. It is It
means the huge paramilitary machine that the CIA built in
twenty four hours. It achieved its primary objective almost immediately.
But the machine didn't get turned.
Speaker 2: Off, It didn't dissipate, It just pivoted. It started hunting
the affiliates, maintaining this global counter terrorism posture, even though
the original threat from that core group was well functionally gone.
Speaker 1: And that initial success just fueled the mandate for this
new paramilitary structure that we still see today, which brings us.
Speaker 2: Back inside the building we need to look at the
specific structures that grew out of this, these two competing
special activities units that still.
Speaker 1: Exist right, the structural bifurcation. This is where the bureaucracy
of spying meets the action of war fighting.
Speaker 2: So we already mentioned the Special Activities Division or SAD.
That's the original covert action unit inside the Director of Operations,
the do the old Guard.
Speaker 1: But then after nine to eleven, the Counter Terrorism Center,
the CTC builds its own parallel force, pulling in all
that new military.
Speaker 2: Talent, the Special Activities Group or SAG.
Speaker 1: So what's the difference.
Speaker 2: The SAG was made up of those military guys on
loan to CTC with a very specific mission to to
specifically target terrorists people actively planning attacks.
Speaker 1: And this created tension. The DOO, the traditional home of
the spies, probably saw the CTC as overstepping.
Speaker 2: A massive overstep, creating their own army basically, and Kiriaku
points to some operational differences that highlight this distinction.
Speaker 1: What were they?
Speaker 2: He says, The SAD ground branch site is usually associated
with direct action, the door kicking we talked about, and
also things like high threat protective details. Okay, but the
special Activities guys working for the CTC SAG, they focused
heavily on kidnappings.
Speaker 1: The unilateral capture operation.
Speaker 2: The first step in the rendition program, and that's a
very different skill set. It's about infiltration, surveillance, extraction, and
getting out clean.
Speaker 1: And the logistics he describes for these kidnappings, it just
sounds like something out of a movie. It shows the
extreme risks they were taking.
Speaker 2: It's not a simple arrest warrant. It's an international abduction
from hostile territory.
Speaker 1: Walk us through the process he describes.
Speaker 2: Okay, So he says, these hops often start with the
team parachuting into the target area at night, totally undetected.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Then they have to steal a vehicle, usually a van,
something that won't attract attention while they set up.
Speaker 1: Surveillance and the actual snatch and grab right.
Speaker 2: They physically grab the target off the street, neutralize anyone
with them, and then it's all about speed getting out.
They have to get to a pre planned extraction point
to meet a helicopter or.
Speaker 1: A plane, and then the final step flying.
Speaker 2: The person to wherever it is you're going to fly
him the rendition and he makes a really important point
about where these operations happen.
Speaker 1: They're not happening in easy places.
Speaker 2: No, He's very clear. They aren't snatching people in stable,
friendly places like Dubai or Abu Dhabi.
Speaker 1: He gives examples of like.
Speaker 2: Benghazi or Khartoum or you know, Karachi, some of the
most dangerous chaotic cities in the world.
Speaker 1: And when you lay it out like that, you see
why you need Delta Force or Seal Team six guys
to do it. The number of things that could go
wrong is just astronomical.
Speaker 2: It's why he says the work is inher currently very
very dangerous.
Speaker 1: And moving from the field back to headquarters, the source
gives us this amazing little detail about the culture, the
actual physical space of the CTC where all this was
being planned.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a great anecdote. It really humanizes this massive,
shadowy organization. He gives a very concrete image of the
CTC office as a huge chaotic bullpen with like.
Speaker 1: One hundred and fifty people, analysts, targeters, case officers, all
crammed into cubicles.
Speaker 2: The sheer number of people they threw at the problem
right after nine to eleven was just.
Speaker 1: Overwhelming, and the space was so big. He says they
literally had to name the aisles.
Speaker 2: Right, which is something you only do when a workspace
gets so massive it's like its own neighborhood. He gives
these incredible, grimly funny examples.
Speaker 1: And Laden Boulevard and Hesbla Highway.
Speaker 2: Can you imagine giving someone directions to your desk by saying, oh, yeah,
I'm at the intersection of Bin Laden and whatever. It
gives you this bizarre, frantic sense of scale, a state
of emergency made permanent, and.
Speaker 1: Right in the middle of this giant, chaotic bullpen, you
have the military guys, and they're totally isolated.
Speaker 2: Deeply compartmentalized. The source mentions they were probably working through
something like the OMEGA program, which was a formal structure
for integrating Joint Special Operations Command with the CIA.
Speaker 1: But the cultural isolation is the fascinating part. They're in
the same room as one hundred and fifty civilian analysts.
But Kyriak, who says they never interacted, not even so
much as a good morning.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate example of need to know.
Speaker 1: He said, they would just vanish for a week at
a time, or two weeks at a time, and then
come back whispering to each other and not interacting with you.
Speaker 2: And he says, because of that, because they were so separate,
and because of how they looked, it was pretty easy
to figure out who they were and what they were
up to, even if no one ever said a word.
Speaker 1: Their whole presence was defined by their operational tempo and
their total refusal to integrate.
Speaker 2: And that isolation is tied directly to the extreme secrecy
of their mission. The details of what they were doing,
the logistics, the targets were so secret that even though
everyone in the office kind of knew, you just didn't
talk about it.
Speaker 1: The stakes were too high.
Speaker 2: And that extreme secrecy it has this one final profound consequence,
especially for the men and women doing these high risk jobs.
It's how the agency deals with its own casualties.
Speaker 1: Right when one of these officers is killed in a
covert operation, the public never knows.
Speaker 2: Their name, the circumstances of their death, it's all classified.
They receive a star on the CIA's Wall of Honor
at Langley. It's the highest tribute the agency can pay.
Speaker 1: But the key detail, the thing that hammers home the anonymity,
is what's missing.
Speaker 2: There's no name attached to the sore. It remains anonymous forever,
a silent marker for a silent service.
Speaker 1: And that really underscores the incredible risk and the total
anonymity of what these units do. They are, in a
very real sense, giving up the right to even be
mourned publicly for the work they do.
Speaker 2: It's the final layer of separation between the reality of
the post nine to eleven CIA and the public it's
supposed to be protecting.
Speaker 1: So when we put all this together, what does it
all mean. We've laid out this massive, incredibly rapid transformation
of the CIA. It went from a spy agency to
a paramilitary force. The line between spy and soldier just
got completely erased.
Speaker 2: And we've seen both sides of that coin. We've seen
the incredible bravery, like the GRS operators in Baghdad, literally
willing to die to protect a case officer.
Speaker 1: But we've also seen the dark side, the extreme risks,
the moral failures, the repeatedly wrongful kidnappings, and the merciless
torture of innocent people.
Speaker 2: We've seen how fast it happened. A decision made the
day after nine to eleven that led to the destruction
of core Al Qaeda in Afghanistan by that Christmas a
stunning initial success.
Speaker 1: But that success came at a cost. It meant institutionalizing
this lethal kinetic machine that really challenges the agency's original purpose.
And as Kyrioku argues, the constitution itself.
Speaker 2: And we see the internal conflicts, the turf wars between
SAD and SAG, the insane risks of the rendition operations,
and this culture of isolation for the warriors inside this
s buy.
Speaker 1: House, and that central conflict between immediate security and our
own founding principles. That's really the final thought we have
to leave you with.
Speaker 2: It is we heard Jose Rodriguez's perspective that you need
people willing to make those tough politicians in a crisis,
that extreme threats require extreme responses, and that's the logic
that created GRS, that fueled SAG, and that leads to
those anonymous stars on the Wall of Honor.
Speaker 1: But the source also shows us that implementing that logic
often meant sidestepping the law entirely. It led to what
many Kuriaku included see as a systemic failure of ethics,
a betrayal of the rule of law.
Speaker 2: So the question for you for all of us. Is
this given the very real, very extreme security thread after
nine to eleven, and given the stark moral conflicts raised
by these tough decisions, where do you draw the line?
Speaker 1: Is this highly kinetic, highly secret component doing these kill
or kidnap missions in places like Karachi and Benghazi? Is
that a necessary evil protect the country or does this
kind of covert mandate end up undermining the very laws
and values it's supposed to defend.
Speaker 2: What is the right role for a spy agency when
a nation declares it's at war?
Speaker 1: Let us know what stands out to you from this
deep dive into the thrilling threads of the CIA's most
secret units.