Speaker 1: Special Operations, Coberts Aspionage The Team House with your host
Speaker 1: Jack Murphy and David Bark.
Speaker 2: Hey, folks, welcome to episode one nine seven of The
Speaker 2: Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with our guest today,
Speaker 2: Gary Harrington. Gary had a really incredible career stretching from
Speaker 2: the Marine Corps to Special Forces, to Delta Force to
Speaker 2: the CIA. We're really excited to have him on the
Speaker 2: show today and Gary, thank you for joining us on
Speaker 2: a Monday evening.
Speaker 3: Hey. Thanks, it's an honor. You know.
Speaker 2: I'll start from the top, like we do with most
Speaker 2: of our guests. I'm going to ask you a little
Speaker 2: bit about you know, your your upbringing and sort of
Speaker 2: that path that took you towards military service, if you
Speaker 2: could kind of on your origins.
Speaker 3: My parents were the first of their families to ever
Speaker 3: graduate high school, so my grandparents, none of them ever
Speaker 3: made it out of elementary school. I had one grandfather
Speaker 3: that was a hobo for a while, so when I
Speaker 3: grew up, it was poor. It was poor, poor farmers,
Speaker 3: and my parents were that generation that, hey, we got
Speaker 3: to leave the farm and do something different. My dad
Speaker 3: had served a couple of years in the Air Force,
Speaker 3: and that was the time he met my mom when
Speaker 3: he was home on leave and I grew up. You know,
Speaker 3: it was western North Carolina. As a matter of fact,
Speaker 3: when I was young, we still borrowed my grandfather's mule
Speaker 3: to plow our garden. So, you know, it was It's
Speaker 3: funny because those skills, you know, I still had relatives
Speaker 3: with an outhouse. Those skills came back to served me
Speaker 3: well in SF. You know, when you go live somewhere
Speaker 3: in some other country and you don't have all those facilities.
Speaker 3: But you know, military wasn't talked about a lot. My
Speaker 3: dad just did his two years in the Air Force.
Speaker 3: I married, my mom worked for a telephone company. We
Speaker 3: moved every few years for that. And you know, my
Speaker 3: parents were that generation that struggled real hard to make
Speaker 3: it improve themselves from you know, barely making its meet. Now.
Speaker 3: I can remember when they used to have to go
Speaker 3: to borrow a dollar from my grandfather to make it
Speaker 3: through the week. And we go up there and work
Speaker 3: on the garden and so we could have the garden
Speaker 3: and a hog and a cow helped get us through
Speaker 3: the year. But hey, they kept digging and working, worked
Speaker 3: real hard, living in the American dream and you know,
Speaker 3: we became middle class family, lived in the suburbs, moved around.
Speaker 3: I think I was one of those people that was shy.
Speaker 3: I had a upbringing that probably made I was probably
Speaker 3: not the most self confident person, which later probably fired
Speaker 3: some of my drive and determination to do some of
Speaker 3: the things that I did. But one thing we were
Speaker 3: taught is hard work, and we were taught to take punishment,
Speaker 3: so that that all served me well in the military.
Speaker 3: And you know, I was pretty shy and didn't think
Speaker 3: of anything about going into the military till I was
Speaker 3: in college at a little place called Campbell College back
Speaker 3: at the time up near Fayetteville, and there was this
Speaker 3: one day I was running track. There was this big
Speaker 3: giant marine six foot four V shape officer selection officer
Speaker 3: walking around. He came up to me and I was
Speaker 3: a scrawny, skinny, thick glasses wearing a distance runner and
Speaker 3: he said, Hey, I hear you think you can run
Speaker 3: pretty good. I'm going to challenge you to a decathlon
Speaker 3: and you can pick eight of the events and I'll
Speaker 3: kick your ass. I was like, what, I'll pick all
Speaker 3: the events that I can do, and in the end,
Speaker 3: you know, I got invited to go to the platoon
Speaker 3: leader's course up in Quantico. And you know, I hadn't
Speaker 3: really thought about the military, but I was a smart
Speaker 3: ass and I love challenges. So you know, that guy
Speaker 3: started talking about you ain't tough enough to make it.
Speaker 3: You know, we we exercise real hard, we'd push you
Speaker 3: real hard, and I just don't think you're man enough.
Speaker 3: Well that was all I needed to hear. So you know,
Speaker 3: I said, hey, wait a second, you're telling me I
Speaker 3: can go up there for six weeks. You're gonna give
Speaker 3: me clothes, to where a place to sleep, and you're
Speaker 3: going to feed me, and at the end you're gonna
Speaker 3: pay me like seven hundred dollars. Shit, I'm there. So
Speaker 3: off I went to the platoon leaders course. But you
Speaker 3: know I got there and it was the discipline and
Speaker 3: everything that happened sort of just changed me. I'd been
Speaker 3: an extremely anxious person, and you know, I had an outgoing,
Speaker 3: overt personality to cover up my shyness and anxiety. I
Speaker 3: think in some respects I grew up as like a
Speaker 3: long ranger kind of guy. But the man I admired
Speaker 3: was Tanto, the quiet, silent guy, the guy that my
Speaker 3: grandfather told stories about from his days of hard working
Speaker 3: men and hoboes. So the discipline in the Marine Corps.
Speaker 3: I realized that, hey, I can take more shit than
Speaker 3: most people can take, and I can be better than
Speaker 3: these other people if I take more, so bring it on,
Speaker 3: give me all you got. And it sort of just
Speaker 3: slipped a switch in me and I became a lot
Speaker 3: more outgoing and confident person. And from that day forward
Speaker 3: I wanted to be a marine. And upon graduation of college,
Speaker 3: I got commissioned as a second lieutenant Marine Corps.
Speaker 2: And what year was I thought, you got commissioned.
Speaker 3: In nineteen Well, December of seventy nine. I was one
Speaker 3: of those people that was on a little bit longer
Speaker 3: than normal college course of study, so I didn't finish
Speaker 3: in quite four years. I dropped. I had dropped out
Speaker 3: for a year, and so December seventy nine and I
Speaker 3: began the basic school in early nineteen eighty.
Speaker 2: And where did you? Where did you land in the
Speaker 2: Marine Corps? After getting commissioned and going through the basic course.
Speaker 3: After the Basic and Infantry Officers course, I went to
Speaker 3: Camp Lea June was in first Battalion, Second Marines. Did
Speaker 3: a year as a platoon commander there heard about this
Speaker 3: thing called Ricon and got offered to try out for recon.
Speaker 3: So made it, went to Ricon. Loved that. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: got to go to SF School School, Mountain Climbing School,
Speaker 3: amphib Recon School, Scout Sniper Instructor School. I was the
Speaker 3: second officer to ever make it through Scout Sniper Instructor
Speaker 3: School and that was in nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 2: So this is like the Greenside Recon part of the
Speaker 2: Marine Corps back in those days. And what was going
Speaker 2: on kind of in the world and in the Marine
Speaker 2: Corps at that time, I mean, were these like the
Speaker 2: Libya Bay Root years.
Speaker 3: So I was actually the one of the first, the
Speaker 3: first marine in Beirut in nineteen eighty two. So, you know,
Speaker 3: back in the eighties, let's remember back then, the eighty
Speaker 3: second Airborne was known as the Jumping Junkies, and you know,
Speaker 3: the military, you know, we were all suffering from the
Speaker 3: post Vietnam time, and people looked down on people in
Speaker 3: the military and in the Marine Corps. You know, Marine
Speaker 3: Corps Infantry, it's high diddle diddle straight up the middle
Speaker 3: and there weren't any wars going and you know, I
Speaker 3: I did take a float a team. My team we
Speaker 3: went out on float to Beirut, wound up in Beirut.
Speaker 3: We were supposed to do this nice med cruise where
Speaker 3: you hit ports and have some liberty doing exercise, but
Speaker 3: the moment we got over to the med, we charged
Speaker 3: off to Beyrout and did the squares in the ocean
Speaker 3: until it was time to go into bay route. The
Speaker 3: first time we went was to evacuate the PLO and
Speaker 3: then we went to take some liberty, and then we
Speaker 3: came back after the massacres and the refugee camps to
Speaker 3: start the M and F. And we stayed stayed in
Speaker 3: Beirut till probably November early November of eighty two. And
Speaker 3: we're relieved by the people that ultimately were there for
Speaker 3: the bombing the next year.
Speaker 2: The embassy bombing in eighty three, or Marine Barracks bombing.
Speaker 3: In Marine Barracks bombing in eighty three. Yeah, And you know,
Speaker 3: it's interesting because in that time, you know, I was,
Speaker 3: I was, I don't know, I was an outspoken person
Speaker 3: as a marine officer. I had a mustache, which is
Speaker 3: not you're not supposed to do, but I chose to
Speaker 3: do so. And at one point, I was told to
Speaker 3: move my recon guys because we were covering the beach
Speaker 3: and doing ops, to move into that barracks. And I said, hey,
Speaker 3: this barracks is a sitting target and we're better off
Speaker 3: at being out front and doing observation. A matter of fact,
Speaker 3: if we took everybody off shore and put them on ships,
Speaker 3: we could put marines on rooftops doing ops and accomplished
Speaker 3: the same mission that we're accomplishing now. And I refused
Speaker 3: to move the marines into the into that building. The
Speaker 3: you know, new people came in after that, and you know,
Speaker 3: things changed and they moved into the building.
Speaker 2: I mean, all this correct me if I'm wrong, arey,
Speaker 2: But it sounds like maybe this was a bit of
Speaker 2: a formative experience in the sense that an introduction to
Speaker 2: terrorism against the United States and American personnel, but also
Speaker 2: sort of your future in scouting out locations where you
Speaker 2: know American forces will be housed.
Speaker 3: Yeah it was. I mean, yes, we had no idea
Speaker 3: what terrorism was at that time, and I'd been trained
Speaker 3: in in rifle, platoon and company level tactics, so I
Speaker 3: could apply them. But here we were doing, you know,
Speaker 3: essentially a police force mission, and you know, we still
Speaker 3: did our ops and and did the basics, and but
Speaker 3: it was it was an eye opening experience. And that
Speaker 3: was the first time, you know that I'd been in
Speaker 3: an environment where you actually talked to civilians and mixed
Speaker 3: with civilians and you weren't sure. You know, it's like
Speaker 3: low intensity conflict. Who are the bad guys and who
Speaker 3: are the good guys? Absolutely?
Speaker 2: And then what what after your trip to UH to Lebanon,
Speaker 2: what was sort of the next stop for you as
Speaker 2: a young marine officer.
Speaker 3: Well, I made first lieutenant and while we were on
Speaker 3: that float, I had the honor and this and misfortune
Speaker 3: of being put in a position of commander of troops,
Speaker 3: which is normally a lieutenant colonel on an amphibious ship.
Speaker 3: But we were there, weren't that many of on the ship,
Speaker 3: so I so the captain and I had a very
Speaker 3: strange relationship because I was a first lieutenant and he
Speaker 3: and I used to go at battle each other because
Speaker 3: he'd tell me that he wanted me to order the
Speaker 3: Marines to do this or that, and I would say, no,
Speaker 3: certain things, I'm not going to order the Marines to do.
Speaker 3: And so it was interesting. But I think that sort
Speaker 3: of set the tone. I just had this knack always
Speaker 3: most of my career kind of bucking the command structure somewhat,
Speaker 3: and it was good practice to do that. So we
Speaker 3: came back to Camp Lea June, and you know, by
Speaker 3: time on the team or with the platoon ended, and
Speaker 3: I got moved up to the training office, in which
Speaker 3: I hated. I'm twenty six years old, I'm a distance runner,
Speaker 3: I've been to Scouts, Niper Instructor School, Amphabricon School, SF
Speaker 3: SCHOOLA school. I want to be, like, you know, an
Speaker 3: enlisted guy and fight. And then he said, well, you're
Speaker 3: going to be a trained officer, so I did that.
Speaker 3: Then the bombing of the barracks happened and they were
Speaker 3: getting ready for Granada, and at first they said they
Speaker 3: wanted me to take to take over and take a
Speaker 3: platoon back into Beirut because I had boots on the ground.
Speaker 3: But then I think smartly they decided that wasn't the
Speaker 3: best thing to do to leave the person commanding that
Speaker 3: platoon with his own platoon to do that. So I
Speaker 3: stayed the training officer and eventually found out that oh, hey,
Speaker 3: you've been promoted the captain. Now your time in the fleet.
Speaker 3: Marine Force is over, you're going to go to You
Speaker 3: have two choices, marine barracks Adak, Alaska or Guam. And they said,
Speaker 3: what is marine barracks duty? And they said, well, don't worry.
Speaker 3: You do that for a few years, then you hope
Speaker 3: you come back as a company commander and get some
Speaker 3: command time. Then you go away for staff again, and
Speaker 3: then you can come back in higher command jobs if
Speaker 3: you make the cut. But you know that's not what
Speaker 3: a twenty six year old guy on adventure wants to hear, right,
Speaker 3: So I ended up I resigned my commission and thought
Speaker 3: about other things to do. I actually almost followed the
Speaker 3: route of becoming a mercenary in Nicaragua, and fortunately that
Speaker 3: didn't work out. I think I'm glad now that that
Speaker 3: and ended up being recruited by the FBI and went
Speaker 3: through their process and took their test until I made
Speaker 3: it to the point the final interview where I'm sitting
Speaker 3: in front of three guys wearing suits and they're saying, okay,
Speaker 3: you understand. And this is in the eighties, and it
Speaker 3: was mid eighties, early nineteen eighty four that the job
Speaker 3: of an FBI special agent is more admin than what
Speaker 3: you're used to. And it's a lot of sitting in
Speaker 3: the office and then you have moments where you do
Speaker 3: other things and are you ready for that? And again
Speaker 3: I was happy right that I had been accepted, but
Speaker 3: I looked at these three guys in suits, and I said,
Speaker 3: is that what I want to be doing fifteen years
Speaker 3: from now? And again I didn't think about the future.
Speaker 3: I thought, I don't know. I thought about the adventure,
Speaker 3: and I guess I believe that I had a role
Speaker 3: in life and that was to be in combat. Maybe
Speaker 3: I wouldn't make it out, but I didn't have a
Speaker 3: plan on getting older, retiring, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: So I yeah. In the moment, I accepted and I
Speaker 3: was told, you know, I'd be getting an assignment to
Speaker 3: go to Quantico. But after I went home and thought
Speaker 3: about it, I was say, I can't do this. So
Speaker 3: I called them up and asked them if I could
Speaker 3: get out of going to Quantico, and they said, do
Speaker 3: you know how few guys we can take that aren't
Speaker 3: lawyers or meeting certain requirements during this time in the eighties,
Speaker 3: And I said, I can't help, but that's not where
Speaker 3: my heart is. So I bailed on AT Then I
Speaker 3: went to enlist in Special Forces, went through a map station,
Speaker 3: was in the process of swearing in when an officer
Speaker 3: runs in and says, hey, stop, stop, stop, you can't
Speaker 3: swear him in. And he pulled out a rag and
Speaker 3: he said, here's this one line that says former officers
Speaker 3: of other branches of the military may not enlist in
Speaker 3: the United States Army no way. And I mean, that's
Speaker 3: one of the reasons I bailed on the FBI, right,
Speaker 3: and I thought, holy crap, you know that the rug's
Speaker 3: been pulled out from under What am I going to do?
Speaker 3: But you know, I fell back and I started researching,
Speaker 3: and I found that the Army Reserve didn't have that
Speaker 3: one line regulation in there. So I went to reserve recruiter.
Speaker 3: Then he was like, hey, you're kind of splitting hairs.
Speaker 3: I said, yeah, but do you want to look at
Speaker 3: how you can do it because it's not in your rag?
Speaker 3: Or do you want to look at how you can
Speaker 3: And I said, you're gonna go out there and hire
Speaker 3: some eighteen year old off the street that you don't know.
Speaker 3: Maybe they're a dropout, maybe they're a delinquent. Whatever, I said,
Speaker 3: I've I've proved myself. I have a career, I've got
Speaker 3: a good record, so you know, in the end they
Speaker 3: accept me. And I enlisted in the Army Reserves for SF.
Speaker 3: But to do that you had to enlist in a shortage. Mos.
Speaker 3: So now I'm going to be SF. I'm like, wow.
Speaker 3: I was in recon and I had these guys. They
Speaker 3: were E two's and threes and they had a little
Speaker 3: bit of years experience Special Forces guys. They're East six's
Speaker 3: and East sevens. They've been doing this year is they're
Speaker 3: going to be like ghosts moving through the forest. They're
Speaker 3: going to be like this big you know, it's the ultimate,
Speaker 3: it's everything, and so I uh and I was really
Speaker 3: excited to become a demo guy or a weapons guy.
Speaker 3: That's what we all want to be. And they said, hey, sorry, buddy,
Speaker 3: we got all the weapons and demo guys we need.
Speaker 3: If you want to come in in SF, your choice
Speaker 3: is medic or como and uh, And I thought about
Speaker 3: the one oh fours and the radios we've been humping around,
Speaker 3: and my time in the Marine Corps, and I said,
Speaker 3: I sure as hell don't want to be a como guy.
Speaker 3: So I signed up to be a medic and went
Speaker 3: through the Medic Corpse Q Course, Medic Course, Airborne School
Speaker 3: and wound up in seventh group as a medic.
Speaker 4: Hey guys, Our show is sponsored by ghost Bag. Check
Speaker 4: them out please and make awesome mattresses, awesome los awesome betting.
Speaker 4: Ghostpread provides high quality, is super comfortable, award winning mattresses
Speaker 4: crafted in the US and Canada. Did you know that
Speaker 4: sixty percent of US adults report being too hot when
Speaker 4: they're trying to sleep? That's me, I'm a sweaty little baby.
Speaker 4: That's why we designed all of our products with cooling
Speaker 4: features so you stay comfortable and asleep all night long.
Speaker 4: Pair any of our mattresses with ghost Beds award winning
Speaker 4: adjustable base and get the ultimate sleep experience. Ghost Beared
Speaker 4: rules the family owned business sixty thousand plus five star reviews.
Speaker 4: They have sleep experts on staff with twenty plus years
Speaker 4: of experience. If you have any questions, you can hit
Speaker 4: them up and ask them, you know, maybe what kind
Speaker 4: of mattresses work for you. Twenty plus year warranty that's
Speaker 4: two times the industry standard. Free shipping and returns on mattresses.
Speaker 4: Most of the products ship out within twenty four hours.
Speaker 4: They have in house customer support and sleep actress sleep
Speaker 4: experts Chilling in Plantation, Florida. It rules, it's the best.
Speaker 4: They give you one hundred and one night's risk free
Speaker 4: to make sure that these beds are right for you.
Speaker 4: If you don't like it after one hundred and one nights,
Speaker 4: you could send it back full refund. When you purchase
Speaker 4: a ghost bed mattress, you're comfort guaranteed. I'm reading it
Speaker 4: right now, and it's capital letters guaranteed. Okay, they do
Speaker 4: the right thing and they're a great company.
Speaker 3: If you're not.
Speaker 4: Sure which ghost bed's right for you, like I said before,
Speaker 4: you could take you could take their mattress quiz online
Speaker 4: or you can give a call to one of their
Speaker 4: sleep experts and they'll help you with exactly what you
Speaker 4: possibly could need, what works for you, and what doesn't.
Speaker 4: And the best news about this is teamhouse listeners and viewers.
Speaker 4: You get an extra ten percent off sitewide for a
Speaker 4: limited time. You just go to ghostped dot com slash
Speaker 4: house and use the code house at checkout one more time.
Speaker 4: That's goosped dot com slash house with the code house
Speaker 4: ho u se at checkout for an extra ten percent
Speaker 4: off site wide. I want to think go sped are
Speaker 4: there continued support. I want to thank all the fans
Speaker 4: that listen and watch for their continued support. Without you, guys,
Speaker 4: we are nothing. So thank you for supporting the show,
Speaker 4: and thank you for supporting the companies that help support
Speaker 4: the show. Go spad dot com slash house for ten
Speaker 4: percent off, made in the US, made in Canada. Shout
Speaker 4: out to our brothers in Canada.
Speaker 3: They rock. Check them out. I love ghost Bed. Thanks guys.
Speaker 2: So Gary, you hit the ground in seventh group, and
Speaker 2: I mean, is it what you were looking for? What
Speaker 2: you were expecting.
Speaker 3: To some extent, you know, going through the Q course,
Speaker 3: I was surprised how everybody kept saying, listen to the rangers.
Speaker 3: Follow a ranger, do what a ranger does. And I
Speaker 3: was like, to be honest, I love rangers. They're great.
Speaker 3: But my training in the basic school, the Officer Infantry
Speaker 3: course and the Recon school and FID Recon school, we
Speaker 3: were really really good at patrolling, so I'm not sure
Speaker 3: I'd learned anymore, but applied all those skills, so it
Speaker 3: was good. And then you know the thing that was
Speaker 3: new to me was deploying and working with foreign militaries
Speaker 3: and that, you know, that was a whole new awakening
Speaker 3: at it kind of reminded me of my first days
Speaker 3: and as an infantry platoon commander, where you know, you
Speaker 3: had high school dropouts, and I had a couple of
Speaker 3: guys that had been given the choice of jail or
Speaker 3: the Marine Corps. So I found that some of those
Speaker 3: old skills came in hand.
Speaker 2: And this is what year that you get the Seventh Group.
Speaker 3: I hit seventh Group probably eighty five eighty six.
Speaker 2: So the wars in Central America are still raging pretty
Speaker 2: hot at that time.
Speaker 3: And that's I mean as a former Marine. I mean,
Speaker 3: one reason I wanted to go to SF was because
Speaker 3: during my time in the Marine Corps I did make
Speaker 3: a little short trip to Honduras and I did meet
Speaker 3: some guys at one of those Black Agency sites and
Speaker 3: some of the folks they were training. That's how I
Speaker 3: almost made a misstep there and wound up working in Nicaragua.
Speaker 3: But I was so excited because I saw, you know,
Speaker 3: this is peacetime. These SF guys, they're out there doing
Speaker 3: it and if anybody's going to get mixed up in anything,
Speaker 3: it's the s F guys, and that's where if you
Speaker 3: want action, that's where you need to be as in SF.
Speaker 3: So I was very happy to get there. We didn't,
Speaker 3: you know, it didn't work out quite on my top
Speaker 3: my own personal time time frame of getting in any action.
Speaker 3: But that's how I spent my time in seventh Group.
Speaker 3: I made several diplomas to Honduras and into Panama. As
Speaker 3: things were getting difficult in Panama. We went down there
Speaker 3: a couple of times, got extended there for several months
Speaker 3: once as people were trying to figure out what was
Speaker 3: going to happen. And yeah, so it was that during
Speaker 3: that time are the is the first time I heard
Speaker 3: people talk about this whole Delta Force thing, and you know,
Speaker 3: I'd never really heard of it. Uh now, my story,
Speaker 3: Major Star, Major Park was on what do you call it,
Speaker 3: green Light team, the forerunners to Delta Blue Light, and
Speaker 3: he did not he did not he didn't care for
Speaker 3: people that worked for him going out for Delta. But
Speaker 3: I heard this thing, you know, and everybody that I
Speaker 3: knew kept talking about if I get in shape, you know,
Speaker 3: it's so hard. And we were on a scuba team.
Speaker 3: I was on a Scooba team. Scuba teams are fit teams.
Speaker 3: We run hard, PT hard and you know. But everybody
Speaker 3: was like, I have to get ready for it when
Speaker 3: there's time, and I'm just not. I'm not that way.
Speaker 3: I like challenges. I like if somebody says it can't
Speaker 3: be done, I'm the guy that would say, well, you know,
Speaker 3: try me and let's see. So I heard that they
Speaker 3: gave a PT test at the old eighteenth Airborne Core
Speaker 3: by the stadium there. I think once a month or
Speaker 3: something like that. You could just show up and take
Speaker 3: a PT test. So I didn't tell anybody, and I
Speaker 3: went and took the PT test past their PT test.
Speaker 3: You know, I not know. We probably all know that
Speaker 3: guys gained that system, right, they know what events there
Speaker 3: are and I didn't know. I just showed up. What
Speaker 3: do you want me to do? And some of those
Speaker 3: events the crab walk and some of that, the some
Speaker 3: of the runs and stuff you do. I had no
Speaker 3: idea how to do them. But they, you know, I
Speaker 3: made the PT test. Then they send you to take
Speaker 3: all the psychological tests, review your records, all that stuff.
Speaker 3: And I wound up getting an invitation to come to selection.
Speaker 3: So and my star major did not like it, and
Speaker 3: I was not successful my first time, you know, and
Speaker 3: I think it's the way I'm wired. I got really
Speaker 3: motivated for it, so, I mean I was in good shape,
Speaker 3: but I started training crazy, and you know, every other
Speaker 3: day I was rucking thirteen miles for fifty pounds. Then
Speaker 3: I would go do stairs with a rucksack for an hour.
Speaker 3: For the days not on that, I would run six
Speaker 3: or seven miles. And I was so motivated to get
Speaker 3: ready to go that I didn't realize I was putting
Speaker 3: myself in a deficit. I went. I went to that
Speaker 3: first selection, had one of those days where I've never
Speaker 3: had a broken compass before, but I had a broken
Speaker 3: compass and then my backup little wrist compass on my
Speaker 3: watch band. When I went to that as the backup,
Speaker 3: it had broken off of climbing over Deadfall and had
Speaker 3: a really really bad add day up there. They kept
Speaker 3: me in, but then like the next day, no, yeah,
Speaker 3: I was, I was cut, but they said, hey, you can,
Speaker 3: we like your attitude. You can come back in six
Speaker 3: you can come back and try again if you want.
Speaker 3: I was like, sure, what's when's the next time? Six
Speaker 3: months from now? So I said Okay, you see me
Speaker 3: in six months. And went back that second time, and no,
Speaker 3: it's it's odd. I was smarter. I like, I saw
Speaker 3: pictures of myself after that first time. I looked like
Speaker 3: there's a picture of me on the Halloween. I think
Speaker 3: I came back right before it was the fall course
Speaker 3: that I was unsuccessful, and I looked like an Auschwitz victim.
Speaker 3: My neck was all drawn tight, my my skin was tied.
Speaker 3: I looked like an Auschwitz victim. And the second time,
Speaker 3: I just I didn't train like I did, and I
Speaker 3: made sure I ate well and I went up there
Speaker 3: healthy and with a good weight on me, and I
Speaker 3: tried to relax some a little bit more drawing the legs.
Speaker 3: And yeah, it worked out and made it.
Speaker 2: And so you make it through selection and then go
Speaker 2: to OTC and I mean, what was that experience? Like,
Speaker 2: I mean, what you're we at now nineteen ninety or so.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and well I got to OTC. Was I mean
Speaker 3: you talk about training OTC is I mean you shoot
Speaker 3: more rounds? Well, I forget what they used to compare
Speaker 3: it to that each individual shoots as much as or
Speaker 3: more rounds than a company of infantry does something like.
Speaker 2: That like I've heard like a million round it was
Speaker 2: something like that.
Speaker 3: You know it for the first couple of months. I mean,
Speaker 3: just to get your hands used to firing that much
Speaker 3: was a lot, and it I mean, it really hones
Speaker 3: your skills. I mean, special Ops, special Forces isn't. I
Speaker 3: don't think it's a lot of super things. It's doing
Speaker 3: the basics with a very high degree of proficiency. And
Speaker 3: the OTC teaches that there's a lot Yes, you learn
Speaker 3: CQB and some other special techniques, but there's a lot
Speaker 3: of time is spent on doing the basics of shoot,
Speaker 3: move and communicate very very well, and those sort of
Speaker 3: things that never leave you all these years later. Like
Speaker 3: in the Agency, when I go back to weapons squall,
Speaker 3: they would always give me a hard time because I
Speaker 3: don't shoot, just when it's time for the recall and
Speaker 3: they want to put me up against some Delta guy
Speaker 3: or some Special Ops or Ranger guy and try to
Speaker 3: egg us on to have a shooting contest. But those
Speaker 3: those that you do the reps so many times that
Speaker 3: it's just ingrained in you.
Speaker 2: I mean from some of the folks I've talked to,
Speaker 2: they say like it was the time of their life.
Speaker 2: All these like counter terrorism scenarios they keep putting me
Speaker 2: through and that are challenging, but sounds like it's it's
Speaker 2: also a lot of fun.
Speaker 3: Well it's fun. But you know one of the things
Speaker 3: that happens is, I mean, you think you've made the
Speaker 3: big time, and you know, I'm I'm one of those
Speaker 3: people that probably put too much emphasis on it. It
Speaker 3: was being that was all I wanted to be, and
Speaker 3: you know, things about family and everything else just go away.
Speaker 3: And by this time I was married and had kids,
Speaker 3: and but that was what was important. I mean, you
Speaker 3: think you're going to save the country, You're going to
Speaker 3: be when I went to when I went to Marine
Speaker 3: Sniper school, that was the time, you know, the Ayatola
Speaker 3: Homiani was there, and I used to dream about laying
Speaker 3: laying behind the a or lying behind a sniper rifle
Speaker 3: and seeing him through my scope and taking that shot.
Speaker 3: Well then you go through the the OTC and you
Speaker 3: dream of doing the assault like like Seal Team six
Speaker 3: did to get ben Laden right, and it's you know,
Speaker 3: it felt just great. And I eventually wound up an
Speaker 3: a squadron and was serving there. During my time in
Speaker 3: a squadron, I because I spoke Spanish, got an opportunity
Speaker 3: to go to in nineteen ninety two to a Central
Speaker 3: American country where there were some activities going on that
Speaker 3: Delta was taking part in down there, and during that
Speaker 3: time I had a disagreement misunderstanding with the guy in
Speaker 3: charge of that, and one thing led to another, and
Speaker 3: then I got sent back home and eventually I got
Speaker 3: the invitation to leave the Delta unit. You know, the
Speaker 3: then Colonel Boyken told me, yeah, he thought about keeping me,
Speaker 3: but you know, my somebody else down the chain it
Speaker 3: was more involved with that didn't want me around. So
Speaker 3: I got invited to take a height and find somewhere
Speaker 3: else to live.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, that was a This was like a like
Speaker 2: a personality conflict.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it started. We had a misunderstanding on this thing
Speaker 3: we were doing, and it blew into stuff and probably
Speaker 3: pauls my the way my personality is. I got phone
Speaker 3: calls that said, you can't talk about this to your wife,
Speaker 3: your team leader, or anybody back in the States. You
Speaker 3: can't say anything. And so I was holding all this
Speaker 3: stuff inside and I couldn't understand what was happening because
Speaker 3: I like, well, nobody's even asking me nobody's talking to me,
Speaker 3: So you know, eventually, eventually I made a choice to
Speaker 3: talk to somebody I thought was a neutral person that
Speaker 3: I could speak to with confidence. But then they felt
Speaker 3: there were things that they needed to tell somebody else.
Speaker 3: And basically what I did was I sort of just
Speaker 3: threw fuel on the fire unknowingly, and a lot of
Speaker 3: fingers started going back and forth, and in the end,
Speaker 3: I'm the newer guy. I got asked to go. And
Speaker 3: it was a devastating blow. This is I had built
Speaker 3: all my self worth on that, and I thought, this
Speaker 3: is it. All my career being a marine, being how
Speaker 3: I viewed my purpose in life. Everything I did was
Speaker 3: based on that. And then the day that ended, you know,
Speaker 3: what what are you going to do? You know, you
Speaker 3: walk sometimes there's things in life that hit you like that.
Speaker 3: So everything you believe, you have to question what do
Speaker 3: I believe about myself? What do I believe about how
Speaker 3: people perceive me? And you know, my future plans and
Speaker 3: goals are gone, so I'm going to have to start
Speaker 3: at the basics and and and refigure my whole plan.
Speaker 3: And that that's a it's a difficult thing to do
Speaker 3: for me. It was especially hard because now you've got
Speaker 3: to go find another job in the military. And you
Speaker 3: go and you go, how you're coming from Delta? You
Speaker 3: are good, good, We're good to have you. Uh and
Speaker 3: uh wait a second, why why don't you leave? Though?
Speaker 3: And you know, I never went into detail or tried
Speaker 3: to make excuses. I said, hey, I had a disagreement.
Speaker 3: I got asked to go take a look at my
Speaker 3: record and as a marine and as a soldier, and
Speaker 3: and then judge me on what I do, because I mean,
Speaker 3: if you if you think I'm a you know, a
Speaker 3: ship bird whatever, and hey, I'm I'm happy to look
Speaker 3: for somewhere else.
Speaker 2: Did did the did the unit offer you a bit
Speaker 2: of a soft landing, because this wasn't like an ethical
Speaker 2: or an integrity issue per se. Did they try to, like,
Speaker 2: you know, help you find a new place to settle, to.
Speaker 3: Be honest, I I they must have. I don't remember
Speaker 3: how how how that happened, but I wound up for
Speaker 3: a very short time going to the center and writing
Speaker 3: a manual on I think one of the first sephardic manuals.
Speaker 2: Oh really yeah, at a special warfare center.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in nineteen ninety two.
Speaker 2: Because there was oh Man, Yeah, so I probably know
Speaker 2: a bunch of people that you cross paths with. Some
Speaker 2: cool people were involved in like standing up that course
Speaker 2: at the time, and there was like a I don't
Speaker 2: know how deep you want to get into it, but
Speaker 2: I mean I know there was like a stack of
Speaker 2: SOPs that the unit used, and that had to be
Speaker 2: kind of like distilled into what Sephardic was going to teach,
Speaker 2: as I recall.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 3: I didn't. I didn't, I wasn't part of I think
Speaker 3: I was dealing more with a language part of it
Speaker 3: and dealing with the secretary there, and we had we
Speaker 3: had the documents and trying to get that turned into manual.
Speaker 3: But then after a few months, I got asked to
Speaker 3: if I wanted to go to Norfolk, Virginia and work
Speaker 3: as the Army rep to the Naval Safety Center to
Speaker 3: oversee the diving safety of all army diving. So that
Speaker 3: was it was a different thing. I was the only
Speaker 3: Army guy and I was an SF diver, but here
Speaker 3: I was with master divers, hard hat divers. There was
Speaker 3: one Seal Corman there, so everybody else was hard hat
Speaker 3: divers and we we would we divided into little teams
Speaker 3: and we traveled around the world. Anywhere there was a
Speaker 3: US military command that had dive equipment, we did the
Speaker 3: inspections on the equipment and on their program and some
Speaker 3: of their record keeping and did that stuff. So it
Speaker 3: was an interest in time. A lot of travel involved.
Speaker 3: I got to go to get qualified in hard hat
Speaker 3: diving and the seat was a c R fifteen, the
Speaker 3: mixed gas rig.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: While I was there, so that it was it was interesting,
Speaker 3: and the Seals wanted me to show up to do
Speaker 3: their inspections because the hard hat divers hated the Seals
Speaker 3: and always they were always extra extra hard on them.
Speaker 3: So I did that.
Speaker 2: I mean, you're also like becoming like highly qualified as
Speaker 2: a soldier between all of your Marine Corps training SF
Speaker 2: you know, being a medic training, you went through OTC
Speaker 2: in the unit free fall, all this additional dive training.
Speaker 2: I mean kind of you were a busy guy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, owen I Court. I went to owen I course
Speaker 3: before I went active duty, so I guess I missed
Speaker 3: the part that. So I came home as a reservist
Speaker 3: with eleventh Special Forces Group when I signed in and
Speaker 3: went through the Q course and all that, but I
Speaker 3: was honest with everybody and said, I don't plan on
Speaker 3: remaining a reservist. As soon as I can go active,
Speaker 3: I am, and so I sort of back toward the rules.
Speaker 3: While I couldn't enlist on active I did enlist in
Speaker 3: the reserves. I did get qualified in a shortage gm OS,
Speaker 3: and then there was a rag that said, if you're
Speaker 3: qualified in a shortagem OS, you can come on active duty.
Speaker 3: So I I handcrried my paperwork after I think that
Speaker 3: after I finished oh And high school and literally from
Speaker 3: driving all around the country. In two weeks, I went
Speaker 3: from being a reservist to getting an assignment to a
Speaker 3: seventh group.
Speaker 2: I love the workarounds.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I got to meet I remember Henry Boone
Speaker 3: some major bone. Well, for there might be some people
Speaker 3: out there. He was the person I had to see
Speaker 3: to get accepted on an active duty and I was
Speaker 3: wearing a mustache. Henry Bong was the guy that he hated.
Speaker 3: He was a very regulation focused individual. He hated mustaches,
Speaker 3: and he was kept staring at my mustache. And I'd
Speaker 3: heard all these stories about him, and I said, some
Speaker 3: major bone, do you like? Is there something wrong with
Speaker 3: my mustache? And he goes, well, you know, I think, well,
Speaker 3: waste like you if you can just make sure it
Speaker 3: stays within regulations. As a former marine, you know I
Speaker 3: would expect that from you. I said, all right, I'll
Speaker 3: just shave it off. So I didn't. I did say
Speaker 3: you had to shave it off. I said, I don't
Speaker 3: want every time I walk around you staring at me
Speaker 3: trying to find a hair out of place, so I'll
Speaker 3: shave it off. Yeah. So I lifted that dive program.
Speaker 3: It kind of got more known, and then then people
Speaker 3: started clamoring for it and won that job. So eventually
Speaker 3: I got reassigned to fifth Special Forces Group in nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety six, and I showed up at fifth Special Forces
Speaker 3: Group and in processed went to five four five as
Speaker 3: my first Fifth Group team and Terry Peters was my
Speaker 3: was my team sergeant. Was a great team, had a
Speaker 3: great time, and you know, we deployed to Kuwait and
Speaker 3: did a bunch of training deployments and just you know,
Speaker 3: really cut my teeth on the Middle East. Then got
Speaker 3: used to working with Middle Easterners. The group commander who
Speaker 3: happened to uh we both know him, have been my
Speaker 3: squadron commander at Delta one day asked me to come
Speaker 3: to his office. So I thought, oh shit, I'm he's
Speaker 3: he's uh, after all this time, he's uh, he's got
Speaker 3: something for me. So I went up there thinking, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm going to get clobberd. But what he told me
Speaker 3: was that he wanted to lead the way back to
Speaker 3: an emphasis on unconventional warfare, and you know, would I
Speaker 3: you know, he was counting on me to take a
Speaker 3: lead role in trying to push that effort forward. And
Speaker 3: so there was some initiatives that was in the earlier
Speaker 3: days of the ASoP course, advantaced Special Operations Technique course
Speaker 3: and those things. I started coordinating with the guys and
Speaker 3: fifth Group that were kind of leading the charge on that.
Speaker 3: Steve Potitt was one of them.
Speaker 2: And this is just a trying to dip back into
Speaker 2: history a little bit. But like this is like the
Speaker 2: was a somewhat like notorious of the quote unquote like
Speaker 2: long haired teams and special forces and the guys who
Speaker 2: did like clandestine things, which is correct me if I'm wrong, Gary,
Speaker 2: didn't that grow out of the RST mission.
Speaker 3: It did so at the time that there was no
Speaker 3: teams other than the RST that were long haired teams, right,
Speaker 3: so they were and they were in fifth group. So
Speaker 3: we had both teams, the team that worked with DARPA
Speaker 3: and DITRA and then the RSTS were the two kind
Speaker 3: of long haired teams. And it's kind of odd because
Speaker 3: fifth group was trying to stand up at SIF. When
Speaker 3: I showed up, I hadn't done it yet. Well and
Speaker 3: and it's funny because I showed up. Everybody, Oh, Delta guy,
Speaker 3: you're a student, You're an assaulter. You know you got
Speaker 3: uh and and that's what you are. But I was
Speaker 3: assigned to a scuba team because I was a d
Speaker 3: MT qualified medic. You know, you're you're never son major
Speaker 3: is never going to let you off scuba team and
Speaker 3: uh so I you know I was, But I said, well,
Speaker 3: I'm as signed to a u w A team and
Speaker 3: I'm throwing all my effort into that. You know, a
Speaker 3: lot of people wanted me to try to change and
Speaker 3: come over. You know, I've been to Sniper instructor school
Speaker 3: as a marine, but you know, I'm a person. You
Speaker 3: tell me what my lane is, I'm gonna do my
Speaker 3: best to do that.
Speaker 2: And that was nice of the group commander. I guess
Speaker 2: to offer some sort of reproach MA after a falling out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because you know, technically, to be honest, that was
Speaker 3: the same guy that you know, my previous conversation with
Speaker 3: him was I'm going to make sure you get kicked
Speaker 3: out of the army. So I was, Yeah, it was confusing,
Speaker 3: but hey, I was glad for the opportunity. And that's
Speaker 3: one of the things that drives you, you know, to
Speaker 3: have had what I had and leave Delta the way
Speaker 3: I did. I mean, that was a big driver to me,
Speaker 3: is like I have to prove myself. I've got to
Speaker 3: drive myself to the ends, no matter what what it
Speaker 3: takes to show that I'm not uh just defined by
Speaker 3: getting kicked out of Delta, you know, for a disagreement
Speaker 3: that happened one time over a long career. And so yeah,
Speaker 3: I pushed real hard at everything I did, and I
Speaker 3: got it. Coincided with my first wife and deciding she
Speaker 3: had greener pastors and that her her role was to
Speaker 3: be somewhere else other than done with me. So about
Speaker 3: that time after she left, you know, I started, I
Speaker 3: went to a SID and I had a very interesting
Speaker 3: time at a SID. And I have this thing of
Speaker 3: when I go through schools. If there's some and I
Speaker 3: don't like, I challenged the instructors and so I challenged
Speaker 3: the instructors pretty hard and they in turn were pretty
Speaker 3: hard on me. But you know it, it worked out well,
Speaker 3: and I think I probably built a reputation with some
Speaker 3: of the things that happened at school as being innovative,
Speaker 3: maybe having some skills, and so you know, I finished
Speaker 3: that school. Well then just like a month later, I
Speaker 3: got called down to SOCKSCND and they were talking to
Speaker 3: me and you know about some classified programs that they
Speaker 3: were wanting to start. So I got selected for that,
Speaker 3: you know, and I felt again that's one of those
Speaker 3: things that drove me because I was like, wait a second,
Speaker 3: of everybody in all Special Forces and all Fifth Group
Speaker 3: and Delta to choose from, I'm getting chosen. So yeah,
Speaker 3: I was. I was whatever they wanted. I was like, hey,
Speaker 3: I'm for it. So off I went to Yemen and
Speaker 3: operated there by myself for a while, waiting for a
Speaker 3: team to join me to do a d mining mission.
Speaker 3: And you know, during that time is was my first
Speaker 3: time up close at trying to do like assessments. I
Speaker 3: was sent ahead of time to work in the embassy,
Speaker 3: and yeah, I spent like two months going through training
Speaker 3: and getting all the right clearances so I could read
Speaker 3: all the human and segent in the various offices and
Speaker 3: then in an embassy that hold those and I was
Speaker 3: to make that assessment about the security for follow on
Speaker 3: special forces teams. During that time that I was there
Speaker 3: is when the situation in Yemen first started, we'll talk
Speaker 3: on nineteen ninety eight first started to go downhill. The
Speaker 3: Islamic Army of Aiden was posting threats against any Americans.
Speaker 3: The line that the ambassador had and all the embassy
Speaker 3: had was Yemen is a very safe place. Yes, al
Speaker 3: Qaeda passes through here and gets documents here, but they
Speaker 3: do nothing here. It's the peaceful place. It's like an
Speaker 3: R and R place. And you know, Yemen is an
Speaker 3: up and coming Middle Eastern country. A matter of fact,
Speaker 3: they were planning on Hillary Clinton coming out to visit
Speaker 3: as first Lady. And so the party line was, Yeah,
Speaker 3: there was a group of like three guys with a
Speaker 3: fax machine that called themselves the Islamic Armory of Aiden,
Speaker 3: but they are not capable of doing anything or just
Speaker 3: a bunch of blowhards. Yemen at the time, European tourists
Speaker 3: used to go there to get kidnapped, because they would
Speaker 3: kidnap you and take you down the like Hadramont region
Speaker 3: and treat you well and feed you and house you.
Speaker 3: Is it kind of like, you know, give you good
Speaker 3: stories to tell. And as soon as the government would
Speaker 3: access and give them some vehicles or wells, they would
Speaker 3: let people go free. So I think that figured into
Speaker 3: the ambassador and the intelligence communities assessment that hey, nothing
Speaker 3: much is you know, it's not dangerous here in Yemen.
Speaker 3: But during my time there, things started happening. There were
Speaker 3: where there was a car bomb in Sinnah out near
Speaker 3: the German consulate. There were more acts of violence, no
Speaker 3: big terror attacks or anything, but but it's to me
Speaker 3: it started. It was that things are escalating. Eventually, the
Speaker 3: team that was going to participate in d mining showed
Speaker 3: up and I went with them down to Aiden and
Speaker 3: we set up and Aiden started operating and Aiden. During
Speaker 3: our time in Aiden, there was a police checkpoint that
Speaker 3: caught a car load of six guys I think in
Speaker 3: it that had explosives, aks, RPGs and a diagram of
Speaker 3: the little hotel that we were renting to stay in that,
Speaker 3: so they arrested them. Those became known as the Aiden six. Later,
Speaker 3: like a month later, there was the Islamic Armory of
Speaker 3: Aiden did take hostages in Aiden at the British consulate
Speaker 3: took some British hostages and there it ended in a
Speaker 3: hostage standoff sort of out outside of town. It was
Speaker 3: a fiasco. The the bad guys were in a depression
Speaker 3: in a circle. They had the hostages stand with their
Speaker 3: legs spread around them and they were firing between their legs.
Speaker 3: And of course the U the Yemen army was not
Speaker 3: well trained, so they were kind of in a circle shooting, shooting,
Speaker 3: and everybody there. So I think a couple of hostages
Speaker 3: were killed and not probably some of them by friendly fire.
Speaker 3: But that changed my assessment. You know, I'm still reading
Speaker 3: the traffic and I'm seeing that. Okay, it's true al
Speaker 3: Qaeda is not active here, and but they have communications
Speaker 3: here and they passed through here. Now I have this
Speaker 3: Islamic Army of Aiden that has shown that they not
Speaker 3: only have access to arms and ammunition, but they're willing
Speaker 3: to take violent action, and they're willing to conduct operations
Speaker 3: against Western interest. And now they may be inept, and
Speaker 3: they were truly inept. But in my assessment, all that
Speaker 3: remained to happen for them to be you know, deadly,
Speaker 3: would be to either accept operational control, meeting, training, and
Speaker 3: direction from al Qaeda, or from hosting an al Qaeda cell.
Speaker 3: So now you know, we're in nineteen ninety nine and
Speaker 3: the US had just signed the agreement to allow US
Speaker 3: ships to start coming in to Aiden. But again this
Speaker 3: from me, My assessment was all enabled by my past history.
Speaker 3: But now my time in Delta and learning about terrorism
Speaker 3: and studying terrorism, and so I think it all helped
Speaker 3: me form this opinion. The ambassador told me I was crazy.
Speaker 3: The Defense attached a quietly on the side, advised me
Speaker 3: not to get on the wrong style of the ambassador,
Speaker 3: to do like he and the other people including the
Speaker 3: agency did, which was, you know, shake their heads and
Speaker 3: say you're right. But it bothered me. I was as
Speaker 3: time was coming for that mission to end and go home.
Speaker 3: I was like, I think, how can I go home
Speaker 3: and something happens here two Americans? Americans lose their lives
Speaker 3: and I didn't do anything. It was just it reminded
Speaker 3: me of beirute, because like, Okay, saying, here we go
Speaker 3: the same thing. For political reasons, she the ambassador did
Speaker 3: not want an assessment going out that would stop Hillary
Speaker 3: Clinton from coming up. Was the big feather in her cap.
Speaker 3: And but it bobbed me to the point that I said, Okay,
Speaker 3: I'm not having success through the embassy, but as an
Speaker 3: s F guy, I can write an area in assessment
Speaker 3: and send that out through military channels and then I
Speaker 3: can get the word out right and I'm not violating
Speaker 3: any role. Well, I didn't know, because in my training
Speaker 3: nobody trained you up that I didn't realize that the
Speaker 3: ambassador has the right to see everything that's written and
Speaker 3: to weigh in on it. And so I sent it,
Speaker 3: you know, use the sackcom and sent my report out
Speaker 3: and informed the embassy after. And that was a pretty
Speaker 3: major thing to do. It prompted a flight by the
Speaker 3: ambassador down to Aiden, called us all in and chewed
Speaker 3: us all out, and she said that she would rather
Speaker 3: run the risk, and she wouldn't let us have our
Speaker 3: rifles there in Aiden, with all this going on, we
Speaker 3: were pistols only, and our rifles were locked away in
Speaker 3: Sna several hours away. And she made this statement that hey,
Speaker 3: I'd rather run the risk of one of you getting
Speaker 3: hurt than the risk that one of you would hurt
Speaker 3: an innocent civilian.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is sounding negligent at this point. Yeah, well
Speaker 2: to me it was.
Speaker 3: You know, but your soldiers, when you're in a foreign country,
Speaker 3: state department has a final say, and so you know,
Speaker 3: we went on. I left, Well, that was nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 3: Now after we know now that in January of two thousand,
Speaker 3: terrorists and I saw the second that should have indicated
Speaker 3: something was going on. Let's just say that the second,
Speaker 3: if you go back and look at everything that happened,
Speaker 3: sort of backed up my assessment. But in January of
Speaker 3: two thousand was when terrorists loaded a boat with explosives
Speaker 3: and they tried to attack the USS the Sullivans. But
Speaker 3: as they made their run towards the boat, it sank.
Speaker 3: Too many explosives, not a good enough boat. It plowed
Speaker 3: under and it sank and we never nobody knew about that.
Speaker 3: But they recovered the explosives, and you know, later in
Speaker 3: October made the successful attack on the coal then and
Speaker 3: I was by that time. I left Yemen, went back
Speaker 3: to the States and then immediately got trained up and
Speaker 3: sent as I guess I became the first, the first
Speaker 3: guy to do these sort of classified go somewhere, do
Speaker 3: your assessment using whatever techniques that you've been trained in
Speaker 3: and some classified stuff. And so I got sent back
Speaker 3: to the Middle East and I was in another country.
Speaker 3: Well then when the attack, when the coal happened, I
Speaker 3: got flown back to Socom to do a classified deposition
Speaker 3: to go to the Coal Commission. But guess what I
Speaker 3: thought the State Department was political. I did not know
Speaker 3: that Socom can be political too, because when I you know,
Speaker 3: I gave you a quote earlier about what the ambassador
Speaker 3: said about us and their rifles. And there were two
Speaker 3: points that I made on my deposition, and when I
Speaker 3: saw the final wording of my deposition, those two things
Speaker 3: were struck out, and I was like, hey, wait a second,
Speaker 3: and Delta, we do a hot wash, and a hot
Speaker 3: wash is right after a training exercise. So we talked
Speaker 3: about the good, the bad, and the ugly to make
Speaker 3: things better. And I thought, that's what we're doing for
Speaker 3: the Coal Commission. And you know, they did not want
Speaker 3: to cast any dispersions toward an ambassador or State Department
Speaker 3: because they said, hey, every j set every SF team,
Speaker 3: anybody wants to get in any country, you know, the
Speaker 3: State Department has to approve that. So we're not we're
Speaker 3: not going to stay.
Speaker 2: A deposition, I mean, is a legal document, a sworn statement.
Speaker 2: I mean, I didn't even know you could go in
Speaker 2: there and chop out parts of it.
Speaker 3: You don't like, you know, what's right? I don't know.
Speaker 3: I know I was pissed off. I understand that because
Speaker 3: I thought, you know, we're soldiers. We always put the
Speaker 3: lives first.
Speaker 2: And the truth has to be first, you know, even
Speaker 2: if it's unpleasant.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the truth has to be first. So yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: it was tough, but you know, I went back to
Speaker 3: to my place in the Middle Least and kept doing
Speaker 3: what I was doing. I finished a year there, and
Speaker 3: so it was that was two thousand and I came
Speaker 3: back to Fifth Group at the end of the year
Speaker 3: and the project I had been doing in the Middle
Speaker 3: Least was in conjunction with the Joint Personnelity Covery Agency
Speaker 3: SOCKCINT sponsored it, but I was working doing some stuff
Speaker 3: for the JPR and a lot of some of the
Speaker 3: guys that worked at the jp r A had been
Speaker 3: guys that worked at Orange and retired start majors from Orange,
Speaker 3: and they knew me and some of the stuff I
Speaker 3: did in my classified projects, I had some successes. And
Speaker 3: so I came back to Fifth Group. Now I've got
Speaker 3: you know, long hair and civilian clothes. And I showed
Speaker 3: up back at group and you might I mean I
Speaker 3: just landed. Well, group happened to be having a change
Speaker 3: of command ceremony and it was John Buholland was taking command.
Speaker 3: So you know, I just showed in to sign in
Speaker 3: and say, okay, I'm getting the hell out of here
Speaker 3: because I got to get a haircut and shave and
Speaker 3: in the uniform. Well then I ran I ran into
Speaker 3: these sergeant majors that I that had that worked at
Speaker 3: jp R A, and they were, hey, welcome, you know,
Speaker 3: and and oh we got to we worked with John Moholland.
Speaker 3: You know, he was you know, Delta and uh on,
Speaker 3: the commander at Orange. So, uh, you got to meet him.
Speaker 3: I go, I can't meet him. I'm in. I don't worry,
Speaker 3: He's not that way. And uh, they took me and
Speaker 3: introduced me to John Moholland, and you know, I guess
Speaker 3: he put a lot of weight on them uh, and
Speaker 3: what they said. And yeah, you know I told him
Speaker 3: right off, Hey, I got asked to leave Delta. But
Speaker 3: he placed what those guys said about my ethics and
Speaker 3: work ethic and abilities. Then you know what the paper,
Speaker 3: what it might have said or whatever happened those years ago,
Speaker 3: and you know he wound up giving me an assignment
Speaker 3: and putting me in Fifth Group Headquarters. Two work in
Speaker 3: this classified cell. Fifth Group was the first ones to
Speaker 3: have it to kind of there was a three man
Speaker 3: cell that kind of oversaw. One thing was the stand
Speaker 3: up of the SITH, the other was the RSTS, the
Speaker 3: other was that other team that does other works with
Speaker 3: DITTRA and DARPA. And two for all the speak at programs,
Speaker 3: we are the ones that sort of had the rains
Speaker 3: on those. And you know, I don't know John mahone
Speaker 3: and I became pretty close. I don't know why. He
Speaker 3: He trusted me a lot, He asked my opinion a lot.
Speaker 3: We We had a lot of heart to hearts in
Speaker 3: his office, I think sometimes to the chagrin of some
Speaker 3: of the battalion commanders and and and officers, because I
Speaker 3: didn't pull any punches if I thought somebody was trying
Speaker 3: to get over or use the like the long Haired team,
Speaker 3: you know, to get away with something. You know, I
Speaker 3: call him on it. And sometimes with the stand up
Speaker 3: of this if I go, hey, you ain't Delta, don't
Speaker 3: need and but you know it worked out. And that's
Speaker 3: where I was sitting in two thousand and one when
Speaker 3: nine to eleven happened.
Speaker 2: And what was that day like for you? And I
Speaker 2: mean this is like a pivotal moment in Fifth Group history.
Speaker 2: I'd really be interested in, like your perspective, like what
Speaker 2: it was like for you, but also what it was
Speaker 2: like for Fifth Group that day and the days of
Speaker 2: months afterwards.
Speaker 3: It's uh some it goes for general humanity. You know,
Speaker 3: that was a shock to the nation and to everyone's census.
Speaker 3: But being a soldier, being in Fifth Group, being trained
Speaker 3: and having a mission, it had a different impact on me.
Speaker 3: I happy the moment it happened. I actually was on
Speaker 3: my way to the Nashville Airport. I lived on a
Speaker 3: little farm outside of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and was on my
Speaker 3: way to the airport when I heard on the radio
Speaker 3: about the first plane hidden. I had a little bit
Speaker 3: of time to spare, so I pulled in this little
Speaker 3: tiny cafe and went in and turned on their little
Speaker 3: tiny TV in time to watch the second plane hit
Speaker 3: the other town or the south towne. And you know,
Speaker 3: the first one, I'm debating, like, you know, could it
Speaker 3: be an accident, but there's a copilot, there's a flight engineer.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure that it could be an accident. I
Speaker 3: think it's probably terrorism, but I'm not sure. And then
Speaker 3: I saw the second plane boom. It's terrorism. And of
Speaker 3: course then they were announced They're going to shut down
Speaker 3: to airspace. So coming out of that cafe, I should
Speaker 3: have gone left to continue to the airport, but I
Speaker 3: knew not to. I turned right and went to group headquarters,
Speaker 3: and you know, I just rolled in and we started
Speaker 3: planning because we didn't know what yet, but we knew
Speaker 3: that we would be involved in some sort of strike
Speaker 3: or payback four nine to eleven, and it was instead
Speaker 3: of the panic, we were all just focused. It's like,
Speaker 3: this is what I've lived to do all my years
Speaker 3: as a marine, all my years as in recon in
Speaker 3: Special Forces in Delta. Now is our chance. This is
Speaker 3: what I'm here for. And that's what it was like
Speaker 3: throughout group. It was sure we were upset, maybe a
Speaker 3: little bit angry, but it was just intense focus on
Speaker 3: what we had to do and getting ready to go.
Speaker 3: Two days later, I was on the first when the
Speaker 3: first planes flew. I was on a plane to fly
Speaker 3: to Tampa to help plan the invasion as an E
Speaker 3: seven as an E seven but but but because I
Speaker 3: worked in this cell handling the classified stuff, part of
Speaker 3: that was our you know, all the speak at stuff,
Speaker 3: which you know includes relationships with the agency and d
Speaker 3: I A and all that, which we knew would be
Speaker 3: a lead effort. So that's mine.
Speaker 2: I was soon And what what was like that when
Speaker 2: you get down to Tampa and start planning the invasion,
Speaker 2: Because like some of the stories, and we've interviewed on
Speaker 2: this show a lot of like some of the first teams,
Speaker 2: another fifth Group guy, Justin Sapp we've interviewed on the
Speaker 2: show before.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I'm justin pretty well.
Speaker 2: You know Justin. Yeah, I'm going to see Justin tomorrow
Speaker 2: at a charity dinner for Afghan refugees. I mean, some
Speaker 2: of some of the like it sounds like we were
Speaker 2: going really into the unknown that we sent the paramilitary
Speaker 2: teams and the initial odas like into this giant black
Speaker 2: hole like where we really didn't know what was going
Speaker 2: on in there, and what was it like from from
Speaker 2: your perspective, Well.
Speaker 3: I went down there with a young major just cut
Speaker 3: getting cutting his bones, you know, getting his bones. Uh, Chris,
Speaker 3: what's his last name? Was just sect deaf? Chris Miller.
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, Chris, Yeah, Chris Miller.
Speaker 2: He's going to be on the show next month.
Speaker 3: Great. Yeah, yeah, So Chris and I go there. But
Speaker 3: now let's be honest. You know, I'm I'm I'm a
Speaker 3: hardened n CEO and still in these seven because of
Speaker 3: the way I left Delta and and we go down there,
Speaker 3: and I'm a bit of a particularly if everybody's too serious,
Speaker 3: I don't like to be too serious. And that everybody
Speaker 3: was serious. And we were initially told, hey, you need
Speaker 3: to plan for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan at
Speaker 3: the same time, what you're going to be getting me?
Speaker 3: And uh, you know, shortly after they said, okay we
Speaker 3: can we're going to scratch off a rack. You don't
Speaker 3: have to plan for a rack. But you know, I mean,
Speaker 3: as it started, everybody, you know, you imagine right after
Speaker 3: nine to eleven, the intensity that everybody had to get started.
Speaker 3: And I remember being in this big room and everybody's
Speaker 3: waiting for a meeting start. Nobody's there to start it,
Speaker 3: and it's just everybody's just all tense. So I stood
Speaker 3: up on a chair and I said to you know, hey,
Speaker 3: can I have everybody's attention, and you know, of course
Speaker 3: it's all you know, everybody from majors to colonels, you know,
Speaker 3: a shipload of them, uh turning, everybody staring at me. There,
Speaker 3: I said, Now, the first thing that we're going to
Speaker 3: do is I don't know, because I got no business.
Speaker 3: You know, I have nothing to do with this, I said. However,
Speaker 3: I stayed at a holiday inn express last night, so
Speaker 3: because at the time they were doing that commercial, I
Speaker 3: tries to be an expert. And at first everybody just
Speaker 3: stared at me, and then after a while, you know,
Speaker 3: some people laughed. But yeah, we started kicking off the
Speaker 3: planning and I returned to Fifth Group and then Colonel
Speaker 3: mohalland asked me to go with the first guys from
Speaker 3: fifth Group out to Carcy Kanabad where we were going
Speaker 3: to set up the base. So there was an initial
Speaker 3: group of four of us that that went and yeah,
Speaker 3: it was good. To because I wasn't on a team,
Speaker 3: but I got to be in the vanguard to go,
Speaker 3: and so I'd already established a record. It kind of
Speaker 3: like seemed like I was always the first person to
Speaker 3: go somewhere, sort of figure out what was going on
Speaker 3: and then prepare for other people or give a report back.
Speaker 3: And it was it was an interesting time. We we
Speaker 3: landed in the middle of the night in a in
Speaker 3: a light rain in Karshi Kanabad and it was old
Speaker 3: this is Bekistan andrew Zbekistan and the guy the battalion
Speaker 3: commander had gotten mohaland to let him go and he
Speaker 3: was taking over as the three. After we landed, some
Speaker 3: rangers were there, maybe some support people and that it
Speaker 3: was pretty bare, but they just landed. So the rangers
Speaker 3: are out on the perimeter. Nobody knows what's going on,
Speaker 3: and we land in the middle of the night, and
Speaker 3: that that guy's walking back and forth. And for whatever reason,
Speaker 3: I guess I'm the senior n c O. He said
Speaker 3: Sartin Harrington. He is, I'm the operations officer now that
Speaker 3: we're on the ground, and I'd like you to walk
Speaker 3: the lines, and I was, you know, it's the one
Speaker 3: am we don't know where to line's on. We just landed.
Speaker 3: It's and I had started, you know, we landed. I
Speaker 3: did what a soldier does. I got my rucksack and
Speaker 3: got out my canteen cup and was making some coffee
Speaker 3: and cocoa, and when somebody came running up and said, hey,
Speaker 3: the the colonel wants to see to so you know,
Speaker 3: I went there. He walked, walked the lines and I
Speaker 3: was like, walk the lines, I go, you can get shot.
Speaker 3: We don't have we don't have a challenge password anything
Speaker 3: as rangers out there on the line. Uh. And he's like,
Speaker 3: I don't care. Walk the lines are troop to lines.
Speaker 3: Troop the lines right, one of those officer training things
Speaker 3: you get. And I said, yeah, okay, and I walked
Speaker 3: back to my backpack where my my coffee and cocoa
Speaker 3: was getting ready, and another guy asked me. He said,
Speaker 3: what do you want you to do? I said, troop
Speaker 3: the lines. He said what you going to do? I said,
Speaker 3: drink my coffee and cocoa, and then so I put
Speaker 3: on my my gore text and drank my coffee and coco.
Speaker 3: Then I took off my gortext so I could get
Speaker 3: wet and then I went back and uh to where
Speaker 3: he was and he said, did you troop the lines?
Speaker 3: I said, everything's fine. So he goes outstanding, outstanding, starting
Speaker 3: to herring. Went on from there, and you know, then
Speaker 3: things built up. A couple of days later, I drove
Speaker 3: from carci Kanabad up to tash Kent to hook up
Speaker 3: with the Agency and to facilitate the Agency coming down
Speaker 3: to the base where we would launch the agency teams
Speaker 3: out of and support the agency teams. And so I
Speaker 3: was in that cell that stood up. I stood up
Speaker 3: that cell to do that, the fusion cell between the
Speaker 3: Agency and the Army. And of course Justin Sap had
Speaker 3: been detailed from the Army to be on Team Alpha.
Speaker 3: So I met all of all of Team Alpha. Yeah
Speaker 3: Jr's team, and Alex and Mike Span Dave the other
Speaker 3: guys Justin So you know, I got back and then
Speaker 3: the CIA started sending its teams in and we we
Speaker 3: would oversee the infill and resupply, and then as agency
Speaker 3: teams developed the situation, then we started putting SF teams
Speaker 3: in with them to work with the locals. Mostly in
Speaker 3: the s F mission was mostly at that point one
Speaker 3: we the medical support was key because there essentially wasn't
Speaker 3: enough medical support and the call for fire, and you know,
Speaker 3: I think the other thing that's always short and when
Speaker 3: you stand up that many teams are Commo guys. So
Speaker 3: the agency was really sort of raping Fifth Group and
Speaker 3: and and groups in all taken medics and como guys
Speaker 3: to fill out their teams. I remember Rumsfeld was, I
Speaker 3: give them them any more people. And the things started
Speaker 3: happening in Afghanistan on the ground so fast that just
Speaker 3: more and more teams needed to go in. And I
Speaker 3: was frustrated because I'm like, shit, you know, I'm going
Speaker 3: to miss my chance. I've done a whole life for this,
Speaker 3: and I'm good. Like the thing at ASOT, you know,
Speaker 3: is sort of preparing a pilot team and I had,
Speaker 3: let's just say I had excelled at some of those
Speaker 3: actions and activities and I thought, you know, I need
Speaker 3: to be one of these teams. And then they started
Speaker 3: running out of the agency couldn't get enough teams. I'm like, well,
Speaker 3: i'll take a team. I'll go in, but way that
Speaker 3: you can't.
Speaker 2: You know, I had someone tell me once Gary that
Speaker 2: because of the mission you specifically referenced doing the ASOT
Speaker 2: unconventional warfare mission in the Middle East that that actually
Speaker 2: set up Fifth Group pretty well to go into Afghanistan
Speaker 2: as far as like having some understanding of how to
Speaker 2: do that, I mean, I guess you were kind of
Speaker 2: the tip of the spear for that.
Speaker 3: Well, it did as far as that part goes. But also,
Speaker 3: just to be honest, any SF team, we all hated FIDD, right,
Speaker 3: but doing FID, whether it was Central America or in
Speaker 3: Kuwait where you know, people don't want to work, don't work.
Speaker 3: It's a different culture, different work ethic, and trying to
Speaker 3: get them to do stuff and to do military operations
Speaker 3: does prepare you for what we ran into there, right,
Speaker 3: And so you know, I was pissed. I wanted and
Speaker 3: I guess I got better and I was like, well, shit,
Speaker 3: you know, I just want to go back to the
Speaker 3: States then, because after I've been there and I set
Speaker 3: all this up and got everything going, I don't want
Speaker 3: to sit here and just keep watching other teams other
Speaker 3: people go in. Then John mohalland asked me and some
Speaker 3: other guys to come with him on his infill because
Speaker 3: we had just just taken Bagram Airfield. So I went
Speaker 3: in with him, and we were there and after a
Speaker 3: few days, it's around Thanksgiving. We'd spent Thanksgiving there on
Speaker 3: the ground in Afghanistan. Of two thousand, the planning had
Speaker 3: started spinning up that Tora Bora was the place where
Speaker 3: al Qaeda had regrouped and where ben Laden might be.
Speaker 3: So the Agency was spinning up to go to Tora Bora.
Speaker 3: In military was trying to figure out what we're going
Speaker 3: to do. There had been an ODA five seven to
Speaker 3: two that the paperwork to chop them to the agency
Speaker 3: had been done to detail them, but that mission never
Speaker 3: came to fruition. You know, they were going to chop
Speaker 3: the whole team uh to operational control of the Agency,
Speaker 3: but that mission never happened. So they were there and
Speaker 3: available back at headquarters. Excuse me. So the Agency, when
Speaker 3: you know, they realized how how big Tora War was
Speaker 3: going to be and that they weren't really prepared to
Speaker 3: handle all that themselves, asked for that team. And Mazari
Speaker 3: Sharif had just happened, Spanning just been killed. John Mulholland
Speaker 3: was a bit reluctant to just give the agency another
Speaker 3: and an o DA for operational control. And yeah, and
Speaker 3: he had some other reluctant reasons that he was somewhat
Speaker 3: reluctant about that team. But one of the guys on
Speaker 3: on the who was detailed from what happened to be
Speaker 3: Orange to the agency, said, well, you trust this Gary
Speaker 3: guy a whole lot. What if we took Gary uh
Speaker 3: with the agency to serve as an advisor, would you
Speaker 3: let us have that team then? So whatever, he said yes,
Speaker 3: and so next thing, you know, without the legal paperwork
Speaker 3: to be detailed. With a handshake, they said, okay, you're
Speaker 3: now on Team Juliette with the agency and along with
Speaker 3: this ODA seventy two, and off we went to Jalalabad
Speaker 3: to get ready to go up to Tora Bora.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's wild, and I this is cool because
Speaker 2: I've never heard this side of the story and so
Speaker 2: so many of the other folks that we've interviewed over
Speaker 2: the last few years. So what was the situation when
Speaker 2: you hit Jabad and getting ready for Tora Bora. I
Speaker 2: mean you linked up with the with the unit guys.
Speaker 3: It was there were a couple of people, actually, one
Speaker 3: of the former guys on you in Delta that was
Speaker 3: detailed to that team and the unit guys weren't there,
Speaker 3: so I got to go in ahead of my old school.
Speaker 3: It was just the agency guys in US and we
Speaker 3: went to j Bad and it was really uncertain the
Speaker 3: the warlords. There is one thing. We first went in
Speaker 3: the pansh here and people that were aligned with Masoud
Speaker 3: and hated the Taliban and hated al Qaeda for killing Masud.
Speaker 3: You know, they were eager to get in the battle.
Speaker 3: I mean, look at what dosed them did. But as
Speaker 3: we started moving further south, that was changing. So we
Speaker 3: hooked up in Jalalabad. We were hooked up with a
Speaker 3: guy named hazret Ali and they were he just drugged
Speaker 3: his dragged his feet. He was reluctant to get involved.
Speaker 3: And let's be honest, it was the the bags of
Speaker 3: cash that we were ferrying in that did it, you know.
Speaker 3: But but but some of that, I have to do
Speaker 3: some cool stuff like trained for the airfield and Jbad
Speaker 3: was bombed. WED bombed it out. So to get the
Speaker 3: first supplies in of uniforms, arms and equipment to outfit
Speaker 3: the force, you know, I called in uh uh the
Speaker 3: C one thirties and they came in low and lapsed
Speaker 3: our parachuted all the equipment in and I remember being
Speaker 3: there and the Afghans couldn't believe that suddenly in the dark,
Speaker 3: out of nowhere, these planes come real low and the
Speaker 3: parachutes are coming out. And I actually found myself dancing
Speaker 3: in a circle with with some Afghan guys holding rifles
Speaker 3: in one hand and their hands on the other. And
Speaker 3: you know, it was exciting times, but it was real uncertain.
Speaker 3: You didn't know who was who. Warlords were against warlords.
Speaker 3: We were in a vehicle coming back from that airfield
Speaker 3: and my vehicle made it through a checkpoint and they
Speaker 3: we didn't we couldn't speak language, we didn't. I got through,
Speaker 3: but then the second vehicle behind me they stopped. Well,
Speaker 3: you don't know who's good and who's bad. So they're
Speaker 3: stopped and it's it's not going well. I remember getting
Speaker 3: out of the vehicle and then take an aim on
Speaker 3: the You know, it's just some dude that's at the
Speaker 3: check with a couple of dudes at the checkpoint, and
Speaker 3: maybe they're trying to follow orders, but maybe they're going
Speaker 3: to ambush us. You don't know who's who. And I
Speaker 3: remember this argument going on, and they had an interpreter
Speaker 3: and me trying to decide, I may not be able
Speaker 3: to shoot him fast enough if he opens up. Should
Speaker 3: I shoot him now preemptively? But then what if that?
Speaker 3: You know, I caused that. So it was you know,
Speaker 3: it was tense. But then he led him through and
Speaker 3: we went on. It took us, the agency a long
Speaker 3: time to get him ready to move his people up
Speaker 3: to Tora Bora, you know, and delays were horrible. It
Speaker 3: was Ramadan when we went up to Torobora. There were
Speaker 3: so many things wrong. You had to kick and yell
Speaker 3: and plead to get them to move up. But is Ramadan.
Speaker 3: They hadn't had anything to eat or drink all day,
Speaker 3: so when it starts getting towards night, they know that
Speaker 3: food and water are back in the rear. So anything
Speaker 3: that they made up during the day they give up
Speaker 3: at night and go back. There's a lot of problems.
Speaker 3: I was on a opie there. We divided. We had
Speaker 3: a headquarters element that was in there, and Delta came
Speaker 3: in later and joined up with them a squadron, and
Speaker 3: the rest of us split in two ops. We were
Speaker 3: five or six of us on a op I think
Speaker 3: the so Cammon history calls that Cobra twenty five Bravo
Speaker 3: was the op we were on, so hey, you know,
Speaker 3: we're just we're calling in bombs were designating on the
Speaker 3: base of the mountain where ben Laden was supposed to be.
Speaker 3: It was really interesting calling fire because we were up
Speaker 3: so high on mountains, like up on the top that
Speaker 3: when you would call for fire down in the valley
Speaker 3: one thousand meters below you, you'd see those missile of
Speaker 3: the bombs come beside you. You could see them coming
Speaker 3: in the air to go down in the valley because
Speaker 3: we were up high on their trajectory because they were
Speaker 3: dropping at twenty five twenty six, one thousand feet and
Speaker 3: we had by that time, you know, the friendly fire
Speaker 3: incident also at Missaari sharif it was, I had a
Speaker 3: close call as I think it must have been like
Speaker 3: two am. I was calling in. There was a aircraft
Speaker 3: that had a like twenty jade ams on it, so
Speaker 3: I brought him in first to drop one or two
Speaker 3: to see if we're on target, and that went fine.
Speaker 3: So you know, he comes out, they rolled out. You
Speaker 3: have about a fifteen minute turnaround before they can come
Speaker 3: back on B two. Yeah, B two, and he as
Speaker 3: he's rolling back in. I say that was good, dropped,
Speaker 3: dropped the remaining ordance, same spot, and he calls back
Speaker 3: the coordinates right, and but he gives me, you know,
Speaker 3: because you call for fire. I had, I gave the
Speaker 3: location of the other op, but he calls out that
Speaker 3: location as the target location. And uh, man, you know,
Speaker 3: I remember my throat jumped in my stomach, jumped up
Speaker 3: in my throat because I did I hear that? Right?
Speaker 2: Did I hear that?
Speaker 3: Right? But and I was just screaming aboard, aboard, aboard,
Speaker 3: and I pictured because it was like a forty five
Speaker 3: second delay, you know, they would drop, and I was
Speaker 3: afraid he was going to say too late. But then
Speaker 3: he corrected and then he gave me the correct coordinates
Speaker 3: and dropped the ordinance.
Speaker 2: But it was yeah, yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 3: You know, a big learning, a big learning, uh incident.
Speaker 3: But yeah, and we know now you know, ben Laden
Speaker 3: got away. The one of the warlords, whether it was
Speaker 3: hasra Arli or the one that was affiliated with the
Speaker 3: Brits that were there on site to covering the back
Speaker 3: end towards Pakistan, somebody facilitated him going. And uh there's
Speaker 3: a book called The Hunt for ben Laden written by
Speaker 3: adulta guy. It was a major on the ground there. Yeah,
Speaker 3: or kill ben Laden and you know he he talks
Speaker 3: about the night that the Delta guys went forward and
Speaker 3: all the locals bailed on them and they were left
Speaker 3: the two guys alone. One of them had Sean was
Speaker 3: had been on my team and a squadron, so it
Speaker 3: was actually a squadron that came in my old squadron
Speaker 3: with a few people still left on it. And that
Speaker 3: same night, and this is where I think that the
Speaker 3: warlords had something worked out with Bin Laden. The Hazrat Ali,
Speaker 3: the chief of the Afghans, called up to his guys
Speaker 3: that were with us. We had there were five or
Speaker 3: six Americans and we probably had ten locals with us. Now,
Speaker 3: we wouldn't let them with us because you didn't train
Speaker 3: these guys. You didn't know who they were good or bad.
Speaker 3: So we used them as tripwires. We put them. We
Speaker 3: were up on this knife ridge and we put them
Speaker 3: between us and al Kaya. We figured, hey, if al
Speaker 3: Kaeda rolls through us, they'll hit them first and it'd
Speaker 3: be like a trip wire to give us a little
Speaker 3: bit of time. But he told them that they had
Speaker 3: to move us off there, and it was for our
Speaker 3: own safety. So you know, our interpret tells us you
Speaker 3: have to go now, you can't stay here. We're not going.
Speaker 3: He goes no, but the general said you have to leave,
Speaker 3: and we're all leaving, and we said no, we're not going.
Speaker 3: So in the end all the Afghans left and left
Speaker 3: us up on that ridge. I guess that was a
Speaker 3: point with me because maybe the guys down in the
Speaker 3: headquarter element didn't get the whole story. But in his
Speaker 3: book he says that that we moved, you know, that
Speaker 3: we evacuated. We did not, you know, we stayed up
Speaker 3: there and we had movement that night down in the
Speaker 3: bottom of a thousand meters below us, where there were
Speaker 3: some lights and movement, and one of the guys wanted to,
Speaker 3: you know, light them up, but I was like, hey,
Speaker 3: at night with your M four, we're not going to
Speaker 3: be effective fire and you're just going to give a
Speaker 3: our position, so you know we're not. But we had
Speaker 3: that movement, so I tried to call some air in,
Speaker 3: but there was happened that there was one of the
Speaker 3: few times in Tora Bora there was no aircraft overhead
Speaker 3: that had any ordinance on it, and I was like, man,
Speaker 3: you know they're moving, and we didn't know if they
Speaker 3: were trying to move maneuver on us, so what can
Speaker 3: we do. The only thing I found was there was
Speaker 3: a Back in those days, the drones were not are
Speaker 3: not yet armed. We weren't that far into the development
Speaker 3: of the war ontariot, but they sounded kind of like
Speaker 3: AC one thirty, when if you brought it down low
Speaker 3: enough you could hear it. So I was able to
Speaker 3: get there that that drone to come in and drop
Speaker 3: low enough that we could hear it. And then those
Speaker 3: lights that we saw down in the bottom of the
Speaker 3: valley they disappeared, so so you know, it did his job.
Speaker 3: So we left. We left tor Bora, got relieved by
Speaker 3: some Delta guys, a couple of them guys on you.
Speaker 3: We went, we hiked down the mountain. We're using donkeys
Speaker 3: to carry our backpacks when all our gear just kept
Speaker 3: our lbe and and weapons with us, and then met
Speaker 3: up with the Delta guys and then they came up
Speaker 3: to take over the op and they're the ones that
Speaker 3: wound up pushing further into the mountains to try to
Speaker 3: get on the trail of Ben ladden, you know, after
Speaker 3: we left. But I got you know, I got to say, hey,
Speaker 3: you know, it's about time you Delta guys. Guy here,
Speaker 3: we've already got posting this stuff done.
Speaker 2: I'm sure they love that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was funny. Well, and you know, and we've
Speaker 3: been tall this stuff about Afghan culture and what you
Speaker 3: can say and what you can't say. And it was
Speaker 3: snowing when we were up in tour war. Before we
Speaker 3: came down, it started snowing on it. As a matter
Speaker 3: of fact, Delta was supposed to come in a day
Speaker 3: before and and they radio said there and I said, hey,
Speaker 3: do you have winter gear? And no, I said, it's
Speaker 3: snowing up here, and it's just it's going to get
Speaker 3: really bad. So they actually delayed and somehow within twenty
Speaker 3: four hours came up with all kinds of winter gear
Speaker 3: that whole Delta supply line, you know. And but when
Speaker 3: we were doing the turnover with them, there were all
Speaker 3: these villagers there, and so we're talking to the villagers.
Speaker 3: I got the interpreter and they said, one thing you
Speaker 3: never can talk about is their women and or the religion.
Speaker 3: But I couldn't help myself. I said, hey, I know
Speaker 3: why you guys have four white you can have four wives.
Speaker 3: And you know he's like, yeah, well, what's your reason?
Speaker 3: I said, because it's so damned cold up there that
Speaker 3: you need a warm place to stay as you move around.
Speaker 3: So you got you can spread four out to different
Speaker 3: places so you can get warm at night. And then
Speaker 3: and the Delta sarn major that was there like no, no, no, no,
Speaker 3: don't don't say that, don't say that. But it went fine.
Speaker 3: You know, they appreciated the joke.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so after Tora Bora you did like a subsequent
Speaker 2: number of deployments back to Afghanistan.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well I didn't go, So I didn't even leave Afghanistan. No. Yeah.
Speaker 3: We were in a safe house in Jalalabad, our team
Speaker 3: kind of recovering from uh our time up here in
Speaker 3: Tora Bora, and the radio message came in said, hey,
Speaker 3: uh Gary Harrington, get back to Carshi Kanabad and see
Speaker 3: the commander. Well, okay, how am I going to get back?
Speaker 3: So I talked to the agency and they let me
Speaker 3: hitch a ride on one of their aircraft. Of course
Speaker 3: I had no passport or anything, and the aircraft landed
Speaker 3: in a tashed kent. I had to hide on the
Speaker 3: aircraft untill they went through it and then wound up
Speaker 3: getting on a I think the next day or maybe
Speaker 3: that same night, on the agency helicopter going back to
Speaker 3: Carci Kanabat. It was you know, and okay, let me honest.
Speaker 3: It was cool because it was kind of like a
Speaker 3: movie because I go by now when I left, there
Speaker 3: was nothing. Now there's this plywood headquarters built. I go
Speaker 3: in there and I walk in, I'm all nasty and dirty,
Speaker 3: and I, hey, I'm here to see the commander. And
Speaker 3: they go back there in office and I walked back
Speaker 3: in there and you know, eat me. We have a
Speaker 3: talk there was you know, he asked me a really
Speaker 3: tough question about a personnel issue that had occurred, and
Speaker 3: he said, you know, I got to make some decisions.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna trust you, so give me. Give me the
Speaker 3: rundown on what happened. You know. So now I'm back
Speaker 3: into say, uh, it's sort of like what happened to
Speaker 3: me in Delta. And I'm the guy that's that is
Speaker 3: making the call. But so I talked to him and
Speaker 3: then we finished and he goes, hey, now I'm putting
Speaker 3: you on another agency team called Kilo and they're going
Speaker 3: to go to a place called Coast, So get yourself
Speaker 3: to Kabul, Afghanistan, go to the Areana Hotel and hook
Speaker 3: up with them. That was my instructions. So I wound.
Speaker 3: I said, can I shower first? I'd I'd like to
Speaker 3: take a shower, get cleaned up, repack my rug. So
Speaker 3: I did that, and then I went down to the
Speaker 3: flight line. Found a H forty seven that was doing
Speaker 3: a check out right. It had some repairs, and the
Speaker 3: pilots agreed to let me on it, and they flew
Speaker 3: me into Kabul or into Bogram, and then I guess
Speaker 3: I got a vehicle and showed up at this you know,
Speaker 3: run down old hotel and joined Kilo, at which Nate
Speaker 3: Chapman was on. So I had met Mike Span and
Speaker 3: helped Alpha get. In a matter of fact, the picture
Speaker 3: in the CIA Museum of Team Alpha, I took that picture.
Speaker 3: But now I'm on the team with Chapman and the
Speaker 3: other guys, and you know, they'd been together a little while.
Speaker 3: I joined late we did. I did Christmas in Jalalabad,
Speaker 3: I did New Year's there in Kabul, and then I
Speaker 3: guess it was like about two January. The infill to coast.
Speaker 3: I'm getting ready. I think it was the night before
Speaker 3: the infill. Some major from group came over to the
Speaker 3: hotel and said, hey, Colonel Mahallan said, y're not to
Speaker 3: go in on the first helicopter in the coast. I
Speaker 3: was like, what do you mean, not going the first helicopter.
Speaker 3: He goes, no, he wants you to hold and go
Speaker 3: on the second helicopter. And you know, I probably had
Speaker 3: a few words to say about that because I was pissed.
Speaker 3: But you know, he's a colonel, so he'd already had
Speaker 3: to write letters for the guys in Kandahar and enough
Speaker 3: other letters for people that weren't coming home that not.
Speaker 3: While I wasn't really happy with that decision, you know,
Speaker 3: it's his calls, he's the boss. So I delayed. Well,
Speaker 3: then the next morning, I'm getting ready to get on
Speaker 3: the helicopter to go in, and that's when the guys
Speaker 3: on Keilo got hit and Chapman got killed. So you know,
Speaker 3: the metal fact came out that had embetic on it,
Speaker 3: and it was a guy, a Third Group guy, and
Speaker 3: you know I went back, so dealt with that, and
Speaker 3: then I went back in that evening. Uh, to coast
Speaker 3: and we were the team was still dealing with what
Speaker 3: had happened and what we're going to do after. And
Speaker 3: that's where you know, the agency is great at what
Speaker 3: is what it does, and the Army Agency, the fifth
Speaker 3: Group agency link up was effective. But there are some
Speaker 3: things and I think this was one of those, and
Speaker 3: some of the stuff I saw Onatora Bora where you know,
Speaker 3: I felt that a seasoned special Ops person could have
Speaker 3: would have made different calls. After Chapman got killed, we
Speaker 3: wound up changing. We went in backing one warlord, but
Speaker 3: after he got killed, they decided, well that war lord
Speaker 3: didn't powerful enough in coast. The other guy is who
Speaker 3: we actually everybody is pretty sure ordered the ambush that
Speaker 3: resulted in Chapman's death. But then the agency, so we're
Speaker 3: going to back this guy, and for a while we're
Speaker 3: gonna they want to back both and he from that
Speaker 3: guy standpoint, it means millions of dollars, right, and so
Speaker 3: you know he's collecting that. But yeah, we so we
Speaker 3: did the end fill the coast. But I learned the lesson.
Speaker 3: I tried to apply the lessons I learned from Tora Bora.
Speaker 3: That my job when Mohan told me that you get
Speaker 3: there and develop the situation and make sure that this
Speaker 3: g force is ready to accept s F, train you know,
Speaker 3: s F people to work with it and direct them. Well,
Speaker 3: now I didn't want a gag on. I learned that. Okay,
Speaker 3: one of the first things I want to do is
Speaker 3: build mobile kitchens. Outfit little pickup trucks with you know,
Speaker 3: gas stoves so we can cook forward so the troops
Speaker 3: don't have to come back to get fed. I want
Speaker 3: to develop some sort of staff structure so that the
Speaker 3: SF guys have something to fall in on, because you know,
Speaker 3: these guys were you know, had flowers sticking out of
Speaker 3: their guns. A lot of them were in opera bow.
Speaker 3: It was a joke and h and it's really funny
Speaker 3: because the guy running that agency team it was a
Speaker 3: former SF guy officer, and you know, they they kept
Speaker 3: doing stuff, but they it's sort of delaying on letting
Speaker 3: me get to the job of getting things structured the
Speaker 3: way I wanted to. And I'm the the army guy there.
Speaker 3: And they kept saying till mohalland to send us a
Speaker 3: mess F and I was like, no, nope, nope, and uh,
Speaker 3: I said not not until we do this. I remember, uh,
Speaker 3: one big team meeting that he said, wait a minute,
Speaker 3: So you're telling me you're and E seven in the
Speaker 3: army telling all of us that it's up to you
Speaker 3: if we get s F people or not. And yeah,
Speaker 3: I think I crossed my arms say yes about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because you want everything set up to properly receive
Speaker 2: the team so they can be effective when they get there.
Speaker 3: We got you got to be effective. You know, he
Speaker 3: can't just jump in on a crowd of people and
Speaker 3: hope and pray that something's going to happen, because it's not.
Speaker 3: And and plus I'd given the you know, the commander
Speaker 3: of my word that I would make sure that it
Speaker 3: was effective and ready, so I wouldn't do that. But
Speaker 3: and so that was going on, and we agreed that
Speaker 3: we would send a team in. But by that point
Speaker 3: the two wards I mentioned it was Zia cheim And
Speaker 3: and Pasha Khan that we're fighting each other, the two
Speaker 3: warlords that we were back in, and it turned into
Speaker 3: a blood feud. It was it was going to derail
Speaker 3: everything the agency and army was trying to do up there.
Speaker 3: So I went to that one guy, so to Zia Khan,
Speaker 3: and I said, yeah, you come from Orgon area. What
Speaker 3: if you go back to Orgon and I will take
Speaker 3: a group of people with you and we'll bring special
Speaker 3: forces into you and support you, but back in your
Speaker 3: home area where you're from. So he agreed, and then
Speaker 3: the agency bought in on that plan. So it was
Speaker 3: decided to split off and open up a new a
Speaker 3: new base in Orgon, and I got to lead plan
Speaker 3: and lead the infill for that. And it's just a
Speaker 3: way different than how I'd ever been trained to run
Speaker 3: an infill in recon Or, SF, and I had al
Speaker 3: Qaeda was spread throughout the region. You didn't know if
Speaker 3: you were coming into what you were going to come into,
Speaker 3: and you know, the warlord had a nephew that didn't
Speaker 3: speak one word of English. And how am I going
Speaker 3: to make an infill? Buy a helicopter in a place
Speaker 3: and ensure the most safety we can? So you're inventing it.
Speaker 3: I trained the guy how to use an IR strobe
Speaker 3: and what we needed for an LZ, picked out the
Speaker 3: most probable place from maps and overhead imagery, and now
Speaker 3: I did some dry rehearsals that you know, to know
Speaker 3: he'd know how to set up the ir strobe and
Speaker 3: sent him back, and they had Theriahs and we had
Speaker 3: an interpreter that spoke pashtune that we were communicating. And
Speaker 3: so we waited a few days. As it got time
Speaker 3: for the infill. What I told him to do was
Speaker 3: to go out and mark that l Z at night
Speaker 3: and to keep marking it every night. And we waited,
Speaker 3: so I didn't go in. We didn't infill the first
Speaker 3: day or second day maybe I remember if his third
Speaker 3: or fourth day. And then to make the infill, I
Speaker 3: invited some of his relatives to get on the helicopter
Speaker 3: with me, so I figured I could throw a few
Speaker 3: civilians on there, kind of as an insurance policy. I
Speaker 3: want to make sure you know that I have you know,
Speaker 3: some of your relatives on this helicopter with me, and
Speaker 3: so you know, we set the pattern of coming in.
Speaker 3: And then the one night we did show up and
Speaker 3: make that.
Speaker 2: In film, and that was the start of the base,
Speaker 2: the fob at Ragoon. Yeah, pretty much that existed through
Speaker 2: like pretty much the whole war. Yeah, it was it
Speaker 2: was interesting, you know, I.
Speaker 3: It was wild. It was kind of wild West. You know,
Speaker 3: you want to be that guy there's no rules, there's
Speaker 3: no other military around you. You kind of run around.
Speaker 3: We were going out and hitting, you know, I'd say hitting,
Speaker 3: not hitting. I think I was extremely successful without ever
Speaker 3: having to hit a weapons cachet. Everywhere in Afghanistan had
Speaker 3: weapons cachets from the Soviet of the war with the Soviets,
Speaker 3: every little village had stuff you would never ever find it.
Speaker 3: But you know, I developed this thing where we'd work
Speaker 3: with a village elder and an interpreter and we'd go
Speaker 3: there and we'd have a couple of vehicles with food
Speaker 3: and blankets and mattresses on it, sitting off backaways, and
Speaker 3: we just go up and ask nicely, hey, you got
Speaker 3: some stuff here and some bad stuff somebody could get her.
Speaker 3: We don't want any misinterpretations. We'd like it if you'd
Speaker 3: let us dig this up or help us show us
Speaker 3: where it is. And they would do that, and then
Speaker 3: after we would recover the stuff and would roll these
Speaker 3: trucks with all these goodies. Before you know, it eventually
Speaker 3: got to the point you'd be finishing in one village
Speaker 3: and here's people from another village. Hey, hey, come to
Speaker 3: our village because we got the money and we started
Speaker 3: collecting you know, it just kept getting more and more
Speaker 3: and more. And I started paying guys with tractors to
Speaker 3: haul our chillerry pieces back back to Ragoon, and I
Speaker 3: was like making a collection of big artillery pieces. It
Speaker 3: was uh yeah, it was exciting days they had. I
Speaker 3: remember when I was in Yemen, the Yemeny's during the
Speaker 3: d mining mission had two guys vaporized in a truck
Speaker 3: carrying a whole bunch of mines, and whatever happened to
Speaker 3: degnate datonated, the whole truck went and they were gone.
Speaker 3: And the Afghans would always pick the two lowest guys
Speaker 3: to drive the truck. And it was, you know, stuff
Speaker 3: hidden from the Soviet time. It was rockets, it was rounds,
Speaker 3: it was mortars, it was mines, everything under the sun,
Speaker 3: in under every kind of condition. In Shlan and in
Speaker 3: the Americans. At first I did it as it would
Speaker 3: be two or three Americans go eventually, and then we
Speaker 3: would ride in a truck and we make sure we
Speaker 3: stayed a couple hundred meters from that truck. Then one
Speaker 3: day I was, you know, in there because now music's allowed.
Speaker 3: They had their little the little uh cassette player playing
Speaker 3: the most horrible Afghan music I ever heard. But they
Speaker 3: were all excited, and these two guys were in there,
Speaker 3: and I felt I felt bad for him. So I
Speaker 3: just went up and opened the door and said, hey,
Speaker 3: I'm I'm climbed in the truck with them, and they
Speaker 3: looked at me like, you're going to ride in here
Speaker 3: with us. I was like in char Land, because if
Speaker 3: you go, I'm going. And off we went. And you know,
Speaker 3: after that, those guys started treating me different, the Afghans.
Speaker 3: I would when we get to where we go, I
Speaker 3: would help them unload the truck, you know, do the
Speaker 3: manual labor, and uh, it got to where they took
Speaker 3: it personal and they didn't want me touching anything. They started,
Speaker 3: you know, taking care of me and treating me like
Speaker 3: I was one of their commanders. My experience with the
Speaker 3: guys in Tora Bora was they were so undisciplined and untrained.
Speaker 3: I expected the same here. We went out to do,
Speaker 3: uh what recover one cachet we thought was going to
Speaker 3: be maybe a hostile. So you don't have time to
Speaker 3: train all these guys, you know, so just just let
Speaker 3: them follow me. So I remember I had them all
Speaker 3: on the back of a steakebed truck and I was
Speaker 3: in the front. My plan was we were gonna get
Speaker 3: off and we were going to cover one ridge. Another
Speaker 3: guy was going to take other guys on another vehicle
Speaker 3: and cover the other ridge, and the Cachet was in
Speaker 3: the valley and I thought, Okay, all you do is
Speaker 3: follow me. I'm going to jump out of the front
Speaker 3: and run under the back. You're all gonna come out
Speaker 3: of the truck and file behind me, and I'm gonna
Speaker 3: I'm the American. I'm going to lead the way up
Speaker 3: the ridge and uh, I've got all my American gear
Speaker 3: on and jump off the truck and come back. Well,
Speaker 3: they're they're jumping off faster than I planned, and they're
Speaker 3: all coming. There's this little guy with a big beard
Speaker 3: and uh, wearing a Soviet officer's belt buckle, and you know,
Speaker 3: we started up the ridge and he just started barking
Speaker 3: orders and those guys were running up the ridge and
Speaker 3: you know, I'm carrying twice the three times the way
Speaker 3: they are, So I'm starting sucking and breathing hard and
Speaker 3: trying to go up the ridge. And I thought I
Speaker 3: was going to lead them. They took off and left
Speaker 3: me and I remember getting getting to the top of
Speaker 3: the ridge and I could barely. I was wheezing, and
Speaker 3: I said, ridge secure and it wasn't. It wasn't because
Speaker 3: of anything I did. They this, this group were hardened
Speaker 3: fighters from the Soviet time, you know, and they knew
Speaker 3: what they were doing. It was pretty cool.
Speaker 2: So after this whole like initial push into Afghanistan, and
Speaker 2: I mean you were involved in it for quite a while,
Speaker 2: what kind of what were the next you know, subsequent
Speaker 2: years like as you were like in and out of Afghanistan.
Speaker 3: Well, so I didn't go well right for me. I
Speaker 3: actually jumped on another agency team for Operation Anakanda and
Speaker 3: did that, uh and then left. I was the last
Speaker 3: guy in fifth Group to pull out of Afghanistan and
Speaker 3: went back to headquarters. And I had been asked for
Speaker 3: by the agency by name this time to be detailed
Speaker 3: to a Middle Eastern country to do some pre Iraq
Speaker 3: preparation of the battlefield stuff there. So there's a lot
Speaker 3: of paperwork to do to prep for that. So yeah,
Speaker 3: I went home in April of two thousand and two,
Speaker 3: took some leave, and then started having to travel to
Speaker 3: get all the clearances and visit the places I need
Speaker 3: to visit to get detailed to the agency. So that
Speaker 3: late after the summer, I wound up being a signed
Speaker 3: to the agency for two years. So that was two
Speaker 3: thousand and two, and I was brought there to do
Speaker 3: this sort of cross border thing, to do the tactical
Speaker 3: side of that, you know. In the run up to
Speaker 3: the agency was collecting some information and running some low
Speaker 3: level people and they had to negotiate the assets, had
Speaker 3: to negotiate Iraqi security. And then there was this little
Speaker 3: problem of the UN. The UN no goes on where
Speaker 3: Americans weren't supposed to be either, and they it had
Speaker 3: been run by by Kuwaiti's before cops, untrained cops with
Speaker 3: thirty eight revolvers, and they got hit in an ambush.
Speaker 3: They were set up by a turncoat and they got
Speaker 3: ambushed and a couple of them killed. That's when they
Speaker 3: decided they needed some experience, some tactical side to come
Speaker 3: in and take over that part. So I was working
Speaker 3: with a small group of Waity policemen and there was
Speaker 3: a case officer in charge.
Speaker 2: And you were just like doing operational preparation of the
Speaker 2: battle space before.
Speaker 3: Yeah, my job was this, Yeah, my job was to
Speaker 3: sneak in, you know, past the UN. We had some
Speaker 3: interesting times where UN troops would come. You know, it's
Speaker 3: an open desert, so you use different techniques in an
Speaker 3: open desert. And I know we were up in this
Speaker 3: tower once and suddenly some UN guys stopped in there,
Speaker 3: and we're up in the tower. I remember taking my
Speaker 3: me and the other guy took our The other American
Speaker 3: took our boots off to creep down this spiral stair
Speaker 3: middle spiral stairway, and they were in they were joking
Speaker 3: and laughing in this other room with I think it
Speaker 3: was Dutch soldiers from the UN. And we went creeping
Speaker 3: by the door to get out, and and it was sky.
Speaker 3: These were cops, so it was it was kind of
Speaker 3: like herding goats. They were they didn't know what they
Speaker 3: were doing, but they had some guns and they thought
Speaker 3: they were bad. So I had to keep everybody close
Speaker 3: enough that I could put hands and push somebody, pull somebody,
Speaker 3: or kick somebody to get them to do what I
Speaker 3: wanted to do. At least I thought that was a thing.
Speaker 3: I was the big, badass SEF guy. One time, my
Speaker 3: humorist got me into a little bit of trouble because
Speaker 3: at the border between Kuwait and Iraq, there's this fifteen
Speaker 3: foot deep, fifteen foot wide trench and a burm. It
Speaker 3: was a tank barrier. The person that we had recovered
Speaker 3: that night. You know, my job was to get them
Speaker 3: in and get them to a place where agency people
Speaker 3: could debrief from Intestine an accent, yeah and asset and
Speaker 3: they were like low level of smugglers. So and then
Speaker 3: my job would be to get him back into Iraq. So, yeah,
Speaker 3: this guy had been lost for several hours down in
Speaker 3: this ditch and uh so the the uh The senior
Speaker 3: policeman said, oh, I know a place. You know, I
Speaker 3: live here. I know a place we can get him
Speaker 3: back across easy, Like okay, So we go and I
Speaker 3: didn't see that. It looked it was some places it
Speaker 3: was eroded down but this place was not eroded. But
Speaker 3: he said, it's the the dirt is is stiff enough
Speaker 3: he should be able to climb. Well, you know, we
Speaker 3: held this guy by the arms and dropped him into
Speaker 3: this hole and I'm watching through. I'm the only one
Speaker 3: with mvgs, and I'm watching him struggle and struggle and
Speaker 3: struggle to try to climb out on the other side.
Speaker 3: And he's not getting anywhere. And after a while, an
Speaker 3: Iraqi patrol is going to stop by here anytime. And
Speaker 3: we're sitting here watching this, and I was like, these
Speaker 3: these guys are all idiots, but you know, I'm a badass.
Speaker 3: And I not only that, and not only I'm a
Speaker 3: bad ass, I am experienced rock climber. I ate, I
Speaker 3: climbed buildings in Delta. I know what I'm doing. So
Speaker 3: I said, I'll get I'll get him back out. And
Speaker 3: I had the guys hold me by the arms and
Speaker 3: drop me down in this hole. I go over, put
Speaker 3: the guy on my shoulders, get him up, go back
Speaker 3: to get out. I went to a place where there
Speaker 3: was a ninety degree corner to try to climb out,
Speaker 3: and guess what, I couldn't get out. And now I'm like,
Speaker 3: wait a second, I'm not stuck in this hole and
Speaker 3: everybody's up there and the iraqis are here, and I
Speaker 3: can't get out, and and I'm I'm supposed to be
Speaker 3: the guy that's the mature, experienced guy. And you know,
Speaker 3: I think I was thinking about, oh my god, this
Speaker 3: is going to be hard to live, because eventually a
Speaker 3: patrol is going to come by I'm going to get captured.
Speaker 3: I didn't think they'd kill me, I said, but I'm
Speaker 3: going to get captured. And when I'm released at the
Speaker 3: end of the war, I'm gonna have to explain that
Speaker 3: I was captured because I got stuck in a hole. Uh,
Speaker 3: I was. I was worried about that, but we thought
Speaker 3: about it. And the other American had these hiking boots on.
Speaker 3: So I had several guys undo their boot laces and
Speaker 3: time all together and made the line and I was
Speaker 3: able to make a loop in the line and uh
Speaker 3: get enough that I could get one foot enough where
Speaker 3: I eventually got out of the out of that predicament,
Speaker 3: as we call it, a gift. And the smuggler, uh,
Speaker 3: you know, I had gotten him side, so he was
Speaker 3: good to go and we got But the first thing
Speaker 3: I did after that was by a collapsible ladder that
Speaker 3: I carried to the border with me. Every time after that,
Speaker 3: I was.
Speaker 2: I was once detained by the Kurdish secret police who
Speaker 2: they alleged that I scrambled across that burm from the
Speaker 2: Syrian side into Iraq. Now there's never any proof to
Speaker 2: substantiate such claims, but you know that I spent I
Speaker 2: spent the night in their jail, which was a fun experience.
Speaker 2: But yeah, those those burms are no joke.
Speaker 3: Well that's that's interesting that you got to spend the
Speaker 3: night in the jail.
Speaker 2: Yea later, so so, yeah, you're doing the agency detail
Speaker 2: and then the war kick soft.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the war kicked off. I went in and it was,
Speaker 3: you know, just a lot of interesting stuff. I I
Speaker 3: I went in. The former cos of Iraq was in
Speaker 3: sitting in Kuwait, and he had his GRS detail. It
Speaker 3: was going to take him back in Charlie and I
Speaker 3: forget what happened, but his details. He was going to
Speaker 3: go in from Saudi and Iraq was still going on.
Speaker 3: I think the battle was had moved to Najeff at
Speaker 3: this point, and uh they for whatever, whoever decided in
Speaker 3: the agency. He was going to go in and get
Speaker 3: a look, go forward and meet up with a guy
Speaker 3: named Greg V that was running the show from inside
Speaker 3: Afghanistan at the time, I mean Iraq at the time.
Speaker 3: Greg V and I were lieutenants together in second recombat.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, Okay, I didn't know that, and I bet
Speaker 2: I didn't. I didn't you know, Well, no, I have
Speaker 2: asked him to come on the show before. I'm still
Speaker 2: I'm still working it. I hope I can convince him
Speaker 2: one day.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, Greg and I were lieutenants together and I
Speaker 3: didn't see him again until two thousand and two Afghanistan
Speaker 3: and the guy, the agency guy I was the tactical
Speaker 3: leader for like me, and he said, hey, you need
Speaker 3: to join the agency. Let me take you and introduce
Speaker 3: you to somebody, and I went, of course, we all
Speaker 3: had beards and civilian clothes. There's this guy, bearded guy
Speaker 3: taking a nap. He stands up, he goes, Oh, Gary Herrington,
Speaker 3: second a company, second recomma tell you. In nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 3: I was like, you agency guys must do your homework
Speaker 3: and he said, I guess you don't remember me, And
Speaker 3: no I didn't at the time, again because we all
Speaker 3: had quite different look than we did as young marines.
Speaker 3: And then after so after that we renewed our friendship
Speaker 3: and then we worked together in Iraq and so yeah,
Speaker 3: I but Charlie Saddell or Charlie didn't have his detail.
Speaker 3: But they said, hey, this guy Gary, he knows what
Speaker 3: he's doing. He can take you into a raq. So
Speaker 3: they said, hey, will you do it. So yeah, I
Speaker 3: by myself on a helicopter took him into into Iraq
Speaker 3: and for his tour and back out. I went in
Speaker 3: and out of bag Dad. The agency let me do
Speaker 3: things that you should be an agency certified form certified
Speaker 3: person to do. But they they decided I could do it.
Speaker 3: So they gave me a few little tests and I
Speaker 3: so I was running some assets in Baghdad in the area.
Speaker 3: I was in Baghdad once with a hooked up with
Speaker 3: a seal. We were looking at doing a hit on
Speaker 3: a terror cell that was located by the Shiah mosque.
Speaker 3: It was a shrine and this is just right after
Speaker 3: Bagdad fell. So the Shiah were very happy and exuberant
Speaker 3: and we wanted to get eyes on. So we had
Speaker 3: rusted Toyota Corolla cruiser that we were in and I'm driving,
Speaker 3: so we kept trying to get through and the road
Speaker 3: was blocked off as we got close, so I'd back off,
Speaker 3: go around, try to come in again. The roads backed off,
Speaker 3: so finally I found a drainage ditch behind the shrine,
Speaker 3: straddled it with the car ease through there and uh,
Speaker 3: you know, it's hard going, but I got through there.
Speaker 3: But as we rounded the corner of the building into
Speaker 3: the square. Suddenly we happened on tens of thousands of
Speaker 3: Iraqi Ashia and they were having a giant It's their
Speaker 3: first asura since the fall. And suddenly you were in
Speaker 3: it and I couldn't back up. It was too with
Speaker 3: a ditch and where I couldn't back up. And then
Speaker 3: just a way but right before the wave of people
Speaker 3: came on us, you know, grab the camera off the dash,
Speaker 3: you know, pull the camera down, take off your shirt.
Speaker 3: You know, we had outer shirts on, cover up the rifles.
Speaker 3: And you know, there's nothing you can do when you're
Speaker 3: in that sea of people. You can't run over enough
Speaker 3: or shoot enough, yeah, to get it out, and people
Speaker 3: would be plastered on us, and hey, you know, my
Speaker 3: big soldier to act was to look at people and
Speaker 3: smile and go, you know, I'm just a dumb American
Speaker 3: and like some and they glare at you. Then they
Speaker 3: go okay, and the guy would move you a few feet.
Speaker 3: Then you'd renegotiate with the next and the next and
Speaker 3: the next. I think it took us thirty forty five
Speaker 3: minutes to get out of that crowd. Whoa out, you know,
Speaker 3: And I just kept picturing, you know, getting ripped apart
Speaker 3: by people.
Speaker 2: Well, there's that famous case study about the surveillance team
Speaker 2: that was I believe it was an ira.
Speaker 3: Web Ira Yeah, yes, and they got ira wedding. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 3: as a funeral. Maybe it was a funeral, and we
Speaker 3: had I think we had talked about that in Delta
Speaker 3: and those guys yeah, were doing surveillance and got made
Speaker 3: and pulled out of the car and killed. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that went through That exact incident went through my mind.
Speaker 3: We were there, but ay, you know it was it
Speaker 3: was different. We had, you know, some adventures and had fun.
Speaker 3: I had kind of made my bones with the agency,
Speaker 3: so they were supportive of me trying to come into
Speaker 3: the agency. And I finished my two years as a
Speaker 3: detailer in two thousand and four and had been running
Speaker 3: back and forth to Iraq. You know, during the day,
Speaker 3: I'd be at the embassy like everybody else. And guess
Speaker 3: who else came to the embassy and was a signaire,
Speaker 3: John Mulholland. Again he was working at the I think
Speaker 3: it was the OMA office there, So we got to
Speaker 3: see each other again and work together a little bit,
Speaker 3: and so the agency supported me. I came back to
Speaker 3: the US fifth group had changed significantly. All the people
Speaker 3: were gone. They gave me a barracks room over the
Speaker 3: gym for two weeks, and I just hand carried my
Speaker 3: paperwork and punched out of the Army against advice. And
Speaker 3: I didn't do all the proper things you're supposed to
Speaker 3: do when you retire. But I was by that time
Speaker 3: when I was in my forties, forty six maybe, and
Speaker 3: the agency had a job for me, and I was like,
Speaker 3: you know, I can't this is my chance. If I wait,
Speaker 3: I'll miss it. So I left Fort Campbell on a
Speaker 3: Friday and reported for work Monday at Langley. Wow.
Speaker 2: And what was what was the job they had lined.
Speaker 3: Up for you? Well, the job I'd been promised, hey case,
Speaker 3: that I'd become an operations officer case officer. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: that I you know, I'd already recruited and all that
Speaker 3: stuff free agency. And but then I got there and
Speaker 3: they go, oh, you can start out as a GS
Speaker 3: eleven and you can't be an operations officer. You're can
Speaker 3: be a sue A support officer. And I was like, huh,
Speaker 3: what what what? Wait a minute to me support officer
Speaker 3: And they said well, you're going to have to do
Speaker 3: that for a while. And so I showed up with
Speaker 3: the Near East Division and that was my job to
Speaker 3: sit at a desk and support Iraqi ops write cables
Speaker 3: and I did that. I did everything I could. I'd
Speaker 3: been fortunate over from the time I was in Yemen
Speaker 3: to Kuwait doing you know, an army project, to when
Speaker 3: I was detailed, and throughout that time in the war,
Speaker 3: a lot of agency people I met a lot, and
Speaker 3: a lot of them depended on me to take care
Speaker 3: of them in the hostile environments. So I guess I
Speaker 3: had friends on the inside and they were telling me,
Speaker 3: you're going to have to do two years before you
Speaker 3: can even be considered to do the training to get
Speaker 3: certified as a case officer. I'm like, but I already
Speaker 3: recruited and doesn't count. And you know, well, I wound
Speaker 3: up after six months there getting my opportunity to go
Speaker 3: to the course to get certified. So I did that,
Speaker 3: and that's you were talking two thousand and five. And
Speaker 3: then I said, you know, because I chose to go
Speaker 3: case officer route instead of ground branch, because you know,
Speaker 3: I was trying to look ahead. I was in my forties,
Speaker 3: I was still great shape and very capable. But I
Speaker 3: was like, I got to do this till I'm sixty
Speaker 3: five or so, and I don't want to be that guy,
Speaker 3: white haired guy trying to still tote the rifle and
Speaker 3: hang out with the badasses. And if I'm a case officer,
Speaker 3: I can have I've never had for the last fifteen years,
Speaker 3: I haven't had a regular life. I can have a
Speaker 3: regular life and still contribute. So so I went that
Speaker 3: round and had made him promise me that, hey, I've
Speaker 3: done a lot of war stuff for you guys. Now
Speaker 3: I want one of those embassy jobs. I want to
Speaker 3: like go to Geneva or somewhere where I can like
Speaker 3: have a good time, live a good life and all that.
Speaker 3: And so I was set to go somewhere. It was
Speaker 3: not Geneva. It was Saudi Arabia, so but it's still
Speaker 3: it wasn't a case officer job. It was a case
Speaker 3: officer job. And then after I graduated the course. A
Speaker 3: day I graduated, the division's personnel officer sent me a
Speaker 3: note congratulations on graduating the course, said please come by
Speaker 3: my office at your earliest convenience about your assignment. So
Speaker 3: I showed up and I said hey, and he goes,
Speaker 3: then no, you're not going there. And what am I doing. Well,
Speaker 3: there's a dire need in Afghanistan and they need you
Speaker 3: and they asked for you, so you're going to Afghanistan.
Speaker 3: I can't not me back to Afghanistan and they go, yep, Afghanistan.
Speaker 3: It turned out it was the Greg V guy was
Speaker 3: the chief and had some people that backed out of assignments.
Speaker 3: I still had the soldier in me where I thought,
Speaker 3: you know, when you're told you have to go somewhere,
Speaker 3: you can complain and you can say ask him to reconsider,
Speaker 3: but you still have to go. I didn't realize, No,
Speaker 3: that's not how it is.
Speaker 2: He yeah, yeah. The interesting thing about the CIA is that,
Speaker 2: like you're not a soldier, they can't order you to
Speaker 2: go to a war zone if you don't want to go.
Speaker 3: But I didn't know that really, so I was like, okay,
Speaker 3: But it all went and it turned out it was
Speaker 3: Greg you know, and and you know, I respect him
Speaker 3: a lot and trust him a lot, and he really
Speaker 3: wanted me, so I was happy to work with him.
Speaker 3: And I worked with him, and you know, he was
Speaker 3: towards the last half of his tour there. So he
Speaker 3: left and was replaced by the guy who had been
Speaker 3: a team leader that I was, a guy named Chris,
Speaker 3: and I was had been his tactical team leader in Afghanistan.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, so between the two of them, now, I'm
Speaker 3: a case officer, but they knew me with my military skills,
Speaker 3: so I sort of went by. They gave me sort
Speaker 3: of a different set of rules than other case officers had,
Speaker 3: so I guess I had more freedom of movement and
Speaker 3: more leeway at pursuing some different kind of you know.
Speaker 3: It wasn't the usual embassy stuff. You know. I was
Speaker 3: going after I D people, and I was for a
Speaker 3: while I was meeting a guy that would bring ied
Speaker 3: trigger devices from Pakistan in and I would meet him
Speaker 3: and give him a little bit of money and i'd
Speaker 3: I'd take the devices instead. Yeah, And then after a while,
Speaker 3: It's funny, I got called into the headquarters and they said, hey,
Speaker 3: we have like especially trained explosive people that should be
Speaker 3: getting these. I go, what are they going to do
Speaker 3: that I'm doing? You know, I was a breacher. I've
Speaker 3: been trained breacher. I know I can take a triggering
Speaker 3: device and it's not but it's you're not qualified, and
Speaker 3: you know it works differently in the agency about your
Speaker 3: qualifications and stuff. So I did that. I did some
Speaker 3: stuff where I convinced some Taliban that they were on
Speaker 3: the wrong side of the fence and they should do
Speaker 3: some other things. I did a couple of the you know,
Speaker 3: traditional case officer recruitments and hirings and all that.
Speaker 2: You also mentioned to me that there are a few
Speaker 2: stories from this timeframe that you quard through the PRBH
Speaker 2: that I'd love to hear if you if you can tell, Yeah,
Speaker 2: well one of them.
Speaker 3: Uh, yeah, So I did do some stuff with Taliban
Speaker 3: and turning some Taliban. One of the stories that an
Speaker 3: interesting one is that I was standing on a corner
Speaker 3: in Kabul called Masoud Circle. It's right by where the
Speaker 3: US embassy was, just outside the security zone, and I
Speaker 3: might have been breaking rules. And I'm standing on the
Speaker 3: street corner with an interpreter waiting to meet in Nafghan
Speaker 3: that I want to take back an interview. And you know,
Speaker 3: while you're standing there, your situational awareness is really turned on.
Speaker 3: You're scanning, you're looking, You're you know, if is anybody
Speaker 3: going to try to come up and try to kill me,
Speaker 3: I'm watching. And as I'm doing that, while we're waiting,
Speaker 3: my attention for a brief moment when on this off
Speaker 3: to my left a black Toyota Corolla. And but I
Speaker 3: was like, okay, well I don't really see anything wrong
Speaker 3: with that, and back, and you know, I was keeping scanning.
Speaker 3: But then I kept turning back to that black Toyota.
Speaker 3: Well then I noticed, well, there's two guys in it,
Speaker 3: and they see me. We're about thirty yards apart, so
Speaker 3: they clearly see that I'm an American. And and then
Speaker 3: I you know, but I was ignoring that little sixth
Speaker 3: sense that comes on in you because I was trying
Speaker 3: to get something done right, So I just kept making excuses.
Speaker 3: There was a cop about ten yards away from that,
Speaker 3: uh that car, and I told myself, well, if there
Speaker 3: was something wrong, the cop wouldn't let them be there,
Speaker 3: because I thought, I'm just bothered because cars don't normally
Speaker 3: park there. And uh, well, then the guy that I
Speaker 3: was waiting for showed up. So we turned around, the
Speaker 3: interpreter and I went back through the security zone. It's
Speaker 3: about one hundred and fifty meters to the gate, and
Speaker 3: we went in and as we were coming in the gate.
Speaker 3: You know, there was just a deafening explosion and the
Speaker 3: ground shaking and the alarm went off. You know, you
Speaker 3: had to get inside the buildings and get on the
Speaker 3: floor and wait, we're probably there. A couple hours things
Speaker 3: started dying down. I went to see the regional security
Speaker 3: officers there that run security for embassies, and I asked him,
Speaker 3: I said, hey, was that a vehicle of Ebid? And
Speaker 3: they said it was. Was it at Kabul's Circle, our
Speaker 3: Masud circle? Right out here? It was? It hit a
Speaker 3: military US military convoy, killed two soldiers, injured four, and
Speaker 3: killed a bunch of Afghans. And I said no, I said,
Speaker 3: was it a black Toyota Corolla? And the guy stopped
Speaker 3: me and he said, nobody knows that. We're just finding
Speaker 3: pieces of that. Nobody knows that. I said, well, I
Speaker 3: was there two minutes before it went off. There were
Speaker 3: two guys in it, so I mean, that's just one
Speaker 3: of those stories that happens. The lesson I took from
Speaker 3: that was pay attention to your instincts and if something's
Speaker 3: bothering you, you know, you need to definitively rule it
Speaker 3: out threat or not threat, but be definitive about it.
Speaker 3: Don't let it sit there, because I've many times imagined
Speaker 3: the conversation those guys had. You know, hey, let's just
Speaker 3: do it now. Here's an American right here. All we
Speaker 3: have to do is touch the wires together. And maybe
Speaker 3: the other guy, well they told us military convoy, and
Speaker 3: but who knows if that's gonna come. Here's one right now,
Speaker 3: and they didn't. The pictures that were went around the
Speaker 3: world after of that explosion, aftermath where I was standing
Speaker 3: was just gone. It was obliterated. The tree, so everything
Speaker 3: was just it was just gone. So, you know, fate
Speaker 3: was with me that day, even though I probably made
Speaker 3: some bad choices about sticking around.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then there's another another one about asset recovery.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So I had had some success with some a
Speaker 3: couple ops I did with ground branch guys where we
Speaker 3: UH flipped some Taliban. He actually got some Taliban fighters
Speaker 3: that we did some stuff, you know with UH for
Speaker 3: a while. And as a following on to that, there
Speaker 3: was a one of the guys that was on the
Speaker 3: top ten list, Mullah Kabir, that was in Pakistan and
Speaker 3: through some people I'd been trying to reach out to
Speaker 3: him to make overtures that if he would come in
Speaker 3: and or cooperate with me, you know, I'd try to
Speaker 3: get him off the list of that that means death,
Speaker 3: because you know, if we can get you, we're going
Speaker 3: to kill you. But maybe there's another option for you.
Speaker 3: And eventually, and and I'd had some success doing some
Speaker 3: those ops, and we thought we were told that there
Speaker 3: that he would come in, but he was going to
Speaker 3: do so at the border of n Angohar Province in
Speaker 3: Nuristan Province. And that was a back in those days,
Speaker 3: we're talking two thousand and six. I believe it was
Speaker 3: no man's land. It was.
Speaker 2: It was bad.
Speaker 3: I think later a big military US military unit got
Speaker 3: shot up pretty bad there. So I rolled we did
Speaker 3: this op. So it was some ground branch guys and
Speaker 3: I we rolled in into thin skinned vehicles in the
Speaker 3: middle of the night to get in. And we had
Speaker 3: two gun trucks, so pickup trucks that had the local
Speaker 3: Afghans that the agency had trained were remained like thirty
Speaker 3: minutes behind. And our thinking, because we didn't have any
Speaker 3: air support, was that if we got hit, we would
Speaker 3: call in those vehicles and with a twenty or thirty
Speaker 3: minute delay, they could get in and provide some extra
Speaker 3: fire support to extract us, and we didn't plan on
Speaker 3: being there long. You can make an infill at night,
Speaker 3: but in a village or out in a remote place,
Speaker 3: unlike the Seals and Loan survivor, you know that you're
Speaker 3: going to be made and you have to get out
Speaker 3: of there, so you can get in, but the fuse
Speaker 3: is burning, so you don't have long to be there.
Speaker 3: As it started getting light, we backed up into I
Speaker 3: found some guy and we paid him some cash that
Speaker 3: he had a walled compound, so a mud walled compound.
Speaker 3: We were able to get our vehicles there, but you
Speaker 3: know that we're still going to get you. You can't
Speaker 3: be somewhere, and as the village wakes up and people
Speaker 3: start moving around, you know you're essentially made. Well, this
Speaker 3: mullaka bear didn't show, didn't show. I had an Afghan
Speaker 3: general with me wearing plain clothes who was ethnic Poshtune
Speaker 3: from that area and he after we had no phone coverage,
Speaker 3: even Thraia at that point. It wasn't where we couldn't
Speaker 3: hit the satellites. It wasn't working. So we're getting to
Speaker 3: the point where I'm going to have to abandon this mission,
Speaker 3: and we the general decided to go forward because he's
Speaker 3: a he's a local, he can blend. So he said,
Speaker 3: I'm going to go forward. And we were at the
Speaker 3: edge of Afghanistan. So by going forward, he was going
Speaker 3: into Pakistan. And I gave him forty five minutes. I said, okay,
Speaker 3: I can give you forty five minutes. Go see what
Speaker 3: the deal is, get where you can make a phone
Speaker 3: call and see if this is own or not. But
Speaker 3: we got to get out of here. The forty five
Speaker 3: minutes went by, he wasn't there, and we had to
Speaker 3: try to. You know, I've got to do something. By now,
Speaker 3: it's getting ten, ten thirty. Surely everybody knows we're there
Speaker 3: by now. So I know that by now, Taliban, al Qaeda,
Speaker 3: whoever knows. And the question is, you know, how soon
Speaker 3: can they take action? And you know, I wanted to
Speaker 3: pull out and take the Americans with me, because that's
Speaker 3: the sure thing to do, and that's what the agency
Speaker 3: would want me to do. That was the politically correct
Speaker 3: thing to do. But then there's that soldier's creed of
Speaker 3: never leave a guy behind. And I, you know, I
Speaker 3: even asked myself the question is well, is he my guy?
Speaker 3: Was my first responsibility to the Americans, right, And then
Speaker 3: this guy is in Afghan and the ground branch guys
Speaker 3: were were asking me, you know, it's my call. What
Speaker 3: are we going to do? And I talked with them
Speaker 3: a little bit and and we you know, we decided, okay,
Speaker 3: it's no longer a secret that we're here. Let's make
Speaker 3: one effort to get this guy. So we called up
Speaker 3: the two gun trucks, you know, the two pickup trucks.
Speaker 3: So we you know, we had twelve Afghans and with
Speaker 3: each vehicle was one, if not two other ground branch guys.
Speaker 3: So we waited on them. They come rolling in. We
Speaker 3: got in front of them and our thin skinned vehicles
Speaker 3: and off into Pakistan we go looking for this general.
Speaker 3: And hey, we got lucky that after we got inside
Speaker 3: and had gone just a few kilometers, suddenly this uh,
Speaker 3: you know, little cab car comes flying up behind us
Speaker 3: and out jumps the general and he's like crying and
Speaker 3: running up and hugging me. And he had his vehicle
Speaker 3: had stalled near Pakistani checkpoint and he'd been they'd fired
Speaker 3: a couple of times, and then he'd been running for
Speaker 3: the last forty five minutes, so he so he was glad,
Speaker 3: but we recovered him and then, you know, thanks to
Speaker 3: the ground branch guy's skill and the guys that they
Speaker 3: had trained, we you know, mounted up and got back
Speaker 3: out and with no incident. You know, it was it
Speaker 3: was just a very tense time. It had reminded me that,
Speaker 3: you know, when I talked earlier about Afghanistan in two
Speaker 3: thousand and two, I was the tactical leader and that
Speaker 3: Chris guy that I talked about later was the team leader.
Speaker 3: And we got set up out in the middle of
Speaker 3: nowhere for this asset that was going to meet us,
Speaker 3: and he wasn't showing and as a tactical leader, I
Speaker 3: noticed that, hey, we're out in the middle of a valley.
Speaker 3: We're in a bad spot. The people in this little
Speaker 3: outpost there's only like five little buildings together are disappearing.
Speaker 3: If the locals are disappearing, something is getting ready to happen.
Speaker 3: So I told him we've got to pull out. We
Speaker 3: can't stay here, and we left. And after we got
Speaker 3: back that night to our base camp, we found out
Speaker 3: that Sigett had picked up al Qaeda Khom, saying that
Speaker 3: they had part of the ambush in on us and
Speaker 3: we're waiting to put the rest of it in before
Speaker 3: they initiated an ambush. But we ended up, you know,
Speaker 3: walking out, and I just thought it was a weird,
Speaker 3: just uh, the sense of irony that I've been on
Speaker 3: one side and now here I was in the team
Speaker 3: leader job and I like it better being on the
Speaker 3: tactical side.
Speaker 2: Was that sort of like emblematic of your time at
Speaker 2: the agency that they kept you in Afghanistan?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I did. I did three tours. It's supposed to
Speaker 3: be one and not that many people even did one,
Speaker 3: and uh, I did. I did three. The after two
Speaker 3: I would have I would have gotten been able to go,
Speaker 3: but I went home on leave and actually married somebody
Speaker 3: in the agency, and she had never done a war
Speaker 3: zone tour. So you say, well, you know, you've done
Speaker 3: your share of war zone, but she's not done a
Speaker 3: war zone, and she's going to be an a war zone.
Speaker 3: So if you want to be with her, you know,
Speaker 3: because we've been in separate countries, married in separate countries
Speaker 3: for a year, it's going to be a war on
Speaker 3: Iraq or Afghanistan. They you know, I've already got everything
Speaker 3: wired here in Afghanistan. I'll I'll stay in Afghanistan. So
Speaker 3: so she came out and I did my third year.
Speaker 3: It was maybe not the wisest choice I made, because
Speaker 3: I didn't realize that after all those years of war
Speaker 3: zones and classified missions, just back to back to back
Speaker 3: to back, you don't realize what it does to you.
Speaker 3: And I'm now in touch with some of the GRS
Speaker 3: Global Support guys that you know, we're bodyguards, that knew
Speaker 3: me and trusted me in those days. They said, hey, man,
Speaker 3: that that third year, and you know, we all wondered
Speaker 3: when you were going to buy the ticket because like
Speaker 3: you're going out on your own and Kabul and driving
Speaker 3: by yourself right and staying at a compound, and you
Speaker 3: kind of had this thing of nobody can touch you
Speaker 3: and eos. Most people don't survive that right now, but
Speaker 3: I did and it was good. But I you know,
Speaker 3: I was done with war zones.
Speaker 2: I guess I'm gonna I want to ask about kind
Speaker 2: of your transition out of the agency, but I'm going
Speaker 2: to hit you with a couple uh some questions from
Speaker 2: our viewers and let me see if I pull these
Speaker 2: up here real quick.
Speaker 3: I know we have a handful.
Speaker 2: Let's see here, Tom's asked, how does the agency have
Speaker 2: to adapt to penetrate harder targets like like nation state
Speaker 2: actors China and Russia as opposed to our g WAT experiences,
Speaker 2: and what from our g WAT experiences can be learned
Speaker 2: as far as like how we go I guess I
Speaker 2: think this is a little convoluted, But I think what
Speaker 2: he's asking is how can we take our experiences in
Speaker 2: the GWATT. It's sort of like rejigger that to target
Speaker 2: nation states and some of the neuro peer adversaries that
Speaker 2: we're in competition with.
Speaker 3: Well, that one, that's, to be honest, that's probably a
Speaker 3: few levels above my pay grade. I think that my
Speaker 3: opinion a base on what I know, is the the
Speaker 3: intelligence services have had a very hard time in our
Speaker 3: near peer countries. You know, I don't want to go
Speaker 3: too far in what I say, but I think we're
Speaker 3: all aware that we've had some spectacular failures regarding China
Speaker 3: and some other countries, and so the you know, a
Speaker 3: lot of a lot of our thinking about how the
Speaker 3: Intelligence Service goes about it I think has to be refigured,
Speaker 3: and the model that we use in Afghanistan would not work. Now.
Speaker 3: I don't know what the Special Forces, whether first Group
Speaker 3: or tenth Group with Russia planning is for, you know,
Speaker 3: to take their side of the battle to those countries,
Speaker 3: but I don't think it. It can't be the same
Speaker 3: like command structure as it was in Afghanistan. And one
Speaker 3: of the big failures. I was one of the plank
Speaker 3: holders as things started deteriorating with Syria, and so I
Speaker 3: was in the midst of the decisions as that was
Speaker 3: ramping up, and based on my experience, I knew that
Speaker 3: whatever we did in Syria, and I'll draw the correlation
Speaker 3: to to a your peer country that like Afghanistan. While
Speaker 3: the agency might start it and have the legal authorities
Speaker 3: under covert actions to do these initial activities, that it's
Speaker 3: gonna inevitably turn over to fifth Group. So my thinking
Speaker 3: was at the beginning, we need to share with SOCOM
Speaker 3: and sock scent and be tied in so that it's
Speaker 3: a seamless transition from agency to army. And you know,
Speaker 3: but that's where you get into those organizational divides and
Speaker 3: jealousies because they're like no, no, you can't eat, and
Speaker 3: I was like, let's go tell them, and there was
Speaker 3: great reluctance to share much. I went down for my
Speaker 3: boss and I went down to brief General Madis and
Speaker 3: that did not go well at all.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: Well it was a general Mattis is a very very
Speaker 3: smart man and at that and you know, we're used
Speaker 3: to doing military briefs, so that's one advantage we have. Well,
Speaker 3: then I came back and a few months later it
Speaker 3: was time to go to SOCOM and we'd had some
Speaker 3: The agency in SOCOM had some difficulties and there was
Speaker 3: a level of distrust there and I was like, so I,
Speaker 3: you know, and by this time, I'm a GS thirteen.
Speaker 3: That's it. I'm a low level GS thirteen because I've
Speaker 3: done all my time, most of my time in war zones.
Speaker 3: I did have one tour somewhere else and I had
Speaker 3: some you know, successes in the terror arena there. But
Speaker 3: so I said, hey, if anybody wants to go with me,
Speaker 3: any flag level person wants to go down to SOCOM,
Speaker 3: you're welcome to. But nobody came. So I walked into
Speaker 3: Admiral Craven's office by myself and it was an ambush.
Speaker 3: He was not happy with Fade and see and one
Speaker 3: of his key staff members had had it. There was
Speaker 3: a big rift. You know. I went there. His briefing
Speaker 3: table was, everybody was there. They introduced themselves, They sit
Speaker 3: me down. Then the door to his office opens. He
Speaker 3: comes in, sits in his chair facing them, says hello.
Speaker 3: Then he spends it and looks at me, goes and
Speaker 3: what do you want? And I was like, well, here
Speaker 3: I am former E seven now talking to uh the
Speaker 3: Socom commander, and uh, you know, I said, hey, sir,
Speaker 3: at heart, I'm an SF guy, you know, and I'm here,
Speaker 3: but I'm gonna tell you the truth, not only about
Speaker 3: what we have and what we're doing, but more importantly
Speaker 3: what we don't have and what we can't do. And uh,
Speaker 3: and we got along. It sort of helped that John
Speaker 3: Mulholland became his deputy and we were friends, and you know,
Speaker 3: I got some assistance from him, and you know, off
Speaker 3: we went. But as that relates to a near peer
Speaker 3: that there has to be a seamless off ramp, and
Speaker 3: you know, my I guess maybe that's changed, uh since
Speaker 3: I left in twenty fifteen. I doubt it, just because
Speaker 3: of legalities and jealousies and everybody's got to protect their turf.
Speaker 2: Joe asks, what is your view of oil and gas
Speaker 2: exploration and Yemen and its impact on the government and
Speaker 2: economy there. Do you have any thoughts about that?
Speaker 3: Hey, Yemen has a lot of oil and it's just
Speaker 3: that the riff between the Shia and Sunni there, we're
Speaker 3: never gonna get that. The French, well, I can't remember
Speaker 3: now the name of the French oil and gas company
Speaker 3: that had the big concessions there back during ninety eight
Speaker 3: ninety nine. It doesn't matter who has the concessions and
Speaker 3: consorting there. They are not going to resolve that issue.
Speaker 3: And it's never going to be stable enough where anybody's
Speaker 3: going to be able to really put the infrastructure that
Speaker 3: needs to be there to be able to take advantage
Speaker 3: of it.
Speaker 2: Mitchell asks, what was the most useful thing you learned
Speaker 2: at Marine Corps boot camp? And I guess he's asking
Speaker 2: that helped in your later role in Jaysack and CIA.
Speaker 2: Please tell us is somehow involved scrubbing toilets with toothbrushes?
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, yeah, well involving toothbrushes. Hey, it's it's shoot,
Speaker 3: move and communicate. It's the basics of never leave a
Speaker 3: buddy behind. It's the belief in your country and in
Speaker 3: your service and devotion to those people around you. It's
Speaker 3: the basics. I felt was really good at the basics.
Speaker 3: And no matter where you go in Jason Cia, whatever
Speaker 3: the most complicated operation you're doing, even you know, I've
Speaker 3: you know, I've done operations against top tier, how kind
Speaker 3: of leaders, it's still going back to the basics, taking
Speaker 3: care of people, shoot, move, communicate.
Speaker 2: It's sort of maybe an open ended question, but Isaac
Speaker 2: asks if you have an opinion about what we've heard
Speaker 2: about in the press about the Havana syndrome.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know about that. You know, when I
Speaker 3: first heard it, I thought it was plausible. It's also
Speaker 3: plausible to me that it could be another or a
Speaker 3: manifestation of anxieties. You know, this is our society today
Speaker 3: is walking around with a lot of anxieties. And when
Speaker 3: you're operating in certain countries and you're undercover, particularly if
Speaker 3: there's hard targets coming after you, that that can weigh
Speaker 3: on you and change you. But but to be honest,
Speaker 3: I do not have enough information and I don't I
Speaker 3: think the medical community is still pretty divided on whether
Speaker 3: you know how on the you know the reality of
Speaker 3: that and the impact of it. I would believe if
Speaker 3: you showed me data, I would believe either way. Certainly.
Speaker 3: I don't put it past some countries to use a
Speaker 3: weapon like that against US.
Speaker 2: JO just asks regarding Tora Bora, would you say Ben
Speaker 2: Laden and al Qaeda had a good understanding of sand
Speaker 2: intercept capabilities?
Speaker 3: I didn't. I say that al Qaeda had a good
Speaker 3: understanding of it. We we were they were intercepting communications
Speaker 3: coming out of Tora Bora and identified Ben Lauden's voice
Speaker 3: on that at certain points, and sometime between six and
Speaker 3: nine December, they stopped getting his voice, So that's when
Speaker 3: we know that he sometime in that timeframe, probably uh
Speaker 3: left to Bora, which happens to be about the night
Speaker 3: they told us to that we had to get off
Speaker 3: our op.
Speaker 2: Paul asks, do you know if any Afghans who worked
Speaker 2: with early on were able to get out out of Afghanistan?
Speaker 2: I guess when they collapsed. I'm guessing it's hard to
Speaker 2: prove they worked with us if they worked with the agency.
Speaker 3: Uh, there's uh, some did, some didn't. There are some
Speaker 3: people you know that I know of that are still
Speaker 3: there Uh, there's a man, one of the linguists that
Speaker 3: I worked with U named Rousseaul is active in trying
Speaker 3: to help. You know, there's various groups and there's a
Speaker 3: lot of SF guys that help get people out, but
Speaker 3: there are guys that are stuck and it's not to me,
Speaker 3: just them, but they're family members. There's one person I
Speaker 3: know that Hey, they're coming around now to my brother
Speaker 3: and if you know, it's either joined or get killed.
Speaker 3: And if they ever find out that I'm in America,
Speaker 3: he's dead. So it's uh, there's a lot. There are
Speaker 3: so many people that are left, and probably a lot
Speaker 3: of agency affiliated people.
Speaker 2: Joe's I think you kind of answered this question, but
Speaker 2: he says, do you have a lot of exposure working
Speaker 2: with sada's or TFO during the AFO OPB mission sets.
Speaker 2: I think you've sort of answered that question.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't. I the sada's, I coordinated with some
Speaker 3: of them, like mostly doing peacetime stuff in Kuwait and
Speaker 3: some of the other places, but not I didn't really
Speaker 3: work with them in the UH in the combat phase.
Speaker 3: I pretty much worked with agency people in most of that. UH.
Speaker 2: Don asks with all of your experience working by with
Speaker 2: and through the State Department. Do you have any experience
Speaker 2: or thoughts working with the Diplomatic Security Service or MSD.
Speaker 3: Hey, A lot of great guys worked there. There are
Speaker 3: plenty of guys. There's rangers, Delta marines, every branch is
Speaker 3: service that some of them leave, you know, mid career
Speaker 3: and come to the Diplomatic Security Service. A guy that
Speaker 3: I trained and trained me in martial arts used to
Speaker 3: be their head of their martial arts program, Tony Mafnis.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you guy's ever heard of him,
Speaker 3: but that's a that's that's the greatest martial art artists
Speaker 3: I've ever known or seen, and he ran the DS
Speaker 3: program for a long time. So yeah, there's a lot,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of good guys there, but yeah, there's
Speaker 3: some that that are inexperienced. In Afghanistan, they were experienced,
Speaker 3: but in places in some other places that were not hostile.
Speaker 3: You know. It's people that have more of an admin
Speaker 3: police type background, so they're maybe not as suited in
Speaker 3: some respects to deal with no hostile environment. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I actually have a quick question before we move on
Speaker 2: to sort of your transition out of governmental service. I've
Speaker 2: been working on this article lately with my colleague Sean
Speaker 2: Naylor for the High Side that we've learned that the
Speaker 2: next commander of Delta is actually going to be a
Speaker 2: aviation guy who comes from Eco Squadron. I was wondered
Speaker 2: if you had any thoughts of that as somebody who
Speaker 2: worked in this community and closely with the community about
Speaker 2: rather than somebody who came from, you know, the traditional
Speaker 2: squadron commander position and working their way up about an
Speaker 2: aviation guy sort of landing in that billet.
Speaker 3: Hey, you know, I think it's time Delta's changed a lot.
Speaker 3: I actually, in the serious stuff, went back to the
Speaker 3: Delta compound to do a briefing there in the run
Speaker 3: up to Syria, and you know, when I left, it
Speaker 3: was three squadrons. I came back and it was like
Speaker 3: it doubled in size. I think there was we're at
Speaker 3: h or whatever, Brazilian squadrons, all bunch of different missions,
Speaker 3: and it had grown. And so with that, I believe
Speaker 3: that you know, the guys that have to develop the
Speaker 3: operational plan on the ground, there will still be plenty
Speaker 3: of people that can do that, But to run that
Speaker 3: behemoth now, I think that anybody that has the proper
Speaker 3: mentality and training and experience, and joint environment is very
Speaker 3: capable of doing that. So I don't I don't think
Speaker 3: that they'll miss a step.
Speaker 2: So talk to us. I mean, I believe you told
Speaker 2: me you spent about fifteen years in the agency before retiring.
Speaker 2: If you could tell us a little bit about your
Speaker 2: transition to back to civilian life after all these years
Speaker 2: and a life of working, you know, sort of in
Speaker 2: the shadows.
Speaker 3: The agency. I entered this field. I again, I was
Speaker 3: a young guy. I thought my job was to give
Speaker 3: my life for my country and never planned on surviving
Speaker 3: all that stuff and getting old, getting older. I pushed
Speaker 3: hard and I had that just some things in the
Speaker 3: agency started, you know, going bothering me somewhat. I had
Speaker 3: a successful operation against a senior Al Qaida person that
Speaker 3: sort of put me in the middle of the political
Speaker 3: aspect and at more senior levels. And I started seeing
Speaker 3: under the tent, you know that a lot of some
Speaker 3: of the politics involved in the decision making process and
Speaker 3: some stuff with the National Security Council, and you know,
Speaker 3: this whole thing about hey, let's not tell so coom stuff.
Speaker 3: I you know, I started becoming like, hey, I'm this
Speaker 3: is bothering me, and I think I had And then
Speaker 3: the wife that I married there in the agency decided
Speaker 3: to move on and do something different. So, you know,
Speaker 3: I started really wondering, like what am I doing here?
Speaker 3: I felt that the agency, a lot of the people
Speaker 3: in the side of the agency I was in, where
Speaker 3: fairly liberal, and that you know, I was viewed somewhat different.
Speaker 3: You know, I don't think I was an old cojure yet,
Speaker 3: but it just started getting where. I started like, I
Speaker 3: don't like the politics in this. And then in my
Speaker 3: personal life, I started I'd been on all these offensive things.
Speaker 3: It's how do we track down this guy? How do
Speaker 3: I get this guy? I had a few times where
Speaker 3: I did something I felt was really good, like getting
Speaker 3: a family out of a denied country. Once you know
Speaker 3: that was that was a good feeling, and I, you know,
Speaker 3: I started searching for and there was a spiritual search
Speaker 3: for me. I'd i'd been a believer in God and Christian,
Speaker 3: but I sure heck wouldn't have been accused of that
Speaker 3: of anybody you me. In a lot of my military
Speaker 3: time and and and maybe agency time, and you know this,
Speaker 3: I started I started having medical issues. I've been under
Speaker 3: extreme stress in some things that we haven't talked about,
Speaker 3: probably shouldn't talk about, and for so many years and
Speaker 3: so long that I started having heart things, and yeah,
Speaker 3: I started thinking this isn't for me. And right when
Speaker 3: my career, after some pretty spectacular successes, should have been
Speaker 3: taken off, I was like, I got it. I've got
Speaker 3: to bail on this. And I resigned in twenty fifteen
Speaker 3: after I think I was eleven as a staff officer
Speaker 3: and two as a detail ee. But I've been working
Speaker 3: on it off with the agency for yeah, fifteen sixteen years.
Speaker 2: And so you sort of reconnected or made stronger connections
Speaker 2: with your with your faith. Yeah, got remarried.
Speaker 3: No, I actually with my faith, you know. I hope
Speaker 3: I don't turn it off, but I had again. I
Speaker 3: decided I needed to be not a believer but a follower.
Speaker 3: I needed to be somebody that made what I who
Speaker 3: I thought it was on the inside and what I
Speaker 3: believe be who I am, how I speak and on
Speaker 3: the outside, because I was one thing that I felt
Speaker 3: I needed to be to get the job done on
Speaker 3: the outside, and I thought I was something different. The
Speaker 3: truth is, you are who you are on the outside.
Speaker 3: Not what you like to think you are on your inside.
Speaker 3: So I did reconnect with my faith. I decided I
Speaker 3: probably wasn't the most qualified person to look for romantic entanglements.
Speaker 3: All the buddyes, my buddies in the military say hey, Gary,
Speaker 3: every ten or fifteen years, don't ever get married again.
Speaker 3: Just every ten or fifteen years, give all your shit
Speaker 3: to some woman and all your money.
Speaker 2: And don't go through that whole just pay palbum so
Speaker 2: and you know, it's a.
Speaker 3: Part of my change and my faith. I gave up
Speaker 3: on all that. And then I was at a church
Speaker 3: in McLean and you know, met somebody there that was
Speaker 3: get I get a God's send, you know, to me,
Speaker 3: I give it up. I was like, okay, I'm not
Speaker 3: looking anymore. And Kimberly Scott walked into my life and
Speaker 3: so we've been together like eight years. You know. It's
Speaker 3: funny because I had just rolled back my cover in
Speaker 3: preparation to leave the agency, and we agreed to have
Speaker 3: coffee to talk about church. So I met her for
Speaker 3: this coffee and she said one of her first questions,
Speaker 3: well what do you do? And I said, well, you're
Speaker 3: actually the first person I can tell but I work
Speaker 3: in the CIA. She goes, oh, you know, she was
Speaker 3: a very she is a very sweet and innocent person,
Speaker 3: besides what little bit of corruption I've been able to achieve.
Speaker 3: And and she said, oh, what I said, Well, I
Speaker 3: actually was a Marine officer to start off, but then
Speaker 3: I resigned and I enlisted in Special Forces and then
Speaker 3: I did this thing that they call the Delta Force
Speaker 3: for a while, and then I went to the CIA,
Speaker 3: and I'm in the CIA, she said. Oh. And she
Speaker 3: goes back to school and some friends of her she
Speaker 3: had a husband, a late husband who had passed away
Speaker 3: a few years before of an illness, and they'd been
Speaker 3: trying to set her up with agency guys because this
Speaker 3: teacher that she worked with, her husband was a senior
Speaker 3: guy in the agency, and they were trying to set
Speaker 3: her up. She says, No, there's a guy at my
Speaker 3: church and I think I'm going to start going out
Speaker 3: with him. And they, oh, oh, tell me about him,
Speaker 3: Tell about him. And it happened to be that this
Speaker 3: woman's husband had been a ranger and before the agency.
Speaker 3: She said, oh, well, he's his name is Gary. He
Speaker 3: was Marine, then he was Special Forces, then he was
Speaker 3: Delta Force, and now he's CIA. And then the woman
Speaker 3: looked at her and laughed and shook her head and
Speaker 3: pat her on the back and said, oh, honey, uh,
Speaker 3: there's nobody just done all that stuff. That's what that's
Speaker 3: that's the kind of thing that guys tell girls when
Speaker 3: they want to get very friendly with them. But that
Speaker 3: that's there's no way, she said, but he seems so
Speaker 3: sincere and I met him at church. She said, Nah, impossible,
Speaker 3: but give me his name and and I'll have my
Speaker 3: husband check him out. So she gave him my name
Speaker 3: and she said, you know, I found out much later
Speaker 3: that a couple of days later that the lady came
Speaker 3: back to her and said, oh my god, she said,
Speaker 3: not only is that true, there's way more than that.
Speaker 3: He's you know, he's he's done all that and there's
Speaker 3: a few things.
Speaker 2: So you passed the smell test.
Speaker 3: I passed that. They did give a little bit extra report.
Speaker 3: They said, he's known as a real good guy, but
Speaker 3: he's not much of a rule follower, but he never lies,
Speaker 3: so you know when they when he gets caught, he'll
Speaker 3: he'll tell him what he did. But so I I
Speaker 3: guess I passed that test.
Speaker 2: And so how has quote unquote retirement been been going
Speaker 2: for you and settling into this new life.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, I think maybe all of us can
Speaker 3: relate to that. Right. It's way way tougher than I thought.
Speaker 3: And and I I like, even in the agency, I
Speaker 3: got used to you know, we're we're government, and I
Speaker 3: want to do good things. And when I was in
Speaker 3: the government, if I write a proposal and get it
Speaker 3: a proposal and convince people to approve the proposal, I
Speaker 3: get money, Like my last year in Afghanistan one point
Speaker 3: whatever million dollars to set up this program. It was
Speaker 3: a very successful program. It was great. So I thought, Okay,
Speaker 3: I'm going to apply my skills to business and do that. Well,
Speaker 3: guess what, there's not all a bunch of people lining
Speaker 3: up to give me millions of dollars to start business.
Speaker 3: And at first I think I got pushed with you know,
Speaker 3: by that time, for whatever other reasons, I knew some
Speaker 3: people in places and they were hooking me up with
Speaker 3: security gigs, and so I was trying to set up
Speaker 3: a security and I would hire seals and sf guys.
Speaker 3: But I never made a success of it because by
Speaker 3: the time you pay the guys to do the work.
Speaker 3: There never was enough for me, so I couldn't live
Speaker 3: off the money. One day I did an event for
Speaker 3: women CEOs when I trained them in anti assault, anti abduction,
Speaker 3: escape from restraints, situational awareness. During that, one of the
Speaker 3: women came up and said, if I knew this before,
Speaker 3: I wouldn't have got stabbed and raped a few years ago.
Speaker 3: And I just liked that. I like giving to people.
Speaker 3: It made me feel that the thirty five years that
Speaker 3: I spent doing the things that I did in hostile environments,
Speaker 3: living under cover, that there were things I could teach
Speaker 3: people that improve every person's life so they can take
Speaker 3: care of themselves, so they can have peace of mind.
Speaker 3: And these days, you know, look how our society is
Speaker 3: devolving and violences right around the corner from any of us,
Speaker 3: and people are increasingly less able to take care of it.
Speaker 3: So I kind of view it as a mission too,
Speaker 3: you know, equip people to be able to take care
Speaker 3: of themselves, just follow them the same principles and habits
Speaker 3: that many of us learn to live with throughout our careers.
Speaker 2: You're still doing, do you? Has this become something you
Speaker 2: do regularly? These seminars and things like this.
Speaker 4: I.
Speaker 3: Have in the past tended to work for higher net
Speaker 3: worth families and people that have like daughters or children
Speaker 3: going abroad to study. I started, I did do some
Speaker 3: I've been doing some events with organizations and I'm getting
Speaker 3: ready to launch an online course called the Prudent Parenting Course.
Speaker 3: And that's too just take parents and guide them through
Speaker 3: how to properly mentor your children so that they are
Speaker 3: self reliant for their security and safety. It's a pretty
Speaker 3: extensive course and I've spent probably two years putting that together.
Speaker 2: And where can people find you on the internet if
Speaker 2: they want to hire you to come speak to their
Speaker 2: group or enroll in one of these courses.
Speaker 3: Well, thanks for asking. My website is Garyharrington dot net
Speaker 3: and I'm on Facebook is Gary Harrington and on Instagram
Speaker 3: is the real Gary Harrington. And have a YouTube channel
Speaker 3: as well.
Speaker 2: And Gary, I think throughout this interview and I'm sorry
Speaker 2: I kept you way longer than I thought we would.
Speaker 2: This has been like over three hours, but I realized
Speaker 2: we could easily do two entire episodes with you in
Speaker 2: all these stories and insights you have are amazing and
Speaker 2: I hope you'll take me up on the offer sometime
Speaker 2: when you're coming through New York to come and join
Speaker 2: us in the studio sometimes because this has been like
Speaker 2: really enlightening and enjoyable.
Speaker 3: Sure, man, we'll talk about coasts some other time. And
Speaker 3: the uh, the killing of the CIA officers there.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I mean we've yeah, we've talked to people who
Speaker 2: are involved in that, and I would love to hear
Speaker 2: more from from you on it as well. Yeah, man,
Speaker 2: thank you so much. Gary, h Hey, thank you.
Speaker 3: I really appreciate the opportunity and uh again, thanks a
Speaker 3: lot for doing what you're doing.
Speaker 2: Absolutely man, And and for the viewers out there, thank
Speaker 2: you for joining us tonight. And we will be back
Speaker 2: on Friday with Dallas Alexander, who's a Canadian JTF two sniper.
Speaker 2: Excited to have him on the show. If you want
Speaker 2: to find Gary, we'll have his links down the description
Speaker 2: so you find all his information down there. And Gary,
Speaker 2: we'll have to do it again sometime.
Speaker 3: Man. Thank you, all right, thanks a loud, thanks.
Speaker 2: For your time and all right, so we'll see all
Speaker 2: you guys on Friday. Take care out there. Hey, guys,
Speaker 2: it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for
Speaker 2: a moment about how you can support the show. If
Speaker 2: you've been watching it, enjoying it, but you'd like to
Speaker 2: get a little bit more involved and help us continue
Speaker 2: to do this. You can check out our Patreon. It
Speaker 2: is patreon dot com slash the Teamhouse, and for five
Speaker 2: dollars a month you can get access to all of
Speaker 2: these episodes of The Teamhouse ad free. The same goes
Speaker 2: with our affiliated podcast eyes On with Andy Milburn, Jason
Speaker 2: Lyons mcmulroy that one, you will also get all of
Speaker 2: those episodes add free. And you support the channel and
Speaker 2: the show, and we really appreciate it. The Patreon members
Speaker 2: are literally what has helped this company, this small business survive,
Speaker 2: especially during our early years, and you are what continues
Speaker 2: to help this thing going even as we navigate the
Speaker 2: turbulent world of YouTube advertising. So we really appreciate all
Speaker 2: of you guys. There's going to be a link down
Speaker 2: in the description to that Patreon page, and there is
Speaker 2: also going to be a link to our new merch shop,
Speaker 2: So if you guys want to go and get some
Speaker 2: Team House merchandise, we got stickers and we also have patches,
Speaker 2: and I should mention if you sign up for Patreon
Speaker 2: at ten dollars a month, we will mail you this
Speaker 2: patch as well, so we really appreciate that. But they're
Speaker 2: also for sale on the merch Shop and additionally they
Speaker 2: got t shirts up there, water bottles, a tote bag,
Speaker 2: coffee mugs, all that good stuff, so please go and
Speaker 2: check them out and support the show. We really appreciate it, guys.
Speaker 3: Thank you,