Speaker 1: The Team House.
Speaker 2: With your hope, Jack Murphy and David bark.
Speaker 3: Hey.
Speaker 2: Folks, Welcome to the Team House podcast. I'm Jack Murphy
Speaker 2: here today with two guests, Matthew Cole and Dave Phillips.
Speaker 2: They collaborated on an article in The New York Times
Speaker 2: called how at top secret Seal Team six mission into
Speaker 2: North Korea fell apart. Dave Phillips is a reporter at
Speaker 2: the New York Times. He's the author of Alpha. We've
Speaker 2: interviewed him on the show before you guys can go
Speaker 2: find that. And Matthew Cole is the author of Code
Speaker 2: Over Country. We've also had him on the show to
Speaker 2: talk about his book. So I hope you guys will
Speaker 2: go back and take a look at those. So the
Speaker 2: story that they published in the Times is one of
Speaker 2: the biggest special operations stories we've seen in sometime, I think,
Speaker 2: detailing a Sealed Team six clandestine operation into North Korea
Speaker 2: and how it kind of went sideways. A little bit
Speaker 2: of preamble before we'll jump into it, some of the
Speaker 2: background North Korea as I understand it really is sort
Speaker 2: of an intelligence black hole. I've had in the past.
Speaker 2: Seals tell me that they can't do ops because they
Speaker 2: have North Koreans out there literally raking the beaches every morning,
Speaker 2: so like there's just no way that you're gonna clandestinely
Speaker 2: infiltrate the area. I've had CIA people tell me that
Speaker 2: when the Chinese send their diplomats and so forth abroad,
Speaker 2: they always have to travel in pairs to make it
Speaker 2: harder for the agency to recruit them as a source.
Speaker 2: With the North Koreans, apparently they have to travel in trios,
Speaker 2: they have to travel as a three to make it
Speaker 2: like literally impossible to recruit these guys as CIA sources.
Speaker 2: So I just say this to kind of give a
Speaker 2: little bit a thumbnail sketch of how difficult it has
Speaker 2: been for the United States government to penetrate North Korea
Speaker 2: from an intelligence perspective. So, Matthew Dave, thank you for
Speaker 2: joining us today. Let's start off a little bit talking
Speaker 2: about the further political background with President Trump during the
Speaker 2: first Trump administration and the nuclear talks that he had
Speaker 2: going on at that time that sort of formed the
Speaker 2: overall premise of why this operation came about.
Speaker 1: You want to take it first, So yeah, let me
Speaker 1: take you back to the teens.
Speaker 3: So this is when President Trump had first taken office,
Speaker 3: and Kim John Un was also a fairly new and
Speaker 3: unknown leader of North Korea, and it didn't start out well.
Speaker 4: Uh, The relationship between the two swung between like fawning
Speaker 4: letters of friendship and like outright threats of nuclear war
Speaker 4: where they were both saying that they could annihilate each other.
Speaker 3: And famously President Trump was was bragging that his big
Speaker 3: red nuclear button was much bigger than Cam's. And it
Speaker 3: was a bad situation. But then President Trump did something
Speaker 3: that other presidents had never done, which was to open
Speaker 3: one on one talks with no pre conditions with North Korean.
Speaker 3: I think he really thought, and this is of course
Speaker 3: the Trump that we've come to know quite well, that
Speaker 3: he could personally make a deal that other people couldn't.
Speaker 3: And so they were going to meet and he was
Speaker 3: just going to work stuff out, and and you know,
Speaker 3: there were some really encouraging signs. The North Koreans, in
Speaker 3: a sort of a good will gesture, stopped all of
Speaker 3: their nuclear testing and missile testing. They released some remains
Speaker 3: of POW's that had been held for decades, and the
Speaker 3: two did start meeting and talking, and the two countries
Speaker 3: started meeting at a pretty high level. So that brings
Speaker 3: you up to twenty nineteen, where they still hadn't come
Speaker 3: to any deal, but they were actively planning summits. They
Speaker 3: had a summit planned in Vietnam for the February twenty nineteen. Things.
Speaker 3: You couldn't say that they were going well, but they
Speaker 3: were certainly going better than they had been for years,
Speaker 3: and there seemed to be at least a possibility of
Speaker 3: coming to a real breakthrough that could lead to a
Speaker 3: d escalation of tensions.
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Speaker 2: We really appreciate you guys. Thank you. And so, how
Speaker 2: did or why did in twenty eighteen Jaysock sort of
Speaker 2: pitch this plan to the White House and say, hey,
Speaker 2: we have this other option that perhaps we can use
Speaker 2: to give the president the presidency a leg up in
Speaker 2: some of these talks.
Speaker 3: Well, I think, honestly, like you said, it had the
Speaker 3: North Korea had been a black holl for a long
Speaker 3: time and so independent of anything that Trump was trying
Speaker 3: to do with the deal, the intelligence apparats in the
Speaker 3: United States had been developing long term solutions, and one
Speaker 3: of these solutions finally came to a point where it
Speaker 3: was ready. It was essentially a listing device, but not
Speaker 3: something that's that's new at all the world of espionage,
Speaker 3: but something that they had refined in technology. We're not
Speaker 3: going to say too much about it, but that gave
Speaker 3: them an opportunity to bug a sensitive place where they
Speaker 3: could potentially at least listening on very high level conversations
Speaker 3: between Kim and the leadership of North Korea and so
Speaker 3: so again, we think this all happened independently. But on
Speaker 3: the one hand, Trump and his diplomatic efforts are trying
Speaker 3: to publicly reach out to mister Kim. On the other hands,
Speaker 3: the intelligence agencies are, you know, very clandescently developing this
Speaker 3: program to slip a listening device onto North Korean shores.
Speaker 3: And eventually those two things meet in the White House
Speaker 3: and President Trump, you know, is probably one of the
Speaker 3: very few people that understands all the things that are
Speaker 3: going on, and he has a decision to make, Okay,
Speaker 3: should I let this mission go ahead, knowing that planting
Speaker 3: this device could give me insight that would be super
Speaker 3: helpful in these negotiations, while at the same time it
Speaker 3: could you know, potentially cause a crisis that would destroy
Speaker 3: these negotiations all together, or worse right, I mean, really
Speaker 3: the worst case scenario here is an escalation towards war.
Speaker 3: You know, what should I do? And he decided, okay,
Speaker 3: I have a choice sending the seals to plant listening
Speaker 3: to device or not. And he decided personally to send
Speaker 3: in the seals.
Speaker 1: There's another one point of correction or just nuance, which
Speaker 1: is check from your question. Jaysok didn't generate the idea
Speaker 1: of the listening device in North Korea. The intelligence community did,
Speaker 1: and that was based on the technology and the creation
Speaker 1: of the device. And so at the White House level,
Speaker 1: the question became, we've got this thing, we do with
Speaker 1: it and I don't when Jaysack says, you know, send me, sir,
Speaker 1: And then you get further down, you know, beneath Jaysack,
Speaker 1: inside Jaysak, the competition and the sort of challenge of
Speaker 1: you know, who's going to take it in, how we're
Speaker 1: going to get it in, and so that that's where
Speaker 1: it unefoolds as Dave described.
Speaker 2: And so the the I mean, we'll get into a
Speaker 2: little bit of the concept of the operation, but you
Speaker 2: guys also reveal in the article that something sort of
Speaker 2: similar had been done in two thousand and five, where
Speaker 2: the seals came upon a shore on an island off
Speaker 2: the coast of North Korea. So there's sort of like
Speaker 2: an idea template that this can be done.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the the wasn't I mean, I don't know, we
Speaker 1: know that it's specific a specific island. We know is
Speaker 1: that there was a previous mission done by Seals Delivery
Speaker 1: Team one to penetrate North Korea in two thousand and five,
Speaker 1: and it was successful. They got on land. There was
Speaker 1: although we didn't I think we pulled this apart from
Speaker 1: the storage just from editing, not reasons. But the commander
Speaker 1: of that mission got a Silver Star, which the reasons
Speaker 1: for us remained classified, but got a silver Star for
Speaker 1: leading that mission into North Korea. And as I understood it,
Speaker 1: a lot of that mission had to do with using
Speaker 1: the Sealed Delivery vehicle that was new at the time
Speaker 1: was essentially a prototype that they wanted to use to
Speaker 1: test and see if they could get them get into
Speaker 1: North Korea and back, which they did. But it was
Speaker 1: a prototype also of the operation that Seal Team six
Speaker 1: used in twenty nineteen to study what they should do
Speaker 1: and how they should get in and out.
Speaker 2: And so this mission is ultimately giving to one of
Speaker 2: the SDV teams working in conjunction with Red Squadron from
Speaker 2: Development Group or Seal Team six. Why was that decision made?
Speaker 3: I don't understanding is that it was first given to
Speaker 3: Seal Team six, or rather they they ran into it
Speaker 3: and raised their hands as Matt Cole said and said,
Speaker 3: stand me, sir. Uh. And then of course, uh, they
Speaker 3: had to connect with it with the unit that really
Speaker 3: specializes in using mini subs, and and the premiere unit
Speaker 3: for that is Sealed Delivery Vehicle H Team one and
Speaker 3: and seal Delivery Vehicle is just a fancy name for
Speaker 3: a mini sub. These things are about the size of
Speaker 3: a killer whale. They're a wet sub, so you're you know,
Speaker 3: the passengers inside are actually using scuba gear. There's no
Speaker 3: air in there, and and they're they're pretty short range
Speaker 3: and they're pretty slow, so they have to get delivered
Speaker 3: themselves by a larger vehicle, either a submarine or or
Speaker 3: there are some other things that can deliver them.
Speaker 2: There's a newer, you know, modernized mini sub that's dry,
Speaker 2: where the seals are actually inside it breathing oxygen. I
Speaker 2: don't know if that's operational yet or not. But the
Speaker 2: ones we're talking about in this mission, I mean, the
Speaker 2: guys were in open water freezing their asses off.
Speaker 1: Frankly, Yeah, that version that you're describing, the dry sub
Speaker 1: is actually the one. The first generation of it is
Speaker 1: what was used in two thousand and five really into
Speaker 1: North Korea.
Speaker 2: Interesting, there's a there's.
Speaker 1: A backstory on all of that. But the those those
Speaker 1: were not available for this operation, and it had to
Speaker 1: do with the fact that the second generation were made
Speaker 1: without There was an error NSW did not put in
Speaker 1: its proposal that they that the dry subs had to
Speaker 1: attach to a to a larger sub and so as
Speaker 1: a result, they were manufactured without the ability to be
Speaker 1: brought in by a submarine. And so now that that
Speaker 1: problem has been fixed, but for this vision, it meant
Speaker 1: that they had to go old school and bring in
Speaker 1: the sdvs, which, as you describe, are wet and cold
Speaker 1: and slow.
Speaker 3: And well like they've been using these things since Vietnam. Now,
Speaker 3: obviously they've been updated, but the basic concept and shape
Speaker 3: of these things is not new at all. This is
Speaker 3: an old, old technology and yeah, and a really like
Speaker 3: risky one.
Speaker 2: And next, as these guys start to conduct mission rehearsals,
Speaker 2: what's the concept of the operation that they come up with,
Speaker 2: you know, sort of like logistically, piece by piece, how
Speaker 2: we want this to work.
Speaker 3: So it's complex and bold, as many Navy seal missions are.
Speaker 3: But basically, a nuclear powered Ohio class submarine, which is
Speaker 3: a really big submarine. These things. This is the longest
Speaker 3: sub in our fleet. They're about two foot fill field.
Speaker 3: It's long. That's going to sneak into North Korean waters
Speaker 3: and carrying it on its back. It has too what
Speaker 3: they call dry docks, essentially a little airlocks that are
Speaker 3: carrying mini subs. The Navy seals are going to go
Speaker 3: into those mini subs, those sdvs that we talked about,
Speaker 3: and once they're close to the shore in North Korea,
Speaker 3: the sdvs are going to leave the nuclear powered sub
Speaker 3: and go to the shore maybe one hundred meters off shore.
Speaker 3: The seals are going to come out, swim to shore
Speaker 3: and plant the device, the listening device we talked about,
Speaker 3: and their target is only a couple hundred meters from
Speaker 3: the beach. So it's supposed to be quick in, quick out,
Speaker 3: and it's absolutely vital that no one gets sneen. Now
Speaker 3: this sounds pretty simple, right, but it's not. Of course,
Speaker 3: you have to get a sneak a nuclear sub close
Speaker 3: to North Korea and then sneak mini subs right up
Speaker 3: to the shore. The seals riding those many stubs are
Speaker 3: crammed into these little vehicles surrounded by cold water water.
Speaker 3: That's what we were told is about forty degrees, you know,
Speaker 3: which which could easily kill you if you were submerged
Speaker 3: in that without protection. So they have to wear heated suits.
Speaker 3: They're crammed into the dark. They're breathing off of essentially
Speaker 3: scuba gear that's hooked to the subs for you know,
Speaker 3: at least an hour, maybe a couple hours as they
Speaker 3: sneak up to the shore. Now, once you get to
Speaker 3: the shore, there's all sorts of security apparatus. Remember North
Speaker 3: Korea and South Korea have been in open conflict for
Speaker 3: decades and they built up pretty fortified shores with all
Speaker 3: sorts of obstacles that keep this type of stuff from happening.
Speaker 3: So you have to get through that, and you have
Speaker 3: to get on and off of the shore without being
Speaker 3: seen at all or even having your footprints show up
Speaker 3: on the beach, because in order for this intelligence stuff
Speaker 3: to work, no one can know that you planted this
Speaker 3: listening device. So that's essentially the plan and some of
Speaker 3: the other challenges with this mission. Special Operations that's gotten
Speaker 3: very used to using ISR or drones and having that
Speaker 3: up for every single mission that they do. That wasn't
Speaker 3: available in this case because of the nature it's a
Speaker 3: you know, denied operation and a denied area, and.
Speaker 2: Then the communications issues too. I mean, we're also very
Speaker 2: used to having comms up at all times, you know,
Speaker 2: real time communications, and it doesn't sound like that was
Speaker 2: available on this operation either.
Speaker 1: It wasn't you know. The overall scene for this is
Speaker 1: something you know there were This was you know, what
Speaker 1: they call a no fail mission, but you're really talking
Speaker 1: about inserting US personnel behind enemy lines in a place
Speaker 1: that has a total communications blackout with no overhead satellite. Right,
Speaker 1: So even leading up to mission in the way that
Speaker 1: they studied to the location of where they were coming
Speaker 1: into to see what the possibilities were that those were
Speaker 1: limited because it was still done mostly by satellite. Right,
Speaker 1: They didn't have people on the ground, They don't have
Speaker 1: anything local on the ground to give them, you know,
Speaker 1: additional intelligence and information about what's going on on the
Speaker 1: land side of where they inserted. And so you're in
Speaker 1: this sort of retro you know, you imagine that there
Speaker 1: are so many people who sign up dream of becoming
Speaker 1: special operators seals in particular for a mission just like this.
Speaker 1: The nation sends them on something that the president has
Speaker 1: authorized that is meant to you know, fill a strategic
Speaker 1: gap in its intelligence collection against an adversary, a nuclear
Speaker 1: armed adversary, and they're going to be sent, you know,
Speaker 1: they're going to go in these sub to a mini
Speaker 1: sub and then and you know, go in peeking their
Speaker 1: head up every now and again above water to see,
Speaker 1: you know, if they've been if they're clear, and make
Speaker 1: it to shore, you know, in the middle of the night,
Speaker 1: plant a device, and then get back out the same way,
Speaker 1: all without the ability to ever speak to a commander
Speaker 1: or have any kind of warning, for instance, if there
Speaker 1: was some kind of security element that was approaching them.
Speaker 1: And so the level of a degree of risk and
Speaker 1: difficulty here is, you know, in that the realm of
Speaker 1: special operations about as high as it can get. And
Speaker 1: given you know, the twenty years or so of the
Speaker 1: g Watt post nine to eleven Global War on tearror,
Speaker 1: totally different from the way in which Seals Seal Team six,
Speaker 1: regular Seals and special operations have been operating anywhere around
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 2: And as we get into early two nineteen, the White
Speaker 2: House approves this mission. What were were there any additional
Speaker 2: factors that went into President Trump's final decision to give
Speaker 2: this thing the green light.
Speaker 3: You know, that's a really great question, and I wish
Speaker 3: I knew the answer. I wish we'd been able to
Speaker 3: sit down with President Trump or his National security advisor
Speaker 3: Michael Bolton, Sorry not Michael Bolton, different man, John Bulton,
Speaker 3: John Bolton, But that would be great too, And but
Speaker 3: we didn't. So what Trump thought in the moment when
Speaker 3: he decided to give this thumbs up is really a mystery.
Speaker 3: Does we do know that he was only weeks away
Speaker 3: from meeting with Kim Jong un in Vietnam. Maybe he
Speaker 3: hoped that he could learn something for that, or maybe
Speaker 3: this was a much long, much longer term deal where
Speaker 3: they thought, hey, whatever happens in Vietnam, we're gonna want
Speaker 3: to know what the North Koreans are thinking afterwards. So
Speaker 3: it could be completely independent. We just don't know. But yeah,
Speaker 3: bottom line, I mean, the bottom line is that the
Speaker 3: nuclear power sub was in the water, headed towards North
Speaker 3: Korea when he had the final window to say go,
Speaker 3: no go, And then you can imagine the stub sinking
Speaker 3: beneath the surface and heading in Well.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about that now about you know, beyond the
Speaker 2: concept of the operation, how the actual operation unfolded.
Speaker 3: Matthew, you want to.
Speaker 1: Take sure we're going to be a little bit. We're
Speaker 1: gonna we're not going to go too far beyond what
Speaker 1: we published. But in essence, a contingent of Seal Team
Speaker 1: six got on this sub. They had the two mini subs.
Speaker 1: They bring themselves the sub. Once it gets the go
Speaker 1: order from the president or as it's relayed, the sub
Speaker 1: goes dark and it gets into North Korean waters. They then,
Speaker 1: you know, the seals get out underwater, they load into
Speaker 1: the stvs. They take a and as Dave said, an
Speaker 1: hour to two hours from the nuclear sub towards their
Speaker 1: insertion point in a North Korean bay, and those two
Speaker 1: many subs get to their location and stop. But unfortunately
Speaker 1: one of the mini subs missed its mark just slightly
Speaker 1: and there had to be turned around and they released
Speaker 1: the seals from the mini sub. At that point, they're
Speaker 1: in about I believe, about one hundred and fifty meters
Speaker 1: from shore. Water is relatively shallow, it's not super deep,
Speaker 1: clear water, still evening, no weather issues, and the seals
Speaker 1: start to make their way with their breathing equipment and
Speaker 1: every few minutes are popping up to a century to
Speaker 1: see what's going on in the bay and make their
Speaker 1: way towards shore, and they get to sure, they're sort
Speaker 1: of you know, I think we had multiple descriptions, but
Speaker 1: water being standing in water between you know, knee and
Speaker 1: waste high as they're taking off their diving gear or
Speaker 1: parts of their gear, when they believe that they're spotted,
Speaker 1: when at least they noticed that there's a fishing skiff
Speaker 1: that's made its way through the bay that they had missed,
Speaker 1: and the mini subs had also missed its sonar had
Speaker 1: not picked it up. And at that point that's sort
Speaker 1: of your critical moment when the mission essentially falls apart
Speaker 1: because the what you know, in the end we realize,
Speaker 1: or what we know is that they were North Korean fishermen,
Speaker 1: divers who were diving for shellfish in the bay in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night, but from the perspective of
Speaker 1: the operators on the shore, that was not at all
Speaker 1: clear to them. And so what they see are North
Speaker 1: Koreans in diving suits, speaking hurriedly and excitedly with flashlights,
Speaker 1: and what they believe, you know, they think the skiff
Speaker 1: is up over the STVS in the water, and they've
Speaker 1: got these flashlights and they're they're shining them around into
Speaker 1: the water, and then one of the North Koreans dives
Speaker 1: into the water, and so the assumptions running through at
Speaker 1: least one of the members of Seal Team six was
Speaker 1: that they had been compromised. The mission was compromised, and
Speaker 1: so when the diver pops back up, the seal decided
Speaker 1: to open fire, and once that first shot is fired,
Speaker 1: the mission is aborted. And so the rest of the
Speaker 1: seals fire on the North Koreans in the boat, and
Speaker 1: then they have to make the mission is totally aborted
Speaker 1: in the sense that there's not even going to attempt
Speaker 1: to place the listening device, and they make their way
Speaker 1: to the fishing boat. Inspect the boat, find no survivors,
Speaker 1: but also no weapons and no communication gear. These are
Speaker 1: no evidence that this is North Korean military or militia
Speaker 1: or any kind of security team. It's just fishermen and
Speaker 1: they ditch the bodies. They stab the We have one
Speaker 1: account which they use their knives to puncture the lungs
Speaker 1: of the North Korean so that the bodies would sink,
Speaker 1: and then they make their way back to the STVS
Speaker 1: and call in a distress signal to the large sub
Speaker 1: and make their way out. And so so you know,
Speaker 1: what should have been a two hour mission didn't even
Speaker 1: last that long because of how quickly the mission fell
Speaker 1: apart once they made it to land. So it was
Speaker 1: you know, in one sense, I mean, obviously it's incredibly dramatic,
Speaker 1: but in another way it was it was over almost
Speaker 1: as soon as it began.
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Speaker 2: A M. A couple other interesting details from the article
Speaker 2: that I'd just like to tease out a little bit.
Speaker 2: You mentioned how they were using deniable weapons, So these
Speaker 2: weren't like American M fours or for sixteens, It wasn't
Speaker 2: American ammunition that would have a head stamp on it
Speaker 2: that you know, the brass would be an indicator of
Speaker 2: where it came from. So the weapon systems were deniable.
Speaker 2: And then you also mentioned the quick reaction force that
Speaker 2: was off the coast.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's interesting the weapons were deniable, but it's it'd
Speaker 3: be hard to keep this vision deniable if anything went wrong, right,
Speaker 3: because you have a team of about eight Navy seals
Speaker 3: at the shore and presumably none of them are Korean
Speaker 3: or or seam Korean, and so uh and you and you,
Speaker 3: as you mentioned, you have a quick reaction force off
Speaker 3: of the shore. So in a nutshell, what happened is
Speaker 3: these guys went to the shore, they thought they'd been spotted,
Speaker 3: They killed some people that they thought might be security forces.
Speaker 3: It turned out they were fisherman, and they left. Everyone
Speaker 3: got off outsafe. Few But when I was reporting this,
Speaker 3: we had a lot of conversations about how bad this
Speaker 3: could have gotten because it wasn't just eight seals. There
Speaker 3: was another quick reaction force of seals based on the
Speaker 3: at the nuclear powered stuff that were ready to inflate
Speaker 3: speedboats and come to shore in case someone was wounded captured.
Speaker 3: You know, you can imagine that that quite easily could
Speaker 3: have happened. That a small firefight on the beach where
Speaker 3: a seal was wounded or captured grows as quick reaction
Speaker 3: forces come in and maybe more seals are wounded and captured.
Speaker 3: But there was another part of the of the response
Speaker 3: plan was there was stealth rotary aircraft that may be
Speaker 3: some blocks was that are the stealth version or maybe
Speaker 3: some Ospreys that were ready to bring in even more
Speaker 3: special operators in case that was needed. So one could
Speaker 3: imagine that if that happened, you could have a black
Speaker 3: Hawk down situation where one of those aircraft went down.
Speaker 3: That has happened in a number of recent Special Operations missions.
Speaker 3: So just imagine if that happened on that night in
Speaker 3: North Korea. There would be probably some dead service members there.
Speaker 3: There would probably be some captives. Best case scenario, shooting
Speaker 3: stops within a few hours and North Korea then has
Speaker 3: a bunch of American captives. Worst case scenario is that
Speaker 3: the shooting continues and spreads across the border as North
Speaker 3: Korea thinks it's being attacked in response to South Korea,
Speaker 3: and that could have gotten really bad. Now, Fortunately, all
Speaker 3: we're talking about is a mission where two or maybe
Speaker 3: three civilians who are out trying to catch something to
Speaker 3: eat got killed. But it could have been much much worse,
Speaker 3: like strategically worse.
Speaker 2: And I mean that's kind of my next question is
Speaker 2: the North Korean response, which is interesting because apparently it
Speaker 2: was just silence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so silence from them, also basically silenced from the Americans.
Speaker 3: President Trump said in when it was questioned about it
Speaker 3: in the Oval Office during a press conference that he
Speaker 3: didn't know anything about it. This is the first he's
Speaker 3: hearing about it, which, by the way, our reporting does
Speaker 3: not support. You know, I've been sort of scratching my
Speaker 3: head about this because we believed, through the course of
Speaker 3: reporting it, it was relatively clear to us that the
Speaker 3: North Koreans did learn about this, and so we wouldn't
Speaker 3: be breaking the news to them, But it wasn't clear
Speaker 3: to us how the North Koreans were going to respond,
Speaker 3: and so as far as we can tell, they haven't
Speaker 3: responded at all. But I was speaking to someone yesterday
Speaker 3: who's sort of a specialist in this, someone who was
Speaker 3: a Green Beret and worked for special Operations come in
Speaker 3: Korea for a long time, and he said, you know
Speaker 3: what these types of missions by South Korea and North
Speaker 3: Korea have been going on forever, and neither side ever
Speaker 3: acknowledges either unless civilians figure it out. And he pointed
Speaker 3: me towards two missions in the nineteen nineties where North
Speaker 3: Korean mini subs essentially went aground in South Korea and
Speaker 3: it was and it was chaos and people got killed.
Speaker 3: It was very serious, more serious than this one. And
Speaker 3: you know, in those cases, these they were the missions
Speaker 3: got too big to deny. But he said, you know,
Speaker 3: as far as we could tell, missions like that had
Speaker 3: been happening somewhat regularly, and the South kind of new
Speaker 3: and the North kind of new, but they would never
Speaker 3: there was no upside for either by calling them out
Speaker 3: when they happened. And he gave me an example. He
Speaker 3: had actually, early in his army career, had been in
Speaker 3: charge of a watchtower on the DMZ and they would
Speaker 3: actually do little ambushes and patrols within the DMZ. And
Speaker 3: he's like, look, we were told, even if we saw
Speaker 3: a North Korean like infiltrating, like unless he's actively like
Speaker 3: aiming at you don't shoot him because like the risk
Speaker 3: of like an escalation is probably worse than the risk
Speaker 3: of an infiltration and maybe that at like a very
Speaker 3: sort of small unit level, is what's going on at
Speaker 3: a strategic level with both nations is like we know,
Speaker 3: we know, they know. We know that they know that
Speaker 3: we know. So what is the upside of us actually
Speaker 3: discussing something that you know is inherently supposed to be secret.
Speaker 2: In the nineteen sixties and seventies and North Koreans would
Speaker 2: even send death squads into South Korea. I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: wild stuff happened, happened in the past. That kind of
Speaker 2: gets memory hold. Yeah, Matthew, we know.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, one of the things we do know,
Speaker 1: and I think we reported in the story is is
Speaker 1: that the Trump White House was working after the mission
Speaker 1: failed under the assumption that the North Koreans knew. Part
Speaker 1: of it was that there was an unexplained, an unusual
Speaker 1: military build up in the location where the operation had occurred.
Speaker 1: And just on the sort of basics, right, you're talking
Speaker 1: about North Korea is not a country outside of you know,
Speaker 1: the security forces, where people have weapons, and so in
Speaker 1: a in a shallow, relatively shallow bay that was well trafficked.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're not going to get into the specific
Speaker 1: location but it wasn't you know, some random, totally remote place.
Speaker 1: You had three bodies that were ultimately going to be found,
Speaker 1: and we're going to be found with bullet holes. So
Speaker 1: even if you can't you know, trace back the ammunition
Speaker 1: specifically to the US, the North Koreans were going to
Speaker 1: be able to figure out that someone had come in
Speaker 1: by water and killed three of their citizens with a gun.
Speaker 1: And so there's really only a few options. You know,
Speaker 1: quite likely, of course, that they made the assumption that
Speaker 1: it was the South Koreans. That's certainly a possibility, or they,
Speaker 1: you know, guessed that it was an American provocation. We
Speaker 1: don't know that, but we do know that they that
Speaker 1: the White House assumed that the North Koreans knew, and
Speaker 1: at least in one case, one of our sources told
Speaker 1: us that leading up to the Hanoi summit, the concern
Speaker 1: or the question inside the White House was are the
Speaker 1: North Koreans going to cancel the summit because of this mission?
Speaker 1: With no one of course saying or signaling either way.
Speaker 1: But the American side, you know, let's call it the
Speaker 1: guilty party, if you will, with the knowledge of what
Speaker 1: they had done and that had gone it had gone wrong,
Speaker 1: concerned that it was going to end the upcoming summit
Speaker 1: between Kim Johan and President Trump. So there certainly was
Speaker 1: the assumption on the American side that the North Koreans
Speaker 1: knew some evidence that they may have known. I think
Speaker 1: the you know, it still is interesting to me.
Speaker 3: One.
Speaker 1: You know, you can't know, of course, what's going to
Speaker 1: happen until the story publishes. But my thought had been
Speaker 1: that it, you know, our story would lead to the
Speaker 1: North Koreans going to the UN, for instance, to make
Speaker 1: some kind of formal complaint about you know, the US
Speaker 1: violating North Korean sovereignty. That was sort of what I
Speaker 1: thought we might be in line with how they react,
Speaker 1: And it's been interesting to see that there's been total
Speaker 1: silence on their part. But of course, you know, we're
Speaker 1: talking still about a hermit kingdom.
Speaker 2: It's I mean, this gets a little bit into like
Speaker 2: sort of the international relations theory. But you'll hear some people,
Speaker 2: I believe Michael Kaufman was one of them, talking about
Speaker 2: how nations will choose to acknowledge or not acknowledge covert
Speaker 2: operations or intelligence operations directed against them. That there's this
Speaker 2: fear that you know, a war will accidentally break out
Speaker 2: between America and China because we make one false move.
Speaker 2: But he was pointing out that actually states look at
Speaker 2: these things a little bit more objectively and will decide
Speaker 2: whether or not to acknowledge it based on their overall
Speaker 2: strategic picture. And I think you probably saw that here,
Speaker 2: like the North Koreans must see something bigger, like we
Speaker 2: still want to get rice and beans from the Western world.
Speaker 2: We're not interested in I don't think Kim Jong unreally
Speaker 2: cares about three dead fishermen, to tell you the.
Speaker 3: Truth, well, and like, what's the upside, right, you know,
Speaker 3: if he acknowledges this happened, and you know, it looks
Speaker 3: bad on him, the authoritarian leader who's saying to your people,
Speaker 3: only I can protect you from the West, who's out
Speaker 3: to get you, and put your faith in me. I'm
Speaker 3: going to need you to sacrifice quite a bit, but
Speaker 3: don't worry. I've got your bath. And something like this
Speaker 3: shows that his nation isn't as secure as he's been
Speaker 3: telling people. That's not good, right, and making a big
Speaker 3: stink about it to the UN probably isn't going to
Speaker 3: lead to any like real material gains. So maybe, you know,
Speaker 3: maybe he is just thinking like yo, you know, like
Speaker 3: why should I bother? What what's in it for me?
Speaker 2: That's one of I think, like the most one of
Speaker 2: the most interesting things about the aftermath of this story
Speaker 2: that you guys wrote is that And I don't mean
Speaker 2: to make light of the seriousness of this operation or
Speaker 2: the consequences that you discussed that many ways this could
Speaker 2: have ended in an absolute disaster, But I think it's
Speaker 2: kind of shocking how low the stakes turned out to
Speaker 2: be in the end, that there's like no fall out
Speaker 2: whatsoever on our side or their side.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I was again talking to someone who
Speaker 3: spent long time and Special Operations Command Korea yesterday and
Speaker 3: he said, you know, I feel like that's one of
Speaker 3: the benefits that comes out of this failed mission is
Speaker 3: we've spent so much time, like generations in this conflict,
Speaker 3: uh worried about North Korea's response, and this thing happened
Speaker 3: and there was no response, and so maybe that tells
Speaker 3: us something helpful about what North Korea actually is. Maybe
Speaker 3: we built it up too much in our minds. Now.
Speaker 3: To me, I felt like that was a very dangerous
Speaker 3: sense of confidence, like great, so you feel like you
Speaker 3: can do this again like I'm sleeping so much better now.
Speaker 3: So I think that that bit of knowledge is both
Speaker 3: potentially helpful and potentially harmful. Like if somethingow this emboldens,
Speaker 3: the United States would be like, hey, check it out,
Speaker 3: we can mess with North Korea. They're not going to
Speaker 3: nucas Like, uh, that's not necessarily a great.
Speaker 1: Thing, right, Well, that's it's and it's because the fallout
Speaker 1: and the failure was contained, right. I mean, there are
Speaker 1: scenarios here that we haven't even discussed. But you know,
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, besides the Tier one
Speaker 1: operators who they inserted, you know, there's a nuclear submarine
Speaker 1: that's sitting in North Korean waters, and god forbid, there
Speaker 1: had been some kind of incident or some kind of
Speaker 1: misapp with the submarine itself where you have a you know,
Speaker 1: I think what they call it is a national capital asset.
Speaker 1: Where there had been a problem with the sub we'd
Speaker 1: be talking about this in a completely different way. And
Speaker 1: and it's it's those potential risks and the fallout that
Speaker 1: are supposed to be you know what is and I
Speaker 1: don't mean to say that they weren't, they're they're considered,
Speaker 1: but have to be weighed against the potential reward of
Speaker 1: a you know, uh, you know, and again I think
Speaker 1: even with the with the tap and what we do
Speaker 1: know about it was it was all potential in the
Speaker 1: sense of this was a black hole. It was an
Speaker 1: opportunity that could have that might have been able to
Speaker 1: give them some kind of strategic advantage or insight into
Speaker 1: what was going on both in Kim Jungun's mind and
Speaker 1: thought process, but also just communications in the country altogether.
Speaker 1: But they don't know that because the truth is is
Speaker 1: that there's no sure thing in any of this, and
Speaker 1: so the question is is risk versus reward with an
Speaker 1: adversary where you don't even have diplomatic relations with I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, the thing that I sort of thought through was,
Speaker 1: you know, if shit had gone had hit the fan
Speaker 1: during the mission, how are they picking up the phone
Speaker 1: to communicate with the North Koreans that, hey, it's us
Speaker 1: and we're not invading your country. It's a small you know,
Speaker 1: we're just planting a listening device let them go. As
Speaker 1: opposed to they believe that the South Koreans have decided
Speaker 1: to invade or there's some kind of you know, the
Speaker 1: miscalculations that go into this and so it turned out
Speaker 1: to be low stakes. But you know that's circumstantial and
Speaker 1: just the way it broke.
Speaker 3: So let me just there's what Matthew said to Like,
Speaker 3: this Ohio class nuclear power sub that went in there.
Speaker 3: We don't know exactly how close it got to shore,
Speaker 3: but we were told that it took, you know, significant
Speaker 3: risks to come and retrieve this seal team once the
Speaker 3: mission was compromised and came closer than maybe was considered
Speaker 3: risk free. Now, imagine if that sub had been grounded.
Speaker 3: There's more than one hundred people on that sub. That
Speaker 3: sub costs more than a billion dollars. Imagine if that
Speaker 3: sub had been detected and had been attacked by their
Speaker 3: defensive forces because they have submarine hunting ships, and potentially
Speaker 3: that whole crew had been killed. There's just so many
Speaker 3: scenarios here that turn out badly. And so what I
Speaker 3: think what motivated both Matthew and I in telling this
Speaker 3: story is I don't have faith that that is that
Speaker 3: process is fully understood, not just by the general public
Speaker 3: but even by special operations, that there is a good
Speaker 3: understanding of the risk reward of these types of operations
Speaker 3: and the sort of the track record of these operations,
Speaker 3: because very few people, even in the Seals, probably even
Speaker 3: in Joint Special Operations, knew about this operation, and it's
Speaker 3: unclear to us what they were ever told afterwards. You know,
Speaker 3: maybe this thing is painted as a win, right, and
Speaker 3: that lessons learned from it are not being learned. And
Speaker 3: so I think it's so important when the risks are
Speaker 3: so severe. So I have a really clear eyed understanding
Speaker 3: of what happened and what could have happened.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you think when a helicopter gets shot
Speaker 2: down on an operation like, Okay, this turned into a
Speaker 2: real shit show. I can't even imagine what a grounded
Speaker 2: submarine off the coast of North Korea, like, what that
Speaker 2: would entail. That's beyond what I can imagine right now.
Speaker 2: When did the administration inform Congress that this operation took place?
Speaker 1: Oh, the administration didn't inform Congress that it took place.
Speaker 1: It didn't happen until Biden became president and he informed
Speaker 1: the Gang of Eight that it had occurred. And that's
Speaker 1: one of the things one of in the ENDU and
Speaker 1: we walked into this. As Dave said, I think trying
Speaker 1: to make public something that requires civilians in particular, but
Speaker 1: also senior military fish is to understand the full scope
Speaker 1: and consequence, potential consequences. We had no idea until sort
Speaker 1: of the end of the reporting that Congress had never
Speaker 1: been notified, which, as far as we understand, is a
Speaker 1: violation of the law. And it's a it's a you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, the truth is is that prior to Trump,
Speaker 1: that that issue alone is a massive scandal. Now, unfortunately
Speaker 1: the world we live in, it's really like a Friday
Speaker 1: in September and and has has gone sort of you know,
Speaker 1: overlooked the idea that the president could authorize a mission
Speaker 1: like this and and then can have it fail under
Speaker 1: these circumstances and then never disclose it to Congress. To me,
Speaker 1: is I mean that alone is reason to publish it,
Speaker 1: but is also reason to to for Congress in particular
Speaker 1: to be up in arms about what the president is
Speaker 1: or is not holding.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can imagine that, like if Obama had done
Speaker 3: the exact same thing or George W. Bush, Congress would
Speaker 3: be going nuts right now. Yeah, But like there it's
Speaker 3: such a different Congress, it's such a different Washington that
Speaker 3: this idea that like, oh, you didn't follow the rules.
Speaker 3: I don't even know if that registers with these books.
Speaker 2: Did you guys get any inkling during your research for
Speaker 2: this about kind of the US Title code stuff and
Speaker 2: like the legal authorities under which this operation was conducted.
Speaker 2: Was it considered a military operational preparation of the environment
Speaker 2: or something else.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if we know to answer this specifically,
Speaker 1: whether there was ope. We know it was Title ten
Speaker 1: and not Title fifty, and so that governed a little bit,
Speaker 1: you know, and that protected them from, for instance, not
Speaker 1: disclosing to Congress before the mission happened that it was
Speaker 1: going to happen. So technically it's a clandestine not a
Speaker 1: covert operation, but it was still you know, as I
Speaker 1: was saying to Dave throughout our reporting, I thought of
Speaker 1: myself as being somewhat of an expert in Title ten
Speaker 1: versus Title fifty, for all the reporting that I've done
Speaker 1: over the years. But the truth is this Title ten
Speaker 1: versus Title fifty is so complicated and fuzzy that I
Speaker 1: still am not quite clear if it's an intelligence operation
Speaker 1: conducted by the military under the authorities of the Secretary
Speaker 1: of Defense, but with the presidents say so, I mean,
Speaker 1: the president had to authorize it, but it didn't require
Speaker 1: a memo a finding from the president. But it was
Speaker 1: for the intelligence community and not you know, a military
Speaker 1: operation as such. It was confusing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not totally clear on all of this stuff either,
Speaker 2: but I mean, I as I understand that the combatant commands,
Speaker 2: the COCOMs have a lot more authority than we commonly think.
Speaker 2: There's something called like the Human Intelligence Executor. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's all kinds of different things that they can do
Speaker 2: that they just choose not to because, as I was told,
Speaker 2: none of these generals want to get dragon in front
Speaker 2: of Congress, you know, telling the congressman like, oh, this
Speaker 2: is the twenty two suppressed pistol we use for close
Speaker 2: in work. Like they don't want to be that guy.
Speaker 2: So there's some interesting legal lease involved. And I know
Speaker 2: you guys don't want to and I won't ask you
Speaker 2: about sourcing for this article, but is there anything you
Speaker 2: want to tell us about kind of how you wrote
Speaker 2: this article and how it came about and you will
Speaker 2: put it together.
Speaker 3: There's nothing I want to tell you about that.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I mean the less said is always the
Speaker 1: better here.
Speaker 3: The only thing, so no one who's listening things for
Speaker 3: being coy, Like potentially people speaking to us broke the law,
Speaker 3: and potentially there's going to be an investigation, and anything
Speaker 3: that we can do to protect anyone who spoke to
Speaker 3: us is helpful, helpful to all of us as a society.
Speaker 1: The only thing I'll say, just very generically, is that
Speaker 1: we really tried hard, and I think we were pretty
Speaker 1: successful at getting a wide variety of sources so that
Speaker 1: we were not stuck in some kind of you know,
Speaker 1: looking through a straw in understanding what was happening, and
Speaker 1: some of that, you know, is dun luck, some of
Speaker 1: it is just circumstance, but we sort of made our
Speaker 1: way together with a pretty broad assessment and understanding of
Speaker 1: what happened. You know, it was well sourced. I'll just
Speaker 1: say that we were very comfortable and feel very confident
Speaker 1: about our sourcing, and you know, from that side of it,
Speaker 1: I would just say I'm quite proud of it.
Speaker 3: Well, you want to know what the White House's complaint
Speaker 3: was after we published? Yeah, I mean, first of like
Speaker 3: for for weeks leaving up to it, they said, don't publish,
Speaker 3: you know you're gonna x y Z. They had very
Speaker 3: big hands up in the air of reasons, strategic reasons.
Speaker 3: But once it published, they're like, I thought you weren't
Speaker 3: going to name the unit and I was like, what
Speaker 3: they said, Seal Team six, Red Squadron. That's very specific classified.
Speaker 3: I was like, come on, you can look that up
Speaker 3: on Wikipedia. And they're like, you said you weren't going
Speaker 3: to name the unit. I was like, no, I didn't.
Speaker 3: We did make an agreement that we would not name
Speaker 3: any individuals who were involved in this mission because saw
Speaker 3: it as, look, these are people who are doing their job.
Speaker 3: Their privacy is very important to their ability to do
Speaker 3: their job. We weren't didn't see any misconduct, so we
Speaker 3: weren't going to call it. Went out from being uh,
Speaker 3: you know, a lawbreaker, but yeah, we were going to
Speaker 3: say the unit because it's important. But that was the
Speaker 3: thing that the White House wanted to know that they
Speaker 3: disapproved of.
Speaker 2: I remember when when Zach and I wrote about the
Speaker 2: Solomani assassination. There's this pushback initially to it, but then
Speaker 2: once Pompeo realized he could use this to make himself
Speaker 2: look tough, it was all like, yeah, I killed Solimani.
Speaker 2: I did that.
Speaker 1: The pushback on what they what their reasoning was a
Speaker 1: moving goalpost.
Speaker 3: Uh it. We didn't know if Trump was just going
Speaker 3: to get on the phone with us and be like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I did it, that would have been a possibility.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I think that the most interesting,
Speaker 1: you know, I said, from someone like like both of you.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not a Washington person, and so it's
Speaker 1: somewhat fascinating to me to see, you know, Trump has
Speaker 1: become his own Washington creature. And the response afterwards that
Speaker 1: he knew nothing about it, which we know to be inaccurate, untrue,
Speaker 1: was really I thought reflective of someone who just refuses
Speaker 1: to be associated with anything that gets labeled as a failure, right,
Speaker 1: And so you know, his his he ran from this
Speaker 1: because he can't own anything that isn't a massive success,
Speaker 1: right whereas it had been a success and we've written
Speaker 1: about it, he would be boasting, I imagine, And certainly
Speaker 1: we've seen him do things like you know, even he
Speaker 1: also has taken a lot of credit for the solomony
Speaker 1: you know, decision or striking you know, the the remember
Speaker 1: when he weaked out or tweeted the picture of the
Speaker 1: Iranian ballistic missile tests that had gone wrong and sort
Speaker 1: of revealing how good American intelligence satellites were, but to boast.
Speaker 1: You know, if he wants to take credit for something,
Speaker 1: he has no problem declassifying things or talking about it.
Speaker 1: In this case, it was I don't know what you're
Speaker 1: talking about, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, you know, on the tail end of this interview here,
Speaker 2: I wanted to kind of like return to some of
Speaker 2: the topics that we spoke to you guys about the
Speaker 2: last time we had you on the podcast. Matthew you
Speaker 2: wrote Code Over Country about some of the war crimes
Speaker 2: and Sealed Team six, and Dave you wrote Alpha about
Speaker 2: the Eddie Gallagher trial and all the controversies surrounding that,
Speaker 2: And both of those books were, at least within NSW,
Speaker 2: very controversial, And I just want to sort of return
Speaker 2: to this subject with each of you to ask about
Speaker 2: what has been the response to these books over the
Speaker 2: subsequent you know, say, three three and a half years
Speaker 2: since the last time we spoke.
Speaker 1: Who will you who should go first?
Speaker 3: And we go first? Dad? Sure, that's a great question.
Speaker 3: So I wrote a book about the seal named Eddie Gallagher,
Speaker 3: who was charged with murdering an ISIS captive and turned
Speaker 3: in by his own platoon, and the platoon had other
Speaker 3: complaints about it. It was just like essentially a bad
Speaker 3: dude and wanted to kill people illegally. It was also
Speaker 3: a story about how they had a lot of problems
Speaker 3: getting the Navy Seals as a culture and as an
Speaker 3: organization to hold Eddie Gallagher to account. What was the
Speaker 3: response to that. There are a lot of people who
Speaker 3: were either Eddie's friends or at least believed in Eddie's
Speaker 3: versions of things that just sort of dismissed me as
Speaker 3: a liar. And there were other people who spent years
Speaker 3: in the Seals and it had seen other Eddies who
Speaker 3: really felt like, you know, thankfully, something's coming out. I
Speaker 3: hope that it helped the Seals as an organization because
Speaker 3: again and again, what I have seen, and this is
Speaker 3: not unique to the Seals at all, but any organization
Speaker 3: that has a high level of self reverence and a
Speaker 3: low level of transparency is headed for Turmo. And that
Speaker 3: doesn't it doesn't matter if you're a prestigious university, or
Speaker 3: you're a religious sect, or you're an elite military unit.
Speaker 3: Like if you can't really understand what's actually going on
Speaker 3: in your community and look at it, critically, that's harmful
Speaker 3: over the long term, and so I think that there
Speaker 3: are a lot of people who saw it as as
Speaker 3: like a useful guardrail, and certainly not everybody, and I'm
Speaker 3: not surprised about that.
Speaker 4: But.
Speaker 3: Personally, I'm happy that it's still there for anyone who
Speaker 3: wants to pick it up and learn something.
Speaker 2: What about like John Q Public, how how have they
Speaker 2: responded to the book over time?
Speaker 3: Generally really really well, because it's I mean, honestly, the
Speaker 3: easiest thing for the reader John KU Public to do,
Speaker 3: The easiest thing that they can do is not read right.
Speaker 3: So we're where you've got to make something accessible, and
Speaker 3: a murder mystery about Navy seals is a good way
Speaker 3: in to learning about this elite unit that you know,
Speaker 3: is very important in our national national security policy and
Speaker 3: learning about both its strength and its weaknesses. So a
Speaker 3: lot of people connected with it. I think people who
Speaker 3: maybe were surprised they were reading a book about seals
Speaker 3: but learned a lot because it's a story about one
Speaker 3: seal who was charged with murder. But it's also a
Speaker 3: story about how their culture has grown since Vietnam, and
Speaker 3: so there's something there for someone who wants to understand
Speaker 3: the wide world.
Speaker 1: How about you, Matthew, Well, you know my book was
Speaker 1: a little different. It was about the culture, yes, but
Speaker 1: it was really focused on the sort of corrupted culture
Speaker 1: at Seal Team six the Seals at large, yes, but
Speaker 1: but focus mostly on Seale Team six, and there's some
Speaker 1: crossover and some causal relationship between the two. They're not
Speaker 1: mutually exclusive. The response was quite good. I mean, I
Speaker 1: have to be honest. I get people who reach out
Speaker 1: from Seal Team six, from the Seals who will quietly
Speaker 1: say thank you. I've had other Seals who've reached out
Speaker 1: to tell me about some of the things that were
Speaker 1: in the book and say I was there. I had
Speaker 1: someone not so long ago do that exact thing and
Speaker 1: described a scene that I have in my book and
Speaker 1: told me it was worse than I reported, and gave
Speaker 1: me details that I knew to be true but didn't
Speaker 1: have enough to support putting in the book at the time.
Speaker 1: And I have had people complain and tell me, you
Speaker 1: know you're missing you're missing this, or you're missing that.
Speaker 1: Not errors as much as omissions of things that I
Speaker 1: didn't know. Although nothing that would have changed how I
Speaker 1: would have reported it or published to be honest. You know,
Speaker 1: I knew going in that my book was probably never
Speaker 1: going to may be for the general audience. What I
Speaker 1: set out with the book was, look, this is a
Speaker 1: group and a community that's been holding on to some
Speaker 1: really bad secrets, some pernicious secrets that frankly have do
Speaker 1: affect like a cloud, psychological cloud over everyone who's in
Speaker 1: on the secret as they go forward in life and
Speaker 1: their families too. And shining light on that has both
Speaker 1: from an accountability standpoint and transparency, but it also has
Speaker 1: the ability for people to you know, just talking about things.
Speaker 1: I mean it sound like a social worker now or
Speaker 1: a therapist, but you know sometimes when you just talk
Speaker 1: about things, they get easier. And my notion was this
Speaker 1: book should be public as these stories need to be
Speaker 1: public because in the future, when there's another war, or
Speaker 1: or in the future when there is a problem that
Speaker 1: occurs with the Seals or Seal Team six, the public
Speaker 1: has to be able to go somewhere to read about
Speaker 1: where it came from, how it started, how we got
Speaker 1: to where we are today.
Speaker 5: And and you know what's interesting, both Matthew and my books,
Speaker 5: there's a ton of sealed history books out there and
Speaker 5: there's zero overlap between those books and what we've written.
Speaker 3: And so it's very easy if like, if you wanted
Speaker 3: to learn about the Seals, to learn a completely sanitized,
Speaker 3: like boy scout version of it. And and you know,
Speaker 3: to your point, Matthew going into another conflict that might
Speaker 3: not like equip you with everything that you need.
Speaker 1: No, totally, and it's exactly it. And I think that
Speaker 1: the you know again, I mean I thought of it
Speaker 1: as like, this book is probably going to be like
Speaker 1: a cult if I could, you know, humor myself, it
Speaker 1: would be a cult classic. But the reality is is
Speaker 1: that it on bookshelves. There's just nothing else. And so
Speaker 1: you know, the fact that it exists means people will
Speaker 1: find it, and they do and I hear from them,
Speaker 1: and you know, I'm grateful. It's it has sold modestly. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm quite happy. And you know, again, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: probably I know it's not for the general reader. My
Speaker 1: wife still struggles to to get through it, but you know,
Speaker 1: it's a it's an important story.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you one thing. There's someone that I know
Speaker 1: very well who every year speaks to a group of
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if they're graduating from BUDS, the BUDS process.
Speaker 1: But there is something that some kind of event that
Speaker 1: happens annually at Coronado and they speak before Seal officers,
Speaker 1: And for the past three years that person has gone
Speaker 1: to the bookstore in Coronado bought copies of my book
Speaker 1: and handed them out to the young seal officers to
Speaker 1: go and go. It is cool, and frankly, that makes me.
Speaker 1: I couldn't be more proud of that, because that's really
Speaker 1: what it's about. That's what that transparency, and it's what
Speaker 1: the journalism is for, which is trying to figure out
Speaker 1: how to fix things that went wrong. And you know,
Speaker 1: I don't overestimate that it had any it had much effect,
Speaker 1: but if it can have any, I'm thrilled for it.
Speaker 2: I'm really glad you brought that up, actually, Matthew, because
Speaker 2: that's what I was going to say next, was that
Speaker 2: I think these books serve as like a cautionary tale
Speaker 2: for young men and now women who are considering a
Speaker 2: career in special operations, that these other histories, the unpublished
Speaker 2: history until now, tells them what to avoid, warns them
Speaker 2: of what to avoid what you don't want to, you know,
Speaker 2: you don't want to end up here, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, I ended up in a conversation with a
Speaker 1: someone who teaches ethics at the Naval Academy and who
Speaker 1: read my book. In fact, they said, normally I wouldn't
Speaker 1: speak to anyone in the press, but I read your
Speaker 1: book and I took it to heart, and I use
Speaker 1: they weren't using anything specific from the book, but the
Speaker 1: general lessons that they thought were portrayed in the book
Speaker 1: as something that they teached the midshipmen that they have
Speaker 1: And again, you know, that to me is like, you know, ideal.
Speaker 1: You know, I think that the seals are you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things I'll tell you over the years,
Speaker 1: the criticism is, you're a seal hater. You hate seals.
Speaker 1: You were you know, you must have been a nerd
Speaker 1: in high school and you know you must have been
Speaker 1: bullied by the jocks and the tough guys who became seals,
Speaker 1: and that's why you're doing this. And I, you know,
Speaker 1: mostly it's so immature that I mostly laugh, and I
Speaker 1: don't mean to be glib, but it really almost like,
Speaker 1: you know, my sources for that book and for all
Speaker 1: their reporting were seals. They were really impressive seals. They
Speaker 1: were impressive seals who did you know, multiple decades at
Speaker 1: Seal Team six, these were not you know, in a
Speaker 1: word that I learned from from Dave's reporting on Gallagher,
Speaker 1: they were not turns. You know, these were the best
Speaker 1: of the best who had been on the inside and
Speaker 1: had tried to fix things and were repeatedly shut down.
Speaker 1: And so you know, in that sense, you know, I
Speaker 1: tell you that I admire the seals. I admired many
Speaker 1: of the seals that I've met, and I, you know,
Speaker 1: surely admire what they do professionally, but that doesn't make
Speaker 1: them or give them some position that's above criticism or
Speaker 1: above accountability or transparency.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's true. Like, you can't do this
Speaker 3: work without interacting with a ton of people from SEFF,
Speaker 3: and like, you know, you get to know people who
Speaker 3: are just awesome people, and maybe that motivates you all,
Speaker 3: or at least if you have a journalist like frame
Speaker 3: of mind, like motivates you that much more to be like.
Speaker 3: But there are problems here, and maybe I can help
Speaker 3: out because I like a lot of these guys, and
Speaker 3: sometimes they're getting a raw deal.
Speaker 2: So you guys can find Dave Phillips at The New
Speaker 2: York Times. Matthew Cole has a website, the Cole Report,
Speaker 2: right Matthew yep on sub stack and there's you know,
Speaker 2: he publishes NSW stories on there as well. You guys
Speaker 2: can go and check that out. Is there anything else
Speaker 2: you guys want to talk about? Anything you're working on
Speaker 2: now or you know where you want to direct people to.
Speaker 1: Dude, I'll tell you to read The New York Times.
Speaker 3: I always have an existential like crisis after a big
Speaker 3: story comes out, and I'm like, oh my god, what
Speaker 3: have I got. I've got nothing. I'm washed up, like
Speaker 3: you got no ideas. So that's that's where you can
Speaker 3: find me now, in my closet crying.
Speaker 1: I'm you know, it's funny to answer your question, I'll
Speaker 1: just tell you I had to source an old source
Speaker 1: who texted me after this the North Korea story came out.
Speaker 1: He was a member of Seal Team six and he
Speaker 1: was sort of I had heard from him in a
Speaker 1: couple of years, and he was complaining that he had
Speaker 1: gotten text messages or emails from He said, roughly one
Speaker 1: hundred people with my story, and I said, you know,
Speaker 1: I apologize. I genuinely.
Speaker 2: Didn't.
Speaker 1: He said, Oh, you're just kidding, you don't You're not
Speaker 1: sorry about it. I said, no, I am. I you
Speaker 1: know I'm not trying. I didn't write this story to
Speaker 1: have people bother you about your your former life. And
Speaker 1: I said to him, and I said, you know, as
Speaker 1: it happens, I am mostly tried to disengage from covering
Speaker 1: sealed stuff and working on another book for an imprint
Speaker 1: as Simon and Schuster that has nothing to do with
Speaker 1: the Navy seals, has to do with the foreign policy
Speaker 1: and Jared Kushner under the first Trump administration. So at
Speaker 1: some point that book will be out, and I hope,
Speaker 1: even though it's not a special operations related subject, you
Speaker 1: might have me on again.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, send me in another advanced reader's copy and
Speaker 2: I will go through it and make my underlines and
Speaker 2: vigorous notes in the margins. We'll do.
Speaker 6: So.
Speaker 2: Thank you guys for joining us. Appreciate both of you
Speaker 2: coming on the show today, joining us on the brocast here,
Speaker 2: and for everyone else, We'll see you guys next time.
Speaker 3: Thanks Jack a pleasure. Thanks Hey, guys, it's Jack.
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