Danny Jones Podcast - #238 - The CIA's Global Assassin Network is Getting Out of Control | Sean Naylor
Aired: 2024-05-13
Duration: 02:19:58


=== Jack Murphy and The High Side (15:25) ===

[00:00:07]  All right, Sean, thank you for coming on the podcast, man.
[00:00:10]  Hey, it's great to be here.
[00:00:11]  Thank you.
[00:00:11]  Yeah.
[00:00:12]  In sunny Seminole, Florida.
[00:00:13]  Yeah.
[00:00:14]  You came highly recommended from my friend Jack Murphy, who's been on the podcast before.
[00:00:18]  And you guys are working together on a Substack project called The High Side.
[00:00:22]  That's correct.
[00:00:23]  Jack and I started this about a little more than a year ago now.
[00:00:30]  It's called The High Side.
[00:00:32]  It's on Substack, so the web.
[00:00:34]  The web address is thehiside.substack.com, and it's really an outlet for our investigative reporting.
[00:00:42]  Occasionally, we'll have a sort of a scoop that's very immediate, and we'll put that out.
[00:00:50]  But our general rule of thumb is that it's got to be national security related, which in our case normally means it's either special operations or intelligence related.
[00:01:03]  And it's got to be information that our readers won't have found elsewhere in the story.
[00:01:11]  Because we do ask people to pay for it.
[00:01:15]  And so if we're going to ask people to pay for it, I feel like we need to be giving them something that they can't find elsewhere.
[00:01:22]  Now, you guys report on national security, special operations, covert ops.
[00:01:28]  Yes.
[00:01:29]  And I know, at least for Jack, I'm not sure about you, but a lot of his sources are intelligence people or CIA people.
[00:01:36]  And he reports, and you guys both report on stuff the CIA does.
[00:01:41]  But what is your view on it?
[00:01:44]  It's kind of counterintuitive, right?
[00:01:45]  Because you guys use the CIA as sources for your stories, but it also seems like the CIA's job is to keep covert ops off the headlines.
[00:01:57]  And, you know, it's pretty well known throughout history that the Central Intelligence Agency has kept a tight grip on mainstream media.
[00:02:10]  I, well, I'm not sure that I'd go as far as agreeing with your last statement.
[00:02:18]  You know, I've worked in journalism here in the United States since the late 80s, and I've seen no sign that the CIA is keeping a tight grip on the media.
[00:02:35]  Now, they certainly try to keep a tight grip on as much information about their operations as possible getting into the but I don't think once it gets into reporters' hands, there's a very limited number of steps they can take.
[00:02:53]  Now, they've certainly taken them, and Jack has experience of this with stories that he's reported.
[00:03:00]  I haven't had as much sort of pushback from CIA, but we'll see.
[00:03:08]  We're working on a number of stories at the moment that are going to concern the CIA.
[00:03:15]  I don't mean concern in terms of worry, but are going to be about CIA operations.
[00:03:23]  So we'll see what happens.
[00:03:24]  But I'm.
[00:03:26]  You don't think they have a strong influence on mainstream media, like when it comes to Fox, CNN, New York Times, you know, these big, big, big outlets?
[00:03:36]  If those outlets are about to report a story that the CIA or frankly any other part of the United States national security apparatus is worried about, I mean, typically what will happen is the reporting team that's reporting the story goes to the CIA or to the White House or the National Security Council or the Pentagon,
[00:04:03]  depends which exact organ of national security is involved, and says, hey, We're preparing a story that says A, B, and C. Do you want to comment?
[00:04:16]  And if it particularly worries the government at that point, then somebody senior will get in touch with somebody senior at the news outlet and try to sway them.
[00:04:33]  I've been, when I was at Army Times, I spent more than 20 years at Army Times, and we had that.
[00:04:41]  happen a couple of times for stories that I'd written about special operations.
[00:04:47]  And usually there's a sort of a gentleman's agreement that, at least in my experience, that you can come to where they lay out six or eight or ten things that they're worried about in the story.
[00:05:01]  And, you know, the news media have all the power in this dynamic, okay, because you've already got the facts.
[00:05:10]  There's a First Amendment in the United States.
[00:05:13]  In other countries, they can basically stop the news organization from publishing the story.
[00:05:20]  That can't happen in the United States.
[00:05:24]  And so, you know, they can, it's up to the government then to make a strong case that, you know, national security will be harmed or somebody's life or lives will be placed in danger.
[00:05:38]  Right.
[00:05:39]  And, you know, I mean, in the cases that I was involved in, you know, we basically published the whole.
[00:05:46]  The whole story, maybe with one or two minor tweaks that were not central to the point of the story in the first place.
[00:05:53]  Right.
[00:05:53]  And that's what Jack explained what happened to his story with the CIA conducting operations through another agency in Ukraine, I think it was like sabotage or no, in Russia.
[00:06:05]  Yes.
[00:06:06]  They were conducting sabotage.
[00:06:07]  And I don't, he never mentioned the name of the publication.
[00:06:10]  I don't know what the name of it is, but it was a bigger one from what I understand.
[00:06:14]  And essentially, correct me if I'm getting this wrong, but from what I understand, is the editor.
[00:06:20]  At the publication, basically, had an agreement with the deputy director of the CIA that they had to clear the story through them.
[00:06:28]  And once Jack finished the story, he had to get it cleared by the deputy director.
[00:06:31]  And they had like a three way call.
[00:06:33]  And the deputy director basically said, No, this is wrong.
[00:06:36]  And they were like, Jack was like, Okay, he just assumed that they were going to include his comment.
[00:06:40]  And instead of doing that, it was like an off the record agreement to where they just, the editors killed the story.
[00:06:46]  Yeah.
[00:06:46]  I mean, I know Jack's discussed this episode in detail on the show.
[00:06:53]  Just one thing I want to be.
[00:06:55]  Clear on so the viewers and listeners understand this was not a story that we published in the HIGH SIDE.
[00:07:01]  This was a story that Jack published on his personal website right, sort of right, basically right as we were about to start the high side up.
[00:07:10]  So I mean, I it's up to Jack to talk about.
[00:07:14]  You know the the iterative details of of how that went down.
[00:07:21]  I I'm not sure I wasn't involved in it right in terms, you know, in terms of which publication.
[00:07:26]  I didn't write the story, Jack, I do know Jack was very frustrated with how he was dealt with at two very well known national publications.
[00:07:38]  But beyond that, I'm a little reluctant to sort of get involved in that fight when I don't have firsthand knowledge of any of it.
[00:07:49]  Yeah, it's just interesting the dynamic and the relationship between the intelligence agency and mainstream human.
[00:07:59]  Huge Main Street publications.
[00:08:02]  Obviously, they aren't telling them, no, you can't publish the story, but I'm sure they have ways of massaging their influence into these publications, right?
[00:08:11]  Where, like, whatever these off the record agreements are, or saying things like, if you publish this, you're going to be responsible for innocent people that are going to die and all these things.
[00:08:23]  Yeah.
[00:08:24]  Generally, the arguments that they'll make are just like the one you articulated.
[00:08:31]  This is going to put lives at risk.
[00:08:33]  This is going to put national security at risk.
[00:08:37]  Or the third one, which is also a strong argument if it can be backed up, which is this story isn't true.
[00:08:45]  I mean, frankly, of the three, that's the one that's, if you can prove to an editor that the story they're about to publish is in part or in total false, untrue, incorrect, mistaken.
[00:09:05]  A good editor doesn't want to have, and a good reporter for that matter, no good journalist wants to have any false information out there under their name or in their publication.
[00:09:17]  Right.
[00:09:18]  So that's, if that's an argument that they can make, that's the argument that they should make.
[00:09:26]  More often, the argument is, hey, we're not going to say that what you're reporting is or isn't true, which means it almost certainly is true, but.
[00:09:38]  But, you know, we think if you publish it, it's going to put the following individuals or the following communities at risk or, you know, it's going to be bad for national security.
[00:09:47]  We won't be able to do this kind of thing again and our enemies will, you know, that will create a vulnerability or whatever.
[00:09:58]  That's more typical.
[00:10:00]  And it's up to the reporting team and the editors to sort of, be armored against those arguments going into it.
[00:10:12]  I mean, you shouldn't have a closed mind, but you need to sort of at least know, hey, they're going to say that this is dangerous to national security.
[00:10:22]  We need to be prepared to counter that, and we need to understand amongst ourselves why we think that's a weak argument.
[00:10:32]  Right.
[00:10:34]  And there are certainly things that could be published.
[00:10:39]  that would be damaging to national security and or would put people at risk.
[00:10:45]  I mean, you know, I try not to do things like publish the names of CIA officers who are undercover abroad at the moment or something.
[00:11:00]  I mean, that's a sort of a gratuitous detail that, you know, unless they are, being investigated for a serious crime or something like that or being charged with or convicted of a serious crime or something like that.
[00:11:19]  There's not really an obvious reason to do that.
[00:11:23]  I mean, that's sort of an obvious example.
[00:11:25]  But believe me, I'm not going to pretend that there aren't a lot of people out there who think that in our reporting in the high side, in my previous reportings for different publications and in my books that I haven't cross that line repeatedly.
[00:11:45]  So, I mean, you know, where you, you know, what's the cliche?
[00:11:48]  Where you stand depends on where you sit or something.
[00:11:52]  I probably got that wrong.
[00:11:53]  Don't shit where you eat.
[00:11:54]  No, no, that's a completely different cliche.
[00:12:01]  I mean, I'm sure you're familiar with the Twitter files that came out about a year and a half ago.
[00:12:06]  Yeah.
[00:12:06]  Mount Taibbi.
[00:12:07]  Yes.
[00:12:09]  I mean, not at a level of detail that, you know, I could recall them, but I mean, I remember the.
[00:12:16]  Controversy communication with the people that were in charge of moderating Twitter with FBI and CIA suppressing that Hunter Biden laptop story, um, you know, all that kind of stuff, yeah, which is kind of like a hard evidence as you can get of the agencies meddling in the media, right?
[00:12:37]  Well, I mean, meddling in Twitter, which is probably one of the biggest social media platforms on earth, yes, yeah, um, you know, I mean.
[00:12:47]  My understanding, and I'm on very thin ice here in terms of the facts of that, but they were not saying to any news organization, you cannot publish this.
[00:13:04]  I think they were trying to say there isn't much truth behind this.
[00:13:08]  But like I said, there's no law in the United States that allows the government to step in and stop the New York Times or the Washington Post or Fox News for that matter from publishing a story, reporting a story publicly that the government just doesn't want reported.
[00:13:30]  Right.
[00:13:30]  I mean, that's what the First Amendment is all about.
[00:13:34]  Yes.
[00:13:36]  How do you navigate your sources for your stories?
[00:13:40]  Like when you approach, like your recent story, for example, the one on Kenya, and you talk to people, you interview lots of people for these stories.
[00:13:49]  Some of them, I'm sure, are, I don't know if they're active or formally, or Or inactive retired CIA people.
[00:13:57]  Yeah.
[00:13:57]  But how do you know whether to trust them or not?
[00:14:01]  Well, that's a good question.
[00:14:04]  First of all, you try to get as many sources as possible.
[00:14:10]  So, you know, if three people say something happened, that's stronger than one person saying it happened.
[00:14:17]  It also depends on what the it is.
[00:14:20]  Is it plausible or implausible?
[00:14:22]  If it's plausible, excuse me, I've got to. slight scratch in my head here from the headphones.
[00:14:30]  If it's a plausible thing, it's sort of human nature that you probably don't feel the need to line up half a dozen sources that all say it happened just to prove to yourself or convince yourself that it happened.
[00:14:48]  If it's something that's wildly implausible, then just because one guy says it happened doesn't doesn't mean anything really.
[00:15:01]  You've got to try to find as many pieces of evidence that it happened.
[00:15:07]  And that can be documentary evidence.
[00:15:10]  That can be human intelligence, if you like.
[00:15:14]  That can be human sources talking to you.
[00:15:19]  I mean, sometimes it's not even something controversial.
[00:15:22]  I mean, a lot of the challenges in doing the sort of reporting that Jack and I do is just finding out. a mundane fact.

=== Verifying Implausible Claims (06:39) ===

[00:15:32]  For instance, I'll give you a glimpse into something that I'm reporting at the moment, which is part of a multi-part series that we're going to have come out in the next, I'm hoping in the next few weeks,
[00:15:46]  that will take the reader from the jungles of Vietnam and Laos to the sort of scalding heat of Khartoum in the mid 80s to the sort of covert ops in the jungles of Zaire and Angola in the late 80s and early 90s.
[00:16:15]  But one of the facts that I was trying to nail down was when were the first Stinger missiles fielded to Angola's UNITA guerrilla army by the United States as part of a covert action program to help UNITA fight the sort of nominally communist government in Angola.
[00:16:42]  And, you know, I talked to people who had very close knowledge of this program.
[00:16:49]  And, you know, at least one of them was convinced that it was 88.
[00:16:56]  Another one at first thought it was in the early 90s.
[00:17:01]  And two or three others, said it was 86 or maybe early 87, and the the printed accounts at the time seem to support the 86 date.
[00:17:15]  But I mean you're talking to somebody who I.
[00:17:18]  I mean I would be talking to you know a former CIA officer who I'm?
[00:17:22]  There's no controversy here.
[00:17:23]  There's no.
[00:17:24]  Nobody's got anything to gain by saying oh, it was 88 versus 86 right, it's just pure memory, right.
[00:17:30]  And some people are convinced that it happened in 88, some people are convinced it happened in 86 and as it's not even that central to the story, but as a reporter I like to include as much detail as possible for my readers, because one, like I said, they're paying for it and I want them to get stuff that they can't get easily in other places.
[00:17:53]  But I also want those facts to be 100% accurate.
[00:17:57]  So it can be very frustrating when you're a reporter and you've got equally reliable, honest individuals telling you Completely different facts, even if the fact isn't that big of a deal.
[00:18:17]  But that happens sort of again and again in reporting.
[00:18:23]  A lot of, especially the stuff that Jack and I write about now, which is often historical in nature, not everything is.
[00:18:30]  I mean, we've had some very topical stories in the last year or so, driven by the Hamas-Israel war and what's going on in Ukraine at the moment.
[00:18:46]  But when we get further back into history, I mean, another story I'm doing, right now that we've sort of got.
[00:18:56]  It won't be out for a while because it's going to take a lot of reporting, but I'm just trying to trace one individual's career.
[00:19:08]  I'm trying to do that in the other story as well that I just mentioned, but this is a slightly different sort of story and a bit more recent.
[00:19:17]  And I've spoken to people who worked with the guy, and you ask them simple questions like, when did he retire?
[00:19:25]  When did he move from this organization to that organization?
[00:19:28]  And they were there at the time and their answers are all over the page on that.
[00:19:37]  Trying to cover for them?
[00:19:38]  No, I don't think so.
[00:19:41]  There's always that possibility, but I think it's more that when you're looking into something that happened 20, 25, 30 years ago in this case, people's memories just get soft.
[00:19:55]  I mean, the human memory is you know, there's countless scientific studies that show that it's just not that reliable.
[00:20:02]  Right.
[00:20:03]  We had a guy, we did a podcast with a guy like that recently who, it's funny, serendipitously enough, we had the podcast scheduled with this guy named Felix Rodriguez.
[00:20:14]  Oh, yeah.
[00:20:15]  And the day before that podcast, we had another guy come in, Danny Sheehan, who's like a historian.
[00:20:21]  He's a lawyer.
[00:20:23]  And he was involved in Iran Contra, he was involved in the Pentagon Papers case, Watergate.
[00:20:29]  All this stuff, and he came in and gave us all these information on Felix Rodriguez and these anti Q or these uh, these uh, anti Castro, anti communist Cuban exiles who were trained as assassins to assassinate Castro, and um, how all of this tied back to um, was it Reagan or Nixon?
[00:20:56]  I can't remember, um, but.
[00:21:01]  You remember?
[00:21:01]  No, I don't remember.
[00:21:03]  But, anyways, I guess his claim was that these same Cuban exiles that were originally trained in these triangular hit teams to take out Castro, he says the same guys were used to kill Kennedy.
[00:21:15]  And he tells me this the day before I go to interview this guy, telling me that he was involved in the Kennedy assassination.
[00:21:21]  But that guy, Felix, also has been accused of murdering a DEA agent in Mexico, Kiki Camarena.
[00:21:28]  I don't know if you're familiar with that.
[00:21:30]  I mean, I'm familiar with the murder.
[00:21:33]  didn't realize that Felix Rodriguez had been accused in some quarter of doing that.
[00:21:40]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:21:40]  There was a really good documentary that came out called The Last Narc, which was all about that, all about the DEA guys that were in Mexico that were somehow the guy Kiki Camarena got caught up in what was going on in Nicaragua and the CIA's involvement in training people in Mexico.
[00:21:58]  And the claim is in the documentary that Kiki learned too much and he had to be.
[00:22:06]  Taken out, and then he was tortured to death basically and murdered.
[00:22:09]  And they claim that Felix was the one there.

=== Secret Service in Ukraine (08:21) ===

[00:22:12]  But that's neither here nor there.
[00:22:14]  When it comes to some of your reporting that you're doing right now on some of the more topical things, the things that are happening in Ukraine and Russia and in Israel and Gaza, what are some of the biggest stories that you're most interested in right now?
[00:22:31]  Well, the one that got a huge amount of attention for us and drove a lot of subscriptions was Jack did an excellent sort of deep dive, if you like.
[00:22:48]  last fall into how Joint Special Operations Command, which is the command in the US military that handles the most sensitive special operations missions, the so-called National Mission Force,
[00:23:04]  had responded to the war between Israel and Hamas and basically had flown a massive task force over to Cyprus to stage for possible hostage rescues and to otherwise assist the Israelis with what they were doing.
[00:23:27]  There was a lot more detail in the story, but that's the sort of story that when we have sort of information that hasn't been reported elsewhere and we're confident that, you know, in a competitive business like we're in, that it's going to stay exclusive until we hit the publish button, that we'll do that.
[00:23:48]  And, you know, I still think that that's in terms of how U.S. Special Operations Forces have responded to the Israel-Hamas war, that's easily the most detailed article that's come out.
[00:24:02]  In the Ukraine case, if you recall, in fact, this was one of our first articles that we published on the high side last year.
[00:24:14]  President Biden made a trip to the Ukraine.
[00:24:17]  And we basically sort of combined two strands of information into a fairly lengthy story.
[00:24:25]  One was we knew that There was going to be some special operations support to a presidential visit like that, and we had some exclusive information on that, so we put that in.
[00:24:36]  What do you mean by that, special operations support?
[00:24:38]  Meaning like like any time that the president goes to a war zone, there's a whole series of steps that get taken, any president.
[00:24:50]  And the Secret Service has a close relationship with Delta Force from the ARMY and other uh, you know special, you know, and and joint special operations command.
[00:25:01]  That Delta Force falls under um, and so we wrote about the support that was being provided on on that trip um, but we also uh, we happened to know a former secret service officer who offered to tell us how the secret service prepares for war zone trips.
[00:25:22]  So we were able to give a very detailed explanation to our readers of how uh how, the secret service keeps those trips secret, you know, avoids because they're usually a secret up to the moment that the president lands in whichever war zone it is to avoid, you know, for obvious security reasons, you know, to avoid giving anybody who might wish ill to the United States president the time to set up an operation to target him.
[00:25:53]  And so, you know, there were some very interesting and in some cases amusing stories of how the Secret Service keeps those secrets, sometimes just from the other Secret Service agents who aren't, you know, who aren't read in on it and aren't part of the mission and occasionally having to smuggle the president out of the White House in different vehicles and so forth.
[00:26:19]  So, I mean, that's the sort of story we'll do that, you know, I feel it's value added for our readers.
[00:26:30]  We charge $5 a month to subscribe, which is, I think I'm on safe ground saying, less than a lot of Americans spend on their coffee every day.
[00:26:42]  That's right.
[00:26:44]  So we don't publish with extraordinary frequency, but when we do publish something, we're pretty confident that it's something you won't have read elsewhere.
[00:26:54]  That's right.
[00:26:55]  And it'll be linked below for people that want to go check out the Substack so people can go down there and check it out.
[00:27:01]  Right.
[00:27:02]  So, can you give me some more details on that story with the Secret Service in Ukraine?
[00:27:07]  Like how Ukraine doesn't see it, it seems like it's kind of chaotic right now.
[00:27:10]  And I know that, or at least I've read that typically when presidents go to visit countries that are in war, they work closely with that country's intelligence services.
[00:27:24]  Oh, sure.
[00:27:24]  I mean, so how would that work in Ukraine?
[00:27:26]  Well, I think I'm sure that, you know, that.
[00:27:30]  The folks that the White House and the Secret Service would be liaising with would be the most trusted Ukrainian security force elements.
[00:27:45]  And there'd have to be some – I'm not privy to this.
[00:27:51]  I don't think really anybody is.
[00:27:52]  But there's always been a concern with Ukraine that it's – some of its intelligence services.
[00:28:01]  And it's got a, as we do in the United States, it's got a variety of intelligence organizations and that some of them probably more penetrated than others by the Russians.
[00:28:17]  Right.
[00:28:18]  So you've got to be careful who you're sharing information with and how closely held it's going to be.
[00:28:25]  But there'd also be liaising with the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv.
[00:28:30]  Which is obviously still up and running.
[00:28:36]  And then the U.S. military and the U.S. Secret Service would have people in place well ahead of the visit.
[00:28:45]  And we sort of run through how that has worked in the past in previous visits to war zones in the Middle East and Africa and so forth.
[00:28:53]  So, with the understanding that it probably hasn't changed much in the meantime.
[00:28:59]  And when it comes to Israel and Gaza, What is the, like, how much special operations forces do we have on the ground there?
[00:29:08]  Like, working, I know we have quite a bit, but what have you learned about what's going on there?
[00:29:13]  Well, when we published our story, which, like I said, was towards the end of last year, so I can't tell you what, you know, we haven't reported on what's happening in May of 2024.
[00:29:29]  But JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command, deployed what I understand to be its standard sort of task force headquarters with associated elements from the special mission units like Delta Force,
[00:29:48]  like SEAL Team 6, with the sort of slices, as they would say in the military, of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment and other units.
[00:30:02]  And they went to Cyprus, to a military air base in Cyprus, to stage.
[00:30:09]  Now, in terms of on the ground in Gaza, I'd be surprised if there's any U.S. military on the ground.
[00:30:18]  When we were reporting the story, it didn't appear to be that there were any.
[00:30:24]  Of course, the U.S. military has, you know, most of these organizations have liaison officers in Israel.

=== Special Ops Units in Israel (02:15) ===

[00:30:33]  And just as part of the normal course of business.
[00:30:38]  And I think, you know, the number of U.S. personnel in Israel was plused up.
[00:30:46]  But at the time that we reported the story, it was plused up, was increased slightly.
[00:30:50]  Got it.
[00:30:51]  But at the time that we reported the story, it didn't appear that there were, you know, entire units being deployed to Israel.
[00:31:00]  That may have changed.
[00:31:01]  I don't know.
[00:31:03]  But when we reported it, it didn't appear to be the case.
[00:31:08]  Right.
[00:31:09]  But they're special operators, though.
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=== CIA Operations in Kenya (16:22) ===

[00:32:49]  Yes, special operators.
[00:32:50]  Right, right.
[00:32:53]  And so your recent story about the CIA extrajudicial killings in Kenya, when did this come about?
[00:33:02]  So the killing that we sort of focused on was in 2012, but it was just earlier this year that a court in Kenya found it to be an unlawful killing.
[00:33:21]  And it was.
[00:33:22]  conducted by a Kenyan unit called the Rapid Response Team.
[00:33:27]  Right.
[00:33:28]  But that was a CIA trained and essentially created organization.
[00:33:34]  So it's an organization that all of our reporting suggested did the bidding of the CIA.
[00:33:40]  And why was this set up by the CIA?
[00:33:43]  Because in the years after 9 11, as part of the so called global war on terror, the CIA set up.
[00:33:58]  Had a program.
[00:33:59]  It was called the counterterrorism operations program.
[00:34:02]  I believe it's still going um and uh it.
[00:34:08]  It basically allowed the CIA to um create surrogate units, proxy forces in uh, you know, in a range of different countries.
[00:34:20]  The ones that we were able to uh identify um it are listed in the article.
[00:34:29]  There's one in the.
[00:34:30]  In fact, we we couldn't even get the source to tell us which country it was, but it was in South America, in the tri-border area of South America.
[00:34:42]  And the other country, I believe, was I don't have the story in front of me.
[00:34:50]  I think, and Jack wrote it, and I sort of edited it and added some quotes from one of my former CIA sources, but it wasn't on this topic.
[00:34:59]  I believe it was Thailand, but I could be wrong about that.
[00:35:04]  Maybe you can fact check that while we're on the air.
[00:35:11]  What should you search for to find that?
[00:35:14]  Just the Kenyan story that we.
[00:35:19]  Yeah, just type in Kenya CIA high side.
[00:35:24]  You'll be able to find it.
[00:35:25]  Yeah.
[00:35:26]  I think you had it up a minute ago, Steve.
[00:35:27]  Yeah, and somewhere in there it says that there are, in addition to Kenya, these teams.
[00:35:36]  I mean, we think the teams were stood up.
[00:35:38]  In a good number of countries, but the couple that we were able to, um, yeah, if you click on that, um, using uh, there you go.
[00:35:53]  If you've got uh, Danny's uh, login, um, well, yeah, you're gonna have to, uh, it's all right.
[00:36:02]  So, okay, so the CIA set up this rapid response team in Kenya, and uh, it was the purpose of it was counterterrorism operations, yes, yep, and basically the You know, the Horn of Africa, especially Somalia,
[00:36:19]  has been a real focus since 9-11, and the years after 9-11, of both the U.S. military and the intelligence community in terms of their counterterrorism operations.
[00:36:32]  There was a great concern over Al-Shabaab, the Somali terrorist organization.
[00:36:42]  And Al-Qaeda, right?
[00:36:43]  Yeah.
[00:36:44]  Well, they were Al-Qaeda.
[00:36:45]  Al-Shabaab.
[00:36:47]  ended up as the Al-Qaeda sort of franchise in Somalia.
[00:36:53]  Oh.
[00:36:54]  And, you know, so the United States using Kenya as a sort of a platform because the relations between the U.S. and the Kenyan government are very close and between the security forces in each country and the intelligence communities are very close.
[00:37:12]  The Kenyans also have very close relationships with the British as well.
[00:37:18]  Aren't they tight with China too?
[00:37:21]  I don't think they're as tight with China as they are with the United States and the UK.
[00:37:24]  Yeah.
[00:37:25]  I know that they're doing the whole Belt and Road thing and that China's investing a ton of money in those countries.
[00:37:30]  Yeah, I mean, some in Djibouti, certainly, and the other side of Somalia.
[00:37:37]  But, you know, they were using Kenya as a sort of a platform, but also they wanted to both strengthen the Kenyan security forces in case this sort of Islamist trend surged south into Kenya, which it started to do.
[00:37:58]  And.
[00:37:59]  At the same time, use Kenyan forces as, you know, in Somalia as, you know, quote-unquote peacekeepers, but, you know, to a degree, those were forces that were going to get in fights with al-Shabaab.
[00:38:16]  And all of that meant that the CIA had a sort of a, from its perspective, a vested interest in developing units in Kenya that did basically, what the CIA told them to do.
[00:38:32]  So, they were training guys in Kenya and in the United States.
[00:38:35]  Yes.
[00:38:36]  Yeah.
[00:38:36]  They brought over.
[00:38:37]  Oh, they brought US guys over.
[00:38:38]  In fact, the photograph that you've got on the screen there is, I believe, a couple white guys.
[00:38:44]  I believe those guys, I think that photograph might have been taken in the United States.
[00:38:48]  Yeah.
[00:38:50]  You can't confirm nor deny, though.
[00:38:53]  Wow.
[00:38:54]  So, oh, wow.
[00:38:54]  So, we brought guys from Kenya over here to train them.
[00:38:57]  Yes.
[00:38:57]  Yes.
[00:38:58]  Wow.
[00:38:59]  Like, train them at CIA, like the CIA's training. headquarters.
[00:39:03]  Yeah, I mean, there's various training facilities that they can use.
[00:39:07]  They can use CIA training facilities, you know, and there's obviously other, you know, military training facilities that are far off the beaten track.
[00:39:18]  So where these guys got trained, I can't immediately recall.
[00:39:21]  But the CIA has, in addition to its well-known farm facility, it's all the farm down in Camp Perry, Virginia, which is a fairly sprawling site.
[00:39:33]  I've heard stories.
[00:39:35]  But it's also got a site in the Carolinas as well.
[00:39:42]  And I suspect probably others in different parts of the states.
[00:39:47]  So their essential goal was just to capture and take out as many of these terrorist people as possible in Kenya.
[00:39:57]  Yeah, I mean, I suppose that's right.
[00:40:01]  It was to use these guys to go after.
[00:40:06]  terrorists that the United States and or the British and or the Kenyans had developed intelligence on to suggest, you know, this guy is, you know, an al-Qaeda guy or an al-Shabaab guy or what have you.
[00:40:23]  And in Kenya, unlike, you know, say, you know, some other Western countries, there was clearly a feeling that there would be fewer questions asked if these guys were just what ended up happening,
[00:40:46]  though, in the case that we wrote about was that one of the guys that got, that they did this to, one of their targets turned out, they turned out to be the wrong guy.
[00:40:57]  They got it.
[00:40:57]  Yeah, a human source, you know, made a mistake, led them basically to the wrong apartment.
[00:41:04]  They kicked in the door of the apartment.
[00:41:07]  You know, the guy and his wife tried to, you know, escape through a bedroom window and they, they, Kill them in their backyard.
[00:41:17]  Well, they didn't kill the wife.
[00:41:18]  I'm sorry.
[00:41:19]  They shot the husband.
[00:41:20]  They shot the husband and he collapsed onto the wife.
[00:41:25]  And she played dead, so they didn't kill her.
[00:41:29]  But, like I said.
[00:41:32]  Were these Kenyan CIA proxies that did this?
[00:41:34]  Yes.
[00:41:35]  Okay.
[00:41:35]  Yeah.
[00:41:36]  This was the RRT, the Kenyan RT.
[00:41:38]  The rapid response team.
[00:41:40]  Okay.
[00:41:42]  And then now, 12 years later, they finally got awarded something like $60,000 or something like that $60,000?
[00:41:47]  Yes, which doesn't sound like an awful lot.
[00:41:50]  Apparently, it.
[00:41:53]  60 grand goes a lot further in Kenya than it does in the United States.
[00:41:59]  But yeah, Kenyan court declared the killing illegal and awarded the widow roughly $60,000.
[00:42:10]  So is this team, is the CIA still actively working with this RRT group in Kenya right now?
[00:42:19]  To the best of my understanding, the best of our understanding, yes.
[00:42:23]  And what, in your view, is the current state of some of these terrorist organizations over there?
[00:42:30]  In the Horn of Africa?
[00:42:31]  Yeah.
[00:42:32]  You know, Al Shabaab seems to be still going strong.
[00:42:36]  I mean, I haven't reported as closely on it as I've done in the past.
[00:42:45]  I wrote a lot about that fight in my book, Relentless Strike, about Joint Special Operations Command.
[00:42:52]  Yeah, hold it up so people can see it.
[00:42:53]  Okay, yeah.
[00:42:53]  When did you publish that book?
[00:42:55]  This came out in 2015, in the second half of 2015.
[00:42:58]  There you go.
[00:42:59]  A little bit higher, a little bit higher.
[00:43:00]  There you go.
[00:43:02]  And it's the sort of warts and all story of Joint Special Operations Command from its inception, you know, right the way through to 2014, 2015.
[00:43:15]  So you're talking about the first, you know, 13 years of the global war on terror, but also all of the operations, well, You know, as many of the operations that it conducted in the 80s and 90s that I could find out about.
[00:43:30]  But I mean, I put two to three years of solid reporting work into that book.
[00:43:38]  So, I mean, and it, you know, it was quite controversial when it came out.
[00:43:43]  There was, yeah, I mean, there was, you know, almost no facts in that book have been challenged.
[00:43:52]  Really?
[00:43:52]  But, you know, I know that in different.
[00:43:57]  intelligence community and special operations libraries.
[00:44:02]  It was removed from the library because it was thought to contain classified information.
[00:44:10]  Some of the units, the special ops units were told, the service members in those units were told, you're not allowed to own this book because it's considered to contain classified information, which of course with those guys is like waving a red flag to a bull.
[00:44:28]  Went out and bought it.
[00:44:31]  And so.
[00:44:33]  What stuff in the book did they say was highly classified specifically?
[00:44:36]  I mean, it would take a long time to go through all of that.
[00:44:42]  But I mean, Joint Special Operations Command is an organization that really, even today, the military doesn't acknowledge as being the organization that conducts all of these operations.
[00:44:57]  So my goal in the book was, so virtually everything in some way is classified, or they might argue that it is classified.
[00:45:10]  The way that I approached the book was to just try to imagine a reader who's interested in current events and is familiar that a certain slew of things happened.
[00:45:27]  They know that Saddam Hussein was captured.
[00:45:32]  They know before that if they were following the course of the Iraq war in the early days that Saddam Hussein's sons were killed in a shootout.
[00:45:46]  They obviously know that Osama bin Laden was killed.
[00:45:54]  Some people would dispute that.
[00:45:55]  Yeah.
[00:45:57]  They'll know that certain hostage rescue operations were conducted, some successfully, like sort of Captain Phillips in you know, off of Somalia and some less successfully.
[00:46:14]  And those are the tips of the Joint Special Operations Command iceberg.
[00:46:20]  And so I wanted to show them the iceberg.
[00:46:24]  Here's the history, not just of those operations, not just of the campaigns that led to those operations, and not just of the individual units that conducted those operations, but the overall headquarters that that has been running them.
[00:46:41]  And, you know, I think the book has stood up pretty well, you know, since it was published.
[00:46:50]  Now, after 9 11, that's when the Title 50, right?
[00:46:56]  The assassination law came into place, or the.
[00:47:00]  Because I'm very fuzzy on this, but I know that before 9 11, we had people over there in like Khartoum that were stalking bin Laden, right?
[00:47:09]  Like, particularly, we had a guy, Billy Waugh, and a couple other guys that were like.
[00:47:13]  Right across the street taking photos of them could have taken them out easily, but we didn't, we couldn't legally do it.
[00:47:19]  Um, but after 9 11, something changed where I mean, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to.
[00:47:24]  No, no, go ahead.
[00:47:25]  Um, my understanding, and I'm I am not a lawyer, but Title 50 is the part of the U.S. code that covers the CIA and and and and its intelligence operations, so it's not something that new that that came along after 9 11.
[00:47:44]  Um, if you're going to conduct Executive action.
[00:47:49]  An operation, if you're going to ask the CIA to go and kill someone, there has to be a presidential finding for that.
[00:47:58]  If you're asking them to do it, particularly in a non-combat zone.
[00:48:03]  So if you want to kill somebody in Sudan where the United States is not at war, there has to be a presidential finding signed by the president, usually briefed to the so-called Gang of Eight, which is sort of the top intelligence committee and congressional leaders,
[00:48:24]  the leaders and ranking members of the intelligence committees in the House and the Senate, and the ranking the leader of the House, the leader of the Senate, and their counterparts from the opposition.
[00:48:48]  I'm not an expert on what Billy Waugh went through, but the way you've laid it out to me would suggest that there wasn't a presidential finding sign saying you can go and kill Osama bin Laden if you have him in your sights.
[00:49:03]  But from what I'm familiar with is that something changed after 9-11 where they implemented this executive action.
[00:49:11]  Well, certainly.

=== Twisted Reasons for Deaths (08:20) ===

[00:49:12]  I mean, there were all kinds of findings, I suspect, signed in the days and weeks after 9-11 to allow for that.
[00:49:22]  I mean, obviously, Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan by U.S. forces.
[00:49:28]  They were U.S. military forces, but they were operating under Title 50 authorities.
[00:49:32]  Right.
[00:49:33]  They were CIA, right?
[00:49:34]  But they were well, they were SEAL Team 6 and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, but they but they were officially under the authority of Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA.
[00:49:52]  Right.
[00:49:53]  So it could be legal.
[00:49:54]  Yes, even though it was really a JSOC mission, it was being conducted.
[00:49:59]  The moment that they sort of crossed the border into Pakistan, they came under the sort of Title 50 authorities.
[00:50:07]  It is super interesting how you classify a war crime.
[00:50:14]  Right.
[00:50:14]  Like, traditionally, it's been like if you're in combat and you're on a battlefield or you're in a desert and you're running around, you can shoot and kill somebody.
[00:50:25]  But if somebody is sleeping in their tent at night, you can't go into their tent and slit their throat because it's considered a war crime.
[00:50:32]  I'm not sure if that's right.
[00:50:34]  I think if the person into whose tent you're slipping is a military person, I think you're allowed to do that.
[00:50:45]  I mean, you know, you might.
[00:50:48]  have a bunch of military lawyers call in and tell you that's wrong.
[00:50:53]  But I mean, that's my understanding.
[00:50:55]  You know, if the person whose throat you're slitting is a civilian and the reason you're slitting their throat is you just want to get a kill for some reason, as has been alleged and has occurred in, you know,
[00:51:11]  maybe not throat slitting, but sort of, you know, a bunch of deaths that have, you know, were initially categorized in Afghanistan and elsewhere as sort of combat deaths.
[00:51:26]  And then it turns out that in fact, they probably weren't combat deaths and that these were US or coalition military personnel for some sort of fairly twisted reason wanting to kill someone.
[00:51:41]  for the sake of killing them.
[00:51:44]  So that's when it becomes a war crime.
[00:51:46]  But, you know, generally, my understanding is, you know, if you're killing a member of the armed force with whom you're at war, the law is fairly broad about whether you can kill them or not.
[00:52:08]  I mean, you can't, once you've taken them prisoner, you can't kill them.
[00:52:13]  If they surrender, you can't kill them.
[00:52:15]  But, you know, if they're fighting you or they haven't surrendered yeah, I mean, there's not really much difference in the way that, you know, the scenario that you laid out of creeping into somebody's tent and slitting their throat.
[00:52:30]  There's not an awful lot of difference between that and having a, you know, a drone flying out of sight of them and zapping the building that they're in or, you know, sending a missile into the car they're driving in.
[00:52:43]  Well, wouldn't this throat slitting be a much better option because you don't have collateral damage?
[00:52:49]  If there's a terrorist in a building and you send a drone strike to hit it, you're going to potentially kill lots of people.
[00:52:53]  People.
[00:52:54]  And I know they justify it in a way like they rank the terrorist, how high they are up, and this is okay, we can kill this many civilians for this guy.
[00:53:01]  But if you have some knuckle-draggar mercenary who's just thirsty for blood, who you can contract with the CIA to go out and slip into this guy's room and cut his throat and no one else gets hurt, wouldn't that be a better option?
[00:53:16]  Well, as a reporter, I'm certainly not about to sit here and say it would be a good idea to get some, quote, knuckle-draggar mercenary thirsty for blood.
[00:53:27]  To go out and kill people.
[00:53:30]  I mean, I think most Americans would hope that, you know, the folks that we're paying, you know, that our taxpayers are paying to do this are not just because the phrase thirsty for blood sort of implies.
[00:53:45]  I don't mean that in a negative way, by the way.
[00:53:47]  I meant that in a good way because there's a lot of guys that are like that that just want to be in combat zones, right?
[00:53:55]  Or they want to be in war.
[00:53:56]  Billy Waugh is a perfect example of that.
[00:53:58]  It's way better than conscripting people, kids, young kids, or not even talking.
[00:54:03]  You don't have to go as far as conscripting them.
[00:54:06]  Even just getting young kids who don't know what they want to do with their lives, they have the option of go to college, get a job, go join the military.
[00:54:15]  And it's like, eh, maybe this will be fun.
[00:54:17]  And then they end up going over there and their brain, they're psychologically screwed for the rest of their lives.
[00:54:23]  Instead of the other option, the guys that are drawn to that, right?
[00:54:28]  That want that.
[00:54:29]  like the guys that really want to be there and doing these things.
[00:54:32]  I feel like, I don't know, I feel like that would be a much better option.
[00:54:37]  Well, I mean, let's, you know, let's assume that you can find those people, I suspect.
[00:54:47]  And of course, there are people who come into the military wanting nothing more than to, you know, be in the most sort of the units that are most likely to see combat.
[00:55:04]  And they want to be quite aggressive about it.
[00:55:10]  The military is an enormous enterprise.
[00:55:16]  And even for the combat arms elements of the Army, the Marine Corps, the special operations community,
[00:55:29]  and their equivalents in the Air Force and the Navy, it's doubtful that there are enough folks coming into the military with that mindset to fill every single billet.
[00:55:46]  of those units.
[00:55:47]  I mean, as you're probably aware, I don't know whether you've talked about it on the show before, but I mean, the military's spent the last two or three years in a recruiting crisis.
[00:55:56]  Right.
[00:55:58]  And, you know, there are lots of factors behind that.
[00:56:03]  But one of them is that only roughly one in four of, you know, 18 to 25, I think, year old Americans is actually qualified to join the military from the point of view of physical fitness, health, and not having a particularly criminal background and so forth.
[00:56:32]  That's before you start dividing that up amongst what the military calls propensity to serve, which is how interested are those individuals going to be in serving in the military.
[00:56:49]  Only a quarter of the sort of the, if you like, the target audience for military recruiting ads, or only a quarter of the age group is even qualified.
[00:57:01]  And then you've got to find the ones who want to serve there.
[00:57:04]  So I think as you drill down, the number of folks who, to sort of use a cliche, want to get their gun on, you know, in that group is fairly small.
[00:57:17]  Yeah, especially, yes, I mean, definitely in the younger generations, right?
[00:57:24]  But I do want to just go back to the business of bloodthirsty mercenaries.

=== Bloodthirsty Mercenaries Defined (02:38) ===

[00:57:32]  I think the term bloodthirsty to me and I suspect it's a term.
[00:57:36]  I might have embellished it.
[00:57:39]  Sort of implies somebody who is not very discriminating.
[00:57:43]  They want to see blood.
[00:57:45]  They want to taste blood, literally.
[00:57:52]  Let's just say a special operations guy with a dagger.
[00:57:54]  Let's just put it that way.
[00:57:56]  Yeah, the special operations community traditionally, one of its strengths has been.
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=== Flaws in Selection Processes (03:13) ===

[01:00:10]  It's a very arduous selection process, making sure that the right people with the right mindset are. are being selected into the community.
[01:00:21]  I mean, there's countless examples in just to use a Delta Force, you know, as a for instance, of folks who make it through the physical and psychological challenges of the so-called long walk where they,
[01:00:41]  you know, the candidates for Delta Force are, you know, taken to a forest basically in West Virginia and told to start.
[01:00:52]  Given a spot on the map that they have to go to and they've got to navigate themselves through the terrain, get to that spot.
[01:01:00]  There's somebody else there just saying, here's your next spot.
[01:01:04]  And there's a time that they're supposed to be meeting to get to the end, but they don't know where the end is and they don't know what the time is.
[01:01:14]  So it's sort of a psychological thing.
[01:01:16]  How do they handle that pressure?
[01:01:18]  But there's countless examples of folks who have made it through.
[01:01:24]  that part of the challenge, that part of the assessment and selection process.
[01:01:28]  And then there are psychological tests and, you know, and there's a panel of senior guys in the unit and graybeards, so-called, you know, former senior guys in the unit who are out now assessing them.
[01:01:44]  And a lot of them get rejected at those stages because they're not considered to be quite the right fit, and sometimes a psychologist will say, you know, they're looking for somebody who's ethical.
[01:02:00]  You know.
[01:02:00]  Now look, there are flaws in every assessment, there are holes in this.
[01:02:04]  Some folks will slip through the cracks in all of these organizations.
[01:02:10]  Um, so i'm i'm not trying to say that any assessment and selection process has has worked perfectly, whether that's special forces, whether that's uh, NAVY Seals, whether that's SEAL TEAM SIX, whether that's Delta Force, the Rangers.
[01:02:25]  Um, you know, you can find, you can find, you know, basically criminals who've snuck in or developed in those communities.
[01:02:33]  Right.
[01:02:36]  But what special forces has, or I beg your pardon, special operations forces has as an advantage over the rest of the military and most of the world's other militaries is that they're, you know, they're so selective about this.
[01:02:52]  Right.
[01:02:53]  And, you know, when you see communities that have in the special ops world that have, when you see organizations in the special ops communities that are having an uptick of problems, I would say it's usually worth going back to the selection process and see have they allowed the selection process to get warped?
[01:03:17]  Are they still selecting for the characteristics that they should have been selecting for or thought they were selecting for?

=== Nuclear Retaliation Scenarios (05:03) ===

[01:03:24]  Right.
[01:03:25]  So, you know, I can't remember how we got onto this tangent, but I mean, it had to do with bloodthirsty mercenaries slipping into tents.
[01:03:35]  I mean, I think that the moment that a nation starts using mercenaries, particularly foreign mercenaries, for operations what do you mean?
[01:03:48]  I was talking about like American mercenaries.
[01:03:51]  Well, I mean, in history, a lot of mercenaries have been foreign.
[01:03:56]  Right, if you go back to the European Wars in the middle ages and so forth um, you know, they weren't all, they didn't all automatically answer to the head of state um uh, for whom they were fighting.
[01:04:10]  That's why they had to go out, and that that country or that kingdom or principality had to go out and hire them to fight for them.
[01:04:18]  I mean that that was the sort of the definition of a mercenary and um, you know I, I think that you know if, if you've got, if a country has People fighting only for it.
[01:04:35]  In other words, not fighting for that.
[01:04:37]  I mean, the argument with folks like the Kenyan RRT that the US government would make, and I'm sure the Kenyan government would make, is that, look, yes, the United States wants Al Qaeda figure X killed, but so do we.
[01:04:55]  So the fact that we're taking American help in terms of training and in terms of resources.
[01:05:02]  To help create this unit, maybe, or certainly train them up, and we're taking their intelligence to target them.
[01:05:11]  But they're killing guys that the Kenyan government wants killed as well.
[01:05:16]  So it's good for Kenya as well.
[01:05:17]  Exactly.
[01:05:18]  But if you're taking somebody from a country whose government has absolutely no say in it, maybe, or maybe that country isn't a democracy, so the people of that country have no say in it.
[01:05:33]  You know, it's at least worth having a conversation about that in the United States, you know, which is why you need to have, you know, news organizations that cover it.
[01:05:42]  Right, right.
[01:05:43]  Yeah, it's interesting, too.
[01:05:45]  You know, when it comes to the Russia story, the Russia Ukraine story, you know, how really, you know, a lot of people are very critical about, you know, all the military aid going to Ukraine and, like, what is Ukraine's strategic importance to the United States?
[01:06:03]  Like, is there really that much?
[01:06:04]  Like, I was watching an interview this morning.
[01:06:07]  Where this guy John Mearsheimer was talking to Piers Morgan about if Russia used a nuke, would the US retaliate?
[01:06:15]  And he was like, he was like, absolutely not.
[01:06:18]  He's like, if the US, if Russia dropped a tactical nuke on Ukraine, the US would not retaliate because the US knows as soon as they launch a nuke towards Russia, it's full on nuclear war.
[01:06:32]  And Ukraine is not worth New York City or Los Angeles to.
[01:06:39]  For the United States.
[01:06:40]  The United States is not willing to give up one of their cities to being hit by a nuke for Ukraine.
[01:06:47]  I can't tell you what a U.S. president would or wouldn't do.
[01:06:49]  I suspect that in the sense of retaliate with a nuclear attack on Russia from the United States, that's certainly probably true because we're not in yet a we don't have a mutual defense treaty with Ukraine.
[01:07:12]  They're not part of NATO.
[01:07:14]  But there are a lot of ways you can retaliate without sending a nuclear weapon.
[01:07:20]  I would be astonished if the Putin regime dropped a tactical nuclear weapon on Ukraine and the United States and other countries didn't do something even more drastic than what's happened so far in response to that.
[01:07:47]  But do you think they might use a nuke?
[01:07:49]  No, I don't.
[01:07:50]  No, no, that's what I'm saying.
[01:07:53]  But when you started out by saying he said that they wouldn't retaliate.
[01:07:57]  And my point was.
[01:07:57]  With a nuke.
[01:07:58]  Okay.
[01:07:58]  Yeah.
[01:07:59]  There's other ways that you can retaliate.
[01:08:01]  Right.
[01:08:02]  Yeah.
[01:08:03]  Because, you know, he's also making the claim that, like, the only reason the United States would use a nuke is if our survival was being threatened.
[01:08:11]  And Ukraine does not dictate our survival.
[01:08:14]  I think that's probably true, but I also don't think that's any great insight.
[01:08:19]  Right.
[01:08:20]  I mean, yeah.
[01:08:23]  We didn't cover this, but can you give people just like a brief.

=== Rock Journalism Origins (02:13) ===

[01:08:27]  Background into how you got into reporting on wars and war journalism and all this stuff.
[01:08:33]  And I know now, I don't know how much boots on the ground stuff you do now, but just.
[01:08:38]  Not as much as I used to.
[01:08:39]  Right, right, right.
[01:08:40]  Yeah.
[01:08:41]  So, a thumbnail bio for me I was born in Canada to two British parents.
[01:08:51]  We moved back to England when I was a little boy, grew up the first half of my childhood in the UK, in southern England.
[01:09:00]  the second half of my childhood in Dublin, Ireland.
[01:09:03]  And it was while I was living in Dublin as a teenager, as a high schooler, basically, I got interested in journalism and specifically in rock journalism.
[01:09:13]  And I got a sort of a columnist slash freelance gig with a magazine called Hot Press in Dublin, still going strong.
[01:09:26]  This would have been in the mid-80s, in the early 80s, really, technically, 83, 84.
[01:09:32]  And hot press.
[01:09:33]  Hot press, yeah.
[01:09:34]  That's a pun in Ireland.
[01:09:38]  It's difficult to explain.
[01:09:40]  A hot press is the Irish word for what the English would call an airing cupboard.
[01:09:45]  But you hardly ever even hear about airing cupboards in the United States.
[01:09:49]  Airing cupboard?
[01:09:50]  Airing.
[01:09:51]  A-I-R-I-N-G.
[01:09:53]  And in Ireland, the word press in Ireland, you know, it doesn't just mean a printing press.
[01:10:00]  It also means a cupboard.
[01:10:03]  It's the word for a cupboard.
[01:10:05]  Okay.
[01:10:06]  And an airing cupboard sits above the boiler in a house that has a hot water boiler.
[01:10:14]  Okay.
[01:10:15]  And it's where you put some of your laundry to finish out drying and fluffing up.
[01:10:21]  So you might put your towels there and things like that.
[01:10:24]  Right.
[01:10:24]  So hot press was a pun on a hot press, like I said, is an airing cupboard in Ireland.
[01:10:29]  So hot press was the publication that was started in 77, I believe.
[01:10:36]  I joined. in 83 and I was the heavy rock writer.

=== Funneled Aid to Mujahideen (04:10) ===

[01:10:41]  And so I, and for two or three years, probably a bit longer than that, depending, but I covered heavy rock for them.
[01:10:51]  But some of that was from the States because I got a scholarship to go to Boston University and to study journalism at Boston University's College of Communications.
[01:11:04]  And there were several professors there who got me interested.
[01:11:10]  In defense journalism and national security journalism.
[01:11:13]  So, my initial plan had been to make a career in the rock business somehow, but I got bitten by the sort of national security bug.
[01:11:22]  I'd always been sort of interested a little bit in military history.
[01:11:27]  And the first time that I really did that was in the summer of 1987, which was the summer between my junior and senior years in college.
[01:11:39]  went out to the border of Afghanistan, Pakistan, specifically to the city of Peshawar in what was then called the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan.
[01:11:50]  It's now called Khaibach Pakhtunkhwa Province.
[01:11:53]  And I covered the Afghan Mujahideen's war with the sort of Soviet forces in Afghanistan from there.
[01:12:07]  And that was a terrific summer.
[01:12:10]  I had some real adventures.
[01:12:12]  to, I spent a part of a day drinking tea in his compound in Miram Shah up near the Afghan border with a guy called Jalaluddin Haqqani, who was basically the head of what later became known as the Haqqani Network, the Haqqani Group.
[01:12:34]  And he ended, at the time, he was the recipient of a certain amount of CIA largesse funneled to him as well as to many other afghan, you know, Mujahideen warlords through the Pakistani ISI intelligence agency.
[01:12:56]  But he later ended up sort of on the U.S. most wanted list, as did another guy I met there called Gulbadine Hekmatyar.
[01:13:06]  And I actually, together with an American friend of mine who was on a Fulbright scholarship, went into Afghanistan, sort of as we would now say, embedded in the forces of Gulbadine Hekmatyar.
[01:13:21]  So we went in into a little bit into Afghanistan with those guys.
[01:13:26]  These guys were working with the CIA or the military?
[01:13:29]  No, well, they were working with, I mean, they were Afghan Mujahideen.
[01:13:36]  So they had their own sort of chain of command, if you like.
[01:13:41]  We didn't see, to my knowledge, any CIA operatives with them.
[01:13:48]  My understanding of that war is very few CIA officers actually went.
[01:13:52]  into Afghanistan.
[01:13:55]  A lot of the business of the covert aid program that was being funneled to the Mujahideen, it was funneled through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.
[01:14:09]  And that gave Pakistan an enormous amount of leverage with the Mujahideen groups and an enormous amount of say about who in the Mujahideen groups got what and how much they got.
[01:14:27]  And the result was that they gave those groups – they gave the more fundamentalist Pashtun-oriented groups the most of largesse because the ISI has always favored the Pashtuns and the fundamentalists in Pakistan.

=== Operation Anaconda Battle (06:23) ===

[01:14:51]  So I did that.
[01:14:52]  I graduated in 88.
[01:14:56]  Boston University had a Center for Defense Journalism, which it had created in the meantime.
[01:15:01]  They gave me, after I did six months reporting for a local paper in Boston in the suburbs there, and then I went back and got a master's degree in international relations with a focus on national security stuff, courtesy of Boston University.
[01:15:18]  And then I came down to Washington looking for a job covering the military and national security, and perfect job happened to open up at Army Times, which is an independent publication that covers the U.S. Army and I fell into it and I was just in my element there for years.
[01:15:45]  I covered, I had various beats, but they all focused on either warfighting or the leadership of the service.
[01:15:58]  So I would go out to the training centers, and embed in units that were going through training.
[01:16:04]  I would go to the real world operations and embed in units.
[01:16:10]  I was in Somalia in 92, parts of 92, 93, 94.
[01:16:15]  I was in Haiti in the mid 90s, then into the Balkans in the mid to later 90s with the US peacekeeping forces there.
[01:16:27]  And then, of course, 9-11 happened and I was in I spent January through May of 2002 back in Afghanistan.
[01:16:40]  Wow.
[01:16:41]  And I was fortunate enough to be embedded with US forces during Operation Anaconda, which was the largest battle of that phase of the war in Afghanistan.
[01:16:54]  And then I wrote my book, Not a Good Day to Die, which I can hold up here.
[01:16:58]  Yeah, hold that up for us.
[01:17:00]  So that's the book that I wrote about Operation Anaconda.
[01:17:05]  If you speak Arabic, I do not speak Arabic.
[01:17:09]  I mean, no more than sort of two words.
[01:17:11]  Okay.
[01:17:11]  I have friends who are very, very good at it, but I am not an Arabic speaker.
[01:17:19]  So, Operation Anaconda, that was when?
[01:17:23]  That was in March of 2002.
[01:17:25]  March of 2002.
[01:17:26]  And it was really an attempt to seal up and destroy, either by capturing or killing, the last.
[01:17:38]  Sort of large pocket of Al-Qaeda and associated sort of fighters that was left inside the borders of Afghanistan, that hadn't yet sort of made it across the borders into the tribal areas of Pakistan.
[01:17:57]  Wow.
[01:17:58]  And it was, you know, I would say it was a failure, really.
[01:18:05]  It wasn't a complete failure, but A lot of, in the sense that the mission was to destroy that pocket of forces, a lot of those forces got away.
[01:18:22]  And then there's a sort of a story within the story of that operation, which I tell in some detail in the book about the Takagar battle.
[01:18:36]  It's sometimes called Roberts Ridge because the first casualty in the battle was a seal called Neil Roberts.
[01:18:52]  was an operation that involved JSOC, the folks that I wrote my next book about, and it involved a sort of a JSOC task force, and it was the culmination of a really successful reconnaissance mission,
[01:19:10]  reconnaissance and surveillance mission that had been undertaken by a Delta Force lieutenant colonel who was in charge of a sort of basically of what are called advanced force operations or AFO for for the JSOC task force and he was able to to
[01:19:43]  push behind enemy lines several teams of uh Delta Force and seal team, six uh operators uh without the enemy realizing that it had happened, and have them in the high ground over this valley.
[01:19:59]  Operation Anaconda happened in a valley called the Shahikot Valley in eastern Afghanistan.
[01:20:06]  And it was a stupendous feat to get those teams in, you know, overland.
[01:20:16]  They deliberately avoided flying them in on helicopters because that immediately lets the enemy know that something's going on, you know.
[01:20:28]  I tell the story in the book about how once it became clear how much success that officer, whose name is Pete Blaber,
[01:20:45]  had had in the operation, then there was pressure on him to let other teams come in and sort of have a slice of the glory, if you like.
[01:21:00]  And, you know, Blaber had spent weeks preparing the teams that had gone in the first time and imbuing them with a sort of a certain sort of a tactical approach and philosophy.

=== The Takagar Mountain Fight (07:12) ===

[01:21:15]  And without getting into an extraordinarily complicated story, he was sort of forced aside.
[01:21:29]  In a way, and other decisions were made that led to um uh, a seal team, uh trying to insert by helicopter on top of the highest mountain in uh, in the valley, key terrain uh, forever for whoever could hold it.
[01:21:48]  But, of course, because it was key terrain, uh the enemy had already taken possession of it and uh they shot the the helicopter up that tried to Insert the team.
[01:22:03]  Roberts falls out.
[01:22:04]  That helicopter flies off.
[01:22:06]  Wow.
[01:22:07]  Just, just very badly damaged.
[01:22:15]  Time passes.
[01:22:17]  They try to go back and pick up Roberts.
[01:22:24]  They try to find him, the original team that had dropped him off.
[01:22:29]  They can't find him.
[01:22:31]  They think he's dead.
[01:22:33]  They think they found him and he's dead, but they don't really check the.
[01:22:40]  They don't have the time to check the body that they think they found.
[01:22:43]  And and uh and go, uh and do vital stats and make sure it is who they think it is.
[01:22:50]  They get driven off the mountain.
[01:22:52]  They, you know, seriously wounded in, in some cases um uh, and then a cascading series of misunderstandings and poor decisions follows.
[01:23:05]  That leads to another helicopter being shot down on the top of the mountain.
[01:23:10]  Uh and um, half a platoon of rangers in the fighting for their lives on the top of the mountain.
[01:23:18]  It ends up with, you know, I think seven U.S. personnel, U.S. special operators killed.
[01:23:26]  An incredibly controversial episode in recent U.S. special operations history because one of the, you know, something I neglected to mention is I gave you that very thumbnail sketch of of the event was that when the team goes back to try and find Roberts for that first,
[01:23:56]  I got that slightly confused.
[01:24:00]  They can't find Roberts, they think.
[01:24:02]  They can't find him.
[01:24:04]  But one of the team, their Air Force attachment, the guy that is supposed to call in airstrikes and so forth, Is shot.
[01:24:19]  They think he's dead and they can't it's.
[01:24:21]  They're under a hellacious hail of fire.
[01:24:24]  They have to get off the mountain and uh, and they leave him behind.
[01:24:30]  Um, they leave what they think is his corpse behind, but later on, a predator that shows up over the mountain of, predator drone drone yeah, captures video of of a a two-person gunfight going on on the top of the mountain, one individual maneuvering on another.
[01:24:51]  This is at a time when no Americans are supposed to be alive on the mountain because they later realize, they later find, when they finally collect, you know, when they finally collect everything off the top of the mountain, they find the bodies, they find Neil Roberts' body and they realize that he was killed very soon after falling out of the helicopter.
[01:25:18]  They realize that Almost certainly that was the Air Force operator John Chapman fighting for his life on the top of the mountain.
[01:25:29]  And if you accept that as fact, then that figure keeps fighting until seconds before the Ranger quick reaction force arrives on the mountain, not knowing that he's there.
[01:25:42]  But then he's killed very shortly before that Ranger force arrives.
[01:25:48]  And they don't know what they're coming into either.
[01:25:50]  I mean, it was, it's, you know, although it was, you know, more than 20 years ago now, it's a classic example of how, you know, even with all, you know,
[01:26:04]  a lot of people had a lot of faith in technologies that didn't work as they were supposed to on that day, you know, there was, because that piece of terrain had been, quote unquote, swept by different, you know, overhead platforms.
[01:26:25]  And nobody had spotted the Al-Qaeda position on the top of the mountain.
[01:26:31]  People thought it was safer to land there than obviously it was.
[01:26:35]  Right.
[01:26:36]  So that's, I mean, there were two medals of honor that came out of that fight.
[01:26:43]  And, you know, they're very controversial.
[01:26:46]  I mean, I wrote a very detailed account of the fight in the book.
[01:26:52]  I then wrote another version of it with a terrific reporter called Chris Drew in the New York Times.
[01:26:58]  And I I wrote a sort of a third or fourth version of it as a cover story for Newsweek because eventually what happened was when the Air Force tried to get John Chapman,
[01:27:16]  who was posthumously awarded a service cross, the Air Force Cross for his actions, when they tried to get his actions upgraded to a Medal of Honor, the seals who were part of his team and who had all signed up for him getting a service cross, an Air Force cross,
[01:27:45]  basically wouldn't sign the statements that were required to be signed to get his cross upgraded.
[01:27:52]  So the Air Force went that way alone and in the meantime the SEALs tried to, well, they successfully got a Medal of Honor for the leader of the team that Chapman was part of that went back to the mountain looking for Neil Roberts.
[01:28:16]  And so you ended up with dueling narratives from the two services, really, about who deserves a Medal of Honor and why.
[01:28:25]  Wow, man.

=== Iraq Invasion Embeddings (15:33) ===

[01:28:27]  So that's, you know, I'm sorry we got sort of sidetracked in Afghanistan, but basically for the next 10 years after 9-11, I went to Afghanistan, embedding with U.S. forces in Iraq.
[01:28:41]  I was embedded with 3-7 Cav for the invasion of Iraq.
[01:28:47]  When you're embedded, what are you doing?
[01:28:50]  Are you filming?
[01:28:51]  Are you taking photos?
[01:28:52]  Are you just writing?
[01:28:53]  I mean, these days, the sort of 20 years younger version of me would probably be filming with this iPhone or something, okay, but didn't exist back then.
[01:29:08]  Fortunately for me, because it would have just been a lot more work, I suspect.
[01:29:13]  I'm taking notes.
[01:29:15]  I'm interviewing people.
[01:29:17]  I'm observing.
[01:29:22]  In the Iraq invasion, I was with one of the lead elements from the 3rd Infantry Division, the sort of screening and reconnaissance force of the 3rd Infantry Division, which was the lead division for the army in the invasion.
[01:29:40]  And so, I mean, I'm just watching the combat going on.
[01:29:46]  And you're in it.
[01:29:48]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:29:49]  I mean, you're in it.
[01:29:51]  I mean, look, I don't want to make too much of that.
[01:29:56]  I was in a cavalry squadron that was enormously well equipped, very well trained, extremely well led.
[01:30:11]  So.
[01:30:13]  you know, and had every advantage other than knowledge of the local terrain over the forces that they were coming up against, be that, you know, Iraqi Republican Guard forces or, you know, like armored forces or be that the sort of Saddam Fedayeen, more irregular forces, you know, more lightly armed.
[01:30:42]  So, but yeah, I mean, it was high adventure.
[01:30:46]  Can't deny that that was.
[01:30:47]  It was uh.
[01:30:48]  It was sort of one of the standout memories of uh of my life, from you know, from certainly professionally, would you say Afghanistan was the most frightening place you ever were reporting in, or what was uh.
[01:31:01]  You know, maybe this I I I, I don't know i'm first of all when you're in the moment, at least for me, I can't talk for other people it's not that frightening, because it's super interesting and you're just trying to.
[01:31:19]  You're trying to remember what you're seeing and, like I said, take notes and just focus on it.
[01:31:28]  In terms of danger, probably the Iraq invasion was.
[01:31:33]  There was a bit more stuff.
[01:31:35]  But, I mean, look, you know, a bullet can find you anywhere, right?
[01:31:41]  I mean, you know, we were getting the position I was in in Operation Anaconda at the north end of the Shahicot Valley was getting kind of mortared and we had pretty good cover.
[01:31:54]  We were in a sort of a wadi, you know, a dried up stream bed.
[01:32:02]  But, you know, you could hear heavy machine gun bullets going overhead and the occasional RPG would come in.
[01:32:14]  But you never, you know, like I said, if a mortar round pops down in the middle of the wadi beside you, I mean, that's just, that's it.
[01:32:21]  That's it.
[01:32:22]  Yeah, you know, that's, but sometimes, Especially as those wars went on, you never know when the most dangerous moment is, when your closest shave is.
[01:32:32]  It might not be the bullet that you can hear zipping five feet overhead or whatever.
[01:32:39]  It might be that on a patrol through Baghdad, your Humvee that you're riding in drove six inches to the left of a pressure plate IED or something like that, an improvised explosive device.
[01:32:56]  And you may never know that.
[01:33:00]  It could be that some Saddam Fedayeen guy in a hedge was drawing a bead up with his AK on your thin-skinned Humvee and then switches to target somebody else's vehicle and maybe misses them.
[01:33:19]  So you never know.
[01:33:23]  I've had some great adventures.
[01:33:25]  There are other reporters who have been in much.
[01:33:29]  have had much closer shaves than I have.
[01:33:32]  And tragically, some of them, you know, haven't been close shaves.
[01:33:35]  I mean, we've had, you know, reporters and photographers killed and wounded.
[01:33:41]  And so I certainly don't want to suggest that my experience for embedded reporters is anything out of the ordinary.
[01:33:52]  I just always felt extraordinarily fortunate to be, you know, an eyewitness to history, you know, to be able to have that opportunity, you know, to be with one of the first units in the Iraq invasion and see it.
[01:34:08]  I mean, I saw a tank battle.
[01:34:10]  How many reporters have seen before the before the uh uh, before the?
[01:34:16]  Uh Ukraine war?
[01:34:17]  I mean, how many reporters have been in a?
[01:34:19]  Uh, in a position to observe a tank battle especially, beg your pardon, one involving U.s?
[01:34:26]  U.s forces?
[01:34:27]  Where was the tank battle?
[01:34:28]  It was, it was south of uh, south of of Baghdad.
[01:34:31]  Um, and where did uh Iraq get their tanks?
[01:34:39]  Do you know?
[01:34:39]  Yeah, the the Soviet, They're Soviet tanks.
[01:34:41]  Yeah, they were Soviet designed tanks.
[01:34:43]  Yeah.
[01:34:43]  I mean, we just had a guy on the podcast a couple weeks ago who was explaining to me.
[01:34:48]  He was explaining how the Soviet tanks in the Russia Ukraine conflict, there's a big problem with them.
[01:34:52]  They're like the pops are blowing off the tops of them.
[01:34:56]  Yeah.
[01:34:56]  I mean, that's, I mean, I don't think that's unknown.
[01:35:01]  I mean, you could have walked through the battlefields of the Kuwait war, of the, you know, of the U.S. you know, in coalition war to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait in 1991, and you would have seen T-72s looking just like that.
[01:35:28]  If there's enough of an explosion in the hull, it pops that turret off and the turret just goes spinning.
[01:35:34]  Right.
[01:35:36]  So, yeah, I mean, they are what they are.
[01:35:40]  I mean, the Soviets and the Russians have always preferred quantity over quality.
[01:35:54]  And they've got, you know, as you can see in the way that they've approached the Ukraine war, you know, they're willing to expend an awful lot of human life for what we in the United States, if it was us, might view as marginal gains.
[01:36:11]  Yeah.
[01:36:12]  And they're even emptying, I heard they're even emptying their prisons for people to fight.
[01:36:15]  Well, they've certainly got prisoner battalions, yeah, that they've created.
[01:36:22]  So.
[01:36:23]  Going back to your journalism in Iraq and Afghanistan, I've heard the phenomena describe it.
[01:36:29]  Maybe you can attest to this where, when people, especially journalists, I think I heard a filmmaker describe this is that when you're in the middle of like a firefight or like a highly intense battle, and you're in probably the most danger you've been in in a long time or throughout the period of the day, you're so focused in on capturing the moment and fulfilling your purpose of being there, you kind of like adrenaline kicks in.
[01:36:57]  The fear of the bullets zipping over your head or mortars going off kind of just disappears.
[01:37:02]  And you kind of like fall into this weird sort of little pocket where you're just so hyper focused on capturing these things, like capturing the moment or filming it or getting a photo or whatever it is, or in your case, remembering it so you can write it down, that the perception of fear just sort of dissipates.
[01:37:22]  Yeah, I mean, I can't tell.
[01:37:24]  Everybody reacts slightly differently.
[01:37:27]  I mean, you only have to look at. at service members and soldiers and even, you know, you'll find soldiers who were in, I mean, far more dangerous and lethal combat situations than I was ever an observer of.
[01:37:48]  And they've made it through, you know, and many, many of those, and they've made it through with apparently little to no lingering after effect psychologically.
[01:38:02]  And then you've got folks who never left the base that they were stationed on, the FOB, the forward operating base, as they were called it during the global war on terror, and have PTSD somehow.
[01:38:18]  And I'm not trying to diminish their PTSD or whatever.
[01:38:24]  My point is that everybody reacts to risk and certain situations differently.
[01:38:38]  I don't know how much adrenaline was coursing through my system at the time.
[01:38:46]  And look, again, it's not like I was in a situation where everybody around me was getting shot.
[01:38:53]  One of the most remarkable things about 3-7 Cavs experience in that war was the and it had that cavalry squadron, Which is normally sort of can't remember, but it probably in in the many hundreds.
[01:39:12]  Uh, a cavalry squadron would have been back then in in a heavy division.
[01:39:17]  Um, had all kinds of attachments, you know engineers uh, field artillery and and so forth that plused it up probably into the low thousands.
[01:39:29]  Not a single service member was killed in that task force in the entire invasion despite, you know, Being ambushed numerous times on the way up and things going wrong.
[01:39:44]  And yet, through dint of the factors I was outlining earlier, very well led, very well trained, very well equipped, highly motivated, and lucky.
[01:40:05]  You can't discount the role that fortune played.
[01:40:10]  I don't know why I just thought about this, but I think this guy might have been in the same part of the world as you during the same time.
[01:40:16]  Have you ever heard of a journalist by the name of Michael Hastings?
[01:40:19]  Yes.
[01:40:20]  The Rolling Stone reporter?
[01:40:21]  Yes.
[01:40:22]  Did you ever meet him?
[01:40:24]  But he's passed away now.
[01:40:26]  I know.
[01:40:27]  Yeah.
[01:40:28]  Yeah.
[01:40:28]  Yeah, that story's pretty wild.
[01:40:31]  Yeah, I mean, have I ever.
[01:40:34]  I have a feeling he and I.
[01:40:36]  We certainly, I don't think, met downrange anywhere that I remember.
[01:40:42]  I might have been.
[01:40:44]  At one or two events with him, but I'm trying to think.
[01:40:47]  I don't want to say that we never spoke in case somebody observed us speaking, but I don't have a memory of that, right?
[01:40:54]  Right, and maybe you can fill in the blanks for me here.
[01:40:57]  But I, from what I recall, he wrote a story, um, that he, I guess, he was in Afghanistan, if I'm not mistaken, and he was embedded there with some people.
[01:41:05]  And then there was a volcano or something that made them have to stay there.
[01:41:08]  He, well, no, he, he, you know, and look, I'm not an expert on.
[01:41:15]  Michael Hastings, but I remember the episode.
[01:41:17]  Yes.
[01:41:18]  He embedded with the entourage of General Stan McChrystal, who was the coalition commander in Afghanistan at the time.
[01:41:30]  Stan McChrystal?
[01:41:31]  Yeah, who is a former, who plays a big role in this book, but he had been the JSOC commander before, which is how he basically made his name as a general.
[01:41:43]  Okay.
[01:41:45]  But as a four-star general, he was running the war in Afghanistan.
[01:41:49]  This is him.
[01:41:50]  Yeah.
[01:41:51]  And, and, uh, haste like a mean dude.
[01:41:55]  Yeah.
[01:41:56]  Hastings, um, had, uh, received permission to embed as a reporting for the Rolling Stone, reporting with, with McChrystal's entourage, um, uh, while they were on a trip to Europe to do some sort of diplomatic work.
[01:42:18]  I can't remember the exact reasons.
[01:42:20]  I know they went to Paris.
[01:42:22]  Um, and, I think McChrystal had to give a couple of speeches and his whole entourage comes along with him, you know, his personal staff.
[01:42:32]  Okay.
[01:42:33]  And it was at the time that the Icelandic, you know, volcano in Iceland erupted and the ash cloud halted commercial flights or all flights above Europe for a period of at least several days.
[01:42:53]  Right.
[01:42:54]  And so as a result, McChrystal and his entourage with Michael Hastings were stuck together longer than the initial plan had been.
[01:43:08]  And, you know, there are, you know, accounts vary on this, but, you know, I think I'm on solid ground saying that the entourage grew comfortable around Hastings.
[01:43:22]  There may have been some misunderstandings. or differences of opinion as to what the ground rules were.
[01:43:29]  I wasn't there, so I can't tell you what they were.
[01:43:35]  The story that he wrote for Rolling Stone was basically had a number of politically incorrect quotes attributed to, not by name, but to members of McChrystal's staff.
[01:43:58]  Crucially, McChrystal himself.

=== McChrystal Staff Controversy (04:23) ===

[01:44:01]  None of these quotes were attributed to that.
[01:44:04]  Oh no, that got, but just his stuff, his stuff, but um, uh it, you know.
[01:44:10]  One of the quotes was about uh, you know, making fun of Joe Biden um, when he was a vice president.
[01:44:18]  Uh this, because this was under Obama's right um, and that was that.
[01:44:24]  Uh Obama uh, called Mcrystal back to the White House, relieved him and, and they fired Mcrystal over this yeah yeah, Over his staff.
[01:44:34]  Making fun of Joe Biden.
[01:44:35]  Well, it wasn't just that.
[01:44:36]  I mean, there were a number of quotes, but I mean, look, I'm not.
[01:44:39]  See, if you could find those too.
[01:44:40]  I'm not here to take sides on who was right.
[01:44:43]  Right.
[01:44:43]  No, it's just an interesting story because I don't know how long it was after that.
[01:44:51]  Michael Hastings died where his car was going like 120 miles an hour down a street in Los Angeles and hit a tree and exploded and the engine went flying and he died.
[01:45:05]  Well, that's behind a paywall.
[01:45:07]  But there you go.
[01:45:10]  Stanley McChrystal, top general, fired over insults to Biden.
[01:45:15]  And the conspiracy theorists speculate that this general was behind Michael Hastings' car getting taken over somehow through technology.
[01:45:24]  I absolutely would not take that seriously.
[01:45:28]  No?
[01:45:28]  No.
[01:45:30]  I mean, yeah.
[01:45:32]  What year was that?
[01:45:33]  That was like 2013, 14, maybe?
[01:45:37]  I wonder if they would even have the technology.
[01:45:38]  They're all starting to run together in my mind.
[01:45:40]  Yeah.
[01:45:43]  But, I mean, that's something they certainly probably would have had the technology to do.
[01:45:49]  I.
[01:45:49]  I just, it's so beyond the realms of possiblyhood.
[01:45:56]  Because he was, didn't he?
[01:45:58]  I mean, I think he said publicly that he was like scared for his life, right?
[01:46:01]  He was scared for his own safety after outing McChrystal.
[01:46:04]  Because after McChrystal, that was his name, right?
[01:46:06]  Yes.
[01:46:07]  After McChrystal got fired, I thought that like he publicly stated that he was like scared for his safety.
[01:46:13]  Can you find anything, Steve?
[01:46:15]  I mean, I've heard, I know that there's a conspiracy theory out there about it.
[01:46:19]  Yeah.
[01:46:20]  I would discount it completely.
[01:46:22]  That's my, you know.
[01:46:23]  Right.
[01:46:23]  Sometimes, you know, Occam's Razor and all of that.
[01:46:27]  Yes.
[01:46:28]  It's more likely that, you know, that he was just going too fast in a fast car and lost control.
[01:46:36]  I mean, that happens.
[01:46:37]  That happens, unfortunately, hundreds of times, you know, a day in North America, probably.
[01:46:43]  And it's actually happening to the new Cybertrucks.
[01:46:46]  I don't know if you saw, but there's a problem with the new Cybertrucks where the gas pedal is getting stuck and these people are like rear ending people going full speed.
[01:46:52]  Yeah.
[01:46:53]  And in no case is it somebody twiddling a device from behind a tree to make somebody's car speed up.
[01:46:59]  So, you know.
[01:47:01]  Yeah, but a high rank in general like that gets fired.
[01:47:03]  I mean, my tinfoil hat's starting to come out of the closet when I see that happen.
[01:47:11]  So, what other kind of stories are you guys working on right now on the high side?
[01:47:13]  Oh, well, we're, you know, we've had a lot of, you know, I'm quite proud of the work we've done so far.
[01:47:20]  I mean, we've got a story.
[01:47:24]  out there on the Omega teams, which is the is that Afghanistan?
[01:47:30]  Yeah, those are the teams formed by Joint Special Operations Command to support the CIA teams that were running Afghan militias, you know, doing, you know, covert action type stuff in Afghanistan.
[01:47:47]  And, you know, of course there was, you know, those teams have been, those militias rather have been accused of war crimes by and human rights abuses by certain organizations.
[01:48:06]  And so that implicitly taints the military teams that are supporting them with the same brush.
[01:48:16]  So we did a sort of a look at the history of those teams.

=== High Award Considerations (03:00) ===

[01:48:24]  We've got a story that I normally don't like.
[01:48:30]  talking too much about future stories because I'm always worried that something's going to fall through and then it doesn't get published and it makes me look stupid.
[01:48:37]  But I'm fairly confident that, you know, touch wood unless, you know, and, you know, unless we get hit by a meteorite or something in the next few weeks.
[01:48:49]  Oh, that's not going to work.
[01:48:50]  Yeah.
[01:48:52]  That we're going to have a story out about it, you know, and I want to be a little guarded about this so that we sort of keep the scoop for ourselves.
[01:49:00]  But it's about an individual who led an extraordinary life in both the United States special operations community and the intelligence community.
[01:49:17]  Still alive?
[01:49:18]  Yes, still alive.
[01:49:23]  And he's being considered for a very high award.
[01:49:33]  And so we sat down with this individual and we were just amazed at the stories he had to tell.
[01:49:42]  And so we decided rather than just write about the fact that he's being considered for this award, we wanted to sort of basically write about his life and times.
[01:49:52]  Because one of the things that we found was not only was what he had done extraordinary, and the way that he had charted his career and taken advantage of so many opportunities that came his way,
[01:50:10]  but while staying extremely humble about it, but that the places he had been assigned and had, you know, was part of larger missions that were incredibly dramatic as well.
[01:50:26]  So we've got, I've got 32,000 words or so written on this, and so we're probably going to turn it into a, I know a six-part series or something like that.
[01:50:41]  So there's still a little work to do on that yet, but the end is in sight, which will, not only is that pleasing to me, but it's very pleasing to Jack, who Jack and I like to keep Jack, please.
[01:50:53]  Yeah, well, Jack and I, I think, I like to think we complement each other.
[01:50:57]  Jack is, you know, very much, you know, his instinct is to publish as soon as possible.
[01:51:07]  My instinct is always in, you know, Every editor I've ever had has sort of like pulled their hair out over this, but my instinct is always to sort of try to get one more interview, you know, dot one, you know, triple check one more fact, dot every I, dot every T and so forth.

=== Havana Syndrome Investigations (15:21) ===

[01:51:25]  Gotta do it live, Sean.
[01:51:26]  Do it live.
[01:51:29]  So that's, you know, but, you know, that's coming up.
[01:51:33]  I think I don't think I'm giving anything away too much to say Jack is can you tell us the guy's name?
[01:51:40]  I don't want to just yet.
[01:51:41]  Okay.
[01:51:44]  But I don't think I'm giving anything away to say that Jack has been doing a lot of work on Havana syndrome.
[01:51:49]  Oh, really?
[01:51:50]  Yeah.
[01:51:50]  Which, I mean, just in case some of your listeners or viewers don't know what that is, it's the sort of mysterious ailments that have afflicted sort of a supposedly a large number of intelligence personnel and others, military and State Department among them.
[01:52:15]  that was first at least identified as such when individuals in the U.S. Embassy in Havana, particularly CIA officers assigned to the Embassy in Havana, started coming down with strange sort of neurological type symptoms.
[01:52:37]  And so we're doing a sort of a deep dive into some of that.
[01:52:42]  Has any of that been published yet or is that still in the works?
[01:52:44]  No, no, that's still in the works.
[01:52:46]  Oh, God, I want to know more about that.
[01:52:48]  And is there new evidence that's coming out in regards to the Havana Syndrome cases?
[01:52:56]  Well, let's see what we produce.
[01:53:00]  I don't want to sort of tease too much about what's in the story, but I mean, there certainly has been from other, you know, I mean, it's not like we're the only publication that's looking at Havana syndrome.
[01:53:13]  I mean, we're getting some exclusive interviews on it, but if you look at 60 Minutes had a fascinating expose, which I think they did in conjunction with the publication called The Insider.
[01:53:28]  which is a publication focused on Russia, but not produced in Russia.
[01:53:39]  So, yeah, I mean, there are we've been working on those weapons for a long time, too.
[01:53:45]  Yeah, so we'll see what transpires.
[01:53:50]  And then we've got slightly further off in the distance, and again, I'd say we've got a couple of stories that if we can nail them so by nail, I don't mean if it turns out that they're true,
[01:54:05]  but more like if we can report them out to our level of satisfaction, which is more than one person who we trust telling us something happened, they would make great movies, frankly.
[01:54:24]  So, I mean, I've been focused so much on this one individual story that that I was talking about, you know, the sort of the Viet from Vietnam to Africa and beyond, you know, to Afghanistan in the end story that I've, you know, I haven't had the time, frankly, to pursue these other stories.
[01:54:51]  But we're going to pick those up and go after them aggressively.
[01:54:56]  We've, you know, I mean, the thing that holds Jack and I back the most is the fact that there's only two of us.
[01:55:04]  And we, like I said, we are not.
[01:55:07]  You know, you'll see a lot of, and I don't mean to necessarily disparage this kind of journalism.
[01:55:12]  It's just a different sort of journalism.
[01:55:14]  But you'll see a lot of substance that are sort of, it's really the author's opinion on the news, right?
[01:55:23]  It's like, hey, the Pentagon announced this.
[01:55:26]  Here's why I think it's a good idea, bad idea, or whatever.
[01:55:29]  Okay.
[01:55:29]  That's not what we're doing.
[01:55:31]  We, you know, we're going out hearing stories that may, things that may be in the news may not be in the news.
[01:55:38]  Like the Havana syndrome has certainly been in the news.
[01:55:40]  Some of the other stuff.
[01:55:41]  We've written about it is not.
[01:55:43]  And going out and finding that untold story and spending weeks and weeks reporting it and and then giving it to our to our readers, that's great, wholesome journalism.
[01:55:55]  Not enough of that around these days, more so, podcasters like me just uh talking out of their ass.
[01:56:00]  Well no there's, I mean there's.
[01:56:02]  I tell you, one of the amazing things about about the media landscape now is, is the podcast landscape?
[01:56:10]  It really has, you know, I can say with some confidence it's exploded in the last 10 years.
[01:56:16]  Oh, yeah, absolutely.
[01:56:17]  Because when I was writing this book, which was really from sort of 2012 and 2013 and the first half of 2014, none of these podcasts existed.
[01:56:32]  And now I see people being interviewed on podcasts from the units that I wrote about.
[01:56:38]  And I'm thinking like, wow, I wouldn't even, you know, I've had to go out doing half the reporting I did if these guys were getting interviewed on podcasts.
[01:56:47]  Now, you know, I mean, I know that the uh, that that JSOC and Delta Force in particular, are trying to rein that in a little bit.
[01:56:54]  Oh, are they really?
[01:56:57]  Yeah, um and uh.
[01:57:01]  So uh, we'll see.
[01:57:02]  But I mean it's fascinating to me that that guys who you used to have to, you know, set up elaborate procedures to to meet and talk not necessarily the same individuals, but the same type of individuals from those units.
[01:57:18]  And you know, now they're now they're they're retiring and And going straight on somebody's podcast and talking about what it's like to be in Delta Force or SEAL TEAM 6 or whatever.
[01:57:28]  And my favorite thing about the whole podcasting thing, the whole podcasting revolution, is that it's kind of like melted away the gatekeepers in media.
[01:57:38]  Now you have people like you're talking about, these retired Delta Force members who can self publish their own book and they can go on podcasts to promote it.
[01:57:47]  It's a win win for both people.
[01:57:48]  Like the podcaster gets a new podcast and the guy who goes on the podcast can promote his book or whatever he's doing now.
[01:57:55]  And it eliminates like the big media enterprises and all that stuff.
[01:57:59]  So it's definitely pushed toward, you know, very strongly towards like the independent journalism and the independent media.
[01:58:06]  And you're seeing like a huge rise in that now.
[01:58:08]  Yeah.
[01:58:08]  I mean, look, I'm not going to sit here and be a hypocrite, right?
[01:58:12]  I mean, right now I am the, I guess, co-editor of my own stories and the publisher of those stories, albeit via Substack.
[01:58:23]  But I spent, Most of my career, you know, working for, I don't know what you want to call it, establishment media, big media.
[01:58:33]  I mean, the Army Times, when I joined, that family of publications was a family-owned company.
[01:58:42]  It later got bought by the Gannett Corporation, which, you know, for a while when I was working there was a $10 billion corporation.
[01:58:50]  And then they sold it, and I think it's now owned by a private equity company or something.
[01:58:56]  I mean, long after I left.
[01:58:59]  But I'm not going to sit here and say what some people call gatekeepers are necessarily bad.
[01:59:11]  I mean, I've had my probably reputation saved on a number of occasions by editors saying, are you sure you want to say, why don't we leave that out for now until we can confirm it or something like that?
[01:59:31]  You know, the First Amendment allows all of these.
[01:59:34]  You know, it allows somebody to have a Substack or, you know, just a blog and put out their opinions.
[01:59:46]  But very few of those, I mean, even on Substack, frankly, are reported journalism.
[01:59:56]  Okay.
[01:59:56]  There's a difference between giving your opinion on something, even if it's an opinion based on a deep knowledge that you have.
[02:00:05]  And actually going out and reporting something firsthand.
[02:00:08]  Yes.
[02:00:09]  And increasingly, you see the balance shifting, in my view, in the United States, towards a lot of people opining, whether that's on Substack or some other blog or from a sofa on Fox News about what's going on in the world, and fewer people.
[02:00:35]  actually going out to find out what's going on in the world and reporting it.
[02:00:40]  And when you're doing that, individual opinions are going to vary, but the organizations that put the most money towards the reporting staff and an editing staff and have the clearest idea of what their mission statement is to produce as close,
[02:01:01]  as unbiased and objective as possible, a daily or weekly, whatever it is, report on the events, on current events, those are the ones.
[02:01:15]  That are most reliable and are doing the most valuable work.
[02:01:18]  You know, there's always a, you know, I mean, I've written the odd opinion article.
[02:01:25]  I mean, I'm not against opinions, but you got to have opinions about something, and the something has got to be factually reported by reporters.
[02:01:35]  Yeah.
[02:01:36]  And I've noticed that.
[02:01:36]  I've noticed that too.
[02:01:37]  I mean, the world we live in now is, like you said, we're saturated with millions and millions of podcasts and opinion journalists.
[02:01:44]  And most of these people, like, to your point, are.
[02:01:47]  Are expressing opinions and views of other people that they've listened to or read.
[02:01:54]  And those people most likely got their opinions from other people that they've talked to or listened to or read.
[02:02:01]  There's so few people that have actually had this firsthand experience of being in these situations, seeing these things with their own two eyes.
[02:02:09]  And it's just going more and more in that direction.
[02:02:12]  Like so many so called experts on so many different topics, they're only experts because they've read. about these things, right?
[02:02:18]  They haven't experienced them firsthand like you have when you've gone overseas.
[02:02:21]  Yeah.
[02:02:22]  And it's not just going over.
[02:02:23]  I mean, sometimes it's just a question of, you know, a bureaucratic story that's happening, you know, something that's going on in the government.
[02:02:31]  But you've got to develop sources in that part of the government to find out what's going on.
[02:02:39]  I mean, these are all skills that not everybody has.
[02:02:45]  And it takes time. to develop them and it takes time to know how to edit them, how to guide those reporters and stuff.
[02:02:53]  I mean, it's, you know, I'm, I'm, you know, I know people get very frustrated with, you know, mainstream media, whatever that means now, but, you know, you'll notice that, you'll know that usually Fox News never gets included in that, even though for most of the last few years it's been, they're absolutely included.
[02:03:19]  Yeah, exactly.
[02:03:20]  They're the, you know, they were the dominant uh cable tv news network right um, so well, they're all corrupted by advertisers and if you have an advertiser that's going to spend x billion amount of millions of dollars with your, with your network um, you're going to not report on negative things revolving involving those advertisers that's, I mean, that's certainly a concern.
[02:03:45]  I I haven't seen that happen in um, in my experience i've the, the most i've seen that play out is and I think this is probably fairly common, you know, i've i'm familiar with publications where, let's say let, I mean I, I think, and I again, these weren't my decisions to make.
[02:04:07]  So i'm, i'm sort of remembering, sort of as a disinterested spectator um uh, you know, if we had a story about a?
[02:04:18]  Uh hypothetically, at ARMY Times um, if you, if you were reporting a story on a increasing trend of Motorcycle accidents involving soldiers.
[02:04:30]  You know, the army is concerned because more soldiers are dying in motorbike accidents.
[02:04:35]  you probably wouldn't put your Yamaha motorbike ad opposite that story, right?
[02:04:42]  But, you know, the kind of stuff that we're talking about, right, involves the government or governments, right?
[02:04:50]  It doesn't, and, you know, the CIA doesn't take out, you know, one-page ads, you know, at least that I'm aware of in, like, the Washington Post or the New York Times.
[02:05:05]  I mean, they might take small ones out these days for recruitment.
[02:05:09]  But, you know, so yeah, I've seen the commercials on social media.
[02:05:12]  Yeah, I don't feel like you know, I think a smart consumer of media, certainly of news media, should always be aware of potential conflicts of interest in the media that he's I mean, to give you an obvious one, The Washington Post, my hometown newspaper up in Washington, D.C., is owned by Jeff Bezos.
[02:05:38]  Okay?
[02:05:39]  So you have to, if you're reading a story about Amazon, which is obviously a massive entity in the United States, and there's going to be stories virtually every week about Amazon in a national paper like The Post, you have to have it in the back of your mind that, hey, the guy that owns the paper owns the organization that's being written about.
[02:06:00]  And to their credit, The Post always includes a line in the story saying, Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, or words to that effect.
[02:06:13]  You know, I'm, you know, look, I'm not saying it doesn't happen that advertisers, I'm sure it has happened.
[02:06:23]  I'm not aware of it happening at any publication where, you know, for any, at any publication I've worked at full time or of any story that I've written where an advertiser has tried to weigh in.
[02:06:39]  I don't know who that would even be.
[02:06:43]  And, of course, it's not really an issue with.
[02:06:45]  Book publishing either.

=== Analyzing Media Truth (13:11) ===

[02:06:46]  Well, I think, I think it really came to light.
[02:06:48]  Really, the surface reared its ugly head during the uh Covid pandemic with like, the big pharmaceutical companies and all the reporting every day that was going on revolving involving the pandemic and basically like the information war that was happening in the media involving that.
[02:07:03]  That's where I think it gets the most I I, you know I, but the only stories I wrote for you know I, I I spent uh almost three years at at Yahoo NEWS um, as the national security and uh national security and sort of investigative reporter, including the sort of first year or so of the pandemic.
[02:07:29]  And, you know, I wrote a couple of stories about, you know, how it was affecting the military and the military lab that was, you know, there was a military lab actually quite close to where I lived in suburban DC that was you know, working to find a solution to it.
[02:07:55]  But other than that, I wasn't covering Big Pharma.
[02:07:59]  Right.
[02:07:59]  So I can't speak to those.
[02:08:01]  Yahoo News is a very credible public.
[02:08:04]  I mean, there's a lot of really big time reporters, the legitimate reporters there.
[02:08:07]  It's funny that you brought up Yahoo News because I had a CIA, former CIA officer in here one time, and we were talking about this very top, this subject about like how to analyze truth in the media or whatever.
[02:08:20]  And I brought up the story from Yahoo News, the famous story about the CIA plan to assassinate Julian Assange.
[02:08:26]  I wrote that story with two other reporters.
[02:08:31]  You wrote that story?
[02:08:32]  Yeah, that was a story that I worked on with Zach Dorfman, who was the initiator of the story, if you like.
[02:08:42]  It was his story that he brought to Yahoo News.
[02:08:45]  I helped him on it for months and months, drafting and redrafting the story and reporting it.
[02:08:52]  And then Mike Isikoff came in towards the end of that process, did some more really great reporting on it.
[02:08:59]  And yeah, so yeah, that was.
[02:09:03]  That.
[02:09:03]  That was that if you call that up you'll find my byline on it.
[02:09:06]  Pull up that yeah, pull up that, that article.
[02:09:08]  So I brought that up to my friend who's a former CIA guy and I was arguing.
[02:09:11]  We were arguing about uh, Assange and he was like well you're, here's your first problem.
[02:09:15]  You're taking new, you're taking uh, information from Yahoo NEWS, not a very credible publication.
[02:09:21]  Hey, that not a single word of, not a single sentence of that story has ever been officially disputed.
[02:09:29]  Can you, for people that might might not be aware of that article, can you give like the basic rundown and how that story came about and what happened with it?
[02:09:37]  Basically, the story was that while Julian Assange was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London,
[02:09:50]  in the United Kingdom, the CIA was interested in, you know, started to explore partly because of some sort of top-down You know, hey, what can we do about Assange demands?
[02:10:16]  They started spitballing ideas and they got some ways into studying the plausibility and possibility of assassinating Assange.
[02:10:34]  There it is, right?
[02:10:35]  Inside the CIA secret war plans against WikiLeaks, right?
[02:10:37]  Yeah, there's a little.
[02:10:39]  Problem here, it's Zach Dorfman and Sean Naylor.
[02:10:41]  It's not a clickable link, it just goes to nothing.
[02:10:44]  Well, that's because our computer's up.
[02:10:46]  No, it's there's something wrong with the link.
[02:10:48]  That's it, does this.
[02:10:50]  That's I, I strange.
[02:10:52]  Click the next link, see if the next link works.
[02:10:55]  Well, that's weird.
[02:10:58]  Yeah, yeah, I can't tell you why.
[02:11:00]  Why, um, uh, the CIA has got our computer tapped.
[02:11:05]  Yeah, not surprised.
[02:11:06]  I'm, yeah, I've no idea what's going on there.
[02:11:10]  Um, and so how did this get out that they had the Zach?
[02:11:14]  Zach is a reporter with a terrific network of sources.
[02:11:19]  He's a very, very good intelligence reporter.
[02:11:23]  I think one of the best in the country.
[02:11:26]  And, you know, we hope he's actually going to be doing some work with us on one of those sort of longer lead time stories that I was talking about that if it turns out to be, you know, true might make a good movie.
[02:11:43]  And so the premise is but he basically, his sources told him about this and he, you know, I mean, you know, he caught a wind of it and he started pulling on that thread and just collecting thread on it for a while.
[02:11:57]  And then he, you know, he had written for us for Yahoo News before.
[02:12:06]  He wasn't a full-time employee of Yahoo News as I was at the time.
[02:12:11]  But he had a good relationship with our Washington bureau chief, Sharon Weinberger.
[02:12:17]  She's now the Wall Street Journal's.
[02:12:22]  sort of national security editor in the Washington Bureau, I believe.
[02:12:27]  And, you know, so he started reporting it for Yahoo News.
[02:12:34]  And I was, as a matter of fact, now I'm thinking back to this.
[02:12:41]  You know, I mentioned before we started recording that I'm always worried I'm going to say something in the heat of the moment that turns out not to be true.
[02:12:49]  I was no longer fully employed by Yahoo News when I worked on that story with Zach.
[02:12:54]  Okay.
[02:12:56]  But I was.
[02:12:57]  I did it as a sort of a freelance project with him for Yahoo News.
[02:13:03]  So I spent, we spent month after month after month, he and I, on signal phone calls together, just, you know, going through every line, me saying, okay, you know, should we move this section, should we move this paragraph, eight paragraphs up to here?
[02:13:25]  Okay, how about this line?
[02:13:26]  Or, you know, I think we don't need this word.
[02:13:29]  the second sentence of this paragraph.
[02:13:31]  I mean, just, and all the time calling new sources, calling other sources back to, you know, double check things.
[02:13:40]  So, yeah, it was an enormous amount of work that went into it.
[02:13:45]  I mean, and Mike Pompeo, who was the director of CIA at the time that the events we described were taking place, was later asked about it.
[02:13:59]  And he sort of joked about it, like he said, well, as a matter of fact, some of that story is even true.
[02:14:03]  Right, but he didn't say any of it actually wasn't right at no point.
[02:14:08]  Did he say he said most of it was true?
[02:14:10]  Some he said something like some of it's true because he was asked about it, and he said it in a joking way that might lead the person watching to think he doesn't think the rest of it is true.
[02:14:22]  But what he actually did was confirm that some of it's true, and he's never denied any of it, you know.
[02:14:30]  Um, so that, yeah, the sources involved in that were they like. active people or were they all retired?
[02:14:40]  I mean, I'll let the sourcing in the story speak for itself.
[02:14:44]  Generally, when you have a, what would we call in journalism a background source, so that's a source who's not on the record, you know,
[02:15:00]  it's not, you know, you're not saying Danny Jones said this, it would be, you know, you know, according to a highly popular podcaster from based in Florida, you know, or something like that, you know, some phrase that lets the reader get a sense of the type of person who's giving you the quote, but without identifying the person.
[02:15:25]  And, you know, for me, it's always like, you know, according to a, you know, a retired special forces colonel or something like that.
[02:15:35]  And so, but once you've agreed that.
[02:15:40]  Attribution with the source, you can't then publicly be giving other details about him or her.
[02:15:47]  Got it.
[02:15:48]  So, you know, I mean, I'll let.
[02:15:50]  But when it comes to fact checking, like when the editors go to fact check a story, do the editors have to get access to your sources to confirm stuff?
[02:15:57]  Sometimes, but they're not likely to.
[02:16:01]  When the editors know the reporters well, they might say, who said this?
[02:16:10]  They're probably not going to.
[02:16:12]  If you can't trust your reporter to give you an honest act, you know, to honestly report what their own sources are telling you, you probably shouldn't be paying them, you know.
[02:16:22]  I mean, no editor has the time to go through every story that he or she is responsible for editing and go through every quote and call every source.
[02:16:34]  I mean, that's basically re-reporting the story.
[02:16:38]  And unfortunately, the dynamics of the news business mean that there are fewer editors and especially copy editors even at major establishments like the New York Times now than they used to be.
[02:16:54]  So there's less and less sort of work time, you know, available man hours, if you like, to do that sort of thing.
[02:17:03]  So no, no, they don't.
[02:17:05]  They'll want to know maybe who said it or what kind of a person said it.
[02:17:10]  Sometimes they may not want to know the source because they don't want to have, you know, in case there's any significant legal blowback, you know, they've plausible deniability as to the identity of the source.
[02:17:28]  Did you or Zach get any kind of blowback on that story?
[02:17:31]  No, I mean, there was.
[02:17:32]  Did you guys have to get confirmation from any, like, similar to Jack's other story, how he had to get the deputy director to sign off on it?
[02:17:39]  Did that, nothing like that?
[02:17:41]  No, no, I mean, it was, like I said, Zach.
[02:17:49]  me and Mike Isakoff, a very well-known reporter in Washington.
[02:17:54]  I think our reputations were strong enough.
[02:18:00]  And Isakoff was at the time probably the senior journalist at Yahoo News, or one of the most senior.
[02:18:10]  I mean, I don't know how you would tabulate that, and very experienced.
[02:18:17]  So if the three of us are bringing a story like that to the table, I don't think the editors certainly ask hard questions, but they're not of the same type that Jack faced in the story you're referring to.
[02:18:37]  Yeah, it's such a heavy story, the idea that the CIA would have thought about or planned to murder a journalist.
[02:18:47]  Well, I mean, and there's the other half of it, right?
[02:18:51]  And then they decided not to, right?
[02:18:53]  So, I mean, it's not like it happened.
[02:18:56]  And we're discussing, you know, so, yeah, I mean, you have to also say that, you know, cooler heads prevailed at some point in that process.
[02:19:06]  Yes.
[02:19:08]  Well, Sean, thank you so much for your time, man.
[02:19:10]  This has been an incredible conversation.
[02:19:12]  Where can people, other than your Substack, which I'll link below, where can they find you, get in touch with you?
[02:19:18]  I'm on Twitter at at Sean D. Naylor, S-E-A-N-D-N-A-Y-L-O-R.
[02:19:27]  A lot of my work, particularly for Yahoo News, despite our recent experience, and for foreign policy and the New York Times, which I worked for on sort of contract and freelance basis, and Newsweek, a lot of that work is available just by Googling.
[02:19:46]  And my books are available on Amazon, barnesandnoble.com, and still in some bookstores.
[02:19:53]  Awesome.
[02:19:54]  Well, thanks again.
[02:19:55]  All right.
[02:19:55]  Great.
[02:19:56]  Thank you.
[02:19:56]  It's great to be here.
[02:19:57]  Good night, everybody.